The Triumph of Evil (7 page)

There was usually a connection between the language of the dream and its subject matter. Dreams of his youth, for example, were most likely to be in Serbo-Croat. Dreams of the present were often in English. But there was no hard and fast rule. Dreams, possessing their own system of logic, had their own scheme of comparative linguistics as well.

This dream, set in the present time, was nevertheless in Serbo-Croat.

In the dream he was in the chemistry laboratory. Its window high in the Science Building overlooked the quadrangle where commencement exercises were to be held. And he talked in the dream to Burton Weldon, who was dead in the dream, already shot down by guardsmen in retribution for a crime Miles Dorn had not yet got around to perpetrating. Though dead, Burton Weldon was able to hear and to speak; miraculously, he was able to understand and to speak Serbo-Croat.

Furthermore, Weldon’s face wouldn’t behave. It kept turning into the face of Clyde Farrar, Jr.

When the time came to shoot Drury, his dream finger froze on the dream trigger. He pulled with all his strength but was not strong enough to make his finger move.

The speech went on and on and on, with Sen. J. Lowell Drury (Dem., N.H.) orating in flawless Serbo-Croat. And then the speech ended, and Drury left the podium, and still the finger had not moved the trigger.

“You see?” Burton Weldon’s corpse shrilled at him. “You see? You could not do it!”

He awoke drenched in sweat, fighting his way out of the dream, fighting Weldon’s voice (but it was not Weldon’s voice in the dream; it was someone else’s; whose?) and clawing at the bed-clothing with hands and feet. He went into the bathroom and stood for a long time under the shower, thinking about the dream.

He knew enough of dream theory to recognize it as a classic impotence syndrome. Virility anxiety. The gun is a penis, and one cannot make it work. And yet it was so specific, and so much related to present circumstances, that he was not certain whether it was in fact a sexual dream or more an indication of unconscious fear that he would fail to kill Drury.

Was it the same thing? Was the gun a penis in his life as well as in his dreams? He had thought of this before, of course. He was too insightful not have had the thought, too honest to dismiss it peremptorily, and yet too hardened to dwell on it.

Later, after he had made the last of the arrangements, set up a meeting with Weldon, scattered more bits of damning evidence (but not too many, and never too obviously; let them work, those cops; they loved to find elusive clues)—after everything was set and checked out, he realized whose dream voice had spoken Serbo-Croat words through Burton Weldon’s dead lips.

Jocelyn’s.

This, more than anything else about the dream, gnawed at him.

SIX

Jocelyn sat, legs crossed, a hand at her chin. “You know,” she said, “when I heard about it I thought of you right away. Some of the things we were talking about before you left. And I wasn’t surprised when it happened, that’s another thing. That’s the thing, nobody was surprised. Somebody was listening to a radio and came down the hall passing the word, and hardly anybody was surprised. As if we all knew they would get him sooner or later. They get everybody.”

“But the boy was a leftist, wasn’t he?”

“If he did it.”

“I didn’t follow the reports too closely,” Dorn admitted. “But I understood it was open and-shut.”

“It always is, isn’t it? Who always gets shot? Kennedy. King. Bobby. Malcolm. Drury. They’re always leftists, and they always get shot by leftists.”

“Not King.”

“No, but it might have looked that way if they hadn’t caught that guy. And even so they want you to believe that there wasn’t a conspiracy, that this Ray broke out of prison and did it all by himself. Nobody believes that. Nobody believes the Warren Commission. I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who believes the Warren Commission. And when Bobby Kennedy was killed, well, they caught him right there, he did it, but somebody must have put the idea in his head. I mean, he was this mixed-up little Arab; somebody must have put the idea in his head.”

“I see what you mean. And Weldon?”

“I guess he flipped out. The letter he started to write, and he evidently made some strange telephone calls. And he was supposed to be in an accident in a stolen car, and then he used a dead boy’s driver’s license to buy a gun in Vermont. Or else he had someone buy it for him. But other people said he was on campus in Caldwell when the accident took place.”

