No Safe Place (39 page)

“Then there’s Kerry the ruthless. We usually don’t get to meet
him
. But every now and then there’ll be a sighting.” Interrupting himself, Nate checked his watch; he was so wired, Lara had begun to notice, that he seemed to time his own conversations. “Do you remember that story last week—where Newark’s ex-prosecutor got sent to jail?”

Lara smiled. “Jail for a Newark politician? That
is
news.”

“You know who got
this
particular politician? Kilcannon.”

“Why? And how?”

“Before his brother got shot, Kilcannon worked for him—Vincent Flavio. Somehow Flavio pissed him off.” Eyes brightening, Nate warmed to his story. “Kilcannon waits four years, until there’s a Democrat in the White House, and then gets a friend of his appointed U.S. attorney—a black guy who ran Kilcannon’s Senate campaign. Supposedly their deal was that if Kilcannon gets his pal Slade the job, he goes after Flavio like hell wouldn’t have it.

“He did, for three years. The first jury hung. So they try it again, and Flavio and his bagman get ten years. When I asked Kilcannon about them, all he said was ‘Even
Newark
can do better.’”

Lara smiled at this. “So was Flavio a crook?” she asked.

“Probably. But some Democrats find that story a little dark—the revenge of Kerry Kilcannon. And Kilcannon won’t talk about the rumors. Let alone give reasons.”

Pensive, Lara found herself fiddling with an earring. Take someone as elusive as Kerry Kilcannon seemed to be, she reflected, and people begin inventing their own truth.

“Well,” she said to Nate, “maybe someday I’ll ask him.”

At nine in the morning roughly two weeks later, Lara introduced herself to Kerry Kilcannon’s receptionist and settled into a plush leather couch. “The senator will be out shortly,” the young woman told her.

Waiting, Lara studied her surroundings. The reception area was elegant—high ceilings, a gilt-edged mirror, two crystal chandeliers. But there were none of the vanity photographs typical of public men, no pictures of a wife or parents or children, nor any of James Kilcannon. From the evidence, Kerry Kilcannon could have been an orphan.

Turning to the entrance, Lara saw a pale young man hesitate in the doorway.

His dark gaze was darting and indirect, as though he could not look at other people without making them, and himself, uneasy. His face was damp, and the gray sport coat, too short for him, appeared borrowed. In a tremulous voice, he told the receptionist, “I came to see Senator Kilcannon.”

The woman seemed to stiffen. Cautiously, she asked, “Do you have an appointment?”

The man shook his head. He could not be over twenty, Lara thought; his hair was lank, badly cut, and his shirt and pants were ill-fitting and drab. Watching, Lara noticed that his hands shook.

The receptionist frowned. “The senator has a full schedule today. If you’ll just leave your name—”

“No.”
The man spoke through clenched teeth now, his voice pleading, a near whisper. “I need to
see
him.
Please.
”

The receptionist’s olive skin looked suddenly clammy. As
she reached for her phone, Lara felt the woman’s instinctive fear, the shadow cast by James Kilcannon’s murder.

Next to her, Lara heard a door open.

Turning, she saw Kerry Kilcannon, his shirtsleeves rolled up, come to retrieve her.

He took in his assistant’s apprehension, then its object. The man froze, staring at Kilcannon with such a seeming hunger for recognition that Lara guessed he must live within his imagination, fixating on a public figure. Kilcannon stepped forward, standing between the man and his receptionist.

“How can we help you?” he asked.

The young man blinked, swallowing. Speechless, he reached into the inside pocket of his sport coat.

Lara tensed, watching his hand. The receptionist half stood. Only Kilcannon remained still.

Slowly, the man withdrew a pamphlet.

Lara could see its cover—a hideous portrayal of a partial-birth abortion, the crushed skull of a fetus. As the man pressed it on Kilcannon, tears came to his eyes.

“How can you abandon children?” he asked simply.

Looking from the pamphlet into the young man’s stricken gaze, Kilcannon’s own eyes narrowed. The silence grew, the pale young man and the senator studying each other.

Two uniformed officers arrived, shattering the frieze. As if awakened from a dream, Kilcannon seemed to start. “It’s all right,” he told them. “This man just wanted to give me something.”

