Sixty-one children.
He flicks the buttons open on his sleeves, rolls the cuffs back, phones downstairs to see if they’d bring him another pot of tea.
ONE SUMMER IN Acadia he learned chess. Move after move. Swap. Remain. Stay. The incredible switch of the king and the castle amazed him. You had to touch the king first and then bring the castle across. He was fascinated by the edge of the board. There was a saying: The knight on the rim is grim.
He learned to keep the knight over at the edge, safe until, late in the game, he could come inside and there was a whole board with eight sudden squares.
FOR THREE DAYS he and his staff stay in the Europa. In downtown Belfast. The Hardboard Hotel, they call it. The Piece Palace. Bits of it blown up twenty-seven times over the past few years. The most-bombed hotel in Europe. It is still, for some reason, the hotel of choice for the journalists, most of whom he knows on a first-name basis. They hang out in the piano bar, all times of the day. He has seen them often, the first drink placed down in front of them, practicing their posture, their casual disregard, their unreadability. They sit at the back as if the act of drinking has been forced upon them. Its obligation. And then all of a sudden the first drink is gone, and they are half a dozen towards obliteration. Stories of Sarajevo, no doubt. Srebrenica. Kosovo. As if Northern Ireland is a slight melancholy demotion. The very idea of a peace process is sentimental to many of them. A mysterious part of them needs an epic failure. They are out most nights, looking for the burning barrels and the kneecapped girls. Or else they are looking for a leak, some shred of scandal, some sexual sectarianism. When he enters the lobby, they try to cadge a quote. He understands it, the base desire at the core of a story. To put their own version of events into the world. It is the tabloids that he avoids the most: the Sun, the Mirror, the News of the World. He is careful whom he is seen stepping into the elevator with, just in case they take a candid shot of him.
They see him as a man who had stepped out from another century, polite, reserved, judicial, an ancient American, yet it is also a form of disguise: underneath they intuit that he is cast for the very end of the twentieth century, biding his time, waiting for his moment. No one has ever quite fully figured him out, if he is driven by the fear of evil, or spurred on by the prospect of what is good, or if he lies in the complicated in-between. Mystery. Silence. Sleep.
Upstairs, the suite is small and dark. The bed narrow. The bedcovers shiny with use. But there is at least a bowl of fruit on the table and flowers on the credenza. Easter lilies: a gentle nudge.
Bags on the floor. Jacket. Shirt. Belt. Trousers. No Heather to tidy him up. He lies down, exhausted, the day’s work still trilling in him. He feels bad for the two security men who have to guard his door. He would like to invite them in, have them put their feet up, pour a soda from the minibar. They are good men, one and all, but what a job, to stand outside a door all night with only the silence of a man who has learned to sleep anywhere, anytime.
Hotel rooms sharpen his loneliness. The hum of others who were here before.
One of his aides once dropped a contact lens on the floor near the window in the downstairs dining room. She got to her knees and searched around by the baseboards. Bits of dust, stray edges of the carpet. She found the contact lens clinging to a piece of wallpaper. But when she fingered the lens, she noticed, for the first time, that the slice of wallpaper was newer than the surroundings. A perfect square, but the paper had been badly applied. A bit of the wallpaper had begun to peel. She noticed a scorch mark beneath, the blackness faded to red. Most likely a petrol bomb thrown years ago. The old hieroglyphics of violence.
He has heard that the women of Belfast used to keep wet blankets by the door, just in case.
He pulls back his own blanket, prepares himself for bed. He has a mobile wardrobe that accompanies him from place to place, a set of lurking ghost clothes. He finds the pajamas, gruffs his way into them. It’s easy then to fall asleep, if even just for a few hours.
HUME. TRIMBLE. ADAMS. Mowlam. Mallon. McMichael. Cooney. Hill. Donoghue. McWilliams. Sager. One by one they visit his office. The air of worried men and women. Everyone with something to lose. This — he has discovered — is part of their generosity. The ability to embrace failure. The cost of what they might leave behind.
They are at ease with him now. They know his ways. He does not like to sit behind his desk anymore. He has broken that territory. He comes out, instead, and sits by the small table that he has set up near the window with four wooden chairs.
With each visitor there is a new set of biscuits and a warm teapot. He pours the tea himself. One of his small gestures. He is not sure if it’s a trick or not, but he likes the ritual. The trays are stacked upon his desk. That, too, is part of his routine. He does not want the meetings disturbed. Showmanship or decency: he is not sure which.
He brings the trays downstairs to the canteen where the ladies in the hairnets hurry out to meet him, all fuss and apology.
— What about ye, Senator?
— Leave those trays be, Senator.
— Ach, don’t be doing that. What’re ye like?
— If ye weren’t married, I’d kiss ye.
— Ye wouldn’t come home and clean my kitchen, would y’now, Senator? That’d be some peace process, let me tell ye.
If the canteen is empty he will take a seat in the corner to watch them a moment. He likes their singsong, their bustle. They remind him of the ladies of Maine. The waitresses in the diners. The women in the tollbooths, leaning out their fume-darkened windows.
One of the tea-ladies, Claire Curtain, has a scar on the left side of her forehead in the exact shape of a horseshoe. One afternoon she caught him looking at it, and she blithely told him that it was a result of a bombing — she was on her way to a concert in a bandstand, there was a horse regiment standing nearby, the blast went off, she was walking by along a tree-lined avenue, and she was hit in the head, left with an almost perfect shoe mark on her forehead, and what she remembered most of all was waking, concussed, confused by the sight of horse hooves dangling in the trees.
THE CORRIDORS BUZZ. A faint chanting coming from the crowds outside. The nervous whirl of helicopters overhead. He climbs the rear stairs towards his office, a packet of McVitie’s Digestives tucked under the flap of his suit jacket.
He was driven last summer, by Gerald, out to a farmhouse on the Plantation Road in Derry. He had been at a conference in Coleraine and it was still early: he was not expected back in Belfast until midnight.
He thought at first that he might get Gerald to drive to the sea and take the coast road up around the headlands, but they swung south instead, out into a tangle of backcountry where Gerald had grown up.
Chestnut trees arced the roads. Sheep and cattle paraded in the fields. The light lengthened, stretched the shadows of the hedges and trees. It reminded him of lower Maine: that lush, rained-upon feel.
They drove along a length of carefully planted forest. Gerald pointed out his old school, the fields, the boxing club. It was nine or ten in the evening, but the sky was still bright, birds out over the haystacks.
— You ever been this way, Senator?
He shook his head, no. They crested a small hill and Gerald pulled the car in towards a blue gate. Down below, in the half valley, there were wide brown steppingstones across a river. Enormous oak trees bent to the water. A series of hedgerows slumped towards a distant farmhouse. Rough tractor tracks ran along the riverbank.