The Triumph of Evil (13 page)

“A horrible thing.”

“But if anything, I’m sorry he didn’t die. That poor old Uncle Tom, that’s the man I feel sorry for. And the people in the luncheonette. Not Guthrie and his pig bodyguard.”

Dorn took her hand. “That’s not the point,” he said. “You don’t get rid of racism by getting rid of Guthrie.”

“Maybe not, but you have one less racist. And one less loud voice on the subject.”

“And you also convince more and more of the uncommitted people that blacks are dangerous and extreme blacks are extremely dangerous. You tell all of the Willie Jacksons in America that they have more to fear from their own kinsmen than from racists like Guthrie. After all, consider this—Guthrie, whatever his attitude, gave Willie Jackson a dollar. What did the bomber give him? Death.”

“Then what is a person supposed to do, Miles?”

“Survive.”

“Is that all?”

“At times it’s chore enough in itself.”

“‘Don’t do anything because it might make the other side stronger.’ Is that what it comes down to?”

“A way to put it.”

Her eyes challenged him. “Is that what you learned in your years in Europe? I know you were involved in politics there. Is that the lesson you learned?”

“Part of it.”

She nibbled her lip. “I forget who said it, but there’s a saying. ‘All that is required for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’”

“I know the saying.”

“But you don’t care for it?”

“But I do. There is a variation of it, though, that I think is at least as valuable.”

“What?”

“‘All that is required for the triumph of evil is for good men to do something wrong.’”

She thought it over. “Who said that?”

“I don’t remember.”

A newspaper item:

“Governor James Danton Rhodine of Indiana today visited the sickbed of Louisiana’s Governor William Roy Guthrie, in good condition after surgery. Rhodine told reporters outside the hospital that he found Guthrie in good spirits and more determined than ever to resume the fight against ‘the forces of decadence, subversion, and black despair.’ Rhodine called on all Americans of good will to ‘take up the torch that lies fallen in Louisiana and spread its light across the nation.’ A spokesman for the Indiana governor later denied that there was any racist connotation in the phrase “black despair.’”

Another newspaper item:

“In a move which informed sources consider linked to the Guthrie bombing, Prime Minister H. J. Gaansevoort of the Republic of South Africa today canceled a proposed state visit to Washington. The visit, originally scheduled for the second week in August, had drawn heavy fire from black spokesmen; it had been initiated through the office of Vice-President Henry M. Theodore, apparently without direct presidential approval. The White House declined comment …”

A long-distance telephone conversation:

“My profound apologies.”

“I had been about to offer congratulations.”

“The trouble with untrained help.”

“Or mechanical failure.”

“Unlikely. The delivery was a day late in the first place. The delivery vessel froze at the switch.”

“Repeat.”

“Weakness of resolve led to a one-day postponement. There was an excuse, but I think it was a cover.”

“Understood.”

“Then another freeze, I would suppose, and an attempt at courageous recovery. But by then the ship had almost cleared the horizon.”

“Not quite, though.”

“No. Annoying. Again, my apologies. I will follow through on this when conditions permit.”

“No need.”

“Established?”

“Absolutely. A hit is as good as a bull’s-eye.”

“The voice remains.”

“But disembodied.”

“True, but commanding allegiance—”

A chuckle. “In no gripping way. The total effect has not been officially told.”

“Oh?”

“A low blow indeed. The flock might go clucking after a wingless rooster, but not after a capon.”

“Repeat?”

“Say that the count stands at one strike, no balls.”

“Understood. Amusing.”

“Definitely amusing. Good luck on Case Four.”

“Thank you.”

ELEVEN

As the summer wore on, one hot day after another, it became gradually evident to Dorn that he was not going lo assassinate the mayor of Detroit. He traveled to that city twice, going there with no clear purpose in mind and doing nothing in particular in the time he spent there. He never got a glimpse of Walter Isaac James, although he frequently read his words and saw his features in Detroit newspapers.

