The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  Emily thought no more about Charlotte. People spoke to Emily all the time as if they were mad. Only Julian had never done that; she could lay her hand on him and feel the rhythms of sanity in the flow of his blood and the steady working of his lungs.

  She hadn’t menstruated in thirty-five days. At night she put her fingers against Julian’s heartbeat; she knew that the baby’s heart, when it came to life, would feel the same as his through her own skin.

  6

  Horace was examining the portrait of his grandmother—the painting was bathed in the glow of a spotlight affixed to the ceiling—when Emily came into the house on O Street. She carried a string bag filled with fresh vegetables and clutched a stack of books and file folders against her breast. A bulging purse was slung over one shoulder, a camera bag over the other. The large round glasses that she wore when she worked had slid down to the tip of her small nose, and on her neck was the faint shine of perspiration.

  “You look like the world’s most beautiful infantryman, with all that equipment hanging on you,” Horace said.

  “I just want to drop it, and drop myself into a bath,” said Emily. She held up her cheek to be kissed. Horace gave her a hearty smack, and with a forefinger pushed her glasses back to the bridge of her nose. She grinned at him.

  Horace had liked Emily from the start. There was a cheerful note within her that he admired; she was more like the oldest of his nieces than a sister-in-law. He would never have done to Caroline anything so intimate as to push her glasses back into place. Julian’s first wife had liked to establish a current of sexuality between herself and all men, and she hadn’t spared Horace. He’d never had any doubts that Caroline would have taken any man it pleased her to have.

  Emily was a different matter. Horace looked at her, and looked again at the portrait of Jennifer Hubbard. “I never realized it, but you and Grandmother favor one another. I wonder if Julian sees that.”

  “Rot,” said Emily, pointing her chin at the woman in the portrait. “That is the face of a woman who never in her life carried her own groceries.”

  She dropped her purse and her bundle of papers on the sofa and went into the kitchen. Horace, catching a jumble of papers as they slid off the smooth cloth of the cushion, saw the name “Patrick Graham” written on a file folder with the broad black tip of a felt marking pen. A handful of notes and press clippings fell out of the folder. Horace put them inside without reading them.

  Julian had already gone upstairs to shower and change, and Emily followed him, leaving Horace with the children. Elliott told his uncle that he wouldn’t go away to boarding school the next year, though he would be the right age for it. It was impossible to protect him at Exeter as he was guarded at home by the Secret Service.

  “That’s why we’re here so much and with Mummy so little,” he said. “It’s not legal for the Secret Service to watch us when we’re in our mother’s custody. I don’t know why.”

  “I like it this way,” said Jenny. “Leo always takes us on his boat to secret destinations. We observe radio silence. There’s no one near you, nobody can find you—I love the sea. Leo gets Secret Service men on their vacations to come along and pays their expenses. It’s very smart of him, I think.”

  “You admire Leo?”

  “Like anything. He’s never serious—is he, Elliott?”

  “A laugh a minute,” replied Elliott, with a wary glance at Horace. He wasn’t sure how his Uncle Horace, a fierce defender of Julian, felt about Leo and Caroline.

  Horace pressed the children for details; he was curious about Leo Dwyer. With the profits from his novels and the films that were made from them Leo had bought a yacht from the estate of a Greek billionaire. He and Caroline lived aboard, always in the sun; they put into port sometimes to see friends; once they had dined with Horace in Beirut, and he had found Caroline, her ivory skin burned nearly as black as that of one of the fellahin she had once longed to be, free of her political obsessions at last. Leo had no interest in politics except as material for his books, no interest in men and women for their looks or money, but only for what they were behind their masks. Horace had liked him at once and saw why Caroline did; he was exactly what he was. “Leo has an acute case of total good will,” Caroline had told Horace. Evidently it was contagious—she had even kissed her former brother-in-law.

