The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  There was a silence.

  “It’s logical,” Philindros said; “but how could Wilmot have known?”

  “The Brits can’t afford our sophisticated devices,” Rose said. “Clive probably followed people; and he used to treat Talil’s brother, Kamal, to little boys and things before Kamal became emir. That was the excuse for expelling him from Baghdad—the police burst in on Kamal and Clive while they were buggering some very small Iraqis. Who knows what Kamal knew? He couldn’t have liked his little brother very much, and old Ibn Awad was always telling him to pray when he wanted to—”

  “All right, Rose,” Philindros said. Rose grinned; Philindros liked his women prudish.

  “Where is Wilmot now?” Horace asked.

  Philindros let his hand drop flat on the table, making a soft noise for emphasis. “You go alone if you go, Horace; FIS cannot be involved. Not our people, not our money. Can you manage that?”

  “We’ll see. Where’s Clive?”

  “I just happen to have an address,” Rose said. She tore a strip of brown paper from the grease-stained bag containing her pastrami sandwich—it was the only paper in the talks room—and scribbled on it. Philindros frowned: evidence. Rose caught her chief’s look. “Horace will swallow it before he leaves the room,” Rose said.

  When Rose had gone, Philindros said, “Graham first. The men’s room by the post office in National Airport at six this evening?” He meant the tape would be passed to Horace there, at that time, by someone he would recognize. Horace nodded.

  “Remember, I want it back,” Philindros said.

  11

  Even before he talked to Philindros, Horace had made a supper date with Emily. He arrived at nine o’clock at the house on O Street with a bag of groceries in his arms. The Secret Service man who admitted him took the sack into the kitchen.

  Emily came into the hall and kissed Horace. “There must be a nip in the air,” she said, “your cheek is cold.”

  “I walked from the grocery; it’s a lovely fall night. I miss this season, living abroad. October is what makes an American of you.”

  Emily’s smile came more slowly than before. Otherwise, she seemed no different to Horace. She had learned to conceal whatever signs might remain from the loss of her child. No one was interested: it hadn’t been a real death to anyone except Emily and Julian.

  In the sitting room, after Emily had made them both martinis, Horace said as much about the miscarriage as he thought she wanted to hear: he took the drink, looked down at her, touched her upper arm gently with the tips of his long fingers. “All right now?”

  Emily nodded. She withdrew a little and then came back. They drank. Horace, who didn’t really like martinis, complimented her on this one. Emily, glad to have something to tell him, related how her father had trained her to make the drink.

  “It wasn’t that he singled me out to know his great secret,” she said; “he taught half the bartenders in the world to do it. He gave them eyedroppers to measure out the Pernod.”

  “Resourceful.”

  “Men are.”

  In the kitchen, Emily sat on a tall stool while Horace laid out the food he had brought and began to prepare it. He shelled oysters, cleaned shrimp, prepared a small striped bass, seasoned these things and laid them in a pottery baking dish. His big hands were as deft as Julian’s, but Emily had never seen a male so much at home in the kitchen, or anyone able to cook, as Horace seemed to do, without thinking about it.

  “It comes from years of doing it,” he said.

  “I have to read recipes as I go along. Even then I always think I’ve left something out.”

  Horace made a sauce for the pasta with mushrooms and bits of ham and cream, and dropped little nests of green and yellow noodles into boiling water.

  “Paglia e fieno, hay and straw, the Italians call this,” he said. “I ate it first when I was a youngster in a restaurant in Stresa. Sunset, the snowy Alps reflected in Lago Maggiore. Bring me here to die, I thought.”

  “Julian only likes plain things,” said Emily a little later, sighing after she had eaten the noodles. “What made you such an epicure?”

  “I don’t know. My mother and I lived in Paris for years after the divorce. She was a gourmand—frustrated women often are. Julian’s mother, and Pa also, only ate plain food. It’s odd, Emily—Julian’s mother—went to France after she left our father. I wonder what drove, his lost women to that country.”

  “Did they see each other ever?”

  “God, no. My mother would have killed Emily on sight, and Julian’s mother lived in a trance. She never knew mine existed. The strangler and the dreamer, I used to call Pa’s two wives.”

  Emily couldn’t eat everything Horace had cooked, and she drank very little wine. She told him she was writing a children’s book to pass the time. She didn’t want to do any profiles for a while. “I don’t want to be close to a stranger just now,” Emily said.

  “The one on Patrick was so good. You ended up liking him, I thought.”

  “I always do. My subjects don’t always end up liking me. You get so close to them, something like love happens. You can’t let it go on.”

  “With Julian you did.”

  “That wasn’t something like love. That was love.”

  “Is it still love? I guessed what Julian had had to tell you the night the baby died. Do you blame my brother for the… loss?”

  These were brutal words. Emily didn’t seem to realize it. She looked back without flinching into Horace’s alert mild face.

  “Yes, it’s still love. I can never change.” She flashed a smile that cost her something. “Your brother is safe with me, Horace.”

  “Good,” said Horace, “because I’m going to ask you if you love him enough to betray him.”

