by D. W. Buffa
Fitzgerald tapped two fingers on the table as he thought about what he wanted to say. He was bending forward, leaning toward me, an arm’s length away. For a moment he did not say a word. His eyes drew close together and his lips pressed tightly as he worked through whatever problem he was trying to solve.
“I’m not the empty-headed fool you think I am,” he said suddenly.
“I didn’t…” I started to object, but quickly changed my mind. It was not a time for false politeness. I did not deny he was right. “Why do you think I would think that?”
His eyes flashed with recognition, an acknowledgement of candor.
“Why wouldn’t you, someone who reads Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and then reads in the papers the kind of things I say. Don’t think for a minute that I don’t wish I had been able to talk at a higher level, or that I haven’t thought myself a coward for staying within the predictable limits of everyday speech. But that’s just it, you see: I can’t connect what I would like to talk about and whatever everyone wants—or thinks they want—to hear. But you, you’ve read things, then remembered, thought about, what you’ve read. The Russian Revolution: you could draw a line, all the way through, starting with what Tolstoy wrote about, the war with France, Napoleon’s invasion, draw the line through the rest of that century right up to the Russian Revolution and beyond: Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Trotsky and the so-called Permanent Revolution, the belief that what had started in Russia would soon spread, would have to spread, through Europe; Stalin and his insistence on Socialism in One Country, the necessity for Russia to look within, to build itself up against the world outside that was intent on destroying what Communist Russia had to do. And then, once Stalin was in power, the countless murders, the millions of peasants killed in order to collectivize agriculture, the attempt to monopolize every aspect of Russian life, and then, finally, the Show Trials, the state-run accusations that those high-ranking Communists who had opposed what Stalin had done had not only been mistaken, but were traitors to the cause, agents of the capitalist powers, proof, the only proof needed, of their own confessions in open court.”
“The show trials of the thirties, Bukharin and the others. Koestler wrote the book.”
“Darkness at Noon,” said Fitzgerald, surprising me again by the breadth of his knowledge. “I read it more than once. Someone charged with crimes he did not commit agrees to confess to those crimes in open court, crimes of high treason against the Communist party, crimes that will cost him his life. And why does he agree? Because—”
“Because the Communist party is the chosen instrument of history, and he cannot deny his guilt without denying his own belief in history; he cannot deny his guilt without denying the only thing that gives meaning to his life.”
Fitzgerald sat back, studying me with a new interest.
“Koestler’s book is based on what happened to Bukharin, who, as you know, was not the only one prosecuted for something he did not do, but his was the most important trial because he was the highest ranking member of the party accused. It is the same position I’m now in.”
How could he possible think that? The difference was too obvious.
“Bukharin confessed to something he did not do. Are you saying that your confession isn’t true, that—”
“I’m saying that the government wants to use my confession in the same way the Russian—the Soviet—government used Bukharin’s and the others: to show the world that not just those in power, but a whole way of life, is under threat and that something has to be done to stop it. That meant execution for the Russians under Stalin; it means the same thing here. That’s why, don’t you see, it’s so important that the trial becomes more about the so-called victim than the question of who killed him. The only question is why Walter Bridges had to die. It has to be a show trial, but one in which the government—the president—is put on trial!”
“Have you ever been involved in a trial?”
“I didn’t go to law school, I’m not a lawyer, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“What I’m asking is have you even watched a trial, a criminal trial, watched it start to finish, watched jury selection, listened to opening statements, followed the testimony of the witnesses, observed the different ways in which the prosecutor and the defense attorney conduct a cross-examination? Because if you haven’t done that, you have no idea what can happen. You can’t just decide you’re going to make the trial about the president. The prosecution can call as many witnesses as it likes, introduce all the evidence it thinks it needs, and everything the prosecution does will be to show that there was no excuse for what you did, that Walter Bridges could have been not just the worst president, but the worst man who ever lived, but that you had no right—no one has the right—to decide on your own that it’s okay to kill someone else.
“No, don’t bother,” I said as he began to interrupt me with an argument of his own. “I know what you’re going to say. I don’t disagree. It’s probably the only hope you have. But you’re making a huge mistake to think you can persuade a jury—any jury—by simply telling your story. You aren’t going to be on the floor of the Senate speaking to a respectful, silent audience of your fellow senators; you’re going to be on the witness stand, answering questions, every answer subject to immediate attack by a prosecutor who wants nothing more than to cut everything you say to ribbons.”
Fitzgerald was not convinced. He might have to answer questions, but he would decide how long those answers would be. He had spent half his life taking questions from an audience, questions that had not always been friendly. He knew how to handle people.
“I’m told that one of the rules in politics, something you learn almost at the beginning, is that if someone asks you a question you can’t answer, answer one you can. You won’t be able to do that here, not when you’re a witness in a trial. Do anything but answer directly, you, and the jury, will immediately be reminded that you haven’t answered what you were asked, reminded in a way that will leave no doubt in the minds of those jurors that there is something you are trying to hide.”
