“Why must cats eat birds?”
“Why?”
“Why do we cry for the birds eaten by cats, when we do not cry for the worms eaten by birds? And why does all our knowledge of the balance of nature and the survival of the fittest do nothing to stop our tears?”
“It is so awful, Miles.”
He ached for her. She was getting a quick glimpse of Hell from a new perspective and there were no words he could speak to blur her vision.
The cat’s return to the house was as unremarked as his exit. All at once he was there, in the living room.
“Oh, Vertigo,” she cried. She ran to pick him up. He turned, wary of her, but she snatched him up and clutched him to her breasts.
“Oh, poor, poor Vertigo,” she said. “I should never have hit you. I didn’t think you would come back. My poor baby. My poor sweet baby.”
She sat with the cat purring in her lap. Dorn went from room to room, closing windows.
Jocelyn, it’s the nature of cats to kill birds. Jocelyn, it is my nature to kill men. Vertigo and I are assassins. It is our nature. And to live in accordance with one’s nature is to make one’s peace with destiny
.
“Tyger, tyger … . did he who made the lamb make thee?” The same hand made both beasts, Jocelyn
.
Jocelyn, I go through life with a gun in my hands. But I, Jocelyn, am a gun in the hands of a man named Eric Heidigger. And he in his turn is a gun in an unseen pair of hands. And famous Danton Rhodine (who has some good ideas) is part of this chain of guns and hands, but whether he is a gun or a pair of hands or both I do not know
.
Why, Jocelyn, do we grieve so much more bitterly for the death of a young animal? Why is the death of a child so infinitely more sorrowful than the death of an adult
?
You wept at once for bird and cat. I weep for you.
One evening after dinner she turned suddenly and caught him looking at her, his face open and unguarded.
“Oh, Miles,” she said.
He tried to turn his eyes from her. They stayed on her face, her perfect face.
She said, “You must know that I love you.”
(“I should have been a pair of ragged claws … .”)
She said, “And you love me. I know you do.”
(“… the mermaids singing …”)
She said, “I don’t have anyone else. Not anymore. When you go out of town—?”
He thought of Rebecca Warriner
(“You’re very sweet, Milton… . That was lots of fun.”)
He thought of the streetwalker.
“No,” he said. (
“No. I’m far too old for that.”)
Jocelyn, Jocelyn, I am not a lover but a killer. My penis is a rifle spitting bullets into other men’s brains, a steel bar that pulps their heads. A knife. A stick of dynamite. A dozen dozen forms of phallic death.
My seed is acid, Jocelyn. The universal solvent that no vessel can contain.
He watched as she stepped purposefully across the room to him.
(“It’s warm. I’ll open a window.”)
He remained in his armchair, his eyes on the softness of her smile. She seated herself sideways on his lap. He looked down at blue jeans and bare feet. She put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes, and he returned the look.
The warmth, the beauty, the smell of her.
He thought of cats and birds, of worms and men. He touched her leg and looked at his hand upon faded blue denim.
(“… ragged claws …”)
“I am an old man.”
“You are not old.”
“And you are so very young.”
She kissed him lightly on the lips. His hands remembered the wounded robin, the tapping of its heart, the weak flutter of crippled wings. She kissed him again, and he drew her to him and tasted her mouth.
“Old … .”
“We are the same age, Miles. I have known you for as long as you have known me.”
He held her close. She put her arms around his neck, her head in the hollow of his shoulder. He felt a heartbeat and did not know whether it was hers or his own.
(“Do I dare eat a peach?”)
“I love you,” he said.
“Oh, I know, I know.”
“I love you.”
He held her. A kitten on his lap, purring. He held her, and his hand moved to cup her breast, to touch her arm, the side of her face.
After a long time she stood up and held out her hands to him. He got to his feet. Her face melted into that warm liquid look he had glimpsed only once before.
(“You were my teacher, and now you are my friend.”)
They walked arm in arm to the bedroom.
Oh, Jocelyn! Warmth, fire, love. A gun, a knife, a stick of dynamite, a length of steel pipe. Not peace but a sword. Jocelyn!
Do I dare?
I will not commit suicide, Jocelyn. I will not leave the country.
