Breach of Trust

by D. W. Buffa

  Browning had other things to say, solemn, consequential things, about the country and where it was headed, and what could be done about it, and why we should try, but I was too caught up in my own thoughts and emotions to listen to much of what he said. This was the first time I had seen him since I left Harvard, the first time I had been in the same room with him since that crystal cold day, years ago on Christmas Eve, here at the Plaza Hotel. Why had he been so insistent I come? And why, of all places, here? There are some people—most of us, I suppose—that you might see every day for years and not really notice when they’re gone. There are others who, even if you only glimpsed them once—a face you passed late one night on a city sidewalk; someone stepping brightly off a daytime curb—you never forgot. The memory of it stays with you forever. Annie Malreaux was that and more. I knew her, and I liked her, and every time I saw her it was like seeing her for that unforgettable first time. She had a voice, a silver tinkling voice that even now, when I thought about her, I could hear all over again. If I had not been in love with her, it was because she was always with someone else, first Jimmy Haviland and then Thomas Browning at the end.

  I glanced around the darkened ballroom, all the anonymous well-tended faces lifted toward the front, listening to Thomas Browning’s memorable speech. I felt the hard leather soles of my shoes push against the hardwood floor, and I remembered the sensuous feel of it, when there were no tables and an orchestra was playing and I was dancing with a girl in my arms, a different girl, staring down at the light glistening on the fine polished floor from the glass chandelier high overhead. When the speech was over and the audience rose in a standing ovation, I slipped away through the crowd. It had been a mistake to come.

  Jimmy Haviland was waiting for me as I got to the door that led to the thick-carpeted hallway outside. The lights had just come on. The applause that had risen to the ceiling was followed by the boisterous noise of hundreds of voices talking all at once, of bumping shoulders and scraping chairs and bursting high-pitched laughter, of shouted partings and mumbled greetings among those who thought they recognized one another but were not really sure. Amidst the swirl of eager, smiling faces, Jimmy Haviland looked quite alone, a passing stranger, watching from a distance a spectacle that had nothing to do with him.

  “Reminds me a little of Churchill, the way he gives a speech,” observed Haviland with a gaze wistful, scornful and detached.

  My mind had been on too many other things to make comparisons between Browning and anyone else. At first, I did not see it, but a moment later, I realized he was right. When you got beyond the obvious differences: that Churchill was so much associated with the war, the war that my generation was born into and that, in ways we never quite understood, shaped our lives, the similarities were so striking you wondered why they had not been noticed before. The deep, rolling cadence, the balanced phrasing, the steely-eyed pause, the gesture done for dramatic effect, the playful teasing, the last-minute change in direction that gave a double edge to his words. It was all there, a kind of practiced imitation, not intended to be identical, but close enough that if you caught it there would be no mistake who his model had been.

  “He’s even started to look a little like him. He always had those sloping shoulders, and he was never much at staying in shape.”

  “There wasn’t much he could do.” I caught myself before I said anything about Browning’s lame left foot. Haviland would not have heard me anyway: He was too intent on his own emotions.

  “I survived it,” he announced. “Annie died, but I survived it.”

  His eyes held a faint glimmer of hope, like the light in a sinner’s eyes, that promise of redemption after the last thing lost. His gaze started to move from side to side, gradually picking up speed. He began to rub his hands together, harder, faster, as he balanced high up on his toes, like someone outside on a freezing winter day waiting desperately for a cab.

  “Jimmy, how would you like to get out of here and go somewhere for a drink?” he stopped at once and with a grateful smile asked if I meant it.

  “Who else in this crowd would I want to have a drink with?” I replied with the cynical edge with which loners like us beat back the empty darkness of the night.

  Haviland started for the hotel bar. I shook my head and kept moving toward the lobby.

  “Everybody will be in there,” I explained. “The same people we’re trying to get away from. What hotel are you in? Let’s get a drink there.” he mumbled something evasive about it being the other end of town. I kicked myself for not realizing that he was probably in some cheap, out-of-the-way place that took an hour to get to and was difficult to find.

  “I’m just a few blocks up—the Warwick. They’ve got a good bar. You mind if we go there?”

  We were through the doors and down the awning covered steps, outside on the sidewalk, just turning away, when I looked back over my shoulder and saw the Secret Service moving Thomas Browning toward a waiting car.

  “Did you think he was staying at the Plaza?” inquired Haviland from a few feet away. I turned and caught up with him. “They usually hold these things later in the spring, or sometime in the fall. They did it now because it worked with his schedule. And they did it here, at the Plaza, because that’s where he wanted it to be.”

  We were walking at a brisk clip in the cool night air. I was glad for the exercise after sitting cramped inside for so long. Haviland stopped, wheeled toward me, and searched my eyes.

  “Why?” he asked in an anguished voice. “Why of all places would he want to have it there?” With a shudder, he turned away and with his hands plunged deep into his pockets, kicked at something unseen in front of him. He began to walk with an angry stride.

  At the corner, a block away from the Plaza, a hand out of nowhere took hold of my arm. “Mr. Antonelli?”