  The Empire dining room, silk and enamel, suited Emily’s fine looks perfectly. David would have painted her, had she lived in his time, with her head held just as she was holding it now. She was so still, after hearing Horace’s words, that the points of the candle flames never wavered in the mirrors of her irises.

  Horace paused and took a sip of wine.

  “There’s something I’d like you to hear,” he said. He drew a very small tape recorder from his pocket and shoved it across the table. “Please listen through the earpiece: it’s a silly precaution, but I’m used to taking them.”

  Emily pushed back her hair and fitted the device into her ear, first removing an earring Horace had seen a hundred times, brushing his mother’s raddled cheek. Emily listened intently. Halfway through, she closed her eyes. At the end, she switched off the tape, and with the automatic gesture of one who has worked with such machines a great deal, rewound it.

  Horace said, “I don’t imagine Julian told you quite all that.”

  It was Philindros’s tape of his entire conversation with Lockwood and Julian, on the night in Kentucky that Ibn Awad’s death warrant had been sealed.

  “No,” Emily said. “The third voice is…”

  “Philindros. He’s my chief, you know.”

  “I didn’t know. I thought as much.”

  “I’m responsible for what happens in my part of the world, Emily. Perhaps Julian held back a little on that account—after all, I was the one who put the gun in Prince Talil’s hand. Julian wouldn’t want you to think less of me.”

  “I don’t, if that’s any comfort to you.”

  “It is, my dear. It’s more important that you don’t think less of Julian. He has a quality that some would call admirable—he’s like our father, a selfless man. He’s selfless enough to let you think—to let the world think, if need be—that he was to blame for this murder.…”

  Emily flinched at the word. Horace kept on in his even tenor.

  “… That he was more to blame than Lockwood.”

  Emily touched the tape recorder. “But he wasn’t.”

  “Of course he wasn’t. He was present, that’s all. It’s his job to be present, to advise. He has an idea, as I
think we both know, that it’s also part of his job to sacrifice himself for the President.”

  “Of course he thinks that.”

  “Well, he won’t do it if I can help it. Emily, it’s not necessary.”

  Horace told her how she could help.

  12

  The Millennium Club was as secure an environment, especially if two men were discussing money, as Philindros’s talks room.

  Sebastian put down his pink gin and cackled. “You mean to say these… suitcases were never found? That that great hillbilly Lockwood can’t prove their existence? Why hasn’t Mallory used that?”

  “He doesn’t know exactly where the bombs are, either. If he can get hold of them, if his agent—”

  “O. N. Laster?”

  “Presumably. Who but Universal Energy would invest that kind of money just to throw something away? In any case, if they can get hold of the suitcases, as you call them, and destroy all traces of them, then the question can be asked: ‘Just where are

  these famous items that were going to erase Jerusalem and/or New York?’”

  Sebastian was enjoying himself. “What a web of foibles your work is, Horace. It always was. Nothing went right in Picardy; I thought it was the French. Politically speaking, the Maquis were like a troop of Cossacks in a dark room with one naked woman; but disorder must be a feature of secret work.”

  “It is. That’s our deepest secret.”

  “But you know where this Britisher is, and you want to get to him before Laster?”

  “Or Laster’s men. They’ll kill him afterwards. He knows that.”

  “He thinks you won’t?”

  “I’ve helped him in the past. Once you buy a man, Sebastian, he’s like a respectable woman you’ve had in one of her weak moments; she may or may not have enjoyed it, but she doesn’t forget—especially if you behaved well afterwards.”

  “This is a lot of randy imagery between godfather and godson. I promised at your christening to look after your spiritual welfare.”

  Horace waved away the old waiter who shuffled towards them; their drinks were all but untouched, though they had been talking for a long time.

  “What I need,” Horace said, “is your authorization to draw funds—clean bank funds, not FIS funds—before I leave New York this afternoon.”

  “Surely.”

  “I’m speaking of a million dollars.”

  Sebastian drained his pink gin and called the waiter over. “Two more, and have them keep a table for us in the dining room,” he said.

  They were seated by a window. Sebastian looked out. The street below was filled with trash, blowing before an edgy October wind.

  “That’s a lot of money to re-elect Lockwood and thereby guarantee that there’ll be no resumption of garbage collection in my lifetime,” he said. “But, by golly, it’s worth it. Let Philindros tell me now you can’t be president of D. & D. Laux & Co. after I go!”

  At three o’clock, back at the bank, Sebastian, groaning a little, got down on all fours in his office and opened a floor safe concealed beneath a rug; Horace had never known it was there. Sebastian placed bundles of thousand-dollar bills one by one on the desk. Then, fussily, he wrapped the lot in a square package, using strong brown paper and stout cord. Horace put his finger on the knots as Sebastian tied them.

  “Homely-looking stuff, done up that way, isn’t it?” Sebastian said.

  “I don’t know when you’ll get it back.”

  Sebastian waved a hand; under the transparent skin his blue veins twined. “Paper,” he snorted. “It’s the human mind that makes it holy. God bless the hopeless human mind—that’s what they all thought.”

  His gnarled hand indicated the portraits on the wall.

  13

  “The great thing,” Horace had said to Emily, “is to make Patrick realize that there was nothing in what Julian did that was meant to humiliate him. It will be very, very difficult for him to accept this.”

