Julian shook his head in annoyance and turned off the tape machine. Horace didn’t know whether his brother was remembering the jagged years of his first marriage, or was merely vexed by the blaring television that drowned out the music they’d been listening to.
“I want to ask you something,” Julian said. “Could you, if you put unlimited resources into it, stamp out this Eye of Gaza—kill Hassan Abdallah?”
“Possibly. They’d have to be hunted like animals. You’d have to pass new laws to make that possible, or place the hunters above the law.”
“Don’t misunderstand what I’m going to say next. In the context of what we’ve been talking about it may sound like a bribe to you, but the matter was settled long ago. When Philindros’s term ends next year, would you like to be Director of Foreign Intelligence?”
“Under Lockwood?”
“I don’t think Mallory would appoint you.”
“But you would, if I steal the election for you.”
“Yes. Lockwood wants you in any case. I want you because I think you’d protect him better than anyone else could.”
Horace, playing his role to the end, spoke in a cold voice. “Do you really think you can justify what you’re proposing to do?” he said to Julian. “Do you think Lockwood can go on being what he is—or what you think he is—if he robs the people in this way?”
“He’ll stay as he is if he doesn’t know, if he isn’t told. If means are going to justify ends, let them be our means and our ends. That’s what your work has been for your whole life. You and Philindros and the FIS exist to do illegal things, to give Presidents and the people the illusion that they live in virtue.”
“Everywhere else in the world. Not in the United States. What would Pa have said?”
Julian laughed. “He would have said, ‘Steal it!’ It wouldn’t be the first time. What do you think happened in Cook County in 1960?”
Horace let a moment pass. “There’s never been any proof of that,” he said.
“No. And there won’t be any proof of this. Your friend Rose, she has all this ‘gamed,’ as you say? She could do it?”
“By Tuesday all could be ready.”
“Then only this remains—the question. Will you do it?”
Horace looked steadily at his brother. “I don’t know.”
“I want to know.”
“All right. Call me Tuesday at four o’clock, in the bar at the Millennium Club. Give me a code phrase that means yes. If I don’t speak the phrase, you’ll know my answer is no. If I do, you’ll win the election.”
Julian thought for a moment. The room, his most private one, was hung with photographs of Lockwood, and the many sheets of framed glass picked up what little light Julian’s old lamp threw out. There was in Julian’s face, and in his voice when next he spoke, a real anxiety. Horace had never conducted a more successful seduction.
“The code phrase will be ‘the sunlit upland,’” Julian said.
13
That seemed a clumsy code phrase to Horace, but he went back to New York without mentioning his feeling to Julian. What did it matter? Julian had become his agent. On Monday morning, he saw where the words came from. Rising early, he switched on the morning news and watched the President mount the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. There must have been a camera in the Washington Monument, because Lockwood’s lonely figure was shown from a height and a distance before the lens brought him closer. Another camera, sighted towards the southeast, showed a feeble sun rising beyond the Capitol and the Anacostia River. The Mall, indeed the whole city with its lawns and marble, was deserted wherever the cameras glanced. A voice explained that the President had decided to speak at this unexpected hour in order to eliminate any danger to others.
Lockwood paused a moment before the alabaster Lincoln, then moved toward the front of the Memorial. He wore a black suit. His expression was solemn. The awkward grace in the way he stood was as familiar as his face. There was no sign of a microphone. Lockwood seemed to be speaking out of the echoing depths of the white temple. Before he began, the cameras moved like reading eyes over the familiar words carved in the walls.
Lockwood did not speak long. A little breeze moved his clothing and his hair, and a camera with a long lens picked up the sympathetic ripples in the flag on the Capitol. Lockwood ended thus:
“There have been other times of blood and other times of fear. We have come through. Decency has lived. Brotherhood has been restored. The American dream has survived in its majesty and the heart has made room for fallen enemies. If we go on as we must, insisting that America has to be herself despite all danger and all sacrifice and all loss, then we will come out all right in the end. If we do not, if we falter, then we will have said to the invisible powers, ‘We wish the end to come.’ I do not wish that. No American, no man or woman or child waiting for freedom and food anywhere on earth wishes that. Nothing in the unconquerable human spirit has ever wished that. Let us therefore have the courage to make the new beginning we must make. Let us summon the strength to take step after climbing step until we shall emerge, all of us everywhere on this planet which is our only given home, onto that sunlit upland where at last the races and the nations shall join hands, knowing that their long dream of peace and goodness has come true.”
Lockwood had been determined to speak at the Lincoln Memorial, and to do so at noon, the hour on which the Eye of Gaza always struck. He had a leader’s vision: in any situation, he stood at one end of a long tunnel and saw the distant spot of light that was his goal. He ignored the darkness between.
Julian had said, “You simply can’t do it. Campaign headquarters says they’ll bus volunteers in if necessary to fill the Mall. It’s all for the cameras. Everyone will see that—especially the terrorists. It will be the Alamo all over again, but worse. People will die in front of our eyes while you speak, and it will be our fault.”
The Secret Service, the Bureau, the police were in despair. A regiment of airborne troops had been flown in secretly. It was all useless; if the Eye of Gaza wanted to commit murder and suicide, it would do so. The terrorists could not be stopped by uniforms and bayonets. At the cost of a handful of lives, Hassan Abdallah had defeated the United States, which could not protect its President or its people from him.
Finally Lockwood saw the reality. A detail of Secret Service men who had stayed up all night with the camera crews in a room where there were no telephones escorted the television technicians to the Lincoln Memorial. They barely had time to get their equipment working before Lockwood arrived by helicopter. As soon as he finished speaking and the video switched back to the studios, the President was surrounded by his guards, the tallest men in the Service, and rushed into his helicopter. It was during those panting moments, crossing the open ground from the Memorial to the aircraft, that Lockwood’s face showed the intensity of the disgust he felt over this fear for his safety.
“If they keep this up,” he roared at Julian as soon as they were alone, “they’ll have the whole country rooting for my assassins. It’s wrong, Julian, to show that kind of panic. It’s better to let whatever happens happen.”
Lockwood meant it. He was infuriated when others thought that he was something he was not. His whole life had been lived in the open; he looked as he looked, said what he meant.
“Where I come from,” he told Julian, calmer now, “they’ve always liked a dead man a whole lot better than a coward.”
On the morning of the election, Lockwood had a huge Kentucky breakfast cooked and served to the whole White House staff in the East Room. He made no speeches, but spent two hours moving from table to table, speaking to his people. For most of them he had a nickname, as “Jolly” was his name for Julian, and a memory of something that had happened between them. Lockwood had roamed the White House and the Executive Office Building for four years, perching on secretaries’ desks, chatting with minor assistants. He and Polly always had them all for a Thanksgiving party. He loved the feel and the looks an
d the small talk of human beings; he withered without these things. From the plate of one secretary he took a piece of ham, and he munched a biscuit stolen from another.
They all knew that they might never see him again like this. They sang “My Old Kentucky Home” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Lockwood’s powerful off-key baritone boomed above all the rest and made them smile as they sang. But when he left they all fell silent, and their faces were those of people lost in a tender memory.
After breakfast, Lockwood and Julian and a handful of others flew to Live Oaks. At noon—he chose the hour himself—Lockwood had one of the farm workers bring his battered small sedan, unused in almost four years, around to the front of the house. He held open the door for Polly and then folded himself into the driver’s seat and rattled down the drive through the green tunnel of old trees. With cars full of jumpy Secret Service men before and behind him and a helicopter overhead, Lockwood meandered along country roads to the schoolhouse where he and Polly voted. They marked old-fashioned paper ballots after identifying themselves to the election clerks seated in the front row of desks. Then they drove safely back to the farm.
While waiting for Lockwood to return, Julian took Emily and the children for a walk. Near a limestone wall, a grouse burst like a booby trap from a clump of grass, and Julian swept Jenny and Emily into his arms and spun with them as if to take shrapnel in his own back. Elliott stood a little apart, watching. Long ago, Julian had seen the look that his son wore now on Horace’s face; he couldn’t remember when.
14
As the explosions occurred during the day, Julian was informed. Every symbolic public building was flooded with police, but at the stroke of noon members of the Eye of Gaza—showing that nothing could prevent them from choosing their own hour as well as their own place—committed fiery suicide. They did so in the rotunda of the Capitol, inside the Lincoln Memorial, in the National Gallery of Art. Statues and paintings were pelted with blood as Lockwood had been at the Alamo. Everyone entering a public building had been searched by police but nothing had been found. All the terrorists on election day were females.
Julian, watching television screens and a computer display in one of the old slave cabins behind the big house that had been converted to offices, could not see that the day’s bombings had altered anything. The early trend ran as expected. Mallory was ahead of his totals of four years before, Lockwood behind. The difference was not much. But what had been enough for Lockwood in the last election would probably be enough for Mallory in this one.
At about three o’clock Lockwood joined Julian, bringing with him the smell of the sharp November wind and the scent of the horses he’d been handling. A filly in heat had jumped a fence and scampered all over the farm. Lockwood had caught her himself. He sucked a rope burn on his hand. He drank from a bottle of beer.
“Has Franklin had anything to say today?” he asked. The runaway filly had erased every trace of bad humor.
“No. Just the closing speech last night. The media consensus is that you’re ahead on points in terms of the final speeches.”
Lockwood, with a shrewd look, let Julian pay himself this little compliment. He had been right about the timing of the speech at the Lincoln Memorial.
“It was the sunlit upland that did it. I stole that from Winston Churchill and saved it for the right moment. The whole speech was a bell-ringer—Lincoln, Stevenson, Kennedy, Holy Writ. Did you notice?”
Julian nodded; he had planted most of the phrases in Lock-wood’s tired mind.
Lockwood propped his wrinkled leather boots on Julian’s desk and took another swallow of beer. Julian gave him the information he had. No one but the terrorists had died in the explosions; people were staying away from public places. Lockwood received this report in silence, but his eyes, peering over the tilted beer bottle, were alive with interest as Julian recited the voting figures.
