Guilty Minds

16

Senator Pat Brennan’s hideaway office was on the third floor of the Capitol building, behind an unmarked door. I would never have been able to find it if the senator hadn’t dispatched an aide, a pretty young redhead, to meet me at security and take me through marble hallways and up winding staircases, through several locked doors.

All senators have hideaway offices in addition to their offices in the Senate office buildings nearby. Some are nicer than others. Some are cramped little closets. They’re given out based on seniority. They’re generally used for quick meetings, a place to escape the press of business, avoid reporters, take naps. During Prohibition, some senators used them as speakeasies. Lyndon Johnson used to invite young women in to “take dictation,” as he called it, in his hideaway. Most senators insist on keeping the location of their hideaways secret from all but their closest aides.

Senator Brennan opened the door himself. He was in shirtsleeves, his bow tie askew. He was a tall, chubby man with stooped shoulders, a ruddy face with a pixielike expression, a high domed forehead, and a shock of white hair that was usually mussed.

“Nicholas Heller!” he boomed. “Good Lord, how long has it been?”

“A couple of years, Senator.”

“In this office, I’m Pat. Please.”

I nodded. “Thanks for taking the time, Pat.”

“I bagged my evening fund-raising calls, which is an obligation I detest, so I should thank you. Come, come.”

He put a hand on my shoulder and escorted me in. I could smell the liquor on his breath. Based on the fluidity of his speech, his articulation, I concluded he was still on his first bourbon. Which was good. He was normally coherent through his first two or three drinks.

His hideaway office was one long and narrow room with a high arched ceiling. A marble fireplace, built-in bookcases, a bathroom; and, in one corner, a bar with a mini-fridge, where he led me.

“You, my friend, get the good stuff,” he said. “Pappy Van Winkle twenty-year-old Family Reserve.”

“I’m honored.”

He glugged a couple of fingers of bourbon into two glasses and handed one to me. Then he clinked his glass against mine. “In the words of Horace, fecundi calices quem non fecere disertum?” He paused, and then translated. “Whom have flowing cups not made eloquent?”

Brennan was a former professor of government at Harvard who’d served in the White House as adviser to the president and was later elected senator from Massachusetts. He was a classics major at Harvard, was erudite, and was obviously not shy about showing it off. The more he drank, it seemed, the more Latin he spoke.

He was also Jeremiah Claflin’s biggest champion. He’d pushed for Claflin’s nomination to the US Court of Appeals. Later, he’d lobbied the White House for Claflin’s appointment to the Supreme Court. They’d been Harvard colleagues — Claflin at the law school — and friends, and Brennan had quarterbacked his confirmation process in the Senate.

I took a sip. “Excellent,” I said. It was bourbon, it tasted fine, and it was no doubt wasted on me.

I’d done a job for Senator Brennan a few years back, when I was with Stoddard Associates in DC. He had a leaker on his staff who was causing him great damage. To make a long and complicated story short and simple, I smoked the traitor out.

He lowered himself heavily onto the corner of a yellow brocade sectional sofa next to a low table, and I sat in a chair facing him. “Let me get right to it,” I said. “I know your time is tight. I have to tell you something in absolute secrecy.” Though I’d signed an NDA, the urgent circumstances justified telling him, I decided. “Cone of silence, right?”

He put up his palms like a priest conferring a benediction. “Sigillum confessionis,” he said. “The seal of the confessional.”

Then I told him about the Slander Sheet story on Claflin.

“Oh, dear God,” he said when I finished, and he took a swig. He looked out the window. The view of the Washington Monument and the National Mall was postcard-perfect. “Slander Sheet. I detest that website with every fiber of my being.”

“Everyone does, but everyone reads it just the same.”

“It’s funny, Nicholas. Everything old becomes new again. Our republic had slander sheets even before it had newspapers. They were mudslingers, that’s all. Every printer belonged to a political faction, and they put out gazettes that endlessly circulated lies about their opponents. Defamation sluiced through those pages like sewage. Adams was declared a bugger, and Madison a spy, and Jefferson — what was it now? — was supposedly keeping a slave mistress!”

“Actually, about that—”

“So I will freely grant: our newborn electoral government was as shit-stained as any infant’s diaper. But something has changed, Nicholas. The Internet has supercharged the gossip pages. Weaponized them. These low-minded rags are like those smallpox-infected blankets we once gave the Indians. The japes and jeers of old now form permanent lesions. And American politics has become gravely disfigured as a result.”

I nodded.

“Let me tell you a story. In confidence.” He arched his great white brows. “I know I can trust you.”

“Of course.”

“About a year and a half ago, one evening, I had a few drinks with some Senate colleagues. Right here, in fact. Maybe I had a few too many. Well, there’s no maybe about it, I had a few too many. I was driving back to my house on Foxhall Road, and I may have gone through a red light, though I still maintain it was yellow. And I was pulled over by the police, who wanted to know if I’d been drinking.”

“Was Congress in session?” I asked.

“Ah, very good. Unfortunately not.”

