Facing Rushmore [Hardcover]

Earnest FBI agent Charlie Hart begins his debut fictive foray (two more Hart novels are planned) claustrophobically, as Charlie rigorously interrogates an Indian demonstrator named John Brown Dog, ringleader of a protest group that has vandalized the St. Louis Arch. Over the whole of Part I, written completely in dialogue, John answers Charlie's questions obliquely, offering detours and metaphors and elliptical threats spread over many chapters. In Part II, Charlie puzzles over John's yarn. Is Brown Dog an enraged crackpot or a terrorist threat? Are his weapons, ghost dancing and a mysterious black powder, just to name a couple, truly powerful or dependent upon the superstition of the targeted victims? Charlie can find no evidence of crime, but as Indian protest swells—Mount Rushmore, a site sacred to Native Americans, is threatened—government bosses order brute force to curb the group; Charlie, who doesn't believe that John Brown Dog is violent, is tasked with taking him down. Martin (The Crying Heart Tattoo) creates real tension out of Charlie's dilemma, particularly in the runup to Part III and the aftermath it chronicles. But Martin's handling of the mystical elements shifts unsteadily from allegory to thriller to clumsy social commentary. Despite some compelling scenes and genuine chills, the whole is a lot less than the sum of the parts. (Nov.)
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When a suspected Native American terrorist starts to conjure up bizarre visions, FBI agent Charlie Hart finds his skepticism shaken. First there were "shape shadows," haunting human and animal images that seem comprised of liquid tar. Then John Brown Dog's "ghost dancing," hypnotic displays that prophesied elimination of the white man through peaceful means. Together with a shrewd Native American elder and a surly prostitute with curious war paint on her face, John Brown Dog is determined to help his people repossess lands that were once theirs. The trio is charged with blanketing the St. Louis Gateway Arch in a mysterious black substance and literally "defacing" Mount Rushmore, dissolving the four presidential visages to gravel. (In the process, a spooky crack forms across Lincoln's mouth, making it appear as if the sixteenth president were about to speak.) Martin, author of The Crying Heart Tattoo (1982), creates a memorable character in FBI agent Hart, who undergoes a startling emotional and physical transformation. A provocative thriller that starts with a bang but loses a little momentum toward the end. Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

"What I like best about a David Martin suspense novel -- and it will grab you, I guarantee -- is that the man knows how to write."

-- Elmore Leonard

The St. Louis Memorial Arch, 630 feet of gleaming stainless steel, twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, built to withstand earthquakes, has been so severely damaged that it's barely standing. What's even more unsettling to a nervous nation: The arch was damaged and turned black overnight but without apparent cause -- no bombs, no guns, no chemicals.

There are suspects, however. And Charlie Hart, a clean-cut FBI agent in the all-American mode, is on the trail of three: Lakota John Brown Dog, an otherworldly whore, and "the grandfather," who's in contact with a shadowy but powerful group known as the allies.

And matters only get scarier for America after the arch is damaged...the four stone presidents on Mount Rushmore come under an attack that a hundred armed agents and a dozen assault helicopters are powerless to stop...then it's on to a second battle of the Little Bighorn. The white man's civilization ends with a lone wolf howling in the desolate forests of Manhattan.

The force majeure behind these events is ghost dancing, which began in 1890 as a promise to Indians that America's original illegal aliens -- the Europeans and their descendants -- could be eradicated without war, without killing. How this promise can be fulfilled more than a hundred years later, in present-day America, is one of the compelling mysteries at the heart of Facing Rushmore.

Martin's ten novels have given him a cult following. His thriller, Lie to Me, and his eccentric love story, The Crying Heart Tattoo, are adored by fans worldwide. But Facing Rushmore is in a class by itself. The novel's unforgettable characters dare to consider a provocative question in the post-9/11 world: Can the technological power of the United States, a power that has dominated the world, be overwhelmed by a superior spiritual force?

Facing Rushmore will thrill and provoke readers. It's a history lesson, a page-turner, and one hell of a journey. If you're a Martin fan, the good news is: He's back. If this is your first trip with him, get ready for the ride of your life.

