Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

  Love reached for the phone with unconcealed glee. Macalaster held it above his head. “Talk to me, Monty,” he said. “What do you remember?”

  As his hand closed on empty air, Love made an angry noise in his throat. “Come on, Ross,” he said. “What is this, for Christ’s sake, recess time in the fifth grade? I’ve only got ten minutes to file my copy.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Then will you give me the phone?”

  “It’s a promise,” Macalaster said.

  Love looked around. He lowered his voice. “Okay, ready?” he said. “I remember the hands coming under the door. I saw them because I was looking down at my shoe, this one.” He pointed at his orthopedic oxford. “It was untied. And then here come the hands under the door, and as soon as I saw them I thought, Who’s screwing around? I thought it was a joke. That was my last thought before the guy grabbed my ankles and pulled me off the stool and I went down. The next thing I knew, I heard my skull crack. Heard my own skull fracture. That’s the last thing I remember. Now can I have the phone?”

  “That’s it?” Macalaster said.

  “Yeah.”

  “All of it?”

  “Give me the phone.”

  “You’re leaving something out,” Macalaster said. “I see it in your eyes.”

  “You do? No wonder you’re rich and famous,” Love said. “Okay. I left out one detail the shrink says is a fantasy, a denial mechanism. Something I don’t really remember, according to him.”

  “Tell me, Monty.”

  “The guy’s fingernails were painted.”

  Macalaster seized the lapel of Love’s trench coat. “Whose fingernails were painted?”

  “Which ones do you think?” Love said, worried about his Burberry. “The mugger’s.”

  “Describe the hands.”

  “I told you. This character had bright-red fingernails.”

  Macalaster said, “A shrink told you this was a fantasy? What shrink?”

  “The police shrink,” Love replied. “That’s how I finally remembered. They called me in and hypnotized me. They made a video of the whole session. On it, I look and sound like I’m awake, but I’m not.”

  “But they didn’t believe what you remembered?”

  “They believed everything but the bit about the nail polish,” Love said. “I don’t blame ‘em. It makes no sense. Now can I have the phone?”

  Macalaster tossed him the instrument. He himself was remembering something: the assassin coming out of the men’s room, smelling of strong foreign cologne, hurriedly putting on leather gloves: a flash of carmine.

  As soon as Love was finished, Macalaster snatched the phone out of his hand. The working day had ended for the federal bureaucracy, so he went outside where he could be alone and called the detective in charge of the Susan Grant investigation.

  Macalaster said, “I just talked to Montague Love.”

  The voice on the phone was flat, bored. “And?”

  “He told me what he remembered under hypnosis. The part about the painted fingernails impressed me deeply.”

  The detective said, “It did? Why is that, Mr. Macalaster?”

  “Because I think I saw them too.”

  “Really? You didn’t tell me that before.”

  “I didn’t remember it before.”

  “I see. But now you do.”

  “I’m not absolutely sure that I do. The assassin was putting on gloves in a hurry when we bumped into each other. I think I saw a flash of what could have been nail polish.”

  “You think it could have been nail polish.” The question was put in a tired and elaborately toneless voice.

  “That’s right,” Macalaster said.

  “Okay,” the detective said. “Why didn’t you remember that before?”

  “I, too, bumped my head that day when I fell down in the snow. Remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “I thought you should know what I just told you because your psychiatrist told Monty it was a fantasy, a denial mechanism. But maybe it was no fantasy. Maybe the assassin did have painted fingernails.”

  The line went silent. Macalaster said, “I sense that you have a problem with what I’m telling you.”

  “You could say that, friend,” the detective said. “Put yourself in my position. I’m asking myself, why would a famous reporter like yourself, trained to observe every detail, trained to remember, why would that individual look at a man—a member of the male sex—with painted fingernails and remember everything about him except that one rather striking piece of evidence?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was the bump on the head. Or what happened afterward. But it’s a fact.”

  “Facts are good, I like facts,” the detective said. “Why don’t you describe the assailant again for me? I’m talking about what you actually saw that day, not what you just rediscovered in your subconscious mind.”

  Macalaster refused to be provoked. He said, “Okay, male in his late twenties, early thirties. Maybe Middle Eastern. Olive complexion, large dark eyes, heavy dark eyebrows, below average height, slender, medium-long black hair with a purple scalp, wearing sunglasses on a snowy day and a dark-colored topcoat with an astrakhan collar.”

  “ ‘Slender,’ you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “Slender in the sense of appearing to be physically weak?”

  “No, but not husky. Wiry, walked slightly sideways, the way some homosexuals do.”

  “Effeminate?” the detective said. “That’s another new detail. Maybe that explains the nail polish.”

  “I haven’t heard the word ‘effeminate’ spoken aloud for fifteen years,” Macalaster said.

  “Excuse me. Will you accept ‘androgynous’?”

  “Yes.”

  “In that case I’ll accept your description. Would you say it was possible that this person, under that topcoat with the Persian lamb collar, was muscular, stronger than your first impression suggested?”

