Necessity

by D. W. Buffa

  Craven lived in one of the pastel-colored houses that without any room between them lined the street across from the marina and the yacht club on the other side. The fog, which had vanished late that morning, giving way to a bright blue picture-perfect sky, had started back, a thick gray veil towering up from the sea, out beyond the Golden Gate. Children with their parents, women with their dogs, walked and ran and talked and shouted on the tan sliver of a beach where the small grass park abruptly ended. In the distance, the other side of the bay, out where the bridge stopped and the headlands of Marin rose up from the water, the lights of Sausalito began to glitter in the darkening light of dusk. I rang the bell, hoping I would remember the name of Albert Craven’s latest wife.

  “Isabel,” she said the moment Mrs. Albert Craven opened the door, and without the slightest sign of embarrassment or hesitation, ran her long fingers through my unkempt hair and kissed me affectionately on my cheek. “And I’m the fourth…or, let me see, I think that’s wrong,” she added quickly, striking a pose of gleeful confusion. “I think the fifth. Come in, Joseph Antonelli.”

  She kept chattering away as she led me toward the dining room, regaling me with one absurdity after another.

  “Between Albert and myself, I think we must have going on a full dozen—marriages, I mean. He was always marrying the wrong woman, and I was always marrying the wrong man. He was always losing money in divorces; I was always getting rich. A dozen marriages, and God knows how many years. Albert, as you know, is older than sin, and I—believe it or not—am no longer a young virgin. Hell, I’m not sure I ever was—either of those things, I mean: young or a virgin,” she remarked to her own vast, full-throated amusement.

  The dining room had changed. Perhaps after this many marriages it had become a habit to start each one by giving everything a new appearance. I had been too preoccupied trying to decide exactly what it was about Tricia Fitzgerald that I did not trust to pay much attention to the fact that the house, which had for years been pale yellow, had recently been painted pale blue. The change to the dining room was too dramatic not to notice. The mirrors that had covered two facing walls to give the room a feeling of infinite space in which a dozen guests seemed the central part of an endless banquet hall had been taken down. The glass chandelier that had cast a glittering light on the eager faces below had been replaced with indirect lighting from canisters inside the ceiling. The room had become warmer and more intimate, softer and more sedate, a place for quiet conversation. I remembered, like a missing friend, the lost sense of boisterous excitement, the sound of younger voices all clamoring for attention.

  I was the last to arrive, though I had actually been a few minutes early. Everyone was already seated, and a maid was moving from one guest to the next pouring wine. The room went silent. Albert rose from his place at the far end of the table, motioning for me to take the empty chair halfway down, directly across from one of the most strikingly beautiful women I had ever seen.

  “The famous Joseph Antonelli, the man we have all been waiting to meet,” she said in a voice that made you think of those cool summer nights and long summer days when you knew, with all the certainty you would ever feel, that those days and nights would never end and that you would spend every one of them with the girl you were with, the only girl you ever wanted to know.

  I looked at Albert Craven, standing there in his dark blue blazer and understated tie, waiting for him to explain. I knew that he always acted with my best interest at heart, but whatever he was doing now had been done behind my back. “I’m not going to do it, Albert,” I insisted before he could begin his well-rehearsed remarks. I raised my empty glass and nodded toward the maid, who immediately brought the bottle.

  Albert threw up his arms, a gesture of polite despair, an apology for his evident failure, and sank back down in his chair. With his hands clasped in front of his chin, he leaned forward. A thin, cunning grin ran unmolested across the gentle contours of his mouth.

  “I think you are; you really have no choice.”

  I sipped on the pinot grigio, my eyes moving from Albert to the gorgeous woman sitting opposite me.

  “No choice at all,” she said, as if the decision had already been made. “Everyone here agrees. You’re the only one who can do this, the only one who can make it right.”

  Make it right? What did she mean? I shot a glance at Craven.

  “Just listen,” he urged before retreating into an enigmatic silence.

  “Yes, just listen,” said a tall man in his early sixties with hooded gray eyes and a tangle of unruly gray hair. He had the cultured look of a classical musician and a voice thick as velvet, but J. Michael Thomas had never played an instrument in his life and his only connection to the arts was the large financial contributions he regularly made to a half-dozen different museums. If he gave a lot, he had a lot to give; more, it was rumored, than anyone else in the city and as much as anyone in the country. “We asked Albert for this meeting. We all wanted to meet you, to talk to you, to make sure you understood what is at stake here. This isn’t about someone’s guilt or innocence; it isn’t whether Kevin Fitzgerald should be punished for what he did.”

  “Punished?” A woman, somewhere in her forties, with frantic hands and nervous eyes, could not wait to break in with an opinion of her own. “He did everyone a favor. Saved the country, far as I’m concerned. It isn’t a crime when you kill a tyrant, someone who doesn’t give a damn about the law, someone willing to commit treason, someone who—”

  “For God’s sake, Naomi,” yelled her partner, Angela Baker, sitting three places down. “I didn’t like him any better than you did. No, don’t interrupt,” she continued. “That isn’t the question. The question is whether no matter how bad he was, you can allow someone to commit murder. He didn’t have to do it, you know. Fitzgerald—we all know him, how much he always wanted to be, had to be, the center of attention. But to kill—murder—the president! They could have impeached him.”

