The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  “That’s twice tonight you’ve suggested there’s some statute of limitations on hatred,” Horace said. “Do you really think it dies like love or fades like sorrow?”

  Julian, in that instant, realized that his father was truly dead. Looking into Horace’s wintry eyes he saw once again the coffin in the snow at West Stockbridge, the mountains veiled by the storm, the stripped trees bent by the wind. The frozen landscape was not unlike a desert. Julian was overcome by remorse, he trembled with it, and it wasn’t his father’s death that made him feel as he did, but the death of another man. He felt near to tears; he felt that he and Horace were as they had been a long time ago—one brother a child, the other already nearly an adult.

  “Horace, there’s something in my life I could never speak about to Pa; I’d like to tell you.”

  Horace held up a palm; his smile returned. “Don’t,” he said. “Not tonight.”

  2

  In Baghdad, Patrick Graham met the man Clive Wilmot had sent him to see. Furtive Arabs, obviously terrorists, gave Patrick an address in the worst quarter of the city. They made him repeat the directions over and over again, as if they were putting him under discipline as a member of their organization, instructing him to knock twice, then once, then twice again on a certain door. They demanded that he arrive at precisely fourteen minutes before midnight—if he was so much as a minute early or late their leader would break the rendezvous and there would be no second chance. “Come alone,” they whispered; “we’ll know whether you’re alone.”

  Patrick found his way without trouble through the unmarked streets. The crowds parted before him, a lone foreigner in a place where he did not belong. Patrick guessed that the poor of Baghdad must know who was following him; the terrorists walking behind him were Mao’s fish, swimming in the sea of people. He entered a building. Its masonry was twisted like a human body distorted by an untreated childhood disease. Patrick climbed the narrow staircase, pausing at one of its turnings to look at the lighted dial of his watch. He was early. He stood on the landing, letting the seconds go by, and gazed out the unglazed window, narrow as a rifle part, that looked onto the warren below. Half of Patrick’s lifetime had passed since the day he realized, shattered, that most of the world lived, and had always lived, as these people did: sleeping, coupling, giving birth, gobbling food, dying, in the open streets. He did not see actual human forms, only their shadows thrown by guttering cooking fires. He smelled the half-spoiled food and open drains and bodies ratted by sickness. Men and women and children shrieked in anger or merriment, their voices breaking against the crumbling buildings like surf against rocks. Only the power of speech made it possible for them to live without hope; had they been dumb they would have fallen on one another like wild animals for the meat.

  Patrick mounted the last drunken flight of stairs and knocked, as he had been told to do, on a door. No one answered, but he pushed open the door; it was hung on broken hinges and it squealed over the concrete floor. Someone struck a match and lit a candle, and Patrick saw Clive’s man sitting on the floor inside a ring of light. The smell of melting wax and human sweat was very strong. The man on the floor was a Palestinian terrorist of the old type: fugitive, threadbare, emaciated; his incurable political fever had eaten the flesh from his bones. Maddened eyes glittered in the sockets of a skull covered by a tissue of polished tan skin. He sat with his back pressed against the scabrous wall. Someone who had followed Patrick up the stairs pulled the squealing door shut behind him.

  Insects and small animals scuttled away from the candlelight. The memory of the East Village, where he and Caroline had loved each other in their youth, struck Patrick in the stomach like a fist. The apartment in which they had lived had been as much like this room as was possible in America. In order to link their destiny, their very consciousness, to that of the wretched, Patrick and Caroline had tried to join themselves physically to them, to live with rats and insects and the diseases these creatures carried, to be made weak and sick by a bad diet. They had even called themselves by the names of the hunted. Patrick’s revolutionary name had been Ahmed; Caroline’s, Fat’ma.

  “I am called Hassan,” said the man on the floor.

