by D. W. Buffa
“The people who think that nothing has to change.”
“And when you talked about ‘deconstructing the administrative state,’ that is what you were talking about, wasn’t it, changing in fundamental ways the American government?”
“Yes, precisely. We need to change the way we do things to meet the changing threat.”
“Because the threat isn’t what it was during the Cold War, it isn’t what some other country might do—it is the threat of terrorism that can come from anyone at any time, not just from an organized, established military power. Correct?”
“That’s right,” he replied emphatically
“Which means, does it not, that all the institutions, all the alliances which were established at the end of the Second World War to protect us against the kind of military threat posed by the Soviet Union are now obsolete. They serve no purpose in a world in which the issue is whether Islam or the West will triumph. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” he replied, but now tentatively, and with guarded suspicion.
“In a world like this, in a conflict like this—the biggest conflict, I think you put it—we have to be ready to join forces with anyone who views terrorism as much a threat as we do; willing, if necessary, to let them have their way with other, lesser nations if that is the price we have to pay to get them to work with us?”
He did not want to answer.
“Any nation, any group—the Russians, if they can give us what we need. Isn’t that correct? The Russians, if they’ll help, and help not just against the terrorists, but against our own government if it is the only way to get rid of that Deep State which, as you just testified, refuses to take seriously the threat we face? The Russians, whose help you told General Rostov you, and Walter Bridges, would be—and this is a direct quote—‘more than grateful to receive’?”
I WAS FURIOUS, and I let Fitzgerald know it.
“The prosecution is finished. Donahue was his last witness. Now it’s our turn, and I have no idea what I’m going to do! No idea at all!”
“You destroyed Donahue, you destroyed them all, every witness the prosecution called. St. John is the one who should be worried.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
I sat down on the easy chair in the cluttered room that served as his temporary cell. The mail bags were now stacked to the ceiling. The table was filled with pages and pages of handwritten notes, some of them, I assumed, the fragmentary starting points for the speech he was going to give in court, while others, the plans he was making for when the trial was over and he was free to go about his business. It was the one thing he had not kept secret from me. He was going to run for president, or rather, not run for the office, but receive it by acclamation.
“Bridges is dead, but they were all involved—Donahue, Reese, Ellison, that idiot Jenny Ann Carruthers, the vice-president. The country won’t stand for it; they’ll all have to go.”
Had he forgotten that the line of succession still held, and that he was not on it?
“You think too much like a lawyer. Consider the politics of it, what the country wants, what the country feels. Remember what happened, after Bridges died? The funeral, what they tried to do—make it into a spectacle, a day of national mourning, the casket on a horse drawn carriage, like what was done when Kennedy died, the color guard, the slow procession down Pennsylvania Avenue. And what happened? Hardly anyone came out to watch; a few stragglers stopped to stare, anyone else on the sidewalk hurried to go somewhere else. It was an embarrassment. Spencer, the vice-president, tried to say something in his speech but… Now he’s the president, but only until everything comes out. Then he’s gone. The line of succession, that won’t matter. Before he leaves office, Spencer will have to choose me—the country will demand it—to be vice-president, which means—”
“That when Spencer resigns, you become…”
It would in anyone else have been megalomania of the most ludicrous kind, an ambition so far out of keeping with any reasonable chance of achievement as to constitute cause for involuntary commitment. But whatever Fitzgerald might be, he was not insane. Calculating, shrewd, and, given what he had done, either ruthless or courageous, willing to assassinate a president either to save the country, as he insisted, or, with the same excuse, to create a place in history that would make him live forever in the memory of men. He and Michael Donahue were, in this respect, not that much different. Only one of them, however, was on trial for his life.
“That’s the advantage I have,” he explained. He sat at the table, a few feet away, his eyes glowing with an inner light, the vast certainty with which he now could see the future. “I stopped it, stopped what they were about to do. When the country hears what it was, there will be no doubt that I had to act. Who else do you think they will want to lead them then?”
“Listen to me. We go back to court tomorrow morning. The judge is going to ask if the defense is ready, and if we are, to call our first witness. How do you think I should answer that, what do you think I should tell Patterson, that the defense doesn’t know if it is ready or not, and in any event could not even guess who it might call first?”
Fitzgerald did not care.
“It’s up to you who you call, isn’t it?”
I could have murdered him then and there. He was the strangest combination of shrewd intelligence and simple stupidity I had encountered. He could think three moves ahead of anyone in politics, could analyze the strengths and weaknesses of a friend or an adversary quicker than anyone since Lyndon Johnson, but it was all instinctive, something he could do without any real understanding of how he did it. But because he could do it, because he had always been able to know what others would do before they knew it themselves, he assumed, and never questioned the assumption, that things would always work out the way he wanted and expected. And they always had. Everything, even murder, could be used to his advantage.
“A lot of things are up to me,” I replied in a low voice full of a warning he did yet understand. “I don’t have to call any witnesses at all. Tomorrow morning, when the judge asks if I am ready to proceed, I can just announce that the defense rests. Then it’s up to the jury to decide.”
