his office. I have traded in my blue jeans for the same charcoal suit I wore to the funeral, the only suit I happen to have brought with me to Washington, and one of only two I happen to own. I am early, so I window-shop. There is a jeweler in the lobby and a dealer in rare books on the corner, and I visit both, happy to be in a city so comfortable with its black middle class that I am not an object of suspicion in either establishment. In the jewelry store, I fight the temptation to buy Kimmer a small but budget-busting present-she has a weakness for diamonds, and I see a pair of earrings I know she would love. On the corner, I talk with the proprietor of the bookshop about a scarce pamphlet for which I have been searching, Bobby Fischer’s self-published account of his mistaken arrest for bank robbery, melodramatically entitled I Was Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse! I leave the owner my card; he promises to see what he can do. When I return to the lobby, Kimmer is already there, pointing at her watch and glaring at me. It is still three minutes of four, but one does not take the slightest chance of keeping Mallory Corcoran waiting. The great Mallory Corcoran does not wait.
Except that he does wait for Kimmer and me. Not only waits, but receives us with all the considerable charm he can muster. He comes out to the reception area himself, wearing no jacket, but, with crisp blue shirt and yellow club tie and yellow braces stretched over his substantial belly, kisses Kimmer’s cheek, shakes my hand formally, and leads us back to the enormous corner office, which, like most offices in the city, has views mainly of buildings across the street, but with a peek at the Washington Monument if you look at just the right angle. His desk is piled high with briefs and memoranda. It is one of the few desks in any law firm in the city with no computer in evidence. He leads us to a leather sofa, faced by two original Eames chairs, one of which he selects for himself. I marvel that it can hold him, but Mallory Corcoran, like many successful litigators, seems to have the trick of adjusting his weight to fit the situation. One of his three secretaries takes drink orders: tea for Uncle Mal and Kimmer, ginger ale for me. A tray of finger sandwiches materializes. We chat about the funeral and the weather and the press and the latest scandal on Capitol Hill. He tells us that a team of paralegals has packed all my father’s personal things and the firm will ship them wherever we specify; he asks if I want to take a last look at Oliver’s office, and I decline, not least because my wife is about to jump out of her skin.
Then we get down to business.
Uncle Mal begins by inviting a senior associate, a nervous woman he introduces as Cassie Meadows, to sit in and take notes. Kimmer is uneasy talking in the presence of a stranger, but Uncle Mal tells us to treat Meadows (as he calls her) like furniture. Not a very nice thing to say, and Meadows, a rail-thin denizen of the paler nation, blushes furiously, but I see his point: with so many people indicted for so many things in Washington these days, and so many indictments resting on vague contradictions in hazily remembered conversations, the great Mallory Corcoran wants a friendly witness in the room.
“Meadows is a hell of a litigator,” he tells us, as though we are about to go into court, “and she knows everybody worth knowing on the Hill.”
“I used to work for Senator Hatch,” she explains.
“And she was a Supreme Court law clerk and the top of her class at Columbia,” he enthuses, playing the usual Washington game of using resume power to bat away questions of trust. If she is this smart, he is saying, you have no business asking why she is sitting in. Then he adds the real point: “And, Kimberly, she’ll be working with me very closely on this matter. Everything I know, she’ll know.” Meaning that Mallory Corcoran, beyond this one meeting with us, will likely be too busy to help my wife out, so that she will be foisted off henceforth on an associate.
Kimmer stops resisting.
Uncle Mal is not the kind of man who is easily pinned down; nevertheless, the meeting goes well. He understands why we are here and he does almost all the talking. He asks Kimmer how her other meetings went, but barely listens to her answers. Kimmer has not had time to tell me much, but I gather she has not, so far, heard the answers she wants. The Senator, who gave her only fifteen minutes (with two aides in the room to prompt him), is firmly in Marc Hadley’s camp and kept telling her there will be other chances down the road; Ruthie Silverman was smooth and evasive; the civil rights lobbyist promised to try, but warned that the administration was unlikely to listen. Mallory Corcoran waves all of this away. What matters is who knows whom. He has his ear firmly to the ground, he says, for he loves cliches, rolling them grandly off his tongue so that his listeners will know he knows they know it is all an act. I wonder whether he will tell us about the skeleton that a cackling Jack Ziegler promised. Instead, Uncle Mal says that Marc Hadley is calling in all his markers, putting on a full-court press, pulling out all the stops-the metaphors go bumping into each other in fine Washington sound-bite fashion-and lots of my colleagues at the law school are helping him. “Probably to get rid of him,” Kimmer mutters, which I think might actually be true, but it is plain that she is upset.
