by D. W. Buffa
“You’ve become such a cynic.”
Finnegan tilted his head to the side, a sense of doubt in his eyes.
“I didn’t want to be, and I wasn’t, when I first came to Washington, but then….” Finnegan’s voice trailed off, and Hart, who knew exactly what he meant, patted him on the shoulder and they both laughed softly at how much in each of them had changed.
“Did Quentin Burdick get hold of you?” asked Finnegan as they started walking away from the cathedral and the crowd.
“No. Why?”
“He’s working on a story, some investigative piece. He told me he had an appointment with Constable, an interview he had finally gotten him to agree to, but it never took place. He was supposed to meet him at the hotel, the one where Constable died, the next morning.”
Chapter Three
“What’s Burdick working on?” asked Hart after he put down the cold beer. His eyes moved from one side of the dark, dingy bar to the other. It was a hole in the wall, a place where this time of day, the middle of the afternoon, you half expected to see someone bent over, his head on his arms, snoring in his inebriated sleep. Hart ran his finger around the frosted edge of the glass. A thin smile edged its way across his mouth. “And what the hell are we doing here, anyway? Why did you want to come to a place like this?”
A smile that mirrored Hart’s own broke across Finnegan’s weathered, freckled face. He leaned against the back of the torn leather booth and tapped two fingers on a scratched up wooden table that, from the look of it, had not been cleaned in years.
“Look around. What do you see?”
“Not a damn thing.”
“What else do you want to know?”
Hart rolled his eyes with a weary, almost helpless, disregard at the various obscurities with which Finnegan answered questions. He took another drink. The cold beer felt good against his throat.
“You don’t see anything,” Finnegan went on, undeterred. “Nobody you know; nobody who knows you. Any more questions?”
Now Hart understood. No one who did business with the Senate, no one who worked on the Hill, certainly no reporter looking for a lead on tomorrow’s story, would come looking in a place like this.
“But why did you want to come to a bar, even one as elegant as this?”
“To get drunk—why do you think?” Finnegan threw down what was left in his glass, caught the eye of the bartender, and signaled for another. “We’re both Irish,” he explained, his eyes alive with the triumph of a well-told tale. “That’s what we’re supposed to do after we’ve gone and buried someone: get drunk as hell and tell all the lies we can about what a great good friend he was and how much we’re going to miss him.” Finnegan hesitated, shook his head in seeming frustration, and looked at Hart with an impish grin. “I forget, you’re from California where everyone is all mixed up about what they are. You’ve probably never been to an Irish wake, have you? Let me explain. If you were really Irish, and didn’t just have an Irish name, you’d be depressed at all sorts of things. You wouldn’t need anyone to tell you that every so often—at least once a week or so—you needed to get drunk enough to start feeling better about all the unhappiness in the world.”
The bartender, stooped and unshaven, with thin gray hair and glasses thick as bottles, shuffled over with Finnegan’s second beer. He mumbled something that sounded like a far off greeting, but which only someone who had known him for half a lifetime could possibly have deciphered. Finnegan looked at him as if he had understood
“Thank you, I will,” he replied.
The old man’s rheumy eyes brightened and for a moment seemed to clear. He nodded, mumbled something else to himself, and then, sure that he was right, nodded once again, turned toward the bar, and slowly moved away. Hart and Finnegan exchanged a glance, reminded of the frailty of things and how difficult sometimes were the lives of others.
“Quentin Burdick,” said Hart, drawing Finnegan back to what they had started to talk about.
“It’s something about the money.”
“Constable’s money? How he got it? Is that what he’s working on? You said he was supposed to meet with Constable the next day, but Constable died the night before.”
Finnegan shrugged. He was puzzled. Burdick, as he proceeded to explain, had come to see him, asked him a few questions, but had not really told him more than that he was working on something that involved money and the president.
“He asked me if I knew anything about something called ‘The Four Sisters.’”
“‘The Four Sisters’? What’s that?”
“I don’t know. I asked Burdick what it meant. He just said it was something he was looking into and that the more he got into it, the more complicated it seemed to be. One thing he said got my attention. The amount of money involved—whatever that means—was ‘amazing.’ That was his word, ‘amazing.’”
Bending forward on his elbows, Hart stared into his glass. The long service, with no room to move around, the oppressive summer heat, and now this dark, lonely place, had left him feeling tired and even a little depressed.
“So now we’re going to learn that the ‘great man’ we just buried was not just a liar but a thief as well? I guess there isn’t really a difference, is there? Don’t you steal something every time you tell a lie—steal some part of the truth from those who deserve to know it?”
“Careful, don’t get philosophic,” said Finnegan, his eyes eager and alive. “With that definition, you’ll make thieves and liars of us all. But you’re right,” he added quickly, “I never knew anyone who could lie right to your face and do it with such complete conviction. There was a sense in which, I suppose, it was not really lying at all. He always lied first to himself. He could convince himself of anything, once he decided there was something he had to have, whether it was the presidency or another woman. He was a hustler, knew in an instant what you wanted to hear. His whole identity was in the eyes of others. Women loved him. They could not help themselves. They knew he must have said the same thing he was saying to them a thousand times before; the difference was—and this is the measure of what a great fraud he really was—that this time he meant it, this time he was saying what he really felt.”
