“You should have told me,” Arctor said.
“What if they come in through the windows?” Luckman said. “Or the back door?”
“To increase the chances of their making their entry via the front door,” Barris continued, “rather than in other less usual ways, I providentially left the front door unlocked.”
After a pause, Luckman began to snigger.
“Suppose they don’t know it’s unlocked?” Arctor said.
“I put a note on it,” Barris said.
“You’ve jiving me!”
“Yes,” Barris said, presently.
“Are you fucking jiving us or not?” Luckman said. “I can’t tell with you. Is he jiving, Bob?”
“We’ll see when we get back,” Arctor said. “If there’s a note on the door and it’s unlocked we’ll know he isn’t jiving us.”
“They probably would take the note down,” Luckman said, “after ripping off and vandalizing the house, and then lock the door. So we won’t know. We’ll never know. For sure. It’s that gray area again.”
“Of course I’m kidding!” Barris said, with vigor. “Only a psychotic would do that, leave the front door of his house unlocked and a note on the door.”
Turning, Arctor said to him, “What did you write on the note, Jim?”
“Who’s the note to?” Luckman chimed in. “I didn’t even know you knew how to write.”
With condescension, Barris said, “I wrote: ‘Donna, come on inside; door’s unlocked. We–‘ ” Barris broke off. “It’s to Donna,” he finished, but not smoothly.
“He did do that,” Luckman said. “He really did. All of it.”
“That way,” Barris said, smoothly again, “we’ll know who had been doing this, Bob. And that’s of prime importance.”
“Unless they rip off the tape recorder when they rip off the couch and everything else,” Arctor said. He was thinking rapidly as to how much of a problem this really was, this additional example of Barris’s messed-up electronic nowhere genius of a kindergarten sort. Hell, he concluded, they’ll find the mikes in the first ten minutes and trace them back to the recorder. They’ll know exactly what to do. They’ll erase the tape, rewind it, leave it as it was, leave the door unlocked and the note on it. In fact, maybe the unlocked door will make their job easier. Fucking Barris, he thought. Great genius plans which will work out so as to screw up the universe. He probably forgot to plug the recorder into the wall outlet anyhow. Of course, if he finds it unplugged–
He’ll reason that proves someone was there, he realized. He’ll flash on that and rap at us for days. Somebody got in who was hip to his device and cleverly unplugged it. So, he decided, if they find it unplugged I hope they think to plug it in, and not only that, make it run right. In fact, what they really should do is test out his whole detection system, run it through its cycle as thoroughly as they do their own, be absolutely certain it functions perfectly, and then wind it back to a blank state, a tablet on which nothing is inscribed but on which something would for sure be had anyone–themselves, for example–entered the house. Otherwise, Barris’s suspicions will be aroused forever.
As he drove, he continued his theoretical analysis of his situation by means of a second well-established example. They had brought it up and drilled it into his own memory banks during his police training at the academy. Or else he had read it in the newspapers.
Item. One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven–on even proven at all–to be anything deliberate. It is like an invisible political movement; perhaps it isn’t there at all. If a bomb is wired to a car’s ignition, then obviously there is an enemy; if a public building on a political headquarters is blown up, then there is a political enemy. But if an accident, or a series of accidents, occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty, especially in a slow fashion, over a period of natural time, with numerous small failures and misfirings–then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself.
In fact, Arctor speculated as he drove along the freeway very slowly, the person begins to assume he’s paranoid and has no enemy; he doubts himself. His car broke down normally; his luck has just become bad. And his friends agree. It’s in his head. And this wipes him out more thoroughly than anything that can be traced. However, it takes longer. The person on persons doing him in must tinker and putter and make use of chance over a long interval. Meanwhile, if the victim can figure out who they are, he has a better chance of getting them–certainly better than if, say, they shoot him with a scope-sight rifle. That is _his_ advantage.
Every nation in the world, he knew, trains and sends out a mass of agents to loosen bolts here, strip threads there, break wines and start little fines, lose documents–little misadventures. A wad of gum inside a Xerox copying machine in a government office can destroy an irreplaceable–and vital–document: instead of a copy coming out, the original is wiped out. Too much soap and toilet paper, as the Yippies of the sixties knew, can screw up the entire sewage of an office building and force all the employees out for a week. A mothball in a car’s gas tank wears out the engine two weeks later, when it’s in another town, and leaves no fuel contaminants to be analyzed. Any radio or TV station can be put off the air by a pile driven accidentally cutting a microwave cable or a power cable. And so forth.
Many of the previous aristocratic social class knew about maids and gardeners and other serf-type help: a broken vase here, a dropped priceless heirloom that slips out of a sullen hand.
“Why’d you do that, Rastus Brown?”
“Oh, Ah jes’ fogot ta–” and there was no recourse, or very little. By a rich homeowner, by a political writer unpopular with the regime, a small new nation shaking its fist at the U.S. or at the U.S.S.R.–
Once, an American ambassador to Guatemala had had a wife who had publicly boasted that her “pistol-packin’ “husband had overthrown that little nation’s left-wing government. After its abrupt fall, the ambassador, his job done, had been transferred to a small Asian nation, and while driving his sports car he had suddenly discovered a slowmoving hay truck pulling out of a side road directly ahead of him. A moment later nothing remained of the ambassador except a bunch of splatted bits. Packing a pistol, and having at his call an entire CIA raised private army, had done him no good. His wife wrote no proud poetry about that.
“Uh, do what?” the owner of the hay truck had probably said to the local authorities. “Do what, massah? Ah jes’–”
Or like his own ex-wife, Arctor remembered. At that time he had worked for an insurance firm as an investigator (“Do your neighbors across the hall drink a lot?”), and she had objected to his filling out his reports late at night instead of thrilling at the very sight of her. Toward the end of their marriage she had learned to do such things during his late-night work period as burn her hand while lighting a cigarette, get something in her eye, dust his office, or search forever throughout or around his typewriter for some little object. At first he had resentfully stopped work and succumbed to thrilling at the very sight of her; but then he had hit his head in the kitchen while getting out the corn popper and had found a better solution.
“If they kill our animals,” Luckman was saying, “I’ll fire bomb them. I’ll get all of them. I’ll hire a professional down from L.A., like a bunch of Panthers.”
“They won’t,” Barris said. “There’s nothing to be gained by injuring animals. The animals haven’t done anything.”
“Have I?” Arctor said.
“Evidently they think so,” Barris said.
Luckman said, “_If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself_. Remember?”
“But she was a straight,” Barris said. “That girl never turned on, and she had heavy bread. Remember her apartment? The rich never understand the value of life. That’s something else. Remember Thelma Konnford, Bob? The short girl with the huge breasts–she never wore a bra and we used to just sit and look at her nipples? She came over to our place to get us to kill that mosquito hawk for her? And when we explained–”
At the wheel of his slow car, Bob Arctor forgot theoretical matters and did a rerun of a moment that had impressed them all: the dainty and elegant straight girl in her turtleneck sweater and bell-bottoms and trippy boobs who wanted them to murder a great harmless bug that in fact did good by wiping out mosquitoes–and in a year in which an outbreak of encephalitis had been anticipated in Orange County–and when they saw what it was and explained, she had said words that became for them their parody evil-wall-motto, to be feared and despised: