The Hearing (16 page)

“You want me to tell you what I mean? You think it’s so awful here? Have to stay up till eleven o’clock serving drinks? You
are
so
abused, you poor little thing. You know how lucky you are? You never should’ve even been
born
.
And all you can say is ‘I hate you.’ You ought to be ashamed. If it wasn’t for what you’ve got here you’d be in an orphanage.
Probably you’d be dead. You oughta be thanking me every day. Without me you’d be dead, your mother’d’ve killed you, and all
you can say is ‘I hate you.’”

“You’re my mother.”

“Oh, really? You know so much. Well, you’re old enough to know the truth. I never had a kid. Neither did your drunken father.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“So now I’m a liar. Well if that’s the way you feel, maybe it’d’ve been better if your mother
had
killed you. A lot easier for everyone.”

“You can’t kill a kid.”

“You can if they’re not born yet.”

Samantha remembered that conversation at least once every day, usually at night. She promised herself that someday she would
meet someone who would love her so much that his love, even if it didn’t take away the memory, would take away the pain. She
began to wonder who she really was. Most kids knew who they were. Why’d her real parents give her away? Why didn’t they want
her? What would it have been like with them? Who would she have been with them?
Was
she lucky to be alive?

As long as she could remember, she had felt like someone in hiding. In Milwaukee, with all the stuff that went on there, she’d
go to bed at night, pull the sheets over her head, and hide. Traveling with her father, she’d still felt like someone hiding.
And now, in this beautiful house with her
real
parents, she was still in hiding. What did you have to do to get out?

She saw her life as books, like the Nancy Drew adven
tures her father bought her in London. She knew that today her life had started a new book. The first eight years she had
titled
Horror Story
. That was the part in Milwaukee. The next one, after Larry took her away, she called
On the Run
. Now, as she stretched on the soft sheets, letting her half-opened eyes roam among the unfamiliar shadows, she tried to think
of a title for the new book. She was in a beautiful big house with a limousine, a maid, and embassies next door. Maybe
High Society
.

She thought about her father and looked at her watch. In Saint-Tropez it was five in the morning. Her father would have just
finished work, walking to the hotel, thinking of her. Aloud she whispered, “I miss you, Dad.”

The next morning, her father called.

“How are you? How was the flight?”

“It was fine. How are you?”

Gus had answered the phone, called her to his office, then quietly left her to talk in private.

Her father said, “I’m okay. I miss you.”

“I miss you, too, Daddy. But it’s great here. Don’t worry. It’s a big house and they’ve even got guards, like bodyguards?
So don’t worry. They won’t even let me out without a guard. I’m real safe. But I miss you.”

She could hear voices in the background and knew he was at work.

“I’ve got to get back, honey. I love you. I’ll call again tomorrow.”

He hung up.

She was happy to hear his voice, but after she put the phone down she felt an emptiness, as if she hadn’t talked to him at
all. It had been over so fast.

She waited for his call the next afternoon, but it didn’t come. He called the day after that, and they talked for half an
hour.

The reporters at the airport had been nothing. Over the next few weeks, Michelle scanned the newspapers, radio, and TV reports,
and every day it got worse.

She said to Gus. “Isn’t there anything—isn’t there anything at
all
these people won’t stoop to? Why do they hate you so much?”

“The White House nominated me. For some, that’s enough. Others, they look at my record—I’ve ruled against what they like and
for what they hate.”

“But you’ve ruled the other way, too.”

“They don’t see it like that. They want someone who will rule the way they want every time. Politics is about dependability,
Michelle. Justice is about impartiality. The two don’t always mix.”

“But this isn’t politics. You’re not running for anything. It’s the Supreme Court. That’s not politics.”

“Not
supposed
to be politics.”

The rape case. Years earlier, Gus had prosecuted a truck driver for the shotgun killing of two other men trying to rape a
young woman in a parking lot. Women’s rights groups demonstrated for the killer’s acquittal. Gus argued that the truck driver’s
desire to defend the woman, while honorable, had not produced the right or the need to blow the would-be rapists away with
a shotgun. Since Gus’s nomination, opposition TV and newspaper ads (coordinated by Helen Bondell’s Freedom Federation) had
screamed that “support for rape” made Gus unfit for the Supreme Court.

