The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  “Is Emily a trustworthy source?” asked Horace.

  “When she’s working, yes. She sees right into people. It amazed me, the amount she knew about me after a week. She wrote things that I recognized to be the truth about myself, but hadn’t perceived before.”

  “That’s quite a gift in a journalist,” Horace said. “It must be an uncomfortable thing in marriage.”

  “No. It only works when she has no emotional attachment. As soon as love entered the picture I became a mystery to her. Odd. I don’t understand it.”

  “How are you going to handle Graham?”

  Julian’s face closed. Even his brother had no business in this chamber of his life.

  The two of them had spent hours discussing the assassination, Julian probing for details and more details. As they talked, a change had come over Julian. He had got used to the stench of the dissecting room, the flaccid body of the subject on the slab, the sight of diseased organs. Where, in the beginning, he had covered his mouth and nose with a handkerchief and stared in horror, he now grasped the scalpel firmly and laid open the abdominal cavity, naming the muscles and guts as he slashed them, calling on Horace’s greater skill when it was needed to find a nerve that was not quite where it should be. Julian had lost his revulsion, and then his fear. Horace wasn’t so sure that he would ever overcome his foreboding. Few did: even the professor of anatomy, munching a fresh pear as he observes the excision of a tumor, knows in his subconscious that only a weak arc of electricity, the voltage in the brain, separates him—hungry and hearty and rubicund—from the gray mutilated cadaver.

  “The President might talk to Patrick,” Julian said.

  “That’s quite a risk.”

  “Letting Patrick fester is a worse risk. Lockwood’s instinct is always to tell the truth.”

  “That can be a perilous instinct. The world remembers what Ibn Awad seemed to be when he was alive. If Lockwood tells the truth, he’ll have to speak ill of the dead.”

  “He knows that.”

  “Does he know it’s suicidal?”

  Julian didn’t want to speak about Lockwood’s feelings. On the other hand, he needed help from a mind like his own. There was no other mind like that, now that their father was dead, except Horace’s.

  “I’m not sure. I’m not sure he cares. It’s possible he thinks he’s not worthy to be President anymore.”

  “Because he prevented a holocaust?”

  Julian hit the top of his desk, hard, with his bony hand. “Where’s the proof of that? Where are the bombs? Where is the evidence? Lockwood has no case except that he acted in blind faith on the suspicions of the FIS.”

  “He acted on a certitude. Jack Philindros doesn’t report suspicions as facts.”

  Julian’s telephone flashed. For once he ignored it.

  “Horace,” he said. “You’ve got to find those bombs for me.”

  Horace sighed; they had been over this before. “You have the whole trail of proof,” he said. “The purchase of the plutonium. We have the man who sold it, and he’ll talk to Graham. We have the technicians who made the bombs; they’ll talk to Graham. All these people work for money. You have—”

  “I have nothing unless I have the bombs. The actual bombs, Horace, physical, tangible evidence that Ibn Awad truly had them, and truly meant to blow up Jerusalem or New York with them.”

  The telephone was still blinking. Julian threw a switch and talked to a man who had just learned that Susan Grant, Franklin Mallory’s assistant, had met O. N. Laster, the president of Universal Energy, in a borrowed empty house in San Francisco; there were photographs of the two of them entering and leaving the house separately. Susan Grant had been wearing a black wig. Julian listened impatiently. But when he responded, his voice was courteous.

  To Horace, though, he muttered, “Fool!”

  “I thought you didn’t run surveillance on your opposition.”

  “We don’t. I can’t control every zealot in the party. That man is a skulker. It’s his hobby. It was a man like him who…”

  Julian stopped. Horace had no need to know where the information about Mallory’s plot to steal Canada had come from, or how it had got into Patrick Graham’s hands. Not even Lockwood knew that.

  Julian came back, tenaciously, to the subject of the bombs.

  “There must be some way,” he said. “Horace, damn it, you and Philindros got us into this.”

  “We didn’t think you’d have to defend it in public.”

  “Do you think we can?”

  “No.”

