For what must have been hours I lay awake. I saw Annie sliding through the Plaza suite, that same wistful look upon her mouth and eyes. I heard Thomas Browning in that low, unhurried voice, doling out benign encouragement to someone tense with insecurity about something—school, a girl— something they thought would make or break their life and that Browning somehow knew would pass. I saw his eyes move toward Annie, while she floated across the room, looking back just long enough to catch his glance, hold it, touch it… let it go. She was in love with him. I seemed to know that now. Perhaps not the way he must have been in love with her, with that desperate all or nothing feeling, willing to sacrifice every hope, every ambition for the chance to be with her; but as much as her free soul would allow. He would have left, dropped out of school, turned his back on the sworn duty of his life. He would have gone with her anywhere and never thought he had sacrificed a thing. He would have been that rancher with his own healthy brood. I knew that now, knew it in that way you sometimes do when you have known something all along, but have kept that knowledge a kind of secret from yourself. Perhaps it was Joanna; perhaps I had cared too much about her to think that she had ended up in a marriage in which she would always be in some sense second best.
Whenever it was I finally fell asleep, I slept like a dead man and did not awaken until the morning was half gone. I showered and shaved, and as I stared at myself in the mirror tried not to think too much about whether time had treated me with the same cruel indifference with which it had left the marks of its passage on Joanna’s once young and beautiful face. I had seen pictures of her in the papers, and a few times on television I had heard her talk, but those had been staged appearances in the proper light, usually from a distance and seldom close up. If she had ever been anything but completely sober, it had never shown.
As I leaned closer to the mirror, I seemed to notice a slight increase in the number and depth of the lines about my eyes. I rubbed a dab of skin balm into my face and the color deepened into a healthy, reddish glow. I began to feel better. I slipped on a crisp, fresh white shirt and a clean blue suit and picked out a cheerful tie. On my way out, I stopped at the window. Buried under a large, floppy hat, a man mounted on a riding mower traced long, parallel paths across the rolling green lawn. The air was turgid, gray, hot and humid, threatening rain. I left the room not feeling quite so good.
The hallway was silent, but then, from somewhere in the distance, behind one of the closed doors, came the low humming noise of a vacuum cleaner. At the bottom of the long, spiral staircase I hesitated, not sure what to do. I listened, but except for the muted vacuum above, there was nothing to hear. I walked toward the front door, stopped at the living room and peered inside, then turned around and entered the dining room. A doorway led to the kitchen, but that seemed vacant as well. The study had the advantage of familiarity. I decided to wait in there.
Rooms, like people, have their moods. The midnight shadows on a lamp-lit wall create a different effect than the flat even dullness of a gray-covered sun. The massive dark desk that had gleamed hard and shiny like some late restored antiquity was old, worn, scarred, marked with years, decades, of pen strokes, left beneath the official important papers on which they had been made. It was the inadvertent record of the endless repetition of written and rewritten words; words started, words stopped, words thrown away, a new sheet of paper placed where the old one had been, a second followed by a third, then a fourth, attempt.
There was a sudden commotion as the front door swung open and the house was drowned in a sea of voices. I moved away from the desk and began to examine more closely the photographs that I had barely noticed before. My eye had just settled on a picture of a man in his sixties with intelligent eyes and a firm, but forgiving, mouth.
“Phil Hart.”
Startled, I turned around. Browning was standing in the doorway, his reddish brown hair windblown in a dozen different directions, his blue eyes curious and alert.
“Have a good sleep?” he asked, gently taunting me as he dropped into the chair behind the desk. “I had a seven-thirty meeting. Now there’s a meeting here,” he said, tossing his head toward the hallway through which he had just arrived. “Then I’m off. I’m giving a speech at noon, another one at three. This evening I’m somewhere, and somewhere else later tonight.” He let both arms fall from the sides of the chair and rolled his head to the side.
