by Sol Stein
“You could have waited to see,” Ed said.
“And get caught on the defensive? That’s a loser’s game.”
“I just don’t like playing on the jurors’ anticommunist sympathies. I want to win because I’m innocent.”
Thomassy moved his face very close to Ed’s and his voice was almost a whisper. “Listen, innocent,” he said, “who is Ludmilla Tarasova?”
*
Thomassy came down the steps. There must have been thirty reporters down there with cameras and notebooks. He was used to juries who could be warned that the fifth amendment was not to be construed as a sign of guilt. If he said no comment, they’d put it in a context that’d make it look like he was ducking.
“Mr. Thomassy, hold it right there, on that step,” yelled one of the TV people.
A newsman with a pad asked the first question. “What is your reaction, Mr. Thomassy, after the first day of this case?”
“What case?” Thomassy said. “The government has no case.”
He recognized the Channel 4 reporter, who asked, “Mr. Thomassy, what do you make of the fact that there are reporters here from Reuters, Agence France Presse, et cetera. Are there international implications in the charges?”
“The charges,” Thomassy said, “are absurd. Excuse me, gentlemen.” He moved forward and away.
“Where are you going?” one of them yelled after him as his cameraman swiveled around to catch the departing lawyer.
“I’m going for an acquittal and a Scotch and soda,” Thomassy said, and hurried his pace because he needed to know a lot more about Ludmilla Tarasova before tomorrow.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Thomassy noticed that Francine had parked her bright red Fiat in the driveway headed out instead of in so that he would see the page of notebook paper under the windshield wiper. “If you’re bringing company home,” it said in her rectangular handwriting, “ring three times and wait a full minute before opening the door.”
In the years before Francine he’d known women who were skilled in the craft of arousal, who’d developed nuances in their voices to match the seductiveness of dresses and blouses and skirts chosen with care. But Francine was the first to administer what he thought of as prearousal arousal, an appetizer before the appetizer. Well, why not? Wasn’t it the kind of thing he sometimes did in the courtroom, getting the jury anticipating something and then stirring them up just before he was ready to deliver? Proverbs eleven, Thomassy’s book: You tingle their balls. You give them a hard-on. Then you let them have it. Well, here’s life full of reciprocity again. He’d come home with a mission, to talk to Francine, to use her role at the American delegation to get at information he couldn’t get directly without Roberts getting his antennae up. And all of a sudden he was moving on another track because that lady left a note under the windshield wiper of her car that was causing his loins to hum even before he’d set foot inside the door.
Thomassy turned the key in the lock and opened the door halfway. Francine was parked legs up on the ottoman watching the TV news and wearing what he had seen only once before and termed the ultimate flimsy, a diaphanous cover-up that covered up nothing, a translucent shimmer of thinly woven silk that called more attention to her breasts and pubic triangle than if she were naked.
“Come in, Bob!” Thomassy shouted over his shoulder, causing Francine to bolt out of the chair and scurry across the room to the bedroom.
Thomassy closed the door behind him.
Francine poked her head around the corner to see into the living room. “You bastard,” she said.
“I could have you arrested,” Thomassy said, “under two forty-five point eleven of the penal code.”
“Which is what?” she said, offering him a full kiss that stifled the possibility of response. Thomassy dropped his keys to the floor so that his right hand would be free to caress the very top of her behind.
“The public display of nudity is a Class A misdemeanor,” he said.
“I’m glad it’s Class A in your opinion.”
“Two forty-five point ten defines nudity as the showing of the human male or female genitals, pubic area, or buttocks with less than a fully opaque covering of any portion thereof below the top of the nipple, or the depiction of covered male genitals in a discernibly turgid state. I think I got it right.”
She glanced downward. “You’d have to have us both arrested. Here.” She handed him the telephone. “Call the police.”
Thomassy took the phone from her. He took his jacket off, removed his tie. Francine turned the deadbolt on the front door. “That’s just in case Bob shows up,” she said, laughing.
*
The fact that the TV kept going had been an additional aphrodisiac, a splatter of words and changing pictures that caused their lovemaking on the living room couch and then the thickly carpeted floor to be as if in the presence of witnesses they were not paying attention to, the anchor man, the anchor woman, faces flashing on the screen. Happily exhausted, they finally lay quietly in each other’s arms.
Thomassy laughed and said, “We wouldn’t do this if we were married, would we?”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s what going to contract does. It increases your goddamn sense of responsibility and diminishes your sense of play. Proverbs fourteen, Thomassy’s book. I know what marriage would hurt. What would it help?”
Francine, unprepared for the question, got up out of the witness box, and grabbing her diaphanous gown in anger as she passed the chair on which it had been flung, disappeared from his view.
*
They decided to have dinner out. They settled for the Greek restaurant because it was within walking distance and they both felt the need to walk, as if the exercise itself would restore some balance to their equation. Once they’d had their stuffed grape leaves in lemon sauce and a bottle of retsina, which tasted like no other wine in the world, and the Turkish coffee had been served, Thomassy broached the subject that had been on his mind when he spied the note under the windshield wiper.
“You’ve met Mike Costa,” he said.
“Once. It was enough.”
