Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

  “Yes.”

  “Do you, at this moment, see any other members present besides yourself, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you name them?”

  St. Clair could not understand why Hammett was letting this go on. He had told Olmedo not to do this, yet he persisted in doing it. Everything was being twisted and made to look sinister. The reputations, the lives, of all Shelleyans were in Palmer St. Clair’s keeping. There was only one thing to do.

  “It is not what you suggest,” he said. “And I’m sorry, I cannot name names.”

  “Then I will put another name to you and you will answer yes or no, if you please.”

  Hammett gaveled repeatedly. “Mr. Olmedo, this is not an inquisition. You are out of order.”

  Olmedo said, “One more question, if the Senate please, sir. Mr. St. Clair, is Chief Justice Hammett a member of the Shelley Society?”

  “I will not say,” St. Clair said.

  “That is your choice, sir, and I will not insist,” Olmedo replied. “But as one man to another I want to ask you a final question. What on earth did you think you were doing with that plastic bag and that fishing fly arid that tape recording?”

  Palmer St. Clair 3d blinked. He looked up. He saw the cameras. He remembered that all this—every fidget, every word—had been going out over the air to tens of millions of television sets, that his privacy had been destroyed, that he had been made to look like what he certainly was not, never had been, and what no person of his breeding, background, and schooling ever could be: a fool. He answered Olmedo’s question with the absolute unvarnished truth: “I thought it was a game,” he said. “A harmless joke.”

  Olmedo scrutinized him with deep commiseration. “If it is any comfort to you, Mr. St. Clair,” he said, “no reasonable person could look at you at this moment and believe otherwise. I have no further questions, but I do have a request.”

  “Make it, Mr. Olmedo,” Hammett said.

  “I ask that the Chief Justice recuse himself from this trial on grounds that he has an undisclosed and irreconcilable personal interest in its outcome, and that a mistrial be declared by the Senate in this impeachment.”

  Hammett looked down on Olmedo with eyes in which fury mixed with the contemptuous light of fulfilled expectations, as if he had known all along that something like this was bound to happen. “Your request is not in order,” he said.

  The words were hardly out of his mouth before Busby was on his feet, moving for adjournment.

  19

  In his NYPD days McGraw had questioned a famous movie star whose terrorist boyfriend had crawled out of her bed one morning and blown up a subway train. Radiant on screen, the actress was just another anxious, thin, sad, hungover, halfway pretty blonde in real life. Zarah Christopher was the other side of the coin, a woman who was more beguiling to the naked eye than to the camera. In the video footage McGraw had seen she looked attractive enough; in the flesh she was a disturbing presence. She joined McGraw and Lucy and Wiggins in the van in the parking lot at Fair Oaks Cinemas. Macalaster was there, too, and McGraw saw that he was taken with this young woman. So was Wiggins. Lucy was less glad to see her.

  McGraw said, “Why is the lovely young lady here?”

  “President Mallory’s orders,” Lucy replied.

  “They know each other?”

  “They are good friends.”

  Her voice was tight, her eyes veiled, all cheek and lip muscles under strict control. No doubt Franklin Mallory felt the same about Zarah as the other members of his gender present in this van. No wonder Lucy wasn’t a fan.

  Lucy handed Zarah her blinders and explained how to use them. Then she said, “How much has President Mallory told you?”

  “Only that some sort of discovery has been made about the terrorist who murdered Susan Grant,” Zarah replied, “and it’s thought that I might be able to help somehow.”

  Lucy reacted coldly. “Why do you say it was a terrorist?”

  “It’s the word that came into my mind when I saw the murder on television,” Zarah replied. “Do you prefer another term?”

  Lucy said, “We’ll soon know the right word, I think.” She handed out the rest of the blinders. She was slightly flushed, there was a trace of acetone on her breath, her voice quivered slightly. Something girly going on here, McGraw thought. He raised his hand. “Forgive me for asking, kids,” he said, “but speaking of the bad guys, what if somebody decides to drop a CS grenade through the window of this van while we’ve all got these blinders on?”