“Phil Hart.” He spoke the name with a kind of eager exuberance, as if I had just mentioned some mutual long-lost friend. “Interesting face, don’t you think? Served eighteen years in the Senate; died a week before the end of his last term. They named the third Senate office building after him; did it while he was still alive. First time a major public building in Washington was named after someone still alive. The vote to do it passed the Senate ninety-nine to zero; only Hart abstained.”
A look of nostalgia swept across Browning’s eyes. He sat forward in the chair.
“Hart was such a modest man, there were people who thought that when he heard what the Senate was going to do he might try to stop it. The night before the vote, someone on his staff suspected he might and put a note on his desk pleading with him not to do it. The next morning she found a note on her desk. He said he wasn’t as modest as she thought and that he could not be more delighted at what the Senate was going to do. He wouldn’t vote for it himself, you understand… ,” added Browning. He smiled hard to keep himself in check, and then, laughing at his own embarrassment, made an awkward gesture with his hand.
“They did that in the summer, and the day after Christmas he was dead. I went to the funeral. Half of Washington was there. Three of his closest friends in the Senate—Ted Kennedy, Ed Muskie, and Eugene McCarthy—were sitting together in the center section about a dozen rows ahead. Kennedy was on the aisle, and I could see him as plainly as I can see you. The tears were pouring out of his eyes, and his face was all red. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so distraught.
“Of all the tributes written, all the things people said, the most moving was a speech given on the Senate floor by—you simply won’t believe this, but I swear it’s true— Strom Thurmond. You could read for years through the Congressional Record, go down the list of five or ten thousand roll-call votes, and I don’t know that you would ever find more than half a dozen on which they had ever voted the same way, and yet Thurmond revered him. Imagine! Strom Thurmond, who led the Dixiecrats out of the Democratic Party at the Democratic Convention in 1948; who promised segregation today, tomorrow, and forever before George Wallace was old enough to talk; who voted against every major piece of civil rights legislation for almost the next fifty years; and Phil Hart, the liberal’s liberal, the floor manager for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the act that put a federal guarantee behind the right to vote and changed the political complexion of the South. Impossible, isn’t it? But true. Thurmond loved him. They all did, all those southern segregationists the rest of the country reviled. And do you know why? Because he treated all of them with unfailing courtesy and respect.
“There’s a Hart story that you won’t see written in any book. The Voting Rights Act was coming up. Richard Russell, the senator from Georgia—one of the other Senate office buildings is named for him—was presiding over a meeting of the southern leadership in the Senate, trying to figure out the legislative strategy of the other side. In the middle of the meeting, the telephone rings. It’s Phil Hart. He’s the floor leader for the bill, and he tells Russell exactly what he is going to do. Amazed—but perhaps not entirely surprised—Russell hangs up the phone, tells the other southern Senators what he’s just been told, and then, in that ultimate southern compliment, looks around the room and remarks, ‘And that was a gentleman.’”
Browning raised his head. A cunning look entered his eyes.
“Some people might think Hart had been naïve; others might think he was just trying to be fair. He was trying to be fair all right, but not just for the sake of fairness. This was not some game where it didn’t matter if you won or lost, only that you played within the rules. This was going to change everything—and everyone knew it. Hart understood—I’m not sure how many others did; I doubt any of the liberals did—that even if you had the votes, it wasn’t enough to win. You had to win in a way that left the other side some dignity in defeat. If the South was going to accept defeat, they had to know they had been given every reasonable consideration. It was exactly a hundred years since the end of the Civil War; it was not going to be another hundred years—not if Hart had anything to do with it— before the races treated each other with respect.
“There was another reason as well,” added Browning. “The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee was James Eastland of Mississippi, and nothing got through that committee the chairman did not want. The real mystery is why Eastland, who could have stopped the Voting Rights Act with nothing more than a word, let it through. The answer, I think, is that Phil Hart asked him if he would. The bill got through the committee, and when it came to the floor, where all the southern senators would vote against it in what they knew, and had accepted, was a losing cause, one of them delivered a speech that attacked Hart by name. Someone started to rise in Hart’s defense, but Hart held him back, explaining that it had all been prearranged. A little verbal abuse from a senator playing to the folks back home was a small enough price to pay for that same senator’s quiet refusal to do anything more than cast a single useless vote to stop it.”
