Lammeck paused. The students cocked their heads and rubbed their chins. Lammeck searched for which smart child he might call on first if no volunteers presented themselves.
“Hmmm? I’ll give you an example to help you along. As you may know, my area of expertise in world history is the assassin. The political killer. There have always been two types of assassination. First, it has been the work of an individual or individuals who kill for only two reasons: They might be deranged, or they might be revolutionaries. Either way, the murders they commit are motivated by a great, uncontrolled obsession for God, country, power, social change, or sometimes just to quiet the voices in their heads.”
The class snickered at this last classification. Lammeck would have laughed, too, had he not known of so many examples.
“The second type of assassination is a bit colder: state-sponsored assassination. Every nation on earth has at one time or another utilized political murder as a way to further the state’s ends.”
One red-clad arm attached to a pimply bejant lifted.
“Yes?”
“Every nation, sir?”
Lammeck laughed. “Oh, yes, every nation. My own dear and brave America, for instance, has done this sort of thing many times, and not always with finesse. The first recorded instance of state assassination in America happened in 1620. Myles Standish, one of our stalwart Pilgrim leaders in Plymouth, invited the local Indian chief, the chief’s younger brother, and two braves to a feast. Once the four were inside and seated, Standish locked the door and personally hacked one of the braves to death with his longknife. The chief and the other brave were murdered by several other Puritans in attendance. The chief’s young brother was allowed to live long enough to be taken to the colony’s edge and hung as a warning to the other Indians in the area. Now, was this the work of patriots? Or madmen?”
A few students uttered “Madmen.” The older ones, the Poles and the veterans, said nothing.
“Madmen? Perhaps. But let’s not forget that the Plymouth colony survived to become one of the few permanent colonies in the New World. And the New World became America. So, the question stands: Can even a bloodthirsty madman determine the course of history? Would the Plymouth colony have survived anyway without this atrocity? Or would the Indians have swept it away, and taken the one in Jamestown, Virginia, with it? Would America then have become not a British colony, but perhaps Spanish? How would that have affected the world’s path? Incredibly, you must admit.”
One of the medical students raised her hand.
“Yes?”
“Professor, doesn’t it seem logical that if a country can go to war, and send millions to kill other millions, that it can also send one person to kill one particular person? Isn’t assassination just a smaller act of war?”
The class nodded, appreciating this question. Lammeck approached the young woman.
“Could you do it? Assassinate someone, if you were convinced your own survival and the survival of your culture or country required it? And I mean kill a king, a queen, a president, the prime minister. A great leader, admired and followed by many, even millions. But you and your side, you disagree with his leadership. So: Could you kill a king?” ,
“I don’t know. I... I don’t think...”
“Yes, I understand, you’re an aspiring physician. Life is precious and all that. And your hesitation is also history’s hesitation. This quandary has tormented some of the greatest minds and commenters of history. On the battlefield, circumstances determine who must die. There’s something random and, therefore, fair about it. But selecting one person? Marking one leader for death? It doesn’t seem cricket. Who determines if a ruler must die? Who is the proper moral judge?”
Lammeck ambled his wide waistline through the desks.
“Saint Thomas Aquinas had no problem with killing a usurper to the throne, but he balked at murdering a legitimate monarch who’d become a tyrant. Here in Scotland, in fact, right here in St. Andrews, the great Calvinist John Knox preached that anyone, royal or otherwise, who did not share his faith was prime for assassination. Knox was quite incensed that Queen Elizabeth did not knock off her Catholic rival, Mary Queen of Scots. And of course, Niccolo Machiavelli made perhaps the best, and certainly most frequently cited, arguments on behalf of assassination, in his sixteenth-century book. Anyone know the piece?”
“The Prince.” The answer came from the lad with one eye.
“Correct. Machiavelli’s main assertion was that religious and ethical notions have no place in politics.” Lammeck quoted from memory: “ ‘It must be understood, that a prince cannot observe all of those virtues for which men are reputed good, because it is often necessary to act against mercy, against faith, against humanity, against frankness, against religion, in order to preserve the state.’ “
He let this notion settle with his crimson students, so bright in the early light.
“On the other side of the argument, no less a writer than Leo Tolstoy was quite clear in his disdain for Napoleon. The old Russian wrote in his epic War and Peace that Napoleon had led nothing, had changed nothing. The emperor was merely a figurehead on a great ship of state, only a name and face put out front before the great momentum of events, all of which would have happened with or without him.”
One of the Polish officers timidly raised his hand.
“Professor.”
“Yes.”
The boy simply said, “Hitler.”
“Of course, Hitler. There’s a perfect example. Do you think if we could pull the little bastard up by the roots, if he’d been hit by a truck or gotten the clap early on, before he became der Führer, could this war have been avoided? You.” Lammeck indicated the Brit veteran with both eyes, wondering where this boy’s wound hid. “Go back in time and kill Hitler for me.”
“Alright, sir.”
“Now, what have we got? War or no?”