  “What makes you think I can do it? I’m hardly a neutral source.”

  “On the level of the intellect, you can’t. Probably no one can. But we’re not dealing with Patrick on the level of intellect. You’re Julian’s wife. You know a lot about Graham, and what you know is fresh in your mind. He respects you as a professional.”

  “I’ve never used another person. Patrick is very clever, far cleverer and older and crueler than I. I still don’t see why you believe I can do anything with him.”

  “There’s a bit of history you ought to know,” said Horace.

  He told her about Caroline and Patrick and Julian. Horace knew more about this than Julian. Rose MacKenzie had had computers talking to one another; and Patrick’s girls had talked more than he thought.

  “The hardest part of this job,” Horace said, “is that you’re going to have to keep it from Julian. Always. As if you were under oath, as he is, to keep secrets even from the person you love most as a duty to”—Horace smiled; devilish, loving—”something higher.”

  When Patrick came home, late that night, he found Emily waiting for him in the drawing room. ffoulkes, Charlotte’s willowy Old Etonian, left in the house while his mistress was on Chipmunk Island, had let her in. The servant asked Patrick if he wanted anything; Patrick told him to go upstairs. Emily had been there for some time; her finger marked a place a third of the way through a book she had taken down from the shelves.

  Patrick sat down opposite her, showing no surprise. He knew what was happening.

  Emily wasted no time on preliminary talk; she would no more do that than touch him. She told Patrick, in a flat voice, what Horace had told her the night before.

  A portion of Patrick’s mind awakened, recorded this information. He was hearing things he would never have known if he had not at last found himself in a position to wound Julian Hubbard. He didn’t doubt for a moment that what Emily was telling him was the truth. It was late for anything else.

  Nevertheless, she made him listen to the tape. He didn’t resist when she took it back, as Horace had instructed her to do.

  They sat for some moments in silence. All that was lifelike in Emily’s young face, all the play of expression that had teased and roused Patrick in San Francisco, had vanished. This face in its changes reminded him of others from his youth. There had been a childlike prostitute in Bangkok who had been all laughter and invitation in a bar but as still and limp as a corpse beneath him an hour later; as he used her he had remembered the unmarked body of a girl lying beside a track into a Vietnamese village after a bombing raid and how, when she was turned over, all the blood from her body lay in a pool on the baked soil. Lifeless women: a whore, a dead peasant—and, always in his memory, Caroline wearing a doll’s porcelain face throughout his unbearable pleasure; Caroline must have seen something in his own face (watching with wild eyes) as she did for herself what he could not do for her.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked Emily.

  Horace had advised: When the moment is right, come right out with it; make sure he understands.

  “I want you to know the truth.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I believe you would never broadcast a lie.”

  “But you think I might conceal the truth?”

  Emily moved.

  “That’s your choice,” she said. “But if you bring Julian down, and the FIS, you’ll bring Frosty Lockwood down, too, and all the rest of it as well.”

  Emily was a natural mimic. Her face, which had been so stony, suddenly formed into an unmistakable representation of Franklin Mallory, as he had looked on the platform in San Francisco, taking the cheers and the chanting of the delegates for his Ganymede Address. Her eyes were contemptuous.

  Patrick looked at her—the firm unmarked flesh, the white strong teeth, the straight bones, the speed she showed even when at rest. Emily had been made by men like Julian and her own father who bred themselves, generation after generation, to beautiful women as they bred proven stallions to fast mares, in order
to produce a type. Emily knew what Patrick might demand of her as his price for believing her. She wasn’t afraid. She could refuse or agree as she chose, and nothing would show on her face or be left on her mind. Lend a man your boat and he might sink it, said the Eskimos; lend him your wife and she comes back as good as new.

  But suppose the man is never the same again? Julian’s wife was begging Patrick for something. Suppose he forced her to kneel and give him the use of her mouth, like some pig of a movie producer in a novel by a writer so young and clumsy he could not describe the act? Would she tell Julian that? In the canal of his shrunken phallus Patrick felt the faintest of sensations, like the tiny charge of electricity that carries an impulse from one region of the mind to another. He knew he would feel nothing more than that. Emily naked and dancing could not arouse him. He laughed, a burst of sound. He listened to the tape again, to Lockwood’s unmistakable voice.

  “Dead at last,” cried Patrick in a black man’s voice. “Thank God a’ mighty, I’m dead at last.”

  Emily could make nothing of this remark; nobody her age remembered Martin Luther King. The phrase made Horace smile, though, when she repeated it to him.

  14

  The last thing Clive Wilmot owned in the world was a small house, made of a kind of tan stone that crumbled like a biscuit, in an olive grove in Provence. Properly, this house could be said to be on the Riviera. Clive’s father had always made a point of saying that it was in Provence. He said, too, that he “went to a public school called Harrow.” The Wilmots, according to their genealogist, were remote cousins of the sovereign, and if all the hundreds who took precedence over Clive’s father in the royal line had died in a plague and he had ascended the throne, he would have explained to visitors at Windsor Castle that he was king of a place called Great Britain.