“You sound like you think he’s crazy.”
“Do I? I sure don’t mean to. But I guess we’ll find out.”
Attenborough gave a tight-lipped smile. “Sounds like we can get this whole mess cleaned up in no time.”
“You’re going the impeachment route?”
“That’s not up to me,” Attenborough said, “but nothing less than impeachment will clear up the question Mallory has raised. Frosty may have had some idea we could have a committee hearing—the son of a bitch never looks, much less talks to anybody, before he jumps, so who knows what was going on in his mind? But bear in mind, Sam, we’re talking about the sanctity of a presidential election.”
“Just remember the situation. The Senate is a tie vote on everything.”
“You need two-thirds to convict. That’s Franklin’s fifty plus seventeen of ours. You think that can happen?”
“It’s happened before.” For a moment Clark was silent. Then he said, “Tucker, what’s the objective of the House in this situation?”
“To find the truth,” Attenborough said, “just like the President of the United States, if that’s what he is, has asked us to do.”
“What if the truth is that Mallory was elected?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Or rather the Senate will.”
“And if somebody blows up the bridge?”
“Then we don’t have a President.”
“I see.”
Attenborough’s face flushed when he was agitated. It was now a bright shade of pink. “What do you see, Sam? Tell me. I’d like to know.”
Clark said, “The abyss, Tucker. That’s what I see.”
14
The fundamentals of Archimedes Hammett’s public persona—his insistence on standing alone, his ideological purity, his prodigious memory, and his unerring instinct for the jugular—carried him through his confirmation hearings with flying colors. Three weeks to the day after Lockwood had nominated him, he was sworn in to testify on his own behalf before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The hearing room was packed with Hammett enthusiasts. The advocacy groups that had formed themselves into a pro-Hammett front had obtained nearly every ticket in the hands of sympathetic senators, and then assigned volunteers to line up for the public seats at midnight the night before. As Hammett pointed out to the organizers in phone calls, the gallery played a pivotal role in the history of rituals of approval and disapproval.
His supporters, whose political movement had been made real by cameras, did not really need to be reminded of this truth. They arranged several coups de theatre as symbols of solidarity. A number of well-known representatives of minorities and genders, together with some movie stars and authors, a delegation of academic celebrities, and a few venerable veterans of the Kennedy administration, took seats that had been held for them in the front rows.
Hammett arrived alone, without ceremony, through the public entrance. He had declined the usual courtesy of being escorted into the hearing room through a private door by the chairman of the committee and other senators, and in fact he had not been seen in the flesh by any senator or member of the staff since the breakfast with Busby and the other sympathetic members. This did not mean that he had not been active in his own cause. On the contrary, he had been on the telephone all night, every night, feeding his advocates facts and phrases, suggesting sources of support and information, organizing telephone and mail campaigns, and above all guiding and nurturing journalists by reminding them, by tone of voice and vocabulary—though never in so many words—that he was the enemy of their enemies.
Seated alone at the large baize-covered witness table, Hammett appeared to be completely relaxed. He had reason to be. When Hammett called Baxter T. Busby at three o’clock that morning, just as he had called him every morning at the same hour since the confirmation process began, Busby had assured him that a diligent search by the committee staff had failed to turn up a single negative fact about his personal life. “Amzi Whipple and the evangelicals will come after you on general principles,” Busby said. “Amzi likes to live up to his biblical name. It means ‘strong,’ as he’ll probably tell you if he ever gets you alone.”
