The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  7

  “Sir, you have to stop,” said Julian.

  “They won’t, even if I do,” Lockwood replied.

  They were aloft, flying from Valley Forge to the farm in Kentucky. Lockwood and Julian never saw the television pictures of the suicides instantaneously, as almost everyone else in the country did. They were always far from a television receiver, on a battlefield or in a speeding car, or airborne. In the evening, though, they watched the tapes.

  “What the hell is this going to accomplish for them?” Lockwood asked after the girl killed herself in Times Square.

  “This,” replied Julian, pointing at the screen.

  The whole of the evening news was devoted to the event. Lockwood’s face and his eloquent words at Gettysburg; then the girl on Times Square, her cry and her death. One image replaced the other, over and over.

  At the farm, Lockwood asked Julian to leave him alone with Polly. Julian, uttering no reproach, had had Emily brought aboard the presidential plane at Valley Forge; the press wasn’t permitted even now to follow Lockwood to Kentucky.

  Emily had never been to the farm before. Julian took her and the children to the paddocks. Elliott and Jenny hadn’t been allowed by Polly to watch television. They asked no questions. They knew that something awful was happening in the world outside. Emily, silent, turned her back on the colts clustered at the fence in hopes of sugar, and looked long at the white columned house where Awad’s death warrant had been signed.

  That evening the four of them played hearts. Julian had forgotten the game and had to learn again.

  The windows in this house, many-paned, ran almost from floor to ceiling. At three in the morning, Julian woke and found Emily standing before their bedroom window, with her slim shadow running behind her on the bare wood floor. He got up and put an arm around her. She didn’t move towards him but remained as she had been, with her arms folded on her breast. The horses were galloping in their pastures, and their hoofbeats were transmitted through the earth and into the boards of the house so that Emily in her bare feet could feel the rhythmic tremor. Floodlights burned all around the perimeter of the farm. From the air it would appear that the President was inside a ring of light.

  Emily thought, These are last days.

  She didn’t know what the thought meant. It had wakened her. She couldn’t go back to sleep.

  The next morning, the Saturday before the election on Tuesday, Lockwood came into Julian’s room shortly after dawn. He hadn’t yet shaved or brushed his hair.

  He told Julian to cancel the next two speeches.

  “We’ll see what happens,” he said.

  8

  Rose MacKenzie had once predicted the precise date on which a war would begin in the Near East by making a computer model of a phenomenon she called “semantic stress.” Rose assigned an emotional value, expressed by a number, to each of a long list of words and phrases in Arabic. Then she had her computers listen to the propaganda broadcasts of the two hostile countries, and count the frequency with which each of these words and phrases was used. When the ones with the highest emotive value were used with greatest frequency, war was imminent. Finally the pattern of hostile words on both sides reached a point where the computer stated that the chances for war on Tuesday were in the ninety-ninth percentile. On Tuesday, tanks rolled across the frontiers.

  Now, in New York, Rose revived this old program. It was a lark, she told Horace. They were in the kitchen of her apartment. Rose was making baba ghanouj as the first course of the Persian dinner they had planned for that evening.

  “What I did,” said Rose, “was to work out the value of words and phrases used by people interviewed about the explosions, and about Lockwood and Awad, and also—this is your refinement—the tonal stress in their voices and in the voices of the TV reporters and commentators. There’s a discernible pattern there, very much like the lie detector test that’s based on voice tones.”

  Pushing eggplant through a sieve, Rose chattered happily about her techniques. These had always been a mystery to Horace, and he listened with only half an ear. He was lifting lamb chops from a marinade and putting them on a skewer. He waited for Rose to state the results of her work. Horace believed absolutely in Rose’s results.

  “Well,” said Rose, licking her finger, “the word is this: Lockwood is going to lose the election.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I tapped the computers at Princeton. All the polls had him even with Mallory or a percentage point ahead before the Alamo. He went up a point in one poll, two points in another, right after that. But the trend ever since has been down. People’s voices—the tone and the word choices—reveal what they really think and feel. And after all these kids blowing themselves up, what they think and feel is that Lockwood is putting them in danger. They’re afraid. They’re losing trust.”

  “Can’t that change?”

  “In three days, with more human bombs going off? Horace, you know Hassan. He’s likely to have a fireworks display with parachutists exploding over the White House on Election Day.”

  “How much will Lockwood lose by?”

  Rose added sesame and lemon to her eggplant and whipped it vigorously with a whisk. She tasted it, held out a gob of it on her finger for Horace to try.

  “More lemon?” Rose asked. She added a few drops from a cut fruit.

  “He won’t lose by much,” she said. “It’ll be like last time—a few thousand votes in two or three states will make the difference.”

  “Is that you or the computer talking?”

  Rose grinned. “The two of us,” she said; “one flesh.”

  9

  Patrick Graham had gone home from the interview at Mallory’s to talk to Charlotte: “You see his intention. He’ll wreck the party, discredit Lockwood, label the whole humanistic movement a lie. He wants to destroy his opposition totally in order to seize total power.”

