The Triumph of Evil

by Lawrence Block

  “But today—”

  “Perhaps it was that a victim was a boy from the college here. Yerkes. When I saw that in the paper—”

  “I can imagine.”

  “I felt an involvement for the first time. Or perhaps I should say a concern.”

  “Right,” she said. “That’s it. When it reaches out and touches someone close to you, that’s what brings it all home, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  FIVE

  Dorn flew to Boston and rode buses North. On the Caldwell campus in Maine, a student told him that the newspaper office was in the Student Union, and another student told him where the Union was. In the office of the Caldwell Clarion there were two girls at large black typewriters and a long-haired boy reading Cat’s Cradle. One of the girls asked Dorn if she could help him.

  “I called before,” he said. “Somebody said if I came down, I could pick up copies of the last half-dozen issues or so. See, I have this pizza stand on the highway and I was thinking about maybe running an ad.”

  “Our advertising manager isn’t here now—”

  “Well, I would just want to look at the papers and then I would get in touch later.”

  “I can certainly help you there,” she said. There were rows of newspapers stacked on a long table. She walked the length of the table, taking a paper from each stack. She said, “Will this be enough? And I’m giving you a rate card, too. The rates are printed in each issue, but the information on the card is more complete, the cost of running cuts and everything.”

  “This’ll do it, then.”

  “And if you’ll give me your name, I’ll have Dick get in touch with you as soon as he comes around.”

  “Oh, never mind about that. It’s easier for me if I get in touch, with my hours and all.”

  “I’m sure an ad in the Clarion would be profitable for you.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what I was thinking. Pull in business and all.”

  “I would certainly think so. What was the name of your pizza place? I don’t think I got it.”

  “You know the one. Right out on the highway.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That one. Uh-huh.”

  From the hallway he heard the boy say, “Now why in the hell would you do an immoral thing like hustle that poor guy for an ad? I don’t get it.”

  “He wanted to advertise.”

  “‘I’m sure an ad would be profitable for you.’ What utter bullshit! ‘Let’s go out for a slice of pizza, I saw this outasight ad in the Clarion.’ Jesus Christ.”

  “Somebody has to pay for the fucking paper.”

  “Yeah. What pizza place on the highway?”

  “You know the one. Come on, Paul. Who cares what pizza place on the highway? Who cares what highway?”

  From an issue of the Caldwell Clarion:

  “Administration sources disclosed today that Caldwell commencement exercises would be moved up to the second weekend in May to facilitate the appearance of Sen. J. Lowell Drury of New Hampshire. Arrangements have already been made for Senator Drury to deliver the commencement address. Much in demand on the graduation circuit, the New Hampshire liberal …”

  From another issue of the Caldwell Clarion:

  “Burton Weldon, former chairman of the now disbanded Caldwell chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) yesterday attacked the selection of Sen. J. Lowell Drury as commencement speaker. ‘Drury has no relevance whatsoever to the current situation. He wants us to love him because he’s a liberal,’ Weldon told the Clarion. ‘I see no reason why anyone whose head is together would waste time sitting through his speech. All he’ll do is put a sugar coating on the same old Establishment pill. It’s a special kind of pill. You take it when you’re feeling good, and it makes you sick.’ Pressed for his ideal choice for commencement speaker, Weldon said, ‘There’s nobody. Everybody worth hearing is in jail.’ Asked about rumored plans to disrupt the exercises, Weldon sharply shot down the rumor. ‘The world is past that stage,’ he avowed. ‘What good are signs and slogans when the Establishment is using guns?’”

  From a third issue of the Caldwell Clarion:

  “Campus radical Burton Weldon refused to confirm or deny imputations that his comments criticizing Sen. J. Lowell Drury constituted the implicit endorsement of violence. ‘I stand by my words,’ the former chairman of the now disbanded Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) announced. ‘People can read into them whatever they want. After all, they’re just words. They aren’t bullets.’ Speaking in sharp rebuttal, Harry Isenberg of the Caldwell Liberal Alliance for Peace (CLAFP) termed his phrases ‘irresponsible, inflammatory, and …’”

  Dorn leaned over the counter, weighing the new reel in his hand. “Can you believe it?” he said, “I drove all the way to Vermont. I was actually at the stream before I discovered that my reel was rusted solid. Now I can’t believe I put it away wet, but I guess I did.”

