NO SAFE PLACE

by Richard North Patterson

  Something seemed to move in Liam’s eyes. “Your mother . . .”

  Kerry could not look at him. He felt Liam’s large hand on his shoulder. “If you want to fight, Kerry, then you need to learn how . . .”

  For a moment, vivid as yesterday, Kerry was a boy again, afraid of his father, fearing for his mother, as lonely as Senator Kerry Kilcannon felt now.

  Ah, Liam. When was the last time I picked up the phone to call you? Three weeks ago?

  Tears filled Kerry’s eyes.

  You had sons of your own, so I could never say how much I loved you. Did you know that? Do you know it now?

  Resting his forehead on clasped hands, Kerry closed his eyes. The world around him vanished.

  When his intercom rang, he started. Angry, he grabbed the telephone.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt you,” his receptionist said. “But Ms. Costello’s here. She’ll only take a moment, she says.”

  Kerry was still.

  “Kerry?”

  “Yes. Send her in.”

  He composed himself, staring at the door. When Lara entered, she took a few steps forward and then stopped, fingers resting on the back of a chair. Her eyes were grave, he saw; she made no move to sit.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  She drew a breath. “I saw the news come over the wire. About your friend Liam Dunn.” Her tone was neither impersonal nor presumptuous. “I was coming to the Hill, and I just wanted to tell you I was sorry.”

  He was not prepared, Kerry realized. Not even for the simple words, or the look on Lara’s face—compassionate, all sense of probing gone.

  “Thank you,” he managed to say. “It’s hard, I’m finding.”

  Lara nodded. “I’ve never lost anyone. Not that way.”

  She must mean her father, Kerry realized. Perhaps, too, she was thinking of Jamie.

  She tilted her head, studying him, plainly hesitant. “Well,” she said, “I guess I should go.”

  Belatedly, Kerry stood. “I appreciate it. Really.”

  She gave him a first faint smile. “I understand.”

  The door closed softly behind her.

  He had needed her to leave, Kerry thought. But the office was too quiet now, and he felt lonelier than before.

  Palms on the desk, he stared down at the green desk blotter.

  There was much to do, he told himself. Call Liam’s widow, then his oldest son. Find out the funeral arrangements and what help they needed. And then, of course, tell Meg he was coming home.

  Kerry did those things. Then he sat at his desk and, after many cross-outs and erasures, drafted a brief statement—the words a senator should say on the death of a party leader.

  * * *

  When they held the service for Liam Dunn, Lara went with the localTimes reporter. Liam Dunn had been an important man in New Jersey politics, and Kerry Kilcannon’s mentor; surely, theTimes believed, there was a story in his passing and, perhaps, the passing of an era.

  Sacred Heart was overflowing as it had not been for years. There were floral displays from friends and local merchants, even one from a tavern in County Roscommon. The mayor and the governor sat in the first pew, as did several congressmen. Next to Liam’s family was Senator Kerry Kilcannon, with a gaunt, handsome woman Lara recognized as his mother and a pert, pretty one with auburn hair—his wife, Lara assumed. Meg did not seem to speak, Lara noticed, nor did she turn to console her husband.

  The priest’s tribute was warm, as were the eulogies given by Kerry and by Liam’s oldest son, a bluff, graying Irishman whose part it was to speak of Liam the husband and father. When Kerry rose, it was to recall the public man.

  “In Vailsburg,” Kerry said with a smile, “we all counted on Liam Dunn to do the best for us. And inmy case, he outdid himself.”

  There was a ripple of laughter, an appreciation of Irish self-deprecation and, more than that, the common memory of what Liam had meant to them all. Kerry’s face turned serious. “But he left me—and us—far more than a legacy of kindness: the belief, in spite of all we hear and read, that politics could be ‘an honorable adventure.’

  “ ‘Telling the truth when it’s hard,’ he once said to me, ‘is what political capital is for.’ ”

  There was more laughter, softer now. “Liam knew,” Kerry went on, “that in politics courage and practicality need not be enemies, and that without the other, either one is insufficient. Just as Liam—the practical man, and the courageous one—knew and said that blacks and whitesmust not be enemies.”

