Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

  “How would I know?” Macalaster said. “Maybe he just lost his head. Maybe he killed the wrong person, then froze.”

  “Automatons don’t lose their heads,” Mallory replied. “Assassinations take a long time to plan; the killer may miss, but there is no such thing as a target of opportunity. His job is to hit the primary target; nothing else matters. Study the tapes again. What happened was not an attempt on my life. It was a warning from people who know that they aren’t strong enough to kill me and still get what they want.”

  “Nameless people?”

  “So far.”

  “Like the Eye of Gaza?”

  “That makes no sense whatsoever. The Eye of Gaza wants Lockwood punished for the murder of Ibn Awad. I’m the fellow who promised that justice would be done. Why would they come after me, especially moments after I announced I was going to throw Lockwood out of the presidency and investigate the Ibn Awad case? You’re not asking the right questions.”

  “All right, what is the right question, besides ‘Why?’ ”

  “Try ‘Who profits?’ ”

  “You actually think this has something to do with your promise to prosecute the Ibn Awad case?”

  “I think it’s a respectable hypothesis,” Mallory said.

  “You’re asking me to think the unthinkable,” Macalaster said. His instincts and experience told him that he was listening to nonsense, but everything Mallory had ever told him in the past had turned out to be true, and some of those things had also sounded strange on first hearing. He believed in hidden truths; exposing them had been his life’s work.

  Mallory said, “What’s so unthinkable about it?”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you asking me to believe that Lockwood is behind what happened?”

  “No, of course not,” Mallory said. “But politics makes strange bedfellows.”

  “All right, I’ll accept the hypothesis if you can give me just one fact to support it.”

  Mallory’s stare was unwavering. “All I can do is indicate a direction in which you might go,” he said. “One of the people we haven’t been able to talk to is Horace Hubbard. Do you know him?”

  “No. I’ve seen him around town, that’s all.”

  “He seems to have vanished. So has his friend Rose MacKenzie. Even Jack Philindros doesn’t know where Horace has gone—or so he says. According to Jack, Horace retired from the FIS last November—on the day before the election, oddly enough. Some say he’s on a special mission for the White House.”

  “How can he be on a special mission if he retired?”

  “Good question,” Mallory said. “But don’t ask me; ask someone who’s in a position to know.”

  “Fine, I’ll do that,” Macalaster said.

  “Good. You might do better than we have.”

  Macalaster said, “Mr. President, I have to be frank with you. I’m having trouble getting my mind around what you’ve been telling me.”

  “I’m not surprised to hear that,” Mallory replied. “Nothing makes a man sound crazier than to describe what crazy people are trying to do to him.”

  Macalaster became aware that his time was up. Someone came into the room behind him and caught Mallory’s eye. He nodded, his first physical movement of the interview, and rose from his chair. To Macalaster he said, “I’ll have to say goodbye for now.”

  “All right. I’ll follow up on all this.”

  “Good. But beware of false scents. They’ll be creating diversions.” He picked up a book that had been lying on the table beside his chair. “Do you ever read Goethe?”

  “Not lately,” Macalaster replied.

  “This morning I ran across something in Elective Affinities that seemed to apply to things to come,” Mallory said. “I’ve marked the place; bear the words in mind as events go along.”

  He handed the book to Macalaster. It was a nineteenth-century volume, bound in limp leather, printed on the thinnest rag paper, with a red ribbon sewn into the binding as a bookmark, a pleasure to hold and smell. Macalaster opened it at the bookmark as if to read the passage.

  “No, take it with you; leave it in the car,” Mallory said. “I’d make you a present of it, but I know you wouldn’t accept.” He seemed tired; it was the first time Macalaster had ever noticed any sign of this in him.

  Wiggins and Lucy were waiting for him just outside the front door. In the car, Macalaster read the passage Mallory had marked with neat penciled chevrons: “Everything seems to be following its usual course because even in terrible moments, when everything is at stake, people go on living as if nothing were happening.”

  Just like Mallory, Macalaster thought.

  18

  That night Lockwood went on television. By this time Congress was in an uproar and the news media had had time to create an atmosphere of almost hysterical expectation inside the Beltway. According to a public opinion sample of the remainder of the United States, only eight percent of the respondents were “very interested” in the issue of the stolen election. Sixty-two percent were “somewhat interested.” The rest “didn’t know.” Fifty-eight percent thought that vote-stealing was a common practice of all political parties, with only eleven percent doubting that this was so, and the rest having no opinion.

  On camera in the Oval Office, Lockwood was his usual self, rumpled and honest. As one commentator said fondly, he looked as though he had placed the suit he was going to wear on television under the mattress the night before to make sure it was properly wrinkled. This Lincolnian touch, devised by himself long before he fell into the hands of image makers, was intended to create a contrast to his eloquence. Unlike Lincoln’s nearly inaudible twang, Lockwood’s voice was deep and strong, almost barking, and even on television he let it loose, having learned that any attempt to tone it down made him sound, as he said, “like Lyndon caught in the chicken coop.”

