Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

  Lockwood glared. “Franklin always has a point. That’s why he’s such a pain in the ass.”

  “But there is a second constitutional solution.”

  “Spats,” Lockwood said. “Not now.”

  Blackstone flushed red; Olmedo avoided both Presidents’ eyes. He felt something awaken and move within himself. He did not mistake it for anything but what it was: fear, primal, instinctive fear, because all that he had learned in a lifetime of defending human beings in extremis told him that the situation had just gone out of control.

  1

  Although few would ever realize it, R. Tucker Attenborough, Jr., had chosen to give his life for his country. That was what his decision to resume drinking meant, and he knew it. Though he came from people who believed it was a good and noble thing to die a patriotic death, there was nothing sentimental about his decision. No other option was open to him. He could not go into a hospital in the middle of the greatest constitutional crisis in American history and leave the leadership of the House of Representatives and the fate of his party in other hands. And as his hallucinations had proved, he could not quit drinking on his own and still do what he had to do. After weeks of pondering, he knew exactly what he had to do and exactly how to do it; the whole scenario was mapped out in his mind—every word, every step, every legal precedent. But he had kept the thing to himself, and it was too late now to hand it over to anyone else.

  On the day he mistook Ross Macalaster for an assassin, Attenborough sought a second medical opinion. He needed a doctor he could trust, so he called in Albert Tyler’s youngest son, Henry, who was an internist on the staff of the small hospital where he had been treated by Dr. Chin. In the privacy of the Speaker’s office, Henry looked into Attenborough’s eyes, felt his liver, read the results of the tests, and asked a few questions. Then he confirmed Dr. Chin’s diagnosis in every respect. Attenborough had three choices: he could check into a treatment program immediately and live, he could try giving up alcohol on his own and lose his sanity, or he could go back to drinking and stay on his feet for maybe two or three weeks before he collapsed and began to die, organ by organ.

  Attenborough said, “How about I wait a month, just drinking enough to keep from seeing things, and then check into the hospital? Got a lot to do right now, Henry, and I’m the only one can do it.”

  Henry said, “Mr. Speaker, you won’t live a month if you keep on pumping vodka through your body at the rate of two liters a day.”

  “How much can I pump through it and stay alive and stay awake? What I want to do is work like I normally do and not have any more of those visions.”

  “I can’t advise you on that.”

  “Sure you can.”

  Henry wagged his head in stern admonishment. “No, sir,” he said. “Even if it was right to tell you that, which it isn’t, I’d be guessing, based on what I know now. I’d have to monitor your blood-alcohol level over a period of days and compute a dose to keep it at a certain level. But in order to do that I’d have to aid and abet your suicide. And I won’t do that.”

  Attenborough nodded sympathetically: Henry was the one who had the problem. He wanted to help him solve it. “How often would a fellow take the dose you’re talking about and how big would it be?” he asked. Henry gave him a suspicious look. Attenborough said, “Just curious.”

  Henry hesitated; a half-smile came and went. But he answered the question. “Small doses at frequent intervals would be best, based on habitual intake.”

  “Call two liters eighty ounces,” Attenborough said. “Divided by twenty-four, that’s just about three ounces an hour. Right?”

  “Mr. Speaker,” Henry said, “that’s an alcoholic talking and I’m not listening.”

  “There’s more to it than that,” Attenborough said. “What you’re saying is I got to quit drinking to live, and the only way I can quit is cut myself off from the outside world. Problem is, I need two weeks, maybe three, to get this impeachment business settled. I can’t run away from that, and I sure can’t get it done from a hospital room.”

  “Consider the alternative.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do here, Henry. Worst thing about what’s wrong with me is I keep falling asleep in the middle of things. Can you give me something for that?”

