It’s hard to underestimate the role of chance in history. Had a young man named Frank Wills not been refused admission to the United States Army during the Vietnam War, he might never have taken a job as an overnight security guard at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC. Had somebody else in that role been less vigilant, Richard Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President might’ve succeeded in bugging Democratic Party headquarters, and the public would’ve been none the wiser. Nixon would not have been forced to resign, the succession of presidents to follow might’ve been radically altered, and the dirty tricks orchestrated from the Oval Office may never have been uncovered.

It’s fitting that Wesley Brown’s Looking for Frank Wills, a novella about that fateful security guard’s life, appears during the second presidency of Donald Trump, who was helped to power by key Nixon-era figures like Roger Stone and Roy Cohn. To some extent, the taint of the Watergate scandal limited the influence of Nixon’s cadre on public life; without the constraints of scrutiny, that cohort might’ve gotten up to all sorts of additional skullduggery.

Browns tells the story of Wills’ life and unlikely heroism through the voice of Wayne Beasley, proprietor of Wayne’s Clip and Trim in North Augusta, South Carolina. Beasley is a Korean War vet and inheritor of his father’s business. As a barber, he’s learned how to listen and how to let customers reveal their true selves, both through their talk and their hairstyles. Perhaps too traumatized by past conflict to seek out more, he’s a fundamentally conservative Black man who’s learned how to get on in the world without sacrificing his dignity but also without directly confronting white power structures.

America in the 1960s is radicalizing around an uneasy Beasley, whose clients include activists and Black Panthers no longer willing to get along quietly in a racist society. He takes an interest in “Frankie,” whom he tries to advise in a lowkey, fatherly way. Beasley urges Wills not to enlist in the Army, but Wills rebels. Fortunately for him and the country, he’s deemed 4F (unfit to serve). So, he decides to move to DC and winds up working at the Watergate.

On patrol one night, he finds a door taped up to keep its automatic lock from engaging. He removes the tape and continues his rounds. When he returns, the tape is back. Wills calls the police and then leads the responding officers through the hotel, resulting in the arrests of Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, James W. McCord Jr., and Frank Sturgis. The falling dominoes that ensue eventually bring down Nixon.

For his action, Wills gets a paltry raise and a smattering of media attention, though there’s a Forrest Gumpian sense that he was simply in the right place at the right time. What publicity he does receive — including a lengthy magazine feature, an appearance at Howard University, and the opportunity to play himself in the Watergate movie “All the President’s Men” — winds up rendering him unemployable.

Multiple figures on both sides of the Watergate scandal, including Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and break-in mastermind G. Gordon Liddy, achieved fame and fortune; Wills ended up living hand-to-mouth, dependent on his mother’s Social Security checks to get by in later life. While the world treated Wills’ contribution to the Watergate saga as mostly inadvertent, Beasley suggests there’s more to it and that Wills took his job seriously in ways other people might not:

“[Wills] believed his life was pointing in this direction for some time. Before his first day, he studied up on the commitment required to become an effective security guard. The motto ‘detect, deter and observe’ was uppermost in his mind. He read over and over a passage from a book on the history of the night watchman.”

Later, the author quotes a passage from that book, which says, “I am the sword in the darkness, the horn that wakes the sleepers.”

History has declared Wills lucky to be the guy who happened to be working when the Watergate break-in occurred. Brown’s dramatization asks us to flip that perspective and consider the nation lucky that Wills was there.

Michael Maiello is an author, journalist, and playwright. He worked for 10 years as a writer and editor at Forbes, and his work has appeared in McSweeney’s, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and other publications.