Uncle Mal sees it too. He smiles broadly and shakes his head. Kimmer is not to worry, he says. Meadows can talk to people on the Hill, he explains, and his anorexic associate nods her head to show that she knows this is a command. The rest of it, says Uncle Mal, he will handle himself. Marc and his friends know some people, true, but- he thumps his chest-“Mallory Corcoran probably knows a few more people than Marc Hadley does,” which is exactly what Kimmer wants to hear. He will make a few calls, Uncle Mal assures us, which means he will talk to the President and, more important, the White House Counsel, Ruthie’s boss, who will make the final recommendation, and happens to be a former partner in the firm. Uncle Mal does not promise to lobby for Kimmer’s candidacy, but he does say he will nose around and find out what is going on, which often amounts to the same thing; for, in the mirror maze of the federal appointments process, sometimes what matters most is having the right person ask the right questions. All of this, he says, should be considered his gift to us, because of the respect in which he held my father-which means, of course, that he will expect us to pay him back without hesitation should he ever ask.
Kimmer by this time is beaming-she is no poker player, my brilliant wife-but I know Uncle Mal is not that easy. When he has us sufficiently awed by his munificence, he adjusts his cuffs and then, somehow contriving to look us both in the eye at the same time, folds his hands and asks what is, in contemporary Washington, the one question that really matters: “Is there anything in your background, Kimberly, anything at all, or yours, Talcott, that, were it to become public knowledge, would embarrass the President, or you?” Or me? is the unspoken but clearly implied third term in the series: Embarrass me and you will never, ever be able to count on the firm again.
“Nothing,” says Kimmer, so quickly that we both look at her in astonishment.
“You’re absolutely sure?” asks the great Mallory Corcoran.
“Absolutely.”
She slips off her glasses and offers her most dazzling smile, which turns most men into fawning sycophants, and invariably devastates me, on the rare occasions that she bothers to try. It is wasted. Uncle Mal has weathered smiles from the world’s leading experts. He raises an eyebrow at my wife and then turns to me. Kimmer grabs my hand and shoots me a glance. This seems unwise: does she think he will overlook it?
“Talcott?” he inquires.
“Well,” I begin. Kimmer squeezes desperately. Surely I would not mention, in front of Uncle Mal and this total stranger… surely. ..
“Misha,” she murmurs, casting her eyes toward Meadows, who, obviously bored, is staring into space. She has written perhaps two sentences on her pad.
But my wife has no need to worry, for her infidelities are not on my mind. “Well, there is one thing bothering me,” I admit. Then I tell them about this morning’s visit from the FBI. As I lay out the details, I can feel Kimmer growing distant and annoyed… and worried. She returns my hand.
Uncle Mal interrupts.
“Did they really say that if you didn’t talk to them about Jack Ziegler it could hurt your wife’s chances?”
“Yes.”
“Those bastards,” he says, but softly, leaning back and shaking his head. Then he picks up one of the four telephones scattered around the room and stabs a button with a sausagey finger. “Grace, get me the Attorney General. If he’s not available, the deputy. It’s urgent.” He hangs up. “We’ll get to the bottom of this, oh, yes.” He turns to Meadows. “Get me a copy of the regs governing FBI interviews with witnesses.”
“You mean now?” she asks, startled out of some private reverie.
“No, next week. Of course now. Go.”
She scurries from the room, still clutching her notepad. I see at once-and I assume Meadows does too-that Uncle Mal does not want her to be around for what is coming next. What I do not see is why. Nor is Mallory Corcoran about to enlighten us. Instead, he takes us on a side trip: “Oh, Tal, by the way, I turned on the television the other night, and who do you think I saw? Your brother.” And he is off, describing Addison’s appearance on The
