The Hearing (37 page)

“Why don’t you wait to launch your attack until I begin?”

Rothman lowered himself into his chair, slowly, his eyes not leaving Taeger.

“Miss Young, at the risk of driving your advisor into a cataleptic rage, I must ask you if you are aware of allegations that
when your mother was pregnant—with you, I mean—she and your father met with a counselor, and that
your mother told the counselor that your father had urged her to have an abortion?”

“Mr. Chair—”

“
Sit down!
Miss Young, are you aware of that?”

“No.”

“Well, as you hear it now, what is your reaction?”

“I don’t think it’s a very nice question to ask someone.”

“Thank you for your opinion of the question. I appreciate that, and I think I tend to agree with you. It’s not a nice question.
But it is, unfortunately, a necessary question. What is your answer?”

“That was my answer. You asked for my reaction. My reaction is that it’s not a very nice question to ask.”

“Do you think your father wanted your mother to have an abortion?”

“No.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’m here.”

“I didn’t ask if she had an abortion. We know, and we are delighted, that she did not. But I asked if you think your father
wanted her to have one. That’s what your mother told the counselor.”

“I don’t know that.”

“You don’t know that?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“You said that’s what a document said a counselor said that my mother said my father said. I don’t really know who said what.”

“Miss Young—”

“I wasn’t there.”

Rothman smiled and stayed in his chair.

“I understand that. But you have no opinion concerning your father’s alleged statement to your mother that she should have
an abortion?”

“I don’t even know that my mother ever said he said that, or that anyone else ever said that my mother said that he said that.”

“So if—”

Samantha’s face went a shade pinker than it had been, and she shifted in her chair, sitting up straight and squaring her shoulders
toward the row of senators. She seemed to have awakened to something.

“But I do know something else. I know that my father would never have had me aborted. My father loves me very much. He has
always loved me. I may not have known him very long, but I know him real well now. When you spend two days with someone in
the back seat of a car you think’s going to blow up, you get to know them. My father is a wonderful man. He is brave and he
loves me and he loves my mother. And about the abortion, or anything like that—well, here I am. So you make up your own mind.”

She had tears in her eyes. The room was dead silent. Taeger remained motionless, didn’t even blink.

Then the audience exploded into applause.

Had Taeger not had the good sense to forget his threat to clear the room, there would probably have been a riot. He waited
for the applause to subside, allowed another five seconds to pass, and said, “Miss Young, perhaps you could tell us something
about your youth. Can you fill us in a bit on your youth?”

“Well, I think I’m still in it.”

The audience laughed.

“Let’s start when you were living in Milwaukee.”

“Well, I was born in Milwaukee. And then I was adopted, and I lived with my adoptive parents, who are named Mr. and Mrs. Young.
You know that.”

“Yes, and what was it like living with them?”

“I think you probably mean the part about the prostitution.”

“Was there prostitution?”

Taeger tried to appear shocked, but didn’t get far. The news media had had the story days ago.

“My adoptive mother had teenage girls living in the house, and they invited other girls over, and men came and had sex with
them for money.”

The tears were gone, and her voice, now solid and businesslike, let everyone know that she was not going to be shamed or intimidated
by events she had had no control over.

“And you were living there?”

“I was living with my adoptive parents, and that’s where they lived.”

“Your father lived there too?”

“Sort of. He was out working a lot. He’s a pianist, and he was working in hotels and bars. And he drank.”

“He drank a lot, didn’t he?”

“I think so.”

The hearing room had returned to a hushed attention, the print reporters scribbling furiously. The only sounds were Samantha’s
and Taeger’s voices and the
clunk clunk clunk
of motorized still cameras.

“And what did you do, when you were home and the girls were there?”

“I helped.”

“You helped? How did you help?”

“Welcoming people and serving drinks. I thought they were all friends of my mother’s, my adoptive mother’s, that they were
guests, so I took their coats and got them drinks.”

“And that was all you did?”

“There wasn’t anything else for me to do.”

“How old were you?”

“About six to eight.”

“And then you left home with your father?”

“Yes.”

“It sounds, Samantha, as if up to this point, at least, you had not had a very happy time.”

“It was okay.”

“If Judge Parham, your father, had known about the life you were living, do you think he would have approved?”

“Of course not.”

“He wouldn’t have wanted you living in a place like that?”

“No.”

“Any parent whose conduct was such that their child ended up in a place like that wouldn’t be a very responsible person, would
you say that?”

“You’re trying to say that my father wasn’t responsible.”

“I didn’t say that, Miss Young.”

“My father had nothing to do with where I was living. He didn’t want me to be adopted in the first place.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I know him. He loves me.”

“Did your mother want you to be adopted?”

“Of course not.”

“She loves you too?”

“Yes, she does.”

“So how did you end up with the Youngs and living in a brothel with prostitutes?”

“I don’t know, but it wasn’t my mother or father who did it.”

“Your father didn’t want you adopted, you said that.”

“Yes.”

“And he didn’t want you aborted.”

“He loves me.”

“So what happened? How did you get adopted? How did you end up living with prostitutes? Who did it?”

“Mr. Chairman—”

Rothman, on his feet, had stepped around the witness table and appeared ready to charge the dais.

“—there are limits, and they have been passed, as to what—”

Samantha ignored him. She said, “Bad people did it.”

Taeger said, “But not your father.”

“
Mr. Chairman
—”

“No! My father is not a bad person. My father is
great
”

“Mr. Chairman
—
”

“This hearing is in recess until two o’clock this afternoon.”

Taeger banged his gavel, rose, and walked out of the room.

