Shaking his head in reluctant admiration, Charlie Finnegan picked up his glass and took a long, slow drink.
“They weren’t alone, those women: the guy was such an engaging fraud, I sort of liked him, too. But he wasn’t worth a damn. He wasn’t serious about anything. He didn’t believe in anything except his own importance. I’m not even sure about that. He had to be the center of attention. He could not stand to be upstaged. There wasn’t any central core. He was like a lot of people I meet these days. His idea of hell was to be somewhere all alone.”
A broad grin cut sharply across Finnegan’s face. He took another long drink, shoved the glass aside, and laughed at himself.
“I can’t understand why they didn’t ask me to deliver one of the eulogies.” He paused, scratched the side of his face, and, growing serious again, furrowed his brow. “There’s more to this-Burdick’s story-than the money. You know Burdick better than I do. You know what he covers.”
Bobby Hart had known Quentin Burdick from his first term in Congress when he felt honored, and a little surprised, when the famous New York Times reporter asked if he might talk to him. Burdick knew a generation’s worth of foreign leaders and every president since Richard Nixon.
“You’re right,” agreed Hart. “There has to be a link to something overseas.” He gave Finnegan a searching glance. “You think Constable was doing business, the kind he should not have been doing, with foreign governments?”
“That would be shocking, wouldn’t it?” replied Finnegan dryly. “That the Artful Dodger didn’t make distinctions among those from whom he was willing to steal? But no, I doubt Burdick has found any direct connection like that. Constable was much too shrewd to be that stupid. He never would have made that kind of mistake.”
Suddenly, Hart thought he knew. He remembered wondering about it at the time, when the first reports were published and the scandals started.
“One of the private equity firms, one of those that collapsed-he was involved in that; one of the investors, as I remember. That was before he became president, but maybe something like it happened again, something that no one knew about. Probably something global, if Burdick has been pursuing it.”
Hart glanced at his watch. There was a reception for those who had been invited to the service.
“It won’t be so bad,” he said, as much to encourage himself as anything. “We don’t have to stay long.”
“Trust me,” said Finnegan, as they got up from the table. “Ten minutes after we get there, you’ll begin to miss this place.” He looked around with a kind of nostalgia at the bare, near empty room, full of the cloying smell of dead air and stale liquor. “You never know how good things are until you have to leave them.”
They stood on the sidewalk just outside the bar, blinking like a pair of drunks who have lost all sense of time or place. The sun hung low on the horizon, a pale yellow disk in a sky that was now seven shades of gray. A deep, hard rumble shook somewhere in the distance, threatening a storm. A wind kicked up, stopped, and then, a moment later, hit them from the other side. Hart looked one way up the street, Finnegan looked the other.
“There!” cried Hart, waving wildly for a cab.
They just made it to the taxi before the rain began to fall. By the time they reached the Georgian mansion that, with the generous help of some of their friends, the Constables had purchased to live in after the president left office, the guests had left the spacious rolling lawn in back and hurried inside. They stood in clusters, talking in the solemn tones of men and women afraid of making a mistake. Waiters in tuxedos drifted through the crowd bearing glasses of champagne on shiny, silver platters.
Bobby Hart had at least a nodding acquaintance with most of the people there. Some, like Frederick Gallagher, who had served as secretary of state during the first term of the Constable administration, he had known, if never quite liked or fully trusted, for years. Standing among a half dozen other former officials, Gallagher still had the same, teeming self-assurance in his hooded, half-closed eyes, the same look of forbearance on his slightly smiling mouth, as if he were doing you a favor just to listen to what you had to say. On those few occasions when their paths had crossed-committee hearings at which the secretary testified-nothing had happened to make Hart change his mind that the secretary was full of his own importance and would not give a straight answer if his life depended on it.
But certain things had changed in the years since Frederick Gallagher held office. Bobby Hart had become one of the best-known names in the Senate and a national figure, while Gallagher had become another former office holder, part of the Washington establishment, one of those men who with each passing year become more and more convinced that what they had done in office was not only right, but brilliant and courageous, and that their return to a position of great influence in the government is the best thing that could happen to the country. Bobby Hart, who had meant nothing to him in the past, was now someone he was always delighted to see.
Gallagher caught Hart’s eye and insisted the senator join them in a drink.
“It’s the end of an era,” said Austin Pearce, picking up the thread of what he and the others had been talking about.
Short, with slumping shoulders and slightly overweight, Austin Pearce had the smooth unwrinkled face of a man who had seemed middle-aged when he was young and would seem that way when he was old. After serving as treasury secretary during Constable’s first term, he had gone back to Wall Street because, he was reported to have said, he preferred the company of the kind of sharks who did not try to pretend they were doing you a favor while they were eating you alive. He had explained his departure in a somewhat different manner in a private conversation he had later with Bobby Hart. “Greed is a more honest form of corruption than what goes on here, if you get my meaning.” Hart liked him enormously. He made the company of Frederick Gallagher almost tolerable.
“Does the era have a name, Austin?” asked one of the others, Eldridge Baker, who had held several different posts in the administration before leaving to get himself elected governor of a small western state. Baker had a talent for teasing others in a way that seemed to bring out something he liked about them. “As I remember, you had a name for just about everything we did, or tried to do-and everyone who tried to do it,” he added with a generous twinkle in his large, dark eyes.
Even Frederick Gallagher fell captive to the change of mood. A thin smile stretched tight across his harsh, angular mouth; but then his eyes narrowed and he quickly shook his head as if to remind himself that a smile in the same room as a grieving widow might be misinterpreted.
“Lady McDeath,” he whispered, darting a glance beyond their small circle to make sure he would not be overheard. “Isn’t that what you once called her, after she kept insisting that we ought to be more aggressive in places like the Middle East?”
“We say a lot of things that only make sense at the moment,” said Pearce, looking straight at Gallagher. “Things that sound a lot different now.”
He turned to Bobby Hart and with a slight shrug remarked in his pleasant, understated voice that if he had to give a name to the era that had ended with the president’s death, it would probably have to be something like “the ‘era of great illusions,’ the belief that there is no price to be paid for anything, that we can do anything we like, fight any battle, win any war, and do it all without any need to sacrifice; in other words, that America is the exception to all the laws of history and economics.”