The Triumph of Evil (18 page)
You thought Guthrie ought to die. At the time I supplied a reason or two why he should not. I did not mention the one that moved me to keep him alive.
It was simply this. Racism will be a factor in American politics for many years, if not indeed forever. And there must be a voice that speaks for this racist opinion. Such a voice may be dangerous or innocuous. Guthrie was not dangerous because he never possessed the potential for national success. Heidigger knew this. Thus, in his profoundly offensive way, he constituted a safeguard to American democracy.
Imagine, Jocelyn, how astonished he himself would be to know this!
But I was willing to see him dead. I hoped it would work out as it did, but the tolerance in dealing with explosives … In any case, I felt the death of Willie Jackson would tend to separate moderate blacks from the bomb throwers. Whether it had this effect I could not say. One small event among so many …
… and thus decided not to kill James. It will never be possible for me to know how much of this stemmed from reason and how much I owe to the fact of our having become lovers. I am sure the latter had some effect… But reason was partly responsible, too. You see, Jocelyn, I felt it was important that James live. I felt the role he played was a positive one, a more valuable one than that played by any of the others.
But how can I possibly make you understand, how can I dare to expect you to understand, that the deaths of innocent persons affect me not at all? How can I convince you of this without at once convincing you that I am a monster?
Nor, on reflection, is the statement wholly true. I am moved by human death, but no more and in no hugely different way than I am by the death of any animal. That baby bird that Vertigo killed, for one example. The chicken we ate for dinner our last night together, for another. I grieve as deeply for that chicken as I do for J. Lowell Drury. I cannot see (and I suspect the fault is mine) any difference between taking the one life and the other. But this does not move me to vegetarianism, either… .
And so I made the mistake of forgetting who I am. I am a killer. For a moment I thought I was God, and that James would live because I had decided that he should live. But my failing to kill him did not immunize him from death at another’s hands.
I learned from this. I learned something I had already known, but one only learns what one already knows. What I learned was that these events would come to pass not only without my participation but also without the movement of which Heidigger and I were a part. Acts grow out of their time. And so I killed P.F. O’Dowd, not because it mattered to me or to Heidigger that he live or die, but lest someone else kill him in a more damaging way … .
I have been over this so many times. There is a danger on the right, and every move the left makes strengthens it. Rhodine himself hardly matters. Remove him and another would take his place.
I am just one man, Jocelyn. I am trying to do what I can to make this country as fit as it can be for you to live in. But I am just one man. I do not know how much effect I can have.
The center holds the only answer. If there is an answer.
Again and again I find myself blinking back thoughts of the unthinkable. That the answer is that there is no answer. But I must go on acting as if I do not believe this to be true …
And the last page:
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
And the last paragraph:
Oh, my darling, my love, my life. Love of you made me selfless. Now it makes me self-sacrificing, because for it I must give up the only thing I want. For I cannot possibly send this letter to you, Jocelyn, my Jocelyn. I write to you knowing you must be spared my words. I cannot burden you with this knowledge. I cannot permit you to share it. You will be questioned at great length. You must know no more than I have already shown you. And what I have shielded from the world, I thus must shield from you as well. You said you would always love me, Jocelyn, and were it true I could bear anything. But you will know of me what the world knows, not what I have written here. For your sake, Jocelyn. But I cannot bear it, I cannot bear it, and something dies now within me.
Miles Dorn
He shed no tears while he read the letter. He would never weep again. The part of him that wept no longer existed. He read the letter dry-eyed all the way through to the signature. Then he burned it, page by page, in Heidigger’s wastebasket. He watched as each piece of yellow paper in its turn caught fire and flamed.
When the last sheet was consumed he stirred the ashes thoroughly. Then, although he knew that the most painstaking laboratory work in the world could not reconstitute those pages, he nevertheless took the wastebasket into the bathroom and flushed the ashes down the toilet. Already the air conditioner was beginning to clear the smoke from the room.
He left all of the cyanide capsules but one at Heidigger’s side. He let himself out of the room, hung the
Do Not Disturb
sign on the knob. The inside lock was the sort he could engage from the outside. He turned the bolt, put the room key in his pocket, and left.
His body moved, acted, performed. It knew its role and did what it was supposed to do. His mind was only peripherally aware of what was going on. For the most part his thoughts wandered in space and time, playing with words and phrases, listening to voices other than his own.
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.
His suit jacket hid the gun stuck in the waistband of his trousers. The patrolman whose service revolver it was would never miss it. He was dead now, in an alley, his neck expertly broken. Dorn had expected Heidigger to have a gun in his room. Finding none, he had not wanted to waste time devising a clever way to get one.
The easiest way was the best. Policemen carried guns. Dead policemen have no need for them. A policeman going to the aid of an apparent mugging victim does not expect that mugging victim to reach up suddenly and break his neck. No amount of training can prepare a policeman for such an eventuality.
(“I voted for the President in the last election. You know who a lot of cops voted for? … Guthrie… . You know who they’re talking about more and more? … Your man Rhodine … 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.”)
It was so easy. That was perhaps the most frightening thing about it, that it had all been so absurdly easy from beginning to end. Even the genuinely complicated parts were difficult only in their conception, not in their execution.
…. 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… .
