The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  Clive Wilmot, who had known Arabs and Arabic so well, had by some misstep been, as it were; blinded. He was no longer of much use to his intelligence service or his country. Everyone knew it. Most were glad enough to see him transformed into a beggar. At length Wilmot had been sent to Washington, where there was virtually nothing for him to do except to have lunch once a week with a middle-grade officer from the American intelligence service. It was a social, not a professional past; when the Americans wanted to deal with the British secret service, they did so through their own chief of station in London. It was believed in Langley that Wilmot was unstable; like Patrick, the American intelligence people didn’t quite trust him. To Patrick they spoke quietly of Wilmot as a man who had lost a brilliant future through a single mistake. That was what everyone said about him. If the men of the Foreign Intelligence Service of the United States, that cautious organization which had supplanted the CIA, knew what exactly Wilmot’s mistake in Baghdad had been, they weren’t willing to share the knowledge with Patrick Graham.

  Patrick returned to the empty living room and took a place beside Charlotte on the sofa. Wilmot sat opposite, his body lax on a fragile antique chair and footstool.

  Patrick said, “All that about Lockwood, Clive—those young people resented it. They don’t understand the weary humor of the Old World, you know.”

  “Oh? I am sorry. I do understand. I see what Lockwood is—all elbows and honesty. Lincolnian. No wonder he inspires belief. You still love him, do you, Patrick—you, yourself? Think he’s the man the world’s been waiting far?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. He’s the best we’ve had for a long time.”

  “Better than his foul predecessor, eh? After all, everyone knows you put Lockwood where he is today. It was you who threw Herr Mallory out of the White House like a shitting cat.”

  “Come, Clive.”

  “True!”

  And it was. Almost four years before, on the eve of a presidential election no one had thought Lockwood could win, Patrick had discovered Franklin Mallory to be involved in a secret plot. Mallory had conspired with politicians in the western provinces of Canada to secede from their own country and join their territory and people to the United States. Hundreds of millions in bribes had been paid by American corporations to buy votes in the plebiscites that would decide the issue of secession. There had been a worse rumor—never proved but widely believed because Mallory’s enemies thought him capable even of murder—that Mallory had tried to assassinate the prime minister of Canada. Terrorists had fired a hundred rounds into the prime minister’s bulletproof limousine and left an American-made machine gun on the pavement in Ottawa as they fled. The Canadian, though wounded, had escaped with his life. Patrick, tapping sources that he still held secret, had pieced the story together and broadcast it a week before the election. He had the largest audience of any commentator in America. His own outrage infected millions of his listeners. Opinion had been swayed. Lockwood had been elected by a plurality of two hundred thousand votes, a fraction of one percent of the total number of ballots cast.

  Now Clive Wilmot asked, “Patrick, I’ve often wondered, did you really believe that Franklin Mallory had a hand in that shooting in Ottawa?”

  Clive had stopped drinking. His whisky glasses stood on the table beside him and he himself sat quietly on the chair. Patrick had begun to take an interest in Clive and in what he said. He saw, as Charlotte had done earlier, that he was not affected by liquor. Clive was up to something.

  “It was certainly possible,” Patrick replied. “Everyone knows what Mallory is capable of.”

  “You’re against assassination, then—no matter who is assassinated, no matter who orders the assassination?”

  “Of course. That’s a damn silly question.”

  “I suppose it is. I just wanted to be sure we were on the same philosophical ground.”

  Clive spoke very clearly now and he seemed less disheveled.

  There was a stillness in him. Charlotte began to pay closer attention to what was happening between the two men. Patrick’s interest was engaged, he had caught something in, Clive’s tone; his senses were as acute as a snake’s when a story blundered near, and he could strike as quickly. Patrick asked no questions; he waited for Clive to come closer to him.

  “Assassinations are rather fascinating,” Clive said. “I wonder, Patrick, if you were at all puzzled by the death of another of your heroes. …”

  “Does Patrick have heroes?” asked Charlotte.

