The Triumph of Evil

by Lawrence Block

  “Upset?”

  “I thought this was a solo, damn it.”

  “Repeat.”

  “I said, damn it, that I thought I had a six-time exclusive.”

  “You do.”

  “Then what happened to Case Two?” Pause.

  “Are you there, damn it?”

  “Yes. You did not do Case Two?”

  “I have been in—oh, shit on it. I have been in the largest account in Case Three’s district—do you read?”

  “In Case Three’s district?”

  “Yes.”

  “I read.”

  “I have been here since yesterday morning. I have been looking around Case Three while waiting to conclude Case Two. Then I picked up a newspaper. Then I picked up a telephone.”

  “Christ.”

  “You didn’t know about this?”

  “Of course not. Christ. Can I get back to you?”

  “No.”

  “Then get back to me. An hour.”

  Another long-distance telephone call. “Hello. We didn’t do Case Two.”

  “Certain?”

  “Certain. I checked all possibilities. We did not do Case Two.”

  “Then who in the hell did?”

  “Our supposition is the printed version is real.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Neither did I. How clean is your line?”

  “Could be anonymously dirty. Drugstore.”

  “Shit.” In rapid Serbo-Croat: “It smells. A commercial touch on the black’s night out? And a call to send him snipe hunting? But I think it was commercial. They would know the schedule. And it was not a snipe hunt.”

  “Repeat last.”

  “I checked this six ways. They were good to begin with and had fantastic luck. The snipe hunt was honest. The black hen was plucked. The snipe call was straight merchandise.”

  “Incredible.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Their good luck. And—”

  “And shit luck for us, damn it to hell.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because after all that they scored small. They tossed and didn’t clean. Nickels and dimes. Christ damn it to fucking hell.”

  “I would never have done it heavy.”

  “Of course not. In and out. Stop the clock and go away. No bad smell.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So instead of a light touch it winds up being heavy and smelling to high heaven.”

  “And this after a stinking week casing it.”

  “Too long on this line. Anything more?”

  “No. Shit.”

  He spent the rest of the day in New Orleans, doing various things. One of the places he visited was a wildlife museum, where he examined row after row of glass cases filled with dead birds. Several of them were specimens of extinct species. He got halfway through the display when he was overcome by a feeling of utter revulsion. He left the building as quickly as he could, certain that the sight of one more dead bird would make him vomit.

  The next day he took a bus to Baton Rouge. He paid two dollars and twenty-five cents to take a one-hour tour of the city on a sight-seeing bus. Like everyone else, he had a camera. He visited, among other places, the State Capitol, the Governor’s Mansion, and the campus of Louisiana State University. When the tour ended he took another bus back to New Orleans and checked out of his hotel, settling his bill in cash. Then he flew again to Charleston and took the bus to Willow Falls. All that day, on the plane and on all the buses, he kept thinking of those display cases with their dead birds. He hardly thought at all of Karnofsky, or of William Tompkins’s mother.

  NINE

  For several weeks Dorn spent the greater portion of his time in his house in Willow Falls. The weather turned quite warm, and the house was not air conditioned, but Dorn did not mind the heat. In recent years he had found himself less capable of enduring extreme cold temperatures, but hot weather had never bothered him.

  Now and then he took a bus somewhere for all or part of a day, but he never stayed away overnight during this period. He went various places, observed various people, read various books and newspapers and periodicals, and spoke at various times on the telephone.

  While he was thus engaged, several things happened here and there across the nation. In Chevy Chase, Maryland, Senator Willard Cosgriff (Rep., Colo.) lost control of his automobile and plowed into a concrete bridge support. He was killed instantly. Autopsy revealed an unusually high concentration of alcohol in his bloodstream. Senator Cosgriff had been a sharp critic of the administration’s war policy.

