The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  The house was built into a steep hillside within sight of the harbor at Cannes. When Clive was a child, the intense blue sea could be seen from the dooryard, where there was a rough arbor made of saplings with grapes growing over it. As children, Clive and his sister often sat there with their parents in the shade at midday, wearing bathing costumes, eating lunch, looking out over the peaceful valley. It was, in those days, all farms and vineyards and other small earth-colored houses like their own.

  Now the sea could only be seen on days when there was a high wind to blow away the pollution, and then one realized that the spoiled Mediterranean had changed color, like a blinded eye.

  The gravel tracks of Clive’s childhood were broad black highways. The farms were gone. Ghastly new villas stood, like rows of nudging yellow skulls, where once grapes and jasmine, olives and blackberries had grown.

  Just beneath Clive’s old house one of these new villas had been built. It had a swimming pool, and beside the pool, sunbathing, lay a girl of sixteen in a string bottom, a mere leaf of cloth covering her pubis; lovely conical breasts bare in the sun. How nice French bodies were when they were young. Pity there were only seven faces to go around for the whole nation. This girl’s was the doe-eyed heart-shaped one. For a month Clive watched her sunbathe and swim. She liked his watching, she was proud of her young breasts; like those of the Maja in Goya’s painting, they stayed where they were even when she lay on her side. You have about two more years of that, my girl, thought Clive.

  In other days he would have found a way to have her, or at least make the attempt. Now he wanted no risk, no other human in his life. He bought the few things he needed in the town above his house; it was a village perché, its streets so steep and its place among the rocks so narrow that it, of all the things within eyeshot, had not changed in years. He ate alone, went about in old jeans and a torn shirt, and let his beard grow; he drank but little wine, and no spirits.

  Clive was hiding. It was a matter of form. Any professional who really wanted to find him could do so, but no one at the moment had the desire. Everyone was aware that he had this house; it was the logical place for him to come if he had no money, and the people who might look for him (all except one) believed that he was broke. The house itself was worth a lot as Clive looked at money, but he had always refused to sell. (“Hold on to the place in Provence,” his father had told him in their last conversation. “It’s your only chance of going south again someday; perhaps Rosalind will have children and they’ll want the sun.” The old man didn’t know his daughter was dead; he wasn’t surprised that she never came to see him in the country house, converted to a depot for the dying, where he had been sent. Why should she? Clive had come through a winter rain to visit the old man; the hospital was as cold and as damp as a school dormitory and as full of nasty smells; his father wore a patched tweed suit under a dressing gown, but no socks; there were round spots of black dirt behind his ankle bones. Old Wilmot was as white as a mime. “I used to come to this house for weekends before the war, when it was owned by a brother officer in the Blues,” he said. “Slept with Boy Ransome-Sackett’s wife here—hauled her out from between the sheets and had her on the floor while Boy slumbered in the bed above us. Boy was drunk, I could smell the whisky fuming out of him each time he snored. The situation excited the woman; she thrashed about as if she’d been beheaded. I don’t know why Boy didn’t wake up, he must have paralyzed his brain with all that drink. Eleanor was her name. She had an amazing cunt. You labored to get in—it was like a tight rubber band with a bit of spit on it for the first two inches, but that was all there was to it. After all that shoving, you’d emerge, if that’s the word, into a cavern, so that four inches of you was sort of waving about in the dark, touching absolutely nothing, while Eleanor had the base of your member locked in this awful grip. The Tourniquet, she was called. We all recommended each other to try it once, and Eleanor was quite happy to oblige.” Old Wilmot went to sleep for a moment, then roused to speak of Provence again. He liked it for its dryness, even the rocks there seemed to be made of compacted dust. Clive, with his love of the desert, had inherited his father’s hatred of wet climates.)

  Horace Hubbard, at the end of his search for him, had found Clive in the desert, in one of the caves of the Hagrebi mountains. Clive had heard a helicopter, and then saw it—an unmarked craft, fluttering along the face of the escarpment. Unfortunately he had put out his sleeping bag, a bright orange one, to dry in the sun; Clive had fever, sweats in the night, The craft landed as near to the cave as it could, but far down the mountain, and a single figure emerged. Clive watched through binoculars as the man labored up the steep slope of polished volcanic rock, and when he was close enough, recognized him. The helicopter flew away.

