The Sun King

by David Ignatius

  We met in a smoky basement bar—their choice; they wanted to be in that same old movie about journalism. The two reporters were both in their mid-thirties and hungry for the chase. Their names were Taub and Loden—not quite right for the book jacket. They ordered beers and barely touched them; I ordered a martini, and then another. I looked around the bar. It was an odd place; nobody was trying to pick anyone up. It must have been unhappy hour. I wasn’t sure, at first, whether to share with my Sun colleagues the information I had picked up from the eponymous Mr. Buzby that morning. But it occurred to me that this might be my escape. As long as I was part of the newspaper’s team exposing Galvin’s misdeeds, it would be harder for someone to accuse me of taking part in them. So without mentioning the fact that I had just talked with the House committee, I ran through the laundry list of what Buzby seemed to be chasing—Angola, Nigeria, South Africa, Iran, Iraq, Russia. I also mentioned my suspicions about Galvin’s collusion with PalmTrust many months ago, when he had acquired the paper. It was all truthful—that was the sneaky part.

  The two reporters listened intently, and took pages of notes. They kept nodding when I brought up a subject, and finishing sentences for me. It became obvious, after a half hour or so, that they already knew most of what I was telling them. “What are you going to do with all this?” I asked when they were done, and one of them answered solemnly that Candace Ridgway would decide.

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE FOLLOWING DAY WAS A SATURDAY, AND I WOULD have stayed at home reading Trollope or searching for perverse Web sites on the Internet, but Galvin called that morning and asked me to come visit. He was feeling poorly, he said; Candace had begged off and he was quite alone in his big house and could use some company. He sounded surprisingly frail, and there was a sad undertone in his voice, which, in anyone else, I would have taken for melancholy.

  Outside was a deadly fairyland. The temperature had continued to drop, chilling the city down to blue ice and then relenting hideously for a few hours before plummeting again. The precipitation came in that interlude of relative warmth—not as a dusting of snow but as an assault of freezing rain that made the roads as slick as a hockey rink. The trees sparkled in their frigid armor—every branch and twig encased in a thin, hard shell. The power lines sagged overhead with the weight of the ice; up Connecticut Avenue, I could hear one that was already down, crackling against the icy pavement. I walked two blocks to the parking lot on Florida Avenue where I kept my car. It was hard just keeping my footing on the sidewalk, and the Pakistani gentleman who managed the parking lot suggested that I was out of my mind, sir, to consider driving anywhere in these conditions.

  I pointed to my battered gray Honda. “Perfect car for a day like this,” I said. “And it’s fate, you see. I’ll either crash, or I won’t.” That disturbed him even more—the possibility that the ruinous fatalism of the East, which he had fled in search of a better and more rational life, was now infecting Washington.

  Out on the street everything was fine, until you had to stop. That was all but impossible, especially on hills. The application of the brakes did not produce the usual effect of halting the car’s forward motion. Instead the car skated along the slick surface until its forward momentum dissipated, or it hit something. I plotted as flat a course as possible to Galvin’s house, but I hadn’t reckoned on the steep pitch of his driveway. I tried to tiptoe down it, going just a few feet before applying the brake. But as the drive grew steeper this strategy failed, and I drifted off the road twice—once hitting a tree and adding another nice dent to my Honda. When I finally arrived at the bottom of the drive and rang the bell, I felt I had achieved something, just in being there.

  Galvin answered the door himself, in a black satin smoking jacket and red velvet slippers embroidered with his initials. At first glance, he still had the look of an old-time movie star, an Errol Flynn, perhaps, or a Clark Gable. But there were dark circles under his eyes and his skin had lost the luminous summertime glow. It was dryer now, almost translucent, with the pale surface admitting the imperfections of age. He looked weary.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said. “I appreciate it very much.” Poor man. He really did seem touched that I had made the trip through the ice and bitter cold.

  “Where are the servants?” I asked. He had never answered the door himself that I could remember. Even the dog, that beautiful yellow Lab, was gone.

