The Sun King

by David Ignatius

  She sat in the back of the plane, wrapped in a blanket. On that plane ride, she had found her way to the white room. When she entered it, she didn’t know if she could survive in the frigid vacuum of her loss. She pulled the blanket around her head so that nobody could see her, and thought about her father. He would never come back. She was alone in the world. Yet inside the white chamber of her heart, she was alive. When she closed her eyes, she could see rays of light. She aged ten years on that flight; a different person got off the plane than the one who had boarded.

  Sandy had wanted to understand what she was going through—just as he wanted to understand and possess everything around him. He didn’t see that she was temporarily out of reach. Candace had always loved his vanity and self-absorption; they were part of what made him seem larger than life. But now she needed solitude. That was the way for her to get better, but he couldn’t see it. When he tried to put that ring on her finger, she felt a physical sense of disgust. It was so wrong, such an intrusion. He had misread the signals so totally. She wondered whether he really loved her if he could do something so selfish. So she had run away—back to the shelter of her white room.

  And then Sandy Galvin went away. He never told her he was leaving Harvard, he was so angry. She only found out when she called his number, one day in January, to see if he was all right. She hadn’t been sure what she would say to him; perhaps they would just take a walk. But the telephone had been disconnected. It was a shock, to know that he was gone. She felt numb again—the way she had the night he proposed—and then she ached. She thought it would go away, but it didn’t—all that winter and into the spring. She kept waiting for him to return, or at least call her to say that he was alive, in some distant place. But he didn’t.

  She had dated other men in college, and many since then. But the ache of longing didn’t go away. Galvin was like a tattoo; he was indelible. First love is sometimes that way—so pure and potent that it creates a place in your heart that didn’t exist before, and leaves behind a permanent emptiness. What she concluded, in those weeks and months—and finally, years—was the sad, simple truth that some things in life don’t work out. Some people aren’t fated to be happy in love. They miss their chance, for whatever reason, and don’t get it back. They can’t have what they want. That was a concept Galvin could not possibly have understood, but it had become part of her identity.

  CANDACE WAS CRADLING HER head in her hands. I walked to the refrigerator and poured us another glass of wine. It was getting dark outside. A fat winter cloud had settled over what was left of the sun. I put my hand on her shoulder to comfort her; she let it rest there, but that was all. She looked up at me. I’d come this far. What else did I want to know?

  “You stayed in touch with Galvin after that,” I said. “That’s what he told me. He said he helped you win your Pulitzer Prize.”

  “It’s true. Nobody’s supposed to know that, but he helped me a lot over the years. After he got rich, he sent me gifts and gave me information. He still wanted me, and I couldn’t say no. Then he wanted to move to Washington, and I let him. It was more than that—I wanted him to come. I thought perhaps now, this time, it could be different. I’m sorry that I lied to you about that, but there was so much to hide. This story was really so complicated, you see.”

  What a long time they’d spent living in suspended animation. I thought again of that Graham Greene passage Candace had read to me many years ago, about how a cold heart was more precious than diamonds. Was her heart finally warm? Would it melt through the chains of obligation and responsibility that surrounded her? I honestly didn’t know.

  “Do you love him?” That was the question I had asked her once before in this house, after the night of Galvin’s party. She had equivocated then, but not now.

  “Yes, of course I do. I always have. As much as I can love anyone, I love Sandy.”

  It’s a terrible thing to say, but even after that intense and overpowering conversation, I wasn’t sure that she was telling me the truth.

  TWENTY-THREE

  A MOVING VAN WAS PARKED IN FRONT OF GALVIN’S HOUSE. It was a huge double-length trailer—so big I wondered how they had gotten it down Galvin’s narrow driveway. The cab was parked in a flower bed to the left of the house, and the big trailer tires had torn up a swath of the lawn. On the front grille of the cab, I noticed, was a Christmas wreath. Large men with arms the size of hams were marching in and out of the house, toting the objects Galvin had collected over the years and stowing them in the cavernous truck. The movers had been hired by the committee of creditors that now controlled Galvin’s fate. They had rushed to seize Galvin’s property after debt-repayment negotiations collapsed the day before. It wasn’t public yet—he still had a few days of grace before the formal bankruptcy papers were filed in court. But his treasures were already being hauled away, to be auctioned off to some other bold entrepreneur.

  Candace and I had driven out that morning to see him. She had decided to publish the investigative article, and she asked me to accompany her. That seemed hideously inappropriate; surely she owed him a last private moment. But she insisted that I come—this was about the survival of the newspaper, she said. It had to be done right, with a witness. And I had acceded, selfishly, on the condition that I would be a passive onlooker only. For in truth, I wanted to be there. My role in this drama, at every point, had been to observe and chronicle it. That was my power and, you might say, my vengeance. I will leave to the reader the Heisenberg question—the problem of whether, in the act of observing, I changed the phenomena I am now describing.

