The Triumph of Evil (8 page)

“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 Louisiana.
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.

It is in the nature of pigeons, Dorn thought, to shit on statues.

It occurred to him that this woman might be feeding such a chemical to the pigeons. She might even be poisoning them. It was impossible to say with certainty.

He took a taxi back to his hotel, packed, checked out. He caught an afternoon flight to Charleston and a bus to Willow Falls.

“How was New York?”

“Exhausting,” he told her. In German he recited its faults. German was a good language for finding fault. “It is, in the first place, impossible to breathe the air or drink the water. There is a trash receptacle on every corner, but no one seems to have informed the public of its function. Consequently the streets and sidewalks are strewn with garbage. One cannot walk a block without being accosted by several panhandlers, perhaps a third of whom were better dressed than I. All of the taxis seem to be permanently off duty. Everyone is shrunken and sullen-faced. No one smiles. I see no reason why anyone should.”

“I was going to say I wished I could have gone along, but you don’t make it sound very wonderful.”

“It was not very wonderful at all. Be glad you were here. Anyone who goes unnecessarily to New York is flirting with commitment to a mental hospital. The city itself is a mental hospital, all patients and no staff.”

“Oh, poor Miles.”

“I survived. Actually I spent almost all my time at the Public Library. An excellent institution. And, perhaps because I hated the city so much, I managed to get an impressive amount of research done in a week’s time.”

“I wish you would give me at least a hint of what this project is about.”

“In due time. You see, I know that if I talk about it, I won’t get around to doing it.”

“I don’t mean to bug you.” When he squinted at the idiom, meaningless in German, she translated it.

“But you don’t bug me,” he said.

“At least you won’t have to go back to New York again, will you?”

“I sincerely hope I will never have to go back there,” he said.

“You’re a good cook,” she said. “This is really delicious. I don’t know how to cook anything.”

“It’s not hard to learn.”

“Do you give cooking lessons? I could afford them, now that my German lessons are free.”

“I learn more from you than I teach you, Jocelyn.”

She put her fork down, raised her face slowly to his. She spoke to him with her face.
If you want,
her face said.
If you would like it, I too would like it. Truly. But you’re the one who
must
decide.

“It’s warm,” he said. “I’ll open a window.”

EIGHT

Less than a week after his return from New York, Dorn packed a suitcase and rode a bus to Charleston. From Charleston he flew on Delta Airlines to New Orleans. The name on his ticket was not one he had used before. He used that name again to register at a medium-priced hotel in the Quarter. In his room he unpacked his suitcase and placed his clothes in the bureau and closet. He took the
Sanitized
wrapper off the toilet seat and raised the seat. He unwrapped one of the water tumblers, drew a glass of water, drank some of it—it tasted of chlorine—and set the half empty glass on top of the dresser. He look off the bedspread, got into bed, rumpled the bedclothing briefly, dented the pillow with his head, and got out of bed again. He closed the blinds and turned up the air conditioning.

On his way out of the room he dropped the
Do Not Disturb
sign onto the doorknob. He knew several ways to lock a door from the inside while being on the outside. None of I them worked with this particular type of lock. There was a transom, but the desirability of leaving the door locked from the inside did not seem to him to outweigh the probable consequences of being seen crawling through his own transom, nor did he much like the idea of trying to crawl back in again. Nor, for that matter, did a broken leg lend itself to his plans.