Browning glanced at the black-and-white photograph. “It’s the only picture of a public figure I keep in here. Hart kept only one picture as well. You know whose picture it was? James Eastland of Mississippi.”
Browning got to his feet. “I keep that picture because it reminds me of what people—even people in politics—can be.” His eyes grew hard, calculating and even, I thought, vengeful. “I keep it to remind me that not everyone is like Connally and Walker and the rest of that crowd who think that government is the enemy and that the poor can take care of themselves.”
His chest rumbled with laughter. “See?—Only one person in the room and I feel compelled to make a speech!” He started toward the door, glancing over his shoulder at Hart’s picture. “Another story you’ll never read about…”
He stopped, came back, sat down at the end of the leather sofa. He appeared to meditate on something grave.
“You remember Reynolds,” he said presently. “What a miserable bastard he was.” There was another pause, not so long, but in a way more profound. He raised his eyelids and revealed a scornful look. “You remember what he did.”
It was not that I thought the offense less serious, or in some way more forgivable, but I had in what was perhaps the desperate comfort of a last illusion decided that if you did what Reynolds had done, you would always live with the knowledge that whatever you might later achieve was based on a fraud. Reynolds was a cheat, and because of that, his life was a lie. Reynolds did not matter. I had long ago dismissed him from my mind. I said this in no uncertain terms to Browning. In reply he gave me a look that told me he wished it were true.
“Unfortunately, that cheat, that liar, is the swing vote on a five-to-four Court. He hates me with a passion. He knows I fought his nomination, that when I heard what the president—it was Connally’s idea—was thinking, I tried to get it killed.”
“Did you tell them what he did at Harvard? How he cheated his way through?”
Browning broke into a broad, rueful smile. “That would have made them even more certain they’d found the right man for the job.”
The smile faded from his lips. “What could I have done? Told them we all knew he cheated, but no one had ever proved it? Proved it? No one had ever accused him of it; not in a way that left an official record. All I could say—and I said this—was that there was some question whether during his long career he had always been honest in his methods. Of course, it all got back to him. He knows what I meant and he hates me for it. He hated me before, me and you and everyone else who knew. He hates us because we know, and I think he hates us even more because we’ve never told.”
With a discouraged look, Browning got to his feet. He glanced again at the photograph.
“Years ago—it seems like forever now—Lyndon Johnson was president, and he put his great good friend Abe Fortas on the court. Earl Warren was going to retire. Johnson nominated Fortas to become chief justice.” Browning looked at me. “You remember all this? Then it was revealed that Fortas had taken some money—not much, twenty thousand or so—as an honorarium, some kind of expense…” Browning was moving now, pacing slowly around the room, hair slipping down the right side of his high prominent forehead. “Fortas had to resign from the court. Johnson wasn’t going to be beaten twice. He didn’t have the strength he had once had—Vietnam had weakened him; almost destroyed him, really. He had probably already decided he wasn’t going to seek a second full term. But he understood the Senate perhaps better than anyone ever had. He decided to give them a name they could not refuse. He was going to nominate Phil Hart to become chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.”
Browning stood still and shook his head, baffled and amused that someone had really done something as remarkable, as unprecedented, as what he was about to tell me.
“Hart turned him down. He thought about it. He made at least one call I know about to ask someone’s advice; but, yes—Hart turned him down. Chief justice of the United States Supreme Court and Hart said no. I don’t know why he did that. The first chief justice, John Jay, didn’t think the job worth having. He said as much when he quit. Then John Marshall took his place, and ever since then it’s become the dream of every lawyer, the obsession of every judge, and Hart said no. I think he had a certain definite sense about the limitations of his own powers: He would not do something unless he thought he could do it well.” Browning shook his head, sadly and with regret. “That of course is precisely the reason why he would have been a great chief justice, one of the best we’ve ever had. Strange when you think about it: In a city of such colossal egos, Hart wasn’t sufficiently vain.”
