Hillary

Chapter Twenty-Five

The message, delivered that morning by courier, could not have been more explicit. Jean Valette would call that night at eleven-thirty, that it was a matter of some urgency, and that she should be there. Hillary Constable knew she had to take the call, knew that she could not afford to get on the wrong side of Jean Valette, but the timing was all wrong. There was too much at stake, too many things that had to be done just right, to start worrying about the past. The president had been dead only a few weeks, and now the country had been informed that he had been murdered by a senator, the husband of a woman with whom he had been sleeping. She was not just walking a fine line; she was walking two of them at once. She was both the widow grieving for her dead husband and the victim of his infidelity; a woman who loved her husband and hated what he had done; a woman who while dealing with all of that was about to become the vice president of the United States. She had to convey an inner strength, the courage to confront death and betrayal and rise above them, forgive the injury and honor the memory of a man who, with all his faults, both she and the country had chosen. She practiced in the mirror a smile best suited to express both sadness and gratitude.

She could not say that she was excited that she was about to be named vice president, to take the post vacated by the man who had now taken her husband’s place; she could not say that she looked forward to next summer’s convention when she and Irwin Russell would be nominated to run in their own right for those two offices. She said instead that no one was better equipped than Irwin Russell to continue the work her husband had started and that she was glad to now have a chance to make some small contribution of her own.

They stood together in the Rose Garden on a sultry, sun-drenched afternoon, the new president and the woman whose name he was sending to the Hill for confirmation as the new vice president. Hundreds of reporters sat on folding chairs while the television cameras captured the event for the evening news. It was a formal announcement, a matter of public importance, done with dignity and respect. The president read his statement and the soon-to-be vice president made a brief reply. There was time for a few questions.

The questions were polite and mainly about process: How long would it take the House to act? Would there be hearings or, given the circumstances, would the House proceed directly to a vote? There was a tacit understanding that this was not the occasion to ask anything about the murder of Robert Constable or the sensational accusations made against the senator now on the run somewhere in Europe. One reporter did ask whether Russell had considered anyone else for the vice presidency, or whether “Mrs. Constable” had been his only choice.

During his long years in the Congress, Russell had been known as diligent, hard-working, and dull, but also, unlike many of his colleagues, modest and self-effacing. There was none of that now. He was confident, decisive, without any apparent doubts about anything.

“There was no one else. The choice was obvious. Hillary Constable changed the definition of first lady. No one knows more about the way government works. No one is more dedicated to public service. And let me add: No one cares more about others and less about herself. I think the record proves that,” he said in a way that by its very ambiguity reminded everyone of what she had gone through with her husband.

“I have a question for Mrs. Constable!” shouted a young reporter at the end of the first row. “Philip Carlyle of the New York Times. Do you intend to report the money that you and your husband received over the years from a financial institution in France, tens of millions of dollars from The Four Sisters?”

Hillary Constable stiffened, but only for an instant, and then she had the look of a woman used to being treated badly.

“I think you’re referring to certain charitable contributions made to one of the foundations established by my husband to provide assistance to people who need it,” she replied with a weary, and much put upon expression. “That has been reported every year, so far as I know, by the people responsible. I was not involved in any of that, so I could not say with complete certainty, but I believe that to be true.”

She turned away, but Carlyle was not finished.

“No, I’m talking about tens of millions of dollars paid into various accounts, money that benefited you directly. Do you have any comment?”

“You’ve obviously been misinformed.” She looked at him as if she had suddenly realized what he was saying. “You think my husband, who, whatever human faults he may have had, dedicated his life to this country, would have done something like that-taken money from someone? What kind of people do you think we are? You really ought to know what you’re talking about before you ask a question like that!”

“You deny it then?”

“Of course I deny it! I’ve never done anything like that in my life!”

Careful to get it down exactly the way she said it, Carlyle did not fail to notice that she had shifted ground and was now talking only about what she had done. Not that it mattered, given what he had learned.

“President Russell!” he shouted as he scribbled the last few words in his notebook. “Do you have any comment, anything you would like to say about The Four Sisters?”

If Russell heard the question, he ignored it. With a quick smile and a brief wave he thanked everyone and with Hillary Constable beside him walked toward the West Wing as if everything had gone just as planned. Privately, the president was furious.

“I thought this story died with your husband,” he said with a withering glance.

