The Triumph of Evil Read online

  He had laughed sharply, laughter that Heidigger had not understood. “Eric,” he had said at length, “Eric, I am not going to examine your bidet. I am going to trust you that there is a bidet in your bathroom. Eric, if I cannot trust you on the matter of a bidet in a bathroom, then we are in serious trouble.”)

  He sat on the toilet and read capsule biographies, written on plain typing paper in a feminine hand. Written with a fountain pen—Leopold Vanders also used a fountain pen, albeit a different one. Was that to be a trademark of the movement? He hadn’t seen a fountain pen in years, wasn’t aware that they still manufactured them.

  John Lowell Drury.

  Senior senator from New Hampshire. Kennedy loyalties and political philosophy. Democratic presidential aspirant. Late but strong antiwar stand. Early antipollution stand. Economic left-centrist. Strongest support from non-radical students. Insignificant black support. Good image with white middle class. Record acceptable to organized labor. Effective speaker, frequent university appearances. Speedy termination advised, preferably via identifiable leftist. This cover may be transparent. Age: 49. Married. One child. Residence: (Washington): 2115 Albemarle; (Berlin, New Hampshire): 114 Carrollton Place …

  Emil Karnofsky.

  Director, National Brotherhood of Clothing Workers. Member, national board, AFL-CIO. Jew. First major labor leader to take antiwar position. Union membership chiefly black, Puerto Rican. Respected by colleagues but regarded as New York Jew leftist. Termination advised to foster solidarity in labor circles. Strongly recommend termination via natural causes or accident. If unavoidably otherwise, political motivation must not be suggested. Age: 77. Widower. Three children, eight grandchildren …

  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 …

  Waller Isaac James.

  First term mayor of Detroit. Black. Economic and social moderate. Foreign policy views unstated. Enjoys near total support of black constituency plus strong support of while power structure, professionals, intellectuals. Relationship improving with white working class. Efficient administrator. Termination acceptable via black extremists or while racists, though latter slightly preferable. Termination ideally to be as dramatic as possible. Perhaps family could be Included. Age: 44. Married. Five children …

  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 hailed throughout eastern seaboard. Termination recommended but not urgent. Natural or accidental termination advised. Age: 47. Married …

  Henry Michael Theodore.

  Vice President, United States of America. An intuitive political amateur with an instinctive appreciation of centrist and right centrist anxieties. A refined demagogue. Romanian ancestry, original name Teodorescu. Theodore’s moderate right-centrist stance and his extraordinary success at focusing white middle class discontent make his termination a quintessential ingredient in movement policy. It should be scheduled at least one and no more than three months after Guthrie’s termination. Terminal thrust must be unmistakably via large scale leftist conspiracy. Involvement should extend to both black and while radicals. N.B. It is imperative that the terminal cover be wholly opaque. Not only must there be no official or unofficial suspicion of movement involvement, but there can he no evidence of any involvement that is not absolutely identifiable as leftist and/or black. Age: 62. Married. One child, one grandchild …

  He paused on his way out of the men’s room to wash his hands with liquid soap. As he dried them in a steam of hot air, a wall scribble caught his eye.

  “If you are not part of the solution,” he read, “you’re part of the problem.”

  Heidigger had said, “If you could take them in order, so much the better. But it’s not vital. Only that Guthrie goes before Theodore.”

  “I imagine there are other lists.”

  “Not on this level of priority. There will be a great many smaller incidents which we will help to develop. Riots, confrontations. But I should be surprised if half of what occurs during the next six months is our work. All of this”—a hand flung out to indicate the world—“would eventually come to pass without us. We lend it direction.”

  “You expect these six in six months?”

  “Just the first four. O’Dowd is less important than the others. If you can’t get to him in hot weather, you might almost as well skip him entirely.”

  “I thought he was supposed to go quietly.”

  “So they say. It hink he should go out loud, that he’s only worth taking out if it makes the niggers burn down Philadelphia. Hot weather for Walter Isaac James, of course. Anyway, figure six months’ lead time. And then the date for Theodore is mid-October. You come as close to that as you can, but no later than the last week of the month.”

  “The election is next year.”

  “What a quick mind! But some states hold off-year gubernatorial elections.”

  “Oh.”

  “And the bigger our man wins, the better he looks next year.”

  “I gather I don’t get to learn his name.”

  “Not today. But don’t shoot any governors except for Guthrie. Just to be on the safe side.”

  “I don’t know if I can do all these.”

  “It’s what you do, Miles, and you do it as well as anyone I have ever known.”

  “I have been known to miss.”

  “Not often.”

  “And these are not six nonentities. There’s not only security in front but the certainly of a stench afterward. The Vice-President, for Christ’s sake.”

  “No one’s safe if you want him. No one on earth. Who knows this better than you?”

