The Triumph of Evil

by Lawrence Block

  My seed is acid, Jocelyn. The universal solvent that no vessel can contain.

  He watched as she stepped purposefully across the room to him. (“It’s warm. I’ll open a window.”) He remained in his armchair, his eyes on the softness of her smile. She seated herself sideways on his lap. He looked down at blue jeans and bare feet. She put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes, and he returned the look.

  The warmth, the beauty, the smell of her.

  He thought of cats and birds, of worms and men. He touched her leg and looked at his hand upon faded blue denim.

  (“… ragged claws …”)

  “I am an old man.”

  “You are not old.”

  “And you are so very young.”

  She kissed him lightly on the lips. His hands remembered the wounded robin, the tapping of its heart, the weak flutter of crippled wings. She kissed him again, and he drew her to him and tasted her mouth.

  “Old … .”

  “We are the same age, Miles. I have known you for as long as you have known me.”

  He held her close. She put her arms around his neck, her head in the hollow of his shoulder. He felt a heartbeat and did not know whether it was hers or his own.

  (“Do I dare eat a peach?”)

  “I love you,” he said.

  “Oh, I know, I know.”

  “I love you.”

  He held her. A kitten on his lap, purring. He held her, and his hand moved to cup her breast, to touch her arm, the side of her face.

  After a long time she stood up and held out her hands to him. He got to his feet. Her face melted into that warm liquid look he had glimpsed only once before.

  (“You were my teacher, and now you are my friend.”)

  They walked arm in arm to the bedroom.

  Oh, Jocelyn! Warmth, fire, love. A gun, a knife, a stick of dynamite, a length of steel pipe. Not peace but a sword. Jocelyn!

  Do I dare?

  I will not commit suicide, Jocelyn. I will not leave the country.

  He lay on his back, every muscle unstrung, every cell at peace. Her hair brushed his face. He opened his eyes to see her looking down at him.

  “Hello, old man.”

  “Hello.”

  Her hand readied for him, her fingers curled possessively around his penis. She said, “I have made a discovery, old man. Men are like wine.”

  “Some turn to vinegar.”

  “Not the good ones. Oh, if you could see your face.”

  “How do I look?”

  “Proud. Beautiful. Grand. How do I look?”

  “Beautiful.”

  “And a little bit ausgeshtupped?”

  He laughed, delighted. “But I never taught you that word!”

  “Did I get it right?”

  “Close enough.”

  She stretched out at his side. He closed his eyes and learned her body with his hands.

  “Miles? What did you say to me the first day?”

  “When?”

  “You said things in different languages so I would know the sound of each.”

  “I said nothing of importance.”

  “What did you say in German?” She swung into a sitting position, legs curled under her. “I knew it! Miles, you’re blushing!”

  “How did you know?”

  “Tell me what you said.”

  “No.”

  “Miles!” She turned his face toward hers. “I knew it! There was something different about your face when you spoke German. That’s why I picked it. Tell me what you said.”

  “I cannot tell you.”

  “Say it in German.”

  “But now you would understand it.”

  “Miles—”

  He said, “Du hast Haar wie gesponnenes Gold and eine Haut wie warma Milch. Ware ich nicht über diese Dinge hinaus würde ich Deinen Rock lüften and stundenlang Deinen Schoss küssen.”

  “You devil.”

  He felt a grin spread foolishly on his face.

  “Devil!” she repeated. “Of course, I can’t be positive what Schoss means. Somehow it never came up in our conversations. Dirty old man! Sweet beautiful dirty old man!” She stretched out, lay on her back, parted her thighs. A wanton glow spread on her face. “I don’t have a skirt for you to lift. Does that matter very much?”

