The Hearing (7 page)

Gus said, “Then what would happen?”

Rothman said, “Then it’s up to the President.”

Dutweiler said, “But you haven’t answered my question, Gus. What about you and Michelle? Harrington’s told you to withdraw.
What are you going to do?”

“We’ve been thinking about that all weekend.”

“Well, you need to know something, Gus. We aren’t exactly novices here. Harrington and his people may not want to suffer the
agony this could bring them. If this goes down to the wire it’ll turn nasty—it’s already turned nasty—and the issue with these
mud-and-blood brawls is always the same. Do the ends justify the pain? Who can inflict the most agony? How much damage is
each side prepared to endure before they cut and run? When I take this to the President I have to know how much pain you’re
willing to tolerate. Both of you. The President’s going to ask me that—he may want to ask you directly—and I have to know
the answer. When he first decided to nominate you, he said he wanted you because you were a slave to the law—that was his
phrase. But the decision is yours. If you want to withdraw, that’s that. I wish you had more time to think about it, but all
you’ve got is till tomorrow at five
P.M.”

Michelle had been leaning out of her chair, chin forward, eyes riveted on Dutweiler. When he paused for breath, she said,
“We don’t need till five
P.M.
tomorrow. We’ve been thinking about this since Friday. Gus is not a withdrawer and neither am I. We don’t want to withdraw.”

Gus said, “I agree with Michelle. We do not want to withdraw. We’re in this for keeps. With one condition.”

“And it is?”

“The girl and her adoptive parents. She’s our daughter, and those parents have raised her. You mentioned pain. I’m
not going to volunteer them for this war. They’re going to have to volunteer themselves.”

“What does that mean?”

“Find them. I want to talk to them, explain what’s happening, have the same conversation with them I’ve just had with you.
How much pain, if any, are they prepared to tolerate.”

Rothman said, “I’m not sure if—”

Dutweiler interrupted. “What if we can’t find them?”

“Harrington found them.”

“They had five weeks to look.”

“But they weren’t the government. They didn’t have your resources.”

“Don’t kid yourself, Gus. People like Harrington—they have extremely sophisticated investigators.”

“Better than the FBI?”

“Not better but a lot less encumbered by legal restraints. They can do things we can’t touch.”

Michelle said, “We have to talk to our daughter and the parents.”

“So it boils down to this,” Dutweiler said. “If we find the girl and her adoptive parents and they say okay, you want to stick
with this?”

Gus said, “That’s right.”

“All the way? No matter what?”

Michelle said, “All the way.”

“You’re not going to wait until we’re in deeper than we can get out and then tell us you’ve changed your mind?”

“I won’t do that.” Gus waited, and then he said, “Will you?”

“I won’t.”

“The President?”

“I can’t speak for the President. He does what he wants. We do not ask the President for promises.”

“But you’ll find them—the girl and the parents?”

Dutweiler said, “Between now and Monday evening? Two days?”

He looked at Rothman. “What do you think, Phil?”

“Forget the two days. Harrington’s just babbling. The Judiciary Committee’s not scheduled to vote till the end of next month.
We can push them. At least two weeks. Probably three or four. Plenty of time.”

Rothman stood, walked to Gus, and put out a hand, palm up. Gus put the video into the hand. Rothman’s soft, chubby fingers
closed around the black cassette.

“Consider them found.”

Dutweiler walked downstairs to show the Parhams to the door, then returned to the study. He lowered himself onto the brown
leather sofa and fixed his eyes on Rothman.

“So what do we tell the President?”

“I’d tell him we’re stronger now than ever.”

Dutweiler laughed. “Always looking for the bright side. If you fell off the top of the World Trade Center, Phil, you’d be
celebrating when you hit the concrete.”

“Look at it realistically, look at—”

“I’m
looking
at it realistically. Parham tried to talk his wife into having an abortion.”

“But she
didn’t
have it. Whatever anyone tries to say, there was
no
abortion.”

Dutweiler sighed.