  He acknowledged this with silence, then looked thoughtfully at Heidigger. His voice softened. “Why should I do this, Eric? You expect me to do it. You and I both sit here expecting that I will do it. Why is this so?”

  “You’ll act for the good of the country. To preserve the American Way of Life. Bathrooms and Holiday Inns.”

  “The question was serious.”

  “So was the answer. Do you know what happens if we don’t act? Do you know? Chaos. Literally, chaos. The trends continue. Polarization increases. The left retains certain strengths. The right is too splintered to lake control. The economy goes completely to hell. The center evaporates like piss on a hot iron. The cities erupt. Pointless bloodbaths. Utter disorder. That is 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.”

  “No, I don’t know it. Perhaps it is true—”

  “It is.”

  “—But I do not know it. I have no politics, Eric. You know that. I do not act out of principles.”

  “Who does, in our line?”

  “You do. You have standards, you have a set political frame of reference. I do not.”

  “Then perhaps that is why you can do this sort of thing so much better than I. I can point. You can act. Perhaps that is why.”

  “But why do I do it? Why, Eric?”

  “Because it is how you are defined, how you define yourself. You do it because it is what you do.”

  “Like robins.”

  “I don’t hear you.”

  “Nothing,” he said. “A private thought.”

&nb
sp; “Enjoy your private thoughts. It’s a free country.”

  Back on the bus, head flung back, half in and half out of sleep, he played with private thoughts while the bus coursed northward through a free country.

  A governor, a senator, a labor leader, two mayors. A vice-president. Worms to feed my baby robins. Men to nourish worms.

  If you are not part of the solution, then you must be part of the problem.

  FOUR

  Monday noon she rang his bell. He was not surprised to see her. He had been expecting her ever since he read the morning paper. “Oh, God,” she said.

  She was ashen-faced, trembling. He took her arm. “You know about it.”

  “I read about it, yes.”

  “I wasn’t supposed to come until tomorrow. If you’re busy—”

  “I have a completely free afternoon. Come in.”

  “I have the five dollars.”

  “You’re being hysterical. Come inside. Now sit down. Would you like anything? Tea? A glass of wine?”

  “No,” she said. She took hold of her upper arms, hugged herself, shuddered. She sighed heavily. Then she said, “I’m all right now.”

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like some wine?”

  “No.” Her eyes found his face. In German she said, “Your intuition saved my life.”

  “Oh, now.”

  “Fourteen of them. Dead. Fourteen kids dead. It was never fourteen before. But when it was four at Kent State, everybody said, ‘God, it was never four before.’” She had returned to English. “And thirty-five wounded. One of them was from here. You know that, you saw the paper. What you don’t know was that he was a friend of mine. They didn’t put that in the paper. ‘Jon Yerkes, 20, who was shot through the wrist and is expected to lose the use of his right hand, was a friend of Jocelyn Perry.’ Is a friend. He’s still alive. He just doesn’t have a right hand any more. He played the guitar. Played. Not plays. You need two hands to play a guitar. God, I can’t relate to that. I was up all night. We were all up all night. Kids went around smashing windows because they couldn’t think of anything else to do. Nonviolent kids went around the campus smashing windows. I can’t relate to any of this. Look, Ma, no hand. Oh.”

  She got to her feet. “I said I was all right. I’m not. I think I have to throw up.”

  Was it one of Heidigger’s? Or did it just happen?

  A confrontation. Students and National Guard. Some students broke the demonstration’s nonviolent code, shouted insults, hurled rocks. (Student radicals? Or plants?) A couple of guardsmen used their rifle butts on demonstrators. (Because it was necessary? Because they couldn’t take the pressure? Or because they were following private orders?) More students responded with rocks. A shot was or was not fired from the crowd. (Was there a shot? Was it a student who fired it?) A guardsman fired a shot in return, killing a student. Then there was definitely gunfire from the crowd, from several points in the crowd, and the guard returned fire. Fourteen students dead, dead. Thirty-five wounded. Look, Ma.

  It could have happened by itself, Dorn knew. As it had happened before, as it would happen again. Spontaneously, a flash flood, a fire in a hayloft.

  Or it could have been handled by three men after a scant hour’s planning.

  Which?

  He didn’t know that it mattered.

  “I might have been standing next to Jon Yerkes. We would have been together. I could have been between him and that bullet.”

  “You could have stayed here and walked in front of a bus. Don’t torture yourself with hypotheses.”

  “I can think you saved my life if I want to.”

  (“Then I owe you my life, Eric. Eh?”)

  “I found the different reactions of public officials interesting,” Dorn said. She was calmer now. They had chatted in German about assorted trivia. She had looked at the baby robins—it was surprising how quickly they grew—and accepted a cup of mint tea. “It interests me how everyone prominent has something to say, and how they can all find such different lessons in the same incident.”

  “Like the President,” she said bitterly. “Our great leader. ‘We must all work together to repair this tragedy. There must be mutual disarmament. Students must not throw rocks, and the Brownshirts must use smaller-caliber rifles.’”