I had spent my life trying cases, and he had never seen one, but he knew better what was going to happen. He was sure of it. This was different, this would be no normal trial. Hadn’t I already said so myself; hadn’t I told him what he undoubtedly had known, that there had never been a trial of someone accused of assassinating the president of the United States?
“Tell me something,” I said as I prepared to leave. “I first started reading about the Russian Revolution when I was in college. What about you? When did you first get interested, when did you first read those Russian writers we were talking about: Pushkin, Turgenev and the others?”
“I read a few things early, when I was still a student, but most of what I’ve read—all the really important things—just a few years ago.”
“When you were already in the Senate?” I asked, just to be sure.
“That’s right.”
“When you were on the Intelligence Committee?”
“Yes.”
“When you first became aware of what the Russians were doing, how they were establishing relationships with Americans, Americans who were private citizens, Americans who had certain kinds of financial interests that involved Russian companies, Russian investors and banks, people who were connected, one way or the other, with the Russian government?”
“Yes, but how did you—”
“I’m not the empty-headed fool you thought I was,” I remarked with a quick sideways smile as I got to my feet. “I have a few sources of my own.”
After nearly two hours with Fitzgerald I still was not sure why he had done what he had. He had made it sound almost accidental, something he had decided he had to do, but, despite that apparent decision, had never really planned. If he had not suddenly been given the opportunity, suddenly found himself alone with the president, it might not have happened at all. But why—and this was a question the prosecution would never ask—if it was obvious,
necessary, that something this drastic had to be done, if it was the only way to save the country, had he not planned every step in great and meticulous detail? And why, if it was all so damn obvious that there was no other choice, had he acted alone? Why had he not engaged a group of like-minded men, formed a conspiracy that by the sheer weight and numbers of those involved, other senators like himself, turned murder into what could then be claimed was an act of public need and retribution, given it at least the color of shared sacrifice to a sacred ideal. Had this involved only private individuals, if the victim had not been the president, there might not have even been a charge of murder. In the absence of sufficient premeditation, it might have been pleaded down to manslaughter.
“It isn’t a criminal case,” replied Albert Craven when I mentioned this to him in his office later that same day. “It’s a political case, a political trial. I scarcely need to explain that to you.”
He sat behind the black Victorian desk, ugly beyond description, that had been the unwelcome gift of one of his first wives. He had hated it, as anyone would, but he was too soft-hearted to think of getting rid of it, even after the divorce. He thought it rather nice of her to think it would help to cushion the blow of her decision to leave if she left it with him. It had become a kind of ritual, a way to keep intact the line of shared memories, that each time I came in to see him, I would manage, now without any conscious awareness, to shudder at the sight of those large, thick, circular legs spiraling up to four carved Herculean figures on whose respective bent backs rested the weight of that enormous monstrosity, ready, at any moment as it seemed, to crash through the floor below.
“Isabel wants me to get rid of it.” With Buddha-like serenity he tapped his fingers together. “A new, modern desk, all glass and steel. It gives her something to do, change everything out of all recognition, make everything new. She mentioned, just this morning, that I need to change my wardrobe. You’ve never been married. There are certain advantages in that. Funny, I never seem to remember that. You would think I would, having had so many chances to learn that particular lesson. One advantage,” he said with a burst of energy as he jumped forward and slammed the palms of his hands on top of what remained a soundless pile of wood, “is that when you’re single and a married woman wants to see you, there is at least the chance that what she has in mind is illicit, especially if she is remarkably good looking and married to a man she quite properly despises.”
“Then it isn’t my new client’s wife?”
“Then you’ve decided for sure to take the case,” he remarked, the gleeful good humor vanishing from his eyes. “Good. Very good. Whatever happens, at least we can now be sure that the truth—whatever the truth is—will come out.”
“You said a woman, a married woman, wants to see me.”
“I did, didn’t I,” he replied, the eager anticipation, if a little less mischievous, coming back in his eyes. “Tangerine Winslow. You must have made an impression the other night at dinner. She didn’t want to call you directly. She asked if I could arrange it. She said that if you were going to take the case, there was something you should know.”
Resting on his elbows, he folded his hands together and held them close to his mouth. He looked at me with a slightly puzzled expression, wondering, as it seemed, how far he should go, how much he should tell me, whether he had the right to interfere.
“She is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen, and easily the most dangerous.”
“Dangerous? What do you mean?”
“I’m really not sure. But every time I see her, I remember an old story about a woman who lived in ancient Greece or Rome. She would sleep with anyone for a price, but the price was unusual—your life. One night, and the next day you died, died by your own hand, suicide the price of carnal knowledge. A price, apparently, a great many were willing to pay.”
“You think that is what Tangerine Winslow might charge?” I asked with a quick, dismissive grin.
“No, but there are other things, other costs you might not think that much different. I told her I would do what she asked, let you know she wanted to see you. I didn’t tell her that I would tell you that you should. And the truth is that I think it might be the biggest mistake you could ever make.”
