The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  “It must be gratifying, giving away Mercedes as an afterthought.”

  Hugo put on his white hat and adjusted the brim; he opened the door.

  “Well, it’s Mr. Laster who does these things,” he said. “It’s a way of making the impersonal a little more meaningful. The tank is full. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye, Hugo,” said Clive, but the American was already walking back towards the center of the city in his white suit.

  The shops were letting out and there were a lot of people in the street. Clive watched Hugo closely until he vanished into the crowd. The American made no signals. In those clothes, he didn’t need to.

  15

  Clive left Nice by the least likely road, the deserted old secondary highway that led northeast through the Maritime Alps to the Italian frontier. He drove conservatively, climbing all the time, with the soundless diesel engine lifting the Mercedes higher and higher over the switchbacks, so that the sunset was enjoyably prolonged. There was no pursuit. When at last Clive stopped, with all houses behind him, on a lay-by near the Berghe Gorge, he could see that night had fallen below him in the valley, although it was still dusk where he stood and the rim of the sun was visible to him beyond the hills to the west. Higher up, there was snow; Clive could smell it.

  He needed light for what he had to do, and privacy. Obviously there had been no ignition bomb in the car, or Hugo would not have got into it; Clive’s violent turns on the crooked streets of old Nice would have jarred loose any sort of percussion bomb balanced on the frame of the car. Hugo had shown not the slightest sign of nervousness during the ride. That left only the possibility of a time bomb. Despite Horace’s warning, Clive didn’t think it likely that O. N. Laster would stoop to such methods, but now that he had half a million francs, he meant to live cautiously until he spent them.

  From his duffel bag he took a flashlight, the cheap square French kind, and as an afterthought, the pistol. He tucked the gun, a flat Walther automatic, into the misshapen pocket of his jacket; it was always possible that a car might be following along half an hour behind. He wanted to be able to defend his francs. Unaccountably, he remembered what he had said to that glorious girl who had been with Patrick Graham in San Francisco about the color of her eyes. The memory of his remark made him smile; Clive loved wordplay.

  Methodically he searched the car for a time bomb, looking first in the most likely places: under the front seats and the back, on the frame beneath the driver’s seat, and then along the whole underside, especially near the tank, though diesel fuel didn’t go up as gasoline used to do; then in the engine compartment. His light was not strong, but it was good enough. He found nothing. There was only the trunk, the least likely place because farthest from the intended victim, remaining. Before he opened it he had to empty his bladder; he had had to do so for some time.

  Clive went modestly behind the car, though no other vehicle had passed and there was no sign of life, not even a bird, in all the scrubby landscape that encircled him. The guardrail was low. Clive unbuttoned and put his knees against it. In the last light of the day (though a beam of sun still shone on a snowy peak above him), he watched his yellow stream arch over the edge of the precipice. He thought, It falls to earth I know not where.

  Behind Clive, the lid of the Mercedes’s trunk opened inch by inch. Hassan Abdallah, with a cord stretched between his two brown hands, emerged. Clive caught the movement, felt it. He put his hand in the pocket where the gun was, but it had got turned around and he grasped the barrel instead of the butt. He couldn’t pull it out. For some reason he couldn’t drop the flashlight that he held in his other hand. His fly was still undone and his penis was exposed.

  Hassan, moving swiftly, reached up and looped the strangling cord around Clive’s throat. Clive was so much larger than Hassan that the terrorist had to put both knees in the small of the other man’s back in order to get leverage. Clive struggled, smashing backwards with his left elbow. The flashlight spun from his hand and lay at their feet with its weak beam shining upwards.

  The cord sawed painfully against Hassan’s toughened palms. Clive, too late, tried to get the fingers of his left hand between the cord and his throat. He tugged at the gun, turning it in his lint-filled pocket, and finally got hold of the butt. He put his finger on the trigger. His sight was beginning to go. He released the safety catch. He didn’t know if there was a round in the chamber. He pulled the trigger and the pistol went off, smashing the hinge of Clive’s artificial leg. He went down.

