Breach of Trust

by D. W. Buffa

  We reached the middle of an open park, crisscrossed with sidewalks, a block behind the Russell Senate Office Building. She stopped and wheeled around.

  “But they’d put up with that, put up with the fact that in any comparison between the two of them, the president will always come out second best. They’d put up with anything to win power and keep it. But now they have the power, and they think they don’t need Browning anymore. They aren’t worried about the next election; they’re worried about the next one after that.”

  “The next one after that?” I asked, drawing out the words. I remembered where I had heard the phrase first, and from whom. “When the president has served his two terms, when someone else will be the Republican nominee?”

  “Whoever is vice president in the second term—if there is a second term—has the nomination. I mean, it’s never certain, but it’s almost certain; and if Thomas Browning is the vice president the right wing can thump their hollow chests and threaten all they want: Browning wins and they know it. That’s why they want someone else, why they want Browning off the ticket—why they’ll do anything to get rid of him.”

  She turned and started to walk away, took three steps and stopped. “They haven’t figured out a way to do it yet; but don’t believe for a minute that those evil-minded bastards over there are thinking about anything else. They’re trying to steal the country, and only Thomas Browning is standing in the way.”

  The burst of energy, the release that came with saying out loud what she really felt, gave a manic quality to her speech. Liberated from her own carefully imposed restraints, she became almost giddy. She took things to absurd extremes.

  “Our own theory is that they’ll use the hostages.”

  I was laughing without knowing why. “The hostages?”

  She settled back into a more introspective mood. “The vice president was supposed to have a voice in who got hired at the White House. That got translated after the election into four or five positions for people who had worked with us. They’re over there somewhere. They work during the day at some menial job, but they’re locked up at night. And the only way to win their freedom is if Browning agrees to go quietly when they tell him he won’t be on the ticket.”

  It pointed to an interesting dilemma. If it was true that Connally, and apparently Walker too, had threatened Browning with political extinction if he did not join the ticket, what could they use to make him suffer dismissal without complaint? As the nominee of his party, the president could name whomever he wished. There were precedents for replacing an incumbent vice president, but, as Elizabeth had adamantly insisted, Thomas Browning had a stature that made him into something of an independent force. He could not stop the president from choosing someone else, but he could turn it into the political equivalent of an ugly divorce. This was a possibility to which Elizabeth Hartley had devoted a great deal of thought. It had been the subject of heated conversations among the people who worked for the vice president.

  “Take it to the convention,” she explained as we walked along the sidewalk next to the Russell Senate Office Building. “First threaten it—then do it. Tell them you won’t quit. Tell them they can pick someone else— announce it to the world, for all you care—but that you’re the vice president, that you were nominated by a convention and you’re going to the convention to seek the nomination again.” A cunning smile on her lips, Elizabeth gave me a sidelong glance. “It’s never been done before. Television would love it: a convention with something to watch. And it wouldn’t matter what happened.” She said this with a kind of forceful intensity, and I was fairly certain that it was an argument she had begun to make within that small circle of the vice president’s advisors.

  “It wouldn’t matter what happened?” I asked. “You mean it wouldn’t make any difference whether he won or lost?”

  “None at all,” she said with a cold, hard, determined look.

  “If he loses, he’s out—someone else is on the ticket.”

  “And the Democrats win the election and Browning runs next time as the Republican who tried to warn everyone about the dangers of a right-wing takeover,” she replied without hesitation.

  That was one possibility. There was another.

  “He loses—and Walker is elected to a second term.”

  She tossed her head. “Browning’s position isn’t any worse than if he hadn’t fought at all. Better, really,” she added with a quick, shrewd glance. “He’s set himself up as someone who will fight for what he believes— whatever the odds. He can run for the nomination as a way of continuing the fight. If he doesn’t do it, if he lets Walker just pick whom he wants, how does he explain four years later that he didn’t object to having some fanatic take his place?”

  She was walking at a brisk clip, talking rapidly as we reached the corner and waited for the light to change. “And what if he wins?” she continued as the light changed and we started across. “Then he’s shown such strength, he’s such an independent force—no one will challenge him for the nomination at the end of Walker’s second term.”

  “And if he wins, but Walker loses? Then what? Won’t everyone blame Browning? Won’t they say it’s because he put up a fight that split the party and let the Democrats win?”

  She was like a chess player who had spent hours, days, years, considering not only every possible move but also the way in which everything changed with each new move that was made. She knew it all by heart, knew it so well that the words were coming out of her mouth before the thoughts had time to formulate in her mind.

  “Lost because Walker, not Browning, was at the top of the ticket. Lost because Walker tried to force Browning out, not because Browning fought back and won. Lost because no matter how much people trust and admire Browning, it’s still just the vice presidency, and after four years the public has had enough of domestic disaster and narrow-minded sanctimony and want something else. So any way you look at it, by fighting for it at the convention, the vice president wins.”

