The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  “It’s Julian I wanted to talk to you about,” Patrick said. “You know him better than anyone. Does he fear anything? Does he want anything?”

  Caroline laughed. “Are you planning to blackmail him?”

  Patrick waited for her answer. Caroline saw that he was serious, and she gave him a smile he remembered—the amused tolerant grin of one who is obliged to explain the obvious.

  “There’s no fear in Julian,” she said. “You have to want things for yourself—love, money, power—and care about losing those things in order to feel fear. There is nothing Julian wants that ordinary people want. He wants to be what he is; he would kill, probably, to remain what he is.”

  “You really think that?”

  Caroline was impatient; she wanted to finish what she had to say; she held up her hand to stop Patrick from talking. “Yes. The thing about Julian is this: he controls and uses everyone as a matter of instinct. He is stronger than anyone else because he needs nothing. He doesn’t even need sex. That’s what drove me crazy with desire for him, I smelled it on him the first time I saw him. I thought I could change him; other males had been after me practically since I was born. Not Julian. He doesn’t know he’s a bastard. I never mattered to him, you’ll never matter to him. Lockwood matters to him only because he’s the means of Julian doing what he really wants to do. Julian wants to do good. He wants to solve human problems. There are people who believe, actually believe on the intellectual level, that mankind at some time in the deep past could talk to the animals and somehow lost that magical power. Julian feels that way about the masses. He wants to rediscover a way for his kind to talk to their kind. He wants to talk to the poor and the hopeless and the stupid. He knows he hasn’t the gift, he’s evolved too far. He thinks Lockwood can do it, the way mystics in India talk to monkeys. Of course it can’t be done—no one has ever been able to talk to monkeys. But Julian will never stop trying. He’d destroy anyone who interfered with the experiment.”

  Patrick reached across the table and took both of Caroline’s hands. She pulled sharply away but he tightened his grip. He saw in her the same fleshly suspicion he’d noticed in Emily in the hotel in San Francisco. Both women assumed that he wanted sex; but he was finished with desiring females that Julian had already had.

  He said, “Julian has committed murder.”

  In a few sentences, squeezing the limber bones in Caroline’s hands at the points in his narrative where the punctuation belonged, he told her about Ibn Awad. As the last word issued from his lips, Patrick let go of her hands.

  Caroline let them lie on the table as if they were, because he’d touched them, no longer parts of her own body. She laughed at him again, until she lost her breath. It was she, this time, who took Patrick’s struggling hands and squeezed them.

  “Oh, what a joke,” she gasped. “That Julian should have to do that for you, too!”

  16

  Horace Hubbard had visited Rose MacKenzie in her apartments all over the world, and he loved what they said about her. Rose lived her professional life in perfect order. In the vaults of D. & D. Laux & Co., among her computers, everything—lucite, stainless steel, silicon—was utterly free of dust, touched only with tools and gloved hands, sterile and functional. Her flat was something else again. Horace found his way from room to room among chairs piled one on top of the other, drunken heaps of books, discarded items of clothing dangling like vines from the chandeliers and the plumbing.

  Horace had returned that day from two weeks of hard work in Europe and the Near East. He had carried back with him a tape cassette, and now he brought it into Rose’s bedroom and slipped it under the pillow before he got into bed. Rose had cooked curry, many kinds of it, and the aromas of their dinner lingered; an ancient air conditioner wheezed in her bedroom window, but it couldn’t cope with the choked atmosphere of the flat. Horace liked the apartment, it relaxed him; Rose’s jumble of useless possessions made it seem, against what they both knew was logic, that danger could not penetrate these rooms. There was too much good humor in them.

  Rose lay on her back with the base of a wineglass resting on the red fleece between her legs. She watched Horace put the cassette under his pillow. She’d asked no questions in the hours they’d been together. Now she said, “You ran Clive down, did you?”

  “I think so. It was just a matter of staying behind him after Jack had done his part of it.”

