Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

  Now, while he awaited the arrival of his first visitor of the day, he sat down with his Macaulay and read with deep pleasure the stately sentences of the grand old Whig, turning pages rapidly to find the ones he already knew by heart: “He [Oliver Cromwell] felt toward those whom he had deserted that peculiar malignity which has, in all ages, been characteristic of apostates.” And “In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.”

  The radicals, Mallory believed, were a herd of demagogues driven by some primal instinct that had little to do with the mind. They were the Puritans of the present age, oppressing mankind in the name of their own moral superiority. How like they were to the earlier crowd (what, after all, was the difference between an Elite and an Elect?), except that they had not yet found their Cromwell. God forbid that ever they should, he thought, in a sort of prayer to Macaulay’s memory.

  5

  Ross Macalaster, a Washington journalist who believed that he knew where all of Mallory’s safe houses were located, had never before been to the house on Capitol Hill. The man was full of secrets. Macalaster had been summoned to appear before the former President at ten o’clock on inaugural morning “to learn,” as Mallory’s handwritten note put it, “something that will be of interest to you.” This communication was delivered at six A.M. to Macalaster’s house in a quiet street off Foxhall Road, on the far side of the city’s peaceful white enclave, by one of Mallory’s boy-and-girl teams. His staff always worked in couples, like the missionaries of some strange long-ago religious community in which the sexes loved and trusted each other.

  Mallory and Macalaster were acquaintances in the transient, half-clubby, half-furtive way that big-time politicians and reporters know one another in Washington. They had few things in common apart from the coincidence that both were outsiders to the rest of their profession and both were widowers. When Macalaster’s wife was killed in a car crash, having driven her BMW at high speed into a stone wall on the George Washington Parkway, Mallory wrote him a long, sympathetic note, referring to the memories of his own, happier marriage. He even came to the funeral, one of only a dozen people who bothered to do so.

  For reasons Macalaster never fully understood, Mallory seemed to like him. As senator and President, he had given him inside information, never asking anything in return, and never complaining when Macalaster repaid him by writing unfavorably about Mallory in other contexts. Once, after receiving Mallory’s letter of condolence, he had been weak enough to mention this balancing of journalistic books. “Don’t worry about it,” Mallory had replied. “It’s only human.” Another man might have quoted Harry S Truman: “If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.”

  Like his father and his immigrant grandfather before him—like Mallory, for that matter—Macalaster had been a manual laborer early in life. He would never have gone to college if he had not been inducted into the Army at nineteen and sent to Vietnam in the place of some rich kid who dodged the draft. His social background won him assignment as a rifleman in the First Infantry Division, and he was wounded twice by enemy fire, both times superficially, in battles around the Iron Triangle.

  While attending Williams College in the early 1970s as a representative of the deserving poor, he had been bullied in class and undermarked by leftist professors while being regarded as a baby-killer by members of the antiwar movement, who constituted the majority of the student body. At the same time, Movement chicks from Bennington College who imagined themselves to be undercover members of the Viet Cong crawled through his window at night, as if he were a prisoner of war who excited their sexual fantasies. At Williams Macalaster discovered in himself a deep, undiscriminating curiosity and a gift for writing, and after serving an apprenticeship on a Buffalo newspaper, he got a job with a paper in Washington. While he was still new in town, he stumbled onto a story that metastasized into a scandal that resulted in the defeat—by the hated Mallory—of the liberal candidate for re-election. Even in an age of total revelation, this revelation astounded: the incumbent President, known for his appetites, had tested positive for an incurable sexually transmitted disease. He had kept this fact entirely to himself for more than a year. The many politically aware women with whom he had copulated were either infected with the virus already or at risk of finding out that they were at some unknowable future date. So, of course, were their husbands and other lovers, nearly all of whom were ideologically committed to the doomed President and to the Cause.

  For the remainder of their lives these people would live in fear of sex, even marital sex. Some of those affected were journalists themselves. Naturally they projected their terror and their anger with the President and what he had done to them and to the Cause onto Macalaster. Full of wine and fury, his wife shrieked, “You’ve made everyone we know, all the good people, look depraved and contagious!” Macalaster had named none of those who had been exposed; he had never even tried to find out who they were. Moreover, he thought his wife had made a strange choice of words (what did being “good” have to do with being immune, or being depraved have to do with being infected, unless you were not considerate enough to mention you were infected before engaging in sex?), but he knew he could never win this particular game of politico-conjugal Scrabble. The bottom line was, he had committed the paramount sin of hurting the Cause, and he could never be forgiven.

