The Better Angels Read online

  A LSO BY C HARLES M CC ARRY

  Old Boys

  The Tears of Autumn

  The Miernik Dossier

  The Last Supper

  The Secret Lovers

  The Bride of the Wilderness

  Second Sight

  Shelley’s Heart

  Lucky Bastard

  Copyright

  This paperback edition first published in the United States in 2008 by

  The Overlook Press Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  N EW Y ORK:

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  Copyright © 1979 by Charles McCarry

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-4683-0032-1

  Contents

  Also by Charles McCarry

  Copyright

  Midsummer

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Midwinter

  To Joseph Judge

  The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

  —ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  First Inaugural Address

  MIDSUMMER

  1

  P ATRIÇK G RAHAM, as he chose his necktie, called out a piece of gossip to his wife. One of their friends had detected her husband in adultery and was suing him for divorce. “Damn!” said Charlotte Graham. “That means we’ll be two short for dinner Wednesday week. Stella might at least have rung me up.”

  Charlotte sat on a bench at her dressing table, vigorously brushing her long hair. “I shall be so glad when Americans can admit that they, too, live in a country where someone else is likely to be the past or present or future lover of the person they happen to be married to,” she said. “That’s the first sign of a civilized society, and it makes entertaining so much easier.”

  Charlotte, an Englishwoman who was the daughter of a peer, had been waiting for this sign all through the fifteen years of her exile in Washington as Patrick Grahams wife. She and her husband were talking to each other through the open door between their bedrooms as they dressed for the evening. “Why are your women so solemn about their snowy American bottoms?” Charlotte demanded. “If they weren’t, we wouldn’t have to give this awful party every June.”

  A hundred people, many of them strangers to Charlotte, would invade the Grahams’ fine Federal house in Georgetown in the next half hour. These were men and women to whom Patrick owed a favor, social or more often professional—people who were not quite those he wanted at one of the twenty dinner parties for six that he and Charlotte gave each year for his important sources. Patrick was the most famous television journalist in America; Charlotte was the most exhilarating hostess in Washington. The last President, a man Patrick loathed, had told her that she would have made a perfect wife for Charles II. One of her ancestresses had made that monarch a perfect mistress, and the king had created her complaisant husband an earl.

  Patrick came into the room and smiled at Charlotte’s image in the mirror. Her wide green eyes, amused and knowing, met his in the glass. Charlotte never wore anything except stockings beneath a dress and she was naked to the hips. Her head was thrown back and her hair fell free. Filled with auburn highlights, it crackled under the brush. She had always had a lovely throat, and her small breasts, with some help from the plastic surgeon, remained firm. Bones were beginning to show through the taut flesh of her back; Charlotte had been as supple as a cat when Patrick married her, but she had grown angular in the years since, and her skin had lost its freshness. She blamed the awful climate of Washington, but Patrick believed it was constant dieting and too much alcohol that had spoiled her figure and complexion; eating and drinking as she did, the results would have been the same even if she had remained in the English mists.

  “You don’t really mind this party,” Patrick said. It was always held on the nearest Saturday to Midsummer Day, Patrick’s birthday; he was approaching fifty, but looked younger than his wife.

  “No. I rather adore it, actually—seeing the fresh crop of lambs each spring, they’re so new to the world and so pretty. It makes one feel quite maternal.”

  Charlotte called this annual event “the Lambs’ Party” because most of the guests were very young; it was no small part of her wit that she put a comical name to everything. Charlotte never meant to wound; she had no malice. But ordinary emotions—innocence, envy, ambition, anger, jealousy, political fervor—were so alien to her own nature that she was seized by mirth when she encountered them in others.

  Like most people of their kind in the last decade of the twentieth century, the Grahams had no children. They had never wanted any. The instinct to breed was feeble in Charlotte’s ancient family; her father had died, penniless and raving, without male issue, and his line was extinct. Patrick, in his heart, thought that his own nation deserved to be extinct; America, the whole West, was dying at last of its appetites, like a rich drunk who refuses to give up bad habits and challenges his doctor to keep him alive.

  Charlotte stepped into her dress and Patrick helped her with the zipper. She handed him her ruby necklace and lifted her hair so that he could clasp it around her neck; she wore a jewel on every finger, but no wedding band.

  Charlotte knotted his tie for him. Patrick wore only one kind of necktie—silk, a small white polka dot on a sober blue or maroon background. It was a sort of trademark, something he’d begun years before, when his career was just starting to prosper. Like many of the marks of Patrick’s outward appearance, the ties had been Charlotte’s idea. She always thought of things that took a long time to be noticed, but which, once remarked, were never forgotten.

  “Charlotte Swan Neck,” said Patrick as Charlotte turned to admire her necklace, and their laughing eyes met again in the glass. They were friends; accomplices. Patrick kissed Charlotte’s cheek, a fleeting pressure of dry lips on painted skin. He couldn’t bear the taste of makeup, or its coarse perfume.

  Downstairs, the doorbell rang and they heard voices in the hall. “The lambs are all arriving at one time,” said Charlotte. “Come help me herd the poor things.”

  The Grahams’ Midsummer party, in truth, had a way of running itself. Charlotte organized it perfectly, a bar in what she called the drawing roam, another in the garden, young Englishmen in footmen’s livery weaving among the guests with trays of drinks and canapés. The British upper class had become, in the Washington of the 1990s, a sort of posh servant class. Once or twice she had discovered that a waiter hired to serve at a party or to hand round the courses at dinner was a blood relation.

  “Well, it’s really only three steps down to the scullery from being a viscount, you know,” she was saying now to the British chargé d’affaires, “so I was hardly amazed when the young chap Kadowaki the caterer sent over to serve cocktails turned out to be Billy Macdonald’s second son Nicholas. It was the Japs who started the whole thing—they all suddenly wanted English servants, you know how faddish their millionaires are, and of course the British working class wouldn’t wait on a lot of Wogs with low kneecaps, so who was left but the peerage?”

  Charlotte, in her long green gown and her jewels, was strikingly beautiful from a distance of ten feet. S
he stood at: one end of the long living room, drinking Scotch and milk, a mixture for which she was famous; no one else in Washington drank it, but Charlotte drank it from morning to night and never showed the slightest sign that she had swallowed anything more powerful than milk alone. “Liver like a rugby ball,” she said of herself; “everything else works awfully well.” Between Charlotte and Patrick, stationed at the opposite end of the room, milled the great crowd of guests. It pleased Charlotte that they were all dressed so well, it showed that they regarded the Grahams’ least important party as an event.

  Mostly, the people who were drinking Patrick’s excellent liquor and nibbling Kadowaki’s sashimi and tempura were fresh and slim; many of the women had obviously got new clothes for the affair. They belonged to that peculiar American class, the showily educated, ostentatiously intelligent, terribly serious children of parents who had been just like them. The air was charged with their nervousness. They drifted from one group to another, wearing the same clothes, flashing the same expensive smiles, uttering the same opinions. Charlotte found them touching. They had all gone to the same schools and now they went to the same shops and had the same ambitions. Yet they didn’t know one another, as people of their kind did in other countries; America produced a ruling class by lottery with each new generation. Names meant nothing; celebrities had cinders for fathers and ashes for sons. No wonder Americans were obsessed when they were young and mad when they were old. Charlotte was kind to all of them, especially to the women whether they had careers of their own or not; Patrick was going to be in business in Washington for a long time to come, and the Grahams knew the wisdom of planting a young tree for every old one that fell in the political forest.

  At the other end of the room, Patrick was smiling down at a young woman. She was a small female with black hair and a face that glowed with intelligence; Patrick, for reasons Charlotte knew well, had a weakness for the type. He made a joke and the girl laughed. Patrick was a handsome man, made lustful by his fame. The girl’s husband, standing forgotten beside her, smiled and said something. Patrick didn’t answer him. He took the raven-haired girl by the arm and led her through the open French doors into the garden.

  Her husband stood alone for a moment, then approached a little ring of people, and, smiling, once again, introduced himself. He hadn’t been introduced to Charlotte. Patrick must not regard him as a comer. Certain of tonight’s guests were almost ready to be invited to a dinner party. Patrick introduced these to Charlotte with a special formula: “Charlotte, really you must meet so-and-so”; for the ordinary run of guests, if he bothered to bring them over to her at all, he merely said, “This is my wife,” and told Charlotte their names. The Grahams had a whole system of verbal signals; Charlotte, who knew so much more about society than Patrick, had been surprised, in their early days together, that she had to teach him about such things.

  No one had devised a signal to warn of the approach of Clive Wilmot. The British chargé d’affaires, who had returned to Charlotte in order to say good night as the party approached its end, caught sight of Clive as he entered the room. “Oh, dear,” he said, in Clive’s own public school accent. Charlotte lifted a questioning eyebrow. “I’m afraid Clive has arrived,” said the chargé. “Oh, dear, indeed,” said Charlotte, and went quickly across the room, smiling and touching those who were left in the thinned party, so as to lead Clive away if he needed leading. Patrick had vanished. Charlotte supposed he was in the garden; he loved to show it to people.

  “A drink, a drink, a very large drink!” Clive Wilmot cried. A waiter appeared at his side with a tray of glasses. Clive took two of them.

  “Clive,” said Charlotte, “how nice. It’s always a surprise to see you at one of our parties.”

  “I can’t think why. I always turn up.”

  “Yes. But you’re never invited.”

  Wilmot’s dark woolen suit was speckled with dandruff and cigarette ash. In the breast pocket he carried a large number of pens and yellow pencils and a red and white tube of Colgate toothpaste. The suit, tailored in London, was too heavy for the climate. Wilmot wore a red-checked shirt under his pin-striped vest, and a Guards tie. Wilmot had made a life for himself as an outrageous character; he loved to crash parties, start rows in restaurants, pass himself off as a drunk. Charlotte looked closely at his eyes and saw that he was quite sober; he usually was.

