He twisted the corner of his pillowcase into a tight spiral. If he removed the pillow, he could roll out the cotton case long enough to make a rope. And then he could strangle Cassandra Sykes with it. God, how this woman obliterated his good will.
“Come to Washington, Cassandra.”
“I’ll think about it.”
Monday morning, as Manny rode in the Town Car on its short trip down 17th Street to the White House, the radio buzzed with Kale’s leak. The driver had tuned his radio to a liberal pundit’s show, a man who sounded thrilled that there was a Latino nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. He spoke of Arroyo’s Puerto Rican heritage with smug satisfaction, as if the inconsequential fact of a justice’s skin had somehow transformed the United States into a better nation, and the pundit himself into a finer human being. Christ Almighty, was skin color the only thing these liberal racists ever thought about? Why should a left-leaning radio host be happy about Arroyo’s nomination? He should be railing against it, on principled grounds, no matter whether Manny was black, brown, white or green. He should be nothing but dismayed.
Manny stepped out of the car inside the White House compound and discovered the entire West Wing staff waiting by the entrance. They applauded, and he beamed, shaking hand after hand. Younger staffers fixed him with the wide-eyed gawk often saved for celebrities, that hunger in their eyes—their desire to connect to a power broker. It was disconcerting and strange, but incredible; he was the same person he was last week, but now he was decidedly more important.
He was paraded through the halls by MacKneer, stopping to shake hands with one person, then another, and then led into a small office, where he was left alone with Gordon Kale. The Deputy Chief of Staff asked him to recite his short acceptance speech, just once, for practice.
“You got it, Manny. You’ll be terrific.”
A press conference had been called for 10 A.M. in the East Room. Manny drank a cup of coffee in the Roosevelt Room and chatted with Kale about the upcoming NFL season. Anyone strong enough to beat the Patriots? Only the Colts, opined Gordon, and Manny was feeling so grand he wasn’t about to disagree. Ten minutes before the scheduled conference, Kale led Manny into the Blue Room to wait with President Shaw, Vice President Bloomfield and Jeremy Rimm. Manny had gone over his speech a couple more times, and all morning he had felt more excited than nervous, but now, standing here with the most powerful men in the world, Manny shifted his weight from side to side, twiddled his fingers, and fiddled with the paper tucked into his jacket’s inside pocket.
“Don’t drop that speech,” said the Vice President, with a wink.
“Is my family here?” Manny was surprised by the plea in his voice. He knew Carmen and Lonny had arrived with Sonia and his parents late last night, and that the White House wanted to keep them in a separate hotel, to make sure no one figured out who the nominee was a day early. Of course they were sitting out there in the East Room.
“Your kids look mighty handsome and proud. Don’t you worry about that.”
“And don’t be nervous,” added the President. He patted Manny on the back. Shaw’s crooked smile indicated his ease. Eight years on the national stage, requiring countless speeches and interviews and debates in two grueling campaigns, had made him immune to cameras and publicity. This little press conference would not be a big challenge for the President. “Best advice I’ve got is don’t say orgasm when you mean to say organism.”
Everyone laughed, even Arroyo.
“My mom used to tell me that before my school presentations. Now that’s some good advice.”
At precisely ten o’clock, Manny stepped into the Cross Hall, flanked by President Shaw and Vice President Bloomfield, and marched slowly toward the blue podium in the East Room. The room was packed with journalists and politicos and was brightly lit. Cameras flashed and clicked. Walking into this scrum felt like an assault, hot and disorienting. As the President spoke at the podium, unfazed, Manny thought about the frank void of the TV cameras’ lenses pointing at him, the recognizable faces of the White House press corps, senators and congressmen. He spied Carmen and Lonny sitting a few rows back, looking a little shocked, hands in their laps, postures stiff, well groomed. Sonia had been nothing but accommodating and gracious in this whole nomination circus, flying out to Washington with the kids even though the White House had opted to keep her away from the press conference, given their recent divorce. When he had confessed his big news to her on the phone, Sonia seemed genuinely proud of his accomplishment. Manny’s elderly parents sat beside his children in place of his ex-wife, his mother teary with pride. His parents were here, in the White House, for his nomination to the Court! Manny grinned like a fool.
