Death Wish

19

The party was overcrowded in Sam and Adele’s small apartment; people stood around in shifting clusters and the place smelled of the rain guests had brought in on their coats. Despite the cold outside, the air conditioners were running at full blast. There were four couples from the office and Paul knew most of the Kreutzers’ other friends but there were five or six strangers — a new couple from down the hall who’d recently moved in from Queens, a psychiatrist Adele had met a party somewhere, a girl who said she was a free-lance magazine writer doing a piece on East Side apartment dwellers, another couple whose identities Paul didn’t catch but whom he kept glancing at because the wife had a hard-pinched mouth and the husband had the kind of impersonal efficient eyes you associated with police officials and major-generals. The rest were regulars except for a smartly dressed fortyish lady stockbroker and an old college roommate of Sam’s who was in town for the weekend on business — it turned out he was the director of marketing research for a packaging firm in Denver. They were all easy to place and easy to dismiss except for the hard-eyed couple.

The talk was loud and blasphemous with forced heartiness, everyone shouting to be heard; they pounded their speeches through the litany of personal questions and world problems, current movies and politics. Sam and Adele prowled the room refilling drinks and making sure people were mixing with one another — they had always been expert hosts; they introduced Paul to the lady stockbroker and later to the girl magazine-writer as if to say “Take your choice,” and a few moments later he spotted them doing the same with the ex-roommate from Denver.

The lady stockbroker revealed a new side he hadn’t detected during office hours — a knife-edged garrulous militancy for Women’s Lib — and he managed to separate himself from her quickly. The girl doing the article on East Side cave dwellers was jittery and afflicted with a tendency to reach too frequently and aggressively for fresh drinks. She smoked steadily with suicidal drags, jetting smoke from her nostrils. Paul found her equally off-putting and drifted into conversation with the Dundees until Adele went around nudging everybody toward the dining table to collect food from the buffet selection she had laid on. There was a confusion of finding places to sit; they sat on the windowsills and the floor and ate with paper plates on their knees.

Sam brought him a fresh drink. “Careful with this stuff — it’s got water in it. You know what they say about pollution.”

Paul waved his thanks with the glass. “Happy anniversary, Sam.”

The talk became looser; crowded together the guests dropped confidences with increasing frankness. Gradually the men became more lecherous, the women more amorous, unburdening themselves to one another with hurt I-want-to-be-loved smiles. The girl who wrote magazine articles said to Paul, “You really seem to understand,” and reached out for his hand.

He went to the bathroom less because he needed to than because he wanted escape. He wondered how professional spies stood the pressure.

The Kreutzers were the kind who left things to read in the john. There was a new issue of New York magazine that trumpeted The Vigilante: A Psychiatrist’s Portrait and he opened it and sat on the throne reading about himself.

“A righteous man stalks New York. While the rest of us sit by and talk idly of the administration in city hall and the way the city is going to the dogs, one man is doing something about it. Who is he? What has triggered him?

“Everyone has an opinion. To most of the lawyers I questioned, the vigilante is a vicious outlaw no better than the criminals he stalks. One lawyer said to me, ‘Remember the trial in Alice in Wonderland where the Red Queen says, “Sentence first, verdict afterwards?”’ To some cynics — including several police officers I interviewed — he is doing what we are all tempted to do. Deputy Inspector Frank Ochoa, detailed to nail the vigilante, shrugged when I asked him what he thought of the vigilante. ‘He’s got a wire down somewhere but I don’t think he’s a raving maniac. Figure it out, look at yourself. What would you do if you knew you’d never be found out? We’ve had these guys before. They think they’re too smart to get caught.’ To the liberals the vigilante is a beast of another species, beyond comprehension. To the blacks of Harlem the vigilante is a Ku Klux Klan-style racist (never mind the fact that of his five victims only two have been black). To a thirteen-year-old boy at P.S. 120 the vigilante is a comic-book sort of hero, an adventurer who wants the chase and flies about the city with a flowing cape bringing vengeance upon wrongdoers à la Batman. To a thoughtful elderly grocer in Spanish Harlem the vigilante is a member of an extinct species which died out about 1918. To a beat patrolman in the West Village he is a good citizen assisting the Police.