  Henry was no longer amused. He was a serious young fellow by nature—melancholy, even. He had reason to be. His two older brothers had been shot to death in the children’s wars of the nineties and his mother had died young. Trying to preserve Albert from another loss, the Speaker had gotten Henry a job as a House page to keep him off the streets; then had fixed him up with government grants to pay for a New England prep school and college and finally for medical school—Harvard, no less. All along, he had helped him any way he could. Naturally Henry resented this. He said, “I don’t see how I could do that either, Mr. Speaker.”

  Attenborough nodded understandingly; he did understand, better than Henry knew. “Henry, I understand what you’re saying to me, but I’ve got to see this thing through. I’m the only one can do what’s got to be done. With you or without you, I’m going to do it. Got no choice. I’m making a choice and asking for your help. You’d be doing a good thing, you’d be doing something for this country that we love.”

  Henry flinched at this final sentence, as Attenborough had known he would; the young man didn’t think he had much reason to be patriotic.

  “I can’t do it,” Henry said. “The kind of pills you’re talking about don’t mix with alcohol. They can kill you.”

  Attenborough put a hand on his forearm and said, “What difference does that make if I’m going to die anyway?” Henry looked down at the old mottled hand on his sleeve, avoiding Attenborough’s eyes. The Speaker said, “Henry, my body’s done for anyway—you say so yourself. It’s my body, my choice. I don’t like to put it to you this way, son, but you owe me.”

  At these words, Henry’s face lost all expression. But he took out a pen and pad and started to write a prescription. “I’ll give you enough for two weeks, one every four hours,” he said. “Don’t exceed the dose.”

  “Appreciate it,” Attenborough said. “Put that in your daddy’s name, if you don’t mind; might save trouble at the drugstore.”

  Now, only a day later, Attenborough was pretty much his old self again. Wide awake at six in the morning, he gazed at the desert plants in the National Botanic Garden and thought about his encounter with Henry, thought about death, thought about how strange it was that the most important conversation of his life should have been with a young black man who thought there was a world between them—a world that an old white man like Attenborough could never comprehend. That was bullshit, but how could Henry know?

  Despite the improvement in his mental and physical functions, Attenborough’s mood was somber. All this introspection about Henry was just a way to avoid thinking about what was happening in the world around him. Before walking down the hill to the greenhouse, he had read Macalaster’s column (“the first of a series”) about Lockwood and Ibn Awad in the morning newspaper. That’s why he was here: to think, to plan, to figure a way out of the mess this was going to cause. Macalaster was saying that Lockwood had put out a contract on Ibn Awad and then lied about it to the country. The paper had not picked up the tale of the tape as a page-one news story—at least not yet—but had printed it under a playful headline (“Dark Doings in the Desert?”) in Macalaster’s customary spot below the fold on the op-ed page. The New York papers, which did not use Macalaster’s column, did not even mention it. This could not last. It was not in the nature of the news media to ignore something like this; it would break out, breed on its own body and multiply; it would gambol among the monuments, it would chew up everything in sight and process it into . . . news.

  Although Macalaster had told him nothing in cold print that he had not always known in his bones, Attenborough did not want to be part of this process. He had come down to the greenhouse, letting himself in the back door
with his own personal key, not just to think the situation over, but also in the hope of avoiding any reporters who might have been rousted out of bed by their editors and sent down to Capitol Hill to ask him questions. By the time he had left his office, every phone was ringing off the hook. He let them ring. His idea was to avoid being quoted on the morning news, which went off the air at eight-thirty, and to dodge his early-rising colleagues in the House, who would want to talk about what it all meant as soon as they read the papers. He felt safe here, isolated; this was his refuge. The greenhouse staff had not yet come to work and the night guards were out back, drinking coffee. Attenborough was alone with the desert plants; he had the whole building to himself, with four hours to think and drink before he banged the gavel to bring the House to order at ten o’clock, launching the process that would decide the fate of a President and maybe the future of democracy in America. Not to mention the question of whether or not he, Attenborough, was going to die in vain.