  A bomb exploded in the main Chicago police station, killing three police officers engaged in clerical duties. Investigation failed to yield any positive clues, although an anonymous letter on behalf of the African Revolutionary Movement took credit for the bombing. The letter contained circumstantial information on the incident which had been withheld from publication. No organization named the African Revolutionary Movement had been previously known to the authorities, in either Chicago or Washington.

  In response to the threat of a disturbance on the Bloomington campus of the University of Indiana, Governor James Danton Rhodine threw a cordon of National Guard troops around the campus. Simultaneously, forty-three student leaders were quietly arrested and charged with crimes ranging from possession of marijuana to fomenting rebellion and civil disorders. Bail was denied to all but five of the students. There was no subsequent disturbance on the campus, and the troops were called off after two days without a rock being hurled or a shot fired. Governor Rhodine’s several speeches and press conferences, in which he spoke of “nipping Red rebellion in the bud,” received extensive national press and television coverage.

  A Louis Harris poll on 1972 presidential preferences for the first time included the name of James Danton Rhodine.

  In Detroit, auto workers marching in support of the administration’s Indo-China policy clashed with peace demonstrators in a battle that raged for eight blocks on Woodward Avenue. Police units, ordered into action immediately by Mayor Walter Isaac James, later drew fire for their lackadaisical attitude in restoring order. Twenty-three auto workers and seventy-six peace marchers received hospital treatment, and two peace marchers subsequently died as the result of injuries sustained in the fray. Spokesmen for each side charged the other with deliberate organized provocation.

  The cumulative death toll across the nation during this period of time included fourteen police officers and thirty-one persons identified as members or sympathizers of the Black Panther Party.

  In Buffalo, New York, the headquarters of a branch of the Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society was raided during the night by persons unknown. The Weathermen had opened this headquarters with an eye toward organizing white working-class support in Buffalo’s predominantly Polish East Side. The office was sacked, mimeograph equipment destroyed, and two Weathermen beaten to death.

  The Secret Service investigated over twenty-five hundred threats on the lives of the President and Vice-President.

  The baby robins, still uncertain fliers, began leaving their nest for longer periods of time.

  Dorn saw Jocelyn almost every day, except for those days when he had business out of town. On afternoons when she did not visit him he found himself stalking uncertainly around the house and yard, picking things up and putting them down, waiting impatiently for her.

  He held long conversations with her when she visited him, and longer conversations with her in his mind when she did not.

  Jocelyn, you know nothing of the man I have been or even of the man I am. Jocelyn, I first killed a man when I was seventeen years old. I killed him because he was a Serb and I was a Croat. At the time this seemed sufficient reason. By the time I was your age, Jocelyn, I literally could not count the men I had killed. I did not know their number.

  Often he read poetry. Blake. Yeats. Rilke. Schiller. Eliot.

  “I should have been a pair of ragged claws … .


  “I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach.

  “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

  “I do not think that they will sing to me … .”

  “I brought a friend to see you,” she said one morning. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  She held the friend in her arms, small and black, with white forepaws and a white tip to his tail.

  “The notorious Vertigo,” he said. “I had begun to question the fact of his existence, as if he were God and I a Catholic adolescent. Welcome to my unworthy house, Vertigo.”

  They sat with cups of tea. Dorn poured a saucer of milk for Vertigo, who sniffed it and walked away from it.

  “Vertigo,” she said. “That’s not at all polite.”

  “That is the strength of cats. They are not amenable to bribery.”

  The cat walked from room to room, investigating. Jocelyn began to talk of James Danton Rhodine. This was not surprising to Dorn. He had noticed that more and more people were beginning to talk of James Danton Rhodine. The man projected vigor, imagination, strength. He knew the right words and spoke them with the ring of conviction. He talked of progress through a return to traditional American values. He praised the spirit of Godfearing American workers and farmers, who toiled for their bread and lived decent honest lives. He railed at the vipers of the left who would divide the country. He quoted Lincoln’s observation about a house divided. The vipers of the left, he suggested, were moved to divide and conquer.