Hillary Constable ignored him. She looked around the Oval Office, noticing the changes. The photographs on the credenza were now pictures of Russell and his dowdy middle-aged wife, pictures of their children and their grandchildren, traditional family pictures instead of the endless gallery of famous and important people that Robert Constable had kept there to remind himself how far he had come from his hardscrabble beginnings in America’s heartland. Russell had not yet replaced the desk, the one that had been used by Theodore Roosevelt, the one that Constable had chosen to paint himself as less partisan than some of his immediate predecessors, the desk that seemed to give him tangible proof that he was as good, or could be as good, as the great ones had been.

“This ‘story,’ as you put it,” she replied finally, “is the only reason you’re sitting in that chair. I wouldn’t think you could have forgotten that.”

No one sat down in the Oval Office until they were first invited to do so, but Hillary did not think she needed anyone’s permission. She took a chair in front of the desk and began to remove her gloves.

“How much do you think he knows?” asked Russell. The lines in his forehead deepened with worry. “It seemed like he knew a lot. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Everything was supposed to be taken care of. Atwood said-”

“Atwood said!” cried Hillary angrily. “You’re really quite pathetic! You decide you want something, but you’re afraid to go get it. You spent too much of your life making deals. You should have stayed in Congress! You can’t compromise your way out of this! You knew what you were doing when you got involved, when you blackmailed your way onto the ticket four years ago.”

Russell’s face turned red. The veins in his temples throbbed.

“I did no such thing! If anything, it was the other way round. It was your idea-his idea-not mine!”

A dismissive smile spread across her face and stayed there, taunting him with her indifference to how he chose to remember things. He could rewrite the past any way he wished; what was important was what they had to do now.

“No one can prove anything, not if we keep our story straight. That reporter-Carlyle-maybe he learned something from Quentin Burdick, but all he has are questions. He doesn’t know anything.”

Russell was not so sure.

“Burdick may not have known anything either,” he said with a caustic glance. “And look what happened to Robert.”

They stared at each other, reluctant to say anything more about the murder that had led to this, a forced marriage of ambition that neither of them had wanted.

“None of this would have happened if it had not been for The Four Sisters. I tried to warn him. Even after it started, I tried to get him to stop. I told him there was too much to lose, that sooner or later someone would find out, but nothing was ever enough for him. He thought that nothing could touch him, that he was indestructible. And then, when the whole thing started to come undone, when that damn Burdick started asking questions, he was like some scared kid caught trying to steal something. He could have lied his way through it, but he was too much a coward for that. He would have told Burdick everything, and tried to blame it all on other people.” She looked straight at Russell. “But you won’t have a problem doing what you have to do, will you?”

Russell picked up the telephone.

“Will you send in Mr. Atwood.”

He turned back to Hillary.

“I think you’re right. No one is going to be much interested in something that may have happened between President Constable and some investment firm overseas. The only thing the public wants to know is when we’re going to catch the man responsible for his murder.”

A moment later, the door opened and Clarence Atwood stepped inside.

“Sit down,” said Russell, gesturing impatiently toward the chair next to the one Hillary was occupying. “What’s happened since I talked to you this morning?”

Atwood seemed nervous, ill at ease. His shoulders slouched forward; his jaw began to tighten. He looked from Russell to Hillary and then back to the president.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing, nothing at all? You don’t know anything about where he has disappeared?”

“He’s not in Paris…at least we don’t think he is.”

Russell glared at him. He had expected more than this.

“The FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service-all the resources of this government, and the help of other governments as well-and the best you can do is tell us that you don’t think he’s still in Paris?”

Atwood bent his lanky frame closer to the president.

“We have run into some problems with the French.”

“What kind of problems?” demanded Hillary. “There aren’t supposed to be any problems-remember? You knew how to take care of everything!”

Atwood’s head snapped around. There was open defiance in his eyes, challenging her to say what she meant. She stared right back, daring him to try to force her hand.

“What kind of problems?” asked Russell in a firm voice. “What do the French want?”

“They want to know what two men from our embassy were doing, whose authority they were acting on, when they broke into the apartment of our political attaché and killed him along with Austin Pearce.”

Russell and Hillary exchanged a worried glance and then looked at Atwood. Russell could barely speak.

“They’re convinced that Hart was not involved?”

“They know Hart was not involved. There was a witness. She was talking to Hart when the shooting started.”

“What have the French been told?” asked Hillary, her own voice suddenly weak and hollow.