It was shaping up us a quiet summer in Detroit. The clash between peace demonstrators and auto workers had not been repeated, and the consequent conflict between the Detroit police and their mayor had been quietly and undramatically resolved. There was a slight stir when Mayor James’s office refused application for a permit for an outdoor rally to the New American Patriots. Governor Rhodine of Indiana had been scheduled to address the rally, and the mayor’s office delayed processing the permit application on various technicaly. A move to hold the rally without a permit was quashed by Rhodine himself.

During his second trip to Detroit, Dorn clipped a newsphoto of Walter Isaac James and put it in his pocket. He fell into the habit of carrying it on his person at all times, transferring it from one pair of pants lo another along with his wallet and his keys. From time to time, when he was alone in his house in Willow Fulls, or while he rode a bus from someplace lo someplace else, he would lake the scrap of paper from his pocket and gaze for long periods of time into that black ovoid face, as if there were some special message in those features that long contemplation would permit him to divine.

The fare was a difficult one for him to read. Time after time he would look at it, an arrangement of black dots on white paper, and all he would see was its color. He wondered at the immense implications of blackness.

He had read once that black ants and red ants were implacable enemies. Whenever a black ant and a red ant met, they fought until one or the other was dead. He wondered if this was true, and he thought of taking a book from the library on insect life, but never got around to it.

There came a point, after he had taken that scrap of paper from his pocket an incalculable number of times, when at last he began to see the face before the color. This might have happened sooner had James possessed any dominant features, a beak of a nose or piercing eyes or oddly shaped ears, but the bland regularity of his features delayed the process. There was nothing about that face that caught the eyes, nothing specific that left a bookmark in the memory. But finally he came to look at the photo and see the man.

Perhaps he had begun to realize even before then that he did not intend to terminate Case Four. It later seemed to him that this was so. Once he passed the veneer of blackness, once the face of Walter Isaac James spoke directly to him, the decision was inescapable.

But how? How to let this man live? Another bungled attempt would not go down well. He could make his little trips, to Detroit or elsewhere. He could give the painstaking appearance of preparation. But for how long?

He could not procrastinate forever. Sooner or later push would conic to shove. Sooner or later the Rubicon would be reached, and either crossed or not.

And so he went on taking the photograph from his pocket and looking at that quiet face, those open eyes. He would look at the man and try to think of ways not to kill him, and then he would sigh and return the scrap of paper to his pocket.

In Birmingham, Vice President Henry M. Theodore told a chamber of commerce luncheon that disorder and anarchy were the greatest threats to the free enterprise system in the entire history of the American nation. “There can be no compromise with these divisive forces,” he said. “Since the days when pioneers carved a nation out of a wilderness, the American businessman has been history’s architect and builder. At this critical point in our history, he cannot sit idly by and watch his proudest structure torn stone from stone, brick from brick, sacked one room at a time by barbarians.” The vice president’s talk was several times interrupted by spontaneous applause, and he received a standing ovation at its conclusion. Outside, black and white protesters attempting to picket his appearance were routed by a mob of angry whites. Assertions of police brutality were widespread.

At the Los Angeles Coliseum, James Danton Rhodine spoke to a crowd of New American Patriots. Among other things, he accused the administration of deliberately prolonging the Asian war. “An unholy alliance of Wall Street money power has shackled the mightiest military machine in the history of the world,” he charged. “The Shylocks and Fagins of New York work hand in evil hand with the heirs of Lenin and Trotsky and Marx. With the aid of that speckled band of traitors, they spill the blood of God-fearing American youths in a war that could otherwise be won overnight.” When a crowd of anti-war protesters attempted to enter the hall, Rhodine’s contingent of marshals instantly surrounded them, beat them into submission, and turned them out into the street. The marshals, uniformly tall, well-built, short-haired and neatly groomed, were becoming a standard fixture at NAP rallies. They dressed alike in tight khaki pants and royal blue shirts. Their brisk and efficient treatment of the Los Angeles protesters was jubilantly applauded by the crowd, and Rhodine himself praised them as representing the highest virtues of the youth of America. “Look at them,” he exhorted his hearers. “They are not long-haired or unkempt or wild-eyed. They are the sort of young men who made America great. They are the young men who will make America great once again.”