  Patrick remained silent. So far as he knew, no outsider had ever seen this man face to face and lived. Hassan was the head of a terrorist organization known as the Eye of Gaza; he hadn’t been sighted—in the sense that the Eye of Gaza had not claimed credit for a new outrage—in years; many believed him dead. This implacable man had been responsible for hundreds of murders, scores of bombings, dozens of kidnappings. In one month his followers had exploded five airliners filled with passengers over Israel. The terrorists made each pilot fly low over Tel Aviv and Jerusalem as they broadcast their messages to the world over the plane’s radio, and then mercilessly blew it up. The debris, fragments of the machine and parts of human bodies, had fallen into the city streets and onto roof tops.

  All this happened at a time when security measures were so strict that the authorities believed it had finally become impassible for a terrorist to smuggle any sort of bomb or weapon aboard a passenger flight. But Hassan had outwitted them. A Palestinian surgeon had found a way to implant plastic explosives inside the bodies of the terrorists of the Eye of Gaza. Several ounces could be packed between the muscles of the thighs; the terrorist, his fresh incision deadened by a local anesthetic, could walk onto the plane and into the cockpit, and there detonate himself with the charge from a battery in an electric watch. These living bombs, spewing blood and slivers of bone and gobbets of flesh, were enough to bring dawn any airliner. How they did it baffled the counterterrorist police until one of Hassan’s walking bombs was recognized by chance in the airport at Cairo and shot dead before he could explode the charges within him. The autopsy on his body, intact except for the head wound that had killed him, revealed the secret. It was very nearly the only secret about Hassan that had ever been betrayed.

  Hassan said, “Do you know who I am?”

  “Yes,” said Patrick.

  “Good. I know something about you—that you were once called Ahmed in a romantic period of your youth. I know other things as well.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “Are you? Twenty-five years ago you wanted to join the revolution. Now you wear a watch that costs more than one of those people down in the streets holds in his hands in a lifetime.”

  Patrick had remained standing. He felt a movement behind him and realized that whoever had shut the door had come into the room before doing so. A man moved into his field of vision. He had a Kalashnikov machine pistol in his hands and the candle’s tongue flicked over its blued surface. Patrick recognized the outmoded weapon, its vicious snout and curved magazine, from a thousand photographs, as he might have identified the flintlock on the shoulder of a statue on a New England village green; it was a homely revolutionary object.

  “That is a comrade,” Hassan said; “he’s here to protect you. No harm will come to you from us.”

  Hassan was speaking in an almost inaudible voice, in the rippling English of an educated Arab. It didn’t matter how loudly they spoke; the building was abandoned and empty, no one could hear. If the terrorists decided to fire a whole magazine from the Kalashnikov into Patrick’s body and leave him dead in this room, no one would hear that either. Someone might come and take the watch from his leaking corpse after Hassan and the gunman departed. But no one would hear.

  Patrick was terrified, but when he spoke the words came out of him clear and loud. Nothing ever affected the strength of his voice. “I am looking into the death of Ibn Awad,” he said.

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “It’s been suggested to me that you may be able to help me.”

  “What do you want to prove?”

  Patrick didn’t answer. Uninvited, he sat down on the floor opposite Hassan. At Patrick’s sudden movement, the gunman shifted his feet, but relaxed at a gesture from Hassan. Hassan and Patrick were looking directly into ea
ch other’s face now. The candle burned between them. Patrick noted every detail; he could bring this scene alive in words during a broadcast as vividly as the camera could have done it.

  “The truth is quite simple,” Hassan said. “Ibn Awad was murdered on the orders of the American President.”

  “President Lockwood?”

  “Lockwood, yes.” He made an impatient gesture. “They’re all the same. Don’t you realize that—that they are all the same? Or have you smothered Ahmed and become Patrick Graham, a rich and famous man—become just like them?”

  “You can judge what I am for yourself. I know what the realities are. I know the truth when I hear it.”

  “And did you hear the truth when Ibn Awad was assassinated?”

  “I heard what the whole world believed to be the truth at the time.”

  “Then you don’t know a lie when you hear one.”

  “I saw the document Ibn Awad had written out in his own hand, ordering his own death.”