Another series of ads claimed Gus had used his position
as a federal prosecutor to release a friend’s teenage son, arrested with four other boys after a fatal car crash. In fact,
the charges were not federal and the case did not involve Gus. The boy, a schizophrenic, had been sent to a state mental hospital.

More ads accused Gus, in ten years as a public official, of never having hired a black or Hispanic. In fact 42 percent of
his staff had been minority.

Two reporters, stopped by police while trying to remove a bag of garbage from the sidewalk in front of Gus and Michelle’s
unoccupied Montgomery home, later wrote a story saying they had been “pursuing information from an informant” who said they
would find “large quantities of empty barbiturate and tranquilizer bottles.” They said they had also been seeking “incriminating”
bank and brokerage-house statements. In fact they had found nothing. They never identified their source, who actually had
been a staffer from Senator Eric Taeger’s office.

Some writers denounced Gus for supporting capital punishment, others for condemning it. (He had done both, in different cases.)
He had also, in different cases and for different reasons, ruled for and against homosexual rights, for and against affirmative
action, for and against school prayer—for and against just about everything. There appeared to be no issue concerning which
he had not ruled on both sides, taking each case as it came, judging according to the law, ignoring his personal convictions.
Even outside the court, he declined to discuss controversial issues publicly and welcomed as unintended compliments opponents’
charges that he was faceless, a man without opinions.

The burglar who had fled the Vienna, Virginia, garage at the sight of Michelle’s kitchen knife had found in the one
carton he got away with a photocopy of a lurid, handwritten, unsigned love letter to, judging from the context, a married
woman with children. The Freedom Federation planted the letter with a supermarket tabloid, and to defend himself Gus was forced
to provide handwriting samples. (An attorney had submitted the photocopy to Gus in connection with a bail hearing in a mail-fraud
case.)

In the weeks since he had returned from France, ads vilifying Gus had shrieked from newspapers, magazines, billboards, even
from the sky, where smoke-trailing airplanes over the beaches of southern California scrawled out
No Gus
.

Celebrities from film stars to prize fighters hit the talk shows to attack Gus and his views, real or imagined. Opponents
demonized him as the thin edge of a wedge, the start of a movement to roll back judicial positions established over decades.
He was feared and hated for views he had never supported but had not condemned.

Direct-mail campaigns put anti-Gus flyers in half the mailboxes of America. Recorded voices, connected by computerized dialing
machines to hundreds of thousands of telephones, urged all who answered to “protest to your senator.” Ads in professional
law journals sought information from anyone who had ever heard Gus speak for or against controversial issues. Hoping to uncover
quirky tastes, investigators visited every book and video store in Montgomery. Canvassers telephoned federal judges, Alabama
state judges, politicians, prosecutors, prominent defense attorneys, journalists, and businessmen from coast to coast, asking
for “questionable statements” they might have heard from or concerning Gus. Similar calls went to Gus’s colleagues, friends,
former professors, and Harvard class
mates. Opposing senators on the Judiciary Committee demanded that Gus produce more than 47,000 documents relating to his official
duties in Montgomery.

One day, a few weeks after they’d arrived at Blossom, Todd Naeder took Michelle to pick up Gus outside the Judiciary Committee
hearing room. Waiting for Gus, she stepped into the back of the room through a door from the public hallway. A woman was testifying,
questioned by a tall, elderly man Michelle took to be Eric Taeger, the committee chairman. Michelle was struck by how much
everything resembled a courtroom.

The witness said, “Because I was there.”

“You were there when he said Judge Parham had called him a nigger?”

“Yes, I was.”

A senator next to Taeger said, “Mr. Chairman …”

Michelle felt her face turn red. She said to Todd, “My husband never used that word in his life. It’s a lie. How can they—”

Todd touched her arm. “The judge is outside. He’s waiting for us.”

“But what does she think—”

Todd practically had to drag her from the room.

