by Steven Gore
Power Blind
( Graham Gage - 3 )
Steven Gore
Steven Gore
Power Blind
Prologue
A Decade Before
Y aqui voices chanted in Moki’s ears as he loped up Jackson Street, his stride keeping pace with the water drums and rattling gourds. This wasn’t really a San Francisco sidewalk beneath his feet, but the Red Rock Trail into the Chiricahuas. Those weren’t shrubs grown tight against fences, but tumbleweeds trapped by the Sonoran wind. That wasn’t a sprinkler, but a headwater spring feeding desperate patches of peppergrass and sage… each alive only by the grace of the weeping earth.
The boy glanced up as he crested the hill, his view of the darkening Pacific framed by six-story cliffs of stucco and brick. A startled pigeon-no, a desert nighthawk-swept across the dying sunset, then spun and dove toward a swallowtail emerging from the Flower World below.
A-la in-i-kun, mai-so yol-e-me, hu-nu kun, mai-so yol-e-mee
So now he is the deer, so now he is the deer
Moki pressed his palms against the earbuds, leaving himself deaf to all but the Mexican harps and the violins and the flutes of the Deer Dance singing in his head, the hunt played out in song and shuffling feet from dusk till dawn… through the eyes of the hunter, and of the deer.
So now he is the deer.
Moki cut right, startling a coyote that ducked behind a hedge. He smiled to himself. The blur of reddish-brown had merely been a family dog stalking whitetails that no longer grazed the asphalt-covered hills. He raced on, angling across the pavement, dodging a black Hummer charging up the hill, its chrome wheels flashing, its engine growling, its music thumping.
Now down toward the bay. The sidewalk steep and slick. Shorter steps. Touching lightly, almost skipping-but off the beat. He lengthened his stride to catch the rhythm… almost… moving faster.
That’s it.
He heard his uncle’s voice soar above the other singers:
A-la in-i-kun mai-so yol-e-me
So now he is-
Screeching tires ripped the air. The Hummer skidded and jumped the curb. His thin arms flailed as he slammed into its side and ricocheted into a retaining wall, his CD player exploding as his head and hands snapped back, the cinderblock scraping his flesh as he collapsed to the ground.
Stunned, dazed, nauseated.
Boots thudding on pavement. Laughter raging down. The stench of spilled beer and wet cigarettes. Throbbing subwoofers vibrating sheet metal and plastic and glass, savage words pounding through the haze from someone else’s music, someone else’s drums, someone else’s life.
Slumping to his side, squinting up in terror, the streetlights blocked by ghostly screaming heads-then punching fists and stomping feet and cracking ribs and spattering blood… until… at length…
The stillness of the weeping earth.
Chapter 1
Private investigator Graham Gage turned as a gentle knocking escalated through the threshold of his jet-lagged concentration. He looked up at his receptionist, Tansy Amaro, standing just inside his third story office, then toward his telephone, a call on hold, the blinking light silent, but not unspeaking.
“You didn’t need to come up here,” Gage said. He reached down and slipped his road-worn passport into a safe anchored to the floor next to his desk. “I’m not talking to him.”
“But he sounds awful.”
Tansy rubbed her hands together like a mother fretting over a sick child, rather than over a man on the corrupt side of Gage’s profession who’d spent his career destroying lives such as hers.
“It’s not my problem,” Gage said, “and not yours either… especially not yours.”
Irritation pierced through the mental haze that had thickened around him during his flight across nine time zones from Zurich to San Francisco.
“You think it’s ever bothered Charlie-or those punks, or their lawyers-that for ten years your son hasn’t even been able to recognize the sound of your voice?”
Tansy lowered her eyes and wiped fine beads of sweat from her forehead. The mid-September inversion layer hovering above the city had overwhelmed the air conditioner and the redbrick walls of the converted warehouse.
She gazed through a casement window at the smog-leadened bay, then looked back at Gage and said, almost in apology, “I’ve just never been able to hate anyone.”
“It’s not hate, Tansy. It’s thirty years of disgust.”
Gage glanced at his watch. It had already been ninety minutes since his flight had landed at SFO. It was time for a cool shower, not for a descent into the miasma of deceit and corruption that had been Charlie Palmer’s life-that Gage was certain still remained his life. For never in his career as a police officer, as a detective, and finally as a private investigator had Gage witnessed an authentic rebirth from a near-death experience, even one as cruel as the shooting that had left Palmer splayed on a Sunset District sidewalk six weeks earlier.
Gage was certain that whatever Palmer was seeking in his call, it wouldn’t be justice. It would only be-it could only be-revenge. And Gage wanted no part of it.
“Does he know who you are?” Gage asked.
“Why should he know who…” Tansy’s voice faded. She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’m not sure how he’d know.”
Gage pushed himself to his feet. The preceding weeks spent tracking a fugitive through Europe weighed on his middle-aged body as if each sleepless minute could be measured in pounds.
“Put him on,” Gage said. “Tell him who you are. But don’t let him know I’m listening.”