  The automatic sprinkling system was operating in the next room, cutting off the approach of intruders. The Speaker’s wristwatch alarm chimed; he had set it to go off every hour on the hour as an aid to his new system of drinking. He drank exactly three ounces of vodka out of one of the eight-ounce plastic cough-medicine bottles, ounces marked on the side, that he had slipped into the inside pockets of his suit coat.

  No man could be sure what would happen once the hounds of politics and press were set loose. But Attenborough knew what he had wanted to prevent from happening before this tape fell into Ross Macalaster’s hands, and now he was no longer sure he was going to be able to do it. Until he had read the morning papers, his neat and tidy plan had been to get all the procedures adopted by two o’clock, by which time everybody would be so hungry and so anxious to go to the toilet that no objection was likely. He would then adjourn the House until two o’clock the following day, with the expectation of getting the three articles of impeachment adopted in one session if he had to keep it going all night long. After that, he’d appoint the managers for the Senate trial and stay with them until Lockwood’s fate was decided or until, as that mean little Chinese girl doctor had admonished, every part of his body stopped working except his heart, whichever came sooner. Not much chance of sticking to that schedule now, thanks to that dumb hillbilly in the White House and whoever was out to get him.

  Yet, Attenborough thought, we might just save the country after all. Thanks to the pills, he felt smarter this morning than he had felt since the day, thirty years before, when he came in first in the Texas law examination with a mark of 100 percent—a sawed-off, ugly-faced poor boy out of the Chihuahua Desert who had memorized every word and punctuation mark of every statute and case in the Texas law books. That flawless performance had been the turning point of his life. Good thing or bad? He’d know by the end of the day, and so would the rest of the country. He raised the medicine bottle again, looked at it longingly with the light shining through it, then resolutely put it away.

  The sun was shining through the roof. Attenborough sauntered on, looking with never-diminishing pleasure at the rainbows created by the nozzles overhead. He thought, The R. Tucker Attenborough Memorial Sprinkler System. He laughed out loud at this idea, but it wasn’t such a bad one—better than having an office building named after you, or a statue. Best way to lose your name was to carve it in stone.

  Alfonso Olmedo stood at the turning in the path, wearing one of his beautiful New York suits. He was solemn and deliberate in his approach.

  “Damn!” In his surprise and resentment at this intrusion, Attenborough spoke loud enough to rattle the greenhouse glass.

  Olmedo was unruffled. “I’m sorry to drop in unannounced this way,” he said in his courtly manner, “but no one answered your telephone.”

  “That’s because I shut the sucker off for a reason,” Attenborough said.

  His tone was fierce, but Olmedo, used to dealing with the theatrics of judges, feigned not to notice. “Mr. Speaker,” he said, “there has been an unfortunate development and I wanted to be sure you are aware of it.”

  “What development’s that? Macalaster’s column?”

  “Then you’ve seen the paper.”

  “Read the sucker first thing every morning. How much trouble are we in?”

  “I don’t know,” Olmedo said. “Macalaster played a portion of the tape to Philindros over the phone.”

  “Does Philindros say it’s the real thing?”

  “I didn’t ask that question.”

  “I don’t plan to ask it myself. Others will. What’s Lockwood’s answer going to be?”

  “I can tell you what his answer to Mallory was.”

  “They’ve been talking?”

  Olmedo described Mallory’s visit to the Oval Office.

  Attenborough said, “Franklin thinks there’s some kind of plot going on, but Frosty made a joke of it?”

  “That’s one way of describing his reaction.”

  Attenborough said, “That means they both think there’s some kind of a plot going on. Does the President still think I’m after his job?”

  Olmedo did not know the answer to this question. “Whatever he thinks,” he said, “he has decided to fight it out to his last breath and drop of blood.”

  “That’s not a surprise, knowing Frosty—win it in the last second of play by sheer dumb luck and marry the cheerleader. Have you got a game plan to save his ass in light of what’s happening, or are you just going to make it up as you go along and throw a few Hail Marys at the end?”

