The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  At the club, Horace bathed and changed and went down to breakfast. A cut grapefruit and the Times were already on his regular table. He opened the paper to the text of Lockwood’s news conference of the day before. It was his second since the Awad story broke. Once again, Horace was gratified to see, no reporter had asked a question about the role of the FIS in the “Awad Affair,” as the media now called the assassination. The press had been put onto a stronger scent, one they were trained to follow, by the revelations about O. N. Laster and Clive Wilmot. The hunt, pink-faced with stirrup cups and good fellowship and the brisk air of an election-year autumn, was following a drag instead of the live fox. Who in this day would understand such a metaphor? Clive Wilmot would, and Horace hoped that the Englishman would live long enough to see the joke.

  The waiter brought Horace a telephone message. After he ate his breakfast, a grilled lamb kidney, Horace rang a private number at D. & D. Laux & Co., and Sebastian Laux’s reedy voice came over the line.

  “Horace, good morning. That man Patrick Graham rang me at home during the night. He wants you to get in touch as a matter of the greatest urgency. Those were his words.”

  There was a pause while Sebastian fumbled with his reading glasses. Then he read a telephone number in a slow, distinct voice. The old man never wanted there to be any mistake about figures. It was a Manhattan number. It didn’t appear in the telephone book under any of the listings for Patrick’s network or in any other logical place, so Horace called Rose MacKenzie for assistance. In seconds she gave him an address on York Avenue; it was an apartment in a fortified neighborhood kept by the network for visiting stars.

  Horace dialed the number. Patrick asked him to lunch in the apartment that day, and Horace accepted; he declined Patrick’s offer to send a car for him. While he waited for noon to strike, Horace looked again at the video cassette of Patrick’s broadcast. He wondered if Rose would be able to make anything of the difference in voice pitch between this Patrick and this Lockwood, as compared to how they usually sounded. Horace thought he could detect their new emotional states even with the unaided ear.

  Horace was lifted to the penthouse of a glass silo by the East River in a high-speed elevator. Its doors opened into the foyer of the apartment, and one of the Grahams’ Old Etonians in striped trousers and a black jacket and white gloves greeted him and showed him in. That year in New York there was a fashion for cluttered Victorian decoration, and the room was crammed with lamps with fringed pink shades, horsehair sofas covered in shades of violet, tables with tapestry cloths sweeping bogus Turkey carpets. Photographs in ornate frames surrounded the candelabra on top of the grand piano, and it, too, was covered with a scarf. It was a room that cried out for dimness, but it was airy and sun-splashed, with glass walls on three sides. Horace paused to drink it all in.

  “Looks like a flash picture of a guilty husband caught in bed with six tarts, doesn’t it?” called Patrick. He sat in a chair in the far reaches of the room. He made Horace come to him; they nodded to one another, Horace smiling, Patrick solemn despite his joke.

  A table for two had been laid near a window and the whole lower half of Manhattan island was spread out below them in the limpid blue light of early autumn. Patrick took no interest in the view. Horace recalled that he had been the same in Beirut. Evidently Patrick was impervious to anything that was farther away than a face in a studio or a picture on a wall. The English servant poured wine from a crystal decanter; he was silent and deft—he had been well trained, but it was evident that a Japanese had done the training: he smiled too much.

  “Julian is well?”

  “Busy. He and the President are all over the place, campaigning. But you know that. You’ve made them run harder than they might have. Awad, I mean.”

  Patrick vouchsafed a tight smile. Oysters were set before them.

  In the fortnight since Patrick’s broadcast, Horace had not spoken to his brother. There had been no need. Lockwood and Julian required no help in dealing with a domestic political situation. In the first wave of shock that ran through the country after the news broke, Lockwood had lost twelve points in the polls and fallen far behind Mallory. Rose MacKenzie, tapping into the public-opinion firms’ computers for a lark, had told Horace the night before that the gap was narrowing already. Sixty-two percent of the American people believed in Lockwood’s “essential decency”; only 49 percent felt the same about Mallory. Horace wondered if Julian had had a hand in phrasing that question for the pollsters, or if he had merely relied on their instincts, as he had done in Patrick’s case.

