The Hearing Read online

“After every advisor who can pack into the Oval Office sees the video of that girl—I don’t think there’ll even be an argument. This is not a negative, Lyle. We just got very, very lucky.”

  “That’s your position.”

  “That’s my position.”

  “And you’re gonna stick with it right up to the minute your face hits the concrete.”

  “I am. Definitely. Absolutely.”

  9

  Helen Bondell loved to fight and she loved to win, but she did not like to be ugly. Not physically ugly—she was thirty-two, blonde, and just this side of gorgeous—but even the most accomplished charmers in Washington, the ones who knew what she did, could not keep the contempt from their eyes. They called her unprincipled.

  In fact, her principles were so huge they blocked the horizon, so wide and towering you had to pull back to get a look at them. All Helen Bondell wanted was to help. She did whatever she could to get certain legislation passed, reminding herself when the blood flew that the legislation helped the people she wanted to help, people like impov erished, husbandless, jobless mothers who wouldn’t be helped unless legislation imposed penalties for not helping them.

  Her natural habitat was the battlefield, and it was covered with blood. The sword in her hand was the Freedom Federation, an alliance of public-interest groups with a zeal for “social change.” A Washington Post reporter had asked her to define the term.

  “Well,” said Helen, green eyes sparkling with a charm younger lobbyists practiced in front of mirrors, “social change is whatever the Freedom Federation says it is.” Helen loved to shock (those helpless mothers couldn’t shock—who would care what they said?), and she had found that nothing shocked more powerfully than candor.

  “In other words,” the reporter said, “it’s whatever you say it is.”

  “I think that’s probably fair.”

  Her cocky willingness to thrust her head above the parapets, to invite attacks on her eccentric honesty, made good copy, which was part of the game. Sometimes it was the whole game.

  She knew what was right and what was wrong, and if you agreed with her she didn’t care what label you carried or who you slept with. What she hated were the people who were wrong, knew it, and didn’t care.

  She admired compassion and honesty. Her late husband—who’d had both, plus courage—had been blown away (literally, a bomb landed under his table) at a café in Algiers. The media said Islamic fundamentalists. She hadn’t even known he was out of the country. He was an international banker—Third World investments, multinational loans, barter agreements, economic recovery projects. But while he wasn’t looking—or maybe while he was—his business became mixed with politics and ended in terrorism. He’d been smart, informed, and so were his friends. She knew her husband had been doing what was right.

  And so was she. People on the other side said she’d set new standards for dirty fighting. New standards. In a business whose hallmark was an absence of standards. If you won you were great. If you lost you were—well, you weren’t anything, you were as close to invisible as live humans ever get.

  And anyway, the standards weren’t hers. She had created and cultivated a reputation for ruthlessness, knowing that the meaner she was thought to be, the nicer she could actually be. Myths were important in Washington. If you could convince people you were what you had to be, it left you free, sometimes, to be what you wanted to be.

  She had just arrived in her office overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, three blocks from the White House, and was snapping open the lid of her Gucci attaché case, a gift from her late husband.

  It was 7:15 A.M.

  The fax machine clicked on.

  Glancing at the cover sheet creeping from the machine, she took papers from her attaché case, closed the lid and placed the case on the floor behind her desk.

  She pressed a button on her phone. “Laura?”

  “Good morning.”

  “Just wanted to know if you were here. Can you give me about ten minutes and then come in with the messages?”

  “Right. Hang on. Warren just walked in.”

  “Oh, not him again.”

  Warren Gier had worked his way through Yale Law as a part-time private investigator, and for the past four years had made a good living moving from one senator’s payroll to the next, concealed behind various staff titles, as nasty little jobs arose that required a political predator to prowl the Washington underbrush, alert to legal snares but unencumbered by weighty moral restraints. Happily friendless, he’d been proud to learn that his enemies called him “the Ferret.”

  Helen said, “Hold him a second.”

  “Love to.”

