The Better Angels
Page 15
Awad came to his new mosque to worship from time to time but continued to live as he’d always done, in a tent in the desert. He spent almost his entire waking time in prayer. Horace kept up his visits to the desert, but he seldom saw Awad. More and more, Ibn Awad was beyond the reach of influence or even simple friendship. The corruption he had foreseen for the Hagrebi when the oil came in was all around him. He withdrew from it. Even the crown prince, a loutish boy in his twenties called Kamal, was wallowing in drink and drugs, women and boys on trips abroad, though he took care to live carefully when he was near his father in Hagreb.
Awad had only the two sons. His wives and concubines had given him a flock of female children. It was unlikely, as he had abstained from sexual intercourse for years, that he would ever have more heirs. Most of his hopes he placed in Prince Talil, the only child of the youngest of his wives.
When Horace first knew Talil he was a very young boy, and Horace was the first person from the outside world he had encountered. From the start, even before Horace had any ulterior purpose, there was an attraction between them. Horace and Talil spent long hours together, talking, hunting. Horace, with his afterglow of the life outside, must have been like a lamp in that dark medieval Bedouin world. Talil studied by Horace’s lamp. (I did the same, at fifteen.) Naturally, as Horace foresaw, Talil came to want more than Horace could offer on his occasional visits. Talil persuaded Ibn Awad that he should have a modern education. Awad gave his son to Horace, and Horace set up in Beirut what amounted to a university with a student body of one. Using Ibn Awad’s inexhaustible funds, Horace brought the best teachers from everywhere in the world. Talil knew the Koran front to back before he came to Beirut; at the end of three years he knew as much as most specialists about Arab history and Islamic culture, and more than most American Ph.D.s about Western civilization. He was expert in the theory of oil production and marketing. He spoke English and read French and German. Through Horace he met the most influential men in the Near East, Arab and outsider alike.
When Talil went back to Hagreb, he found his father insane. Ibn Awad spoke to the prince of conversations with angels. He heard voices in the desert, and the voices insistently repeated two things: purify Islam; kill the Jews. He spoke like a madman only in private; in public, and in his radio speeches, he was the saintly figure and voice the world still believes in. Radio Hagreb, along with the example of Ibn Awad’s ascetic life, won the old man an enormous following among the Arab masses. They were ripe for him: the moneyed young were sickened by the excesses of their parents, the poor were enraged that they had remained poor in the midst of an ocean of money.
Awad made Prince Talil the head of his bodyguard and his prime minister. To him alone he confided that he was planning to cleanse Islam through the use of terrorists.
Talil turned to Horace for help. He saw that his father’s illness could be controlled if he could be brought under treatment; but Awad would not leave the desert.
A team of FIS doctors was flown to Hagreb. They saw at once what Awad’s problem was, gave him lithium carbonate, and brought his psychosis under control. As we know, Awad refused to continue the treatment because the medicine took away the visions and voices he saw in the desert.
Before long, the voices told him to destroy Israel by fire. He had agents buy the necessary plutonium and find the required technicians. He made his bombs.
Horace had known for some time that there was a connection between Ibn Awad and Hassan Abdallah of the Eye of Gaza. Rose MacKenzie, a kind of magical technocrat who worked with Horace, had learned to read the messages that Awad sent to the Eye of Gaza in the form of prayers broadcast at certain hours, in a certain sequence, over Radio Hagreb. The broken code told Horace that the bombs would be handed over as Philindros described to the President and me that night three years ago at the farm.
“Never did I suggest to Talil that he should kill his father,” says Horace. “We examined one way out after another; we saw that none would work. I suggested kidnapping, a Swiss clinic. There would have been an uprising in Hagreb. Finally Talil said, ‘I will have to kill him.’ That was what I had wanted him to say… trained him to say. I advised him not to do it. He came back to me again. And again. Finally I received the order from the President. At that point, and not before, I told Talil that he must kill his father. You have to understand, Julian, that he loved the old man. Imagine yourself murdering Pa—an insane Pa, dangerous to the world, but your father all the same. That was Talil’s situation, and I—you and Lockwood and I—put him into it.