  The house was nearly empty. The movers had done their job with ruthless efficiency by the time we arrived. The rooms were bare; the fine carpets had been rolled up and stowed in that vast truck; the paintings pulled down from the wall and packed in wooden crates. Galvin asked us to come sit in the sunroom. It was the only room that seemed to have any furniture left. The locusts had stripped him of everything else in the space of a few hours. He sat on a wicker couch with bright yellow cushions. Candace took the chair next to him, while I sat some distance away, as close to disappearing as I could manage.

  Galvin’s health had deteriorated further. There was a pallor to his skin, and a puffiness around the eyes, as if he had been taking drugs. He gathered the blanket across his lap as we talked. From the strain on his face he looked to be in some pain, though it was hard to tell, he was so good at concealment. On the coffee table in front of him were the Matisse etchings that had been hanging on the wall of his small dining room—the ones of the tauntingly beautiful model who looked so much like Candace. He was keeping them close now, like a bag of gold coins. They were all he had left.

  “This is one hell of a situation!” he said in the most blustery voice he could summon. “Carting away a man’s furniture in the middle of the night. I promise you, they’ll regret it. When I’m back on my feet, I’ll make them eat every stick they’ve taken out of here.” He sat back gingerly on the couch after his brief burst of bravado.

  Candace mumbled apologies for disturbing him on such a difficult day. She was having trouble looking at him; she was feeling the embarrassment of a healthy person visiting a sick one, when there are no right words to say, only wrong ones. It was a shock to her, obviously. It had been several weeks since she had been with him, and she wasn’t prepared to see him so visibly changed.

  He took her hand. It was still twice the size of hers, however papery and thin it had become. “Hey, sweetie,” he said. “Cheer up. Everything’s fine. I’ll buy more furniture.”

  Candace laughed nervously. It was obvious she hadn’t told him yet why she was there. For all he knew, it was just a social call.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked. “I’ve been looking forward to seeing you, Candace, although I must say, you could have chosen a better day.”

  “This is hard,” she said awkwardly. “You aren’t going to like it.”

  “I don’t like anything that’s hap
pening to me right now, except the fact that you’re here with me.” He took her hand again and gave her the sick man’s version of his bedroom smile.

  “It’s about the newspaper.” She looked at the floor, not at him, and kept talking. “You’re in financial and legal trouble. That puts the Sun in a difficult position. We have to publish something about you before everyone else does. If we don’t, it will look like we’re covering things up—just because you’re the publisher. So a few weeks ago I asked two reporters to do an independent investigation of your finances. I thought it was a way of protecting you, and the newspaper.”

  “Right. Sure.” He studied her face. Who was she, really? What was she made of? He would finally know. “So what did they discover?”

  “Painful things. The reporters found that you’re in default on a billion dollars in loans. They found that you’ve been in financial trouble for more than two years, and that you’ve been living on borrowed money ever since you arrived in Washington. They found that the SEC and the Justice Department are investigating you, and will probably bring charges soon. They found evidence that you acquired the Sun by fraud.” As she went through the list, she sounded like a newspaper reporter.

  He looked at her dumbly, unable to speak for a moment. It was as if she had given him a kick in the solar plexus and knocked the wind out of him. This was the answer to his question: She was in league with the misery makers. “What do you want from me?” he said, barely above a whisper.

  “We need your comment. Then we’re going to run the story. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re kidding me.” He was shaking his head; the blood was rising in his pale cheeks. He hadn’t let himself believe it before, when I tried to tell him. He loved her too much to think that she would deliberately hurt him. “You want to run this crap in my newspaper? And you want me to comment?”

  “Yes. I apologize, but that’s standard procedure. It would be wrong to run a story about anyone without letting them comment. Those are the rules.”

  “Okay, here’s my comment. What you said is total bullshit, and I’ll sue anybody who runs such a story. How would that be? I’ll sue myself, and win!”

  “Don’t make this harder than it has to be, Sandy. Please. For my sake.”

  “For your sake?” He took her forearm and pulled her toward him, hard enough that she cried out. “Don’t do this, Candace. Don’t play by these rules. You don’t have to.”

  “Yes, I do.” He was still holding her arm tightly. He hadn’t entirely lost his boxer’s strength. She was trembling, her face a few inches from his, and it was obvious that she was frightened. When Galvin saw that, he relaxed his grip.

  “You’re crazy,” he said. “Completely crazy.”

  “No, I’m not. You made me the editor of your newspaper. I told you then that I would do it the right way. I never imagined we would have a problem like this. But I have to protect the integrity of the paper. That’s the most important thing right now.”

  “No, it’s not, Candace. Duty to others is not the most important thing. Neither are rules or appearances. If you love me, you can’t possibly do this. It’s wrong. You’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

  “I’m a journalist. I have a responsibility to my colleagues. They’re depending on me to do what’s right.”

  “What an excuse! I guess I’m supposed to roll over and say ‘of course, darling,’ then do the ‘right thing.’ But it won’t work with me. We’ve had this argument before. That time, you didn’t bother to ask me for comment before you stuck a dagger in me.”

  She fell back in her chair; his words had wounded her as if he had struck with his own dagger. The look on her face now was one of pain and resignation. He would never understand. It was pointless to argue.

