by D. W. Buffa
Without another word, without even the usual, and traditional, thanks to the witness for her testimony, without even bothering to acknowledge formally the end of his direct examination, Raymond St. John, lost in some unsettled thoughts of his own, walked to the other side of the counsel table and silently took his seat.
“Mr. Antonelli?” asked Judge Patterson, quiet and subdued. “Do you wish to cross-examine the witness?”
I did not move. I just sat there as if I could not decide. I let Jenny Ann Carruthers wonder whether I might be reluctant, even afraid, to try to match wits with her. Slowly, and with an effort that suggested I was still not sure, I pushed myself up, shook my head as if at an unavoidable ordeal, and leaned my hip against the table and stared up at the ceiling.
“The speech, the speech given on the floor of the Senate. Would you quote me that line again?” I asked, my gaze descending until my eyes squarely met hers.
“He said the country could not survive another two years of the Bridges administration, that the only way to save the country was to get rid of Walter Bridges.”
“Yes, very good. And I can tell the jury and everyone else who is listening that that is exactly what Kevin Fitzgerald said in that speech he gave in the Senate.”
A small, vindictive smile marched triumphantly across her mouth.
“And, if you would not mind, now that you have quoted that line, quote the line right after that. You remember!” I remarked when her only response was a blank stare. “The line that says, ‘Impeachment is the only way we have to rid ourselves of what is almost certain to turn out to be a criminal enterprise the likes of which we have never seen in our public life.’ Surely you can’t have forgotten that, Ms. Carruthers. I remember distinctly seeing you on television, in the White House briefing room. It was all the reporters wanted to know about: what the president thought of Senator Fitzgerald’s call for his impeachment!”
She was halfway out of the witness chair, protesting what she called my deliberate attempt to mischaracterize what she had said.
“Quoting someone, you think distortion?” I asked with a smile, walking in a half circle in front of the two counsel tables. “Because the meaning of what the senator said isn’t what you said it was?”
“He said they had to get rid of him. That’s what he did.”
“Yes, perhaps, but that raises the question, doesn’t it, of why. You testified that Senator Fitzgerald was considered the most serious, and determined, political opponent Walter Bridges had. You testified that you and others in the White House, including especially the president himself, thought the senator the most likely opponent the president would face in the next election. Isn’t that what you said in direct response to the question Mr. St. John asked?”
“Yes, but—”
“And if you thought Senator Fitzgerald was that formidable an opponent, would it not be safe to say that you had your reasons?”
“Reasons? What do you mean?”
I looked at her, incredulous.
“What do I mean? You’ve been a member of Congress, you were involved in the president’s election. You’re considered a very good political operative, someone who knows her way around politics, who knows what it takes to put together an effective campaign. There were reasons why you thought Kevin Fitzgerald a threat, a political threat. What were they? Had you done private polling on the likely result if the two of them ran against each other?”
“Yes,” she replied with some reluctance.
“And who won in a matchup like that?”
“The senator.”
“By what margin, in the last poll that was taken?”
“Fitzgerald was ahead fifty-six percent to thirty-two percent.”
“The rest undecided?”
“That’s right.” She looked at the jury, anxious to explain something she thought it important everyone know. “It seems like a large margin, but the election was two years away, and once we put an end to all the groundless rumors, all the false reporting, once we got Congress to concentrate on the president’s agenda, those numbers would turn in a hurry.”
“But they had not turned yet. And so you sent the president to California to give a big speech, a speech that was never given, correct?”
“The president was murdered!”
“The speech was never given. Who wrote that speech?” I asked with an urgency that for a moment caught her off guard.
“There were several writers involved, several people who—”
“It was written by Michael Donahue, wasn’t it? Michael Donahue, who was the principal foreign policy advisor to the president. Michael Donahue, who is now the new chief of staff.”
“The speech was about technology and the world, so, yes, Michael would have been involved.”
“Involved? No, he wrote it. That speech was supposed to set a new direction for the country, that speech was going to describe how with the new technology the country could chart a new course in which our first, our only, duty was to ourselves. Isn’t that correct? Isn’t that what Walter Bridges was going to say in that speech, nearly every word of which was written by Michael Donahue?”
“The speech was never given! Kevin Fitzgerald made sure of that. Maybe that was his idea of how to save the country, stop anyone from saying anything he might disagree with!”
“Your Honor!” I shouted as she gaveled the courtroom to order. “Would you please instruct the witness what it means to be one?”
Evelyn Patterson and Jenny Ann Carruthers were about the same age, but years apart when it came to their understanding of what was tolerated in a public forum. Carruthers might ignore a reporter; she could not ignore this judge.
“You give answers to questions, truthful answers, the shorter the better. Do anything else, Ms. Carruthers, and I assure you the White House will be getting along without you while you have an extended vacation right here in San Francisco, though not in one of our better hotels. In brief, Ms. Carruthers,” she added with a steely-eyed stare, “don’t…with me, understood?” She paused just long enough to make sure the question answered itself. “Your witness, Mr. Antonelli.”
