Shining City

by Tom Rosenstiel

  “I think he’s lucky to have you around.”

  Almost on cue Madison returns from his decompressing walk. He sits down in the chair where he was before and says, “Okay, Ms. Brooks, I am ready to accept my training as a witness who does not want to help the prosecution.”

  “That’s it, Pop,” Vic says.

  They’re reviewing questions Judiciary members asked in past confirmation hearings, talking through what questions each member might ask now, trying to make a puzzle of the process to engage Madison. The judge is amazing when he wants to be.

  An hour and a half later, Brooks sticks her head into Rena’s office. “We’re breaking up. You want to pop in?”

  Rena thinks Vic looks tired.

  “I’ve got some potentially painful news,” he says. He tells them about the murder of the former San Francisco assistant DA, Alan Martell.

  “Did you know him? He was there when you were on Superior Court.”

  Madison rubs his chin with his right hand. “I think I did,” the judge says.

  “He appeared before you?”

  “I think so.”

  Rena hands Madison the newspaper. There is a picture, from Martell’s Justice Department employee tag, a tiny head shot, a balding man who appears to be in his mid-forties.

  “He was beaten to death.”

  “My God,” Vic says.

  “The killer also attacked what may be Martell’s dog.”

  Roland rubs his fingers over his cheekbone. “Horrible.”

  “Vic, did you know him?” Rena asks.

  “No.”

  “We’ve got to get ready for Stevens,” Brooks says.

  “Before you go, do you have a minute?” Rena asks his partner.

  “Sure.”

  Back in Rena’s office, he calls Smolonsky. “I need your brain in here.”

  Brooks glances at a copy of the Weekly Review, the conservative opinion magazine, sitting on the coffee table: “What a Court Pick Tells About the Still-Enigmatic President,” the headline reads.

  “What’s up?” Smolo says when he arrives.

  “You still got friends on D.C. Metro homicide?” Rena asks.

  “A couple.”

  “I want to keep tabs on what the police know about that murder in the park, if you can do it discreetly.”

  “Sure,” Smolo says. “Why?”

  “Abundance of caution. If anybody else makes the same connection we did about Martell, they are going to ask the White House, and the White House is going to ask us, and we need to know what we want to say.”

  Smolo’s face settles into a deceptively dull expression. “Okay.”

  “And we should ask Wiley to check Martell’s name against Madison’s on cases,” Rena says.

  “What was it?” Brooks asks Rena. “A twitch of Madison’s left eyebrow when he said he barely knew the man?”

  Rena laughs.

  “No. But if it occurs to us that they might know each other, it will occur to somebody else. So we better know if they ever had any cases together or if there is a photo of them at some fund-raiser.”

  “Hell, it’s San Francisco. They could be kissing,” Smolonsky says.

  “When you see what your friends in homicide have, be subtle. Don’t make it seem like we’re that interested.”

  “Peter, we can’t ask and not make them curious.”

  “I’m sure you’ll figure something out. What’s the Polish word for charm?”

  “Urok.”

  “Oh . . . well, use your urok.”

  Thirty-three

  12:34 P.M.

  Neenah, Virginia

  His arm feels like someone poured acid on it.

  He can’t look at it, and at the same time he can’t get it out of his mind. It looks like meat being dressed after hunting.

  This has to be the turn. He slows, and makes the left onto the dirt road. He’d gotten the name of these folks from George, who once lived in Virginia. George said they could help. It has taken hours to get here. The place is out by the Chesapeake Bay, near someplace called Neenah, out in the middle of nowhere. No, not the middle. Way past that.

  He turns at a battered rural mailbox on a post and heads down a long dirt drive until he comes to a cluster of buildings. This is not the kind of farm you see in a movie. There are three houses in a clearing, none of them matching, all of which look like they belong in a poor neighborhood in a city, and nearby something that looks more like a garage than a barn.

  He parks and walks up slowly to the front door of the first house. He rings the bell three times. Then waits. They said he might have to when he called ahead. “Don’t run off,” the man had said on the phone. “May take us a minute.”

  Finally a man in overalls rounds the back of the house. He’s young, probably thirty-five, the face dark ebony, weather beaten and tired looking.

  “You Scott?” The name he had given them.

  “Yes, sir,” he says with a smile.

  “You called?”

  “Yeah, that was me.”

  The man in the overalls is wiping his hands on a red handkerchief, which he stuffs in his back pocket when he is done. He is squinting in the summer sun. He doesn’t hold out his hand to shake.

  “Who’s your friend again?” Suspicious.

  “George Rockford. He used to live out here. And do some sport dogs with you.”

  The guy’s overalls aren’t like work clothes from the city. They are full of dust and dried manure. Farm work. The man inside the overalls blinks several times, as if it helps him think.

  “Wait here.”

  He goes back around behind the house and leaves him there by the front door. A few more minutes pass. Finally, from back of the house, a woman who couldn’t be more than twenty-two appears and heads toward him. She’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and has the same weathered face as the man.

  She looks him over, tilting her head in a funny way. She steals a quick glance at his arm, which he is holding at an angle so it hurts less.

