The Triumph of Evil

by Lawrence Block

  And so they are oddly careless. It was easy to arrange a secret meeting with Burton Weldon, easy to mention a few of the correct names and phrases, easy to win not his trust but his physical presence.

  “You may be a cop, man. Let’s say that I take it for granted you’re a cop.”

  But, taking it for granted, he still told no one where he was going or whom he was meeting, he still met with Dorn and went into the Science Building with him, mounted the flights of stairs, entered the chemistry lab.

  “The funeral was on television yesterday,” she said. “A lot of kids watched it. Even some of the ones who had gone around saying that Drury was just a knee-jerk liberal. They changed their attitudes completely the minute his body was cold. I didn’t watch the funeral.”

  “A show,” Dorn said. “Entertainment for the public.”

  “That’s all it is. And I was thinking. There was no big televised funeral for the fourteen kids who died in Washington. Someone was saying that they ought to put Burt Weldon’s funeral on television. You know, under the equal-time code.”

  “There’s a bitter thought.”

  “If Weldon even did it. But I guess there’s no doubt, is there? I mean, he was right there with the gun in his hands.”

  “I was told to contact you,” he said, “because of your feelings toward Drury.”

  “My feelings? The whole point of it is that I haven’t got any feelings about him. He doesn’t exist. He’s not relevant.”

  “Some people feel he ties marginal revolutionaries to the Establishment.”

  “No question. So?”

  “So perhaps we might return bullets for his words, as you suggested.”

  “Hey, don’t turn it around on me, man. I don’t know you. I don’t know what you want to make my words do.”

  “I’ll be honest with you, Weldon. I was sent here to give Mr. Drury a bullet.”

  “Oh, wow!”

  “I need assistance.”

  “From me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re going to shoot him from here. From the window. Wow. Listen, I don’t really know that this is my kind of thing. I don’t know that I’m ready for it, if you follow me!’

  “You can see the political value.”

  “Radicalize more people. Create confrontation. Cut out the phony liberal alternative. It’s obvious. I’m not an idiot.”

  “And you approve?’

  “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  “And you’ll help?”

  “How?’

  “Have a car ready for me in back. I would do my own driving, but you could get the car in position for me. Then, when the time comes, you could create a diversion. A minor disruption, some egg throwing, perhaps. Something to confuse them for a moment so they would be less quick to pinpoint the source of the gunfire.”

  “Oh, wow!”

  “You could never be connected with me.”

  “Even so. I could see about the car, maybe. No. No, look you leveled with me. I’ll level with you.”

  “Yes?”

  “I wouldn’t do anything to get in your way. I can see what you’re doing and I can dig it, but I can’t participate. Do you understand?”

  “Of course.”

  “I suppose it’s a cop out on my part, but I would have to do that, to cop out. I wouldn’t get in your way.”

  “You’d feel no moral imperative to inform anyone in authority?”

  “Are you serious? Man, I would never fink. I’m not going to kill Drury, maybe that’s my own personal hang-up, but I wouldn’t run out and save his life, either.”

  “That’s interesting.” Dorn said. “You are not part of the solution.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Oh?”

  Dorn jabbed at the boy’s solar plexus, fingers extended and rigid. He drew his hand back and chopped gently at the side of the boy’s neck. Gently. He did not kill him.

  “You must be part of the problem,” he said.

  “It’s going to be a bad summer,” she said. “Not so much because of Drury. You know, that’s the thing about something like this. This assassination. It gets all the attention, and everybody takes a set on it, but there are so many other things going on. Did you hear about what happened in Portland?”

  “No.”

  “In Oregon. Not in Maine. God, isn’t that weird? There’s violence in Portland and you can’t even guess which Portland. It happened yesterday. The pigs just broke into a Panther hangout and everybody started blasting away. Three cops killed and five Panthers.”

  “This was yesterday?”