  Employed at the moment by Eric Taeger, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Warren was never out of touch with Helen and the activist group leaders clustered under her Freedom Federation umbrella.

  She glanced over at the pages still creeping from the fax machine and saw the familiar heading of the American Bar Association. The ABA’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary rated White House nominees for judicial appointments. The head of the rating committee was a close working friend of Helen’s. She picked up the fax.

  The White House gave the ABA the names of potential nominees for screening before the nominations were publicized. The ABA routinely passed the names to Helen’s Freedom Federation. Helen then shared the names with other activists groups. If the groups disapproved of the nominee, their opposition, voiced to the ABA screening committee, some of whose members shared the political goals of the Freedom Federation, could kill the nomination on the spot.

  The fax said the White House was requesting a qualification rating on a Federal District Court judge named Augustus Parham, sitting in the Middle District of Alabama in Montgomery. Augustus Parham? Sounded like some seventy-year-old redneck coot.

  Warren walked in. “Sorry for interrupting.”

  “No you’re not. You ever hear of Augustus Parham?”

  “Why I’m here. The President’s gonna nominate him for the SC.”

  Warren only had time for abbreviations. You had to keep up.

  “I won’t ask you how you know that.”

  Dark-haired, perpetually tanned, a good listener, Warren was a charmer, and Washington was loaded with lonely female staffers. He made it his business to woo the most vulnerable, feeding them dinners and kindness, periodically harvesting their office secrets as a shepherd shears sheep. Information was power, and power was money, excitement, and fun. No one in Washington understood that better than Warren.

  Helen said, “Who is he?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Warren, if I admit you know more than I do, will you tell me?”

  “Five years ago, locked up some Colombian dope dealer, the media went crazy for him.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  That Augustus Parham. Certainly. Gus Parham. How could she forget? She’d seen him on the Today show. Looked like they’d had to tie him to the chair, unhappy to be wasting his time but gracious about it. Guts but nice. Good looking. Like her first husband. They always ended with tire tracks up their backs, or blown to bits in cafés. She wondered what his wife would be like. Even had a brief fantasy, before a commercial dumped her back in reality. Gus Parham. Supreme Court. My, my.

  She said, “So what do you think?”

  Warren shook his head. “Bad news.”

  “Because?”

  “I haven’t had much time, just since lunch yesterday. Grandfather made a lot of money in tobacco and timber, father still takes care of it, lives on a forty-five-acre estate in Connecticut. Gus’s personal holdings are in a blind trust. His judicial record and reputation show anti-choice, anti-affirmative action, heavy on judicial restraint, stare de-cisis, the usual coloring of your basic rich Ivy League southern white conservative right-wing fundamentalist bigot.”

  “That’s quite a lot since lunch yesterday.”

  “Just the highlights. Film at eleven. You wanna call Bobbi
e?”

  Bobbie McQuire was national director of the Reproductive Rights Alliance, one of the nation’s largest feminist rights groups.

  “Does she know yet?” Everyone would know. If Warren hadn’t told them, Helen would do it when he left. Sam Waller of the National Defense League, Debbie Jennert of the Women’s Assistance Fund, Sheila Riesman of the Social Action Center, the whole array of activist groups who lived and died by influencing legislation, appointments, nominations.

  Warren grinned.

  “You told her.”

  “Maybe.”

  What made Warren so secretive? No one knew him. You called, all you got was the machine. Did he have a home? Where’d he take the women?

  10

  Hi, Ernie.”

  John Harrington had never been comfortable calling Ernesto Vicaro “Ernie.” He wasn’t a first-name person, and a man as fat, ugly, and evil as Ernesto Vicaro was not someone Harrington could think of as Ernie. It was hard having clients you hated. But Harrington was a product, like a right fielder, for sale to anyone with the money. Ernesto had insisted. “Call me Ernie.” Sweating and wheezing. So what the hell, at $500 an hour he’d call him Ernie.

  Harrington lowered his chin and looked up through his thick black eyebrows. “What can I do for you?”