It’s a little-known fact that members of Congress cannot be arrested or detained while Congress is in session, except for treason or felony. “I told him who I was, and he said, ‘Shit,’ and he made a call. And after a long while he got out and told me to get into his cruiser and he took me home. And that was that, except for a nasty hangover. We managed to keep it quiet. Well, a few months after that, my office got a call from a reporter at Slander Sheet. Somehow they’d found out about the incident, and they were threatening to publish a story. You can imagine we went into something of a panic. What do you do? How do you induce them not to publish? Back in the day, if it was The Washington Post, I’d call Ben Bradlee, and we’d do some horse trading. I’d offer him an exclusive on something... A splash more, Nicholas?” He poured himself another few fingers of bourbon.

I shook my head. “I’m good.”

“But Slander Sheet is a new creature entirely. Who owns it? Who calls the shots? The editor in chief is a loathsome little toad named Julian Gunn, but he’s not the owner. And he doesn’t exactly play ball. My aides tried to negotiate with him, but no dice. So I called this Julian Gunn myself and said to him, ‘Look, what can we do here? Surely your readers don’t care about some antiquated senator from Massachusetts and what he does in his off hours!’ I promised him an exclusive, I offered him special access, but he wasn’t interested in any of that.”

“He wanted dirt,” I said.

“Exactly. Anything personal on the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, what have you. He wanted dirt, and he wasn’t going to settle.”

“You gave him something, I assume, because I never saw the drunk-driving story.”

Brennan bowed his head. A line of sweat beads had broken out across his forehead. “I did something I regret to this day.”

I nodded sympathetically and waited. He looked genuinely agonized.

“I gave them dirt. I gave them Steve Frazier.”

“The congressman?”

“Former.” He nodded. “And former friend.” Representative Steve Frazier was a powerful conservative congressman from upstate New York who’d recently resigned after Slander Sheet had published a story revealing that, in the course of some rocky divorce proceedings, his wife had filed a domestic violence complaint against him, which she later rescinded. “Someone in my office had learned about the allegation from someone in Frazier’s office. But I gave it to them. I gave them Steve Frazier’s head on a platter. Really, I traded my head for his. So that’s why I’m still here and Steve is gone.”

“But there’s a difference,” I said, “between your drunk-driving incident and the Claflin story. The DUI story was true. Whereas this thing about Justice Claflin is a lie.”

He was quiet for a long time. “Let me refresh your drink,” he said. I offered him my glass this time, just to be sociable. He poured some more into my glass and then his own.

“Gideon and Claflin—” I began.

“Good men. A real partnership.”

“How so?”

“Well, Jerry Claflin is sort of Gideon’s protégé.”

“I figured.”

“I know I get all the credit for pushing his confirmation through the Senate, but the plain truth is, it was Gideon who greased the wheels behind the scenes. Prepared him for the big-time oppo that hits any candidate for the high court.” By “oppo,” he meant opposition research. “Which was a sort of passing of the baton, you might say, because back in the days when Gideon’s name was bounced around for the court — he’s too old at this point — Jerry played that role. He was Gideon’s cornerman, his defender and confidant. You see, the thing about Gideon and Claflin — their relationship is all about loyalty. In both directions. In a town where loyalty is as scarce as spotted owls.”

I nodded slowly, taking it in.

“Jerry Claflin is a deeply honorable man,” Brennan went on. “Perhaps a bit of a stickler, to my taste. But a brilliant jurist. You know, I’m sure, about his contribution to mens rea law.”

“Mens rea? I forget...”

“Criminal intent. Literally, ‘guilty mind.’”

“Right.”

“It matters whether the defendant intended to commit the crime. What the defendant meant to do. Anyway, Jerry will always be celebrated for clarifying the vexed ‘conditional intent’ problem of mens rea. Adam Liptak in the Times compared his decision in Hagedorn to ‘a bed with hospital corners and sheets tucked so tight you could bounce a coin off them.’” He chuckled with pleasure.

“I didn’t know.”

“But this story is just scurrilous, and it will damage him. As Virgil tells us in The Aeneid, fama, malum qua non aliud velocius ullum. There is no evil swifter than a rumor.”

“So who’s trying to destroy him?” I said. “Who has the animus and the resources to do something like this?”

“The proper question is, who’s driving the story? Is it a plant by someone angry about one of the court’s decisions, and Slander Sheet is innocent? Or did Slander Sheet initiate the attack?”

I nodded again. “If it originated with Slander Sheet, do you think it was political?”

“Here’s the thing, Nicholas. Most of the time, owners of magazines and newspapers don’t hide their ownership. They want to be known as the owners, right? They want to be courted and flattered. The fact that we don’t know who really owns Slander Sheet tells me it may not be someone with a political agenda. If you look at the pattern of their hit jobs, I’m not sure there’s a political slant. They came after me, and I’m a liberal, of course. In my place they took down Steve Frazier, who’s as right-wing as they come. Then again, maybe there’s a subtle figure in the carpet. Hard to say.”

“So who benefits from the destruction of Jeremiah Claflin’s career?”

“Ah. That old shopworn phrase cui bono — who benefits? And I’ll tell you the God’s honest truth. I don’t have the slightest idea. It’s a goddamned mystery.”

I got up. I had more work to do that night. “Can I give you a ride home?”

“Don’t worry,” said the senator. “I have a driver now.”