Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

  Hammett’s dark eyes glittered with resentment. He replied, “The answer is no.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “I’ve answered your question, Mr. President. Do you think I’d be crazy enough to expose myself to this process if I had anything to hide?”

  “Crazy doesn’t come into it. Ambition and hoping for the best have been known to play a part in these situations. All I’m saying to you is, you’d better be sure you’re clean, because tomorrow morning will be too late to change your story.”

  “Noted,” Hammett said.

  Lockwood relaxed. He said, “Well, I can see you don’t like to take any crap, and that’s a pretty good qualification for Chief Justice. You’re going to have to stand your ground up there.”

  “You needn’t worry about that, Mr. President.”

  “Maybe not. But I’m not too sure what your ground is.” Hammett opened his mouth to speak. “No,” Lockwood said. He dug a horny forefinger into Hammett’s breastbone to make sure he had his attention. “Don’t tell me. I’ve got enough to worry about as it is.”

  They were standing up, face to face. Hammett’s chest throbbed as if he had been punched; he was sure the gouging fingertip had left a mark on his skin. Lockwood’s breath smelled of fish and whiskey. By genetic endowment the Maniátes were an undersize people, and though he was much taller than his grandfather, Hammett was at least a foot shorter than Lockwood. Nevertheless he raised his own forefinger to the level of the President’s nose, which was full of wiry gray bristles. “If you’re not comfortable with me, Mr. President, we can call the whole thing off right now,” he said. “I have a life already. I don’t need what you’re offering.”

  Lockwood’s deeply lined face relaxed into its customary good-natured expression. “Nothing personal, Archimedes,” he said. “All I know about you is what I read in the newspapers and what Julian tells me about your sterling personal qualities. I’m not nominating you as the person I’d like to be marooned on a desert island with, and history suggests you’ll turn out to be the man nobody knew as soon as you climb up on that bench. So all I want to know is, have you kept your pecker in your pants? You say you have. I have to believe you; I’ve got no choice. But if you’re hiding anything, I’m telling you, you’re going to be one sorry Greek.”

  Hammett glared at the President. Although he had made a career of denouncing others, he could not bear to be criticized in even the mildest way, or to have his own moral rectitude brought into question. Lock-wood’s words had outraged him, and his manner, which suggested that he believed that Hammett, like an ordinary mortal, had something to hide and might not be able to conceal it under pressure, had been even worse. Most injurious of all, because it was true, was the scornful message in Lockwood’s exhausted eyes: This jasper wants what I’m offering him, so he’s mine.

  In an abrupt change of mood, a tactic that had always served him well, the President threw an arm around Hammett’s shoulders and hugged him hard. He was enormously strong. Because he had avoided embraces all his life, Hammett had not realized that a human being could be so strong. Lockwood was grinning down at him, breathing on him. Hammett realized that this alien, bearlike creature somehow understood his phobias and was taunting him.

  “Say hello to Sam Clark,” Lockwood said, turning Hammett around, physically moving him 180 degrees, to face the Majority Leader, who had just come into the room. “Sam’s going to introduce you to the fellows on the Judiciary Committee, and if you need any advice in any shape, form, or substance about the U.S. Senate, he’s the man to talk to. Starting tomorrow morning. We’re all too tired to go into it tonight.”

  Clark said, “Is breakfast at eight all right for you, Archimedes? I’ve invited the chairman and some of the others.”

  Hammett hesitated, envisaging ham and eggs and other poisonous animal products being chewed and swallowed by a tableful of fat people.

  Lockwood said, “Say yes, Archimedes. You can eat some locusts before you go.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Good,” Clark said. In his loud speech and broad gestures, he evoked Lockwood’s manner so strongly, Hammett thought, that he might have been a stand-up comic doing an impersonation. “Just come to my office in the Capitol at seven forty-five. Just you, no staff.”

  “I travel alone, Senator.”

  “So they say,” Clark said, unsmiling. “Come in the Senate door on the east face. A pretty young lady will meet you there and show you the way.”

