The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  Far from the lodge, lower down the mountain where aspen and cottonwood and conifers grew more thickly, hundreds of acres had been fenced. The space within the fences had been stocked with game, just as the crystalline lake by the lodge had been stocked with bass and trout and even muskellunge from Minnesota. All were fed like livestock. The fish here were bigger, and easier to catch, than anywhere else. Hunters could bag elk and deer, moose and antelope; cougar and bear; there were pheasant and partridge in the woods, and geese and duck on the lake.

  Mallory bred the game for his friends. The walls of the cabin were hung with trophies and the floors were covered with fur rugs. O. N. Laster, that day, had caught the trout they were having for lunch, and in the earlier morning had shot a grizzly bear that measured out at more than eight feet; the guide had been saving it for him on Mallory’s orders. O. N. Laster, while he watched the Graham Show, cleaned his rifle, and the acrid odors of gunmetal and burned cordite and oil mixed with those of resinous woodsmoke and bourbon.

  Franklin Mallory himself never killed anything. Among the snarling faces of cougars and grizzlies and the antlered heads of gentler species hung tapestries after the paintings of Miró and Picasso and Picasso’s great rival, Juan Gris; these reflected Mallory’s real taste. The tapestries looked well—almost like the work of savages—against the peeled-log walls among the stuffed beasts. Mallory liked the juxtaposition of Gris and Picasso. Gris, he thought, had been the better and more honest artist, but he had died poor and in obscurity because he hadn’t Picasso’s great gift; Picasso sensed what the whim of the critics would be, or had their whim at the same time they did. What the public had thought ugly became beautiful as a result. This was the greatest gift a man could have.

  “Are you going after Lockwood hard on this?” Laster asked. He was a small man with none of the nervous habits of a small man. He moved with deliberation and spoke in measured tones. The night before he had been sharpening a hunting knife on a stone and he put it down for a moment on its back, so as not to spoil his work; Susan, looking at it with the firelight winking along its surface, thought that Laster was like the knife: honed, with the sharp edge upwards.

  “I don’t think it will be necessary,” Franklin Mallory said. “Bit by bit, the whole thing will get on the record. Lockwood killed that pathetic old man. There was no reason for it. It’s a simple message.”

  “Someone has to pound even a simple message home or the voters will forget. You have eight weeks till the election.”

  “I have a calendar. The media will be fed at feeding time.”

  Laster put his rifle back together with deft movements. The parts clicked into place with small satisfying noises; the firearm was a perfect instrument. Both Laster and Mallory liked objects that performed as they were designed to do.

  Laster carried the rifle up the stairs and racked it with the others at the end of the gallery that ran around the cabin. One whole gable was filled with guns, like organ pipes in the transept of a church.

  O. N. Laster was here only for a night and a day; he had flown in from Paris, over the pole, in his own unmarked plane, and the machine had stayed on the ground only long enough to refuel and take off again. He and Mallory and Susan were alone; all the staff had been sent away. Susan was doing the cooking.

  “Someone has to ask Lockwood for proof,” Laster said. “Where are these bombs? It’s a reasonable question.”

  Susan said, “That question will be asked.”

  “Just as long as it is, and soon. What will he say?”

  “ I’d say I’d had them destroyed for the good of mankind,” Mallory said.

  “No one would believe you.”

  “No, but they might believe Frosty.”

  “Why should they? They want to believe Lockwood is good for this country, good for the world?”

  “You know they do. Two thousand years of Christianity, a century of psychology, three hundred years of political parties have conditioned them to believe that there is such a thing as a savior.”

  “I believe that, too. His name is Franklin Mallory.”

  Mallory smiled sardonically. “You might think that if you watched the convention on the night I was nominated. But there are millions of others out there and they weren’t in the Cow Palace.”

  Susan called them to the table. O. N. Laster put food into himself as if he were putting another rifle back together, and then folded his napkin and laid it beside his plate; he’d had no need to use it because his movements were so sure that no food ever touched his lips. Mallory watched him with wry affection.

