The Evil That Men Do

by Robert Gleason

  “You definitely want to keep away from him.”

  “He seems harmless enough.”

  “He’s one sick fuck,” Raza said.

  “You’re trying to scare me, aren’t you?”

  “Remember when you told that merc that you were a ‘booty bandit, some sheet-shaker, a real pee-hole pirate’?”

  “Ye—e—e—e—s—s?” Rashid said with clear misgivings, drawing out the word into several syllables.

  “Well you enjoy les liaisons dangereuses? Tariq enjoys collecting kurtas [testicles].”

  “He has been staring at my crotch for quite some time,” Rashid had to admit. “It’s a little unnerving.”

  “He especially has it in for you. Our superiors are pissed at him. He kills too many prisoners prematurely during interrogations. He wants you to help him prove that he can still break men—totally. You’re his last chance to prove himself.”

  “But you’ll protect me from him?” Rashid asked.

  “If you don’t tell me what I want, I’ll make Tariq look like the Holy Hajj.”

  “Suppose informing on my friends violated my religious convictions?” Rashid asked.

  “Fine, but if you don’t give me what I want, your religious convictions will experience an ass-whipping of apocalyptic proportions.”

  “Does it have to be either/or?” Rashid asked.

  “Affirmative. A binary yes-or-no.”

  “You could try bribing me.”

  “Will you take a check?”

  “I’ll take checks, food stamps, IOUs, supermarket coupons, beads and wampum.”

  She wrote him an IOU for $100 trillion.

  “Not enough.”

  “Suppose I were to give you a whole shithouse of hard cash,” Raza said, laughing. “Would you even know what to do with it?”

  “Absolutely,” Rashid said.

  “What would you spend it on?”

  “What I always do—hard liquor, harder drugs, fast women and slow horses.”

  “And the rest you’d waste?”

  “You just wrote my epitaph.”

  “Then I’ll chisel it on your tombstone and piss my brains out on it,” Raza said, smiling.

  “Are you suggesting that I might not survive this little Love Boat?” Rashid asked.

  “I believe we should all view each day as if it were our last,” Raza said.

  “Words to live by.”

  “Especially for you,” Raza said, “given the life you’ve led. If you died right now, what would you leave to the world? What would your legacy be?”

  “Besides cold graves and sobbing widows?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I don’t think about the Big Picture,” Rashid said. “Not anymore. I just live for the day.”

  “Then today won’t be one of your all-time greats,” Raza said.

  “But you could change all that.”

  “Maybe—if you give me what I want.”

  “Which is?”

  “The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

  Rashid shook his head glumly. “That’s asking a lot.”

  She picked up a thick black device that looked like a flashlight and brandished it under his nose.

  A cattle prod.

  “So which is it?” Raza asked. “Will you tell me what I want to know or do I turn you over to Tariq?”

  “What will he do?”

  “He’ll electrocute your genitals.”

  “So will you—so there’s no difference.”

  Then Tariq opened his doctor’s bag, removed a small leather bag and emptied it on the worktable. It had been filled with surgical instruments.

  “There is one difference: My friend over there will geld you like a steer first.”

  Rashid watched in horror as Tariq began honing a scalpel on a whetstone.

  2

  “Our financial sectors have run up over $1.5 quadrillion of global derivative debt,” President Tower said. “That’s pure intrinsic uncollateralized … debt. When that market crashes, Washington will have to cover our losses—they’ll have no choice—and they’ll have to cut us more checks. We’ll make a fortune. We’ll own this country before it’s over.”

  “We’ll own … the world,” CIA Director Billy Burke said.

  It was almost 9:00 P.M. now, and Brenda had asked her brother’s most trusted advisers, Ambassador Waheed and CIA Director Billy Burke, to come up to Tower’s penthouse apartment. Relaxing on couches and stuffed chairs, they sat in their white shirtsleeves, their ties loosened, and stared out over New York City.

  “You really think you can rein in Jules Meredith?” Brenda asked her brother.