Gus and Michelle flew at Samantha. Photographers and TV cameramen fought to get near them. Reporters, fingers stuck in their
ears against the pandemonium, screamed into telephones.

In the midst of it, a smiling Rothman relaxed at the witness table, an island of sweet stillness in the storm. It was going
better than he had hoped, and the best was yet to come.

At ten past two, they were back. During the two-hour recess, CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS had canceled other programming and carried
replays of Samantha’s testimony. Rothman and Dutweiler raced from microphone to microphone arguing the White House position
against opposition senators and pundits.

In almost every interview, Rothman was asked about a growing rumor that the opposition had a secret last-minute disclosure
that would blow Gus and Samantha out of the water. He laughed. “Gus and Michelle and Samantha are what they are. There are
no secrets. Totally transparent. The opposition’s problem is that when they see Samantha testify they’re seeing truth, and
they’re not used to it. It blinds them.”

Taeger said, “Miss Young, good afternoon.”

“Good afternoon.”

“Senator Kostner?”

You could almost hear the groans. Everyone had been expecting round two of the Taeger-Samantha match, and now Taeger was passing
the microphone to another senator, one friendly to Gus’s nomination.

Kostner asked a few innocuous questions and passed to the next senator. As the turn moved from senator to senator it became
clear that Gus’s supporters wanted to say nothing that might distance attention from Samantha’s morning display of love and
loyalty to her father. And those opposing the confirmation were not about to climb into the ring with Samantha, to cast themselves
as tormentors of a thirteen-year-old girl who that morning had won the nation’s heart.

So in less than half an hour, the microphone was back with the chairman, Senator Taeger.

“I think we’re about to wrap this up, Samantha,” he said, using her first name for the first time since early in the morning’s
testimony.

She smiled.

“We heard your testimony this morning about prostitution in your house in Milwaukee.”

Samantha nodded.

“I’m sorry. The stenographer can’t hear your nod.”

“Yes. I should have said yes.”

“You said, if I remember correctly, that you helped, that you welcomed customers, took their coats, served them drinks.”

“Yes.”

Rothman wished she had said that she didn’t know they were customers, thought they were guests. Much of her morning’s feistiness
was gone. She looked tired.

“And they were nice to you, for doing that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You found them likable?”

“Most of them.”

The shark was circling the bait. Rothman struggled to keep his expression vacant. He was not a good poker player.

“You weren’t frightened of them.”

“No.”

“They never harmed you.”

She said nothing. A slight nervous movement in her shoulders made Rothman’s breathing accelerate. It had been vital that she
not be prepared. She had been told nothing of what would happen. Nor had Rothman told Gus.

Rothman rose from his chair. “Mr. Chairman …”

“Yes, Mr. Rothman?”

Taeger’s voice was perfectly calm, unthreatened and unthreatening.

Rothman said, “I think …”

He had to play the part. Taeger was sniffing the bait, but he hadn’t yet taken it.

“Yes, Mr. Rothman?”

So calm, the voice of a man holding four aces against a pair.

“Excuse me,” Rothman said, and sat down.

Taeger said, “Samantha …”

A fine sheen of perspiration glistened on her forehead. She said, “Yes?”

“I’m afraid now, Samantha, that I have to do something very painful. I apologize in advance to you and to your father and
to your mother, and indeed to all those who have taken such a heartfelt interest in your welfare. But there is a question
I must ask.”

He paused, timing it, letting the tension grow.

Take it
, Rothman thought.
Take it, you bastard.

Speaking slowly, word by word, Taeger said, “Samantha, did you kill a man—”

Rothman heard gasps behind him.

“—when you were eight years old? Didn’t you plunge a kitchen knife with a five-inch serrated blade into his stomach?”

Photographers lunged closer, shoving for position. Gus and Michelle were on their feet.

“And isn’t it true that he lost almost a pint of blood on your kitchen floor before anyone called an ambulance, and didn’t—”

Rothman turned in time to see Samantha, hands flat on the table, try to push herself upright. She was half out of the
chair when her face went pale, her knees buckled, and she fell. Her right shoulder hit the table on the way down, and she
ended in a heap next to the chair. Motionless, she was immediately covered by photographers. Gus and Michelle fought their
way to her side, and by the time she came to, a minute later, paramedics had arrived out of nowhere with a gurney.

It was more drama than Rothman had even hoped for. Gus was in. No one could stop the confirmation now.

I
t was Rothman, of course, who insisted she go to the hospital. Whether he did this for reasons of health or politics was
a question Rothman refused to answer and cynics never had to ask. Certainly it helped to cast Taeger as a child abuser. And
having the ambulance in which Samantha rode (and that Rothman had arranged to have waiting at the entrance nearest the hearing
room, its paramedics on standby in the hall) appear on TV screens coast to coast, with flashing lights and wailing siren,
less than forty-eight hours before the full Senate confirmation vote, was applauded all over town as a stroke of political
genius. Within minutes, a
flood of pro-Gus phone calls, faxes, and E-mail inundated Senate offices.

Rothman admitted nothing, never told anyone that he had known nine days before Samantha’s testimony that she had killed a
man, and that he had spoken anonymously by phone with Warren Gier and had sent him court documents, knowing Gier would pass
everything to Taeger, who would use it to try to discredit Samantha and shift public sentiment away from Gus. Certainly Taeger
would think he could attack Samantha’s appealing innocence—and the support that gave Gus’s confirmation—by a surprise revelation
that she had killed a man. And whatever Samantha’s reaction might be (even if she had not collapsed in a dead faint), Rothman
had intended to rush to her side, hand her over to the paramedics for a dramatic, lights-and-sirens dash to the hospital.
As it happened, everything had worked even better than Rothman had dreamed it might.