“You agree that Senator Fitzgerald was the biggest political threat you faced, correct?” I asked, boring in as I moved closer. “You knew that in a head to head matchup he won by more than twenty points, isn’t that correct? You knew, in other words, that Kevin Fitzgerald had nothing to worry about, that he was almost certain to be elected president in the next election, not two years away. There was no reason for him to do anything but wait, isn’t that right?”
She could not wait to answer, to show everyone what a fool I really was.
“But he didn’t wait! He murdered him!”
I was less than an arm’s length away. I took a single step back.
“Which can only mean that something had happened, that he had learned something that told him he could not wait, that something, something drastic, had to be done to save the country. What do you think that was, Ms. Carruthers? What was going on, what was the president, what were you and your friends in the White House, doing that would make someone think they had to kill the president the United States, whatever might happen to them?”
“There was nothing going on!” she cried, her face red with rage. “Nothing!”
“You were director of communications under President Bridges. And you still have the same position. Were you asked to stay on during the transition, until the vice-president—I should say, the president—has assembled a staff of his own?”
This seemed to quiet her. She was back on solid ground. She was proud of her position, proud that she deserved to have it.
“The president has asked me to continue the work I had been doing. There aren’t going to be any changes. The vice-president—all of us—are determined to finish what we started.”
“There aren’t going to be any changes? That isn’t quite true, is it? Some changes have already been made. Richard Ellison, who was chief of staff, isn’t chie
f of staff now, is he?”
She dismissed this as a minor matter, the normal, routine shuffling that follows every change of administration, even a transition as tragic but as seamless as this. Ellison, she insisted, had not been replaced, he had been given the main responsibility for the domestic policy agenda. I repeated the question.
“He isn’t chief of staff anymore, is he?”
“No, as I just said, he’s been—”
“The new chief of staff, the person through whom everything, including the domestic policy agenda, will go is Michael Donahue, isn’t that correct? Michael Donahue, who—”
“I’m sure this is all quite fascinating,” said Raymond St. John, rising from his chair to state an objection. “But it isn’t clear what connection the defense thinks there is between the question of White House staffing and what is at issue in this trial.’
“Mr. Antonelli?” asked the judge. “Is there a connection? Because otherwise it is difficult to see the relevance of this line of questioning.”
There was a connection, a serious connection, but I had learned it through Jean-Francois Reynaud, and I could not yet reveal it.
“I’m finished with the witness, your Honor.”
Jenny Ann Carruthers was excused. She left the courtroom without looking at Kevin Fitzgerald or anyone else. She had looked at him only once, and then only briefly. She had never looked at him when she was accusing him of murder.
Fitzgerald had not noticed.
“I was too busy watching the way the jury was watching her,” he explained that evening when I visited him in his unusually comfortable cell. “They didn’t like her. Hardly anyone ever did.”
He sat on the edge of the bed. His dinner tray, which he had barely touched, lay on the floor next to him. The room seemed smaller. There were more bags of mail, double the number there had been just a few days before. The letters he had opened, the samplings he made that, as he informed me, showed that a majority had been written to show support, were stacked on the table he used as a desk. The numbers who had sent messages on their electronic devices exceeded anything that had been seen before.
“We’re winning,” he assured me with the same bright, artificial smile he must have flashed to a thousand different audiences.
“You might be winning in the country, but you’re not winning in court.”
“The trial has just started.”
“The trial is damn near over. All that’s left for the prosecution is to introduce your confession.”
For a single, fleeting moment, he seemed to lose confidence, but then, remembering who he was, he was as brash and as defiant as ever, convinced that everything was under control.
“Which is when the trial really begins, when the prosecution rests and it’s our turn. Cheer up, Antonelli, there’s nothing to worry about.” He got up from the twin bed and walked over to the stack of open mail. “Everyone knows what I did, and nearly everyone understands it was necessary, that there wasn’t any choice, that it was either Bridges or the country.”
Did he really believe that, I wondered. Whatever he may have read in the letters he had been sent, however much the sentiment expressed in them was running in his favor, he read the papers, pouring over every line of the coverage of his trial. He had to have known that on the question, not whether Walter Bridges had been fit to be president, but whether there could have been any justification to kill him, less than a third of the American people were willing to go as far as that.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said with that unerring instinct he had for what was going through other people’s minds. It was the politician’s clairvoyance, to know in advance the weak point of their own argument. “But you’re forgetting that most people aren’t going to admit they approve. That’s a secret they’ll share only with themselves, and maybe,” he added with the shrewdness of a thought just discovered, “not even with themselves. They’ll act on it, though, when they have the chance, when they’re voting in the jury room, or at the polling place. You’ll see. I’m not wrong about this.”
