by D. W. Buffa
“There were attempts, every step of the way, to prevent the truth from coming out. Everything’ almost everything, you heard was true. And what you did not hear was true as well, and it was lethal!”
I stopped him before he got too far ahead of the story. He knew everything that had happened, but the jury did not.
“The beginning. What happened, what did you learn that eventually led you to believe that you had to…? What about the Russian investigation?”
“It needs to be divided into several different but ultimately interconnected parts. Before the election, before the campaign had even begun, before Walter Bridges became a candidate, he and others around him—friends, members of his family, business associates—had connections, relationships with various Russian individuals and entities. These were, so far as anyone knew at the time, perfectly legal. American investors in Russian enterprises—gas and oil, construction, technology, that sort of thing. Russian investors in American enterprises—mainly real estate, high-rise buildings in New York, golf clubs, resorts, and various industries, including high tech companies who were doing business around the world. There was nothing suspect about any of this. It was seen as nothing more sinister than the workings of the new world economy everyone was always talking about. Money, capital, moving from bank to bank, country to country, at the speed of light, the instantaneous electronic transactions that have come to dominate modern commerce. But there was still that other side of things. Money moved from place to place, but so did the people who had it. Americans who were doing business in Russia spent time in Moscow; Russians who did business in America or Europe spent time in New York and Paris. Relationships were formed, friendships—apparent friendships—were made, understandings were reached.”
“Understandings?”
Fitzgerald nodded, a cynical, knowing look on his face.
“There is a difference between men and women in public life, and people who live their lives in the private sector making money.” He shook his head, marveling at how things had changed. “When I first got into politics, someone told me—and it was something everyone new to politics was told—never to do or say anything you didn’t want to read in the newspapers the next morning. A married man or woman who holds public office who sleeps with someone not their wife or husband faces a scandal that, even today, will either drive them out of office or make their next election more of an adventure than they ever wanted. A private businessman staying in a Moscow hotel isn’t thinking what may happen to his chances in the next election. With the Russians, it’s all very subtle. They were subtle enough with Walter Bridges.”
There was an audible gasp in the courtroom, not because anyone had ever seriously doubted Bridges could have done the kind of things in his private life that had been endlessly chronicled in the tabloids, but because Fitzgerald was apparently about to confirm that the stories were true.
“Bridges was never someone who knew, much less practiced, the virtues of restraint. On this one trip to Moscow, he spent a week in the most luxurious suite of Moscow’s most expensive hotel. The cost meant nothing to him, and he certainly did not haggle over the price of the various high-priced Russian call girls who kept him company at night. He had to have known—everyone knew—that foreigners, especially rich, influential ones, were kept under close surveillance. But like a lot of wealthy men used to getting whatever they want, he, apparently, believed that what happened to other visitors would somehow never happen to him. He didn’t follow anyone’s rules, and he was, then and always, too reckless to follow his own, if, in fact, he had any.
“It was only at the end of that sybaritic week, the last night he was there, that what he thought his great, good Russian friend, a man he had been doing business with, told him over dinner—told him as if he was delighted—was that he understood that he had had a really good time. And before Bridges could say anything, he assured him that the secret of what he had done in a Moscow hotel would ‘always be safe with us.’ Not safe with me, your supposed good friend—safe with us. Even Walter Bridges could figure out what that meant.
“That was only part of the story, one of the ways the Russians acquired a means of influence over who, at that point, was simply another brash, rich American. Well, not simply that. He had already begun to speak out, to make a name for himself, at least among the tabloid journalists and cable news shows who liked nothing better than someone who would attack celebrities and well-known politicians, someone who seemed to like calling other people names. But it is safe to assume that no one in Russian intelligence, no one in the Russian government, ever imagined this same rather vulgar, boorish fool—those are the words they used among themselves, the Russian intelligence operatives, to describe him—would ever be a candidate, much less actually become president.