  Lucy gave him a resentful look, but Wiggins understood that McGraw’s question was not a serious inquiry but a means of changing the subject. “We’re covered by two other teams outside the van,” he said, “the one that brought Miss Christopher and the one that brought Mr. Macalaster. Besides, it’s an hour till the first movie is over; nothing’s moving.”

  “That’s a relief,” McGraw said. “So what are we going to see?”

  “For starters the same footage as before,” Lucy said.

  “The exact same stuff?” McGraw asked.

  “A somewhat edited version,” Lucy replied. “But essentially the same, yes.”

  The footage they watched omitted the pictures taken inside Zarah’s house and the behavioral analyses of Zarah and Sturdi. Everything else was there, including the horrifying footage of the assassination. When the blinders came off, Lucy’s gaze was fixed on Zarah.

  Zarah said, “You’re very thorough.”

  “You mean the surveillance on you and the Eve woman?” Wiggins asked.

  “Among other things, yes.”

  “Now that you’ve seen exactly what happened to Susan, you’ll understand why we ran the surveillance,” Lucy said.

  Zarah did not reply to this. “What exactly will this program do besides project these images?” she asked.

  Wiggins said, “The system has a number of additional analytical functions based on the comparison of images. Lucy is the expert.”

  Zarah turned to her. “It will analyze physique, sort out habitual movements and gestures, penetrate disguises, make identifications?”

  “Exactly,” Lucy said. “It’s called Logarithmic Impersonation Entropy—LIE for short.”

  Zarah said, “Then I’d like to suggest that you compare the images of the assassin to the images of me.” She looked straight at Lucy, who blushed slightly.

  “that’s hardly necessary,” Wiggins said.

  “I’m interested,” Zarah said. “Aren’t you, Lucy?”

  “Why not?” Lucy replied. “It’s a start.”

  They put their blinders back on. Images of Zarah and the assassin appeared side by side, were broken down limb by limb, gesture by gesture, movement by movement. Reduced as before to the form of a birdcage graph, every single image of both women was analyzed in this way, dismembered heads, arms, and legs moving back and forth from one figure to the other. Finally the system put the original images of the two females back together, stood them side by side, turned them in space like manikins on turntables, and flashed the result: LIE = 0.257.

  “Meaning what?” McGraw said.

  Lucy replied, “The scale is one to ten. Five is a possible impersonation, seven is suspicious, ten is Bingo—absolute confirmation that the two images analyzed belong to one and the same person. Zero, of course, is the opposite of ten. If my arithmetic is right, in this particular case the system says there is less than one chance in two thousand that Zarah and the assassin are the same individual.”

  “What a relief,” Wiggins said.

  Zarah said, “Try Sturdi.”

  Lucy was still resisting this line of analysis; she resisted anything Zarah suggested, McGraw thought. She said, “Did you observe something that makes you think the result will be different?”

  “Maybe,” Zarah said. “Didn’t you?”

  Suddenly Lucy looked taken aback, then pensive. The fact was that she had felt there was something there the first time she looked at the fo
otage—something indefinable and way out on the edge of perception. But she had been concentrating on Zarah and now the system had just told her she was wrong. “Okay, why not?” she said again. “Here we go.”

  In moments, the system produced its result: LIE = 7.387. No one commented.

  “It’s not conclusive,” Lucy said at last. “But it is a very high factor of probability.”

  “Ask it why it’s not absolutely sure,” Zarah said.

  Lucy did so. The system replied, BODY WEIGHT DIFFERENTIAL BETWEEN KILLER & SUSPECT APPROXIMATELY 9.0 KILOGRAMS. MUSCULATURE DIFFERENTIAL 3.78%. GESTURE INDEX INDETERMINATE.

  “You said you had all her records as an athlete,” Macalaster said. “Can you access those?”

  “Just a minute,” Lucy said.

  Almost instantaneously a series of charts popped up, graphs of Sturdi’s body weight over a ten-year period as kept by her high school and college track coaches. Just before and after major competitions in the heptathlon her weight had gone up or down by a factor that ranged from five to nine kilograms.

