The Triumph of Evil Read online

  He broke himself out of the dream. When his heart rate slowed, he turned to her, irrationally anxious that something had happened to her during his dream. But she slept peacefully on her side, one leg drawn up and bent at the knee. She was clutching her pillow in her sleep.

  Karnofsky, too, had clutched his pillow.

  She left in the afternoon, in a car with two boys and two girls. Dorn remembered them vaguely from the party. She took very little with her. Some clothing, and she would stop on the way to collect Vertigo. Her other clothing remained in Dorn’s closet, her books on his shelves, her radio on his kitchen table.

  After the car was gone, and after he had given himself up to a few minutes of weeping, Dorn reviewed his performance. As far as he could determine, she had not the slightest suspicion that she would never see him again.

  FOURTEEN

  In Washington he took a room in a decent but no longer fashionable hotel. His room was on a high floor and he could see quite a bit of Washington from his window. He rarely availed himself of the view.

  One of the first places he went in Washington was a chain drugstore, where he purchased a legal-sized pad of ruled yellow paper and several ball-point pens. He returned with his purchases to his room. There was a small writing desk. He seated himself at it, pen in hand, and stared for several minutes at the blank pad of paper.

  Then he began to write.

  My Jocelyn,

  You hold in your hand a letter from a man you now know as the author of a heinous crime. Writing these lines, I ache at the thought of what you must now think of me. You must wonder how you could possibly have loved me. You must recoil at the realization that there was so much about me you could not begin to know.

  And yet you knew me, Jocelyn, as no one had ever known me before.

  Jocelyn, you know nothing of the man I have been or even of the man I am. Jocelyn, I first killed a man when I was seventeen years old. I killed him because he was a Serb and I was a Croat. At the time this seemed sufficient reason. By the time I was your age, Jocelyn, I literally could not count the men I had killed. I did not know their number.

  He filled page after page in his small neat cramped hand. The words flowed of their own accord, and it was all he could do to make the pen move fast enough to get them down. When they stopped he set the pen down on the desk top and closed his eyes. His forearm throbbed all the way to the elbow. He rubbed it idly with his left hand.

  After a few moments he got to his feet. He did not read what he had written, nor did he sever the filled pages from the pad. He went to the massive old dresser and, with an effort, pulled it free from the wall. He lifted the carpet where the dresser had been and placed the entire pad of yellow paper beneath it, then carefully pressed the carpet tacks back into place. Finally he returned the dresser to its original position and left the room.

  No day passed without this ritual being repeated. Once every day he would shove the dresser aside and take up the pad of paper. Then he would sit at the small desk and write for as long as he had words to put down. The words did not always flow freely. Sometimes he found himself staring at the page before him for ten or twenty or thirty minutes in an effort to sort out a thought and get a sentence in its proper order. One day he wrote three short paragraphs in no time at all, then stopped abruptly, through for the day. But however much he wrote and however long it took, each day the pad of paper went back beneath the carpet, and each day the dresser was replaced over it.

  When he was not writing or sleeping he moved around downtown Washington. He took several tours. On a tour of the White House his group unexpectedly encountered the President, who was then emerging from a conference with someone. The President smiled and shook hands with several members of the tour group. He did not shake hands with Dorn.

  The Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial were key attractions on the tours Dorn took. He visited both of them afterward, by himself. Standing close to the Washington Monument and dizzied by its height, he thought of its particular appropriateness, an absolute phallus raised in tribute to the Father of his Country.

  After his visit to the Lincoln Memorial, he wrote these words on the pad of yellow paper:

  Once, Jocelyn, I asked you a pair of questions. I asked you, first, whom most Americans regarded as their greatest president. Without hesitation you named Abraham Lincoln. Then I asked you who you thought was the greatest American president. You thought for a moment. “Lincoln,” you said.

  There was a man named Henry Clay who never became president, his hopes notwithstanding. For a period of thirty years Henry Clay prevented the Civil War from taking place. Almost single-handedly he drafted one compromise after another. He adhered to no particular principle and made himself roundly despised as a man without principles. But for him, the South would surely have seceded at a time when the North could have done little to prevent secession.

  Of course the election of Lincoln made secession inevitable, and war in turn was an inevitable consequence of secession. I often wonder what would have happened if Abraham Lincoln had not been elected. Mechanical developments, such as the cotton gin, would have made slavery obsolescent as an institution in not too many years. Other causes of sectionalist rivalry might have smoothed themselves out in much the same fashion.

  Perhaps not. But it hardly matters, because Abraham Lincoln was in fact elected, and the South did secede, and war followed. And the North won, and the Union was preserved.

  I was at the Lincoln Memorial this morning. I looked into the marble eyes of the most sorrowful face I have ever seen. It struck me, looking into the fact of that deeply troubled man, that Booth’s bullet was an unintentional kindness.

  There is no memorial to Henry Clay. I asked you once if you had heard of him. You knew the name.

  One night Dorn went to a rally of the New American Patriots. The speaker was James Danton Rhodine. At the entrance to the auditorium Dorn was searched by two well-built and neatly groomed young men. Both wore the now standard royal blue shirts and khaki trousers. They were very well-mannered, and smiled as they apologized for the necessity of searching the men and women who had come to hear Rhodine.

