Shall I then fear Death? I can only say that I do not. I have lived too long, Jocelyn, and to too little purpose. I find nothing very awful in the prospect of ceasing to be.
And yet. And yet one fear gnaws at me, Jocelyn. It eats at me like cancer. And that is the fear that you will hate me.
Before I met you, Jocelyn, no action of mine ever stemmed from a selfless purpose. Since then everything I have done has grown out of love for you. So I write these lines, these endless lines, to you. To gain your understanding. To win your forgiveness. To keep your love. You are my afterlife, Jocelyn. Your love is my Heaven, its absence all I need of Hell.
He stopped and reread the last paragraph, knowing that Penelope’s shawl was complete. He had finished. Whatever could be said was said, whatever had been omitted would remain eternally unsaid. All that remained was to sign his name.
And yet, and yet.
His head ached, his forearm throbbed, his fingers were stiff. Aloud he said, “No, no,” and the words turned into a low and agonizing groan.
He picked up the pen and wrote one final paragraph. He could not see the words as he wrote them. The tears flowed freely from his eyes and he did not even attempt to halt them.
Nor did he reread the final paragraph. He wrote his name,
Miles Dorn,
beneath the last line.
Later, when he had composed himself, he returned the pad of yellow paper to its place beneath the carpet. For the last time he pushed the dresser in place over it. Then he went downstairs and found a telephone.
“I anticipate your question, Heidigger said. “The room is electronically clean. It always is, and yet you always ask, so I tell you in advance.”
“How can you be certain?”
“Two clever devices. One of them somehow senses the presence of any electronic ears. Please do not ask me how as I have not the slightest idea. The process was once explained to me, leaving me as ignorant as before. The other device is predicated on the assumption that the first device is not foolproof. It emits a signal that renders any electronic surveillance of the premises quite ineffective. Of course whenever the first device tells me someone is listening, I immediately change my room. I tell the desk that my room is too large, or too small, or that I saw a mouse in a corner. They are always quite obliging in such matters.”
“Does that happen often?”
“More often than you might think. Not because the surveillance was designed with me in mind, however. I have never had cause to suspect that to be the case. But there is so much of this bugging going on, Miles, and it would be an embarrassment to be taped quite by mistake, would it not?” Heidigger laughed happily at the thought. “But the devil with all that. The devil with machines. I find it difficult to think in terms of machines. I use them, one cannot but use them, but I have small faith it them. Machines cancel each other out. In the final analysis, it is men who must make the difference.”
“I agree.”
“Men like you, Miles Dorn. Let me look at you.” Heidigger struck a pose, chin in hand, brow quizzical. “I do believe all of this has changed you, you know. Which I do not find surprising in the least. Your achievements have made an extraordinary impression in high places. Which is as it should be. They have been extraordinary achievements.”
“You’re kind to say so.”
“How could I say otherwise? Five prominent men, five men in the public eye. That one lived is nothing. He could be no less a threat if he had died. Nor is it more than an interesting footnote that you only killed three of the four who died. One takes help where one finds it, eh?”
I killed three, Eric. But not the three you think. You credit me with Walter Isaac James, a death with which I had nothing whatsoever to do. And deny me the credit for Emil Karnofsky.
“I brought what you asked for, Miles.” He took a vial of pills from an inside jacket pocket. “Two dozen of them. I was surprised you did not already have some of your own.”
“For years I never moved without at least one on my person.”
“I still don’t.”
“And then after my retirement I kept a bottle of them always at hand. A vestigial remnant. It became increasingly clear that I would have no call for them in my new life, until one day I found them in the medicine cabinet and had momentary trouble remembering what they were. It struck me that the faint possibility of ingesting one accidentally far outweighed my possible future need for them. I flushed them down the toilet.”