  “Follow me,” she says.

  He does as he’s told. They walk past the first house and toward the smaller one behind it. They enter it into a living room being used as an office. There are two desks and papers piled everywhere.

  “So you got tangled, huh?” the girl says. She says it more like an observation than a question.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Okay, then.”

  She leads him down a hallway into what looks like a bedroom. There’s an examination table there made of plywood and two-by-fours, with a pad on it.

  “Get on up here,” she says. “Lemme see it.”

  A screen door slams, then footsteps and the man who greeted him enters the room.

  “We fine here now, you don’t need to be hoverin’,” the woman says.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he says. The man stares with fierce eyes. “You say your name was Scott?”

  He nods.

  “Come on now, lemme see it,” the woman says.

  He takes off his shirt and shows her the arm.

  “My, you tangled all right.”

  There are three wounds in his forearm. The worst is a series of tears to the flesh. One of the bites is fairly superficial.

  “You been like this all night?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Why didn’t you go to the hospital?”

  “They’d get nosy. Ask questions. I’d lose my dog. Get my friends in trouble.”

  “You not from here,” the man by the door says.

  “No, sir. Arizona. Visiting my sister. Brought my dog with me. Thought I’d get some action in. But we had some trouble separating some dogs. Yesterday, up in Pennsylvania. So I called George Rockford, who I knew had lived ’round here.”

  The man eyes him.

  “George is from out farther west,” the man says suspiciously.

  “We know each other from fightin’ dogs.”

  “T, the man needs help. He obviously ain’t fakin’ being hu
rt.”

  So the man’s nickname is “T,” he thinks. He realizes they have not shared their names and he gave them a false one.

  “You’ll need a rabies shot,” the man says.

  “I figured.”

  “And antibiotics, and painkillers, and you need stitches,” the girl says. “And then you need to rest. You got to heal this. But if we can stop it from becoming infected, I think you’ll be okay. You don’t need skin grafts or nothing. But this was a big dog. Not a trained dog. Not a killer. It didn’t know what it was doing. That’s what saved you.”

  “You got money?” the man asks. The voice is cold.

  “I can pay.”

  “T, I swear. If you’re gonna stay here, you gonna keep your mouth shut.”

  “You’d fill the house with birds with broken wings if I didn’t stop you,” says the man.

  “And what would be wrong with that?”

  She turns her attention back to the wound. “This wasn’t your dog, was it?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Too bad. If you knew it had its shots . . .” she says without finishing the sentence.

  She pulls a long, syringelike thing out of a plastic sandwich bag and dips it into a jug labeled “saline.”

  “I’ll give you the first shot and what you’ll need for the rest. But you will need to take them on the schedule I tell you.”

  He nods. He’d heard rabies shots were a series.

  “We’re going to wet this all up. Irrigate the wound. Then we’re going to make sure it’s all cleaned out. We’re going to be here awhile. Then start to stitch.”

  “Okay.”

  “You take anything? For the pain?”

  “A lot of ibuprofen.”

  “How many?”

  “Maybe six.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t take so many. Just four. No more. But if you okay with that, then that’s good. ’Cause the prescription stuff will make you loopy. Lie down now.”

  The girl looks back at the man behind her.

  “Hell, this man too messed up to do anything to me, T. You might as well go back outside.”

  “I’m fine here,” he says.

  “Suit yourself.”

  He looks at the girl. She has her eyes on the wound. She hasn’t made eye contact with him. Then he looks over her shoulder.

  T hasn’t taken his eyes off him.

  Thirty-four

  Monday, June 15, 10:46 P.M.

  Alexandria, Virginia

  Josh Albin isn’t sure he has read the first line correctly.

  Maybe he only hoped it.

  “Urgent News: SCOTUS.”

  SCOTUS is short for Supreme Court of the United States.

  For a moment, his mind passes over the miracle that such an email could come to him at all. The email is from an alias set up for just one group. The Watchers.

  He dreamed of the Network all those years ago, contacted people he thought might help, just as the legend suggests, but not much has come of it. The Watchers at first were an aspiration, if not quite a lie. In time, some who had heard the stories were inspired and came to him, first one, then a few. They come and go, and usually, if he is honest about it, they don’t offer much he doesn’t already know. It’s the idea of the Watchers that’s important—that has power. The legend became the truth. Perception became reality. Behold the power of ideas.

  This might be different. The second line of the email reads: “I have information that will end the nomination of Edmund Roland Madison.”

  He feels a surge of adrenaline. If this were real, it would be the most powerful thing to ever have come from the Watchers. How should he handle it?

  The next day, just after 1 p.m., he has an answer.

  “What’s going on in the flesh-eating zombie world, Josh?”

  Gary Gold calls it doing his “rounds.” Once a week or so, he spends a few hours making phone call after phone call, checking in with friends, sources, people who have helped him, even victims of past stories. He taunts, jokes, cajoles, threatens, and generally reminds folks he is out there. And then, brazenly, Gold brags about how much people leak to him. “It is amazing how often sources tell you things just because you called.”