  The church was quiet, mourners of both races nodding. “We are lucky,” Kerry told them, “when a leader’s courage and practicality is informed by simple decency. That was Liam Dunn.” His voice became a gentle replica of an Irish lilt. “ ‘Do the right thing, Kerry, and things tend to come out right in the end. But the first is the only part you control. And sometimes going to bed square with yourself is a day-to-day kind of thing . . .’ ”

  Lara saw tears forming in the eyes around her; to her surprise, she felt the loss of a man she had never known. There was brilliance in what Kerry was doing, she thought. By summoning Liam back to life, Kerry gave those who remembered him a second chance to honor what some had not acknowledged—that Liam had reached across the racial divide.

  As Kerry’s gaze swept the church, their eyes met.

  He looked incalculably sad. In that moment, Lara thought she understood him better: that who he tried to be, and what he tried to live up to, involved far more than a murdered brother. And, believing that, she felt for Kerry; there was so much left inside him that he could not say to others.

  “ ‘Day to day,’ ” Kerry finished quietly, “Liam was the best of us.”

  * * *

  The mourners came to the two-story wooden home Liam had never left. Reporters were welcome, Liam’s son Denis assured her; his father respected the press, knew they had a job to do. “Some of you,” Denis said wryly, “he even liked.” And so Lara found herself there, late into the night, nursing an Irish whisky, talking to neighbors and old local politicians, listening to an Irish band, and hearing how Newark and Vailsburg had been when the two Senators Kilcannon were boys. “That Jamie,” an old woman told her, “could run like the wind and charm the birds out of trees. And what a smile he had, like a film star.”

  The house was jammed with people—old and young, children and grandchildren—and the tables were covered with food and drink and photographs of Liam. The mood was as complex as death itself—brave, nostalgic, sad—and laughter mingled in the air with the softer voices of recollection. Lara had no chance to talk to Kerry. He was trapped in his role of public man—shaking hands, listening to complaints or advice, suffering those for whom his presence made their own grief more important, something to be shared with a senator. But for the fact that, to Lara, he appeared drawn, Kerry looked contained—speaking softly, touching and being touched, smiling when that was called for. The others left him no time for his wife.

  Meg, Lara found, was an enigma.

  She seemed quite different from the subdued woman Lara had noted at the funeral. Here, she was animated, seeking friends out, her warmth and energy offset only by a somewhat short attention span, a smile that seemed to flash and vanish. In this, she was the opposite of Kerry, who appeared to slow down, to look into faces. But it was not until Lara returned to the buffet that she found herself next to Meg.

  “Pardon me,” Lara said. “You must be Meg Kilcannon, the senator’s wife. I’m Lara Costello.”

  It took Meg a second to react, as though she had been startled from some private world. “I’m from Washington,” Lara explained. “I cover Congress for theTimes .”

  The warmth in Meg’s eyes receded. “That must be interesting,” Meg said. “What brings you here?”

  “Liam Dunn. He and the senator seemed so close.”

  Meg nodded. “Kerry really cared about him.”

  It was a reasonable enough remark, Lara thought. But the distance in Meg’s tone p
uzzled her; she could have been talking about a rumor she had heard, rather than something she knew and felt. Then Meg was off to seek new company, smiling again.

  It was time to go, Lara thought.

  Glancing around the living room, she looked for Kerry, hoping to put in a word. But he was talking to a black couple Lara recognized from the photograph in his office. Kerry appeared tired now; head bent, he said something muted, and the woman kissed him on the cheek. Then the man touched his shoulder, as if in valediction, and Kerry walked out the front door, alone.

  Puzzled, Lara went to take leave of Denis Dunn, then stepped into the night.

  On the lawn, Lara saw a slim figure in shirtsleeves, gazing up at the moon.

  She hesitated, and then walked toward him. A few feet away, she stopped.

  Kerry did not turn. “Liam had a long run,” he murmured. “But still . . .”

  When she stepped closer, Lara saw the tears on his face.

  “Without him, Lara, I don’t know what would have happened to me. When I was nine—” His voice broke, and then was soft again. “When it comes to death, I’m no philosopher. It’s a weakness, sure.”