Hammett had avoided being alone with Whipple or any other senator in the opposition by omitting the time-honored ritual of paying courtesy calls on the members of the Judiciary Committee. This calculated snub had offended Whipple and other minority members, but it had generated think pieces in the press that reinforced Hammett’s image as an uncompromising idealist, and therefore made the support of his own constituency even stronger. In their minds, at least, he had made his right to privacy the issue and provided himself with an unspoken reason for not answering questions about his beliefs, opinions, and associations. His reason was simple: Almost nothing was known about his private life or his true opinions, and he wanted to keep it that way. It would have been self-defeating to give his questioners the opportunity of sounding him out in advance on sensitive issues. Let them deal with his answers on the same basis with which he had to deal with their questions: without preparation. This gave Hammett the advantage. Senators—in fact the whole government apparatus—had long been out of the habit of living by their wits. Some had entirely lost the knack of expressing a complete thought. The prime function of the news media was to fill in the blanks, so that all a public figure usually had to do to win a front-page story with half a column of runover or a full minute on the evening news was to utter a burst of language on the issue of the day that contained a strong noun and a colorful adjective. Hardworking journalists to whom words came easily did the rest. Spontaneity was Hammett’s best friend precisely because it was so rare among politicians.
Senator Amzi Whipple sensed Hammett’s contempt for the institution of the Senate, and tried to take advantage of it by turning the tables on him at the outset. “Mr. Hammett, the news media have taken note of the fact that you did not call upon a single one of the minority members of this committee to pay your respects,” he said as preamble to his first question to the nominee. “According to this clipping from The Wall Street Journal, this was because you disdain—and I quote—’disdain the empty courtesies of the Washington establishment.’ Is that a fact, sir?”
MR. HAMMETT: Very little that comes out of Wall Street is a fact, Senator. (Laughter)
SENATOR WHIPPLE: Are you so contemptuous of this committee that you will not traffic with it even to respond to a question?
MR. HAMMETT: Senator Whipple, the answer is no. But let me quote some words back to you, sir. The day President Lockwood paid me the honor of sending my name to the Senate for confirmation as Chief Justice of the United States, you were quoted by the Associated Press as saying, “Archimedes Hammett is the most dangerous man in the United States. Making him Chief Justice would be tantamount to making Karl Marx the Pope.” Those words, which held me up to ridicule and contempt, were broadcast and rebroadcast in every city and hamlet in the United States of America and in many places abroad. Senator, I knew even before you made this extraordinary public statement that you did not like me or respect my lifework. There seemed little point in giving you the opportunity of telling me in private what you had already told the world, or in my trying to persuade you that you’re wrong.
SENATOR WHIPPLE: IS it your testimony that I am wrong about you, sir?
MR. HAMMETT: My testimony is that you said what you said, and I found your words an outrageous confession of your belief in a double standard. Would you have said the same thing about any of the justices nominated by your own party’s President?
SENATOR WHIPPLE: It’s a simple question I have asked you, sir. Answer it, if you please.
MR. HAMMETT: Perhaps you should repeat the question, sir, so I will be absolutely sure I am responding to your need.
SENATOR WHIPPLE: The question is, Am I wrong about you, sir?
MR. HAMMETT: Of course not, Senator. (Laughter)
The laughter was prolonged.
&nbs
p; Hammett’s easy triumph over Whipple made the other Republican senators wary. It was not the nominee who frightened them, but the television cameras. They knew that they could win a long exchange with the witness and still lose the encounter if he made them look foolish or unfair with so much as a single clever answer. Whipple’s humiliation would play on the evening news in every living room in North America; they did not want to join him in being outwitted on camera. They also wanted to strike while the iron was hot in the matter of impeaching Lockwood and knew that they could not try him and install Mallory in the White House unless they had a Chief Justice. Even Hammett would do for this purpose.
One after another, the other reactionaries delivered homilies instead of asking questions. The radicals, having been assured by Busby that all the tough questions had been asked at the working breakfast, and being anxious to install a Chief Justice friendly to the Cause, were even less vocal.
The hearings continued for another day for the examination of other witnesses. A day after that, by a vote of eleven to ten, the Judiciary Committee recommended to the Senate that Hammett be confirmed as Chief Justice. Two days later he was confirmed by the full Senate on a tie vote on strict party lines, broken by Vice President Graves.
After the floor vote, Amzi Whipple caught up with Baxter Busby in the cloakroom. “You got your puff of white smoke, Buzzer,” he said. “What now?”