The glow of nostalgia in Browning’s eyes vanished, replaced with a look cold, hard, intense. “And now exactly the opposite situation is playing out in front of my eyes, and there isn’t anything I can do about it. Reynolds is on the court because Walker wanted him there, and Walker wanted him there because the chief justice is dying.” With a stern look that swore me to secrecy, Browning added: “Only a few people know. Cancer. He has maybe a year.”
I could not believe what I knew he was about to tell me. “Reynolds—chief justice?”
“Of course. They have the presidency; they want the court. Reynolds as chief justice is like having Arthur Connally over there. They’ll tell him what they want, and he’ll do it.”
There was one hope left. As soon as I said it, I realized how ludicrous it must sound.
“Other presidents have thought that. They nominated people they thought would vote one way who voted another. Earl Warren didn’t turn out to be the kind of chief justice Eisenhower thought he would.”
Browning nearly laughed. “Reynolds? Even if he wanted to do the right thing, he’d never be able to figure out what it was. Remember what Teddy Roosevelt said about Oliver Wendell Holmes?—That he had the ‘backbone of a banana.’ Reynolds has the eyes of a beggar: craven, cowardly, eager to please. Watch him sometime, the greedy look in those nervous little eyes when he’s introduced. His mouth starts to form the word Justice as if he has to hear it twice. His eyes light up like a match being struck. He loves the sound of it, the title, the fact that everyone has to call him ‘Mr. Justice Reynolds.’ He spent days training the woman who answered his phone to say it exactly right.”
Browning caught the look of skepticism that flashed across my eyes. “Days, I tell you.” A raised eyebrow acknowledged that if he had not known better he would have had the same reaction. “‘Mr… Justice… Reynolds.’ That was crucial,” Browning explained, suppressing a grin. “That pause—that pregnant pause— after each word.” He cocked his head and gave me a puzzled, doubtful look. “The real mystery is why he did not add a flourish of coronets. I’m tempted to say it’s because he didn’t have the wit, but when it comes to advertising his own importance… No, it wouldn’t be because he didn’t think of it. He’s probably saving it, keeping it for later, when he becomes chief justice and can reserve it for himself.”
Certain he was right, he nodded once and then, vastly amused, shrugged his shoulders. “They play that flourish each time the president enters a room; why not the chief justice?”
He walked past me to the French doors that led out to the covered porch. He raised his arm and rested it against the corner of the bookcase as he stared through the glass. Seen in this attitude of repose, his hand was surprisingly graceful: a violinist’s bow would have fit perfectly within the grasp of the smooth, round fingers. His hands were too small to have played the piano with more than passable skill, but I could see them moving with the blur-like speed of a virtuoso the short distance of a violin’s strings. With a quarter turn, he leaned against the flat end of the bookcase and the casement of the door. He held his arms, loosely folded, across his chest, sunk in a single troubling and depressing thought.
“Reynolds has never been sick a day in his life. He could be chief justice for twenty, twenty-five years— maybe thirty. If that happens, and if I’m forced out—if they put the kind of man they want into the vice presidency, someone who can follow Walker with another eight years of welfare for the rich and laissez faire economics for everyone else—there may not be anything that can put this country back together. With Reynolds chief justice, and with the additional vote they pick up by filling the vacancy, they’ll have a permanent six-to-three majority. There won’t be any constitutional restraints on what these people want to do.”
“Abortion; the right to bear arms; prayer in schools,” I said, beginning with the top of the list generally considered the conservative agenda. Staring down at the floor, Browning shoved one foot an inch or so ahead of the other.
“That’s what they want everyone to think. It keeps everyone’s attention away from what they really want,” he muttered darkly. He pushed himself away from the side of the bookshelf and turned toward me, filling the space inside the frame of the French doors.
