Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

  “Come on in.”

  Wordlessly Macalaster led the way to the kitchen. He got a jug of orange juice out of the refrigerator and held it aloft.

  Once again Julian shook his head. “Are we alone?” he asked.

  “Manal is upstairs, but my guess is she’s asleep.”

  “Ah, the medium. She made a very strong impression on Emily.”

  Swallowing orange juice, Macalaster nodded. Long before she knew Julian, when she was an intern at the Post, Emily had baby-sat with Manal. From an early age, the little girl had claimed to be able to communicate with the spirits of the dead through a Ouija board, and one night while the Macalasters were dining out, she had put Emily in touch with her dead grandmother, who had spoken from beyond the grave in pig Latin, the language she and Emily had used together when Emily was a child, and said things that only she could know. Julian thought this was nonsense—charming nonsense, but nonsense just the same.

  “Beautiful name, Manal,” he said. “Where did you find it?”

  “Brook named her for an Egyptian poet,” Macalaster said.

  “One of Brook’s friends?”

  “A kindred spirit.”

  “Poor Brook,” said Julian.

  Julian had known Macalaster’s wife since Movement days as a fervent worker for the Cause. He sighed, remembering her. Her life had been a series of failed self-portraits: civil rights worker, member of a commune, campus agitator, sexual revolutionary, feminist, adopter of a Romanian orphan, lawyer, suicide. After a silent moment, he looked at the kitchen clock and came to the point. “Look, Ross,” he said, “I have something to tell you, and a favor to ask.” Then he confided that President Lockwood, probably the next day, was going to announce the appointment of Archimedes Hammett as Chief Justice.

  Macalaster said, “You’re joking.”

  Julian looked puzzled. “Why do you say that?”

  “You’ll never get away with it. If one of those human bombs had gone off close enough to Lockwood to kill him, he would have defended the people responsible.”

  “That’s what lawyers do. Nobody does it better than Hammett. The President just thinks that it’s time to make a courageous appointment to the Court, someone who will stand up to the Mallory faction.”

  “Hammett will do that, all right.”

  “The President thinks so,” Julian replied. “No—no coffee, thank you.”

  Then he laughed. He had responded not to any offer made by Macalaster, but to the recorded sound of a saccharine female voice that fluted, “Coffee is ready!” when the coffeemaker, a Christmas gift from Manal, finished its cycle. Macalaster poured himself a cup.

  “Besides,” Julian said, as if he had never been interrupted, “one man’s terrorism is another man’s noble cause.”

  Macalaster lifted his eyebrows. “I didn’t know an old fighter pilot like yourself thought in such theopolitical terms,” he said.

  “ ‘Theopolitical’? Is that a word?”

  “It is now.”

  “You invented it? Then I’ll start using it,” Julian replied. “These are mind-stretching days. Everything I just told you is yours exclusively until the end of the day. Strictly on deep background, of course.”

  This meant that Macalaster could print everything Julian had told him but could not identify his source. Macalaster said, “Fine.”

  Glancing at the clock again, Julian continued, “That’s one reason I came by so early. I know your column comes out on Wednesdays.”

  “I’m grateful for the leak,” Macalaster said. “What’s the favor?”

  Julian looked puzzled. “The favor?”

  “You mentioned a favor.”

  “Oh, yes. Almost forgot. It’s very hard for the President to meet privately with anyone. I wonder if you’d mind his getting together with Hammett here, in your house.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Sure. What time?”

  “It’s a little more complicated than a simple meeting. We’d like you to have a small dinner party, including Hammett. Lockwood would come by for coffee afterward, and the two of them would just sort of run into each other.”

  “Fine. Just tell me who you want invited and what they want to eat.”

  “All that will be taken care of,” Julian said. “The caterer will be in touch this morning.” He produced a file card on which a list of names had been typed. “This is the guest list; we’ll make the calls. See you at eight tonight.”

  Julian left by the back door. Macalaster read the names on the card. The Hubbards, Sam Clark and his wife, and Hammett. The last entry, scribbled in a hurried, half-legible hand that Macalaster recognized as Emily’s, was Zarah Christopher.

