Joan smiled. “Say that again? When did a woman get to be the Surgeon General?”
Hank laughed. He wore a gold Breguet watch on his left wrist. It was, he liked to say, Winston Churchill’s favorite model. He glanced at it on his naked arm. “I better get some clothes on. I need to be on the set in two hours.”
He made no effort to hide how much he was looking forward to his three-sentence, one-minute role as the United States Secretary of State, in an expensive thriller (explosions, love affairs, guns, assassinations, cars driving upside down on the ceilings of tunnels, Arabs, FBI agents) based on a novel he’d published two years earlier, Extraordinary Rendition.
“How long did you say it took you to memorize your lines?” she asked, trying to lighten her mood.
“Memorize them, baby? I wrote them.”
He dropped the towel to the floor. Naked, he walked toward her, moved the hand in which she held her cigarette away, and embraced her, bending her backwards slightly, tango-style. He stiffened, instantly aroused. He whispered into her ear: “I’ll take care of you later.”
“Get out of here,” Joan said, playfully, relieved that her mood had turned quickly. “You don’t want to keep Matt Damon and Nicole Kidman waiting.”
“Who?”
“Get your cute ass in gear, Mr. Secretary.”
Just thirty minutes later, Joan was again impatient, distracted, and nervous in the Bentley, as the uniformed driver cruised slowly by all the classic Paris buildings-the smooth stone facades, the tiled roofs-on the way to the ornate Italian embassy where the filming was taking place. She barely glanced at the Seine, at the Ile de la Cité (that magic island dividing the river), the Louvre, or the low, curving stone bridges over the Seine.
Hank said, “All right, Joan, it’s time to talk. You’ve been down over the last two days. I fell in love with and I still love a beautiful, generous, vital woman. We shook off the reporters on the way to JFK. Didn’t that help? Nobody has found you here.”
“I’m really, really confused, Hank. Worried.”
He looked at her, waiting for more.
She said, “I spoke to Jake yesterday.” As much as she hated to use the words, Jake Hecht was her “public relations advisor.” A former journalist, he had an uncanny ability to learn about news reports before they were printed, broadcast, or posted on the Internet. Jake Hecht was like a game fixer: through a bribe, a fixer could react impassively as a horse race was underway because he lived in the future, he knew the outcome.
“What did our little wizard learn?”
“That bitch Raquel Rematti has been giving interviews. Jake said she’ll be a guest tomorrow night on CNN. She’ll say that she’s at last persuaded the DA to subpoena you to go in front of a Grand Jury.”
Hank Rawls’s body was instantly suffused with that spasm of anxiety he’d only experienced two or three times in his life, including when, fifteen years earlier, he first saw the long-lens pictures of Cynthia Hall and himself on that remote, sun-drenched beach on Saint Kitts. They were naked. He was married to someone else at the time. As soon as he saw the pictures, he knew that his short campaign for President was over. “Maybe Bill Clinton could survive this,” he had told his campaign manager. “I can’t.”
Deliberately concealing his anxiety, he said, “Don’t worry, sweetie. I’ve told you that was the other shoe. They always look at the husband or wife first, and then at the boyfriend or girlfriend. Don’t forget, I’m a lawyer, even though, thank God, I never practiced a day in my life.”
Over the last two months, Joan Richardson had sat in front of a Grand Jury on three separate days. Each day was a draining ordeal. The badly dressed young prosecutor, Menachem Oz, never once was pleasant, never treated her with the kindness or sympathy she imagined a widow of a murdered man might deserve, or with the respect she thought one of the most generous philanthropists in the world merited. Menachem Oz-a name she could not forget-had the sour demeanor of an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, which he was. He wore a yarmulke. His suits were off-the-rack from Target. He was very smart and very tenacious. She was afraid of him.
And she had lied to him. Menachem Oz knew it and again and again returned to questions about the day Brad was murdered, searching her for inconsistencies. “What time did you wake up?” “Where did you go in Manhattan?” “Who was your housekeeper?” “Was she there that day?” “Did anyone visit you?” “Were there any deliveries?” “How long were you at lunch?” “Did you eat alone?” “How many times in the last year have you had lunch alone?” “What are the names of the doormen who worked at the building that day?”
She had lied in her answers to almost all of these and many other questions. Joan never said that Senator Rawls came to her apartment in the morning of the day Brad was killed and that they didn’t leave until seven that evening, both of them dressed in classic evening clothes for the party at the Met. Instead, she said she’d had a lunch alone at a small restaurant on East 77th Street and then strolled uptown on Madison Avenue, stopping at the intimate Crawford-Doyle bookstore between 81st and 82nd Streets.
Menachem Oz knew she hadn’t been in the bookstore. “Did you use a credit card to buy books?”
“No, cash.”
“What was the book?”
“You mean the name?”
“Right, the name of the book?”
“The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin.”
She knew the skein of her senseless lying was fast unraveling but felt powerless to stop herself.
As the Bentley approached the rented embassy, she waited for Hank to say more. He leaned forward, looking at the camera trucks, the catering trucks, and the trailers where the lead actors had their private rooms. He was excited, like a boy arriving at a carnival, or like a politician approaching a cheering crowd.
The Bentley slowly made its way toward Helen Whitehouse, one of the assistant directors. Helen opened the door of the car. She was 25. She looked at him as though he were her favorite man in the world. As Hank Rawls rose to his feet, he engaged the woman with his famous smile and said, “Helen, it’s just great to see you.”
When Joan emerged from the car and was introduced to her, she entered the force field of the tacit, excited connection between her lover and this young woman. She had no doubt that Hank Rawls would in the not-too-distant future be screwing Helen Whitehouse.
Joan Richardson was wrong. That had already happened.
15.
Raquel Rematti was always struck by how much Riverhead, the town seventy-three miles east of Manhattan where Long Island divided into the North Fork and the South Fork, resembled the decaying factory cities of Rhode Island, southeastern and northeastern Massachusetts, and southern New Hampshire. Instead of abandoned factories, Riverhead had abandoned gas stations, most of them on lots with grass and weeds growing through the fissures in the broken concrete. There was even a rusty Esso sign rising over the lot of a long-closed gas station. Esso signs were artifacts of another era, like the big cars with whitewall tires she could remember from her childhood in the late sixties. Most of the storefronts on Main Street in Riverhead were boarded over with plywood. Graffiti was sprayed on the plywood. The only active stores were essentially indoor flea markets. There wasn’t even a McDonald’s or a Burger King.
The residential streets around Riverhead had the look of small towns in Appalachia; there were hundred-year-old houses that must have looked poor when they were built, pick-up trucks in the driveways, and sofas and stuffed chairs on the porches. Raquel knew the poverty of most of America-the decrepit housing, the rundown public schools, the bleak shopping malls-the America that the cheery, pervasive television and print advertising for cars and vacations and prescription drugs never depicted.