She said, “I noticed you in that lynch mob but it didn’t register until afterward.”
“I’m flattered you remember me at all.”
“Your column on me wasn’t particularly friendly, as I recall — something about me being the apostate leader of a new wave of sentimentality and cornball trash — but you did me the extraordinary courtesy of printing what I’d actually said in the interview. I find that unique.”
He dipped his head an inch. “Thank you.”
“Are you also old-fashioned enough to honor an agreement to keep something off the record?”
“If the agreement is made beforehand. I won’t print anything without your permission.”
“You won’t even discuss it among your friends. Fair enough?”
“All right. But—”
“The quid pro quo, I know. I’ll give you an interview you can print. This is something else.”
Dwiggins acceded with a dip of his broad face.
“I’ll make it as painless for you as possible.” She nodded toward the tape recorder, granting permission. “You want to know how I feel about the death of my son. I feel every which way — like a kaleidoscope. Right at this moment I have an acute desire never to feel anything again.”
“Sure.”
“I’m sure you don’t need remarks from me about the senselessness of this tragedy. Of course it’s arbitrary, it’s a grisly waste of a brilliant human life, it’s pointless and maddening.”
He said quietly, “Have you cried much?”
“Yes, I have tears but I don’t let them blur my vision. Mainly right now I feel rage. I want revenge, you see. I can’t help it, I can’t rationalize it away. It’s intensely personal and I’m sure that’s a useless response to such an impersonal attack but that’s how I feel. I want these terrorists punished.”
“Brought to justice.”
“Justice,” she said, “doesn’t come into it. I’m talking about emotions now. Justice is an abstract concept.” She made a loose fist and contemplated it; she looked up at the reporter. “I want to be there, physically present, the day these animals are destroyed. I’ll get satisfaction from it — I know, nothing can bring my son back. But all the same. It’s what I feel.”
Dwiggins said, “Tell me about Robert.”
At one point he stopped her to flip the tape cassette over to Side Two. They kept talking and it was unreal to her: Two people conversing normally as if the world still were the same as it had been a week ago. She tried to be candid and articulate. She tried to listen carefully to his questions and respond appropriately. But the words — both Dwiggins’ and her own — broke up in her mind. Half the time she was not aware of what she was saying, although a canny part of her mind kept hold of the secrets that had to remain off the tape and off the record; she talked automatically but not carelessly.
When the tape was finished Carole said, “Thank you. You could have made it much harder for me.”
“I promise you there won’t be any snide asides about cornball trash.” He had relaxed during the interview, slumping back in the chair, crossing his legs, watching her amiably while she spoke. He was not a threatening figure. She sensed a great deal of sadness in him but had no clue to its source.
She asked if he wanted to drink and he declined, surprising her. “I’m a bit of a lush,” he confided, “but I keep it under control and I don’t drink when I’m working.”
“Do you mind if I have one?”
“Not at all.”
It was a two-ounce screw-top bottle of Scotch she’d dropped in her handbag on the airplane. She sucked it straight from the nipple of the bottle. “We go off the record now,” she said. “All the way off the record. This is exclusively between you and me and it goes no farther.”
“Fair enough. What do you want me to do?”
“Did you ever know my brother?”
“Warren Marchand? No, not personally. I admired his work a great deal. He was a hell of a writer.”
“I thought you might have known him. That series you did for the Examiner about the CIA mercenaries in the Montagnard country.”
“That was years ago. I’m astonished you’d remember it.”
“I remember it because it was the kind of thing my brother would have done.”
“I take that as a considerable compliment.”
“It was meant as one,” she said. “Is that the only time you’ve departed from your usual Hollywood beat?”
“No. I did a series on the Alaska pipeline a few years ago. And I was in Angola a while during that mess. I covered the aftermath of the Allende assassination in Chile, too. Once in a while I ask for a hard-news assignment. It reminds me of the real world out there beyond the tinsel.”
“Do you still keep in touch with any of the people you interviewed on those stories?”
“Which people?”
“Mercenaries.”
His eyelids dropped; he gave her a long scrutiny before he replied. “This is hardly the century for that kind of romantic gesture, you know.”
“Maybe it’s a good idea whose time has come back. I’m descended from good solid Norman stock. People whose record of violence and rapacity would make Caligula look like Shirley Temple. If you look at it that way it would be completely out of character for me to sit by and do nothing in the face of this — this, what can I call it? Obscenity? Affront?”
“You’re being irrational, you know.”
“Of course I am. If God had wanted us to be entirely reasonable he’d have made us in the image of a Univac computer.”
Dwiggins said, “Forgive me if I pick this up as if it were ticking.”
“It won’t be any risk for you, whatever happens.”
“I don’t want to be the one to send you into the jungle.”
“You’re a good guy, Dwiggins.”
He said, “What do you know about terrorists?”
“Not much.”
“I’ve made a few observations over the years. Want to hear them?”
“Certainly.”
“The terrorist is a juvenile delinquent, whatever his age. He’s not much different from a kid who gets into drugs or joins the Moonies or makes his bedroom into a shrine to some rock group. Does that surprise you? He senses misplaced feelings all around him, and inside him. The terrorist can’t stand the idea of being an ordinary person like anybody else. And he can’t stand the idea that ordinary people may actually enjoy their lives. In a sense he has an amazing affinity for the banal — violence, I think, is one of the stupidest but most natural responses to frustration, and what’s the real difference between terrorism and football? The problem isn’t terrorists, the problem’s the world that creates them. When things get so big and complex and impersonal that no individual feels he can affect anything around him, he becomes sullen and apathetic and he resents his impotence and sooner or later he explodes. One way or another. We all have our own private explosions. We’re all caught up in the obsession with novelty — marching to ever new tunes, excited by ever new fads of salvation — astrology, drugs, gurus, revolutions. One man’s ‘est’ is another man’s terrorism. Do you see what I’m saying to you? I think you seem to have managed to convince yourself that the people who killed your boy aren’t human. It’s the key psychosis of warfare. The enemy isn’t human because he’s the enemy.”
“Dwiggins,” she said with a tight little smile, “you can take your social theories and wrap them in sandpaper and shove them all the way up.”
He professed not to hear her. “I’m not excusing them. God knows they’re more to be censured than pitied. But look, when children drop and smash their toys you don’t murder them, you just clean up the mess as best you can.”