Julian had no smile for his brother. “I suppose you’ve talked to Jack Philindros,” he said.
“Yes, on my way here.”
“Horace, you and I are going to have to work together on this. Before we go onto a professional footing I want to say something to you as your brother.”
Horace nodded, looking upward into Julian’s steady eyes. His brother was sitting bolt upright, fingers laced on the desk before him.
“Jack Philindros may have some idea he can use the fact that you and I are brothers against the President. That will not happen, I promise you.”
Horace could hear the clatter of a secretary’s typewriter through the thin wall behind him. Julian was making no effort to moderate his voice; Horace wasn’t comfortable. He responded in a lower tone.
“Why should you fear any such thing? Nothing has happened yet. Patrick Graham has raised some dust. He may know nothing.”
“We’ll come to Patrick Graham later. I’m speaking to another problem. You. More accurately, you and me. You know as well as I do what your involvement means.”
In Julian’s voice there was a rasp of anger, the tone of a man looking for a quarrel. Horace spoke softly.
“It means,” Horace replied, “that I was the FIS resident in that part of the world. It means that I had the necessary access to the target. It means nobody else could do it. That’s all it means. You’re talking about how it looks. That’s a different matter, and I see your point.”
“You didn’t see it three years ago, when you were given that order?”
“Of course. But I’m under discipline. What I’m instructed to do, I do.”
“Without question? Without examination of the consequences?”
“Consequences,” said Horace, “are not my problem. They’re the President’s problem and yours. You both have brains. I assumed you knew what you were doing, that you had examined the options, as they used to say thirty-five years ago in this house, when assassination was a new toy.”
“Don’t compare us to those people.”
Beyond Julian’s rigid body, framed in the window at his back, were the lawns of the White House. The sprinkler system was on. The sun, shining through the playing waters, created rainbows. Horace watched the colors in the dancing spray, collecting his thoughts; he wanted to give Julian time to reflect on what he had just said. He and Julian were not thinking of the same people. It made no difference. Those who had sat in Julian’s place—possibly in this same mean room just down the corridor from the Oval Office—justifying the attempts on Castro and Diem and the rest might well have felt just as Julian did. They were very old men now. They had spent what was left of their lives arranging for the blame to fall on others, preserving their President’s myth.
“You think Jack Philindros tricked the President—that I tricked you, Julian—by not telling you I was involved in Awad’s murder?”
“You and Philindros both. Horace, I didn’t even know you were in the FIS until I learned it by accident, in this job. Now, to learn this about you…”
“About me? Didn’t President Lockwood give the order, with your advice and approval?”
“Perhaps. But to use my brother, to make me responsible for sending you out to kill…”
“Julian.”
Horace leaned towards his brother, put a hand on the edge of the desk. He saw that the silver frame on Julian’s desk contained two photographs—Lockwood on one side, Elliott Hubbard on the other, both men frozen on film at about the age of fifty-five, both outdoors with the sun shining on their faces.
“That night in New York, after Pa died, after Emily had gone upstairs,” Horace said. “You began to tell me something. Do you remember?”
“I remember. You stopped me.”
“I thought it must be this business. I didn’t know how you could not know about my part in it. There was no point in talking about it; the thing was done.”
“It might have been better to talk then than now. We were never more brothers than we were that night.”
Horace raised his hand, a shadow of the gesture he had made in their father’s dining room the winter before. “We’re not responsible for each other,” he said. He settled back into his chair. He told himself to be careful: he was so used to handling men in their moments of weakness, and this man was his brother, and the President’s assistant.
“Philindros might not believe that,” Julian said.
“He would. He knows the world wouldn’t. Jack has a long memory, Julian. He knows what happened in the past in affairs like this one. He loves the FIS. He loves this country. He doesn’t think they can exist without each other.”
“So he’d destroy the country to save the FIS?”
“Is that really your question, Julian? If you want to know if he’d humiliate a President to save the FIS, the answer is yes. That would just tie the game, a generation after the last time a President put the blame on us for what he’d done. We couldn’t survive another scandal.”
Horace spoke in the tones of a reasonable man. To him, the case was obvious. All at once, Julian realized that Horace was bound by ties of brotherhood to something that he loved more, perhaps, than he loved his family. Julian swiveled in his chair and looked out the window as Horace had done a few moments before. A pair of Zeiss field glasses that Elliott Hubbard had brought back as a war trophy hung by their worn leather strap on a hook screwed into the sash. Horace guessed that Julian watched birds in odd moments, perhaps while he chewed a sandwich during a hurried lunch, his mind still on the President’s work. Horace was pleased by the thought of Julian identifying some unusual species in the White House shrubbery and noting the sighting in his field book. “I never stop seeing the boy in Julian,” their father had said to Horace after the three of them had lunched together on 93d Street to celebrate Lockwood’s election to the presidency. Neither did Horace: his brother’s outgrown younger face was always visible to him in the craggy features of the grown man; he heard the lighter voice of the child in Julian’s baritone. Julian swung around to face him again.
“Our hope is to contain this story,” he said. “Our expectation is that we won’t be able to do so. In that case, I want to keep the damage to the President to a minimum.”
