by D. W. Buffa
“Abortion; the right to bear arms; prayer in schools,” I said, beginning with the top of the list generally considered the conservative agenda. Staring down at the floor, Browning shoved one foot an inch or so ahead of the other.
“That’s what they want everyone to think. It keeps everyone’s attention away from what they really want,” he muttered darkly. He pushed himself away from the side of the bookshelf and turned toward me, filling the space inside the frame of the French doors.
“Every time I hear Walker or one of his friends give a speech and mention Teddy Roosevelt, I want to throw up. Roosevelt understood what industrialization had done to the country and how it was going to change the world. There was no equivalency, no balance between the interest of business and the interest of the American government for Roosevelt. The government—the public interest—was what counted. The nation!—That’s what mattered. You think these people believe that? They don’t have the faintest idea what Teddy Roosevelt meant.”
With a long, deep breath, Browning gathered himself, the look in his eyes urgent, serious, intense.
“We don’t talk about ourselves as citizens, with a citizen’s duties and obligations; we talk about ourselves as consumers, people whose basic function is to buy the things we make so we can keep making more. The country is attacked. What do we do? Call for great sacrifice? Call for a new dedication to what we believe as a country? Treat it as a second Pearl Harbor and ask everyone to join the military or in some other way help prosecute the war? Treat it as a great opportunity to change the way we live, to become a country with something more important to do than choose the latest amusement? No—Do the same thing you’ve done before: spend money, shop. The economy is the important thing. And patriotism—the willingness to sacrifice for freedom and for the country you love? It’s become too expensive, something we can’t any longer afford. If I had been president, things would have been different. I can assure you of that. The days of soft self indulgence would have been gone forever.”
“What would you have done?” I asked.
He did not seem to hear me, but then, as if the question had echoed somewhere in his mind, he looked at me hard and intense.
“I would have…” He caught himself. With his head bent forward, he made his way to the desk. He pulled open the second drawer down on the left and extracted a small, thin paperback volume. The cover was bent and broken, the purple color worn away.
“When you argue a case to a jury—when you know you’re right—have you ever found yourself so swept up in the emotion, in the passion of the moment, that you say things that have an immediate effect; and it’s exactly the effect you want, because it’s the truth and you feel it; and because you feel it, everyone watching you, listening to you, feels it, too; and not only do they feel it, but they know they can trust you, believe you, believe that what you’re telling them is true? And have you ever then gone back, after the trial is over, after all the heat of the moment is gone and read in the cold light of day a transcript of the trial; read what you said that day, read what you believed with such fervor, such conviction; and because the moment has passed, cringed just a little, wondering how you could have done it, how you could have said the things you did? And at the same time, didn’t you know you had been right, that it was all true, and that while it might sound stilted, even fanatical, in the same circumstances, surrounded with the same sense of urgency, you would do it again?—That you would, in that old, timeworn phrase, ‘seize the moment’?”
Browning glanced down at the book he held in his hands. When he looked up there was a trace of regret, a sense of having been close enough to touch, but not quite close enough to grasp, something he had wanted more than anything. It lasted only an instant, and if I had not known him as well as I did, or as well as I thought I did, I would have questioned whether I had seen it there at all.
“Here,” he remarked, laughing at himself as he handed the book to me. He put his hand on my shoulder as we turned and I went with him toward the door. “Read this if you want. There is something in it that explains what I was going to say.”
I glanced at the cover as he opened the door to the hallway. “Montesquieu, The Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline.” Puzzled, I looked at Browning, but he was walking quickly toward the dining room where behind the closed door could be heard a tumult of fierce, shouting noise. He put his hand on the door handle, but did not pull it open.
“Read especially the part about what happened, or rather what could have happened, after Julius Caesar was stabbed,” he said, a distant, enigmatic smile on his lips. “Then there will be two of us who have.”
He opened the door, and a dozen screaming voices were immediately dumb. Toward the far end of the table, Elizabeth Hartley opened the fist with which she had just struck the table and spread her fingers out.
“It’s good to see that your deliberations are proceeding in such a calm, dignified manner,” said Browning. “I’ll be with you in a moment.” He shut the door behind him and with his hand on my shoulder walked me a few steps away.
“Think about what I told you. I meant what I said: Someone is going to be indicted. You’re the only one I trust.”
“I still can’t believe they would actually…”
“Mr. Vice President,” said an urgent voice from the end of the hall. Browning waited as one of his assistants walked quickly toward him and handed him a telephone. Browning seemed to understand immediately that it was important. He held the phone to his ear, staring straight ahead, listening without the slightest change of expression until the end.
“Thank you. I understand.”
After the assistant had taken the telephone and left us alone, Browning gave me an ominous look.
“Things are moving more quickly than I thought. The grand jury is meeting this morning in New York.” He dropped his head and stared intently at the floor. A shudder passed through him. “They’ll have an indictment by this afternoon.”
