“That’s it?” he asks.
I nod. “That’s it.”
“I’m not missing anything?”
“Nope.”
“Why do you care about that?” he asks.
“Hike, you don’t have a dog, right?”
“No way. I’d wind up with the mange, and I’d break out in rash pimples, filled with pus. I hate pus.”
“Really?” I asked. “I love pus. But the thing is, him owning Tara creates sort of a curiosity, like a bond in some way. It’s like if you were married, and you met your wife’s first husband, you’d be curious, right?”
“No.”
Hike has a law degree from Yale, and an M.B.A. from Harvard, but curiosity is not his thing. He figures that the more he finds out about something, the more depressed it will make him. He’s probably right.
Once we get to the county jail, it takes about twenty minutes to get through security, and we spend another twenty waiting in a small visiting attorneys room for Galloway to be brought in.
I’ve seen him on television a couple of times, but he looks taller and thinner in person. He also wasn’t handcuffed in those TV appearances, but he certainly is now.
“Mr. Carpenter, I’m sorry about this,” is the first thing he says.
“About what?”
“My wife asking you to come down here. I didn’t want her to do that.”
“She’s trying to help you,” I say. “This is my associate, Eddie Lynch.”
“Hike,” is how he corrects me. “How’s the food here?”
Galloway shrugs. “It’s okay.”
“Watch out for bugs in the salad. I accidentally ate a couple of bugs once, I think at a rest stop off the Jersey Turnpike. They wound up taking a stand in my gut; I couldn’t get rid of them. They turned my intestines into the goddamn Alamo.”
“Thanks for sharing that, Hike,” I say, and then turn back to Galloway. “So what can I do for you?”
“Not much.”
“Do you have an attorney?” I ask.
“They assigned the public defender to me for the purposes of the arraignment. He seemed to handle it well enough.”
The sense I get from Galloway is very different from every other recently arrested person I have ever met, and I’ve met a lot of them. Usually they are afraid, especially those who’ve been arrested for the first time. They don’t know what is ahead of them, but they know it’s going to be awful.
Some of them, the more experienced ones, are angry. Angry at themselves for getting caught, and angry at the authorities for catching them.
A lot of people claim to be able to judge someone’s emotional state by looking in their eyes. I don’t make eye contact, so it’s a talent I’ve never perfected. When I talk to people, I generally look at their mouth, so while I can’t judge emotions, I’m pretty good at identifying cavities.
But there is no mistaking the vibes that Noah Galloway is giving off. He is tired, maybe even a little relieved, and wearily resigned to his fate. It’s depressing, and being in a room with Galloway and Hike, in a prison no less, is about as dreary as it gets.
I want to get out of here as fast as possible, so I quickly make a verbal agreement with Galloway that, for the sum of one dollar, Hike and I will serve as his lawyers for the next two hours. I’m hoping that two hours from now I’ll be home walking Tara, but I use it as an outside amount of time. Galloway has no money on him, so I accept his promise to pay. We do all this so that anything he tells us will be covered by attorney-client privilege, though he seems unconcerned by it either way.
Once that’s accomplished, he quickly tells us that he has always known that he set the fire, but that he has no recollection of doing so. It comes as no surprise, since Becky had said the exact same thing. But it still makes very little sense, so I ask him to explain his feelings of guilt.
“I had hit bottom,” he says. “Except I didn’t bounce off the bottom; I stuck to it. My entire world revolved around drugs, pretty much every dollar I had went to pay for them. And I didn’t have many dollars.
“I would have blackout periods, sometimes lasting for a day or more. When I would wake up, I had no idea what I had done, or how I had gotten to the physical place I was in. It was scary, but not as scary as you would think.”
“Why not?” Hike asks.
“Because I really didn’t care that much if I lived or died, so there was nothing to be scared of. And if I did live, dealing with blackouts was not important; getting drugs was the first and only priority.”
Galloway is saying all this in a fairly dispassionate way, with no apparent embarrassment, or emotion. It seems he has long ago come to terms with what he was in those days.
He continues. “So I woke up one day from a two-day binge, in my apartment. The drugs hadn’t worn off, not even close, but it was the pain that brought me out of it.”
“What kind of pain?”
“I had burns on both of my arms. Chemical burns.”
For the first time, I’m seeing emotion in Galloway as he gets closer to talking about the fire that killed all those people. I don’t want to ask him anything yet; I find that when a story is pouring out voluntarily, questions can be a distraction.
He goes on to describe how the people in one of the apartments on the first floor of the incinerated building were his suppliers, and how they had cut off his credit, little as it was, earlier in that week. Though he doesn’t know where, he says he must have gotten the drugs elsewhere, but they were likely of lower quality, and he reacted badly to them.
“I was terribly angry at them for doing that; I had been buying from them for over a year, and they knew how badly I needed it…” He shakes his head at the memory. “There’s no doubt I wanted them dead. I wanted them worse than dead.”
He goes silent for about twenty seconds. Silent time in a prison interview room is interminable, treadmill time zips along by comparison. I obviously need to get him back on track. “You mentioned chemical burns, as if that were significant,” I say.
He nods. “I have a graduate degree in chemical engineering. The mixture that was reported to have caused the fire is something I am very familiar with. Most people aren’t.”
I ask Galloway if he knows what the police uncovered so many years after the fact to lead to his arrest, but he professes to have no idea.
“Whatever it was,” he says, “I feel glad it finally happened. It was long overdue.”
This is the kind of stuff they should include in the orientation.
That’s what Senator Ben Ryan thought about as he sat at the bar, and it brought a smile to his face. The rest of the night, he knew, would bring quite a few more smiles.
Incoming freshman members of Congress are subjected to long, boring meetings about what life in the halls of power is like, and how to successfully navigate this “new world.” The focus is on understanding the rules, whether they be legal, political, financial, or ethical, and dealing with the press and constituents.
That was all fine, and Ben had heard it, internalized it, and used it to his advantage in the eleven years since. But what he never learned back then, and which he felt should be required, was anything about places like Chumley’s.
It was his third time at Chumley’s, a bar in the lobby of the Newcastle Hotel in Amsterdam. Ben wasn’t staying at the Newcastle, he was staying at the much nicer Plaza Victoria, with the rest of the delegation. There was a meeting scheduled for the next morning at ten A.M. and he’d make it, but not by much.
The orientations, Ben felt, should have included long sessions on delegation trips, and the value of them. Not value to the government or the people, since most of them were boondoggles. But rather value to the elected representative, in this case none other than Ben himself. It had taken him a while, but he had learned where the value was, and how to find it.
The key was in getting on the right committee, and he had certainly accomplished that. He was the ranking minority member on the Europe subcommittee in the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs. It was aptly named,