David Lozell Martin's previous novels include international bestsellers Lie to Me and Tap, Tap and the critically acclaimed The Crying Heart Tattoo, The Beginning of Sorrows, and Crazy Love. Facing Rushmore is his eleventh book. Martin lives in the Washington, D.C. area.

Chapter One

"Dance. I dance, Charlie. If you want to put that down as my occupation, go ahead, it's all I do, it's all I've done for sixteen years, since I was seventeen. I didn't go to college, didn't even finish high school. I never married. I danced. During the day I danced with other dancers, at night I danced alone."

"How'd you end up in Tennessee, isn't that where all this started?"

"Three months ago the grandfather asked me to move to Tennessee."

"Did he tell you why?"

"He gave me money to rent an apartment, he gave me money to live on, he asked me to wait, but he didn't tell me why, no."

"You move from Montana to Tennessee without knowing why?"

"Yes, because the grandfather asked me to. The apartment I found in Nashville, there was no place to dance outside, so I danced in my apartment until the woman below me complained. I would watch the window for her car to leave, then I'd dance while she was gone. I know all the dances, Charlie. I wanted to ask you -- in prison will I be allowed to dance?"

"You think you're going to prison?"

"Don't you?"

"It depends on how much of what you're telling me checks out."

"And how much is just me being crazy."

"What's the grandfather's name?"

"I won't tell you that."

"When I cut you down, you said you'd tell me everything."

"No, I said I'd tell you the truth."

"How about the woman you were traveling with, the prostitute, what's her name?"

"Elena. I was never told her last name, I'm not sure if she had one."

"And she came with the grandfather to your apartment in Tennessee?"

"Yes. At three A.M. She had fish eyes."

"What does that mean, fish eyes?"

"At the outside corner of each eye, two black lines intersected, one that had been drawn above her eye and one from below. These intersecting lines looked like the tail of a fish, the two fish facing each other across the bridge of her nose."

"What did he say about her, about why she was there?"

"The grandfather introduced her as God's whore, he said her mother sent her to see the ghost dance."

Copyright © 2005 by David Martin

Chapter Two

I told the grandfather that dancing at three A.M. would make the neighbor below me pound on her ceiling with a broomstick, but you have to understand, Charlie, I would be ashamed not to do what he asked.

When I was sixteen and living alone in a trailer, when I was incorrigible and drunk and had dropped out of school, the grandfather came to me. I figured he had been sent to deliver a lecture about staying in school and bettering myself, this lecture I had heard many times from the apple Indians, those who are red on the outside but white inside, and from European teachers, from Christian ministers.

I invited the grandfather into my old trailer, a hunter's trailer without power or water, and out of respect for his age offered him a chair and then I put on my Indian face. It's the face I wore when you first began questioning me, a good face to show during grandfather lectures and government interrogations.

The grandfather asked if I knew how to read. I said I did. He told me, "We Indians believe in the words a man speaks looking us in the eye. But the Europeans will tell one thing to your eye and then write another thing on paper and then it is the written word they swear by. So it is good you can read what they write. Each morning I walk to the library and read yesterday's Jew York Times. You can trust the Jews to write the truth, they are a tribe."

I think you will meet the grandfather before this is over, he is negotiating on our behalf, and when you see his face you will see how old it is, how dark, creased by ravines, and I believe you will trust him.

The grandfather delivered a lecture brand-new to my ears, saying it was good I quit school, good I refused job training, good I would not work for wages, good I spent all my time hunting and fishing and riding horses. The European ways must be rejected, he told me. Especially their poison. I had beer bottles everywhere on the floor, lined up and leaned over.

The grandfather explained that tolerance to alcohol increases with a people's exposure to alcohol. He said that the ethnic group that has used alcohol the longest will have the lowest rates of cirrhosis, dementia, public drunkenness. He said he was thinking of the Jews again, who have been drinking wine for thousands of years and have a low incidence of alcoholism. But for a people newly exposed to alcohol, it is poison to them. Europeans knew this intuitively, which is why they gave us alcoholism along with other diseases for which we had no tolerance. He said I could not be a ghost dancer if I kept drinking alcohol, it would disrespect our ancestors to ask for their resurrection while I was drunk.

You asked me, Charlie, why the little whore's mother wanted her to see ghost dancing, why I have spent so many years ghost dancing. Let me tell you.