  Clive knew that the man on his back was Hassan. He didn’t understand how this Arab could be killing him. Hassan weighed no more than a skeleton, but he wouldn’t be dislodged. The strangler was panting and cursing in Arabic. Clive, on three limbs, bucked and smashed backwards into the side of the car, trying to break Hassan’s bones. The cord cut deeper into Clive’s throat. He knew he had lost, but it was taking such a long time. His penis dangled, naked. He thought, “The Tourniquet, she was called.”

  Clive thought, Why didn’t he use a wire, the twit? A shepherd brought his sheep through the dooryard in Provence, taking them from one pasture to another, and Clive, a very small boy, watched as they flowed over the slope like an avalanche of dirty snow.

  Clive thought, I didn’t know there were any Americans called Hugo.

  It took Hassan a long time to regain his strength. When Clive collapsed at last, he kept up the tension on the strangling cord for several minutes more. Then, sobbing for breath and trembling from head to foot, he took the pistol from Clive’s pocket and put two bullets through the Englishman’s skull. He got inside the Mercedes and lay on the fragrant leather of the rear seat until he was able to breathe normally again and the strength returned to his twitching arms.

  He searched Clive’s body, but there was nothing in the pockets that could identify him. Hassan lifted Clive, one limb at a time, onto the low guardrail, and pushed him over into the gorge. He heard the body hit, roll in a shower of gravel, hit again, dislodge more shale, and finally stop. Hassan hoped the corpse was not visible from the road. It didn’t matter, really—who was likely to look over the edge or, having looked, to believe that the queer bundle far below was a dead man? Even seeing and knowing, most people would simply drive on. Hassan had these thoughts in English, as though they were transmitted by Clive’s ghost.

  In the car, Hassan found the pigskin satchel and carried it around to examine it in the headlights. He squatted—this was his natural position, he wasn’t hiding or feasting on his catch like a bird of prey—and counted the francs. It was a long time since the Eye of Gaza had had this much money. He had a plan for it.

  Hassan didn’t know precisely where he was. He decided it would be best to go down, since he knew that the car had been climbing for an hour before it stopped. He turned the Mercedes around and went, very cautiously, down the dark vertiginous road.

  He turned on the radio, then turned it off. Western music was monotonous in his ear; harsh.

  FOUR

  1

  T HE WEATHER WAS FINE all over America in the last week of October, balmy in daylight and crisp at night, aspens golden on the slopes of the Rockies and swamp maples scarlet on the Appalachians. It was a real Indian summer, the first the country had had in several years.

  President Lockwood, riding through the towns in an open car, would see, behind the crowds in the streets, men raking leaves in their front yards. In Lisbon, Ohio, on a wide street lined with brick houses, a dazzling girl smiled brilliantly at the President as he passed; she was nursing a baby and drinking beer from a bottle. Lockwood asked Julian if he had seen her. “The American madonna!” he cried.

  The girl and her pretty town, so civilized and shady and quiet, remained in Lockwood’s mind for a long time. Julian told him there were few votes for him there; Lisbon was Mallory country, conservative, a place proud of its thrift and its dead soldiers. As in most small towns, Lockwood heard no cheers. His strength was in the cities.

  Lockwood, as he
spoke, was lit by the soft sunlight of autumn and framed by the leaves in their dying colors. Julian roamed the crowds during the speeches, and he sensed a return of good humor and affectionate feeling. It was Lockwood weather. The people were forgetting Awad.

  Through thousands of miles of travel and hundreds of speeches and tens of thousands of hands pressed in his own so that he needed salves and injections to control the pain in his horny fingers, Lockwood had almost drawn even with Franklin Mallory. The polls showed that the momentum of opinion was running in the President’s favor. On the plane between stops he collapsed, exhausted; but when his feet touched the soil and his voice moved the crowd, he was rejuvenated. Taxiing to the apron of some airport in Illinois or Florida, he would be pale and trembling while Julian told him where he was, described the local issues, and repeated the names of the local politicians. But once outside, the color would rush back to Lockwood’s skin, his shoulders would straighten and his stride lengthen; his huge voice needed no microphone.