  TEN

  William Roy Guthrie

  Three-term governor of Louisiana. Presidential candidate, Free American Party, 1964,1968. Sectionalist demagogue with minor racist appeal in industrial Midwest. Controlled alcoholic. Insufficient stature and character for national leadership. Political program neopopulist, negative. Termination advised to allow his personal following in the southeast to flow into the movement. Termination of Guthrie must precede termination of Theodore. Thrust may come from black extremist or university radical. This cover should be opaque. Age: 57. Married. No children …

  When Dorn was in Baltimore, a young black with an Afro hairstyle thrust a newspaper at him while he was walking down the street. “Read the truth, sir,” the boy said.

  Dorn had been thinking of something far removed from Baltimore. Far removed, too, from the truth. He blinked, drew back, recovered, and reached to take the paper. It was a tabloid. The headline, bold black type over a red background, shrieked of murder. One of the stories that caught his eye spoke of a nationwide network of concentration camps for blacks.

  “What is this?”

  “The truth,” the boy said, as if by rote. “You won’t get it elsewhere, sir. Published by the Black Panther Party. And that’s the truth.”

  Dorn squinted at the upper-right corner. “The price is twenty-five cents?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dorn dug out a five-dollar bill. “Interesting,” he said. “I could use a dozen of these.”

  “I’ll have to give you some coin—”

  “No, keep the change,” Dorn said. “Power to the people.”

  “Right on!”

  In Chicago, police arrested a seventeen-year-old high school dropout for questioning in connection with the bombing of police headquarters. He was reported to have confessed to participation in the act and to have named several associates in the plot before breaking loose from his captors and hurling himself through a fourth-story window. He died in the fall.

  Dorn read several accounts of the incident. In one of these, the reaction of Governor Guthrie was reported as follows:

  “In a characteristic gesture, the florid-faced Louisiana governor winked and laid a finger alongside his nose. ‘I’ll tell you, boys,’ he said confidentially, ‘it’s a good thing we don’t get that sort of agitation down in my part of the country. I don’t know what-all we might do. We just don’t have a window high enough to chuck one of those fellers out of. I guess we’d just have to take him on up to Chicago.’ Governor Guthrie went on to cluck at reporters who asked if he were suggesting extralegal action on the part of the Chicago police, or if his words constituted an endorsement of such tactics. ‘I don’t know why on earth I bother chatting with you boys,’ he said in mock exasperation. ‘You know you just twist every old thing I say. And you never can tell when I’m cracking jokes with you.’”

  In a room in a Holiday Inn in Charlotte, North Carolina, Heidigger was engaged in a spirited analysis of the relative merits of stewardesses on various U.S. airlines. The TWA girls were the best-looking. The ones on American were the best at their work. The ones on Northeast were tough and brassy. On United—

  Dorn bathed in the flow of words without attempting to pay attention to them. He watched Heidigger bounce about, gesturing theatrically with his hands, flashing gold teeth, punctuating his words with a thrust of his cigar. Light glinted off his bald head. The fringe of white hair had not been cut since Dorn had last seen him, and it gave him the look of a mad scientist in a horror film. The white lunatic fringe, Dorn thought.

  “… their wonderfully transitory quality, Miles. For the length of the flight they hover over you, suffer your abuse, indul
ge your whims. Then the plane lands, and you never see them again. In retrospect their faces merge into a single face, their bodies into a single body. Do you know what they resemble? They are like whores. Instead of cunt they give you coffee.”

  If there is a Day of Judgment, Dorn thought, what would weigh most heavily against him was not the crimes he had committed but that he actually liked Eric Heidigger. He had been thinking about this for some time and had been unable to settle on the reason why it was so. He did not like to believe it was because Heidigger so obviously appreciated his talent. One often enough liked people for lesser reasons than that, but it nevertheless seemed to him that his affection for Heidigger—that was what it was, affection—should have a rather deeper motivation.

  Psychoanalysis could perhaps furnish an explanation, he thought, and smiled at the image. Suppose he had stretched out on Greenspan’s couch that day and spoken truth instead of fiction. I am an assassin, Doctor, and I am concerned that I feel a genuine affection for my employer. He grinned, imagining Greenspan tugging at his little beard and nodding, nodding, nodding.