  “Does Jack know?”

  “Not all of it. We meet at dawn in the talks room. He may want you, so stay sober.”

  Rose dug Horace’s ribs and he recoiled. He was naked, too.

  They had not yet begun to make love; perhaps they wouldn’t. In bed, Horace and Rose had the leisurely ways of old friends. That is what they were; though they had known each other sexually for twenty years and there was love between them, neither made any claim on the other. What they did for each other—cooking meals, making gifts of wine, saving jokes, watching one another’s professional flanks—they did for the pleasure of it.

  Neither ever had to be uncertain about the other’s reaction to anything—after all their years together in the same peculiar profession they knew each other’s mind. Spy must love spy as a dancer can only really love another dancer. All others are fat and clumsy.

  “Sound?” asked Rose.

  On the television screen at the foot of the bed, President Lockwood had just entered Madison Square Garden to make his speech accepting renomination. For many minutes, politicians had gestured soundlessly on the tube, making their introductory speeches. Rose pressed a button and they heard the crash of stormy applause as Lockwood came onto the stage with Polly’s hand in his.

  These delegates were very different from the ones who had nominated Mallory in San Francisco. No more than half of Lock-wood’s people were white, and those who were tended to be very young or very old. This dappled crowd, black and brown and yellow faces among the white, seemed to give off the shine of joy and good will. It was happy, exhausted, loud; affectionate towards Lockwood. Mallory’s convention had been smug, self-controlled, deadly patient; and, towards Mallory, worshipful.

  Horace asked Rose if she saw these differences too.

  “I’d like to run those two sets of adjectives through the computer,” she said. “They’re a semantic history of political attitudes in the United States.”

  Rose held up her empty glass and Horace filled it from a bottle of Orvieto; droplets of ice water fell on their bodies. Rose shivered; Horace held the dripping bottle above her, and ran it down the length of her torso. She plunged her hand into the ice bucket and then clapped it over Horace’s genitals. Rose liked this sort of play; she had almost no interest in politics. She switched off the sound and started to take off her glasses.

  “No,” Horace said. “I want to hear.”

  Lockwood had not yet begun to speak. In the President’s face, Horace saw the signs of strain; anyone who did not know what Horace knew would see this as the natural wear of office. Lockwood never spoke from a text. He conversed with audiences; when, shuffling and dry-throated, he began a speech, it seemed that he had just spent a long time listening to what everyone else in the room had had to say, and now wanted to talk for a while himself. After long stretches of muddy plodding, eloquence would burst from time to time like a star shell.

  “Well,” Lockwood began, “in spite of everything, here we are. The family has gathered. Four years ago, some said there wouldn’t be another gathering of this clan. But brothers and sisters are held together, and brought back together in spite of everything, by ties of love. We love one another in this party, and in this country, and in this world from which so much misery remains to be lifted.

  “That’s what we have to say—that we know how to love. That’s what we have to offer—invisible gifts of the heart, spoken in the heart’s inaudible language.”

  Lockwood spoke to his exultant followers of new sacrifices, of new gestures of friendship to enemies, of new gifts of food and energy to
the poor in America and abroad.

  “Let us go to the world, an America with clean hands, saying, let there be peace; let there be food; let there be freedom. Let there be good sense and gratitude, so that if the worst comes to the very worst, and everything is extinguished on this planet—the lights of our cities, the flames of our furnaces, the sparks of our machines—if all that goes out, and nothing burns here except the little fires in the darkness around which the human family began, then, my fellow Americans, we will have lost nothing. We will instead have found ourselves once more.”

  Rose, one ankle crossed over the other, sipped wine and listened.

  “We’ll have found ourselves once more, all right,” she said. “Some of us will be turning on spits over those little fires in the darkness. But, God, I like Lockwood. He kisses me right on the primitive brain.”

