Breach of Trust

by D. W. Buffa

  “They’ve started an investigation,” he said, narrowing his eyes.

  “An investigation?”

  Browning’s eyes widened. His small, closed mouth moved to one side then the other. He bent his head to the side and for a moment seemed to study me.

  “An investigation into the circumstances of Annie’s death.” He gave me a strange look. “Can you think of a better way to destroy someone’s political career than to have him accused of having been involved in a murder?”

  Annie’s death had been ruled an accident. There was a police report to prove it.

  “Haviland? You think after all these years he decided to say that it was not an accident, that it was murder? That Annie didn’t fall, that she was pushed? I know what he said to me, but…”

  “There is a witness. I don’t know who it is, and there may be more than one. Remember, I was there when it happened, when Annie died. It was ruled an accident— it was an accident—but if they make it sound like murder…” There was a flash of impatience in his eyes. “They don’t have to accuse me. Don’t you see? If they charge anyone, then I had to have been involved. If someone murdered Annie, then I must have been part of a cover-up, a conspiracy to protect whoever did it. If that happens—if they charge someone with murder, if they get a conviction, I’ll either have to resign or I’ll be impeached.”

  “Who are you talking about? Who are these people who are going to convict an innocent man of a murder that never happened because they want to ruin your political career? And what is it you think I can do?” I asked, searching his eyes. “Are you looking for some kind of legal advice?”

  “I want you to take the case.”

  “What case? There isn’t any case; there might not even be an investigation. This might be nothing more than rumor.”

  There was something in his eyes, an almost imperceptible enlargement, a silent acknowledgment that he had anticipated, perhaps word for word, the question, the objection, the statement of possibility. I had not finished talking before he was making his reply.

  “They’ll have enough of a case to take to a grand jury. There will be an indictment. I guarantee there will be a trial.” His eyes became cold, immediate. “It’s the only way they can bring me into it. I was there. How could I not be called as a witness for the defense?”

  “If they’re not going to charge you—whom are they going to charge? Who else was there? Who else can they accuse?”

  Browning was only thinking of one thing. “Whomever they charge, I want you to defend him.”

  That was not up to me, and it certainly was not up to him.

  “If someone is indicted, he’ll choose a lawyer of his own.”

  Browning slapped both hands hard on the desk and sat bolt upright in the chair.

  “Good God, Antonelli! You’re the best there is. Why would anyone accused of murder—especially a murder he didn’t commit—want ‘a lawyer of his own’? In addition to everything else, you knew Annie, you were there, you know it was an accident. Of course he’ll want you.”

  Browning was on his feet, moving rapidly around the desk. His arm was around my shoulder, guiding me with his earlier ebullience down some well-lit corridor to another endless series of rooms. He stopped in front of an enormous gray hammered-metal door.

  “Come with me to Washington. We can talk more about this then.”

  “I can’t go to D.C. tomorrow,” I protested. “I have to get back home.”

  Browning nodded, but not because he agreed with what I had said or had even paid attention. There was something else, something he had just remembered that he wanted to add.

  “Joanna is expecting you. And no one ever says no to Joanna,” he remarked with a warning smile.

  “I thought she was going to be here—in New York.”

  “Something came up, and she couldn’t come.” It was the kind of vague, meaningless explanation that passed for politeness among people who were not in a position to question it.

  “How is she, anyway?” I asked as he turned to go. He stopped, and for a moment appeared to think not only about the question but also about all the different answers he could give. A smile like a shared secret floated over his mouth.

  “The same as when you saw her last.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Have you ever been here?” asked Thomas Browning in a quiet, indulgent voice.

  “To Washington?” I asked, turning toward him with a blank expression on my face.

  “No, here—to the White House.”

  The limousine rolled to a stop in a small parking lot hidden between the West Wing of the White House and the Executive Office Building next door.

  “It was always the ‘Old Executive Office Building,’ the ‘OEOB,’” remarked Browning with a disparaging glance. Someone quickly opened the door on his side, and I followed him out. He gestured briefly toward the gray monstrosity looming overhead. “Then during the Clinton administration the name was changed to the ‘EEOB.’”

  A tightly controlled young man with black, resourceful eyes reminded him that he was running late. “It can wait,” said Browning. The assistant began to protest. Browning stopped him with a look. “It isn’t that important. It seldom is,” he added in a whispered aside as he sent him on his way.

  “Remember John Nance Garner?” Browning asked. “He did a number of interesting things, but the only thing he’s remembered for is his very apt description of the office he and I have both had the honor to hold: The vice presidency ‘isn’t worth a warm pitcher of spit.’ I’ve thought about that,” he said, laughing softly as we began to climb the long steep steps to the entrance of the EEOB. “I’ve taken a pen, and sat at my desk, staring at a blank piece of paper, trying to come up with a better way of saying it. I must have tried it a dozen times, but I couldn’t do it. ‘A warm pitcher of spit.’ By the way, what Garner really said was that it wasn’t worth a warm pitcher of piss. But no one would print that then. Now everyone would, wouldn’t they?”

  A few steps from the top, Browning halted. “You’ve never been here—to the White House? Good. I’ll give you the tour.” he looked at me the way he used to, when he was about to propose something that might not be entirely within the rules, something you did on a dare.

