by D. W. Buffa
“If I take your husband’s case, there would be conditions,” I informed her.
Anyone else would have agreed at once. She demanded to know what those conditions might be.
“How old are you?”
The question surprised, and irritated, her.
“What difference does it make how old I am, what—”
“That’s the first condition. You—and your husband—answer any question I ask. I decide what is relevant and what isn’t.”
Her chin came up a defiant half inch, anger flashed across her eyes.
“I don’t think—”
“There are a lot of lawyers, Mrs. Fitzgerald; good ones, all of them eager to take this case. You won’t have any trouble finding one.”
“I’m thirty-two,” she announced, mastering for the moment all her latent hostility.
“Understand, right at the beginning, I’m going to need to know everything about you, everything there is.”
“But I’m not on trial, I’m not accused of anything. I’m not the defendant.”
“Don’t be too sure. Things come out in a murder trial, things that suddenly become important, things that make a jury believe, or refuse to believe, that the defendant is someone who isn’t the kind of person who would have committed the crime. What was his state of mind? Was he angry, upset, because his young and beautiful wife was having an affair, that she was about to leave him for another man?”
She did not protest the way some women might have done, fearing what I might think their silence to mean. She had too much an instinct for her own advantage, too much the sense of her own interest, to allow herself an emotional reaction. If she had an affair, she would never feel guilt.
“Or if it were to come out at trial that the defendant had been cheating on his wife,” I went on, describing with analytical clarity the way that what might have seemed exclusively private matters could prejudice a jury. “You won’t find it in any of the jury instructions, it isn’t what the judge says concerning what they may and may not consider, but once a jury thinks a defendant someone they would never trust, the verdict is all but certain. So, no, Mrs. Fitzgerald, there isn’t anything that isn’t relevant, nothing that you can hold back because you don’t think it important or that it isn’t anyone’s business.”
“Kevin has never cheated on me, and I have never cheated on him,” she said, cool and self-assured. “And if you’re thinking that wives don’t always know what their husbands have done, we aren’t like other married couples. We both understood the political damage something like that could cause.”
It was a curious way of putting it. She understood, as well as he had, the danger involved. It was not just his behavior, but hers as well, that might cause scandal. The possibility of indiscretion had, as it were, never been just on one side. I had the feeling that this had been discussed and decided, fidelity part of a check list of what his, or rather their, political ambition required.
“What about before you were married, when your husband was still single?”
She started to laugh, wondering if I was really that out of touch with the way other, younger people lived their lives.
“Kevin was young and good looking, wonderful to be with. He had his share of girlfriends. He had…I’m not quite sure what you’re asking.”
“Did he ever have an affair with a married woman? Did he have an affair with Tangerine Winslow, Evan Winslow’s wife, while he was running for mayor?”
“That never happened,” she insisted, shaking her head. “It was a rumor, nothing more. Kevin told me that it never happened.”
I now knew what I had not known before: Kevin Fitzgerald did not always tell the truth. Or was she the one who was lying? Was this just another way she protected her husband? We talked for another thirty minutes. I was not so much interested in the answers she gave to the questions I asked, questions that had mainly to do with the basic elements of their respective biographies, as in the way she continued to assume that if everyone did not already think her husband had done a very great thing, they would after everything came out in the trial.
“Kevin was on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He knows things other people don’t; he knew what was going on, he knew what was going to happen if someone did not stop it.”
“He told you that?” I asked, intensely curious. “He told you he knew what was going to happen?”
“Not what it was. He couldn’t do that, he couldn’t tell anyone, not even me, about the classified material he had seen. But, yes, he told me that however bad the things that had been done before, what was going to happen, what these people—what the president and the people around him—were going to do was worse, much worse. ‘Catastrophic’ was how he put it. He was worried, Mr. Antonelli, more worried than I had ever seen him. You have to help, Mr. Antonelli; the story has to get told. He saved the country.”
I promised to see her husband, but I did not promise that I would take the case. I might still change my mind after I had seen him. I told her only that I would make a decision after I talked to him. She did not have any doubt, once I met him in person and listened to what he had to say, what my decision would be.
“There is something you should know,” she remarked as she rose from the chair and in that effortless way she had started to turn toward the door. “All those millions of people who think what Kevin did was right, all those millions who keep sending money, who keep expressing their support, want more than an acquittal. They want him to lead the country.”
She said this with all the shining certainty of a triumph long foretold, like the dream of the fanatic who thinks her every fantasy destined to come true. I remembered what Jean-Francois Reynaud had told me at lunch, the eager willingness, both in ancient and modern times. to find in murder a political excuse.
A few minutes after she left, there was a soft knock on the door and Albert Craven walked in.
“Jean-Francois Reynaud—”
“I was just thinking of him.”
“He called a few minutes ago. He asked me to tell you that he wondered if you could return sometime tomorrow what he gave you at lunch today. He said it’s quite important that he have it back, and that you would understand.”
