The tone of the president's answers, which veered between genial and terse and in which he often failed to recollect fund-raising details, differed significantly from the caustic confrontation between Vice President Al Gore and Mr. Conrad, which occurred on April 18 at the vice-presidential mansion.

Mr. Gore's interview lasted four hours and took place in the dining room of the vice-presidential mansion, aides said.

A rebel group in an unnamed South American capital storms the vice-presidential mansion, where a large number of foreign diplomats and government officials are celebrating the birthday of a Japanese electronics mogul.

It's sad to picture Al Gore, his brain all caked, locked up in his spooky vice-presidential mansion frantically crunching the numbers and e-mailing on his Blackberry and laptops and speed-dialing Tallahassee.

It would have been impossible to remember, his talent was to be invisible, to lift the soprano up, but now the people in the living room of the vice-presidential mansion listened to Kato with hunger and nothing in their lives had ever fed them so well.

In the vice-presidential mansion, none of the guests, not even Ruben Iglesias himself, knew the house as well as the members of LFDMS.

He was a slender man with long, graceful legs, and while it might have gone unnoticed while he was lying on the couch, here in the sun, running rings around the vice-presidential mansion, it was easy to see that the manufacturer of German pharmaceuticals had once been an athlete.

Loosely inspired by that event, Ann Patchett's fourth novel is set in the vice-presidential mansion of an unnamed South American capital, where some 200 foreign diplomats, government officials and businessmen have gathered to celebrate the birthday of a Japanese electronics mogul and opera buff named Katsumi Hosokawa.

His obsession with Maria's fate also causes President Masuda to miss experiencing captivity himself, when members of a rebel group called La Familia de Martin Suarez storm the vice-presidential mansion.

South American rebels storm a vice-presidential mansion during a lyric soprano's recital.