  “I’ll have her bosses do it for me,” Tower said. “My friends and I own a big piece of the news media. The people who run it aren’t muckrakers; they’re buck-takers.”

  Brenda smoked a Gauloises Blue and sipped brandy. She noticed that Waheed favored French reds, while Burke drank Macallan’s single-malt neat. Tower sipped his ubiquitous black coffee.

  “Jim,” Director Burke said, “I hope you have them in your pocket. Our sources at her book publishing company say she’s got the names and amounts of every one of your campaign contributors and contributions. She’s also exposing all your offshore-tax-haven money.”

  “So what?” Tower said. “I’ll simply announce to the world that she’s vindictive because I wouldn’t fuck her—or maybe because I stopped fucking her.”

  “None of that’s true, Jim,” Brenda said.

  “I don’t have to prove anything,” Tower said. “All we have to do is vilify her character and cast doubt on her data.”

  “That’s how we discredited the climate change scientists,” Ambassador Waheed said, nodding and laughing. “And they were right on the facts.”

  “And in discrediting the climate change scientists, we proved facts don’t matter,” Tower said.

  “In other words,” Brenda said, pouring another snifter of brandy, “we lie.”

  “At the Agency, we call it disinformation,” Burke said with a small smile.

  “I prefer ‘truthful hyperbole,’” Tower said.

  “Someone once said no lie can live forever,” Brenda said softly.

  “And whoever said that had shit for brains,” Burke said, shaking his head.

  “Unfortunately for us,” Brenda said, “Jules has the power of the press behind her.”

  “The press is not exactly filled with ‘truth-tellers,’” Director Burke snorted contemptuously.

  “‘Truth-killers’ is more accurate,” Ambassador Waheed said.

  “Mencken once described the American people as Boobus Americanus,” Burke said.

  “He also said no one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” Brenda said.

  “We sure as shit haven’t,” Ambassador Waheed said, sipping his drink.

  “Look at how much money the public loses at our casinos,” Brenda said, shaking her head, incredulous, “yet they keep coming back and throwing hundreds of millions more at us.”

  “And on all your derivative investment scams,” Director Burke observed.

  “What a country,” Tower said. “Where else could we rob the public blind and get lionized for it?”

  “Look what Romney did at Bain Capital and what Trump did with his bankrupt casinos,” Director Burke said with smug smirk. “None of my Wall Street friends have done an honest day’s work in over fifty years. They just pile up debt.”

  “Debt’s the key,” Brenda said. “Borrow enough money, and debt becomes currency. Milken proved that with junk bonds. Romney proved that with all those LBOs. They brag about it.”

  “Our financial sectors have run up over $1.5 quadrillion of global derivative debt,” President Tower said. “That’s pure intrinsic uncollateralized … debt. When that market crashes, Washington will have to cover our losses—they’ll have no choice—and they’ll have to cut us more checks. We’ll make a fortune. We’ll own this country before
it’s over.”

  “We’ll own … the world,” CIA Director Burke said.

  They all nodded in silence.

  “On our financial statements,” Prince Waheed finally said, “we often list debt as assets.”

  “Exactly so,” Tower said. “We can also convert all that debt into salable derivatives that no one understands, chop those instruments up into tiny fragments that are even more inscrutable, shuffle and combine those pieces into packages, and wait for the Wall Street firms to beat our doors down in a feeding frenzy just to be first in line to buy them.”

  “Isn’t that better than making cars and trucks?” CIA Director Burke said.

  “Romney sure as hell didn’t go into his old man’s auto business,” Prince Waheed said. “He took over firms, looted them wholesale, then sold off the debt. Fucking brilliant!”

  “Our bankers at Tower, Inc., do that all the time,” Tower said. “They target firms for takeover, plunder their assets piecemeal, load them with debt and peddle them to unsuspecting pension-fund managers before all that debt goes comes due. We make a fortune.”

  “Those pension-fund managers,” Burke said, “have to be the biggest chumps that ever lived.”

  “We take them every time,” Tower agreed.