  Patrick drank some Pouilly Fuisse and lifted a belon, flown down that morning from Nova Scotia, to his mouth. There were three oysters on his plate, a half dozen on Horace’s.

  “You’re very hard to reach,” Patrick said. “Are you in touch with your brother?”

  “I’ve been moving around a good deal,” Horace said. “There’s been no occasion to talk to Julian. I have spoken to Emily. Evidently Charlotte has been very kind to her.”

  Patrick, having made his pretense of eating, left the rest of his oysters. “Yes,” he said. “Charlotte mentioned the miscarriage. Well, Julian has other things to think about these days.”

  “Thanks to your work, I say again. I don’t enjoy seeing my brother embarrassed, Patrick, but I have to admire you. Another scoop. What an amazing fellow you are.”

  The Old Etonian cleared away the first course and gave them the second. Patrick said to him, “Go away. Don’t come back until I ring.”

  To Horace, who was slicing into the medallion of a lamb chop, Patrick said, “All right, Horace. Cut the shit.”

  “The ‘shit,’ Patrick?”

  “Do you really think I don’t know that the FIS was in this business over Awad up to its eyeballs? Do you really think I don’t know that D. & D. Laux & Co. is the FIS, that I don’t know you are what you are?”

  “Oh? What am I?”

  “What you’ve always been. CIA in the old days, FIS ever since. The Resident for the Near East. Philindros’s trigger finger.”

  Horace, having cut a neat triangle from the lamb chop, put it into his mouth and chewed it. He swallowed.

  “Who is your source for all that?” Horace asked pleasantly. “Clive Wilmot?”

  “Clive only knew what everyone knows, Horace. Any shoeshine boy from Cairo to Istanbul could have told me.”

  “I suppose so. The Arab world has always been full of shoeshine boys who hinted to gullible strangers that they are, in real life, the head of the Secret Service. It’s not always wise to believe them.”

  “Horace, please. Enough urbanity.”

  Horace laid his silverware on his full plate, as a gesture to show that he took Patrick’s questions seriously. “Patrick, I am able to tell you with perfect truth that I am not in the pay of the FIS or any other intelligence service,” he said.

  A flush of anger spread upwards from Patrick’s perfectly laundered collar to the roots of his hair. Beads of spittle formed in the seam of his lips. Horace had read of such things, but he had never in life seen a man’s face distorted in this way. It was a rare thing for Horace to make an involuntary gesture, but he thought Patrick might be having a heart attack, and instinctively he started to rise to go around the table to help him. The scarlet drained out of Patrick’s face almost as quickly as it had appeared, and Horace sank back in relief. Not so Patrick. He had got hold of himself, but he could not conceal his rage. When he lifted his water glass in his trembling hand, the ice cubes rattled.

  “I want you to know what I think, Horace,” Patrick said. “Patrick, I am anxious to know. This is a very strange conversation.”

  “Julian—”

  Patrick’s voice broke on the name, and all at once Horace understood. There was hatred here. Horace knew the emotion well—he had used it often enough to turn one Arab against another, and before that, Koreans and Chinese and Vietnamese and half the dark peoples of the world. He just wasn’t used to seeing it in its nak
ed form on an American face.

  “I think,” Patrick Graham continued, “that you used Prince Talil to kill his father. And then you killed the witness—Talil, who loved you—on orders from your brother.”

  “On orders from Julian.”

  Horace spoke in a flat tone. He wasn’t agreeing. He wasn’t questioning Patrick Graham any more than he would have questioned a lunatic with a knife who confronted him on one of his solitary walks through the midtown streets. He was merely repeating Patrick’s words to show he’d understood his delusion.

  “Yes. On orders from Julian. I think all that crap Julian dumped in my lap—the tape recordings of Laster and Wilmot, the stuff from FIS files, the whole bundle—came from you, Horace. It had your fingerprints all over it.”