  Macalaster said, “Can you check her performance statistics in practice a month before and after each competition against her times and distances in the competitions themselves?”

  The numbers came up; the differences were significantly better in competition than in practice, especially in the events requiring strength, such as the shot put and javelin throw, one-hundred-meter hurdles, and high jump. Her times in the two-hundred- and eight-hundred-meter races also improved, but less dramatically.

  “Looks like she either dogs it in practice or she’s a real clutch hitter,” McGraw said.

  “That’s one explanation,” Macalaster said. “But there’s another, more likely one.”

  “You want to tell us what?” McGraw said.

  “Not yet,” Macalaster said. “Was it really menstrual cramps that kept her off the Olympic team? Can that be checked?”

  “That’s not in the data base,” Lucy said.

  Wiggins said, “What do you think, Lucy? You’ve always gotten a lot of exercise.”

  Lucy had gone to college on a track scholarship. Her periods had always been irregular and were even more so now, owing to the regimen of strenuous exercise that was part of her job. Running five miles five days a week and mountain-biking ten miles on the other two, lifting weights every other day, working out with the martial arts trainer and swimming fifty laps once a week, not to mention passing the grueling run-bike-swimshoot test once a month, all had the effect of turning off the cycle. So did the minute-by-minute ruthless suppression of womanly mannerisms, traits, and instincts that went with doing a man’s job. As McGraw had sensed, her body was trying to be a woman’s body right now and causing her problems.

  Lucy said, “It’s possible, but not too likely.” She searched the data bank. “But the answer to your question isn’t in the system, Ross.” She had never called Macalaster by his first name before, and he felt oddly flattered.

  McGraw said, “Lemme make a call. I’ve got a friend.” He punched in the number from memory, got through almost immediately, asked the question, waited for a minute, listened to the answer, and said, “Thanks, pal, that’s a big help.”

  McGraw turned to the others. “She was canned from the team because anabolic steroids showed up in her urine sample,” he said.

  “Just like they found anabolic steroids in the urine in the assassin’s toilet,” Macalaster said.

  “Wait a minute,” Lucy said. “Don’t forget she’d have to lose nine kilos in one month. That’s the interval between the assassination and the period when this subject began following Zarah.”

  “Have you ever used steroids?” Macalaster asked.

  Lucy was offended by the question. “No. They make you crazy.”

  “According to my trainer at ye gods, thirty days is all it takes to put the muscles on and take them off again,” Macalaster said. “Check it out.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Lucy said. “What do we do now?”

  “Good question,” McGraw said. “What we’ve got here is a hypothesis, not proof that will stand up in court. Would you write this in your column, Ross?”

  “No,” Macalaster said. “But we can’t just let it go. This maniac killed a woman for no reason at all.”

  Zarah said, “Wait. Don’t assume there was no reason at all.”

  “What reason could there be?”

  “I don’t know,” Zarah said. “Does the system recognize that people who live together acquire each other’s gestures?”

  “I’ll ask it,” Lucy said.

  The answer was yes. Zarah said, “Do you have the video pictures of the carjacker who attacked Senator Garrett with a hammer and stole his car?”

  Lucy scanned the data bank and found the home video taken by the neighbor who witnessed the assault. The system compared the carjacker’s body language with that of the assassin and flashed a LIE of 8.988.

  “The hammer-blow was struck with the left hand,” Zarah said. “Ask the system which hand Sturdi used to throw the javelin and put the shot.”

  Lucy checked. “The right hand,” she said. “Why?”

  “Because the assassin is left-handed,” Zarah replied.

  “She is?”

  Lucy brought up the pictures again. Zarah was right: the killer was a left-handed shooter, and had also thrown the smoke grenade, the one that spiraled like a forward pass, with the left hand.

  “That’s using the old eyeballs, Zarah,” McGraw said. “We all missed it.”

  “So did the damn system,” Lucy said. “And that’s supposed to be impossible.”