He lay on his back, every muscle unstrung, every cell at peace. Her hair brushed his face. He opened his eyes to see her looking down at him.
“Hello, old man.”
“Hello.”
Her hand readied for him, her fingers curled possessively around his penis. She said, “I have made a discovery, old man. Men are like wine.”
“Some turn to vinegar.”
“Not the good ones. Oh, if you could see your face.”
“How do I look?”
“Proud. Beautiful. Grand. How do I look?”
“Beautiful.”
“And a little bit
ausgeshtupped?”
He laughed, delighted. “But I never taught you that word!”
“Did I get it right?”
“Close enough.”
She stretched out at his side. He closed his eyes and learned her body with his hands.
“Miles? What did you say to me the first day?”
“When?”
“You said things in different languages so I would know the sound of each.”
“I said nothing of importance.”
“What did you say in German?” She swung into a sitting position, legs curled under her. “I knew it! Miles, you’re blushing!”
“How did you know?”
“Tell me what you said.”
“No.”
“Miles!” She turned his face toward hers. “I
knew
it! There was something different about your face when you spoke German. That’s why I picked it. Tell me what you said.”
“I cannot tell you.”
“Say it in German.”
“But now you would understand it.”
“Miles—”
He said,
“Du hast Haar wie gesponnenes Gold and eine Haut wie warma Milch. Ware ich nicht über diese Dinge hinaus würde ich Deinen Rock lüften and stundenlang Deinen Schoss küssen.”
“You devil.”
He felt a grin spread foolishly on his face.
“Devil!” she repeated. “Of course, I can’t be positive what
Schoss
means. Somehow it never came up in our conversations. Dirty old man! Sweet beautiful dirty old man!” She stretched out, lay on her back, parted her thighs. A wanton glow spread on her face. “I don’t have a skirt for you to lift. Does that matter very much?”
William Roy Guthrie
Three-term governor of Louisiana. Presidential candidate, Free American Party, 1964
,
1968. Sectionalist demagogue with minor racist appeal in industrial Midwest. Controlled alcoholic. Insufficient stature and character for national leadership. Political program neopopulist, negative. Termination advised to allow his personal following in the southeast to flow into the movement. Termination of Guthrie must precede termination of Theodore. Thrust may come from black extremist or university radical. This cover should be opaque. Age: 57. Married. No children …
When Dorn was in Baltimore, a young black with an Afro hairstyle thrust a newspaper at him while he was walking down the street. “Read the truth, sir,” the boy said.
Dorn had been thinking of something far removed from Baltimore. Far removed, too, from the truth. He blinked, drew back, recovered, and reached to take the paper. It was a tabloid. The headline, bold black type over a red background, shrieked of murder. One of the stories that caught his eye spoke of a nationwide network of concentration camps for blacks.
“What is this?”
“The truth,” the boy said, as if by rote. “You won’t get it elsewhere, sir. Published by the Black Panther Party. And that’s the truth.”
Dorn squinted at the upper-right corner. “The price is twenty-five cents?”
“Yes, sir.”
Dorn dug out a five-dollar bill. “Interesting,” he said. “I could use a dozen of these.”
“I’ll have to give you some coin—”
“No, keep the change,” Dorn said. “Power to the people.”
“Right
on!”
In Chicago, police arrested a seventeen-year-old high school dropout for questioning in connection with the bombing of police headquarters. He was reported to have confessed to participation in the act and to have named several associates in the plot before breaking loose from his captors and hurling himself through a fourth-story window. He died in the fall.
Dorn read several accounts of the incident. In one of these, the reaction of Governor Guthrie was reported as follows:
“In a characteristic gesture, the florid-faced Louisiana governor winked and laid a finger alongside his nose. ‘I’ll tell you, boys,’ he said confidentially, ‘it’s a good thing we don’t get that sort of agitation down in my part of the country. I don’t know what-all we might do. We just don’t have a window high enough to chuck one of those fellers out of. I guess we’d just have to take him on up to Chicago.’ Governor Guthrie went on to cluck at reporters who asked if he were suggesting extralegal action on the part of the Chicago police, or if his words constituted an endorsement of such tactics. ‘I don’t know why on earth I bother chatting with you boys,’ he said in mock exasperation. ‘You know you just twist every old thing I say. And you never can tell when I’m cracking jokes with you.’”