  “Yes. It’s just obvious, isn’t it? Somebody sent the order down, get the Panthers. And all the cops in the country figure it’s open season. It has to be a conspiracy. The Establishment decided to get rid of the Panthers and that’s how they’re doing it.”

  He looked at her thoughtfully. “It might be less clear-cut,” he suggested.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Well, just as a hypothesis. Suppose one man acting by himself called the Portland police. Anonymously. To give them some sort of tip. That there was a cache of heroin at a certain address. That there were armed burglars inside. Anything. And suppose the man then called the Panther house and said the police were on their way with orders to shoot everyone dead. Enter police with guns drawn into room filled with armed Panthers. Result—instant bloodshed.”

  “My God.”

  “You’re probably right that there is a police conspiracy, but even in the absence of one—”

  “I never thought of it that way.” Wide blue eyes. “Oh, Miles, that’s scary!”

  “It’s the sort of thing that could happen.”

  “And I thought I was paranoid before. I don’t know about this summer, I really don’t. My father wants me to go home to Connecticut. I could hang around here. There are always empty beds in the dormitories during summer session. I can’t even concentrate on the choices because of everything that keeps happening. I think about leaving the country. That’s what we all talk about. Just getting out of here. This country is on a death trip and I just want to get off.”

  The speakers’ platform was 80 yards from the window of the chemistry lab. There was no wind to speak of. The lab was on the third floor of the building, the top floor, and the slight downward angle was easily allowed for.

  There was not much in the way of security. A half-dozen state troopers with high-powered rifles. A handful of obvious plain-clothesmen. Enough for his purposes.

  (“The White Hope. A lot of people say that someone like that does more harm than good.”)

  When it was time, he moved quickly. He propped the inert Burton Weldon on a chair in front of the window. He had previously opened the window a foot and a half. Now he drew the shade. He crouched behind Weldon, leaned the boy forward a little, put his arms around the slender body, and settled the barrel of the deer rifle on the window ledge.

  (“… . and so the third night he goes to bed in the White House and when he wakes up in the morning he’s not J. Lowell Drury anymore, he’s Hubert Humphrey.”)

  A four-power scope. Sighting easily, the cross hairs finding their target.

  (“I like Drury. I see him on television and I like him.”) Rugged New England features seen through the scope. Face animated, beaming, self-confident.

  (“But you wonder if the country would be any worse off without him?” “Right. And I can’t see how it would.”)

  He gave the trigger an easy squeeze, popped Drury’s skull half an inch above the bridge of his nose. He fired off the rest of the clip, his fingers agile through the sheer gloves, working the bolt between shots, aiming over the crowd, hitting no one. The clip was empty before anyone began returning his fire. He fastened Weldon’s hands on the gun, leaned him further forward, and scurried back toward the door. The gunfire began before he was out of the room and was still going on when he cleared the last flight of stairs.

  In the bus terminal in Al
bany a man wanted to talk about Drury. Veins showed on his cheekbones. He wore green work-clothes and carried a glossy black lunch bucket.

  “About time someone got that sonofabitch. For my money he was asking for it. He was a Commie, you know.” “I didn’t know that.”

  “It wasn’t generally known. But I take an interest in these things, see. I’m at the Vets’ Post and we get speakers who give you the inside story. Card carrying Commie. Take my word for it.”

  “We were talking about Drury again last night, Miles. It’s just fantastic the way the same people who said the worst things about him are turning him into a saint.”

  “You can’t be a saint without martyrdom.”

  “Is that all it is? I think there’s more to it than that. Martin Luther King was a saint even before he was shot.”

  “More people knew it afterward.”

  “But look at Kennedy. Either Kennedy. I remember when I heard about Dallas. What I was doing, everything. I remember it so completely.”

  “Everybody does.”

