Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

  Olmedo gave her a slow, solemn look. “The price may be somewhat higher than that, Dr. MacKenzie,” he said.

  Rose, who had been wolfing the other half of the huge corned beef sandwich, ignored the warning; perhaps she did not even hear it over the noise of her own chewing. She stood up and peeled off a sweater, further tousling her heavy hair. She and Horace were still in their sailing clothes, layers of wool beneath thick turtleneck sweaters, and even though the heat was turned low because the building was closed, her forehead shone with perspiration.

  “The best way to begin may be for you to read this,” Olmedo said. “It’s a copy of the material given to Lockwood by Franklin Mallory.”

  Horace let Rose do the reading. She accomplished this with amazing speed, licking her forefinger and flicking the pages as she scanned them. Finally she said, “We’re familiar with these data.”

  “Then I must ask you this,” Olmedo said. “To the best of your knowledge, is any of this inaccurate in any particular?”

  Rose said, “No, of course not. It came from the memory of the FIS computer.”

  “So the two of you actually did all the things you are described as doing?”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  Horace smiled indulgently. “Wait a minute, Rose. You weren’t in on absolutely everything.”

  “No. I ran the computer. I can speak to that. And what you have here is accurate in that respect, as far as it goes.”

  “You remember every detail? There’s a great deal of data in that file.”

  “No, I don’t remember every detail. All I did was keyboard commands, and I can’t possibly remember all of them because I was improvising. This particular task had never been done before. There was no need to remember what I was doing; all that mattered was the result. The computer does the remembering. That’s what it’s made to do, in the simplest possible terms—remember everything.”

  “And it’s never mistaken in its memory of events?”

  “By definition, no. It can’t be.”

  “It cannot be corrupted? Data cannot be changed?”

  “The computer can’t be corrupted. Data can be. But as this file demonstrates, the computer remembers everything it is told to do. What we did was substitute invented data for what you might call ‘real’ data, quote unquote.”

  “False data.”

  “A human being might use that term. To a computer, data are data. It has no capacity for value judgments, no way of differentiating between the qualities you call true and false. I told it something. I told it what to do with what I told it. It did it. That’s what it remembers. In human terms, what has happened here is that the computer has been induced by a hypnotist to recall from dormant memory—from its subconscious, so to speak—what it knows about this particular sequence of events.”

  Olmedo said, “Would you say it has told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

  Rose smiled the same knowing smile she had given McGraw in the elevator. To her, computers were what Samoans had been to Margaret Mead, a happier breed about whom she knew more secrets than she was prepared to betray. “Well,” she said, “nothing but the truth, certainly. As for the rest … ”

  She looked sidelong at Horace. Something passed between them—a flicker of conjugal conspiracy, a warning, a signal. McGraw saw this happen, and so did Olmedo. With a sudden look of alarm, Rose leaped to her feet and said, “Oh-oh. Ladies’ room.”

  McGraw took her arm; prisoners who suddenly had to go to the bathroom made him apprehensive, especially if they were ex-FIS employees. “Come with me.”

  “All right,” said Rose, her bright eyes filled with urgency. “But walk fast.” She clapped her free hand over her mouth and accompanied him out of the room at a brisk walk.

  Horace smiled after her, and though he was too much the gentleman to mention Rose’s distress, a husbandly look of amused concern lingered on his windburned face.

  Olmedo said, “Dr. MacKenzie seemed on the point of telling me something significant.”

  Horace looked interested but slightly baffled by this observation. “Did you think so?” he asked.

  “Yes, I thought so. Why did you stop her, sir?”

  Before answering, Horace looked for a long moment at the carpet, a moderately good Heriz. “I thought it was the corned beef sandwich that stopped her,” he said. “But it is true—perhaps you’ve found this out in your own work—it is true that people who’ve been in the business of keeping secrets, as Rose has been, often don’t know how to stop themselves once they start telling what they know.”

  Olmedo nodded. “That’s so.”

  Horace nodded in eager agreement; he and Olmedo understood each other on this important consideration. “Now, Mr. Olmedo,” he said, leaning forward confidingly, as if doing something he had done many, many times before, “let’s you and me get to the crux of this matter.”

