Green waved his hand in the air as if to excuse his digression, or, more likely, to try to forget how disappointed he was in the kind of politicians that had taken his place.
“Marshall had no chance against Arthur Sieman. None. That was not the reason he was running. I tried to explain that to him—that he wasn't running to win, but to show that Sieman had lost the support of conservatives. If Marshall got just a quarter of the vote in the primary, we would have made our point; if he got a third of the vote, then Sieman, for the first time, would look vulnerable. But Marshall couldn't stand the thought of losing. He had to ask, 'And if I win?'
“ 'You're going to lose,' I told him. 'But remember,' I suggested, 'there are losers, and there are losers. Sieman isn't going to stay in the attorney general's office. He'll run for governor, or if not that, senator.' ”
Green looked at me with the bluff, affable manner with which, as soon as I saw it, I knew he had shaken a million hands and told a thousand lies.
“ 'And then, next time,' I said, 'you can win the nomination, win the election, and I'll be able to call you Mr. Attorney General. I look forward to it.' ”
Augustus Marshall did exactly as Hiram Green had expected.
Within weeks of his announcement, he moved from the category of political unknown to that of the almost famous challenger of the immensely popular Republican incumbent. The public opinion polls charted his progress: twelve percent at the end of the first month, seventeen percent at the end of the second, twenty-three at the end of the third. Then, after another month of exhaustive effort and exorbitant spending, it all came to a stop. He was stuck at twenty-three percent. Convinced he could still win, Marshall tried everything, but nothing worked. Two more months and there was still no change. Hiram Green had been right—he was going to lose—and though he never said it, Marshall was too intelligent not to have finally understood that he had never had a chance to win in the first place. And then, with only a few weeks left before the primary election, Arthur Sieman did something that no one—not even Hiram Green—had considered in all their political calculations as even a contingent possibility. He died.
Hiram Green did not know what to think. All he knew for certain was that in a single mortal instant the candidate he had put forward to lose had become the first conservative in years almost certain to win. Marshall was the Republican nominee, and because none of the Democrats who might have had a chance to win had wanted to run against Arthur Sieman, he became attorney general in a landslide. When it was all over and the only thing left was the victory speech in the ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Augustus Marshall had turned to Hiram Green, the man who had gotten him into the race he told him he could not win. Green remembered the way Marshall looked at him, the broad smile and the relaxed, friendly manner, and he remembered how certain he was that Marshall was about to thank him for everything he had done. Then Marshall started to speak and his eyes turned hard.
“ 'If I had lost,' Marshall said to him, 'you would have found someone else to run the next time, wouldn't you?' ”
The crowd was chanting Marshall's name, louder and louder, demanding what they always demand: that their new leader listen to them. Marshall stood there, his head held high, waving his hand back and forth, a triumphant smile flashing across his face.
“I remember wondering,”Green mused aloud, “whether I might not just end up missing Arthur Sieman after all.”
Tw o years after he was elected attorney general, and—more important in terms of the political calculations that had by now become instinctive—two years before the next election, Augustus Marshall divorced his wife after twenty years of marriage. She kept the home in Bel Aire; he kept the small one-bedroom condominium a block and a half from his office in the state capitol in Sacramento. It had become the only home he cared about.
The announcement of his divorce was made quietly and handled with all the discretion to be expected of what everyone would understand was a purely private misfortune. His marriage four years later to Zelda St. Rogers, the daughter of the owner of the largest newspaper in Los Angeles, received more attention than the inauguration of all but a few of California's governors. It was, as every columnist wrote and every commentator observed, a perfect alliance of new power and what in a place that worshiped the present passed for old money. As if to underscore their connection with California tradition, the bride and groom spent their honeymoon in Carmel.
“And I'll bet you anything,”Green said, leering at the thought of it, “they spent most of their first night together watching the television coverage of the wedding. You think he didn't know what he was doing, marrying her? Three weeks later he announced he was running for governor. He got the support of his father-in-law's paper. And we used to think that only women slept their way to the top.”
