Andersen, Kurt (57 page)

So, Chuck Levy: pilot, would-be air force aviator, intelligence operative, and freedom fighter. Buzzy Freeman: military veteran, cowboy revolutionary, and patriotic warrior. Both of them boy-men who kept secrets and believed in political ends that justified lethal means. Ditto “Stewart Jones,” a foulmouthed combat veteran and cowboy intelligence operative, a professional secret-keeper and occasional overseer of government killing. I believe in the rule of three, so I can’t deny the obvious. I fall for men utterly unlike the one I married. Men somewhat more like my father, it turns out. Men, yes, ridiculously, from James Bond’s universe.

I absolutely never imagined I was in the running to be a Supreme Court justice. When the seat opened up and my name began appearing on journalists’ lists of possible candidates, I figured it was bullshit, the result of my quasi-celebrity—the books and my appearances as a constitutional expert on cable news and PBS and NPR. I was about to give the commencement address at Harvard. Compared to federal judges of whom nobody had ever heard, I had a name that was more fun for media people to bandy.

Another
female law school dean who had never been a judge?
Another
woman with Type 1 diabetes?
Another
1970s alumnus of Yale Law School?
Another
New Yorker? The
seventh
Roman Catholic out of nine justices?
No way,
I thought, even as I enjoyed the attention.

My constitutional views have been described as “quirky” and “unorthodox”—for instance, I’m a non-Republican who really believes states’ rights can’t be wished away—and the novel I published features a heroic gay prosecutor, lots of salty language, and a main character who wonders why people who live on the Great Plains aren’t constantly tempted to commit suicide. In my one appearance on
Oprah
—a booking I got only because I agreed to talk about diabetes—I told her that when my blood sugar is very high, I feel like “a certain kind of American—dull-witted, heavy, sated but not really satisfied, faintly depressed. Greasy-brained.” That caused a small uproar. I have a prescription for medical marijuana, and for years I smuggled Nicorettes into the U.S. and donated my used, HIV-free insulin syringes to an unauthorized New York needle exchange program for junkies.
No way could I get confirmed,
I thought.

None of that stopped me from gaming the fantasy. I run one of America’s top five public-university law schools, I taught constitutional law at Yale, I very successfully practiced law in the real world. I helped draft a national constitution. For twenty-one years I was a member of the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court, where I argued nine cases at the advocate’s podium. And I served as the associate attorney general of the United States. Given that I’d be replacing a woman, I would be the new third female justice, not a fourth. My lack of judicial experience meant I had no trail of decisions that could be held against me. A few years ago I wrote that overturning
Roe
v
. Wade
would be a disaster, but that the decision was poorly argued and had a whiffy constitutional basis. This is the big reason people on the left mistrust me, along with my twenty years of representing corporate clients, and why right-wingers loathe me less than they do other liberals.

It was all a game, a fictional exercise. No one from the White House had called to tell me I was under consideration or to suss out my interest in being appointed.

Naturally, I heard from Alex Macallister right away.

“It’s a figment of the media’s imagination,” I told him. “The FBI hasn’t called you to check on me this time, have they?”

“No. But it’s an honor just to be nominated. That’s true, you know.”

“This is not the Oscars, Alex. I haven’t been nominated. I’m not going to be nominated.”

Then the White House did call. I had just arrived in Cambridge to give my Harvard speech the following day. I was on the administration’s list for real. “It’s not a long list,” the fellow from the White House told me.

I didn’t immediately say no.

For forty-four years, I had gotten away with it. I had made it under the radar three times, twice as a clerk in the 1970s and then as associate attorney general in the 1990s. A seat on the
Supreme Court.
Jesus God.

