Shining City

by Tom Rosenstiel

  She touches her fingers on his cheek.

  “I didn’t figure it out completely until I was a teenager. I finally puzzled enough out to confront my father. Basically, that most of what I thought about my life was a lie.”

  “Where was your mother?”

  “She ran off. We moved to America. My father never set foot in Italy again.”

  “Why?”

  “We were from a small village, and though it was the 1970s for my father this was still a great shame.”

  “Have you ever tried to find her?”

  “After my father died.”

  “And?”

  “There was someone in Milan, it was probably her. By the time I located her, I realized I didn’t care. That woman, whoever she had become, wasn’t part of my life. I wasn’t interested in revenge.”

  Vic’s gray eyes hold his. “No wonder you don’t like secrets.”

  He takes her face in his hands, and he doesn’t think about Josh Albin or Roland Madison or anything else for a long time.

  The lights have gone out. The figure in the Nats cap in the alley across the street drops a cigarette and steps on it.

  He is not entirely sure why he followed her. Or what he plans to do next.

  Boredom? The father down for the night, the daughter took off running. Who knows? An impulse. Sometimes you just go with it.

  After all the months of planning, getting ready, he feels . . . pressed down, like he’s using the whole of his weight to hold something up that’s falling and he can feel his strength about to give out.

  All day he concentrates on the judge, how he thinks, waiting. Sometimes you just have to let go.

  His arm aches. But at least, he thinks, the pain’s not getting worse. That’s something. It means it’s not infected, he hopes. That’s the main thing, the woman at the farm said.

  He does wish he could wear short sleeves and let the arm breath a little. It’s so damn humid out here, even in June, not like home. But he has to keep the arm covered in case anyone is looking for someone with a bandage over a possible severe dog bite on their arm.

  Fuck it. Everything had been so smooth until Martell. That isn’t so much, one glitch, really. So he shouldn’t panic now.

  Maybe he will just hang around awhile. Then he starts to imagine them in there with the lights out. He feels pathetic standing here. Too easy to be noticed. He smokes another Marlboro Light. Then, he realizes, he’s left trace. He isn’t thinking clearly. Better take off.

  Thirty-eight

  Wednesday, June 17, 9:38 A.M.

  Washington, D.C.

  Albin looks at the shards of shattered porcelain on the floor—a piece of blue mug with the logo of the Cato Institute still visible—and the drippings of brown coffee splayed on the wall.

  He is ashamed. He shouldn’t have given in to his anger and thrown the mug. Then again, it’s been years since he’d made a mistake as stupid as the one he made last night. Let alone seen his mistake played out in the New York Times in the morning.

  He checks online again for updates on the story about Madison as a victim of a smear campaign by conservatives. Classic liberal media claptrap.

  Unless he and his allies have something substantially new and significantly serious, any effort to push back now on the Berkeley story would only reinforce the idea that Madison is the victim of Washington’s vicious political culture. His own force is being used against him. It is political jujitsu.

  Albin walks over and picks up the shards. Somehow Rena figured he is the leak. How?

  Worse, people know he is the source peddling the story. That has damaged his reputation as a disciplined tactician.

  No one has even come close to his office this morning. Virtually no email. No calls. He looks at the coffee stain on the wall.

  “How do you do the math?”

  The senior staff of Fair Chance for America are gathered in Deborah Cutter’s office.

  “Well, I know one thing,” says Todd Paulson. “Josh Albin is in an incredibly foul mood this morning.”

  Cutter looks up. Has Paulson really put spies in offices around town? Or does he just want her to think so?

  “What, do you have a mole inside Albin’s office now?” Nan Bullock, the oldest of Cutter’s staff, asks Paulson.

  Paulson shrugs.

  Bullock can’t contain herself. “You know, spies, and moles and all this idiocy isn’t new,” she declares. “We pulled those kinds of stunts in the seventies, when we were inventing public interest activism.” Her voice tightens, her anger spiking suddenly, like a pot of pasta boiling over with foam. She knows people tend to dismiss her as old and out of touch and it enrages her. “Well, it never amounted to much. And I suspect that is all it would be worth now.”

  She can see she has hit a nerve with Paulson. “You see, we learned that if you try to win at all costs, you lose everything. Isn’t that the point in all this? Don’t we work like this so we’re not shooting it out in the streets? You really can’t save the village by destroying it.”

  She has gone too far, again, she thinks. Too much the old scold. And they will miss her point.

  Cutter’s eyes are on her, and the boss doesn’t let the silence linger. “What we need to know, people, is whether Madison is damaged goods. Or is the White House getting out in front of this.”

  “It depends, I think,” Bullock says, “on whether the White House has come completely clean.”

  “Yes,” says Sylvia Blechman, Cutter’s chief of staff. “They can’t let this drip out.”

  Cutter has a thought. “Maybe we win either way.”

  “Careful,” Blechman says slowly. “If we’re seen as hurting the White House, we can get hurt, too.”

  Cutter notices Paulson smiling. He really is something of a weasel, she thinks, but she shouldn’t underestimate him.

