To Save a Son

by Brian Freemantle

  “You don’t make him sound a very nice guy,” said Franks. “I know I’ve got my own reasons for not thinking so, but it seems to me that you do, too.”

  “Which means I should hate him; dislike him at least,” said Maria. “But the truth is that I never felt like that. Not even on the night he confessed to me, when he cried and held me and said he hated himself for something he couldn’t stop. I never felt any dislike or rejection. If there was a feeling at all, I suppose it was a pity. I know he cheated me and I know he used me—just like he cheated and used you, I guess—but I still couldn’t hate him. Do you?”

  Franks was off-balanced by the question. Of course he did; the bastard had come close to wrecking his life. Just how close he still had to find out. So what other emotion could he have but hatred? But he didn’t think that was his feeling. To hate, you had to feel anger and vilify and think all the time of revenge. Franks’ thoughts about Nicky were of complete emptiness; a void, as if the man had never existed or occupied any part of his feelings. Why was feeling—any feeling—always so difficult?

  “I don’t know,” he said unwillingly.

  “I’ve told you,” said Maria, still brisk. “All of it. Not particularly nice, is it?”

  “No,” said Franks. “I’m sorry. That it didn’t work out better, I mean.”

  “We’ve finished eating,” she said unnecessarily.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Do you want to go on sitting here?”

  “Why don’t we go into the other room and have some brandy?”

  “I don’t think I want brandy,” said Maria.

  They were back looking at each other again, touching without feel. Aware of the household staff and of the attentive Elizabeth, Franks said, “You’d better go up ahead of me.”

  “Don’t be long.”

  “I won’t.”

  Franks took a brandy by himself and kept it a small one. He sat in the same chair in which he’d agreed with Maria that they were going to sleep together. He felt the heat he’d warned her about and realized that if he was going to pull back, like he should pull back, now was the time—the last available time—to do it. There’d been a moment that seemed like a million years ago but really hadn’t been when he’d had the chance to pull back, and he was going to regret for the rest of his life that he hadn’t done so. Franks drank his brandy, got up from the chair, and went upstairs.

  She was already in bed when he went into her room, but when he did she threw back the covers so he could see. She watched while he undressed and he bent over her, not getting at once into bed but starting with his mouth low, just inside her knee and gradually moving up. She shifted to make it easier for him, whimpering with the pleasure of it and then getting ahead of him, snatching at him and forcing him into her, hurrying him to match her, which he couldn’t do. She quietened after the first climax, matching his pace, and they came together the second time and only needed to rest briefly before they were able to make love again. Finally, exhausted, they drifted into a half sleep from which Maria recovered first, urging him awake because she needed him again; Franks was surprised—and pleased—that he could match her demands, wanting her as much as she wanted him.

  It was near light when he left her at last, to go back to his own room. Franks had slept hardly at all, always vaguely aware of her, but he didn’t sleep when he got to bed alone, because he couldn’t. What sort of deception was it to have made love to a woman while his wife was away at the bedside of a sick father, and his two children—two trusting, dependent children—were asleep in another part of the house! Franks waited for the remorse to come—wanted it to come—but it wouldn’t. He felt deceitful and embarrassed, but there wasn’t any genuine remorse. Having abandoned practically everything else, Franks refused any longer to stop comparing them. Maria was a much more exciting and accomplished lover than Tina. Was that what he wanted, a wife and a mistress? That was a question he couldn’t answer. Another, to join all the rest. He didn’t know if he wanted Tina and he didn’t know if he wanted Maria. Or the additional complication he had created for himself in an already overcomplicated, difficult situation.

  In the shower, later, Franks considered confronting Maria and apologizing for a mistake and asking her to forget that it had ever happened and then realized that that was ridiculous and that he didn’t want to do it anyway.

  They worked to be alone and succeeded in the afternoon, and the lovemaking was better than it had been the previous night. Conscience urged Franks to go up to see Tina and her parents and he did so without experiencing any guilt. Enrico had responded to tests and the doctor was fairly convinced of some sort of recovery but wasn’t prepared at that stage to forecast how complete it might be. Tina looked gaunt and tired and had not bothered with any makeup. She seemed impatient and distracted and ill at ease with him. Franks said he didn’t think he’d stay, but go back to Scarsdale—sure the guilt would come now, but it didn’t—and Tina said that would probably be a good thing and then blurted out that her mother blamed him for Enrico’s collapse and didn’t want him in the house. It was too much trouble to try to justify himself, and so Franks didn’t bother. He got away, back to Scarsdale and Maria.

  They slept together that night and made love as anxiously but as well as before. As they lay wetly together afterward Maria said, “Sorry?”

  “No,” said Franks positively. “Are you?”

  “No,” said the woman. “You’re fantastic.”

  “So are you.”

  “I haven’t worked out what we’ve really done yet,” Maria admitted. “Just that I think it’s wonderful and I don’t want it to stop.”

  “I tried and gave up,” said Franks.

  “I know this is going to sound pretty stupid and hypocritical in the circumstances, but I don’t want to hurt Tina,” she said.