“You can’t expect-”
“Let’s see what he’s learned from living with just a fraction of Moki’s misery. Let’s see whether he feels any remorse at all for sabotaging the case against those thugs.”
“But we never got proof it really was him,” Tansy said.
Gage pointed at the speakerphone centered on the conference table and said, “Maybe after all these years we’re about to get it.”
But Gage didn’t think so.
Even if he was right that it had been Palmer who’d terrified the only prosecution witness into fleeing on the eve of the trial of the young men who’d beaten and stomped Moki, Gage doubted Palmer would now confess and make this his day of judgment. For confession would require Palmer to admit to himself who he was and what he’d been: a weapon in the hands of the wealthy and powerful employed to revictimize their victims, slashing through the fabric of their lives, leaving those like Tansy bereft of the truth of their own pasts, and those like Moki deprived not only of justice, but of the joys of a fully lived life.
Tansy sat down and reached toward the on button. She paused, staring at the phone, and then withdrew her hand.
“You don’t believe he’s learned anything, do you?” Gage said.
Uncertainty washed over Tansy’s face. “No… I mean yes… I mean you can’t expect people to change that fast.”
Gage knew it wasn’t a matter of speed, but of possibility, for Palmer’s flaws were of character, not aberrations of circumstance, and one of those was an indifference to tragedy that made him incapable of guilt and impervious to others’ sorrow.
Gage tossed a file folder into his briefcase and pulled his suit jacket from the back of his chair.
“You’re going to have to roll the dice,” Gage said. “Maybe you’ll get your answer, and I’ll get mine.”
Tansy took in a breath and connected the call.
“Mr. Palmer? Mr. Gage isn’t available. I really did give him your message.”
The strained, wheezy voice of Charlie Palmer answered. “Why… would… I… think-”
“Because I’m Moki Amaro’s mother.”
Tansy looke
d up at Gage. His grim expression filled the empty seconds, his gaze fixed on her.
“Mr. Palmer?”
In Palmer’s silence, and in each other’s eyes, Gage and Tansy heard and saw that they’d each gotten their answers.
Gage shook his head as Tansy lowered hers and reached toward the off button-but she left her hand hovering, as if praying the call wouldn’t end in a soundless void.
A quiet sobbing emerged from the speaker. It rose toward a suffocating hysteria that choked off Palmer’s voice as he grasped for words.
“I… I… pl… please… don’t… hang up.”
Tansy’s eyes teared. She covered her mouth, still staring at the phone. She again looked at Gage, silently asking, Enough?
Gage wasn’t sure it was enough, or if there was anything Charlie Palmer could do or say, or was capable of doing or saying, that would be enough. But gazing down at Tansy and listening to the man’s hard breathing at the other end of the line, Gage couldn’t escape another truth: that Palmer, too, was part of the fabric of others’ lives. He was a father, a son, and a husband. And although Palmer’s past meant Gage couldn’t trust his plea in the present, in it Gage saw their faces and heard their voices.
Gage laid his coat over the back of a chair and set his briefcase down on the floor.
“What’s on your mind, Charlie?”
Gasps and sobs fractured Palmer’s next words, then the line disconnected.
“What did he say?” Tansy asked, looking up, her brows furrowed, as though searching for something lost. “I couldn’t make it out.”
“I think he wants to compose himself,” Gage said. “It sounded like he said he’ll call back in an hour.”
Tansy’s eyes kept searching. “Will you wait?”
Gage nodded. “I’ll wait.”
S ixty-three minutes later, Tansy once again stood at Gage’s office door. But this time her fretting hands and her downcast eyes that rose and looked past him toward the unblinking intercom light, told him even before she spoke the words that Charlie Palmer was dead.
Chapter 2
Senator Landon Meyer leaned back in his chair on the sixth floor of the Dirksen Building and gazed down through his window and watched the midday traffic passing on Constitution Avenue.
Constitution. His conscience bit at him as he said the word to himself. Who was he to tell the executive branch who it could or couldn’t nominate to the Supreme Court? Who was he to violate the separation of powers that once seemed so indispensable to the American form of government?
But in ten minutes he would settle into the rear seat of a limousine, ride to the White House, and do exactly that.
A phrase of St. Augustine’s repeated itself in his mind as he surveyed the city:
It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels.
Then he reminded himself, as if in absolution, that the humble don’t run for office-or at least they don’t win-and the prideful are unable to compromise.
Compromise. Another twinge refocused his mind.
There would be no compromise.
Not this morning.
Not with this president.
Not on these nominations.
Landon didn’t doubt that under the law he was merely one among equals. Unus inter pares. But for causes he thought only a political physicist could discover, he had become the pivotal force in a divided Senate, making him primus inter pares. First among equals. And it gave him the power to dictate through these new justices-and through the uniquely American Leviathan the Court had become-what privacy rights Americans would retain, what powers the president would wield in war and peace, and even what latitude would be left to the states to govern their own affairs.