  “I think so. Lockwood seems to be one, Patrick’s always talking him up on television. So was the chap I was referring to, Ibn Awad. Patrick, it was you who called Awad ‘the new Gandhi,’ wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. That’s what he was. It was obvious to the whole world that he was an authentic saint. Like Gandhi or Pope John. They don’t come along often, but when they do, people see them for what they are. I saw it, too.”

  “Yes, you built him up wonderfully. I remember your broadcasts from Hagreb—old Ibn Awad in his white jibba, praying and passing barefoot over the burning sands.”

  As in so many things, Patrick Graham had been first in the discovery of Ibn Awad’s sainthood. The emir of a desert tribe, Awad had resisted the drilling of oil wells in his backward country for twenty years. When finally he permitted it, he used the enormous income from his wells to build mosques and hospitals and a powerful radio transmitter over which he broadcast prayers for peace and brotherhood and the purification of Islam. Though he was one of the richest men on earth he had gone on living the life of a Bedouin, wandering in the desert. He made long pilgrimages, traveling on foot, to Mecca and other holy places. Patrick had done a series of extraordinary interviews with him, the two of them talking into a camera with the limitless empty sands all around them. Ibn Awad’s simple faith, his goodness, had shone out of his weathered old face. He had been small like Gandhi, but he had had the head of a falcon, not the humble face of a martyr, under his windblown kaffiyeh.

  Charlotte said, “But Ibn Awad wasn’t assassinated, surely? Patrick was there.”

  “So was I. We all thought he had had himself killed. A last appeal to the world, an example of self-sacrifice. What did you call it, Patrick? Crucifixion of the self?”

  Charlotte spoke because she saw that Patrick wanted her to do so. She often asked the obvious questions for him; it didn’t matter how ignorant she seemed, but, Patrick was supposed to know everything. “I must say he chose a bizarre death. Having his own son shoot him, and then the son being beheaded for the crime.” She shuddered. “The television pictures were awful. Patrick, your voice trembled, coming over the air.”

  “I don’t wonder,” said Clive. “You must have been close enough to smell the blood when they took off the boy’s head. Normally one smells nothing in the desert, there are no odors. A sudden gout of blood can knock one back a step or two.”

  Still Patrick said nothing. But Charlotte, seated by him, could feel the tension in his body. Sometimes, when Patrick was onto something big, a story that engaged his emotions, his whole being would tighten—mind, feelings, the very muscles of his body—and nothing could set him loose except the discovery of the truth.

  “I’m afraid I have something rather disagreeable to tell you, Patrick,” Clive said. “Ibn Awad was assassinated by President Lockwood.”

  Nothing had ever made Patrick feel sicker than Clive Wilmot’s words—not even that gout of blood in the desert or the cloud of black flies that had come from nowhere to settle on the slippery red stump of Prince Talil’s severed neck. A huge man had beheaded Ibn Awad’s favorite son with a ceremonial sword. Patrick had watched the polished steel blade flash in the sun, had seen the head leap from the body, had seen the red ejaculation of blood. For a long moment his mind could not connect the memory of that horror with Bedford Forrest Lockwood.

  Then, striking time after time, he began to ask Clive questions. Clive gave Patrick details. Patrick attacked the evidence. He demanded proof.<
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  Clive shrugged. “There are no documents when one head of state orders the death of another.”

  “Then you can’t prove this?”

  “I can show you how to prove it to yourself,” replied Clive. “I wonder if you can bring yourself to believe it even after you have all the evidence in hand.”

  Patrick was on his feet. Clive’s rigid artificial leg rested on the brocaded cushions of the footstool. He lifted what was left of the leg with a grimace.

  “What reason could there possibly be?” Patrick demanded. “Why would Lockwood, of all people, want to kill Awad, of all people? It’s crazy.”

  “Yes, isn’t it? But then perhaps it takes one to kill one. They were both great ones for saying their prayers in public, weren’t they?”

  “There are such creatures as men of good will. Nothing you’ve said to me so far convinces me that Lockwood and Awad fall into any other category.”