  “Impeached him? That would have taken forever.”

  Even in a coat and tie Evan Winslow looked rumpled and only half dressed. His shirt was not quite tucked in, the tie not quite pulled up. He seemed disconcerted, constantly fidgeting with his stubby fingers, constantly shifting his line of vision. There were those who thought him a financial genius; there were others, more envious, who thought him an idiot, dumb luck the only possible explanation for his success. Either way, he had been a shrewd investor when it came to politics. No one had contributed more to winning candidates. The only one he had not backed had been Kevin Fitzgerald.

  “Impeached him?” he repeated. “That would have taken a little more serious effort, a little more strength of character, than our good friend Kevin Fitzgerald has ever exhibited.”

  Dinner was served, but no one paid much attention to what they ate. There was only one thing on their minds, and only one thing on mine.

  “I’ve listened, I’ve heard what you have had to say. Some of you hated the president; some of you apparently did not think all that much better of the senator. Some of you think killing the president is something that, if it isn’t worthy of praise, should not be punished. Some of you think that, like any other crime, it should. But I haven’t heard anyone tell me why you think I should take on Fitzgerald’s defense as opposed to some other lawyer.”

  “Perhaps they don’t know the reason,” said someone who had not spoken before, a man who spoke English with the formal precision of a second language. “Perhaps it is simply something they feel.”

  “Jean-Francois Reynaud,” said Craven, introducing the guest who sat on his right, “the French Consul.”

  He looked the part, with the calm, easy manner of someone trained in all the arts of misdirection, the studied expression of friendly indifference, the languid charm of the detached observer willing to offer an occasional remark but always without commitment, willing, if called upon, to hazard a guess about the direction of affairs, but never without the stated assurance th
at, more often than not, he had been proven wrong about such things. Years earlier, or in older movies, there would invariably have been a cigarette dangling from his fingers.

  “If I may speak for everyone here,” he said, without any obvious doubt that, for some reason, he could, “the feeling, not just in this room, is that after what has happened, a trial, to have anything like the desired effect, has to be comprehensive. What I mean is that nothing can be left out. The truth, whatever the truth is, has to be told. Anything less than that, anything less than the whole story—what happened, why it happened, who was involved, who was not involved—and nothing will ever get back on the right track again. Everything and everyone, all of it has to be brought out into the clear light of day. And that won’t happen if some other attorney takes this on. Forgive me for putting it this way, but Americans, and especially American lawyers, are too much in love with technique, with the way things are done, with how they happen. You haven’t the same interest in what those things are. You lack any real understanding of history. The great nineteenth century historian Jacob Burckhardt once said—and please forgive me for this—that ‘barbarians and American men of business lack all knowledge of history.’ This, however, seems not to be a deficiency you share. You seem actually to have a serious interest in such things. That is the reason why you are the only one who can do this, take on a case that is in every sense truly historical.”

  It was not clear to me why he was here, or why he would have an interest. And while I understood that Albert Craven knew everyone in the city, including the various foreign diplomats stationed here, I did not understand why he had decided to include Reynaud instead of one of a dozen others. After all the other guests had left, he tried to explain.

  “I’m sorry about this, Joseph. I should have said something to you. I know that now. But they were all so insistent. They wanted to talk to you, try to convince you, but they wanted to get together first, to make sure they knew best how to proceed. As you could see, it didn’t work out very well. They’re still in shock. Everyone is. They don’t care—they’re frankly rather relieved—that the president is gone. What they’re worried about is what is going to happen now, not just the immediate reaction, but the long-term consequences. And they don’t really care, most of them, what happens to Kevin Fitzgerald.”

  I shook my head, remembering Evan Winslow.

  “Some of them seem like they wouldn’t mind if he was drawn and quartered.” I was curious. “What is the reason Winslow doesn’t like him? It seemed almost personal.”

  Albert emitted a low, knowing laugh.

  “Personal? Yes, I suppose you could say that.” He tucked his chin and gave me a look that seemed to taunt me with my ignorance. “You met her. She was sitting right across from you. The one you couldn’t take your eyes off. I’m sorry. Things got started so suddenly, when you first arrived, I forgot all about introducing people. Tangerine Winslow.”

  “His wife?” I exclaimed, unable to hide my astonishment, and, perhaps, my disappointment. “She’s married to him?”

  “Doesn’t make any sense, does it?” He slid the wine bottle we had been sharing across the table to me. We were sitting in the kitchen, new white tile everywhere. “She’s the reason why he hates Fitzgerald. They were friends. He thought they were friends. He had money, a lot of it, but, as you no doubt noticed yourself, not much else. Fitzgerald was outgoing, good looking, full of charm, and full of praise and compliments for those like Winslow who were helpful to him. The first time Fitzgerald ran for mayor, Winslow headed his finance committee and did a wonderful job of it, got people to contribute who had never contributed to a candidate before. He also contributed a lot of his own money. And then, just days before the election, he finds out that his great good friend, Kevin Fitzgerald, has been sleeping with his wife.”

