The Touch of Treason

by Sol Stein

  “Oh sure. When I know, you’ll know. Unless we negotiate before—”

  Thomassy cut in. “My client is not copping a plea under any conditions. Any.”

  “That his idea or your idea?”

  Thomassy was silent.

  “Koppelman thinks it was your idea,” Roberts said.

  “Who or what is Koppelman?”

  Roberts smiled. “I thought you might remember him. A sandy-haired summa cum laude from Harvard Law who applied to you for a job last year. Brilliant kid. Said you agreed to see him because he said he was from Oswego.”

  “He wasn’t from Oswego.”

  “Nobody’s from Oswego,” Roberts said. “He thought you’d be impressed by his tactic since you’re reputed not to give interviews. He got in.”

  “For three minutes.”

  “You should have hired him,” Roberts said. “He came to me next. He’s putting in a lot of overtime on this case.”

  “I work alone.”

  “If you’re intent on going to trial, you might need some help on this one.”

  Thomassy laughed. “You suggesting I hire Koppelman away from you?”

  “Koppelman seems to have lost his admiration for you when you turned him down. I, of course, retain mine. It was Koppelman who suggested that you and I might have a little talk about keeping the witnesses down.”

  “Sure,” Thomassy said. “We can keep it real short. When I move to have the case dismissed, don’t fight it.”

  Roberts, the patrician, smiled at Thomassy’s little joke. In a quiet voice, laced with what Thomassy thought of as North Shore divinity, Roberts said, “Five of us looked at the evidence, separately and together, before we decided to present the Fuller case to the Grand Jury. I hope you got your fee up front.”

  Thomassy moved his gaze from Roberts’s confident eyes to Roberts’s blond hair, then Roberts’s chin, then Roberts’s left ear, then Roberts’s right ear. The four points of the cross. It made witnesses nervous. They couldn’t figure out what you were doing. You weren’t doing anything except making them nervous.

  “I wanted to save time,” Roberts said.

  “You’d like to finish up before the campaign season starts.”

  “You’re looking for trouble with me, Thomassy.”

  “I’m looking for enough time for the jury to get used to the idea that my client is a human being. I’m out to save years of his time, not days of yours. Every slip you make, I’ll go for a mistrial until you’re dizzy.”

  Roberts said, “You don’t have to play Bogart with me. I’m not a juror. Fuller’s life was taken.”

  “You’ll have to prove it was taken.”

  “The Grand Jury was convinced.”

  “The Grand Jury eats lemon meringue out of the palm of your hand. The reason we have trials is to get you out of your closet and into a room like this where there are two sides. You’ve got the wrong defendant, Roberts.”

  “That’s one mistake I’ve never made.” Roberts paused, summoning disdain from the generations that had preceded him. “I’ve always tried to be fair with you fellows who didn’t have the advantages.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Roberts.”

  “I’m trying to tell you this trial is over your head. Look who you’re defending.”

  Thomassy knew the clenching of his right fist was a street instinct he’d hoped to leave in Oswego along with the flowered tie his mother had given him, and the wing-tipped shoes. “I’m going to whip your ass in front of the judge, the jury, the spectators, the press, and your mother’s DAR den if they’d like to come watch.”

  Roberts, fingering his striped tie, said, “I’d meant this to be a friendly conversation.”

  Thomassy stepped closer to Roberts and lowered his voice. “I mean, in the friendliest fashion, to show that the government has to prove that the death of Martin Fuller was not accidental, that if not accidental it was accomplished by the willful act of another person, and that that person is my client, that he had a motive to kill his teacher, and that you can prove your case, if there is a case, to a jury of my peers, not yours. This isn’t going to be one of your one-two-three trials. I’ve got a footlocker full of reasonable doubt. You’re going to get very tired. You’re going to come out of this wishing you’d given it to one of your honchos.”

  Roberts had no choice but to turn to go. At the double doors he said, “The calendar says the people versus your client, not me against you or you against me.”

