"The mystic tradition," she said. "It's not till this afternoon, actually, but I've got a lot of studying to do."
"Tough one, is it?"
She looked uncomfortable. Did she suspect sarcasm? "Yes," she replied. "Besides, Professor Zacharias is a world authority on the subject, and I'd really like to do well."
"You'll wow him," I said. "No problem."
She looked at me, and then quickly looked away. What had I said now?
"How'll you get home, Liz?" Kevin asked from the front seat.
"Oh, don't worry about me, Kevin. My girl friend Sally lives in Cohasset, and she can drop me off."
We started talking about logistics then: when my flight was leaving, when I was coming back, who was picking me up. My everyday hectic life took over once again, and the memories of the funeral faded.
Maybe they'll arrest me at the airport, I thought. That would be dramatic enough to suit Cavanaugh.
Cabot College is crammed onto a small campus on the fringes of Harvard; its proximity to its better-known neighbor figures prominently in its recruiting brochures. Kevin dodged his way past the lunatic Harvard Square pedestrians and pulled up in front of the student center. Liz gathered her things and prepared to get out of the car. I put my hand on her arm. "Thank you, Liz," I said. "You were wonderful."
Her cheeks reddened. I thought about kissing her, but the moment passed, and she was gone. We watched her enter the building, and then Kevin headed for the airport.
"Do you believe the spirits of the dead are always with us?" I asked Kevin on the way.
He considered. "To an Irishman the dead are more real than the living," he replied. "You know that, Senator."
"Too true," I agreed. "Too true." The memories had faded for today, but they would return, I knew. They would return as long as I was among the living. I stared out the window at the traffic, and we were silent for the rest of the ride.
Chapter 9
No one arrested me at Logan; no one arrested me when I arrived in Washington. I was puzzled but grateful; the longer Cavanaugh delayed, the better things looked. One of my aides was waiting for me at the airport, and he drove me to the Capitol. It was time to do my job again.
The job. Millions of dollars and thousands of people were involved in the fight over it. I had it and wanted to keep it; Bobby Finn was trying to take it away from me.
Why?
Not for the money. Finn's wife is rich, and I could make a hell of a lot more practicing law than I could being a senator, as Liz was always willing to remind me. The salary might be tolerable, actually, if the expenses weren't so appalling. The government pays your plane fare back and forth to your home state, for example, but it doesn't do much to help you maintain two residences. When we first moved down to Washington, Liz and I crunched the numbers, and they just didn't add up; we couldn't afford to keep our house in Hingham as well as own a place in D.C. That was a big part of the reason Liz eventually decided to go back to Hingham, while I moved into the kind of dreary apartment I had thought I'd left behind after law school.
And that brings up the personal cost of being a senator. Where is the time to be a father and a husband? You have a duty to your constituents; you have a duty to the nation and to history. Your personal life can wait, or it can disappear. History won't mind. Your constituents won't mind—unless they find out you're a hypocrite.
So Kathleen grew up with a father who saw her occasionally on weekends and during Senate recesses. She refuses to let me apologize, but I know that somewhere inside her she must resent this.
Ah, but surely the power a senator possesses is worth the personal struggle. How much power do I really have, though? I work all year in committee on some bill, and it gets filibustered or amended to death by some senator who wants to look good to the folks back home. Everything is watered down in the constant pressure to compromise, to find the votes, to get something passed. In the attorney general's office I had power over human lives: my employees, the people I prosecuted, the people whose interests I protected. In the Senate I am just one voice among a hundred, shouting to make myself heard.
So why be a senator? Why spend millions of dollars of other people's money, and all my time and energy, running for an office I'm not sure I want?
Because I'm a politician.
Because Harold White forces me to run.
Because I'm trying to make things up to a mother I never knew.
Because occasionally I make a difference.
* * *
Well, I may not be sure why I want to be a senator, but one thing is clear: I'm good at it. I struggled for a while when I first went down to Washington, as my preconceptions battled with reality. But then I was lucky—and privileged—to find a mentor, someone who could show me what I had to do to make my mark.
His name is Carl Hutchins. Like me, he is basically a law-and-order Republican. But he is a generation older than I am, and he has been in the Senate long enough to become an institution. He was returned for a fourth term the year I was elected. I didn't approach him at first because, for all my ignorance, I at least knew that freshmen senators don't go to the institutions; the institutions come to them—if the institutions so choose. One day he sat next to me on a sofa in the cloakroom as we waited for the Senate leaders to extricate themselves from some procedural tangle. His suit was rumpled; the cuffs of his white shirt were frayed. "This is the damnedest place, isn't it, son?" he murmured.
"I'm beginning to find that out," I replied.
He scratched the left cheek of his long, thin face; he hadn't shaved very well, and there were white hairs peeking out from the craggy skin. "Son," he said, "the Senate is made up of three kinds of horses: the workhorse, the show horse, and the horse's ass. Nowadays it's gettin' tough to tell those last two apart. But you know, it's the first kind that really gets things done around here."
"Are the workhorses the ones who get reelected?" I asked.
He chuckled. "It's never failed for me, son. Never failed for me."
