The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  But Patrick’s hour on the air didn’t leave that impression. Instead, Lockwood was made to seem almost innocent. Without even knowing he was doing it, Patrick had chosen material and tones of voice and nuances of expression that had the effect of exonerating, the President. The real story seemed to be that Lockwood had saved Israel from destruction, and perhaps the world from global war; and that O. N. Laster and the oil interests, using a seedy British spy, had tried to betray a state secret in order to put Franklin Mallory, their puppet, back into power. The real plot, discovered just in time, was against Lockwood.

  Ibn Awad’s death and Talil’s punishment for it occupied no more than a minute of air time, at the very beginning of the broadcast. There were no scenes of Ibn Awad leading his great praying crowds of the faithful, no horrible reminders of the execution of Talil. Instead there were shots of the oil fields of Hagreb, footage of acts of terror by the Eye of Gaza. Still photographs of O. N. Laster’s cold features, reminders of his connections to Mallory, were intercut. Patrick’s chilling description of his meeting with Hassan in Baghdad and the terrorist’s admission, recorded on Horace’s tape, that the Eye of Gaza had meant to destroy the holy city of Jerusalem and perhaps even New York, drove the fact of Awad’s assassination to the back of the audience’s consciousness. What was the death of one man, and a madman at that, against all that Patrick had to tell?

  “Great show, Patrick,” said his producer as the closing credits blinked on the screen. Patrick strode out of the screening room without answering. From the windows of his penthouse office he could look down on the White House. Despite Lockwood’s campaign to save energy, the grounds of the mansion were floodlit for security reasons, and its white paint, more brilliant than any other, shimmered in the darkness.

  A presidential helicopter, navigation lights flashing, left the South Lawn in a steep climb and turned south. Patrick had no doubt that Lockwood and Julian were inside; and as the whole show—the images he had chosen, the tones of his own voice, the cumulative effect of it—rolled once more through his mind, Patrick had this thought: They are getting away.

  He had come back from Baghdad a hunter, and the prey he’d been stalking had led him in a circle and finally, like some wise great cat, had come on him from behind. He saw at last how ruthlessly he had been used. Patrick struck the springy glass of his office window with his fist. It bent beneath the blow and gave out a throaty half-musical, half-animal sound, like that of a temple bell.

  “Fool!” Patrick cried to himself.

  Julian had told him no lies. He hadn’t had to—he had merely relied on Patrick’s conditioning.

  For years, Julian had given Patrick gifts—first that club membership, then the friendship of men who were Julian’s friends because he was born to be trusted—after all, he was one of them, one of that crowd of imperialist liberals who had been running the United States for generations. Finally Julian had given Patrick the last thing he ever expected to have—an American he could believe in: Frosty Lockwood.

  Julian, scrap by scrap, had given Patrick a place in life that he was terrified to lose. He had made him his creature.

  Fool, “Patrick Patrick repeated, whispering.

  His phone was ringing. The people who had his private number were calling to tell him what a splendid job he’d done; how well he’d held the line—how he’d made things clear to the people, who were so apt to be confused, who couldn’t quite be trusted to think unless, like hounds having a bit of clothing rubbed over their muzzles, they were given the right words to remember and follow.

  Patrick used another line to call the girl with the raven hair he’d talked to at the Midsummer party. He didn’t even speak his name; Patrick never spoke his name on the telephone, even to Presidents—he was his voice. He knew just what the girl’s voice would sound like when she heard his on the line.

  2

  Julian, while he spoke to Patrick, had known that Emily was somewhere in the house. He hadn’t seen her all day; they had both had to work late. The children were asleep; in a few days they would be at sea with Leo and Caroline.

  After showing Patrick out the front door, Julian called Emily’s name. Things hadn’t come right between them after her return from San Francisco. She was silent and mistrustful. He’d told her nothing, and he’d been home very little. There had been the convention to handle, and the long wait for Horace’s return from abroad had told on Julian’s nerves.