  7

  Instead of coming to Macalaster’s dinner for dessert, Polly and Frosty Lockwood arrived midway through the cocktail hour. They had ridden across town incognito, behind the smoked windows of Sam Clark’s Lincoln, inside a protective formation of unmarked Secret Service cars. Whatever degree of anonymity this subterfuge afforded was quickly dispelled. As soon as the President was inside the house, the street was blocked at both ends, agents armed with automatic rifles patrolled the neighborhood, and helicopters equipped with blinding searchlights clattered overhead.

  Lockwood entered. Hammett came almost imperceptibly to something resembling attention. Instead of his emblematic workshirt and jeans, he wore a dark chalk-striped Savile Row suit with a white shirt and an expensive maroon silk polka-dot tie.

  “Hello there, Archimedes,” Lockwood said, waving off Macalaster’s attempt at an introduction even though he had never met this man. “They told me you never wore a suit of clothes, but you look like a regular member of the bar tonight.”

  “Well, this is a special occasion, Mr. President.”

  “Is that the only suit you’ve got?”

  “The only good one, sir.”

  In his broadest eastern Kentucky accent, Lockwood said, “Is it tailor-made? Looks like one of those bespoke English suits that cost two thousand dollars apiece.”

  “That’s what it is.”

  “Then they’ve got your measurements on file over there in London in case you need to have ‘em whip you up a few more?”

  Hammett nodded.

  “Glad to hear that,” Lockwood said. He turned to Macalaster. “Ross, how’s it going? Who’s this glorious young lady I see before me?”

  Mock flirtatiousness was part of Lockwood’s stock-in-trade, although he was, like Mallory, famously chaste and strictly monogamous—”Lyndon without the hound-dog lust,” as the Southern contingent had called him when he was Senate Majority Leader. Macalaster introduced Zarah.

  “Paul Christopher’s daughter?” Lockwood said. Zarah nodded. Lockwood said, “You look like him. Mighty fine American, your dad. The country’s in his debt.”

  “That’s a kind thing to say, Mr. President.”

  “Just truthful. I know what he did—some of it, anyway, I guess nobody knows all of it—from my days on the Senate Intelligence Committee. I didn’t know your mother, but I think Polly did. Honey?”

  Polly Lockwood turned away from Hammett, whom she had begun to interrogate in her gentle way. “Yes, dear?”

  “Wasn’t this young lady’s mother a Bluegrass girl?”

  Zarah said, “My mother was Catherine Kirkpatrick.”

  “Cathy was your mother?” Polly said. “My goodness, yes. We lived just a couple of farms away. Your grandmother and grandfather were Lee and Lee Kirkpatrick, wonderful folks but you never knew who was talking to whom because they had the same first name. Your mama was the most beautiful girl anyone has ever seen, and just as nice as she could be. Rode like an angel. Played the piano like one, too. Are you the girl she raised out there in the Sahara Desert, so far away from everyone else?”

  “I’m the only one she had.”

  “My goodness. I’d like to hear all about that. Emily, you bring her over for tea next week; we’ll never get it all talked out tonight.”
She put a hand on Zarah’s arm. “Sarah? Have I got it right?”

  “Zarah, with a zed,” Zarah replied.

  Hammett had been listening. This expression out of Shelleyan ritual startled him. “With a ‘zed’?” he said. “Why do you pronounce it that way?”

  “Sorry, I forgot myself.”

  “Forgot yourself?”

  “I had British teachers as a child.” Zarah addressed herself to Polly. “It’s a boy’s name, really. It means ‘sunrise’ in Hebrew.”

  “Hebrew?” Hammett said, startled. Zarah was blond and gray-eyed, with a face out of a Dürer drawing. “Are you Jewish?”

  “No, are you?”

  Hammett, defender of Jewry’s most implacable foes, uttered a strangled guffaw. “Good God, no, but it’s a novelty to be asked. In fact, it’s a novelty to meet someone who doesn’t read the papers. Does that come from growing up in the Sahara Desert?” Staring at her with intense concentration, he waited for her answer, which did not come. Zarah simply absorbed his question into some pool of silence at the center of her personality.