  “A forgery.”

  “Then where is the forger?”

  Hassan’s teeth gleamed. “If he were my forger, he’d be dead. I suppose the one the Americans used is dead, too.”

  Patrick’s fear was fading. In a way, even in this place, he was on his own ground. He was used to testing men, pushing them back with his voice, making them reveal themselves and the facts.

  “The document, Ibn Awad’s suicide note if you want to call it that, was sent to the imam of the great mosque in Mecca. Surely he is trustworthy?”

  “Priests can be trusted to believe what they want. The imam wanted to believe that Ibn Awad had done this bizarre thing, this insane thing—had his favorite son kill him, knowing that his son would be executed for the crime and they both would go to hell forever—because he wanted to save Islam even at the cost of those two souls.”

  “You call it bizarre. You’re right. It’s too bizarre not to be true.”

  “You’re a clever man, my friend. If one wants to deceive a clever man one must act in a clever way. The Americans were clever. They killed Ibn Awad, then forged a suicide note that was so unbelievable, so absurd, that the only choice clever men had was to believe it.”

  Hassan was utterly relaxed. He reached down the neck of his jibba—it was made of unbleached cloth and was much patched—and scratched his chest. Patrick opened his mouth to speak but Hassan held up his palm to stop him.

  “I’ll tell you what I can tell you,” he said. “Then you can go away.”

  “I have a lot of questions.”

  “Ask them of the Americans. We hear that you go to tea at the White House. Put down your teacup and ask President Lockwood questions.”

  Hassan leaned forward. As he came closer to the flame it cast darker shadows in the deep hollows of his face and his polished head looked more than ever like a skull.

  “Two facts,” he said. “First fact: I saw Ibn Awad only hours before his death, in his tent in the desert of Hagreb—the very tent in which he was killed. We made plans to meet the next day. Ibn Awad was going to give me an important gift at that time.”

  “What gift?”

  “It was buried in the desert, only he knew where.”

  “What gift?” Patrick insisted.

  “Something to give the Eye of Gaza its greatest victory. Ibn Awad believed in our cause. He was a great Arab.”

  “He was a saint, not a terrorist.”

  “In his understanding, the Eye of Gaza killed in the name of God. We killed bad Arabs who had betrayed their people and their religion. We killed Jews. What did Ibn Awad want above everything else? To cleanse Islam. He saw the Eye of Gaza as God’s instrument to do that.”

  “Ibn Awad was secretly connected to the Eye of Gaza? He was giving you money?”

  “He was going to make us a great gift. The Americans learned about it. They killed him to prevent our having what he was going to give us.”

  “How did the Americans find out? Who told them? And what was this gift that it should make them kill the holiest man on earth?”

  Hassan had been holding his skeletal hands clasped in his lap. Now he spread them in resignation. His yellow nails looked like bits of gnawed bone.

  “Prince Talil’s father trusted him utterly. Talil trusted the Americans. As for the nature of the gift—ask the Americans. Perhaps they found it. I could not, though I searched very hard.”

  Hassan’s hands were still suspended before him. He clapped them together twice, tiny explosions in the stifling room. “Ibn Awad,” he said after the first clap; “Prince Talil,” he said after the second. “The Americans killed them both.”

  “But I saw Ibn Awad’s note. It was examined by every expert in the world. It was compared to Awad’s handwriting by computers and by humans. The handwriting on the document sent to the imam in Mecca was genuine.”

  “Was it?” asked Hassan. Patrick had to strain to hear what he was saying. “Here is a second fact,” Hassan said. “Ibn Awad, the emir of Hagreb, could not write. As a child he was thought to be an imbecile. He very nearly didn’t inherit the throne because he couldn’t learn to write. His tutors—priests, naturally—assumed that he couldn’t learn to read either, so they didn’t bother to teach him.”