“I don’t give a damn about the clothes he wears. He’s a first-rate investigator. I don’t like surprises at a trial.”
“Unless you spring them.”
“Exactly. Mike came up with the name of one potential witness Roberts was thinking of using. He had two meetings with a Ludmilla Tarasova. He must have decided not to use her. Maybe that means that we should. Her name mean anything to you?”
Francine nodded.
“I need to know everything you know about her. I asked Ed Porter, but I can’t tell if he’s giving me a distorted version.”
“I don’t know that much,” Francine said. “She does some work for Washington on occasion.”
“What kind of work?”
“In her field. Analyses of first- and second-level characters on the Soviet scene. Backgrounders on shifts in the Politburo, that kind of thing. My boss knows her. I haven’t met her. I hear she’s a tough and attractive lady.”
“Could fit you.”
“Tarasova’s sixty.”
“What’s her background?”
“The usual. Russian born, escaped West during the war, probably been a U.S. citizen for some time. Have to be to do what she’s been doing. She teaches political science at Columbia. I haven’t read her books, but I’ve seen them quoted, sometimes alongside stuff from Fuller.”
“Any other connection between the two of them?”
“Why don’t I arrange for the three of us to have lunch, you, me, my boss. He can fill you in. He’s known Tarasova for a long time.”
“Look,” Thomassy said, acknowledging the delivery of the check with a nod at the waiter, “I’m up to my ears with this trial in Westchester. If I run down to the city for lunch, with travel time it’s half a day lost. And when am I supposed to do it, on Saturday? Does your boss work on Saturday? You’re in town every day anyway. Just l
unch with him, find out what he knows about Tarasova.”
“What reason could I use?”
“I’m sure a lady as clever as you proved to be this evening can figure out something that won’t get him unduly suspicious. Will you help?”
“What do you pay Mike Costa for snooping?” Francine asked.
“I make love to him regularly.”
“You are an arrogant man, Thomassy.”
“If I were really arrogant, I’d have political ambitions, like Roberts. I just like to win my cases.”
“A modest lawyer. Let’s go home and watch you on the late night news.”
*
Despite the Turkish coffee, Thomassy found himself dozing off for seconds at a time in front of the TV. He glanced over at Francine to see if she had noticed. If she had, she was being polite, her eyes straight ahead. She must have had just as tough a day at her diplomatic zoo as he’d had onstage in the courtroom, but she was twenty-eight and he was forty-five and hating it because the energy that had once seemed limitless was failing him. He’d been saying ridiculous things to himself for years, that he had half his life still to go. He wasn’t going to make ninety. Hardly anyone made ninety. What does over the hill mean, when you’re finished or when you’ve passed the peak and are coming down the slope on the other side? Maybe it was the television? If he were playing tennis, he’d be feeling exhausted and young, not like a washrag resting on the edge of the kitchen sink.
Francine’s elbow alerted him just as the anchorman was saying, “The international press was well represented today as the prosecution presented its case in the murder trial of Edward Porter Sturbridge, scion of the Sturbridge pharmaceutical family. The ex-Columbia University graduate student is accused of murdering his former professor, Soviet expert Martin Fuller, in a case that is being prosecuted by the Westchester district attorney personally.” And there were the reporters crowding around Roberts on the courthouse steps. “When asked how the first day had gone,” the anchorman’s voice said, “District Attorney Roberts said…”
Roberts flashed onto the screen, first full length and then in tight close-up. “The people today presented their case against the defendant, who stands accused of having committed the most hideous of crimes. Mr. Thomassy, counsel for the defendant, tried to turn things around to make it seem the people are on trial. Mr. Thomassy has the reputation of being quite a magician in the courtroom, but I think his bag of tricks won’t work in this case. We’re lucky to have a good jury and an experienced judge and despite Mr. Thomassy’s obfuscations, justice will be done.” The image went blank. A Ford commercial usurped the screen.
“Where the hell were you?” Francine asked.
“On those same steps.”
“Maybe your brilliance overexposed the film.”
“Some son-of-a-bitch in the cutting room left my segment on the floor.”
“Don’t get paranoid. Maybe your remarks were dull compared to Roberts’s.”
Thomassy grabbed at her as she got up.
“Missed,” Francine said.
“That prick Roberts.”
“Why don’t you send him around sometime?” Francine said.
“You’re supposed to be providing aid and comfort to me, not the enemy.”
She left him sitting in the living room. He’d have to learn how to handle the damn press. Roberts made it seem like it was an open-and-shut case. It’s a good thing the jurors aren’t allowed to watch television. But, he thought, most people he knew watched the late news. As far as they were concerned, wherever in the world Telstar beamed its message, he had lost the first round.
*
When Francine came out of the bedroom, she was dressed for the street and carrying the Lark bag with the multicolored stripe in which she had first brought what she called her “live-in essentials.”
“George,” she said, “you’re going to be able to concentrate on your case better. I won’t be here evenings. I’m not pulling a Lysistrata. I just want to be by myself for a while.”
He couldn’t bring himself to plead with her. She wasn’t asking anything. She said quite a lot. He didn’t interrupt her. When he found his voice he said, “I’ll carry your case out to the car.”
