The Touch of Treason

by Sol Stein

  “Don’t you think you can get an acquittal without her testimony?”

  “Only a fool would attempt to predict how a jury will react to a string of circumstantial evidence. With Tarasova’s testimony, I could build the possibility that half of the KGB was out to assassinate Martin Fuller.”

  Perry glanced at Widmer. Widmer looked jumpy. Then Perry said, “We mustn’t lose perspective. A murder charge is one thing. If you put into the jury’s head the idea that this murder might have been committed at the behest of a foreign government, you’ll have opened a can of worms. He’ll never stand a chance with a jury of quite ordinary people who see treason clearly, not in the complex way, say, that intellectuals like Porter do. If he’s convicted—”

  “Now wait one minute!” Thomassy interrupted. “Nobody’s getting convicted. I’m using Tarasova to show that any one of a zillion guys in the KGB could have been on an assignment to take out Fuller while my client was peaceably pursuing his research.”

  Perry’s rude finger pointed straight at Thomassy. “I said if he’s convicted, and if you’ll let me finish, I’ll add that when and if that happens we’ll be obligated to use him. Youngsters like Porter don’t do very well in maximum-security institutions. Once he’s had a taste of prison he might listen to the kind of postsentence bargaining we very rarely get into. In other words, if you don’t get him off, Mr. Thomassy, we could get him out of prison subsequently with a sealed court order. However, the pictures you saw would indicate that Porter and the Soviets are not in tune, probably because what they wanted is what we would have wanted under similar circumstances. I can see us wanting to know what a Soviet expert on America might be thinking, but we wouldn’t want to stop his mind from working. That’s amateursville. If Porter’s convicted, the Soviets will be on edge. They know we’d visit him in prison and that every day would create pressure for him to talk to us. I assure you it’s only in the movies that men resist the chance to get out. The Russians would be afraid Porter might reveal who recruited him—we don’t know that yet—and who his control is or was. If you get Porter off without Tarasova’s testimony the publicity stops, and we can all return to the détente mirage for our own reasons.”

  “What happens to Porter?”

  “Who knows?” Perry shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  Thomassy looked at Perry. What had he been like at Porter’s age?

  Perry said, “I’m afraid that what Ned and we have got you involved in has repercussions outside the criminal justice system that outweigh the case itself. May I make a few suggestions?”

  Thomassy grunted. “You can make all the suggestions you like. I’m going to be guided by my principles, not yours.”

  “A declaration of a closed mind is hard to talk to.”

  “I didn’t say my mind was closed to anything, Mr. Perry. I’ve been sitting here listening to stuff that makes a man’s skin crawl. I said principles. And one of them is my responsibility to my client to use every possible avenue to suggest that others might have committed the crime.”

  “Whether he’s guilty or innocent?”

  “How many times do you think criminal lawyers get hired by innocent people? I’ll do what I have to do for my client.”

  “For your principles?”

  “Now you’ve got it,” Thomassy said.

  “They come ahead of your clients?”

  Thomassy felt suddenly peaceful because he was beginning to understand. “I suppose your client, if we wanted to put it that way, is the United States.”

  “Of course.”

  “Not a particular agency, or party, or person?”

  Perry didn’t like where the conversation was going. “The interests of the United States come first. Always.”

  “As a matter of principle?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Because your principles and the principles of the United States are the same?”

  “They are congruent.”

  “Then do you think it was in accord with the principles of the United States, as you understand them, for you people to have helped smuggle known mass murderers from Nazi Germany into Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, Argentina, and into the United States so they could escape justice in the countries in which they committed their crimes, and to do so on the alleged grounds that they might be useful?”

  “We used the mafia in Sicily to facilitate the Allied landings there.”

  Thomassy wanted to stand. This is not a courtroom, he told himself. Every place is a courtroom, he answered himself.

  “That was the Sicilian mafia in Sicily to save American lives during a war. What’s that got to do with rescuing Nazi criminals after the war? Do you think the American people would have ever voted for anybody who proposed such a move? Do you people think that you aren’t responsible to anyone? I’ve got one lousy client in court at a time, and I try to get him a fair shake before the law, but I don’t try to spirit him out of the country. My clients stand trial. Your fucking clients are living it up all over South America and you dare talk to me about my principles against your principles?”

  Thomassy stared straight at Ned Widmer, who looked like a man whose candle was barely flickering. “Ned, what’s your role in this? You’re not working for the government the way these people are, are you?”

  “No,” Widmer said, sighing. “Not in any sense except in which all citizens give something of their lives to it from time to time. Perhaps in error. I think we ought to go in to dinner now, George.”

  “Where’s Francine?” Thomassy asked.

  “I believe she’s at your house, as a matter of fact.”

  “Mind if I skip dinner, Ned,” Thomassy said. “Please convey my regrets to Priscilla.”

  “She’s gone visiting to some friends for the evening. I’m doing the serving,” Widmer said.

  “I’m sure you and your friends from Washington will have some things to discuss,” Thomassy said, heading for the door.

  *

  “Well,” Widmer said, “I guess he’s going to call Tarasova. I’m sorry you couldn’t persuade him not to.”