  Rose switched off the television set. Lockwood’s face, superimposed on his joyous army, smiled one last time and then shrank and vanished.

  Before the point of light had disappeared from the blackness of the deadened screen, Rose was kissing Horace erect. He needed more help than usual, but Rose was skilled and patient, and once he was roused he remained so for a long time. He had drunk a lot that evening. Drink, he had been told, left other men flaccid; it made Horace rampant. Even when he was young, alcohol had had the effect of delaying his ejaculation; now he required as much help from Rose to finish as to begin, and even afterwards he would drift, still swollen, towards sleep.

  All during the act—while Rose straddled his body or turned her back to him, moving and muttering, her whole capacity for sensation concentrated on the places where his body entered hers—Horace had been unable to focus on what was happening between him and this familiar woman. Other impressions kept registering—the title of a book lying open on the floor; a highlight in a painting, splotched and reckless like one of Julian’s mother’s pictures; and from outside, the re-echoing double shriek of a police car, like the heartbeat of a machine that has enough intelligence to hunt.

  Horace was trying not to think about Lockwood. Or Julian. He had no primitive brain to be kissed.

  In the cassette under his pillow was the key to Lockwood’s fate, and therefore to Julian’s. Lockwood, political ideas, the presidency—these meant nothing to Horace, who knew how little they meant, how soon time erased such things.

  Once, when he was a young officer, Horace had brought in a piece of information that the man then occupying the White House had not wanted to believe; it contradicted everything the President’s most trusted advisers had told him. He cared nothing that Horace had made a man die to get the information. (Thousands died every day; one of this President’s advisers, a brilliant academic, had said that the total number of Americans killed in Vietnam was only equal to the number killed in highway crashes in the United States every year. “Hell,” said the professor with a sardonic grin; “we can afford that; it’s small change.”)

  So they had not believed Horace. But what Horace reported was going to happen, happened. Now that President was gone, vanished utterly from the public mind, as Presidents do as soon as they walk down the White House steps and hear “Ruffles and Flourishes” for the last time.

  Horace was still there.

  17

  Horace and Rose got out of her crumpled bed at three in the morning. Downstairs, a car waited; Philindros was inside, at the wheel.

  “What do you have?” he asked.

  Horace told him and held up the tape cassette to show that the longer version of the story was on it.

  Philindros told them what had happened in London; Horace hadn’t seen him since they left Julian’s office two weeks before and went their separate ways.

  “The Brits were terrified when I showed them the pictures,” Philindros said. “They haven’t had a really horrendous scandal in twenty years. They managed to hush up the trouble Wilmot got into in Baghdad. This was more of the same. They wanted to dismiss him at once. I had to plead with them just to show him the pictures and open an investigation. That would mean prison. Wilmot couldn’t face that. I thought that would make him run.”

  “It did,” Horace said. “We had a hell of a time keeping up with him. He’s really not such a bad operative, you know.”

  “Why is he doing this?”

  “Money. He thinks he can escape being what he is if he has enough of it. ‘Poverty is like a woman you realize you can’t bear for another day,’ he told one of his contacts—you’ll hear it on the tape; ‘one day, if you’re British as I am, and the product of the sort of people who bred me, you know you simply cannot get into bed and do your duty even once more.’”

  Rose said, “There may be more to it than that. I never understood why his sister was killed in Baghdad. Who would do it, unless it was a random thing? There was a lot between those two. Byron and Augusta? Some of the Brits in Baghdad thought so.”

  Philindros wasn’t a man to believe in incestuous relationships unless there were motion pictures showing the brother and sister in the act of copulation; but he never dismissed a possibility from his calculations.

  “Wilmot was mad with sorrow at the time,” Rose said. “She was a beautiful girl and the only relative he had left. Even if she was just a little sister, Jack, her death might be a motive.”