I picked up the briefcase and placed it on my desk. Whatever was inside, it was something no one outside the French government was supposed to have.
“Do you know what documents are in here?”
“Only in the most general terms. Jean-Francois would not tell me more than that they were highly confidential, that only a few people in the highest positions in the French government knew of their existence, that no one in American intelligence had been told about them and never would be.”
“But he gives them to me?” I asked skeptically.
“I think he must have explained that to you already. They have an interest, all of Europe has an interest, in making sure that the truth, all of it, gets out. You’ll need this, you’ll need to know what they know, for the defense. It isn’t what happens to Kevin Fitzgerald that concerns them; it isn’t their concern whether a jury finds him guilty or not. It is the reason Bridges was murdered—what he did that led to this—they want out. For obvious reasons, they can’t be seen involved. It is an American murder and an American trial. Everything is now in your hands.”
I FORGOT ALL about dinner, I forgot about everything except what I was reading, each page more compelling, and more damning, than the one before, all of them together a complete indictment of Walter Bridges. Everything I had read before, what from almost the beginning of his administration had been reported with growing alarm and disbelief in the papers, had been true, and yet none of it close to the real truth, the organizing principle of what had been attempted. I sat at my desk, reading some things three and four times to make sure I really understood the darker nature of what, by any definition, was clearly subversion. I was afraid to leave the office, afraid to take home with me this astonishing dossier compiled by agents of French intellig
ence, afraid that if I let it out of my sight for even a few moments it might disappear; afraid that what I had thought my ungrounded fear from earlier in the day that I was being watched, being followed, might not have been groundless after all. I read until I could read no more. A few minutes past two in the morning, I locked the briefcase and its incredible contents in my desk and went home. The first rose-colored light of morning began to paint its way down the steel towers of the Golden Gate when, my head still full of what I had read, I finally fell asleep. A few hours later, showered, shaved and dressed, I was on my way to the county jail and my first meeting with Kevin Fitzgerald.
He seemed oddly disengaged, as if what had happened had nothing to do with him. He spoke like someone describing not what he had done, but what he had seen, a witness, not a participant in something the significance of which he had not yet fully grasped. Or was it the other way round? Was it that he understood better than anyone the nature of his achievement? He was in jail, but he was not being held in a normal cell, one of those narrow, dismal places of confinement. It was a light, airy room that must have been used as an administrative office. There were bars on the two windows high up on the wall opposite the door, but the door itself was a normal wooden door, not one made of iron. The bed was a regular twin bed with a box spring mattress. There was a wooden table, and on the table a laptop computer. The bathroom, which had a shower, had a separate entrance of its own. Four large, overstuffed canvas mailbags were stacked close together against the wall on the far side of the table.
“Fan mail,” explained Fitzgerald.
Gesturing toward a faded, slightly tattered green easy chair the near side of the table, he sat in a straight back chair in front of the computer. If he had not been wearing the tan shirt and pants of an inmate, I would have thought I was in the private rented room of a writer working all alone on his novel.
“Trish told me you would be coming,” he said with a friendly, easy grin that could not quite conceal the coldness of his eyes.
He was smaller, thinner, than he looked on television or in the photographs I had seen in the papers. His hair was straight, black, parted sharply on the side, his eyes set evenly apart, his nose an almost perfect line and his mouth pulled back at the corners as if on spring set hinges. It left you, that look of his, with little doubt that time could not measure the interval between the instant he once he grasped the reaction you were hoping for and the reaction he would give. I decided to shake him out of his self-complacency
“You lied to your wife, why would I think you wouldn’t do the same thing to me?”
I said this so matter-of-factly, with such an obvious unconcern what he answered, or even if he answered at all, that he had begun to smile, the way he ingratiated himself with any well-meaning constituent who asked a question of no particular significance. The smile died on his lips. A question of his own shot through his cautious eyes.
“Lied to my wife? I don’t know what you mean.”
“Lied to her when you told her you had never had an affair with Evan Winslow’s wife.”
He looked at me, incredulous.
“You talked to Trish about…? I didn’t lie. It never happened. I never had an affair with Tangerine. Winslow lied about it; he started that rumor. I knew her, I knew them both. We were all good friends once. But it was in my first campaign, when I ran for mayor. Evan was doing all the fundraising, contributing a lot of his own money. He thought it meant he would have a place, an important place, in the new administration when I won. He also seemed to think he could tell me what I had to do as a candidate, what I had to say, what positions I should take. When he found out that none of that was going to happen, that he could not control what I did, there was a big blow up. He thought I had used him, used him for his money; he swore he would get even. His wife, Tangerine—have you ever seen her?—there’s only one reason she would have married a guy like him. She was probably sleeping with all sorts of people. It was easy to start a rumor that she was sleeping with me, that it was the reason he quit. He wasn’t going to tell the truth, that he quit because he couldn’t buy himself a place in city hall.”