Eric, I itch to tell you about Karnofsky. Because I know damned well you checked. Those casual questions. How had I planned to enter the building? And then you sent someone to make quite certain I had visited that psychiatrist, just as you sent someone else to make sure I had been in my room in New Orleans when Karnofsky died. I would love to tell you all this, Eric. I would love to see your face.
“Make sure they’re what you want.”
Dorn opened the vial, took a capsule between thumb and forefingers.
“Plastic,” Heidigger said. “Nonsoluble in mouth or stomach. It must be crushed between the teeth.”
“Cyanide?”
“In English, cyanide. In Japanese, sayonara. The effects are virtually instantaneous.”
“Yes.”
“And not dreadfully unpleasant, or so I am told. But there is a dearth of firsthand evidence on the subject. No one ever returns to testify.”
“Which is the object.”
“That no one testify? To be sure. You want them for your men, I imagine. Remember, though, that the likelihood of their using them is remote. You or I might recognize when self-destruction is the only alternative. Even the most fanatic of amateurs usually flinch at it. It is child’s play to persuade a true believer to undertake a mission where his chance of survival is infinitesimal. Yet the same man will so often balk at killing himself.”
“At least they’ll have the option. Whether they exercise it or not, their trail won’t lead back to me.”
“You’re very sure of this?”
“I am.” He suddenly smiled. “Nevertheless, one of those capsules is for me, Eric. I will not be caught. But if by any chance I am—”
“I understand.”
Do you, Eric? And do you think I do not realize that I would not outlive Henry M. Theodore by a day? That some man of yours would gun me down before any trail could possibly turn me up? To think otherwise would be to think you a fool. You are not a fool, Eric. You are not quite as brilliant as you think, but you are by no means a fool.
“It is all in order, then.”
“Completely so.”
“Would it be in order to ask the day?”
“Why not? Today. A matter of hours.”
“Again you surprise me, Miles.”
“At three o’clock the President and his worthy and respected associate, the Vice-President, will leave the White House in the presidential limousine. At three-thirty the President will address a joint session of congress on the most recent development at the Paris peace talks. The development, rumor has it, is that there has been no development.”
“Nor will there be.”
“There will, however, be a development before that joint session of congress opens. A development of sufficient moment to cancel that session, I would think.”
“I too would think so.” Heidigger whistled tonelessly. “I think at once of the security, the fantastic security. But of course you have already considered this.”
“Of course.”
“And you have made a plan that penetrates all of this security.”
“Of course.”
“And that leaves no room for doubt that this horrible act is the work not of a deranged soul but of a heartless and soulless conspiracy.”
“Of course.”
Eric, I want to tell you about Karnofsky. God, do I want to tell you about Karnofsky!
He listened as Heidigger told him that no other man could do what he, Miles Dorn, was doing. And he thought that this was very likely true, and in ways Heidigger did not imagine.
And then he broke into a sentence.
“Eric, is that the device you were talking about? The electronic wonder?”
“Where?”
“There—”
And even as the head was turning, his hand was in motion, reaching for the back of the neck, reaching, making the grab precisely. Intercepting the flow of blood to the brain, cutting it off neatly, neatly.
He caught Heidigger as he fell, eased him gently to the floor. He knelt beside the man. The thick glasses had slipped down on the nose. He replaced them, his hands gentle.
“And how I wanted to tell you about Karnofsky, Eric,” he said aloud. “Childish of me, eh? But you shall not hear it, old friend. It is the least I can do for you, is it not? To grant you the bliss of dying in ignorance.”
He uncapped the little vial, let a capsule role out onto the palm of his hand. He pried open Heidigger’s jaw.
“They will even bury you with your gold teeth, Eric. This is America. A free country.”
He lodged the capsule between Heidigger’s teeth. He put one hand on the bald head, one on the underside of the chin. He turned his own head aside and pressed his hands toward one another.
There was a faint, almost undetectable odor of almonds.
“My old friend,” he said, looking down at the corpse. “My oldest, dearest friend.” He spoke the words several times over, and meant them. But he spoke with no tears in his eyes and not a trace of sorrow in his voice.