  Lockwood’s eyes flicked in open amusement from Hammett to Zarah. He said, “No offense to old Ross here, but if you can get away from the newspapers in the Sahara Desert, that’s where I want to be. Can you actually do that, Zarah?”

  With all the easy charm she had been withholding from Hammett she said, “You sure can if you go to the right place, Mr. President. I never saw one, even in Arabic, until I was grown up.”

  Hammett said, “What did you do for news?”

  “There wasn’t any.”

  “Then what was there?”

  She paused for a beat. “Life,” she said without expression.

  “Zarah grew up on a diet of locusts,” Emily said. “The nomads boil them, Mr. President, then dry them in the sun. They taste like shrimp.”

  “That’s poor folks’ talk,” Lockwood said. “Back home we always said mushrat tasted like fried chicken.”

  “My grandfather and grandmother were from the poorest part of Greece,” Hammett said, speaking directly to Zarah. “For a hundred generations their people ate meat only once a year, at Easter.”

  “Sounds like the klephts of the Mesa Mani,” Zarah said.

  Thunderstruck, Hammett said, “What do you know about the Maniátes?”

  “Not much. That they were murderous brigands, romanticized as patriots by people like Shelley.”

  “ ‘Romanticized’?” Hammett was outraged. “Shelley had nothing to do with it. The Maniátes were heroes who fought for their freedom for two thousand years. Sacrificing everything.” Zarah shrugged. Hammett said, “It’s pretty obvious you don’t know an idealist when you see one.”

  “Whatever you say,” Zarah said with a level look.

  Hammett spun on his heel and plunged across the room, stopping midway across the carpet when he realized there was no one else to talk to except Lockwood and Clark, whom he did not wish to approach, or Julian Hubbard, who was responsible for luring him into this den of unpredictable strangers.

  “I think you touched a nerve there,” Macalaster said to Zarah.

  “Or something,” Zarah replied.

  She did not smile; her voice was toneless. Yet Macalaster had the impression that Zarah knew exactly who Archimedes Hammett was, was aware of his whole résumé, and thought him a dangerous fool. From across the room, Hammett scowled; with wonderful economy, as if she had fired a pellet of sanity into his brain, she had made him know this too. But how? And why?

  As soon as Lockwood finished his ounce of lukewarm Maker’s Mark bourbon, his favorite drink, the caterer’s butler announced dinner. Lockwood took Zarah’s arm. “I’ll escort you, little lady,” he said. “I don’t care what the place cards say, you’re going to sit next to me.”

  Macalaster took Polly Lockwood in. At his back, he could hear Hammett talking to Julian Hubbard. “What’s with that Christopher female?” he asked. “She was just trashing Shelley. What does she know about Shelley?”

  Julian responded with a quizzical grin. “Well, she grew up in a place where there wasn’t much to do but read.”

  “Where was that?”

  “The Maghreb, among the Berbers. It’s quite a story.”

  “Tell me. I’m dying to know. What is she, a trained killer raised on a secret CIA base, like the rest of her family?”

  Into the pocket of silence this remark produced, Polly Lockwood said to Macalaster, “Why, Zarah’s even lovelier than her poor mother, though I would never in this world have thought such a thing was possible.”

  The First Lady looked up into Macalaster’s face and smiled encouragingly. Her own features were still a little pink from the anger Hammett’s remark had provoked. Macalaster wondered if she knew about the honor her husband was about to bestow on this strange, angry man. At dinner, all his doubts on this score were erased by the velvety way in which Polly examined Hammett on his past, his beliefs, his purposes in life. He answered gruffly in monosyllables, as if he were being interrogated by an agent of a hostile intelligence service under deep cover. Lockwood, busy telling stories to Zarah and Emily and swapping guffaws with Clark, ignored him completely. The menu was Washington-caterer short-notice weeknight fare: lobster bisque, Dover sole with asparagus and miniature boiled potatoes, salad, and fruit compote.