  Pregnancy made Emily pale and sleepy; Julian found her curled up on a sofa in the evening. She’d stopped drinking for the baby’s sake, and though she was still nauseated in the morning she would take no pills to relieve the condition. She ate the right diet, did the correct exercises. For months she had been studying manuals for pregnant women; she knew exactly what to do to make her body give itself over completely to the well-being of the fetus.

  Julian found her in the living room, just wakened by the sound of his voice, stretched out in a chair. They kissed. Her dry lips were hot but he knew this was no fever; sleep heated Emily’s skin. Julian sat down near her and waited for her to wake completely. Emily smiled as she woke—one of her old bursts of joyful response. Then, in an instant, she was serious again.

  “I read your piece on Patrick,” Julian said.

  “And?” Emily loved praise for her work. She wrote as a kitten played: a pretty bundle of fluff scampering along her sentences, rising on her hind legs to bat a dangling bell with a soft little paw. And then the wee claws and teeth flashed.

  “One of your best. I loved the description of Patrick among the freaks after Mallory’s Ganymede Address. I’m not sure you’ve done the President a favor, coining that phrase for it.”

  “It was supposed to be ironic.”

  “Irony is lost on Mallory voters, I’m afraid. Did Patrick really make you that extraordinary speech about himself?”

  “About his loutish family and his first girl? Yes. I thought it was wonderful. Would that have been Caroline he meant, the girl he loved who didn’t want him?”

  “I suppose so, unless there was some prom queen before her I never heard about.”

  “So sad. He still loves her, you know. I saw it in his eyes when he spoke to me about her.”

  Emily’s eyes, so much less changeful than Caroline’s, brimmed with sympathy.

  “Patrick is like Rhett Butler,” Julian said. “He has a weakness for lost causes once they’re really lost.”

  Emily got out of her chair and pointed a finger at Julian.

  “Julian,” she said, “I’m going to tell you something. You make a mistake, having so much contempt for Patrick.”

  She went to the bar, poured and stirred, and came back with a frosted glass. Emily made the best martini Julian had ever drunk: Bombay gin and Noilly Prat and one drop of Pernod. Her father had taught her how; he’d belonged to a generation that made a lifetime study of the drink. Julian didn’t know why Emily imagined he’d want a martini at two in the morning.

  Julian sipped, then put the cocktail on the table beside him and held out his arms. Emily hesitated, then sat on his lap. She was nearly weightless. Emily drifted when she made love, moved over the water like a blown leaf when she swam; her footfall was inaudible. Julian held her as tightly as he dared, pushed back her hair, kissed her soft cheek. His beard scratched her and she moved her face away an inch, smiling.

  “Patrick was here while you slept,” Julian said.

  “To serve a summons on me?”

  “No. How could he not like what you’ve written? Nobody’s ever made him seem so human.”

  “Then why? Charlotte’s going to Chipmunk Island, you know. She can’t bear the heat of summer, or Patrick’s absences in an election year. I think she has a lobsterman on the side.”

  “Surely one has lobstermen on the bottom?”

  Julian reproduced Charlotte’s accent. It made Emily laugh. This woman would probably die, like Gertrude Stein, with a mockery on her lips.

  “Why was Patrick here in
the middle of the night?” Emily asked again.

  Julian told her. Before he began to speak, he moved her body a bit farther away on his long thighs so that they could look into each other’s face. His hands lay lightly upon her, one on her back, the other on her rounded knee; he didn’t feel in Emily the tensing of muscles that he had expected.

  He did not tell Emily everything—only what she would learn anyway from the news. He left out Horace and Philindros and the FIS; he said nothing of the night scenes with Lockwood in Kentucky. He spoke in detail about the link between Clive Wilmot and O. N. Laster of Universal Energy.

  “Clive Wilmot is doing this for money?”

  “I guess so,” Julian said. “Life is hard for Englishmen of his class. They’ve had everything taken away from them at home.”

  Emily fell silent, sitting absolutely still on his lap. His martini remained unnoticed, the ice melting in it.

  “Was there no way not to have that happen to Awad?” she asked.