  “Sometimes they’ll loosen up for you,” the man behind the counter said. “More trouble than it’s worth, most likely. And they’ll never be the same as they were. How are you for bait? Hooks?”

  “Strictly a fly-fisherman, and I’m in good shape on everything else. On everything, now that I’ve got the reel. Say, I was noticing those guns when I came in. What do you have to go through to purchase a rifle in Vermont?”

  “Have to be a resident.”

  “I thought as much. And then you probably have to have a firearms card with your fingerprints on it.”

  “Nope, just a resident driver’s license. Where you from?”

  “Pennsylvania.”

  “And you’ve got a lot of red tape down there, do you?”

  “They’ve made it just about impossible to buy a gun.”

  “Ayeh. I’d say that’s what they have in mind, wouldn’t you say?” he leaned his weight on the counter. “It’s different up here. I’ll tell you. You people have a situation with the colored. There are all those colored, so naturally a white man wants to arm himself. Way the government must see it, the more people with guns the more shooting is going to happen.” He winked, a gesture that astonished Dorn. “Put it this way, at least they can’t sell them to the colored either. Be thankful for small things, eh?”

  The boy made himself comfortable on the car seat and asked if it was okay to smoke. Dorn told him to go ahead. The boy lit a cigarette and rolled down the window to flip the match out, then rolled the window up again.

  “Nice car,” he said.

  “It belongs to a friend. I borrowed it.”

  “That’s the kind of friend to have.”

  The boy was about 20, 5’9”, 140 pounds. Burton Weldon, former chairman of the now-disbanded Caldwell chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, was 21, 5’ 10”, 150 pounds. This boy was clean-shaven and had short hair. Weldon’s hair was long and he wore a Zapata moustache.

  “You live here in Vermont?”

  “Yes, sir. In Hazelton.”

  “Can you drive? That’s the main reason I stopped, to be frank. My head is splitting and I don’t want to take chances with a friend’s automobile. You can drive?”

  “Since I was fifteen.”

  “You have a license? You have it with you, I mean.”

  “Always carry it.”

  “You wouldn’t mind driving?”

  “A car like this? You kidding?”

  Dorn pulled to a stop. He turned to face the boy. “Tell me,” he said. “What do you think of J. Lowell Drury?”

  “Who’s he?”

  “You don’t recognize the name?”

  “I don’t think so. Is that your name or something?”

  “Interesting you never heard of him,” Dorn said. “You helped to murder him.”

  “Huh?”

  “Your role was a small one. A spear carrier. You stole this automobile. Then you lost control of it and crashed it into one of those trees, I think. You weren’t wearing your seat belt.”

  “Mister, I don’t think—”

&nbs
p; “You died in the accident,” Dorn said, reaching, hands quick and accomplished. He cupped the back of the short-haired head with his right hand, caught up the shirt front with his left. He snapped the boy’s neck forward. There was no struggling. There was no time.

  The boy’s license was in his wallet. The boy had automatically tapped a pocket when Dorn asked him about the license. That was the pocket he looked in, and the wallet was there. He took the license, replaced the wallet. The boy’s name was—had been? no, was—Clyde Farrar, Jr.

  He propped Clyde Farrar, Jr., behind the wheel, left his seat belt unfastened. Dorn sat on the passenger side. He started the engine and steered with one hand. His own scat belt was fastened, and he was braced when the car hit the tree.

  Before he entered a second sporting goods store, this one considerably closer to the Maine border, he used a pencil to change Farrar’s date of birth from 1950 to 1920. His signature on the bill of sale for the deer rifle would have fooled anyone but a handwriting expert, The clerk didn’t look at it twice, or at the altered date of birth, for that matter.