  “I let the servants go. All except the housekeeper. Things may get ragged around here, and I didn’t want them to get caught up in it. This way, I could pay their year-end bonuses and kiss them all good-bye.”

  He led me into the small study where we’d sat that magical night with Candace—magical for the two of them, at least. He had a fire blazing away, and a big mug of tea on the side table. The place wasn’t quite so tidy now, with the servants gone. That made it more attractive—it seemed like a place where a real person lived. A crocheted blanket lay on the couch; Galvin folded it and put it aside. He asked if I wanted some coffee or tea, but I poured myself a glass of whiskey instead.

  “You don’t look well,” I said.

  “It’s this damned cold,” he answered. “I haven’t been able to shake it. It’s hard to sleep at night, with all the coughing and blowing my nose. But I’m all right. Better in no time.”

  I nodded. Whatever he wanted to say was fine with me.

  “These must be tough times for you,” I said. “I’m sorry you’re under the weather, in addition to everything else.” It was hard to find the right words. He was a man who gave encouragement and affection so easily to others but found them hard to accept himself.

  “Not at all,” he answered. “In most respects, this is the happiest time of my life. I’ve achieved the things I wanted.” His smile was gentle and unfeigned, and for all the fatigue that showed on his face, he radiated his own kind of serenity. He meant it, obviously. Yet I felt a need to warn him, even if I couldn’t protect him from what lay ahead.

  “They’re coming after you,” I said. “The House committee is gathering a lot of material. They’re looking at every deal you’ve ever done, every commission you’ve ever paid. If you or Ted Amara ever bribed anyone, anywhere, they’re going to find out about it.”

  “I know, I know.” He sounded bored, more than pained. “Let them collect all the garbage they want. There’s nothing I can do about it. I haven’t done anything illegal—nothing that matters, at least. I have a clean heart. So let them take their shot. We still have our newspaper. I don’t care about the rest.”

  A chill came over him; he bundled himself tighter in the smoking jacket and laid the blanket over his lap. He looked so gentle and forgiving sitting there, it gave me a bad feeling—not about him, but about myself. I didn’t like confessions, but I owed him one.

  “I have to tell you something,” I said. “I talked a few days ago to an investigator from the House committee. They invited me to come in for an interview, and I agreed. They asked me a lot of questions, and I didn’t really tell them anything. But it bothers me, and I thought I should tell you.” I blurted it out, and then stared at the floor in embarrassment.

  “I know you went to see them,” said Galvin.

  “You do?” I was astonished. Why had he been so civil if he knew I’d been meeting with his enemies?

  “A committee staff guy called me afterward, claiming you were cooperating with them. I didn’t believe it. They’re just trying to squeeze me. This is what they do when they decide to make you a target. But I don’t care. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “They wanted to know how you bought the Sun. They think you were colluding with Wolfe. They made it sound like fraud, and they seemed to think I was part of it.”

  “Don’t worry.” He patted my hand. “They don’t have anything on you. If it comes to it, I’ll swear I never told you a thing. But it won’t.”

  It wasn’t even possible to betray this man. His serenity was so enveloping, it left you defenseless. But all the cal
m in the world wouldn’t pay his bills.

  “How will you survive financially? They made it sound like you’re in real trouble. How can you hold on to the newspaper when people are squeezing you for money?”

  “I do have money trouble,” he said. “I’ll admit it—to you, at least. My commodities business owes more than a billion dollars, and I’ve run out of people who’ll lend me more money. It will go bankrupt in a few days or weeks, depending on when people decide to take it down. But so what? It’s finished, and I’m not sorry. The people I owe money to have too much of it already, and most of them are idiots. I won’t miss them. All I care about now is protecting the newspaper.”

  “How can you save the Sun if all your other businesses are in the toilet?”

  “I’ve taken steps, set some things up. What do you think Ted Amara has been working on? But don’t ask for details. It’s too complicated.”