  Mallory would destroy Patrick as well; they both knew it—Charlotte who had lost one glittering world, Patrick who had never quite got inside another.

  “Do you really care so much for Lockwood? For Julian?” Patrick could not return her smile. Charlotte had never really managed to teach him how to be debonair.

  “They are the better angels,” he said.

  They were alone, of course. Charlotte, in their drawing room with its Hogarth and its Daumiers, put a languid wrist on Patrick’s shoulder and lifted his left hand in hers as if they were beginning a waltz.

  “After all this, Alaska,” she said. “Imagine.”

  Barbed wire and snow. That was what Patrick had told his dark-haired girl to fear. He himself didn’t fear those things, or the loss of what he owned, or the destruction of his place in the world. In a way he would welcome spending his last years in a concentration camp: his life had been a long process of reconfirming the truths he had perceived when he was twenty. American society, if he and his generation had been right about it in their youth, should have destroyed him long ago. Now he saw the irony: society had given him everything, but it had only been waiting for the arrival of Mallory in order to collapse and crush Patrick and everyone like him in its debris. He said all this to Charlotte.

  “Well, perhaps it won’t fall on you quite yet,” she said. “I have something concealed in the bosom of my frock.” She reached inside (Patrick had seen her make this gesture a thousand times as she dressed, settling her bare breasts in her décolletage) and produced a square blue envelope. “Poor Clive Wilmot has died,” Charlotte said, “and left me everything. He had a house in Provence; I’d been there. And he had some new money, it seems.”

  “Clive? Why you?” Patrick took the envelope from his wife’s hand.

  “There was sympathy between us. We were cousins of a sort, you know, and when he came back from Ireland with that awful wound, I didn’t mind.”

  “You were lovers?”

  “You’d best read the letter.”

  Patrick did so. Evidently Clive had ma
de some arrangement, only spies and characters in films knew how to do such things, to have the letter delivered to Charlotte in case of his violent death. It had come, without explanation, in the morning mail.

  “I expected to read that he needed a loan,” Charlotte said, “but he speaks of leaving me a great deal of money, buried in a cave. It’s too Clivish.”

  Clive wrote of a great many other things—all he knew, in fact, about the Awad affair. Patrick put the letter in his pocket and went out the door without saying good-bye to Charlotte. He took the first available shuttle to New York; he took the dark-haired girl, too, when he found her still in the office when he stopped by to pick up some money.

  Patrick Graham, having the run of the network’s apartment, had no need for a club in New York (his Washington clubs were enough), so he had never joined one. The Millennium Club, like the house of a man who has grown old with inherited possessions, was less splendid than it had been. Its members liked it as it was. A whale-oil lamp burned on the cigar counter. The library contained, bound in red morocco, a copy of every book ever written by a member, and these were filed not in alphabetical order but in order of accession to membership: the volumes of Washington Irving, the club’s founder, stood at the top center, and as the eye moved downwards and to either side the spines of the books grew redder according to their newness, scarlet near the floor and rose higher up; the effect, when the light was strong in evening, was like a sunset as painted by an amateur watercolorist.

  Inside the door, Patrick found Horace waiting for him. Patrick had called him from the dark-haired girl’s bed to make this appointment. Horace, with his unshakable good manners, took Patrick’s coat. He peered into his guest’s face, as if to detect signs of discomfort. “Are you all right?” he asked, pointing to the door of the lavatory that opened off the vestibule. Patrick shook his head in impatient refusal.

  They went upstairs, and Patrick saw that they were quite isolated at their table. A group of younger men was drawn up in a circle at the other end of the long room, but nearby only one old member sat alone, wearing gray tweeds with the trousers hitched high to reveal argyle socks and chalky new tennis shoes.

  “You don’t still work for D. & D. Laux & Co., do you?” he asked.

  “I’m on leave of absence.”

  “What exactly are you doing these days, Horace?”

  “Nothing, really.” The smile. “I’m out to pasture.”

  “You’re not going back to Beirut?”

  “Eventually, I suppose. I thought I’d hang around to vote next Tuesday, comfort Julian if that’s necessary.”

  “You’re really out of the FIS?”

  Horace said, after the briefest of pauses, “What’s your prognostication on the election? The bets in this place are pretty evenly split, I’m told. Funny thing: Frew, the barman, has been holding bets—people bet drinks on the outcome—on presidential elections for years. He says a majority have always bet for the winner.”

  The old member in tweeds and tennis shoes awakened; he stared in puzzlement at Patrick—this man with Horace was someone he recognized but didn’t know. Patrick spoke cordially to the old man and the dim eyes turned away.

  “Horace,” said Patrick, “I suppose you have some way of communicating with Julian.”

  “Yes. Of course, I try not to bother him just now. Surely you can reach him.”

  Patrick didn’t want to reach Julian. What he was about to do was an act of conscience. How could Julian understand that? All the wreckage of their two colliding lives lay between them. Horace was the only possible messenger: he would reveal his source to the right people and guard it with his life from the wrong ones.