  “At first we thought Leo was weird,” Jenny said. “He took us swimming on the boat, it has a big pool aft. He was so small, and all covered with hair.” The children, used to the smooth bodies of the men in their own family, had been repelled by Leo’s grizzled pelt; tufts of graying hair sprouted from his shoulders and his back as well as his chest. Leo saw the trouble. “Some guys, like your Pa, are higher on the evolutionary tree. Look at you, Elliott—you’re already taller than I am; you’ll be a skyscraper. Think of the advantages of being two feet taller than your stepfather.”

  Leo played Marco Polo with them in the pool. He taught Elliott to cheat at cards; he had little evening dresses made for Jenny in Paris, and, dancing with her to the music of a tape recorder, taught her forgotten numbers like the rumba, the tango, the cha-cha-cha; he spoke of his experiences, while he had been waiting for fame, as a dance instructor at a studio in his native New York. “It gave ugly girls a sense of confidence to start out with me,” he explained; “the ganefs handed them on to handsome guys in tight pants when it came time to sign up for the full course of lessons—twenty dollars a week for the rest of your natural life for half an hour alone in a room with Romeo.”

  “Mummy really likes Leo,” Jenny said to Horace. “But I think she still loves Pa.”

  “You mustn’t hope for that. There’s Emily now.”

  “Emily loves him madly, madly,” said Elliott. Jenny flushed; that was what he’d wanted. Both children were used to the healthy appetite Julian’s wives had for him. For Jenny, of course, her mother’s sexuality was one thing; Emily’s was another. She never got into her father’s lap anymore, or kissed him to wake him up—Emily did these things; Jenny didn’t like their having a new meaning.

  At dinner, all traces of their frantic day had vanished from the faces of Julian and Emily. They wore clean clothes—Julian a seersucker jacket, Emily a flowered frock that left her smooth shoulders bare. She had a glow that no shower could account for, and Horace wondered if Emily and Julian had taken time to make love while he chatted with Elliott and Jenny. He hoped so. In any case, Julian’s mood had changed. He was once again the bantering person he’d always been within the family, listening with a smile deep in his eyes to Jenny’s account of a painting lesson, questioning Elliott about a game of baseball he had played that afternoon. They were leaving in a week or two to join their mother at sea, depending on when Leo finished a screen treatment of one of his novels. They didn’t know where Leo was taking them this time; he always guarded the surprise. The children excused themselves and left. “Antarctica,” said Emily in a whisper. “Can you imagine? Icebergs, penguins, Spitsbergen, noble Scott and nasty Amundsen. I wish I’d had a stepfather like Leo, but my mother stuck like glue to Daddy. I’m just like her. From bridal bed to double deathbed, that’s my life’s journey.”

  They had lobster salad. Horace took the last bite from his plate. “Pa’s sort of meal,” he said.

  “Don’t you like cold things, Horace?”

  “Of course, and this was wonderful. Lobster has vanished from the Mediterranean, you know—killed by pollution and gone forever, they say.”

  “What brings you to Washington?” Emily asked.

  Horace smiled. “Dark doings for D. & D. Laux & Co. I don’t think I’ll be here long.”

  “Perhaps I’ll keep him in town for a while,” Julian said. “I’ll need the company.” Julian took a dripping bottle from the ice bucket beside him and, stretching his long arm, divided what was left of the wine among their three glasses. “Emily’s off to San Francisco, she tells me.”

  “I have to cover the convention—or, rather, cover a man who’s cov
ering the convention,” Emily explained. “One of my profiles. I’d like to do you, Horace, but they’d hang me for conflict of interest.”

  “I thought you only did silent, powerful types like Julian.”

  “Like brother, like brother.”

  Emily’s remark brought Ibn Awad into the room. Two murderers relaxing at twilight. Horace and Julian exchanged a look, and in his brother’s eyes Horace thought he saw guilt move, then vanish, like a small animal at the mouth of its burrow. Emily noticed nothing.

  “That’s the other party’s convention. I’ll be regarded as a spy in Franklin Mallory’s camp. They know whose wife I am.”

  “They’re a floating police state; they know everything,” Julian said. “There’ll be microphones in your mattress, Emily.”