An officer took the young man’s arm. To Lara, he looked pitiful now. His mouth opened, but he could form no words.

As they led the man away, Kilcannon stared after him.

Abruptly, he remembered Lara. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said with a show of humor. “But the fun never stops.”

Thanking his receptionist, he led Lara through a suite of offices, occupied by assistants, to his own.

“He
did
seem a little off,” Lara said as they walked. “Don’t you ever worry about security?”

He gave her a quick ironic glance. “
You
came through the metal detector, I hope.”

“Yes.”

“So would he have. Unless someone slips up.” He put the
pamphlet on his desk, motioning Lara to a chair. “We get used to drop-ins here, and some have a certain charm. My current favorite is the eighty-five-year-old World War Two veteran who wanted a hundred percent disability. For impotence.” Kil-cannon’s tone became wry. “His particular war wound had occurred in Italy, in 1944, when he was hit in the groin by a soccer ball. But when I asked when he’d become impotent, guess what he told me. Two years ago.”

“A gradual case, I suppose.”

“Very. And it was a very delicate task suggesting it was because he was eighty-three, and not because he’d been nailed with a soccer ball forty-two years and six kids ago. But what’s a senator for, if not to make tough calls?”

Lara returned his smile. Part of his persona, she was learning, was an appreciation of the human comedy and a perspective on his own place in its cast of characters. But his humor also defused subjects that might become more personal. Glancing around his office, Lara saw only three photographs: a white-haired woman who resembled James Kilcannon; a blunt-faced man with shrewd eyes and red-tinged gray hair; then a black family of five—a stocky father and a slender mother, merry-looking twin girls in their early teens, a sweet-faced boy who could not be over four. “Your parents?” Lara asked.

“My mother.” Kilcannon’s voice was soft. “The man’s my godfather, Liam Dunn. Much of what I learned about politics, or anything else, came from him.”

Still no pictures of dad, Lara thought, or brother. Or, for that matter, Meg Kilcannon. “And the family?”

“Friends of mine. Clayton’s the U.S. attorney in Newark.”

Lara turned to him, hesitant, and then decided to take a chance. “The one who indicted Vincent Flavio.”

Though his eyes turned cool, Kilcannon’s face held no surprise. “Not just indicted,” he answered. “Jailed.”

That was not a matter, Kilcannon’s tone made clear, which was open for discussion. Almost idly, he picked up the pamphlet on abortion, studying it in silence and, from his expression, deepening reflection. It was as Nate Cutler said, Lara thought; Kilcannon was there, and then something made him slip away.

He stood, suddenly restless. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll explain our schedule on the way.”

For the next nine hours, Kerry Kilcannon was constantly in motion—subcommittee meetings; huddling with aides to make quick decisions on various bills and amendments; granting a CBS interview in his office to discuss the administration’s exit strategy in Bosnia; a visit from the foreign minister of Vietnam, in which Kilcannon showed great tact, listening far more than he spoke; a press conference on the lawn in support of school lunch programs; a private visit to the Senate office of the Vice President—with whom Kilcannon was known to have differences of temperament and policy—to discuss, Lara guessed, Kilcannon’s role at the upcoming convention; lunch in the Senate dining room with a group of parochial school boys from New Jersey, which Kilcannon seemed to enjoy, even though the main topic was why the New Jersey Nets were so lousy.

Kilcannon was far quieter in private, Lara noticed, than in public. But his sense of humor remained keen, his attention to each person unflagging; his staffers called him Kerry—unusual in the Senate—and their own energy and dedication seemed as high as his. As hours passed, Lara found herself impressed: Kil-cannon showed an excellent memory, an ability to switch subjects without effort, to ask the right questions and make decisions on the spot. “It’s a defense mechanism,” Kilcannon told her. “Otherwise I’d have to think.”

To her surprise, he made her day not just interesting but enjoyable. At each new stop, he introduced her graciously. Often he would seem preoccupied and then, as they hurried around the Hill with a series of legislative aides, would surprise her by anticipating those points about which she was most curious. Lara was smart, his manner suggested—little comment was required of him. “After all,” he said with a smile, “you’ve been covering Willie Brown.” And then he was off again, at six in the evening, leaving her with his office manager as he rushed to the Senate floor.