  Olmedo bowed perfunctorily to Attenborough’s sarcasm. He said, “Our position is twofold—”

  “Hold it right there,” Attenborough said. “Take my advice and make it onefold, Alfonso. This town is like a horse. It can only think about one thing at a time, so what you want to do if you’re planning to stick your arm up its rectum is put a twist on its lip so its mind will not be on the end where the action is.”

  Olmedo said, “I am always grateful for an expert’s opinion. Perhaps you can help me to choose between two thoughts: one, the tape is inadmissible—”

  “No chance. Remember Nixon.”

  “Or, two, it is a politically inspired attempt to distort the truth.”

  “That’s better, because Macalaster can’t be called as a witness. Journalists are above the law in this town, and even if they weren’t, old Ross has got his principles. He’d go to jail for the rest of his life rather than betray a source, and to hell with the United States of America. So the idea that the tape’s a fake is your twist on the horse’s lip—unless you still think there are credible witnesses to the conversation.”

  “I don’t think we can count on any help from witnesses,” said Olmedo. “The question is, what constitutes credibility on Capitol Hill?”

  Through the fine wool of his dark-blue made-for-television suit, Attenborough touched his medicine bottle. “Credibility?” he replied. “It’s the same on the Hill as anyplace else in the world: Tell ‘em what they already think they know.”

  “And in this case, Lockwood’s case, what do they think they know?”

  “Yesterday or today?” Attenborough said. “Yesterday he was the reincarnation of Abe Lincoln. Today the seed of doubt is germinating. What you’ve got to worry about is tomorrow, because that’s when it’s going to sprout.”

  2

  Penned in by ropes, the news media awaited Attenborough in Statuary Hall, near the door of his everyday office. As he appeared among the columns and sculptures the reporters surged forward, making a collective noise, as though their many bodies were controlled by a single overloaded brain. He walked straight toward the creature, smiling and winking into its numerous faces; each wore the same expression of vexed suspicion. Microphones bristled, tape recorders waved, notepads fluttered; the Speaker’s name was uttered like a mating call by two dozen identically pitched voices. He smiled more broadly, completely at ease. The creature was dangerous but predictable. It was always hungry; to keep i
t at bay, to prevent it from having bad memories of you, you had to feed it each time you saw it. As long as you did that, it seldom surprised you.

  But sometimes it did. Morgan Pike, out front as always, asked the first question. Thrusting the trademark pink bulb of her microphone into his face, she said, “Mr. Speaker, we’ve just learned that Vice President Williston Graves has died in the night of an apparent heart attack. How will this affect your handling of the impeachment proceedings in the House, especially since you are now next in line for the presidency?”

  Willy Graves dead? Attenborough stared in mute disbelief. As the camera searched his face, Morgan Pike concentrated on her next question, which was being fed to her over the earpiece hidden beneath her swinging hair.

  Morgan Pike was keen-eyed and succinct. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, Mr. Speaker,” she said. “I know he was an old friend of yours. Personal sorrow aside, does this create a conflict of interest for you?”

  “Conflict of interest? What do you mean by that?”

  “If Lockwood goes, you could be our next President.”

  “What makes you think President Lockwood is going anywhere?”

  “He’s about to be impeached by the House.”

  “As far as I know, Morgan, the House has not yet voted on that.”

  “I’ll rephrase the question. He may be impeached by the House and deprived of his office by the Senate. Are you comfortable with the prospect of presiding over a process that might make you President?”

  “Right now, Morgan, my thoughts are with Vice President Graves and his family.”

  Morgan Pike did not react to his words because she was listening to another incoming question. Her vividly painted face wore the stunned expression of a schizophrenic hearing inner voices. As the camera switched to her, the look disappeared and she was sprightly again. “Will you step aside, Mr. Speaker,” she asked, “and let someone else preside over the House during the impeachment hearings?”