Balance of Power

    "More direct than you know, Mr. President. The provision wiping out gun lawsuits is retroactive. If it passes as part of the final bill, it will terminate lawsuits which have already been filed, even if they're ready for trial."

    Including Mary's, Kerry thought. "Then Fasano's sold out to the SSA."

    "True enough." Hampton's tone was grave. "And he's in a hurry, too. He already means to stall your gun safety legislation and try to pass this first."

    "He can't pass it this way," Kerry answered. "The restrictions on plaintiffs' lawyers are way too extreme. He can't get enough Democrats to survive a veto."

    "Agreed. But he's at least appearing to give an array of interests what they want. He's preparing for an all-out war, supported by a slew of business groups and the foot soldiers of the right. He clearly means to keep the gun provision in the final bill, and jam it through as a package."

    Turning, Kerry gazed at the twilit garden outside the Oval Office. "It's no time for gentility," he said. "We need to split corporate interests from the gun lobby, any way we can. Or, at a minimum, to divide the gun manufacturers and the SSA."

    "How do we accomplish that?"

    "I'll reflect on it, Chuck."

    But whether he liked it or not, Kerry already knew. His next call was to Lara.

TWELVE

Philadelphia. Frank Fasano's territory. Lara' s sixth city in as many days. Exhausted, she sat in her hotel suite, reading the mail dropped off for her by strangers, and which she had demanded to see.

    The last piece, a flat manila envelope, contained a photograph of skeletal corpses heaped in a pile at Auschwitz, a collage of decimated limbs and pale skin and vacant eyes. The note scrawled in one corner read, "This is what will happen once you disarm our country." The second photo in the envelope was taken from the videotape of the murders, with Lara's head superimposed on her mother's neck. In close-up the wound in Inez's throat was a jagged tear.

    Carefully, Lara placed the photographs in the hate pile for Peter Lake.

    She would be speaking soon, meeting with victims' families. That would help keep this bottomless hatred from driving her into a well of grief. Since her wedding, she had learned that grief must be managed.

    Beside the pile for Peter was a service tray with the remnants of a tuna sandwich and a glass of iced tea. As with the meals she had eaten, her first seven days on the road were a blur—press conferences, speeches, interviews, meetings with victims, sessions with sympathetic Republicans, an hour on Oprah Winfrey, visits to women's shelters. Five days before, reminded of the AIDS quilt, she had proposed a web site dedicated to all those lost to guns in the last twenty years, with photographs and brief descriptions of their lives. Already thirty thousand photographs had joined Inez, Joan and Marie in a cyberspace memorial, growing hour by hour. Last night's town meeting in Pittsburgh had run past midnight; Lara had stayed to answer every question, to hear every story of pain and loss.

    She was glad to be doing this. The cause was her mission, and forward motion was imperative. Every day took her farther from the moment of devastation until, she had to believe, a healing—perhaps so deep within her that at times she did not feel it—would bring her to that moment when, though forever changed, she would be herself again. She craved this as much for Kerry as for her.

    Every night they talked, no matter the hour, before she fell asleep. She missed him then, desperately. It reminded her of Kosovo, when she had thought she might never see him. But now, absent some terrible event, she knew that she would.

    Absent some terrible event.

    From their first meeting, she had felt his bone-deep fatalism, his sense that happiness might be fleeting, contingent. Then she had attributed it to the murder of James Kilcannon. Now she understood it.

    There was a brisk knock on the door. Briefly entering, Peter Lake glanced at the photographs, then Lara, without comment. She touched his sleeve, a mute thanks for his kindness.

    "I'm ready," she said.

* * *

    The hotel auditorium was jammed. This was good, Lara thought. Not only was Philadelphia Fasano's home, but the state's junior Republican senator, far weaker than Fasano, was up for reelection.

    With other survivors seated behind her, Lara spoke in a calm, clear voice. The audience listened with the taut stillness which now greeted her every appearance.

    "None of us," she said, "wanted to believe that homicides or suicides or accidental deaths would take someone we loved. But now they have.

    "So what can we do? We can try to wall off our grief. Or all of us, together, can give witness to these tragedies and say that the violence must stop." Pausing, she felt her listeners drawing closer, an emotional bond expressed in a collective forward leaning of their bodies, an openness in their expressions. "It's not enough," she continued, "to share the comfort of good intentions.