Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

  “Zarah must have traveled abroad,” Mallory said.

  “Evidently not. She had no contact with anybody except the tutors and the tribespeople. That was her mother’s whole idea. She didn’t want her to be like her own kind, especially the Christophers, and even more especially, not like her father.”

  “But she seems to be just like him.”

  “Yes, she does,” Philindros said. “So much for planned parenthood.” His nearly inaudible voice was failing him; he cleared his throat in discomfort. Mallory made a gesture. As Philindros understood it would be, it was picked up by a hidden camera, and within seconds a servant appeared with a glass of mineral water on a tray. Gratefully, Philindros took it and drank.

  “I’ll let you go home soon,” Mallory said. “But I don’t understand why none of this is in the data bank. If you know this much, how can the computer draw a blank?”

  Philindros took a sip of his water as he considered how to answer this question. “It’s possible Patchen had the data wiped,” he said at last. “She was with him when he died.”

  “Zarah was with Patchen?”

  Philindros nodded. David Patchen, the last director of the Outfit, the familiar name by which the operational secret intelligence service had formerly been called, had been captured, tortured, and murdered by terrorists five years before. This event had led to the dissolution of the Outfit, on grounds that its secrets had been irreparably compromised by what Patchen had presumably told his torturers. Thereupon the FIS had been created to replace it.

  Although Mallory, as President of the United States, had made the decisions and signed the executive orders and the legislation that made these changes possible, he had never been told what Philindros was now telling him. “Why don’t I know this?” he asked.

  “Because the Outfit itself didn’t know all the details,” Philindros answered. “Patchen ran the whole operation himself, for his own reasons, telling no one inside what he was up to.”

  “What operation? I thought Patchen was kidnapped.”

  “He was. But some people think it was a sting. He set up his own capture.”

  “What for?”

  “To replace the Outfit, which was a worn-out relic of the Cold War, with a new intelligence service, the FIS.”

  “That’s an established fact?”

  “No, but that’s the way things turned out, and it’s the fixed opinion of everyone who knew the way Patchen’s mind worked that he designed it that way.”

  “You mean he and this girl were the only ones in on the operation?”

  “No. We think, though we do not know, that there were others, all Outfit old boys and their buddies.”

  “Who?”

  “The O.G., Paul Christopher. Yeho Stern, formerly head of the Israeli intelligence service, a money manager in New York—Patchen sold a painting to finance the operation. Some paramilitary friends of Zarah’s from the Maghreb who conducted the rescue. I really can’t tell you more, Mr. President, because it’s all speculation.”

  “Was she tortured?”

  Philindros said, “Something like that showed up in the debriefing.” His voice failed altogether; he paused to drink again. “Or so I heard. There’s nothing in the files. It wasn’t an official debriefing.”

  “Not an official debriefing?”

  “Technically there was nothing to debrief her about; she just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong man, Patchen. She was never an agent or an asset of ours. Or anyone else’s.”

  “Then why did she do whatever it was she did for Patchen at the risk of her life?”

  Philindros shrugged; he did not like to be pressed for answers he could not support with hard data. He said, “Genes?”

  “That can’t have been the only factor.”

  “Probably not, but as I said before, it was an old boy thing. The O.G. was always close to the Christophers. Paul Christopher was his godson. He obviously regarded Paul’s daughter as more than a great-goddaughter; he left her his whole estate.”

  “Why doesn’t that show up on the computer? An inheritance is a routine transaction. Why conceal it?”

  “The O.G.’s ways were not a computer’s ways,” Philindros said with a trace of hero worship. “If he designed something to remain undiscovered, it won’t be discovered.”

  “But what was the point of all this?”

  Philindros stood mute. If he knew, as Mallory was sure he must, he was bound by some spy’s oath never to tell. Mallory said, “De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Is that your reply?”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “ ‘Speak only good of the dead.’ ”

  Philindros smiled, a flash of white in a dark face. “That’s one way of putting it.”

  8

  Mallory was excited by the knowledge that there were no known facts about Zarah. Her blank file might mean that she was actually free of the baneful influences that in his opinion had produced in the children of the American intelligentsia a strange compulsion to hate everything young people might normally be expected to love: their species, their families, their country, their culture, their very language. And, of course, themselves. Even while Philindros talked, he decided that he must know this woman better.

  As was his way, Mallory acted immediately on his decision. Thirty minutes after Zarah got home from his dinner party, he rang her doorbell. At first, examining a television image of her caller on the screen of the surveillance system that came with the O.G.’s house, she did not recognize him because he wore a black knitted cap that covered his hair and altered the entire aspect of his face. It was a simple but amazingly effective disguise. As far as she could tell, he was alone, without protection; at least no bodyguards were picked up by the camera over her door.

  “I hope this isn’t inconvenient,” he said when she opened the door. She understood that this was a plain statement of fact; he was being courteous, not trying to make himself charming.

  Zarah stood aside. “Come in.”

  As she led him back through the house, Mallory examined it with a practiced eye. The furniture was good, probably inherited—mostly French and English antiques with a few American pieces. A bronze head with mud-pie features that could only have been done by Daumier stood on a pedestal, and in rooms that opened off the corridor he saw several good paintings, including, again unmistakably, a Monet of the Giverny phase.

