Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

  “One-Question Attenborough,” said Laval. He was smiling, but Attenborough saw rebellion in his face, and in some of the other less ruddy faces around the table, too. The key to success was getting Laval under control and making him part of the team effort by giving him more to lose than anyone else. He said, “I’m going to recommend that Bob Laval, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, be nominated as chairman of the Committee of Managers. It’s a big job with no thanks at the end of it. They’re the prosecutors in the Senate trial. Is that all right with you, Bob?”

  “What happens to the Judiciary Committee?”

  “It’s too big and unwieldy to get this done in the time allotted.”

  “It’s the Judiciary Committee’s right to get it done.”

  “The House decides that. In the Andrew Johnson case, the Committee on Reconstruction handled the details because what he was really being impeached for was his policy of mercy toward the South. If you want a committee that’s got seventeen of Mallory’s smartest lawyers on it deciding the fate of the presidency, that’s fine. But I hope you’ll not refuse this cup you’re being offered.”

  The historical reference to what the Republicans had done to the South struck home; Laval was from Louisiana, after all. “They’re going to feel stepped on, Mr. Speaker,” he said.

  “I know that,” Attenborough said. “But their chairman will be in charge of the process from start to finish, so they won’t be left out. Will you do it, Bob?”

  Laval understood exactly what he was being offered: center stage in the biggest political drama of the new century. He thought it over, then nodded. “Fine. If I have independence.”

  “As long as you stick to the point like I just said and get it over with by tomorrow night, you’re on your own,” Attenborough said. “All you’ve got to do is get yourself elected to the Committee of Managers by the full House.”

  Laval knew what this meant: He could not possibly be elected to anything by the House without Attenborough’s approval and support, so he had to accept the Speaker’s terms or bow out.

  “All right,” he said. “But I’m telling you we’re not going to be able to ignore this other thing.”

  “That’s settled, then,” Attenborough said. “You fellows can decide who else should be managers, but you’d better keep it small—say eight members besides Laval, five from our side, three from the other party, good political mix, sensible citizens in the majority. You may want to get most of ‘em or all of ‘em from Judiciary; that’s where the lawyers are.”

  “Any suggestions?”

  “I’ve made my suggestions,” Attenborough said.

  He left them to their work and, to avoid further contact with the world, went outside and walked through the landscaped grounds of the Capitol. He was alone except for a few early-rising tourists and a Capitol policeman or two. Though it was still winter in the Northern Hemisphere, Washington’s annual false spring had begun, and premature tulips and jonquils sparkling with dew bloomed at his feet. Behind the Capitol, hanging above the eastern horizon, the early sun filled the enormous billowing flag on the roof with flaxen light. Its colors and the other colors of the morning were so intense that they seemed almost otherworldly to the Speaker. He felt the pills and liquor again: they had produced a kind of anti-D.T.’s which made reality seem more vivid than it possibly could be, but he loved what he saw all the same. From within the shadow of the backlit dome, etched on the lawn in perfect detail right down to the feathers on Freedom’s headdress, he paused and gazed westward over the emerald Mall to the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial beyond. In between, against the azure sky, Old Glory, endlessly repeating its translucent rippling image, flew over Greek temples and Roman rotundas, as though an army of American boys had invaded classical antiquity and captured it for the folks back home. Attenborough loved this city, and he was overcome with a loverlike sorrow at its wanton yet unattainable beauty. Standing in the shade without a topcoat, he shivered and said aloud, “Sweetheart, life is too damn short.”

  5

  At 9:55 A.M. Attenborough entered the House, ascended the podium, and sat down in the Speaker’s chair. A number of notes awaited him, including one from Bob Laval; he did not read them because he did not want to be diverted from his plan of action by the second thoughts of others. Ram it through, get it done, stick to the game plan—that was what he was going to do. Down below, on the floor, Laval was gesturing to him with a cellular phone. He pointed at the phone, then pointed at Attenborough, telling him to pick up his own instrument. Whatever it was he had to say, the Speaker did not want to hear it. New opinions at this late hour could only complicate matters. He shook his head and pointed at his watch. Laval shook his head in exasperation and turned his back.