The President finished his introduction, stepped back from the podium and touched Manny’s shoulder. They shook hands for the cameras, and he stepped forward. The reporters clutched pens and pads of paper, cameras clicked ceaselessly. Lorna MacKneer, L. J. Batherson and Rolando Nicolaides were discreetly positioned in the back, standing beside a television camera. Manny removed his speech from his jacket pocket, pressed it on the podium’s slanted surface. The printed words were enlarged, so he wouldn’t have to worry about squinting or misreading them. He rested his palms on the sides of the famous podium, the President and Vice President flanking him like choice wingmen guarding their ace fighter.
“Mr. President, I am humbled and honored by your nomination today, and I thank you for the confidence you have shown in me.”
Five weeks later, Gordon Kale crossed the threshold into the Roosevelt Room in the middle of Manny’s meeting. The Deputy Chief of Staff was an overweight man with pale skin, a waddling double chin, and a knobby, elongated head that reflected light from the powerful halogens. He never looked healthy. His rounded fat shoulders blurred any distinction between neck and arm, and dark stains colored the pits of his white shirt. He wore rimless, tinted glasses that made him look like a gangster. Red-faced and glaring, Kale pressed his lips together and held his jaw tight.
“I’d like to see you in my office.” Kale’s breathing was audible and phlegmy like a bulldog’s. He had been driving Manny batshit crazy these past few weeks, and that had made him all the more physically repulsive. Kale had been autocratic and demanding, and every minor problem was an emergency: the stubborn Republican senator from Michigan who wouldn’t commit to voting yes, that hiccup investigation into Manny’s underpaid tax return in 1996. Now here he was again, angry as hell, interrupting Manny’s robust meeting with Batherson and MacKneer with some other manufactured crisis.
“Can it wait, Gordon?”
“No, it cannot.”
Kale pushed his glasses up on his nose and disappeared into the hallway. Batherson and MacKneer glanced at each other and shrugged, and Manny tossed his pen on the table. “Excuse me.”
The Deputy Chief of Staff was already seated behind his desk. His small office felt constraining on a good day, but today it seemed as tight as a dog cage, even with its expansive view of the trees behind the White House.
“Shut the door.”
Manny resisted an urge to tell Kale to calm down and not to speak to him like that. Instead he did what he was told. He sat down.
“We got ourselves a big problem.” Kale held up a stapled, three-page document. “This article’s coming out in next month’s Vanity Fair. Claims you’ve been amorously involved with Cassandra Sykes for eight or nine months running, and that you broke up her marriage. Further accusations of the scandalous sort. Sources double-checked and confirmed. Now the editor wants the White House to comment on it. Or even better—you. They’re pretty well going to print this no matter what we say.”
He handed over the document and leaned forward onto his desk, defiant, furious. Manny tried to look calm as he read the headline: Arroyo’s Girl.
“Maybe we could start by telling them that Cassandra is a full-grown woman, not a girl. She’s an accomplished lawyer.”
“I’ve been dealing with this thing all afternoo
n, Manny.”
“And I’ve been in the Roosevelt Room, doing my job.”
Kale twisted his lips and snorted. “Well, I’m going to let you take a minute or two to read this thing over. That’s what I’m going to do.” He sat back, squinty-eyed, glowering.
Manny’s mounting panic made him want to scream and punch indiscriminately, or stand up and kick down the door. No good would come from staring defiantly at Kale, or acknowledging him in any way. He scanned the document, its print drifting in and out of focus as waves of fear and rage took hold and passed through him. Who the fuck had betrayed him? This journalist had better name names. He focused on the beginning of the article.