  In Sam Clark’s Lincoln on the way back to the White House, Clark said, “I don’t like that son of a bitch, Frosty.”

  Polly said, “I wouldn’t trust him.”

  Lockwood let a moment pass; the tires hummed on the pavement beneath them. Finally he said, “Sounds like we’ve got us the right man.”

  8

  Manal Macalaster, who had been playing in a school basketball game, came home soon after the President’s clamorous departure. She asked no questions about the dinner party. Famous people did not interest her. From the cradle onward, her mother had instilled in her Lord Acton’s dictum that great men were almost always bad men, even though her father was always talking to them on the telephone.

  Hammett, who disliked hotels, had sometimes stayed with the Macalasters when she was small, and though he had ignored her—he was not interested in children—she remembered him kindly because his being in the house had pleased her mother so. She shook hands with him and all the others and said “How do you do?” in a perfectly composed way.

  Manal was a natural gentlewoman who had one single, benevolent manner for everyone she met. One of her many Third World nursemaids, a Maya Indian from Guatemala, believed that she had been a queen in an earlier life; this notion had infuriated Brook, who wanted the child’s ancestry to be as wretched as possible. Who wanted to preserve the gene pool of royalty, especially Romanian royalty? Brook preferred to believe that Manal, who was dark in complexion and merry in nature, had Gypsy blood—or, even better, was descended from a mysterious group of Africans who, as she had been assured by a former U.S. ambassador to Bucharest, had somehow found their way to Romania in centuries past. She had adopted Manal on political impulse after the fall of Ceauescu (a dictator doomed, in Brook’s view, not because he was a Stalinist in his methods, but because he had been a CIA collaborator), when many other enlightened women were also adopting orphans from Eastern Europe. Manal (emphasis on the second syllable) was named after a female Egyptian poet with whom Brook had fallen in love during her militant feminist phase. In infancy, the child had been ill almost continually, owing to the aftereffects of the six or seven diseases with which she had been found to be infected on arrival from Bucharest. When she was old enough to go to school, it was discovered that she was dyslexic. Ten years later this was regarded as an advantage by the college counselor at the expensive school for the learning-impaired that she attended: many highly selective universities were enhancing their student bodies by admitting a certain number of disadvantaged persons with intellectual disabilities, and Manal was regarded as a sure bet for one of the Seven Sisters, and might even get into Princeton or Brown. This development would have delighted Brook, but the fact of the matter was that she had lost interest in Manal as soon as a new political fashion came along.

  Now, embracing Emily Hubbard, Manal smiled in a way that made her seem quite beautiful. Soon the three females were seated together in a tight circle, talking and laughing.

  Manal touched her father on the hand. “Emily would like to have a séance,” she said. “Is it all right, Daddy?”

  “Yes, sure,” Macalaster said, looking at his watch. “But not a very long one; it’s almost ten o’clock.”

  Hammett stared incredulously at Macalaster and the girl. “A séance?” he said.

  Manal looked at him without expression, and without answering. “We’ll do it in the den,” she said. “The visitors like that room.”

  Hammett gave her a questioning look. “ ‘The
visitors’?”

  “The spirits of the dead,” Manal explained. “They like the den because it’s small and everyone is close together.”

  “Ah-ha.”

  Hammett looked trapped and started to turn away, but Emily took his arm and drew him along with the others. “Come on, Hammett,” she said. “Be a sport.”

  As a Ouija board Manal used a brown-paper supermarket bag on which she had scrawled, in Magic Marker, the letters of the alphabet and the numbers 1 through 0. Owing to her dyslexia, some of the letters were backward or upside down. The planchette that moved over the surface of the board was an inverted two-ounce shot glass that slid easily over the waxy brown paper. Everyone except Hammett placed a forefinger on the shot glass.

  After a short wait, while Manal appeared to concentrate on some absent force or entity, and to grow less alert as she did so, the shot glass began to move in a jerky, random way over the alphabet. At first it spelled out nonsense, and in one case, obscenities.

