The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  Mallory was a trencherman; when the platters were brought around again by the Filipino servants he took more of everything. Susan said no. Patrick’s plate, of course, still held most of what he had taken as a first serving.

  “You eat a great deal,” Patrick said to Mallory.

  Mallory’s mouth was full.

  “Only once a day,” said Susan. “Coffee in the morning, an apple at noon, and then this Henry the Eighth dinner.”

  “No eggs in the morning?”

  “Really, Patrick,” said Susan, “there are no new egg jokes. Franklin has heard them all.”

  Patrick was not here because he wanted to be. Whatever the world might think, he was not entirely his own man, and the president of news at his network had ordered him, in a curt memorandum, to interview Mallory. Patrick had not mentioned Mallory’s name on the Graham Show since the interview during the convention in San Francisco. Patrick suspected the president of news of being a secret Mallory supporter. There were little signs: at staff parties, when the jokes about Mallory started, the president’s maximum response was a grim smile. He complained that only unflattering still photographs of Mallory were shown on news programs. He had never congratulated Patrick on his Awad scoop, though it was a piece of reporting that was bound to win awards for the reporter and the network. Patrick felt a chill gathering around him: at a party, the president of news had made a point of rushing across a crowded room to shake hands with a young and unimportant correspondent who was covering Mallory’s vice-presidential candidate; he told the youngster what a great job he was doing; he mentioned a stand-up he had done in a driving rain in Milwaukee. “Great work, Harry!” the president of news had said; and then he had fixed Patrick with a cold stare and, without uttering a single word to him, had taken one step backwards, and turned on his heel and walked away. Everyone in the room saw what happened. Later, Charlotte said, “Darling, don’t you see? He thinks Mallory is going to win.”

  It was Charlotte who had given Patrick the idea for a different kind of interview. Mallory had said virtually nothing spontaneous throughout his campaign; he hadn’t left his mansion. “Why not do that thing Ed Murrow used to do—at home with Franklin Mallory and his concubine?” asked Charlotte. “Stroll through the house, set up the cameras in the drawing room, be ever so civilized—and then go for him! Of course he’ll go for you, too, if you’re lucky. It ought to be thrilling, Patrick—two great white stallions bashing and biting on prime time.”

  Susan Grant had resisted the idea at first. Then, unaccountably, she agreed. But, as always, Mallory insisted that the program be broadcast live. He trusted no one to edit him. The cameras had followed them down the gallery of paintings, taping, but that footage, being edited now while dinner was served, would be used behind the credits as the show opened.

  Susan and Patrick waited while Mallory finished his second helping. Talk died. The clock was moving. There was no dessert. The dining room was dark: candles on the table, sconces with weak bulbs on the fumed-oak paneling of the walls. Susan looked at her watch.

  “We’re on in two minutes,” she said.

  Both men were already wearing makeup.

  “Remember,” Patrick said, “they’ll start shooting as soon as we come out of the dining room; the cameras will follow us into the living room. The mikes will be live.”

  Mallory nodded. They walked through the double doors into the glare of the television lights. Mallory, coming out of the dining room, which was as dark as a cave, didn’t even blink.

  Patrick paused by a window. “Miss Grant,” he said, “there’s something very unusual about this house. These windows aren’t real, are they?”

  “Not everyone notices that,” Susan said. “You see glass. But there are sheets of some sort of everything-proof steel armor between two sets of panes.”

  “Let me show you,” said Mallory. He went to a switch and suddenly the room was bathed in artificial sunlight that seemed to fall through real window glass. Mallory picked up a fireplace poker and rapped the glass with it; it gave off a ring like that of a tank struck by a rifle bullet.

  “It’s computerized, so that the light coming from the windows changes to simulate the angle of the sun,” said Mallory. “Ridiculous, but security people fear the world.”

  Mallory put the poker back in its rack. “We should have had a fire,” he said “it’s beginning to be the season.”

  “Coffee in the big room,” Susan said. “There is a fire there.”