  Down to business, get in and get out. Prisons depressed him. He’d never been in a prison till Vicaro. People in prison rarely had enough money for lobbyists.

  “Wrong question.” Vicaro smiled, tiny baby lips opening a damp red wound in the heavy flesh. “I’m gonna do something for you.”

  “What’s that?”

  Vicaro said, “Gus Parham.”

  Harrington wasn’t surprised to hear the name, though he had no idea what might be on Vicaro’s mind.

  Vicaro waited, looking smug.

  The interview room was like a green-walled toilet, smelling of sweat since Vicaro had oozed into the metal chair.

  Vicaro didn’t speak. Harrington was determined to wait him out, stink or no stink.

  After half a minute, Vicaro opened his mouth and exhaled loudly, his foul breath propelling droplets of foaming spit. “I just read about him in the papers.”

  “Did you?”

  Harrington moved his chair back. At $500 an hour he had to listen to Vicaro, but he didn’t have to breathe his spit.

  Harrington said, “He might be nominated for the Supreme Court.” Some Washington Post columnist had had it three days earlier, mentioning unnamed sources on the Hill.

  Harrington, a senior partner in Parks & Simes, a Washington law firm that lobbied for a half dozen international corporate clients, had had a call last week from Helen Bon-dell letting him know that Parham was a potential nominee. Helen’s Freedom Federation was opposing the nomination—”We don’t like his record”—and she obviously suspected that Harrington wouldn’t be too happy with it either. She knew that Parham’s strong anti-crime views were not likely to match the goals of one of Harrington’s clients, Ernesto Vicaro.

  And of course she was right. Vicaro, serving time in a federal penitentiary from which he continued to direct the multinational activities of a South American conglomerate whose interests included cocaine trafficking and arms dealing, wanted changes in the American government’s approach to law enforcement. He was after a relaxation of federal sentencing guidelines, a tightening of procedural controls on police and prosecutors, broader authority for federal parole board members, a far more malleable procedure by which convicted federal felons might win early release. The last two of these, which could critically influence the possibility of Vicaro’s eventual freedom, were encapsulated in Javez v. Rench, a case challenging the federal law under which Vicaro had been sentenced.

  He also wanted the decriminalization of marijuana and, eventually, cocaine. He already controlled coca plantations, processing labs, and distribution networks. Legalization would eliminate all the people Vicaro had to pay so liberally to do his illegal processing, shipping, warehousing, and retailing. Hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to Latin American officials would no longer be necessary. Decriminalization would let Vicaro turn his expensively illegal operation into an even more profitable legal enterprise. Another R. J. Reynolds.

  If the drive for legalization could ever be moved out of the legislative branch, where it had little support, into the Supreme Court (as abortion had been), Vicaro wanted justices there who would not oppose it. And the thin edge of the decriminalization wedge was almost certain to appear before the Supreme Court later that year in the form of Hacker v. Colorado, an appeal testing the constitutionality of a state law prohibiting the growth of small amounts of cannabis in private homes. Vicaro saw the court as evenly divided both on that case and on Javez v. Rench. He did not want Gus Parham’s vote tipping the balance.

  And if Vicaro, who paid Parks & Simes $20 million a year, didn’t want Gus Parham on the Supreme Court, John Harrington didn’t want him there either. So when Helen Bondell called, Harrington had said, “Thanks for letting me know. I’ll do what I can.”

  At eight o’clock the following morning, Harrington had had a phone call from “Jonathan.” Harrington had never met Jonathan, knew nothing about him except that he had the voice, vocabulary, and diction of an extremely genteel upper-class Englishman. Whenever Vicaro needed Harrington to know something and didn’t want to send a letter or observe whatever prison procedures were necessary for making a phone call, he managed, in ways Harrington had no desire to know, to contact Jonathan. And Jonathan, for reasons Harrington also did not want to know, ever so graciously passed the message to Harrington.

  “Yes, Jonathan?”