  “Yes?”

  A man in his late thirties with short-cropped hair and a face I can only describe as anonymous looked straight at me. It was not raining, but he wore a tan raincoat over his coat and tie. A thin wire ran from outside his shirt collar to a clear plastic plug in his ear.

  “The vice president would like to see you,” announced the Secret Service agent in a matter-of-fact monotone.

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  I smiled. “Can’t. I’m having a drink with a friend.”

  The agent blinked. He was not amused.

  “The vice president of the United States would like to see you, sir. The car is waiting.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Haviland starting to move off. With a sharp look I told him to stay where he was, that this would take only a minute.

  “I can’t see him now. I have something else I have to do.”

  “Sir, I…”

  “I’m not trying to make your life difficult, but I’m not going with you. It’s as simple as that.” he decided I was serious. Nodding to himself, he moved half a step away, whipped out a thin hand-held phone and in a worried voice reported in. After a few moments of muted conversation, he put his hand over the phone and gave me a quizzical glance.

  “When could you come, sir?”

  Haviland had inched his way back into the shadows. His only thought was to avoid trouble.

  “I’m having a drink with a friend. About an hour, I suppose.—Or sometime tomorrow,” I added with indifference.

  “Where are you going for your drink?”

  “That’s really none of your business, is it?”

  A grudging, but not unfriendly, smile crossed his firmly set mouth. “Where would you like me to pick you up?”

  I told him the Warwick, smiled back at him, and shook his hand. It was all in the attitude.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” insisted Haviland after we had ensconced ourselves in the Warwick bar. He gulped a double whiskey and water with a sense of something close to panic. “You don’t just ignore a summons like that.” His mood was changing from timidity and fear to anger and confusion. He leane
d both arms on the bar and, with his head sunk between his shoulders, stared bitterly into his glass. “I shouldn’t have come. I knew it would be a mistake.”

  As quickly as it had come, the anger vanished. He laughed and turned to me, a baffled look on his honest, open face.

  “I’m always doing that: doing things I know damn well I shouldn’t do. It’s because I’m a coward, and when you’re a coward you do stupid things because the only reason you can think not to do them is you’re afraid. I’ve always been like that,” added Haviland as he tossed back his head and gulped down what was left. The hollow glass struck the bright polished bar with a lonely echo. “Another,” he instructed the bartender whose lackadaisical eyes had been drawn automatically by the all-too-familiar sound.

  “Was like that as a kid. Long as I can remember, I was like that. It’s why everyone liked me.” He pulled the leg closest to me around the leather stool, hooking it on a metal rung. His elbow rested on the front edge of the bar. His face was inches from mine and I had to make an effort not to turn away from his stale, deathlike breath. “That’s the truth, you know. Everyone liked Jimmy Haviland because there wasn’t anything Jimmy Haviland wouldn’t do.”

  It is always a sign of trouble when men start to refer to themselves by their own names. Tired drunks and breast-beating politicians do it most often, but whoever does it, it is usually the beginning to an endless orgy of self-pity and worse.

  “Listen, Jimmy,” I said as I stood up, “I better get up to my room. I have to change into something different before they come to pick me up.”

  With surprising strength, Haviland gripped my wrist. “I’m trying to tell you something.”

  The bartender set a second drink in front of him. With a thoughtful gaze, Haviland lifted it to his lips, but he did not take a drink, or if he did it was barely a touch. He held the glass pressed against his lower lip, the smell of it mixing with the air, the familiar scent of late-night musings on things he should not have done. When he put it down, he did it with a kind of regret, as if he had run out of excuses by which to postpone what he thought he had to say.

  “It was my fault what happened. It was what I told you before. I always do things I know at the time I shouldn’t do. I shouldn’t have come to the Plaza that day,” he said with a bleak, rueful expression. “I knew what Annie would say when she saw me; what she’d say when I told her that I wanted a second chance. That’s why I had to do it, why I had to come.” Haviland shook his head, as if after all these years, he still could not understand why he was the way he was; why he always had to prove something to himself. “The only reason I could think of not to tell her that was the fear of what she would say. And that’s why it happened—because I did that.”

  It did not explain anything, but he did not understand that, not at first. He looked at me, waiting, I think, for me to give him some kind of absolution, to say something that would finally give him some relief. We stared at each other, locked in an awkward pause.

  “They were standing there, she and Browning, talking so intently they did not realize I had walked into the room. I told her I loved her more than Browning ever could, that I wanted her to give us another chance. She told me I shouldn’t have come, that we could talk about it later, but not now, not there.” With a distant smile, Haviland stopped.

  “That we could talk about it later. That was all the hope I needed. I was not going to lose Annie twice. I told Browning what I thought of him: that he was a liar and worse, and that he didn’t have the right to do the things he had; that he didn’t love Annie, that he didn’t love anyone except himself. That’s why it happened, because I walked in there where I didn’t belong, and because I had to say the things I said. She ran after me, tried to calm me down. She blamed herself for the way I had become. She was like that, wasn’t she? She blamed herself, I think, for letting me fall in love with her, as if there was anything she could have done about that.”