  “Franklin,” O. N. Laster said, “I know you don’t want to know the details, and I don’t want you to know them, but a hell of a lot of planning and expense has gone into this whole thing. It’s taken three years. The results so far aren’t quite what I wanted.”

  “You mean your name coming up on the first day?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the risk you ran. Can they prove anything? Can they actually link you to this man Clive Wilmot?”

  “Anything’s possible. The man’s a fool, playing all sides for nothing but money.”

  “I suppose he was the only possible man for the job?”

  “Yes. He had the access; we had him. Not everyone knows Hassan Abdallah and Graham and the Hubbards on a social basis.”

  Mallory made a sound in his throat. Laster stopped him from saying more. “This is clearly your problem,” Laster said, “but I worry sometimes. You have a weakness for Lockwood. I think you’d let him survive. Franklin, it’s a mistake to let fools survive. In politics as in zoology, saving defectives defeats natural selection. The body politic goes to hell. Look around you.”

  “Or above you.” Mallory lifted his head to indicate the silvery gibbous moon that had risen in the daylight.

  Laster grunted. His company had a thermonuclear laboratory, two-thirds finished, in a high orbit around the moon. Laster was sure—every rational man he knew was sure—that the secrets of fusion power generation could be discovered in that laboratory. Plants could then be built on earth, and unlimited energy would become available to the human race; Laster’s unlimited profits were incidental. The laboratory symbolized a step in man’s evolution. Lockwood, in his first week in office, had canceled Laster’s great project and brought the crews back to earth. The thermonuclear lab went on circling the moon, the cinder of Laster’s dream. This wasn’t the only thing Lockwood had done to Laster; he thought that Universal Energy and companies like it were, by the nature of their work, a danger to mankind. Lockwood feared changes in the environment, feared changes in man. Laster thought the species would die unless it changed its environment and changed with it—became something else. Man couldn’t go on as he was. It was Laster who had given that idea to Mallory; Laster, in his way, was a visionary.

  “Bastards!” said O. N. Laster, of Lockwood and those who thought like Lockwood.

  Franklin Mallory looked across the table at his friend’s unshaven face. It was a rule of the camp that no one shaved or bathed while they were there. Mallory came up here, after victories and after defeats, to breathe the thin air that even in summer never lost the scent of snow, and to feel and smell his own itching skin for a week or two.

  “Let’s go outside and look at your bear,” he said to O. N. Laster.

  The enormous hide was stretched on a frame of saplings. The left eye was missing from the grinning head, removed by the single shot with which Laster, from a range of fifteen yards, had ended the animal’s life. The fur was unimaginably thick; the fingers could not penetrate it to touch the skin beneath. The inner side was the color of tallow, with traceries of vermilion and blue—exquisite colors.

  “Does it please you to kill something like that?” Mallory asked.

  O. N. Laster’s neat head, like an otter’s, turned in a flash. “Of course; but after it falls, the pleasure stops; you forget.”

  Mallory laughed. “Aren’t you going to miss the pleasure of stalking F
rosty Lockwood?”

  “Someone else will do the stalking. I’m just feeding him, keeping him alive inside his fence, the way you did with this grizzly. There are all kinds of professional hunters, Franklin.”

  O. N. Laster’s tone was light, joking. But Susan realized that Laster, somehow, meant to kill Lockwood, literally kill him as he had killed the bear. Would Mallory let him do it? Even she could read nothing in her lover’s face. She put her hand on the rich fur of the grizzly.

  “Such a beautiful thing this was, alive,” she said.

  “Maybe, but useless. Endangered species are endangered because they’ve outlived their time on earth. It’s an offense against nature to keep something alive if it can’t cope with change.”

  “Including Lockwood and his kind?”

  O. N. Laster didn’t answer Susan directly. It wasn’t his way to trouble himself with women’s questions. The best of them, Susan herself, were lamed by sentiment. He put a hand on Mallory.

  “Franklin’s going to win this election,” he said. “Afterwards, I predict, nobody is going to miss the grizzlies.”

  Susan had taken her hand off O. N. Laster’s bear, but he stroked it now, smiling at her. It was an affectionate, almost a sexual, gesture.