  That is how he appeared, hearty and American, each night on the news. Sometimes, flying back to Washington on a weekend, he would invite one important reporter or another to sit with him. The two men would sip bourbon in their shirtsleeves, and Lockwood would give the journalist a story for the Sunday papers.

  “Where on earth is Patrick Graham?” Lockwood asked Julian. “Haven’t seen him for weeks.”

  “Patrick will turn up, he always does,” Julian replied.

  But he, too, wondered where Patrick was. In bed one Sunday morning he asked Emily if she had seen him.

  “Once, for a few moments,” she said. “He seemed worn out. Like you.”

  Julian didn’t pursue the issue. The children were back from their cruise. Julian had his Sundays with them again. Now Emily came on their outings, too. Elliott and Jenny spoke little of their trip to Antarctica now that it was over. Elliott showed Julian and Emily hundreds of slides of the things he had photographed; he’d made a tape-recorded commentary on the pictures. Jenny was finishing her book of birds, putting color in her sketches and a musical staff for each specimen’s song below the bird, as if it were perching on its own music. This was to be Julian’s Christmas present. She showed it to Emily, and Emily kept that secret from Julian as faithfully as she kept the larger one she shared with Horace.

  Julian had extra security put on the children. The campaign made him nervous. A man had been arrested in a crowd in Phoenix with a loaded revolver in his possession; a shot had been fired in Indiana. A string of firecrackers had been let off in Cleveland and a Secret Service man had pursued the prankish boy responsible, wrestled him to the ground, and before his colleagues could intervene, smashed the bones in his nose and cheeks. The suspect, hardly older than young Elliott, had been taken away with his face a mask of blood, sobbing in a piercing voice, while the Secret Service man stood by, chest heaving in panic.

  Life could end in an instant.

  Emily still refused to be protected. She went about the city alone, riding the Metro and the buses, shopping, lunching with friends. Always, at the President’s personal orders, two Secret Service operatives shadowed her. Julian wondered if she knew.

  Emily read him her children’s book. It was a story about Elliott and Jenny and their father and the veery in the garden and its eggs; while Julian was traveling with Lockwood, the eggs had hatched, and now the family of veeries had flown away. Emily made a sweet story of it.

  Julian made love to Emily the night she read him the story. It was their first time since the loss of the baby, and Emily trembled and wept. In the early days of their love affair and marriage, she had often shed tears after the act; Julian remembered the taste and shine of them on her opened face. This was a different sort of weeping. He held her afterwards very close to him in the dark. The memory of the baby’s death welled up in him, and glimpses of Jenny when she was very small, and a certain gesture of Emily’s.

  Julian himself began to cry. Tears came without warning and he was helpless to stop them. He thought Emily was asleep, but then he felt her hand on his face. She said nothing to him. They didn’t stir, either of them, apart from the small movement of Emily’s hand, brushing the tears away from his cheek. Julian knew Emily had begun to cry again as well. This was the last thing he remembered; he wondered for days afterwards if they had gone to sleep while weeping.

  Julian was tired; in his job he could never show any loss of control, any flash of temper, any sign of fear. After the firecrackers had gone off in Cleveland, Polly Lockwood had put her arms around a young secretary who collapsed, sobbing, in the airplane. Polly’s own face was expressionless and so was Julian’s as he brushed past the two women, carrying some paper that Lockwood needed into the presidential cabin.

  The children, on shipboard in the Antarctic when the story broke, had heard nothing about Awad, or so Leo reported. “Why tell them?” said Leo. “I thought, better not.” By the time Elliott and Jenny returned to Washington, people had stopped talking about it.

  “Do you think the children know?” Julian asked Emily.

  “I don’t know. It’s as if Awad never existed. He’s gone back to being a suicide in people’s minds. One of the fools.”

