Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

  “Forget his side of the story,” Hammett said. “He just stopped being the President who could not tell a lie. Besides, how is he ever going to tell his side if the story doesn’t come out? Can you lay hands on a transcript of the testimony?”

  “A diskette.”

  “Leave it in the usual place. Now.”

  “They’ll know who did it; access is very tight. It could cost me my job.”

  “Nonsense. The reactionaries will love you for it,” Hammett said. “And if they don’t, you’ll get a better job, one where you can be yourself. Everybody will know you’ve earned it. Believe me.”

  Without waiting for her acquiescence, Hammett disconnected and immediately punched out the number of a borrowed house in Southeast Washington where Sturdi was working late with Slim on their schedule for the next day, when they were being interviewed by the newsmagazines and the long-format weekly television shows. The prospect of all this exposure made Slim nervous—Sturdi was amazed at just how nervous, and she had spent the evening calming and reassuring her friend. Sturdi was not glad to hear the phone ring, but she answered circumspectly by reciting the phone number.

  Hammett’s voice said, “I’d like to order a medium pizza with mushrooms and peppers under the sauce, sugar- and sodium-free.” Sturdi said, “Right away, sir. Name and address?” Hammett said, “The name is Charley, spelled with a y. Rayburn House Office Building. Just leave it at the desk between one and two. Make it fast.”

  This gibberish told Sturdi that she was to pick up a package on C Street, between First and Second Streets, from beneath a parked car with the letter y soaped on the rear window. She had done this before when Graf had had something for Hammett and the Cause. Sturdi did not welcome the assignment. Slim needed her, and that was not an everyday event. All the same she put on her biking clothes, clipped a tube of red-pepper anti-mugger spray to her wrist because she would be riding through destabilized neighborhoods, and left immediately.

  While he waited for Sturdi to carry out her assignment, Hammett began making calls, putting out the bitter, all-but-unbelievable word that Lockwood had betrayed them all, that the President they had trusted was not what they had thought he was—that is, a man from the underclass whom they had raised up to power so that he could act on the basis of their wisdom—but instead was a pawn of the Establishment. On one point, however, he was careful to add a word of caution: “Lockwood is one thing, and to our sorrow we now know what that thing is,” he said in his reasonable, collegial, we-all-talk-the-same-language way, to each of the three dozen political activists and public officials he called. “Nothing can atone for what this man did and how he deceived us. But don’t make the mistake of blaming Julian. He’s with us and always has been. I know for a fact that he deserves no part of the blame. Why do you think he resigned? I can’t say more. Just remember all he’s done for the Cause and try to imagine what he must be going through because he trusted Lockwood just as we did.”

  Hammett knew they would all be on the phone themselves as soon as the sun rose, networking, organizing congressmen and key congressional staffers, briefing the second echelon of the media.

  Sturdi arrived at Hammett’s place just before dawn with the diskette she had retrieved from beneath the parked car on C Street. He read the documents with a reassuring sense of growing calm: knowing the inmost truth—knowing the worst—about anything had always tranquilized him. He understood perfectly what he held in his hands. This bombshell, bursting in the media just hours after the sensation Slim had created with her exposure of Attenborough, would be one of the great one-two punches in the annals of guerrilla journalism.

  9

  The full story of Attenborough’s assault on Slim had already broken on the evening news. Because the accused refused to discuss the matter even on background, the coverage was based on the allegations in Slim’s lawsuit, with additional details provided by the knowledgeable sources who had already been talking to journalists about the episode for several days. The words “rape” and “penetration” occurred often, and because it was impossible in a family newspaper to provide full anatomical details, many readers, perhaps even a majority, did not understand which part of Attenborough’s body had been the instrument of penetration. “The question is irrelevant,” said Sturdi, refusing to be specific but willing to be clinical when it was put by a sympathetic but curious reporter. “My client was violated; she was penetrated; that is rape no matter what instrument the rapist used.”

