The House of Cards Complete Trilogy

by Michael Dobbs

  Forty-Seven

  Grasp the moment. Grasp the dagger! Destroy others before they can destroy you. And if that is not possible, it is better to destroy yourself.

  Claire, in answer to his summons, found him writing letters in his study. He brightened as he saw her; he appeared pale with exhaustion but more at ease, as though he had ceased to battle against the impossible current and was finally reconciled to being carried downstream.

  “Can I help?” she offered.

  “You may help yourself, if you want. I’m writing out a list. Disposing of a few baubles and trinkets to those who have been kind.” He looked at her intently. “My Resignation Honors.”

  “You have decided to go?”

  “That has been decided for me, I no longer have any say in the matter. But in the manner of my passing…” He waved the piece of paper. “Can I find something for you?”

  “There is nothing that I want,” she replied quietly.

  “For Joh, perhaps?”

  She shook her head.

  He fell to pondering. “My doctor. Corder, too. Mortima, especially Mortima. She must have something.”

  “You sound,” Claire suggested slowly, “like a man disposing of his most personal possessions from his…”

  “Deathbed?” He completed her thought. His cheeks filled with a little color, an expression of defiance began to erase the bruises around his eyes. “No!” he said with feeling. “I intend to live forever.”

  He returned to the papers on his desk. “Tell me, what do you think Geoffrey deserves?”

  “You want to give him something?” The words stuck in her throat like dry biscuit.

  “But he surely merits some recognition.” An ironical smile played about his lips but reached no further. The eyes remained like old ice. “You may have noticed he was unable to attend our little session in the Cabinet Room yesterday, sent a message saying that he was away campaigning around the country. So I tracked him down by phone. He swore loyalty. To me. Which was why he was working so hard in the constituencies, he said. Tireless, the man is tireless. D’you know, it sounded as though he was almost in tears.”

  She shook her head in evident bewilderment.

  “You misjudge him, my dear; our Geoffrey has never been idle or lacked passion.”

  “In his own cause most certainly, but in others’?”

  “Why, I even asked if he would issue a public statement of support, which he readily agreed to do. I have obtained a copy.”

  He indicated a press release on the corner of his desk. She read it quickly. An appeal for party unity. Emphasis on achievements. A call to arms, of battles still to be fought and victories to be gained even through difficult times. Of faith in the future.

  “But there’s not a single mention of your name.”

  “Precisely. His trumpet sounds, but not in praise of me or even in epitaph. It’s the first rallying cry in his own leadership campaign. He wants my job.”

  “You expected any less?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “So why do you want to give him something?”

  “Language is important in this job, and I’ve learned to use my words with care.” It sounded almost as if he were embarking on a lecture. “I asked you what he deserved.”

  “Disappointment. But are such things still within your power?”

  “I may be mortally wounded but that makes me dangerous, not incapable. I am still Prime Minister. I can prick him, prick them all. If I want.”

  “Do you?”

  “In his case?” He pondered, one last time. “Yes.”

  “Why are you so unrelenting?”

  He picked up three envelopes, as yet unsealed. “Because some people are born to ruination. Geoffrey is one.” He sealed the first envelope, addressed to the chairman of Booza-Pitt’s local association, regretting that “in light of the new circumstances” the offer of an honor would have to be withdrawn.

  “Because in that process of personal ruination,” Urquhart continued, “Geoffrey would also ruin the party.” He licked the gum of a second envelope, intended for the Chairman of the House of Commons Committee of Privileges, containing a copy of Geoffrey’s letter of resignation with its tale of marital and financial malpractice. It bore the day’s date.

  “And because he has tried to betray me.” The third envelope, also with a copy of Geoffrey’s letter, was sealed. It was addressed to the editor of the News of the World.

  “Power is there to be used, Claire. To command people and their destinies. We talk of economics, of ethics. But we mean people.”

  “Destroy others. Before they destroy us. Is that it?”

  “No!” His eyes were sharp. “You must understand, yet you don’t. We all talk about a vision for a better future but it is our vision and their future. People are our building blocks and you cannot build a temple without breaking a few bricks.”

  “As I said. Destroy others, before they destroy you.”

  He shook his head, but not in anger. “No. In politics, we destroy ourselves. We do such a good job of it we scarcely need the assistance of others. Although such assistance is so readily given.”

  He sealed a fourth envelope. It was for Annita Burke’s husband. A photograph of her and Riddington engaged in the sort of detailed discussions that were impermissible even under the loosest interpretations of collective responsibility. A double blow to the ranks of those who might succeed him.

  “It is given to few to cast their shadow across the land. If you desire success then you must stand tall, not constantly be bending down to commiserate with the masses huddled in the shade. That is for nuns.”

  “I am no nun.”

  “But I wonder what you truly are, Claire. Whether you know yourself.”

  “I am not you, Francis. Nor am I like you. That is why I want nothing from you. I already have what I want.”

  “Which is?”

  “A view of power. From the inside.”

  “At the feet of a master.”

  “A man who has destroyed himself.”

