The Evil That Men Do

by Robert Gleason

  * * *

  “Fuck her and the laptop she wrote that shit on,” Brenda said. “She’s just jealous she doesn’t have a view like this.”

  “Times are changing, sis,” J. T. said. “The world’s metamorphosing all around us, and the ground is shifting under our feet. The country’s madder than hornet-stung harpies at people like us. She could beat us.”

  “Are you saying that the UN’s Anti-Inequality Initiative has a chance?” Brenda asked her brother.

  “A better chance than it had a year ago,” Tower said. “The Senate’s Democratic majority is also pushing hard for the UN Anti-Inequality Resolution. They not only want to charge wealthy people like us with tax dodging, they want to expropriate half our offshore funds.”

  “At least the UN bill only wants to take a third of our offshore funds,” Brenda said.

  “You can’t blame its supporters,” Tower said. “It’s a good deal for them—even though it’s terrible for us.”

  Sighing wearily, President Tower glanced out over the city and caught his window reflection: a tall man—nearly six feet, four inches—casually attired in a black leather western-cut sport jacket, matching cowboy boots and pale blue jeans. He slowly nodded his approval. He liked the Wild West look. He thought it suited him. Then, however, his eyes drifted over to his face, and he winced. Heavily lined and hard-used, the face stared back at him, empty of affect or expression, its gaze pitiless as the sun. He was staring at a face that felt nothing, that cared for nothing, a face that neither asked nor gave with eyes cold as the grave. The face and eyes bothered even him.

  No wonder you and your sister are so close, he thought. You’re two of a kind—raised by the same heartless old man.

  “I blame a lot of it on Jules Meredith,” Tower said. “You ask me, she’s a fucking Communist.”

  “And if she and the UN have their way,” Brenda agreed, “Marx would finally win.”

  “It could happen,” Tower conceded. “It’s very hard for legislators to reject the will of their constituents.”

  “Then why don’t you seem more concerned?” Brenda asked.

  “Putilov says he’s got something in the works,” Tower said. “It’s so hush-hush he won’t tell me about it. He says it’s because you and I need ‘plausible deniability.’ He also warned us not to go to that UN conference.”

  “Oh shit,” Brenda said. “This could get ugly fast. Remember how Putilov consolidated his dictatorship?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Tower said.

  “He blew up five Russian apartment complexes,” Brenda said, “killing and injuring over thirteen hundred people. Blaming it on Chechen separatists, he declared martial law, invaded Chechnya and became Russia’s dictator for life.”

  “Sheer fucking balls,” Tower said, nodding appreciatively.

  “Jimmy, it sounds like Putilov’s going to hurt some people at the UN.”

  “Knowing Putilov,” Tower said, “a lot of people will get hurt very bad.”

  “Very, very, very bad,” his sister said. “And that doesn’t bother you?”

  “You mean because a bunch of pasty-faced, one-world, peace-creep assholes might get hurt,” Tower asked, “I’m supposed to fucking care? Are you nuts? I hope Putilov drops daisy cutters on those UN cocksuckers.”

  3

  “That dope could’ve … made a glass eye weep and turned out a nun!”

  —Danny McMahon

  Jules watched Danny McMahon’s monologue from the wings while she waited to go on. She was going to be his final guest of the evening.

  “This is the part of the show we call ‘Get Real,’” McMahon said to his audience, “in which I give you my honest opinion on ‘the state of play in the world today.’ So far, we’ve had a lot of fun, but now this is showdown shit. In fact, I’m so serious, so intense, I wish I’d smoked . . a great big fucking blunt before the show. I could use something right now … to calm my nerves.”

  Instantly, hundreds of audience hands were raised, brandishing every type of cannabis, every type of cigarette paper and smoking appliance known to God and man.

  “This is my kind of crowd. You people know how I occasionally enjoy a little Mary-Jew-Wanna.”

  The audience’s guffaws were thunderous, but there were isolated shouts of: “Mary-JEW-Wanna?”

  “What? I can say Mary-JEW-Wanna. I’m one-half Jew on my mother’s side!”

  Again, the audience roared.