  Macalaster’s information had come from a mysterious anonymous informant whose identity he never revealed, and because of the political damage it wreaked, many believed that Mallory had been his secret source. There was no truth in this. In fact Macalaster had been tipped off by a manipulative radical activist who had never thought that the stricken President was militant enough. The source had personal as well as ideological reasons for what he did: he regarded the Chief Executive’s illness as a treacherous threat to his own health and life because he was acquainted with a number of the women who had slept with the President; his own information came from one such infuriated female. Nevertheless the mere existence of gossip that Macalaster had made a bargain with the Devil was enough to get him drummed out of the secular religion to which his diploma from Williams had provisionally admitted him. Eventually he gave up his work at the newspaper and devoted himself to writing books, appearing on talk shows on cable television, and writing a twice-weekly syndicated column. These activities made him modestly famous and prosperous, and this reinforced the idea that he was being paid off for doing dirty work.

  Quite soon Macalaster had no friends at all. The shunning to which he had been sentenced affected his wife, too, and this was the underlying reason why she lost her balance. In the sixties she had been a Movement chick who had marched against the war and hurled obscenities and feces at the police. Because she was a female and could not escape from that fate no matter how hard she tried, she regarded herself as a Third World person even though she had gone to the Brearley School and Bennington and her father was a senior partner in a famous brokerage house on Wall Street. While Macalaster covered his beats in Buffalo and Washington, she cut off the magnificent long hair she had worn in college as a badge of belongingness and went to law school on a grant for disadvantaged students. She became a public defender, then counsel to a feminist organization. The last thing she imagined was that she would ever become an outcast. When she became one along with Macalaster, she found that she could not live without the moral support she had always received from her family, her friends, her professors, and her professional colleagues. And so she had died for his sins.

  At ten o’clock precisely Macalaster was shown upstairs in the house on Capitol Hill. The noise of the celebration was by now inside the walls. Washington row houses, brick, with no windows at the sides, resemble chimneys, drawing odors, voices, and, in summer, the sodden equatorial heat of the city up the stairwells. As Macalaster entered the library, Mallory put down his book, rose to his feet, and shook hands. The pressure was firm and dry and lasted only as long as was necessary to contract the
finger muscles and then relax them again.

  “Good of you to come on such short notice,” he said.

  “I was in the neighborhood anyway,” Macalaster replied.

  Mallory did not smile at this weak jest; he rarely smiled, even when there was a reason to do so. It did not come naturally to him. In this, as in nearly every other way imaginable, he was a contrast to the perpetually jovial Lockwood. Macalaster was surprised to find Mallory alone. Politicians of his magnitude nearly always had a witness present, and in Mallory’s case the third party was invariably his chief of staff and constant companion, a woman named Susan Grant; he applied the rule of couples even to himself. Macalaster, a connoisseur of unattainable women, was sorry that Grant was not present. She was a pleasure to look at, a long-legged blonde with disconcerting light-brown eyes and the aloof, bored countenance of a cheetah.

  Mallory indicated a chair; a file folder marked in large computer-generated type with Macalaster’s name lay on a low table before it. The manservant, grave, short, and bowlegged in flannels and a made-to-measure blazer, gave Macalaster an excellent cup of coffee and asked if he wanted anything else, then withdrew.

  At this point in the proceedings, Lockwood would have devoted five minutes to small talk or a joke before getting down to business. Mallory was brusque. He said, “Ross, at eleven-thirty this morning, I’m going to challenge Lockwood’s inauguration on grounds that the November election was stolen by means of vote fraud in California, New York, and Michigan.” He picked up the file and handed it to Macalaster. “Why don’t you read this while you drink your coffee? Then I have a proposition for you.”

  The file was a typical Mallory product: terse, logical, complete, and seemingly unanswerable. Macalaster, whose fears regarding the political future of the country were deep, read it with a rising feeling of nausea. The night before, he had drunk twelve ounces of Swedish vodka, a bottle of California cabernet sauvignon, and a couple of snifters of calvados; like many others who lived in desirable Washington neighborhoods, he drank himself to sleep most nights of the week. Though naturally a fast reader, he lingered over the last pages in the hope of gaining control of his facial expression before looking at Mallory again. When at last he did look up, he realized, from the flicker of perception in Mallory’s eyes, that he had not succeeded in hiding his reaction.

  “Am I the first to read this?” he asked.

  “No,” Mallory replied. “Lockwood was—or rather, his court readers were—Julian Hubbard and the White House lawyer, Blackstone. But you’re the first member of your profession to see it. It will be delivered to the others later this morning.”

  “What was Lockwood’s reaction?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Mallory described his visit to the White House the night before, leaving out nothing essential but speaking so economically that he was through in a short time.

  Macalaster took no notes; he prided himself on being able to recall an entire conversation verbatim. He said, “What do you think Lockwood is going to do?”

  “Fight, of course,” Mallory replied. “His advisers will tell him to deny everything, to go on the attack, to try to make it look like a right-wing plot involving the FIS.”

  “Do you think he can win?”

  “He can confuse the issue. But there’s only one way he can win: do as I advised him to do, step aside and rise to fight another day. But it’s not in him to do that. His people—please note that I say ‘his people,’ not Lockwood—would rather see the country go up in smoke than see me back in the White House.”