  “On the contrary,” Perry said. “The best way to reinforce an obstinate man’s decision, is to try to talk him out of it.”

  “You wanted him to call Tarasova?”

  Perry didn’t answer. He turned to Randall. “Tell the boys we’ve got a green light.”

  *

  Thomassy drove home keeping his speedometer at exactly seven miles over the speed limit. If you spoke friendly to a cop, not arrogantly, not scared, he’d never known one to give a ticket for seven miles over. Ten maybe, not seven. That’s what his grade-B head was full of, junk facts. Francine, trying to puff up his ego, had said, George, the UN is a big stage, with nothing going on. You’re on a small stage, with a lot going on. He’d believed her for the wrong reasons. He’d accepted the justice system as a game he could play as well as anyone. All those years since Oswego he had let himself believe that crap about law. He had always worked his way around the law on behalf of his clients. He had worked his way around something that didn’t exist. The courts were as much a pretense as diplomacy. There was no law. And if that was true, what the hell was he practicing?

  He’d always worked crime. Now he was in Madison Square Garden working something else. He had been yanked out of orbit. He wasn’t up against Roberts. He was up against two governments, neither of which was on trial. They both ought to be.

  He couldn’t pull his car into its usual place in his driveway because Francine’s car was already there, blocking the way.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Thomassy remembered coming home with his parents from his first sleep-over trip away from Oswego, a Thanksgiving weekend visit with his aunt and uncle Thomassian in Binghamton. He’d slept in his mother’s arms most of the way home in the Model-A his father called “the rattletrap,” but as they neared home, he stirred and woke as if he knew it was almost time and then he saw their house, isolated from all other houses, outlined in the
moonlight, and he’d asked his mother in alarm, “Why aren’t there any lights on in the house?” And his mother had patted him on the head, and in her Armenian accent he could still hear, said, “Because we not there.”

  For the fourteen years that he’d been practicing law in Westchester, Thomassy had arrived home to a darkened house. Known to all of his women as a bachelor by choice who did not want to share his life the way he saw other people sharing theirs, he had sometimes thought that if he’d had a family, at least there’d be a light on in the house when he came home. Once he’d mentioned that to Alice and she’d said, “You could leave one lamp on. It wouldn’t cost that much.” He’d told her, “I don’t want to advertise an empty house. One steady light says nobody’s home. A darkened house might have a security system on. I’ve defended burglars. I know how they think.”

  In the last year he’d usually gotten home before Francine since she commuted all the way from the city. But five or six times she’d been there first. And the inside lights had been on, as now.

  Thomassy turned his key in the familiar lock as if it were to a vault he was opening for the first time, unsure of what he would see when he swung the door open.

  He saw Francine in front of a fire she did not need except as a focus for attention outside herself as she sat, legs up on a hassock.

  “Hello, George,” she said.

  He wished she didn’t look so painfully attractive. “You set me up at your father’s.”

  Francine swung her legs off the hassock. “Before we start that argument, I have something to say. Let’s talk first and fight afterward.”

  Thomassy, his anger thwarted, loosened his tie, slipped his jacket off his shoulders and onto the back of a chair. Over on the counter an uncorked bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and two empty glasses caught his attention. He poured some wine slowly into each, brought one to his antagonist, slipped into the other chair in front of the fire. His shoes felt weighted. Would it seem too domestic if he took them off? Hell, her feet were bare.

  “You are pouting,” she said.

  “I am not pouting. I’m angry. You shared this place for most of nearly twelve goddamn months and you left on two seconds’ notice.”

  “They weren’t goddamn. I didn’t leave. I went away to think.”

  “You could have done your thinking here.”

  “Maybe some people can meditate in the middle of Times Square. I can’t be around you when I’m thinking about us.”

  “And what conclusions have you come to, Your Honor?”

  She smiled. The trouble with most of the men she’d met is that they behaved like boys when ostensibly courting, a game with goals, a kiss, a feel, a grope, a lay. And when they talked, it wasn’t for the fun of it but for points in the game. They played tough but had no sinew. They spent their ambition climbing a ladder that ended in the sky, nowhere, instead of living rung by rung. There was some of that in Thomassy, too, maybe in all men, hunters who went out to feed a family and got trapped in the skills of the hunt. Thomassy wasn’t interested in feeding anybody, including himself. He wasn’t out to get richer lawyering like daddy’s friends. He wasn’t a spectator. The play he was interested in was the one he was playing, in the courtroom, or with her in bed, or out walking on Sunday. Thomassy was the first to give her hope of a partnership. Their game would be them against the others, whoever the others turned out to be. She soared on thoughts like that, and then he’d say things like Your Honor to her and he was suddenly a boy like the rest. Maybe she wanted too much too fast.

  “George,” she said, “you’ve been conditioned by years of trying crazy cases that people either win or lose. Even trial marriage is not like a trial. Either both win or both lose.”

  “Yes, Spinoza.”

  “Don’t play high school with me. I am not lecturing. This is the beginning of what I hope you will allow to become a conversation.”

  At last the muscles in his cheeks relaxed, boyish belligerence fled.