  One set of cameras followed them, another awaited them. Susan gave them espresso from a silver pot. Patrick realized how giddy he was. Mallory had drunk one weak cocktail; Susan had had a little wine with dinner. Patrick saw that they were watching him —four shrewd eyes glinting with amusement.

  “Do you fear the world, Mr. Mallory?” Patrick asked. “Is that why you’ve spent this whole campaign locked up in this fortress while President Lockwood goes out among the people?”

  “Why is it, Patrick,” Mallory asked, “that you always bring up this contrast between Frosty Lockwood’s campaign style and mine? Do you suspect me of cowardice?”

  Mallory’s voice, as always, was light, even playful. Nothing offended this man or surprised him. Patrick wondered if Mallory had ever said or done anything that gave him remorse the following day.

  “Cowardice is the last thing I’d suspect you of, Mr. Mallory. But you don’t really seem to like the smell of the crowd. Everyone knows there’s great danger in the world today, especially to public men.”

  “I don’t think the people are dangerous, Patrick. They’re an intelligence. I can speak to them as well from this house as from a platform in their home community; the nation is one community, thanks to your medium of television.”

  Patrick let a pause occur; he counted six heartbeats and then said, “But the fact remains that President Lockwood exposes himself every day to the people. It seems to have helped him and hurt you.”

  “Oh? How is that?”

  “He’s virtually even with you in the polls. It’s remarkable, when you think of it; when the Awad story broke he dropped way down. A lot of people thought that would finish him.”

  “Did you?”

  “The possibility entered my mind, yes.”

  Patrick still felt less than sober; it cost him an effort to keep his speech from slurring. This was a folly he hadn’t committed for many years. He missed the first part of something Mallory was telling him.

  Then Mallory’s voice penetrated Patrick’s reverie. “… Lockwood has done an amazing job of making people forget what he did.”

  His voice slipping from drink and emotion, Patrick said, “You say ‘what Lockwood did.’ Do you say to the people that the death of Ibn Awad was caused by President Lockwood and by him alone?”

  In the days since he had heard the tape Emily had brought to his house, Patrick had been split into two parts. One part, the youthful believer in the morality of revolution, told him to suppress the story; the other, the implacable journalist, shook the bars of his conscience and demanded that the truth be let out. Suddenly Patrick, freed by alcohol, hoped that Mallory could be made to bring out the truth: that he could be manipulated just enough on camera, now, to make him say what Patrick couldn’t bring himself to say.

  Mallory had guessed the truth, or more likely knew it for a fact. He had been the President; he knew what Presidents did. He had men in the FIS who must be loyal to him. O. N. Laster knew; it followed that Mallory must know.

  “Of course it was Lockwood;” Mallory said. “Only a king may kill a king. It’s the oldest of rules.”

  “Would you have done the same?”

  Mallory did not respond. Susan Grant was sitting next to him on a sofa, her long legs crossed under her skirt, sipping coffee. She seemed to take no interest in the conversation, but Patrick knew that nothing ever escaped her ear or her memory. She quivered under her load of secrets, under her burden of contempt for those who, like Patrick, had done Mallory an injury.


  “Would he?” Patrick insisted, addressing himself to Susan.

  “No,” she replied. “If a President knows how to be a President, as Franklin does, he so controls events that he is never forced to do anything desperate.”

  “You think Lockwood is a desperate man?”

  “I think that all you humanitarians, as you call yourselves, are desperate men, because you refuse to see the world as it is. I think Lockwood could as easily destroy Russia as he destroyed Ibn Awad, and that you, Patrick, would be on the air when the first Soviet missile hit Washington in retaliation, explaining that death and desolation were going to turn out to be excellent things for people. You don’t think, any of you. You feel. You’re proud of that. Honest emotion, whatever that’s supposed to be, excuses anything.”

  Patrick felt the heat in his reddening face. Susan offered him more coffee. Her words to Patrick were only what Mallory said all the time in speeches; neither of them cared what stinging insults they delivered. An audience of millions or Patrick Graham alone, three feet away with his back to a snapping fire of apple logs, was the same thing to them. They said what they thought.