  Julian didn’t answer. Emily’s mind was quick again; she had absorbed what he’d told her. Now the questions were beginning to whirl within her. Two or three times he saw her bite back impulses to speak.

  At last she said, “You wanted him dead.”

  Emily rose from Julian’s lap and went back to her own chair.

  “Yes,” Julian said. “It would be a lie if I told you otherwise.”

  “Would it have been a lie if you’d never told me? You wouldn’t have told me ever, Julian, if Patrick hadn’t been put onto the story by Clive Wilmot.”

  “No. Some things I’m not free to tell you.”

  “Is this the sort of thing, conniving at murder, that’s called Realpolitik? I thought this was what we were supposed to be free of, people like us, and what we were supposed to fear in Franklin Mallory.”

  “It is. Do you think it’s Lockwood O. N. Laster wants to see in the White House?”

  “It’s Lockwood that killed Ibn Awad. Not Mallory. Not O. N. Laster. Not the interests.”

  “That’s a cruel judgment.”

  “It’s the one the whole world will make as soon as this story is out. Lockwood’s an accessory to murder. My God, Julian, so are you.”

  Emily began to cry. Bright tears squeezed from the corners of her wide-open eyes and ran glistening over her cheeks. She made no attempt to wipe them away. Both her hands were pressed against her stomach.

  “Do you know how large your child is?” she asked. “No bigger than his father’s finger, but he has eyes and ears and a heart; he sleeps and wakes. Julian!”

  “There’s something you don’t know. Emily, will you listen?”

  Her wetted eyes had not left his face. There was horror in them. She shuddered. “Someone has just walked on my grave,” Julian’s Aunt Jennifer would say when that happened to her. Julian had walked on the grave of Emily’s child; even now, only weeks after its conception, it was living within her. But she knew that ten or fifty or sixty years from this moment, it could be killed by men it didn’t even know, just as Lockwood and Julian had killed Ibn Awad.

  Julian told her about the nuclear weapons; about the Eye of Gaza. He didn’t dramatize. Such a thing was hardly possible, given the plain facts of the case. As he spoke, Emily watched. Julian showed no emotion, he let no color come into his dry voice.

  Emily asked no more questions. For some time she sat quietly, looking into Julian’s face. His beard was dark on his cheeks. At length Emily rose and touched a light switch. The lamps over the paintings came on, and she turned out the others. The center of the room, where Julian and Emily were, lay in shadow. All along the walls, the paintings glowed in little pools of light.

  Emily picked up Julian’s glass, emptied his warm untouched drink, and made him another. He took the martini from her and drank. She remained standing before him in her stocking feet.

  “How many would have died if you’d let Awad live?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Half the Jews in Israel. Perhaps most of New York. It would have been a holocaust.”

  Emily nodded. She touched Julian’s fingers, the ones curled around the cold martini glass, and her hand seemed, as it always did, very warm. Julian finished his drink and they went upstairs to bed.

  During the night, Emily lost the baby.

  Julian had slept badly. He dreamed of Vietnam. He felt ground fire striking his Phantom, felt the huge weight of the machine become real as it lost the power of flight. He jerked into wakefulness. Emily, roused by his sudden movement or possibly already awake, turned nervously to a new position. Once or twice she uttered her soft nighttime groan. Finally Julian fell into a deep sleep.

  He woke to the sound of sobbing. Julian leaped to his feet and started out the door into the hall, flying to Jenny, believing she had been awakened by a nightmare.

  But his mind cleared at once, and he knew it was Emily who was crying. Light showed around the frame of the bathroom door. Julian tried the door. It was locked. He called Emily’s name; only the racking sobs came back. He put his enormous hands against the thin panels of the door and heaved; the lock ripped out of its screws.

  All the lights were on. Emily in her long transparent nightgown stood staring down into the toilet.

  Julian put his arms around her. He could not force himself to look.

  “I just came in….”

  Emily gave him a wild look. She gasped, throwing back her head like a diver rising into the air.