  “Oh, I hope they send you faked tapes! I want to see you mad with jealousy, thinking of nothing but me, tempted by all those rich old men and muscular bullies in Mallory’s party.”

  “Not to mention Patrick. Emily’s been assigned to do a story on Patrick Graham. Why does the Post think he’s interesting?”

  “Because he is interesting,” Emily said. “He’s the man who knows everything. This town is filled with eager attendants, pumping secrets into Patrick’s ear.… That’s not bad; I’ll use it in the story.”

  Emily giggled. She loved these assignments, a week of living pressed up against a stranger’s life. She heard astonishing confessions off the record; her subjects gave her information in confidence about themselves that they feared to see in print. By binding her to secrecy, giving her the trust that only a friend could have, they protected themselves from exposure. It wasn’t necessary. Emily was a kindly writer—and in the end she always surprised some more vivid secret from her subjects than any they volunteered about themselves. There was no bottom to her curiosity. Like all good reporters, she could be astonished by the commonplace. In Emily’s eyes nothing was so extraordinary as the normal.

  “I should think the interesting thing would be Graham’s encounters with Franklin Mallory,” Horace said. “After all—with all due respect to Lockwood’s appeal and your genius, Julian—it was Graham who swung the election against Mallory four years ago. Have they seen each other since?”

  Julian did not volunteer what he knew. Emily was able to find out whatever she needed to know without tapping him as a source. Even before they had married, there had been no pillow talk between them.

  “Charlotte says yes,” Emily replied. “Evidently Mallory had them up to dinner in New York, and couldn’t have been nicer. She says she expected a noseful of cyanide spray when they stepped off the elevator. Instead, Mallory told her Patrick was the best journalist in the world.”

  “I hope Mallory was being true to his character when he said that,” Julian said.

  “How’s that?” asked Horace; it was almost an interruption.

  “Insincere.”

  Horace paused before he spoke again; at the best of times he didn’t like to discuss American politics. As things were now, he had better reasons than ever for keeping up the strict political neutrality Philindros drilled into all his people. Horace was neutral; he cared little who was President; it was the bureaucracy that was the living organism.

  “Insincere?” he said. “I’d have thought Mallory was one of the most sincere men who ever won the presidency. He said what he was going to do, and did it—or as much of it as could be done in this country. He means what he says and does what he means.”

  “I suppose you’d say Hitler was sincere,” Julian said.

  “Of course. I wouldn’t say Mallory was like Hitler.”

  “Wouldn’t you? Both created a mythical monster—Hitler the Jews, Mallory the humanitarians—’humanitarians’ means Lockwood and you, Emily and me, but it also means the blacks and the poor. Hitler gassed defectives; Mallory passed a law to have anyone whose IQ falls below a certain norm sterilized on the birth of their first child. Hitler made a frontal attack on religion; Mallory tells us we must be ‘rational’…”

  “Are you so religious?”

  “No. But I don’t mind if others are. People can be as irrational as they like—that’s called free speech and thought.”

  “He hasn’t used Hitler’s thuggery.”

  “No. He didn’t begin in the streets. He began among the elite. Who are Mallory’s people? First of all, the colossal rich, men like O. N. Laster of Universal Energy, but he keeps them well hidden. They only come out in the night when he tries to steal Canada. Second, the educated disgruntled. We have two million men and women under thirty-five in this country who have advanced academic degrees and can’t get jobs. Mallory with his space program and the rest of his gadgetry gave them jobs—he harnessed their education and intellectual ingenuity in the way Hitler harnessed the physical brutality of the Brown Shirts. He made someone of each of them. No, there’s no thuggery—people aren’t beaten with truncheons, they’re just quietly castrated as soon as they produce one drone to replace them, or quietly put away forever in a federal prison if they commit a crime out of desperation, or quietly deprived of a living if they believe in the perfectibility of man. That’s not thuggery, Horace, is it? It’s all quite rational.”

  “It seems to have an effect on your rationality.”

  Julian swallowed the rest of his wine. “Fear tends to do that,” he said.