“I carried it in, George. I’ll carry it out.”
Ten minutes after he heard her Fiat disappear down the driveway, he went over to the bottle of Scotch and emptied it down the sink because he suddenly didn’t trust himself not to wreck his brain for tomorrow’s day in court.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Toward morning Thomassy woke to the drumming of rain on the roof, reached out toward the other side of the bed, pulled back his disappointed arms.
It wasn’t as if Francine had moved out. She had never moved in. But for a year his expectation was that after work she would come to his home as if she lived there.
Thomassy listened to the rain. She’d said he didn’t respect the idea of a permanent relationship. She’d said she had no obligation to nest in any particular place.
His leather-faced father, Haig Thomassian, breeder of horses in Oswego, had said I swear by your mother’s memory, to catch a woman you walk away.
Thomassian’s son, the courtroom manipulator, felt the center of pain in the hollow of his chest. He never longed like this for the women who used to come and go. His mind could not shut off images of Francine, the line of her neck, her hair, her eyes, the way she crossed her legs, whatever she was doing elsewhere. His father was wrong. Walking away was too big a risk. Besides, he hadn’t walked. She had. If he pulled away, that would double the distance.
If he didn’t get his minimum sleep he’d be like an angry kid in the courtroom. Thomassy reached into the drawer of his bedside table. His fingers found the earplugs he used to shut out sound. Counting sheep always seemed loco to him. He counted Francine’s hips walking across the screen of his mind. He needed not to think of her. He thought of his mother singing an old-country lullaby, her voice a whisper of itself, something about a sailor coming home from the sea.
When the alarm shattered him awake, he sat up with a start, expecting to see his mother still sitting at his bedside. How could it still be dark outside? The rain was now a continuous, angry fall of water blocking the sun and his sense of life.
He put his feet into slippers. From the window, he could see water cascading down his driveway, too much for the ground to absorb.
He remembered bad-weather mornings when he was a school kid reluctant to get out from under the blankets, his father standing in the doorway saying Hey George, terrific outside. God teach men God is God. Get your ass out of bed, George. Ghosts move us, Thomassy thought, heading for the bathroom. He turned the shower on, hot only, to let the enclosure steam up before he stepped in. Francine’s peach bath sheet was still on the towel rack, waiting to be used again. For a second he thought of using it instead of his own. He balled it up and threw it into the hamper, slamming the lid down. A small brass nail fell out of the hinge, spun on the tile floor, went under the radiator.
He stepped into the shower stall, turned his face into the rapidly heating water, mixed some cold in, used the long-handled brush’s coarse bristles to punish his shoulders. She had stepped in to soap his back, saying you won’t need that brush anymore. Like hell.
Twenty minutes later he was behind the wheel of his Buick, turning the ignition unsuccessfully for the third time. Maybe he’d flooded the carburetor. He grabbed the umbrella from behind his seat and went out into the maddening downpour again. His trousers, already wet between the bottom of his raincoat and his shoes, got wetter still.
On the line, the local taxi service was telling him no chance, not for an hour. He slammed the receiver down. He’d once thought of having a second car just for situations like this, but it’d seemed crazy for a single driver to have two cars. If Francine had stayed over, she could have given him a lift. Or at least gotten him to somewhere where he could get a damn taxi. This rain is going to make everyone in the courtroom act
as if they’re on downers today, the jurors, the judge.
He went out to the car once more, opened the driver’s door, sat down sideways, then tried to close the umbrella from inside the car, and succeeded only in splashing himself as he closed it. The battery, already weak from his having left the parking lights on one night last week, was further weakened by the nonstarts. He tried again, and suddenly the engine caught. He pumped the gas pedal carefully. Thank you, God. Probably Haig Thomassian from the Oswego corner of heaven, rewarding him for thinking of the dead.
*
Traffic inched. In places, the water was deep enough to hydroplane. When the run-off pipes in the area were installed half a century ago, some brilliant engineer had twenty-four inchers emptying downhill into eighteen inchers and then into twelve inchers. Whenever it came down like this the sewers backed up quickly, flooding the low places. He longed for revenge against the long-dead engineers.
He glanced at the dashboard clock. Thomassy proverb number seventeen was always arrive in court early. He’d seen too many lawyers get the judge going by arriving minutes late. It was hard enough representing people in a system that called the accused defendants. We’re all guilty, Your Honor; today the prosecutor is just picking on this particular defendant. He swung out of the traffic and took a shortcut to the Sprain Brook Parkway, which didn’t flood the way the Taconic and Saw Mill River did because its engineer had a functioning brain.
Thomassy arrived at the courthouse parking lot twelve minutes late. He ran, his left arm hugging his briefcase, his right trying to keep the umbrella vertical despite the wind that whipped rain into his face. Inside, he stopped in the john to paper-towel his face and hair. Then he tried to comb it, remembering the days when it was short enough not to need a hair blower. Nothing he could do about his soaking pants bottoms. Or his spirits.
The second he was behind the counsel table, the court officer shouted “All rise!” as if in reproof for Thomassy’s late arrival, and Judge Drewson swept in. Ed wanted to ask Thomassy something.