  “Well,” Heidigger said. “To more explosive matters, wouldn’t you say? I have what you ordered.”

  “Good.”

  “It’s under the bed. A little package for you. Could you get it? But please don’t drop it.”

  “If it’s what I asked for, Eric, you could drop it off the Empire State Building and nothing would happen. Unless it hit some poor fool on the head.”

  “Merely a joke, Miles. It is as you ordered it. Although we could have engineered something to specifications if you had permitted it.”

  “I prefer to do my own assembling.”

  “And wisely, I think. Trust your own craft.”

  “I prefer it.”

  “Under the bed, then. The far end. I would get it myself, but my stomach gets in the way when I bend over. Hence I do so as infrequently as possible.”

  Dorn felt distinctly uncomfortable kneeling on the floor and fumbling under Heidigger’s bed for the parcel. In his mind’s eye he envisioned Heidigger moving up behind him, putting a pistol to the back of his neck. One of the negative aspects of his profession was that one was not only instinctively cautious in times of danger but was quite as apprehensive in perfectly safe situations.

  The parcel was half the size of a cigar box. It was wrapped in birthday wrapping paper and tied up in a pink bow.

  “Is it someone’s birthday, Eric?”

  “I thought this would amuse you.”

  “I used that once, you know. Ages ago.”

  This reminded Heidigger of a story, which Dorn listened to. He excused himself to use the bathroom. Unlike the room in Tampa, it had no bidet.

  When he had finished, Heidigger wanted to talk about the death of Emil Karnofsky. He said that no one seemed to know how the burglars had gained entrance to the building. Dorn thought this was possible, but not terribly likely.

  “For curiosity, Miles, how well did you have your own plan worked out?”

  “To the last damned detail,” he said bitterly. “It would have been a hell of a lot slicker than what happened.”

  “You had a way to get inside?”

  He nodded. “A psychiatrist. Moritz Greenspan.”

  “A Jew?”

  “No, an Australian Bushfellow. Yes, a Jew. I actually went and stretched out on his couch for fifty intolerable minutes and talked about how depressed I was. The shit wouldn’t even take part in the conversation. I paid him fifty dollars and had to do all the talking.”

  This, predictably, reminded Heidigger of a joke. It was one Dorn had heard.

  “I was going to go back again. I made an appointment. The only time it’s difficult to get into the building is late at night. At other times you just see any of the doctors there, and you’re inside.”

  “You were going to take Karnofsky out during the day?”

  “No, of course not,” he said, impatiently. “I was going to see the idiot doctor and then hide somewhere in the building until four in the morning. They watch the entrances and elevators, but they don’t check anything else. There were several apartments empty, tenants on vacation. I could have let myself in and had a nap until it was time.”

  “And you’d do it while Karnofsky and the nigger were both asleep?”

  “Of course. I wasn’t sure of method. I was thinking of insulin shock. That’s easy. Or an air bubble in a vein. He used a needle all the time, one more puncture wouldn’t have surprised anybody.”

  “A damned shame. There are the stupidest rumors. That it was a power play within his union. That the Mafia rubbed him out. Stupid. You know, I couldn’t believe it was your work.” He laughed shortly. “Fifty dollars, a dollar a minute to tell some silly old Jew your troubles. And the troubles were not even your own!”

  On a television set in another hotel room, Dorn watched an excerpt from a press conference called by Governor William Roy Guthrie to explain his declining an invitation to address a convention of New American Patriots in Milwaukee. “I’d certainly like to go up there and talk to those folks,” Dorn heard him say. “It does my heart good to see that people up North are beginning to see things the way we-all been seeing ‘em down here for years. But it’s my job to see to the problems of the good people of Louisiana. That’s what they pay me for, not to go flying all over the country. Besides, I’m not too sure how safe it’d be up there. I’d have to go and sit out in the sun through a lot of Louisiana summers before I felt secure in that part of the country.”

  A reporter asked the governor if his decision stemmed from a reluctance to play second fiddle to James Danton Rhodine, already slated as principal speaker.

