Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

The Richard she was watching on television came across as unflappable. He wasn’t just comfortable in his skin, he inhabited it with an undeniable confidence. It wouldn’t bother him to see one of Cadence’s ex-boyfriends on television. She’d never known him to lose his composure, not on television and not on the phone with attorneys and producers and editorial boards and the other random public people that populated his contacts, and certainly not with her. He could change the oil in his own car, break apart a fifty-year-old faucet to replace its cartridge and washer, and pair a bottle of wine both reasonable and right for the occasion with almost any of the whimsical foods that she’d chosen to order.

She sat fidgeting with her hair and decided to come clean. “He’s the lawyer I told you about. The guy I was seeing.” She wondered if seeing Richard on television had changed the preconceptions Chadley must have had. Lawyers by definition existed as older, well groomed, wealthy. Richard looked that way on television.

Chadley said, “‘Seeing.’ As in ‘dated.’ As in the past tense?” A disembodied voice coming from the bathroom, his tone flat and matter-of-fact, until it cracked and the end of his sentence rose like a question.

“We’re not going to have this conversation now,” Cadence said.

“Just when are we going to have it? One of those nights when I call at two in the morning and you don’t answer? Or when I get off a plane to find a message that says you can’t see me Saturday night, but maybe we can squeeze in brunch Sunday morning?”

“I’m not sure we’re ever going to have that conversation. What’s the point? We’ve had a good thing here, but that’s just what it is. A thing.” Cadence gathered clothes from the floor, more from the foot of the bed. She was proud of herself for resisting the urge to use the word temporary.

“And what do you have with him? Is that a thing?”

“A complicated thing. I don’t have to explain it.”

“It is complicated, or it was complicated?”

Chadley moved back to the bed and attempted to rub Cadence’s shoulders. Cadence shook off his touch and went to the closet and began depositing her clothes in an overnight bag. “He’s been in the past tense for about two months. That’s how long it’s been since I’ve seen him. I called him one night at two in the morning and hung up. I’m just not sure that he isn’t in the present tense, or the future tense too. It’s complicated.”

Chadley lowered his head, sulking. “I guess that means it is, as opposed to it was. ”

“I’m heading to the airport. We can share a cab if you want,” she said as she zippered her bag shut. “You sound more like a fucking lawyer than he does.”

THE NETWORK cut to a tease for the next game, a sportscaster inviting viewers to the granddaddy of them all. When they came back from commercial, the anchor read a one-minute summary of the underground newspaper and its aftermath. “Richard MacMurray, I’m asking: what’s a fair punishment for these problem students?”

Richard’s media training had taught him to reject the premise of the question. Somehow, when politicians did it, people got irritated, but anyone who hadn’t stood for election could get away with it routinely. He stuck to his talking points. “The word punishment suggests that these boys did something wrong when they didn’t. They’re exactly the kind of students you want in honors journalism. Their heroes are Murrow and Cronkite, Woodward and Bernstein. But it doesn’t help anyone when the principal, who is white, goes on the local news and calls two African American high school seniors uppity. Any reasonable person knows that at best, that’s a poor choice of words, and at worst, it’s a code word, a slur.”

The congressman sat forward. “This is the same argument he gives anytime he’s wrong. Anyone who doesn’t want to sanction pornography is suddenly a Nazi. And let’s be clear. What these kids put out is pornography. But I should have expected that, since your guest here makes his living defending the indefensible.”

And that’s when Richard knew he had the congressman; he’d made it personal, and with Richard, the argument was always about a theology of freedom, the right of a true American to be left alone, especially by assholes. “I love the fact that a member of Congress thinks that the First Amendment is indefensible. You took an oath to defend that right, Congressman Bickley. To defend the entire Constitution, not just the parts you like that week. Those Founding Fathers you are so fond of quoting had enough wisdom to know that we didn’t need a Ministry of Propaganda. The right to speak freely doesn’t end once you pull into the school parking lot,” Richard said.

Then the stage manager jumped forward and gave Richard both hands up, a stop sign; he moved so abruptly that Richard and the congressman both reflexively checked the monitor to see if he was in the shot.

The anchor set it up. “We’re getting word of a breaking story out of Dallas. For more on that, we’ll go to headquarters in New York.”

A technician materialized in front of Richard, unclipped his microphone and battery pack.

From FBN News World Headquarters in New York.

Two words: Special report.

The monitors filled with the two-word graphic that even now in Richard MacMurray evoked irrational memories of childhood terror—in his short life, dead popes, dead presidents, celebrities dead in car crashes, millionaire philanthropists missing in their hot air balloons, assassinations and near misses, Three Mile Island, blindfolded hostages being paraded around the embassy compound, the sinking of an overcrowded ferry three-quarters of a world away, volcanoes that awakened after decades of percolating slumber, tornadoes that took aim at Walmarts and trailer parks, the sixty-plus-car pileup on a fog-shrouded interstate, car bombings in Gaza, the springtime Mississippi creeping malevolently past its banks, that one summer when so many young blond girls disappeared into the teeth of evil, and now, according to the chatter in Richard’s earpiece, the sudden disappearance from radar of a commercial flight. Special report . The two words triggered in Richard an immediate reaction: fear.

Special report. The first time Richard remembered hearing those words, they’d been about his father.

It was the disillusioned autumn of 1978, the president begging us to drive fifty-five and turn the heat down to sixty-eight, the shah of Iran about to wander the globe in search of the Western miracle of chemotherapy. Ron Guidry of the Yankees had just picked up the Cy Young Award for his one miraculous season.

Lew MacMurray was the chief of staff to a member of Congress, and one morning he walked into a Rayburn Building anteroom to find a group of parents from San Mateo waiting patiently, hoping they might convince their congressman to investigate just what had happened to their daughters. Two families telling the same story: she’d once been the shining light of their family, they said, and now was off in the Guyanan jungle in the grip of some Svengali.

They’d seen news footage of the Reverend Jim Jones peering over the dark lenses of his Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses, the kind favored by state troopers. He kept telling the children how the time would soon come for the dispensation of judgment. These parents had written letters, epistles of heartbreak, but the congressman could not understand how this was a governmental matter and shuffled the letters off to Lew, told him to make it go away. And Lew picked up the case. The parents told him there had been reports: the minister was having sex with the children; it was more like a commune; they were growing weed; they were trying to create a master race; they were holding people against their will. The Reverend claimed they were building a utopia in the jungles of South America, and he’d begun to say some strange things; he was too fond of quoting Revelation, stories of horses carrying plagues, stories about the end of times. But in his correspondence with congressional investigators, the Reverend was surprisingly lucid, inviting them to come on a fact-finding visit to the plantation—a thousand Californians living a simple agrarian life in the Guyanan jungle, raising their own livestock and growing their own vegetables, weaving rope and fabric out of the hemp they grew. They hadn’t given up the comforts of home entirely, the Reverend said; a plane came in from the States once a week with mail, toilet paper, magazines, and Hershey bars.