  “As every American must know by now,” Lockwood said with only a terse “Good evening, my fellow Americans” as preamble, “Mr. Franklin Mallory called on me here in the White House in the early morning hours of January twentieth and told me that he believes that last November’s election was stolen from him and consequently he is the rightful President of the United States.

  “I think he is wrong on both counts. Otherwise I would never have taken the oath as President. Nevertheless, there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that this is former President Mallory’s sincere conviction. Clearly it would be wrong for me to believe these shocking charges on the basis of his word alone, but it would be just as wrong to reject them simply because I think he is mistaken. He has produced evidence which is persuasive to him, but he is an interested party. I am also an interested party. In the end, the only party whose interest counts is the American people. Even if my opponent is wrong and I have been duly elected President, as I believe to be the case, I do not have the authority to decide this question. Still less do I possess any such authority if, as former President Mallory charges, I was not elected by a true plurality.

  “Under the Constitution, only Congress has the power to decide questions of presidential tenure, and believing as I do that Congress embodies the collective wisdom of the American people, I am content that it should investigate this matter down to the last particle of evidence and decide whether the people elected Franklin Mallory or myself. If the answer is Mallory, I will relinquish the presidency. If it is Lockwood, I will remain where the people have put me. I ask that the Congress act on this supremely urgent and important matter with the least possible delay consistent with a just outcome. God preserve the United States of America.”

  After the cameras were turned off, White House staffers standing along the walls broke into applause. Some of the network crew joined in. A strong-voiced floor man called out, “That was damn near as good as the Gettysburg Address, Mr. President. Hang in there!”

  All this drew no smile or rejoinder from a brooding Lockwood. Standing quietly with the others, Julian Hubbard offered neither comment
nor advice, although while his chief was speaking he had had a brilliant idea—one so brilliant, in fact, that he believed it might save the presidency.

  1

  By the time Lockwood became President, advances in computer technology had made it possible to communicate with any point on earth, and with many places elsewhere in the solar system, with such rapidity that it became necessary to divide the second, formerly the smallest measurement of time that had any meaning in human thought, into ever-smaller fragments—the microsecond, the millisecond, and then the nanosecond, which is to a second what a second is to thirty years. At the same time, the bottomless but unpredictable appetite of the news media for data created a situation in which the government, like a mother with a finicky child or a lonely person with a difficult cat, gave up its own life in order to devote itself to tempting the creature to eat the treats that it set before it. Among other benefits to mankind, this combination of developments rendered obsolete the secrecy in which governments had always operated. Sharing a secret with anyone, even a close associate, became an act of folly because no matter how much you trusted your confidant, he was almost certain to leak it to a journalist. If he did not betray you, your enemies, foreign or domestic, would find a way to do so.

  Speaking of confidential matters over the telephone or by means of fax or computer became unthinkable. Every telephone, every power outlet, every visitor’s tie clip was a potential listening device. The virtual certainty of being found out and misunderstood, no matter what precautions rulers and their chamberlains took, slowed the inner business of politics to a pace not much faster than the one that applied in the time of Charlemagne. People like Julian committed no vital communication to writing, even in code. They spoke to each other in whispers, face to face, in the open air, in the most remote locations possible.

  This was the reason why Julian invited a friend of his from Yale days, Archimedes Hammett, to go cross-country skiing with him on the weekend after Lockwood’s inauguration, at the Harbor, as the Hubbards called their country place in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. This isolated eighteenth-century farmhouse, surrounded by hundreds of acres of thick forest; was the last place in North America where Julian could be fairly certain of privacy. Not even Mallory or the Japanese could bug every tree.

  Privacy was essential because Hammett was even more of a media figure than Julian. The role assigned to him by network bureau chiefs was Man of Conscience. Since his graduation from Yale Law School, he had won fame as a defender of terrorists and others who had been swept over the brink of conscience by the excesses of capitalism. The fact that his courtroom strategy was usually designed with propaganda rather than acquittal in mind had only improved his reputation. The target of his argument was not the jury; it was the news industry. Most of his clients, having claimed responsibility for premeditated murder, expected to be sentenced to death or life imprisonment, and wanted nothing more than to be recognized as martyrs.

  Hammett argued that whatever the crimes his oppressed clients had committed, including the wanton murder of other innocents like themselves, they had a moral warrant to act as they did. “Only the victims of society have a right to take life, or give it, in the cause of social justice,” he had said. Although he never accepted money for defending a criminal case, he had earned large amounts as a public speaker and benefited from a steady flow of contributions to The Fund for Justice, a charitable foundation he had established to pay the costs of defending his penniless clients.

  Never married, Hammett lived alone in apparent celibacy in the style of the last surviving monk of some unimaginably virtuous but now vanished religious order. He did good in the world, studying continually, eating nothing but organic vegetables and whole-grain bread and dressing in the same jeans and workshirts he had worn as an undergraduate. His Yale salary easily covered the expenses of the extremely simple life he led. He dwelled in an apartment on a back street in New Haven that was antiseptically clean but otherwise not much more luxurious than the hideout of Abdul Ahmed Jackson, whom he would almost certainly defend if he was ever arrested.