“Well,” I said, as I stood up, “I can at least promise I won’t be running off with her to London or New York. I have a trial to get ready for.” Then I remembered. “But she said there was something about the case I should know?”
SOMETHING ABOUT the case, that was what I told myself as I walked into the Mark Hopkins Hotel and took the elevator to the restaurant at the top where I had agreed to meet her at the bar. I was right on time, nine o’clock, and she was not there. I ordered a scotch and soda and stared at the lights of the city, and the lights of the bridge, and the lights dancing in the distance the other side of the bay in the Berkeley Hills. The place was full of well-heeled tourists, the out of town guests staying at what, along with the Fairmont across the street, were the best-known hotels on Nob Hill, places you could brag about when you finally had to leave and go back to wherever you had come from, full of all the excitement that came with telling everyone that San Francisco was everything you thought it would be and even more. They were not all newcomers, of course; some were old enough to have started coming here half a century before, when travel took longer and people stayed longer in the same place, and when instead of a quick drink on the way to somewhere else, afraid that otherwise something might be missed, most of those who came to drink, drank until last call, drank and talked and drank some more when, if you were lucky, you might see that great scoundrel of a lawyer Melvin Belli on a three-day drunk with some of his famous hard drinking Hollywood friends, when Herb Caen, chronicling all the city’s glorious indiscretions, might be seen scribbling a note to himself, perhaps thinking already of the line he would later use when, dying of cancer, he would tell ten thousand of his closest raucous friends at a downtown rally in his honor that he had dreamed he had died and gone to heaven and that after he had a chance to look around, St. Peter asked him what he thought of heaven: “It’s very nice,” he said he told St. Peter, “but it isn’t San Francisco!”
There were people at every table, scarcely any room left at the bar. The noise was not deafening, but loud enough that the bartender had to lean forward to hear my order. And then, suddenly, the noise stopped, the only sound a kind of puzzled hum. Turning around, I immediately knew the cause. Tangerine Winslow, looking just like Elizabeth Taylor, looking just like Natalie Wood, looking just like every movie star you had ever seen, was walking across the room as if the place belonged to her. Everyone was watching, certain they must know her, certain she had to be someone famous, wondering why they could not remember her name. She came straight toward me, and I felt that long forgotten rush of boyhood pride and pleasure in the knowledge that she had come to be with me. She took the empty stool next to me and without a word, or a look of greeting, asked the bartender for a glass of wine. She stared straight ahead, an enigmatic smile of Egyptian secrecy moving catlike across her firm, full mouth.
“I’m late,” she said, as if I was not there and she were speaking to herself. “I don’t know why I can so seldom be on time. Do you think,” she asked, turning suddenly to me, “it’s because I spend too much time getting ready? Too much time worrying whether you will be as interested in me as I would like you to be?”
Wearing a black, low-cut dress, with diamond earrings and a gorgeous diamond necklace, she had thrown her fur coat over the back of the high-backed leather stool with the careless gesture of a woman who took for granted that whatever clothing or jewelry she wore owed all their luster to her.
“I heard a story,” I began, nursing the scotch and soda, “not that long ago, about a woman who lived a long time ago, a woman so beautiful that she would only sleep with a man if he agreed to kill himself the morning after they spent the night.”
“And did she sleep with many?” asked Tangerine
, sipping on her wine.
“Endless numbers.”
“Then she was a fool.”
“A fool?” I laughed. “Why?”
“Because at least once in a while she should have found one worth sleeping with twice.” Her eyes still on me, she took another slow drink. “And would you like to know if I ever have—found someone I wanted to sleep with twice?”
I caught myself, stopped while I still knew what I was doing.
“You already answered that.”
“Yes, of course. Kevin, that’s who you mean. And you’re right, I did—and I would have for who knows how much longer. Yes, I admit it: I was in love with him, in ways I had never been before.”
I felt a slight sense of disappointment, a tinge of regret, a feeling, not jealousy exactly, but something more like envy, not of Kevin Fitzgerald, not of him directly, but the wish that it could somehow have been me; the sense of something lost, not something I had ever had, but, if I had had that chance, would have wanted.
“You remind me of him a little,” said Tangerine, as if she could read, not my mind, but something deeper, the thought that has not yet come, but would. “It isn’t that you’re about the same age. You don’t look anything alike. His looks are all surface; you’re are more ingrained, more a true reflection—if I’m any judge—of who you really are. Yes, that’s the difference, I think. You don’t care what other people think about how you look. You never think about yourself that way. That’s what makes you so attractive: it never occurs to you to wonder if you are. What you have in common, why you remind me of him, is the way you both are so single-minded, so obsessed with getting what you want. It’s the reason, unless I miss my guess, why you never lose a trial. You won’t allow it to happen. You’ll spend all your time, concentrate all your energy, on only that one thing: winning, finding a way to convince a jury that the only choice they have is to find the defendant not guilty. Am I wrong?”