“We can say no,” Brooks says when he calls her.
He knows she doesn’t mean it.
“Not without consequences.”
“There are always consequences,” she says with a laugh. “Especially when the person asking is the president.”
“Why do you think he invited me and not you?”
“Oh, that’s easy, Peter. You’re the Republican. You haven’t done a lot of these. When it leaks out they came to you, the optics are different than if they came to an old Democratic hand who had vetted a dozen nominations.”
“Maybe.”
“What’s eating you?”
“I don’t like nominations. They’ve become ugly and ritualistic. Everyone comes away bloodied.”
“It’s a lifetime appointment,” Brooks says. “That’s a long time to lick your wounds.”
He marvels that the darker side of the city only seems to make her want to fight more. He doesn’t raise his deeper fear: that they are being set up somehow. That Nash might secretly want this different kind of jurist to fail so he can pick someone more liberal afterward. Is that far-fetched? Is he being paranoid? Why does he doubt Nash’s sincerity? Why does everyone doubt Nash’s sincerity?
“Let’s sleep on it,” he declares. “No decision should ever be made at the end of the day if it can be avoided.”
“See you in the morning.”
He puts on Sarah Vaughn singing “More Than You Know.” In Italy, before he came to America, most of what his father knew about this country was jazz. When he moved the two of them here, his father surrounded them with it.
The martini is gone. Maybe a second would help him sleep. Or not. He fixes one. Vaughn sings about love found after years of searching. He feels vodka in his temples. He closes his eyes.
His cell phone wakes him around 11:00. Caller ID from Virginia. He doesn’t know the number. Something tells him to answer anyway.
“Peter!”
It is James Nash’s voice.
“Mr. President?”
“I want you to feel you have a direct line to me. Anything you think I should know, just call. Use this number. I won’t answer. But I will always get back to you.”
Rena hasn’t said yes yet. It doesn’t seem to matter to Nash.
“I mean it. If there is anything that you need to ask, that you don’t want through channels.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Excellent. Good night, Peter.”
“Good night, sir.”
Rena hangs up.
What does James Nash want?
Seven
8:03 P.M.
San Francisco
He sits at a kitchen table and thinks about the unthinkable.
After all this time, it has really begun. After all the dreaming, plotting, thinking, planning. He thought he might be scared. He isn’t. He feels incredible.
He watches Mama carry the casserole to the table with that little shuffle in her walk that comes from wearing her slippers.
She slides into her seat without saying a word, gives him a look, just for a second, and then quietly says grace to herself as if he weren’t there.
“Eat your supper, Sweetness,” she says wearily. Sweetness was her nickname for him from when he was little.
When he got older, and into trouble, he came to think of the name as a mocking thing. He would overhear her tell people, with a shake of her head, “He has the face of an angel, so sweet, but there is a devil in his heart.” That hurt him back then. He wanted to please her. The way Peanut pleased her. And he feared the devil.
But eventually, when he was a teenager and angry most of the time, he fed off that hurt. He thought the “devil’s heart” meant he scared her a little. And he liked to think he scared people, maybe especially her.
All that was in the past now, almost twenty years ago, before he was sent away. Before he learned everything. Before all this started.
“You wash your hands?”
“Yes,” he says.
Mama’s head is tilted down toward her plate, her eyes looking up at him. It is the way cons eat inside, he thinks, as if suspicious someone might steal their food. He has been back more than a year, almost eighteen months. But he and Mama don’t talk, not really. She thinks he’s a boy still. They don’t have the years in between.
“I’m older now and I’m changed,” he said to her once, about a year ago, as if he wanted to explain to her how he felt differently now about so many things and wanted to make a lot up to her. But she looked at him as if he were throwing prison in her face, like he resented her for it or something, which wasn’t what he meant. After that, he never seemed to find a way to explain.
“What you been doin’ with yourself?” she asks.
“You know,” he says, not expecting the question.
“I don’t know. How would I know?”
“Mama, I . . .”
“You’re not hanging out with hoodlums I hope.”
Hoodlums? He starts to get that old feeling, angry, like a rod of steel has shot up his back and in a second he will explode from it. But he doesn’t. He feels the sensation rise and he just waits it out, and then he feels it go down again, and he thinks this is the new him. He has learned.
“No, Mama. I don’t see them anymore.”
He spends his time alone now. Planning.
“You going to that job?”
Clarke got him the handyman job. He’d always been handy.
“Sure.”
She looks at him. “You gotta keep that job now.”
“I will. I am.”
The job is a joke. An insult. A thing for ex-cons. Something for people who can’t get anything better. But he can’t say that to her. He can’t complain about the few things that people have done to try to help him.
“I hope so,” she says.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve been going to the job.” She looks at him, her eyes sunken, and takes a bite of her casserole. She is different, too. Not just older. Hollowed out.
If only he could tell her. How careful he is. How he has worked out all the details.