  “I should leave,” she said. “I have to get back to the office. I’ll send you a copy of the story for you to read, and if you have anything you want to say, you can call me.”

  She rose again and stood a few feet from him, her arms folded implacably across her chest. He looked up at her, whispering a cry of sadness to himself, and his eyes suddenly filled with tears. How could it have come to this? How could love be so powerless? She was frozen as if in an iceberg, drifting away from him forever, and he couldn’t pry her loose.

  “Sit down,” he said weakly. She sat, in deference to his tears if nothing else. He was such a big man; it was hard to see him humbled. He blew his nose in a handkerchief and dried his eyes with his sleeve.

  He took her hand one last time. “Come away with me,” he said. “Forget all these rules and obligations. They’ve never made you happy. Come away with me now. We’ll leave tonight for Switzerland. I still have a house there, and we can sit by the lake and be together for a little while, at least.”

  “I can’t. I have to edit the paper.”

  “Come away,” he repeated. “Let yourself be happy.”

  “It’s impossible. I would have to resign my job. The paper would collapse. It would be a scandal.”

  “Come away with me,” he repeated a final time. “I’m very sick. That must be obvious to you. I need to rest. I don’t know how much time I have, but however much it is, I want to spend it with you. I love you, Candace. The only mistake I truly regret in my life is that I made it too hard for you to accept my love. But there’s still time. You can still break the rules.”

  “No, I can’t.” She spoke the words quietly but firmly.

  She rose from the chair a last time and walked out the door. I followed her. We left him alone in that big, empty house, wrapped in his blanket, clutching the drawings of the woman he loved so perfectly in his heart but could not capture in life. As we drove away, I could see him standing at the window of his sunroom, looking down at the Potomac far below. Ice had formed at the banks of the river, but at the center there was still a powerful rush of water onward that flowed to the city—and past it, to the ocean.

  In an odd sense, Galvin had gotten what he wanted from Washington. His world had come tumbling down around him, but he had done what he’d come here for—he had lived for love. He had done everything in his power to bring his beloved along with him; and if she had refused, he could not blame himself. It didn’t diminish his love, that she wouldn’t accept it.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  GALVIN CAUGHT A FLIGHT THAT NIGHT FOR GENEVA WITH Ted Amara, so he never saw the story that appeared the next morning in his newspaper. It was a masterful piece of journalism, by the usual standards of the profession. It explained in clear language Galvin’s astounding rise to financial power and his spectacular collapse. The lead of the story, inevitably, was the fact that the Justice Department was conducting a criminal investigation of the publisher of The Washington Sun and Tribune, focusing on his fraudulent misrepresentations in acquiring the paper. The reporters had ably gathered the facts. They had quotes from Harold Hazen, his daughter Ariane, and even Galvin’s putative partner in the scheme, Melvin Wolfe. Galvin’s refusal to comment was high in the story. My modest role in assisting Galvin went unmentioned.

  Candace Ridgway wrote a signed commentary piece on the editorial page, which explained why the newspaper had taken the unusual step of investigating its own publisher. It was an eloquent statement of the values that animate good journalism, and in its own way, it was compelling. She also disclosed in the article that for many years she had maintained a close personal relationship with Galvin. That was a wise addition. It rendered the information valueless to others, and blocked any criticism of her.

  Candace was lionized by the rest of the media. The New York Times ran a front-page profile of her, and published an editorial commending her courageous stand. The fact that she’d chosen to investigate the publisher, even though he’d been her close friend, was seen as further evidence of her probity and incorruptibility. She was lauded as a model of everything that journalism stood for, and that was true enough. Commentators were already predicting that the paper’s courageous self-examination would win the Pulitzer Prize for Pu
blic Service the next April—the profession’s highest award.

  THERE WAS A GREAT commotion over what would happen to the newspaper. Galvin’s creditors moved immediately to seize it, to repay his debts. But they hadn’t anticipated the publisher’s legal wizardry. It turned out he no longer owned any interest in the Sun. With Ted Amara’s help, he had months ago placed his shares in a trust for the benefit of the newspaper’s employees. They now owned the newspaper. As administrator of the trust, Galvin had designated the paper’s editor, Candace Ridgway. She was now, in effect, the chief executive officer of the company.

  Galvin’s creditors were furious, needless to say, about this legal chicanery, and several of them tried to challenge Galvin’s transfer of ownership to the employees. But the paper had become so popular, thanks to Candace, that there was a political uproar at the notion that greedy Wall Street bankers might grab it to repay Galvin’s debts. Members of Congress even talked of introducing legislation to prevent seizure of the paper’s assets, but that proved unnecessary. The creditors backed off.

  CANDACE SUMMONED ME TO her office in January, a few weeks after Galvin’s departure. She asked for my resignation, and made clear that she would fire me outright if I refused to go quietly. The reason, she said, was that I had been in league with Galvin in his fraudulent takeover of the paper. I had escaped prosecution or public exposure, but what I had done was unconscionable. The newspaper couldn’t tolerate it. I didn’t really argue with her, but I suspected that wasn’t the real reason I had to go.