A quiet sobbing emerged from the speaker. It rose toward a suffocating hysteria that choked off Palmer’s voice as he grasped for words.
“I… I… pl… please… don’t… hang up.”
Tansy’s eyes teared. She covered her mouth, still staring at the phone. She again looked at Gage, silently asking, Enough?
Gage wasn’t sure it was enough, or if there was anything Charlie Palmer could do or say, or was capable of doing or saying, that would be enough. But gazing down at Tansy and listening to the man’s hard breathing at the other end of the line, Gage couldn’t escape another truth: that Palmer, too, was part of the fabric of others’ lives. He was a father, a son, and a husband. And although Palmer’s past meant Gage couldn’t trust his plea in the present, in it Gage saw their faces and heard their voices.
Gage laid his coat over the back of a chair and set his briefcase down on the floor.
“What’s on your mind, Charlie?”
Gasps and sobs fractured Palmer’s next words, then the line disconnected.
“What did he say?” Tansy asked, looking up, her brows furrowed, as though searching for something lost. “I couldn’t make it out.”
“I think he wants to compose himself,” Gage said. “It sounded like he said he’ll call back in an hour.”
Tansy’s eyes kept searching. “Will you wait?”
Gage nodded. “I’ll wait.”
S ixty-three minutes later, Tansy once again stood at Gage’s office door. But this time her fretting hands and her downcast eyes that rose and looked past him toward the unblinking intercom light, told him even before she spoke the words that Charlie Palmer was dead.
Chapter 2
Senator Landon Meyer leaned back in his chair on the sixth floor of the Dirksen Building and gazed down through his window and watched the midday traffic passing on Constitution Avenue.
Constitution. His conscience bit at him as he said the word to himself. Who was he to tell the executive branch who it could or couldn’t nominate to the Supreme Court? Who was he to violate the separation of powers that once seemed so indispensable to the American form of government?
But in ten minutes he would settle into the rear seat of a limousine, ride to the White House, and do exactly that.
A phrase of St. Augustine’s repeated itself in his mind as he surveyed the city:
It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels.
Then he reminded himself, as if in absolution, that the humble don’t run for office-or at least they don’t win-and the prideful are unable to compromise.
Compromise. Another twinge refocused his mind.
There would be no compromise.
Not this morning.
Not with this president.
Not on these nominations.
Landon didn’t doubt that under the law he was merely one among equals. Unus inter pares. But for causes he thought only a political physicist could discover, he had become the pivotal force in a divided Senate, making him primus inter pares. First among equals. And it gave him the power to dictate through these new justices-and through the uniquely American Leviathan the Court had become-what privacy rights Americans would retain, what powers the president would wield in war and peace, and even what latitude would be left to the states to govern their own affairs.
The American Leviathan. That’s how he’d described the Court a week earlier while walking with a summer intern down the marble hallway toward the Senate chamber. The young woman had looked up at him with an innocent smile and said how much she loved reading Moby Dick as a child, then blushed when she realized the reference was political, not literary. She then said she’d read Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan in a government class in college and found it terrifying.
Landon recalled smiling to himself and letting the matter drop, for he’d actually been thinking of the Book of Job, an allusion he suspected she was still too many uncommitted sins away from understanding.
The image faded and was replaced by another, a memory of winter steelhead fishing as a young congressman with Graham Gage on the Klamath River. It was a month after Gage had exposed an opposition push-polling operation that had used the similarity of Landon’s wife’s maiden name to that of a criminal to accuse her of real estate fraud. Gage, standing in the drift boat, teaching him how to read water, how to deduce the unseen from the seen, pointing toward a submerged rock, sheared off the cliff above and ragged enough to rip through the hull, its presence revealed only by the water churning below it downstream.
Landon now felt the chill that had shuddered through him at that moment, one far deeper than the one inflicted by the raw wind sweeping up the canyon. It was a terror of hidden hazards, deposited solely by chance, upon which his career might someday be wrecked.
Chance.
Landon understood, even as he sat there readying himself to impose his Supreme Court nominees on the president, that his enormous power was an outcome of events that all could have been otherwise. Suppose he hadn’t survived the childhood car crash that killed his sister? Suppose he hadn’t been elected student body president at Yale? Admitted to Harvard Law School? Elected to Congress? Run against House and Senate opponents who ran aground each election eve on the shores of their naive mistakes? And, finally, stepped into the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee only because of the death of a colleague?
It wasn’t a secret from Landon why these events now replayed in his mind. It was the subconscious way he’d always reminded himself that the inescapable and all-too-human sin of pride was threatening to mutate into a secular hubris: the dangerous belief that he alone was the source of the power he possessed. It sometimes even tempted him to dismiss the warning of Shakespeare’s Brutus that he’d framed and mounted in his office wall on the day he was first sworn in to Congress:
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
Looking up at those words as he did now, Landon had often felt a peculiar unease, a kind of bad faith. A Republican senator elected by the people of California was nothing if not against the tide. Republican governors? Nearly always. Senators? One in a generation: himself-and he knew this was exactly the sort of dangerous material from which hubris was formed.
A beep from his phone startled him. He leaned forward to rise, thinking it was his secretary informing him his driver had arrived. He then noticed the call was on his private line. He picked it up. It was his younger brother, Brandon, a federal judge in their hometown of San Francisco, calling to take vicarious pleasure in something Landon viewed as merely necessary.
“I’m just about to leave… Sure, I’ll call you later.”
Landon hung up the phone. Ultimately, he recognized, it was to his brother he owed what he didn’t owe to chance. As a corporate lawyer, it was Brandon’s connections that funded his campaigns and later supplied the money he deposited into the political action committees of the Senate leadership to buy himself a seat on the Judiciary Committee.
As much as he had despised it, at Yale they were known as Machiavelli and the Prince. Brandon: dark hair, peering eyes, diminutive face, expert debater. Landon: tall, fair-skinned, strong-jawed. A leader, not an arguer. That they could be brothers had unnerved their classmates, just as it had the families on Nob Hill where they’d grown up. The dissimilarity had always powered an undercurrent of whispering that tugged at them as they walked to their table in the dining room of their parents’ country club or swam in the pool. But, fortunately, age, like erosion, had smoothed the stark edges of their contours and softened the contrast.