Emmanuel Arroyo doesn’t look like he’s 51 years old. The handsome, olive-skinned jurist has a youth and vibrancy that has acquired legendary status throughout the scattered cities of the massive Ninth Circuit. With his striking physique, slicked back hair, and stylish Burt Reynolds-era mustache, Arroyo’s the pinup boy of appellate judges. “Manny’s got arms like a linebacker,” said one career employee at the James R. Browning Courthouse in San Francisco, where Arroyo has worked since his appointment to the federal bench in 2002. “Big shoulders, bulging pecs—that guy is cut.”
Emmanuel Arroyo’s already commanding presence is about to get even a whole lot more impressive. If confirmed this month as President Shaw’s second selection to the United States Supreme Court, and its first-ever Latino, Arroyo’s vote would have the power to radically transform American law, pushing it far to the right on the country’s most contentious issues like gay marriage and abortion rights. The Court will get younger and bolder, more confident and conservative. And it’s not just the law that will change. Some say Arroyo has the potential to spice up the stodgy atmosphere on First Street more than any nominee who has come along in a generation.
But Washingtonians won’t have to wait for Arroyo’s confirmation or his presence in the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court Building for sexual intrigue to land in the nation’s capital. Vanity Fair has confirmed that the recently divorced judge has been dating one of his clerks for months now, a married woman who recently followed him to Washington and is temporarily working with the White House staff on Arroyo’s nomination. Her name is Cassandra Sykes. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Cassandra Sykes is the accomplished daughter of his future colleague, Justice Rodney Sykes.
Manny squeezed his hand into a fist under the desk. Coffee burned the lining of his stomach. He skimmed a few more paragraphs. The tone was breezy and lurid all the way through. The article claimed their affair had begun in February, that Cassandra had left her husband for good in July and moved to Washington in August. (Denny, thankfully, hadn’t been quoted.) The journalist hadn’t missed anything, but nowhere, nowhere, did it mention sources—who exactly had ratted Manny out.
He tossed the papers on Kale’s desk and shrugged as if there was nothing of consequence there, certainly not about him. Kale sighed.
“Let’s be frank with each other, Manny.”
“I’m happy to be frank. I don’t believe the White House should make any comment about this speculation, or that I should either.”
“Is it true?”
“Of course it’s true, Gordon. You think Vanity Fair would get this far if it wasn’t true?”
“When did this thing start?”
“Over the summer.”
“Cassandra was your employee.”
“Not at the time, she wasn’t. We were two consenting adults no longer working together.”
“If this started before June, we’ve got an ethical mess on our hands.”
“It’s not unethical to date a coworker, even a subordinate. Besides, our relationship began in early July.”
“In July, Manny? When she was done with her term and you two were barely seeing each other? You really expect me to believe that?”
“Our relationship started in July.”
“I could go upstairs and ask Cassandra myself, mind you.”
“Go right ahead.”
“Some sworn witness is going to say February before the Senate Judiciary Committee. You understand that, right?”
“Look, Gordon, if some liberal saboteur claims they saw me kissing Cassandra under the mistletoe last winter they can go right ahead, but I will swear the contrary under oath, and it will be my word against theirs.”
“Goddamn it, Manny, we asked you outright if you were seeing someone, and you did not mince words in your denial.”
“Who I sleep with is not the business of the United States government. I’m fairly certain that’s settled law. Besides, none of this matters. We’ve got enough votes to get me through.”
“Oh, we have the votes, now, do we? It’s all smooth sailing from here on in for Manny Arroyo? So I guess you’re pretty positive that the President’s going to stick with your nomination even though you lied to him outright?”
Manny sat back and crossed his legs. He showed nothing, nothing—but imagined having to shuffle up to that podium in the East Room to read another speech in oversized font, before the flashes and television cameras, although without any senators or his family present. Having to stand there and thank the President for his evaporated support. Having to apologize sincerely—Again! With sincerity!—to the entire country for fucking everything up. Manny cleared his throat. He wanted to hop out of his chair and pound that fat fuck Kale right in his sneering jaw.
“You have reason to believe my nomination would be in jeopardy over something this trivial?”
“It is not trivial. The President is very upset.” Kale picked up the article, scanned it, shook his head. “What’s this country coming to?”