  The stories included interviews with anonymous sources among the emergency room staff at a large downtown hospital where Slim had been interviewed and examined immediately after she left Macalaster’s house. They described her hysteria, her disorientation, her injuries, which appeared to have been inflicted by a sharp object. Unnamed clerical and technical personnel at the smaller hospital where Attenborough had been treated for a cut suffered in a drunken fall added their recollections. It was reported that Attenborough had called the young Chinese-American resident who treated him “that little Chink doctor with the nice ass.” Other women who had been pinched, fondled, or otherwise harassed by the Speaker were quoted at length, also anonymously.

  The network morning shows were thronged by agitated women, joined by an enlightened male or two, from the phalanx of feminists who had clustered so protectively around Slim in Statuary Hall. Slim herself appeared on Newsdawn with Patrick Graham. Her great, almost irrational fear, she had told Sturdi, was that she would be recognized and accosted by strangers who had seen her on television. Sturdi, who had a way with makeovers, had calmed her friend’s fears, though she had not banished them, by inventing a new schoolmarm look for Slim, concealing her most memorable features by covering her legs with a long skirt, skinning back her luxuriant shampoo-model’s hair into a bun, and shielding her lavender eyes with tinted granny glasses. The result was a Slim as new and unexpected as the one who appeared at Macalaster’s dinner party, a Slim who was the picture of a politically wholesome woman: a trained mind in a mortified body.

  Slim did not discuss the specifics of the attack on herself. She did not have to: Graham was already in possession of every detail, and in his introductory remarks he omitted none of them. In her live interview, conducted by Graham personally, she stuck to the larger question of the political implications of male sexuality, despite his pointed demands for a more personal approach: How had she felt then? How did she feel now? How should other women feel if this happened to them?

  In reply, Slim made a number of abstract comments that were, feminists agreed, more devastating than any mere clinical report of her humiliation could have been. A sexually ruthless white male member of the governing elite in a position of great power, Slim said, could be compared to the commandant of a concentration camp who selects and uses a female prisoner as a sexual toy. All women know, are born knowing, that something like this can happen to them at any moment.

  Patrick Graham heard Slim out with a mixture of sympathy and impatience that sent its own signal to the audience. “Should a man who can be compared to the commandant of Auschwitz be President of the United States, or even Speaker of the House?” he asked.

  “That has always been the question,” Slim replied. “And now, after centuries of silence, victims are demanding an answer.”

  If Graham perceived any incongruity in comparing life in a concentration camp to attending a dinner party in the wealthiest zip code in America, he did not let it show. “Ms. Slim Eve, ladies and gentlemen,” he said with transparent admiration. “Victim and advocate, woman and citizen, talking about a deeply troubled man who is a heartbeat away from an even more deeply troubled presidency. After these messages, Morgan Pike on Capitol Hill.”

  10

  Attenborough, who was part of Patrick Graham’s audience, fell into a deep slumber as soon as Slim went off the air. He had skipped his morning pep pill. Under the circumstances, he didn’t really expect to be awakened by callers, and after many sleepless hours he needed rest. He wa
s dreaming about a West Texas sandstorm—grit blowing in through the cracks in the House chamber, burying the members’ desks—when Albert woke him just before noon.

  “Here’s your pill,” Albert said. Pouring coffee into a cup that already contained three fingers of Absolut vodka, he added, “Don’t take another one till four o’clock. Henry says too many are bad for you.”

  “Hadn’t noticed,” Attenborough said. He swallowed the pill, draining the coffee cup to wash it down, and closed his eyes as if to go back to sleep. A minute later he opened them again with a now-familiar snap as he felt the amphetamine take effect. Amazing stuff.

  Taking the cleaner’s plastic bag off a fresh blue suit and pinning Attenborough’s Phi Beta Kappa key to the lapel, Albert said, “Majority Leader wants you to call him soon as you’ve got a minute.”

  “Soon as I shave and get dressed. Leave the suit. We got plenty of spring water, Albert?”