  “…I just had a little stomach ache,” Emily said. “I thought I’d look for something in the medicine chest when I got up. Then I felt him go. Julian, he just left me.”

  Emily leaned against him and resumed sobbing. This time tears came; she shuddered so that he wrapped her into his body for the warmth, as though it was the cold that made her shake.

  Julian looked down. Their child floated in the cold water. It was, as Emily had said, no larger than its father’s finger.

  Later that morning, while Patrick and Lockwood were talking of Ibn Awad, Julian brought Emily home from the hospital and helped her into bed. The doctor had given her an injection; she could barely hold on to consciousness as Julian undressed her. As Julian pulled the sheet over her Emily beckoned him closer, and forming the words but making no sound, she said:

  “He … heard… us… talking.”

  3

  Franklin Mallory and Susan Grant and O. N. Laster, the president of Universal Energy, sat together on a long couch in Mallory’s hunting lodge and watched a television cassette of Patrick Graham’s program about the Ibn Awad assassination. Mallory and Laster were unshaven and they wore flannel shirts and hunting boots with woolen socks, hand-knitted by Ute women from the unbleached fleece of sheep that ran wild on Laster’s ranch.

  “I would like to have been in the room while Frosty made that decision,” said Laster. He was drinking bourbon and he took a small sip and shook his head over the strength of the liquor and the humor of the image. “What a mixture of guilt and ecstasy! Lockwood must have looked like a Jesuit undergoing fellatio.”

  Susan Grant turned off the television. “He seems to have handled Patrick Graham pretty well,” she said. “Graham’s made it sound like a laying on of hands—Lockwood prevented World War III and cured Ibn Awad of insanity.”

  “That image will change. The thing is to keep the story alive.”

  “I think we can do that,” Franklin Mallory said.

  O. N. Laster stared for a moment at the dead screen. “Is it Lockwood’s line that he didn’t have anything to do personally with the assassination of Ibn Awad—that maybe he didn’t even know about it till he saw it on the morning news? Or am I imagining things?”

  Susan said, “You’re not imagining things. He didn’t actually lie. But you know what he wants the world to think—the FIS did it; or at worst, he just let it happen. That cover story has worked before. He knows that Pavlov’s dogs in the media will support such a version.”

  Susan’s voice was level; she was a technician stati
ng a set of facts. Mallory smiled at the truth of what she said.

  “It may not work this time,” he said. “We all know, and the country is going to know, that the American intelligence service cannot carry out an assassination without a direct order from the President. If I know anything about Jack Philindros, there’s a tape recording of Lockwood saying yes, oh yes! locked up in a very safe place.”

  “And then there’s Horace Hubbard. He’s Jack’s ace in the hole. The minute Frosty starts blaming it all on the FIS, Horace’s name will come out. He’s Julian Hubbard’s brother. And who is Julian Hubbard?”

  “Yes. Philindros grabs as many handles on a man as he can,” said Mallory. “I used to wish Jack had some politics, but he doesn’t; he’s as blank ideologically as a newborn babe. A fellow could use a man with Jack’s skills.”

  “You’ll only have him for the first year of your new term, Franklin,” said Laster. “Then you can appoint some more warm-blooded type. Ten years is a long term; a Director of Foreign Intelligence could do a lot in that length of time, if he was the right fellow.”

  They smiled, all three. Franklin Mallory wagged his head in mock disbelief at his outspoken friend.

  Aspen logs crackled in the huge stone fireplace. Mallory’s lodge lay high in the Uinta Mountains in Utah, the loneliest place left in America. At nine thousand feet, the afternoons already had the edge of winter in them; sometimes there was snow in the mornings, even in late August. Mallory owned ten thousand acres of wild country here; he’d bought it when a law was passed by the first Congress controlled by his party—before he was President—making it possible for the tribes to sell off their reservations to those who would explore for energy resources. Mallory had dammed a snowfed stream and made a lake, built an airstrip, done some timbering, and found a little coal. Susan had taken care of all that, to satisfy the law and the terms of his contract with the Indians.