“It’s a witch hunt.”
“It sure the hell is a witch hunt, but it’s your own fucking fault.” He tossed the article back on his desk. “The President’s going talk to you about this today. In fact I’ll check in now, see if this is a good time. We got maybe twenty-four hours if we’re lucky until this thing gets out national, and then it’s going be a tornado in your world—photographers in your lobby, your garage, everywhere, and we need to know exactly how the heck we’re handling this before the vultures descend.” He stood, the fat old walrus, puffing his chest like an alpha male perched on his stubby back flippers. “You read that thing over carefully because there’ll be some hard questions coming your way pretty soon.”
Kale left him stinging. Such blatant disrespect. No one believed him anymore; they didn’t even want to pretend. Manny rubbed his face with damp palms and picked up the article.
Fresh out of Penn Law, Emmanuel and Sonia returned to Oakland, where Arroyo was hired by the prestigious California law firm of Farrow Marsh. Although he was the only Latino lawyer in a company with few visible minorities, that didn’t bother him much. Arroyo had always been more comfortable in the white world of California than in Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican community with Sonia’s family. “Manny attended every cocktail party and reception we had,” said Roger Korn, a now-retired partner at Farrow Marsh. “He always gravitated to the most powerful man in the room, whoever that happened to be. Pretty soon we were actively pairing Manny up with clients who needed a personal relationship. Because Manny could charm anyone, and loved doing so.”
It was in those elite cocktail parties and board rooms of Farrow Marsh that Arroyo first met Jeffery Haverstein, the future governor of California, and Gordon Kale, the present Deputy White House Chief of Staff. Kale was working for Fieldstone Consolidated at the time, a corporation that had extensive dealings with Arroyo’s firm. Arroyo grew close with both men, and was prescient enough to keep them as friends. No doubt Governor Haverstein and Gordon Kale helped secure the judge’s meteoric rise.
Farrow Marsh has a long-standing mentoring policy, assigning each incoming lawyer to a senior partner, someone who can guide the new hire and show him the ropes. Emmanuel Arroyo was rash and pushy, and his mentor couldn’t have been a bigger contrast in disposition. “We rather blindly assigne
d him to Rodney Sykes,” said Korn. “It’s kind of incredible now, when you think about it—two future Supreme Court justices put together like that.” Sykes was a staid and studious lawyer, 12 years Arroyo’s senior, with no real interest in social climbing at Farrow Marsh. “Rodney was a quiet guy who kept to himself. His only real friend was Morris Bayfield,” said Korn. “Sometimes I’d hear them talking about opera or wine in the hall, and I know they had lunch together frequently, but they never came to cocktail parties.” Not only did Bayfield and Sykes live low-key personal lives, they also shared an emphatically traditional view of law as a set of rules to be strictly obeyed, never circumvented or massaged. “Rodney’s skill set matched the needs of our more conservative clients,” said Korn, “but we had other clients, too, who were more keen to push boundaries. Powerful companies, mostly. Those were the clients that Manny wanted right away. But he felt he couldn’t get access to them while shadowing Rodney Sykes. He was ambitious, and felt hampered by Rodney’s temperate manner.”
Arroyo’s growing frustration with his cautious mentor peaked in a now-infamous confrontation that lawyers at the firm still call “The Eichmann Incident.” “About six months after Manny joined us, a group of top partners gathered in a boardroom to discuss one of Sykes’s trickier cases,” said Clayton Youkalis, another senior partner at Farrow Marsh. “Sykes was arguing for restraint and compliance on every issue, as he often did, and you could see it was driving Arroyo crazy. We all noticed it. But then Manny cracked. He started shouting that Sykes’s reasoning was slavish, and that it reminded him of Adolph Eichmann’s, and that if we left it unchecked it would probably have the same grim results. The whole room fell silent. Manny was so aggressive, and what a shocking thing to say. After that outburst, it was all over between them. Arroyo was reprimanded, and I don’t think he and Sykes worked together again.”
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