  “In fact, last night I enjoyed some hydroponic herb that was so mean—weed that was so wicked—”

  “How mean was it?” the audience roared back at him. “How wicked was it?”

  “Mean enough to murder Jesus! Wicked enough to kill a rock! That dope could’ve … made a glass eye weep and turned out a nun! Where do they send … my corpse?”

  McMahon’s audience exploded, and pandemonium reigned.

  It took him a full minute to calm them down.

  “But now we need to get serious. I want to talk about the Mideast’s new Osama bin Laden, Kamal ad-Din. He claims to have merged al Qaeda and ISIS with Pakistan’s most formidable terrorist group, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, otherwise known as the TTP. He says he’s liberating and uniting Muslims everywhere. That’s bullshit, of course. Kamal has one goal and one goal only: To ride history’s blood tide to its final apocalyptic end. To gain total power, absolute authority and to achieve complete dominion over that region. He calls himself ‘the New Mohammed.’ I would describe him as a cross between Mohammed crossed … with Count Dracula times metastatic cancer! He’s the obese brain-damaged offspring of … Josef Stalin and Chuckles the Clown! But then that’s just me.”

  He then treated the audience to his infamously infectious smirk.

  “Let’s show the audience a picture of Kamal,” McMahon said.

  A close-up of Kamal flashed onto the screen. Decked out in a white robe, he had narrow, close-set beady eyes and a dark voluminous beard. His body was shockingly spheroid and spectacularly overweight.

  “Wow!” McMahon said. “That is … one fat motherfucker!”

  “How fat is he, Danny?” the audience roared.

  “So fat it makes you wonder what his mother looked like. She must have won … every Miss Goodyear Blimp Look-Alike Contest twenty years running! To drop anything … that intergalactically gross … his mother must have been … a human zeppelin! She must have tipped the freight scale at least … a half ton!”

  Again, the crowd’s laughter rocked the huge theater.

  “Look at Kamal’s face.” McMahon’s pained grimace was agonizing to look at. “If I had a dog that ugly … I’d shave its ass and make it walk backward!… That’s a face that would make … a freight train take a dirt road and knock a buzzard off a shit wagon!… Kamal’s smile … would make a pit bull drop a pork chop!… I heard his mama had to hang a hunk of goat meat around his neck … to get the dog to play with him!

  “That’s not a man, that’s … a fucking dirigible, that’s the … Muslim Moby Dick!!!!… That’s … Kamal the Camel!!! Who is his couturier anyway? Omar the Circus Tent-Maker?”

  More thunderous laughter and applause.

  “You know someone got a shot of Kamal sunning himself on a private beach? Put it up for the audience. This shot was taken surreptitiously through a telescopic lens from over 300 yards away.

  “Wow! Now that is … big! That’s not a Saudi prince. That’s … a living breathing garbage scow! That’s … up-front, jump-the-shark, in-your-face, balls-ass, gag-me-with-a-spoon … ONE THOUSAND POUNDS OF BUTT-UGLY … FAT! Talk about bringing the mountain to Mohammed. When it comes to this guy, this Mohammed … is the fucking mountain!

  “Kamal, old buddy, you got more blubber on you than … a Nantucket whaling ship! Doesn’t the Koran say anything about proper nutrition? I got five words for you, pal … ‘the Bataan Death March Diet!’

  “Zoom in on that head. What is his hat size anyway? Extra Watermelon? I’d say: Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Kamal, but the SPCA would h
ave me for … cruelty to animals! Kamal’s tonnage would … kill a Clydesdale and drop a dromedary to its knees!

  “Surprisingly enough, I hear Kamal has an eye for the ladies.” The crowd shouted out its skepticism, but McMahon lowered his hands and quieted them down. “He’s got four wives, a dozen or more concubines, and I’m told he gets beaucoup hip-action. Can you imagine though what it’s like having sex with him? Here’s a shot of his first wife.” She came up on the screen. She was as spherical in shape and almost as massive as Kamal. “That is one big girl. I hear after they have sex, she says: ‘Thanks for the tip!’”