  Albert Craven sighed with sorrow, less at the predictable improprieties of vain and ambitious men, than at the absence of all reasonable honor and pride in the minds and souls of men who have had the misfortune to fall in love with beautiful women.

  “What really almost killed him, the real reason he hates him, isn’t that Fitzgerald slept with his wife. The real reason is that his wife was going to leave him to marry Fitzgerald instead. She would have, too, according to what I’ve been told, but Fitzgerald, who was still single at the time, was too worried about what the scandal might do to his career.”

  “And so she stayed married to Winslow instead.”

  “As I say, it would have killed him if she had ever decided to leave.”

  “But he still wants Fitzgerald to have a fair trial?”

  “No,” said Craven, shaking his head emphatically. “None of them care anything about that. They want more than that. We all do. Jean-Francois said it best. It would be one thing if this had happened somewhere else—back East somewhere, or in the Midwest, or even the South. If it had to happen anywhere, it should have happened there. If it had been some demented loner, some white racist who thought the president was not going far enough, some half-educated fool who thought it would make him famous, everyone would have said all the usual things: what a tragedy it was, how violent we as a country have become, and then felt a private sense of relief at having finally reached the end of all the mindless, all the dangerous, nonsense to which we had been subjected. But it happened here, on Air Force One while it was parked at SFO; it happened here, in San Francisco, the place every conservative, and not just every conservative, thinks of as the gay and lesbian, the transgender, capital of the world, the place where we would rather give a home to a Muslim terrorist than a white straight couple who take their kids to church. That is bad enough, but then the killer—the assassin—is a sitting U.S. senator who just happens to be the former mayor of San Francisco. Do you know who those people were this evening? The civic and cultural establishment of the city, or to be more precise, the most important dozen members of that establishment. And they’re all scared to death. They might be glad the president is dead, they might wish they had done it themselves, but they know—they think they know—what will happen if they don’t scream louder than anyone else that Kevin Fitzgerald should be punished to the full extent of the law.”

  Craven poured himself what was left in the bottle, looked at the room still remaining in the glass, got up and went over to a cabinet and pulled out another bottle.

  “A friend of mine,” he remarked as he twisted the corkscrew with a practiced hand, “wanted to ‘get back to the land.’ He bought a vineyard and a winery up in Napa. Given what he paid, better pretend you like it. The cost of producing it was astronomical.” He took a long, slow drink, swishing it around his mouth before he finally swallowed. “Not bad,” he judged, wrinkling his nose. “Actually, I don’t really know if it is or not. Would you like a scotch and soda instead?”

  It was late, and I had had enough, and there were still things I wanted to know.

  “Why the Frenchman? What is his role in this? There was a reason you invited him. I understand what you were telling me about what the others are afraid of, why they want…what is it they really want? Some kind of trial of reconciliation, something that gives them immunity, removal of responsibility, exoneration for anything they might have said or done that might have contributed to the climate in which something like this could happen? Because if that is what they’re after, they’re not likely to get it from me. I don’t try cases to make people feel better about themselves; I try cases to win. Never mind that now. The Frenchman, Jean-Francois Reynaud. What does he have to do with this? He wasn’t here to remind me about the deficiencies of American education.”

  Albert looked down at his hands. He seemed to grow older, more fragile as he sat there, contemplating what he was going to say. Something was haunting him, perhaps a secret that he could not tell, a secret to a mystery no one else suspected.

  “People tell me things they shouldn’t. It is why I have so many friends, some of them quite disreputable,” he remarked with a gentle, forg
iving laugh. “Maybe it’s the face I have, maybe it’s my manner, maybe because, unlike you, no one would ever look at me and think me any kind of threat. I never slept with other people’s wives; I quite frequently never slept with one of my own. It’s why Isabel married me; it’s why, at my age, I married her. She likes you, by the way. She told me so. That’s unusual with her. She doesn’t like many people, and even those she likes she doesn’t like to any great degree. But she likes to talk, and she can talk to me. The day after the assassination, Jean-Francois came to see me. He told me things, things I had no right to know. He was here tonight because he believes what he said about the potential consequences of a trial. He was here because, as he told me, before he fully commits himself, he wanted to meet you in person.”

  “Fully commits himself? To what?”

  “I don’t know, or rather, I’m not sure. I have my suspicions. In any case, he now wants to see you alone. He asked me if you could meet him tomorrow at the consulate for lunch. I hope you will. No, I’m asking you to do it. See him, see Jean-Francois, and listen to what he has to say, and then, before you make a final decision, go and see Fitzgerald. Hear his side of it.”

  I left Albert Craven’s house and started walking up the street to my car. The fog had settled in again and I could barely see a block ahead. I did not notice the car that was following me until I heard a door swing open and a now familiar voice asking me to get in.