It was good advice, especially because it was advice I wanted to hear. I am by nature a workhorse, even if I've had to master some of the show horse's tricks. So I was more than willing to do the studying and the preparation. The leadership put me on the Armed Services Committee, so I valiantly attempted to master the defense budget. I got the seat I wanted on the Judiciary Committee, where I did my homework on the nominees for judgeships and became an expert on federal criminal law. I soon realized that I couldn't master everything, though, so I kept my focus narrow and didn't pretend to know what I didn't.
And my strategy worked. Before long my colleagues were paying attention to me. Fellow Republicans started following my lead on my chosen issues, realizing that I wouldn't steer them wrong. Even better in some ways, the press paid attention, also understanding that I was a reliable source of information. I got a reputation as an effective legislator. People began to talk about my heading for a still-higher office.
Meanwhile, Liz was hating every moment of it.
A year or so after I was elected, Senator Hutchins wandered into my office late one night. This was a rare occurrence, I knew. Senators are too busy to go visiting each other on the spur of the moment. His tie was loose, and his suit as usual was rumpled. He looked approvingly at the mound of paper work on my desk. "Sometimes I sleep in my office," he said. "Get more done that way. Saves the commute."
His wife had died a couple of years before, his kids were grown up, and he lived by himself. He was a busy, powerful man, but he also had to be terribly lonely. "Maybe I should do the same thing," I replied. "Shower in the gym. Save the rent. My wife is moving back to Massachusetts with our daughter."
He nodded. "It's a hell of a life," he said.
I thought about that for a moment. "Do you mean that in a positive sense or a negative sense, Senator?"
He chuckled. "Hard to say, son. Hard to say." He sat down and started to talk, and we both began to feel a little less lonely.
*
* *
"Mrs. Sullivan, round everyone up for a meeting at five-thirty," I said as I strode into the office.
"Yes, sir." Everyone would be rounded up. Mrs. Sullivan is a stout dynamo who has worked on the Hill all her life. She likes it that I don't call her by her first name.
I called Art Chandler and Denny Myers into my office. Denny was another aide, a hotshot just a couple of years out of Stanford Law. They brought me up to date on the current state of senatorial affairs. Mondays are usually fairly slow in the Senate, while its members straggle in from the weekend visits to their states. But things tend to fly out of control toward the end of the session, as everyone rushes to get some action on bills before time runs out. Tactics change from moment to moment, and if you make the wrong decision, a pet project can be lost irretrievably.
My pet project was the prison aid amendment to the crime bill. Like many pieces of legislation, it started with a staff member's bright idea and grew. The idea was simple and not even especially "law and order":
Problem: One reason our criminal justice system is failing is that states have nowhere to put the criminals.
Related issue: The Defense Department is closing many of its military bases as the result of budgetary cutbacks.
Solution: Why not give these bases to the states and provide the states with some money to turn them into prisons?
The difficulties with turning such a straightforward idea into a law turned out to be enormous. The Pentagon wanted to hold on to the closed bases, in case communism should rise again. Fiscal conservatives didn't want to fund another costly program. Liberals wanted the bases earmarked for the needs of the homeless. States that didn't have the closed bases complained that they would be treated unfairly—why should they be denied the federal windfall? Towns where the bases were located complained that they didn't want prisons in their backyards.
But enough people were interested so that the plan lingered, got worked on, and developed. It moved away from dealing solely with the closed bases to a general procedure for helping states build prisons. Now it set up a complicated system by which the federal government matched state funds for prison construction, gave states priority in obtaining closed bases if they were going to turn them into prisons, provided towns with incentives to accept prisons... and so on. Something for almost everyone.
But the plan was still a bit too controversial, and I couldn't even get it out of committee as part of the omnibus crime bill. The chairman wanted something he was sure he could shepherd through the full Senate. There is a crime bill every election year to placate the angry voters, and no one wants to see it fail because of one dubious provision. So now I had to offer the plan as an amendment when the bill came to the floor.
In the meeting in Boston on Saturday Art Chandler hadn't been optimistic about our chances. I wanted to know if anything had changed.
Art shook his head. "It's gonna be close. You may have to lean on a few people to win this one."
"What if we cut the cost projections? Lower the federal contribution or something."
"Lower it any more, and states won't think it's worth their while getting involved," Denny Myers pointed out. "The whole rationale of the plan disappears." It had been his idea in the first place, and he wasn't used to the give-and-take of the legislative process yet. He no longer recognized his brainchild, and it made him unhappy.
"Something's better than nothing," I said. "I've got to get this thing passed, especially after the little media event we staged at that county jail yesterday."
"Then you should go to work on Carl Hutchins," Art said. "There are five, maybe six senators who'll follow his lead."
I sighed. "He's got a problem, doesn't he?"
Art nodded. "A thirty-eight-year-old two-term congressman with a pretty wife and a big smile and favorability ratings that are off the chart. The congressman's up ten points in the polls, so Hutchins can't make any mistakes."
"But surely Carl can make the case on this one. It's not like we're, I dunno, trying to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment or something."