  “And the Vice-President.”

  “Sweet old Theodorable. According to him, this proves that protest is self-defeating. In other words, if somebody’s jumping up and down on your back, you’d better lie there quietly so you don’t get him really mad. Oh, God, I hate that man. When I see him on television I want to kick the screen in. Somebody ought to put a bullet through that head of his.”

  He started. “Do you mean that? Or is that rhetoric?”

  “I don’t even know.” Frowning, “I’m nonviolent. I mean I’ve always been nonviolent. I don’t like window-breaking or any of that. I mean, how can you protest violence by hurting people? But I keep feeling myself going through changes. It’s weird, like I’m being led through things. That man is tearing the country apart, and the more he does it the more the idiots applaud. I think he’s a dangerous man. I think—I don’t know.”

  “And yet the Vice-President sounded moderate enough compared to Governor Guthrie.”

  “That rotten fascist bastard.”

  “Did you hear what he was quoted as saying?”

  “I don’t think I want to hear. I can imagine. Oh, tell me.”

  “I won’t get the words right, but the essence was that if any Red anarchist hippie niggerlovers tried that sort of thing in Louisiana, it would be the last time any of those hands had the life to pick up rocks.”

  “He actually said that.” It wasn’t a question. “The son of a bitch.”

  “And he added something about machine guns.”

  “Oh, I hope somebody gets him,” she said. “I’m not that nonviolent. I think it would be worth dying, to get someone like Guthrie first.”

  “Of course, there were other voices, too. Several senators called for an investigation of the guard’s role. And there was one senator, I think from New Hampshire or Vermont, I can’t remember his name.”

  “You mean Drury? The White Hope?”

  “Is that what they call him?”

  “I don’t know. Some people do.”

  “I thought he put things very well. He said that dissent could not be repressed, but then he took it a step further. He said neither could dissent be ignored. That dissenting elements in our society had to be accommodated not only for their sake but for the sake of society itself. What’s the matter? You look enormously unimpressed.”

  “I don’t know. Oh, shit, what good does it do? He’s been saying that for years. Each time something happens he says it and each time it’s true and each time everybody claps and each time nothing happens, and now J. Lowell Drury is up there again saying get out of Vietnam and stop the pollution and stop killing the Panthers and the students, and the only difference is that last time Jon Yerkes had two hands and this time he has one.”

  “I wonder, then. Doesn’t a man like Drury do any good at all?”

  “I don’t know if he does or not.” She nibbled at a fingernail. “What a lot of people say, what they’ve been saying all along, is that someone like that does more harm than good. Because he’s on your side, you know, he really is, it’s not bullshit, he means it. And he’s part of the system. And what he says and does makes people think maybe there’s hope working through the system.”

  “And there isn’t?”

  “Well, is there? The Democrats wouldn’t nominate Drury, and if they did, he wouldn’t win, but suppose he did. So he takes office, J. Lowell Drury of New Hampshire, and the first day the generals take him aside and whisper in his ear, and the next day the businessmen take him aside and whisper in his ear, and if he’s lucky the CIA takes him aside and whispers in his ear, and like he’s part of the Establishment and he can’t turn his ear off when these people whisper in it, and so the third night he goes to b
ed in the White House and when he wakes up in the morning he’s not J. Lowell Drury anymore, he’s Hubert Humphrey.”

  And, a few moments later. “I don’t know. I like Drury. I see him on television and I like him.”

  “But you wonder if the country would be any worse off than it already is without him.”

  “Right.” Eyes wide, empty. “And I can’t see how it would.”

  “It really helped to talk to you, Miles. You’re the only older person I know that I can rap with. And I can get a better set on things from talking with you. The other kids. We always say the same things to each other.”

  “It does me good to talk to you.”

  “How could it?”

  “In precisely the same way. And because I would find your company enjoyable in and of itself if we talked of nothing more profound than baby birds.”

  “Baby birds can be profound.”

  “I know.”

  “There was a book in our high school library called A Mouse Is Miracle Enough. I never read it, but I flashed on the title.” In German she repeated the title. And in English again, “I like just talking with you, too. In any language, and about anything.”

  “Forget about the lessons,” he said. “I’ve felt uncomfortable taking money from you for weeks now. And my schedule is going to be chaotic for the next few months. Come over whenever you feel like it. If I’m home, we’ll talk. In German, in English.”

  She looked intently at him. He wondered if he had said more than he should have. The next instant her face melted into a rich warm liquid smile.

  “You were my teacher,” she said, “and now you are my friend.”

  “Miles? I was just thinking. You really got into what happened in Washington in a heavy way. I was surprised.”

  “Oh?”

  “I always had this impression of you that you really weren’t a political person.”

  “I’m not. I was politically concerned in Europe for many years. When I was able to settle comfortably in America, I thought one could remain uninvolved.”