The Triumph of Evil

by Lawrence Block

  On one occasion Dorn told her of a town in Slovenia where he had spent a day and two nights twenty-five years ago. He described the town and talked about the Slovene language and the local architecture. He told her of the meals he had eaten there, and of the wine, which was good but extremely tart. He did not tell her that he and two other men had gone to the burgomaster’s house in the middle of the second night. They searched the house but could not find the man. They knew he was there. Dorn held the wife’s arms while a man named Gotter hit her in the breasts and belly with his fists. She wept but insisted her husband was not home. Dorn went into one of the bedrooms where a child had been sleeping. He brought the little boy out and told the woman he would put out the boy’s eyes. It wasn’t necessary to do this. The burgomaster was in a steamer trunk in the cellar. They had seen the trunk earlier but had not thought to open it—it looked too small to hold a man and the lock was rusted. They smashed the lock and took the burgomaster out of the trunk. He was a small plump man who wept soundlessly until Dorn shot him in the center of the forehead. They left immediately. Gotter wanted to rape the wife—the widow. Violent death acted as a sexual stimulant upon him. Dorn was never able to understand this. But on that occasion there was simply no time, and Gotter was disciplined enough to repress his lust.

  Now Jocelyn was saying that she might go to Washington for the weekend. “There’s a demonstration,” she said in German, not having to hesitate for the noun. “Friends of mine are driving up, and I might go with them.”

  “A peace demonstration?”

  “A memorial for Landon Waring.”

  “He was killed?”

  “It was all over yesterday’s paper, and on the radio all the time.”

  “I haven’t seen a paper in several days. He was what? A Black Panther?”

  “I’m not sure whether he was a Panther or just worked with them. He was in Jacksonville for a rally. Why would he come to the South? It seems so suicidal. The Gestapo killed him. Isn’t that funny—we call them that, the police, but in the middle of a conversation in German.”

  “The police killed him?”

  “The official lie is that he was trying to escape, and that he grabbed a pig’s gun.” Back to English. “I can’t see how that could possibly go down with anyone. Even the Silent Majority has to know better than to believe it. He was a beautiful man, you know. I saw him speak once. Everybody’s being killed. The kids I know, we were talking, and there’s all this paranoia. Like it’s a conspiracy. I don’t know if it is or if it’s just the way the whole country is going in two different directions, and each side hates the other side. There was a riot in Jacksonville last night. They had the National Guard. First the Gestapo and then the Brownshirts. I don’t know, I just don’t know. You want to do something, but you wonder what’s the point, what good will it do. Like what good does it do to put one more body in Washington when no one pays any attention anyway. What good does it do.”

  “I don’t think you should go.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He smiled. “For selfish reasons. Landon Waring is just a name to me, and a dead man’s name in the bargain. You are a friend. It could be dangerous for you, and to no purpose.”

  “They can’t kill everybody.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Sometimes I feel guilty because I didn’t go to Chicago. Of course I was only seventeen but I could have gone, some friends of mine did go. Nothing happened to them. The guilt—I don’t feel guilty because I didn’t go, but because I’m secretly glad that I didn’t go. If that makes any sense. Sometimes I wonder what Megan would be doing now. She would be twenty-one, but she’s fourteen forever now, and there’s no way to guess who she would have grown into. She was always two years older than me and now she’s frozen at fourteen while I get older and older. That’s how death takes people away from you. It steals the people they would have been.” She gave her head a sudden shake. “I’m sorry, Miles. This is terrible. I was very down last night and I keep slipping back into it. Let’s talk about something else. I don’t know what. The baby robins? Anything.”

  Not long before she left, she said, “What’s that smell? I keep noticing it.”

  He had to consider. “Oh. A Turkish cigarette.”

  “You haven’t started smoking?”

  “No. I had a visitor earlier today.”

  “A student?”

  She didn’t know he had no other pupils. “Not a student,” he said. “He smoked I think two cigarettes. The smell of Turkish leaf lingers.”

  “At first I thought it was grass.”

  “Marijuana?”

  She nodded, and he laughed at the thought.

  “You’ve never tried it?”

  “Oh, no, no. I don’t even drink coffee. A glass of wine at dinner, that’s all.”

  “And spearmint tea.”

  “And spearmint tea.”

  “Maybe you should try it, someday.”

  “You use it?”

  “Sometimes. Not often. So many people like to be high all the time.” She caught her knee with her folded hands. Her expression turned impish. “I could turn you on,” she said. “If you ever wanted.”

  “Don’t you suppose I’m too old for that?”

  “You never seem old to me.”

  There was something hard to read in her eyes. He shifted position. He said, “I thank you for the offer, but I don’t think I’ll accept it.”

  “It’s a good feeling. And it lets you, oh, get into yourself, sometimes in new ways.”

  “Is that good?”

  Her face clouded. “It depends what you find. But if you find something bad, you tell yourself I’m high, it’s just the drug, and when I get straight again it won’t apply.”

  “And that works?”

  “For me.”

  “I was with several men once who used hashish. I mean that they used it in my presence, but I didn’t partake. They didn’t seem to be affected by it, and yet I gather they were very high.”