  “Well, we’re .going to have to. There is a way. All I want, Horace, is a straw for Patrick to grasp. He’ll swim the Atlantic for Lockwood, you heard what Emily just said on the phone. But I have to give him something he can hold on to.”

  “I’ve given you all we have, Julian. The truth.”

  The President buzzed for Julian. He stood up. “What I want, what I need, is better information,” he said to his brother. “I know it must exist. Go where you have to go, do what you have to do. But, Horace, get it.” He put his hand on the door leading into the Oval Office.

  “Don’t you feel any responsibility for this man?” he asked. “Don’t you see what losing Lockwood would mean?”

  Julian went through the door. While it was still open, Horace heard the President’s voice and his brother’s—Lockwood’s loud, Julian’s a murmur. Horace knew what he had known all along: that Philindros was right. Julian would ruin himself, ruin their name, ruin the FIS, for Lockwood.

  “I’m damned if you will,” said Horace to the closed door into the Oval Office; and, smiling at Julian’s secretary as he passed through her clamorous office, he sauntered out of the White House.

  11

  Emily never accepted food or drink from a subject; it was a reporter’s principle. But now she had all she needed about Patrick Graham. There was no further need to watch what he did, record what he said; he was just an acquaintance again. She could write the story. When Patrick asked her to dine with him on their last evening in San Francisco, she accepted.

  Emily knew, too, that there was almost no chance that Patrick would try again to have her; they were taking a midnight flight to Washington, and before they left for the restaurant they checked out of their rooms at the Fairmont and sent their bags ahead of them to the airport. Before she left the hotel, Emily tried again to reach the physician to whom she’d given a sample of her urine for a pregnancy test. She left the name of the restaurant Patrick was taking her to with the answering service.

  The restaurant was French. Patrick was well known there; the owner sent wine to their table and the chef served the entree himself. It was something he had invented for the occasion, and he stood near the table in his kitchen whites, watchful while Patrick took the first taste.

  “Exquisite, Claude,” said Patrick.

  “So kind, Mr. Graham. May I name it for you?”

  They were speaking in French, but Emily understood what they were saying—or, rather, construed the meaning of their simple words by comparing them to the ones she remembered from schoolgirl Latin and French.

  “I’m honored,” Patrick replied. “But will you name it instead for the lady?”

  “Done. Loup de mer jolie Madame.”

  The chef bowed and Patrick told Emily in English what had happened. She thanked the chef, who kissed the air an inch from her hand. Waiters in black tail coats alighted in flocks at their table; dirty dishes were wafted away, crumbs were brushed up as soon as they fell on the linen cloth, each sip of wine was replaced as it was taken from the glass. Patrick joshed the waiters. He enjoyed the fuss. Emily stopped herself from getting out her notebook. This was private, off the record. The scene did not please her; Julian would never have allowed this sort of attention to be paid to him. No one who knew him would have tried. Julian didn’t even like to be recognized in public places, and the headwaiters they knew had learned not to address him by name when he came in. Julian’s way, Emily knew,
was as bad a pretension as Patrick Graham’s, but she preferred it.

  There was something attractive about Patrick. She understood why he had all the girls he wanted. His fame might be an aphrodisiac, but there were things about him that would have coaxed women into his bed if he had been unknown and poor. Emily herself cared little for looks in men, and Patrick’s handsome face, his perfect clothes, his well-kept body meant less to her than they might have to another woman. He had beautiful hands with long tapered fingers, and the good sense not to spoil them with rings.

  The quality in Patrick that moved Emily was his shyness. He fought to hide it, but it came to the surface all the time. Charlotte was right. For all his fame and success, Patrick wasn’t quite sure of himself. At some time, thought Emily, he must have lost something that he loved and wanted very much. He feared that it might happen again. Emily imagined that Patrick must be a desperate lover; he would want the woman to like him best of all the men she’d known. There was no glimmer of this trait in Julian; he had never had a woman until she loved him. Who, then, was incomplete—Julian or Patrick?

