The Triumph of Evil

by Lawrence Block

  He spent the next day with Jocelyn. At one point she told him that he seemed to be in an unusual mood.

  “It’s true,” he admitted. “I am apprehensive.”

  “Of what?”

  “I can’t remember the last time I had something to lose. The sensation is enervating.”

  “Something to lose?”

  “You.”

  “You’re silly,” she said, kissing him.

  He went back to Baltimore. It took him more time than he had anticipated to learn the name and find the apartment. It was late when he knocked on the door. A gaunt black woman with cautious eyes opened it.

  He said, “Royal Carter?”

  “What you want with him?”

  “It’s private.”

  She frowned disapproval but turned and went into another room. A few moments later the boy with the Afro haircut came to the door. He looked at Dorn without recognition.

  Dorn tugged at the lobe of his ear, then put his finger to his lips. Royal Carter’s eyes narrowed for an instant. Then he nodded shortly.

  Dorn said something inane about Methodist missionary activity in Botswana. While he talked, he held a piece of paper so that Carter could read what was written on it. It said: Greyhound terminal men’s room 20 minutes.

  Carter took in the message and nodded curtly. Then when Dorn paused in the middle of his speech about Botswana, he said, “I ain’t interested in missions, man,” and closed the door in Dorn’s face.

  A long-distance telephone conversation:

  “I’m in Egypt, man.’“

  “No trouble?”

  “No. Take forever to grow that hair back, that’s all that bothers me.”

  “It’s for a good cause.”

  “No complaints. Hate having to wait three more days. That’s all. But if an old man like him can hold up his end, I can carry mine. The way he stands there and toms, and then to deliver like this.”

  “I hope you haven’t talked to him.”

  “No, I’m cool. I just watch him is all. And I don’t hang around too much.”

  “Good.”

  “Thursday, then.”

  “Good.”

  Dorn did not like the waiting either. Too many things could go wrong and he could not control them. Royal Carter was alone in Baton Rouge with no one on hand to keep his nerve up. The plastic object in Carter’s pocket could be activated, through nervousness or accident, at any time. Many times in his career Dorn had had to run an amateur, and he had learned early to stay close enough to the runner to hold onto the reins.

  This was not possible. It was very important to him that he not be in Baton Rouge when the shit hit the fan. It was, further, quite necessary that he be with Jocelyn, and this saddled him with the three-day waiting period. She was in New York, enduring a summit meeting with her father.

  “He’ll play the heavy parent role,” she had said. “It’s no problem. I can handle him. I’ll be back by Wednesday at the latest. Will you miss me?”

  “Perhaps a little.”

  “And what will you do while I’m gone?”

  “Rest,” he said. “And conserve my strength.”

  He wanted her to be with him when it happened. It did not seem likely to him that she would make an association between his absences from Willow Falls and the violent deaths of prominent persons. He was gone frequently when nothing happened, and there were all too many violent deaths, unconnected with Dorn, that took place while they were together.

  He occasionally wondered if she was having an adverse effect on his judgment. He knew that, but for her, there would be no need for this hectic running back and forth between Willow Falls and other parts of the country. He had to preserve this cover of his only because his relationship with her was a part of it. Otherwise he would simply have floated around, constantly mobile, like Heidigger with his Holiday Inns.

  He decided that speculation was pointless. But for her, after all, everything would be completely different.

  “That rotten fascist bastard. Oh, I hope somebody gets him. I’m not that nonviolent I think it would be worth dying, to get someone like Guthrie first.”

  Q.E.D.

  On Thursday morning, while Miles Dorn and Jocelyn Perry were weighing the desirability of breakfast against that of remaining in bed a little longer, Royal Carter was drinking coffee at a lunch counter across the street from the State Capitol Building in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was so seated on his stool that without moving his head he could glance either out through the window to the Capitol steps or across the counter to the large flyspecked mirror. His eyes would dart first to the right and then to the left. When he looked at his reflection in the mirror, he had to repress the impulse to reach for his head and touch his hair, now uniformly cropped to within a quarter-inch of his scalp. When he looked out the window, his right hand, kept at all times in a pocket of his overalls, automatically fingered a plastic gadget the size and shape of a pack of cigarettes.

  He rarely glanced at the clock. He kept wanting to, but didn’t. And when a glance out the window for the first time that morning brought him the sight of Governor Guthrie, he did not react in any visible way. Perhaps his heart speeded up, perhaps his blood pressure increased, but he gave no outward sign of excitement.

  He remained cool throughout the ritual shining of the shoes, his eyes now fastened upon the ceremony, with no time off for anxious inspections of his mirror image. His right index finger located the button and caressed it with something akin to love.

  Dorn had told him how it would happen. How Willie Jackson, the hair nearly rubbed from his head by all those years of racist patronage, would be affixing miniature explosive devices to the undersides of Guthrie’s insteps. How Jackson, who could not risk detonating the devices himself, would then remain in his stand, waiting. And how he, Royal Carter, would rid the world of an arch-pig without ever attaching the slightest suspicion to himself.

  The shoeshine went on unendurably. It took all his effort to refrain from pushing the button now and getting it over with. Why chance Guthrie’s noticing that he had something stuck to his shoes? Why not do it now, and let Willie Jackson go out with him in a blaze of glory?

  No, he couldn’t do that. Brother Jackson had paid his dues, year after year of dues, year after year of tomming his way through Hell. He had a right not only to live but also to enjoy this moment.

  And so he waited, just as Dorn had told him to wait. Waited for the final bit of spit and polish, waited for the snapping of the buffing rag, waited for the rubbing of the white-thatched head, the good-luck rub.

  See how good your luck is, Billy Boy!

  (“The essential strategy is to minimize the possibilities of failure. Let him go just so far but no farther. The top of the first deck of steps. Not sooner, or Jackson would be in danger. No farther, however, because every step increases the likelihood of his noticing the plastic on his soles.”)

  The cloth snapped, the head was rubbed, the dollar bill passed with a flourish. And Guthrie, flanked by his bodyguard (who, if they survived, would shortly find themselves without a body to guard) turned and mounted the Capitol steps.

  One, two, three, four, five … .

  When Guthrie put his foot upon the top step on the first deck, two things happened in a single thunderclap.

  The permanently installed stand of the official Louisiana Shoeshine Boy disappeared.

  So did a large portion of the lunch counter diagonally across the street.

  “I’m sorry,” Jocelyn said. “I don’t feel sorry for him.”

  “Nor do I.”

  “I mean, I think it’s horrible for anyone to have his legs blown off. One at the knee and one at the hip. I get a little sick thinking about it. I flash on it and I look down at my own legs—”

  “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.”<
br />
  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.