  O. N. Laster’s plane came back for him at dusk. Susan and Mallory drove him to the airstrip, Susan at the wheel. They drove back to the cabin. Mallory caught her arm.

  “Would you like to sleep on the boat?”

  They were so seldom alone. Susan cast off and Mallory took them out. The northern lights were visible for a time.

  “From the Strait of Magellan to the aurora borealis!” said Mallory. “Still not such a bad idea a century afterwards.”

  Susan stood behind him as he steered the boat, with her long body pressed against his. He could feel the warmth of her flesh even through his thick outdoorsman’s clothes. They anchored. On deck, the silence was perfect except for the splash of an occasional feeding fish, smashing through the placid face of the lake like a stone through a pane.

  They went below and stripped, shivering in the unheated cabin. Soon they were warm inside a goose-down sleeping bag. Mallory’s eyes smiled; Susan could read their expressions even when there was almost no light. Susan’s muscles contracted. Mallory’s enlarged. They floated, in perfect silence, in peace, loving the future as men and women do in these sweetest moments of life.

  “Mmmm.” Susan was tired. They kissed lazily for long moments; Mallory realized she’d gone to sleep. Softly, he went on kissing her, but his mind was still in the future.

  4

  On the day before Patrick went on the air with the Awad story, Horace called on Sebastian Laux.

  “I’ve come to ask for a leave of absence, Sebastian.”

  “A leave of absence? You’re sick?”

  Horace told him what he could expect to hear on the Graham Show. “I don’t think my name is likely to come up, but after all I’m Julian’s brother, and neither of us would want anything to embarrass the bank.”

  Sebastian waved away the young male secretary, one of Philindros’s acquisitions from the Harvard Business School, who started to come into the room with a folder of papers. No one at D. & D. Laux & Co. had the right of free entry enjoyed by Julian into the Oval Office.

  “The best way not to embarrass the bank is to go back to Beirut and carry on as vice president,” Sebastian said. “This gnat—Graham, is it?—wouldn’t follow you there.”

  “He would, I’m afraid. Besides, there’s Julian.”

  Sebastian sighed. “Yes, I suppose there is. Take what time you need. Help your brother.”

  For the time being, there was little that Horace could do to help Julian.

  Horace stayed for a few days in Rose MacKenzie’s flat; he discovered that several Siamese cats lived in caves in the debris. Dressed in old cords and a tennis shirt, he wandered alone through the unswept streets of the city. He was a student of architecture, and every block or two the front of a lovely building, surviving from New York’s great period of a century past, leaped to his eye from the ugly ranks of glass boxes and concrete cubes.

  Horace was often accosted by prostitutes of both sexes. A pair of young blacks, as fleet and implacable as Afghan bandits, attempted to rob him; Horace kicked one of them in the groin and broke the other’s forearm and left them both vomiting in pain on the pavement. A policeman watched the scene impassively from a parked cruiser; he was eating a hot dog and licking mustard from his fingers. Under Lockwood’s policy of giving large federal grants to the leaders of racial minorities, this city, like most other large metropolitan areas in America, had fallen as completely under the control of blacks as in the past they had been in the grip of the white power elite. The black police force neither harassed nor protected the whites who still lived in guarded towers along the East River and on certain blocks of Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue that were the only ones on which lights still burned after dark. When men like Sebastian Laux ventured out of their sanctuaries, they went like the rich of the Renaissance into the perilous streets of Florence, surrounded by liveried toughs in their private pay.

  “I still love this city,” Horace said to Sebastian Laux that night in the Millennium Club.

  “You don’t remember what it was. ‘Come back, O glittering and white!’—Scott Fitzgerald. Even I’m younger than that era, but the city was still wonderful in my memory.”

  “Won’t it be again, when these people know enough to see its beauty? I’ve seen metropolis after metropolis rise in the black countries.”

  “Perhaps. But neither I nor any of mine will live to see it. What’s this man Lockwood thinking of? Is he mad, giving money to people so that they can organize crime and corruption?”

  “He’s an idealist.”

  Twice a week, Horace met Sebastian at the club for a drink and a chat about bank business; Sebastian wanted to remind Horace that he must someday come back to D. & D. Laux & Co. Now he twisted the bell on the waxed table between them to call for another drink.