  “Must have been, to do what he did to Monty Love and Susan Grant and get away from the entire federal and local law-enforcement apparatus when it was on full alert for the inauguration. But no, I didn’t get the impression I was looking at a muscular person.”

  “Then maybe you weren’t looking at the right person. Because the assassin was a bodybuilder.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You understand this is an internal matter and we are totally off the record?”

  “If that’s how you want it. But why are you telling me?”

  “To put your mind at rest. This is a closely held detail. The assassin took a leak and forgot to flush the toilet in his apartment before he went out on Inauguration Day. His urine contained heavy concentrations of anabolic steroids. But there was no nail polish anywhere to be seen.”

  “Anabolic steroids?” Macalaster said. “You’re rejecting what I tell you on the basis of urine you found in a slum toilet that anybody could have wandered into and used?”

  “You’re questioning appearances,” the detective said. “That’s good. But I don’t want you to do that for us anymore. Thank you for calling, but if this office needs to talk to you again, you will be notified.”

  “Don’t worry,” Macalaster said into the dead and humming line. While on the phone he had been walking blindly around the east plaza of the Capitol, concentrating on the conversation, and as he disconnected he realized that he was standing only a few feet from the spot where Susan Grant had been killed. He stared at the stones as if, like film, they had captured pictures of the event.

  “Pictures,” he said aloud to himself. Then he punched in the number for Mallory’s computer. He had not spoken to Mallory for days, and remembering their last heated conversation, he wasn’t sure that the computer would put him through after it recognized his voice. But it did, and when Mallory came on the line, Macalaster told him what Monty Love had told him and what the detective had subsequently said.

  “The police don’t think this is
significant?” Mallory said.

  “The man in charge scoffed.”

  “But you think it’s important?”

  “Yes, that’s why I’m calling. For help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “I’d like to see the pictures taken by your people that day.”

  For a long moment after this Mallory was so still that Macalaster thought that he had put down the phone. But he was still on the line. “Come over now,” he said. “Lucy and Wiggins will show you whatever you want to see. Then we’ll talk.”

  7

  Lucy had never before looked at the pictures of the attack on Susan Grant. The analysis had been handled by others who had not actually been present at the murder, as she had been. Her job had been to keep Grant safe, and because she had failed so terribly she had never been able to bear the thought of watching her die again. Lucy had admired Grant—loved her, really. She had wanted to be like her, a woman who respected no boundaries, who had no anxieties.

  Not that she had actually seen Susan die. Like Wiggins, like everyone else on the scene, she had been blinded by the smoke grenade, convulsed by the CS gas—and, most intense memory of all, paralyzed by the horror of knowing what was happening and being prevented by the natural responses of her own body to the gas from doing anything to stop it. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. The idea of seeing it happen again, maybe seeing herself floundering helplessly over the ground, blinded and vomiting, was almost unbearable. Especially since she would be doing so in the company of Macalaster—a journalist, a stranger, a scavenger, someone who had no right to invade the reality and sorrow of the experience. She let Wiggins do the talking.

  “What exactly are we looking for, Mr. Macalaster?” he asked. The three of them were alone in a soundless, frigid computer room in the basement of the Norman manor house.

  “A physical detail,” Macalaster replied. “It could be important in identifying the assassin.”

  “Identifying him?”

  “Possibly,” Macalaster said.

  “Whatever you’re looking for may not be visible on-screen,” Wiggins said. “The scene was very confused. There was smoke, snow was falling. The network cameras got very little because the cameramen were overcome.”

  “I remember all that. And I’ve seen the network footage. That’s why I called Mallory and asked to see your pictures. You must have had your own cameras operating.”

  Even though he had been ordered by Mallory to show Macalaster everything, Wiggins responded to this suggestion with silence. Of course their own cameras had been operating: eight remote units disguised as traffic signs, as bicycle headlamps, as almost any everyday object, all controlled from a mobile communications center. Every moment of every public appearance Mallory made was videotaped; every syllable he and others uttered was recorded. But that was sensitive information. Even to reveal the existence of these techniques compromised Mallory’s safety by opening a chink in the protective system.

  “Did you have cameras going that day?” Macalaster asked. Wiggins did not reply. Macalaster said, “Look, I understand how you feel. But I’m not here as a reporter.”

  Lucy, who did not believe anything any journalist said or wrote, did not believe this for a moment, but she had been ordered to show him anything he wanted to see, so she sat down at a terminal. “It will simplify matters if you tell us exactly what to look for,” she said.

  She was proper, withdrawn, sober. Macalaster saw little sign of her usual brisk condescension. He told her what he was looking for. Lucy nodded matter-of-factly and sent a command to the computer. Huge back-projected screens, divided into four windows each, filled with flowing imagery: establishing shots of the Capitol and the scene of the news conference, network cameras and microphones and other media gear being set up, Mallory and Susan walking through the falling snow along Constitution Avenue, hundreds of freeze-frames of individual faces in the crowd. Macalaster had never seen anything like it. This was visual gluttony, like watching a photographed dream of the event that was far more vivid than the event itself.