  “And you,” said Patrick, “if you win next week—”

  “Franklin will win next week,” Susan said flatly, interrupting.

  “Will he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has he some bombshell that will change the trend? Lockwood’s curve is up, Mallory’s is down.”

  “A lot can happen in a week,” Susan Grant said.

  Patrick had never heard her talk so much. Patrick’s head had cleared. He had not felt so alert for days. Once again, there was bait in the water. But some stubborn imp prevented Patrick from taking it. He was sure that Susan or Mallory would tell him almost anything. He would not ask. Let her, let Mallory come out with it. They wanted something from him. Patrick had had enough of being used.

  Mallory and Susan waited through Patrick’s silence. He found himself smiling at Franklin Mallory, who smiled back.

  “What did Miss Grant mean, ‘A lot can happen in a week’?” Patrick asked at last.

  Mallory’s smile broadened. “Nothing sinister, Patrick. A lot can happen in a week in presidential politics. Four years ago you yourself made a great deal happen in a week; I was defeated when you told the world about the secret plan to join Canada to the United States.”

  “The people, as you say, are an intelligence, sir. They understood you’d deceived them. There was a rumor of an attempted assassination of the Canadian prime minister at that time.”

  “It wasn’t a rumor. Terrorists actually tried to assassinate him.”

  “Terrorists?”

  “Yes, terrorists—not the President of the United States, not any arm of the United States government.”

  Patrick let these words hang; a tight close-up of his worried, puzzled face went out over the network.

  He said, “You really do think you’ll be inaugurated as President again in January, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “That the Lockwood administration, with all its concern for ordinary people, all its efforts to preserve what remains of the earth’s natural environment, all its programs to restore eroded freedoms, was a mere interruption?”

  “That it was an interruption, yes. As for the rest of your language, your viewers can judge its accuracy. Certainly the voters will do so in a few days.”

  “And they will choose another Mallory presidency—more huge expenditures on space; more development of biological weapons; more special quickie courts for felons; more imprisonment for life of men and women who are classified as criminal personalities in camps in Alaska; more sterilization of the poor on a mass scale?”

  Patrick, as he spoke, shifted his glance to Susan Grant. Why did he keep on thinking he would catch her, when he could not catch Mallory, in an unguarded reaction? Her face showed nothing.

  “The people know what I stand for, Patrick, and my policies are not quite as you describe them. It’s pointless to contradict you. I have stated my intentions to the people very clearly. So, in his more roundabout way, has President Lockwood.”

  “And they’ll choose you?”

  “I hope so. I believe so. It’s a choice between facing facts with me and chasing myths with Lockwood.”

  “On one matter you haven’t been entirely candid. May I say what I think it is?”

  “Say whatever you like, Patrick.”

  “You’ve refused, until tonight, to discuss the Ibn Awad assassination. Why?”

  “Because it is not a political issue. It is a legal issue. Now is not the time to deal with it.”

  “When will you deal with it?”

  Mallory paused. This time it was his face, perfectly composed, stern, unruffled by emotion, that went out over the network.

  “When I am President again. That will be the proper time. I’ll make it the first order of business of my second presidency, and I hope that I will be able to persuade the appropriate committees of the new Congress to make it their first order of business.”

  “You mean you’ll stage an investigation?”

  “Yes,” Mallory said.

  “You’d put the country through that? It would be a witch hunt.”

  “No. A search for the truth. Murder has been done by the President. By that act, he made the people his accomplices without their consent. They deserve to know the facts—surely they are owed that much.”

  “It would be an impeachment trial of a defeated President,” Patrick said. “It would destroy him. It would destroy Lockwood’s party. It would destroy everything.”

  “Everything? Not justice, sir; not truth. Not the principle that no man is so high in America or so pure in his political beliefs that he need not answer for a crime.”