  Zarah guided him past two or three unlit rooms to a small sitting room with a bar. Abstract paintings: a Braque—newspaper glued to the canvas and a lopsided cat clawing a violin—that was entirely new to him, two pieces by a painter unknown to Mallory, and an arrangement of cascading terra-cotta cubes like a hillside village in Spain that was probably by Juan Gris. Hanging over the cold fireplace was a portrait in oils and tempera of two women, one fair and the other dark, seated side by side on a bench in a lush garden. Their stiff mirror pose suggested that they might be dolls or manikins instead of living persons. They wore identical white dresses and red shoes. The painter had exaggerated the size of their eyes, making these the focus of the composition. Mallory was strongly drawn to this picture. He read the signature aloud: “S. Zaentz, 1932. Who was that?”

  Zarah said, “A friend of my grandparents’ in Berlin.” She indicated the pictures Mallory had not recognized. “Those are some of his later works.”

  But Mallory was interested only in the double portrait. “This one is wonderful. Why isn’t he better known?”

  “He suffered interruptions.”

  “Why?”

  “He was a Jew in Nazi Germany.”

  Mallory did not ask for further clarification of this statement but returned his attention to the painting; the computer would tell him whatever he wanted to know about Zaentz later on.

  “I don’t like pointing out a family resemblance twice in one evening,” he said. “But the figure on the left—”

  “My grandmother, Lori Christopher. The other woman was her best friend. Meryem. M
y godmother.”

  “Your godmother was not a German?”

  “She was a Ja’wab—Berber from the Maghreb.”

  “A Muslim in Berlin in the thirties?”

  “Not exactly. She was an unusual person.”

  Mallory leaned closer to the canvas. “There’s something strange about the women.”

  “Look again,” Zarah said. “The painter gave them each other’s eyes.”

  Mallory leaned closer. The fair woman had dark eyes, the brown woman blue ones.

  “I see it now,” he said. “Why did the painter do that?”

  “Because they saw things in the same way. At least Zaentz thought so. But there were other reasons. It was painted as the frontispiece for one of my grandfather’s novels, which was about Lori and Meryem and him. The book was an example of what he called ‘reality as fiction.’ It was done as an experiment. Everything in it actually happened to the three of them, but by design. They were following an outline written by Grandfather, who then wrote down what happened.”

  “What was the result of the experiment?”

  “It destroyed their lives. But that’s not in the book.”

  “Then I must read it.”

  “You have time for such things?”

  He turned away from the picture. “In an organized life there’s time for everything important.”

  Zarah suppressed a smile.

  Mallory said, “Philindros told me a little about you after you left—your life with your mother, the connection to the O.G. But he knew only a little.”

  Ah, thought Zarah, now comes the cross-examination. He would be disconcerted by the exercise. Americans of the scholastically successful class always were, because they could not locate points of reference in her answers to their questions. They themselves were mostly the children or grandchildren of men who had broken out of the working class after World War II by attending college on the G.I. Bill. Consequently they equated social status with academic credentials. On meeting her they wanted to discover where she came from in the States—What did her father do? Where had she gone to school? What was her career? Whom did she know?—and found out that she was from another planet. Living as they did in such a vast and artificial society, they had no way of knowing one another except by chance meeting; they married strangers and lived in places where everyone was a stranger. Consequently they were always demanding to examine credentials and asking, on first meeting, the brusque questions that other nationalities put to foreigners at the frontier to make sure, they had no criminal purpose. This lust for the personal, for the familiar, for passwords and countersigns, was a national affliction. No one in this strange and constantly changing caste of arrivistes who depended on diplomas instead of ancestry could ever be quite sure that he, or especially she, was not conversing with a liar.

  However, Mallory surprised her by letting her ask the first question.

  She said, “What do you want to know that Jack Philindros didn’t tell you?”

  “Nothing,” Mallory said. “What I already know is enough; as far as that goes, what I knew before I talked to him was enough.”

  “You’re satisfied with very little.”

  “The rest will emerge with time.”

  “ ‘With time’? Am I about to become part of your organized life?”

  “That’s my hope,” Mallory said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “It is?” She was amused. “Is this a draft notice? Will there a physical examination?”

  Mallory changed the subject. “You’ve done the house up very nicely,” he said. “It doesn’t seem as gloomy as before. Or as cluttered. Do you spend much time here?”

  “No,” Zarah replied. “I’m in Washington for my half sister’s birthday. She’ll be fourteen on Friday.”

  “Another half sibling, like Horace and Julian.”

  “It runs in the family. All the Christophers are half Hubbards and vice versa. They—we—have been marrying each other for a long time.”

  “There are no single Hubbards your age?”