  “Todd, I want your guys digging up whatever they can about Madison today harder than we ever have before.”

  Cutter’s assistant, Laura Wilson, enters the room with a phone message. She hands it to Blechman to hand to Cutter.

  “Well, you may need to decide quickly, Deborah,” Blechman says.

  “Why?”

  “Because Peter Rena is on the line.”

  Thirty-nine

  11:00 A.M.

  Washington, D.C.

  Rena has let Cutter pick the meeting place and she’s chosen Java Green, a coffeehouse near her office, probably to annoy him.

  Java Green calls itself “an organic eco café.” Rena’s a Republican and ex-military. He would hate it, right?

  She finds him a table in the back. She looks elegantly bohemian, in flowing wheat-colored cotton pants, a silk blouse, and a dark paisley scarf.

  “Not your kind of place?” she says.

  “Oh, I like the food here.”

  “Really?”

  “Our offices are nearby. Funny thing about people in the service. A lot of us are health freaks. We run. Eat carefully. Could do without the New Age attitude. I mostly get takeout.” She shifts in her seat.

  A waiter appears and they order. Two coffees.

  “What can I do for you Mr. Rena?”

  He stares at her a moment, hard and very still.

  “You can tell me what you want.”

  “What I want from what?”

  “From this nomination.”

  “What do I want from the Madison nomination?” she says after a pause.

  One thing he had learned from the files on Deborah Cutter: She is most comfortable on the offensive. He needs her uncomfortable. She isn’t that different in some ways from Albin.

  “It’s the president’s choice,” she answers vaguely. “And he didn’t consult with us in advance.”

  “I don’t know the president very well, Ms. Cutter, but he seemed to want to make a point here of making this decision alone.”

  “But you want to consult, now?”

  “I’m not the president.”

  Cutter nods in a way that says, no
, indeed, sir, you are not.

  “But I should have called you sooner. It’s my job to get this man confirmed. Knowing what you want would help.”

  “So why didn’t you contact me sooner?”

  “Not everything occurs to me when it should.”

  “But it did now?”

  The coffees appear.

  “Mr. Rena, I think what you really want is to see how we will react to this story about Judge Madison’s antiwar activities. To see how much trouble Madison is in.”

  “Actually I want to see how much his hand was strengthened today.”

  Cutter laughs and tries her coffee.

  “So what will you tell the press about this Berkeley business?”

  Rena wants her to recognize what he’s doing—that he is fixing her into a position. If she lies to Rena now, or changes her mind later, it will be as if she is lying to the president.

  Cutter has to calculate that her options are more limited today than they were a day earlier. She can’t possibly attack Madison for protesting Vietnam.

  But he isn’t sure her options will be so limited tomorrow—if anything else breaks about Madison. That is why he needs to register her feelings now. And tell her he is reporting them to the White House.

  “From the details we know so far, it seems fairly innocent. If that is all the opposition has, we would bemoan this as a witch hunt that smacks of McCarthyism.”

  “But not directly defend Madison.”

  “I think that is a defense.”

  “Not a strong one, but better than you’ve offered so far.”

  “You are direct, I give you that,” Cutter says.

  “I’m told it’s my best quality.”

  Cutter shifts under the table, uncrossing and crossing her legs, then leans forward to steady herself.

  “The wind does seem to be blowing your way. Even some of the conservative intellectual blogs this morning are dismissing this as not serious.”

  “It was serious. He was serious. But it is a sign of a thoughtful, searching young person in 1970, not something that disqualifies you from the Supreme Court.”

  Rena arguing the liberal view to Deborah Cutter?

  A small smile creases her face.

  “If we’re being candid with each other, Mr. Rena, I want to know if that is really all there is.”

  Rena pauses. “I’ve heard you don’t like me, ma’am.”

  That makes her pause. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “Be that as it may, you should know this about me: I’m not a fan of war protests. I served in Iraq. The second one. Plenty about the war to question. But not the bravery of the soldiers.”

  “Your point, Mr. Rena?”

  “I’m also not a fan of spin. Roland Madison had to persuade me he’s now revealed everything.”

  Cutter’s look suggests she is trying to decide whether this little speech is itself spin.

  “Tonight,” Rena continues, “ABN is going to have a piece on the nightly news with interviews of two other men who were involved in this with Madison vouching for his story. One of them is a judge who is going to say that the only reason it has not come out until now is that he, not Madison, wanted it kept quiet. And there will be a long first-person story appearing in the LA Times website this afternoon by a journalist who was also involved, explaining the whole business in detail.”

  “Not just one story leaked, but several,” she says. “A whole media offensive coming from various places all backing up your version of events. You’ve played your hand well.”

  “It’s no play. That was the deal with Madison. Hold nothing back now.”

  “You’ve boxed in the Right pretty thoroughly.”

  “I don’t know that.”

  “I do. I understand Josh Albin was furious this morning. The little general has been thwarted. By tomorrow afternoon, I suspect you will have friendly bloggers ranting about McCarthyism and how we need to change our politics and ennoble ourselves again.”

  Cutter leans back in her chair, takes a breath, and continues.