  “No.”

  “So we’re going to have to be careful.” She paused. “Or stop.”

  “I don’t think I want to stop,” said Franks.

  “I know I don’t,” said the woman. “But then I’ve not got a lot to lose, have I?”

  “No.”

  “It’s got to be your decision,” insisted Maria. “When it’s time, you’ve got to be the one to say.”

  “All right,” accepted Franks. How easy was it going to be?

  “I don’t know if it’s going to happen with you,” said Maria. “Maybe not. I think it’s already happening with me. So perhaps it would be a good idea for you to call it off before you fall in love.”

  “I—” started Franks, but she put her fingers across his lips, stopping him. “No,” she said. “Don’t say it. Don’t ever say it, not even if you think it’s true, unless you think you can find a way to make it work properly.”

  They had one more idyllic day before it was time for Maria to exchange duty with Tina. His wife came back clearly on the edge of exhaustion and Franks insisted she remain in bed all day, which she accepted without any argument. Alone downstairs—apart from passing contact with the attended children—Franks missed Maria and found it difficult not to regard Tina as an intruder. She got up that night for dinner and he explained in greater detail what he had done in England and Switzerland, but she seemed to find the necessary concentration difficult.

  “Poppa’s never going to get completely well,” she said.

  “Did the doctor tell you that?”

  “He doesn’t have to; it’s obvious.”

  “We’ll get specialists, when the immediate crisis is over,” promised Franks.

  Tina smiled briefly. “You didn’t tell me what happened at the schools.”

  Intentionally, thought Franks. He tried to make it sound better than he believed it was, waiting for the outburst, but Tina seemed too tired to respond with anything but resigned acceptance.

  “You’re still exhausted,” said Franks. “Why don’t you sleep again by yourself tonight?”

  “It might be a good idea,” agreed Tina at once.

  Franks
wondered if the following day was going to be difficult, in the house and alone with Tina after she was fully rested, but Rosenberg called. The grand jury had been convened. Shortly after that Waldo and Schultz arrived personally, with more agents to strengthen the protection because of the formal notification that would have been made to Dukes, Flamini, and Pascara.

  “Now it starts!” declared the huge FBI man.

  “Now?” queried Tina. “I thought it already had, a long time ago.”

  Waldo looked curiously at her. “It hasn’t begun yet, Mrs. Franks,” he said.

  PART FOUR

  Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error.

  George Eliot

  MIDDLEMARCH

  26

  The grand jury appearance was different from what Franks expected, despite a preappearance briefing from Rosenberg the day before, when he and Tina were driven into Manhattan under heavy escort and installed in the Plaza under the most stringent guard yet. Franks’ only awareness of courts was from the dramatized reconstructions in movies and on television; there was, he supposed, some sort of similarity but not as much as he imagined there would be. Although he was warned by Rosenberg that they were unlikely to attend, Franks was still surprised not to see Pascara, Flamini, or Dukes.

  He wasn’t the first witness, so he queried their nonappearance with Ronan during a break in the presentation of the case before the jury.

  “They were invited,” confirmed the district attorney. “Law says they’ve got to be. But people like these rarely show; they can come under examination. Legal advice is nearly always to wait until the actual trial, if there is one.”

  “What about legal representation now?”

  “Not permitted,” said Ronan.

  Franks had hoped that the break from the guarded monotony of Tina’s life would have lifted her, even though the circumstances of the break were what they were. It didn’t. She sat away from him in the car bringing them into the city, unspeaking; at the hotel she concerned herself with telephone calls to Scarsdale and Elizabeth, to talk about the children, and went directly to bed after a picked-at meal in the suite. Now, in the prehearing anteroom, she stood as close to the window as Tomkiss would allow, staring out at the city skyline. Franks had the impression that she wasn’t seeing anything. Neither of them was called to the stand, the first day or the second, and Tina’s hostility, to everything and everybody, worsened.

  “Why the hell were we brought in, if they don’t want us!” she exploded when they got back to the hotel on the second night.

  “All the witnesses had to be assembled, in readiness,” said Franks. “Ronan can only make an estimate of how long things are going to take.”

  “I hope the strength of his case is a damned sight better than his estimates,” she said.

  “Relax, Tina,” he said wearily.

  “Relax! How the fuck am I supposed to relax?”

  “Do you think it’s any easier for me?”

  “I think you’re enjoying it.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” said Franks, exasperated himself now.

  “It doesn’t seem to be worrying you.”

  “Of course it’s worrying me! I’m just determined not to give in to it; just like I’m determined not to give in to them.”

  “So now I’m weak!” demanded Tina, able to see a challenge in everything.

  When it was all over—the jury hearings and the trial and the period in the protection program—Franks didn’t think it was ever going to be possible for things to be the same between him and Tina as they had been before. And it wasn’t because of what had arisen between himself and Maria. Franks felt that Tina had failed him. There’d been all the early talk of love and trust and admiration, but when the stress came she just hadn’t been able to handle it. She’d cracked—was cracking—and Franks was disappointed. He’d trusted and admired her—loved her, too—and expected more. He said, “If you want an opinion, then yes, you are being weak.”

