Balance of Power

THREE

With deep foreboding, Kerry received Jack Slezak in the President's private office.

Slezak hunched in a wing chair, ankles crossed, hands clasped, his thick body held slightly forward. But for the brightness in his light green eyes, betraying a hint of superiority, he had the somber look of a worshiper at Mass, bent before the imponderable will of God. Even his voice was hushed.

"I'm sorry, Mr. President. I had no choice but to come in person."

Briefly, Slezak averted his gaze in what Kerry saw as feigned embarrassment. Increasingly certain of Slezak's purpose, the President spoke in a voice drained of welcome or encouragement. "Concerning what?"

Though still bent forward, Slezak gave the President a swift, keen glance which lifted the red eyebrows beneath the broad plane of his forehead. "I received a call. The man told the receptionist he was the president of the AFL-CIO. That's a call I've got to take." As he watched Kerry from behind his mask of reluctance, his voice became harsher. "Turned out it was a man I didn't know, saying he had a message for you.

"I was so pissed I nearly hung up on him. Then I thought"—here Slezak interrupted himself with a helpless shrug—"you know, that it might involve some threat against your life."

The tacit reference to Jamie's murder, and Kerry's own near death, made Slezak's pretense of humanity more offensive. With a faint cold smile, Kerry said softly, "But, of course, it wasn't."

The disbelief implicit in Kerry's remark caused Slezak to look at him sharply. "No. It was about the First Lady."

To Kerry, his own smile felt as though it could crack glass. "Only Lara?"

"No." Slezak studied his clasped hands. "He said that the two of you were involved when you were still married to your former wife."

Though prepared for this, a thickness in his throat forced Kerry to pause before mustering a tone of irony. " 'Involved'? Was your caller all that delicate?"

Plainly annoyed, Slezak looked straight at Kerry. "He said you'd made her pregnant, and that she'd gotten an abortion."

With veiled contempt, Kerry murmured, "At last."

Slezak stared at him. In their silence, the pale light of two standing lamps, Kerry began absorbing the calamity, long deferred, which now would fall on Lara and on him, pervading every corner—public and private—of their lives. Then Slezak added bluntly, "There's more."

"I thought there would be."

Without the pretense of any encouragement from the President, Slezak finished in a toneless voice. "He said they have the counselor's notes from the abortion clinic your wife went to, and that the notes confirm you were the father."

Despite Slezak's presence, Kerry was helpless to fight the current of memory—the emotional wreckage which Lara had become, his own pleas to have their child. "An interesting story," Kerry observed coldly. "Rich in detail. Did your source explain why he was sharing it with you?"

Slezak's eyes narrowed in shrewd appraisal. "Not exactly. Only that you'd know that it was true. And that once I told you, so would I."

The tacit statement of Slezak's leverage triggered, in Kerry, a mute fury at his own impotence. Standing, he said dismissively, "So now you know whatever you assume to know."

Slezak stood as well, seemingly propelled from his chair by a banked antagonism of his own. "That's not the end," he said curtly. "The guy said if you veto the Civil Justice Reform Act, all of America will know."

And Charles Dane already knew. To Kerry, the pattern was now crystalline. The SSA had the memo, and had promised Slezak cover if he defied the President. Slezak felt impervious: his charade was Dane's message to Kerry, the final piece of a three-pronged effort—preceded by Dane's settlement offer to Lenihan and Fasano's offer to Kerry—to assure the President's quiescence. Perhaps Fasano knew; perhaps he, too, was a pawn. But of one thing Kerry was quite certain: though he could not prove it, Jack Slezak was a liar, a knowing party to blackmail.

"Why do you suppose," Kerry asked quietly, "that they picked you?"

Left unspecified was who "they" were. In the same flat tone, Slezak answered, "Because they knew I would deliver the message."

"No doubt," Kerry told him, nodding toward the door. "So now you can leave. Lara and I don't get much time, and I don't like being late for dinner."

* * *

They sat on their bed as Kerry told her.

Her reaction was more devastating than he could have imagined. Nothing but the tears on her stricken face.

Kerry took her hands. "I'm sorry," he said softly. "Sorry that my becoming President has brought so much harm to us."

Her eyes were black pools of horror and grief. "They're using 'us,' " she said with quiet wonder, "to erase the public memory of my family." She grazed her cheekbones with the fingertips of one hand, as though to wipe them clean of dampness. "And you, Kerry. Nothing about what I did was ever fair to you."

Quiet, Kerry sorted through the tangle of his thoughts: that Lara did not deserve this; that those who had believed in him—indeed the country—did not deserve it either; that his ambition to be President had outrun his reason; that he was President, and could not let love, or even fear for their future, obscure the iron fact of his political dilemma, the harsh choices he must make. It was pointless to wish that they had never faced this moment.

"I love you," he said.

With a shiver of emotion, she rested her forehead against the hollow of his neck. "You would have loved our child."

Kerry simply held her. At length, she murmured wearily, "We've got no time for this."

The pitiless accuracy of this statement moved her husband to protest. "We've got time."

"Not now." Leaning back from him, she said, "You are President. And I've got Mary to think of."

To his own shame, Kerry realized that he had not considered Mary. Even if he did not yield to blackmail, a President crippled by scandal might not be able to sustain a veto which, even now, rested on a onevote margin. Whatever their decision, Mary would have to know. "I suppose that's the good part," Lara added softly. "Never again will Mary envy me my perfection."

Silent, Kerry considered the toxic consequences he had thrust on Lara, the fruits of his decision to wound the SSA through Mary's lawsuit. From first to last, he had been poison to Lara's family.

I'll do whatever you want, he almost said, and then realized he could not promise even that. "We both know the playbook of our times," she told him with quiet bitterness. "I do the media calvary, the stations of the cross, dragging my sins from network to network. A few days of that will transform disgust to pity."

Kerry imagined her enduring this ritual of self-flagellation, the humiliating mix of theater with a remorse too personal to dramatize. Equally embittering was his regret that Lara must be so clear-eyed.

"I'd resign," he said simply, "before I'd watch that happen."

Her lips parted, as if to argue, and then she absorbed how literally he meant that. "And I won't watch you protect me at any cost. To you, or to me."

Feeling their impasse, the conflict of love and politics, Kerry absorbed anew the consequences of whatever they chose to do, their inability—now—to consider only the personal costs of dealing with a long-ago private act.

"We'll need advice," he said at last. "We can't decide this on our own."

Once more, tears filled Lara's eyes. "I know," she answered.