  “Like Grant took Richmond,” Director Burke said.

  “Like Hitler seized power in Germany,” Tower said, “and Lenin commandeered Russia.”

  “Putilov did it too,” Director Burke said, “and made out like a bandit.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I admire that man,” Tower said. “You know, he and I have become good friends. Everyone else treats him with such fear and deference. I think he likes it when I treat him like ‘one of the guys.’ I call him ‘Comrade’ and ‘Putie.’ I believe I’m the only one who can speak to him as an equal—man-to-man.”

  “I’m sure he appreciates your candor,” Ambassador Waheed said.

  “In fact,” Tower said, “I’m going to call him right now. You’ll see how frank we are with each other.”

  “Great idea,” Burke said.

  Tower took out his digitally encrypted cell phone, put it on “speaker” and punched in Putilov’s private number.

  3

  Still, in that last microsecond, balanced between truth and hallucination, between psychosis and reality, during that final hair-trigger eternity, Putilov heard a small voice asking him whether his hatred of Tower was driving him … mad.

  Putilov said his good-byes to Tower and put down the Skype phone. He’d eluded the idiot’s calls as long as he could, but this time Tower had told his assistant that the call was critically important—in fact, a crisis—so Putilov broke down and took it. The call, however, was about nothing at all, and he could tell Tower had his cell on speakerphone. Furthermore, his informants had told him earlier that Tower was meeting with CIA Director Burke, Ambassador Waheed and Tower’s hard-drinking, chain-smoking sister. Putilov suspected that Tower had other people in the room and had only wanted to prove to them that he could get a direct line to Putilov any time he wanted.

  Would the fool never give him any peace?

  Putilov didn’t know how much longer he could take dealing with him. Tonight’s conversation had been especially distressing. Tower had been unable to stop bragging and lecturing.

  Putilov poured ten desomorphine tablets onto his desk. Grinding the pills up between spoons, he chopped the granules up with a razor blade and dissolved them in 190-proof Everclear, ether and gasoline. He then boiled the solution in a Pyrex bong and sucked the fumes deep into his lungs, where he held them for a full half minute.

  Smoking desomorphine radically heightened the pills’ power.

  * * *

  Putilov and the bong went back a long way. He’d confiscated it from a suspect in Berlin and kept it as a souvenir. Breaking the man in a particularly brutal and bloodthirsty way, he had employed all the instruments of unendurable pain and perverse persuasion, including pliers, blowtorches and hot knives. He’d then handed the man his own bong, heated it and pumped him full of krokodil fumes, utterly robbing him of his sense and any final scintilla of resistance. In the end Putilov had not only tortured a flagrantly fallacious confession out of the man, he’d convinced the poor imbecile, that he, Putilov, was the man’s best friend, that he had the man’s best interests at heart. Putilov had so brainwashed the moron that the man had actually thanked him for the agonizing auto-da-fé. He had never achieved such total control over an individual in his entire life. It was as if he owned him—mind, body and soul. The man’s eyes were filled with atonement and contrition; even when Putilov had finally granted him his release, his coup de grâce—a bullet between his appreciative puppy-dog eyes—the man was still murmuring his heartfelt gratitude.

  At the time, that sense of godlike power had filled Putilov with the most amazing calm and serenity, something almost resembling … joy. Later, however, when he remembered the man’s utter breakdown, his confession, thanksgiving and death, he had felt not mere satisfaction, fulfillment or even genuine happiness but a most special … arousal. Perhaps that feeling of excitation was the reason he’d never thrown away the man’s bong. It reminded him of that very singular night.

  * * *

  Again Putilov put the bong’s stem to his mouth and inhaled deeply. With an almost overpowering avidity, he waited for the drug to once more take hold of his senses, to vanquish his fears, doubts and anxieties, to hammer him like an express train, full-throttle and out of control. The krokodil never let him down. Still, at the last microsecond, balanced between truth and hallucination, between psychosis and reality, during that final hair-trigger eternity, Putilov heard a small voice asking him whether his hatred of Tower was driving him … mad.