  Even as she said this, her mood began to darken. There was something she did not know: a sense that other forces were at work. It was like a hint of danger: vague, disquieting and real. She could feel it. It had happened before.

  “There’s something—I don’t know—like what they did in South Carolina. They might try that: a smear campaign. If they think it’s the only way.”

  Elizabeth checked her watch. “Just got time to get you over to the embassy. That’s where you’re meeting the vice president—right?”

  We were on Embassy Row, close to our destination, when I remembered something she had said, and the question I had wanted to ask.

  “What happened in South Carolina?”

  Elizabeth stopped at the curb. “They made up some awful stories, things that weren’t true, but stories that you can’t come out and deny without making it sound like there must be something to it.”

  “What kind of stories?” I persisted.

  “Things about him, things about his wife; there were even some things about their children. The worst one, though, was a rumor.”

  “What rumor?”

  “That years ago he killed someone, a woman— pushed her out a window in some hotel in New York.” she shook her head. “These are dangerous people, Mr. Antonelli. If someone fell out a window now, you know what I would think? That they did it so they could start another terrible lie: that Thomas Browning must have done it because it was the kind of thing he had done before.”

  CHAPTER 7

  It was one of those countries known only to school children forced to memorize the names of countries on a map, one of those remote places that other than when an occasional earthquake of devastating proportions struck was never mentioned on the news, a place that exists without history or memory for thousands of years. The precise size of its population was a matter of hazy conjecture, and at least one of its borders followed certain of the tributaries of a vast swollen river that had never been entirely traced. The rain-rus
ted weaponry of its proud and vainglorious army, used on occasion against a few unarmed civilians, had never been fired in war. Insignificant and forgotten, it was still an independent country, and in the strange mathematics of international relations entitled to exchange ambassadors on terms of strict equality with the greatest power on earth. Like the famous equality of both the rich and the poor to sleep under the bridges of Paris, it was an equality that did nothing to change, or even conceal, the fact that no one in Washington paid the slightest attention to the ambassador or, with the possible exception of some junior clerk in the State Department, knew his name. His Excellency, the ambassador, the official representative of a sovereign nation that was only too eager to be a full partner in all relevant discussions about the great issues of war and peace, had finally convinced his government that the only way to be noticed by the colossus of the north was to build an embassy the like of which official Washington had never seen. The night it opened, everyone who was anyone lined up to get in.

  Browning had not arrived, so I grabbed a glass of champagne from a waiter and got into the receiving line just ahead of the flowing robes of a sheikh from Bahrain. When I reached the ambassador, he was pointing toward an enormous weathered beam that ran under the glass ceiling from the wall of gold-filled mosaic to the opposite one of reddish beige marble.

  “There were only two trees like it in the world,” he said with evident pride at having cut the number in half. I gave my name to the ambassador’s assistant whose job was to whisper the name of each new guest into his master’s ear. The ambassador finished shaking hands with the statuesque woman in front of me. Because I was obviously of no importance, he bent his head toward the assistant, quickly memorizing the name of the sheikh from Bahrain, as he shook my hand.

  I wandered around, through thick clusters of faces familiar to one another, conversing in a babble of languages that sounded more interesting than my own. Even the English sounded strange and foreign. A couple of Australians were laughing uproariously, taunting a hapless New Zealander with the outcome of a rugby match that had taken place ten thousand miles away at home. A slight, nervous-looking man, speaking in a clipped British accent, remarked that all the embassy lacked were the slot machines he had seen in the only other building that looked like this, “out in Las Vegas, where the American civilization has reached its peak.”

  “Do you always stand against a wall at these things, talking to yourself?”

  I looked up into the laughing dark eyes of a woman in her mid-thirties with a mouth both intelligent and sad. Her hair was dark brown, the part of it in the shadows looked black. With thin shoulders and slim wrists, moving with a soft, lithe step, she was graceful and elegant and entirely self-possessed. She pronounced each English word as if she were trying it out for the first time, not certain how it would sound, with the effect that you found yourself sympathizing with her mistakes. Not only was she charming, she was the first person here I had seen who did not seem obsessed with having everyone see her. She was wearing a plain black dress. She held out her hand.

  “I’m Gisela Hoffman.”

  “German?”

  “Yes, German. And you are?”

  I cringed at my bad manners. “Joseph Antonelli.”

  She laughed, teasing me with her eyes. “Italian? And what brings you here tonight?—A mission from your government—or did you simply fall in from the street to examine more fully—I think I mean ‘more closely’— Yes?—the ugliest building in Washington and maybe the world?”

  She held a glass of champagne at the level of her chin. She looked at me with a studious expression, as if she had passed a judgment of profound importance, the whole time daring me not to laugh.

  “I wasn’t invited, but I wouldn’t have come on my own, either,” I replied, watching the soft, easy way she moved.

  “Then you’re with someone,” she remarked. There was a hint of disappointment, a hint so subtle that I could not be sure it had not been my own vanity imagining what was not there.

  “In a manner of speaking, I guess I am.”