  Patrick came in from the garden. “Ah,” he said, “the Regency buck. How are you, Clive?”

  Elsewhere in the room, the remaining guests were putting down glasses and preparing to leave. “Just let us have a moment to say good-bye to our invited guests,” Charlotte said.

  “Don’t want to drive them out,” Wilmot said. “Probably all future senators, Supreme Court justices, inventors of bombs that only kill the vegetation and leave the mammals to eat each other up.”

  The Grahams were smiling at Wilmot. Charlotte had always liked him for his mockeries, and Patrick knew that he was the head of the Washington station of what remained of British intelligence. Patrick didn’t quite trust him, but he was a useful man to know.

  “Stay!” Wilmot called to a small group of departing young people. “We’re going to have a wonderful discussion. Want to speak to you about the virtuous qualities of your President. Wonderful chap. New type of human, only took two and a half centuries of feverish cross-breeding to produce him. Homo americanus. Fucks no one but his wrinkled wife, great example to the rest of us. Sends messages of love to the benighted—uplifts the miserable of the world.”

  Most of the Grahams’ guests worked, in one way or another, for Bedford Forrest Lockwood, the President of the United States. His administration had drawn a great troop of young idealists to Washington. Patrick had called them the largest influx of intelligent reformers to come into the capital since the New Deal. They were listening to Clive Wilmot in silence, their faces hostile. He was touching a sensitive nerve. Lockwood, in his first term, had put policies into effect, idealistic programs that he had promised in his campaign for the presidency, which had placed his re-election in doubt. The President’s altruism, his open displays of sympathy and understanding for the miserable, his insistence that the sacrifice of self-interest was the only true self-interest, had brought him close to becoming a figure of fun. Lockwood’s followers had very little sense of humor about him, and even less about his program. They were the first generation in a very long time that had been given something to believe in. They would believe in Lockwood, and in his ideas, for the rest of their lives. Patrick Graham had said of them, in one of his television commentaries that had helped in a subtle way to elect Lockwood, that they were fighters of a new kind—fighters against disillusion.

  Now Patrick’s raven-haired girl stared at Clive Wilmot and her delicate face was a mask of disgust. Charlotte took her hand in both her own.

  “You mustn’t mind Clive,” she said. “He’s quite harmless.”

  “I’m sure he is. Good night, Lady Charlotte.”

  She left and the others followed her, quietly saying good night to the Grahams. Clive Wilmot gave each departing couple a cheerful wave with one or the other of the two glasses of Scotch whisky that he held in his hands.

  Usually Wilmot subsided when his audience left. Tonight he went on babbling, standing in the spot he had chosen when he entered, near the cold fireplace. He drained one glass and helped himself to another. Charlotte watched him consume four Scotches in less than fifteen minutes, while Patrick was in the hall, tipping the waiters. Charlotte wasn’t concerned. Wilmot could hold a lot, and the drinks were very weak—she always had them watered after the first trays were passed. All the same, Wilmot seemed to be getting drunk very rapidly. He must have a reason to behave as he was doing.

  “Clive, you’re a rude beast and a tiresome show-off,” said Charlotte. But she was amused by him; she always was. Years before, when she was twenty and he was only a few years older, they had been lovers during a whole winter in London. He was just back from Ul
ster, where he had lost a leg to an IRA mine. He compensated for his mutilation by a maniacal cheerfulness and great sexual inventiveness. Clive had a friend who owned a theatrical costume shop and he would borrow clothes from him; Charlotte, dressed as a flapper, might be tumbled by Clive attired as a Czarist dragoon in full dress uniform; the historical periods were always mixed. Because Clive was often female in his sexual desires, so was their lovemaking. Wilmot’s shouting, his artificial speech from the plays of Noel Coward, his drunken brawls, these were really his honesty. One night as Charlotte lay on his body, making rhythmic love, he had recited “The Owl and the Pussycat” in the same solemn cadences, like those of a tipsy evangelist, with which Dylan Thomas, on old phonograph records, had recited his jumbled poems. The experience, intense orgasm combined with uncontrollable laughter, had been one of the sweetest in all Charlotte’s life. She did not often see Clive without remembering that moment.

  Long afterwards, Wilmot had had bad luck. Posted to Baghdad—he had read Arabic at Oxfard—he’d been exposed as a British intelligence officer and sent home in open shame, persona non grata ever afterwards in the Near East.

  Banishment from the Arab world was a disaster. For a generation, Arabs had controlled the world’s wealth; because they controlled the sources of the world’s energy, they controlled the world. A sheikh’s thumb lay on the windpipe of every Krupp, every Mitsubishi, every manufacturer on earth. There were no more Arabs than there ever had been, and their territory had not enlarged. Territory meant little, in modern terms: large countries in cold climates were poor countries because they had to burn fuel to keep their people alive, and there was very little fuel outside the deserts of the Arabs. The Arabs were, as the rich and the powerful always are, the objects of burning curiosity. They were the prime target of every intelligence service in the world. To know what one imam or sheikh or emir might do, and to know it before anyone else, could mean billions in gold, or even national survival.