“Every time I hear Walker or one of his friends give a speech and mention Teddy Roosevelt, I want to throw up. Roosevelt understood what industrialization had done to the country and how it was going to change the world. There was no equivalency, no balance between the interest of business and the interest of the American government for Roosevelt. The government—the public interest—was what counted. The nation!—That’s what mattered. You think these people believe that? They don’t have the faintest idea what Teddy Roosevelt meant.”
With a long, deep breath, Browning gathered himself, the look in his eyes urgent, serious, intense.
“We don’t talk about ourselves as citizens, with a citizen’s duties and obligations; we talk about ourselves as consumers, people whose basic function is to buy the things we make so we can keep making more. The country is attacked. What do we do? Call for great sacrifice? Call for a new dedication to what we believe as a country? Treat it as a second Pearl Harbor and ask everyone to join the military or in some other way help prosecute the war? Treat it as a great opportunity to change the way we live, to become a country with something more important to do than choose the latest amusement? No—Do the same thing you’ve done before: spend money, shop. The economy is the important thing. And patriotism—the willingness to sacrifice for freedom and for the country you love? It’s become too expensive, something we can’t any longer afford. If I had been president, things would have been different. I can assure you of that. The days of soft self indulgence would have been gone forever.”
“What would you have done?” I asked.
He did not seem to hear me, but then, as if the question had echoed somewhere in his mind, he looked at me hard and intense.
“I would have…” He caught himself. With his head bent forward, he made his way to the desk. He pulled open the second drawer down on the left and extracted a small, thin paperback volume. The cover was bent and broken, the purple color worn away.
“When you argue a case to a jury—when you know you’re right—have you ever found yourself so swept up in the emotion, in the passion of the moment, that you say things that have an immediate effect; and it’s exactly the effect you want, because it’s the truth and you feel it; and because you feel it, everyone watching you, listening to you, feels it, too; and not only do they feel it, but they know they can trust you, believe you, believe that what you’re telling them is true? And have you ever then gone back, after the trial is over, after all the heat of the moment is gone and read in the cold light of day a transcript of the trial; read what you said that day, read what you believed with such fervor, such conviction; and because the moment has passed, cringed just a little, wondering how you could have done it, how you could have said the things you did? And at the same time, didn’t you know you had been right, that it was all true, and that while it might sound stilted, even fanatical, in the same circumstances, surrounded with the same sense of urgency, you would do it again?—That you would, in that old, timeworn phrase, ‘seize the moment’?”
Browning glanced down at the book he held in his hands. When he looked up there was a trace of regret, a sense of having been close enough to touch, but not quite close enough to grasp, something he had wanted more than anything. It lasted only an instant, and if I had not known him as well as I did, or as well as I thought I did, I would have questioned whether I had seen it there at all.
“Here,” he remarked, laughing at himself as he handed the book to me. He put his hand on my shoulder as we turned and I went with him toward the door. “Read this if you want. There is something in it that explains what I was going to say.”
I glanced at the cover as he opened the door to the hallway. “Montesquieu, The Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline.” Puzzled, I looked at Browning, but he was walking quickly toward the dining room where behind the closed door could be heard a tumult of fierce, shouting noise. He put his hand on the door handle, but did not pull it open.
“Read especially the part about what happened, or rather what could have happened, after Julius Caesar was stabbed,” he said, a distant, enigmatic smile on his lips. “Then there will be two of us who have.”
He opened the door, and a dozen screaming voices were immediately dumb. Toward the far end of the table, Elizabeth Hartley opened the fist with which she had just struck the table and spread her fingers out.
“It’s good to see that your deliberations are proceeding in such a calm, dignified manner,” said Browning. “I’ll be with you in a moment.” He shut the door behind him and with his hand on my shoulder walked me a few steps away.
“Think about what I told you. I meant what I said: Someone is going to be indicted. You’re the only one I trust.”
“I still can’t believe they would actually…”
“Mr. Vice President,” said an urgent voice from the end of the hall. Browning waited as one of his assistants walked quickly toward him and handed him a telephone. Browning seemed to understand immediately that it was important. He held the phone to his ear, staring straight ahead, listening without the slightest change of expression until the end.