A careful search of the room revealed no gun. He had expected that Heidigger would have a gun on his person or in his luggage and was mildly annoyed that this was not the case. This was inconvenient, but his schedule allowed for the inconvenience.
He found a coded address and memorandum book in Heidigger’s pocket. He was at first inclined to leave it on the corpse, then changed his mind and put it in his own pocket. In its place he left a letter in his own hand to Heidigger, giving a version of his plan for terminating Case Six. He had prepared the letter in the most difficult code he was able to devise, an elaborate cipher based on a Serbo-Croat key word. He doubted that any decent government cryptographer would have any appreciable degree of difficulty cracking the code.
He also found, among Heidigger’s effects, a packet of pornographic photos of an interracial couple and an electrical masturbatory device. He laughed aloud, and returned these to the drawer in which he had found them.
When he was quite through, he removed from one of his own pockets a thick sheaf of folded sheets of lined yellow paper. His letter to Jocelyn.
He checked his watch. There was time. Even with the necessity of obtaining a gun, there was time.
He sat down in an armchair and read the letter from its beginning to its end.
Here are parts of what he read:
My Jocelyn,
You hold in your hand a letter from a man you now know as the author of a heinous crime… .
Do
you remember the day my house stank of Turkish cigarettes? The following day I traveled to Tampa to meet a man named Eric Heidigger. He wanted to employ me in the only profession I have ever practiced, that of assassination. He wanted me to kill the following men …
What I could not get out of my head, Jocelyn, was not that the plan was outrageous but that it was so eminently feasible. His analysis of the state of the country was weighted, but not much so. And it seemed to me that fulfillment of the plan did not hinge upon its execution. I looked at the country and saw it all beginning to happen… .
Why, you might wonder, did I not report this to the authorities? I did consider this. But what precisely did I have to report? Some fanciful plan concocted by some not-to-be-found Eric Heidigger? And to whom would I make my report? Suppose I poured all this into an ear that already knew. And approved… .
You will wonder, then, why I felt compelled to take any action at all. Perhaps you will recall my own advice to you. To avoid involvement. To survive.
But I could not survive in any event. From the moment I met with Heidigger in Tampa my own death was inevitable. It was only a matter of time. If I did not take Heidigger’s assignment, I would in turn become someone else’s assignment. If I were not part of his solution, I became part of his problem. My knowledge of the plan was only acceptable so long as I was part of that plan.
I might have tried flight. Halfway across the world the trouble in killing me would be greater than the hazard I would present. But I made a promise to myself, Jocelyn. I swore not to commit suicide, and I swore not to leave the country. You might be interested in the source of this oath… .
Do you remember Eichmann’s plea in Jerusalem? I still find it amusing. That he was only following orders. That he was given a job to do, and that the job would be performed by someone else if he refused it. And that he thus resolved to carry it out as well as he possibly could.
I, too, was confronted with a job that would be done by someone else should I refuse to undertake it. Heidigger liked to flatter me that no man alive could do the task as well as I. But any number of men could and would have done it, one way or another. I have told you that, from the time of that meeting in Tampa, my death was a foregone conclusion. But so were the deaths of the men on that list. I could not possibly have prevented this… .
One thing I could do. In one respect I was in fact unique. I knew Heidigger’s plan. I was a part of Heidigger’s plan.
And I was opposed to it.
Thus I was in an extraordinary position, that of a fifth column within a fifth column. A precarious position at that, because I had to do the job given to me while modifying its results in certain important but not readily detectable ways… .
I could easily have made Drury’s murder the act of a conspiracy, or at least the act of a rational leftist assassin. But by taking pains to cloak Burton Weldon in the trappings of madness… .
With Karnofsky, I arranged that both Heidigger and most of the public would see the murder as the result of a burglary. But among the more knowledgeable labor leaders there would be some suspicion, some slight feeling …