  “I had hash once.”

  “It’s the same idea as marijuana, isn’t it?”

  “Well, like an orchestra is the same idea as a tin whistle. It’s tons stronger. Where was this, that you were?”

  “Morocco. No, Tunis.”

  “It must have been total dynamite. Tunis? What were you doing there?”

  “Negotiating. There was an interest in mineral rights.”

  “You were with some corporation or something?”

  “I represented them. Just in that series of negotiations. Nothing came of it.”

  She said, “I wonder about you, you know. For hours at a time. About your life. Who are you. You paint all of these pictures, but I can never quite see you in any of the pictures.”

  “There’s really nothing to see.”

  “Just a sweet quiet man who drinks mint tea.”

  “And watches robins.”

  “You know-”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said. She got to her feet. “I can’t even pay you today and look, I stayed three hours, almost four. I guess I better go.”

  There was a brief moment when he could have asked her to stay for dinner. He recognized the moment and willed himself to let it pass.

  “I’ll be over Tuesday, then.”

  “Yes, good. And don’t worry about the money. Please.”

  “I should have it by then.”

  “If you don’t, it’s no matter.” He walked her toward the door. “I may be out of town,” he said. “I can’t be sure, and I don’t know how long I would be away.”

  “The Turkish cigarette?”

  “Yes. Something I might have to do.”

  He thought of the man who had smoked the Turkish cigarettes, and of the letter from Heidigger. Tampa. Jacksonville. Washington. His mind jumped through cities and time.

  He said, “A favor.”

  “What?”

  “One I’ve no right to ask. And can’t honestly explain.
Don’t go to Washington tomorrow.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Call it a feeling I have. I’ve learned to live on my intuition. I find it more reliable than pure reason. You’ve said your presence won’t affect the demonstration any more than it in turn will affect policy. Indulge an old man. Spend the weekend here.”

  She looked at him. “All right,” she said finally.

  Twice more before the sky darkened he went to the kitchen window to watch the robins. The amount of work required of the parent birds was prodigious. They were constantly flying off and returning with worms to be thrust into gaping mouths.

  He wondered why they bothered. Because they were robins, he thought, and that was what robins did.

  Could they think, he wondered. Could they in any sense muse on the instinct, the irresistible urge to fill up the planet with copies of themselves? He decided they could not. The musers, the ponderers, would miss too many worms. They would build shaky nests. Cats would stalk them and pounce upon their reveries. And their seed would die, while less intellectual birds killed off the more thoughtful worms.

  A wave of wholly unreal sadness enveloped him. “What shall I wish you?” he asked the birds, speaking aloud in English. “A long fruitful stupid life? Or fatal insight into the avian condition? Eh?”

  He cooked some spaghetti. He used a bottled sauce, cooking a few sprigs of garden herbs into it. He drank a small glass of dry white wine with his supper.

  Would she have enjoyed sharing this meal with him? Or would such an intimacy have made them nervous with each other?

  A few minutes after nine he left his house and walked downtown. A neighbor, trimming a privet hedge with electric shears, waved to him as he passed. Dorn returned the greeting. At times he wondered what the neighbors thought of him. Probably they supposed he was doing something vaguely scholarly. A foreigner, a refugee, settled in a college town. No trouble, quiet, keeps to himself. Had they invented a role for Jocelyn? He smiled at the thought.

  At nine-thirty he placed the call from a telephone booth in the hotel lobby. He told the operator his name was Leopold Vanders. A woman with a Latin accent answered on the third ring and accepted the call. The operator rang off. Dorn waited, saying nothing.

  A man’s voice said, “Mr. Vanders? I hope your decision is favorable.”

  “It is.”

  “Can we see you tomorrow? It would be three times better that way.”

  “Yes, I understand that.”

  “You received a letter today. The food is good there.”

  “All right.”

  “Until then.”

  The line went dead. He held the receiver for a moment, then replaced it. The voice was not one that he recognized. He was fair-to-good at American accents but would have had trouble placing this one with assurance. Kansas? Oklahoma?

  He left the hotel. He walked the several blocks to his house and noted the spring in his step, the increased vitality. Did one ever retire?

  The dining room of the Holiday Inn in Tampa at three in the afternoon. Until then.

  TWO

  Heidigger had a cowl of longish white hair around the edges of his large bald head. He wore thick horn-rimmed glasses, a short-sleeved white shirt open at the throat, dark blue trousers, and blue crepesoled canvas shoes. His face and arms were deeply tanned. His smile showed several gold teeth.

  “Miles Dorn,” he said. “Miles Dorn, Miles Dorn. Am I really to call you that?”

  “It suits me.”

  “Miles Dorn. You know, I think it does. There is a thick, blunt honesty to it. Miles Dorn. Miles. Yes, it works. I believe you’ve lost weight, haven’t you? I, on the other hand, have found some.” He patted his belly. “But I am more at ease with it. I thought recently of those times in my life when I was thin. Never gaunt, mind you, but thin. Genuinely thin. I was also miserable, or in deep trouble. Often both. So I cannot regret my paunch. You did eat, I trust.”