  “You don’t represent the people, Roberts. You represent the government. I represent the people. We’re all defendants.”

  It was funny the way Roberts tried to slam the swinging doors. You idiot, Thomassy thought, you can’t slam swinging doors. They take their own good time.

  CHAPTER TWO

  On a particular morning half a year earlier Martin Fuller had caught himself thinking that before every murder, two minds are at work, the murderer’s and the victim’s. If each knew the mind of the other, if there were no miscommunication, would the murder take place?

  The answer, Martin Fuller thought, was in most cases yes. Our thoughts are far worse than what we allow ourselves to say.

  As he carefully put the manuscript he had just worked on inside the safe in his study, Fuller, then in his eighty-third year, thought of one particular murder. He imagined Trotsky with the small, pointed beard at his desk in his house of exile in Coyoacan, reading the manuscript of the young man who was standing behind him, looking over his shoulder. Trotsky knew the handsome fellow as Sylvia Ageloff’s lover or husband—it didn’t matter which—a Jacques Mornard who had come reportedly from a Belgian bourgeois family to succor Sylvia, and who was now beginning to seem a convert to Sylvia’s conviction that Trotsky was the redeemer of the October Revolution. As Trotsky bent over Mornard’s manuscript, the blow came, and in that millisecond Trotsky knew that Stalin’s long-awaited messenger had arrived. For Mornard, Fuller and the whole world learned soon enough, had taken a piolet, an ice-axe, out of his raincoat pocket, and with the energy that comes to an ideological assassin at the moment he has been living toward, had struck Stalin’s rival in the skull with the sharp point, releasing a scream that the assassin later acknowledged felt as if it were piercing his own brain.

  Trotsky, Mornard reported, bit his hand as a dog might do, then stumbled out of the room, blood streaming down his face, yelling See what they have done to me!

  They was the word that reverberated in Fuller’s head.

  Martin Fuller had known the antagonists, Trotsky and Stalin, and had quarreled with both. It was inevitable that Trotsky, in his Mexican exile, would be writing a biography of the man he knew had sentenced him to death. Well, Fuller’s writing was of a very different sort, a book that would never be published as a book. The stipend he received from the U.S. government, which supplemented his pension from the university, was for the creation of a manuscript intended only for the eyes of the National Security Adviser and his successors.

  The man who had visited Fuller nearly a year ago to persuade him to accept the assignment was someone he had known casually for a long time, Jackson Perry. Fuller, who throughout his long life had forsworn neckties as a punishment visited upon men, thought Perry looked like a man whose necktie was as much a part of his presence as his close-cropped hair. When Fuller bade Perry sit, he noticed the tinge of pink embarrassment in Perry’s face as he unstrapped his attaché case from his wrist before he could put it down.

  Fuller could remember with amusement when the attaché case had been a sign of expense and rank. Soon afterward middle-management types started carrying attachés made of rougher leathers. Young men in suits began to carry metal and plastic attachés. It was said Puerto Rican runners on Wall Street carried their lunches in them. Once the Con Edison man showed up at the Fuller home carrying an attaché case; when opened, it revealed his work tools.

  Perry’s well-worn attaché looked like it might have been made of glove-soft leather darkened by wear and repe
ated restoration; but the leather strap, one end tied to the attaché and the other to Perry’s wrist, Fuller had seen only once before, when a courier had caught up to him in the south of France. Fuller presumed that Perry was required to make a verbal presentation, and if Fuller did not reject the assignment out of hand, only then would Perry take out of his case a written summary of what he had just said.

  Instead Perry reached into the case and from a blue folder removed two sheets of heavy bond paper with the great seal on top.

  My dear Fuller, Three of my advisers in the field of intelligence agree—and they seldom agree on anything—that you more than any other living person have predicted correctly the likely conduct of the USSR based on the past behavior of specific leaders. Your knowledge of the system, they tell me, is profound.