Horace nodded.
“Tell me everything about your part in this,” Julian said.
4
The Awad situation was only one thread, though a scarlet one, in the fabric of Julian’s day. Horace told his story—what had actually happened—in minute detail; what he had felt played no part in his narrative. In his profession, emotions were not discussed; that was its only privacy.
There were incessant interruptions. Julian’s telephone rang relentlessly; he was pestered by members of the staff whose problems could not wait, by senators who could not be ignored, by political workers who were planning the last details of the party’s convention in New York. Julian had had the bold idea of renominating Lockwood in Mallory’s own city, to dramatize the changes the Lockwood administration had made there. A young woman with a pencil thrust in her hair came in and, ignoring Horace’s presence, perched on a sliding pile of documents that filled the old green sofa beneath Julian’s family pictures; she had a Mallory story.
“He’s going to ask for a constitutional convention if he can lie his way back into the White House,” she said. “Can you imagine? A few small modifications of the Bill of Rights, a minor rewording of the other Amendments. They say he has a plan to institutionalize everyone who’s committed one violent crime for life; all those kids he’s marked down, as criminals would be put away before they could do harm; anyone with an extra chromosome would be sterilized. They talk of a vast new prison in Alaska, on the North Slope, underground, Julian—just one way in, a steel hatch in the tundra, and no way out. Can you believe it?”
Julian listened patiently. “Research it,” he said; the girl went away.
Horace, a lover of women—their tempers, their bodies, the force of their love and ha
te—watched the girl’s fine back disappear. “Is Franklin Mallory really such an ogre?” he asked.
Julian grunted. “It does no harm to have smart people like Mary, there, think so. Mallory wants to take this government back. But we’re going to keep it.”
The reason Julian’s office was so small became apparent; he had sacrificed size for proximity to the President. It was separated from the Oval Office only by one tiny room used by Lockwood as a place to change clothes and take cat naps. At the sound of a buzzer, Julian would disappear through a low door, frameless and set flush into the plaster wall. Once or twice Horace caught glimpses of the President; near the end of the day, Julian responded to a knock on the door and when he opened it Lockwood stood on the other side, naked to the waist, removing the laundry’s cardboard from a fresh shirt. Lockwood saw Horace but made no acknowledgment of his presence.
By the day’s end, Horace wasn’t sure that Julian had absorbed anything that he had told him.
“I have a feeling that I’ve been shouting into the wind all day,” Horace said.
“I’ve had no trouble hearing you.”
It was six in the evening. The typewriters had ceased; untended telephones rang in deserted offices. Lights seldom burned at midnight in Lockwood’s White House. By six o’clock he and his staff had already worked twelve hours; the President believed a man who couldn’t do his job in that length of time was inefficient. Lockwood came in to say good-bye to Julian before he went upstairs to join Polly; again, he ignored Horace.
“Why don’t you go over to O Street by yourself?” Julian said. “We can have dinner. Emily and the kids want to see you. The guest room is made up for you.”
“What about you?”
“I have to do my diary. It’s something I never neglect.”
Horace’s solemnity vanished. “Pa again.” Elliott Hubbard had kept a journal for fifty years, writing a full page on vellum paper in a calfskin volume each night before he slept. Julian got his diaries from the same company in New York with the year stamped in gold leaf on the spine.
“Pa had you burn his, did he?”
“Yes; I did it at the bank—the facilities are there,” Horace said. “It was quite a load. I wonder what was inside. If he told all he knew about everyone he knew, a lot of secret history went up in smoke.”
Julian smiled. “I don’t know who’ll burn mine. Jenny, I think.” He showed Horace the way to the garage. Then he went back to his office, opened his safe, and got out his diary. He held it in his hands for a moment, liking the compact weight of it and the texture and scent of its leather cover. He enjoyed the discipline of keeping the journal; it gave him fluency in his real work. Julian, like his father before him, never had a writer’s block; sentences, paragraphs, pages of English leaped out of him. He took up his pen, and after a long interval of thought, began to write.
I find this difficult to write. I’ve sat for a long time with the ink drying on the point of the pen, remembering over and over again, like a film run backwards and forwards, that day when I lay drugged in the hospital in Hawaii and Horace, against every rule I thought he had, leaned over and kissed me as he said good-bye. He had just told me to love life and want it.
Today my brother and I have come together because I made a murderer out of him.
Of course Philindros knew what the effect of using Horace would be. He has the right sort of name, Philindros: there is a Greek cunning in him. It is his profession—it is in his blood—to know what the rest of us have forgotten: that the simplest tricks, the oldest, always work best. I can never sacrifice Philindros, never advise Lockwood to sacrifice him or the FIS, unless I am willing to sacrifice my brother as well. Never have I been so utterly outwitted, never so stung by surprise.
Philindros let me know what a fool my job has made of me; I am the only man permitted to touch the king: I really had come to believe that this made me untouchable. The magic of Lockwood’s person would keep enemies away. Now Jack Philindros, a man so low in my estimation that I didn’t trouble to understand him, has made me the instrument by which he can, if he will, strike down the two men I would protect with more ferocity than my own children: the President and Horace. There is no way out of this dilemma. I have accepted that.