Two hours later, Lara found herself chatting with his owlish AA as they watched Kilcannon on C-SPAN, criticizing human rights abuses in China. “Why is it,” Kilcannon demanded, “that
the less business we do in a particular country, the more vehement
our denunciation of its human rights offenses? Or have we started measuring freedom of speech in earnings per share?”

The pointed question, Lara thought, was bound to make the current administration—Dick Mason included—unhappy. Intrigued, she began wondering what Kilcannon was up to, when he entered his office alone, suit jacket slung over his shoulder.

He stopped, gazing down at her in astonishment. “
You’re
still here?” he asked. “I’d have thought you’d tire of this.”

Lara smiled. “You were right, Senator. The fun never stops.”

Smiling quizzically, he glanced at his watch, then seemed to come to a decision. “For me,” he answered, “it stops when I’m hungry. The least I can do is buy you dinner.”

Kilcannon’s car was an aging Ford Taurus, ennobled by the USS 1 plates issued to New Jersey’s senior senator. When he turned the ignition, a grinding sound, not unlike a pencil sharpener, made him wince in mock dismay. “I
still
meet people,” he observed, “who think we’re in it for the money. When you consider the hours, and throw in the loss of privacy, we don’t drive a very hard bargain.”

Kilcannon began steering them toward Pennsylvania Avenue. It was twilight; the dome of the Capitol glowed behind them, a tourist’s dream. “Then why,” Lara asked, “do you fight to stay?”

“‘We’ generically? In part because we’re more interested in doing good than voters imagine. That’s one of the most depressing things about our politics—this contempt so many voters seem to have for us as irrelevant, petty figures, concerned with nothing but self-preservation. Abetted by the press, of course. Worse, we have a ‘shoot to kill’ political culture premised on permanent scandal, where people in both parties don’t just try to win but to destroy each other with charges and countercharges. And I’ve stopped counting the number of special prosecutors there are.” His voice became thoughtful, a kind of self-admonition. “But what’s still just as pernicious is the overwhelming sense of your own power and importance, reinforced in a thousand ways. Unless you’re careful, it becomes an addiction.”

“But how does anyone avoid that?”

“My friend Bill Cohen writes—it helps give perspective, he
tells me. But I’m a little less gifted.” For a moment, Kilcannon was quiet. “For others, I suppose, it’s family.”

Did he mean children? Lara wondered. After all, Kilcannon had a wife. “And what do
you
do for perspective?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Other things. Stuff that has nothing to do with this place.”

“Such as?”

“Good works. Saintly acts.” In the darkness of the car, she could not read his expression. “But if I talked about them to you, then they
would
have to do with this place, wouldn’t they? Another senator on the make, tending his image as a sensitive human being.”

This was fair enough, Lara thought. But Kilcannon might simply be taking her seduction to the next level, drawing her in with carefully packaged candor. Her doubts, Lara realized, reflected the divide between politician and journalist—in this case, between Senator Kerry Kilcannon and Lara Costello of the
New York Times
—which made any interaction seem double-edged, a prelude to manipulation or betrayal. It struck her that this was also true of relationships between politicians; in Washington, there was no safe place for Kerry Kilcannon.

“It must seem pretty solitary,” she ventured. “Always being so guarded.”

In the silver glow of oncoming headlights, Lara saw his sardonic smile. “Are you a journalist,” he asked, “or a psychiatrist?”

To Lara, Kilcannon’s tone implied that she had overstepped her bounds; despite his smile, she felt slightly patronized. “It was an obvious question, Senator. We were talking like real people, I thought.”

In his silence, Lara watched them slip past the Washington Monument and the Ellipse, the White House appearing from between the surrounding trees, so familiar, yet so distant behind its wrought-iron fence, the barricades blocking Pennsylvania Avenue. “It’s odd,” he murmured. “Lately I catch myself sounding like my brother. You could go a lifetime, and never know what he really thought. Or felt.”

What Lara felt was genuine surprise; Kilcannon’s public reticence on the subject of his brother was well known. There was something wistful in the veiled apology, a trace of puzzled
self-reflection. She decided to let him be.

“Solitary?” he said at last. “Sure. You know your peers, but seldom very well. Because almost every relationship is based on mutual calculation—what will this do for me, and what will it cost?