  “None.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  This remark was some sort of declaration. Of what, Zarah did not know, but she received it with neutral good manners. It was clear that he hoped for more than good manners. Examining Mallory’s earnest face, she became aware that he had extraordinary eyes. His dark-blue—nearly black—gaze was surprisingly benevolent. Her father had the same sort of eyes and so had Lori, judging by the ones Zaentz had given to Meryem in the painting. A strange idea came into her head: If she reminded Mallory of Paul Christopher, Mallory reminded her of the same person—not in looks, not in voice, not in his way of thinking, but in the calm intelligence that emanated from him as an almost visible aura, and in his deep sadness. When at last she had met her father after a lifetime of imagining what he was like, she felt that she had suddenly been granted the full use of the other hemisphere of her brain, which had hitherto been inaccessible to her. Knowing her father at last, she knew twice as much about herself.

  Nor was that all. On very first sight she had discerned in her father something that she could only call an absence. She had thought that this must be the psychic space that had formerly been occupied by his mother, now empty forever. When the Gestapo had arrested Lori before her son’s eyes when he was fifteen years old, the brutal parting, followed almost certainly by her murder, had created within him a void that could not be filled. She now perceived the same emptiness in Mallory, who had recently seen Susan Grant murdered before his eyes. A tear ran down her cheek.

  Mallory said, “Have I said something to upset you?”

  Zarah shook her head, her hair moving in the silken fashion that Macalaster had noted, as if bound together by light or electricity. “No,” she said. “I was thinking about my father.”

  9

  “You think you’re dying but everyone else thinks it’s funny.” That was what somebody from Hollywood, Macalaster could not remember who, had said about jealousy. In his neurotic profession and marriage he had observed jealousy in nearly all its guises, and had always regarded it as a particularly maddening form of stupidity. Yet while driving home from the dinner party at Mallory’s, he felt the stab of dread, the rush of suspicion, the panicky fear of ignominious discovery that are the symptoms of the emotion. This was not, he told himself, a wholly irrational response to the situation into which he had blundered by inviting Zarah to accompany him.

  Macalaster was a trained observer. He had understood the effect Zarah Christopher had on Franklin Mallory. In making his goodbyes, Mallory had been more cordial to him than ever before, shaking his hand, making an adroitly flattering joke, suggesting an early meeting. A less practiced student of the behavior of the rich and famous might have thought Mallory was trying to make him look good in front of his date. But Macalaster knew better. The son of a bitch was thanking him for what he took to be a vassal’s gift of a golden woman on whom he could exercise droit du seigneur at his leisure.

  Macalaster cursed his own stupidity as he drove down Foxhall Road at forty-five miles an hour in his ten-day-old Jaguar convertible. As he came around a curve he collided with a two-hundred-pound whitetail buck that leaped out of nowhere straight into his headlights. The impact of the inflating air bag twisted his wire-rim glasses out of shape and gave him a bloody nose. The deer, a ten-point buck, sustained two broken legs and thrashed piteously in the roadway as it was savaged by the pack of pedigreed Rottweilers, Labradors, and spaniels that had been pursuing it. The environmental police arrived after half an hour and fired a lethal dart into the neck of the half-devoured creature. The Jaguar, with 134 miles on the odometer, looked as though it had hit a tree. It was after midnight by the time Macalaster finished dealing with the consequences of this episode, which included a Breathalyzer test, a two-hundred-dollar charge for towing his wrecked car to the body shop, and a summons for “depriving a wild animal of a safe habitat.”

  Yet when he arrived home in a taxi, all the wind
ows of his house glowed with electric light. Owing to Brook’s apocalyptic worries about the environment and his own tendency to lurk in his third-floor study or read in bed by the light of a single lamp, he had never before seen the place fully illuminated. Perhaps it never had been, he thought, as the taxi pulled up to the curb. Then he felt another stab of anxiety, this time for Manal. Had something happened to her? He rushed to the front door. It was triple-locked. This, too, was unprecedented. Did he have all three keys?

  Struggling with the locks, Macalaster looked through the window into the bright interior. Nothing moved. Finally the door opened. Monophonic Indian music—sitars and percussion instruments repeating a single melodic line—played on the stereo system. Incense burned. The smell of jasmine tea mingled with the wafting incense. Nothing unusual about all this: these were among Manal’s favorite things. Two Himalayan cats, also Manal’s, patrolled the dining-room table, sniffing the remains of dinner—four soiled plates, four glasses, a half-empty bottle of water, the uneaten end of a flat loaf of unleavened bread. Four for dinner? Had Manal had a party without asking his permission? Macalaster called out her name. She did not answer. He went into the living room to switch off the music. Every table, chair, and sofa was littered with law books and other volumes lying open on their faces, tattered newspapers with their pages full of holes where articles had been clipped, and long streamers of computer printouts.

  This was not Manal’s sort of mess, but perhaps she could explain it. Macalaster inhaled, intending to shout her name. Then he remembered that Archimedes Hammett was his houseguest. This was his kind of mess. He switched off the stereo and went from room to room, calling not Manal’s name—he supposed she was long since in bed—but Hammett’s. No one answered, and he was about to go upstairs to make sure Manal was all right when he heard the murmur of voices in the den. He opened the door and found Manal, Hammett, and Slim and Sturdi Eve, the inseparable ecolawyers who looked after Hammett’s food, seated in a circle around the brown-paper Ouija board.