The boy hesitated. Lammeck watched him blink. Memories or pain—something—redirected him from this sunny, safe classroom away to the battle where he got whatever bullet or shard had been destined for him. Lammeck was about to relieve the soldier of the question when the lad replied:
“War, sir.”
“Tolstoy agrees with you.”
“And you, Professor?” The question came from the eye-patch soldier.
“As an historian, I straddle the fence. Machiavelli could argue that it might’ve been a good job to send a few of Hitler’s pals to Hades with him, like Goebbels and Himmler. I think we might actually have spared ourselves a lot of trouble by erasing that crowd from history sooner rather than later. I agree with our lovely med student here that state-sponsored assassination can be viewed as an act of war. But I cannot be convinced that poking knives into Julius Caesar altered anything along the lines which Brutus and Cassius anticipated. In fact, ending Caesar’s dictatorship did not result in the republic but only in Augustus and the long line of autocratic Caesars who followed. Later, the murder of feeble Tiberius served to open the door for that SOB Caligula. Or take little Gavrilo Princip and his Serbian band of Black Hand assassins who plotted against, then plugged, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. This act toppled all the dominos to start The Great War. Even so, historians agree that that war was just waiting for a spark, and it would have found one even without Princip’s pistol. No one seriously pretends that Ramon Mercader, Trotsky’s ax-murderer in Mexico City, was not an agent for Stalin. Trotsky’s dead, Stalin is Stalin, and the world keeps spinning Russia’s way. The message here is that it’s hard to imagine anyone worse than Hitler. What if the plot last July to assassinate him had succeeded? Some argue that that would have accomplished nothing but to end the war last year instead of this year. Then Germany would have been able to cry that it was betrayed and that’s why it lost, the way it did after the last war, instead of having its fanny kicked on the battleground fair and square and for good. What if we could have eliminated Hitler in his cradle? Might that have changed history for the better, or worse? Or woul
d it perhaps have just put a different and equally loathsome figurehead on Tolstoy’s ship of state? A good many historians and philosophers believe that, sooner or later, here we’d be, right where we should be.”
For a moment, Lammeck thought of hauling before this new crop of students the bodies of Gabčik and Kubiš. The sacrifice of the two young Czechs had been sponsored by the British state, and by Lammeck personally. They’d certainly been successful assassins. Heydrich was dead. And what was the result? The martyred Reichsprotektor was celebrated on stamps in Nazi Germany. Czechoslovakia remained brutally occupied. The towns of Lidice and Ležáky had been erased. Nothing had changed, not for the better.
Even realizing this might happen, Gabčik and Kubiš hadn’t straddled any fences. Nor do any of those boys up in the Highlands, training on this fine morning to kill.
What was the lesson?
Lammeck shrugged, to show he did not know, and to end this part of the discussion.
A hand went high from one of the Air cadets.
“Yes?”
“What about the others, Professor? The lone actors.”
“Ah, the zealots and avengers. The crazed gunmen, poisoners, and stabbers. Yes, what about them? They’re my favorites. They are history’s wild cards. The ghosts in the machine. Impulsive, always oddly timed. Sometimes they act at a pivotal moment, when teetering history just needs a slight nudge to fall hard. Sometimes their targets are marked for death anyway; history was simply done with them. Other times the assassination is a tragedy, marked by woe the world over, because it served nothing but hatred. John Wilkes Booth’s handiwork falls into this category.”
“Lincoln,” added one of the med students.
“That was an easy one, so don’t look so smug. Some say Lincoln was our greatest American president. Booth’s plan was to kill both Lincoln and Ulysses Grant, who was supposed to be in Ford’s Theater that night with the President. Other conspirators were to murder a few more officials in the government on the same evening, Good Friday, April 14, 1865. None of them pulled it off, though Secretary of State Seward was stabbed in the throat. Booth was the only one to score big that night. Grant was not in attendance at the theater with the President because Mrs. General Grant had grown tired of Mary Lincoln’s hysterical outbursts—Mrs. Lincoln was not a well woman—and begged off. After the play began, Lincoln’s only bodyguard, a member of the Washington police force, left the presidential box for a nearby tavern. By now, the Civil War was over. The only thing Booth, a Southerner, could achieve was revenge. He walked unhindered into Lincoln’s box, cried out ‘Sic semper tyrannis’—Ever thus to tyrants—and with a derringer shot Lincoln behind the left ear.”
Another of the Air Force cadets piped up. “Are you saying nothing changed in America with Lincoln’s death?”
Lammeck strolled the sunny classroom.