I had the feeling that what was about to happen had happened a long time ago, and that I was somehow living it all over again, repeating it until I finally got it right.
Browning did not say who was going to be indicted, but I think he knew. Perhaps he was still hoping that it would not happen, that what he had just been told was wrong, or that if there were an indictment, it would name someone else. All he said was that we would know for certain before the day was out and that he was more certain than ever that I had to do what he had asked me to do the night before.
“Take the case. Call me as a witness; put me on the stand. I was there; I know what happened. I know how Annie died.” He looked me straight in the eye. “When was the last time all you had to do to win a case was put a witness on the stand who told the truth?”
His eyes blazed with confidence. With his hand on my shoulder, we shook hands.
“I meant what I said two nights ago, at the dinner in New York: You’re the best of them; and I knew it from the first day we met.”
He had his hand on the door to the dining room when he remembered. “There’s a telephone message for you,” he said, gesturing toward an office on the other side of the stairs from the study. He looked away awkwardly. “And I’m afraid that Joanna won’t be able to join you for lunch as she had planned. She isn’t feeling very well today.” He raised his head, glancing at me for an instant before he opened the door and disappeared inside. With that look he tried to apologize for the lie.
The message was from Gisela Hoffman. When I called her back, she answered on the second ring. The accent that made me start to laugh was gone. She was cold, aloof, severe. She said she had to see me. It was urgent.
In one of Browning’s private limousines I was driven out the gate and onto the street below. We passed the embassy that had for a few brief hours been the center of Washington’s attention the night before. People walked by without so much as a glance.
The driver pulled up in front of a narrow brick house on a leafy, tree-sh
aded Georgetown block filled with other houses of a similar look and nearly identical dimension. Most of them were three stories tall, with bay windows in the front; some of them had ornamental iron fences bulging with layers of lumpy black paint and shiny lacquered front doors; all of them had the dimly colonial look of lost elegance carefully restored. They were row houses, built originally to house the city’s vast supply of what were then called Negro servants and menial workers, but who were then driven out when the housing shortage became desperate in the great expansion of government that came with the Second World War. During the heady days of the New Frontier they became the fashionable address of the Washington elite. They were still home to some of the most famous and powerful people in town.
Gisela answered the door with the face I remembered. The cold and peremptory voice on the telephone seemed to belong to someone else. Holding the edge of the door with both hands, she glanced quickly down both sides of the street as I slipped inside. Browning had told me about the angry confrontation that had taken place at the embassy the night before. I wondered if she was worried about what might happen if she was seen talking with me twice. There was something amusing, and in a strange way, thrilling, about the thought of a jealous husband waiting somewhere outside.
She was wearing a white blouse and a simple black skirt. Her hair was pulled up. She had on red lipstick and high-heeled shoes that left a sharp abrasive echo in the air as she led me through the marble entryway and onto the hardwood floor of the living room, really nothing more than a small parlor, past the steep staircase that seemed to rise straight up from the hallway to the towering ceiling on the third floor above, and from there through a mirrored, windowless dining room into a large kitchen in the back.
“Thank you for coming.” She had that slightly embarrassed look I remembered from the night before, grinning like a schoolgirl at her best-intentioned failure at the right pronunciation of the words. “When you called me…” She hesitated, putting the sentence together in her mind. “When you called me back, I couldn’t speak—talk. I was at the office,” she explained. “I didn’t want anyone to know. I’m afraid—I was worried—you must think me very rude.”
We sat at a square table beneath the same high ceiling—at least ten, perhaps twelve feet—I had passed under in the rooms I had come through. Each floor must be like the first, one room wide, and with the sense, because the ceilings were so high, that the walls were pressing toward you, squeezing out the light.
Gisela looked at me with dark wide-open eyes, organizing her thoughts. She took a deep breath.
“I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. Her long, fine lashes beat rapidly as she sprang to her feet. “Can I get you something?”
“You said you wanted to see me. You said it was urgent.”
It was irresistible, that look of baffled embarrassment that swept across her face each time she remembered something she could not understand why she had forgotten. She shook her head and threw out her hands, then shrugged her shoulders, knit her brow, and tried hard to think.
“Well, urgent—perhaps that’s not quite the word. Important might have been better.” Slightly flustered, she blinked her eyes and glanced around the room as if she were a stranger, seeing it for the first time. “I asked you here, because I didn’t know anywhere else that might be… safe? Yes, well, perhaps… where no one would know we talked.”
With her fingernail she drew an invisible line on the table. By the time she stopped, she had become serious and strangely intent.
“You were in the same class in law school as Vice President Browning.”
It was not a question; but then again, it was. Or rather it was the beginning of an interrogation: polite, civilized, friendly and, as I immediately understood, potentially dangerous. I was waiting for her when she raised her eyes.