  “I just don’t know,” she said, her face troubled. “Everybody says he’s a reactionary, and I guess he is. But—”

  “Yes?”

  “Sometimes I can’t help feeling that some of the things he says make sense.”

  “What do your friends say?”

  “Everybody hates him. You know, ‘fascist bastard.’ He’s an obvious racist. He doesn’t come right out with it like that redneck Guthrie. But it’s there. There’s a phrase he uses. ‘The speckled band of subversion.’”

  “I thought that was a reference to Sherlock Holmes. He calls radicals ‘vipers of the left,’ and the ‘speckled band’ was a snake in a Conan Doyle story.”

  “I know. But first he’ll talk about the black nationalists, and then he’ll talk about radical college students, and then he’ll use this ‘speckled band’ thing. Like speckled black and white. That’s what I get from it.”

  “I see. A subtly racist remark.”

  “That’s it, Miles. He’s subtle. And he’s so great on television. There was one speech I saw, I only caught the tail end of it, and there wasn’t a thing he said that I especially agreed with, but when he finished, I don’t know, I felt like standing up and singing ‘God Bless America.’ I felt like marching.”

  “Interesting.”

  “I hear people I know say, ‘I don’t like him, but he has some good ideas.’ Once I heard a friend of my father’s say that about Hitler.”

  Dorn smiled. “Ah. Hitler did have some good ideas, you know. The German people went to him as an alternative to chaos. And he put a stop to inflation, and increased employment, and raised the standard of living, and ended civil disorder, and reversed the terms of Versailles. And—”

  “You make it sound—”

  “And then, when he had evidently saved the German people from chaos, he went on to create for them the most nearly total chaos the world has ever known. He launched an impossible and unnecessary war. He guided the war so as to make utter defeat inevitable. He slaughtered millions. Millions. He destroyed all that he had created along with all that had existed before him. The savior from chaos turned himself into the supreme nihilist. But he had some good ideas.”

  “Do you think—”

  “A wild exaggeration on my part,” he said. “After all, this is America.”

  There was the noise of a small struggle outside, and unfamiliar sounds of pain. Dorn rushed out the front door. Jocelyn was close behind him. The cat was in a bed of irises by the side of the front steps, killing something.

  “Oh, Vertigo!”

  Dorn stooped for a closer look.

  “Is it a mouse?”

  He took hold of the cat by the nape of the neck and retrieved its tiny victim.

  “It’s a bird,” he said. “A young robin.”

  “Oh, no!” She stood over the cat, her face drawn with anguish. “Vertigo, you bad cat! How could you do it? Oh, you bad, bad cat!”

  Dorn had released his hold on the cat’s neck. Vertigo looked up, puzzled, as the girl wailed at him. He stood still while she slapped him twice across his face. Then, baffled, he darted off into the bushes.

  “Oh, God,” she said. She was shuddering. “How could he do that? How did he get out?”

  “It was my fault. There were windows open. It did not occur to me that he might leave.”

  “No, I should have thought. He never did anything like that before. He’s always been a good cat, a wonderful cat. He never even puts out his claws. How could he do that? Is the poor thing—”

  There was life in the bird that he held in his hands, but it was terribly mauled. “I’m afraid it’s dead,” he said gently. “Go in and sit down. I’ll bury it.”

  He walked to the garage, giving the bird’s neck a quick snap as he walked. He got his trowel and buried the bird in a flower bed.

  She was on the front steps, calling to the cat. “He won’t come,” she said. “Oh! I never hit him before. He didn’t know what was happening, and now I don’t know where he is and he won’t come when I call him.”

  “Come inside,” he said. “He’ll be back.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He wants to go off and consider what’s happened to him. But he’ll be back.”

  In the living room she said, “Was it one of our birds?” They went together to the kitchen window. One of the baby robins was absent from the nest. She began to cry, her shoulders heaving, tears flowing freely. Awkwardly he put an arm around her shoulders. She pressed her face against his chest and cried for a long time. He felt as though something was breaking inside his chest. At last her sobbing stopped and she sighed deeply. He released her. She took a step backward, turning her face from him.