  Quiet descended on them. Nobody had expected this outburst, least of all Emily. She put her hand over Julian’s.

  “Mallory’s not going to win,” she said. “He’s a lovely cynic—but too lovely.”

  Julian ran his thumb over the back of Emily’s small golden hand. “That sounds like one of Charlotte’s brittle witticisms.”

  “It is. I confess.”

  “Have you been talking to her a lot?”

  “Just at lunch today. It was her idea that I should do the piece on Patrick. Isn’t that interesting?”

  Julian and Horace exchanged yet another look.

  “Yes,” said Julian.

  7

  “The obsession with the invisible is the curse of mankind,” said Franklin Mallory.

  Patrick Graham was taking no notes. He wanted Mallory relaxed. This was a conversation, not an interview. Patrick would have Mallory on his show two days hence. If he could discover now what Mallory really intended, he might be able to maneuver him into revealing himself before the cameras later on.

  Patrick and Emily were in Mallory’s suite in the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Although this was Patrick’s interview, Mallory’s remarks were addressed mainly to Emily. As she had foreseen, he knew exactly who she was, and of course she had her looks. It was plain to Emily that Mallory was having fun with Patrick, baiting him with these sardonic pronouncements that were a parody of Patrick’s own speaking style. The woman who was Mallory’s chief assistant, and who was known to be his lover as well, watched the byplay with an amused smile on her lips.

  “Frosty Lockwood is obsessed with the invisible,” Mallory continued, “and so is that whole crowd of dreamers he represents. All that talk about the spirit of man, the destiny of America, brotherhood. They’re missionaries, armed missionaries. They want to save man from himself, reveal to him the mystical good that lurks within.”

  Patrick Graham found it difficult to smile at this man. He thought Mallory was a maniac, but he sensed his appeal. There was political electricity in him. Patrick was more than half afraid that Mallory might be the first of the new Americans, a man who had burst into a new era that only he understood, because he was in the act of creating it. The country had been through a lot. Its heroes had been murdered, its resources bled, its money and idealism debased. Mallory looked like its rescuer.

  We’re so much like the Germans at the time of Weimar, thought Patrick. He had had the thought before. He knew it was trite. But he dealt in worn simplicities—only worn simplicities could be understood on television.

  “And what are you obsessed with, Mr. Mallory?” Patrick asked. He would no
t call Mallory “Mr. President.”

  “Nothing. I’m interested in life on this planet. Life as it is, as it always has been, as it always will be so long as the human species is in charge—defined by our nature, limited by our limitations. I am interested in reality, Patrick, and I’m going to run for President again, and I think I’m going to be elected President again, on the platform of reality.”

  “Such as stealing Canada?”

  “A case in point.” Mallory’s brilliant eyes turned on Emily again; he made his argument to her, knowing that Patrick of all people was unconvincible. “The United States and Canada are a natural unit—our technology and capital and population, their space and natural resources,” Mallory said. “Canada has no authenticity as a political entity. It can’t support itself or even defend itself. The British designed it as a colony to be exploited. When the British Empire expired, naturally an enormous power like the United States absorbed Canada economically and culturally, and dominated its consciousness. Why not join the Canadians to us politically as well? It would have been good for Canada and good for the United States. We have that headache over energy and minerals, you know, and there are an awful lot of those things under the tundra.”

  “And you think we ought to swallow Canada like an aspirin to cure our headache?”

  Mallory laughed. He had a boisterous laugh, one of his most human qualities. “I suspect we’ll hear that phrase on TV before November,” he said. “I envy you your silver tongue, Patrick. Also your gift for leaving out the essential fact. We weren’t going to march in and take the Canadians’ country away from them. I thought the whole episode would go down in history as a noble success—the first time ever that one country had been joined to another, at least on such a scale, through the consent of the peoples involved. It’s not without grandeur, this idea—even you’d have to grant that, Patrick.”

  “Napoleonic, sir. Yet the American people saw it as a deception. That’s why you were defeated.”