Death Wish

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 ba

“‘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 cha