  But not, Julian saw, in Emily’s mind. She turned her back to him when she spoke these words. There was a new quality of withdrawal in Emily, there were things she didn’t mention. Julian saw something of his mother in her sometimes: the day he’d almost drowned in the Seine and the older Emily had gone away and changed from her bikini into clothes that concealed her body. Neither woman knew the whole of what had happened to him; nor understood why the signs they saw in him meant something different from what they thought.

  2

  P ATRICK G RAHAM SAW NO SIGN of worry in Franklin Mallory. The two men, one on either side of Susan Grant, were walking leisurely from picture to picture in a long gallery that took up one whole side of Mallory’s house in New York. Cameras followed them. There were Picassos here and Braques and the works of American experimenters who had gone out of style.

  “It was my wife who got me started collecting,” Mallory said.

  “When we were still in college she saved money from the budget and bought reproductions at Brentano’s—once a month, so we’d have a new picture. Finally we could afford the originals. On weekends I like to look in art catalogs and send away for things. Marilyn’s taste still guides me—ah, I think, how she’d like this Juan Gris! Strange.”

  Patrick thought so. He stole a look at Susan Grant, but her face was serene. It was evening and Patrick was invited to dinner. Susan was transformed from her daytime self, Mallory’s brain and sinew, into Mallory’s handfast wife—hair loose, glasses gone, a long dress, her nervous corded hands softened by jewels and bracelets. In heels Susan was a trifle taller than Mallory. As they walked along the gallery she held his hand. Neither Mallory nor Susan had ever made any pretense about their relationship; she had been his hostess even in the White House.

  Mallory paused before a Van Gogh landscape; it looked as if it had been painted by a man miraculously cured of color blindness and able for the first time in his life to perceive that wheat was golden and trees green.

  “You know, this sort of art is over,” Mallory said. “Beautiful as it always will be, it isn’t enough.”

  “Isn’t enough? What is enough?”

  “Humanity orbiting Jupiter. That was the greatest work of art in the history of man.”

  “That was technology.”

  “So is this Van Gogh. It was done with tools—brushes, a palette knife. If ten thousand men create a form as beautiful as that ship, and send it hundreds of millions of miles into space with the human intelligence aboard, why is it less a work of art than anything Vincent ever did and sent into the future to us? Surely Humanity is as lovely as any cathedral ever made, and it has the power of infinite flight besides. It could sail forever if we chose to let it do so. That isn’t art?”

  Patrick could think of no reply. Mallory’s
idea was too strange to him. A machine beautiful? How could engineers and scientists—and slouching men like his brothers who put the rivets into the ship’s metal—be called artists? How could thousands of uncaring hands make one work of art? It was an absurdity.

  Mallory was watching him, his silver eyebrows raised just slightly. The expression on Susan Grant’s face matched Mallory’s almost exactly. Everyone around Mallory sooner or later came to resemble him; his people took on his gestures, his tones of voice, his healthy pinkness. Mallory’s clones. The phrase pleased Patrick and he smiled. He would never be able to use it on the air; it required too much explanation.

  Susan seemed to receive some signal. Patrick knew that this house was webbed with invisible electronic devices. Inwardly, he giggled—perhaps the eye in a painting had winked. Patrick had broken his strictest rule; he had had two drinks before coming here and two since arriving. He was beginning to see humor in everything. Drink made him admire recklessness.

  “Dinner seems to be ready,” Susan said.

  She and Mallory turned, still hand in hand, and walked with Patrick along the rows of fabulous oils. The pictures were worth millions but there was no visible security system. It was all computerized; Mallory loved computers. Patrick knew that an alarm was hidden somewhere. Perhaps the heat of a burglar’s body would activate a lightning bolt, striking him dead. Patrick laughed aloud. He knew the microphones were dead now. Neither Mallory nor Susan asked him to explain his outburst.

  Throughout dinner, Mallory spoke of everything but politics. Susan asked after Charlotte; as a girl, she had spent summers off the coast of Maine on Chipmunk Island; like Charlotte, she was an expert sailor.