“Perhaps he had an accomplice.”

“Maybe.” She looked doubtful. “I guess he was very militant. So many kids, though. They talk more than they act. That’s part of the game, putting the Establishment uptight. Of course if he flipped out, and then they say he called somebody and said he realized Drury was his father. You know, if he was in that whole Oedipus bag—”

Was there anyone so easily manipulated as the amateur at revolution? They were suspicious, cautious, their caution occasionally verging on paranoia. They accepted it as highly likely that any adult was a policeman. But they did not honestly believe that anything could happen to them. They were young, and that damned them because the young always assume themselves to be immortal and immune. They may state flatly that they expect to die, that they do not expect the planet itself to survive another ten years. But the idea of personal death, of sudden pointless personal death, is never real to them.

And so they are oddly careless. It was easy to arrange a secret meeting with Burton Weldon, easy to mention a few of the correct names and phrases, easy to win not his trust but his physical presence
.

“
You may be a cop, man. Let’s say that I take it for granted you’re a cop
.”

But, taking it for granted, he still told no one where he was going or whom he was meeting, he still met with Dorn and went into the Science Building with him, mounted the flights of stairs, entered the chemistry lab.

“The funeral was on television yesterday,” she said. “A lot of kids watched it. Even some of the ones who had gone around saying that Drury was just a knee-jerk liberal. They changed their attitudes completely the minute his body was cold. I didn’t watch the funeral.”

“A show,” Dorn said. “Entertainment for the public.”

“That’s all it is. And I was thinking. There was no big televised funeral for the fourteen kids who died in Washington. Someone was saying that they ought to put Burt Weldon’s funeral on television. You know, under the equal-time code.”

“There’s a bitter thought.”

“If Weldon even did it. But I guess there’s no doubt, is there? I mean, he was right there with the gun in his hands.”

“I was told to contact you,” he said, “because of your feelings toward Drury.
”

“
My feelings? The whole point of it is that I haven’t got any feelings about him. He doesn’t exist. He’s not relevant
.”

“
Some people feel he ties marginal revolutionaries to the Establishment
.”

“
No question. So
?”

“
So perhaps we might return bullets for his words, as you suggested
.”

“
Hey, don’t turn it around on me, man. I don’t know you. I don’t know what you want to make my words do
.”

“
I’ll be honest with you, Weldon. I was sent here to give Mr. Drury a bullet
.”

“
Oh, wow!
”

“
I need assistance
.”

“
From me
?”

“
Yes
.”

“
You’re going to shoot him from here. From the window. Wow. Listen, I don’t really know that this is my kind of thing. I don’t know that I’m ready for it, if you follow me
!’

“
You can see the political value
.”

“
Radicalize more people. Create confrontation. Cut out the phony liberal alternative. It’s obvious. I’m not an idiot
.”

“
And you approve
?’

“
I don’t know. I guess so
.”

“
And you’ll help
?”

“
How
?’

“
Have a car ready for me in back. I would do my own driving, but you could get the car in position for me. Then, when the time comes, you could create a diversion. A minor disruption, some egg throwing, perhaps. Something to confuse them for a moment so they would be less quick to pinpoint the source of the gunfire
.”

“
Oh, wow
!”

“
You could never be connected with me
.”

“
Even so. I could see about the car, maybe. No. No, look you leveled with me. I’ll level with you
.”

“
Yes
?”

“
I wouldn’t do anything to get in your way. I can see what you’re doing and I can dig it, but I can’t participate. Do you understand
?”

“
Of course
.”

“
I suppose it’s a cop out on my part, but I would have to do that, to cop out. I wouldn’t get in your way
.”

“
You’d feel no moral imperative to inform anyone in authority
?”

“
Are you serious? Man, I would never fink. I’m not going to kill Drury, maybe that’s my own personal hang-up, but I wouldn’t run out and save his life, either
.”

“
That’s interesting.” Dorn said. “You are not part of the solution
.”

“
I don’t follow you
.”

“
Oh
?”