  1

  Olmedo’s cross-examination of Philindros and, even more, his interrogation of Palmer St. Clair 3d, who had stood up to his inquisitor with such bravery, was described by most opinion makers as a brief but foredoomed attempt to return to the nightmare of the witch-hunt long after every rational person in America had realized that there were no such things as witches. Nothing was said about the names St. Clair had confirmed—after all, the Hubbard brothers had already been named in the case, so what was the harm?—but he won admiration and praise for his sturdy refusal to slander Chief Justice Archimedes Hammett.

  The counterattack in the news media came mainly in the form of ridicule. On Newsdawn with Patrick Graham the president of Yale University said quite truthfully that he had never heard of the Shelley Society and could not locate anyone at Yale, past or present, who had, but in his capacity as a teacher of English literature he could confirm that Percy Bysshe Shelley had been a thoroughly dangerous character who had been an open supporter of the American and French revolutions and wanted to rid the world of kings—in fact, of all tyrants. St. Clair, who made an excellent impression on camera with his bony face and meager flesh, appeared on all six segments of Newsdawn, with Graham himself handling the interviews, an honor usually reserved for the durably famous. As Graham put it, St. Clair looked “a bit scorched but quite debonair, everything considered.” Simply and modestly St. Clair said, “All I did was what anyone who hates fascism would have done.” Graham did not blink at the implication that this term applied to Lockwood, for whom the media’s adjective of choice until a few days before had been “Lincolnian.”

  Asked by Graham what exactly the Shelley Society was and what it did, St. Clair smiled sheepishly and replied, “It’s a little embarrassing, actually. We call each other up and recite poetry.”

  Graham said, “Inflammatory poetry?”

  “Oh, yes,” St. Clair replied, “The Mask of Anarchy, Ode to Liberty, the lot.”

  Graham made a sober face. “I can understand why you’ve kept all this a deep dark secret,” he said. “Now, as a Yale man on whom the shadow of suspicion has inevitably fallen, I will read you a name: Patrick Graham. Is he a member of the Shelley Society? Answer yes or no.” Behind the cameras the unseen studio crew guffawed, a rare occurrence.

  St. Clair said, “No.”

  Graham gave the camer
a his trademark glower of gruff confidentiality. “I don’t know whether to believe this dangerous radical or not,” he said.

  Insiders knew that all this was on the surface. In its bowels the Cause seethed with righteous anger and fierce apprehension. Tens of thousands of telephone calls, faxes, and E-mail messages warning of the imminent rebirth of McCarthyism poured into the offices of senators, congressmen, and media personalities. Nearly all of these messages expressed support for Hammett and outrage that his integrity had been so shamefully dragged into question. Overnight the drama changed, among radicals, at any rate, from a process that would decide the fate of a President to a moral struggle between the Goliath that was the Establishment and Hammett’s David—“armed only with the Constitution,” as Patrick Graham put it.

  Outside the Senate Conference Room, where the Committee on the Impeachment was locked in a closed meeting until the small hours of the morning, Baxter Busby told Morgan Pike that he himself had already received more than five thousand messages of concern from the American people. “They are running ninety-nine to one in favor of Chief Justice Hammett,” he said. “And, Morgan, a lot of those concerned Americans are mentioning Archimedes Hammett as a possible President. They like what they see up there on that high place of judgment—a man of learning and integrity and courage who’s absolutely untainted by political ambition.”

  Morgan Pike said, “So you now regard the Chief Justice as a possible future President? Even in the near future?”

  Busby said, “History has a way of matching the man with the hour, especially in this fortunate land of ours, Morgan. But the rule I live by is One thing at a time. And now I have to go in to this meeting and reason with my colleagues.” He hurried through the great gleaming doors of the Senate Conference Room.

  Morgan Pike signed off, “More later. Back to you, Patrick.”

  To his attentive viewers, Graham looked very, very thoughtful. “Much more, Morgan,” he said, “and sooner rather than later, if this reporter is any judge of things past and things to come.”