  The audience erupted in insane howls. Quieting them down, McMahon continued:

  “I’ve heard he’s a real hound dog too—that he’d fuck … a crocodile if it didn’t have teeth!… a goat with aftosa!… a bear trap … if someone glued hair on it! A snake … if somebody would hold it!

  “You know why Kamal wears … robes?” McMahon yowled at them at the top of his lungs.

  “WHY???” the audience howled back.

  “Because a camel can hear a zipper at fifty paces!!!”

  More audience screams, more foot pounding.

  “I know I make a lot of jokes, but now I want a moment of quiet. I want to be deadly serious. This may be the scientific discovery of the century. We know now with near-mathematical certainty where and how Kamal’s genome came to be. NIH has studied his family history exhaustively and now has incontrovertible scientific proof that Kamal’s earliest antecedents … fucked monkeys!”

  The ovation went over forty-five seconds.

  “Actually, I have heard that Kamal and his family are more than a little … weird. Do you know where Kamal goes to find … dates with girls?” McMahon finally asked.

  “Where, Danny?” the audience bellowed.

  “Family reunions!”

  More hysterical howls.

  “Ever seen his family tree?”

  The audience brayed like an army of 2,000 feral mules, and McMahon bellowed his answer.

  “It’s a straight line!!!”

  The audience thundered like Sturm, Drang und Götterdämmerung.

  “I know, I know,” McMahon said. “Some of my critics will point out that I too have a reputation as a ladies’ man. They’re going say, ‘Hey, McMahon, who the hell are you to cast stones just because Kamal gets mucho pussy?’ Well, I got a flash for you, sports fans. Unlike those trolls that Kamal flattens like a fifty-ton steamroller, my women get stoned … before … they … fuck!!!”

  The crowd detonated for a full minute.

  “I won’t say Kamal’s promiscuous, but I’m told his life’s driving dream is … to give HIV back to the monkeys!”

  The audience’s laughter reverberated through the theater like a rolling artillery barrage in an echo chamber from hell.

  “Look at that low, sloping forehead and the underslung, prognathic, Neanderthal jaw. God, does he look … dumb.”

  “How dumb is he?” the audience shouted.

  “Dumber than … a dump truck? Dumber than … a Dumpster? So dumb his friends have to water him like a potted plant! So stupid they hang jackets on him … like a coatrack! Any dumber and … pigeons would shit on him like a statue.”

  The audience’s laughter roared and soared.

  “Then there’s the Koran. The most tendentiously tedious … crock of ground-up goat shit ever written. I’ve read that book three times, and it just gets more absurdly imbecilic each time. I want to know why, if Allah is omniscient, omnipotent and could create us and this universe, why did he make himself … such a shitty writer? Forget Shakespeare and Homer. Why couldn’t he write at least as well as, say … Danielle Steel?”

  Again, McMahon had to calm the audience down.

  “Still I have to add that I personally believe all followers of all faiths everywhere are dangerously self-deceiving. After all, why should anyone anywhere subscribe to any faith? Why does one group of people choose to worship Allah instead of Quetzalcoatl or prefer the Old Testament Jehovah over Shiva, the Hindu God of Creation and Destruction? As Sam Harris points out, worshippers do not come by their faith through rational choice but as an accident of birth. Ninety-nine percent of the time Christians believe in Jesus or Hindus adhere to Hinduism, it’s because they were born into that faith. Their parents and their clerics inculcated it into them. The belief in one god over another has nothing to do with the superiority of one religion over another. Their religious belief was not a rational objective choice. These worshippers can’t even prove any of their gods exist, let alone that one is superior to another.

  “There is no more reason to follow the teachings of the Koran than to kneel at the fictitious feet of Olympus’s capricious gods or to tremble before Odin in Valhalla’s hallowed, mead-soaked, thunder-cracking halls. All faith in magical invisible beings is, by definition, detached from physical evidence. These votaries can never validate their deities’ existence, so by definition such worshippers are … delusional—in other words … psychotic.

  “You know who also admired Islam? Hitler was a ferocious fan. He desperately wanted Islam to be Germany’s national religion. Under Allah’s banner, he swore he could have conquered the whole fucking planet. Listen to what Der Führer said of Islam:

  “‘It’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Islam would have been more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?