  “You fellows come up with the strangest things,” Guthrie said. “I wouldn’t mind hearing Rhodine myself. Just because he’s seen fit to jump on our southern bandwagon is nothing for me to object to. I’d like to see all the good people in America jump on the bandwagon. There’s room for the lot of us.”

  While in the microfilm room of the New York Public Library, Dorn had read a number of stories that had nothing whatsoever to do with Emil Karnofsky. One of these was a human-interest piece on Willie Jackson.

  Willie Jackson was a 63-year-old Baton Rouge shoeshine boy. In his earlier capacity as commissioner of public highways, Guthrie had stopped every morning at Will Jackson’s post outside the State Office Building for a shine. Upon election to the governorship in 1962, Guthrie had sent instructions to Jackson to be at his office every morning at nine to shine Guthrie’s shoes.

  Willie Jackson was not the sort given to voluble complaint. But he seemed to have said something to somebody, and one of the many reporters who despised Guthrie managed to come up with the story. It seemed that Jackson was not at all happy with his new post. The governor’s office in the State Capitol Building was a brisk ten-minute walk from his post outside the State Office Building, and after he had arrived, Guthrie frequently kept him waiting for as long as an hour before letting him apply wax to leather. As a result, Willie Jackson was being done out of a major portion of his income. Furthermore, according to the original story, Guthrie never gave him more than a dime.

  The Times story went on to explain that when Guthrie had read all this he was enraged. As it happened, he was genuinely fond of Jackson and thought he had been doing him a good turn, that his appointment would lend him status with his peers. It had never occurred to him that he was costing the man money. Finally, and this was the sorest point of all, he invariably gave Jackson a dollar, which was considerably more than the average payment for a shoeshine in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

  Dorn suspected that Guthrie’s first impulse must have been to throw Jackson into a room with a naked white girl and let him die of shock. But the Louisiana governor had style. He immediately shot a bill through the state legislature appointing Willie Jackson official Louisiana Shoeshine Boy for life, and authorizing at taxpayers’ expense the erection of a permanent shoeshine stand on the steps of the State Capi
tol Building.

  And every morning, as Governor William Roy Guthrie and his four-man bodyguard walked to the governor’s office, Guthrie stopped for a shine. Willie Jackson shined his shoes, and Guthrie gave him a dollar, and virtually every newspaper in America had ran, at least once, a photograph of this little ceremony. Some of the photos showed Guthrie standing with his hands on his hips, beaming around a fat cigar. In others he was depicted leaning over to rub Jackson’s nappy white head for luck.

  Dorn loved the story, and had got to the point where he could not think of Guthrie without thinking of Willie Jackson. Periodically he found himself experiencing the same sort of grudging affection for Guthrie that he did for Eric Heidigger, and he suspected the reasons, whatever they might be, were not all that dissimilar.

  On Dorn’s second and final trip to Baton Rouge, he took along his copies of the Black Panther newspaper, along with some of the contents of the parcel Heidigger had given him. He brought other supplies as well.

  It was not so easy to move around unobtrusively in Baton Rouge as in a city like New York. Dorn devoted a few hours to following Willie Jackson after he had closed his shoeshine stand for the day. It was in his mind to secrete copies of the Black Panther paper in Jackson’s room, but the more he considered this the less advantageous it seemed. He ultimately buried the papers in a trash can.

  He spent several more hours determining the pattern of surveillance in the Capitol area. The actual process of secreting an explosive charge in the base of the shoeshine stand took less than ten minutes, start to finish.

  One item in Heidigger’s parcel that Dorn did not take to Baton Rouge was a squat plastic cube the size and shape of a pack of regular cigarettes. There was a button on it, set at a level with the surface of the device. When depressed, it would emit a high-frequency signal that would activate a companion device which was presently in Baton Rouge. One night in Willow Falls, Dorn used a knife blade to pry the device apart at the seams. He made an interesting modification of the device and put it back together again.