  At ten o’clock precisely, Attenborough gaveled the House to order. Laval rose as agreed and offered a resolution to constitute the House as a Committee of the Whole—”a grand and solemn grand jury of the people’s representatives, empowered by the Constitution”—to consider whether the President of the United States should be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. The resolution was adopted with only fifty dissenting votes, nearly all from the far-left wing of the party, which did not want to consider anything that had originated with Franklin Mallory.

  There was little to debate. The rest of the four-hour session went exactly as Attenborough had planned. The House formally confirmed the Speaker’s powers as chairman of the Committee of the Whole into which it had resolved itself, a formality but a necessary precaution in case of a later revolt on the floor. Finally Laval and six others, including the ranking minority member of the Judiciary Committee, were elected as a Committee of Managers and instructed to draft articles of impeachment for consideration by the House at two o’clock the following afternoon.

  At precisely two o’clock Attenborough adjourned the House. As he descended from the podium, Laval tried to intercept him, but the Speaker pretended not to see him and scurried off in the other direction as if on an errand of state. After all that time in the Speaker’s chair, his blood alcohol level had dropped below the comfort level and his amphetamine was wearing off, and if he wasn’t exactly seeing things yet or falling asleep on-camera, he knew he would soon be doing so unless he had a drink and another pill. He headed for his formal office, whose door opened directly from the floor of the House. After washing down a pill with nine ounces of vodka—he was three hours behind in his dosage—he refilled his medicine bottles and slipped them back into his inside breast pockets. Then he washed his face. He was in no way surprised when he looked up, dripping, from the sink and found his sardonic image in the mirror giving him a knowing wink. Attenborough winked back. “My friend, you got eyes like a couple of dead canaries,” he said. The image grinned in agreement.

  Attenborough waved goodbye to his doppelgäanger and went out to face the press. At the moment it resembled an undulating phosphorescent marine polyp that had attached itself tenaciously to Bob Laval, on whom were concentrated its glowing lights and its bubbling collective voice. The Speaker quickened his pace, hoping to draw near in time to overhear whatever Laval was saying; he was beginning to regret that he hadn’t talked to him before he went on television.

  Protected by the velvet rope that kept back the lobbyists and the tourists as well as the media, Attenborough walked past the carved figures of King Kamehameha I of Hawaii, Father Junipero Serra, and Frances Willard, forgotten personages who proved his point about statuary. A woman with a big head of wild blond hair called out to him from across the velvet rope. He ignored her, but she ran along beside him, still talking. Mistaking her for Morgan Pike and therefore not looking at her closely, he said, “No exclusives, Morgan.” He kept on walking, picking up the pace a little and looking straight ahead. At his side he heard her high heels banging on the marble floor, and because he had always thought that Morgan’s gangling legs were her best feature, and because he realized in some part of his mind that he wouldn’t be looking at legs
much longer, he stole a look. What he saw instead of Pike’s showgirl limbs was a pair of calves that belonged in the NFL, and when he lifted his eyes to identify their owner he found himself looking into the face of a black-eyed woman who was a total stranger to him.

  She gave him a horrible Junior League grin and said, in a husky, unmistakably Texan voice, “Are you Richard Tucker Attenborough, Jr.?”

  Attenborough looked grim and hurried and said, “That’s me.” She said, “In that case, I have something for you.” She thrust a blue-backed legal document into his hands. As she did so the two of them were bathed in camera lights.

  Without thinking, the Speaker took the document, looked at it, and immediately realized that he had seen sued. But by whom and for what? Forgetting the cameras, he said, “What the hell is this supposed to be?”

  “I think you know what it is—retribution,” Sturdi replied.