  “When that happens, Albin and his cohort will have been weakened, and Madison will have been protected from further attack. For Madison to go down after that it will have to be something huge.”

  She looks pleased with her analysis and leans forward.

  How would Deborah Cutter know what was going on in Josh Albin’s office this morning, he wonders? It reminds him of the problem he may have in his own office of people talking.

  “So, you want to know what I want from this nomination?” Cutter continues.

  “Yes.”

  “I want a better nominee.”

  They are the same words Albin used.

  “Which means someone who sees things the way you do?”

  “What else could it mean?”

  “And is that what you still want?” he asks.

  “Now, Madison may be closer to being on his way,” she says.

  “Meaning?”

  “If Madison is going to make it, we are going to do what we can to help. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  “I want to hear whatever you’re thinking.”

  “I think I want to wait one more day. I want to know that there really is nothing else here.”

  Rena, who hasn’t touched his coffee yet, takes a first sip. “There isn’t. Not that I know of. That is the truth. A fact, in context, without spin.”

  Cutter smiles.

  “If you want to wait a day,” Rena says, “do us one favor. Don’t announce you are waiting. I’m sure the president would appreciate it if the next thing you say publicly is your strong endorsement of Madison and your denunciation of the witch hunt against him.”

  “I hope that’s what can happen,” she says.

  “If it isn’t, then I have been lied to.”

  When he calls that afternoon, Gary Gold doesn’t identify himself. He just starts talking.

  “I know in the age of the Internet anyone can be a journalist. But Jesus, Peter, can you at least let us write the stories so they seem like journalism?”

  Is Gold calling to confirm something—the other shoe to fall? Or to fish for some remnant he thought Rena might give him?

  It is the difference between this being a good call or a devastating one.

  “Really, some of these media outlets should ask you to pay them. Lord knows we need a new revenue model. Is this what they mean by native advertising, where the advertisements look like stories?”

  “We just decided to tell everything we knew. Once we knew it was about to be distorted.”

  “Oh, be careful with words like everything, dude. It’s always the superlatives that will get you in trouble.”

  Rena says nothing. If Gold dangles something in front of him to comment on now, they’re in trouble. If he doesn’t, he doesn’t have anything.

  “You’re not laughing, Peter. I’m told you’re usually pretty droll, though some people miss it.”

  “I have a droll expression on my face. You just can’t see it through the phone.”

  He hears a tight chuckle. Then silence.

  Gold’s voice gets serious on the other end of the line.

  “You owe me now, Peter.”

  Gold has nothing.

  “I’ll remember that, Gary.”

  “Okay then.”

  Rena can check three items off the list: Albin, Cutter, and Gold. None will hurt him—for now. But the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours are critical.

  Forty

  Thursday, June 18, 1:30 P.M.

  Washington, D.C.

  The meeting with the White House is held in Spencer Carr’s office. Does that signify something? Keep the president a step away from this? Avoid signaling a crisis?

  When Rena and Brooks arrive, Carr is sitting with Attorney General Charles Penopopoulis, a short, round man who looks more like a corner grocer, which his father was, than the founder of the most elite law firm in the Pacific Northwest. Penopopoulis has been in and out of adm
inistrations for a generation and is the most experienced hand in Nash’s cabinet. Next to him sits White House Counsel George Rawls, with whom Rena has been working since the nomination began. They are gathered around a small meeting table on the other side of the room from Carr’s desk. Rawls and Penopopoulis are old friends.

  And next to Rawls, legs crossed, the top foot dangling with the ease of a man completely comfortable, sits Senator Llewellyn Burke, his former political mentor.

  Llewellyn Halstead Burke, who could trace his lineage to the Dodge and Ford families of Michigan as well as Martha Washington’s in Virginia, is not an especially handsome man, particularly for a politician. His features are soft, his face round and boyish, but something about him, something in his confident intelligence and quiet honesty, makes virtually everyone who meets him recognize they can trust him.

  Their eyes meet. Why is the senator here? He’s from the other party than Nash and doesn’t sit on Judiciary. But they are both scions of old political families. They are both part of a vanishing breed, independently minded moderates.

  Then Rena realizes, like the tumblers clicking on a lock, how he came to be involved in the Madison affair in the first place. It all goes back to Burke. Burke persuaded Nash to hire Rena, Burke the uber-connected senator no doubt thinking he is looking out for one of his many surrogate sons. The heir of the Michigan auto establishment trying to steer the president, the heir to a Nebraska political dynasty, to a different kind of judicial nominee. It is just like Burke. A hand everywhere he thinks matters.

  Further proof then that Madison’s nomination can’t be set to fail—at least not entirely. Burke would never do that to him. Burke sees the look on Rena’s face and smiles, eyes twinkling

  From a side door President Nash suddenly is inside the room. Everyone stands. So they didn’t want this meeting on the president’s official schedule.

  “We’re here as a status check. No minutes. No record of our meeting. We just wanted to look each other in the eye and see we are on the same page. In light of what’s occurred. We agree we want to proceed?” Carr begins.