  This had become standard practice at NAP rallies ever since an unsuccessful attempt on Rhodine’s life a month earlier in San Francisco. Dorn took it for granted that this attempt had been staged. He found it increasingly difficult to believe that genuine assassination attempts ever ended in failure. It seemed as unlikely as a politically prominent person’s dying a natural death. Possible, to be sure, but not likely.

  Dorn found himself paying very little attention to the speech. He amused himself at the onset by anticipating the words before they were uttered. This palled before much time had elapsed. Thereafter, he found himself paying more attention to the crowd and the Blueshirts than to Rhodine. He remained until the address was over and left the hall with I the sound of rhythmic applause ringing in his ears. He went back a to his hotel and went to sleep.

  Every night, every single night, dreams woke Dorn. These dreams were rarely confined to a single language. Characters would begin a sentence in Serbo-Croat and end it in English. Then another character would respond in German or Russian. Heretofore Dorn’s dreams had always confined themselves to one language at a time.

  He interpreted this new element as another sign of confusion and anxiety. It thus distressed him, as such signs must, but he could not regard it as surprising or as cause for special worry.

  He rarely had a dream without Jocelyn in it. In many of the dreams she died, most often at his hands. These dreams were the worst.

  He never tried to return to sleep after a dream had awakened him. Each time he would wait until calm returned. Then he would shower and shave and dress. Then he might read from a paperback anthology of English poetry. Or walk through the predawn streets. Or move the dresser and take up the pad of yellow paper and add another passage to his endless letter to Jocelyn.

  He never once read over what he had written. Nor d
id he ever discard a page or cross out a line. There were times when he wanted to do this last, times when he felt he had made a point badly. But he had decided that everything must stand as written.

  Today as I was walking back to my hotel a fire engine passed me, siren open. My first thought was of a policeman in Philadelphia who could not understand why people would throw rocks and bottles at firemen fighting a fire.

  I thought next of my hotel. It is an old building, and no doubt would burn like a torch. I froze at the thought of this manuscript burning. Not that it might be discovered in the rubble but that it might simply turn into a cinder.

  There would not be time to write all of this again, Jocelyn, nor do I think it likely that I would have the heart to try. I stood on the pavement and visualized a lifetime of work going up in smoke. “The work of a lifetime.” Those were the words that came to mind.

  And, however grandiose they seem, I would not change them. Jocelyn, I am drowning in Washington. My whole life passes before my eyes, takes its form on these sheets of lined yellow paper.

  Of course it was not this building, nor even a building very near to this one. My manuscript was not even warm to the touch.

  One afternoon he bought a bag of bread crumbs and went to a park to feed pigeons. He threw out the bread crumbs in huge handfuls so that the birds would not have to fight over them. But no matter how fast he scattered the crumbs, so many more pigeons kept coming that there was not standing room for them all. They shouldered one another aside, pecked at each other, puffed themselves up.

  He left the park as soon as the bag was empty, not waiting to watch them finish the crumbs.

  It occurred to him from time to time that his letter to Jocelyn was similar to Penelope’s shawl. The letter would never end, and until it ended he would not do the deed which had brought him to Washington. But Penelope had unraveled each night what she had knitted during that day. Dorn did no unraveling.

  One day he wrote:

  You are the only person whose judgment matters the slightest to me. I have never loved anyone but you. No one else has ever truly known me. No living person but you has ever known me at all. I realize that it is not unusual for a man to care deeply about the opinion that strangers hold of him. I cannot understand why this is true. I know that it is not true of me.

  Perhaps I ought to be tempted by the thought that History will vindicate me. But in the first place I doubt that History’s judgment will be kind, and in the second place I do not care in the slightest whether it is. The Judgment of History! The phrase itself is a joke, a contradiction in terms. History has no judgment. History is all blind men and elephants. Not a one of us, Jocelyn, knows much more than a very little about the peripheral facts of our own small lives. Yet History, removed in time and place, presumes to judge. The perspective of History is that special perspective afforded by a glance through the wrong end of a telescope. No man lives in History. Death is absolute.

  Shall I then fear Death? I can only say that I do not. I have lived too long, Jocelyn, and to too little purpose. I find nothing very awful in the prospect of ceasing to be.

  And yet. And yet one fear gnaws at me, Jocelyn. It eats at me like cancer. And that is the fear that you will hate me.

  Before I met you, Jocelyn, no action of mine ever stemmed from a selfless purpose. Since then everything I have done has grown out of love for you. So I write these lines, these endless lines, to you. To gain your understanding. To win your forgiveness. To keep your love. You are my afterlife, Jocelyn. Your love is my Heaven, its absence all I need of Hell.

  He stopped and reread the last paragraph, knowing that Penelope’s shawl was complete. He had finished. Whatever could be said was said, whatever had been omitted would remain eternally unsaid. All that remained was to sign his name.

  And yet, and yet.

  His head ached, his forearm throbbed, his fingers were stiff. Aloud he said, “No, no,” and the words turned into a low and agonizing groan.