“Talil was wearing the robes of a royal prince—gauzy white with a purple headpiece. It was night. He had just come from a reception at the palace. We were alone in the desert. There was a very bright moon. Talil sank in his robes to the ground, so limp with anguish that I imagined for a moment that his body had left his clothes; he was just a heap of bright rags on the sand. He yipped like a dog. This boy I had created yipped. That was the most intelligent sound he could make.”
It was Horace, of course, who brought Talil, step by step, to murder. Talil thought the idea was his own, that the guilt was his own; Horace, manipulator of hidden controls, knew better. It was Horace, too, who suggested the bizarre faked suicide note. In it, as the world knows, Ibn Awad informed mankind that he had ordered Prince Talil to kill him as a sacrifice to his faith. At the time, I half believed this story myself (Horace knows my secret weaknesses); I thought Awad in his madness had saved Lockwood and me from doing murder. But it was only Horace’s cleverness that saved us, for a few years, from suspicion.
Talil’s execution wasn’t part of Horace’s plan. He wanted Talil, his instrument, on the throne of Hagreb. Talil was a man who could influence the Arab world for a generation to come. He believed Horace to be his best friend—more than that, his second father. Yet when Talil was beheaded, Horace was able to weigh up the benefits against the loss. Unblinking, Horace said to me, “It did occur to me that Talil was the only witness to American involvement.”
Still, Horace was puzzled. Had some unseen enemy altered the suicide note of Ibn Awad? He had Rose MacKenzie run the computers day and night, analyzing and reanalyzing the new material in the note that condemned Talil to death.
“The explanation,” says Horace, “was very O. Henryish—real life often is. Talil had himself executed; perhaps he went into madness with his father before he followed him into death. Rose compared the suicide note with all samples of Prince Talil’s handwriting in the computer. There was no doubt Talil had written it himself. Ibn Awad was illiterate—Talil had always done all his writing for him. After we said good-bye, Talil simply added another paragraph. It was his own death warrant. It read: ‘My beloved son Prince Talil begs that he be executed according to God’s law for this act of patricide. I have instructed him to kill me, and he, in his great love for me, has obeyed. May the sacrifice of our two lives wake Islam; may God forgive my son and me for doing His work as we have done it. If He should punish us, forever, we accept the fire as the sign of His love for our souls, and of our love for His Word and His people.’”
Talil could kill his father, he would let no one else do it. But he himself refused to live afterwards.
“Imagine killing Pa.” I could not have done what Talil did, and lived myself. How does Horace, who loved Talil, live?
Julian closed his diary, capped his pen, and locked away what he had written. His eye followed his hand as it reached for the switch on his desk lamp, and saw his father’s picture. He turned off the lights and went home.
5
Emily lunched that day with Charlotte Graham. They were alone, and before they ate they had an apéritif. They were seated side by side in the love seats where Charlotte and Patrick had been when Clive Wilmot began everything, only two weeks before.
“These chairs are Delanois, aren’t they?” Emily said. “And the duchesse brisée, too.” She indicated the chair and the long footstool on which Clive had sprawled while telling his tale.
“Not all that much, and it’s a bit newer—Empire, mostly. I did art history at Bryn Mawr and stayed up all night swallowing pills to memorize all the names. This is a lovely room.”
The furniture was remarkably fine—French and Italian and a few German pieces, marquetry tables and commodes. Charlotte had replaced the blocked windows with pier glass; two of the mirrors were possibly by Matthias Lock.
“The room was supposed to be rococo, you know,” Charlotte said, “but Patrick had his Persian carpets. I suppose that’s all right; but then he developed this passion for hanging nude females about. They all have moon-colored skin, d’you see, and great hams. It does give an effect—what would one say?—of dykes in a china shop.”
