Lovers and Liars Trilogy (51 page)

“Maybe he’s here to play the proud paterfamilias. John Hawthorne’s the guest speaker, after all. It’s a pretty big occasion.”

“This?” Stein gave a dismissive gesture. “Hawthorne makes three speeches a week at equally prestigious gatherings. This is no big deal for him. Anyway”—he gave Gini a glance—“you watch. Hawthorne’s a good after-dinner speaker. He’ll have them eating out of his hand.”

“This audience?” Gini looked around her doubtfully. “So many journalists, so many media people? Not the easiest house to play.”

“Wait and see.” Stein paused while a waiter removed their first-course plates, and a second waiter bent between them to serve wine. Stein gestured to their wineglasses and smiled. “Call me cynical if you like, but one thing I’ve always noticed about any dinner where Hawthorne has to make a speech—you get very good wine. And plenty of it. Far more than usual. Try that claret, and you’ll see what I mean.”

Gini did so. The claret was excellent. She smiled. “Oh, come
on.
John Hawthorne isn’t even the host tonight….”

“Okay, you don’t believe me? Watch this.” He picked up his claret glass. “At most of these dinners—this many people, the waiters under pressure—they put the bottles on the table, right? So the guests can serve themselves. The standard ratio for a table like this—eight people—is four bottles initially, if you’re very lucky, five.” Gini looked at the bottles flanking the flower arrangement in the center of the table. There were eight of them. “Now, watch this.” Stein drank the claret in his glass. He put the glass back on the table but made no move toward the bottles. “I give it thirty seconds,” he said in a dry way. “I made a study of this a few years ago, when I followed Hawthorne on the campaign trail. I’m thinking of publishing it.” He smiled. “A time and motion study. How to win friends and influence people…Ah.”

The wine waiter had materialized at his side. He refilled Stein’s glass, and a couple of others at the table. He replaced the empty bottle with a full one.

“Right to the second,” Gini said.

“There you are. Now you know one of the reasons John Hawthorne’s speeches always go so well at these occasions. Attention to the tiny details.” He shrugged. “But then, that’s the mark of the man.”

“So tell me,” Gini said. “What’s John Hawthorne like on the campaign trail? Which of his campaigns did you cover?”

“Two. I covered his first senatorial campaign—that’s, what, around sixteen years ago. Then I covered his final one, when it looked like he’d be going for the Democratic candidacy in ninety-two. I put in the hours on the Learjet. And I can tell you his methods hadn’t changed. They’re impressive—and so is the stamina. John Hawthorne can get by on three hours sleep a night, I swear it. I was punch-drunk after three days of his schedule. But not him. Dawn at some godforsaken airstrip someplace, and Hawthorne’s there, fresh as a daisy, with the aides and the lists—all fired up and ready to go.”

Gini waited while the waiters served the second course. She glanced at Stein. “Lists?” she said.

“Local worthies, factory officials, fund-raisers, women’s groups, party workers, big wheels in the local police department…” Stein shrugged. “Whoever he’s meeting that day. They’re graded for him, by the aides. Level five get five minutes of his time, and—”

“—And level one gets only one minute?”

Stein laughed. “Sure, but a man like Hawthorne can clinch a vote in thirty seconds—that’s what the aides liked to say. The right handshake, the right questions, little bursts of charm. Hawthorne’s always briefed, always primed.”

“So what kind of questions would those be? It can’t be that easy, surely….”

“Listen,” Stein said, “Hawthorne never meets anyone of any use to him without knowing beforehand whether he’s met them before, how many kids they have, which football team they support, whether they have a dog or a cat, hell—what brand of cereal they have at breakfast, for all I know. It’s all printed out for him, by the aides. Hawthorne has an incredible memory. Best I’ve ever seen. He learns it on the way there, in the car or the plane. It works on rednecks and bank presidents. The aides call it CTC.”

“CTC?”

“Channeling the charm.”

There was a brief silence. Gini considered this. She ate a little of the food, which was excellent, and avoided the wine. Irrespective of other events, she was beginning to see that she had been wrong about her conversation with Hawthorne at Mary’s, and Pascal right.
CTC,
she thought.
And I fell for it too.