  “Thanks!”

  “Aren’t you?” he insisted. “Where’s the support been, from you, since all this began?”

  “I’ve supported you,” she said.

  “No you haven’t,” he said. “You want to know how every conversation has begun from you, for weeks now? I. It’s always, ‘I can’t do this,’ or ‘I can’t stand this,’ or ‘I can’t understand how I’m expected …’ When was the last time you thought beyond ‘I,’ Tina?”

  “So I haven’t thought about David and Gabby?”

  “We weren’t talking about David or Gabby. We were talking about your support for me.”

  “I thought you were supposed to be able to look after yourself.”

  Nothing took very long to get back to cliché, he thought. He wondered what Maria was doing up at the Scargos’; it would be tiring for her to stand duty throughout the time that Tina was down here in the city. Disinterested in prolonging yet another dispute—why was disinterest always the prevalent word applying to them!—Franks said, “I think they should reach you tomorrow. And it shouldn’t take long; it’s only formal stuff about the proxy vote and your unawareness of what they were doing.”

  “I hope so,” she said.

  “I’ll be giving evidence for much longer,” said Franks. “Could run over more than one day; several, in fact. You want to stay down here or go back home?”

  Tina looked disparagingly around the suite and back at her husband. “You mean do some shopping at Bergdorf Goodman or Saks and maybe take in a matinee or something, while I wait?”

  “I just asked.”

  “At least I can breathe at home. And I want to get back to Poppa anyway.”

  Which would relieve Maria. Could she come down, to join him? Now Franks gazed around the suite and thought of the security arrangements in the corridors outside and in the surrounding rooms and realized the emptiness of the hope. He said, “I’ll fix it tomorrow with Tomkiss.”

  He had to, because Tina was the first witness. It was very brief, as Ronan had advised them, and Franks was the next to be called, so there wasn’t time for any particular farewell, which was a relief for both of them.

  “I’ll call,” he said.

  “All right.”

  “Hope your father’s going on okay,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Give the children my love.”

  “Yes,” she said again.

  Franks wondered whether to kiss her, conscious of the waiting court usher and their FBI protectors, and decided against it. The way he felt—and suspected she did also—would have made the gesture hypocritical.

  Franks followed the usher into the hearing, took the oath, and accepted the invitation to be seated. It put him partially facing the district attorney and partially looking toward the grand jury. The first row was predominantly women, just one black at the end, but after that the jury was composed of a majority of men; having reached the third day, they seemed settled in and comfortable with their surroundings. Very quickly Franks found it easy to do the same. Since the law did not allow the absent Pascara, Flamini, or Dukes to be legally represented, there was no cross-examination of his evidence. Franks gave it to Ronan’s lead, setting his involvement down in the chronological order in which he’d first given it to the district attorney. Ronan was a painstaking prosecutor, refusing to let Franks hurry and miss detail, and they only got halfway through the account by the time of the evening recess.

  Franks was glad to be alone at the hotel, freed from Tina’s company. He had a couple of drinks and watched the evening news and had a bottle of wine with his meal, but stopped short of brandy, not wanting to be thickheaded the following morning. Elizabeth answered when he telephoned the Scarsdale house. Franks feigned surprise at realizing that Tina was at her parents’ and said dismissively that he might as well talk to Mrs. Scargo to see how things were if she was there. Maria came at once to the telephone.

  “How are you?” he said.

  “Okay,” she said. “You?”

&n
bsp; “Okay, I guess.”

  Would Waldo have put any sort of monitor on the telephone calls? Franks wasn’t sure that the man could be trusted. Hoping to warn the woman, he said, “I’m phoning from the hotel, through the switchboard.”

  “Yes,” said Maria.

  “How’s Poppa Scargo?”

  “A lot better. Doctor says he can start eating solids in a couple of days. He’s ordered Mamma to bed, though. She’s out on her feet.”

  “You must be tired,” he said.

  “Not too bad,” she said. “I’ll be able to get some sleep tonight.” There was a pause, and she said, “When do you think you’ll be back?”

  Franks understood the meaning of the question and was excited by it. “I don’t know,” he said. “I only started giving evidence today.”

  “Oh,” said Maria.

  Franks thought disappointment was obvious in her voice and that Waldo would recognize it if he were listening. Damn the man; it wasn’t any of his business. He said, “Maybe I’ll be able to get back in a day or two.”

  “Seems like ages since I’ve been to Manhattan,” said Maria, and Franks knew she was having the same thoughts that he had earlier, about her coming to him.

  He said, “The restrictions are pretty stringent; people everywhere.”

  “I guess there would be,” she said, accepting the difficulty.

  “Tell the kids I called, will you?” said Franks, feeling he should.

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll call to see how they are tomorrow,” promised Franks. So he was using David and Gabby as an excuse; so what!

  “Of course.”

  “About this time.”

  “I’ll expect you, then.”

  “Take care.”

  “And you.” Franks thought the protracted conversation was familiar and then remembered this was how it had been with him and Tina.