Julian realized that she was trying to kill her sexual inhibitions. He himself had none.
On his final leave before reporting aboard Enterprise, then on station off the Vietnamese coast, Julian took Caroline out to dinner in New York. He wore his khakis, she was in her disguise—bib overalls, work boots—as a member of the working class. He had to smuggle her into a room in the Dorset Hotel. In bed, with her frail body joined to his enormous one in a narrow single bed, she had screamed, “Don’t die! don’t die! don’t die!” She rolled off his body, and folding herself into a miserable package with her head between her knees and her arms locked around her thighs, had sobbed uncontrollably for a long time. Then she told Julian that she had joined a revolutionary cell while he was in flight training and, only two weeks before, had aborted a baby belonging to one of the other members. “These are committed people, they’ve gone beyond the counter culture into the ultimate reality of total violence,” she told Julian. “They’re the North American Tupamaros. You’ll hear about me, but you’ll never see me again. I’ve become another person, secret from you forever.”
Caroline put on her clothes and left. It was the only time in all their lives together that she had been satisfied to make love to him just once. Years later, Julian learned that the child she had gouged from her womb belonged to Patrick Graham.
4
Patrick Graham shut the window in his Baghdad hotel and took another shower. Shortly afterwards, dressed in a fresh suit, he boarded the first available flight to Beirut. In that glistening city, in another hotel, he was able, with the aid of a pill, to sleep through the afternoon.
He dined that evening with Horace Hubbard. Horace had been in Beirut for a long time and he did himself well. His apartment, reached by a private elevator, occupied the entire top floor of a high glass tower, and he had made the rooftop into a garden, with huge trees growing in tubs and many kinds of roses. The table had been laid in the garden: white damask and blue china and silver as thin as an old voice; a fitful wind blew in from the sea, and the perfume of the blooming flowers came to their nostrils from time to time like a puff of scent left by a woman passing in the darkness. A small fountain splashed beyond the candlelight; Patrick had seen it in daylight on a previous visit and knew that it came from a Roman bath that Horace’s great-uncle had excavated in Cappadocia.
Horace spread his napkin on his lap. Patrick began to ask him questions about Ibn Awad.
“You knew the old fellow pretty well, everyone says.”
“He was a valued customer of the bank,” Horace said. “Years ago I saw quite a lot of him before the oil came in in Hagreb. In his last years, he was pretty solitary.”
Horace was vice president of the Beirut branch of a private New York bank called D. & D. Laux & Co. He was also, as men like Patrick knew, the head of American intelligence for the entire Near East; this was the most important post in the Foreign Intelligence Service after that of Director of Foreign Intelligence.
“Ibn Awad did send Prince Talil to live with you for years while the boy was educated,” said Patrick.
“Hardly to live with me. I helped Talil to set himself up in a house in Beirut and the family consulted me about tutors. We brought people from Harvard and Oxford—professors on sabbatical. They all found Talil an exceptional young man.”
“I saw them cut his head off.”
Horace’s butler, a displaced Taiwanese who spoke neither Arabic nor English, came in with a silver tray: Horace’s version of the deaf-mute of more barbaric times, thought Patrick. Patrick took a piece of veal and some peas. Horace, a less careful eater, helped himself to larger portions. He made no reply to Patrick’s last statement apart from a quick movement in his eyes.
“What was your relationship with the Awad family?” Patrick insisted.
Horace finished chewing and took a sip of wine. It was Horace’s idea of courtesy, Patrick knew, never to betray surprise. He showed interest in everything that was said to him, and he had trained himself to give the impression that the man he was dealing with was obviously more intelligent than he himself. When Horace said an interesting thing, he did so with a faint smile of apology.
“One doesn’t have a relationship with a royal family,” Horace said now with one of those smiles. “One is either admitted into the presence or not; one is either useful or not. I was one of their bankers.” Horace put down his glass and looked about him at the foliage ruffled by the breeze. “I suppose they regarded me as a sort of day servant.”