  He picked up the pen and wrote one final paragraph. He could not see the words as he wrote them. The tears flowed freely from his eyes and he did not even attempt to halt them.

  Nor did he reread the final paragraph. He wrote his name, Miles Dorn, beneath the last line.

  Later, when he had composed himself, he returned the pad of yellow paper to its place beneath the carpet. For the last time he pushed the dresser in place over it. Then he went downstairs and found a telephone.

  FIFTEEN

  “I anticipate your question, Heidigger said. “The room is electronically clean. It always is, and yet you always ask, so I tell you in advance.”

  “How can you be certain?”

  “Two clever devices. One of them somehow senses the presence of any electronic ears. Please do not ask me how as I have not the slightest idea. The process was once explained to me, leaving me as ignorant as before. The other device is predicated on the assumption that the first device is not foolproof. It emits a signal that renders any electronic surveillance of the premises quite ineffective. Of course whenever the first device tells me someone is listening, I immediately change my room. I tell the desk that my room is too large, or too small, or that I saw a mouse in a corner. They are always quite obliging in such matters.”

  “Does that happen often?”

  “More often than you might think. Not because the surveillance was designed with me in mind, however. I have never had cause to suspect that to be the case. But there is so much of this bugging going on, Miles, and it would be an embarrassment to be taped quite by mistake, would it not?” Heidigger laughed happily at the thought. “But the devil with all that. The devil with machines. I find it difficult to think in terms of machines. I use them, one cannot but use them, but I have small faith it them. Machines cancel each other out. In the final analysis, it is men who must make the difference.”

  “I agree.”

  “Men like you, Miles Dorn. Let me look at you.” Heidigger struck a pose, chin in hand, brow quizzical. “I do believe all of this has changed you, you know. Which I do not find surprising in the least. Your achievements have made an extraordinary impression in high places. Which is as it should be. They have been extraordinary achievements.”

  “You’re kind to say so.”

  “How could I say otherwise? Five prominent men, five men in the public eye. That one lived is nothing. He could be no less a threat if he had died. Nor is it more than an interesting footnote that you only killed three of the four who died. One takes help where one finds it, eh?”

  I killed three, Eric. But not the three you think. You credit me with Walter Isaac James, a death with which I had nothing whatsoever to do. And deny me the credit for Emil Karnofsky.

  “I brought what you asked for, Miles.” He took a vial of pills from an inside jacket pocket. “Two dozen of them. I was surprised you did not already have some of your own.”

  “For years I never moved without at least one on my person.”

  “I still don’t.”

  “And then after my retirement I kept a bottle of them always at hand. A vestigial remnant. It became increasingly clear that I would have no call for them in my new life, until one day I found them in the medicine cabinet and had momentary trouble remembering what they were. It struck me that the faint possibility of ingesting one accidentally far outweighed my possible future need for them. I flushed them down the toilet.”

  Eric, I itch to tell you about Karnofsky. Because I know damned well you checked. Those casual questions. How had I planned to enter the building? And then you sent someone to make quite certain I had visited that psychiatrist, just as you sent someone else to make sure I had been in my room in New Orleans when Karnofsky died. I would love to tell you all this, Eric. I would love to see your face.

  “Make sure they’re what you want.”

  Dorn opened the vial, took a capsule between thumb and forefingers.

  “Plastic,” Heidigger said. “Nonsoluble in mouth or stomach. It must be cr
ushed between the teeth.”

  “Cyanide?”

  “In English, cyanide. In Japanese, sayonara. The effects are virtually instantaneous.”

  “Yes.”

  “And not dreadfully unpleasant, or so I am told. But there is a dearth of firsthand evidence on the subject. No one ever returns to testify.”

  “Which is the object.”

  “That no one testify? To be sure. You want them for your men, I imagine. Remember, though, that the likelihood of their using them is remote. You or I might recognize when self-destruction is the only alternative. Even the most fanatic of amateurs usually flinch at it. It is child’s play to persuade a true believer to undertake a mission where his chance of survival is infinitesimal. Yet the same man will so often balk at killing himself.”

  “At least they’ll have the option. Whether they exercise it or not, their trail won’t lead back to me.”

  “You’re very sure of this?”

  “I am.” He suddenly smiled. “Nevertheless, one of those capsules is for me, Eric. I will not be caught. But if by any chance I am—”

  “I understand.”

  Do you, Eric? And do you think I do not realize that I would not outlive Henry M. Theodore by a day? That some man of yours would gun me down before any trail could possibly turn me up? To think otherwise would be to think you a fool. You are not a fool, Eric. You are not quite as brilliant as you think, but you are by no means a fool.

  “It is all in order, then.”

  “Completely so.”

  “Would it be in order to ask the day?”

  “Why not? Today. A matter of hours.”

  “Again you surprise me, Miles.”

  “At three o’clock the President and his worthy and respected associate, the Vice-President, will leave the White House in the presidential limousine. At three-thirty the President will address a joint session of congress on the most recent development at the Paris peace talks. The development, rumor has it, is that there has been no development.”