  “‘I can imagine people being enthusiastic about the paradise of Mohammed, but as for the insipid paradise of the Christians! Christianity is an invention of sick brains.

  “‘Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers, we would have been in all probability converted to Islam, that cult which glorifies heroism and which opens up the Seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so.

  “‘The only religion I respect is Islam. The only prophet I admire is the Prophet Mohammad.’”

  “And Kamal’s followers call him the New Mohammed? That asshole is … the idiot love child of Charles Manson and Pedro the Pederastic Clown! He says his group is an alliance of al Qaeda, ISIS and the TTP? Bullshit. It’s an ululating horde of purple-ass mandrills, throwing shit with one hand and jacking off with the other! Kamal isn’t the Second Coming of the One True Prophet. He’s just another brain-damaged terrorist … from East Jack-Me-Off-a-Stan! And his amanuensis and partner-in-crime, Raza Jabarti, has … the soul of a cash register, the moral code of an Iron Maiden, the heart of a hard-trade whips-and-boots whore, but I got to say she has … a bodacious body that’s hotter than all the fires of hell rolled up into one thermonuclear conflagration! Just look at her.”

  On the big wall-size screen behind him flashed shots of Raza on a nude Cannes beach and in a skimpy minidress in a Monte Carlo casino.

  “Is there anyone here who wouldn’t say Raza is … hot?” McMahon asked.

  “HOW HOT IS SHE, DANNY?” The audience roared.

  “Hot? You want hot? Raza’s got a body that would make … the Pope butt-kick Mother Teresa through a stained-glass ten-story Vatican window!”

  The audience guffawed, howled, war-whooped, rebel-yelled, ape-yiped and generally fell all over itself with comedic convulsions.

  “But speaking of hot. I’d like you to meet our closing guest, the legendary author and war correspondent, the ravishingly lovely, deliciously delectable and mind-bogglingly brilliant Jules Meredith!”

  Jules Meredith strolled across the stage toward him with a runway model’s arrogant, I-don’t-give-a-shit swagger, her smile sinfully sensuous and eyes filled with mockery, mischief and are-you-ready-for-the-good-times-to-come merriment.

  PART II

  Tower and his plutocratic pack are no ordinary band of psychopaths. They are men who have made their fortunes bilking entire nations out of trillions … men engaged in enterprises so preposterously profitable that there is no way they
cannot be exploitative. For unlike the robber barons of the 19th century, Tower’s billionaires produce almost nothing that is useful or socially redeeming. Instead they rip the public off with their Wall Street skim-scams, through fiscally destructive mergers—yes, 80 percent of mergers line the coffers of the key players but impoverish everyone else—through their predatory casinos, and, of course, through their debt-derivative con games that Warren Buffett has called “financial weapons of mass destruction.” Theirs is an avarice so arrogant, a self-entitlement so maniacal and a hubris so soaringly grandiose that at some level these people have to be … deranged.

  —Jules Meredith

  1

  “Then more’s the pity.”

  —Elena Moreno

  The Stockholm pub was all stainless steel, blond wood and matching leather. Sitting at its burnished hardwood bar, Elena sipped a glass of St. Emilion. It was 4:09 P.M.; the place had just opened. Near-empty, it was dimly lit.

  Adara made her entrance. Decked out in black tights, a red half-sleeved designer T-shirt cut short just above her navel and dark, hand-tooled boots with three-inch heels, she strode toward Elena with long deliberate strides.

  Glancing at her own reflection in the bar mirror, Elena saw a woman wearing black Levi’s and a matching leather jacket, under which she a wore gray-black sweatshirt with the hood up. Even in the dimly lit bar she wore large Oakley sunglasses.

  It was the reflection of a woman with something to hide.

  Elena left the bar and took her drink to a circular table surrounded by a quartet of chrome stools with curved padded-leather backs and armrests. She took a deep breath. Whatever Adara had to say, it would not be good news. She wouldn’t be here if it was good news, and neither of them wanted the bartender or customers listening in.

  Adara grabbed up her double shot of Asbach Uralt brandy and Elena’s bottle of Skol and took them to the table.