  He called to the housekeeper to make him some more tea, and then shuffled off to the bathroom in his velvet slippers. He took little steps now, like an old man, instead of those thirty-league strides I remembered from our first encounter. But in most respects, he hadn’t really changed. I thought of all the people who had stood on his back lawn at those early parties, drinking his liquor and basking in his reflection. I was certain that not one of them would come to his aid now that he had been brought to ground.

  GALVIN WANTED TO SIT in the sunroom. It was a glassed-in porch that overlooked the back gardens and the rocky hillside that led down to the river. He’d cranked the heat up so that it felt toasty, despite the chill outside. The ice-coated trees glinted in the low winter sun, their bare and spindly branches bound in the shimmering wrappers. It was like a primeval forest that had been frozen dead in time by some catastrophic event—the eruption of a volcano, or the crash of a meteor. I could see where the tent had stood the night of his triumphal party—and see in my mind’s eye the figure of Candace, spinning in his arms on the dance floor.

  Our conversation turned to her, inevitably. She was the maypole around which we had been dancing for all these months, though I doubt that Galvin even then realized the depth or complexity of my feelings for her. I still found their relationship puzzling. I saw the effects, but not the cause. And the more I’d tried to explore it, the more confused I had become.

  He brought Candace up. That was the odd thing. I had assumed that I would never get him to open up about her—he was so private about the things that really mattered to him. But he wanted to talk. Maybe I was the only person who knew them both well enough to be a good listener.

  “The thing you have to understand about Candace is that she’s frightened,” he said during a lull in the conversation. We had been talking about the newspaper, and how Candace was doing in her first weeks as editor.

  “Frightened of what?” I asked. That wasn’t the first word that would have come to mind to describe her.

  “Commitment. Failure. All the things people are usually afraid of, plus what her father’s death added to the pile. She was different after that.”

  He was inviting the question, so I asked it. What had happened to Candace in the weeks surrounding her father’s death? Why had she left Galvin, if she had loved him so much? If I could understand that, maybe the rest would be clear.

  “You want to hear the story?” he mused. “How it ended?” Of course I did, he could see that, and he was a man who liked to give other people what they wanted.

  THEY WERE DRUNK WITH love, as Galvin remembered it, but they both knew it was time to sober up and settle in. He was twenty-one; she was nineteen. They had returned from that palmy trip across the country, riding freight trains and sleeping on the beach, but the Kerouac days were over. It was the fall of 1971: The circus was leaving town, and people were cleaning up the debris.

  Candace had gone home first to Washington, to see her parents before school started. She came back to Harvard looking frazzled. Her father’s problems were getting worse. She wouldn’t talk about it, but it was obvious that he was unwell. Her mother, in her anxiety, was nagging at Candace. She didn’t approve of her relationship with Galvin, and had tried to stop her from traveling across the country—relenting only when Mr. Ridgway told her to relax, a little rebelliousness was a good thing. Inwardly, she blamed Candace for making her father’s illness worse. There had been a terrible scene before Candace left, with her mother screaming and Candace in tears.

  All this discontent burdened Candace when she arrived back at school. Galvin wanted to lighten her load, but he wasn’t sure how. She was spending more time by herself in the dorm; she said she needed to study more sophomore year, but Galvin knew it wasn’t that. She was pulling away. Her family and its tight-lipped craziness were reclaiming her, he thought. One bright Sunday in October, Galvin made a picnic and took her to Walden Pond. They came back to his room that night and made love. But she was gone at first light, and he was too sleepy to say good-bye.

  As things turned out, that was the day her father killed himself. Galvin heard about it as he was leaving a seminar in William James Hall, from a friend who’d heard the news on the radio. By the time he called Candace, she had already left for Washington.

  Galvin followed her. He was there for the funeral, but he felt like an outsider. This wasn’t his tribe, and all his latent insecurities about his girlfriend’s elite background returned. Candace submerged her grief in the work of planning the funeral. This was a public event, and the family’s friends and retainers crowded around. Her mother was overwhelmed, and much of the planning fell to Candace. Galvin knew that the most generous gift he could offer was to stay out of the way.