  “I’ve never seen a trial except in the movies,” she said, “but the impression I get is that each side makes points for the benefit of the judge or the jurors, correct?”

  “Go on.”

  “There are no third parties in a marriage. Making points is only useful if you’re keeping score. There’s no score in marriage. It has ups and downs, but if in general it’s going right, there’s no judge, no jury, and no witness to anything that’s important in it. The minute partners start assembling witnesses, the fracture’s there.”

  “Who’s talking marriage?”

  “It applies to living together, married or not,” she said. Was she trying to box him in, do what men did to women in the game?

  Thomassy stared at her profile, lit by the fire.

  Was this his way of deflecting himself from what she was saying? “I thought we were headed somewhere. Are you listening, George?”

  He nodded. Throughout his childhood, having seen his father’s horses die, he had thought that one of his ongoing duties was to prepare himself for the death, first, of beloved horses, then people, including his father, and then himself. He had taken his mother, Marya, for granted, just as his father had, and she had died first, even before the horses, and he had realized how out of control life was in its ending and that what even a kid had to seize on was this day. For many years now the joys of this day were winning: motions, battles, courtroom cases, women; settling for the joy or work well done or a woman who would be glad to come back again. The Future—he always envisioned it with a capital letter—was in whatever breach of luck God flung down. A career was too long range. A permanent woman was equally long range. Before Francine he hadn’t prepared himself to meet a woman whose mind was crisp in places his was sodden, who could percolate an idea freshly that he’d long ago segregated in a drawer like his socks and handkerchiefs. Whenever he thought of her, present or absent, he felt her sense of life. If Marya had known her, she would have had to live longer.

  Francine touched his hand. “You aren’t listening!”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I was listening to myself.”

  “That’s an improvement over some of the people you listen to,” she laughed. Even her laugh was a death-dispeller. He’d come in wanting to vent his anger.

  “George,” she was saying, “when a couple starts producing evidence of the malfunctions of one side or the other, they’ve put themselves on trial, but we’ve done something better. We’ve put ourselves into a kind of trial first. We’re exchanging information, experience, getting to know, filtering in stuff from the past. I’ve got all that primordial WASP junk, you’ve got all the Neanderthal Armenian ready-to-be-massacred-unless-you-fight-back-first junk. We’re exchanging junk now so that if we end up living together more than a year, we won’t get sandbagged the way my friends did who got married five or six years ago, innocent about everything except sex and money. You know what I’m afraid of, George?”

  “Not sex.”

  “Not money either. I’m scared of palpitations because I can’t control them. Love sure fuzzes up a clear picture, which is why, I suppose, the palpitations vanish after a time so you can get used to seeing the other person without the damned glow.”

  “Finished?”

  “Those are my views, and I’m not ready to be cross-examined on them. Before you respond, maybe you should spend three days thinking about it the way I have.”

  “Why did you set me up tonight?”

  Francine got up slowly. “You’d rather fight than fuck, wouldn’t you?” she said, striding across the room.

  Thomassy wanted to shout Sit down! loud enough to shatter glass, letting the irrational roar like a rocket taking off. He wanted to yell The most important thing you want from a friend is not to betray you.

  He cut the switch. The WASPS thrived everywhere on control.

  She’d gone into the bathroom, slamming the door. You see, he wanted to tell the invisible jury, they go bananas just like Armenians and Italians and Jews.

 
; The fire glared back at him. Was the courtroom the place he hid from his own life?

  Did she think she could set him up with impunity because he loved her? Did Porter pretend to admire Martin Fuller in order to betray him? Or did he really love Fuller and betray him anyway? Thomassy, he told himself, you’re thinking sick. The only thing you’re supposed to be thinking about is that they can’t prove their case. Photographs don’t make a case. You’ve had photos submitted in other cases and made fuzzy pretzels out of them for the jury. And Roberts doesn’t have the photos, the Feds do, and they’re ready to deal.

  He sipped the wine. He put a pine wood log on the fire because he wanted to hear the sizzle. When the wine in his glass was gone, he finished Francine’s.

  Why did you set me up tonight? was a lawyer’s question, an accusation. If he learned to be civil to her, would it hurt his courtroom style? That is sick thinking, Thomassy. Like screaming at somebody. Had the Widmers learned that it was inappropriate or merely useless?

  He stretched his left foot toward the fire, the foot that worked the clutch when he’d had a gearshift car. You needed to be able to disengage the clutch that left you vulnerable to your own emotion. You can’t drive around life with automatic transmission.

  He got up and in his stockinged feet went to the bathroom door and knocked on it.

  “Please come out,” he said, thinking that in all the courtroom trials of twenty years he had never heard the word please.

  *

  When she came out Francine looked like she’d washed her face after crying. He took her hand and tried to lead her into the bedroom, but she said, “Sex doesn’t cure everything.”

  And so he led her back into the living room. He stretched out in front of the fire. She insisted on sitting in a chair.

  “Tell me your version of how I ended up at your father’s with the National Security Council instead of you.”

  “Where’s my wine?”

  “I drank it. I’ll get you another glass,” he said, starting to get up.

  “Never mind. I’ll get it.”