I could not push my luck once again, not this far. Could I? I had never actually lied about my past, never denied what I’d done, because all the forms I’d signed over the years inquired only about charges, indictments, and convictions. They didn’t ask, and I didn’t tell. But with the vetting to which I’d be subjected as a Supreme Court nominee, by the FBI and the White House lawyers and the press, the truth would surely come out. Wouldn’t it? After fantastically, paranoically embellishing Obama’s glancing association with one Weather Underground geezer during the 2008 election, in 2012 the Republicans would try to use me to destroy his presidency once and for all. And if I were nominated and confirmed? I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life worrying and lying more than ever, did I? No. I did not.

I called back the nice man in Washington the next morning and told him thanks very much, I was honored beyond words, but no thanks. Then I gave my speech, in which I told the new graduates that we are all to some extent fictional characters of our own devising, and I quoted the narrator of Kurt Vonnegut’s
Mother Night,
a fictional memoir by a former OSS double agent who pretended to be a Nazi during the war. “This is the only story of mine whose moral I know,” the character says at the beginning of the novel. “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” I choked up a little, which mystified and intrigued the audience. When I said later in the speech that “honesty in the defense of liberty is no vice” and that I’d just decided against spending the last chapters of my own story as a candidate for the Supreme Court, they all thought they understood why I’d gotten emotional earlier. Thanks to the Twitterers in the audience, my news was all over the Internet and on TV within the hour.

35

Wheel Life Pictures is in a building in Santa Monica that’s old for L.A., which is to say a building built around the time I was born. Originally a small factory, it has been renovated, adaptively reused—also like me, although much more stylishly. I’d be surprised if any of the dozen people Alex employs here are more than half my age.

I’ve been standing and staring out the twenty-foot-high gridded glass window toward the Santa Monica airport for five minutes when I feel his hands gripping my shoulders.

“Ms.
Hollander,
” he says in a soft growl.

I spin around and we kiss. When we were eighteen, he was slightly taller than I was, but now we’re the same height. He’s astonishingly fit. His hair is shortish but thick and luxurious, so white that I wonder if he bleaches it.

He tells me one of the reasons he bought the building is that he can leave his office and be aboard his Gulfstream 650 ten minutes later. “I can actually walk to the plane.”

“Really? It’s only a ten-minute walk?”

“That sounds about right. I said I
can,
not I
do.
It’s a two-minute drive.”

An assistant brings me a perfect cappuccino with a decoration on the foam that I guess is a wheel. I pass on the offer of “a few foie gras nibbles” left over from a lunch meeting. Selling foie gras has been prohibited in California for the last two years, but possession remains legal. The assistant closes the door to Alex’s private office.

Rio was “fantastic, of course,” watching England beat Germany in the World Cup final was “too perfect,” seeing white lions in the African bush was “beyond.”

“And this black panther we saw rip apart an impala? In Ethiopia? My God,
the
sexiest creature
ever.
Although did you know ‘black panther’ is redundant? All African panthers are black. Funny.”

“You finally made it to Ethiopia. I remember your plan to live in exile in Addis Ababa.”

This is my attempt to bring up 1968 gently, but he ignores it and proceeds to tell me that he’s heading to outer space.

“How very Bond-villain of you,” I say. “Someone I know went last year, on one of the first regular flights.” After my colleague’s wife died unexpectedly, he decided he could afford to drop two hundred thousand dollars of their retirement savings on a one-day adventure into space. “You take off from New Mexico, right?”

Alex frowns. “That’s
Virgin Galactic,
” he says, as if I’d asked whether the Chrysler out in the parking lot was his, or whether his round indigo eyeglasses were from LensCrafters. “It’s cute. But it’s just a few hours, up and down. Suborbital. They only go up sixty miles, the same as from here to … Laguna Beach. And they sell it like some theme-park ride—’Virgin Galactic Mission Control,’ ‘book with your local accredited space agent.’ Please.”

“So what are
you
doing?”

He smiles. “Lunar expedition.” In eighteen months, two years at most, he will spend a week flying to the moon and back, orbiting a few times but not, alas, touching down. He’s accompanying a forty-three-year-old South African entrepreneur (electric cars, solar power, spacecraft) named Elon Musk. “We’ll be the first private space
explorers.
”

Alex explains all this with a straight face, but I will Google this Mr. Musk after I leave here to make sure he isn’t a fictional character, maybe a Viennese coconspirator of Harry Lime’s from
The Third Man
or a villain from one of the dozens of James Bond novels published since Ian Fleming died.