Busby laughed and clapped his old friend on the back. “The odor of burning paranoia, Amzi. You’ll recognize it when you smell it.”
“I know what I smell, my friend. A rat.”
15
On the day of Hammett’s confirmation by the Senate, Slim and Sturdi Eve returned to Macalaster’s house to gather up Hammett’s belongings. They had rented an apartment for him in one of the new high-security buildings just west of Capitol Hill on Pennsylvania Avenue. A place in the suburbs, though more private and secure, was out of the question because Hammett, fearing a highway crash with all its incalculable consequences to his body and peace of mind, refused to commute.
In the aftermath of the confirmation process, Hammett felt dreamy, removed from reality, His whole life, after all, had just changed. He had never been one to live in the present moment; his mind was always bounding ahead to the future or lingering over the lessons of the past. But on this day, the greatest so far in his eventful life because it represented not only the reward for all he had done but also the beginning of all he hoped to do, his grandfather was much in his thoughts. During his testimony before the Judiciary Committee, he had felt the mystical presence of the old fighter so strongly that he would not have been surprised to look over his shoulder from his place at the witness table and see his grandfather—brooding, watchful—perched on one of the empty chairs behind him. This fierce hawk-faced apparition would have whispered, “Overcome them, Archimedes, my son! Aim for the heart!”
It may have been some inexplicable impulse to be alone with the memory of his grandfather that caused Hammett to leave Slim and Sturdi to their packing and wander up the stairs to the attic of Macalaster’s house. It was a Saturday. Macalaster had gone somewhere early that morning and had not yet returned, and Manal was attending a birthday party. Hammett knew her schedule because, hoping to persuade her to have another séance, he had made a point of joining her at breakfast every morning and talking to her about the trivial events in her life.
Manal responded by telling him a lot about her life, but not everything. He was sure of that. Someone, he sensed, was using her, feeding her dangerous information. The name Shelley, the angry nonsense spewed by the so-called trapped spirit called Susan, who was clearly supposed to be Susan Grant, and all the rest of the mumbo jumbo were designed to tantalize him into some damaging self-revelation. There was no other plausible explanation for the words spelled out on the Ouija board. But who was doing this? What was the purpose? These were the questions to which he wanted answers.
Hammett walked down the windowless attic corridor. The door of Macalaster’s office was ajar. Looking around to make sure he was not being observed, he laid a ballpoint pen on the floor to mark the door’s exact position, so that he could leave it precisely as he had found it when he left. Then he pushed the door open and went inside. In the half-darkness of the winter afternoon, he saw what he might have expected—filing cabinets, shelves of books, heaps of newspapers and magazines, a television monitor, a desk piled high with what appeared to be a lifetime accumulation of junk mail.
The computer, an ancient made-in-Korea IBM clone, was on, cursor blinking. Hammett sat down in front of the coffee-stained keyboard and typed DIR. The directory of Macalaster’s files scrolled. All the titles were in plain English, a surprising sign of the owner’s naïveté. But when Hammett tried to access the data under “Hammett” and “Mallory”, he discovered that they were protected by passwords. Hoping to hit on it by chance, he tried “Manal,” “Brook,” “Ross,” the telephone number and house address, Macalaster’s date of birth (which he had once had a reason to commit to memory), and several variations on these typed forward and backward, but was unable to unlock the files. It did not occur to him that this was a strange thing for the Chief Justice of the United States to be doing on the day after his confirmation by the United States Senate.
Hammett, whose genetic heritage included exceptional hearing as well as excellent eyesight, heard a car pull up outside. He switched the computer off and on to clear the screen and remove the evidence of his snooping, then went to the round window that overlooked the street. Manal was getting out of a car. Although a light rain was falling, she remained at the curb, smiling and waving goodbye, as the car pulled slowly away. Suddenly she remembered something and ran frantically after the vehicle, waving her arms to attract the driver’s attention.