“I talked with Theodore Perrine, the famous forensic psychiatrist, in his office at the Columbia University Medical School. After issuing the usual disclaimer to the effect that a psychiatrist shouldn’t be taken seriously when he tries to psychoanalyze a patient he’s never even met (Dr. Perrine does not admire such long-distance whimsies as Dr. Ernest Jones’s attempt to psychoanalyze Shakespeare’s Hamlet), the shrink who has probably testified in more banner-headline criminal cases than any other psychiatrist in America made this estimation of the character of the vigilante:

“‘We live in a death-oriented society. We anticipate the ultimate calamity and many of us are convinced there’s no hope of avoiding it. Our world is a world of conscience-stricken nuclear scientists, and young people who’ve become disabused of the notion that we have simple problems for which there are solutions. Everyone feels personally betrayed by the way things are going — the future is no longer a rational extension of the past; everything’s up for grabs, so to speak. We all tend to feel like laboratory animals who know nothing about the science except what we can observe while we’re in the process of being vivisected. That’s the milieu in which we all have to navigate, and it’s hardly surprising that some of us resent it so much that we’ve begun to hurl ourselves against it more and more irrationally.

“‘There’s a large reservoir of aggression in all of us. We hate crime, yet we don’t do anything about it. We begin to feel that we’re not merely decent people, we’re so decent that we’re immobilized. That’s why a man like this captures our imagination so vividly — he’s acting out fantasies we’ve all shared. He’s not the only one acting them out, of course — we’ve seen how a great many groups who claim to be for or against something find it necessary to take the law into their own hands. Terrorism has become a legitimized political tool. In that respect the only unusual thing about this fellow is that he’s doing it as a one-man operation. If it were an organized effort like the Jewish Defense League or the Black Panthers we’d find it far less fascinating. It’s the lone-wolf aspect of it that appeals to the American sensibility. One rugged individualist out there battling the forces of evil — it fits right into our mythology, you see. But other than that, this fellow is merely carrying the accepted concept of political terrorism into the criminal arena.’

“I asked, ‘You mean you don’t believe this killer is much more insane than the rest of us?’

“‘Insanity is a legal term, not a medical one. But I should think this man is hardly a raving lunatic. Except for the nature of his crimes themselves, there’s nothing inherently irrational in his behavior. It could be interpreted as the logical result of a certain series of psychological inputs. For example, suppose he’s a combat veteran who’s recently returned from Indochina where GI’s take it for granted that if someone gives you a hard time you simply kill him with a fragmentation grenade. That occurrence has become so common in Southeast Asia that “fragging” has become a part of our language.’

“‘Are you suggesting he’s a Vietnam veteran?’

“‘No. He may be, but we have no evidence. If he were, it would be easy to see how he might simply be carrying over the system of values he learned over there to the situation he finds here.’

“‘You said you feel the vigilante is acting out fantasies many of us share. Do you think that means his actions will influence other people to do the same thing?’

“‘I expect it to, now that they have this man’s example.’

“‘Then you’re saying we’re all capable of it — it’s only a matter of degree.’

“‘Not at all. It requires a psychopathic personality — the kind that’s capable of muting what we think of as the civilized inhibitions. Guilt, anxiety, social rules, the fear of being apprehended.’

“‘Then he doesn’t know right from wrong, is that what you mean? The legal definition of insanity?’

“‘No. I’m sure he knows right from wrong quite acutely. He’s probably more of a moralist and less of a hypocrite than most of us.’

“Dr. Perrine is a tall man, bald with a white monk’s fringe clasping his skull above the ears. He talks with vast lunges and gestures; his hands describe large arcs as he talks. He has a commanding Presence, a great force of personality; it is easy to see why he is in such demand as a witness at dramatic trials. At this point in the interview he pulled his chair over close to me on its casters, leaned forward and tapped me on the knee. ‘He’s less inhibited, that’s the controlling factor. He shares that quality with the criminals he assassinates. Most of us have the gut reaction now and then — we see a crime take place, or we hear of one, and we think to ourselves, “I’d have killed the son of a bitch.” But we don’t kill anyone. We’re conditioned against it, and we believe it’s wrong to descend to the criminals’ level because there has to be a difference between us and them. Look, most of us are all right as long as we don’t know the worst for sure. We can pretend. We can stay on the tightrope because we’ve erected sufficient defenses against the hopelessness that inspires this violence in our society. Most of us really don’t want to know the things that have set this man to killing his fellow men.’

“Dr. Perrine halved his professional smile; his words fell heavily, dropped like shoes, spaced out, as though he were lecturing to a class of first-year Med students. ‘He’s a benighted idealist, really; I would judge he’s a man who has seen injustice and frustration to an unbearable degree. His experience has made him hate criminals enough to be willing to destroy himself if he can take some of them down with him. It’s an idée fixe, with him; he’s filled with rage and he’s found a way to channel his rage into action. He’s transfixed by this obsessive hate.