“Thank you. I understand.”
After the assistant had taken the telephone and left us alone, Browning gave me an ominous look.
“Things are moving more quickly than I thought. The grand jury is meeting this morning in New York.” He dropped his head and stared intently at the floor. A shudder passed through him. “They’ll have an indictment by this afternoon.”
I had the feeling that what was about to happen had happened a long time ago, and that I was somehow living it all over again, repeating it until I finally got it right.
Browning did not say who was going to be indicted, but I think he knew. Perhaps he was still hoping that it would not happen, that what he had just been told was wrong, or that if there were an indictment, it would name someone else. All he said was that we would know for certain before the day was out and that he was more certain than ever that I had to do what he had asked me to do the night before.
“Take the case. Call me as a witness; put me on the stand. I was there; I know what happened. I know how Annie died.” He looked me straight in the eye. “When was the last time all you had to do to win a case was put a witness on the stand who told the truth?”
His eyes blazed with confidence. With his hand on my shoulder, we shook hands.
“I meant what I said two nights ago, at the dinner in New York: You’re the best of them; and I knew it from the first day we met.”
He had his hand on the door to the dining room when he remembered. “There’s a telephone message for you,” he said, gesturing toward an office on the other side of the stairs from the study. He looked away awkwardly. “And I’m afraid that Joanna won’t be able to join you for lunch as she had planned. She isn’t feeling very well today.” He raised his head, glancing at me for an instant before he opened the door and disappeared inside. With that look he tried to apologize for the lie.
The message was from Gisela Hoffman. When I called her back, she answered on the second ring. The accent that made me start to laugh was gone. She was cold, aloof, severe. She said she had to see me. It was urgent.
In one of Browning’s private limousines I was driven out the gate and onto the street below. We passed the embassy that had for a few brief hours been the center of Washington’s attention the night before. People walked by without so much as a glance.
The driver pulled up in front of a narrow brick house on a leafy, tree-shaded Georgetown block filled with other houses of a similar look and nearly identical dimension. Most of them were three stories tall, with bay windows in the front; some of them had ornamental iron fences bulging with layers of lumpy black paint and shiny lacquered front doors; all of them had the dimly colonial look of lost elegance carefully restored. They were row houses, built originally to house the city’s vast supply of what were then called Negro servants and menial workers, but who were then driven out when the housing shortage became desperate in the great expansion of government that came with the Second World War. During the heady days of the New Frontier they became the fashionable address of the Washington elite. They were still home to some of the most famous and powerful people in town.
Gisela answered the door with the face I remembered. The cold and peremptory voice on the telephone seemed to belong to someone else. Holding the edge of the door with both hands, she glanced quickly down both sides of the street as I slipped inside. Browning had told me about the angry confrontation that had taken place at the embassy the night before. I wondered if she was worried about what might happen if she was seen talking with me twice. There was something amusing, and in a strange way, thrilling, about the thought of a jealous husband waiting somewhere outside.
She was wearing a white blouse and a simple black skirt. Her hair was pulled up. She had on red lipstick and high-heeled shoes that left a sharp abrasive echo in the air as she led me through the marble entryway and onto the hardwood floor of the living room, really nothing more than a small parlor, past the steep staircase that seemed to rise straight up from the hallway to the towering ceiling on the third floor above, and from there through a mirrored, windowless dining room into a large kitchen in the back.
“Thank you for coming.” She had that slightly embarrassed look I remembered from the night before, grinning like a schoolgirl at her best-intentioned failure at the right pronunciation of the words. “When you called me…” She hesitated, putting the sentence together in her mind. “When you called me back, I couldn’t speak—talk. I was at the office,” she explained. “I didn’t want anyone to know. I’m afraid—I was worried—you must think me very rude.”
We sat at a square table beneath the same high ceiling—at least ten, perhaps twelve feet—I had passed under in the rooms I had come through. Each floor must be like the first, one room wide, and with the sense, because the ceilings were so high, that the walls were pressing toward you, squeezing out the light.