  “My friend would like to see you. He says it’s extremely important. Today, if at all possible.”

  “I don’t know if I can get a flight. I’ll try. If I can’t make it late today, I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “Thank you very much. He said today. I’ll see he gets the message.”

  So Harrington had told his assistant to clear his calendar and book him on the next flight to Chicago, nearest airport to the federal prison where Vicaro was incarcerated.

  Responding now to Harrington’s remark that Parham might be nominated for the Supreme Court, Vicaro said, “You are wrong, my friend. He will be nominated for nothing. And if he is, he will not be confirmed.”

  “You sound very certain.”

  “Mr. Harrington …” Vicaro always called him Mr. Harrington when he was serious. Harrington didn’t like it—nobody liked it—when Vicaro got serious. “I’m going to tell you something, and you will know what to do with it.”

  Harrington didn’t like the sound of that, but he said, “I’m listening.”

  Vicaro leaned forward, an operation requiring the labored displacement of more than 300 pounds of deadweight flesh. He looked up at Harrington and exhaled. This time Harrington did not pull back. He had a son at Princeton and a daughter at a private school in Virginia.

  “Parham’s a thief.”

  Vicaro, studying Harrington, looked like a delicately triggered bomb. Harrington didn’t want to disturb the atmosphere. After ten seconds he said, “Why do you say that?”

  “Because … I am thinking of the airport.”

  Harrington didn’t understand. “Yes?”

  “And the suitcases.”

  Still in the dark. “Yes?”

  “There was four million dollars in the suitcases.”

  Oh, that airport, those suitcases. “Okay.”

  “You’re not surprised, when I tell you that?”

  “Should I be?”

  “They counted three million, Mr. Harrington. Three million one hundred eighty-six thousand and four hundred, to be exact.”

  “You have a good memory.”

  “It was my money.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “What am I saying?” Vicaro wheezed, pushing himself heavily back into an upright position. “I am saying that Judge Augustus Parham is a thief.”

&
nbsp; “Why is he a thief?”

  “Because he stole eight hundred thirteen thousand and six hundred dollars. Out of the suitcases.”

  This was ridiculous. If Gus Parham had been after money he’d have accepted the offer Harrington made in his Montgomery office. But that had been vague promises. This was stacked cash, right before his eyes. People who had never seen four million dollars in hundred-dollar bills didn’t understand. The sheer blaze of it could burn principles to a crisp.

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “I was there when the four million went into the suitcases. I counted it. Parham said he sent the cop—Carlos somebody—to the phone to call for help. So while the cop was gone, he scooped up a few handfuls, stuffed them into his briefcase, pockets, whatever. The fact is, when they counted the money at the bank, there was only three million one hundred and eighty-six thousand and four hundred dollars. Eight hundred thirteen thousand and six hundred dollars was missing. Parham took it.”

  “That’s very interesting.”

  True or not, Harrington didn’t care. If it was true, it’d be easier to prove. But even not true, it might be made into a credible allegation. When you wanted to destroy a nomination, credible allegations were all it took.

  “That’s what you call it? Interesting?”

  “It’s more than that, Ernie. But it’s your word against his.”

  “Maybe not.”

  Vicaro smiled. Those little red baby lips, pulling back from tobacco-stained teeth. Harrington had never seen anything so revolting.

  “Tell me your thoughts.”

  “I think the cop—Carlos …”

  “Carl Falco.”

  “Yeah, Falco. Carlos knows.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He was there, right? Maybe he got some too. They’re good friends, I hear.”

  Harrington thought it over. Vicaro could swear out an affidavit. It wouldn’t be worth anything, a convicted felon accusing the prosecutor who locked him up, but it’d be a piece of paper, a document. Carl Falco, a conspiracy between him and Gus, that was—no one would believe that. But Vicaro. An affidavit. Maybe. Yeah. The more he thought about it, the better it got. Handled just right. He’d give it to Helen Bondell. She’d know how to make the most of it.