He thought I was kidding.
“But you’re not going to do that,” he said, beginning to show the first signs of doubt.
“I may not have any choice.”
He looked at me, astonished. He began to be nervous. All his well-laid plans now perhaps in jeopardy; his chance to tell the jury, to tell the country, what he had done and the great, good reason he had done it, about to be taken away.
“You never call a witness when you have no idea what they are going to say. You have refused, time and time again, every time I asked you, to tell me what was so damn urgent, what threat, what danger so immediate that you had to kill Walter Bridges, what was so incredibly important that you could not stop it by any other, lawful, means.”
His friendly, publicized eyes went cold.
“You can’t stop me from testifying. A defendant has the right, the absolute right, to testify in his own defense.”
“Is that what your wife told you, what they teach in law schools?”
I did nothing to hide my derision. Both of them had from the beginning promised to tell me whatever I wanted to know. Neither had kept their word.
“What they don’t teach in law school, what you are about to learn, is that lawyers, like politicians, can throw out the rules when no one else is following them. You don’t want to tell me what you’re going to say in court, you’ll say it in court with someone else to represent you. I’m done.”
I grabbed my briefcase and started for the door.
“Wait! Don’t go. I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
For the next two hours I listened in growing amazement to a story I would never have thought possible, a story that made every rumored allegation of what had been done by Walter Bridges and those around him seem nothing more than the mindless antics of sch
oolyard boys. It was an indictment more damning, more devastating, than any criminal charge I had ever read.
“I didn’t know if you would believe me if I told you everything at the beginning, if you hadn’t first heard the testimony—what you drew out of the prosecution’s witnesses on cross—about what Bridges and the others had done and were planning to do.” With a quick, troubled expression, he added, “I wouldn’t have believed it if someone had told a story like this to me.”
Now that I knew what Fitzgerald was going to say, I knew the kind of questions St. John was likely to ask on cross. Fitzgerald had anticipated most, though not all of them.
“The ten minutes, the time you were alone with Bridges on the plane. I’ll ask you about that. All the prosecution can do then is try to follow up. The fact that you did not know you would be invited on the plane. Why, in that case, did you have a knife? St. John is good. He’ll do everything he can to cast doubt, anything that shows, or seems to show, an inconsistency, he’ll be all over it. Why did you have the knife?”
Fitzgerald smiled, then looked away. He began to rummage through the notes scattered over the table. He seemed to be thinking of something, making up his mind.
“I was going to do it when he came off the plane,” he said finally. “While everyone was standing around.”
Like the assassination of Julius Caesar, I thought, done in full view so no one could doubt who did it or why it was done. I wondered if Fitzgerald had thought about what he might say at the moment he struck the fatal blow. He was too much in love with what he thought the world would think of him to have let the deed go unaccompanied by a few well-rehearsed words. I remembered an English teacher I had in college who once remarked that the most heroic thing a hero could do was to do something heroic and never tell a soul. If I had had more courage, or more wisdom, I would have told Fitzgerald that.
“In front of all the cameras, in front of all the world,” I said out loud before I knew I was saying it. “All right, I don’t think there is anything else.”
“I’m testifying tomorrow?”
“You’re the first witness for the defense.”
He had been looking forward to this moment, the chance finally to tell his story for so long, he could not hide, not his excitement exactly, his sense of relief.
“This is the truth?” I asked, searching his eyes as I stood up to leave. “Everything you told me this evening?”
“Every word of it,” he swore.
My hand was on the door when I remembered the question I had wanted to ask from the first time I met him, before I had agreed to represent him.
“You lied to me when you told me that you hadn’t had an affair with Evan Winslow’s wife. Why did you do that?”
He treated the question, the accusation, as without significance. He could not understand why I would even ask.
“I hardly knew you. We had only just met. Why would I tell you something like that?”
TANGERINE WAS not surprised. But there were other things she wanted to talk about.
“This is mine now,” she explained, glancing around at what was both the living and dining room of her Sausalito home. “It’s all been arranged. I don’t need anything else. He can have everything else, the house in the city, the house in Palm Springs, the house—oh hell, we had houses everywhere!” she cried, laughing at the inconsequence of what she had once thought important. “This was always mine. I picked it out, I had it practically gutted and rebuilt, I decorated it, I furnished it, and when you finally came into my life, I got laid in it. Can you think of a better title than that? It’s mine, Antonelli, which means it’s yours as well.” She gave me a glance full of mischief and seduction. “You got laid here, too. Your title is as good as mine.”
She was wearing a green skirt and a white blouse, and, as I found out later, nothing else. Walking barefoot on the carpet, she opened the sliding glass door and looked back.
“Come join me for dinner.”
We sat at a small round glass table out on the deck. The sky was turning midnight blue and the first stars had begun to shine.