In 1889, the Paiute medicine man Wavoka had a vision during a solar eclipse, and in this vision Wavoka saw the new world rolled up and, underneath, the old world revealed as it once was, with fish in our rivers and lakes, game in our forests, and buffalo, not Europeans, by the millions on our land. In this old world, occupied only by Indians and by those we call our friends, we would be reunited with our resurrected ancestors. All this would be brought about without violence, without war, without killing.

The promise of ghost dancing required two things of the Indians. One was rejection of everything European: their culture, their money, their jobs, their religion, their alcohol. Their law, too. The grandfather asked me many times how can you trust a legal system that says if a man has committed a crime but you can't prove it, then that man is not guilty.

The second thing required of the Indians was ghost dancing.

Ghost dancing is unlike our other dances. It is slow and without instruments, not even the drum, and women are permitted to ghost dance. We move in a circle following the sun while singing softly our resurrection chants.

In 1890, ghost dancing appealed to the defeated Indians of the American West. Many whites called ghost dancing the messiah craze; it was said Jesus had given up on the whites and was coming this time to the Indians.

Why did ghost dancing frighten your ancestors? Think of it, Charlie. You have defeated a proud and fierce people. They have become compliant. They line up for Army beef and stay drunk. But then, because of some crazy dance, these former warriors sober up, no longer tame. Now these Indians are keeping their own counsel, rejecting everything European. And they dance, Charlie. I think maybe it reminds you of those long hot nights on the plantation when you heard jungle music from the slave quarters.

No, of course, your ancestors didn't own slaves, I know that, Charlie. They were innocent.

When the great Sioux medicine man Tatanka-lyotanka, the one you call Sitting Bull, began ghost dancing, the Europeans became even more frightened. He was an old man but he had been at Greasy Grass, what you call the Little Bighorn. For the sin of ghost dancing, Tatanka-lyotanka, sixty years old, was arrested and killed while resisting arrest. Shot in the back by tribal policemen.

Trying to stamp out the ghost dancing messiah craze, the U.S. Army rounded up Indians at Wounded Knee Creek. Five hundred Army troops with four rapid-fire Hotchkiss guns surrounded four hundred Indians, men and women and children and babies in their mother's arms, many of the Indians without blankets or food. The Army was so afraid of ghost dancing that even the Indian women were disarmed of cooking knives and sewing awls. While the Indians were being disarmed, a shot went off and the Army opened fire. When women and children fled into the ravines, they were chased down and shot in the head, in the back. Twenty of the soldiers were awarded Congressional Medals of Honor for shooting women and killing babies held in their mothers' arms.

The chief they called Big Foot died at Wounded Knee as he rose from his sickbed. And now at gas stations and drugstores in the western states you Europeans buy postcards with the picture of Big Foot's frozen body. I don't know what you do with such a profane image. I think you must take it home and gloat.

The Indian dead at Wounded Knee were left where they lay for three days in the snow, more than three hundred murder victims. When a hired burial party finally arrived, four starving babies were found still alive, wrapped in their dead mothers' blankets. The grandfather said this again reminded him of the Jews and how a few of them were on occasion found alive in Nazi burial pits.

White curiosity seekers came to Wounded Knee to snatch up souvenirs. Indian babies whose parents had been killed were adopted by white families but the Indian babies were said to be like certain wild animals, cute while young but unmanageable when mature.

With the Europeans' grisly sense of history, they called this massacre the Battle of Wounded Knee. Not even the Nazis were so indiscreet as to call Auschwitz a battle. It is dangerous to make the comparison, but six million Jews were killed by the Nazis, more than ten million Indians killed by Europeans in the conquest of the Americas.

If the Nazis had won the war they might have put up monuments to the Final Solution. The Europeans, who did win in America, put up a memorial marking the jumping-off spot for settlers, explorers, prospectors, soldiers, and others who were heading west to complete the genocide of Indians -- and that memorial is the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, and that's why the whore and I cracked its ribs.

The grandfather brought her to me in Tennessee. At his request, I showed Elena the ghost dance. After a few minutes, before the downstairs neighbor began complaining, the grandfather said, "You can stop now. The promise of ghost dancing has come about."

I asked him, "If I walk outside, wil...