Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

  Abruptly, in the same loud tone as before, Lockwood said, “They tell me you’re keeping company with Franklin Mallory. Is that so?”

  “We see each other,” Zarah said.

  “How often?”

  “Quite often, Mr. President.”

  “When will you see him again?”

  Zarah let a moment pass before answering. “As soon as I leave here, Mr. President. It’s a long-standing appointment.”

  “Good,” Lockwood said, “because I want you to tell him something for me. Do you mind carrying a message to Garcia?”

  Zarah laughed, understanding why she had been invited to tea. “Is it customary to mind when the President asks you to do something?”

  “Not if it’s a patriotic deed,” Lockwood said. “And this is. What I want is for you to ask Franklin a question and bring me back the answer tomorrow. Will you do that?”

  “If that’s what you want me to do. But why me?”

  “Because there’s no other way I can talk to him or he can talk to me in this damn goldfish bowl full of piranhas. And I’ve got to be able to talk to him and know it’ll stay confidential. It’s vital—vital.”

  “Mr. President, aren’t you assuming a lot? You hardly know me.”

  Lockwood glowered again. “Bloodlines is all I need to know,” he said. “Besides, there’s no one else that knows us both and that nobody else knows.”

  “All right,” Zarah said, “I’ll be glad to help.”

  “Atta girl,” Lockwood said. “This is the question: Is he going to leave things as they are, or is he going to take the next step? Got that?”

  Zarah nodded. For a moment, Lockwood gazed mournfully into her eyes. Then with a grimace of pain he closed his own eyes tightly and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Headache,” he said. “Must have been the cold Coc’-Cola, it always does it to me.”

  Polly released Zarah’s hand and gave her a look that unmistakably meant go. Zarah got to her feet as Polly rose too. Lockwood remained seated. Lifting a hand, he said, “Sure appreciate it.”

  “How shall I give you Mallory’s answer, assuming there is an answer?”

  “If I know Franklin, there’ll be an answer,” Lockwood said. “Come on back here at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Right here, to this same room. Polly’ll have ‘em let you in.”

  9

  At five-thirty, late for her appointment with Mallory, Zarah left the White House by the northeast gate and hailed an eastbound taxi on Pennsylvania Avenue. Sturdi Sturdevant. who had followed Zarah to the White House two hours before and had been waiting for her in Lafayette Park behind a screen of homeless people—excellent cover because they attracted no more notice than the ginkgo trees that had themselves long ago ceased to be curiosities—set off in pursuit. Rush-hour traffic was at its height, so she had no trouble keeping pace with the cab as it inched its way eastward. In fact, Sturdi sometimes had to jog in place in order to stay in the driver’s blind spot. It wasn’t likely that the cabby, a dusky Third Worlder who was talking animatedly to his passenger, was in the pay of Mallory or some other hostile element. However, Sturdi gave him no benefit of the doubt; she operated on the sound assumption that everyone was an enemy until proven to be otherwise. She herself looked like any of a hundred runners of indeterminate gender who were taking their evening laps. Her costume drew admiring glances. The trendiest athletic gear was Sturdi’s only concession to fashion. Today she was dressed entirely in black—baggy sweats that cloaked her muscular body, the latest helium-filled running shoes, a sweat-wick cap with ventilated crown drawn down onto her thick dark eyebrows, goggles, and a highly advanced, featherweight antipollution mask that reduced inhalation of exhaust emissions and other airborne poisons by seventy-three percent.