The car stopped. It was a small, plain machine of American manufacture. Catching up, Manal bent over and said something through the window. The driver, wearing a hooded rainjacket that hid her hair, got out, keys in hand, and opened the trunk. As Manal removed her school-bag, still chattering away, Hammett saw that the woman was Zarah Christopher. He thought, Breakthrough!
Now was the moment to talk to Manal. He knew that it might, in fact, be his last opportunity to identify the person who was tormenting him by planting names and ideas in the girl’s head. After positioning the door of Macalaster’s office at its original angle and retrieving his ballpoint pen from the floor, Hammett dashed down to the second floor and waited in the hallway for Manal to come upstairs. He knew she would do so immediately when she saw Slim and Sturdi working in the living room; she did not like them. To cover his intentions, he took a piece of paper from his inner pocket and made a pretense of reading it. An instant later, Manal’s head with its great swinging mop of black hair appeared at the head of the stairs.
“Manal,” he said in a tone of surprise. “You’re home. How was the party?”
“Fun.”
“Good. Whose birthday was it? I forgot to ask.”
“Lori Christopher’s.”
“Who’s Lori Christopher—a schoolfriend?”
“Different school.” Manal was not a chatterer.
Hammett said, “Christopher. Is that lady who was here the other night her mother?”
“Who? Oh, you mean Zarah. No, that’s her sister. She brought me home.”
Manal pointed to the bustling figures of Slim and Sturdi. “What’s going on?”
“I’m packing to leave,” Hammett replied. “I have to start my new job.”
“Oh. It went through?”
“Yep. I aced them.”
Manal smiled at him. Hammett responded with a pained grimace that she knew was meant to be a friendly smile. He seemed small and nervous and somehow out of place, not like a Chief Justice—but then, practically nobody her father brought home ever looked like what they really were up close. “Well, good luck,” she said.
Hammett nodded his thanks and turned away, resuming the reading of the slip of paper he carried
in his hand. Then, as if on impulse, he whirled on his heel and said, “Manal? Would you do me a favor before I leave this house?”
“If I can.”
“Get back in touch with that spirit you were talking to the other night, that Susan.”
Manal gave Hammett a level look. “Sure, why not?” she said. “But you can never be sure they’ll be there when you call.”
However, the visitor called Susan came on line immediately, and what she spelled out on the Ouija board made Hammett go serious and pale.
“That was funny,” said Manal when the visitor had withdrawn back into darkness. “I’ve never known one of them to talk in numbers before.”
16
All his adult life, and even before, Julian Hubbard’s father had kept a diary. No matter how tired he was, or what joy or tragedy had occurred that day, or who was waiting for him in bed, he made a ritual of setting down the events of every day before he retired for the night. He wrote two pages every night, never more, never less. As Elliott Hubbard explained this habit to his sons, it helped him to remember what he wished to remember with accuracy, and to expurgate the rest so that he could sleep with an easy mind. He called it the writing cure and believed that any bad memory, any misfortune, any fixation, even the most enslaving sexual fantasy, could be banished from a man’s life by recalling its details exactly and putting them down in English sentences on good rag paper with a gold-nibbed fountain pen. By the old man’s own account, he had cured himself of both his divorced wives by this method, and of many other troublesome memories. What these were, exactly, would never be known because in his will he had commissioned his older son, Horace, to burn unread the sixty-two leatherbound volumes, one for each year, that he had filled up in his adult lifetime.
Horace had never kept a journal, presumably because it was impossible to do so in his line of work. But Julian, as in many other matters, emulated his father by becoming a compulsive diarist. Lately his conscience had troubled him because he had been neglecting his entries. The press of work created by Mallory’s accusations, the stress of the resulting constitutional crisis, Lockwood’s anguish and his own, everything had got in the way. However, on the night of Hammett’s confirmation, unable to sleep, he rose at two in the morning and went down to his basement study, where his own diaries were locked up in the same large green gilt-lettered safe that Elliott Hubbard had used for the same purpose.
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