  “Come on,” he said as he began to climb the steps with renewed vigor, “let’s see what they’ve done to me while I’ve been away.” he reached the landing on top, stepped ahead and caught the door, holding it open while I went through. “This mausoleum was always the OEOB—the Old Executive Office Building—but then, after the Republicans got control of Congress and they changed the name of the airport from National to Reagan, they decided they would rename this as well. Hard to say which is most astonishing: the sheer effrontery of people like Gingrich and Armey and all the rest…” Browning stopped in midsentence, struck by how strange and incongruous the world could be. “They were a curious bunch—third-rate academics who had taught at second-rate schools. No uncertainty about anything because they are so damnably certain of themselves. They were going to change the world—save Western civilization—that’s what they said.” Browning lowered his head and gave me a shrewd glance. “You might have thought they would start with something smaller, like saving the United States; and even then, been a bit more careful about claiming so much more than they could do.”

  We moved through a long, depressing hallway to another flight of stairs. We could have taken an elevator but, as Browning later explained, he wanted me to get the full nineteenth-century flavor of the place. Each time we passed someone, they would stop to make way, smile, and make themselves a little crazy wondering why they did not know who it was he was talking to with such friendly affection and apparent respect.

  “So they decided to show who was really running things. The Old Executive Office Building became the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. I suppose we should be grateful that in their relentless attempt to change history they didn’t decide to name it after Harding or Coolidge.�
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  We reached the door to the vice president’s second-floor office.

  “And Clinton did not do anything to stop it. He probably wanted everyone to think it was his idea.”

  Browning opened the door and, with a cheerful growl to the staff who rose to greet him, barreled through the outer office. He opened the next door, the one to what was formally known as the ceremonial office of the vice president. Before he went in, he turned around and, with a gleam in his eye, announced: “This is my old friend and classmate Joseph Antonelli. Mr. Antonelli will be visiting with us for a few days. Please treat him with the same disrespect and condescension with which you usually treat me.”

  Browning ducked inside, took two steps, then went back to the doorway and called out: “Tell them over there that I’m going to be coming by a little later, that I have someone I want to show around.”

  Shutting the door behind him, he stood next to me, certain he knew what was going through my mind as I stared at a long table, varnished to a hard reddish gold luster, that took up half the room. At one end it was flanked by a sofa facing a fireplace on the mantel of which models of triple-masted sailing ships, the kind that once fought the nation’s wars, were arranged. At the opposite end, the vice president’s desk waited, clean and immaculate, only a telephone and a single, thin stack of papers at the side.

  “If it doesn’t look like anyone works here,” said Browning with a grunt, “it’s because hardly anyone ever has. This is where they banish people once they’ve served their need. Here, let me show something.” he pulled open a drawer and had me look inside. There was nothing there, not a scrap of paper— nothing. He told me to look closer. Then I saw the deep, definable scratches, the different letters of names and initials carved into the wood. Browning could scarcely wait to explain.

  “It’s hard to think what to call something that no one knows anything about,” he mused aloud, listening to his own voice like someone practicing a speech, a set of remarks, he wanted to sound just right. “It can’t be a tradition if it’s a kind of private secret. And you can’t exactly call it a rite of initiation when instead of at the beginning it happens only at the end. It’s more like a schoolboy prank: grown men, acting like teenage boys, carving their names and initials in a bathroom door. That’s what it is, the secret of the least desirable club I know of: vice presidents of the United States who didn’t have a damn thing else to do.”

  Browning gave a nod to respectability. “It’s a bit more serious than that. Every vice president since Truman has done it: carved his name or initials in the same drawer of this same desk on the day he left office. If it had not been for the fact that Truman left to become president the day Roosevelt died, I would have suspected that it began as a kind of protest against anonymity, a way to leave a record—or at least a mark,” he added with a low chuckle, “to prove they had actually once held the office.”

  Browning straightened up. “Not every vice president. They wouldn’t let Spiro Agnew do it.” Raising his thatched eyebrows, he wrinkled his nose in disgust. “If Agnew had opened the drawer on his last day, it would have been to look for more cash.”

  I had finished looking, or thought I had. Browning insisted I look again.

  “There—not next to Nixon, but close to Truman— ‘H.S.T.’ What do you see?”

  “T.S.B.?” I said, glancing up from my bent position over the drawer. “I thought you said the last day… ?”

  Browning’s eyes became hard, relentless, the eyes of someone with a deep grievance that was never far from his mind. He began to pace behind the desk, three steps one way, three steps back. Abruptly, his head jerked back and he stopped.

  “I did it the first damn day I was here. I did it to tell myself that as far as I was concerned my first day here was my last.”

  There was a slight, almost imperceptible movement; a quiet, inward turning; a silent shift of attention from what he could blame on others to what he blamed on himself. He looked at me, and for an instant I thought he had forgotten who I was; then he appeared to forget everything he had just said.