  The hour had run out. It was Mallory, not Patrick, who saw the frantic signals of the floor man, and it was Mallory who had the last word. Mallory and Susan rose to their feet. Patrick, automatically, got up as well. He felt himself being walked towards the door. The cameras were following. Patrick straightened his back; the microphones were dead again; the three people smiled at one another. They paused, as they had rehearsed, to look for a moment at a Hellenic head of a youth; the nose was broken, but one could see what beauty the boy had had, two thousand years before. It might be a head of Alexander. It looked like Talil.

  In the hallway, one of the Filipinos appeared with Patrick’s coat; another stood by the front door, ready to open it. He could not open it in the normal sense—there was no handle; one of Mallory’s invisible beams worked the latch. All was wizardry here.

  Mallory, offering his hand, wished Patrick good night and gave the journalists in the street his customary smile. He never waved. Too many photographers were waiting for just the right pose: Mallory with a stiffened right arm upraised before a cheering crowd.

  Patrick went down the steps. One or two newsmen, acquaintances, spoke to him, but he wouldn’t be interviewed.

  In his car, overheated after its long wait, Patrick felt a wave of nausea rising. He fought it down, but it rose again. He hadn’t vomited since childhood. Was that true? Patrick didn’t know. His cameraman had vomited when they turned over that slain girl in Vietnam and he saw the blood. But not Patrick. He’d been too tough for that.

  This was a different matter; something truly important, something invisible, was dying now.

  3

  The first of Hassan Abdallah’s men exploded two days later in the crowd at the Alamo.

  It had been Lockwood’s own idea to spend the final week of the campaign visiting, at noon each day, one of the great historic sites of the United States. He would speak at the Alamo, at Gettysburg, at Valley Forge, at Plymouth Rock, at Williamsburg where Patrick Henry spoke, and finally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, with the brooding figure of the Great Emancipator behind him and the ghost of Martin Luther King beside him. Lockwood had the eye of a theatrical producer for the right background.

  The terr
orist at the Alamo was dressed in a white jibba and he was an Arab. He carried a hand-lettered placard that said, in English and Arabic, “Remember Ibn Awad!” The Secret Service watched him. There had been others like him all along the campaign trail: the jibba, the sign. They had been passive, but the Secret Service was never lulled into believing that anyone within gunshot of a President was harmless.

  Therefore a young Secret Service man was close to the Arab when he exploded. It was the old Eye of Gaza method: plastic charges had been implanted in the man’s thighs. He set them off with a battery connected to wires which were in turn connected to detonators inside his body.

  Blood, bone, and flesh burst inside the crowd, twenty-five feet from Lockwood, who stood on a platform before the scarred gates of the Alamo. Hassan’s human bomb created a geyser of fire and blood. The noise was deafening.

  The young Secret Service man, standing between the terrorist and the President, was killed by a shaft of bone that pierced him front to back like an assegai. Five others standing near the terrorist died and many more were wounded. The President, before he was thrown to the floor of the platform and covered by the bodies of his guards, was spattered with droplets of blood. The television cameramen recorded this in the frozen instant before the Secret Service men could spring: Lockwood, tall and smiling as he spoke, being struck by a storm of gore. This, and the footage of the exploding fanatic that two networks had been lucky enough to get, were played and replayed in slow motion all that day.

  Emily, watching in Washington, kept seeing Julian, standing in the crowd, facing it, just below Lockwood at the base of the platform. The force of the blast ballooned his unbuttoned seersucker jacket like a gust of wind before a rain. One moment, he was clean and neat, the next he was smeared with blood. She thought, Julian is dead.

  Emily saw Julian turn and scramble onto the platform, his first and only thought for Lockwood. A Secret Service man, blinded by the rain of blood so that he couldn’t recognize Julian, or merely acting on instinct, kicked him in the chest. Julian grasped the man’s leg and threw him into the scattering crowd. His struggling body flew, clawing the air, as if it had been dropped from a helicopter. Emily had never know how much strength Julian had. She thought, It’s adrenaline; he’s mad with fear for Lockwood.