  “Yes.” He had taken a table downstairs and ordered a sandwich and iced tea. While he waited for it a young woman passed his table and repeated a three-digit number twice. After he had finished his sandwich he went to the room that matched that number. Heidigger, alone, admitted him.

  “Do you like my room, Miles Dorn? In the past few years, I have discovered Holiday Inns. The most extraordinary institutions! There is at least one in any American city you could possibly have occasion to visit. The most unlikely places have them. And you know what is so remarkable about them? Not merely that they are clean and comfortable. One expects that in this country. The big cars, you know. The soft seats in theaters. And the American bathroom. God, the American bathroom! I’ve heard it attributed to the Puritan heritage, a pathological absorption with cleanliness. Nonsense! Americans simply have an honesty that enables them to admit that human beings piss and shit and ought to be able to do so under the best possible circumstances. American toilet paper. I could write a monograph on American toilet paper. Have you ever stopped to think that this is quite possibly the only place in the world where a man can actually look forward to the prospect of wiping his asshole?”

  “I hadn’t, but I’m sure the thought will never be far from my mind. Eric, is this room clean?”

  “Clean? Oh. Electronically? Yes, it’s absolutely clean. Spotless. Unquestionably. Where was I? Yes! The institution of the Holiday Inn. It’s my point that it is not the quality of these establishments that recommends them to me, or even the delicious impersonality of them, which in itself is such an absorbing commentary on the culture. Do you know what it is? It is their uniformity. Their uncanny uniformity. They are all the same. It doesn’t matter where you go. St. Louis. Detroit. Tampa. San Francisco. Is there a Holiday Inn in Willow Falls, South Carolina?”

  “I believe there is. Near the turnpike entrance. I have never been in it.”

  “You don’t have to. Look around you. What you see here you would see there. No important differences. Take my word for it.”

  “Be assured that I do.”

  “Even the food is the same. Under no stretch of the imagination could it be called good. You could no more call it good than you could call it bad. It is Holiday Inn food, of a piece with everything else. But do you see how wonderful this is? Wherever I go, it is as if I have not traveled at all. My home is a room in a Holiday Inn, and as it is quite impossible to tell one of them from another, it is as if I am always at home in any city in the country. It has not yet happened, but some morning I will awaken and not know what city I am in. I will call the desk to ask them. ‘I know this is the Holiday Inn, my dear. Be so good as to tell me which Holiday Inn. What city? What state?’ It will happen.”

  Heidigger could not be hurried, nor did Dorn much want to hurry him. One could hardly fail to respond to the man’s effervescence. His unflagging good humor never deserted him. It was present at all times, while he stole, murdered, deceived, betrayed, subverted, and ruined. Dorn had often felt that it might be an important component in the man’s habit of survival, which viewed rationally was difficult to explain. Their trade was capriciously hazardous in the best of circumstances. When one had Heidigger’s genius for picking losing sides, one became singularly unattractive to insurance companies.

  “Miles? You indulge me. You pay close and uncomplaining attention however far afield my conversation wanders. More than that, I cannot avoid flattering myself with the feeling that you actually enjoy listening to me.”

  “I actually do, Eric.”

  “Do you know something? I like you.” He said this as if he found it remarkable. “I don’t know if you are aware of this, but I once came very close to having you killed.”

  “In Prague.”

  “Prague? No. Oh, yes, then, but that was something else, that was not what I was thinking of. In Prague I would have killed you if the opportunity had come up, but it simply didn’t. No, this was another time and another place, and I don’t think I’ll tell you where or when, but the suggestion was made to me that you ought
to be terminated. A very strong suggestion from someone in a position to put forward suggestions strongly. Yet the matter was left to my discretion. I have never regretted the decision I made. I assure you I do not regret it now.”

  “Then I owe you my life, Eric. Eh?”

  Heidigger stared for a moment, then laughed. He held his paunch in his hands and roared.

  Heidigger said, “One wonders how much to tell someone. It varies with the person and with his role and with so many other situational factors. What elements need discussion? Money? With the least important men that is the most important topic to discuss. With you it is not. There is money here, Miles, Miles Dorn. We shall all feather our nests with this one. Which reminds me. Here. Take it. It is a token, an earnest, a guarantee of operating funds. It is only a thousand. Don’t be shy, take it.”

  “I haven’t said I’m in.”

  “But you are, aren’t you? How easy is it for you to get out now? Don’t look at me that way, that is not a threat; it is a practical statement. Consider. You want to know more before deciding. I want to say nothing to an uncommitted man. A stalemate? Not at all. You can change your mind and throw the money back. I can lie. Think. You have not been away from this so long, your head has not rusted. Think. Take the money. That’s better.

  “Now. Of course you must know about the area of operations. It is not Cuba. I understand that was a point of some concern to you.”

  “Yes.”

  “So.” Heidigger threw himself into a chair, propped his elbows on its arms, made a steeple of his index fingers. “The country’s name is immaterial. Not completely so, not ultimately, but in terms of giving you the situation, of highlighting it for you. So instead of naming our target area, I will tell you some things about it which I consider pertinent. Agreed?”