  “She told me I had better go, that Browning was upset, that we could talk later, that everything was going to be all right. Then, after she went back to see Browning, there was something else she wanted to tell me. That was how it happened—or that’s how they said it happened—she was leaning out the window, looking for me. They said—Browning said—that she lost her balance and before anyone could reach her, Annie fell eight floors to her death.”

  I put my hand on his sleeve and looked directly into his damp, reddish eyes. “Browning told you that she was trying to look for you at the window?”

  Haviland blinked his eyes. “He told me it was my fault. He told me he never wanted to see me again.”

  “Browning told you that it was your fault? And you believed him?”

  “It was my fault. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t gone there and said the things I did.”

  There was something about the way he said it, something in the haunted expression that he could not quite control that told me there was a secret he was hiding, a secret he wanted me to know.

  “But you don’t think it happened the way he said, do you?”

  “No, I don’t. I never did. I think Browning was angry because of what I had done. I think they got into an argument over it. I think he pushed her. I think that’s how she died.”

  I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked up into the waiting eyes of that same Secret Service agent. I had an appointment with Thomas Browning, an appointment that suddenly seemed long overdue.

  CHAPTER 3

  Outside the Warwick hotel, the Secret Service agent stepped into the street and hailed a taxi. After three days of waiting for a call that never came, this is the way I had finally been summoned for my meeting with my famous former friend: in the filthy backseat of a New York cab. I had flown three thousand miles, not because I had wanted to, but because Thomas Browning had called me himself and put it in a way that made it impossible to say no. Come a few days early, he had suggested; that way we might have more time. And like a fool I believed him. I sat in the hotel, waiting for a call, each time I went out certain that it would come before I got back. A lot of messages were left, but never one from him.

  The agent gave the driver an address, and then, pointing with his finger, told him where to turn. Out of habit, his eyes kept moving back and forth, searching the garish bright-lit sidewalks for anything out of the ordinary. The movement of his head slowed, hesitated, stopped. A half smile of interest started on his thin straight mouth. He looked at me through curious eyes.

  “You mind my asking?”

  I was as much interested in what the question might be as he could have been in the answer.

  “You’ve known him a long time?” began the agent tentatively. “In law school together.” I waited in the rumbling silence for him to go on. “I was there in the room tonight. I heard what he said about you.”

  The cab turned onto Fifty-Eighth Street, between Central Park and the Plaza Hotel. A long line of limousines was still waiting outside the hotel. Some of them, I imagined, would be there for hours while members of my law school class, Browning’s challenge to do more for public service all but forgotten, spent their way into the promised illusion of their own importance.

  “I’ve been on this detail two years, since he got the nomination. He isn’t what you’d call free with praise. I’ve never heard him say anything like what he said about you.”

  We rode in silence as the cab headed up Madison and then cut across to Fifth Avenue.

  “Anyway, I just wondered—that’s all,” he remarked presently.

  “Wondered what?”

  The agent pressed his lips together and shook his head, baffled by something I did not understand. “Why you turned him down. No one’s ever done that before. We were just pulling away from the front of the hotel. He must have spotted you heading down the street. He wanted you to ride with him.”

  I looked out the window at the stone wall that bordered the park and the dark mass of trees sheltering in mystery everything below. Sometimes I though
t I did not understand anything, other people, other places, least of all myself. Anyone else would have been jubilant with pride, no other thought in their mind than not to let it show too much. I sat there listening to a glowing tribute and discovered in it only grounds for suspicion and a reminder of things I would have preferred to forget.

  “Sometimes…” I stopped and looked across at the agent. “You have an old friend? Someone you’ve known since you were a kid? You know how sometimes something gets said—you take it one way when it wasn’t meant that way at all?”

  The suggestion that it had been a misunderstanding between friends and that the fault had been mine alone seemed to satisfy him.

  “When I told him what you said, that you had other plans—were going out for a drink with a friend—he laughed, and said: ‘That’s Antonelli, all right. No one ever could tell him what to do.’”

  Antonelli. That is what Browning called me the first time we met. It was not what he had told the crowd. I had learned it from him, not the other way around. I had been raised in Oregon; I had spent four years in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan, which still thought itself an outpost of civilization in the untrammeled wilderness of the West; and now, finally, I was on the East Coast, at Harvard, where, I assumed, everything had a reason and tradition went back to a time before anyone thought there ought to be a Great Republic in which people like me could come to a place like this. There is nothing the ardent democrat is more eager to learn than the custom of a royal house. From the first day we met, one bright, crisp mid-September New England afternoon, I was Antonelli and he was Browning and I felt I might finally have found a home.

  He even referred to his grandfather by his last name. A few months after we became roommates he made one of the strangest remarks I had ever heard.

  “Jesus gave you Christianity, but Stern gave you the car.” Browning’s eyes bubbled with mirth. “Jesus gave us Christianity and, according to some, enfeebled the human race; Stern gave us the car and ruined any chance we had left.”