Patrick laughed. “Was the Awad family as grand as all that, Horace? Up to the time old Ibn Awad was persuaded to let Universal Energy drill for the last deposits of oil in the Near East, he was a tribal chieftain out of the past, counting his wealth in horses and eating sheeps’ eyes.”
“That’s true. But his blood went back to Mohammed. Horses or oil didn’t come into it. Ibn Awad knew just who he was. But of course you knew him, too—better than I did, probably. I remember those amazing television interviews you did with him. It was you who made him into a world figure.”
“Nonsense. He did that himself, simply by being himself. I just brought cameras and microphones to him.”
“He had force of character, all right. But you talk so well, Patrick.” Horace raised his bushy eyebrows. “You made him play beyond his game. I never heard him so eloquent.”
Patrick hadn’t touched his food; he seldom ate. The table, for him, was a workbench. In his own house he could let course after course go cold on his plate while he asked questions of his guests. He heard their most telling answers, sometimes, in their jokes and their silences. He heard something valuable, now, in Horace’s flattery.
To Horace he said, “And now Ibn Awad is dead and Hagreb is a hellhole. I wonder how he’d feel. His life, his teaching, seems to have come to nothing—worse than nothing.”
“I imagine he’d be confident that Islam will triumph in the end. He took a long view of life.”
“It was you, wasn’t it, who talked him into letting Universal Energy in?”
Horace shook his head. “Patrick, you have an exaggerated view of me. I’m just the manager of a small bank. The fact is, nobody could talk Ibn Awad into anything. He made up his own mind, in his own way and in his own time. He waited twenty-five years before letting the first drilling rig into Hagreb.”
“Why did he do it?”
“He told you, on that broadcast of yours. He decided he could use the money from the oil to propagate the faith. That’s pretty much what he did—the mosques, the radio transmitter, the pilgrimages.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean why—all of a sudden, after years of refusing, he decided to let Universal Energy—O. N. Laster, that whole oily crowd, Mallory’s men!—come in.”
The Chinese returned and poured more claret; Horace watched the ruby liquid trickle into his glass and answered a question the man asked in what Patrick supposed was Cantonese.
Horace turned to Patrick and said, “I don’t think Ibn Awad was quite so sensitive to the shades of moral difference among oil cartels as, for instance, you are, Patrick. You ask why he did what he did. I understand the decision came to him in a dream.”
“In a dream? How do you know that?”
“He told me so. Ibn Awad often had dreams and visions. That’s why he stayed so much in the desert—he saw things when he was alone out there.”
“Saw things?”
Horace, sipping Pomerol, looked around at his garden again.
“I may be saying too much. The man is dead.”
“He saw things?”
“And heard them. It’s a common experience of mystics. Ibn Awad would go out into the Hagrebi desert alone and fast and pray, and he’d encounter God and His angels.”
Nothing in Horace’s manner suggested that he saw anything unbelievable in what Ibn Awad believed he saw and heard in the desert. He took another mouthful of food.
“Do you think Ibn Awad believed he was the Mahdi?” Horace was thoughtful.
>
“Maybe. He never said so.”
“A lot of other people said so.”
“I know. He did fit the description—a purified man out of the desert, a great teacher burning with faith. Types like that don’t come along very often.”
“And are dangerous when they do.”
“Well, the world’s never very glad to see messiahs, is it? They all seem to die untimely deaths.”
Patrick pushed his untouched plate away. “Do you believe,” he asked, “that Ibn Awad actually had himself killed by Prince Talil?”
“That was the explanation at the time.”
“But do you believe it?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“You knew him better than anyone.”
“I don’t deserve that compliment. But I did know him. It seemed, to me anyway, perfectly in character for him to do what he did.”
“Why?”
“Why did he do anything he did? God spoke to him.”
“You’re suggesting he was mad.”
Horace sighed. He let a moment go by, turning his wineglass by its stem. “I don’t know what constitutes madness. Ibn Awad was fixed on a single idea, the rebirth of Islam. He killed himself for the idea, I guess, to show the world how much he believed in it.”