  Manal, who could not read the words, evidently could somehow hear them, because she responded to this and all subsequent spirit messages by speaking aloud. When the shot glass, sliding over the paper at a furious rate, spelled out a string of four-letter words, she said, “Please don’t speak to us like that.” The same obscenities were repeated, spelled backward. “I’m sorry,” Manal said, “but we just can’t talk to you anymore.”

  Manal took her finger off the glass. “Some of the visitors are crazy,” she explained. “And a lot of them are really unhappy, especially if they died before their time. If they’ve been murdered, they can’t get out of darkness until their murderer dies.”

  “ ‘Darkness’?” Hammett said. “What’s that mean?”

  “It’s where the dead go right after they die, to wait.”

  “I always heard you saw a brilliant white light.”

  “That’s not what the visitors say,” Manal replied.

  “Shush,” Emily said. “I want to talk to Grammy.”

  The glass spelled out another obscenity.

  Zarah said, “I don’t think we should go on with this.”

  With a twist of the lips, Hammett said, “You mean you believe in ghosts? This is very interesting.”

  Zarah ignored him and made as if to get up. She was seated on the floor, with her wide skirt spread around her. The glass moved again, very rapidly.

  “Come on, Zarah, don’t give up now,” Emily said. “I-ay ant-way oo-tay alk-tay oo-tay y-may randma-gay.”

  Zarah hesitated, then placed her forefinger with the others’ on the shot glass.

  Macalaster fought sleep. He had never been able to bring himself to play this game, if that was the word for it. This was not because he was a skeptic. He had no doubt that Manal was a genuine medium, and he harbored the notion that Brook would someday be among the visitors.

  Manal said, “Stay awake, Daddy. This one wants you”.

  Steeling himself—he knew it was foolish to feel as he did, but it made him queasy nevertheless—Macalaster touched the shot glass.

  To the spirit, Manal said, “Who are you?”

  SUSAN. The letters were spelled slowly and hesitantly.

  “Do you recognize the name, Daddy?”

  Macalaster shook his head and yawned. He was relieved; whoever this was, it wasn’t his dead wife. Wrong name, wrong vibrations. He felt anger and accusation in the air. But not enough of either for Brook to be present, dead or alive.

  Manal said, “Do you have something to tell Ross?”

  YES.

  “We’re listening,” Manal said.

  I WAS MURDERED.

  “We’re so sorry. Do you know who did it?”

  YOUR FRIEND SHELLEY KNOWS.

  “We have no friend named Shelley,” Manal said.

  WRONG. MANY SHELLEYS. TWO ARE WITH YOU NOW.

  The shot glass flew off the table as if flung by an invisible hand.

  “Susan?” Manal said. There was no reply. “She’s gone away,” Manal said. “I think we should stop now.”

  Julian and Hammett were looking at each other with great intensity and solemnity. Macalaster noticed that Zarah was watching the two men closely. Hammett felt her eyes on him and gave her a sharp look.

  “Susan is still very angry,” Manal said matter-of-factly. “She hasn’t been dead very long. Did you notice how slowly she spelled until she got used to it? That’s always a sign. The murdered are always confused at first and filled with bitterness. Some never get over it, never get out of darkness.”

  Zarah was quite pale, and even quieter than before. She said, “Manal, that was very interesting. How often do you do this?”

  “Not often. It’s tiring. I don’t really like it.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re so unhappy.”

  Zarah nodded as if she understood perfectly. “You remind me of someone I used to know very well. You should be careful with this.”

  Manal said, “I know. But that last one will be back no matter what we do.”

  “I know she will be,” Zarah said.

  “You know?” Hammett said. “That’s very interesting.”

  She looked Hammett full in the face with her steady gray eyes. Her eyes, shimmering with intelligence, seemed to project an accusation or a message he couldn’t quite read. He could not hold her gaze and looked away, only to discover the same eyes looking down on him from the mirror above the fireplace. He did not know whether he read the message this time, or whether, as he afterward came to believe, he realized in his own mind which Susan it was who had awakened him.

