Hart glanced back up the steps. More schoolchildren were coming, and groups of sweaty, red-faced tourists dressed in shirts and shorts, cameras slung over their shoulders, heading for the relief of air-conditioned buses that would take them to other famous landmarks or back to their hotels. A few of them, catching sight of Bobby Hart, began to wave.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Hart under his breath as he smiled and waved back.
They moved in the lazy rhythm of a burning southern summer, a slow, unhurried procession, through the leafy park-like grounds of the Capitol. The heat was all around them, each step a dim reminder of something distant, far away, as if instead of moving forward they were destined never to move at all, held in one place by the thick molasses air. They walked in silence until they crossed the street and passed through the side entrance of the Russell Senate Office Building. Speech required effort.
Hart’s office, or rather his suite of offices, was on the second floor. His staff, overworked and underpaid and all of them glad for the opportunity, were crammed into cubicles so small that if one of them stretched her arms there was the danger she might hit both her neighbors at once. They worked from early in the morning until late at night, and weekends they worked just as hard at home. It was not a job; it was a calling, and they thought themselves far more fortunate than friends of theirs who had gone to work in hot pursuit of money and the things it could buy. Most of them were in their thirties, still too young for disillusionment. Some were younger, just out of law school, with long-distance dreams of one day winning a Senate seat of their own. A few, like Hart’s administrative assistant, David Allen, a rumpled veteran of the political wars both at home in California and here on Capitol Hill, were older than the relatively young senator and more devoted to him than anyone other than his wife.
Allen did his best to conceal it. He seldom praised anything Hart had done and did not hesitate to let him know in no uncertain terms when he thought the senator had made a mistake. They both understood what Allen was there to do. Practically everyone in Washington, from the most senior member of the Senate to a first term congressman elected in a fluke, was so often called great that in no time at all they came to believe it, and, believing it, to need it, the constant echo of their own achievement. It made every small thing they did major; every routine vote they cast an act of unexampled courage. Hart hated the self-importance of it, the sense of entitlement, the emptiness of a life bound up in other people’s adjectives. Part of David Allen’s job was to make sure he remembered that and did not become what he despised. It was one of the things Allen liked best.
The door to Allen’s small cubbyhole office was open as Hart passed down the narrow windowless hallway. Sitting at his cluttered desk, poring over the latest budget numbers, Allen did not look up.
“Nice of you to drop by,” he remarked in a dry, caustic voice. “I’d get up, but I’ve aged a lot since the last time we saw you and…” He had just caught a glimpse of Charlie Finnegan. He sprang to his feet and started to straighten his sleeves. “Sorry, Senator, I didn’t realize…” he sputtered.
Finnegan came into his office and with a huge grin shook his hand.
“It’s me, David-Charlie. I wouldn’t want you to treat me any different than this fraud you work for.” He looked over his shoulder at Hart, standing in the doorway laughing, and then looked back. “Why don’t you come and work for me. I lead a pretty dull life compared to Bobby here. I’m always in the office.”
Allen liked Charlie Finnegan, liked him a lot. There was not any false posturing with him; you always knew where you stood.
“Would I have to become a Republican?”
“What the hell for? Most people don’t think I’m one.” He turned to Hart. “Though it’s hard to see why I’d still claim to be one if I wasn’t. Not much advantage in it these days, is there?”
They left David Allen to get back to his numbers and went into Hart’s private office, a large, well-appointed room, with two tall windows and a gray marble fireplace. Oriental carpets were scattered over the floor. A white sofa and two easy chairs were arranged below the windows, while, at the other end of the room, in the corner opposite the fireplace, sat Hart’s desk, with a gray leather chair, worn to his dimensions, and two straight back chairs in front of it. This was where he met with anyone who had come to make a formal case for something they wanted from the senator; it was not where he had a conversation with a friend like Charlie Finnegan. Hart dropped into one of the easy chairs near the windows, while Finnegan settled onto the sofa. Finnegan nodded toward the door they had just closed behind them.
“Does David know?”
“No one knows, except Laura, and now you.”
Hart’s gaze rolled from one window toward the other one. He waved his hand in a listless gesture and then shook his head and, after that, scratched his chin.
“That’s not true,” he said finally. “Everyone knows. That’s not true, either,” he added quickly. “Quentin Burdick knows. He knew already; I confirmed it. I didn’t tell him how I knew, only that I did. Austin Pearce knows, too. I didn’t tell him how I knew, but like you, he guessed.” Still curious how quickly they had both jumped to that particular conclusion, Hart looked at Finnegan. “Not really a guess, though, was it? As soon as you heard it, you knew-both of you. She always had a reputation for having the real power in that marriage, even in that presidency.”
For the next half hour, Hart described everything that had happened, everything he had learned, from the day Hillary Constable asked him to find out what he could to the night, just the day before yesterday, when he met with Clarence Atwood of the Secret Service.
“How long is Burdick going to sit on the story?” asked Finnegan when Hart was finished.
“I talked to him yesterday on the phone. He’s got an interview with Austin Pearce tomorrow. Assuming Austin tells him what he told me, not long at all. He knows Constable was murdered. He was convinced of it after what Morris told him out in Lompoc, after what happened to Morris. I confirmed it, but I wouldn’t tell him how I knew it. He won’t use that; he won’t attribute it to me-not yet, anyway. After he talks to Austin, my guess is that he’ll want to find out more about this Jean de la Valette and The Four Sisters, but you’re right, we’re looking at most at a few days, maybe a week, before this thing breaks wide open. Which means I don’t have any time at all. I have to go to France.”
“To France? To see Valette? Are you sure that’s wise?”
“I’m not sure of anything. But after all I’ve heard I’d like to see for myself what he’s really like, whether it’s even possible he could have arranged to have Constable murdered.”
“When are you leaving?”
“As soon as I can; a day or two at the latest.”
Finnegan got to his feet, ready to leave, but then he thought of something, and wondered why he had not thought of it before.
“What about the president?”
“Constable?”
“No, our new one: Irwin Russell. How do you think he’s going to react when he finds out Constable was murdered and that the Secret Service knew it and did not bother to tell him? Or do you think they did?” That thought led to another. “And what do you think the real reason was that Hillary Constable asked you to look into this? If she’s as ambitious as we all think she is-everyone knows she thought she was going to be her husband’s successor-doesn’t she want this kept quiet long enough to figure out how to handle it with the least cost to herself?”
“I know the rumors,” replied Hart, “the deal that was supposedly made. Russell goes on the ticket, but with the understanding that he wouldn’t try for the nomination-he didn’t have the kind of support on his own that would let him try for the nomination-at the end of Constable’s second term.”