  The light came from a smaller cell of the media, split off from the main organism, that now bounded forward, dragging tentacles of cables and wires behind it. In the distance, Laval broke away from his questioners. They too started to run toward Attenborough, as if the polyp that had been sundered by some action of the sea into two gelatinous parts was now swimming frantically back together again.

  Before they could get to him, the real Morgan Pike thrust her pink microphone in his face. “What are your feelings at this moment, Mr. Speaker?”

  “About what?” Attenborough said.

  “About being sued by a certain Slim Eve for twenty million dollars for the physical injury and mental anguish she suffered when you allegedly raped her.”

  Attenborough frowned into the cameras, then glanced down at the blue-backed legal document in his hand. Slim Eve? Who the hell was that? He said, “Did what to who?”

  “Ms. Slim Eve. Over there.”

  Cameramen scampered to capture the image of Slim, who stood with her attorney, surrounded by a support group of forty or fifty people, nearly all of them women. It took Attenborough a moment to recognize his dinner companion without her miniskirt and cleavage; today she was dressed like a nun, her legs and all the rest of her swathed in black except for her wan, unpainted, tormented face. Her hair, which had been so curly and sexy the last time he saw her, was now skinned back into a knot at the back of her head. It looked dull—gray, even—which heightened the impression that she had undergone a life-altering experience. Certainly she didn’t look much like the siren dressed for date rape who’d parted her knees so sweetly under that dinner table. All the other females clustered around her were also costumed as drabs. Like the journalists, they seemed to have merged into a single but much more dangerous organism, all with identical frozen expressions, all wearing somber dark suits with trousers or skirts that descended nearly to the ankles. Among these forbidding beings he recognized seven members of the House, three senators, and two members of Lockwood’s cabinet, in addition to the usual actresses, writers, professors, lawyers, advocacy specialists, and other do-gooders whose faces were familiar to him from earlier public appearances in support of various causes within the Cause.

  The rest of the media had arrived, lights shining. Attenborough faced them, expecting to be battered by questions about Slim Eve. Politic answers formed in his mind, but for the second time that day, he was surprised by the questions.

  “Chairman Laval has just announced he’s going to hold a secret session of the Committee of Managers tonight to discuss the Ibn Awad case,” one journalist said. “What’s your comment on that, Mr. Speaker?”

  All of a sudden Attenborough felt the tumbler of vodka he had just drunk very strongly, felt the pill he had just swallowed doing its work, and saw everything with such surpassing clarity that he could not believe that he hadn’t seen this coming. With deep solemnity he said, “I am sure the truth will be established. Meanwhile, let there be no rush to judgment.”

  With triumphant anger, Morgan Pike said, “Is that also your advice concerning the rape charge, Mr. Speaker?”

  The many lights of the media shone upon him. Across the crowd, Slim Eve regarded him with the contemptuous plum-blue eyes into which he had fallen like Lucifer.

  “You bet it is,” he said. “As the Good Book says, ‘A foolish woman is clamorous; whoso is simple, let him turn in hither.’ Book of Proverbs, chapter the ninth, verse the thirteenth.”

  6

  Attenborough turned on his heel and left Morgan Pike and the rest of them to get on with the job of making Slim famous. Beyond the rope, the media polyp divided momentarily, one part following him, pulsing and glowing, until he reached the sanctuary of his formal office, where Alfonso Olmedo was waiting for him.

  Olmedo was angry, and for once he did not conceal his emotion. “What is the meaning of calling a closed meeting of the Committee of Managers on Ibn Awad without notice to the President?”

  “I didn’t,” Attenborough said.

  “Well, your man Bob Laval just did on national television,” Olmedo said. “How could you permit this?”

  “Hold on, there, Counselor,” Attenborough said, “do you think I knew it was going to happen? Laval just went out there and announced that the lynching was about to begin.”

  “Lynching? What are you talking about?”

  “What do you think I’m talking about?”