  “Patrick, I don’t know what you mean. On the air, you said pretty much everything you’re saying here, although you didn’t accuse me of murder. I thank you for that. You told the reasons that Awad was killed—the Eye of Gaza, the nuclear devices. What’s different here?”

  “I’ll tell you what’s different here. I know fucking well that you and Julian made Frosty Lockwood do it.”

  Horace, recovered from his astonishment, listened with his habitual look of interest.

  “What you and your brother have done,” Patrick said, “is hand this country over to Franklin Mallory. He’s going to beat Lockwood. We’re going into the long night at last, Horace; we can’t hold it back this time. Julian and you are to blame. I want you to tell him something, because he won’t return my calls. Tell him I know.”

  “Just that?”

  “No, you can tell him this, too—before I’m through, everyone will know.”

  Patrick stood up. Crystal and china swayed on the table. He looked at his watch, though three large clocks standing in various parts of the room were striking the hour of two.

  “I’m due somewhere,” Patrick said.

  Horace used his napkin and got up, too. The pale servant stood by the elevator with the door open; Patrick must have rung a hidden bell to bring him gliding back into their presence. Music, the Emperor Concerto, wafted from the speakers in the waiting cage. Patrick was rooted where he stood, and Horace understood that he was to find his own way across the room. He gave it one more admiring glance.

  “I’ll tell Julian what you’ve said,” Horace said.

  In the plummeting elevator, Horace moved his head to the rhythms of the music. The pianist played with bravura. Horace recognized the artist. Horowitz; he had the same recording in his library at Beirut.

  8

  “Graham cannot know what isn’t a fact,” said Horace to Julian. “He just wants very badly to believe in this theory of his.”

  “Wanting to believe something is as good as knowing it for Patrick. He’s a man of strong emotions.”

  The brothers were together in the courtyard of the Maison de la Ville in New Orleans. John James Audubon was said to have lived here when he was making his drawings of American birds. Julian liked that legend. Now it was an elegant small hotel. Lockwood always stayed here when he was campaigning in Louisiana, taking over the whole establishment. The President’s boisterous voice came to them from the other end of the courtyard as he swapped stories with a group of politicians.

  “The question is,” Horace said, “is Graham likely to go out of control?”

  “Out of control? Who has any control over him anyway?”

  “1 thought you had some. Certainly he’s run on the tracks you laid for him so far.”

  “He’s influenced by his political convictions. That means he likes Lockwood and hates Mallory. It doesn’t mean, as you say in your business, that he’s ‘under discipline.’”

  Julian’s voice was weary and his appearance was rumpled—tie pulled slightly to one side, suit unpressed. He had been traveling with the President for days. They would visit two or three states and half a dozen cities between dawn and midnight, then fly back to the White House and make a week’s decisions in a day before setting out again on the campaign trail.

  Lockwood was running very hard to catch up with Franklin Mallory. The pace exhilarated him. He was feeling better inside himself all the time as he went around the country, publicly mourning the death of Ibn Awad. His remorse was being accepted as genuine. Those who had always loved Lockwood loved him still—some of them loved him even more; he had shown fiber. The case for justifiable homicide was being made.

  This phase of the campaign would not last much longer; Lockwood did not want to keep Ibn Awad’s name alive; he wanted to invent new phrases, new issues. Bit by bit, as October drew near, he began to speak of the old choice: himself and the humanitarian movement, preserving the planet and the spirit of man; or Mallory and his dark forces, filling the skies with smoke and trifling with nature and man. “I want to lead this great people,” Lockwood said; “but what does Franklin Mallory want to do? Is it possible he wants to train us? Are we the mere creatures he thinks we are, with just enough spark in us to learn new tricks—is America to become a vast obedience school?” The cheers would then crash in Lockwood’s ear. He was speaking words that Julian had written.

  If Lockwood was rejuvenated by this, Julian was exhausted. It was he who heard all the warnings of defeat that no one dared address to the President. It was no wonder that emperors, if no assassin found them, lived such a long time. Lockwood was shielded from bores, protected from bad news, tended by a doctor, commanded to eat properly and get the right amount of rest. Julian was the President’s doorkeeper. This was a sleepless profession. On many days he ate nothing but a sandwich; often he forgot to swallow his blood pressure medicine and then his patience would grow short. He spent his long days with a telephone at his ear or with a stranger’s unwelcome hand on his shoulder.