Emily couldn’t imagine why Charlotte had wanted to give her lunch. It was a very good one, served by a tall pale boy younger, even, than Emily. Willowy, thought Emily, as the slender footman served them cold soup and sherry, grilled sole and Montrachet; she had read the word but until now had seen no one in life whom it described. “I do hate thin wines,” said Charlotte. “Men think they have to shrivel their tongues with those dry things, but they aren’t here to watch, are they?” She spoke to the servant. “Go away now, ffoulkes, we can pour the rest for ourselves.”
“Your ladyship.”
Charlotte ate with gusto and went on talking about furniture. Emily wondered if she really had such a passion for it, or if she feared it might be Emily’s only subject.
“You know,” Charlotte said, when she had got through her food, “I’m a great reader of those pieces you do in the Post. How can anyone as young as you be so wise about people?”
“I’m not wise, the people I write about are. I just follow them around and take notes like mad. It’s all quotes and straight description.”
“But you capture them! I remember poor Julian. You wrote he had eyes like Boswell’s, assuming that he had burned the notes for his Life of Johnson.”
“Did I write that?” Emily didn’t smile. “Those were sad days for Lockwood and Julian, just at the beginning of the administration. Lockwood had pardoned Glick, that lawyer Mallory had hounded into jail for defending terrorists, and the whole right wing was down on him. Everything was going wrong. They had a horrid fight on over repeal of Mallory’s program to give free heroin to addicts without even trying to rehabilitate them—let them shoot up and die was Mallory’s idea. ‘Administrative murder,’ Lockwood called it.”
“I remember all that. And of course, Caroline had just run away with that dwarf.”
“I don’t know that that was such a blow to Julian. But who knows what Julian felt? In any case he’s very attached to Lockwood, as everyone knows, and secretive—he’d tell me nothing. I kept provoking him, asking why they failed to do good in the world when they talked such a good game.” Emily picked up her wineglass and looked through the amber liquid at the sun pouring through a round window set high in the wall. “I’m afraid Julian got awfully fed up with me. Lots of people do. I’m a pest when I’m doing these profiles.”
“No one who looks as you do, my girl, is ever a pest.” Charlotte rang and ffoulkes came back to clear away the plates and give them strawberries. Once again Charlotte got busy; she ate the berries, as an Englishwoman would, with a fork and spoon, pausing after chewing each one as though she wanted to forget the flavor of it before being delighted by the next.
“You know, Emily, I am finding you rather sly,” she said at last.
“Sly?”
“I know the Post has given you Patrick as a subject. Are you going to do him?”
Emily was astonished; she had got the assignment only that morning, by telephone, and hadn’t yet approached Patrick. How could Charlotte possibly know?
“You’ll think me a meddler,” Charlotte said, “but I suggested it to Trevor when he dined here last week. He rang up this morning to say they’d asked you to do it. I’m so glad.”
“why?”
“Why am I glad, or why did I suggest it?”
“Both.” Emily was faintly annoyed. She never mixed social things with professional ones. She never even discussed her work with Julian; she had never discussed it with anyone.
“I’m glad because you’re so very good, and I don’t think anyone has ever written about Patrick as he really is—he’s built up this persona, you know, and all anyone sees is hair and flashing teeth, and all anyone hears is the voice from the burning bush. I think you’ll get underneath all that and rehumanize him. And that’s why I suggested it.”
“Patrick may not think that’s such a wonderful thing.”
Charlotte laughed. “My dear, he’ll be delighted. I think you ought to go to San Francisco with him next week to watch the convention nominate Mallory.”
Emily had drunk hardly any wine, and now she put a finger on the rim of her glass as ffoulkes approached with the bottle.
“ffoulkes, do take these fruit plates.”
“Your ladyship.”
Emily said, “I’ll have to speak to Patrick. But San Francisco would be the place to do the piece. That’s what interested the paper—Mallory and Patrick, toe-to-toe again.”