“Drunken chicken,” she said, her eyes sparkling at the crazy way it sounded. “A little chicken, a lot of wine. Some other things, too, but I can’t remember what they were supposed to be. I guess a lot when I cook,” she announced, shaking her head at her own pretended incompetence. Then she laughed again, a soft, gentle laugh that floated birdlike in the air. “Now, eat; it really isn’t too bad.”
Time stopped. The past had not happened and the future would never come. Words lost their meaning and speech had not been discovered. It did not matter what we had for dinner, nothing had ever tasted as good. A hillside in Sausalito became Babylon, the blink of an eye marked the passage of a thousand years.
“I was there, in court, today, when—”
“I know, I saw…”
“And you thought of me then, didn’t you, because—”
“That stupid smile on my face, and I couldn’t remember what—”
“But you did, that next question you asked, no one would have thought that—”
“I didn’t know what I was asking; I didn’t know what I was doing for—”
“For the few seconds it took to put me out of mind.” She laughed. “I probably shouldn’t have gone, but I wanted to know what it was like, the feeling in the courtroom, the tension, the sense of anticipation. It isn’t at all like what you think it is when you watch on television. You’re even better in person,” she remarked with an innocent smile full of promised evil.
The sky had disappeared, lights were shining everywhere, on the hillside, on the long, curving outline of the Golden Gate, all over the city and then back over the Bay Bridge to the other side of the bay, all of it, every light from everywhere, danced reflected in her eyes. She bent toward me, looking across the top of the wine glass dangling from her smooth tapered fingers.
“It’s completely different. Everything is so alive. The cameras show you one thing or another, usually the witness and the attorney asking questions, but when you’re there, you see everything, the way the jury is watching, the different expressions on their faces, the different ways they sit. The way the judge stares daggers at whoever she decides isn’t doing what they’re supposed to do! Tell me about her. What is she really like? She can’t be like that at home. Who could live with that?”
“You don’t think she keeps a gavel on the table to keep order at dinner?”
“Really, what’s she like?”
“I don’t really know what she’s like. She’s married; I think she is. She had a photograph in her office, a family picture: she and her husband and two teenage girls. But when it was taken, whether she’s still married… All I really know is that she is as tough as they come in court. She was a prosecutor; supposedly never lost a case. She’s well trained. Graduated from Stanford, went to law school at Michigan, came back here to work for the district attorney. She had a chance to go on the appellate court a few years ago but she turned it down. She likes the action, the excitement of a trial. There is nothing like it, especially now.”
Sipping slowly on her glass, Tangerine tilted her head to the side, the silent expression of the question she wanted me to answer.
“Everyone, almost everyone, does everything electronically. We don’t live in the world anymore, we live in what they call cyber space. People like Michael Donahue seem to think it’s the only thing that’s real anymore. But in court, in a trial, nothing has changed. It’s the same as it was a hundred, two hundred years ago. Some of the evidence is different, but—you saw it yourself today—a man, a woman, is sworn in as a witness, sits there with twelve people observing everything they say, everything they do—every change of expression, every change of emotion—and answers, under penalty of perjury, questions put to them first by one side, then the other. And you never know how anyone is going to do, you can never be entirely certain when you put them on the stand how they’ll hold up.”
I la
ughed at what I had just remembered, laughed with the kind of nostalgia you felt for your vanished innocence, the feeling you had when you were just starting out.
“The first time—the very first time—I walked into a courtroom to try a case, something strange happened. I had not been able to sleep more than a few hours at a time, for days I could not stop thinking about what was going to happen, the questions I was going to ask, the thousand different answers I might be given. It was making me crazy, and then, the moment—and I mean the very moment—I walked into that courtroom and sat down at the counsel table, it all stopped. It was like I had come home.”
“I can understand that; you were doing what you had always wanted to do. And you knew that after all the years waiting, all the years in school, you were ready.”
I had not quite thought of it like that, but I knew she was right. It was what I had always wanted to do—the only thing I had wanted to do.
“But it made me forget something, and even now, after all these years, and God knows how many trials, I look around the courtroom and everyone looks so calm, so self-assured. The judge, the prosecutor go about their business like they have never had a doubt about anything in their lives. Every eye is on them when they speak, but they don’t seem aware of it. The witness, who may never have seen the inside of a courtroom before they find themselves swearing to tell the truth, sit there, answering questions as if they did this every day. The jury, called up one by one, walk all alone from the first few rows of the visitor’s gallery to the jury box. Like being called up to the front of the class in grade school or high school. And then, in front of everyone, including hundreds of strangers and however many millions are watching on television, a lawyer, someone you probably think a trained assassin, asks you questions about your life—where you live, where you went to school, what you do for a living, whether you’re married, if you have any children. And they answer, as best they can, and they never, not even once, suddenly forget what they want to say. And so you sit there, watching it all play out in front of you, and you have to remind yourself that what you are really dealing with are people, especially among the jurors, who are so nervous, so self-conscious, so worried they might do something wrong it is a wonder they can stand.”