Jason Stein had turned to talk to the woman on the other side of him; Nicholas Jenkins continued to cold-shoulder her. She did not mind this isolation, which at least gave her time to think. When the waiters removed their plates and began to serve dessert, Jason Stein turned back to her with a smile.

“So, you have a particular reason to be interested in Hawthorne?” he asked.

“No. No. Politicians interest me as a species, that’s all. I like to work out how they operate, what makes them run.” She paused, looking at Stein, whom she knew to be an excellent journalist, well informed, smart. “Do you think he’s really given up on U.S. politics now?” she asked. “You think he’ll ever try for a comeback, further down the road?”

Stein shrugged. “Hard to say. A year ago, when he accepted me posting here, I thought he’d thrown in the towel. God alone knows why—I mean, it was way out of character. But recently, I’ve heard a rumor or two, just straws in the wind. Hawthorne always had very powerful backers, you know, in the Democratic Party and elsewhere. There’s a whole lot of very influential people, and pressure groups—and from what I hear, Hawthorne’s still their favorite son.” He smiled. “It depends. I don’t have a crystal ball. But if you asked me, would I rule Hawthorne out as a future presidential candidate, even as president, I’d have to say no.”

“I guess you’re not going to elaborate on those rumors?” Gini gave him a sidelong glance.

Stein smiled. “You’re damn right, I’m not. Not to a reporter on the
News,
even if she is Sam Hunter’s daughter. Look at it this way, Genevieve”—he nodded toward the head table—“the man’s forty-seven. He looks thirty-seven. He’ll stay here in London how long? Maybe two, at most three years. I’d give it two. Then, before you know it, he’s back in the States, rebuilding that political base of his. Meantime, in any case, he can rely on the Magus. I will tell you one thing. I hear—and I hear it from very good sources—that old S. S.
never
gave up. This is a blip as far as he’s concerned. Back home he’s busy wheeling and dealing the way he always was. He’ll keep John Hawthorne’s seat nice and warm.”

Gini glanced across at Hawthorne’s father. He was speaking, she saw, to Frank Romero again. She turned to Stein. “You see that guy over there, the man talking to Hawthorne’s father?”

“I see him, sure.”

“He’s one of Hawthorne’s security people?”

“He’s one of his
father’s
security people, that I do know.” Stein’s expression hardened. “I forget his name, but I know him. He goes way back. He was always around, drafted by the father, making sure that when John Hawthorne was campaigning, he stayed on the straight and narrow. Oh, and making sure he didn’t get killed, of course. That too. S. S. knows how to protect his investments.”

“You mean that?” Gini stared at him. “You mean the father hired the bodyguards—”

“—And they doubled as Daddy’s spies?” Stein grinned. “Sure.” He hesitated, then frowned. “Way back, in the early days, before John Hawthorne became as tight-lipped as he is now, he used to talk about it. Joke about it even, late at night, after a day’s campaigning, over a drink or two. His version was, the father was just a tad overprotective, like he wired his son’s room at Yale, had his lady friends investigated, that kind of thing…”

“You’re joking. Hawthorne himself talked about that?”

“Sure. I heard him myself, once or twice. Like I say, he’d pretend to be amused, tell the story in this dry, droll kind of way. Make light of it.” Stein shrugged. “He’s an interesting man, Hawthorne. A complex man. What I said earlier—I didn’t mean to belittle him. He’s tough now, hard—that’s inevitable. But I used to like him.”

“And you don’t like him now?”

“I don’t like his politics, that’s for sure. Do you?” He gave her a sharp glance.

Gini said, “You mean, all things to all men?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. But that’s what brings in the votes, Genevieve,
and
the donations.” He began to count off items on his fingers. “Pro-civil rights, so he brings in the black vote, the Latinos. Pro-Israel, a real Zionist in public but an anti-Semite at home. No Jews at
his
dining room table. No blacks or Latinos either, I can tell you. Hell.” Stein gave an almost angry shrug, and broke off. “So, he’s not a man of principle. He could have been, but he isn’t. So, he’s a politician. What’s new?”

“Then it’s not just his politics? You don’t like the man?”

“I never met a politician I did like.” Stein grinned. “Snakes in the grass, every goddamn one of them.”

He leaned back in his chair. Coffee was being served, and liqueurs. Stein took one of the cigars being offered around the table, as did Jenkins. Through a haze of aromatic smoke, Gini saw the microphones being positioned. The full television lighting was switched on.