Hiram Green got up from behind his desk and walked over to a cabinet. He filled a glass with a chalky-white substance, stirred it with a spoon, and then, with a shudder, forced himself to drink.
“Ulcers,”he explained, patting his stomach as he came back to his desk.
“Do you know how many times Augustus Marshall has called me during the eight years he was attorney general and the nearly four years he's been governor?”he asked, frowning as he drank a little more of his medication. “Not once. Not even a Christmas card, the ungrateful son-of-a-bitch.”
He looked at the glass, then he looked at me. “I'd offer you something,”he said, “but this is Saturday and there's no one here.”
Just as I started to wonder again if I should tell him what day of the week it was, the buzzer on the console on the corner of his desk went off. The soft voice of a woman I assumed was the receptionist gently reminded him that he had a luncheon appointment in an hour. He thanked her and then went on with our conversation as if there were nothing inconsistent with what he had just said. Perhaps, at his age, when he spent most of his time thinking about things that had already happened, every day seemed like Saturday.
“There you have it, Mr. Antonelli,”he said. “The short history of Augustus Marshall. There's really no getting around it: Some people have luck on their side and some people don't.”
Green smiled, but it could not quite conceal the trace of bitterness in his voice, as if even now he still resented what had happened to the neophyte he had rescued from the anonymity of private life compared to his own undeserved political misfortunes.
“Arthur Sieman was as healthy-looking as any man you've ever seen. He'd just had a complete physical six weeks before. No history of heart trouble on either side of his family; he didn't smoke and hardly ever had a drink. He took care of himself: He jogged, he swam, played tennis—he was in superb condition. It's true that he would have betrayed his mother—and he betrayed me—but that isn't normally counted among the standard list of health risks. If it was,”he added, quivering with silent laughter, “there wouldn't be a politician left alive in America and Augustus Marshall would now be at least ten years dead.”
Green pressed his hands together in his lap and for a moment did not say anything.
“The odd thing is,”he said presently, “people in politics hardly ever die—not while they're in office.”An ironic smile, perhaps in acknowledgment of how much he had already cheated mortality, lingered for a moment on his mouth. Then he added, “Not from natural causes.”
Gripping the arm of the chair, Green drew himself up to his full height. He looked past me, a hard shrewdness in his aged eyes.
“Arthur Sieman was one of the only men I ever heard of who dropped dead in what to all the world seemed like perfect health.”
His eyes came back to me, and I thought I saw in them a kind of cheerful malice, as if he took a certain pleasure in having outlived any illusions he may once have had about how far anyone might go to get what they wanted. It was the look of someone for whom the beginning and the end of all wisdom was the knowledge that no one did anything for anyone without first asking what was in it for themselves.
“First Sieman, now Fullerton,”he remarked. “Strange, the way things happen. Marshall could never have become attorney general if Sieman hadn't died; and he could never have been reelected governor if Fullerton hadn't been killed. Either one of them alone would have seemed just a matter of chance— wouldn't it? One of those fortuitous circumstances which help explain the rise of nearly every successful man—or woman—in politics. But together—Sieman and Fullerton? That is an extraordinary run of luck, isn't it? Without precedent, I should say. If I didn't know better, I might begin to believe that Augustus must have had something to do with it—one or the other—or perhaps even both.”
“If you didn't know better?”
An enigmatic smile circled over his lower lip. “Yes,”he replied. “That sort of thing doesn't happen in this country, does it?”
He rose from his chair and with his hand on my sleeve walked me out of his office. He moved more slowly than when I had first arrived, and his voice, when he spoke, was now somewhat difficult to hear. As we entered the hallway, he stopped in front of a framed photograph of a very young Richard Nixon, taken while he was still a congressman from southern California, with his black wavy hair and nervous, darting eyes. The picture had been taken at a ground-breaking ceremony. Nixon stood together with five other men in a shallow semicircle, all of them bent over shiny silver shovels, staring straight ahead into the camera. Green's grip tightened around my arm.