Rothman moved forward in his chair.

“On the one hand, Lyle, Parham’s pro-choice because he urged his wife to abort. On the other hand, he’s pro-life
because he’s delighted that she didn’t. Something for both sides to like.”

“Or hate.”

“But you’re missing the point. The key here is the girl. Did you
see
that girl?”

“I saw her.”

“You cannot believe for one minute—not for one
minute
—that Harrington or anyone else is going to be crazy enough to come against her. It’d be like shooting Bambi.”

“You think we can find her?”

“Oh, we can find her. For sure, we can find her. Lyle, Parham’s an even better nominee now than before we saw the video. Thirteen
years ago, in the heat and pressure of the moment, he urged his girlfriend to have an abortion—no one’s gonna hate him for
that. But today—well, look at the girl on the video.
Not
aborted, beautiful and full of life. He’s delighted she wasn’t aborted. And who wouldn’t be? How can you attack him?”

“What about the others?
Someone’s
going to tell the President that video makes Parham unconfirmable.”

“Unconfirmable—like, for example, Clarence Thomas? Pornography, sexual harassment, pubic hairs on Coke cans, remember all
that? A complete nightmare.
Much
worse than anything Parham will
ever
be accused of. And he was confirmed.”

“Are you ready for another bloodbath like that?”

“I’ll tell you a bloodbath I’m
not
ready for. I’m not ready to tell the President we blew it again. Politically, after two previous mistakes, we cannot afford
to withdraw this nominee. I don’t know why we’re even discussing this. There’s no choice, Lyle. And aside from the politics,
you’ve heard the President say it a hundred times—Parham is the man.
There’s no
chance
he’d withdraw him. Parham is the President’s
man.
He’s been nominated and he’s going to stay nominated.”

“So your advice is …”

“After every advisor who can pack into the Oval Office sees the video of that girl—I don’t think there’ll even be an argument.
This is
not
a negative, Lyle. We just got very, very lucky.”

“That’s your position.”

“That’s my position.”

“And you’re gonna stick with it right up to the minute your face hits the concrete.”

“I am. Definitely. Absolutely.”

H
elen Bondell loved to fight and she loved to win, but she did not like to be ugly. Not physically ugly—she was thirty-two,
blonde, and just this side of gorgeous—but even the most accomplished charmers in Washington, the ones who knew what she did,
could not keep the contempt from their eyes. They called her unprincipled.

In fact, her principles were so huge they blocked the horizon, so wide and towering you had to pull back to get a look at
them. All Helen Bondell wanted was to
help.
She did whatever she could to get certain legislation passed, reminding herself when the blood flew that the legislation
helped the people she wanted to help, people like impov
erished, husbandless, jobless mothers who wouldn’t be helped unless legislation imposed penalties for
not
helping them.

Her natural habitat was the battlefield, and it was covered with blood. The sword in her hand was the Freedom Federation,
an alliance of public-interest groups with a zeal for “social change.” A
Washington Post
reporter had asked her to define the term.

“Well,” said Helen, green eyes sparkling with a charm younger lobbyists practiced in front of mirrors, “social change is whatever
the Freedom Federation says it is.” Helen loved to shock (those helpless mothers couldn’t shock—who would care what they said?),
and she had found that nothing shocked more powerfully than candor.

“In other words,” the reporter said, “it’s whatever
you
say it is.”

“I think that’s probably fair.”

Her cocky willingness to thrust her head above the parapets, to invite attacks on her eccentric honesty, made good copy, which
was part of the game. Sometimes it was the whole game.

She knew what was right and what was wrong, and if you agreed with her she didn’t care what label you carried or who you slept
with. What she hated were the people who were wrong, knew it, and didn’t care.

She admired compassion and honesty. Her late husband—who’d had both, plus courage—had been blown away (literally, a bomb landed
under his table) at a café in Algiers. The media said Islamic fundamentalists. She hadn’t even known he was out of the country.
He was an international banker—Third World investments, multinational loans, barter agreements, economic recovery projects.
But
while he wasn’t looking—or maybe while he was—his business became mixed with politics and ended in terrorism. He’d been smart,
informed, and so were his friends. She knew her husband had been doing what was right.