  “It might be.” Philindros settled into the corner of the seat and said nothing more. When they arrived in the garage beneath D. & D. Laux & Co., Julian Hubbard was already there, standing in full view beside a parked car with two FIS security men by his side. Philindros wouldn’t let the Secret Service know of this place. Even Julian had never been here before, and he didn’t quite know why he was here now. He strode across the concrete and spoke to Horace.

  “Why now? Why here?”

  “Your hotel room didn’t seem quite the place, Julian. Mallory’s people probably have transmitters sewn into your underwear.”

  And, before Julian was allowed to enter the talks room with Horace and Philindros, Rose shut him in a transparent booth and her computers scanned all the frequencies on which a transmitter secreted on his person might be broadcasting. Julian didn’t undergo the ordeal with good grace.

  In the talks room, he soon forgot the inconvenience. Horace pressed the cassette into a player. They began to hear Clive Wilmot’s jittery speech. The cassette was a condensation of many hours of conversation, in several cities, with a number of different people.

  First came Wilmot’s encounter with his masters in London, who wanted to know why he had let himself be photographed with two hairy male lovers in the same bed. These were the pictures Philindros had flown to London and put in the hands of his friend, the head of the British service—quietly, without comment, as a gesture of fraternity. Wilmot’s homosexual partners were members of the KGB; Philindros had got the photographs from an agent inside the Soviet embassy in Ottawa. Wilmot had been entrapped while on a visit there by the local Soviet station chief, an old-liner who still believed that Westerners could be blackmailed with evidence that they had performed acts which were even now considered disgusting in the puritanical U.S.S.R.

  “‘I mean Ottawa, hidden cameras, one-way mirrors, in this day and age!’” Wilmot said.

  “And before that, Baghdad. Why, Clive, do you expose yourself and this service to these hideous embarrassments?’

  “‘It was a cold night, I was alone. How can it matter, my dear fellow? KGB or no KGB, it was squirt squirt and good-bye. A bit of tail in a strange city.’

  “‘Precisely.’”

  To Philindros, Julian said, “I didn’t know this was quite the sort of thing you had in mind when you spoke of our countenancing an operation against the British.”

  Philindros ignored the rebuke. Julian held up his hand. They had come to a portion of tape on which Wilmot was talking to an Arab. Philindros switched it off to ask a question.

  “Do we know who this is?” he asked.

  “Hassan Abdallah. We have his voice print in the computer.” It
was the final section of the tape that caused Julian to listen, deep in thought, with his eyes closed. Here the voice responding to Wilmot’s, first on a telephone and then in face-to-face conversation, was American.

  The two men were discussing, in detail, the death of Ibn Awad. Horace’s name was openly spoken. Secrets that ought to have been locked in the F1S computers were discussed: the death warrant from Lockwood, the meetings between Horace and Prince Talil, the forged suicide note that sent Awad to his death, the alteration in the note that resulted in Talil’s execution.

  The man with the American voice reassured Wilmot: his money would be paid as soon as the full story of Awad’s assassination on Lockwood’s order appeared in the United States. Patrick Graham, because of his known loyalty to Lockwood, was the preferred outlet. Only in the last resort could another reporter be used.

  “‘Graham wants more evidence,’” Wilmot’s voice said. “‘He wouldn’t buy Hassan; I wouldn’t myself—old Hassan’s not really a witness one can produce and be proud of, is he?’”

  Wilmot was desperate for the money. Of course he saw Philindros’s hand in the delivery of the photographs to his own service. He expected dismissal. His chief had long wanted to rid himself of Wilmot in any case; the pretext that he might be a Soviet agent would serve as well as any.

  Philindros rewound the tape and took it out of the machine. He handed it to Rose. “One copy,” he said. She returned in an instant with the extra spool. Philindros put the original in his pocket.

  “The American voice,” Horace said, “belongs to O. N. Laster. It’s amazing that Wilmot is dealing directly with him. Usually the presidents of outfits like Universal Energy don’t run this kind of errand themselves.”