In that way they are alike, he has come to think. She is the kind of person who lives in the details of things. She and her friends always tell each other everything that happened each day—they went here and what this person said, and this is how they felt about it. It used to drive him nuts, but lately . . . He has discovered he is good at details, too. Now that he has a purpose.
The casserole has a smell from when he was a boy. He takes a bite. The smell is better.
Then he thinks of the day. It almost doesn’t seem real. Holding the bag over her head, feeling the life go out of her.
When will he do the next one? Soon. It has to feel right. He has to feel right. He needs to think about it. For a few more hours at least. Trust his instincts. He is good at this. He can feel it.
He looks over at his mother. She has had so much pain in her life, and he knows he’s been one of the causes. That tears at him.
I’m doing all this for you, he thinks. I am sweetness.
Part Two
The Scrub
April 14 to April 30
Eight
Tuesday, April 14, 11:00 A.M.
Arlington, Virginia
The cars are lined for a quarter mile.
They snake up the road toward the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, past the sloping green fields and the groves of oak and dogwood and the fallen of seven wars. The land that became Arlington National Cemetery once belonged to Robert E. Lee. His mansion still looks down on the grounds. By the summer of 1864, the Civil War had filled up all the cemeteries of Washington. So the Union confiscated the rebel general’s home and began to bury the boys he had killed in Mrs. Lee’s rose garden.
Rena watches people in dark colors and good shoes try to negotiate the steep lawn to the interment site. Secret Service has erected a security perimeter with electronic checkpoints, bunching the crowd into three lines. Inside the perimete
r, the number of mourners already exceeds five hundred. It will double in the next twenty minutes.
They have come to bury Supreme Court justice Julius Hoffman.
“The old judge would have loved this.”
Rena’s friend, the journalist Matt Alabama, is standing beside him. A correspondent for ABN News, one of the three old broadcast television networks, Alabama is taller than Rena and about twenty years his senior, with thick salt-and-pepper hair and a dashing but weary handsomeness. He is also older and more accomplished than network correspondents are usually allowed to become these days—he had spent a decade writing for the New York Times and had written four novels. Networks like CBS and ABN once had a penchant for hiring people like that, Rhodes scholars and literary intellectuals, back when television was new and trying to prove itself. Today, their audiences halved, network news divisions operate largely as break-even legacies, and Alabama is kept mainly for assignments like this, funerals and inaugurations—historic moments and signature rituals still deemed to require institutional memory.
“The Hoff liked an occasion,” Alabama says. “The pomp and circumstance of the town.”
“Why here?” Rena asks.
Most memorials for the high and mighty are held at the National Cathedral, across the river in Washington. Large public events at Arlington are rare.
“Hoffman wanted it that way,” Alabama says.
“And you know this how?” Rena asks.
“It’s an obvious question . . . the journalist’s greatest friend.” Rena raises an eyebrow. “I asked the son,” Alabama deadpans.
Alabama scans the growing assemblage of mourners. “And now I gotta go ask a lot of obvious questions of obvious people,” he says. He offers Rena a crooked salute and drifts away.
In the rows of white folding chairs, all of establishment Washington is on display. Such occasions are rare enough. Joint sessions of Congress assemble the elected, but only funerals seem to gather everyone, the elected and unelected, the powerful and truly powerful, and the seemingly ever-growing list of influence seekers.
Rena’s partner, Randi Brooks, arrives and offers him one of her big, marvelous smiles. At full wattage it involves her whole face, especially her eyes. She is tall, only an inch shorter than Rena, and heavy, but her soft features and prematurely graying chestnut hair accentuate her natural warmth for people—and hide her lawyer’s cunning.
“They could either save the damn country or destroy it if they dropped a dirty bomb right here, and I’m not sure which it would be,” Brooks says.
“That’s not funny,” Rena says.
“I’m only kidding,” she says. “It’s just that the only person in Washington who’s missing is the vice president.”
“He’s probably at a secret location, to protect the line of succession,” Rena says.
“He’s balling his mistress at a condo in Bethesda,” Brooks says.
“That is funny.”
“Now I’m not kidding.”
She probably isn’t. Brooks knows these sorts of things.
A short, broad-shouldered man moves in their direction. Brooks moves aside. The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives sticks out his right hand and places his left on Rena’s shoulder.
Brooks calls this move “the shug.” Half handshake and half hug, it is a staple of Washington. The shug is a way of suggesting something more intimate than acquaintance, though enemies could shug as easily as allies. The shug allows someone to lean in and whisper in another’s ear and not be overhead.
The Speaker makes use of this feature now.
“Peter, I want to thank you for this Cartwright thing.” His voice is low, signaling his seriousness. “How is Belinda?”
“Still processing,” Rena says.
Square-faced, balding, and doughy, the Speaker has a tendency toward dishevelment and a habit of sometimes using not-quite-the-right word, qualities that lead people to dismiss him. But he always looks you in the eye, and no one in Washington could remember him lying.