“That they must have been acting on their own, but that we’re conducting an investigation to make sure.”

“Do they believe that?”

“No, Mrs. Constable, they don’t. They not only know that Hart was not involved, they know he tried to save Austin Pearce. They’ve started asking questions. They think that there must have been a reason why two men from the embassy-they know the functions they performed-killed Pearce and the other guy. They think it was because of what they had learned from Hart. They think that someone in the government-this government-arranged the murder of the president and is now trying to blame it on the senator.”

“The French can believe whatever the hell they want!” cried Hillary in a rage. “There’s nothing to link any of us to that! Who’s going to pay any attention to some vague suspicion of the French police?”

A bitter smile cut hard across Atwood’s crooked mouth.

“For one, that same reporter-Philip Carlyle-who was asking questions about The Four Sisters. He just got back from Paris, where he was spending time with the detective investigating Pearce’s murder.”

The president stood up, a sign that the meeting was over. There was only one thing he wanted to know.

“Can you control this?”

Atwood thought about it for a moment, and then nodded slowly.

“I’ll take care of it.”

Hillary and the president were left alone. For a long time, neither of them said anything.

“You didn’t know anything about your husband’s financial dealings,” Russell said presently. “You have no reason to think he ever did anything with this investment firm, The Four Sisters, or anyone else, that was not what it should have been. There were a number of contributors to the various foundations that the president established to do good works. Other people took care of that. You had your own work inside the White House, trying to help the people of this country.”

There was a hint of disapproval, regret that he could not be free of all this, in the way Russell looked at her as he summarized what would have to be her public position. His resentment, however, was nothing in comparison to hers.

“You don’t have to tell me how to handle this. I don’t recall that we ever asked you for your advice when you were my husband’s vice president.”

“It might have saved you some embarrassment if you had!” he shot back.

Her eyes went wild with anger.

“The only reason you’re sitting in that chair is because-!”

“But I am sitting in it, and there is nothing you can do about it now.” A smile full of malice twisted slowly across his mouth. “There never was anything you could do about it. Did you really think that once I took over, you could run against me for the nomination?”

“I could have beaten you, and we both know it!” she cried, jutting out her chin.

The smile on Russell’s face deepened and took on another meaning, one they both understood.

“Yes, but you didn’t run, did you? The world would have found out the truth about you and The Four Sisters, and a few other things besides. And what could you do?-Tell about me? I didn’t take anything like as much as you and Robert did; my involvement was minor compared to yours. Don’t look so upset. You’re going to be sitting here one day, or at least you’ll have your chance, just not as quickly as you had hoped. You’re about to become vice president, next in line of succession.”

A strange look of cruelty and contempt gleamed in his eyes as he looked past her for a moment. He laughed silently as at some private joke.

“That means you get to go home every night and hope that when you wake up the first news you’ll have is that the president is dead. I should warn you, however, that with none of the careless habits of your reckless husband, I won’t be an easy victim should someone decide they can’t wait for the accidents of mortality. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to study the speech I’m scheduled to give this evening when I introduce you as the next vice president and tell how we propose to build on the foundation of our beloved predecessor.”

The president had his speech, and so did she. In front of a vast audience in the Kennedy Center she struck just the right chord: somber, serious, and, despite the tragedy of her husband’s death, still hopeful that the country could move forward, building on what Robert Constable had done. There was a moment when it all seemed too much for her. She had just finished telling them, all these people who had supported her husband in the past, how the night at the last convention, when Irwin Russell’s name had been placed in nomination for vice president, he had said to her that Russell was the one man who could take over and continue his legacy if anything ever happened to him. There was a catch in her voice; her lips trembled, a tear came to her eye. The audience rose as one and began to applaud, a long, somber tribute to the memory of her husband and to what she had been forced to endure. She flashed a brave smile and managed somehow to go on. Whatever else anyone might remember about those two speeches, they would remember that. Hillary was sure of it.

She knew then that what she had said earlier in the Oval Office was true: that Irwin Russell would have had no chance had she chosen to run against him, that the nomination, and the election, would have been hers for the asking. If it had not been for that damnable secret she would have been here tonight launching her campaign for the presidency instead of being forced into the second place part that, except for the title, she had been playing for the last seven years. Everyone was there to see her, not the accidental president no one had seriously thought would ever hold the office. They lined up, nearly all of them, almost three thousand men and women, waiting to tell her how much they loved her and how much they admired her courage.