“New York,” Lockwood said. “Franklin’s got to come down to the Bronx county line with a majority of a million to beat me there. Is he doing it?”
“It’s too early for humans to know. The computer projections are beginning to suggest he might.”
Lockwood’s hopes for re-election would live or die in New York and Michigan and California. Because of the time differences, only New York had begun to report returns in any substantial way. Lockwood took his eyes off the silent television screen, where new numbers had just been posted for scattered upstate small towns, and swiveled in his chair. He looked out the window. There wasn’t much to be seen—the back of the big house with its wide veranda, a patch of lawn, the old brick cookhouse, a fragment of the horizon with stripped trees, shivering in the wind, against the sky. He spoke while his back was still turned to Julian.
“You know, Jolly,” the President said, “if I have to come back to this place in January to stay I won’t be sorry. Living in the White House hasn’t been all that much—growing up the way I did, I always knew a boy could get there. But here? I never dreamed it.” He spun around in the squeaking chair and lifted the beer bottle to his lips.
“For years,” he said, “all I had was a football suit and Polly, up on the hill in this white house.”
Lockwood pushed his Stetson back on his forehead with a stiff forefinger. There was a look of mockery on his homely face.
“You missed a lot,” Lockwood said, “never being poor.” He grinned. “The suspense is terrific—you never know whether or not you’ll stay that way.”
“I’ve got the rest of my life before me.”
“Everybody does, Jolly. That’s a good thing to bear in mind.”
“Are you saying,” Julian asked, “that you wouldn’t mind losing?”
“No. Just that I could live with it, I could go on to something else. So could you.”
“I wonder.”
Lockwood shrugged, dismissing the storm of lies and shame and ruin that lay ahead of him if he lost. “If you’re going to die of bellyache,” said Lockwood, “you’ll never be kicked to death by a mule. We ought to believe in fate a little more, and accept it, like our granddaddies did.”
Julian said, “I hate the idea.”
“Hate what? My losing, or Mallory winning?”
“Both. You do, too.”
“Yes, I do. We are the better people, Jolly. I’m not sure we’re the smartest. Franklin is a genius, and it’s always death to a people that chooses a genius to lead them. But it’s out of our hands.”
The television screen flickered. New numbers went up—pitifully small totals compared to the millions that would be posted by midnight, but as clear in their meaning to Lockwood as the green spots in a sheep’s entrails would have been to Caesar Augustus, and he accepted them with as much fatalism.
Lockwood got to his feet and stretched. The empty beer bottle dangled from his hand. Lockwood winked at Julian. He balled his fist and swung it softly against Julian’s chest.
The two men were close together. Just before leaving Julian, Lockwood always wore a look of expectancy in case Julian should have one more thing to tell him. He wore the look now. Julian said nothing.
Lockwood tossed his beer bottle into the air, end over end, and caught it with a little noise as the glass slapped into his palm. He turned and walked out the door. His boots scuffed on the rough boards of the tiny porch outside, and then Julian heard them on the gravel walk that led to the big house.
Julian went to the window. On the path, Lockwood had just met Caroline and Julian’s children. The President’s face lighted with pleasure; it was his first glimpse of Jenny and Elliott that day. He ruffled the boy’s hair and swung Jenny into the air; the child was wearing long white stockings and a blue jumper, and she had never looked more like her mother. Caroline saw Julian’s face in the window and stood, hands in the pockets of a sheepskin jacket that belonged to Emily, staring calmly into his eyes. Lockwood said something to Jenny and she gave him her slow smile; Lockwood hungrily kissed her cheek and Julian remembered how silken that skin
was. Caroline went on looking at him, steadily, without expression. She was wearing one of Emily’s scarves over her hair as well as Emily’s coat; perhaps it was that—the clothes of his new wife on the body of his old wife—that caused such a shock of love and desire to run through Julian. Lockwood went on towards the house, and Caroline and the children, with their guards surrounding them, continued their walk; they were headed in the direction of the stables.
Julian turned away from the window. He watched the rolling images on the television screen for a moment. The phone rang but he didn’t answer it. He looked at his watch, though he had no need to do so. It was four o’clock exactly. He took a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and, pulling the telephone to him, punched out the number of the Millennium Club bar.
Frew the barman answered on the third ring. His toothy New York voice sounded all the consonants in “Millennium Club.” Horace came on the line. For a moment he and Julian chatted about nothing. Horace checked with Frew to see how the betting stood.
“Frew says Mallory is ahead by a hundred drinks with two thousand in the book,” Horace said. “The betting is closed.”
Horace must be alone in the bar or nearly so, thought Julian. He could hear no hubbub through the receiver, but of course it was early in the day for that.
“All the same,” Horace said, “I’m telling Frew to put his money on the sunlit upland.”
Frew hummed aloud as he polished glasses at the far end of the bar while Horace phoned Rose MacKenzie in the vault at D. & D. Laux & Co.
“If you’re working late,” said Horace, “I’ll be glad to bring down some sandwiches.”
“Marvelous. Pastrami?”
“And hold the mustard.”
The Better Angels Page 36