“They did this—Russian intelligence—as a matter of course, but there was also a very specific reason. Bridges was someone they thought they could use for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. He owned hotels, he owned casinos, he had an interest—a financial interest—in dozens of different enterprises. The Russians needed ways to move money. The Russian economy was controlled from the top, but not like what it was under Lenin and Stalin and the others who came after them when the Communist Party was in control and Russia was still part of the Soviet Union. It was not socialism in one country anymore, it was not even an attempt at socialism. The state-run industries had been sold off, given away, to a few well-placed people, all of whom became extraordinarily rich. Russia became an oligarchy, or in the eyes of those who had to live there, a kleptocracy—a government of thieves who had stolen what rightfully belonged to the Russian people. The oligarchs—people Putin trusted, and Putin himself—were worth billions. The question was where to put it, where to keep it safe, safe and untraceable. Walter Bridges, and people close to Bridges, provided one of the answers.
“It is very simple. You run a Russian bank. You have money from various Russian mobsters. You invest that money in an American construction project, or you loan it out through some third party to an American investor who uses it to pay off a loan he owes to a different bank, a legitimate bank. And now, if you are one of the Russian oligarchs, you have gotten rid of money you did not want anyone to trace, and have instead acquired through the loan you made what looks like a legitimate American investment, and with it something even more important: a chokehold on the American who now owes you a billion or so dollars that he may or may not be able to repay.
“What I have just described is not some hypothetical case. It is what the Russians actually did with Walter Bridges. They hold, through various intermediaries, the mortgage on the biggest building he owned. What they had on him from his time in that Moscow hotel became, in a way, security for his debt. He might be able to use the bankruptcy laws to avoid paying other creditors, but he would not be able to bankrupt out of this. They did not have to threaten him, both sides understood the game. No one was harmed, no one lost money; it was business as usual. The Russians were laundering money. Walter Bridges ran his companies. When Bridges needed money, when one of his businesses was in trouble, he could go to any bank he wanted to. The problem was that he was in trouble so often that there weren’t many banks interested in giving him, for the second or third or fourth time, the help he needed. But there was always one source he could use. I say one source, not one bank. The Russians were too smart, too careful, to use one bank alone. There were dozens of them, banks in different parts of the world they either controlled or had sufficient capital in, banks that would, following direction, make whatever loan Bridges required.”
For the next two hours, I handed Fitzgerald one document after another: bank statements, financial transactions, loan applications, the long, tedious, Byzantine record of the ways in which Walter Bridges had done business with the Russians. He examined each document, identified its origin and explained in clear, concise language what it meant. Then I handed him a folder full of photographs. Before he had opened it, St
. John was on his feet, renewing the objection he had made earlier, in chambers, when he and I met privately with Judge Silverman.
“Your Honor, the prosecution objects to the introduction of these photographs into evidence. They serve no legitimate purpose. They are salacious in the extreme, and prove nothing relevant to what the jury is here to decide.”
The jury, and everyone else, was immediately interested. The word “salacious,” used in court, had that effect. Silverman waited to see if I wished to reply.
“The jury is asked to decide not if the defendant killed someone, but whether there was a lawful excuse. Whether there was such an excuse depends, in this case, on what kind of person the victim was, whether Walter Bridges was a man who could control his impulses, a man who held himself to the normal, civilized standard of behavior, or someone, as the defense contends, willing to do anything he wanted and damn the consequences. These photographs tend to prove the latter.”
Silverman did not hesitate. He seldom did.
“For that purpose alone, they are admitted.”
Fitzgerald opened the folder and thumbed through them.
“They’re all photographs of Walter Bridges.”
“Is he alone?”
“No, he is with several different women.”
“Can you tell from the photographs where they were taken?”
He held one up and examined it closely.
“There is a menu, a room service menu, I think, open on the lamp table next to the bed. It’s written in Russian. And, here, at the top of the photograph, it is marked Moscow with the time and date.”
At my instruction, the clerk took them from Fitzgerald and handed them to the juror sitting in the first row, in the corner closest to her. I stared into the middle distance, careful not to watch the jurors’ faces as one by one they looked through the photographs of a naked Walter Bridges in all his pale ugliness cavorting on a garish golden four-poster bed with painted harlots nearly as hideous as he. When the photographs had been passed all the way around, when the last juror had given them back to the clerk, I hazarded a glance. If anyone was stunned or surprised, they did not show it. They seemed almost indifferent, as if they had grown used to Walter Bridges’s notorious lack, not just of morality, but of even minimal good taste. Those, and there were several, old enough to remember the rumored indiscretions of John F. Kennedy might have been forgiven if they thought it still proved something that the women Kennedy had known had all been volunteers. Fitzgerald did not say that, but then he did not have to. He may have been accused of murder, but he conducted himself with decorum. He looked at the jury as if he wanted to apologize for what they had just been forced to see.
