The Triumph of Evil Read online

  “Is that so?”

  “He’s popular with a certain element. Why the hell not, he wants to give them the whole city on a platter. I shouldn’t be talking like this.”

  “I’m from out of town.”

  “Yeah, and it’s a free country. Freedom of speech, unless you happen to work hard and pay your taxes and try to live decent. Then they expect you to keep your mouth shut. My old man was on the force. Also an uncle, one of my mother’s brothers— as a matter of fact he’s still on the force. I grew up taking it for granted that I would be a cop. I never even thought of being anything else. If I knew it was gonna be like this.”

  “It must be very difficult.”

  “You wouldn’t believe it.” He looked at Dorn. “At least where you’re from they let law enforcement people do their job. They don’t handcuff them. I’ll give you an example. We had a situation here the other day that didn’t even make the papers, but to give you an idea. This buck over in the center city had himself a skinful and decided to stick a knife in his wife. Whether she was actually his wife or not I couldn’t say. Anyway, he takes a knife this long and sticks it in her. Lucky he doesn’t kill her. So naturally somebody calls us, and they send a car around and rush her to the hospital and take him downtown.

  “Now this is no civil rights thing, is it? I mean it’s a case of a man cutting up a woman. ADW, assault with a deadly weapon, maybe attempted second-degree homicide if the district attorney has a hair up, which he usually doesn’t. But nine times out of ten it’s nothing at all because the wife decides she loves him and says she fell on the knife, or she stabbed herself, or whatever the hell she says, and the charges are dropped. But it’s no civil rights thing, it’s no police brutality.

  “Listen to this. They surround the police car. Dozens of people. They start rocking it, they won’t let ‘em take this drunk downtown. So one of the guys in the car calls downtown and explains the situation. ‘Let him go,’ the order comes back. ‘But he’s drunk and he wants to kill people.’ ‘It doesn’t matter, let him go.’

  “So they let him go. And the crowd lets the cops go, and they drive away. But that’s not enough for these people. They go nuts, the rocks start flying, the store windows go. Black, white, it doesn’t matter who owns these businesses. It’s a hot night and this is an easy way to pick up a free television set and a few quarts of Scotch. So everybody starts looting.

  “And we do nothing because our hands are tied. ‘Let ‘em loot. Let ‘em cool down by theirselves.’ So in a couple hours they have all the liquor and clothes and television sets they want and they go home, and there’s no big story for the papers, and all over the country people look at Philly and say ‘O’Dowd knows how to keep things cool.’ All he keeps cool is the police force. Jesus, I shouldn’t be mouthing off like this, but I didn’t get on the force to sit around watching people burn down the country.”

  “It’s frightening,” Dorn said.

  “It really is. You want a cigarette?”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Yeah, I been trying to quit myself, but it’s impossible. I don’t know. When I was a kid it wasn’t just me, with my father and all, but everybody respected the cops. He was this tall guy in a uniform who helped people. You know something? You take your average criminal, I mean a hardened professional criminal, and he respects the police. He knows we have a job and we have to do it. But these people nowadays, to them we’re pigs for doing our job. For trying to keep the city together. They say the job isn’t worth doing. These people, when a building is burning they stand and throw rocks at firemen. Guys trying to put out a fire and save a building, and these people stand and throw rocks at them.”

  “You would think there must be an answer.”

  “But where the hell is it? There’s a lot of guys leaving the force. Going out in the suburbs where they don’t have to contend with this, where they can still do the job they’re being paid to do. Others leaving police work altogether. The pay you get is nothing when you look at the dangers and the abuse you have to put up with. But I believe in this job, you know? Somebody has to do it. What happens if everybody throws his hands up and says the hell with it?”

  “Then you have anarchy,” Dorn said.

  “Yeah. Anarchy. I guess it’s a lot different where you’re from. Another world, it must be.”

  “Completely different.”

  “I voted for the President in the last election. You know who a lot of cops voted for? What’s-his-name, that had his legs blown off. Guthrie.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “But I couldn’t see it myself. I mean what would he really know about running the country? About foreign policy? So I voted for the President, but if they had an election tomorrow I don’t know what I’d do. You know who they’re talking about more and more? Well, you would know, being from his state. Your man Rhodine.”

  “Yes, he’s building up quite a following.”

  “To tell you the truth, he’s a little far-out for my tastes. There’s a lot of talk that he’s coming down pretty hard on the Jews. Reading between the lines. I don’t know about that. But Jesus, we need somebody to take a strong stand on what’s happening in this country. It’s not getting better. Maybe this country needs a man like Rhodine to get things moving in the right direction again.”

  “He knows how to maintain law and order.”

  “Yeah. And we could use some of that. You know who else I like is Theodore. Of course he hasn’t got Rhodine’s style. But I like what he’s got to say.”

  On the flight North he had sat with eyes closed and hands in lap. The newsphoto of Walter Isaac James was in his pocket. Still.

  Jocelyn, I made a mistake and Detroit is burning. Something—your love, a black man’s face—blurred my vision. I no longer saw myself plain.