  Hammett wore this same kind of mask when outdoors during the hours of peak atmospheric danger. Not that he had instructed Sturdi, in so many words, to follow Zarah, but she knew he wanted to know everything—everything—about this woman, and twenty-four-hour close-up observation was the quickest, surest way to compile the necessary data base. They were starting from scratch. Like Wiggins and Lucy before them, Sturdi and Slim had found no trace of Zarah in the usual files; she seemed not even to have gone to college anywhere in the world, a freak of biography that was completely off the graph of twenty-first-century reality. How could a person be said to exist, much less to matter, when lacking the most basic credentials? Even the fertilized ova in Mallory’s deep freeze were better documented than this creature whose gleaming blond hair and classic profile showed in the rear window of the taxi. Physical beauty in another person affected Sturdi deeply and the sight of Zarah filled her chest with longing, but in this case she fought against the reaction, knowing that it was mere autonomic stimulation and could lead to nothing. This was a woman made for men, a relic of the old femininity; Sturdi could see this by the way Zarah moved, and by the way she was attuned to the male admiration in which she was continually bathed. She even smelled like a sex object; Sturdi knew, because she had a real gift for this sort of work and more than once had been close enough to apprehend the natural scent of Zarah’s body.

  The fact that Zarah had been to the White House, entering and leaving by an entrance reserved for invited visitors, was interesting but not surprising: at Macalaster’s dinner party Hammett had overheard Polly Lockwood inviting her to tea. He had also noted Lockwood’s strong response to her physical appearance. Judging by the time of day and the amount of time spent inside and a number of other small signs, including the fact that she had entered and left the President’s house through the East Wing, which was First Lady’s territory, it was reasonable to suppose that she had in fact been invited to tea. Sturdi could not be sure that this was so because Zarah’s phone was regarded as too sensitive to tap—not because Zarah herself was likely to detect a surreptitious listener, but because some of the other people who could be assumed to have tapped her line might already have done so. These included Mallory, the FIS, and certain terrorist elements who had reason to suspect or even hate this woman because of her family connections.

  Sturdi loved the investigative aspect of her work. Each possibility, each weakness, each folly, each seemingly mundane detail, was part of the process of rediscovering that every reality worth knowing was concealed beneath a seemingly innocent surface. With her carefree beauty and inexplicable knowledge of people and things and her secret connections, Zarah Christopher was a perfect example of this central truth. Sturdi’s world was a mare’s nest of such snarled threads; this was what made it so inexhaustibly interesting and also made it worth the labor and sacrifice required to live within it as a fully committed person.

  Zarah’s cab dropped her at the entrance of the East Building of the National Gallery. Sturdi dropped back behind a belching metropolitan bus and looked at her watch. She was baffled by this destination. It was after six; the gallery was closed. Why was Zarah getting out of the cab here? She was talking to the driver as she paid him. Sturdi accelerated so as to get within earshot. Although she did not speak or understand Arabic, she recognized it when she heard it as a result of her many encounters with Hammett’s Near Eastern clients. Zarah was speaking to the driver in that language, spinning out sentences as easily as she spoke English. This was a new detail; switching on the miniature tape recorder clipped to the waist of her sweatpants, Sturdi recorded as much of the exchange as she could. It might be useful. Sometimes even the cleverest operatives talked more freely when they were speaking a language that they imagined was incomprehensible to eavesdroppers. Sturdi jogged in place at the end of the crosswalk as if waiting for the light to change. With a camera disguised to look like a pedometer, she took several photographs of Zarah and the cabdriver, of whom she was now truly suspicious, and also snapped the license plate and logo of his taxi, although she had committed these items to memory during the thirty-minute run from the White House.

  With an empathetic smile and a final burst of glottal Arabic, Zarah turned away from th
e clearly smitten cabby and strode swiftly over the cobblestones toward the glass doors of the East Building, skirt swinging round her legs, pale hair lifting and falling in an iridescent cascade. She had the air of someone who is late—not anxious, not hurried, but determined not to waste a moment. The interior of the building was dim; Sturdi, who had superb eyesight, could only just make out the paddles of the huge Calder mobile turning airily in the currents generated by the ventilation system. Surely Zarah realized that the place was closed and that she would encounter a locked door, or did she think the sesame of her beauty would cause the gates to swing open?