He ascended to the speakership because he was the only candidate with whom all of the factions in his party were still on speaking terms. None of those increasingly ideological factions fully trusted him. Each thought it could manipulate him. He, in turn, imagined he had outmaneuvered his puppeteers because he had more alliances than they did. “If you have many bosses you don’t really have any,” Rena had heard him joke. But his power is tenuous.
“Belinda understands the situation?” the Speaker asks.
Rena nods.
“I’m afraid her problem is that she’s a fool, but that isn’t usually a fire-able offense,” the Speaker tells him with a grim smile.
Rena thinks ambition, not foolishness, has been Cartwright’s ruin. But politicians are not inclined to see that quality as a vice.
Someone touches the Speaker’s shoulder; he nods a parting acknowledgment and disappears into a tide of aides.
Across the expanse of gathering people Rena sees William Stevens of Rhode Island, the second-longest-serving member of the Senate and the last lion of old-style liberals, but one who would also still make deals with Republicans. Stevens is talking to Rena’s old boss, Llewellyn Burke, the heir to an auto family fortune from Michigan who seems to move seamlessly among nearly everyone in both parties.
A round man approaches Rena with a smile. “A bad day for the country,” he announces.
“Senator,” Rena answers. The senator is Fred Blaylish, a Vermont Democrat with a thick New York accent, and a member of the Judiciary Committee, which would review Nash’s Court appointment.
“A bad day for everyone,” Blaylish adds, “including Justice Goldstein, though he’s too arrogant to know it.” Justice Goldstein and Justice Hoffman, both Jews, represented the two polar extremes of the Court.
“How’s that?” Rena asks.
“Hoffman made Goldstein’s arguments better. And the other way around. Great arguments require great antagonists.”
It’s the kind of point not many politicians would make.
Blaylish is the most liberal person in the Senate. He’s also openly gay, the only one in either legislative body, and considered by many the smartest person in Congress. Certainly Fred Blaylish thinks so.
“What do you think the president will do, Peter?”
Blaylish would be plugged in, Rena thinks. He might even know about the meeting at the White House last night. Rena doesn’t answer.
“You know there are seventy million Americans who consider themselves progressives in this country. They need a champion on the Court, too, Peter.”
Rena again says nothing, and Blaylish smiles.
The senator had befriended Rena, unpredictably, four years ago when his lover was implicated in a drug scandal. The Democratic Party hired Rena to find out if the scandal might implicate the senator, too. It wouldn’t, Rena concluded, but Blaylish had appreciated rather than resented Rena’s thoroughness. They also discovered they had friends in common, including Matt Alabama, and a shared enthusiasm for reading history. They had dinner occasionally.
“Peter,” he says, “if I can’t get information from you, at least I can do a little lobbying while I’m here.”
Rena pretends to be confused.
“The question now,” Blaylish says, “is how much Nash wants to tangle with the opposition. Especially with Chairman Morgan.” Furman Morgan is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. An ancient southerner, he must be close to eighty-five. He would run the hearings evaluating the nomination of Hoffman’s successor.
Whoever Nash nominates will not only need about half a dozen Republican votes to be confirmed, he or she will also need Morgan’s assent—however tacit it may be—if not his actual vote.
“And what does Chairman Morgan want?” Rena asks.
“Ah, well. Furman likes to create mystery. Or maybe at his age everything is a mystery,” Blaylish says with a lift of his substantial eyebrows.
“Freddieeee.” Blaylish tu
rns and Rena sees Deborah Cutter, the head of the liberal interest group Fair Chance for America. Cutter is one of the most powerful and respected women in Washington. She transformed Fair Chance from the second tier to the preeminent liberal interest group by moving further left at a time when many other progressive groups had withered or tried to become more moderate.
A considerable part of Cutter’s success was her skill on television. Unlike many liberals, Cutter believed that social values played into the hands of progressives, and she relished denouncing social conservatives as intolerant hypocrites whose insistence on religious faith dictating government policy was anti-American in a way the Founders would have considered repellent.
It helps that she is more beautiful than most movie stars—a youthful forty-three with flowing red hair and a hypnotizing smile—and more ruthless than even the most jaded political consultants. On camera that combination tended to intimidate opponents regardless of creed, color, or gender.
“The president has got to be strong,” Cutter says to Blaylish. “He’s got to. And frankly, he could use a good fight, Freddie. Really, he has more to gain from picking someone as strong as Hoffman, and losing, than he does from picking someone weak and winning.”
Blaylish tries to answer.
“I hope someone tells him that, Freddie. Someone he respects.”
“Hello, Deborah,” Blaylish says slowly.
“Have you talked to him?”
“Deborah, Justice Hoffman is not yet even in the ground,” Blaylish says.
“Freddie!”
Cutter notices Rena. “Hello,” she offers, along with a power smile, and pulls Blaylish away.
Shining City Page 4