The Confirmation Read Online Free

platform. I’ll be in the nosebleed section.”
    â€œI’m surprised you want to go at all, given that it’s Long,” the woman replied.
    â€œIt’s painful, but I don’t have a choice. If I don’t go, it will be a story.” He turned back and smiled mischievously. “Call you later?”
    â€œSure,” she said, sliding out from underneath the sheet. Penneymounter noticed how fit and trim her physique was as she slipped on a bathrobe. How he envied her youth. He glanced down at the paunch at his own midsection. Age is a cruel thing, he thought.
    â€œGotta run,” said Penneymounter. “I have this room for another night, so you don’t have to rush out.”
    â€œAnother night?” she asked seductively, walking over to him and pressing up against his chest. “In that case . . . maybe I’ll stay. That is, assuming you can handle me.”
    Penneymounter smiled. “What are you trying to do, kill me?”
    â€œYou’ll die with a smile on your face,” she said with a grin.
    Penneymounter laughed as he knotted his tie. He opened the door slowly, checking to see if anyone was in the hallway, and walked briskly to the elevator. As he waited for the elevator to arrive, he looked at his watch. He had twenty minutes to get to his seat.
    THE CHIEF JUSTICE OF the Supreme Court took his seat on the front row while the other members of the Court sat as a group to the right. One justice remained conspicuously absent. It was Peter Corbin Franklin, the eighty-eight-year-old senior justice and liberal lion of the Court. Some wondered: Was he boycotting the ceremony? Beset by old age and dementia, Franklin had taken to nodding off during oral arguments. His deteriorating mental state was an open secret among the media and Supreme Court watchers. But the feisty jurist, keeper of the progressive flame on the Court, had refused to resign his seat to prevent the outgoing Republican president to nominate a conservative to replace him. Long’s election now made retirement even less likely. His absence would be a slap in the face at Long or a further sign of his declining physical condition; his presence in temperatures barely hovering above zero degrees Fahrenheit would say loud and clear that he planned to leave the Court only one way: feet first.
    At ten minutes to noon, an ambulance pulled up to the east front of the Capitol. Lifted out of the ambulance on a stretcher and helped into a wheelchair by a team of paramedics was Peter Corbin Franklin. His withered frame was folded into a dark suit and a shock of white hair topped his weathered face. A wrinkled hand, twisted by arthritis and covered with blue veins and age spots, gripped a cane. The medics wheeled him through the Capitol. When he reached the stairs on the West Front, he insisted on walking and descended the steps with agonizing deliberation, balancing himself with the cane while he held onto the arm of the Marine guard who assisted him.
    As Franklin struggled to his seat, people tried not to stare. But the sight of the frail and weak man, the liberal conscience of the Supreme Court who was determined to be present at the swearing in of the new president, was moving.
    â€œPeter made it,” whispered Salmon Stanley to a Democratic senator who sat next to him. “I’m so glad. Good for him.”
    â€œI hope he’s going to be alright in this cold,” the colleague replied.
    â€œMe, too,” said Stanley. “We need him healthy for four more years at a minimum.”
    â€œYou mean until you’re elected president?” the senator replied, jabbing the majority leader in the side with an elbow.
    â€œOh, you never know about things like that,” replied Stanley. “It’s a funny business.”
    â€œWhat better evidence is there than the fact that you and I are sitting here at Bob Long’s inauguration, after you beat him in the primaries?”
    â€œGod