  “What exactly is a bisque?” Lockwood said. “You grew up in a foreign country, Zarah. Can you tell me?”

  “Soup made from shellfish, Mr. President.”

  “Is that right? That’s a relief. I thought it was French for some part of the lobster they didn’t want to describe in plain English.”

  Hammett ate nothing. He left each dish untouched, waving it away when the waiter came around to collect the china at the end of the course. Neither did he taste his wine or even his water.

  “This sole is delicious, Archimedes,” Polly said at last. “You haven’t eaten a bite. Don’t you like seafood?”

  “Oh, I’m just fine,” Hammett said. As a gesture to her motherly concern he broke a fillet of Dover sole in half with his fork before pushing it aside.

  “Archimedes doesn’t trust American food,” said Emily from across the table. “He thinks it’s poisoned by capitalist agents.”

  All heads turned in Hammett’s direction, expecting him to reply to what those who did not know him took to be a straight line. Instead, he gazed at the ceiling.

  Finally Lockwood said, “You’ve got nothing to worry about, Archimedes. That’s why I brought Sam along—he’s my taster. Just watch him for the first few bites. If he doesn’t die, you can go right ahead and eat.”

  Clark laughed; everyone except Hammett did. When the merriment died down, the party rose from the table. While the others went into the sitting room for coffee, Julian, who had been shown the way earlier, led Lockwood and Hammett down the hall to the library.

  While the dinner party was in progress, Secret Service technicians in evening clothes had “sanitized” Macalaster’s library—that is to say, they had searched it visually and electronically for listening devices and installed counterbugs designed to deafen any transmitters or microphones or deflect any beams of electrons that had escaped detection or might be activated after Lockwood and Hammett entered the room. The windows were masked. The phone was removed and the whole phone system for the house disconnected, and because the electrical wiring of any house constitutes a ready-made antenna into which eavesdroppers can tap with simple equipment, all outlets in the room were fitted with jamming devices. Julian listed all these precautions on the way down the hall.

  “There’s no such thing as an effective counterbug,” said Hammett. “To open each door there’s a key.”

  Julian smiled tightly. “How well we know that.”

  “It makes no difference one way or the other,” Lockwood said as soon as the door closed behind them. “I’m not going to say anything to you, Mr. Hammett, that I wouldn’t say on national TV, and you’d be wise to follow the same procedure.”r />
  Now that they were in private, the “Archimedes” of first meeting became “Mr. Hammett”; the President’s etiquette was the reverse of the usual practice. He was jovially familiar with strangers in public encounters, coldly formal behind closed doors. Picking up on this change in mannerisms, Hammett started to say something that would demonstrate his own seriousness, but Lockwood held up one of his hands to stop him; it was a paw, huge and freckled with liver spots. “Now as I understand it,” he said, “Julian has told you what we have in mind for you.”

  “Yes, Mr. President, he has,” said Hammett, who carried an undetected, and indeed undetectable, voice-activated tape recorder in the inside pocket of his jacket so as to capture everything on tape. “Julian Hubbard has told me”—Lockwood again held up his hand for silence, but Hammett raised his voice slightly and talked right through the gesture—”that you intend to nominate me to fill the vacancy of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.”

  Lockwood gave him a searching look; he knew what it usually meant when visitors spoke so specifically for the record. “That’s right,” he said. “Now I want to ask you a question. Bearing in mind that the confirmation process is going to be very heated and searching, do you know of any reason having to do with the private part of your life that might, if discovered, disqualify you or embarrass me?”

  Hammett lifted his eyebrows. “I think that’s what’s called the Harding Question,” he said.

  Lockwood said, “Boy, I already know you’re clever as a whole damn barrel of monkeys; you don’t have to prove it to me. But what you’re about to go through has nothing to do with life as you’ve known it up to now. Nobody is going to give you the benefit of the doubt because you’ve got all the right ideas and a silver tongue. Courtroom rules of evidence aren’t going to mean a damn thing. You’re going to have to prove your innocence of every crime on the books, including original sin, to a bunch of people who’ll be out to screw and tattoo both of us. So please answer the damn question.”