  “I’m such a child,” she said.

  He said nothing.

  “I don’t understand how he could do it. I named him Vertigo because he has this height thing. I never met a cat like that before. He has to work up his courage to jump down from my bed. How could he get into the nest?”

  “They’ve been leaving the nest. But they don’t fly well. They’re easy to catch, even for clumsy cats. The parent birds would have driven Vertigo away, but evidently they were off on other errands.”

  “We watched those birds grow up. And then he—”

  “You can’t blame him. It’s the nature of cats to kill birds.”

  “But how would he know to do it?”

  “As he knows to arch his back at dogs, land on four feet, and clean himself.”

  “Damn it, he doesn’t have to catch birds! I feed him twice a day. I spend more on his meals than—”

  “What do you feed him?”

  “Cat food.”

  “What does it contain?”

  “Everything he needs, protein, vitamins—”

  “I mean the composition?”

  “Everything. Beef and liver and chicken and fish and—oh!”

  “Don’t, Jocelyn.”

  But she began to cry again, and this time he did not attempt to comfort her. She covered her face with her hands and wept. “It’s so wrong,” she sobbed. “Why does everything have to eat everything else? Why?”

  “Why must cats eat birds?”

  “Why?”

  “Why do we cry for the birds eaten by cats, when we do not cry for the worms eaten by birds? And why does all our knowledge of the balance of nature and the survival of the fittest do nothing to stop our tears?”

  “It is so awful, Miles.”

  He ached for her. She
was getting a quick glimpse of Hell from a new perspective and there were no words he could speak to blur her vision.

  The cat’s return to the house was as unremarked as his exit. All at once he was there, in the living room.

  “Oh, Vertigo,” she cried. She ran to pick him up. He turned, wary of her, but she snatched him up and clutched him to her breasts.

  “Oh, poor, poor Vertigo,” she said. “I should never have hit you. I didn’t think you would come back. My poor baby. My poor sweet baby.”

  She sat with the cat purring in her lap. Dorn went from room to room, closing windows.

  Jocelyn, it’s the nature of cats to kill birds. Jocelyn, it is my nature to kill men. Vertigo and I are assassins. It is our nature. And to live in accordance with one’s nature is to make one’s peace with destiny.

  “Tyger, tyger … . did he who made the lamb make thee?” The same hand made both beasts, Jocelyn.

  Jocelyn, I go through life with a gun in my hands. But I, Jocelyn, am a gun in the hands of a man named Eric Heidigger. And he in his turn is a gun in an unseen pair of hands. And famous Danton Rhodine (who has some good ideas) is part of this chain of guns and hands, but whether he is a gun or a pair of hands or both I do not know.

  Why, Jocelyn, do we grieve so much more bitterly for the death of a young animal? Why is the death of a child so infinitely more sorrowful than the death of an adult?

  You wept at once for bird and cat. I weep for you.

  One evening after dinner she turned suddenly and caught him looking at her, his face open and unguarded.

  “Oh, Miles,” she said.

  He tried to turn his eyes from her. They stayed on her face, her perfect face.

  She said, “You must know that I love you.”

  (“I should have been a pair of ragged claws … .”)

  She said, “And you love me. I know you do.”

  (“… the mermaids singing …”)

  She said, “I don’t have anyone else. Not anymore. When you go out of town—?”

  He thought of Rebecca Warriner (“You’re very sweet, Milton… . That was lots of fun.”) He thought of the streetwalker.

  “No,” he said. (“No. I’m far too old for that.”)

  Jocelyn, Jocelyn, I am not a lover but a killer. My penis is a rifle spitting bullets into other men’s brains, a steel bar that pulps their heads. A knife. A stick of dynamite. A dozen dozen forms of phallic death.