Gisela looked at me with dark wide-open eyes, organizing her thoughts. She took a deep breath.
“I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. Her long, fine lashes beat rapidly as she sprang to her feet. “Can I get you something?”
“You said you wanted to see me. You said it was urgent.”
It was irresistible, that look of baffled embarrassment that swept across her face each time she remembered something she could not understand why she had forgotten. She shook her head and threw out her hands, then shrugged her shoulders, knit her brow, and tried hard to think.
“Well, urgent—perhaps that’s not quite the word. Important might have been better.” Slightly flustered, she blinked her eyes and glanced around the room as if she were a stranger, seeing it for the first time. “I asked you here, because I didn’t know anywhere else that might be… safe? Yes, well, perhaps… where no one would know we talked.”
With her fingernail she drew an invisible line on the table. By the time she stopped, she had become serious and strangely intent.
“You were in the same class in law school as Vice President Browning.”
It was not a question; but then again, it was. Or rather it was the beginning of an interrogation: polite, civilized, friendly and, as I immediately understood, potentially dangerous. I was waiting for her when she raised her eyes.
“And there was also at the law school, though not in the same class, another student: a young woman named Anna Winifred Malreaux?”
All my hurried caution vanished. I started to smile.
“Annie’s middle name was Winifred? I never knew that.”
Gisela’s expression did not change. She had not known Annie; she had not known any of us. She was interested only in what she had asked.
“Then, yes? Anna Malreaux was in law school at the same time?”
It was, I realized, a journalistic formality: the questions to which the answers were already known, before the other questions, the real questions, were asked.
“You already know that,” I replied. “Why are you asking me what you already know?” I asked sharply. “If you want to know about the vice president, don’t you think you ought to ask him?”
I was sorry that I had come. I started to get up. A wounded look entered her eyes, and without quite changing my mind, I paused, settled back in the chair and waited.
“I’m sorry. Perhaps I shouldn’t have… but I thought you would want to know. There is a new investigation into her murder and…”
“Annie wasn’t murdered,” I objected. “It was an accident. She fell out a window—she wasn’t pushed.”
“There is a new investigation into her—death; and there is going to be an indictment.”
I searched Gisela’s serious eyes. “How do you know that? How could you know that?”
Gisela lowered her eyes, studying the backs of her fingers after she laid her right hand palm down on the table. Browning had only just learned of it—how did she know it so soon?
“When did you hear there was going to be an indictment?”
She raised her eyes. “I learned about it this morning, just before I called. I can’t tell you any more than that.” she held herself with a rigid formality, like someone trying hard to be objective between the truth they cannot reveal and the lie they do not know how to tell.
“Someone in the New York district attorney’s office told you this?”
She started to fidget with her hands, became aware of it and stopped. Her eyes stayed fastened on mine, afraid that by looking away she would tell me what she did not think she should. Instead of hiding the truth, it gave it away. She knew there was an investigation; she knew there might be an indictment—but she had not gotten that information from anyone in New York.
“Your source is someone here, someone in the White House.”
She bent her head a little to the side. “You know I can’t tell you that. But you can tell me, can’t you? The vice president knew her? It happened in his hotel room—yes?”
“No,” I said almost angrily. “Not in his hotel room.” It was odd the way that seemed to change the meaning, the way it gave a completely different interpretation to what had happened. “At a hotel suite—a suite at the Plaza—in New York.” I laughed in frustration. “A suite! That scarcely does it justice. He may have had the whole floor: All the rooms connected one after the other. It was immense. There were people everywhere, milling all around.”
She gazed at me steadily, refusing to let herself be drawn away from the central, all-important point. Behind that malleable self-deprecating manner, there was something firm and resolute.
“You were there, then. What happened?”
“Yes, I was there.” I paused, hesitating; not about whether to tell the truth, but how much of it to share. “No, I wasn’t there.”