  “Then you are going to have an unhappy month or two,” said Clive. He removed a pencil from his bulging breast pocket and handed it, together with a single sheet of cheap notebook paper, to Patrick. “I’d rather you wrote this in your own hand,” he said. He dictated a name and address; it was a common Arab name, obviously false, followed by the name of a cheap hotel in Baghdad.

  “Go and talk to this chap,” Clive said.

  “Who is he?”

  “You’ll recognize him when you see him.”

  “Is he going to tell me again what you’ve told me tonight?”

  “Perhaps a bit more.”

  Clive lifted his artificial leg, locked its hinge, and heaved himself to his feet. When he sat dawn or got up, one leg stiff and the other normal, his amputation was noticeable. When he was tired he dragged the bad foot. He walked out of the room without offering to shake hands with Patrick, or even making a last joke with Charlotte.

  They heard the door close, and, a moment later, Clive’s unmatched footsteps shuffling by the garden wall. The French doors into the garden were still open and the faint scent of roses came into the room along with the muffled noises in the quiet street.

  Patrick read the name and address again and put the slip of paper into his pocket.

  “What’re you going to do?” Charlotte asked.

  “Go to Baghdad, for starters. Even if Clive’s story is a lie it’s interesting. Why would he tell me this?”

  “I wondered why you didn’t ask him that.”

  “He’d lie. It’s his profession.”

  Patrick picked up a telephone. Charlotte listened to him tell somebody at the network to book him a seat on the SST to Beirut the next morning; he’d have to fly a local airline from there to. Baghdad. He was taking no camera crew with him. He was taking no one at all.

  When he hung up the phone, Charlotte said, “I’m surprised you don’t just ring up Julian Hubbard and ask him to let you talk to the President. This business of meeting in Baghdad with mysterious Arabs doesn’t sound good to me.”

  “Time enough to talk to Julian when I get back.”

  “I don’t like Baghdad. Bullets, knives, bombs. That’s where those lunatics killed poor Rosalind Wilmot.”

  “They won’t kill me, any more than they killed Clive. Men are safe as long as someone has an idea they’re useful.”

  Patrick rose and walked to the other end of the room and back.

  Charlotte watched him as he looked at his Daumier bronzes, his pictures, his new tapestry copied from an Ingres painting. There were no windows in the room except for the French doors into the garden; they had had to brick them all up in this age of terror and murder before the insurance company would issue a policy on Patrick’s life. Looking at the tapestry, Patrick was forty feet away from Charlotte and his back was turned. But he had no trouble hearing her question.

  “Can you?” she asked. He didn’t reply, and although she knew he understood her meaning she finished the question. “Can you bring yourself to believe what Clive told you if you do find it’s true?”

  “Yes,” said Patrick, running a finger over the weave of the tapestry. “That’s my profession.”

  ONE

  1

  J ULIAN H UBBARD, President Lockwood’s principal assistant, was six feet five inches tall, and as he shaved he had to stoop a little in order to see his face in the mirror. It was a Sunday, the morning after the Grahams’ Midsummer Night party. Julian hadn’t gone to the party, and though his life and Patrick’s had mingled for twenty-five years and more, Graham was the last man he was likely to think about today. Julian had been reminded, moments after rising, that this was his dead fathers ninetieth birthday, and as he lathered his long jaw his mind was crowded with memories of his parent—or, to be as precise as Julian liked to be, his thoughts were on himself in relation to his family: as son, father, brother, husband.

  Julian had awakened at six o’clock, as he had trained himself to do, with his new wife lying beside him, slender and nude and deeply asleep. Smiling with pleasure, he spent several minutes examining her body—the fine ankles, the graceful legs, the hips that were so narrow when she was clothed and so full when she was not, the tumbled heavy hair streaked by the sun. She had already got a tan, and her skin, under its coat of bleached dawn, was golden in the lambent first light of day. They had been married only six months, and her beauty still surprised him.