In a room in a Holiday Inn in Charlotte, North Carolina, Heidigger was engaged in a spirited analysis of the relative merits of stewardesses on various U.S. airlines. The TWA girls were the best-looking. The ones on American were the best at their work. The ones on Northeast were tough and brassy. On United—
Dorn bathed in the flow of words without attempting to pay attention to them. He watched Heidigger bounce about, gesturing theatrically with his hands, flashing gold teeth, punctuating his words with a thrust of his cigar. Light glinted off his bald head. The fringe of white hair had not been cut since Dorn had last seen him, and it gave him the look of a mad scientist in a horror film. The white lunatic fringe, Dorn thought.
“… their wonderfully transitory quality, Miles. For the length of the flight they hover over you, suffer your abuse, indulge your whims. Then the plane lands, and you never see them again. In retrospect their faces merge into a single face, their bodies into a single body. Do you know what they resemble? They are like whores. Instead of cunt they give you coffee.”
If there is a Day of Judgment, Dorn thought, what would weigh most heavily against him was not the crimes he had committed but that he actually liked Eric Heidigger. He had been thinking about this for some time and had been unable to settle on the reason why it was so. He did not like to believe it was because Heidigger so obviously appreciated his talent. One often enough liked people for lesser reasons than that, but it nevertheless seemed to him that his affection for Heidigger—that was what it was, affection—should have a rather deeper motivation.
Psychoanalysis could perhaps furnish an explanation, he thought, and smiled at the image. Suppose he had stretched out on Greenspan’s couch that day and spoken truth instead of fiction.
I am an assassin, Doctor, and I am concerned that I feel a genuine affection for my employer.
He grinned, imagining Greenspan tugging at his little beard and nodding, nodding, nodding.
“Well,” Heidigger said. “To more explosive matters, wouldn’t you say? I have what you ordered.”
“Good.”
“It’s under the bed. A little package for you. Could you get it? But please don’t drop it.”
“If it’s what I asked for, Eric, you could drop it off the Empire State Building and nothing would happen. Unless it hit some poor fool on the head.”
“Merely a joke, Miles. It is as you ordered it. Although we could have engineered something to specifications if you had permitted it.”
“I prefer to do my own assembling.”
“And wisely, I think. Trust your own craft.”
“I prefer it.”
“Under the bed, then. The far end. I would get it myself, but my stomach gets in the way when I bend over. Hence I do so as infrequently as possible.”
Dorn felt distinctly uncomfortable kneeling on the floor and fumbling under Heidigger’s bed for the parcel. In his mind’s eye he envisioned Heidigger moving up behind him, putting a pistol to the back of his neck. One of the negative aspects of his profession was that one was not only instinctively cautious in times of danger but was quite as apprehensive in perfectly safe situations.
The parcel was half the size of a cigar box. It was wrapped in birthday wrapping paper and tied up in a pink bow.
“Is it someone’s birthday, Eric?”
“I thought this would amuse you.”
“I used that once, you know. Ages ago.”
This reminded Heidigger of a story, which Dorn listened to. He excused himself to use the bathroom. Unlike the room in Tampa, it had no bidet.
When he had finished, Heidigger wanted to talk about the death of Emil Karnofsky. He said that no one seemed to know how the burglars had gained entrance to the building. Dorn thought this was possible, but not terribly likely.
“For curiosity, Miles, how well did you have your own plan worked out?”
“To the last damned detail,” he said bitterly. “It would have been a hell of a lot slicker than what happened.”
“You had a way to get inside?”
He nodded. “A psychiatrist. Moritz Greenspan.”
“A Jew?”
“No, an Australian Bushfellow. Yes, a Jew. I actually went and stretched out on his couch for fifty intolerable minutes and talked about how depressed I was. The shit wouldn’t even take part in the conversation. I paid him fifty dollars and had to do all the talking.”
This, predictably, reminded Heidigger of a joke. It was one Dorn had heard.