The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  “Where did this come from, Clive?” Patrick demanded.

  “From a lover of truth, like yourself.” Clive Wilmot stood up, smiled once more at Emily, and pulled the table away. “Happy flight,” he said. “Say a prayer for poor old Ibn Awad. Who knows, he may hear you up in heaven, though I don’t suppose he’s much of a one for listening to Americans, now that he knows everything. Do you believe that, Emily—the dead know everything?”

  Patrick took Emily’s arm and led her away. The headwaiter was whispering in Wilmot’s ear. The Englishman searched his pockets for money. He took no further interest in Graham or in Emily. Emily looked at him closely, pausing to do so while Patrick tugged at her arm.

  At the door, the owner spoke her name.

  “Mrs. Hubbard, the telephone.”

  She took the instrument from his hand, listened, thanked the caller.

  “Patrick,” she said, “is that man really with British intelligence?”

  “Yes. He’s the head of it in Washington. Julian will tell you.”

  “Then why was he saying that? Is it true?”

  Patrick Graham shrugged. “Julian would know,” he said. “Ask him.”

  12

  During the flight to Washington, Emily sat alone, many rows away from Patrick’s seat in the smoking section. She refused the drinks the steward offered her and wrapped herself in a blanket, her legs curled beneath her. The flight would take hours: no SSTs flew over the United States under Lockwood. She couldn’t sleep. She opened her purse to find a tranquilizer, then remembered that she mustn’t take them anymore, because of the baby. The phone call in the restaurant had been from the doctor. Her pregnancy test had been positive.

  Emily had always expected that she would sense a quickening within her when at last she heard that news, but as the wind of the jet’s passage whined at the cold black window in which she saw her whitened face, she felt nothing at all.

  From the airport Emily went straight to the White House. Julian’s day was just beginning in the hushed West Wing, but Horace was already in Julian’s office. He gave her the single chair and stood leaning against the wall. Emily’s hair was unbrushed and separated into lank strands. Her eyes were red from lack of sleep and there was a sickly pale ring around her lips. When Julian’s secretary brought coffee, the cup rattled on the saucer in Emily’s hands. The smell of it made her ill and she ran from the room with her hand over her mouth.

  “You do have morning sickness,” Julian said. He had gone out into the corridor to wait for her outside the lavatory.

  “Yes, I do. The test was positive this time.”

  Julian put his arms around her. Her body was rigid, withdrawn. When he kissed her, tasting the sourness that lingered in her mouth, her lips didn’t move against his. Her eyes behind her glasses were watchful; he hadn’t seen that look in them since the first week they’d known each other, when she was studying him for her newspaper piece.

  “Come back to the office,” he said. “I’ll have Horace go away.”

  “He can stay. I haven’t come to discuss secrets of the marriage bed.”

  In the office, Emily gave Julian no chance to speak to Horace about her pregnancy. She told them both what she had heard in San Francisco from Clive Wilmot.

  “Does this man know what he’s talking about?” she asked. Julian looked gravely across the desk at Emily. She was sitting upright, a narrow figure in the wide chair; the fine hair at her temples was damp with perspiration after the effort of her retching.

  “Did Patrick believe it? Did you?”

  “Patrick wouldn’t confirm or deny. I certainly don’t want to believe it. Murderers? Lockwood? My husband? Julian, tell me.”

  “Emily, really. Why are you so upset about something that was said by some mad character you don’t even know?”

  “Wilmot plays the madman. But his eyes aren’t crazy at all. He was doing what he did for a purpose. It shook Patrick.”

  “And you.”

  “Jesus Christ, yes! Five minutes afterwards I hardly understood what the doctor was telling me when he said I was pregnant.”

  Horace asked questions. Emily told him all that had been said: Patrick Graham’s trip to the Near East, his meeting there with a man named Hassan.

  “Hassan?” said Horace, alert. “Where, exactly? What country?”

  “They didn’t say. Horace, why are you the one who’s grilling me? Do you work here now?”

  “Horace knows that part of the world,” Julian said. “He’s trying to help.”