And so was she. People on the other side said she’d set new standards for dirty fighting. New standards. In a business whose
hallmark was an absence of standards. If you won you were great. If you lost you were—well, you weren’t anything, you were
as close to invisible as live humans ever get.

And anyway, the standards weren’t hers. She had created and cultivated a reputation for ruthlessness, knowing that the meaner
she was thought to be, the nicer she could actually be. Myths were important in Washington. If you could convince people you
were what you had to be, it left you free, sometimes, to be what you wanted to be.

She had just arrived in her office overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, three blocks from the White House, and was snapping open
the lid of her Gucci attaché case, a gift from her late husband.

It was 7:15
A.M.

The fax machine clicked on.

Glancing at the cover sheet creeping from the machine, she took papers from her attaché case, closed the lid and placed the
case on the floor behind her desk.

She pressed a button on her phone. “Laura?”

“Good morning.”

“Just wanted to know if you were here. Can you give me about ten minutes and then come in with the messages?”

“Right. Hang on. Warren just walked in.”

“Oh, not
him
again.”

Warren Gier had worked his way through Yale Law as
a part-time private investigator, and for the past four years had made a good living moving from one senator’s payroll to
the next, concealed behind various staff titles, as nasty little jobs arose that required a political predator to prowl the
Washington underbrush, alert to legal snares but unencumbered by weighty moral restraints. Happily friendless, he’d been proud
to learn that his enemies called him “the Ferret.”

Helen said, “Hold him a second.”

“Love to.”

Employed at the moment by Eric Taeger, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Warren was never out of touch with Helen
and the activist group leaders clustered under her Freedom Federation umbrella.

She glanced over at the pages still creeping from the fax machine and saw the familiar heading of the American Bar Association.
The ABA’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary rated White House nominees for judicial appointments. The head of the
rating committee was a close working friend of Helen’s. She picked up the fax.

The White House gave the ABA the names of potential nominees for screening before the nominations were publicized. The ABA
routinely passed the names to Helen’s Freedom Federation. Helen then shared the names with other activists groups. If the
groups disapproved of the nominee, their opposition, voiced to the ABA screening committee, some of whose members shared the
political goals of the Freedom Federation, could kill the nomination on the spot.

The fax said the White House was requesting a qualification rating on a Federal District Court judge named Augustus Parham,
sitting in the Middle District of Alabama in Montgomery.
Augustus
Parham? Sounded like some seventy-year-old redneck coot.

Warren walked in. “Sorry for interrupting.”

“No you’re not. You ever hear of Augustus Parham?”

“Why I’m here. The President’s gonna nominate him for the SC.”

Warren only had time for abbreviations. You had to keep up.

“I won’t ask you how you know that.”

Dark-haired, perpetually tanned, a good listener, Warren was a charmer, and Washington was loaded with lonely female staffers.
He made it his business to woo the most vulnerable, feeding them dinners and kindness, periodically harvesting their office
secrets as a shepherd shears sheep. Information was power, and power was money, excitement, and fun. No one in Washington
understood that better than Warren.

Helen said, “Who is he?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Warren, if I admit you know more than I do, will you tell me?”

“Five years ago, locked up some Colombian dope dealer, the media went crazy for him.”

“Oh, yeah.”

That
Augustus Parham. Certainly. Gus Parham. How could she forget? She’d seen him on the
Today
show. Looked like they’d had to tie him to the chair, unhappy to be wasting his time but gracious about it. Guts but nice.
Good looking. Like her first husband. They always ended with tire tracks up their backs, or blown to bits in cafés. She wondered
what his wife would be like. Even had a brief fantasy, before a commercial dumped her back in reality. Gus Parham. Supreme
Court. My, my.

She said, “So what do you think?”