  They always began with flattery. Who was impervious, especially on this stationery? He wondered who had drafted the letter.

  I am told that your advice to previous presidents has proved to be of even greater value than was anticipated. My concern is that while the principles of your system have been understood, no one else has yet demonstrated his ability to use those principles as effectively in the application to actual impending situations of great moment. Can you—with speed if possible—set down your method in such a manner that successors to my present National Security Adviser, of lesser or greater knowledge than the incumbent, will be able to see that your methods will be used even by future generations responsible for the safekeeping of the nation?

  Lest you think this request discretionary rather than imperative, I need only to remind you that the Soviet leaders are presumably as concerned about the proliferation of our respective nuclear arsenals as we are, and also as concerned about the leader of some client state with covert nuclear capability seeking to trigger an irreversible cataclysm between the Soviets and ourselves. We must keep up with their thinking so that if fast action is called for, the chances for misunderstandings are curtailed. We need your guidance urgently in a form useable by others before it is late.

  Fuller looked up at Perry. “He’s worried about my dying.”

  Perry, motivated by politeness, started to object.

  Fuller stopped him with a wave of his hand. “At my age, I think about it, too.” His eyes returned to the letter.

  I ask you to accept this burden in the full knowledge that it is an imposition you would abjure were you not as concerned as I am about the avoidance of misunderstandings that could lead to war.

  Mr. Perry is empowered to discuss all terms and conditions. 1 trust your answer will be in the affirmative.

  Fuller looked up at Perry’s anxious face. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m afraid the answer is no.”

  Perry’s face crusted with dismay. He had been told not to fail. He tried to smile. “With all respect, Professor Fuller, I believe you’d rather leave this legacy than any other.”

  “Why me again?” Fuller said.

  “Nicolaevsky is dead. Shub is dead.”

  I, too, soon, Fuller thought. They will have to get used to going to the younger generation. Those who had lived through it would be gone. His prescience had never been based on subjective impressions but on transmittable guidelines, and he had taught those guidelines to others. It was not his fault that the government hadn’t yet found a satisfactory interpreter of his method.

  “What about some of the younger people?”

  “It was discussed at length,” Perry said.

  “What about Tarasova? She’s twenty years younger. I taught her everything.”

  Perry had looked down, as if embarrassed by what he knew. “She’s an émigré.”

  “Forty years ago, Mr. Perry!”

  “They wanted the perspective of someone born in this country.”

  “That’s nonsense. A method has nothing to do with one’s place of birth.”

  “He wants you, not one of your students.”

  For a moment Fuller had been tempted to say that he and Tarasova could work together on this, but he knew that was not possible. And so when Perry waited him out, Fuller finally said, “When I finish this one, will I be free to die?”

  Perry, after so many years of surreptitious work, still had the laugh of a civilized man, textured with pain. “You’ll outlive us all,” he said. “We’ll see to it.”

  Fuller protested the security arrangements that Perry told him would be installed. “Terrorists are multinational,” he said. “They have institutionalized the gratuitous act, killing the wrong people as easily as victims selected with purpose. Is my life more in danger because I will be writing this manuscript for you?”

  “If they know about it.”

  Finally they shook hands. It would all be arranged Perry’s way, foredoomed. Perry slipped his papers back into the attaché, closed the case, then restrapped it to his wrist in the name of a security that Fuller knew no one in the world could feel any longer.