  He changed it back after he left the store.

  A long distance telephone conversation:

  “Hello. You received the funds?”

  “Yes. Something else occurs to me.”

  “Oh?”

  “It would be best if there were no academic difficulty in my home district.”

  “We never considered it. That’s an undeveloped district, after all.”

  “Like so many, it has some surface tension. Admittedly of low density. I wouldn’t want the waters troubled. It would spoil my own swimming.”

  A chuckle. “As it happens, you have exclusive representation in your district. Now that you mention it, it might be worthwhile to assign someone in a conciliatory capacity.”

  “Try it again.”

  “You’re swimming alone, but if the water’s troubled we can send you some oil.”

  “Understood, but no. It’s my backwater.”

  “Delicious. Anything else?”

  “No.”

  Another long distance telephone conversation:

  “Hello? Hey, turn that down, huh? Hello?”

  “Is that you, Roger?”

  “Yeah. Who’s this?”

  “Burt.”

  “I can’t hear you, man.”

  “Burt Weldon.”

  “Man, this is a shit connection. You got to talk louder, you sound like you’re coining through a roomful of Dacron or something. Is it Burt?”

  “Right on, baby. Burt Weldon.”

  “Like I can just barely make you out. What’s happening?”

  “Everything’s happening, man. Everything.”

  “You cool, man? You sound kind of weird.”

  “I’m beautiful. I want you to recognize it when it happens.”

  “Huh?”

  “I want you to know where it came from.”

  “You sure you’re all right? It’s Burt Weldon, baby, I don’t know what he wants. He sounds really weird, totally fucked up. He never used to use anything. Hey, Burt? What kind of trip arc you on?”

  “The ultimate trip.”

  “Whatever’s cool.”

  “The ultimate cool. A trip down Drury Lane. That’s all I can say.”

  “Whatever it is I couldn’t hear it.”

  “I said a trip down Dreary Lane. We all know the Muffin Man.”

  “Huh?”

  Dorn set up the portable typewriter in his motel room. On a sheet of plain typing paper he typed:

  To the good people, who are dead or in jail:

  No one will understand this. Maybe that proves it was the right thing to do. The things the world understands always turn out wrong.

  Does the end justify the means? I no longer comprehend the question. Once I knew the question but did not know the answer. Now I know the answer but have lost my grasp of the question.

  We tried words. Words are out-of-date. Dreary Drury gives us words, and we throw back bullets.

  It seems to me

  An hour later he went to the off-campus apartment house where Burton Weldon lived. He traded the typewriter for Weldon’s, which was open on the desk. He put a box of shells for the deer rifle on the closet shelf and covered it with a dirty shirt. He crumpled the unfinished letter and dropped it in a corner of the room where several crumpled sheets of paper already nestled.

  He left with Weldon’s typewriter in hand.

  The night before commencement exercises he had a dream in Serbo-Croat.

  For some time now English had been his language of thought as well as his language of speech. Certain idioms might occur, in thought as in speech, in any of several languages; there were certain concepts that did not translate. But it was English that he both thought and spoke.

  Dreams might come in any language. Lately they had been most often in English, but as recently as a year ago they had been primarily in German. He also dreamed occasionally in Serbo- Croat, and now and again in French.

  There was usually a connection between the language of the dream and its subject matter. Dreams of his youth, for example, were most likely to be in Serbo-Croat. Dreams of the present were often in English. But there was no hard and fast rule. Dreams, possessing their own system of logic, had their own scheme of comparative linguistics as well.

  This dream, set in the present time, was nevertheless in Serbo-Croat.

  In the dream he was in the chemistry laboratory. Its window high in the Science Building overlooked the quadrangle where commencement exercises were to be held. And he talked in the dream to Burton Weldon, who was dead in the dream, already shot down by guardsmen in retribution for a crime Miles Dorn had not yet got around to perpetrating. Though dead, Burton Weldon was able to hear and to speak; miraculously, he was able to understand and to speak Serbo-Croat.