  Gold calls almost every week.

  “Why do you try to provoke me, Gary?”

  “Because you, Josh, understand the secret of politics, which is also the secret of journalism.”

  “What is that?”

  “That grievance and fear are more powerful than hope. Hope is for church on Sunday. Politics is for fear. And you are a savant of fear.”

  Gold has elevated obnoxious to an art form.

  “Gary, I thought you told me you were digging into Roland Madison’s background. I haven’t seen much.”

  Albin could goad people, too. But he needs to play this right.

  “Oh, hell, you gotta do better than that. The guy is on a slipstream to coronation. He keeps doing kissy-face on the Hill. He’s tall, lean, looks like a wholesome Peter O’Toole, he’s courtly. Charmed the moderates even more than the liberals. They should vote now, skip the murder boards and hearings and save the taxpayers five million bucks. You guys have been shooting total blanks.”

  “Not so fast, Gary. There is a good deal you and the rest of the country don’t know yet about E. Roland Madison.”

  “Well, enlighten me, then, Josh, ’cause once we sense this thing is on autopilot to passage, a nomination without controversy isn’t news.”

  “I doubt the U.S. Senate really wants to be known for putting a communist on the Court.”

  “What? I just had a drug flashback. What year is it? A communist?”

  He can tell he has Gold’s attention.

  Gold won’t want to appear too eager, however. Eager reporters scare people. But if reporters sound like they don’t give a shit, sources will try harder to impress them. It’s dumb how obvious the whole thing is.

  “I’m not the type to BS you, Gary. You know that. I don’t play games.”

  “Okay,” Gold says. “I’m interested, Josh.”

  The people who would have the most stuff on Madison would be the vetting firm. Gold has one good contact at Rena, Brooks & Toppin. He and Walt Smolonsky met when he covered the Senate and Smolo was an investigator there.

  “Yo, Big Foot.”

  The nickname was something Smolonsky had acquired years ago when he was a D.C. Metro cop. When Smolonsky had become a Senate investigator, the nickname migrated with him, thanks to an envious former colleague from Metro turned Capitol Police officer. Gold, who had been stuck with a nickname himself, remembered the story. Using the nickname would remind the guy how far back they go.

  “What you working on, Gary?”

  “Me. Shit, I never know. Same as always. I’m working on whatever I can get my hands on. Just trying to avoid being caught in the next newspaper buyout. You tell me what’s new.”

  “I’m just an ex-cop who went corporate so I could afford to have kids.”

  “I’m too much of a kid to ever have kids.”

  Smolo laughs a little.

  “You remember when we climbed to the top of the Senate building and put a bra on the flagpole? Shit, what was that, like 1993? We thought since you were an ex-cop, we were protected.”

  “You know I was assigned by the Senate majority leader to liaison with the Capitol Police on the investigation. I was investigating myself.”

  “Who better?”

  “It was like that movie with Kevin Costner where he is investigating a Soviet mole in the Pentagon and he’s the mole.”

  “It wasn’t that fucking good. And you didn’t fall in love with Sean Young.”

  “Sure I did. She just never met me.”

  They both laugh more than the joke deserves.

  “So whaddya got for me?” Gold asks.

  “Very amusing, Gary. Have I ever given you anything?”

  “Never. You’re the worst old friend I have. You give old friends a bad name.”
<
br />   “What do you want, Gary?”

  Gold can sense Smolo getting uncomfortable.

  “I’m just doing rounds, man. Looking for a story.”

  “And what are you finding?”

  “Shit, they got me on Madison duty. Background stuff. You guys are doing him, right?”

  Smolonsky doesn’t respond.

  “So, you hear about that guy who was murdered in Rock Creek? Martin or whatever?”

  Gold is using the wrong name deliberately to see if he corrects him.

  “What?”

  “The guy who was found in Rock Creek Park murdered this week. He had worked in San Francisco as a DA before coming to D.C. You think maybe Madison knew him?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothin’,” Gold says. “Forget it. But there’s another thing.” Gold’s voice suddenly is serious. “I hear that Roland Madison has a past.”

  “Yeah, the older you get, the more you have.”

  “No, I mean a past, asshole. One he wants to keep secret. From his days in Berkeley.”

  Smolonsky hopes he hasn’t reacted audibly.

  “I mean treasonous shit, Smolo. Like revolutionary stuff.”

  “Jesus, Gary,” Smolonsky says. “Even communists are capitalists now.”

  “You think that kind of thing will hurt politically? You think the Common Sense movement people would get upset by shit like that?”

  Smolonsky says nothing. No backhanded confirmation. Gold tries forehanded.

  “So, you heard about this?”

  “Nice try, Mad Dog,” Smolonsky says.

  “What? You’re not going to say?”

  “We’ve known each other a long time, right, Gary?”

  “No shit for all the good it’s doing me.”

  “Then you should know I am not talking about Madison, period. One way or the other.”

  “You can’t blame a girl for trying. I also heard you guys know about this and are covering it up.”

  Just for a fraction of a second, Gold senses Smolonsky hesitating.