  “I need fresh air,” he said. “Julian, walk with me. We have things to talk about.”

  He left at once, without thanking his host or saying goodbye to anyone.

  9

  Julian and Hammett walked toward the Potomac down woodsy residential streets. Emily had caught a ride home with Zarah. Two gleaming Secret Service cars, one half a block behind the men and the other the same distance ahead, kept pace with them, radios crackling. Otherwise the posh neighborhood was silent. Then, suddenly, off on the flank, there was the clangor of falling garbage cans. Four deer emerged from behind a house and were immediately transfixed in the cars’ powerful spotlights. Hammett froze in panic. Seeing this, Julian identified the threat: “Deer, Archimedes!”

  The animals bounded away into a cemetery. As they disappeared among the ornate headstones, Hammett relaxed, but not for long. He had been deeply upset by the last part of the séance, especially by its reference to Shelley.

  “That whole séance thing was a setup if I ever saw one,” Hammett said.

  Julian did not immediately respond to this statement, though he knew it was an appeal for confirmation. He looked upward into the overcast sky. There was little hope of reasoning with Hammett when he was in the state he was in now. After a moment, suppressing a sigh, he said, “What exactly do you mean by a setup,’ Archimedes?”

  “I would have thought it was pretty obvious. Unless, of course, you think it really was some creature from the next world who was spelling out ‘Shelley’ on the Ouija board just now.”

  “To be honest,” Julian said, “I thought the whole thing was a coincidence.”

  “Of course you did,” Hammett said. “You’re so afraid of looking paranoid that you can’t admit the obvious.”

  “Maybe,” Julian said. “But the obvious isn’t always so obvious. Archimedes, we’re talking about an adolescent girl.”

  Hammett snorted derisively. “I’m talking about another female whose name begins with zed. Does that way of saying a certain letter of the alphabet ring a bell?”

  Slowly and carefully Julian said, “You think Zarah knows about the Shelley Society?”

  Annoyed by his neutral tone of voice, Hammett said, “Somebody had to do the spelling, and know what words and names to spell for maximum shock effect. Why shouldn’t she know about it? Your whole family belongs to it.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You live
with Zarah’s best friend, who just happens to be as curious as a cat. Do you and Horace always watch what you say in front of dear little Emily?”

  From long experience Julian knew that Hammett had no sense of what not to say. He found this suggestion outrageous, but he controlled himself in this as in every other situation. In the same calm voice as before, he said, “You think my wife is spying on me?”

  “No offense,” Hammett replied, “but she’s a female. They’re born into an eternal CIA that’s been keeping files on the other half of the human race ever since Eve was recruited by the serpent.”

  Coming from anyone else, this statement would have merited an appreciative chuckle. In this case, Julian remained silent because as usual Hammett was perfectly serious. By now they had almost reached the riverbank, where the streetlights were more powerful. Like some great swollen firefly hovering overhead, a buzzing sodium lamp shone down on them, banishing all shadows, giving Hammett’s skin a corpselike hue. Because Hammett was Hammett, this was a comical effect, and Julian could not help but smile.

  Hammett was offended by this levity. “What’s so funny?”

  “The light,” Julian responded. “I was wondering if I look as dead as you do. At least we’re not in darkness.”

  Hammett, who did not like any kind of joke, liked jests about death least of all. “Maybe you think you’re not in the dark,” he said. “But there’s something going on, some kind of mind game, and I’m going to find out what it is and what it means.”

  As they moved out of the light Julian rolled his eyes; Hammett was off to the races. There was no such word as “coincidence” in his vocabulary; all unexplained events were the result of conspiracy. Julian knew all the signs.

  In a half-whispered monologue that lasted the length of a long city block, Hammett went on about the séance, and Zarah’s part in it.

  At last Julian said, “Archimedes, calm down.”