  “Just put a new bottle in the cooler. Remember what Henry said about that, too.”

  In the bathroom, Attenborough took a shower and shaved, an exercise in self-denial, before getting out the spring water bottle and having his second three ounces of the day just a few minutes early. The image in the glass winked and said, “Don’t do that again, Tucker.” Attenborough replied, “Don’t worry, you know me.”

  When he emerged into his office, his scrawny body wrapped in a big Turkish towel that the Turkish ambassador had given him, the Speaker found Sam Clark standing in front of his desk. Clark looked a little apprehensive, as if he thought Attenborough might not be glad to see him. However, his host gave him a wave of welcome, remembering with a rueful twinge how the breakfast flew the last time Sam had been here on an Odd Wednesday. He said, “Howdy, Sam. I was going to call you as soon as I got my pants on.” He dropped the towel and began to put on the underwear, socks, shirt, polka-dot necktie, tailor-made Suit, and shoes that Albert had laid out for him.

  Clark went right on looking worried. “I’ll make this short and to the point,” he said. “Is this story in the papers true?”

  Attenborough looked up a little dizzily from the difficult job of tying his shoes. “You mean the one about my brutally ravishing a spotless, struggling virgin on the dinner table while the Chief Justice and all the ladies present cried ‘Stop, stop, in the name of all that’s decent and holy’?”

  Clark did not crack a smile. He said, “Tucker, just answer the question.”

  Deftly knotting his tie without a mirror, Attenborough replied, “Okay. The answer is, I felt her up under the table. Got all the way home, in fact. She acted like she was enjoying it. Then, all of a sudden, she jumped up and hollered ‘Rape.’ What does that sound like to you?”

  Staring hard, Clark compressed his lips. Attenborough had never lied to him. As far as Clark knew he had never lied to anybody; when he wanted to avoid telling the truth he made a joke. The Majority Leader said, “It sounds to me like somebody’s out to get you.”

  Attenborough buttoned up his vest, put on his suit coat and buttoned that, too. “Don’t it, though?” he said. “Makes you wonder who’s next. For all I know they already got poor old Willy Graves.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “The hell I’m not. Willy liked the girls. Common knowledge. Maybe that same dolly with the hole in her stockings worked old Willy up till he had a heart attack.”

  “What are you trying to tell me, Tucker?”

  “Sam, I’m not trying to tell you anything. It’s as plain as the nose on Lockwood’s face. Somebody’s playing Ten Little Indians with the presidency of the United States. I was trashed in time for the evening news, and after Bob Laval got mouse-trapped into calling that damned hearing, Lockwood’s turn is next—unless this town has changed all of a sudden.”

  “You think Franklin is doing this?”

  “No,” Attenborough said. “Hell, no. Franklin may be a hardhearted son of a bitch who’d have the Little Match Girl arrested for loitering, but God knows he works right out in the open. That’s why we’ve been put to all this damn inconvenience. Besides, why would he? He thinks he was elected President—and he’s probably right, not that it’s going to do him much good.”

  “Then who?”

  “Why ask me? Nobody’s going to believe a word I say for the rest of my life.” Attenborough coughed, a long spasm that brought color to his deadened skin and made him hear his pulse beating in his skull. Looking up at the end of it with tears in his eyes, he winked broadly and said, “I’m talking two weeks. Maybe three.”

  11

  As Patrick Graham walked from the front door of his fine Federal house on O Street to the limousine that would transport him to the studio at 4:30 A.M. on the day after the Laval committee hearings, a bicycle messenger delivered a transcript of Philindros’s testimony to him. The messenger, an androgynous being who wore yellow goggles even in the darkness of the morning, sped away into the warren of Georgetown streets before Graham could react.