  “Is it possible,” Horace persisted, “that Patrick Graham will actually go on the air with this nonsense about the sinister FIS and the evil Hubbard brothers?”

  “Of course it’s possible. It’s been possible from the start.”

  “Is it likely?”

  A wry smile cleansed the fatigue from Julian’s face. His eyes turned for a moment towards Lockwood, who was having such an enjoyable time with the senior senator from Louisiana and the governor and his wife and a dozen other politicians just a few yards away in the flowered courtyard.

  “It wouldn’t be such a bad thing for the President if Patrick did just that,” Julian said. “The FIS and you and I would become yet another dark force to blame all this on. Better that than blaming it on Lockwood.”

  The telephone rang in Julian’s room and his secretary came to the door. He went away to talk to whoever had called him. Evidently Julian considered that he and Horace had said all that was necessary on the subject of Patrick Graham.

  Horace had boarded a plane soon after his lunch with Graham and come to New Orleans in order to warn his brother again that this man was his implacable enemy. Julian already knew that, and did not care.

  “Patrick has these seizures,” Julian said to Horace; “he always survives, and so far, I have too.”

  Julian was used to taking the blame for Lockwood, it went with the job; there wasn’t much difference between letting the world think he had written a line in a speech that offended some minority group and letting history believe that he, not Lockwood, was Awad’s murderer. The only truth was the great one—that the right idea and the people who believed in it should win out in November.

  “Horace,” he said, “I know you’re worried about the FIS. With Lockwood, a promise is a promise; he isn’t going to lay the blame for Awad on Philindros or the intelligence service. But if Patrick Graham decides to do a show in which you and Philindros and I meet on Awad’s grave, there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

  “That’s not much comfort. Graham can destroy the FIS and Lockwood would go down with it. Even if he doesn’t, what do you think you’re going to do without an intelligence service in Lock-wood’s next term?”

  “‘’Tis tim
e enough tomorrow to be brave,’” said Julian. His voice was light, but he had turned his eyes away.

  “Quoting Pa’s favorite sayings from Shakespeare isn’t going to help,” Horace said.

  Julian did not hear him. Lockwood was calling to him. He touched Horace’s arm, his attention already elsewhere, and said again, before he walked away, “Don’t worry about the FIS.”

  It wasn’t the FIS Horace was worried about. He saw that it could be saved. Julian was another matter.

  Outside, in the tawdry streets lined with nightclubs named for jazz musicians who had long been dead, Horace found a telephone booth with a working instrument. Someone had covered the foul matter on the floor with a newspaper; a picture of Lockwood, arms raised in greeting to a crowd, covered most of the stained front page.

  Horace made two calls. First, he booked a seat on a flight to New York. Next he put through a message to Philindros to meet him there.

  9

  An hour after Horace left him, Patrick Graham learned something of value.

  The girl who lay naked in bed with him kissed him and said, in an idle after-lovemaking voice, “Didn’t Ibn Awad belong to the killable category?”

  Patrick might have been hearing Caroline’s voice.

  “I mean,” said the girl, stretching her limbs like a waking animal, “the Eye of Gaza, blowing up Jews, marching into the past at the head of an army of the faithful? After all!”

  It was only then that Patrick realized what a remarkable job Lockwood had done in raising the consciousness—what an old-fashioned phrase that was to come back to him—of people like this girl. She saw now that Awad had personified brutal and backward forces and it was fitting that his life should be extinguished. Patrick, and those who believed with him, had always thought such men should die by violence. Exultation, not mourning, was the right response.

  The mere fact that a man held power did not mean that he deserved to die. Some leaders shone in the imagination. Thirty years and more had not sufficed to heal the wound that John Kennedy’s death had inflicted on Patrick and his friends. But any one of them, Patrick especially, would have killed Richard Nixon with his own hands and been proud of the act.