  At the mouth of the cave, Horace stopped, blowing a bit but smiling his cheerful smile. He carried a light pack and he took this off and sat down on it.

  “I have a thermos of cold water,” Horace said. “Would you care for some?”

  Horace had a folding cup of the kind British war correspondents used to buy on the expense account before going out to cover skirmishes in hot climates. The two men drank; the water was icy; you could feel the chill through the thin metal. Clive didn’t ask Horace how he had managed to find him, or what he wanted; the first didn’t matter, the second he knew.

  “I suppose the suitcases are not too close to where we are?” Horace said.

  “Not particularly.”

  “Well, of course I’ll have to have someone who knows about these things look at them before I give you any money. I have a technician in the helicopter. If you have map coordinates, we can simply radio them and they’ll go and pick up the things. They won’t know who the seller is.”

  Clive believed that. Horace had no reason to want him dead; he was too valuable a witness.

  “What sort of payment are we discussing?”

  “I thought a million U.S. would be reasonable.”

  “Plus a passport, plus a receipt.”

  “The passport, of course. It’s Canadian, I thought you’d be comfortable with that. But a receipt? I’m afraid not, Clive.”

  Clive pointed to the pack under Horace’s haunches. He was asking if the money was inside. Horace nodded. “It’s in thousands, but the serial numbers are not in any computer system. You’ll have no trouble with them.”

  Clive really had no choice. He could agree to sell Horace the bombs, or refuse and find out what Horace’s contingency plan was. The Americans were sparing in their murders, it was true, but Horace knew all sorts of people, everywhere, who were less scrupulous.

  “Done,” Clive said. He gave Horace map coordinates, and Horace, after transposing the numbers in his head into a letter code, transmitted them to the helicopter, which was circling beyond the horizon. While they waited, Clive and Horace spoke of films. “Ralph Richardson lost his topee off a rock rather like this one in the Sudan and went blind from the pitiless sun before he could get to the bottom, d’you recall?” Clive said. “Four Feathers, of course. ‘Guns, guns, guns, the Thin Red Line.’ What was the girl’s name? Esme?” They couldn’t remember.

  The helicopter radioed back. The crew had found the bombs. Horace gave Clive the million dollars, still done up in Sebastian’s brown parcel. Clive untied the square knots and looked at the money, then wrapped it again.

  “I hope you have some sort of shielding for those cases,” Clive said. “The half-life, or whatever it is, of plutonium is supposed to be three hundred thousand years or something. You may have odd-looking children if you sit on the things all the way back to where you’re going.”

  “I think that’s all been taken care of. Clive, I don’t want to thrust advice on you. However, if I were you, I’d be careful about seeing Laster again. This transaction is going to make him impatient with you.”

  Clive, weighing the parcel of money on an outstretched hand, grinned.

  Clive got out of the desert that night; if Horace could find him, so c
ould others. He crossed into Egypt after a lot of night driving. Using his Canadian passport—Horace had renamed him Percival Cheyne—he flew to Stockholm, and then to Berlin, and then went to Frankfurt in a bus, before taking a train for Cannes. No one had been behind him; no one, after he passed by the unshaven lout who glanced at his passport as he left the Cairo airport, had even looked at his identity papers. He’d left his million dollars in a safe place; no one knew the Hagrebi desert as he did, now that the tribesmen had all gone roistering into the city, and there wasn’t so much as a mouse in that parched place to chew at the corners of the green thousand-dollar bills; the money would keep forever in its dry cave, in its tin box.

  Now, at his place in Provence, Clive waited. Every Tuesday he took a bus into Grasse and asked at poste restante for his letter. It hadn’t come yet. It would; there were reasons for O. N. Laster to make payment as he had promised. After the payment, a lot of people would want to find him—Laster, the Arabs Laster used, the Arabs the Americans used, the Arabs his own peevish service used. At least they were all the same Arabs.