  She laughed, and then, as if we had been acquainted for a long time, placed her hand on my wrist and told me it was something she hoped no one would ever say about her. I was not quite clear what she meant. She laughed again, quieter, more intimate, than before. Her hand still rested on my arm.

  “Be with me ‘in a manner of speaking.’”

  The sadness, that strange first impression of her mouth, turned into a bittersweet smile that a moment later died upon her lips. I did not know her—we had barely just met—and I was explaining myself as if I had done something wrong.

  “No,” I stammered, “all I meant was that I’m supposed to meet…” I started to say the vice president, but it sounded stuffy and pretentious and much too official. “I’m supposed to meet an old friend, my roommate from law school.”

  She raised her eyebrows as she sipped champagne, a kind of blank response that seemed to end a flirtation that had perhaps never begun. Her gaze roamed around the hot, crowded room. The friendly warmth in her eyes had been replaced with cold impatience. She was waiting for someone else as well.

  “He’s late,” she said, turning quickly back to me. “He’s always late.” She plucked another glass of champagne from a silver tray that floated by. “Americans seem to think it doesn’t matter—that you can come when you want, that everyone will wait.” She checked her watch and stood tense and rigid, her eyes glittering with the severity of the judgment.

  “You’re the lawyer,” she said suddenly. She seemed astonished that she had not known it before. “Joseph Antonelli. I thought you looked familiar. And of course the name… But what are you doing here? Yes, meeting your law school roommate. What an odd place to meet. We’ve met before,” she said with a look that dared me to remember. “Last year—in Los Angeles—at the Stanley Roth trial.”

  I had met a lot of people in Los Angeles during that trial, but I was certain I had not met her. I would not have forgotten if I had.

  “When you held that first press conference, the one outside the studio. I was there, one of the reporters writing down everything you said.”

  “You’re a reporter? You covered the trial?”

  “No, unfortunately not. I work for a German paper, and I was offered the chance to join the Washington bureau.” She inclined her head, smiling to herself as she looked at me from a different angle and saw me in a different light. “Joseph Antonelli,” she mused. “I saw the movie they made about the case. The actor who played you was very convincing.”

  She paused, searching for the exact words with which to make a strange observation. It was shrewd and subtle, and it went right to the heart of something that until I heard it from her I had not quite grasped.

  “It must be difficult, though, to have become that famous and have everyone think you look like someone else.”

  “It may have been what saved me. What kept me from confusing who I was with what I saw on the screen.” That was as far as I wanted to go. I did not want to talk about me; I wanted to find out more about her.

  “You cover politics for a German paper? That’s why you’re here—the opening of the new embassy?”

  She dismissed it out of hand.

  “Browning. I cover the vice president every chance I get.”

  With a casual gesture, she gently took hold of my sleeve, pulling us a little closer.

  “It’s fascinating. The two of them, the president and the vice president, represent the two extremes in America: the best of what you are and the worst. It’s hard to believe—isn’t it? You could have had Browning and you chose Walker. It’s fascinating. It really is. It’s the best story in town.”

  There was a sudden commotion. Then all the noise stopped. Every pair of eyes looked the same way at once.

  “It’s what I told you,” whispered Gisela Hoffman. “He always comes late.”

  The ambassador waited with open arms, ready to embrace in the name of freedom and
equality the vice president of the United States. Browning stopped a step short and placed his left hand on the ambassador’s shoulder, perhaps as part of his greeting, or perhaps to hold him at bay. In a distant gesture of formal goodwill, he offered his hand. The ambassador’s smile froze on his face. Browning stepped forward to address the crowd, and the ambassador found himself alone and ignored.

  Browning was gracious, but only to a point. He said he had wanted to see for himself the “very interesting” building that had caught everyone’s attention, and that he was as mindful as anyone that there were countries in the world with rich cultures and traditions that were not given the attention they deserved. Then, under the towering walls of marble, gold and glass, he proceeded to remind them of how another country had once gone ignored.

  “When the United States first became a country, we could not afford embassies of our own. The few ambassadors we sent to the great capitols of Europe, London, Paris, Saint Petersburg and Madrid, lived in boardinghouses or cheap hotels and waited sometimes for years before they were so much as granted an audience with the foreign secretaries of those great and powerful nations.”

  Browning looked around the crowd. His brown eyes danced with cheerful malice. When he spoke, his voice carried a cautionary tone.

  “We made a very poor appearance among all the extravagance of a European court. We complied with all the forms of diplomatic usage in our formal relations, but that was as far as we could go. We were young, and perhaps unimportant, but we understood what we were and what we wanted to be. We had made a revolution in the name of freedom and we were not going to give that up. We were the New World, not because we were on one side of the Atlantic and Europe was on the other, but because we understood that republican government, that democracy, owned the future, whoever may have owned the past.”

  Raising his eyes, Browning stretched out his hand, a gesture meant to encompass all of his surroundings, from the timbered glass ceiling down to the elaborate hand-sculpted floor.