  He took a tape recorder out of his pocket and handed it to Olmedo.

  “You may want to sample this before you hear my offer,” he said. “Use the earpiece, please.”

  7

  Lockwood said, “He wants what?”

  “Immunity from prosecution for Julian and Rose MacKenzie,” Olmedo replied. They were alone in the Lincoln sitting room; the lawyer had things to discuss with his client that could not be said in the presence of a witness, not even Norman Carlisle Blackstone.

  “He thinks Julian’s got something to worry about?”

  “Apparently the whole thing was Julian’s idea. He asked Horace to do it.”

  “In my name?”

  “No.” Olmedo paused. “But for your sake.”

  “For my sake? In what way?”

  “To preserve you from a charge of murder in the Ibn Awad case.”

  Lockwood gave Olmedo a long look of black and silent resentment. Finally he said, “That’s what Julian said?”

  Olmedo nodded. “According to his half brother, yes.”

  “Those were his words?”

  “Yes, sir. I took them down in writing.”

  “You took them down in writing.”

  Lockwood’s voice was flat, as if he wished to hear these scarcely believable words in his own voice before accepting that they had actually been spoken aloud. His mobile face was expressionless for the first time in Olmedo’s experience. He fell into a lengthy silence. Olmedo waited patiently for the President to break it. Finally Lockwood said, “So now that you’ve got Horace, what do you think you’ve got?”

  “We have an eyewitness who can testify as to your complete innocence in regard to the theft of the election, Mr. President.”

  “Oh. I thought maybe you still thought you had that sacrificial lamb you were talking about just now. Is Horace willing to be led to the slaughter?”

  “He is willing to testify that you knew nothing about the theft of the election, and that all knowledge of it was kept from you as a matter of deliberate choice.”

  “Whose choice?”

  “Julian’s. Horace told him you wouldn’t agree. Julian replied … ” Olmedo took an index card from his pocket and read from it: “ ‘He won’t have the opportunity. Philindros told him about Ibn Awad. Was that a good idea?’ ”

  “Where’d you get those words?” Lockwood held out his hand for the index card, but Olmedo put it back into his pocket.

  He said, “Horace recorded the conversation.”

  “He taped his own brother?”

  Olmedo made no response. Lockwood’s eyes narrowed. His breathing was audible. His unshod feet were propped on an ottoman between them, and Olmedo noted a small hole about the size of a fingernail in the heel of the President’s right sock.

  Lockwood said, “Are you sure Horace will keep his side of the bargain?”

  “Within the bounds of predictability, yes, I think he will. I need hardly tell you, of all people, Mr. President, that one can never be sure what any human being will do when it comes right down to it.”

  Lockwood nodded cu
rtly. “This guy may be playing some other game altogether,” he said.

  Olmedo indicated more interest in this obvious thought than in fact he felt; he was discovering that dealing with a President fostered sycophancy. He said, “In what way might that be true, sir?”

  “Those goddamn spies lie for a living. Horace is an international grand master of false witness. You do realize that?”

  Olmedo nodded soberly. “I’ll bear that in mind,” he said. “But he’s not the first grand master of that particular craft that I’ve ever met.”

  “Old Horace also thinks he’s the original invisible man,” Lockwood said. “Maybe he’s got an idea he can make what he did look like something it wasn’t. A noble deed. Outwit everybody. Get out of it.”

  “How could any sane person, even a spy, think such a thing under the present circumstances, Mr. President?”

  “You think stealing a presidential election is the act of a sane man?”

  “I hear what you’re saying to me,” Olmedo said. “But if he does not say why he did it, if he cannot be induced to say why for reasons of honor—”

  “Honor?”

  “He has his own definition of the word. Most people do. But if he keeps the bargain, then his motive is irrelevant to the case.”

  “To hell with his motive,” Lockwood said. “I didn’t kill Ibn Awad or anybody else.”

  Did Lockwood believe this? It was possible. “As you wish, Mr. President,” Olmedo said. “But you should know that Horace Hubbard has your voice on tape, giving Philindros the order to kill this man.”