Horace has spoken to me openly of his life in the intelligence service, and especially of his role in the assassination of Ibn Awad. He’s held nothing back; Horace is a man in whom duty reacts like an enzyme. He’s told to kill a holy man, revered throughout the world as a saint, and does so. He’s told to spill secrets that he had meant to keep locked away in his darknesses until he died, and does so. No matter what the truth may be, he faces it. In some odd way that is almost frightening to me, Horace is able to turn me at will from his brother into The Assistant to the President; on signal, he no longer sees Julian, he sees a man with a legal right to know all secrets.
He tells me these secrets, the terrible sets of facts that make up his hidden life, with a complete lack of emotion. His voice loses pitch, his face loses expression. He might be Philindros’s twin. I keep watching him for signs of himself, traces of him as a boy, expressions that will strike some note that I’ve heard in him before, or heard in Pa or someone else in the family. Nothing. For almost thirty years Horace has been a man that none of us who loved him even knew existed. Our Horace has been the actor. Philindros’s Horace has been the real man.
I dramatize; I exaggerate. It’s true that Horace kept his real existence hidden from everyone outside the FIS—except, it seems, our father. Pa’s connections within the intelligence world never eroded: once in, always a part of it. That old saw is true. They went on trusting Elliott Hubbard until the day he died. It was he who made the purchase of D. & D. Laux & Co. possible through his comradeship with old Sebastian on one side and the fact that he was Horace’s father on the other. Apart from the man who was President at the time of the purchase, and the heads of the intelligence oversight committees in Congress, only Pa and Sebastian, outside of the FIS, knew what D. & D. Laux was in reality. Only they, outside the FIS, knew about Horace. Even I did not guess until I came into the White House and was told by Lockwood what Horace’s bank did as its main business.
Otherwise Horace would never have told me. It is no temptation for him to tell; he lives in secret as easily as a trout lives in running water.
Why do I reach for metaphors? In fact there is nothing more unnatural in Horace’s living as he does than there is in my life. Horace’s life seems strange only because I have not been able to imagine living it. And then there is this: I desire to believe his life bizarre. Do I think that will make it easier for me to accept that it was I, as I’m a part of everything Lockwood does, who made Horace kill? That he wanted the order we gave him? He never wanted anything less.
Having unburdened myself of the foregoing, I want to set down, so that I can see it on the page and make it real in my mind, what Horace has told me about the Ibn Awad affair. I cannot capture his tone, but what I write is faithful to the substance of his experience.
Hagreb, because of its oil reserves and its geographical position, was a natural target for U.S. intelligence activity. The Hagrebi were an autonomous tribe, but no one thought of them as a nation until the oil wells came in; the wells only came in because Americans—Universal Energy, Lockwood’s enemies—found a way to bring very deep-lying pools of oil to the surface by pumping heated gases into them. For years Ibn Awad would not permit exploitation of the oil. He wanted to keep his people—fanatically orthodox Muslims—in the desert and in the past, living according to the uncorrupted teachings of the Prophet. You must move with the times, some Texan told him. “The times are unclean!” retorted Ibn Awad.
Horace overheard that. He had an idea. Horace is of course a speaker of Arabic, an Islamic scholar. Horace made friends with Awad. The process took years. Horace, knowing Awad’s hatred of machines, had always to arrive on horseback at the emir’s encampment. There were no cities in Hagreb, only the wandering trib
e in the empty desert and their tents.
Horace would have the tents photographed by space satellite; their location would be beamed to him through his computers at the Beirut branch of D. & D. Laux & Co. The resolution of the pictures was so fine that Horace could sometimes see Awad himself, actually recognize his face, in the enlargements that the computers made. After tracking Awad with a camera that floated hundreds of miles outside the earth’s atmosphere, Horace would ride out on horseback to find him in his tent on his speck of desert. Horace would bring gifts. He and Awad would speak; Horace is a great amateur of the Koran and it pleased Awad to have scripture spoken aloud to him. Awad’s other passion was the history of the Hagrebi; Horace learned this by heart too, though it was not written down.
Awad believed that the Hagrebi were chosen by God to carry His message out of the purifying desert and into the corrupted world. This is not, Horace says, an uncommon delusion among desert patriarchs (or any other people for that matter); Awad differed from all the rest in that he thought, as late as the final decade of the twentieth century, that the Word could be heard by human ear, and that it could bring salvation.
We wanted the oil. The point of leverage was Awad’s religious obsession. “Is it pious to refuse?” Horace began to ask Awad. “Perhaps the greed of these oilmen is the instrument of God to send you forth out of the desert to purify Islam.”
Finally (the process of persuasion took Horace years), Awad permitted the wells to be drilled. Soon he was depositing royalties amounting to several million dollars a week in the Beirut branch of D. & D. Laux & Co. Awad immediately hired American engineers to design and build the electronic minaret that was called Radio Hagreb. In its shadow he built the largest mosque in the world. Around the mosque, Hagreb City—skyscrapers and hospitals, schools and stadiums, gardens and parks irrigated with desalinated water pumped overland from the sea—rose out of the sands.
The Better Angels Page 14