  “Who may yet save himself.”

  “I can’t see how.”

  “That’s because, as you said, you are not like me. Because, after all, you are another who has turned away from me.” She could detect no animosity in his tone. He sealed another letter. To the editor of the Mail. In it was a copy of Max Stanbrook’s birth certificate, which showed him to be both illegitimate and a Jew. A doubly burdensome cargo that would surely sink his ship in the storm waters of a leadership contest. Pity. Urquhart liked Max Stanbrook and he was good. Perhaps too good, that was his problem.

  “I haven’t turned my back on you, Francis. I’m still here.”

  “And I ask myself why.”

  “Because I’m not a silly girl who flees in tears at the first sound of gunfire.”

  “No. Leave that to the grown men of my Cabinet.”

  “And because I can still learn from you. From all this mess. If you’ll let me.”

  “You want to watch the autopsy.”

  “To find out how to do it better. When my turn comes.”

  “Oh, you have ambition?”

  “I thought for a while you’d destroyed it, turned me off politics and their ways. But I want to find a better way.”

  “You won’t have long in which to learn. But you may still have much to learn.”

  “Such as?”

  “Who do you think will lead the party after me?”

  “Tom.”

  “And if he doesn’t want it? Or can’t have it?”

  “Stanbrook. Riddington, perhaps.”

  “But you see, they have all”—he straightened the pile of envelopes—“destroyed themselves. They cannot succeed.”

  “Then who?”

  “I fear it leaves only Arthur.”<
br />
  “Bollingbroke? He would be a disaster!”

  “He’s popular. After the party is thrashed at the election they’d cling to anything that floats.”

  “He’d split the party.”

  “Probably.” His eyes grew distant. “And then how they will sit around their campfires in the depths of fiercest winter and bemoan the folly of turning on Francis Urquhart. Not such a bad chap after all, they’ll say. A great chap, even. One of the finest.”

  She hung her head in disbelief. “You are a remarkable man. Why, you’re trying to write history even…”

  “Even from beyond the grave.” The clarity in his own thinking seemed to have brought about a remarkable transparency in her own. He rose and came around the desk to her. He took her arms. “Kiss me?”

  He intended to have her, there in the study. Desire ran through his veins, a renewed sense of life. And lust. The final flicker of a guttering candle, perhaps, but a new energy, an electricity that stiffened his body and fueled his appetites. He would not back away this time.

  She shook her head. “Once, perhaps, Francis, but not now.”

  “Have I misunderstood you?”

  “No, you’ve misunderstood the time. And timing is everything.”

  ***

  It was well into the afternoon before they would allow Passolides to inspect the ruins of his home. He was allowed in with a fireman to see whether there was anything capable of salvage, before the place was boarded up.

  It stank. He was surprised and disgusted at the overwhelming stench of rancid ashes and charred remnants of what a few hours before had been his life. It scraped his nostrils and stung his eyes, which began to pour.

  “Upsetting, sir,” the fireman commiserated, “but think of it this way. You were lucky to be out of the property. Particularly at that time of the morning. Have insurance, did you?”

  Passolides detected the edge of suspicion.

  “We’ll have to put a report in. Some evidence that the fire was begun deliberately…”

  The fireman prattled on as Passolides wandered desolate through the ruins, poking at the sodden ashes with his walking stick. Vangelis seemed so much smaller now that the upstairs floor had collapsed and all the partition walls had burned down. Everything was black, charcoal, rafters, and jagged wreckage scattered around like smashed bones at the bottom of a medieval burial pit. On a wall where the first floor had been, a washbasin hung at a drunken angle; the old enamel bath now lay overturned in his kitchen. In what had been his kitchen. He scratched, he prodded, hoping to find something of value that had survived the blaze when his stick struck metal. It was the British military helmet that had adorned the back of his door. Flattened like a plate. Vangelis had gone.

  “Know of anyone who might want to burn you out, old man?”

  Passolides was standing on the site of his food store. The walls had gone, the freezer had melted and all that remained amid the other odors was the reek of scorched flesh. He closed his eyes. Was this how it had been, with George and Eurypides? Burned by the same people, these British whose game of war and death never seemed to stop, even after all these years?

  “They have taken everything from me.”

  “Got nothing?” the fireman inquired, compassion beginning to squeeze aside the suspicion.

  “My clothes. My stick,” Passolides responded. Then he remembered the gun. Tucked in his belt. He still had the gun. It hadn’t all gone.

  “Social services’ll take care of you.”

  “I have a daughter!” he spat, fiery proud of his independence; he needed nothing from these British. Then, more sadly: “She’ll be back tomorrow.”

  He sank onto the seat of the overturned bath, his forehead coming to rest on his stick, a bent and bleary-eyed old man, overflowing with miseries and exhaustion. In his dark clothing and beret he seemed to melt into the soot-smeared surroundings as though he would never leave this place. The fire officer, wanting to check the stability of the party wall at the rear of the premises, left him to his private sorrow.

