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...
You thought Guthrie ought to die. At the time I supplied a reason or two why he should not. I did not mention the one that moved me to keep him alive.
It was simply this. Racism will be a factor in American politics for many years, if not indeed forever. And there must be a voice that speaks for this racist opinion. Such a voice may be dangerous or innocuous. Guthrie was not dangerous because he never possessed the potential for national success. Heidigger knew this. Thus, in his profoundly offensive way, he constituted a safeguard to American democracy.
Imagine, Jocelyn, how astonished he himself would be to know this!
But I was willing to see him dead. I hoped it would work out as it did, but the tolerance in dealing with explosives... In any case, I felt the death of Willie Jackson would tend to separate moderate blacks from the bomb throwers. Whether it had this effect I could not say. One small event among so many...
... and thus decided not to kill James. It will never be possible for me to know how much of this stemmed from reason and how much I owe to the fact of our having become lovers. I am sure the latter had some effect... But reason was partly responsible, too. You see, Jocelyn, I felt it was important that James live. I felt the role he played was a positive one, a more valuable one than that played by any of the others.