  As Zarah approached the glass wall in which the locked and bolted revolving doors were set, three indistinct figures appeared on the other side. Sturdi, who knew she was staying too long in one position but had no choice if she wanted to see what happened next, grasped her left shoe and pretended to stretch. At the last possible moment, the door was opened by a young woman whom Sturdi, an expert on Mallory’s security operations, recognized as Lucy. Wiggins, whose face was also known to Sturdi, stepped outside and took up a station between the door and the world, blocking the view. Sturdi dropped her foot and moved a few steps to the left, improving her angle of vision, and in so doing attracted Wiggins’s attention by her movement, which meant that she would never be able to wear these black running togs again. She felt a pang—the outfit was almost new and she had little money to spend on another one—but the feeling passed when she saw Franklin Mallory, unmistakably himself with his shock of white hair, his suit and tie whose cost would have fed an African village for a month, and his master-of-all-he-surveyed body language, greeting Zarah just inside the door. At the sight of her his face exploded—there was no other word—into a grimace of delight, an expression absent from the millions of photographs of him published in the news media. He gazed happily into Zarah’s eyes while rapidly speaking words that Sturdi could neither hear with her own ears nor hope to pick up with her recorder through the thick plate glass. But one thing was plain: This man, so recently bereaved of the love of his life, adored this woman who had just been drinking tea with the wife of the greatest enemy he had in the world. What a discovery!

  10

  Had he been aware of Sturdi’s analysis of his feelings toward Zarah Christopher, Mallory would have agreed that her intuition was sound. He had loved two other women and been happy with them sexually, but he had taken each into his life not out of any overwhelming desire but as a matter of conscious choice. Both Marilyn and Susan, coming to him at different stages of his career, had been right for him in terms of his needs at the time, and this was why he had made his decisions to love and cherish them and had abided by them faithfully. Romance had had nothing to do with the matter.

  With Zarah, however, he was now experiencing, on the verge of old age, something that he had always been sure did not exist: love at first sight. As in Sturdi’s case (and of course that of many other people of both sexes; Zarah had looked this way for several years), this woman’s physical being acted in some inexplicable way upon the involuntary functions of his own body. Mallory being Mallory, he had attempted to analyze this phenomenon. The impression Zarah made on his senses when he saw her across the room on that first night in Kalorama had been something like the effect of a sudden burst of interstellar static on a shortwave receiver; he lost, without hope of recovery, the emotional signal to which he had been listening all his life. Thereafter he breathed differently, thought and spoke differently; he even fancied that his heart was functioning in a different way, that his blood was a different temperature, that the amount of oxygen being furnished to his brain was different. All these things began to happen to him before he even spoke to Zarah, much less began to discover the subtleties of her mind and to sense that stillness at the center of her being which was so mysterious that it suggested reincarnation: it seemed possible to him that she had lived many times in the past. Mallory amazed himself with this bizarre idea. He was not given to high-flown thought or language—famously not given to it—but these were the terms in which he found himself explaining his feelings about Zarah to himself; that same morning, he had written all of the foregoing conceptions down on a tablet while flying home to Washington from his hunting lodge in Utah. This torn-off sheet of notepaper was now folded up in his coat pocket.

  “I want to tell you something quite strange,” he said to her now. “With everything that’s been going on in this country, and in my own life, over the past week, with who knows what hanging in the balance, the thing I’ve thought about most is showing you these pictures. And talking to you about them.”

  Mallory stepped aside and made a gesture for Zarah to precede him into the gallery. The room was dark when they entered, and then all the lights went on at once, illuminating the paintings on the wall.

  Looking into his happy face in this sudden glow, Zarah felt a twinge of guilt. Normally she was not a victim of this emotion, thanks to the systematic way in which her mother had insulated her from the politics, secrets, and other romantic fantasies that had, as Cathy believed, ruined her own life and Paul Christopher’s, as well as the lives of most of the rest of their generation. But Zarah had just come from the White House, where she had been entrusted by Lockwood with a secret message for Mallory. Clearly it was wrong to let this man tell her anecdotes and show her paintings as if nothing had happened. The burden of the mission Lockwood had forced on her had seemed slightly comical at first because it had been done so dramatically, but now it seemed heavy. She resented knowing what she knew; she did not want to know it.