  Lucy sent the computer another command. The screens went black and the assassin appeared simultaneously in all eight windows, a spectral figure in white with a gas mask for a snout, rising from the snow, holding a smoking canister about the size of a beer can in either hand. Lucy touched another control and the figure moved in extreme slow motion, caftan flowing gracefully. Dreamily the killer tossed the canisters, shoveling the one in the right hand into the crowd and expertly spiraling the one in the left hand like a forward pass above the heads of Mallory and Grant. In other windows the intent faces of Mallory and Grant and various journalists appeared; they had not yet seen the figure in the caftan. Dreamily the assassin caught a pistol that swung from a lanyard and dreamily lifted it. At this moment, both canisters exploded, filling the screens with a shower of sparks and then with lazy dense smoke. Journalists fell writhing to the ground as if struck down by an invisible force. A portly network cameraman went down, taking his camera with him; this was, Macalaster realized, the origin of the dizzy accidental shot of dome and sky that became the signature network image of the event. A security agent in a skirt whom Macalaster recognized as Lucy floundered over the snow toward the flash of the assassin’s pistol, vomiting convulsively, unable even to draw her weapon.

  Grant’s face, so fine and intelligent, filled a window all its own. She was not yet affected by the gas; less than a second had elapsed in real time; evidently the CS fumes had not yet reached the place where she and Mallory stood, several paces downwind from the knot of reporters. Gowned and masked, feet planted in the snow, body leaning forward into the rock-steady weapon, the assassin continued to raise the pistol. Grant, arms outspread, eyes fixed on the killer, leaped in front of Mallory. Colors and shapes were blurred and softened by the falling snow. With shocking suddenness, a long jet of blood and brain tissue ejaculated in slow motion from the back of Grant’s skull, and as it met the resistance of the air, was transformed into wavering tendrils as if the victim were underwater. A second, much less concentrated jet exploded outward from what remained of the cranium. Four more rounds, so evenly spaced in time as to have been fired by an automaton, emerged from Grant’s body, which was still upright though she was already dead. Like the others, these bullets were trailed by streamers of blood and tissue. They struck Mallory in the chest, staining his bulletproof coat with gore.

  “The hands,” Macalaster said. “Can you move in close on the hands?” Lucy worked the controls, and the multiple images broke up and rearranged themselves until nothing remained but close-ups of the assassin’s hands, encased in surgical gloves, holding the weapon. “Go in close on the fingertips,” Macalaster said. “As tight as you can.”

  The windows filled with freeze-frames of the assassin’s fingertips. Inside the transparent gloves the nails were painted bright red. “There it is,” Macalaster said.

  “There’s more,” Lucy said. Her face was wet with tears but she sent more commands to the computer. Wiggins said, “Did you notice something?”

  Lucy nodded and went on working. All the elements she had isolated in all the windows combined into a single large image of the assassin, caftan and gas mask and pistol, moving jerkily across the large screen. This image resolved itself into a birdcage of lines, the three-dimensional outline of the figure. A small window opened in the upper right-hand corner for the display of data. Lucy let it scroll, line after line of solutions indicating height, weight, age, and other probable characteristics of the assassin until it came to the one she apparently expected to see. She froze this line.

  “Good God,” Macalaster said.

  On-screen the assassin’s image turned this way and that. Lucy froze it, too, as it disappeared into the pall of smoke with the murder weapon in its hand.

  “This is a woman,” she said.

  8

  Half an hour after the Senate trial adjourned, just before twilight, a weather front moved through
the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, dumping rain and fog onto Camp David. Lockwood, dressed for the outdoors in a battered black slouch hat and U.S. Navy oilskins, stood on a promontory overlooking a panorama of forested hills, listening to the noise of a helicopter that hovered above the squall. A strong west wind bent the rain-soaked trees and dispersed the fog. Moments later the low-lying sun broke through and a big green U.S. Marine Corps chopper came down through the clouds in a burst of rotor noises.

  The weather was clearing rapidly now and the rain-drenched broken upland, miles and miles of sunshot woods, opened up before Lockwood. The view did not interest him. He kept his eyes on the helicopter. He had come up here at noon to escape the media and because Camp David was the only spot in America where he could be certain of privacy, but he did not like this place and never had. Its Appalachian vistas reminded him of the mountain hollows of eastern Kentucky and everything that went with them: mushrat stew, chilblains, shame, anger, penniless trips into town, and his father taking off his hat to a fat man with a cigar who was humiliating him before giving him a job digging coal at twenty-five cents an hour, his father smiling for the sake of his family at the insults and saying yessir, Mr. Pettigrew, yessir.

  Lockwood the President dealt with these memories as he dealt with most things, by making jokes. “Welcome to Hillbilly Heaven,” he said to Alfonso Olmedo C. as the lawyer appeared on the path in the company of a Secret Service agent.

  Olmedo had come direct from the floor of the Senate and was in no mood for banter. He said, “How much do you know, Mr. President?” It was still raining lightly, and Olmedo also wore a Camp David–issue bright-orange slicker with USN stenciled on the back and the presidential seal on the chest. Inside the hood, his face was anxious and resentful.

  “About what?” Lockwood said.

  “About the trial. Did you watch any of it?”