  Clive came out of his house on a Tuesday morning with a bowl of coffee in his hand; his thumb was in it, he didn’t mind. He took a mouthful to soften the stale bread in his mouth. The girl lay on the diving board. She must be an exhibitionist; even here the sun wasn’t warm enough on October mornings to lie about naked. Clive had always had keen eyesight. She didn’t seem to be shivering, but the nipples were erect. Excitement or cold?

  He went to the back of his house and fetched a canvas bag containing his suit and a shirt and tie. This was his day to check poste restante. If the money came, he’d need the suit to go into the bank, if Laster decided to use a bank. Naturally, he hadn’t been willing to let Clive control the way in which the money was delivered; Clive was in no position to insist. In the canvas bag, along with his suit, were a loaded pistol and, besides the Canadian passport Horace had given him, a dead man’s Irish passport that he’d kept up to date for years.

  They had his letter at the post office. It was handwritten. Clive admired that—one would have thought a man like O. N. Laster, an amateur and a tycoon, would have used a typewriter. But no, he had got some female, Dutch perhaps from the spiny shape of her letters, to write it all out as a love note. The paper was perfumed.

  Clive took the letter outside and read it. My beloved, Please wait for me on the terrace of the Negresco at four this Tuesday. A bottle of chilled Mumms will warm my heart, already on fire for you.…

  O. N. Laster must have dictated the letter after all, it sounded so little like anyone who knew how to talk to a lover. That’s what comes of being able to buy all the sex you want, thought Clive; you forget it’s involved with speech. It was after eleven in the morning.

  It would take him three hours to get to Nice by local bus over the old steep mountain roads. He put the fake love letter in his pocket and started out.

  Clive stopped in at a cafe in the old marketplace in Grasse and changed into his other clothes. He had a cup of coffee to pay for the use of the toilet as a changing booth. While he was there he washed up a bit, splashing cold water on his face from the trickling tap, combing his hair and beard. He had lost weight. The thin face within the wild beard looked quite different to Clive from his usual one as he examined it in the foggy glass of the mirror. There was no mirror in his house. His father had broken them all years and years before, during a quarrel when he and Clive’s mother were still young. The two of them had been to Nice that night and they were drunk—they often were. Clive never knew why the mirrors needed smashing. No one had ever replaced them. He’d had a pretty mother, a pretty sister; the whole family had always been good-looking: slim rosy women with high tempers, gaunt careless men with Norman noses.

  At four o’clock exactly Clive stepped onto the terrace of the Negresco. The oil shortage had done nothing to make Nice quieter; swarms of motorbikes roared on the Promenade des Anglais. Clive ordered a half bottle of Mumm’s champagne. The waiter didn’t like the look of Clive among the silken people already sitting at the white iron tables.

  “Don’t open it quite yet,” said Clive, when the wine came. “I’m waiting for a friend.”

  The harbor looked clean and the pebble beach was as unlittered, as washed in appearance as it had ever been. The wind was offshore, blowing away from the pink and white city the smell of a sea in which nothing but algae and a few blinded fishes could live. Clive observed it all: the palms, the potted hibiscus vivid in the wrong season, the old men sitting with merciless young boys and girls.

  A very clean young man sat down at Clive’s table. He wore a double-breasted white suit with a magenta shirt and necktie. When he took off his hat, a white fedora, not a single hair on his blond head was crushed or displaced. He smiled, and from the perfect teeth going all the way back to his throat Clive saw that he was an American.

  “Ah, Mumm’s,” said the American. “The sight of it chilling warms my heart.”

  “From the look of you I’d have thought your heart was already on fire,” replied Clive.

  The waiter opened the wine and poured it.

  The American smiled again and put a flimsy French banknote on the table, tucking it under the ice bucket so that it wouldn’t blow away in the fresh wind. Whitecaps were beginning to show offshore. Still the American’s hair remained in place; Clive’s beard fluttered like a helmsman’s.

  “In real life I can’t abide this stuff,” said the American, sipping his champagne.