  Patrick spoke to Emily about paintings. Most of his conversation was about objects, and she had never, in her research, quite managed to break through this barrier. He didn’t like to talk about people; the men and women he met and interviewed in his work were the raw material of his profession. He lost interest in them as soon as he was through with them. Julian had said once, when he and Emily were walking home from a dinner party at the Grahams’, that Patrick and Charlotte had no friends apart from one another, only contacts; Julian thought that was the nature of life in Washington. It was the nature of life in the modern world; somehow, before Emily was born, people had got separated from one another. Before Julian she had never felt attached to any other human. Even her lovers broke away from her during the very fall into pleasure, she could feel them go into themselves, into a blackness where she couldn’t follow. As a child, and even now, she loved books and films about simple people in old America, going west in wagons, making farms in the wilderness, facing hardships, loving a little knot of family.

  Patrick broke her train of thought. “That’s a handsome Sargent, the young woman in the field of black, that you and Julian have,” he said.

  “Julian’s grandmother. Her first husband killed himself when she was twenty-three, no one ever knew why. She was still in mourning when the picture was painted. She married a Hubbard afterwards, and had Julian’s father by him.”

  “She was as romantic as she looks, then.”

  “Yes. The Hubbards went in for tragic romance in their palmy days.”

  “Do you have things like that in your family history?”

  “Everyone does. In our family we call suicides and people who run away with other people’s husbands ‘the fools.’ A name will come up. ‘Ah,’ we’ll say, ‘that was one of the fools.’”

  Patrick was given a note by one of the waiters; he read it, then glanced down the row of tables. Near the end, alone, sat Clive Wilmot.

  “Speaking of which.”

  “Of which what?”

  “Fools. Clive Wilmot wants to join us for coffee and cognac.”

  “Should I know him?”

  “No. Waiter, please tell the gentleman that we’re sorry but we have a plane to catch.”

  But it was already too late to escape. Wilmot, carrying a bottle of French brandy in his hand, was approaching their table. In his wake came the nervous headwaiter, protesting.

  “Glasses, man,” Clive said. “Three of those great balloons to put the brandy in.”

  “It’s all right, Jean-Pierre,” Patrick said. “Clive. I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “My dear Patrick, you never expect to see me anywhere. That’s my value to your life. I introduce the element of chance; I might be anywhere, spying, breaking in on trysts. Lovely girl you have tonight. Eyes as blue as a Swiss bank note. That’s meant as a great compliment. One adores what one doesn’t have. As water is to a thirsty Hottentot grubbing for roots in the sands of the Kalahari, so are Swiss bank notes to the Englishman. I am an Englishman, my dear. That excuses everything.”

  Patrick didn’t introduce Emily. Clive sat down opposite them in a chair brought by one of the waiters and put his elbows on the narrow table. It tipped towards him and Patrick, with a deft movement of both hands, saved his wineglass and Emily’s from spilling.

  “Marvelous, you Yanks are all such athletes,” said Clive. The glasses came and he poured brandy into them. “This isn’t bad stuff, considering where we are. Bought it with secret funds, Patrick. Be warned—it may contain a drug to control the mind. You’ll tell me everything—after the first sip, this young woman’s name, let us say.”

  “Emily Barker, Clive Wilmot.”

  “Howdeedo. Are you a San Franciscan? No? Too bad. I had my first topless shoeshine in San Francisco. Can’t forget it. Aureoles and nipples like hypnotic pink eyes at the ends of those great gyrating globes. Where is she now?”

  “Have you been observing the local madness?” Patrick asked.

  “The convention? Your man Mallory? Yes. Have to keep up the British end, you know. Cable home my keen insights. There’s fear of Anschluss in Whitehall; Today Saskatchewan, tomorrow Kent and Cornwall. Will you elect that man again?”

  “Anything is possible.”

  “I do hope so. We haven’t had a real lunatic running a first class power for ages. I mean, madmen like old Amin don’t count, do they? Or Qaddafi or even Ibn Awad. Uganda and Libya and Hagreb don’t come up to much. Besides, all those chaps are gone. Sanity everywhere. Too boring. Here’s to Franklin Mallory. Long may he rave.”