  Furthermore, Weldon’s face wouldn’t behave. It kept turning into the face of Clyde Farrar, Jr.

  When the time came to shoot Drury, his dream finger froze on the dream trigger. He pulled with all his strength but was not strong enough to make his finger move.

  The speech went on and on and on, with Sen. J. Lowell Drury (Dem., N.H.) orating in flawless Serbo-Croat. And then the speech ended, and Drury left the podium, and still the finger had not moved the trigger.

  “You see?” Burton Weldon’s corpse shrilled at him. “You see? You could not do it!”

  He awoke drenched in sweat, fighting his way out of the dream, fighting Weldon’s voice (but it was not Weldon’s voice in the dream; it was someone else’s; whose?) and clawing at the bed-clothing with hands and feet. He went into the bathroom and stood for a long time under the shower, thinking about the dream.

  He knew enough of dream theory to recognize it as a classic impotence syndrome. Virility anxiety. The gun is a penis, and one cannot make it work. And yet it was so specific, and so much related to present circumstances, that he was not certain whether it was in fact a sexual dream or more an indication of unconscious fear that he would fail to kill Drury.

  Was it the same thing? Was the gun a penis in his life as well as in his dreams? He had thought of this before, of course. He was too insightful not have had the thought, too honest to dismiss it peremptorily, and yet too hardened to dwell on it.

  Later, after he had made the last of the arrangements, set up a meeting with Weldon, scattered more bits of damning evidence (but not too many, and never too obviously; let them work, those cops; they loved to find elusive clues)—after everything was set and checked out, he realized whose dream voice had spoken Serbo-Croat words through Burton Weldon’s dead lips.

  Jocelyn’s.

  This, more than anything else about the dream, gnawed at him.

  SIX

  Jocelyn sat, legs crossed, a hand at her chin. “You know,” she said, “when I heard about it I thought of you right away. Some of the things we were talking about before you left. And I wasn’t surprised when it happened, that’s another thing. That’s th
e thing, nobody was surprised. Somebody was listening to a radio and came down the hall passing the word, and hardly anybody was surprised. As if we all knew they would get him sooner or later. They get everybody.”

  “But the boy was a leftist, wasn’t he?”

  “If he did it.”

  “I didn’t follow the reports too closely,” Dorn admitted. “But I understood it was open and-shut.”

  “It always is, isn’t it? Who always gets shot? Kennedy. King. Bobby. Malcolm. Drury. They’re always leftists, and they always get shot by leftists.”

  “Not King.”

  “No, but it might have looked that way if they hadn’t caught that guy. And even so they want you to believe that there wasn’t a conspiracy, that this Ray broke out of prison and did it all by himself. Nobody believes that. Nobody believes the Warren Commission. I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who believes the Warren Commission. And when Bobby Kennedy was killed, well, they caught him right there, he did it, but somebody must have put the idea in his head. I mean, he was this mixed-up little Arab; somebody must have put the idea in his head.”

  “I see what you mean. And Weldon?”

  “I guess he flipped out. The letter he started to write, and he evidently made some strange telephone calls. And he was supposed to be in an accident in a stolen car, and then he used a dead boy’s driver’s license to buy a gun in Vermont. Or else he had someone buy it for him. But other people said he was on campus in Caldwell when the accident took place.”

  “Perhaps he had an accomplice.”

  “Maybe.” She looked doubtful. “I guess he was very militant. So many kids, though. They talk more than they act. That’s part of the game, putting the Establishment uptight. Of course if he flipped out, and then they say he called somebody and said he realized Drury was his father. You know, if he was in that whole Oedipus bag—”

  Was there anyone so easily manipulated as the amateur at revolution? They were suspicious, cautious, their caution occasionally verging on paranoia. They accepted it as highly likely that any adult was a policeman. But they did not honestly believe that anything could happen to them. They were young, and that damned them because the young always assume themselves to be immortal and immune. They may state flatly that they expect to die, that they do not expect the planet itself to survive another ten years. But the idea of personal death, of sudden pointless personal death, is never real to them.