Jocelyn had a dual effect upon the waiting, the stalling. Her presence made indolence bearable. She lent focus to his life and made a place for his mind to go when he did not want to think of Walter Isaac James. He had discovered within himself a capacity to lose himself almost completely in her arms. His coming in the precious envelope of her flesh was the little death that the French called it. There was each time that perfect instant when, by becoming, he ceased to be.

And yet her role in his life added too a lazy urgency, oddly enervating. Because she existed, because of the part she played, his own need to resolve the situation was so much the greater.

Heidigger had said that James was to be killed in hot weather. Detroit lay hot under the July sun, hotter still in August. The city maintained an uneasy calm. Policemen muttered to themselves but kept a light rein in black neighborhoods. Polish machinists in Hamtramck cursed the black mayor and thanked God for the autonomy that made their enclave a suburban island inside the Detroit sea. The lid might be shaky but the lid remained on, and Dorn looked at a black man’s photograph and sought a way to keep the lid in place.

He considered near-misses. He thought of running a gunman and tipping the runner to the police at the last second. He thought of putting a bullet in an arm or leg, canonizing James with partial martyrdom. But even a close attempt on the mayor might spark a black riot, while anything less than success would go down badly with Heidigger.

Often he awoke with the conviction that he had dreamed of James and the nagging suspicion that his dream had held an answer. But he could never remember these dreams.

One afternoon, elaborately casual, she said, “There’s a sort of party tonight. Not too many people. About a dozen kids or so.”

He kept his feelings off his face, out of his voice. “You ought to go,” he said. “You can’t spend all your time with an old man.”

“You’re not an old man. I think you just say that so I’ll tell you you’re not.”

“Oh? How old is your father?”

“Oh, come on, Miles.”

“You once told me. Fifty? I am fifty-four.”

“You’ve never met my father.”

But he had, once, although of course he had not told her. Once in New York, between sieges at the microfilm viewer, he had walked a few blocks to the firm that manufactured beads for dressmakers. On some pretext he got himself shown into the man’s office, then let it develop that it was another Howard Perry he was looking for. Jocelyn’s father was sleek, balding, with pouches under his eyes and a bitter look about the mouth. It had pleased Dorn, later, to examine his own reflection in a mirror and to remark that he looked younger and more fit than Perry.

“You think I should go?”

“But certainly.”

“They invited both of us, Miles. What’s the matter—did you think we were a secret?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Well, my friends know that you and I are a thing.”

“A thing?”

“Lovers.”

He realized that it had not even occurred to him to wonder whether her friends knew this. When she was with him it was as if she ceased to exist apart from him. No, he corrected himself, it was more that what they shared, what they were to each other, had no points of reference to the rest of the world.

“I thought maybe you’d like to go.”

“Why don’t you go without me? I would be out of place, don’t you think?”

“Well, it’s a couples thing,” she said, not pressing. “I wouldn’t go alone, that wouldn’t be cool. But it’s not important.”

“You would like me to go with you?”

“Only, you know, if you want.”

“Why not?”

There were six couples at the downtown apartment when he and Jocelyn arrived. Two more students came ten minutes later. Dorn smiled through introductions but made no attempt to remember names. He sat cross-legged on a cushion on the floor and accepted a glass of too-sweet wine. He listened in on various conversations, ranging in topic from politics to music. His eyes wandered around the large, sparsely-furnished room. Several posters caught his eye. One was a list of instructions on proper behavior in the event of a nuclear attack. It told the reader to curl himself up in a ball and place his head down between his legs.
“Now kiss your ass good-bye,”
it concluded. Another showed a Nazi flag, a black swastika stark on a red field. Above it, English words were written in German Gothic type:
“It’s your flag; love it or leave it.”