If I had not seen her, if I had not heard from her that she would have left her husband and married him, if he had not had the kind of ambition that required money, I might have believed him. He was that good. Only seasoned politicians and courtroom lawyers can convince themselves the lies they tell are only the truth.
“I didn’t lie to my wife,” he insisted, indifferent, as it seemed, whether I continued to doubt his honest word. “And I won’t lie to you, if that is what you came to find out—whether you can trust me to tell you what you want to know.”
Reaching inside my briefcase, my own, not the one that belonged to Jean-Francois Reynaud, I pulled out a yellow legal pad and, with the fountain pen I always carried, began to scribble a few brief notes, the shorthand summary of what I would need to remember.
“Let’s begin at the beginning. The place it happened. Why here, why San Francisco, why on board Air Force One?”
He nodded slowly, and looked off to the side of where I sat waiting to hear what he was willing to tell me about what had happened just ten days before.
“I did not plan it in advance,” he said suddenly.
“Why were you there, then, if you didn’t go with that purpose in mind?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t go there with that purpose.”
“You didn’t…?”
“I didn’t know if I would get the chance. I didn’t know if I would even see him; close up, I mean, close up and alone. There were other times, other places—Washington, the White House, where I had been invited to meet with him, but always with other members of the House or Senate. I thought, when I learned he was making the trip to San Francisco, that there might be a chance to see him alone. I was part of the greeting party, the elected officials who stand on the tarmac to welcome the president when he visits the state.”
“But you got on the plane.”
“That was just chance. The plane was a few minutes early. One of his staff people comes down the staircase and tells me that Bridges wants a word. I was taken to his cabin. That’s where I found him, all alone. As soon as I was inside, the door shut behind me.”
I knew what had happened, everyone in the country knew what had happened then. What I did not know was why Fitzgerald had been so eager to confess.
“You think I should have denied it, said someone else must have killed him?” he asked with a jaundiced, thin-lipped smile. “I understood immediately the situation I was in.”
Had he? I wondered.
“But you didn’t confess right away. They had you in custody, held incommunicado, for three full days.”
“Want me to tell you that they beat it out of me, like in some old movie? That confession is my best defense.”
“The law of necessity?”
Fitzgerald pointed toward the bursting bags of mail, tens of thousands of letters which, he informed me, were running ten to one in favor of what he had done.
“They call me an American hero, another Nathan Hale, a patriot willing to die for my country. And those are just the one who write letters. For every one of them there are a thousand others registering their approval, and if not always their approval, their sympathy, for what I was forced to do. There isn’t a jury anywhere that is going to convict me of murder.”
This led to a question, cruel in its implications and impossible to answer, because, if it were true, every thought of heroism was destroyed.
“Is that what you believed when you killed him? That you could never be convicted, that you could do it and everyone would applaud?”
“I wasn’t thinking about the consequences; I thought about what I had to do.”
“There has never been a trial for the assassination of an American president,” I reminded him. I wanted him to understand that in something this unprecedented, there was no basis on which to assume that murder might be forgiven. “There a
re a lot of people on death row who thought they killed someone who deserved to die.”
“There isn’t anyone on death row—at least no one who deserves to be there—who killed someone who was a threat, an imminent threat, to the lives and the well-being of every citizen in this country. Call it a presidential assassination if you want to, but it isn’t as if I killed Kennedy or Lincoln!”
I now knew enough, thanks to Jean-Francois Reynaud, to know that Fitzgerald was righter than he knew. But he was already too certain of himself, too certain that everything was going to go his way, to tell him this.
“You have the reputation of a serious man, Mr. Antonelli. It is even said that you read serious things. Have you read any Russian history?”
“Some,” I replied, wondering at his interest. “When I was in college I took a course on the Russian Revolution, and I’ve read some things over the years. But most of what I read about Russia was Russian literature: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky—”
“Pushkin,” he added, picking up the thread. “The Queen of Spades is a great story,” he added with a reader’s eager nostalgia.
It surprised me that he had read Pushkin; it would have surprised me had he mentioned any Russian author’s name. I had thought him one of that breed of politician who lived his life as a cliché.
“Pushkin, Chekov, Lermontiv, I read them all, including, of course, War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov. You can read all the so-called experts in the field, all the dull, painstaking studies, the economic projections, the political analysis, but it is only what great writers write that tell you what is essential about a people, another country’s way of life. Someone once wrote—I’ve forgotten who it was—that by showing how corrupt, how ineffective the Russian aristocracy had become, War and Peace made the Russian Revolution not just possible, but inevitable. A Marxist would never believe that, but then no Marxist thought the revolution, the revolution that would destroy capitalism, could possibly start in Russia where capitalism barely existed.”