  “I was like eleven years old. My father hated Kennedy. He had all those jokes about Jackie being a nymphomaniac and the Pope moving into the White House. But after Dallas it was as if he’d never had an unkind thought about the man. He even bought this terrible oil painting of Kennedy and Jackie and the two children, it looked as though it had been painted by numbers, and he wanted to hang it in the living room. My mother wouldn’t stand for it. They actually had a fight about it, if you can believe it.

  “And then when it happened to Bobby. That was something I really felt happening in myself. We were all for McCarthy. My friends and I, I mean. My father was busy being a Republican again, he would say things like Bobby wasn’t anything like the man his brother was. Completely forgetting how he’d felt about his brother in the beginning. But a lot of kids I knew were in the New Hampshire campaign for McCarthy, and we all had it down that Bobby was this vicious calculating opportunist with no principles. And then he died, and it was amazing the way we all went through the identical changes. All of a sudden he was really something, he was a man who could have saved the country. He dug the new politics and he identified with blacks and poor people and at the same time he got across to working people the way McCarthy never could. And we looked at each other and wondered why the fuck it took a bullet to teach us that.”

  “And it’s like that with Drury?”

  “Uh-huh. You can’t help thinking that he might have been somebody, that he might have done something.”

  “Death supplies time and distance, Jocelyn. It improves most people.”

  “I keep hating myself for what I said to you. For thinking he wasn’t important. Maybe he wasn’t, maybe I was right then, and this is just death improving him. I really don’t know. But I wish—”

  “You have nothing to blame yourself for. You didn’t aim the gun, you didn’t pull the trigger.”

  “I know.”

  “None of the words you spoke to me, none of the thoughts you had, had the slightest thing to do with anything that happened in Maine.”

  “Oh, I know that.”

  SEVEN

  In New York he stayed at a Times Square hotel under his own name. Each morning he breakfasted at a coffee shop on the corner and read The New York Times. Now and then an item would prompt him to nod or to shake his head. Occasionally he would smile.

  Several times he went to the microfilm room of the New York Public Library. He liked to go there around noon when the steps outside the building were thick with young people eating lunch out of paper bags and listening to transistor radios. The strip of earth between the sidewalk and the library front was densely planted with tulips and grape hyacinths, the latter just starting to show gray death in their rich blue color. Someone had spray-painted Free the Panthers on one of the lions guarding the entrance.

  He would sit for hours at a little desk running selected back issues of the Times through a large viewer. There were two attendants, a starched and virginal young woman given to white blouses and dark skirts and a loose limbed boy with abundant curls. Both performed the same quick silent service, bringing him box after box of microfilm cartridges. They were remarkably obliging.

  He was constantly amazed that all of this should be made available to him. That he could walk in unannounced, offer no explanation, pay no fee, and not merely make use of the library’s resources but be so well served in the process, One day, descending the steps, passing between the stone lions, he wondered what use would be made of the building after the movement had consolidated its position.

  Emil Karnofsky lived in a large Edwardian apartment building on Central Park West in The Seventies. There were three door men working eight-hour shifts around the clock. When a doorman broke for a meal or to use the lavatory, one of the porters relieved him. All guests were announced by the doorman, and no one was admitted lo the building until the doorman received the tenant’s permission over the intercom system. Two television sets in the lobby monitored the two passenger elevators. The freight elevator was operated by a porter.

  Parking was permitted on one side of Central Pink West on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, on the other side on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Accordingly, several tenants had provided one of the doormen with keys to their cars and had arranged that he move their cars as the regulations dictated. This occupied the doorman for almost an hour each morning, during which time a porter took over his duties.

  The building was several stories taller than either of the structures adjoining it.

  Karnvofsky’s apartment was on the tenth floor. He had occupied it without interruption since before the war and remained there after the departure of his children and the death, five years ago, of his wife. A Negro named William Tompkins lived in the apartment and served us Karnofsky’s chauffeur, valet, and body guard. A woman—Dorn did notlearn her name—came three times a week to clean the apartment.