  Clive lifted his glass to his lips. He closed his eyes tightly while he drank, like someone at the instant of greater pleasure. His lids opened and he stared at Patrick. Neither man spoke.

  Emily said, “You’re a journalist?”

  “No.”

  “Clive,” said Patrick, “that’s very good. Can you keep all your replies that short from now on?”

  “What, then?” asked Emily.

  Patrick replied for Clive Wilmot, speaking in a light tone of voice, smiling. After a week of minute observation, Emily knew the signs that he was annoyed and wanted to hit a target.

  “Clive is a secret agent,” he said. He paused, then whispered, “British intelligence.”

  “Are you really, Clive?”

  “Patrick likes to glamorize his friends. Always lying them up—makes him look better, you see. I work in the embassy in Washington. Perhaps I do skulk a bit, hoping people will believe Patrick’s thrilling stories about me.”

  “Why do you have the Colgate toothpaste in your breast pocket?” Clive had succeeded in amusing Emily.

  “To hide microfilm in, you know. Also to brush my teeth. Hygiene’s most important here. My predecessor had baize teeth, very British; no one in America could bear the sight…. I say, Patrick, when are you going to use that story on Ibn Awad?”

  Patrick called for the check and signed it with a gold fountain pen. He ignored the waiter’s thanks for the enormous tip. He pushed his untouched brandy glass away with his forefinger, one inch across the white damask.

  Clive said, “I mean, you went all the way out there and spoke to the right chap, didn’t you? And didn’t he tell you Awad had been done in? First-class source, Hassan. Knows all.”

  “Clive, this is not the place for this conversation.”

  “No? Ah, the young lady. Probably doesn’t know who old Awad was, much less why your chaps wrote finis to him. Just another raghead, eh, Emily?” He gave her a broad wink.

  “Why doesn’t Patrick like you?” Emily asked.

  “Doesn’t he? Can’t think why not. Gave him the scoop of his life. Lean closer. My breath all right?”

  “Clive,” Patrick said. “Really I have to leave. Get up and let us out.”

  “You see,” Clive said to Emily, “there was this man called Ibn Awad, the emir of Hagreb. Filthy rich, you know,
oil. But mad.”

  “I know who Ibn Awad was.”

  “Do you? Brava. Did you know he was murdered by your President? Diabolical plot.”

  “Which President?”

  “The one you’ve got now. Lockwood? Holy sort of chap himself. But he rubbed out old Ibn Awad. Patrick knows it. Right, Patrick?”

  “What is this man saying?” Emily demanded.

  Patrick Graham shoved the table. Its opposite edge struck Clive Wilmot’s chest. The headwaiter sprang to the back of Wilmot’s chair and pulled it backwards. Clive remained seated and was dragged back over the carpet.

  “Absolute truth. Patrick loveth not the truth. Pity,” Clive said.

  “We have a plane to catch,” Patrick said.

  Clive put both hands firmly on the table, trapping Patrick and Emily on the banquette. “Spare me a moment,” he said. From the inside pocket of his sagging jacket he produced a long envelope. He offered it to Patrick. “Do take it,” he said. Patrick did so, and heard the snick of a camera; he didn’t look up, he was so used to being photographed; but Emily did, and saw a man who had emerged from the men’s room a moment before put a tiny camera in his pocket and walk purposefully out the door.

  “A bit of light reading for the airplane,” Clive said. “I think when you spoke to Hassan he mentioned something about a strange disease. Dysgraphia, is that the name?” He turned his haggard face in appeal to Emily. “Do you know that word?”

  “No.”

  “Pity. Old Patrick does. Look inside, Patrick, old chap. Do.” Patrick opened the clasp and looked into the envelope. He saw a computer printout.

  “The medical file. The bit about the lesion on the brain occurs about midway through; I’ve drawn a red line under it.”

  Clive gave Emily a brilliant smile. “You wouldn’t care to leave at once for Tahiti, would you?” he asked. “You do have hundred-franc eyes.”