The Submission - Amy Waldman [84]
“I screwed up,” she said, as the waiter pulled her chair out, then tucked her into the table. “I apologize, Paul.”
“And I thought I was going to have to waterboard you to get the truth,” he said drily. “Would that all of our country’s information-gathering efforts went so smoothly.”
“I’m not wavering, though. She mischaracterized me. She kept trying to provoke me into saying I thought Khan should come clean.”
“So you, not just your friends, talked to her? Why the Post, of all places, Claire?”
“She told me she had information on Khan.”
Paul raised his eyebrows in surprise. “And?”
“He was in Afghanistan, Paul, and—”
“Yes, I know,” he said.
“You know? Why didn’t you say something to us?”
“Because it has no bearing. He went for his architecture firm. It’s perfectly legitimate, raised no flags.”
“That’s not what she—Alyssa Spier—said.”
“Then perhaps we should hire her in place of our security consultants. What did she say, exactly?”
“It’s—that he—there weren’t really details,” Claire said, and blushed, then seemed to blush at her blushing. She was now beautifully pink.
Paul, in vain, waited for more, then said, “Be careful, Claire. You’re an important player in this—among the most important—and people are going to try to manipulate you. Even more so now with this story suggesting you’re persuadable. It puts you in play.”
“Well, I’m not in play; I haven’t changed my position. I just needed to know if there was anything to know.”
“You can’t have it both ways.”
A plate of melon and prosciutto landed between them. Claire paused while the waiter bowed off.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“You can’t say people shouldn’t be suspicious of him just because he happens to be a Muslim, then have suspicions of your own.”
“I don’t have suspicions! I just want to know what I’m defending. It hasn’t been easy to have my position public. William has been picked on—it’s very upsetting.” Her agitation was evident; her pupils seemed to dilate.
“I’d still like to know how your support for Khan became public in the first place,” Paul said. “It was also Alyssa Spier who reported that, wasn’t it?”
“Paul, you don’t think I would have—”
“It’s hard to know what to think anymore.”
“That didn’t come from me. I’m fine with it being public but between us would have preferred that it wasn’t. It limited my room to maneuver. I think you let Lanny off too easily on the leaks,” she added provocatively.
He ignored this, took a bite of melon, and pushed the plate away.
“No appetite?” she asked, with a little too much surprise.
He tried to make light—“I’m too fat a target”—but he didn’t feel light. The House minority leader, also a presidential aspirant, had labeled the jury Islamist sympathizers and vowed to sponsor legislation to block the construction of Khan’s design. Geraldine Bitman’s response to this was hardly reassuring: “The danger to America isn’t just from jihadists,” she said. “It’s from the naïve impulse to privilege tolerance over all other values, including national security. Mohammad Khan has brought us face-to-face with our own vulnerability.” Paul was finding it ever harder to get his old friend on the phone.
The cacophony drowned out his repeated, and reasonable, attempts to point out that the jury had selected from anonymous entries. He prided himself on buffering his jurors from the onslaught, took the pressures on himself as evidence of his capacity to lead. But it was wearing. A flamboyant real estate mogul with a toupee and an inestimable fortune was vowing to sponsor his own memorial design competition, then underwrite construction of the winner, although