“... 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.
“I was going to go back again. I made an appointment. The only time it’s difficult to get into the building is late at night. At other times you just see any of the doctors there, and you’re inside.”
“You were going to take Karnofsky out during the day?”
“No, of course not,” he said, impatiently. “I was going to see the idiot doctor and then hide somewhere in the building until four in the morning. They watch the entrances and elevators, but they don’t check anything else. There were several apartments empty, tenants on vacation. I could have let myself in and had a nap until it was time.”
“And you’d do it while Karnofsky and the nigger were both asleep?”
“Of course. I wasn’t sure of method. I was thinking of insulin shock. That’s easy. Or an air bubble in a vein. He used a needle all the time, one more puncture wouldn’t have surprised anybody.”
“A damned shame. There are the stupidest rumors. That it was a power play within his union. That the Mafia rubbed him out. Stupid. You know, I couldn’t believe it was your work.” He laughed shortly. “Fifty dollars, a dollar a minute to tell some silly old Jew your troubles. And the troubles were not even your own!”
On a television set in another hotel room, Dorn watched an excerpt from a press conference called by Governor William Roy Guthrie to explain his declining an invitation to address a convention of New American Patriots in Milwaukee. “I’d certainly like to go up there and talk to those folks,” Dorn heard him say. “It does my heart good to see that people up North are beginning to see things the way we-all been seeing ‘em down here for years. But it’s my job to see to the problems of the good people of Louisiana. That’s what they pay me for, not to go flying all over the country. Besides, I’m not too sure how safe it’d be up there. I’d have to go and sit out in the sun through a lot of Louisiana summers before I felt secure in that part of the country.”
A reporter asked the governor if his decision stemmed from a reluctance to play second fiddle to James Danton Rhodine, already slated as principal speaker.
“You fellows come up with the strangest things,” Guthrie said. “I wouldn’t mind hearing Rhodine myself. Just because he’s seen fit to jump on our southern bandwagon is nothing for me to object to. I’d like to see all the good people in America jump on the bandwagon. There’s room for the lot of us.”
While in the microfilm room of the New York Public Library, Dorn had read a number of stories that had nothing whatsoever to do with Emil Karnofsky. One of these was a human-interest piece on Willie Jackson.
Willie Jackson was a 63-year-old Baton Rouge shoeshine boy. In his earlier capacity as commissioner of public highways, Guthrie had stopped every morning at Will Jackson’s post outside the State Office Building for a shine. Upon election to the governorship in 1962, Guthrie had sent instructions to Jackson to be at his office every morning at nine to shine Guthrie’s shoes.
Willie Jackson was not the sort given to voluble complaint. But he seemed to have said something to somebody, and one of the many reporters who despised Guthrie managed to come up with the story. It seemed that Jackson was not at all happy with his new post. The governor’s office in the State Capitol Building was a brisk ten-minute walk from his post outside the State Office Building, and after he had arrived, Guthrie frequently kept him waiting for as long as an hour before letting him apply wax to leather. As a result, Willie Jackson was being done out of a major portion of his income. Furthermore, according to the original story, Guthrie never gave him more than a dime.
The Times story went on to explain that when Guthrie had read all this he was enraged. As it happened, he was genuinely fond of Jackson and thought he had been doing him a good turn, that his appointment would lend him status with his peers. It had never occurred to him that he was costing the man money. Finally, and this was the sorest point of all, he invariably gave Jackson a dollar, which was considerably more than the average payment for a shoeshine in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.