  “I demand a postponement of this hearing. My client has rights, Mr. Speaker.”

  “He does?” Attenborough laughed aloud. “If you believe that, Counselor, I’ve got a nice bridge, just slightly used, between Manhattan and Brooklyn that I can let you have real cheap.”

  Olmedo said, “You can joke—joke about a matter of this kind?”

  Where was Olmedo’s famous superhuman coolness? He was sputtering. Amazed, Attenborough held up a tiny hand. “Don’t know what else I can do about it, Counselor,” he said.

  Olmedo stood silent for a moment. At length, with a rueful shrug, he said, “I apologize, Mr. Speaker.”

  “No need,” Attenborough said. “You’ve got a right to be pissed off. I’ve got a bigger right. I should have seen this coming—a blind man would have seen it.”

  “Can there be a postponement?”

  “Of the committee hearing? That’s not in my power. And it’s not what I was talking about anyway. I was talking about this.”

  He handed Olmedo the legal document Sturdi had served on him. Olmedo scanned it. When he handed it back, his face was somber. “This could be serious,” he said.

  “It’s serious for your client,” Attenborough said. “It takes away every bit of respect and moral authority I ever had, right on the eve of the one session I know I’ve absolutely got to control.”

  “You’ve been sued, but you’re still the Speaker of the House.”

  “Correct. But this is not one of your New York lawsuits. It’s not the twenty million dollars they want. All I’ve got in the world is a mortgaged town house and next month’s paycheck, and every lawyer in town knows that. What these people want is something else altogether. I’ve just been charged with rape in the highest court in the land, the news media. On the evening news and tomorrow morning’s TV shows, the witnesses will be heard. Then the newspapers will take a day to ponder the evidence and hand down the conviction. After that I’ll be on Death Row, politically speaking, and leaving prayer out of it, I won’t be able to do a hell of a lot for myself, let alone for your client.”

  Olmedo struggled to say something that would show he understood what Attenborough was telling him, even if he was from out of town and a stranger to politics. “The timing is suspicious,” he said.

  “Truer words were never spoken,” said Attenborough. “Funny coincidence, ain’t it?”

  “I hope it won’t be as bad as you think.”

  “Hope springs eternal but it don’t swat no flies,” Attenborough said. “As far as Ibn Awad goes, I can’t stop what’s going to happen. Bob Laval even tried to tell me, but I put him off, so it’s my own fault I was taken by surprise.”

 
“He tried to tell you? I don’t understand.”

  “I didn’t think he’d go ahead and do it without telling me. The way things are supposed to work around here, if he didn’t tell the Speaker, it couldn’t happen. But then I was charged with rape, so it didn’t matter whether he told me or not.”

  “I see,” Olmedo said. Attenborough wondered if he really did. The lawyer said, “You can’t get him to postpone?”

  “Forget it. We don’t have a Vice President, and we’ve got a charge of homicide and conspiracy in the papers against the President. Old Bob decided it was his duty to have hearings and have ‘em now, tonight, and there’s no way he’s going to back away from what he just said on television.”

  “His duty? To aid and abet slander?”

  “Slander? Bob Laval’s an honest man, Counselor.”

  “And a member of Lockwood’s party. What is his purpose?”

  “To find out whether your client, who may or may not be the legal President of the United States, is really so dumb that he actually did what the newspaper says he did.” Attenborough paused, surprised to note that his hand was suspended nervelessly in the air, like the yellowed marble hand on his own future statue. He must have been gesturing with it and have frozen without knowing it. Why was his mind on statues? Intimations of mortality?

  “You have a pungent way of expressing things, Mr. Speaker,” Olmedo said. “Will I have the right to appear before the committee on behalf of my client?”

  “Sure you will,” Attenborough replied, “if that’s what you want to do. But take my advice, don’t yell at old Bob like you just yelled at me. And don’t start talking about Lockwood’s rights.”