  Patrick was stifled by the odor of bodies in the close room. Hassan was watching him; in the Arab style he made no effort to conceal the crafty pleasure on his face as he waited for Patrick to challenge what he had just told him. Patrick, instead, continued to stare, and made a gesture with his fingers, beckoning more information out of Hassan’s mouth.

  “What made Ibn Awad seem an idiot as a child was later on regarded as a sign from God—his family and the priests thought God had meant to keep him innocent. Ibn Awad was a very intelligent person, some would call him a genius. He memorized the whole Koran, by having it read to him. If he heard a thing once, no matter what it was, he never forgot it.”

  “But he couldn’t write, or read.”

  “Correct. But this was no sign from God. Modern people like you and me know it was a disorder with a scientific name. This inability to write is called dysgraphia. It’s caused by a lesion on the brain. Perhaps he had a childhood fever or an injury at birth.”

  “What proof have you of that?”

  “Ibn Awad had other medical problems. Prince Talil had him examined by American doctors. They discovered the lesion. Find the records of their examination. Surely that’s not beyond a man of your skills and connections?”

  Hassan stood up. He brushed the grit from the skirts of his jibba. They had been sitting on the stone floor for a long time, but Hassan showed no sign of discomfort though his bones, poking through his leathery skin, must ache. Patrick’s shanks, his spine, his whole body gave him pain.

  “Go to Hagreb and ask questions. Go back to Washington and ask questions,” Hassan said.

  “I will, don’t worry.”

  “Worry? I have no reason to worry. The revolution will happen in its own time whether you’re still strong enough to help it or not.” Hassan leaned over and cupped the candle with both hands; the fingers were sinewy and his sleeves fell back to reveal corded muscular forearms; this man who seemed so fleshless had killed with his hands more than once.

  Hassan blew out the candle. In the dark he said, “Ahmed. I wonder if that person—that believer—is still alive in you?”

  Alone, Patrick waited until he could hear no noise outside the door. Then he lit a cigarette and smoked the whole thing down to the filter, inhaling lungful after lungful of hot smoke. He did not think about what Hassan had told him. He had had to learn not to let his mind work too quickly. It was best when he had been startled, when he ceased to believe one thing, and began to believe another, to keep his head empty. All around him in the dark the little unclean creatures rustled and he concentrated on that sound and on the scorching smoke going in and out of his throat and lungs.

  When he went into the street he found that the Eye of Gaza had withdrawn its shadowers. He was pawed by
beggars all the way back to his hotel. Children touched his genitals and snatched at his watch while their ragged elders pointed and laughed. Patrick wanted to break into a run, but he controlled himself. At last, emerging into a broad lighted street, he found a taxi.

  Patrick’s hotel room was cooled to a temperature thirty degrees below that in the streets. He could still feel the beggars’ hands on his skin. He stripped off his clothes and took a shower, soaping and scrubbing, rinsing and scrubbing again. He called room service and ordered breakfast. A large glass of water came with it, filled with the tubular transparent ice cubes that only an American machine could have produced. Patrick took the glass to the window, cranked open the sash, and threw the water and the ice cubes out. The heat and smell of the ancient city came in.

  The air-conditioned room, the food on its heated plate, the ice cubes, awakened in Patrick the hatred he had felt all his life for his country, inventor of devices that no one needed but that every human being—even Hassan, even the silent guard ready to die for Hassan, certainly the beggars who had frightened Patrick with their sores—envied and coveted. Patrick himself, born poor, had done so.

  “‘They’re all the same, don’t you realize that?’” Patrick heard the echo of Hassan’s sibilant question.

  The window remained open; he was sweating. Smelling himself, he smelled Hassan in his filthy jibba. His mind, trained to miss no useful detail, remembered Hassan’s queer fastidious gesture—how he had brushed his gown when he rose from the verminous floor. After all was said, what was it that Hassan wanted? For what had he plotted and tortured and torn the life out of strangers all through his bloody life? He used code words to explain the horrors he was driven to: freedom, revolution, justice, homeland. But what did he want? He wanted a country—and what was a country if it was not a machine for making the men who invented it rich?