"Agreed. But all I know is that he hasn't committed yet, so you've gotta make him commit. Call in your IOUs. Turn on the charm. Just don't let him slip away."
"All right," I said. "I'll get on it. And, Denny, you figure out how to cut the cost by, let's say, twenty percent. Now, what else have we got?"
There was plenty more. And there were bells signaling votes on the Senate floor, there were photo sessions with delegations representing this and that, there was a conference call with the campaign staff back in Boston, and another day passed.
At five-thirty I met my assembled staff in the largish open area where a few poor souls answered my mail. I like my staff, and I imagine they like me, although it's impossible to say for sure. Senators spend more time with their staffs than they do with one another, but still the gap between the boss and his workers is virtually unbridgeable. The workers don't appear on national TV; they don't get invited to the White House; their names aren't familiar to millions of people. And they certainly have no hope of someday taking over their boss's job. I try to be pleasant with my people, but the Senate is too demanding and the stakes are too high for me to be especially forgiving of incompetence. So perhaps they fear me more than they like me, but that simply can't be helped.
"And how was everyone else's weekend?" I asked for starters, and they gave me an appreciative laugh. Then I launched into a version of the talk I had given to the campaign workers Saturday night, except a little less political. It was crucial that my own people see me as confident and unafraid. Otherwise rumors were bound to leak to the media: He's running scared; morale is low; things are falling apart.
I got a round of applause when I finished. Everyone was more than willing to hear good news. Their jobs depended on my reelection, after all.
And then I retreated into my office again to catch up on business. I tried calling Carl Hutchins, but he wasn't available. After a couple of hours I was starving, so I decided it was time to go home.
Home. A reporter for Town and Country or House & Garden or some such magazine once wanted to do a piece on the glamorous young senator's living quarters. Marge Terry actually brought up the request at a staff meeting, to give everyone a laugh. I live in a nondescript apartment in a racially mixed neighborhood in the District. My housekeeping does not enhance the neighborhood. Kathleen visited the apartment once, and after her first view of it she said she couldn't be blamed for her sloppiness; it was clearly inherited.
What's a guy to do? I never have the time or energy to clean. Hiring someone would be more trouble than it was worth. I could have asked Liz to decorate the place, but it was a matter of pride that, if she didn't want to stay in Washington, I didn't need her help.
Besides, I basically don't care. The apartment is a place to park my body at night, nothing more. I didn't come to Washington to entertain or do little household projects; I came to be a senator.
When I finally arrived at my apartment with a briefcase full of memos and a leaking bag of Chinese food, however, I could have wished for a more welcoming sight than last week's newspapers strewn across the couch and a balled-up pile of shirts that hadn't made it to the laundry on the kitchen table. "Such glamour," I muttered. I got the last beer out of the refrigerator and sat at the table in front of my dirty shirts, where I drank the beer and ate some of the Chinese food; the rest would have to do me for the week. Then I cleared a space on the sofa, sat down, and called Danny.
He was the one to answer the phone for a change. "Danny, did the police talk to you yet?" I said, without bothering with any amenities.
"No. No one's come. That's good, isn't it?"
He sounded hopeful but nervous. I heard the TV in the background; children were shouting at one another. He wanted me to tell him the danger was past. But how could I tell him that?
"Sure it's good. But it could still happen. Did you talk to any of those lawyers?"
"Uh, I didn't get aroun
d to it."
I hadn't really expected him to. "Just don't start thinking we're out of the woods," I said. "There's no telling what the police are up to."
"I understand," he said, a trifle belligerently. He didn't like lectures. "I'll call you if anything happens."
"Please, Danny. Please do that."
I hung up and stared at the phone. He was right; it was a good sign that the police hadn't come to talk to him. Why hadn't they? Grilling him was the obvious first step. Unless the police didn't have the tape.
But they had to have the tape—unless my brother was deluded. Unless whoever had killed Amanda had stolen it.
And who had told Amanda about my relationship with Jackie Scanlon? I know I hadn't, and Danny and Jackie both denied it. Who else was there?
I gave it up for the moment. The light on the answering machine was blinking. I rewound the tape and played back the messages.
And suddenly I was listening to Amanda once again.
"Hi, uh, it's Friday morning at, let's see, nine-thirty. I guess you've already left. The thing is, Jim, I'd like to see you again. I know how busy you are but—maybe just a few minutes this weekend. I know I shouldn't be calling you like this, and I promise not to be a pest but—please, Jim. It's important. Just come over anytime."
Silence and then a beep, and that was all.
It gave me an eerie feeling, to listen to her voice in my empty apartment. A message from the dead. If she had called a few minutes earlier, she would have gotten hold of me. Would that have changed anything? Would that have somehow kept her alive?
I played the message again and again, searching for clues. She didn't sound like a reporter on the trail of a scoop. She had the uncertain, tentative attitude I had become so familiar with, as if she weren't quite sure what to say to me, how to act. But was she in fact acting? She had her chance to break through the barriers now. You want human interest; I'll give you human interest. And maybe get a Pulitzer for my trouble. So why not pretend just a little and get me over to her apartment for one final, devastating interview?
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