  I am a killer, Jocelyn. Whatever shoes I wear, I cannot walk other than on an assassin’s feet. I committed the great error of forgetting this central fact. I, a gun in another man’s hand, presumed to be a hand myself.

  From now on, Jocelyn, I shall remember who I am.

  They had aspirin at the White Tower. Dorn, who would have asked for some anyway out of a regard for detail, had a headache by the time he reached the coffee shop. He found this amusing. He took two aspirin tablets and drank a glass of iced tea. Twice he found himself reaching for the clipping in his pocket. Both times he caught himself and shook his head, annoyed.

  He walked back to his hotel. He passed several uniformed policemen in the few blocks but did not see the one with whom he had spoken. He picked up his key at the desk and went to his room. Inside, he locked the door and affixed the chain bolt. The Do Not Disturb sign was in place upon the doorknob.

  Patrick John O’Dowd. Second-term mayor of Philadelphia. Liberal Republican. National aspirations. Charismatic. Social radical, economic conservative. National appeal to youthful left-centrists. Strong secondary black appeal. Focal point of white working-class hatred throughout eastern seaboard. Termination recommended but not urgent. Natural or accidental termination advised. Age: 47. Married …

  He took the photograph of the dead mayor of Detroit from his pocket. He set it on the bed and sat on the edge of the bed and looked down at the photograph.

  He heard Eric Heidigger’s voice echoing:

  (“… the alternative, Miles Dorn. The mistake everyone makes is to believe that the alternative to change is preservation of the status quo. And this is so rarely true. The alternative to change is another sort of change. You know this.”)

  “I betrayed you,” he told James. “By seeking to preserve you, I in fact betrayed you. For I could have given you so much better a death. At my hands you would have died peacefully and quietly and safely. I would have left not three but five of your children to honor your memory, and their mother would have lived to care for them.”

  He got to his feet. It would be good to sleep a few hours in this narrow bed. It would be wise to devote a day or two to reconnaissance and planning. But he
felt an urgency that could not be denied.

  He placed the photograph of Walter Isaac James in an ashtray on top of the dresser. He struck a match. “Forgive me,” he said aloud. The photo flared and burned, and he watched even as he wondered at his own unaccustomed participation in the ceremony.

  He flushed the ashes down the toilet. Then he opened his window and let himself out onto the fire escape, closing the window after him to within a few inches of the sill. He climbed down five flights, then let himself drop the last flight to the pavement below. He landed lightly, on the balls of his feet, and waited long enough to assure himself that his departure had attracted no attention.

  Margaret Keller O’Dowd professed herself incapable of believing the fact of her husband’s suicide. “He was too much involved with life. He loved challenges, he loved to test himself in difficult situations. Of course he was under stress, but there was something in Pat that responded to stress. Sometimes he was depressed. He was one man in an impossible job at an impossible time. Of course he would get depressed. But he knew how to triumph over depression. And he was a Catholic, he was always close to the Church. How could he possibly kill himself?”

  And yet it was impossible that he had not. The facts were clear enough. Shortly after midnight he had said good-night to his wife and stayed up in his study, going over reports of the latest school board crisis. The school situation had weighed heavily on his mind of late and seemed to be insoluble. When one crisis was resolved another sprang up in its place. He sat at his desk and smoked heavily and initialed reports.

  By morning he had still not come to bed. The door to his study was locked from the inside. Attempts to arouse him from without failed. One of the policemen posted outside the mayoral residence was summoned. He kicked the door in and found O’Dowd hanging from a ceiling beam. He had used a cord from the study’s drapes to hang himself. He had cut the cord with a paper knife, and shreds of fiber adhered to its blade. He had stood on his desk chair, then kicked the chair over.

  No one could have been in the room with him. There were no signs of another presence, no signs of a struggle, no signs that anything other than simple suicide had taken place.

  Nor had there been a note. Press reports managed to suggest in an oblique fashion that such a note might have been repressed, either by the authorities or by the mayor’s widow. Close associates of O’Dowd’s testified to his increasing periods of depression and frustration over the political situation in Philadelphia and throughout the nation. His deepening sorrow over the continuance of the Indo-China War was also mentioned.

  In Willow Falls, Dorn several times looked with longing at the cord of his Venetian blinds. He read Blake and Yeats and Auden and Arnold.

  “Oh love, let us be true to one another ….” He did not kill himself, or leave the country.

  THIRTEEN

  But if he could not leave the country, he could yet send himself out of reach of time and space, and if true death eluded him, he could taste la petite mort over and over again.

  His appetite for her did not diminish. If anything it increased, and his capacity remained its equal. This astonished Dorn. Sexual pleasure had never played a strong role in his life, and in recent years he had thought himself to have outgrown it. Now it seemed he could hardly have been farther from the truth.

  He occasionally wondered how his life might have turned out if he had ever loved anyone in the past.

  For as long as he possibly could, he spent all his time in Willow Falls and as much of it as possible in her company. There were short trips, any number of them, that he might profitably have made. He did not make them. There was research he could usefully have undertaken. He did not undertake it. In all too short a time, he knew, he would have to devote himself to Case Six, the final and most important phase of the entire operation. When that time came, it would demand his complete attention. Until then, until the very last minute, he intended to give his complete attention to Jocelyn.