Dorn jabbed at the boy’s solar plexus, fingers extended and rigid. He drew his hand back and chopped gently at the side of the boy’s neck. Gently. He did not kill him
.

“
You must be part of the problem,” he said.

“It’s going to be a bad summer,” she said. “Not so much because of Drury. You know, that’s the thing about something like this. This assassination. It gets all the attention, and everybody takes a set on it, but there are so many other things going on. Did you hear about what happened in Portland?”

“No.”

“In Oregon. Not in Maine. God, isn’t that weird? There’s violence in Portland and you can’t even guess which Portland. It happened yesterday. The pigs just broke into a Panther hangout and everybody started blasting away. Three cops killed and five Panthers.”

“This was yesterday?”

“Yes. It’s just obvious, isn’t it? Somebody sent the order down, get the Panthers. And all the cops in the country figure it’s open season. It has to be a conspiracy. The Establishment decided to get rid of the Panthers and that’s how they’re doing it.”

He looked at her thoughtfully. “It might be less clear-cut,” he suggested.

“How do you figure that?”

“Well, just as a hypothesis. Suppose one man acting by himself called the Portland police. Anonymously. To give them some sort of tip. That there was a cache of heroin at a certain address. That there were armed burglars inside. Anything. And suppose the man then called the Panther house and said the police were on their way with orders to shoot everyone dead. Enter police with guns drawn into room filled with armed Panthers. Result—instant bloodshed.”

“My God.”

“You’re probably right that there is a police conspiracy, but even in the absence of one—”

“I never thought of it that way.” Wide blue eyes. “Oh, Miles, that’s scary!”

“It’s the sort of thing that could happen.”

“And I thought I was paranoid before. I don’t know about this summer, I really don’t. My father wants me to go home to Connecticut. I could hang around here. There are always empty beds in the dormitories during summer session. I can’t even concentrate on the choices because of everything that keeps happening. I think about leaving the country. That’s what we all talk about. Just getting out of here. This country is on a death trip and I just want to get off.”

The speakers’ platform was 80 yards from the window of the chemistry lab. There was no wind to speak of. The lab was on the third floor of the building, the top floor, and the slight downward angle was easily allowed for
.

There was not much in the way of security. A half-dozen state troopers with high-powered rifles. A handful of obvious plain-clothesmen. Enough for his purposes
.

(“
The White Hope. A lot of people say that someone like that does more harm than good
.”)

When it was time, he moved quickly. He propped the inert Burton Weldon on a chair in front of the window. He had previously opened the window a foot and a half. Now he drew the shade. He crouched behind Weldon, leaned the boy forward a little, put his arms around the slender body, and settled the barrel of the deer rifle on the window ledge
.

(“… . and so the third night he goes to bed in the White House and when he wakes up in the morning he’s not J. Lowell Drury anymore, he’s Hubert Humphrey.”)

A four-power scope. Sighting easily, the cross hairs finding their target
.

(“I like Drury. I see him on television and I like him.”) Rugged New England features seen through the scope. Face animated, beaming, self-confident
.

(“But you wonder if the country would be any worse off without him?” “Right. And I can’t see how it would.”)

He gave the trigger an easy squeeze, popped Drury’s skull half an inch above the bridge of his nose. He fired off the rest of the clip, his fingers agile through the sheer gloves, working the bolt between shots, aiming over the crowd, hitting no one. The clip was empty before anyone began returning his fire. He fastened Weldon’s hands on the gun, leaned him further forward, and scurried back toward the door. The gunfire began before he was out of the room and was still going on when he cleared the last flight of stairs
.

In the bus terminal in Albany a man wanted to talk about Drury. Veins showed on his cheekbones. He wore green work-clothes and carried a glossy black lunch bucket
.

“About time someone got that sonofabitch. For my money he was asking for it. He was a Commie, you know.” “I didn’t know that.”

“It wasn’t generally known. But I take an interest in these things, see. I’m at the Vets’ Post and we get speakers who give you the inside story. Card carrying Commie. Take my word for it.”