  Emily looked from one brother to the other. She had never before seen Horace without the faint smile, like Julian’s, that always danced in his eyes. Now Horace looked like a very hard man, someone who was too cold to let anger or any other feeling show.

  “Julian,” she said, “you don’t want to discuss this with me, do you?”

  “Not now. I knew that Patrick was chasing this rumor.”

  “Have you spoken to him?”

  “In passing. He’s not our enemy, Emily. I’m not terribly worried.”

  “Then you don’t understand Patrick. He’s a reporter before he’s anything else.”

  Again Julian and Horace were silent. Emily saw that she was an alien here; her husband and her brother-in-law were not the same people when they were in this house. Her body relaxed. The energy that Clive Wilmot had put into her with his accusations drained away. She realized how tired she was—her back ached, the muscles in her thighs were sore, her feet in their flimsy shoes bothered her. She wanted a hot bath and a long sleep. She’d done too much in San Francisco. Anxiety for the baby stabbed at her, and then guilt that she hadn’t thought enough about this small life for which she’d waited such a long time. Julian saw the change in Emily. He held out both his hands as if to grasp Emily’s, though they were too far away from each other to be able to do this.

  Horace broke in. “The envelope Wilmot gave to Patrick,” he said. “Can you describe it?”

  Emily sighed. “It was a long brown envelope with a clasp at the flap, you know the kind.”

  “What was in it?”

  “I didn’t look. Wilmot said it was a medical report. He said that this Hassan Patrick had interviewed had mentioned it.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Wilmot mentioned a disease, asked me if I knew what it was —dys-something.”

  Horace was looking at her with his pale bright eyes, distant as the sky in a waterless country. She wanted to tell him whatever he wanted to know.

  “Wilmot said something about a lesion on the brain. He said he’d underlined it in red.”

  The smile came back into Horace’s eyes. Emily had always thought that the sight of her gave Horace pleasure. Now she wasn’t so sure—she’d seen how easily he could put out the light in his face. He put on good humor like a disguise. Julian, too. They were both, in their silence, lying to her. She knew it.

  “I’m so glad about the morning sickness,” Julian said. “Celebration tonight at the Cantina?”

  Emily nodded. Julian always wanted to go to this restaurant when he was happy. It was the best in Washington.

  “I’ll call Joseph and make the reservation,” Emily said. She took Julian’s face between her hands when he came around his desk, and kissed his lips.

  The Secret Service took her home. The children weren’t there. She turned on a tape machine to break the silence. Lying in the tub, she had the frightening idea—it came and went in an instant that the baby could read her thoughts. She stopped thinking about Julian and what he might have done. With her head cushioned on a folded towel, she dozed, her slight body half afloat in the soapy water.

  13

  Jack Philindros’s plain black shoes were together on the carpet and his hands were folded in his lap. He looked, Julian thought, like a person waiting for the choir to finish a hymn. Horace had been sent away before his chief arrived. Julian told him what Emily had reported about the encounter between Patrick Graham and Clive Wilmot in San Franc
isco.

  Philindros said, “Wilmot has always been too reckless. But even knowing he’s the source, FIS can’t surveille him while he’s still in the United States. It would be illegal. Do you want me to notify the Bureau? Of course, I’d have to tell them why they’re tailing Wilmot, but if that’s what the President desires…”

  Giving the FBI so much as a scent of the case was the last thing Julian desired. Mallory had seeded the Bureau with his men when he was in office; it was the natural place for them.

  “What we desire, Jack, is to find out two things—how Wilmot knows what happened to Awad, and why he told Graham about it. He must be acting as somebody’s agent. Is he being paid? Is he a believer of some kind?”

  “Clive is not a believer,” Philindros said. He made no other reply to Julian’s remarks. Julian had been giving a command. He didn’t know if Philindros understood that. He chafed under Philindros’s stolid caution, his polite refusal to see another man’s intentions until they had been spoken aloud. Julian was used to dealing with people who thought as he thought, who acted as they knew he would act.

  “I’d like your advice as to how we can discover these facts, Jack,” he said, spacing the words.