“Would he have killed others?”
Horace gave Patrick a mild look. “He killed Talil for it, surely. And he loved the boy above everything in this world.”
“Everyone seems to have loved Talil. The crowd was weeping, grown men were sobbing in that square in Hagreb City, when he was executed. Talil himself was absolutely serene. Did you ever really look at Talil? His face in profile was like Alexander’s on a coin.”
Patrick thought for an instant that he had lost Horace’s attention. The other man’s eyes wandered away.
“You ought to be glad you didn’t have to see Talil’s execution,” Patrick said in his hardest voice. “He was a stranger to me, and even so it was bad enough.” Horace’s gaze turned back to Patrick. He still wore his expression of polite interest. “Something startling has been suggested to me in the past few days,” Patrick said. “I don’t know what to think about it.”
Horace waited for him to go on. His brother Julian had this mannerism too; he never encouraged others to speak, and somehow this made them talk all the more. Patrick wasn’t saying more than he intended to say, but he did not like this trick of the Hubbards’. They watched to see how far into their privacy you’d dare to come. They were the old rich. Their money, their possessions, their manners, were warning signs. Would you know enough to recognize them?
Patrick leaned across the table. His movement made the goblets touch and ring. “Is it conceivable to you, Horace,” he asked, “that Ibn Awad could have been involved somehow with terrorists?”
“Terrorists? What terrorists?”
“I don’t know. Imagine the worst case—that he had some connection with—oh, the Eye of Gaza.”
In the silence before Patrick spoke, Horace had picked up the wine bottle in its wicker basket. Still holding it, waiting to pour, he looked steadily at Patrick.
Patrick said, “I want to be frank with you, Horace. I’m beginning to fear that Ibn Awad was murdered—that he had nothing to do with his own death, that the whole thing was staged. That someone else was behind it. I think someone killed a holy man, and killed Talil, too.”
“The Eye of Gaza?”
“No. Worse than that.”
Patrick knew all the signs of a liar—the unblinking eye, the smiling lips, the confidence surging into the voice, the hand that was a bit too steady. Horace showed none of these; he just looked interested, but at a loss—as if Patrick, as a guest in Horace’s club, had started a political argument with one of the members. He put down the basket with the bottle in it.
“Well,” he said, “anything is possible. But this is quite a leap of intuition, even for you, Patrick. Who on earth have you been talking to?”
“Sources.”
“I hope for everyone’s sake they’re reliable sources.” Horace relaxed in his chair and gave a dry laugh. “You may turn out to be the Mahdi instead of poor old Ibn Awad. If you can convince people around here that he was slaughtered by the infidels you’ll certainly be the cause of a holy war.”
The Chinese returned and cleared the plates. Horace offered no dessert, but pushed back his chair and put his napkin on the table. He led Patrick down the stairs into a sitting room. It was the highest room in the city—no window in Beirut had line of sight on Horace’s apartment. One whole wall was glass, and Patrick, knowing that it must be bulletproof, stepped fearlessly up to it. He could see the line of surf along the beach, and cars, dozens of them, in the streets. This was a sight seen now only in Arab countries. The Near East, because of its oil reserves, bulged with cars and gold, as America once had done.
Horace offered Patrick a Havana cigar. The humidor he held in his hands was a beautiful old thing, inlaid with rare woods and mother-of-pearl. Patrick commented on it. “It belonged to my grandfather,” Horace said. There was a Pissarro on the wall and a hunting carpet that must have been two centuries old, and a Constable, with its unmistakable fleecy English clouds. Horace hadn’t had to buy anything in the room. Patrick, who’d had to pay for everything he owned, knew that. Horace was smiling easily at Patrick, holding the open humidor. Patrick selected a cigar and Horace cut it for him. Patrick put the blunt end into the flame of a wooden match to start it burning before he placed the tip between his lips. He sucked the cigar to get it going.
“Horace, there was something else I wanted to ask you.”