The American Leviathan. That’s how he’d described the Court a week earlier while walking with a summer intern down the marble hallway toward the Senate chamber. The young woman had looked up at him with an innocent smile and said how much she loved reading Moby Dick as a child, then blushed when she realized the reference was political, not literary. She then said she’d read Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan in a government class in college and found it terrifying.
Landon recalled smiling to himself and letting the matter drop, for he’d actually been thinking of the Book of Job, an allusion he suspected she was still too many uncommitted sins away from understanding.
The image faded and was replaced by another, a memory of winter steelhead fishing as a young congressman with Graham Gage on the Klamath River. It was a month after Gage had exposed an opposition push-polling operation that had used the similarity of Landon’s wife’s maiden name to that of a criminal to accuse her of real estate fraud. Gage, standing in the drift boat, teaching him how to read water, how to deduce the unseen from the seen, pointing toward a submerged rock, sheared off the cliff above and ragged enough to rip through the hull, its presence revealed only by the water churning below it downstream.
Landon now felt the chill that had shuddered through him at that moment, one far deeper than the one inflicted by the raw wind sweeping up the canyon. It was a terror of hidden hazards, deposited solely by chance, upon which his career might someday be wrecked.
Chance.
Landon understood, even as he sat there readying himself to impose his Supreme Court nominees on the president, that his enormous power was an outcome of events that all could have been otherwise. Suppose he hadn’t survived the childhood car crash that killed his sister? Suppose he hadn’t been elected student body president at Yale? Admitted to Harvard Law School? Elected to Congress? Run against House and Senate opponents who ran aground each election eve on the shores of their naive mistakes? And, finally, stepped into the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee only because of the death of a colleague?
It wasn’t a secret from Landon why these events now replayed in his mind. It was the subconscious way he’d always reminded himself that the inescapable and all-too-human sin of pride was threatening to mutate into a secular hubris: the dangerous belief that he alone was the source of the power he possessed. It sometimes even tempted him to dismiss the warning of Shakespeare’s Brutus that he’d framed and mounted in his office wall on the day he was first sworn in to Congress:
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
Looking up at those words as he did now, Landon had often felt a peculiar unease, a kind of bad faith. A Republican senator elected by the people of California was nothing if not against the tide. Republican governors? Nearly always. Senators? One in a generation: himself-and he knew this was exactly the sort of dangerous material from which hubris was formed.
A beep from his phone startled him. He leaned forward to rise, thinking it was his secretary informing him his driver had arrived. He then noticed the call was on his private line. He picked it up. It was his younger brother, Brandon, a federal judge in their hometown of San Francisco, calling to take vicarious pleasure in something Landon viewed as merely necessary.
“I’m just about to leave… Sure, I’ll call you later.”
Landon hung up the phone. Ultimately, he recognized, it was to his brother he owed what he didn’t owe to chance. As a corporate lawyer, it was Brandon’s connections that funded his campaigns and later supplied the money he deposited into the political action committees of the Senate leadership to buy himself a seat on the Judiciary Committee.
As much as he had despised it, at Yale they were known as Machiavelli and the Prince. Brandon: dark hair, peering eyes, diminutive face, expert debater. Landon: tall, fair-skinned, strong-jawed. A leader, not an arguer. That they could be brothers had unnerved their classmates, just as it had the families on Nob Hill where they’d grown up. The dissimilarity had always powered an undercurrent of whispering that tugged at them as they walked to their table in the dining room of their parents�
� country club or swam in the pool. But, fortunately, age, like erosion, had smoothed the stark edges of their contours and softened the contrast.
The phone beeped again. This time it was his driver. Landon rose, and then glanced down at the Supreme Court building across the street. It seemed at this moment like a fist with two fingers missing, mangled and powerless-
But not for long.
As he walked down the hallway toward the elevator, he wondered what the president’s reaction would be when he heard the two names. How would a president who had always fled to the center because he’d lacked the courage of his convictions adjust to this reminder that he owed his presidency to contributors who were finally demanding that they receive what they’d been paying for over all these years.
Chapter 3
The sun cresting the East Bay hills blinded Gage as the bridge exit into San Francisco looped back toward the waterfront. He descended into the shade of the office towers and condo complexes that had reshaped the shoreline in the quarter century since he had converted the hundred-year-old warehouse into his firm’s offices. A minute later, he emerged near the four-lane Embarcadero, its palm-bordered trolley line giving the boulevard the unnatural and uncomfortable appearance of having been harvested from the San Diego harbor and grafted onto San Francisco Bay.
Gage paused at an intersection as a still-groggy runner crossed against the light, then drove south past a scattering of piers and restaurants, and slipped into an alley. He parked along the back wall of his building and walked around to the front, where he spotted his surveillance chief sitting on the concrete steps, staring across the street toward the water.
“Thanks for calling Socorro,” Viz said as Gage approached. “Your and Faith’s condolences meant a lot to her.”
Hector McBride had been nicknamed by Gage for his godlike ability to catalogue the covert lives of his targets and to condense and evaporate like an omniscient cloud. Despite standing a couple of inches taller than Gage’s six foot two, it sometimes seemed the ex-DEA agent could disappear into the sliver of a midday shadow.