  The funeral service was held in Washington Cathedral, with many hundreds of people crowding the nave. The Establishment understood that Dwight Ridgway was a casualty of war. They had watched him come apart, layer by layer; he was a symbol of the ruination of their world. Candace was dry-eyed through the service—making it easier for the others, trying to be her father’s daughter. She read the passage from the Song of Solomon that had been open on her father’s reading table the morning he died. The way she read it, she made you believe that love was stronger than death, that many waters truly couldn’t quench it nor floods drown it. That had been her idea. It was as close as they had to a suicide note. The organ surged at the end of the service, and even the immense pillars at the crossing seemed to resonate with the sound. At the reception later, a long line of people waited to kiss Candace and tell her how proud her father would have been of her.

  When the public events of the funeral were over, she was overwhelmed with grief. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, could barely talk. It was like watching someone waste away. Galvin didn’t know what to do. He had never seen anyone grieve like that. He returned to Cambridge, and she followed a few days later. He waited for her to get better, calling several times a day and bringing her flowers or food. Sometimes they would take long walks together, but she would go for twenty or thirty minutes without talking. She had to return home twice that month to Washington, to take care of her mother, who was in even worse shape. By November, Galvin began to worry seriously about Candace. The family was taking its revenge; they would swallow her alive.

  Galvin knew that he loved her. And he believed that, in time, he could heal the pain she was feeling. He felt a responsibility. She was so alone now; he was her real family. One clear, crisp Saturday in mid-November he invited her to have dinner with him. A graduate-student friend was away for the weekend, and Galvin borrowed his apartment along the Charles. It was in a high-rise building; through the big picture window you could see the dark ribbon of water bending back and forth all the way up to Fresh Pond. They arrived in the late afternoon, as the sun was setting. The low clouds were tufted with a rosy pink, almost a lobster red at the western edge, and then suddenly they went dark as the sun set.

  Galvin lit a candle and opened a bottle of champagne. The bed was turned down, for later. He sat Candace down on the couch, looking out at
the panorama of the city, and took her hand in his. He wanted everything to be just right, so that they would always remember how perfect it was. “Will you marry me?” he asked. He had said the words before, as another way of saying that he loved her, but this time he meant it. Now was the time. She was falling apart. He could give her happiness, if she would let him. He opened the box and took out the engagement ring.

  She looked at him distractedly, as if she hadn’t heard, and then began crying. For a brief moment, he thought they were tears of joy. He repeated his proposal, and this time she said it out loud: “No.” She didn’t want to marry him.

  When he pressed for a reason, she got angry. She said she couldn’t breathe. Galvin was smothering her. She had too many responsibilities, plans, things to do. She loved him, but she had a duty to herself and her family. That was the problem, Galvin told her sharply. That was what had killed her father. He pleaded with her to come away—to save herself and start a new life. But she refused. “Stop trying to hustle me!” she screamed. She grabbed her coat and ran to the elevator—leaving Galvin alone with his candle and bottle of champagne and engagement ring, and her words ringing in his ears.

  It was the worst moment of his life, he said. Even now, nearly thirty years later, he could feel the intense pain of that rejection. She had finally said it; he was a hustler. He wasn’t good enough for her, after all. He might be handsome and charming, but he wasn’t marriage material.

  And then Galvin decided to go away. He felt rejected—not just by her, but by the world she represented. The Ridgways were gods at Harvard. Her father had gone there; her cousins went there. It was a family industry. Galvin couldn’t bear to remain. He tried to study, go to the gym, date other girls—but it was all dust in his mouth. The game was over. He was a young guy from Pittsburgh with a screwball socialist for a dad, and he didn’t have two nickels to rub together. But his instinct for self-preservation was intact. He had an overwhelming desire to leave that place and get started.