Horace, lighting his own cigar, welcomed the question by opening his eyes a bit wider.
“Do you happen to know,” Patrick asked, “whether Ibn Awad was illiterate?”
Horace exhaled a mouthful of smoke and watched it drift away.
“Illiterate?” he said. “Now that, Patrick, is not a question I would ever have felt comfortable putting to a man in Ibn Awad’s position.”
Next morning, as his SST crossed the ocean, Patrick found himself thinking of Caroline. He had trained himself over the years not to do this, but he had slept badly after he left Horace and he had taken two tranquilizers in the hope of having a nap while the plane took him back to Washington. It was a piece of music coming over the earphones that triggered Patrick’s thoughts—the Trout Quintet. One night, when they were having a revolutionary meeting with the members of the cell they had both belonged to and when they feared, as they always did, that the FBI or the CIA had planted microphones in their hideaway, Caroline had astonished him by sitting down at a battered piano that some earlier tenant had left behind and playing, with a perfect touch, an hour of Schubert; the music was supposed to muffle their words so that the listening devices couldn’t pick them up. Patrick hadn’t known until that moment that Caroline could play. She surrendered secrets to him in the way a frigid woman permits caresses—at bad moments, when it suited her purposes. Thus she told him of the one moment in her life, beyond any others, that had formed her politically. When she was fourteen her parents had taken her, on her birthday, to Lutèce. Something about the restaurant—the glittering decor, the fawning service (her father was an extravagant expense-account spender), the rich unrecognizable food glistening with sauces, like a king’s vomit—put Caroline in a state of rage. She attacked her parents for living as they did while the poor suffered in the streets of New York and all over the world. Her mother said: “We give ten percent of our income to charity. All our lives, even before it was fashionable, we’ve fought for Negro rights, we’ve hated discrimination and injustice. We believe in causes.” Caroline laughed in her face. She went on taunting her parents, and they went on drinking cocktails—two kinds of French wine, champagne with dessert, cognac with their coffee. Caroline glared at them, refusing to eat the treats they ordered for her. With each new dish she hissed, “Hypocrites!” Her mother wept, but Caroline’s father made her stop. At last they we
nt outside. Caroline’s father went to get their car. In a doorway on 50th Street, her mother noticed a female derelict, chattering to herself and hugging her skeletal body in the cold. Caroline’s mother, without so much as a glance at her daughter, removed her sable jacket and gave it to the old woman. The derelict, bony elbows and hips under a shapeless black dress, awakened from her torpor and seized the jacket, examining it like a rat that has come on a bit of good food, and then gathered up her shopping bags and the beautiful fur and scuttled away into the dark. When Caroline’s father came back with the car, the women told him what had happened. At first he said nothing, just drove out of the city in silence. But when they were halfway to Westchester he pulled the car off the Saw Mill River Parkway into a darkened gas station, carefully set the brake, and then, his face contorted in the green glow of the speedometer lamp, turned towards Caroline’s mother, who had fallen asleep beside him, and drove his fist with all his strength into her stomach. The next day he reported the jacket stolen and collected the insurance.
Then Caroline told Patrick about Julian. This happened on the night Julian left for Vietnam. Patrick had known for years about the love affair, but the idea that she would come to him from this lover, this man who was going to Asia to do murder, caused something to break in Patrick. They were lying on a stained mattress on the floor, with the streetlight coming through the sooty panes of the uncurtained window; all the other members of the cell lay about them on the floor in the same room, sleeping or talking or smoking dope. Patrick raised his hand, clenched his fist: he had never struck a human being, but he wanted to kill Caroline. Instead, he raped her. She lay naked, unsmiling. He fell on her, grappling with her unresisting body. No woman had ever excited him as she did. Making love to her, he would shudder and cry out; he felt that his heart was emptying out of his body and into her. When he came to himself, her eyes were open. They always were. He rolled away. Caroline began to masturbate. He heard her in the dark. He could not open his eyes to watch. He heard her quickening breath.
The Better Angels Page 6