  “How the hell could he? I didn’t know a thing about it till they told me what they’d done three years after the fact.”

  They locked eyes. Once again Olmedo nodded, touching his ear. Did this mean he had actually heard the tape played? Lockwood wondered—his curiosity might as well have been spoken aloud, he took such pains to conceal it—but he did not ask. His gaze was steady, controlled, opaque. It admitted nothing and betrayed no emotion. In other words, the President of the United States looked like any other guilty man at the moment when his alibi breaks down; Olmedo had observed such men in such moments by the score.

  Olmedo shrugged. Lockwood said, “Did you hear it?”

  “Yes, sir. Not by choice, but there was no way to avoid it. He just switched it on.”

  “I see. So what do we do about this?”

  “We play the game or forfeit it,” Olmedo said. “The decision, of course, is yours.”

  “And if we play, what happens?”

  “Who can predict? I think Horace stole the election not for his brother’s reasons but for his own—to protect the FIS. Perhaps he was afraid that the truth about Ibn Awad would come out if Mallory was elected, and that if it did, it would be the end for American intelligence.”

  “Small fucking loss.”

  “You know infinitely more about that than I ever could, Mr. President. What Horace hopes to do by coming forward is to create such a diversion by telling all about the election, and thereby demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are innocent of all wrongdoing, that the crime of which he, at least, believes you are guilty—the premeditated murder of Ibn Awad—will never be revealed, much less tried in any American court. Unless, of course, there really was reason to fear what Mallory might know, what evidence he might have—”

  “Such as what?”

  “The obvious possibility is that there is more than one copy of the tape.”

  Lockwood grunted. “Anything’s possible,” he said, “including this: What if the tape is a fake? Those spooks can fake anything.”

  “If a reasonable doubt could be raised on that point, the jury might consider you innocent.”

  “Do you?”

  Before replying, Olmedo stared fixedly at the fleck of skin that showed through the hole in Lockwood’s sock. He was strangely worried by this little sign of self-neglect. More than any of the many indications of Lock-wood’s mortality that he had observed this evening, it seemed to confirm that he was in the presence of a man who was near the end of his resources.

  Olmedo answered Lockwood’s question like a lawyer, from the head, not the heart. “I’ve told you, sir, that when in court I argue from the known facts and from the law,” he said, “never from conviction.”

  “Whatever that means,” Lockwood said. “Well, I can’t do anything for Horace Hubbard, much less for myself. You’d better talk to Clark and Attenborough about immunizing the other two. But don’t be surprised if you don’t hear no cries of eager delight.”

  Olmedo nodded soberly. Like Blackstone, he was not entirely sure whether he was supposed to be amused by Lockwood’s deliberate use of bad language. including bad grammar.

  8

  To Zarah Christopher, Polly Lockwood said, “You were an only child, dear, just like your mother was?”

  “Yes,” said Zarah, “but I wasn’t lonely. There were lots of other children to play with in the village.”

  “You must have stood out, being the only American.”

  Zarah was used to questions of this kind. “I suppose so,” she said pleasantly, “but no one ever mentioned it.”

  “Sounds like you grew up with angels, dear.”

  “Among friends, anyway.”

  “That was nice, being so hidden away from all your own kind. Your mother was a solitary child, born in the Great Depression, when there were hardly any children at all coming into the world, and she was all alone in that great big old house with hardly even a colored child her age around the place because your grandparents had her so late in life. She was always doing solitary things—playing the piano, riding, talking to the dogs. She used to sit up in a big old hickory tree in the home pasture and read poetry. She was such a romantic sight, like a wood nymph, with that long yellow hair down her back and those pretty legs dangling down.”

  Like Zarah’s mother, Polly dropped her final gs and talked with a Southern belle’s dazed amusement when she was being polite to company or talking about life in the Bluegrass country. The two women were seated on a sofa before a low table, drinking oolong tea and eating cucumber sandwiches. The invitation to tea at the White House, mentioned in passing at Macalaster’s dinner party, had been tendered that morning by a member of the First Lady’s staff. Zarah had been about to refuse because she had planned to meet Franklin Mallory at five that afternoon to look at some pictures he had given anonymously to the National Gallery. But the woman on the telephone had said, “Ms. Christopher, it is not customary to hesitate when you are invited to the family quarters.”