“And there was also at the law school, though not in the same class, another student: a young woman named Anna Winifred Malreaux?”
All my hurried caution vanished. I started to smile.
“Annie’s middle name was Winifred? I never knew that.”
Gisela’s expression did not change. She had not known Annie; she had not known any of us. She was interested only in what she had asked.
“Then, yes? Anna Malreaux was in law school at the same time?”
It was, I realized, a journalistic formality: the questions to which the answers were already known, before the other questions, the real questions, were asked.
“You already know that,” I replied. “Why are you asking me what you already know?” I asked sharply. “If you want to know about the vice president, don’t you think you ought to ask him?”
I was sorry that I had come. I started to get up. A wounded look entered her eyes, and without quite changing my mind, I paused, settled back in the chair and waited.
“I’m sorry. Perhaps I shouldn’t have… but I thought you would want to know. There is a new investigation into her murder and…”
“Annie wasn’t murdered,” I objected. “It was an accident. She fell out a window—she wasn’t pushed.”
“There is a new investigation into her—death; and there is going to be an indictment.”
I searched Gisela’s serious eyes. “How do you know that? How could you know that?”
Gisela lowered her eyes, studying the backs of her fingers after she laid her right hand palm down on the table. Browning had only just learned of it—how did she know it so soon?
“When did you hear there was going to be an indictment?”
She raised her eyes. “I learned about it this morning, just before I called. I can’t tell you any more than that.” she held herself with a rigid formality, like someone trying hard to be objective between the truth they cannot reveal and the lie they do not know how to tell.
“Someone in the New York district attorney’s office told you this?”
She started to fidget with her hands, became aware of it and stopped. Her eyes stayed fastened on mine, afraid that by looking away she would tell me what she did not think she should. Instead of hiding the truth, it gave it away. She knew there was an investigation; she knew there might be an indictment—but she had not gotten that information from anyone in New York.
“Your source is someone here, someone in the White House.”
She bent her head a little to the side. “You know I can’t tell you that. But you can tell me, can’t you? The vice president knew her? It happened in his hotel room—yes?”
“No,” I said almost angrily. “Not in his hotel room.” It was odd the way that seemed to change the meaning, the way it gave a completely different interpretation to what had happened. “At a hotel suite—a suite at the Plaza—in New York.” I laughed in frustration. “A suite! That scarcely does it justice. He may have had the whole floor: All the rooms connected one after the other. It was immense. There were people everywhere, milling all around.”
She gazed at me steadily, refusing to let herself be drawn away from the central, all-important point. Behind that malleable self-deprecating manner, there was something firm and resolute.
“You were there, then. What happened?”
“Yes, I was there.” I paused, hesitating; not about whether to tell the truth, but how much of it to share. “No, I wasn’t there.”
She stared at me in astonishment. “You were there— you were not there?”
“I was there at the Plaza in New York; I wasn’t there where it happened, when she fell.”
“Who was there?”
I looked away, glanced at my watch as if I thought it must be time for me to go. Scratching the side of my chin, I tried to sound indifferent and sounded instead like a fraud.
“It was a long time ago,” I said, gazing into her unbelieving eyes. “It was an accident. It was an accident,” I repeated. “There isn’t any question about that.”
“The vice president was in the room, wasn’t he?” she asked in a calm, measured voice.
With anyone else, I w
ould not have answered at all. I seldom spoke to reporters, and then only if I had known them for years and knew just how far I could go. But I was angry, angry at her for asking these questions, angry with myself for the foolish, awkward way I kept trying to avoid the truth.
“Why ask me something you already know? The White House must have told you he was there. It isn’t any secret. There was a police report—perhaps they failed to mention that! Annie Malreaux’s death was ruled an accident. Of course Browning was there. This is nothing more than a bad joke. The only reason there is an investigation is because the people who work for Walker—including, I imagine, the person you’ve been talking to—seem to have a talent for starting stories that help them get rid of people they couldn’t otherwise beat!”
I was on my feet, mumbling an apology about the way I had just spoken, telling her I had to leave. She let me go on, rambling incoherence, while she sat there, calmly watching me with cool, lucid eyes.
“You also went to law school with someone named Jamison Scott Haviland?”
The long formality of the name struck me as odd, incongruous, as if Jimmy Haviland had become a distinguished jurist, a member of the United States Supreme Court, someone who might have sat in place of Reynolds, with folded hands and a dignified smile, when each October the nine justices sat together to have their photograph taken at the opening of another term; as if Jimmy Haviland had made something of himself, been what he once had every right to expect he could become, instead of… well, instead of what he had become.
“Yeah,” I admitted, edging toward the kitchen counter. With my hands behind me, I leaned back, waiting for what came next. “Why?”