  Hammett and Julian had met in the 1960s at Yale; Hammett was a class ahead of Julian, who admired him above all other human beings, including Lockwood. This was not because they came from similar backgrounds. Hammett’s seemingly patrician name and Old Blue credentials were deceptive. He had gone through Yale and its law school on full financial aid. His grandfather, a descendant of Spartans from the Mesa Mani, a wild and impoverished region of mountains on the extreme southern tip of the Peloponnesus, had emigrated to the United States after the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. His Greek name, an ancient one, was Gika Mavromikháli, but he had been renamed George Hammett by a U.S. immigration official because he had arrived without papers and, being illiterate, could not write out Mavromikháli, even in Greek letters. When the immigration officer bullied him, Gika hawked out the Greek word for “fuck”: “Gamoto!” The stupid fellow heard this as “Hammett” and wrote it down as the newcomer’s American surname. Gika was willing to accept this gift of a new official identity because he was on the run from the Turkish secret service as a result of his patriotic activities during the war in Serbia and Macedonia, in which, as a sniper working behind the line of the enemy’s retreat, he had killed a large number of Turks of all sexes and ages. Destroying one’s enemy from long range while lying in a place of concealment was the traditional Maniáte way of fighting.

  Setting up the meeting with Hammett required ingenuity. Julian could not, especially now, make sensitive calls from the White House or even from his home telephones. Nor could he risk using a pay phone; he was too recognizable.

  Fortunately, Julian’s wife, Emily, a free-lance writer, picked him up from work that evening, and he was able to use the phone in her rattletrap car while she dashed in to a Safeway to buy groceries for their supper; he was home for a meal so infrequently that she did not keep solid food in the refrigerator.

  Because there was need for secrecy, Julian did not call Hammett directly, but instead dialed a number in Stamford, Connecticut. It was answered on the second ring by another Yale man, who sometimes, when it was wiser for the two men not to talk to each other over an open line, acted as a cutout between Julian and Hammett. Julian had never made a more sensitive call to Hammett than this one.

  To let the go-between know that this was the case, he did not identify himself by name but used a code phrase known only to a very small circle of men. “What,” asked Julian without preamble, “did Trelawny snatch from the funeral pyre at Viareggio?”

  The go-between replied, “Shelley’s heart.”

  These words referred to the famous romantic gesture of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s friend, Edward John Trelawny (1792-1881), who burned the drowned poet’s body as Shelley had wished, with the rites accorded to a hero of ancient Greece, and, by his own account, reached into the raging fire to recover the heart. The phrases were the secret greeting and response of the Shelley Society, the most obscure of Yale’s many private clubs. Although two of its members had served as president of Yale, and at least one as President of the United States, neither the university nor the U.S. government had any inkling that the Shelley Society existed. Its motto and purpose were taken from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s fiery pamphlet A Defence of Poetry:

  A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.

  To this was added the key passage from another of Shelley’s political works, A Philosophical View of Reform:

  Equality of possessions must be the last result of the utmost refinements of civilization … toward which it is our duty to tend.

  The first passage was known within the society as the Shelley Definition, or more often simply the Definition, the second as the Duty. Living by these two plain but noble precepts was regarded as every member’s first purpose in life. The purpose of the Shelley Society
was, and always had been, to force what Shelley had called “the moral progress of politics”—American politics above all, but the world political order as well. A Defence of Poetry was written in 1821. The Shelley Society was established ninety-eight years later by Yale men who had come back from the First World War disillusioned by the slaughter in the trenches, alienated from the privileged class to which they belonged, and determined to make the world a better place, no matter by what methods. On being inducted into the society they swore to work toward the time when justice for all finally became a reality. In Shelleyan parlance, this moment in the future was called the Year Zed. All Shelleyan meetings began and ended with the toast “To the Year Zed!” The British pronunciation of the letter Z had become part of the ritual because one of the society’s founders had served in the Royal Flying Corps.

  To outsiders, if an outsider could have known anything about it, such ritual might have seemed silly. There was nothing silly about it in the mind of any Shelleyan; to the last man they believed that the Year Z would come, and that they would will it into being by doing good by stealth. Shelleyans, like the Poet himself, had always been renegade sons of the Establishment; to leaven the society’s patrician character and keep it in touch with the real world, a proletarian like Archimedes Hammett was chosen every fifth year. That was the theory; in practice the poor boys tended to be greater snobs than the rich ones. Nevertheless, the Shelley Society was profoundly subversive in terms of family, class, church, and country, not to mention the ideas then underlying a Yale education. Paradoxically, it was certainly the most exclusive club to which an Old Blue could belong.

  The paradox did not end there. Only one member was taken in, as a junior, from each class, and again in theory, a member knew the identities of just two other Shelleyans: the man who tapped him and the man he himself tapped the following year, with the advice and approval of his sponsor. In reality, everyone knew everyone, but members never communicated with each other directly. Instead, they always went through another member of their own cell, even with the simplest messages and requests. This cumbersome way of doing things preserved the illusion of impenetrable secrecy while giving every Shelleyan access to every other member.