Shaking his head in reluctant admiration, Charlie Finnegan picked up his glass and took a long, slow drink.
“They weren’t alone, those women: the guy was such an engaging fraud, I sort of liked him, too. But he wasn’t worth a damn. He wasn’t serious about anything. He didn’t believe in anything except his own importance. I’m not even sure about that. He had to be the center of attention. He could not stand to be upstaged. There wasn’t any central core. He was like a lot of people I meet these days. His idea of hell was to be somewhere all alone.”
A broad grin cut sharply across Finnegan’s face. He took another long drink, shoved the glass aside, and laughed at himself.
“I can’t understand why they didn’t ask me to deliver one of the eulogies.” He paused, scratched the side of his face, and, growing serious again, furrowed his brow. “There’s more to this—Burdick’s story—than the money. You know Burdick better than I do. You know what he covers.”
Bobby Hart had known Quentin Burdick from his first term in Congress when he felt honored, and a little surprised, when the famous New York Times reporter asked if he might talk to him. Burdick knew a generation’s worth of foreign leaders and every president since Richard Nixon.
“You’re right,” agreed Hart. “There has to be a link to something overseas.” He gave Finnegan a searching glance. “You think Constable was doing business, the kind he should not have been doing, with foreign governments?”
“That would be shocking, wouldn’t it?” replied Finnegan dryly. “That the Artful Dodger didn’t make distinctions among those from whom he was willing to steal? But no, I doubt Burdick has found any direct connection like that. Constable was much too shrewd to be that stupid. He never would have made that kind of mistake.”
Suddenly
, Hart thought he knew. He remembered wondering about it at the time, when the first reports were published and the scandals started.
“One of the private equity firms, one of those that collapsed—he was involved in that; one of the investors, as I remember. That was before he became president, but maybe something like it happened again, something that no one knew about. Probably something global, if Burdick has been pursuing it.”
Hart glanced at his watch. There was a reception for those who had been invited to the service.
“It won’t be so bad,” he said, as much to encourage himself as anything. “We don’t have to stay long.”
“Trust me,” said Finnegan, as they got up from the table. “Ten minutes after we get there, you’ll begin to miss this place.” He looked around with a kind of nostalgia at the bare, near empty room, full of the cloying smell of dead air and stale liquor. “You never know how good things are until you have to leave them.”
They stood on the sidewalk just outside the bar, blinking like a pair of drunks who have lost all sense of time or place. The sun hung low on the horizon, a pale yellow disk in a sky that was now seven shades of gray. A deep, hard rumble shook somewhere in the distance, threatening a storm. A wind kicked up, stopped, and then, a moment later, hit them from the other side. Hart looked one way up the street, Finnegan looked the other.
“There!” cried Hart, waving wildly for a cab.
They just made it to the taxi before the rain began to fall. By the time they reached the Georgian mansion that, with the generous help of some of their friends, the Constables had purchased to live in after the president left office, the guests had left the spacious rolling lawn in back and hurried inside. They stood in clusters, talking in the solemn tones of men and women afraid of making a mistake. Waiters in tuxedos drifted through the crowd bearing glasses of champagne on shiny, silver platters.
Bobby Hart had at least a nodding acquaintance with most of the people there. Some, like Frederick Gallagher, who had served as secretary of state during the first term of the Constable administration, he had known, if never quite liked or fully trusted, for years. Standing among a half dozen other former officials, Gallagher still had the same, teeming self-assurance in his hooded, half-closed eyes, the same look of forbearance on his slightly smiling mouth, as if he were doing you a favor just to listen to what you had to say. On those few occasions when their paths had crossed—committee hearings at which the secretary testified—nothing had happened to make Hart change his mind that the secretary was full of his own importance and would not give a straight answer if his life depended on it.
But certain things had changed in the years since Frederick Gallagher held office. Bobby Hart had become one of the best-known names in the Senate and a national figure, while Gallagher had become another former office holder, part of the Washington establishment, one of those men who with each passing year become more and more convinced that what they had done in office was not only right, but brilliant and courageous, and that their return to a position of great influence in the government is the best thing that could happen to the country. Bobby Hart, who had meant nothing to him in the past, was now someone he was always delighted to see.
Gallagher caught Hart’s eye and insisted the senator join them in a drink.
“It’s the end of an era,” said Austin Pearce, picking up the thread of what he and the others had been talking about.
Short, with slumping shoulders and slightly overweight, Austin Pearce had the smooth unwrinkled face of a man who had seemed middle-aged when he was young and would seem that way when he was old. After serving as treasury secretary during Constable’s first term, he had gone back to Wall Street because, he was reported to have said, he preferred the company of the kind of sharks who did not try to pretend they were doing you a favor while they were eating you alive. He had explained his departure in a somewhat different manner in a private conversation he had later with Bobby Hart. “Greed is a more honest form of corruption than what goes on here, if you get my meaning.” Hart liked him enormously. He made the company of Frederick Gallagher almost tolerable.