  Lara’s fingertips grazed the sleeve of his shirt. “It’s not a weakness,” she said, and left.

  EIGHT

  After Liam’s death, Lara felt a subtle change in her relationship to Kerry Kilcannon.

  They never spoke of Liam, or the night of his funeral. But Kerry seemed to accept her as more than a journalist. To Lara, they had entered that ambiguous zone of friendship in which a politician and a reporter use each other for their own purposes, and yet self-interest is tempered—and complicated—by genuine liking. Without saying so, they made up their own rules: personal conversations were always off the record; deceptions were forbidden; each would call the other with useful information. Lara was free to drop by his office; sometimes, when Kerry was restless, they might walk around the Capitol. “You’ve become the Kilcannon expert,” Nate told her. “With a lot of luck, you’ll be White House correspondent.”

  Even Kerry, who understood her colleagues well, teased her about this. “If I decide I’m never running,” he told her, “you can always cultivate Dick Mason.”

  “Just let me know,” she had answered. But Lara found Kerry intriguing for his own sake, a complex mix of toughness and sensitivity, fatalism and calculation. “He’s like a work in progress,” she told Nate over drinks at the Monocle. “Or a house where they keep adding rooms.”

  Nate took off his glasses, inspecting them for smudges; by now, Lara recognized this as a nervous tic, perhaps the residue of shyness. “Does he ever talk about his wife?”

  “No. Not really.”

  Nate glanced up at her, smiling slightly. “Eight years in Washington is a long time to spend alone. Do you think maybe he’s got someone, after all?”

  “Based on what?” Lara answered with some asperity. “Besides, for Kerry Kilcannon, sin actually exists. Inthis crowd, it’s part of his appeal.”

  It was true, Lara thought, but for reasons beyond Catholic guilt. Kerry deeply wanted to be good, as a politician and as a man, and doubted that he was. To violate his own moral sense would be to wound himself; however blind his wife might be to this, Meg Kilcannon was a beneficiary, and so was Lara. Though she liked him for it, it made her a little sad.

  “Do you ever want kids?” Kerry had asked her the day before.

  They were sitting on the lawn in front of Capitol Hill, enjoying the first break of spring; Lara had brought sandwiches and, between bites, had been asking why flood relief for North Dakota was held up in the Senate. The conversation had meandered to Lara’s biggest news—for the first time, she had become an aunt. “It’s hard to believe,” Lara told him, “that I’m related to this midget.” Kerry laughed; his question had followed, asked with the detached curiosity of one friend to another.

  “Me?” Lara gazed out at the cherry blossoms, trying to form an honest answer. “I think so. But it scares me, too.”

  Kerry tilted his head. “Why’s that?”

  “Because if I let it mean too much to me, maybe I’ll get married when I shouldn’t. I’m only twenty-eight. I need independence, my own reason for getting up in the morning.” Lara’s voice grew pensive. “I guess I think about my mom.We were the only reason she got up.”

  “Does it have to be one or the other?”

  His tone was serious, genuinely questioning; Lara guessed that the subject had meaning to him. “Part of it, I guess, depends on who I’m with. I still haven’t figuredthat out.”

  Kerry was quiet. Never, Lara realized, did he ask about her social life, nor did she ever speak of it. “Well,” he said at last, “thank God you have choices. At your age, my mother believed hers were already made. Mostly, she was right.”

  Lara had an instinct for hurt; she could still remember coming home, a ten-year-old, and discovering her father was gone—that he had not loved his wife, or her, enough even to warn them. The same instinct told her not to ask about Michael Kilcannon and yet, perversely, spurred a question she could not resist.

  “What about you, Kerry? Did you ever want kids?”

  Kerry picked a blade of grass. “Yes,” he said. “It just never happened. And with politics . . .”

  It seemed to trouble him, Lara thought.If you want children, she almost asked,why not have them?

  As if he had heard her thoughts, Kerry looked up. “At least I get to be godfather,” he said, “to Clayton and Carlie’s kids. And there’s a boy I see here, whenever I can. A five-year-old.”

  “ ‘See’?”

  “I take him places. On Sunday afternoons whenever I’m here.”