  The scent of Washington in the early morning, like that of a woods freshened by rain, came in the open window. Julian got up without touching his wife and closed the sash. Mist drifted from the lawn in the walled garden below as the rising sun, already strong, burned away the dew. Julian listened for a moment to the birds as they began to stir, and identified the call, loverlike and quavering, of a purple finch, one of a pair that nested in a young elm he had planted at the back of the garden; it pleased Julian that these two American species, the bird and the tree, once so common and now so rare, should come together in his yard. His wife uttered a faint groan, shuddered, and moved her tongue with a clicking sound in her dry mouth, but didn’t wake. Julian covered her with the sheet that lay on the floor beside the bed in a tangle with her nightgown and his pajamas. She was twenty-eight years old, nearly twenty years younger than Julian. She had his mothers name, Emily.

  Julian had wanted to have a birthday party for his father on this day, bringing his half-brother Horace back from abroad, finding such friends of his fathers as might still be alive—college classmates, lawyers who had worked with him in the New Deal, officers who had served with him in the OSS, the politicians and bankers, musicians and editors, ballplayers and actresses who had been his New York friends. President Lockwood had been asked to come to the party, accepting with transparent pleasure, and had suggested using the presidential yacht. Lockwood had met Julian, and many others who had helped to make him President, at Elliott Hubbard’s table.

  But then, in February, Elliott had died, instantaneously, of a massive stroke, alone in his own house, as he would have wished. No good-byes. There never had been any between Julian and his father, perhaps because the son was always going to places—Exeter, Yale, the Navy, Washington—where the older man had gone before him. Elliott Hubbard almost never advised his son, never criticized him; Julian’s father believed in leaving things unspoken, and so far as Julian could tell, unjudged. The strongest emotion Elliott Hubbard ever showed, at least in Julian’s presence, was amusement. Perhaps the strongest one he actually felt was disgust. All his life, when he was separated from his father, Julian had missed him intensely; he missed him now.

  On the day he left for school, Julian had drawn Elliott Hubbard into conversation about an antique Persian hunting carpet that hung on the wall of the study in their New York house. The scene in the carpet, swarthy horsemen in sparse black beards hunting stags through a forest, had always fascinated Julian; he had liked to bring his books into the study to do his homework and daydream over it. Into the silk, in Farsi characters, was worked a motto. Julian’s older brother, a student of languages, had already
told him what it meant, but now he asked his father for a translation. “I’m told,” Elliott Hubbard said, with his impish smile, “that those are the three rules of character that nobles in ancient Persia taught their sons: to ride, to shoot straight, to tell the truth. Very little else, in their view, was useful in a man’s life.”

  On that same afternoon, a bright day in September, Julian’s father had given him his first alcohol, a glass of manzanilla, and then sent him, alone with his baggage in a taxi, to Grand Central Station. “Play football if it appeals to you, there’s a lot of enjoyment in it after it’s over,” Elliott Hubbard had said by way of farewell. “And don’t let anyone lie to you. Bullshit is the curse of boarding school—of life, in fact.”

  Ever since, inflexibly, Julian had demanded the truth of others. It was a painful trait. Other key rules he had guessed correctly, from observing his father: drink only dry wines and good liquor, and drink everything sparingly; work very hard without letting others see the effort involved; think what you please, but never speak unkindly of another man; forget any woman who has stopped loving you.

  Julian was the child of his father’s second wife, a woman much younger than he who had left him, not for a lover, but for an illusion. She thought she was a painter. It was evident to Julian, even as a boy, that his mother had no talent; it was just as clear that putting color an canvas, rising every morning and spending the whole day doing this, brought her intense happiness. She deserted her husband and her child when Julian was eight and went to live in a cottage in Normandy. It was a very small stone house, heated by a fireplace, without electricity. The roof was thatched, with blue and yellow iris growing along the ridgepole, and these flowers were always in bloom when Julian arrived to spend the summer. At night he heard animals—mice and squirrels and nesting birds—rustling in the thatch above his bed.