“Remember watching the pictures from the first Apollo mission that orbited the moon,” he says, “those mind-blowing images of the lunar surface and the earth? Didn’t we watch together, you and I, on the telly in my suite in Adams House?”

“I was never in your suite in Adams House, Alex.”

“No! That’s
impossible.
”

“We didn’t hang out much after freshman year. And also? We wouldn’t have been on campus, because that first lunar mission,
Apollo 8,
was at Christmas.”

“Bang on! Nothing can stop Hollander the human search engine!”

“It’s the book. I’ve spent a lot of time researching, getting all the dates straight.
Apollo 8
was Christmas—1968.”

“Poor Buzzy, eh?”

My second attempt at a soft segue has worked. “It was
awful.
So
sad. And so unnecessary.”

“How much did he know about this book of yours?”

“He knew about it. I met with him earlier this year.”

“Did you?”

“You know what? Buzzy never served in Vietnam. I found out that was total bullshit, complete fiction.”

“Is that right? How interesting. He knew you knew that? He knew you were going to write that?”

I shake my head. “So: Alex.”

“Yes, counselor?”

“In April sixty-eight, when … at the end, when you had your last phone call with Chuck, you told him you were CIA.”

“I told him I knew people in CIA.”

Thank God: he is no longer trying to gaslight me. “Did he tell you he was an agent, too, an informant for military intelligence, for the army?”

From his expression, the momentary but unmistakable look of surprise, I can tell he’s impressed by what I know. He shakes his head. “I didn’t find that out until afterward. Not from him. And I’ve never known that it was the army. They didn’t tell me which agency. Interesting.”

“At the end, you were trying to get him to work with the CIA, like you. Right? You were trying to bring him in from the cold, to save him.”

Are his eyes moistening?

“I was. I really was, Hollander.”

“I know that, Alex. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you in person.” All of the possible phrases seem thin:
I understand,
I forgive you,
no hard feelings.
“Both of us were trying to save Chuck.”

He smiles. “This is like the end of
Gaslight,
when Ingrid Bergman has Charles Boyer tied up in the chair and toys with him, letting him think
maybe
she’s going to let him go.”

“I am publishing the book.”

“So how were
you
trying to ‘save’ Chuck, Hollander?”

“Right after the rest of us decided not to go through with it and he kept going, I phoned the Secret Service from New York and gave them his name. Which is why, for the last forty-six years, I thought I’d gotten him killed.”

Alex smiles. “Interesting.
So
interesting. All of us were compromised.”

“Except Buzzy.”

“
Buzzy.
He was a
clown.
” Alex stretches, clasps his hands behind his head, swivels around to look out his giant window, then turns back. “You know, I’ve decided I can deal with people knowing I stopped an assassination. Having worked with CIA has lost its old stigma. In fact? It may be the opposite now.” He looks at his watch. “I
love
seeing you. And we absolutely
will
have dinner soon. But … are we about through with this, Hollander?”

We are not through. “The thing I don’t entirely understand about you and our plot, Alex, is your state of mind. Your precise intentions at various moments. You were a CIA asset between August twelfth, 1967, and February second, 1968, and you were still a CIA asset after March thirty-first, 1968, when we called it quits, and until we graduated in June 1971. But exactly what were you thinking during those two months from February third, after we decided to kill Johnson, until March thirty-first?” I’m being disingenuous, as all litigators sometimes must be.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he says. “I don’t have the calendar committed to memory like you, darling. A touch
Rain Man
-y, no?”

“From the morning we decided to kill the president until the night we decided not to, were you with us, or half with us, or what? You turned on a dime and voted to cancel the plot as soon as Johnson said he wasn’t running for reelection—”