Hart did not respond. There were too many people around, too great a chance to be overheard. With a faint half-smile, he nodded-enough to tell Finnegan that they would talk outside.
As many as had gathered inside the cathedral, a hundred times that number were standing behind the barricades erected on the street, come to pay a final tribute to the president. The air was thick with the humid scent of summer smoke, every movement made uncomfortable, an effort that required strength; things seemed to pass in slow motion, the world become a crawl. Hart blinked into the dusty, reddish sun and felt a sudden disability, a sense of slow paralysis, a loss of all ambition beyond a cool dark place to sit and something cold to press against his lips.
“Remind me to die in winter,” he remarked. He stood next to the entrance of the cathedral as the crowd surged past.
Finnegan slipped on dark glasses and loosened his solid gray tie. A slight, caustic grin curled the edges of his mouth.
“What difference the season, if you die in the bought luxury of a Manhattan hotel in the arms of a high-priced hooker?”
“I’ve heard the rumors,” replied Hart, watching the pallbearers load the casket into the waiting hearse. Hillary Constable stood just off to the side, remote, unapproachable, her black gloved hands held neatly in front, her eyes distant and impenetrable. She had not yet shed a tear, neither inside the cathedral, nor here outside, as if she knew better than to overplay her part. It kept the mystery alive, the mystery born of the suspicion that she had never really loved him; or rather, that she had, but had understood that with a man like that she could never count on anything.
“But they’re just rumors,” continued Hart, looking back at Finnegan. “Everyone thinks he slept with other women all the time. No one wants to believe he could have died alone.”
“He has Air Force One at his disposal, but he spends the night in a Manhattan hotel. And he did it all the time. Why do you think he did that, because he thought he could get a better night’s sleep there than upstairs in the White House?”
“You’ve become such a cynic.”
Finnegan tilted his head to the side, a sense of doubt in his eyes.
“I didn’t want to be, and I wasn’t, when I first came to Washington, but then…” Finnegan’s voice trailed off, and Hart, who knew exactly what he meant, patted him on the shoulder and they both laughed softly at how much in each of them had changed.
“Did Quentin Burdick get hold of you?” asked Finnegan as they started walking away from the cathedral and the crowd.
“No. Why?”
“He’s working on a story, some investigative piece. He told me he had an appointment with Constable, an interview he had finally gotten him to agree to, but it never took place. He was supposed to meet him at the hotel, the one where Constable died, the next morning.”
Chapter Three
“What’s Burdick working on?” asked Hart after he put down the cold beer. His eyes moved from one side of the dark, dingy bar to the other. It was a hole in the wall, a place where this time of day, the middle of the afternoon, you half expected to see someone bent over, his head on his arms, snoring in his inebriated sleep. Hart ran his finger around the frosted edge of the glass. A thin smile edged its way across his mouth. “And what the hell are we doing here, anyway? Why did you want to come to a place like this?”
A smile that mirrored Hart’s own broke across Finnegan’s weathered, freckled face. He leaned against the back of the torn leather booth and tapped two fingers on a scratched up wooden table that, from the look of it, had not been cleaned in years.
“Look around. What do you see?”
“Not a damn thing.”
“What else do you want to know?”
Hart rolled his eyes with a weary, almost helpless, disregard at the various obscurities with which Finnegan answered questions. He took another drink. The cold beer felt good against his throat.
“You don’t see anything,” Finnegan went on, undeterred. “Nobody you know; nobody who knows you. Any more questions?”
Now Hart understood. No one who did business with the Senate, no one who worked on the Hill, certainly no reporter looking for a lead on tomorrow’s story, would come looking in a place like this.
“But why did you want to come to a bar, even one as elegant as this?”
“To get drunk-why do you think?” Finnegan threw down what was left in his glass, caught the eye of the bartender, and signaled for another. “We’re both Irish,” he explained, his eyes alive with the triumph of a well-told tale. “That’s what we’re supposed to do after we’ve gone and buried someone: get drunk as hell and tell all the lies we can about what a great good friend he was and how much we’re going to miss him.” Finnegan hesitated, shook his head in seeming frustration, and looked at Hart with an impish grin. “I forget, you’re from California where everyone is all mixed up about what they are. You’ve probably never been to an Irish wake, have you? Let me explain. If you were really Irish, and didn’t just have an Irish name, you’d be depressed at all sorts of things. You wouldn’t need anyone to tell you that every so often-at least once a week or so-you needed to get drunk enough to start feeling better about all the unhappiness in the world.”
The bartender, stooped and unshaven, with thin gray hair and glasses thick as bottles, shuffled over with Finnegan’s second beer. He mumbled something that sounded like a far off greeting, but which only someone who had known him for half a lifetime could possibly have deciphered. Finnegan looked at him as if he had understood
“Thank you, I will,” he replied.
The old man’s rheumy eyes brightened and for a moment seemed to clear. He nodded, mumbled something else to himself, and then, sure that he was right, nodded once again, turned toward the bar, and slowly moved away. Hart and Finnegan exchanged a glance, reminded of the frailty of things and how difficult sometimes were the lives of others.
“Quentin Burdick,” said Hart, drawing Finnegan back to what they had started to talk about.
“It’s something about the money.”
“Constable’s money? How he got it? Is that what he’s working on? You said he was supposed to meet with Constable the next day, but Constable died the night before.”
Finnegan shrugged. He was puzzled. Burdick, as he proceeded to explain, had come to see him, asked him a few questions, but had not really told him more than that he was working on something that involved money and the president.
“He asked me if I knew anything about something called ‘The Four Sisters.’”
“‘The Four Sisters’? What’s that?”
“I don’t know. I asked Burdick what it meant. He just said it was something he was looking into and that the more he got into it, the more complicated it seemed to be. One thing he said got my attention. The amount of money involved-whatever that means-was ‘amazing.’ That was his word, ‘amazing.’”
Bending forward on his elbows, Hart stared into his glass. The long service, with no room to move around, the oppressive summer heat, and now this dark, lonely place, had left him feeling tired and even a little depressed.
“So now we’re going to learn that the ‘great man’ we just buried was not just a liar but a thief as well? I guess there isn’t really a difference, is there? Don’t you steal something every time you tell a lie-steal some part of the truth from those who deserve to know it?”
“Careful, don’t get philosophic,” said Finnegan, his eyes eager and alive. “With that definition, you’ll make thieves and liars of us all. But you’re right,” he added quickly, “I never knew anyone who could lie right to your face and do it with such complete conviction. There was a sense in which, I suppose, it was not really lying at all. He always lied first to himself. He could convince himself of anything, once he decided there was something he had to have, whether it was the presidency or another woman. He was a hustler, knew in an instant what you wanted to hear. His whole identity was in the eyes of others. Women loved him. They could not help themselves. They knew he must have said the same thing he was saying to them a thousand times before; the difference was-and this is the measure of what a great fraud he really was-that this time he meant it, this time he was saying what he really felt.”