  Macalaster raised his voice slightly. “All of them? Did each and every one of them take part in stealing the election?”

  “No. But how many of them would disapprove of the operation?”

  “Some would say that what you’re doing is just as likely to send the country up in smoke. And that your real objective is to destroy the political left and all its ideas so that the right can take over on a permanent basis.”

  Mallory was unruffled. “Of course they’ll say that, but even they know it isn’t true,” he said. “I’m in the right, and that makes a happy result possible. For one thing, Lockwood won’t have the heart to continue if he becomes convinced that the election really was stolen.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Absolutely. He’s an honorable man. He knows that the country will go back to normal very quickly if the truth is served. But if the truth is not on his side, and he listens to those radicals who surround him and gets himself acquitted, he’ll be a thief and a liar, and one way or another, he’ll still be brought down. This involves the most basic of all issues. The popular vote is the American equivalent of the divine right of kings. Lockwood is not one to fly in the face of the Almighty. He knows that usurpers come to no good end.”

  “Elections have been stolen before.”

  “Yes, and look what happened afterward. Assassination, war, scandal, cover-up, the wholesale falsification of history. The people behind this kind of thing are always idealists like Julian and his brother, true believers who think that they know better than the people. But it’s the Lockwoods who pay with their reputations, even their lives.”

  Macalaster’s tone was sarcastic. “So what you’re doing is your attempt to save Lockwood’s place in history?”

  “No, only Lockwood can do that. My purpose is to preserve the principle that the people, and only the people, choose their President, and that the people is always right. Next to that, Lockwood’s fate, or my own for that matter, means very little.”

  “ ‘The people,’ Macalaster repeated, ‘is always right’? What famous person said that?”

  “I did,” Mallory replied. “But there was a time when the idea seemed so obvious that nobody had to say it.

  “Now for the proposition.” He was studying Macalaster closely. This was a disconcerting experience. Few people of the journalist’s anxiety-ridden generation were used to sustained eye contact; it was dangerous in public, compromising in private. “I think we agree that this situation is interesting.”

  “Interesting?” Macalaster said. “It’s going to tear the country apart.”

  “That depends on what Lockwood does. My own expectation is that Julian Hubbard will win out over Frosty’s better instincts and that we’ll have a donnybrook.”

  “Civil war.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, though I’ve always said the people would need all the guns they can get if the Julians of this country ever gained absolute power.”

  “You weren’t joking about that?”

  “No. Certainly not. These characters despise the people; every time they’re rejected at the polls they think the voters have been duped. If there was no vote, truth—as they call their gibberish—would prevail and they’d damn well see to it that human nature was replaced by a code of conduct devised by themselves. ‘The aim of revolution,’ said Zhou Enlai, ‘is to change man himself.’ ”

  This was vintage Mallory. Macalaster said, “You really do hate those people, don’t you?”

  “Hate them?” Mallory replied. “No. But I think I understand them.” He waited for Macalaster to reply, but the other man had nothing to add. “All right,” Mallory said, “back to the point. What usually happens in a situation in which one side is composed of true believers who are in the wrong, and the other is made up of defenders of an older faith, is that everyone tells virtuous lies. There is no authentic account of what really occurred. Look at the Spanish Civil War, the wars of liberation of the last century, the whole Marxist-Leninist epoch. There is no honest history of these events because the people involved, especially the educated classes, habitually lied about events, not only to the world but also to themselves.”

  “You think the left lies?”

  “Yes. About everything. They systematically falsify reality as a matter of keeping faith with their political delusions. They’re in their final days—a vanguard elite with a secret agenda who stopped being a popular movement a l
ong time ago and have survived for half a century by lying to the people. Like all liars, they live in a panic because they know they may be discovered at any moment. If it’s proved that they stole the election, they could be finished as a political force—out of power in this country for all time to come. They’d do anything to escape that fate.”

  “Come on, Mr. President,” Macalaster said. “This is Frosty Lockwood you’re talking about.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Mallory replied. “I thought I’d made that clear. Lockwood didn’t steal the election. Others did it for him. Why should they consult him about it? Frosty’s no maximum leader; he’s just the Muppet they show the people every fourth November to prove how harmless they are.”

  “That’s harsh.”

  “No use wasting Christian kisses on a heathen idol’s foot,” Mallory said.

  “That must be Kipling,” Macalaster said.

  “It is. Now, here is my offer. If you undertake to write a book about the events that are about to unfold and agree to devote yourself primarily to this task, I’ll tell you everything I know and everything we’re going to do as we go along, and give you complete access to my files.”

  “In return for what?”

  “In return for an honest account based on authoritative sources.”

  “An honest account of your side of the story, you mean.”

  “Yes, but you’re free to be honest in regard to the other side, too. I have everything to gain by this, which is why no one else in your business will be honest about Lockwood. In fact, that’s a condition of the deal. Lockwood has to do the same as I’m doing.”