His confidence seemed absolute, and yet he kept glancing at all those mail bags stacked on top of each other, appealing, as it were, to that vast anonymous public opinion that was the only jury he seemed to take seriously.
“We have some work to do,” I reminded him.
For the next two hours we went over what I thought the remaining prosecution witnesses were likely to say. But I was mainly interested in getting him to go into detail about his confession. It struck me as remarkably vague, a bare outline of the crime. What was the reason he had not been asked about his motivations, why he had decided to kill the president? His response did little to fill in the gaps.
“I told them what happened. I was not going to tell them any more than that.”
“Most people who confess to a crime want to talk about why they did it; they want to get it all off their chest, make a complete confession.”
“I’m not most people, and this wasn’t a crime. It was an act of defense!”
“You did not think it would be better to tell the whole truth, not just what you did, but why?”
“A confession like Bukharin made in those Russian show trials under Stalin we talked about?” He shook his head. “Bukharin’s confession was made in open court, which, you might remember, is where I’m going to make mine.”
“But not to announce you’re guilty, like Bukharin, but to insist on your innocence, like…” I could not remember a comparison I could draw. The case against Fitzgerald had no obvious precedent.
“When you kill the king, they call it tyrannicide and throw flowers at your feet, but only if, after killing him, you wear the crown. But you’re on trial for your life, and Steven Spencer, who was vice-president, now sits in the Oval Office.”
“A borrowed crown, to use your analogy; one that won’t be permanent.”
“Is that your plan: walk out of court a free man and run against him in the next election?”
Fitzgerald gave me an odd look.
“Not after what I have to say in court.”
“Then you wouldn’t—”
“Yes, I would—I will. But Spencer won’t—he can’t.”
It was like listening to what Lenin must have talked like in the sealed train in which the Germans brought him back to Czarist Russia. The Germans hoped he would cause dissension in the Russian army and help them avoid defeat in the First World War; he planned on causing more than disaffection, a revolution that would bring him, and those who followed him, to power. Sitting in his cell, Fitzgerald was already thinking how his trial for murder would be his springboard to the presidency. It was more than stunning, it was madness.
“They were all involved—all of them. The Russian thing was real. There are no coincidences. Listen, it isn’t that difficult to understand. Bridges was going to lose. It was not going to be close. Now, imagine you’re someone close to him, someone who does business in Russia. You know a lot of people, you have Russian friends, people you do business with. It doesn’t have to be anything criminal—money-laundering, that kind of thing—legitimate business, all of it above board. Whatever else was going on, whatever else may have happened, just assume that everything up to that point had been perfectly legal. You’re having dinner with some Russian investor, some partner in some international enterprise. The conversation turns to the campaign. The Russian mentions that he had heard there is a lot of information, really damaging information, on the other candidate. He wonders if you think Bridges might be interested, whether Bridges might be able to use it. He may be able to get it for you—he knows some people—but only if it is kept completely secret. The people he knows can’t afford to be involved. Bridges hasn’t got a chance, but now you have a chance to help. Your friend tells you that everything can be arranged. All you have to do is get someone in the Bridges campaign to open a line of communication so they can decide the most advantageous times to release what they have. You don’t ask how any of it was
obtained. It’s out there, why not use it? Collusion doesn’t mean that everyone agreed to something in advance; it doesn’t require a conspiracy. All that is needed is that you do something that helps someone do what they had planned all along. That is one of the things that happened. There were others.”
“Other things? Such as?”
“Michael Donahue. It almost doesn’t matter what involvement he had with the Russians in the election. He’s a bigger threat than that. He discovered history too late to understand it.”
ALBERT CRAVEN DROPPED into the chair in front of the desk where I was working, unbuttoned his suit coat, placed both hands on his stomach and rolled his small, round head from one side to the other as if to make sure that nothing in my office had changed.
“You’re here because it’s Saturday and you don’t have to be in court, and because, usually, you have nowhere else to go. I’m here because it’s Saturday and I’m meeting someone for lunch.” A faint whisper of a grin slid without effort across his pear-shaped mouth. “I come in almost every day, though I don’t really know why. All it does is interfere with lunch. The only reason I make an appearance is so the junior partners downstairs know I’m still alive. That way they have an incentive to keep working until all hours so I might decide one day to move them to an office here, upstairs. What do you think about doing something different, after you’re finished with this godforsaken trial of yours? We’ll leave the firm, leave all my aging, ungrateful clients, and we’ll start all over, just the two of us, an office somewhere—”
“South of Market, so you can get away from all your monied friends?” I taunted gently.
“Nothing that drastic,” replied Craven, wrinkling his nose in genuine distaste. “You can go on representing all these murderers, rapists and thieves. I’ll keep going to lunch so I can keep telling you what everyone in San Francisco is talking about. The difference is that I won’t have to feel guilty about what I’m doing. Someone else can look after the bright new futures of a few dozen over educated men and women who think billable hours the only true measure of a lawyer’s life. Really, Antonelli—I mean it.”