  “Bad luck,” said Clive. “What shall I call you, in real life?”

  “Hugo.”

  Hugo had placed a pigskin satchel, as new as his clothes, beneath the table beside Clive’s old blue drawstring bag. Clive touched it with his toe.

  “Is that it?” he asked.

  “Yes. The agreed sum. I’ll ask you for a receipt.”

  “You intend to pass it to me here, while wearing that fluorescent costume?”

  Hugo examined Clive’s own clothes, like an actor who has come into a low bar hoping to observe mannerisms for a character he is going to play, and flashed his teeth again.

  “No,” he said. “I have a car just around the corner. I thought we could go for a drive whenever you’ve had enough of this delicious wine.”

  “Not a very long drive. Me at the wheel.”

  “Fine. Just up to the Moyenne Corniche?”

  “No.”

  “Then you choose the place.”

  Hugo turned in his chair, knees together, picked up his hat and his satchel, and walked away. His shoes and his silk socks were white like his suit. Clive followed him across the street and down the sidewalk. Beside a tan Mercedes, Hugo halted and handed Clive the keys. He waited patiently by the door on the passenger side until Clive opened it from inside.

  Clive drove along the curving road beside the harbor and turned left through an archway into the market. He ran the Mercedes, horn honking, past the stalls through the narrow streets of the old town. He made a long circuit of the city, one eye on the mirror, the other on Hugo. The American lounged, expressionless, on the tan leather seat. From time to time he smiled at Clive; apparently he had hoped for behavior like this.

  “Marvelous,” Hugo said’, “you’re my first spy, you know.”

  At last Clive pulled the car into a parking place near the old port. All the fishing boats were gone, never to return, and here the viscous sea lapped against the soiled stones of the breakwater like oil in the hold of a tanker.

  Hugo opened the catches of the pigskin satchel and handed it to Clive. Inside were neat bundles of pale blue hundred-franc notes, done up in the Swiss style, nine notes lengthwise and the tenth folded in half at right angles to the stack. There were five hundred stacks.

  “That’s only five hundred thousand,” said Clive.

  “Well, I’m afraid that’s all there’ll be today. Mr. Laster prefers that you be paid the second installment after he has collected the merchandise you promised. This money is for yo
ur, uh, press agent work.”

  “The merchandise is a long way away.”

  “That’s all right. You tell me where, we’ll collect it, and you’ll collect the second five hundred thousand. There must be some trust between us. I mean, here I am, right on time.”

  Hugo handed Clive a sheet of creamy thick writing paper, with deckled edges, and a fountain pen.

  Hugo said, “Please write: ‘Received the sum of five hundred thousand Swiss francs (digits and letters, please), and one Mercedes automobile. These good and valuable considerations release the holder of this note, unconditionally and forever, from all obligation, debt, or lien whatsoever in regard to myself, my heirs and assigns.’ And sign it, printing your name in capital letters below your signature. Date it, too, please.”

  Clive wrote as Hugo dictated, in a flowing hand. He had nearly forgotten the pleasure of writing on good rag paper with a fine gold point.

  “All that remains,” Hugo said, “is for you to give me the information about the merchandise.”

  “You can write that down yourself.”

  Clive handed back the pen. He dictated the same map coordinates he had given Horace. Now, of course, the cave was empty, but no doubt Laster’s men would be able to read the radiation levels with instruments; they might even think someone had stumbled on the cases and carried them off. It wasn’t much of a possibility, but Clive had known intelligent men to believe in more foolish theories. Hugo wrote slowly, in tiny letters, in a limp pocket diary with thin blue pages. He was left-handed, an imperfection—a surprise.

  Hugo put his hand on the door. “Have a nice trip. If you’d like to meet me here again…”

  “No. Two weeks from today, same hour, on the Ile Rousseau in Geneva. You can feed the swans if I’m delayed.”

  “Very well. Happy motoring.”

  “You’re actually giving me this car?”

  “A token of good will. It’s registered in the name you used for mail. I hope that’s all right; we deduced you must have some sort of identity document with that name on it.”