  He read the transcript in the limousine. Included as a bonus were photocopies of supporting documents—memorandums of Philindros’s conversations with Lockwood and Julian Hubbard, reports from the FIS officer in the field who handled the assassin (unidentified in the document but known for a fact by Graham to be Horace Hubbard), and transcripts of intercepted conversations between Ibn Awad and the terrorists—that Philindros had submitted to the committee. The whole bundle, neatly bound in red loose-leaf covers, weighed not less than four pounds. The documents were stamped TOP SECRET SENSITIVE EYES ONLY CODE WORD NO FORN in red ink.

  Because he knew a history-making story when he saw one, and even more because he was still smarting from the humiliation of having Ross Macalaster print a story that he, Graham, had uncovered months earlier but had been too decent to broadcast, he put it on the air raw before the credits rolled on Newsdawn. Then, after the most cursory mention of the other news, he devoted the entire two hours of the show to in-depth interviews with congressmen, leaders of every political grouping that had any conceivable interest in the event, ex-spies, and ordinary people accosted on their way to work by roving reporters. Naturally the story was picked up by all the other morning shows while Newsdawn was still in progress, and a brief last-minute story under a 72-point headline (FIS CHIEF SAYS LOCKWOOD LIED) was splashed on the made-over front page of the final edition of the newspaper. Ross Macalaster was given no credit by Graham, or even by his own newspaper, for breaking the story.

  By the time the House convened at two in the afternoon, the White House and the Capitol were encircled by chanting pickets. Tens of thousands of phone calls, faxes, and E-mail messages had been delivered to every member of the House, and were still coming in as fast as the phone lines could handle them. Lockwood was denounced on the floor by member after member for “lying to the American people.”

  At four o’clock, in good time for the evening news, the President was impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. Two articles of impeachment were adopted, the first for ordering the assassination of Ibn Awad, “contrary to the laws and moral standards of the United States of America,” and a second, omnibus article charging him with taking the presidential oath of office “under false pretenses and with mental reservations,” in that persons acting in his interest had falsified the outcome of the voting in Michigan, New York, and California. What the false pretenses might be Attenborough could not imagine, but he smelled trouble in the phrase.

  Lockwood’s own party deserted him in massive numbers. Only twelve votes, including Attenborough’s, were cast against the Ibn Awad article. The opposition voted unanimously for impeachment, as they had planned to do all along for political reasons that had nothing to do with the evidence. Fifty members, a tiny minority, voted against the article concerning the presidential oath, a formulation that differed in what Attenborough knew was almost certainly a fatal way from his original formula for impeaching Lockwood on charges of which he was clearly innocent— namely personal involvement in the theft of th
e election. Attenborough did not think the Ibn Awad article would ever stick, or was meant to; what it was designed to do was to turn Lockwood’s reputation upside down and make it look as if he were capable of anything, for the purpose of setting him up for conviction on the rest of the articles. The provision on mental reservation was the sleeper: It was the oath that made you President through God’s blessing and anointment by the Constitution. Therefore if the oath wasn’t valid, Lockwood had never been President. Attenborough did not even want to think about the Pandora’s box that this would open, let alone what would pop out of it.

  The Speaker did his best not to think about it while the riot in the House lasted. After what had been said about him in the media, he knew he could do little to control the debate and even less to influence the outcome. During the roll call he laid his head against the tall leather back of the Speaker’s chair and closed his eyes, opening them only to vote against both articles of impeachment. ‘As he dozed, or seemed to, the network commentators remarked, one after the other, on his fall from grace and power. “When he has finished his nap,” said Patrick Graham sonorously, “the Speaker will wake up to find that he has, in a single moment of lust and folly, lost any claim to power and prestige.”

  After it was over, Attenborough walked past the press, which had again attached itself to Laval. This time the Speaker was close enough to hear the chairman’s words. He was saying, “Arguing this case against my old friend Frosty Lockwood is the saddest duty and the heaviest burden of my life, but I will do the best I can. All that matters now is the truth.”

  Damn right, Attenborough thought, but where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? No one asked him to put his thoughts into words. He passed in ghostly fashion among the media people and they shrank away from him as if he gave off a sepulchral chill.