  All this showed in her face. In open puzzlement—what had so suddenly gone wrong?—Mallory asked, “You don’t like the pictures?”

  Zarah shook herself. “Sorry,” she said. “It has nothing to do with the paintings. I haven’t even looked at them yet. It’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “Later. Let’s look at the pictures.”

  Later, after a dinner of salad and cold chicken in Zarah’s kitchen, she delivered Lockwood’s message.

  Mallory stared at her in disbelief. Color drained from his face and every vestige of good feeling vanished. “That man actually asked you to speak those words to me?” he said. “He had Polly invite you to the White House for tea, and then came upstairs and said this?”

  Zarah did not answer; she had already told him the details of her visit.

  “The fool!” Mallory said. “The bastard!”

  Zarah started; she had never known Mallory to use profanity, had never heard emotion in his voice, had never seen him as he was now. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because he’s put you in the middle. And that puts you out of my reach.”

  She gazed at him in puzzlement.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Remember who your cousins are.”

  “I’ve never for a moment forgotten.”

  “Let me ask you this,” Mallory said, calmer now. “Did you feel sorry for this man?”

  She said, “Yes, of course. He looked like a man who thought he was going to lose everything.”

  “That’s right. So to equalize matters he wants me to lose you.” Mallory actually blushed as these words escaped him. “Forgive me,” he said. “That was presumptuous.”

  “Never mind,” Zarah said. “Why don’t we just forget this ever happened?”

  “Impossible,” Mallory replied. “Frosty has seen to that. But I think we’d better sleep on it. Don’t you want Lockwood’s message decoded? Or did he explain what he was talking about?”

  Zarah did not even have to consider the matter. “No,” she said, “he didn’t explain.”

  “Thank goodness for small favors.”

  Zarah found herself thinking about Cathy yet again. She said, “I think I’m beginning to understand what my mother meant when she used to say that somebody ought to burn this town and sow the fields with salt.”

  Cathy had been perfectly serious about this because she believed that Washingt
on, or what it had symbolized during the Cold War, had robbed her first of innocence and then of the possibility of love.

  “Look,” Zarah said. “I don’t mind doing this if there’s something you’d like to say to him.”

  Mallory looked away for a moment, then back at her. “You understand that this isn’t something you can do once and never do again?”

  “I think so. But what does it matter?”

  “It might matter a great deal, Zarah. Think carefully.”

  She said, “Do you want to send Lockwood a message or not?”

  Mallory sensed what was in her mind—or so it seemed—and with a small but visible effort, once again became the man Zarah knew. “All right,” he said, “tell him this: I will not take the next step, but he’s crazy if he doesn’t think that someone else won’t. The means exist. It could happen any time. The best thing for everyone is to end it now by using the mechanism I suggested to him on the night before the inauguration. Between us we have the votes in Congress to save the situation. But once the other thing gets out, neither one of us will be able to control events.”

  “The other thing?” Zarah said.

  Mallory shook his head; he was not going to be the one to tell her this particular secret.

  She said, “Franklin, why are you so upset about this?”

  “Because this is not what I had in mind for you.”

  He left her. Wiggins and Lucy awaited him just outside the front door. Sturdi, walking five quarrelsome small dogs down Zarah’s street, noted the time of his departure, and observed with professional admiration how very effective his understated disguise was—a watch cap covering his hair, a parka that concealed the shape of his body. She herself wore jeans, a comically oversize sweater, and a curly pepper-and-salt wig. Her own disguise made her look, even to Wiggins and Lucy, like the penniless dog walker—possibly a refugee from a bad marriage or a late-blooming graduate student—that she appeared to be. And in fact was: using an invented name, Sturdi had signed up at a dog-walking service that served this neighborhood.