“Does the era have a name, Austin?” asked one of the others, Eldridge Baker, who had held several different posts in the administration before leaving to get himself elected governor of a small western state. Baker had a talent for teasing others in a way that seemed to bring out something he liked about them. “As I remember, you had a name for just about everything we did, or tried to do—and everyone who tried to do it,” he added with a generous twinkle in his large, dark eyes.
Even Frederick Gallagher fell captive to the change of mood. A thin smile stretched tight across his harsh, angular mouth; but then his eyes narrowed and he quickly shook his head as if to remind himself that a smile in the same room as a grieving widow might be misinterpreted.
“Lady McDeath,” he whispered, darting a glance beyond their small circle to make sure he would not be overheard. “Isn’t that what you once called her, after she kept insisting that we ought to be more aggressive in places like the Middle East?”
“We say a lot of things that only make sense at the moment,” said Pearce, looking straight at Gallagher. “Things that sound a lot different now.”
He turned to Bobby Hart and with a slight shrug remarked in his pleasant, understated voice that if he had to give a name to the era that had ended with the president’s death, it would probably have to be something like “the ‘era of great illusions,’ the belief that there is no price to be paid for anything, that we can do anything we like, fight any battle, win any war, and do it all without any need to sacrifice; in other words, that America is the exception to all the laws of history and economics.”
“That’s rather glib, isn’t it?” said Frederick Gallagher dismissively. The look in his eyes, however, suggested that fundamentally he did not disagree.
“I was asked what name I would give it,” replied Pearce calmly and without irritation. “What would you suggest?”
Gallagher was not interested in taking up the challenge. The conversation started to drift to other things. Gallagher noticed someone else he knew and wanted to know better.
“Let’s get together soon,” he said to Hart with the quiet urgency of a man of importance. “There are a number of things I think we might discuss.”
Hart watched as Gallagher moved across the crowded room, never looking to the side, always straight ahead, certain that he was being noticed by everyone he passed.“Hopeless, isn’t he?” asked Austin Pearce, not without a kind of sympathy. “He’s one of the smartest people I know,” he added when Hart turned to him, “and one of the dumbest. Sort of like poor Robert Constable, when you think about it: afraid that if he ever stopped being the center of attention no one would know who he was.”
“I think you just described half of Washington.”
“Only half? You seriously underestimate the vanity, and the insecurity, of the American politician.”
Pearce reached for a glass from a passing waiter. The rain had stopped, and the sound of thunder had become a distant fading echo in the yellow, sultry sky. Some of the guests started to make their way back outdoors. Searching for a place that would provide more privacy, Pearce took Hart by the arm and led him across the room, next to a white marble pillar. While Pearce sipped from his glass, Hart gazed across at Hillary Constable, watching her repeat with the same look of gratitude and sympathy the words with which she returned each mumbled expression of encouragement and loss. His hand was on the pillar, and he suddenly realized she was just like it: beautiful and cold, as near as anything, and as distant as twenty centuries, a woman who would never break, a woman who would break instead any hammer that tried to break her, unless of course she shattered.
“She is, isn’t she?”
Hart turned to find Austin Pearce watching him with friendly interest. Hart waited for Pearce to explain, but instead Pearce shoved his hands deep in his pockets, stared down at the glowing white marbl
e floor, and then, as if giving up the attempt to find an explanation for what he felt, shrugged his shoulders.
“I guess I don’t really know—what she is, I mean. I knew her—I knew them both—starting years ago, but even then, she was—they both were—a kind of mystery. Bright, ambitious….” He paused long enough to give Hart a meaningful look. “Everyone in Washington is ambitious, but their ambition—it was of a different kind altogether. I wouldn’t tell anyone else this, but it always seemed to me that they weren’t constrained by anything; that, to put it bluntly, there wasn’t anything they wouldn’t have done to get what they wanted.” He hesitated, wanting to make sure he got it right, the thing that he had always known and yet had never been able really to explain or even describe. “That makes them sound ruthless, without principles, willing to use any means. They were all of that, all right, but there was something more. There wasn’t anything they didn’t want. Yes, I think that’s it. They didn’t stop when they got what they wanted. As soon as they got it, they had to have more.”
Bobby Hart tapped his finger against the hard white marble column.
“Like this?”
“Yes, exactly—a house the size of an embassy, as if from being president the next step was to become a country of his own. You think they could at least have waited until his second term was over. That was the reason I left, when I began to understand the outsized needs he had, his gargantuan appetites, this absence of all restraint, and then this thing he did….” His voice trailed off and for a moment he said nothing. “Can you come up to New York?” he asked suddenly.
With anyone else, Hart would have started to make excuses, but this was Austin Pearce and Austin Pearce was different. There were not ten people in the country who knew anything about financial markets and the global economy, maybe not ten people in the world, who would not have dropped everything and flown any distance to spend an hour alone with him.