“You recognize anyone in that picture—I mean besides Nixon and me?”
I examined the smiling faces of a half dozen men now either dead or a half century older.
“No, I'm afraid I don't.”
“On the far left,”he said, pointing toward a young man in his late twenties or early thirties, wearing a tan double-breasted suit. Like the others, he was smiling, but there was something different about the way he did it. He seemed more confident, more at ease, less interested in making an impression. I still had no idea who he was.
“He's the one who could have done it.”Green saw the question in my eyes. “The one who could have been what I told you about before,”he reminded me as if we had not spent the last hour and a half talking about anything else. “The mind like Nixon and the manner like Reagan. He had it all—maybe the most brilliant man I ever met, and one of the most engaging men I've ever been around. He could have gone all the way— governor, president. Nothing would have stopped him. He would have done whatever he had to do to win. He always did whatever he wanted. Maybe that's the reason he never wanted to run for anything,”he added, squinting at the faded photograph. “Too many things about him that might come out, things I'm sure he wanted to hide—that and the fact that Lawrence always liked money too much,”he said, shaking his head.
“Lawrence?”
“Yes,”he replied, turning to me. “Lawrence Goldman. I'm sure you've heard of him. We were good friends once, back in the days when I could raise the kind of money we raised in Marshall's first campaign.”
“What kind of things did he think he had to hide?”I asked, trying to conceal the intensity of my curiosity.
Green looked at me as if he were trying not to laugh at some great, delicious secret that was almost too good not to share.
“Everything,”he said, as he led me away from the black and white framed photographs that, with all the hundreds of others that had been so carefully fastened to the walls, told the story of a life everyone else had managed to forget.
Outside, the sunlight shimmered off the sidewalk, and in the quiet shade of the tall sloping palm trees, the face and words of Hiram Green seemed like an old movie that kept playing over and over again in my mind. When I got to the airport, I took one last look around, wondering whether there was something in the languid scent of the air that had given him such a long life and the strange unreality in which he seemed to have lived it. Overhead, the planes kept coming in, one after the other, bringing more people with dreams of their own to become one of the famous names and faces that live in the dreams of people all over America, strangers they would never meet and would never know.
I caught the next plane to San Francisco and, after it leveled off for the short flight north, opened the newspaper I had bought at the airport. On the right column of the front page was a picture of Ariella Goldman, beaming like one of the faces in the long, darkened gallery of Hiram Green's office, the new Democratic nominee for governor. Though she had never run for office before, she was, according to the story, only seven points behind Augustus Marshall and there were still nearly three months to go before the election. I folded up the paper, and closing my eyes, remembered what Hiram Green had told me. First Arthur Sieman, then Jeremy Fullerton. Was it only chance?
W
ith all the resources of Albert Craven's firm and with the full-time services of three different detective agencies, every friend and every relative of Jamaal Washington, everyone who had known him at the university, and everyone who had known him at work was interviewed and, if there was so much as a single inconsistency between what one person said and what was learned from another, interviewed again. The gun, the bullet, the car itself—every piece of forensic evidence was examined, analyzed, discussed, and debated by one expert after another. The route Jamaal had taken from the Fairmont Hotel to the place where he had found Jeremy Fullerton dead in his car was measured to the last inch and timed to the last second. No expense had been spared; everything that could be done had been done. Now, finally, it was time for trial.
We waited in the monotonous silence, broken only by an occasional muffled cough or the shifting, shuffling sound of someone trying to find a place to sit. Dressed in a conservative gray suit, white dress shirt, and solid maroon tie, Jamaal Washington sat on the wooden chair next to me, the one closest to the jury box. The cane he now used to help him walk lay on the floor next to him. His soft light brown hands were folded in his lap. Under half-closed lids, his large deerlike eyes floated with a kind of languid indifference as he watched the court reporter fidget with a thick roll of stenotype tape.