  PART VI

  “I don’t think J. T. Tower’ll die until he’s drawn, quartered, cremated … with a stake hammered through his ashes.”

  —Jules Meredith

  1

  “I’d prefer shooting you with scopolamine and sodium pentothal, but the law frowns on such techniques.”

  —President J. T. Tower to Jules Meredith

  Jules Meredith’s cell phone rang a little after midnight. The caller was Brenda Tower.

  “Well Jules,” Brenda said, “you aren’t going to believe this, but your wish has been granted. My brother is inviting you up to his New York penthouse.”

  “You know I’ve been asking him for an interview for three years,” Jules said. “What made him change his mind?”

  “Who knows? Who cares?” Brenda said. “Maybe your articles have so incensed the president that he finally feels compelled to set the record straight.”

  Jules showed up at Tower’s penthouse a little after 1:00 A.M. The president let her in himself. Casually dressed in red sweatpants, a gray T-shirt and white Nike jogging shoes, he stood a good six four. Jules noted that his hair was colored—brownish-blond with a hint of red—but even so, it was, at age sixty-five, still full, piled thick and high on his head. His face was deeply but artificially tanned.

  “At last, I meet the Troubler of my Peace,” he said, shaking her hand.

  Jules’s attire was informal as well—pale bleached-out jeans, a navy blue silk blouse and ebony boots with three-inch heels. Her dense fluffed-out hair was, unlike Tower’s, black as obsidian.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. President. So this is your famous Tower of Power?”

  “It’s one of them. I also built five other needle towers in this town. They all have penthouses just like this.”

  “But you sold those penthouses to other billionaires.”

  “I have to sell something to someone. I can’t own the world.”

  “But still you try.”

  “You ought to know,” Tower said. “You seem bent on scrutinizing and publicizing every business I’ve ever run since, at age five, I set up a lemonade stand. I’d like to know why.”

  “May I speak plainly, Mr. President?”

  “Please.”

&
nbsp; “I was born to bring you down.”

  ”And to that end,” Tower asked, “you’ve made exposing my business dealings your life’s work?”

  “Part of it.”

  “A big part of it,” Tower responded. “You’ve unearthed stuff on me even I didn’t know about.”

  “I’m a master of my craft.”

  “So murdering Jim Tower in the press is now a ‘craft’?”

  “Ah, Jimmy, no one can kill you.”

  “Why not?”

  “You reanimate yourself nightly in your coffin.”

  “So now I’m a vampire.”

  “A very dangerous one,” Jules said. “I don’t think J. T. Tower’ll die until he’s drawn, quartered, cremated … with a stake hammered through his ashes.”

  “And you plan on driving the stake in yourself.”

  “Oh, do I ever.”

  Tower escorted Jules to the penthouse’s center. Turning in a circle, she studied his luxurious lair and the world beyond. The living room, dining area and the partitioned-off study were a single open space and made up half the apartment. The bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchen took up the rest. With the bedrooms’ and bathrooms’ sliding doors open, Jules saw that she had a 360-degree view of Manhattan.

  Resisting the impulse to gawk, Jules forced herself to focus on the décor. She wanted to remember the furnishings for future reference. Their conversation might be off the record, but Tower’s penthouse wasn’t. One day—perhaps soon—she would want to write about it.

  Given that the apartment occupied the entire top floor, it wasn’t as big as Jules had imagined—only forty-six feet long and forty-six feet wide—but then the building was a “needle tower.” One hundred stories high, it was ultra-thin for a skyscraper, its square base also forty-six feet on edge, and each apartment occupied a whole floor.

  The walls were almost entirely unobstructed glass, so the view of the city was 360 degrees. To the south, the penthouse overlooked Lower Manhattan all the way to Staten Island. The northern view included Central Park, Harlem and the Bronx. To the east lay Long Island, and to the west, New Jersey, but it appeared from the penthouse’s point of view to be far more than two states. From her august vantage point, the entire country seemed to stretch before her in all directions.