Gentry’s personnel file… nothing in it but his resume, pay records, and a couple of letters of commendation.”
Leon Janowitz pushed the folder across the table to Frank and Jose. Meeting in Janowitz’s cramped cubicle was impossible. It was Friday, the cavernous subcommittee hearing room wasn’t being used, and so the three men huddled at the witness table. Before them, a semicircle of raised seats from which subcommittee members could look down on those testifying and into the cameras. Centered on a low wall below the seats, the crest of the House of Representatives marked where Frederick Dumay Rhinelander would preside.
Looking up at the crest, Frank remembered a vacation in Rome when he and Kate had toured the Colosseum. He had stood in the arena and had looked up toward where, with a roll of the hand, emperors had once decreed who would live and who would die for the entertainment of the crowd.
“ROTC at UCLA,” he heard Jose reading off the resume. “Lieutenant, Southern Command…”
“I’ve asked for his service records,” Janowitz said. “They have to send off to St. Louis.”
“Law school, NYU,” Jose picked up. “Then State Department, Western Hemisphere Affairs…”
“I’ve had a few of those,” Janowitz murmured.
“Those… what?” Jose asked.
“Affairs in the western hemisphere,” Janowitz cracked.
Jose frowned and lowered his eyelids and gave Janowitz his “Down, boy” look, then continued. “Four years at State, then staff of Senator Patterson, New York, then here.”
“Interesting background,” Frank said. “Anything else?”
“Just this.”
Janowitz passed over a sheet of paper.
“Character references,” he explained. “Gentry gave them when Rhinelander interviewed him for the job.”