  “There is something else not too many people know. When Nixon was vice president, he kept a tape recorder in the desk,” said Browning, shaking his head in amazement. “All he had to do to start it was press his knee against a button. There have been some strange men elected to the presidency….” With a meaningful glance, he let me know that he did not exclude the present occupant. “But Nixon had to have been one of the strangest of them all.” Browning sank into his chair. “I’ve read a lot of the biographies. None of them has gotten close to the truth of what he was.” Browning’s eyes wandered listlessly around the strange, time-bound room. “It’s the mistake we make about a lot of people: to think there is something there when there isn’t.”

  The room grew quiet, still, the bleak prospect of futility hanging heavy in the air. Browning took out a black fountain pen and began tapping it, slowly and methodically, against the hard wooden surface of the desk.

  “I think that must be right,” he said presently. He held the pen upside down in five fingers, tapping it over and over again. “It’s the office.” he was not talking to me anymore; he was talking to himself, trying to make sense out of things.

  “You can’t really think about someone who occupies it the same way you did before. You knew this guy when he was staying in cheap motels and lying to any three people he found on the street; you knew him when there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do—any promise he wouldn’t make—to get the money he needed to win. You knew he was a ruthless, sanctimonious bastard so convinced of his own rectitude he could put a knife in your back and believe it was self-defense. You knew all that, but now he’s the president of the United States, and you think about Lincoln and Jefferson, Washington and Roosevelt, and all the others who were great, and you think something about the office has to rub off and make whoever holds it bigger and better than they were.”

  The words echoed in the varnished silence. Browning rolled his head to the side, a look of amusement glowing on his soft, round face.

  “Funny how much we cling to our illusions even when we know that’s what they are. The truth of it is that the office doesn’t change a thing: It just magnifies whatever virtues, whatever vices, were there before.” He bent forward, his shoulders above the desk, his hands plunged down between his thighs. “That’s the key—to understand that. Listen to what the president says—read it in the papers—then imagine that someone else—the proverbial man on the street—had said it instead and see if it isn’t just about the stupidest damn thing you ever heard in your life. But none of that matters, because it’s the president, after all, and what the president says is important.”

  Browning raised his eyes to the ceiling and made an expansive gesture with his hand. A smile spread over his mouth, creased his cheeks and headed for his ears.

  “It’s like hearing all that terrifying Godlike thunder coming from on high, then pulling aside the curtain as Dorothy did and finding that the wizard behind it was just a harmless old man blowing a lot of hot air in the formidable name of Oz.” Browning bolted to his feet, a mischievous glint in his eyes. “Which for some reason reminds me: I promised you a White House tour.” he left me alone for a few minutes while he went into another room to confer with someone on his staff. When he returned he was visibly annoyed, grumbling to himself in a way that made me think that it was part of his ongoing frustration with the role he had been forced to play. By the time we started across the parking lot to the West Wing he had begun to find some humor in it.

  “There are spaces for forty or fifty cars in this lot. The vice president’s office has been allotted two of them. Good thing I’m such a shrewd negotiator. The original offer was one.”

  Browning caught me straightening my tie. He seemed to think it an appropriate, and perhaps undervalued, reaction. Though born into circumstances so different some would have said we came from two different worlds, Browning and I were both of that ge
neration when mothers told their sons they could grow up to be president, when that was considered the ultimate honor and not a disgrace. We were born in the days when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in the White House and even his enemies had to concede that he was larger than life. It was before Johnson and Nixon, Carter, Ford and the others—some of them men of decency, but none of them great—presided over our long, gradual decline. If democracy was our civic religion, the White House had been our sacred shrine.

  Browning took me first into the Roosevelt Room because, he explained, there was a story he wanted to tell.

  “When Truman was president the place was falling apart. Literally falling apart. Truman moved out, went over to Blair House for a year or so while they completely renovated the place. He wanted a room next to the Oval Office that could be used for meetings and some press briefings—things like that. It was Truman’s idea to call it the Roosevelt Room. It’s the only room in the White House named after one of its occupants. The Lincoln bedroom isn’t really named that—it just happens to be where Lincoln—and later on a lot of rich contributors—slept. Well, that was fine for Truman, but what was Eisenhower to do? Today someone would insist on the right to rename the room. Eisenhower was too subtle for that,” said Browning, beaming at the general’s cunning and craft. “He simply replaced the portrait of Franklin Roosevelt with one of Theodore Roosevelt. Genius lies in simplicity. My grandfather first taught me that. Eisenhower is president and the Roosevelt Room is still the Roosevelt Room, but without a word to anyone it no longer belongs to FDR.

  “Eisenhower started a tradition, like the Army-Navy game, or some other big collegiate rivalry: The winner gets to have the picture of his choice. And it went on that way, the Democrats putting up one Roosevelt, the Republicans the other—until Clinton.” Browning gave me a baleful glance. “There wasn’t any tradition he wasn’t willing to break. He didn’t put FDR back up. He left Teddy hanging there.” Browning shook his head thoughtfully. “Perhaps it was because he thought of himself as a progressive like TR; or perhaps he thought the best way to position himself for reelection was to make Republicans think he was really one of them. Whatever the reason, he could not bring himself to take it the whole way. He had to give himself an edge, an angle, a way to show that he wasn’t really breaking a tradition—he was starting another one.”