But didn’t they know how easy it was? Didn’t everyone know? It seemed to him that Dallas should have taught them that much. Not the assassination of Kennedy. But the assassination of Oswald, when one man with a gun walked through everyone and committed the world’s first televised murder.
One man with a gun.
(“Sweet old Theodorable… . 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… . 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.”)
What was Jocelyn doing now? She was at the commune with the Land People, and it bothered him that he could not picture the place in his mind. Perhaps she was working in the garden. Or putting up preserves for the winter. Or talking with someone, or sitting around high on marijuana. Or making love.
(“I’ll always love you, Miles. Always.”)
Will you, Jocelyn? Will you? I am going to believe that you will. Permit me a little self-deception. Permit me to believe this. I will not have to believe it for very much longer.
…. 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 white radicals… .
One man with a gun.
One man with a gun, in the right place at the right time. One man with a gun at the Capitol steps as the presidential limousine approaches.
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 be no evidence of any involvement that is not absolutely identifiable as leftist and/or black.
One man with a gun.
In one pocket, a key to a room at the Holiday Inn. In another pocket, Heidigger’s coded address and memorandum book. In his mouth, tucked in a cheek, a plastic-coated capsule filled with cyanide. A capsule that would not dissolve in the mouth or in the stomach. A capsule that had to be crushed between the teeth.
(“I will not kill myself. I will not leave the country.”)
One man with a gun.
One man with a gun in the waistband of his trousers, moving forward as the presidential limousine disgorges its contents. One man with a gun in his hand, moving through the crowd like a ghost through walls.
(“But didn’t they know how easy it was? Didn’t everyone know?”)
One man with a gun. One man with a gun in his hand.
(“If you are not part of the solution, then you must be part of the problem.”)
One man emptying that gun point-blank into the chest of the President of the United States.
And turning even as the last bullet hit home. Turning, empty gun in hand, cyanide capsule still tucked between cheek and gum.
(“I will not kill myself.”)
One man with a gun, turning to point the empty gun at the Vice-President of the United States.
(“Sweet old Theodorable ….”)
One man with a gun. One man with an empty gun that no one else knew was empty. One man with a gun pointed at the Vice-President of the United States while Secret Service men threw themselves over the president’s body.
Fools! Do you think I could miss?
One man with a gun,
welcoming the bullets that pierced his flesh.
It took so long to die.
La grande mort.
He fell so slowly. Whoever would have thought the ground would be so far away? The ground was miles away.
(Miles from Croatia.)
The feel of the plastic capsule against his gum.
(I will not—)
How odd it felt, this business of dying.
I die in your arms, Jocelyn.
“I’ll always love you, Miles. Always.”
Jocelyn—
The Triumph of Evil
was the second book I published under the pen name of Paul Kavanagh.
Now there was an excuse for the first one, although I’m not sure it was a very good one. Paul Kavanagh was not only the putative author of
Such Men Are Dangerous;
he was also its protagonist and first-person narrator. I’m sure virtually all of the book’s readers recognized that it was a novel and that it had been written by a professional writer of fiction whose name was almost certainly something other than Paul Kavanagh. Still, it was a way for the book to present itself and at least a tenuous reason to employ a pseudonym.
But
The Triumph of Evil
was a third-person novel, and its protagonist was world-weary European agent and assassin named Miles Dorn. The book was a novel of political suspense, by no means categorically dissimilar to the books I was writing under my own name, so why slap Paul Kavanagh’s name on it?
It’s not as though the Kavanagh lad had a following.
Such Men
got some good reviews but it didn’t set the world on fire, and Paul Kavanagh’s name on a book wouldn’t cause it to fly off the shelves.
So why the pen name?
Why any pen names, ever?
Well, I don’t suppose it’s hard to grasp why I might have wanted to use names other than my own on the books I wrote for Nightstand Books and Midwood Tower and Beacon Books. The houses occupied the lowest echelon of paperback publishing, and the books I published with them were soft-core erotica. They are quite tame by today’s standards, but they were as determinedly erotic as the times allowed. It wouldn’t astonish me to learn that a bookseller here and there may have gone to jail on my account.
I wasn’t worried about going to jail. I was probably more afraid of being forever overlooked, but I didn’t want my name on books that were categorically third-rate. I wasn’t ashamed of the books I published as Sheldon Lord and Andrew Shaw. I was, if anything, proud that I could produce publishable work, proud that I could make a living doing so. The books did what they were trying to do, but their sights were set low. My own name, I felt, ought to be reserved for something more ambitious. And almost everybody else in the business seemed to feel the same way.
I also wrote purported nonfiction, books on sexual topics featuring fabricated case histories, and I used pen names on those books as well. Two of the names had
M.D.
after them—you can do that, I was assured, as long as you neither diagnose nor prescribe. I never did either, nor did I yank out anybody’s appendix. Is it any wonder I didn’t put my own name on those books?
The very first book I wrote,
Strange Are the Ways of Love
, had to have a pen name on it. It was a lesbian novel, and you couldn’t publish a lesbian novel with a man’s name on the cover. That’d be just a little too butch for the market. I liked that book just fine, I’d have been proud to have the world know who wrote it, but that wasn’t an option. And, when I wrote some more lesbian novels a few years later, I became Jill Emerson to do so.