Lord Melrose stood and began his speech of introduction. It was elegant but overlong. He had not, Gini thought, made Hawthorne’s task as main speaker any easier. The audience might be well oiled, but there was restlessness in the room.

As John Hawthorne rose to his feet, the cameraman moved into position. Hawthorne waited until there was silence. Then he gave an easy smile, a Hollywood smile, and he threw the switch. Gini could sense him do it, just as he had done briefly at Mary’s party. Whatever charisma was, that elusive, hard-to-define quality, Hawthorne had it. She could feel its force in the room.

“Privacy and the press…” Hawthorne looked around his audience. “What an opportunity. Here I am, and I can give you my views, secure in the knowledge that when I get to the end, I won’t have to take one single question….” His tone had become dry. “And let me tell you, when facing the British press corps, that’s very good to know….”

It was perfectly judged, Gini thought. The delivery was good, the timing was good, the smile was good—and he got the response he wanted. There was a ripple of amusement from the audience, and a collective relaxation. The moment of tension that always precedes any speech had been quickly overcome. Having relaxed his audience, Hawthorne then proceeded to wind them in.

He spoke without notes, clearly and concisely. He kept his speech light initially, then turning to the central question—the freedom of the press versus the protection of the individual—he began to take a tougher approach. He put the case for each side with scrupulous exactitude, like an attorney. Gini waited to see which side he would come down on. With this audience there could be no fudging of the issues: Would he take the liberal or the conservative line?

Pausing, Hawthorne fixed his audience with a cool blue stare. “Several years ago now,” he continued, “when I was still a United States senator, I made a long tour of Middle Eastern Arab states—something I guess I couldn’t risk now. While I was out there, I learned firsthand what it was like to live in a society where ordinary men and women had no access to the truth. Where newspapers and television had been corralled by the state. Where journalists like yourselves had to print and promulgate propaganda, or risk imprisonment and death.” His blue gaze raked the room.

“I’ll say this—I was probably naive. I had every reason to understand what those societies were like, and how they operated—I could read Western newspapers, after all. But to read those accounts and actually to experience that kind of state propaganda were two very different things. I learned a lot from that trip, and one of the chief things I learned was fear. The techniques being used in those countries weren’t new ones, you see. They’d been perfected at the time of the Third Reich, in Nazi Germany. Fifty years later, when the cold war was ending, I could see propaganda methods first used by Joseph Goebbels. They had worked then—and they worked just as effectively, and just as damnably, right now.”

He paused, and gave his silent audience a long, cool look. “Now, of course, all of us here tonight are fortunate. I am, you are. We live in Western democracies. We have a free press. We can look back over our own recent history, and we can point specifically to historic changes we owe to those freedoms. That isn’t exaggeration. It isn’t hyperbole. I’m thinking about events such as Watergate. I’m thinking, in particular, about the Vietnam War, and the journalists who risked their lives to bring back the truth from a war zone. Those men and women changed America. They turned a whole nation around. And in the final analysis, it was they, and their influence, that brought an end to that war. Now”—he paused again, and lightened his tone—“I have to admit, all reporting isn’t of that magnitude—I feel that exposing the sexual peccadilloes of British cabinet ministers, or investigating the private lives of the monarchy, may not rank on quite the same scale as bringing home the truth about a war. When people say to me that kind of coverage is intrusive or morally wrong, I have to admit I have a certain sympathy with their view.” He smiled. “I’ve suffered press investigations in the past, I’ve had those lenses trained on me and I know exactly how unpleasant it can feel…. However”—his tone became serious again, and the smile disappeared—“I do believe this. Those of us who enjoy privilege, and those of us granted power—we
have
to remain accountable. For the public figure there can be no truly private life. That is the price paid. Politicians, presidents, and—yes—even princes, have to face press scrutiny. After all, if they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear. That”—he stabbed the air—“
that
is how we preserve a free society. And if we don’t like it, we can always go someplace where those in power are better protected.”

There was a ripple of response and Hawthorne cut it short. “So,” he continued, and Gini could see he was winding down now, “I believe we should all continue to fight for press freedom. We should oppose censorship. We should oppose other more insidious curbs, freedom of the press is the bedrock of democratic society—even when, for those on the receiving end, it feels like a bed of nails.”