  Julian wanted Philindros to hear the annoyance in his voice. The other man registered nothing; in his measured, soft tones he answered Julian at once.

  “Assuming that you reject domestic surveillance by the Bureau, and want FIS to deal with the investigation,” Philindros said, “then the best thing would be to somehow send Wilmot out of the United States. Panic him in some way. Follow him abroad, track him to his source.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Yes, but difficult. He’s vulnerable, but he’s British. We’ve always felt we should be… correct with the British. Would you countenance an operation against them—a deception?”

  Julian used a gesture he found useful with Philindros—he beckoned with a forefinger, as if Philindros’s words were figures small in the distance that must be called closer. Nevertheless, Philindros waited until Julian nodded.

  “Then if you’ll give me a few days, and give me back Horace for that period, I’ll work out some possibilities.”

  Julian named a time the next day when Philindros was to come back.

  Philindros said, “Can I take Horace with me now?”

  “He’s downstairs. You can meet him in the garage.”

  Philindros was already standing; he’d risen from the chair without touching the arms; most people struggled and heaved in its depths to get to their feet. Philindros had extraordinary muscle tone; he ran twenty miles a day and had climbed some unnamed peak in the Himalayas on his last vacation.

  Beneath a James Joseph Cerruti oil of two work-thickened old Italians playing cards in an American tenement yard, a table at the Cantina d’Italia was set for Emily and Julian. Champagne cooled in a silver bucket. Julian touched Emily’s hand under the table. On coming home two hours before, he had found her asleep and wakened her to make love. She never failed to leave Julian filled with tenderness; from the start Emily had been something new to him. Caroline in the acts of sex had seemed to snarl over her shoulder at the male like a lioness, and this strangeness was exciting; other women had wept in Julian’s arms or lain under him like stones. Emily danced and glowed, breathing gently during her excitement, sighing afterwards like a bride in wartime holding a photograph to her breast. But today she had held him away from her, and risen quickly from the rumpled bed.

  Emily ate very little. She said she feared sickness in the morning. She drank sparingly of the wine Julian had ordered to celebrate the baby’s conception. Julian found her looking at him several times during dinner. That afternoon, with her supple muscles still gripping his emptied flesh, he had opened his eyes and found Emily’s eyes, wide and wiser than he thought they could be, staring at him. It was only a matter of time before Emily began to ask more insistent questions. Curiosity—a compulsion to know people and events for what they really were—was Emily’s curse. She studied, burrowed, questioned, observed; she practiced her writing as a girl with an ear for music might spend eight hours a day at the piano.

  “Julian, is Horace something besides a banker? Is that why he’s spending all this time with you?”

  Julian turned his gaze on her. The Hubbard twinkle, thought Emily, remembering how suddenly it had vanished that morning from both brothers’ eyes. Now it went out again.

  “You won’t answer because you won’t lie to me, is that it?”

  “Because this is not the place. Emily, Horace truly is a very good banker. And he’s my brother.”

  “But that’s not where the truth about him ends.”

  “Where does the truth about you end? Are you my wife to the exclusion of everything else?”

  “Before everything else.”

  Julian nodded. “Believe me, Horace is my brother before everything else.”

  For a long moment Emily watched her finger as it traced a pattern on the starched tablecloth.

  She said, “Julian, why don’t you tell me Clive Wilmot was lying?”

  Emily looked up quickly; sometimes, she knew, she could catch the reaction to the shock of a question before it could be hidden. But in her husband’s face she saw nothing at all.

  At home, Emily, after her long afternoon nap, couldn’t sleep. She went downstairs in her dressing gown; before she left she leaned over the bed, her big round glasses golden in the lamplight, and gave Julian a chaste kiss on the forehead. Since they left the restaurant she hadn’t spoken to him at all. Julian turned out the light and drifted in and out of sleep. Each time he woke he heard the clatter of Emily’s typewriter drifting up the stairwell from her workroom in the basement.