  “There’s a bit of information I want to give you,” Patrick said. “I expect you to keep the source to yourself.”

  “You want me to pass this on to Julian?”

  “You can do anything you like with it.”

  Patrick laid stress on these words and Horace’s eyes widened. Another politeness: amazed pleasure that a journalist should trust a man he knew to be an officer of the FIS. These expressions of Horace’s flashed on his face like transparencies on a screen. He had spent his life paying silent compliments to men he must despise. No wonder Prince Talil and all the rest had fallen into his net.

  Patrick handed Horace Charlotte’s letter from Clive Wilmot. Horace got out his reading glasses and went through it. He was a rapid reader. Wilmot’s handwriting was as flamboyant as the rest of his manners—large, with strokes of the pen running from one word to the next; the British public school hand was like the British public school accent, Horace reflected: plumage. Still, Clive had known a great deal; more than Horace imagined he could have known. Why, after his death, would he wish to have somebody like Patrick smash the secrecy he had always lived by?

  Horace looked over the top of his glasses. “You’re under some obligation not to use this information on the air?”

  “No. If I could confirm it before the election, I would use it. But the network would never permit it. Mallory might win. They think he is going to win. I see the signs.”

  “And they fear his revenge?”

  “Is there someone who doesn’t? Mallory wants the presidency for purposes of vengeance—that’s the real meaning of his whole political movement, to revenge itself on those who’ve stood in its way.”

  Horace was silent.

  “What this does, of course,” Patrick said, “is to layout, naked, the connection between O. N. Laster and Mallory and the Eye of Gaza.”

  “Surely you don’t think what’s going on now, those terrorists blowing themselves up, is Mallory’s work?”

  “Don’t you?”

  Horace was sitting back comfortably in the old cracked-leather chair, one leg crossed over the other. “Let’s say I’m glad I’m not in your position, Patrick; I wouldn’t want to have to make such an accusation on television.”

  “Mallory would like nothing better. He could dismiss it as another last-minute attempt by television—by me, Mallory’s known enemy—to swing the election to Lockwood.”

  “That’s awfully subtle.”

  Patrick sat forward. His flesh quivered—all of it: manicured hands, knees beneath the perfectly creased trousers, facial muscles. “If Mallory gets in, Horace, you must understand what he’s going to do. He’s going to destroy Lockwood. He’s going to put your brother in jail. He’s going to turn the FIS into a personal secret police force.…”

  Patrick stopped himself. Horace said, “I wonder if you’d mind if I just made a copy of this letter? There’s a machine downstairs they’ll let me use.”

  Patrick nodded. Before he left his guest alone, Horace called over the waiter. “More ginger ale?” he asked Patrick. When it came, Patrick drank it at a gulp, as though it were something a great deal stronger that he needed very badly.

  Horace was gone only a short time; but by the time he came back he had phoned Philindros as well as making a photocopy of Clive Wilmot’s last letter. He handed the original, in its shoddy square envelope, the sort that can be bought in tobacco shops in France, back to Patrick.

  “You will get this to Julian?” Patrick said.

  “Of course. It’s an interesting document, but then Clive was an interesting man. So, Patrick, are you.”

  Patrick shook off the compliment impatiently. “I wouldn’t blame you if you thought I was a raving paranoid. But you don’t know Mallory. If he wins this election, Horace, you will know him.”

  Horace said, with no smile, “Yes, it sounds that way.’

  10

  In the talks room, Philindros came up from the depths of one of his silences. He held the photocopy of Clive Wilmot’s letter in his hand.

  “Why do you suppose Graham came to you with this?” he said.

  Horace shrugged. “He said he wanted me to pass it on to Julian, but of course he could have done that himself. He wanted you to see it.”

  Philindros went silent again. There was no worry or anger in hi
s face. There never was, once he had all the facts he needed.

  “Really,” Philindros said, “the man is very peculiar. What does he expect us to do? Strangle Mallory and throw him over a cliff?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I hope no one else does. We’ll get the credit. Idiots like Graham will see to that.”

  The day before, Clive Wilmot’s body had been found, well preserved in the snow that had fallen on the night of his murder. Actually, one of Philindros’s men had found it a week earlier, but he had left it undisturbed. A shepherd had stumbled onto the corpse finally, and called the police. Identity had been established, though the French had said publicly that the name of the dead man might never be learned as his face had been obliterated by the heavy slugs that had shattered his skull.

  “Our surveillance team saw the exchange of money, saw Wilmot drive away in the Mercedes; the fellow in the white suit was Laster’s man Hugo Fugger-Weisskopf; he’s one of those Germans Laster has trained up to be mirror images of nineteenth-century Harvard boys. He sends them to Harvard.”

  Philindros’s men had tailed Clive until they were sure he was on the old road where, a little later, he died. The idea was that another FIS team would pick him up and protect him at the Italian border, but Clive never reached the frontier.

  “Hassan’s people must have known he’d take that road,” Philindros said. “How? Not that it matters; they have the money, and we have Hassan’s people exploding all over the President of the United States.”