  “The two greatest idealists of my time were Heinrich Himmler and that fellow Beria in Russia—they even looked alike, round eyeglasses on flabby faces. Tremblers,” Sebastian said. “Preserve me from true believers. Your father would say the same if he were here.”

  “I’m sure he would. Isn’t Mallory a true believer?”

  “Don’t know him.”

  “Julian told me something; Lockwood did all the things you hate so—let the habitual criminals out of jail, canceled the space program, stopped the free heroin, turned out the lights—under the laws passed by Mallory’s men when he was in, giving Mallory special powers. Then he started fighting to have the Mallory laws repealed.”

  “Your father thought that was funny. ‘There’s a lot of fox in Lockwood,’ he said. I guess there is, but the hounds are on him now.”

  That didn’t trouble Sebastian. Politicians came and went. But he didn’t like the idea of somebody like Mallory blooding his pack on a Hubbard. “Look after young Julian,” he said each time he and Horace parted.

  While he’d worked for the bank, Horace had lived the life of a tycoon; D. & D. Laux & Co. kept apartments in all the cities where it had branches for the use of its vice presidents. Horace had never carried luggage when he traveled; clothes and toilet articles awaited him wherever he might go. Sebastian, forgetting that these apartments really belonged to Philindros, offered the one in New York to Horace, but Horace declined. Sebastian saw his mistake, but it took a moment; he wasn’t used to not being able to give away whatever was in his name.

  Sebastian told Horace one morning about the death of an old man who had been living in the Millennium Club. Horace moved into these rooms. He still had his flat in Beirut; his things were in the care of the Chinese manservant and well guarded.

  The old man who had had the rooms in the club before Horace left no heirs. No one took away his possessions: two shelves of first editions; a wall of sketches done by a gifted amateur (the old man
’s wife); a small case of rare butterflies; trout rods with the line rotted on the reels. Horace, who had nothing with him but the clothes he kept in New York, lived among these objects and ate in the club except on the two nights a week when he and Rose cooked in her apartment and slept together afterwards.

  Rose was always cooking. When Horace thought of her he smelled spices; her hair was full of their after scent. The first time he’d gone to Sri Lanka, when it was still Ceylon, he’d stood in a spice grove, moving from tree to tree, breathing the aroma of clove and cinnamon, nutmeg and cumin.

  In New York, for the first time in twenty years, Horace had time to let his mind wander. He thought a great deal about his father; Sebastian Laux, of course, mentioned Elliott Hubbard often. One afternoon, after he had seen Sebastian to the door of the club—the old man dashed down the steps as if he had twice as much life in him as he ought to have—Horace remembered something from Julian’s childhood. On a summer’s day the three of them—their father, Julian, and Horace—had been walking along a graveled path in a park. Julian at the time might have been three or four; he was skipping ahead of his father and his brother, skylarking. Beyond Julian in the path were two wolfish slum boys very much like the ones who only recently had attacked Horace in New York. For no reason except the cruel fun of it, one of the boys reached down, snatched up a large pebble, whirled and threw it at Julian. The stone hit Julian in the stomach. He shrieked in pain and shock. Nobody had ever hurt him before. Elliott Hubbard had been talking to Horace about the lost beauties of Joe DiMaggio’s play in center field. He saw the thrown stone, heard Julian’s scream, and in an instant was transformed into a mindless animal. Elliott flung his body at Julian’s attackers, howling a curse, as if he were springing from the mouth of a cave. The boys stood their ground for a moment, then turned and ran. Elliott pursued them for a few steps, then stopped, and, with his back to his sons, seemed to reach out and draw civilization back into his skin. When he turned around he had conquered his rage, but he was a drained man. Horace knew that his father would have killed the boy who threw the stone if he could have laid hands on him; he saw that his father knew it too. Horace had already picked up Julian and was kissing him to comfort him. Elliott Hubbard didn’t touch his younger child, but he gripped Horace at the nape of the neck. Horace guessed that this manly gesture was meant to tell him that there had been a time, before he was old enough to protect himself, when his father would have killed for him as well.