“Your name?”

“Carl Falco.”

He looked her in the eyes, smiling. The eyes acknowledged his smile, but the face was brittle. She knew he wasn’t bringing
flowers.

“And you’re with?”

Carl showed her the badge. Special Agent. Drug Enforcement Administration. Department of Justice. The White
House had arranged Carl’s temporary assignment to Gus’s security detail, providing an office for him in the Executive Office
Building.

“Excuse me.”

She disappeared through an unmarked door. In a minute she was back, holding the door open. “This way, please?”

Helen Bondell didn’t look like the activist shrew Carl had expected. She was blonde, attractive, warm, relaxed. Carl was impressed.
Not many people can do that—look relaxed when the feds walk in.

He said, “Sorry I didn’t make an appointment. I thought maybe I could just catch you with some free time.”

“Well, you did. I have all the time you need. What can I do for you?”

White silk blouse, gold bracelets, slender tanned face that looked as if it’d just come back from two weeks in the Caribbean.

“Nothing, really. I thought maybe I could do something for you.”

“That’s a nice change.” She laughed, and the laugh had a tan too. “I don’t often hear that.”

She raised a hand to her hair. The bracelets tinkled down a long, slender forearm to her elbow.

Carl said, “Do you know a man named John Harrington?”

“I know an attorney by that name.”

“Has a client called Ernesto Vicaro.”

She looked blank.

“Does business as Translnter.”

Still blank, giving nothing away.

“It’s a South American holding company. Banks, hotels, airlines. Also cocaine.”

“Oh,
that
Ernesto Vicaro.”

She smiled.

“Right.
That
Ernesto Vicaro.”

“I’ve read about him. I think CBS had a special, maybe six months ago?”

“Possibly.”

“Harrington represents him?”

“Well, he represents TransInter. And when you peel the onion you find Ernesto.”

“I see.”

She leaned forward, intensely curious, eager to become more informed.

Lady, you are beginning to insult me
.

“So there’s cocaine, and then TransInter, and then Vicaro, and then Harrington.”

“Fascinating.”

“It is, isn’t it?” He grinned, kicking a little cynicism into it. “Harrington does more than provide legal representation
for Vicaro in his difficulties with the federal government. He also lobbies for TransInter.”

She leaned back slowly in her chair, adding about two feet to her distance from Carl.

Carl said, “Recently that involved an attempt to bribe a federal agent.”

She drew in her chin. Carl thought the slight tremble around her mouth might be genuine.

She said, “John Harrington tried to bribe a federal agent?”

“Of course not. Don’t be silly. But someone who works for Harrington, or for his firm, took a shot at it.”

Don’t give her more than that. If she asks Harrington, he can tell her about the nice young attorney with an ankle problem.

Carl said, “I believe Harrington works for the Freedom Federation?”

“I wouldn’t say he works for us. He has clients—other than Vicaro or …”

“TransInter.”

“Yes, or Translnter, and sometimes our interests and the interests of one of his clients coincide.”

“The nomination of Gus Parham.” Out of the blue.

“Yes? What about it?”

“Ernesto Vicaro has reasons for wanting to influence that process. You want to influence it too. Mr. Harrington—”

“There’s nothing wrong with—”

Carl waited. Patient. Hopeful. But she caught herself.

“Excuse me for interrupting. Please go on.”

“I just thought you might like to know that when someone speaks to you in the voice of Translnter, they’re speaking to you
in the voice of Ernesto Vicaro, who at the moment is busy doing twenty years in a federal penitentiary. That may not be the
kind of help the Freedom Federation wants or needs.”

She said, “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Icy. Doesn’t like being told what she needs.

“No offense. Just thought the information might be helpful.”

“You’ve been very helpful.”

“Want more?”

“If you’ve got it.”

“Translnter controls about sixty percent of all the cocaine entering the United States. They would love to have
that business become legal—make things a lot easier, safer, and more profitable. Their chief executive officer would also
love to be out of the slammer. Neither of those objectives would be furthered by the presence of Gus Parham on the Supreme
Court. Follow me?”