  And so, although he duly read the papers and listened to the newscasts, nothing that he heard weighed very heavily upon him. Speeches, whether by Theodore or Rhodine or the President, did not much affect him. The periodic reports of riots and shootings and confrontations and demonstrations came to his attention but did not hold it long. He knew what was likely to happen and was neither surprised nor gratified when such things came to pass.

  One day he saw a patch of overhead sky darken at the passage of a huge flock of small birds. Migrants from Canada bound for a winter in Argentina. The local birds had not yet begun gathering themselves for flight. But soon, he thought. Too soon.

  There was a night when their lovemaking reached an almost painful peak. His climax fooled him—he truly thought himself to be dying, not petite mort but grande mort. Afterward he lay listening to his heart and considering the perfection of such a death.

  But then he saw the tableau from without, not merely the pure personal pleasure of so dying but the horror of it for her, to emerge from the languor of love and discover that one held a dead man in one’s arms. The image jolted him, and brought with it the unwelcome realization that he had postponed their parting too long. This sweet death was an indulgence of self. She had to go on living, and the longer they were thus together the more difficult her situation would be.

  He felt tears behind his eyes, and breathed deeply, and willed them away.

  Then she said, “Miles? The fall term started last week. I didn’t enroll.”

  “I thought you were going to.”

  “I was. I went through all the shit of getting reaccepted, and then I just couldn’t hack the whole business. I figured I would just drop out again sooner or later and I couldn’t do that to everybody, go back just to drop out again.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you spoken to your parents?”

  “They want me to come home. But that’s out. No way.” She ran a hand down his chest, gripped him gently for a moment. “Some of the kids are talking about this commune in North Carolina. Up in the hills around Asheville.”

  “And you were thinking of going?”

  “I was thinking you might like to go for a couple of weeks. It’s supposed to be an interesting life-style. They grow their own food and make all their own belongings. The idea is to become as self-sufficient as possible and to live naturally, without doing badness to the ecology. Recycling wastes and living in balance with nature. That trip.”

  “It does sound interesting.”

  “A lot of the communes are into drugs in a heavy way. Or else they turn into cults. There’s a leader, and everybody decides he’s getting messages from God, and they have to clear it with him before they pick their toes. But the Land People are supposed to be pretty straight.”

  “Is that what they call themselves? The Land People?”

  “Uh-huh. I wondered, you know, if you’d like to see what it’s like.”

  Somewhere inside him something flared and died, like a star going into nova. If only he could shed these feet of his. If only he could be the person who could take this perfect girl to that perfect society.

  But that’s out. No way.

  “I wish I could do this,” he said.

  “It wouldn’t have to be right away.”

  “But your friends are going soon, aren’t they?”

  “Tomorrow, as a matter of fact. But we could go, you know, anytime at all. If you wanted.”

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, deliberately, “I’m going to have to take a small trip. More than a small trip, actually. I expect to be gone for two weeks, perhaps as long as a month.”

  “When?”

  “I planned to leave the day after tomorrow. I hadn’t told you because I’d been hoping something might come up to make me postpone it, but nothing has.”

  “Where do you have to go?”

  “Washington.”

  “I could come with you. I might even be helpful. I can run errands
, do research. And stay out of your way when you’re busy.”

  “You tempt me. But it wouldn’t work.”

  “Oh.”

  He took her hand. “An idea occurs to me. Why don’t you go to the commune with your friends? The Land People? Go with your friends to the Land People.”

  “I don’t want to go without you, Miles. I—”

  “Let me finish. You go with them. I’ll go to Washington. I’ll take care of my business as quickly as I possibly can. I’ll know you’re at a good place, which will put my mind at ease and thus make the work go faster. Perhaps I’ll be done sooner than I think.

  “In any case, I won’t be more than a month. As soon as I’ve finished I’ll find these Land People. If you’ve discovered you loathe it there, we’ll leave. If you like it, we’ll see how it suits us. The two of us, together.”

  Her eyes said, Do you mean it? All of it?

  His said, Yes.

  Her face glowed and he kissed her, and his passion surprised him as it had done so often lately. “Oh, let’s make this the best ever,” she said, fitting her body to his. “How can I go a month without you? God.”

  She asked the same question afterward, as she was drifting off to sleep.

  “Oh, a week with the Land People and you’ll forget me.”

  “I’ll always love you, Miles. Always.”

  Will you, Jocelyn?

  A fragment of dream awakened him. He was at an amusement-park shooting gallery, rifle in hand. Heads passed by, not the usual two-dimensional targets, but genuine heads, disembodied but nonetheless alive. Clyde Farrar, Jr., Burton Weldon, J. Lowell Drury, Emil Karnofsky, Willie Jackson, Royal Carter—an endless parade of the heads of those he had killed.

  And, with no will of his own involved, he kept working the trigger, kept sending bullets into those heads. And each head turned into Jocelyn as he killed it, and each dying Jocelyn head fastened tortured eyes upon him, and yet he kept on working the trigger, kept turning head after head into Jocelyn.