  Julian woke at four and Emily still wasn’t beside him. He found her downstairs, stretched out on a sofa, covered by his camping coat. The acrid smell of woodsmoke rose from the waterproof cloth. He went back to bed.

  Three hours later, when he came into the kitchen fully dressed, Julian found Emily at the table with a cup of coffee held between her hands as though she were warming them on a winter’s day. Outside, the sun of late July beat down on the garden. The skin of Emily’s face bore creases from a wrinkle in the sofa pillow, and her eyes were still dull after her long night of work and sleep. When Julian leaned to kiss her she offered her cheek but didn’t respond in any other way.

  “Look,” he said. “I know how troubled you are.”

  Julian touched Emily’s tousled hair. He heard the engine of his car starting, precisely on time, at the back of the house.

  Emily wouldn’t look at him. Her glasses were on top of her head; she slid them down over her eyes, pulled the untidy stack of manuscript pages that lay on the table towards her, and began editing her story about Patrick Graham.

  Julian left her so. As he went out he heard Jenny call down the stairs, and Emily answered. When speaking to the child, her voice was as free and musical as ever—like his mother’s, answering a question before she went away again into one of her paintings.

  14

  Charlotte Graham pointed with a bony shoulder into the chattering crowd at the cocktail party. The gesture was not quite a shrug.

  “That dark lady by the window,” she said. “How small she seems, Patrick, how like a wren, a waif! Ah, she sees she’s been recognized. She takes a tremulous step backwards in her simple black dress, like a chanteuse pawed by applause.”

  Patrick handed Charlotte his drink, wrapped in a sopping napkin, and crossed the room to Caroline. She stood alone by a sheet of curved glass that ran the whole length of the room, two stories high. Beyond her, distorted by the glass, were the buildings of the United Nations with their floodlit crescent of tiny flags out front. Farther away, twisted like melted chocolate, were the East River bridges—dark shapes in the Lockwood administration, which allowed no wasteful bulbs to burn on their old girders.

  “Why are you alone?” Patrick asked.

  Caroline looked up at him out of t
he same ivory face that he remembered. The eyes were as full of movement, the pianist’s hands as still.

  “Leo has gone to find me a glass of wine.”

  Everyone was in evening clothes. The woman who was giving this party for President Lockwood had a sense of theater. She had been an actress on the musical stage before marrying a popular composer. Patrick looked over the room filled with men in dinner jackets and women in jewels and long gowns. When he turned again, Caroline was looking out the window.

  “Can you see as far as the East Village from that window?” he asked.

  “Ah, Patrick—still the romantic. This has always been Camelot.” She indicated the gossiping fashionable crowd.

  Caroline had a way of standing, one foot slightly ahead of the other, as if ready to step into anything. Whatever jokes Patrick’s wife might make about her, Caroline never shrank.

  She wore a dress that was the same shade of black as her hair and even had the same lights in the fabric. A necklace of star sapphires mimicked her eyes. Leo must have given it to her; Patrick knew Caroline had left all her old jewels behind, because he had seen some of them on Emily Hubbard.

  Everyone in the room knew who Caroline was—knew, rather, who she had been. Julian hadn’t come yet, but he would. He and Lockwood, inseparable, were at the Waldorf, working on the last version of Lockwood’s acceptance speech. Suzie Stanwood, the hostess, had announced that. The President would be there not later than ten.

  “Frosty had better not be much later than that,” Suzie said, standing on the piano bench with her hand on the shoulder of her husband, “because Harvey’s written something for him as a surprise, and our friend and host the composer falls asleep promptly at ten-thirty.”

  Harvey, like many successful songwriters, wrote one tune supremely well. From show to show he changed the tempo of his music and sometimes transposed whole bars, but fast or slow, backwards or forwards, his tune was always the same tune. Only a trained musical ear could detect this, and he sent people whistling from theaters. He’d had the luck, too, to have a clever lyricist whose name nobody could ever remember. And he had Suzie. Singing softly of love, she could bring people forwards in their seats to catch the subtleties of her tremolo—or, with her perfect diction, she could shoot words into an audience like darts from a blowgun.