  Karnofsky was a diabetic, The disease had manifested itself in his late fifties and was controlled with diet and insulin. He had suffered a mild coronary thrombosis in 1957 and had made a complete recover. He had since given up whiskey and cigars, although he occasionally drank a small cognac before retiring. This he rarely did before two in the morning, spending late hours reading on a wide range of subjects, including the political history of Great Britain during the Industrial Revolution, a topic on which he was an acknowledged authoiity. He was an early riser, he had been notoriously faithful to his wife during her lifetime and had remained celibate since her death. Every Sunday he was visited by all or some of his grandchildren.

  William Tompkins had been with Karnofsky for almost twelve years. For the past fifteen months he had been having an affair with a woman who lived on West 85th Street near Riverside Drive. The woman was married but separated from her husband. She had two small children. Tompkins visited her only during the day, at an hour when Karnofsky was in his office in the Kent-Walker building and the woman’s children were at school. On Tuesday nights he played bridge in Greenwich Village, returning around midnight before his employer was ready to retire. Every Thursday night he visited his widowed mother in Astoria, leaving in time to have dinner with her and returning around 11 o’clock.

  None of this was particularly hard for Dorn to learn.

  At various times while he was in New Yoik, Dorn read the following items in the Times while ruling breakfast:

  “Calling for ‘a spirit of unity and trust In a time of grave division,’ the President repeated his appeal for a suspension of political extremism as a memorial to J. Lowell Drury. ‘He was a man who knew full well the folly of implacable extremism,’ he said of the late senator, ‘and if we are to honor his memory …’”

  “… sharply criticized Vice President Henry M. Theodore’s recent diatribe on campus dissent and demanded that the White House immediately repudiate the Vice President’s rhetoric …”

  “… said that ‘Even a man like Drury would be safe in Louisia
na. We do things different down here.’ He added cryptically, ‘I wouldn’t be the first person to say something about chickens coming home to roost.’ Pressed for further elucidation, he remarked that ‘People in this part of the country know what I’m talking about, and the rest of them …’”

  “… thunderous applause from a crowd that filled the auditorium to capacity and overflowed into the street. ‘I cannot be a spectator at the crucifixion of the world’s mightiest nation on a cross of riot and anarchy. I will not, and you true Americans will not, stand idly by while the Statue of Liberty is fitted for a crown of throns by the serpents nestled in her own bosom. John Lowell Drury attempted to make peace with those very vipers of the left. But men of good will cannot make peace with the Devil. John Lowell Drury played with the vipers of the left. John Lowell Drury learned too late that even he was not immune to their poison.’

  “Generally conceded to be an easy victor in his November bid for reelection, the popular Indiana governor has increasingly turned his oratorical guns from state to national issues. In response to speculation that …”

  Dorn favored the first three items with a nod, and gave the last a quick smile of recognition.

  One night Dorn went to a movie on Times Square. On the way back to his hotel a young woman emerged from a doorway and beckoned to him. He stopped to see what she wanted.

  She said, “You want some sweet brown sugar, lover? I’ll fuck you, I’ll suck you, anything you want.”

  “Oh no,” Dorn said firmly, then softened it with a smile. “No,” he repeated. “I’m far too old for that.”

  “You ain’t too old,” she said as he turned away. “Bet I make you feel young again.”

  He walked away.

  “Motherfucker!” she called after him.

  He walked back to his hotel and went to sleep. In the morning he went to Central Park and familiarized himself with some of the paths. He saw a woman feeding bread crumbs to the pigeons. She seemed to have purchased a bag for that purpose. He thought that it was nice of her to do this, and was reminded of an item he had read reporting that the Board of Aldermen somewhere had appropriated funds for a program designed to eradicate pigeons by feeding them with a chemical which would interfere with their reproductive processes. They would lay eggs, but the eggs would not have shells. This was heralded as humane. Dorn wondered why. The pigeons were to be eradicated—terminated, Dorn thought—because they had a propensity for shitting on statues and the steps of public buildings.