“‘But I see no signs that it’s interfered with his capacity to reason. Take, for example, the fact that all his victims — or all we know about, anyway — have been killed with the same gun. Now guns aren’t that difficult to obtain, unfortunately. He could easily have used a different murder weapon each time. He didn’t. Why? Because he wants us to know he’s out there. It’s a message to the city, a warning cry.’

“‘Like the come-and-get-me phone calls of that mad killer in San Francisco?’

“‘No. You mean the Zodiac killer. No, I would judge that one is truly psychotic. He’s probably pointed a loaded revolver at his own head and found he couldn’t pull the trigger; ever since, he’s gone around looking for someone who’ll do the job for him. No, our man here is not self-destructive — or to be more precise, that’s not his primary motivation. What he’s trying to do is to alert the rest of us to a danger he believes we aren’t sufficiently concerned with. He’s saying to us it’s wrong to throw up our hands and pretend nothing can be done about crime in the streets. He believes there is something we can do — and he believes he’s showing us what it is.

“‘It’s rather like the legend of the Emperor’s New Clothes, isn’t it. The legend has value only because it includes one naïve honest child who’s frank and uninhibited enough to announce that the Emperor is wearing no clothes. As soon as there’s no longer a single honest child to proclaim the truth, the legend loses its meaning.’

“The smile, this time, is deprecatory. ‘I shouldn’t like to give the impression that I regard this man as a brave valiant savior holding back crime in the city like a boy with his finger in the dike. Too many people are beginning to idolize him that way. Actually he’s only contributing to the chaotic anarchy of which, God knows, we have more than enough. In terms of practical effect, these killings of his are having about as much effect on the total crime picture as you’d get by administering two aspirin tablets to a rabid wolf. I hope you’ll emphasize this point in your article. It’s no good condoning any of this man’s actions, it’s no good trying to put a high moral tone on them. The man’s a murderer.’

“‘In that connection, doctor, I’ve heard it said that the vigilante cares less about seeing people dead than he cares about watching them dying. The argument goes, if he really wants justice why doesn’t he cruise the streets with an infra-red camera and take pictures of these criminals in the act, instead of shooting them dead in their tracks?’

“‘I’ve heard the same thing, even from some of my own colleagues. But I think that argument misses the point. This is a man who’s been deeply grieved and distressed by some intimate and violent experience. Now if you give a man a universe of pain to live in, he’ll do anything he can to get out. I would guess this man has already tried formal justice and found it wanting. He’s not concerned with bringing criminals to trial, he’s concerned with averting immediate dangers immediately — by removing the miscreants in the most positive and final way possible.’

“‘You think perhaps he was the victim of a crime and saw the criminal thrown out of court, something like that?’

“‘Quite possibly, yes. If you know our courts at all you must have seen occasions when a case the prosecution has spent months of agony to build is destroyed by one misguided witness who cuts through all their reasoned legal arguments simply because he doesn’t like the color of the prosecutor’s necktie or he had a sister who resembled the defendant’s mother. Our legal system is a shambles, we all know that. Punishment, to deter, must be immediate and impartial, and in our courts it is neither. I have a distinct feeling this man knows that firsthand; he’s probably been the victim of it.’

“For a psychiatrist Dr. Perrine seems to have a few unorthodox ideas. I put that to him: ‘Isn’t it more common for members of your profession to side with the defendants? Crime is a disease to be treated, and all that?’

“‘I don’t subscribe to those old shibboleths. Personally. I tend to believe the so-called humanitarian approaches have added greatly to the suffering of society as a whole. We have laws because we need to protect ourselves. To break those laws is to injure society. I long ago gave up believing in the therapeutic approach to crime, except in those cases where you’ve got a demonstrably curable case of aberrant behavior — certain sex offenses, for example, that are known to be curable by various drug treatments or psychotherapies. But we’ve gone much too far in the baby-bathwater direction. The function of punishment is not to reform the criminal, it’s to protect society by preventing and deterring certain types of misbehavior. The original idea behind putting offenders in jail was simply to get them off the streets and thereby prevent them from committing any more crimes during the period of their punishment. Capital punishment was the same in theory, except of course that its effect was permanent. If I had to hazard a guess I’d say this is our “vigilante’s” primary objective — to prevent these people from committing any more crimes. The primary goal of protecting society seems to be what many of us have forgotten in our rush to safeguard the rights of accused persons — and perhaps that’s what this man is trying to remind us of.’

“Dr. Perrine pushed his chair back and stood up. He spoke slowly again, choosing his words; the act of standing up was deliberate, I’m sure, intended to emphasize what he was going to say.