“Always difficult to tell, of course. This sort of inquiry is a brew of fact and speculation. But no, Andrew Johnson stepped in as president and the sun came up the next morning. Secretary of State Seward recovered. However, after studying assassinations for twenty years, I have my own little theory. I believe that history anticipates certain acts. She readies herself for them to keep everything on track. But I don’t think history saw Booth coming. You can always spot when history is annoyed, when one of her favored sons or daughters is killed before their time. She steps in and does something exceptional, to make certain the assassins get caught. Here’s what happened. After shooting Lincoln, Booth leaped over the railing to grab a curtain and slide down to the stage floor. But his spur got caught on the fabric and he fell to the stage, breaking his left leg. Without this injury, John Wilkes Booth might have ridden fast out of Washington and gotten himself lost among the rebel soldiers flowing home after Lee’s surrender. As it was, he needed medical attention. He got that attention from a Maryland physician named Dr. Mudd. This unfortunate country doctor appears to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Implicated in the conspiracy, he was sentenced to life in prison. The doctor also gave rise to an American saying. When someone’s luck abandons them, we like to say ‘Your name is Mudd.’ History has a sense of balance, you see, even fair play, and is not without humor. She accepts but does not like caprice. History does not pout; she picks up her skirt and moves on. That’s why she fascinates us.”
Lammeck returned to his podium.
“This is the question, my scholars. Do great men and women create their times, or do great events identify the people needed and simply allow them to take the credit? The list of the great who have been cut down before their time is ludicrously long. Pancho Villa and Zapata, Thomas Becket, Nicholas II, Shaka Zulu, American Presidents Garfield and McKinley, Rasputin, Wild Bill Hickok, eight popes, and more Chinese and Roman emperors, English and French kings and queens, shahs, tsars, and Latin American dictators than you can imagine. And let’s not forget the lucky ones who dodged assassination attempts. Hitler, Lenin, both Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt—a list as lengthy as the roll call of poor buggers who bought the farm. But not once did history pirouette and dance off in another direction just because one of her actors had left the stage.”
Lammeck stopped to look over his charges.
“Or did she?”
The students all seemed breathless at the scope of carnage among the famous and important. They sat eager and baffled by the answerless question. Lammeck could have continued at this pace for hours, casting famed and obscure names and episodes, near misses and fatal luck. On this first day of the semester, however, he decided they were going to be a good class and rewarded them. He’d dismiss them early. He’d go back to his flat, work through the rest of the day, then leave at dawn for the Highlands, for tomorrow’s weapons session with the Jeds.
“I’m going to let you go a bit early today. You have the reading assigned for Wednesday? But first, one more tale. Then off with you.”
Lammeck pointed to a small poster tacked to a corkboard hung on his classroom wall. The poster depicted the painting by the artist David of Jean-Paul Marat, knifed in his bathtub.
“At fifty years old, Jean-Paul Marat was a doctor turned journalist and revolutionary. His writings are widely held to be responsible for helping unleash the Reign of Terror which cropped up to defend the French Revolution. Marat approved of the slaughter of thousands, stating that the guillotine must stay busy in order to keep the revolution alive. He composed death lists. He demanded that the French king be executed. On July 13, 1793, a twenty-four-year-old Girondist, Charlotte Corday, arrived at Marat’s door in the turmoil of revolutionary Paris. She was stopped by guards, but Marat heard her insist and called out to admit the girl to his bathroom. He sat soaking, working on his lists, in a disgusting medicinal mixture designed to relieve a festering skin disease, now believed to have been a wanking case of herpes. Miss Corday told him of antirevolutionary activities in her hometown of Caen. Marat shouted, ‘I shall send them all to the guillotine in a few days!’ Taking this as her cue, young Charlotte produced a six-inch knife from her bodice and plunged it into Marat’s lung and aorta. At her trial, held two days afterward, she steadfastly refused her lawyer’s plea of insanity, crying out that she had committed an act of assassination. ‘That,’ she declared, ‘is the only defense worthy of me.’ Only four days after killing Marat, the brave girl faced the guillotine. The historical result of Charlotte’s act was that, in the frenzy that followed, many thousands more were sentenced to death than Marat at his best might have been able to order murdered. A sad outcome. But dear
Charlotte Corday had one of the nicest moments in all my studies of assassinations and assassins. Shall I tell you?”
The rapt students shouted, almost indignantly, “Yes!”
“Alright, settle down. Listen to this. After the guillotine had lopped her off at the neck, Charlotte’s executioner held up her head to the crowd. And slapped her.”
The class sat agape. Someone coughed. Lammeck chortled by himself.
“No?�
� he pleaded. They stared. “You don’t think that’s just perfect?”
Lammeck sighed, resigned that, even with a promising class, he alone might appreciate history’s beauty, that a century and a half later he would even know Charlotte Corday’s name. This was splendidly unpredictable, human, and seductive.
“Alright, go home.”
* * * *
LAMMECK POURED A DRAMBUIE. He swirled the tastes of Scotch whisky, heather honey, and herbs over his tongue. The window beside his desk looked down over Muttoes Lane, a brick alley where scarlet academic robes mingled with drab townsfolk. He set the glass on the sill to inspect the afternoon light through the amber liqueur.
He flicked a finger against the sheet of paper, upright and blank in his typewriter, to punish it for being blank. Below his window, some students laughed.
Lammeck sat back in his chair, knitting fingers across his stomach. On his desk, lunch waited uneaten. The plate was partially covered by the pages of a book. He gazed at the ceiling of his apartment, also broad, white, and empty.
The Assassins Gallery - [Dr Mikhal Lammeck 01] Page 5
