The Triumph of Evil (3 page)

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?”

“Why not?”

“Good.” A huge smile, gold teeth glittering. “We are concerned with a country which after a lengthy period of stability has been moving more and more into a state of revolutionary ferment. For decades almost all political opinion was religiously centrist. Now this is no longer the case. The left and right expand at the expense of the center.

“Leftist activity stems from two principal areas. As is almost invariably the case, the universities play a central role. There is a bookishness about the university radicals, but as their militancy increases this is less and less a factor. Further, there is a larger and larger circle of nonuniversity youth who look to the university radicals for political direction.

“Now. This country is biracial. The white population exists to a certain extent at the expense of the black population. The blacks have begun to depart from centuries of conditioning. They are becoming more vocal. As militancy becomes more and more a habit, the demagogues of the black left become increasingly extreme. Again a part of this process of polarization, if you will.”

“That always happens,” Dorn said. “I assume the black population constitutes a majority.”

“No. Ten or fifteen percent. No more, although of course their birth rate is higher.”

“Of course. Ten or fifteen percent. That surprises me.”

“Higher in certain areas, of course.”

“Yes. That does surprise me. I had been about to name the country and puncture your balloon. Instead it is I who am deflated.”

Heidigger beamed. “No pins in my balloon, please. This is more than good theater, Miles. How easily your name fits into my speech! You’ve chosen well. More than good theater, though. There’s method to it.

“To continue. The rightist reaction of the white
lumpenproletariat
is easily imagined. Their instinctive response is racist and anti-intellectual. They begin by living in terror of a black take-over. Simultaneously, and in much the same way, they dread the economic effects of a communist or quasi-communist revolution. Their preferred racial status permits them to see themselves as middle-class, and the bourgeoisie is invariably counterrevolutionary. Consider Cuba. The middle-class shopkeepers and professionals did not realize until they had helped the man to power that their own instincts are counterrevolutionary. Here, largely because of the racial situation, the reaction is more immediate. Here the militancy is just now emerging on a broad basis. Before the present, rightist activity was cultist. It was on the fringes. Now the lines are more clearly drawn. An effective demagogue has not yet surfaced on the right, but there are more and more confrontations with the university radicals, more and more groups forming with a broad base. There has been no consolidation of these groups, but that is only a question of time.”

Dorn started to say something, but Heidigger showed his palm. “Another aspect is sectional. The southwestern fourth of the nation is its economic and political center. The rest of the country, the whites in the rest of the country, consider the southwesterners to be almost a separate tribe. A different nation. This is most strongly felt in the northwest, where the black concentration is greatest and where all of the obvious responses are intensified for the white lower class. It is also true throughout the East, and in rather a special way. There are entrenched economic interests in the East that feel almost completely alienated by that core of southwestern money power. These people think of the southwest as Jew-influenced and pandering to the blacks at the expense of the rest of the country.”

“What about the economy, Eric?”

“A long tradition of prosperity. Thirty years of noteworthy growth and stability. But a surprising incidence of poverty nevertheless. Black poverty, of course. White poverty in many areas, but most especially in the depressed northwest.

“Within the past two years, the economy has found its way into a state of chaos. Riotous inflation. Increasing unemployment, particularly black unemployment. Shares dropping off badly on the principal exchanges. This is a highly industrialized country, as you’ve perhaps gathered.”

“Yes. It’s also a Chinese puzzle. I can’t think of what name to put to it.” He touched his chin, the side of his nose. “I scarcely | even read newspapers, you know. I’ve lost all touch with international politics.”

“Then let me tease you some more. Certain things have occurred which would even make the pages of whatever sort of newspaper you have in Willow Falls, South Carolina. Did you ever think you’d come to live in a town with such a name, by the way? Certain events, I say, which if they ring no bell—this is a presentation, Miles, rather than a guessing game, though I can appreciate your temptation to play—certain events that may point up the directions the country is taking, the directions it might be coerced to take in the future.

“Politically, the national establishment is essentially oligarchic. One of these ruling families—their orientation is left-centrist—has produced several charismatic political leaders, each of whom in a particular way managed to appeal to disparate portions of the local population. Two of them have been killed. Among the blacks, there have been considerably more liquidations, especially in the lower levels. But again there have been two very important murders recently, both of them removing dynamic and charismatic leaders who managed to mobilize their followers effectively without approaching the extreme positions of their rivals. You see the pattern, of course.”