“Yes, I could see they’d like that. Pump it up, I would if I were you. Patrick loathes the man. They’re rather alike, Patrick and Mallory. So bright, so beautiful, so…”
“Yes?”
“… so unlike Julian. So unlike One. D’you ever read Nancy Mitford? I suppose no one does now, but she was rather funny about English society. She adored snobs, the poor dead things. In her books, or maybe it was just one book, she had a prancing queer who called himself One, with the O capitalized. ‘Not like One, the Germans’; ‘Not like One, those American divans—everyone sits in a row and the ennui makes One fall off.’ Those aren’t Mitford’s exact words, but that was the sense of it. That’s Mallory’s trouble, he knows he’s not like One; it’s Patrick’s trouble too.”
Emily looked in wonderment at Charlotte’s animated face across the table. This woman seemed to think it was all right to speak as flippantly about her own husband as she would gossip about an acquaintance.
“You see, the thing about Patrick,” Charlotte went on, “is that he’s always lived rather at second hand. Really, he wants to be President—or, at least, he wants to be Julian. He wants to run things, not just describe them and attack them. He doesn’t have what he wants, poor chap.”
“He seems to have quite a lot.” Emily let her eyes wander around the opulent room, and finally rest on Charlotte herself.
“Yes, One would be satisfied, but not Patrick, I’m afraid. It’s all disguise; he wanted to be born higher. He thinks it means something. I keep returning to Julian. In Patrick’s eyes, your husband just stepped effortlessly through doors into the room where the secret of life is kept in a box. Poor old Patrick has been scratching at the door all these years. He can’t know there is no box.”
Charlotte shrugged and gave a helpless smile. ffoulkes returned. “Coffee, your ladyship?”
“In the drawing room.”
ffoulkes withdrew. “Why does he keep on calling you that?” Emily asked.
“‘Your ladyship’? It gives him a giggle. He would have been a marquess, his people were much grander than my family, had there always been an England. These young chaps, handing the plates around, pretend what’s happened to them is a great joke. The Russian nobility did the same for the first generation or so. Noblesse oblige, you know. In five years he’ll paint his face and go off on a yacht with some Arab.”
Charlotte, her Scotch and milk in her hand, took Emily back into the drawing room, where ffoulkes gave them coffee. They talked some more about decor. Charlotte’s long hands flew with her voice; Emily, a quiet girl who never wore jewelry in daytime, counted her hostess’s rings. Because of her lineage it was assumed Charlotte had brought the fam
ily jewels with her into marriage, but Patrick had purchased everything she had.
“There is this,” Charlotte said suddenly. “I’m talking to you in this way because I have a bit of a conscience, Emily. There’s something new going on between Patrick and Julian.”
“Going on?”
“I mean Patrick wants to know something and Julian won’t tell him, or isn’t ready to. Patrick gets awfully cross about such things.”
“That’s nothing to do with me, Charlotte. On assignment, I’m Emily Barker; I have no Hubbard connection.”
“How intelligent. Do make Patrick understand that. He might think you were the door to Julian, you know.”
Emily gave Charlotte a long, solemn look. Christ, these Americans are such lovely creatures, thought Charlotte; or is it only that she’s young?
“I mean, Patrick does require feeding and grooming and you’re awfully beautiful,” Charlotte said. “If you’re going to spend a week with him three thousand miles away from Julian, you can expect sudden moves.”
“Liaisons dangereuses?” Emily laughed. “Is that a worry to you?”
“Darling! No. Respond as you like. But you are so sweet, and Patrick—well, he will think he’s more than a match for you.”
Charlotte lit a cigarette, Emily watching until she had it going.
“But not for Julian.”
“That,” said Charlotte, her words mixed with a long plume of tobacco smoke, “is the question.” She laid a hand on Emily’s. “So many enemies, darling; it’s all such a waste. Do let’s be friends, you and I.”
Emily had shopping to do, and she slipped away from the Secret Service man to go to the market. In the cab, riding home, she wrote down everything that Charlotte had said to her in her notebook.