  “There really should be cake and cookies,” Polly said, offering a cucumber sandwich, “but nobody wants to be pleasingly plump anymore. You certainly don’t seem to have that tendency. The Kirkpatricks were always lean, of course. Did your mother ever put on an extra ounce?”

  “I don’t think so. But she hardly ate and never touched alcohol, and she rode in the morning and played the piano for two or three hours every afternoon, so she got plenty of exercise.”

  “She rode in the Sahara Desert? In all that heat?”

  “We were in the mountains, and in winter it’s cool even on the desert floor. She loved to race ostriches.”

  “Ostriches?”

  “They run faster than a horse and a whole lot farther, always in an absolutely straight line. No horse can possibly stay with them, so there was no possibility of ever catching them, let alone harming them. It was better than fox hunting, Mother said.”

  “My goodness.”

  Behind them, suddenly, Lockwood’s resounding voice said, “Honey?”

  “Here he is,” Polly said. “Frosty, you remember Cathy Kirkpatrick’s girl Zarah.”

  “Sure do; that’s why I came upstairs,” Lockwood replied. “How do, Miss Zarah. Polly, are those poor limp little things with the crust cut off sandwiches?” He picked up three of them and ate them in rapid succession, then grinned at Polly. “May I have another, Mother?” He ate four more, chewing and swa
llowing vigorously as he dragged a fragile Louis XV chair across the rug and dropped his weight into it, facing the women. “Miss Zarah, if compliments to ladies were not strictly forbidden under the treaty between my administration and the Feminists’ Republic of America, I’d tell you that you’re looking mighty pretty. How’ve you been?”

  Smiling, as she knew she was expected to do, Zarah said, “I’ve been well, Mr. President. I hope you have been, too.”

  Lockwood reached for another handful of sandwiches, the last on the plate. “Me?” he said. “I’m keeping one nostril above the Dismal Swamp. Just barely. Is there anything to drink besides that tea, Polly? Can you order me up a Coc’-Cola? I’d appreciate it.”

  A servant appeared, apparently in answer to a hidden bell; Polly ordered the drink and it was brought on a silver tray, in the can, the way Lockwood liked it. He popped it open and took a long swig.

  “We were talking about Zarah’s family down in the Bluegrass,” Polly said.

  “I didn’t know them,” Lockwood said. “Didn’t know there was such a thing as a sandwich made out of cucumbers, either, until I met Polly. Tell me all about the Kirkpatricks, Zarah.”

  “I didn’t know them, either,” Zarah said.

  As soon as these words were spoken, Lockwood’s face took on a look of intense interest. “Is that a fact?” he said. “Your own grandfolks?” But there was no glimmer of true curiosity in his eyes, and Zarah realized that his reaction was a politician’s reflex; over the years he had learned to feign interest in others. Without changing expressions, he suddenly gave up the pretense and wiped a drop of mayonnaise from his lower lip with a knuckle.

  “I’m tired out, damnit,” he said, and closed his eyes.

  He remained so for several moments, his head thrown back, his legs sprawled before him. Watching maternally, Polly kept complete silence, and took Zarah’s hand in a tight grip as if to hold her in place in case she mistook Lockwood’s behavior for a signal to leave. The ticking of a clock could be heard, a most unusual sound in America; when, after a while, it whirred and struck the quarter hour, Lockwood opened his eyes. For a long moment he gazed intently at Zarah, as if trying to remember whether he had ever seen her before. She submitted calmly to this scrutiny. It did not make her in the least uncomfortable. There was no male interest in the examination, not even any personal interest—nor, as far as she could judge, emotion of any kind. He seemed blank, spent, indifferent. Was this the same man who five minutes before had been gobbling sandwiches and making flirtatious jokes? The change was mystifying.