  *

  Now, after months of work on the manuscript, Fuller longed to be freed of his duties to history. He was more sensible than Trotsky, he would tell himself each day as he locked the safe in his study. For he allowed no one except Leona into the small room in which he worked. The door was deadbolt-locked when he was inside as well as outside. Trotsky was guarded by idealistic students and by Mexican police, neither a reliable category. Fuller’s safety, on the one hand, was in Perry’s charge, and Perry had given him Randall, a professional whose sole responsibility was to see that no harm came to Martin Fuller. Fuller referred to Randall behind his back as “my spook,” but he appreciated that because of Randall his mail was safe to open, his phone line untapped, there were no bugs in his study or elsewhere in his home, and that, since he’d begun work on this project, an elaborate fire and burglary warning system had been installed in his home in Westchester at federal expense. Whenever Fuller opened the safe in the early morning, that act was registered by a green light on a board somewhere nearby. When Fuller, his work for the day finished, closed the safe some hours later, the light went out. If anyone not familiar with the combination tried to open the safe, or even jostled it—as Leona found out it was so sensitive you could not brush it accidentally with a broom—Randall or one of his lieutenants would be at the house within minutes. And he knew that if the phone lines from the house, though they were underground, were ever cut, the red light would go on instantly, even before the prospective intruder could enter.

  Randall had pleaded with Fuller to make a carbon as he worked so that a safety copy could be lodged somewhere. Fuller said he couldn’t be bothered with carbon paper. Randall suggested a copying machine be brought in and the manuscript reproduced under Fuller’s watchful supervision. “That will give you two things to worry about,” Fuller said. “My copy and the safety copy. And how can you make safe what I have not yet put down on paper?”

  Fuller was aware that those who came to visit, whether from the U.S. or abroad, even the students who hung around to refresh themselves and him in what seemed to outsiders like abstruse debate, had had at least a cursory check without their knowledge. The problem was, of course, that so many people who were interested in Martin Fuller had what Randall referred to as “difficult backgrounds.” The older ones may have once been Stalinists, Trotskyites, Lovestonites, or came from Asian and African countries that seemed to be unwilling or unable to provide background information on their own subjects. The younger ones were sometimes casual users of what Randall referred to as “controlled substances”; they sometimes lived out of wedlock and dressed intentionally in scruffy clothes; some of them had been to the Soviet Union in recent years as exchange students or tourists; others were former peaceniks making the usual migration of age from left to right. Fuller enjoyed the range of his guests and was purposefully delinquent in giving Randall the names of prospective visitors for advance checks.

  Once, when Randall was insistent about the strangers coming to a buffet dinner at the Fullers’, Fuller said, “Why don’t you tell me who�
��s coming to visit you this weekend.”

  “Nobody interesting,” Randall said.

  “Then I’ll lend you some of my guests,” Fuller said. “If you’re afraid to let them in your house, you can always frisk them first.”

  Randall, who’d gone to Georgetown University before becoming a Secret Service officer, was sometimes embarrassed by his role. “This isn’t normal bodyguard duty,” he’d been told. “It isn’t something we can assign to just anybody. We need someone Fuller can respect, who understands the implications of what’s being guarded.” But Randall wondered whether he hadn’t become the instrument of the government’s paranoia. Fuller wasn’t writing of military secrets. He was describing his method of analyzing the past conduct of each member of the Soviet leadership, whose protégé each was, how he’d climbed the ladder. He had studied those people the way good constitutional lawyers study the justices of the Supreme Court so they could try to predict their future actions on given subjects. “Don’t let him die before he finishes,” Perry had said. “Not with what’s at stake.” Randall knew the number of nukes didn’t make the difference. Brains did. He was supposed to guard Fuller’s brain. Perry, always joking, had said, “Your job is to see that Fuller dies from natural causes. After the work is finished.” I’m not God Randall had wanted to shout at him. But he knew what Perry meant. Fuller himself had said In previous centuries terrorists were crazy freelancers. Today they are psychopaths and ideologues trained by governments to traffic in premature death. Randall remembered Perry saying, “The Soviets don’t want Fuller dead. They want to know what he’s telling us. Protect the manuscript first, then the man.”

  But Randall, being human, had his own priorities. Once he had showed up at the house with what he called an interim query from Washington while the Fullers were still at breakfast and he observed with alarm that on a paper napkin next to Fuller’s bowl of cereal, there were eight pills and capsules, none of which he’d had a chance to have tested in the lab.