“‘This man has spent his life as a liberal of good conscience. I’m convinced of it. And now he’s reacting against many things he’s been taught — principal among those things being the idea of tolerance. He’s come to realize that tolerance isn’t always a virtue — tolerance of evil can be an evil itself. He feels he is at war, and as Edmund Burke put it, ‘Wars are just to those to whom they are necessary.’ To this man his private war is the ultimate necessity. Otherwise he wouldn’t have started it — he’d have been too frightened. He’s a very frightened man.’

“‘I had the feeling he was just the opposite. You get the impression he has steel cables for nerves.’

“‘Quite the reverse. He’s terrified. It’s only that his rage is even greater than his fear.’

“‘Do you think his fear is real or imaginary?’

“‘Fear is always real. The question is whether it’s justified by the actual conditions. If it isn’t you have paranoia in some form.’

“‘Then he’s paranoid?’

“‘Most of us are, to some degree, certainly if we live in the cities. Usually we get along, we’re protected by our neurotic defenses. But sometimes those defenses fail and the ego collapses, and the unconscious terrors burst through into the conscious centers. I’m sure to this man it’s a vital and very personal fact, not just a dry statistic, that the heroin addicts in New York outnumber the police by a factor of several thousand to one.’

“‘Doctor, if you were asked to draw in words a composite psychological portrait of the vigilante, what would you say?’

“‘It’s difficult. So much depends on factors we don’t know — his upbringing, his experiences. But I think you can say this much. He’s careful, methodical, quite intelligent. Probably an educated man to some degree. Certainly he’s not terribly young. I’d say he was at least in his middle thirties and more likely well over forty.’

“‘What makes you think that?’

“‘Well, it’s rather analogous to our emotional reactions to space flights. Those of us in my generation are rather mystified by the whole thing, we don’t pretend to comprehend it on the emotional level even though we may understand the scientific basis for it. On the other hand children take it for granted — my younger daughter, for example, has never lived in an age without space flight and television. A little while ago she asked me quite seriously, “Daddy, when you used to listen to the radio, what did you look at?” Do you know I couldn’t remember? But the point is that the young people have grown up accustomed to shifting circumstances and unstable values. They may not like the things they see happening, they may even act violently to express their idealism, but at bottom they understand and accept the fact that these things do happen. When they act, they act in groups, because that’s the dominating ethos. You don’t find solitary teenagers going off into the backwoods to start organic farms; they do it in communes. You don’t find individuals protesting the war at the Pentagon — it’s always groups, however badly organized. Our youth have become group-oriented; perhaps it’s the influence of Marxism. But the rugged individualism, if you want to call it that, which this man stands for, is something our youth have rejected vehemently. And it’s also fairly clear that this man is bewildered and hurt by all the drastic things he sees around him — he doesn’t understand them, he can’t comprehend what’s happened, let alone accept it. He’s fighting back, but he’s doing it according to the traditions of his generation — not theirs.’

“‘Then you say you’d draw a picture of a middle-aged man, reasonably well-educated, careful, intelligent. Could you add anything to that?’

“‘Well, I’ve already said I think he’s probably a confused liberal. If he were a right-winger he’d have access to like-minded groups and we’d be more likely to have an entire wave of assassinations — an entire gang of them out there murdering people, rather than one isolated killer. That’s the strange things about rightists, of course, they preach individualism but they’re far more adept at organizing themselves than the left. And I’d add that he’s probably a man who’s alone — really alone — and that this situation is something new and sudden in his life. That is to say, it’s quite likely his family was recently taken from him. Killed by criminals, perhaps. That’s merely speculation — everything I’ve said is. But it would explain a number of things, you see. We all know people who seem to lose all their inhibitions the day they get divorced. They do things they wouldn’t have dreamed of doing before they were married.’

“‘You seem convinced the vigilante is a man. Isn’t it possible it’s a woman?’

“‘It’s less likely, although anything’s possible. Women don’t resort to overt violence nearly as much as men do. The gun isn’t a female weapon.’

“‘It’s been suggested in the press a few times — the fact that the murder weapon is a .32. That’s a rather small caliber — they used to call them ladies’ pistols.’

“‘It may also be a practical matter. A small caliber pistol makes far less noise than a .45, you know. But my own impression is that he’s a man who’s not intimately acquainted with the use of firearms. A small pistol is much easier to handle. Somewhat more accurate, certainly less recoil and noise, and easier to conceal in your pocket of course.’

“There wasn’t much more. But if Dr. Perrine is right — and he has the reputation — then be on the lookout for a middle-aged, middle-class liberal who has just lost his family, possibly to criminal attackers.

“It could be anyone, couldn’t it. Someone I know, someone you know. It could be you.”