  As Passolides contemplated the end of his world, something caught his eye, a figure standing in the screaming hole where yesterday had been the doorway. The stranger was clad in black leather and a motorcycle helmet with a courier’s personal radio at his shoulder, and was calling his name. “Package for Passolides.”

  A clipboard was thrust at him and, in exchange for his signature, he was rewarded with a padded manila envelope. Without another word, the courier left.

  The gnarled fingers fumbled as they sought to open the package. Tentatively he spilled the contents onto his lap. For a moment he did not understand. There was the photograph of Michael Karaolis, the young EOKA fighter with the defiant eyes and exposed neck around which in the morning they would put a noose. The photograph that, the night before, had hung on the restaurant wall. There was another photograph, a fading portrait of a young British army officer whom Passolides did not immediately recognize. And two scorched crucifixes that fell from his shaking fingers—God, how the memories pounded at him, made him gasp for breath, almost knocking him to the floor. The small engraved crosses were those he had given on their name days to George and Eurypides.

  The dark world around Passolides seemed to stand still, only his tears had life, washing clean the ash-covered crucifixes as he retrieved them from the floor.

  It was not finished. Two further pieces of paper slipped from the envelope. The first was a photocopy of a British Army service record, tracing the short career of a junior officer in a Scottish regiment from his induction in Edinburgh through service in Egypt. And onward to Cyprus. In 1956.

  Passolides found the name at the top of the service sheet—now he recognized the officer in the photograph. Lieutenant, one day Prime Minister, Francis Ewan Urquhart.

  And the second piece of paper. A primitive leaflet. Appealing to all to come tomorrow to the rally in Trafalgar Square.

  At last Passolides knew the identity of the man he had been searching for. The man who had murdered his brothers. And, with a passion for Hellenic honor fermented over endless centuries, he knew what he had to do.

  ***

  Mortima woke to find he had stolen from their bed again. She followed the noises to the narrow galley kitchen. He was busying himself at the refrigerator when she walked in.

  “I am sorry if I disturbed you,” he apologized.

  “Why can’t you sleep, Francis?”

  “There seems so little to sleep for.” There was a finality in his tone. “Anyhow,” he offered in mitigation, “I was hungry.” He had before him a large slice of Dundee cake and cheddar cheese, a favorite childhood delicacy the family gillie always produced during their beats across the Highland moors in search of grouse and deer. It had been years, he’d almost forgotten the sharp-sweet flavor. He began to consume the pieces slowly and with considered relish.

  “You pay your midnight feast more attention than you do me in recent days, Francis. You’ve locked yourself away from me, looked straight through me, you’ve neither heard me when I’ve spoken nor offered answers to my questions. There’s an anger, an impatience within you that drives you from my bed.”

  “Bad dreams. They distract.”

  “I’ve been your wife long enough to know it’s not dreams that bother you,” she rebuked.

  “Go to bed, Mortima.”

  He took another mouthful, but she would not be moved.

  “You’re not running from your dreams, Francis, you’re no child. And neither am I. You’ve never been like this with me before.” Her distress was evident. “You are angry with me.”

  “No.”

  “Blame me for my folly with the letter.”

  “No!”

  “Think that I have helped destroy you.” She reproached him and reproached herself still more.

  “We destroy ourselves. All that
I have done would have been done whether the letter existed or not. And all that must be done, too.”

  “What will you do?”

  He looked at her but would not answer. He began munching again, carefully breaking morsels from both cheese and fruit cake, gathering up the crumbs.

  “You shut me out.”

  “There are some journeys we can only take on our own.”

  “After all these years, Francis, it’s as though you no longer trust me.”

  He pushed aside his plate and came to her. “Nothing could be further from my mind. Or from my heart. Through all these troubled times you have been the only one I could rely on, could reach for in the darkness and know you would be there. And if I’ve hurt you through my silence then the fault is mine, not yours, and I beg for your forgiveness. Mortima, you must know that I love you. That you are the only woman I have ever loved.” He said it with such force that there could be no doubting his sincerity.

  “What will you do, Francis?” she repeated, demanding his trust.

  “Fight. With all I have, for everything I have achieved.”

  “In what way?”

  “So many men spend their lives in fear of doing something wrong, of making error, that they do nothing except live in fear and slip uselessly away.” His eyes blazed contemptuous defiance. “I will not go meekly into the night. The world will hear of my going. And remember.”

  “It sounds so very final, Francis. You scare me.”

  “If my life were to end at this moment, Mortima, there would be only one regret, that I would be leaving you behind. Yet we both know that the time must come. What matters is what I leave behind, for you. A legacy. A pride. Dignity. A memory people will applaud.” He smiled. “And that Library.”

  “I can’t imagine life without you.”

  “As I cannot imagine life without all this.” He waved his arms around the most private trappings of power. “But there comes a time when the body is worn, the spirit tires, the sword is blunted by battle—and even love must have its rest. What survives, for those chosen few, is the name, even after all else has faded away. Immortality. I want you to trust me, Mortima. To support me in whatever it is I have to do.”