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anything….”
    She stopped him with a look, a slight,
enigmatic smile that seemed to acknowledge the awkward futility of
saying anything with words. She bent toward him. “Stay. Don’t go. I
have to see you.”
    She whispered an instruction to a young man
standing just behind her, and looked again at Hart to let him know
that, whatever she wanted to see him about, it was important. Then
she was taking the hand of someone else, and, in that way she had,
making them feel that they were the one she had been waiting all
the while to see.
    “This way, Senator,” said the aide as he led
Hart out of the room and down a long corridor. The house was a
labyrinth, hallways that seemed to turn left and turn right,
hallways that seemed to turn back on themselves; stairways that
spiraled somewhere out of sight and that, from the look of them,
had seldom been used in the hundred years since the house was first
built. They passed a dozen white varnished doors, all of them shut
and probably locked, like the vacant rooms in some grand decayed
hotel that were only opened when someone ventured in to clean and
air them out. After making at least three different turns, they
climbed a narrow back staircase to the second floor. Hart was shown
to a suite of rooms where, he was told, Mrs. Constable would join
him as soon as she could.
    “She asked me to tell you,” said her aide,
“that it’s a matter of some urgency.” He paused as if he wanted to
be absolutely certain he did not forget even the smallest part of
what he was supposed to do. “She wouldn’t ask you to wait like this
if it wasn’t.”
    It seemed odd, once he was left alone and had
time to think about it, that he had been asked to wait here, this
far away from the main part of the house. He was in a sitting room,
richly furnished with a sofa and two easy chairs arranged in front
of a marble fireplace. Through an open doorway, he could see a
large bedroom with heavy drapes drawn across the windows. A second
doorway led to a book lined study. Restless, and with nothing else
to do, Hart pulled a leather bound volume off a shelf. The pages
had not been cut. He pulled down another and discovered the same
thing. Hundreds of burnished leather bound books, the pride of any
collector, some of the books hundreds of years old, and none of
them ever read. They were like the furniture in a roped off room,
there to be seen and never used. Hart wanted to laugh. It was
Robert Constable all over again, life as a magician’s trick, the
illusion of things that never were.
    The drapes were closed in this room as well,
and Hart, who did not like dark places, pulled them open. To his
astonishment, he found himself staring down onto the backyard lawn
and the circling crowd that had left the house and gathered
outside. For all the twists and turnings that he had been made to
follow, Hart was just one floor above where he had started.
Whatever Madelaine Constable wanted with him, she seemed strangely
intent on making certain no one else knew about it.
    A few minutes went by, and then a few more.
Hart paced back and forth, wondering how much longer he would have
to wait. He looked at the long rows of priceless, unread books and
the desk on which, instead of pen and paper, were a number of
framed photographs, each of them a different size. He walked over
to get a closer look. All of the pictures were of Madelaine
Constable, but never alone, always with someone else: a friend, a
relative; photographs taken at ski resorts and tropical islands,
photographs taken at different periods of her life; a history, as
it were, of life outside of Washington and the usual corridors of
power, and not one of the pictures a picture of her with her
husband. It was as if Robert Constable had never existed; or,
rather, that her time with him had been a public property, an
exploitable advantage, something she had not allowed to intrude
into what she had had of a private, personal life.
    There was a soft, whirring sound