She stared at me in astonishment. “You were there— you were not there?”
“I was there at the Plaza in New York; I wasn’t there where it happened, when she fell.”
“Who was there?”
I looked away, glanced at my watch as if I thought it must be time for me to go. Scratching the side of my chin, I tried to sound indifferent and sounded instead like a fraud.
“It was a long time ago,” I said, gazing into her unbelieving eyes. “It was an accident. It was an accident,” I repeated. “There isn’t any question about that.”
“The vice president was in the room, wasn’t he?” she asked in a calm, measured voice.
With anyone else, I would not have answered at all. I seldom spoke to reporters, and then only if I had known them for years and knew just how far I could go. But I was angry, angry at her for asking these questions, angry with myself for the foolish, awkward way I kept trying to avoid the truth.
“Why ask me something you already know? The White House must have told you he was there. It isn’t any secret. There was a police report—perhaps they failed to mention that! Annie Malreaux’s death was ruled an accident. Of course Browning was there. This is nothing more than a bad joke. The only reason there is an investigation is because the people who work for Walker—including, I imagine, the person you’ve been talking to—seem to have a talent for starting stories that help them get rid of people they couldn’t otherwise beat!”
I was on my feet, mumbling an apology about the way I had just spoken, telling her I had to leave. She let me go on, rambling incoherence, while she sat there, calmly watching me with cool, lucid eyes.
“You also went to law school with someone named Jamison Scott Haviland?”
The long formality of the name struck me as odd, incongruous, as if Jimmy Haviland had become a distinguished jurist, a member of the United States Supreme Court, someone who might have sat in place of Reynolds, with folded hands and a dignified smile, when each October the nine justices sat together to have their photograph taken at the opening of another term; as if Jimmy Haviland had made something of himself, been what he once had every right to expect he could become, instead of… well, instead of what he had become.
“Yeah,” I admitted, edging toward the kitchen counter. With my hands behind me, I leaned back, waiting for what came next. “Why?”
There was something strangely sympathetic in her eyes, as if she knew that Haviland’s name brought back things I did not want to remember.
“What about Jamison Scott Haviland?” I asked with a sudden sense of foreboding.
“He’s the one who is going to be indicted. He’s the one they’re going to charge with the murder of Anna Winifred Malreaux.”
“It’s impossible,” I insisted. Jimmy Haviland seemed barely able to function as it was. Just going back to the Plaza had taken everything he had. An indictment, a formal, public accusation of murder—Annie’s murder—would destroy him.
“Haviland—he was a friend of yours?” At first I did not quite hear what she said. In a softer, more sympathetic voice, she asked again.
“We were—yes.”
I could see him now, the way he had been, Jimmy Haviland, the one everyone liked, the one who, if you had had to guess which of the members of that class were most likely to go into politics and succeed, would have been right at the top of the list. Jimmy Haviland, who could always find time for someone who needed help; Jimmy Haviland, young and good-looking, who had gone out with too many girls to be serious about any of them, until he met Annie, and then did not know any other way to be.
“Then you’ll help him—defend him? Take his case?”
“What?” I asked with an absent glance. “Would I do what? Help him?”
I was still thinking, still remembering, trying to see Annie’s face, the way she looked, the effect she had, the way she changed the way other people—Jimmy, Browning, all of us—felt about themselves. I was nodding my head and did not know I was doing it.
“Yeah,” I heard myself say in a vague, distant voice. “I’ll do whatever I can.”
“Because you are a friend of Jamison Scott Haviland, or because you are a friend of Thomas Browning?”
I barely heard the question, and I did not know the answer. My mind was on something else. Where had Jimmy Haviland’s name come from? There was something troubling about it, something sinister and cruel that suggested an indefatigable resolve, a cold, iron will that would stop at nothing. And then there was the question, the question I was almost afraid to think about: that it was not just a rumor started out of nothing, that the people who were behind this knew something, that Annie Malreaux’s death had not been an accident after all. But if that were true, what did Thomas Browning know and what was he holding back?