  Lara felt the freshness of discovery. “Is it some sort of secret?” she asked. “I’ve never read anything about it.”

  Kerry shrugged, as if discomfited. “Why should you have?”

  All at once, Lara was deeply curious—it was as though she had discovered another missing piece of him. On impulse, she asked, “Do you ever let anyone come with you?”

  His eyelids lowered, and then he looked at her directly. “If someone wrote about this, it wouldn’t be about Kevin anymore. And I’d guess he wants me to himself.” His voice softened. “The sad thing is that it takes so little. One interested adult can make such a difference, and many kids don’t even have that.”

  Lara turned to him. “How did you meet Kevin?”

  “At a day care center I was touring. Every time I turned around, he was there.” As if reliving this, Kerry shook his head. “Sometimes you can look at kids, and see the problems in their eyes. Kevin didn’t have to say a thing.”

  There was a flatness in Kerry’s voice, the tone he sometimes used, Lara had learned, when he was trying to gain distance from his own feelings. “What do you do when you can’t be here?”

  “I call him. Once you start this, it can’t be a hobby.”

  What would it have been like, Lara thought to herself, to have had a father who cared, even enough to pick up the telephone and call. “It’s good you feel that responsible,” she said.

  “The harm you can do . . .” His eyes narrowed, as if at some distant memory. “Ten years ago, when I was a prosecutor, a young boy got attached to me. I invited him to.” His tone became quiet again. “I learned not to create too many expectations, and to know the ones I could keep.”

  The recollection was hurtful, Lara sensed. “It sounds like you’re pretty good with kids, Kerry. In fact, I was thinking you were prime father material.”

  In profile, Kerry was still; Lara felt him deciding whether to respond. “At some point,” he said at last, “Meg realized she didn’t want a family. Perhaps politics makes it look worse to her—being Jeannie Mason’s not for everyone.” He turned to her. “I mean, canyou imagine being Jeannie?”

  How honest should she be? Lara wondered. “No,” she answered. “But then I can’t imagine marrying a politician.”

  “That’s just it. Meg didn’t.” His voice had the trac
e of irony that Lara had come to know as his response to sadness, the inscrutable works of fate. “To understate the matter, my career was an accident. One Meg wanted no part of.”

  Lara gazed at him, a youthful man of thirty-nine, and tried to imagine Kerry nine years before, faced with his brother’s death. “So the price you pay . . .”

  “Is having a wife who doesn’t want to give up her own life—friends, career, predictability—to be an afterthought in someone else’s. Who can blame her?” As if listening to himself, he said more softly, “The truth, Lara, is that I’ll always feel guilty about coming here when our marriage needed my attention most, and I’ll always resent Meg for the feeling. I’ve never known who to blame, or whether it would have been different.”

  And how will it be next year? Lara wondered. Or the year after that: early in its second term, the administration was beset by allegations of illegal fund-raising, raising anew the potential that Kerry could challenge Mason. “What if youdo run?” she asked.

  Kerry’s expression became almost bleak. “It would make the human cost that much worse—for Meg and for me. A friend once told me, ‘To want any one thing too much is barbaric.’ Run for President, I think, and you learn how true that is.” Kerry looked directly into Lara’s eyes. “You’re part of the cost—you and your friends in the press. If I ran, you’d pick over Meg and our marriage until there was nowhere left to hide.”

  Lara met his gaze. “No one’s comfortable with that,” she said evenly. “Not you, not us. But Nixon and then Gary Hart changed the rules. We can’t knowwhat decisions a President might be asked to make, but we can ask what kind of man is making them, and why.”

  Kerry shook his head, smiling faintly. “Easy for you to say. You’ll never be on the other end of the telescope.”

  “Because I’d never choose to be. But anyone who runs for President does.” Her voice softened. “Would that really keep you from running, do you think?”

  Turning, Kerry gazed at the lawn, its shadows lengthening in the afternoon sun. “Oh, it should . . .” For a long time, he was silent. “After I was shot, and then Jamie died, I wondered why it had happened that way. Why not me? I asked myself. Every day since then has seemed like a gift. Now the question I ask myself is ‘What are you doing to deserve it? And whatshould you do?’ ”