She began to realize that it was not too late. She could become vice president, wait a few months, and then break with Russell over some made-up issue, announce that she did not have any choice, that she had promised her dead husband to complete his unfinished agenda, but that the president wanted to take the country in a different direction, one she could not in conscience follow. The country would have to decide. She would run for the presidency herself.

Why had not she thought of it before? Russell could not threaten her with exposure, not after he had vouched for her honesty and integrity by choosing her to become his own vice president. Some of his people might start rumors, but that was a game two could play.

Careful to maintain an air of reserve, she kept shaking hands, thanking each one for the kind and thoughtful things they had to say, promising to do everything in her power not to let them down. The line passed from her to the president, but she knew they had all come to see her, and he knew it, too. She could see it in his eyes, this sense that he was an afterthought, a necessary obligation, a price the crowd was willing to pay for the chance to first have a few moments with her.

“They all love you, Hillary,” said the president when it was finally over and they stood outside.

“They loved Robert,” she replied.

Russell’s smile suggested that they both knew the truth, knew that the crowd had loved Robert Constable only because they had not really known him. It also suggested something deeper, something that Hillary understood immediately: the crowd loved her for the same reason.

“I better go,” she remarked coldly. “I have a very long day tomorrow.”

“I’m sure they’ll all be busy now,” said the president as he turned and got into the limousine.

She watched the motorcade speed away and then, full of thoughts of her future, stepped into her own waiting car, and headed home. It was ten minutes past eleven. Her mood began to darken as she remembered the call she had to take in twenty minutes. Why was Jean Valette calling her, and why now, the night before the last piece would be in place for what she had been waiting for all her life?

Maybe it was nothing. Perhaps he just wanted to offer his own congratulations. Probably he wanted to remind her that he had always been their friend, her and Robert’s, and that he hoped he could in some manner be helpful in the future. That was it. Everyone wanted to remind you of their friendship once you had a position in which you could do something for them. Perhaps she ought to tell him that it might be best if they put things on hold for a while, that things were a little too delicate to do anything that might cause someone to start looking at what their relationship had been like before. Jean Valette would understand. He was too intelligent not to realize the consequences of making a mistake at this point.

The house was cloaked in darkness. Two Secret Service agents escorted Hillary inside while several others took up their positions on the grounds. Though she was not yet vice president, as the former first lady, and the widow of a slain president, she had never stopped being under their protection. Leaving the two agents downstairs, she went up to the privacy of the second floor. She did not like coming back to an empty house. She was used to having people around, people who worked for her and shared her ambitions, people who were always full of ideas, eager, all of them, to be the first with the latest rumors or the latest news. She needed that, the constant noise, the constant attention, the sense of being in the center of things, but tonight she was all alone. Everyone who worked for her had been at the Kennedy Center, listening to her speech.

The study was pitch-black. She turned on the desk lamp and sat down. It was almost eleven-thirty; the call would come any minute. She glanced at the photographs that covered the desk, a chronicle of what now seemed ancient history, the times beyond remembering when she had last had the chance for what might have been a normal life. She wondered why she still kept them. She supposed it was to remind her of the price she had paid, and how that price had been so much greater than what she had originally imagined. She remembered what it had been like, when she was young and attractive and every man she met eager to have her, and how she had known even then that any one of them would be a better husband than Robert Constable. Knowing it, she had done it anyway, because Robert Constable was going to be president, and no one was going to be able to stop him. It seemed odd now, looking back, that she had never once doubted that extraordinary, improbable fact. She had known he was going to be president, and she had known that there was every chance he would make her life a living hell. She had hoped she might be wrong about that.

The clock struck eleven-thirty. She moistened her lips and began to rehearse in her mind what she was going to say. It was so quiet she could hear her own breath. A minute passed, and then another. She tapped her fingers softly on the desk’s leather top. Five minutes passed, then ten.

“Damn,” she muttered in frustration. “Five more minutes, that’s all I’m giving him.”

Suddenly, she felt a strange sensation, one she could not account for, a kind of warning, a premonition, that something was different, not quite right.

“I’m afraid Jean Valette won’t be calling tonight. I’ve come instead.”

She jumped to her feet, pointing into the darkness at the other side of the room, where from the chair in which he had been sitting Bobby Hart rose to greet her.