“These photographs, are they consistent with what you learned as the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee?”
“Yes, they are.”
“Is there any doubt, based on what you learned, that the Russians had this information, and that the Russians had substantial financial ties with Walter Bridges?”
“No doubt whatsoever.”
“But this was all background, wasn’t it? Until he became a candidate. What happened then, once Walter Bridges emerged as the likely nominee of his party?”
“Some of it,” he began, looking directly at the jury, “you already know. I don’t mean what you read in the papers, what you saw on television. I mean what you learned here, in court, when Michael Donahue testified for the prosecution. He can deny it all he wants, but the fact is he met with the Russians, and he had others do the same thing. We don’t know—we may never know—who made the first contact, whether it was someone in the Bridges campaign or someone from Russian intelligence. We know, and there is no doubt about this, that they met, not once or twice, but dozens of times. We know what they discussed. We know how, over time, those discussions changed.”
With my arms crossed, I followed the movement of my feet as I slowly walked a few steps in one direction and then back again, concentrating on every word; listening intently not just to the words, but the sound they made, the rich, clear, bell-like sound that made you listen even closer. There was seduction in that voice of his. The more he talked, the more you wanted to hear. And he knew it. You could see it in his eyes, the absolute, unshakable certainty that he could convince everyone of the truth of anything he believed. It was the gift of the politician who had never lost an election, the gift of the lawyer who had never lost a trial, a gift that belonged only to those who could first convince themselves that they were never wrong. It was the gift of arrogance, the gift that almost always led to your own destruction.
He had said the discussion, what went on between Bridges and his people with the Russians, had changed. Before he explained how, I had a question.
“You referred a moment ago to the testimony of Michael Donahue. In addition to what he testified—that he had dinner with a Russian at a Paris restaurant but did not know he was a Russian general, much less the one in charge of their cyber warfare program—did he, to your knowledge, have any other meetings with high-ranking Russian officials?”
“At least three others. Twice with the Russian ambassador in Washington, one with a Russian banker. That meeting took place in Zurich.”
“There were no other meetings?”
“General Rostov, the man he had dinner with in Paris. That was the second time they met.”
I wondered if Reynaud had known about this.
“There were five meetings, then? Was that second meeting with Rostov also in Paris?”
“No. They met two months before. I said there were four meetings because the second time Donahue met with the Russian ambassador is when he was introduced to Sergei Rostov.”
“The general was here, in Washington, in the United States?”
“He and Donahue spent the better part of the day together.”
“At the Russian embassy?” I asked, just to be sure.
“They never left.”
“TELL ME EVERYTHING!” insisted Tangerine when she picked me up from the third floor of the hospital parking garage.
She looked astonishing, sitting behind the wheel of her car, her chin tilted up and a smile on her lips, her eyes vibrant as a summer rainbow. I forgot all about the trial. All I wanted to do was watch. She drove up the steep, narrow exit that spiraled to the street outside.
“Tell me everything that happened, Antonelli!” She laughed, turning the wheel hand over hand through the passing white concrete maze. “Don’t leave out anything. I couldn’t watch on television and you wouldn’t let me come to the trial, you—”
“Had to try to concentrate on what I was doing. You’re not much help with that.”
Wrinkling her nose, her chin shot higher and in that thrilling voice called me a liar, and with her glowing, eager eyes told me she was glad I thought I was telling the truth.
“Later, at dinner. I promise I’ll tell you everything, though there really isn’t that much to tell.”
We were out of the garage and on the street, weaving through traffic, daring each light to wait, and not always stopping when it did not. She seemed to take it as a challenge whether she could make it to the bridge without having to stop even once.
“I think that’s called cheating,” I remarked when she coasted through the last light in the park just as it turned red.
“It wasn’t even close,” she argued. “Live dangerously, don’t live stupidly. What chances did you take today? Ask any questions you didn’t know the answers to? Make any promises you know you’ll never keep? Tell the jury your client is innocent when you know he is, in that wonderfully dull phrase, guilty as hell!”
I leaned against the door, watching out the window, Alcatraz in the middle of the bay shining black and gray in the evening sun.
“I’ve never done that…or maybe I have. You’re not supposed to say whether you think the defendant is guilty or not. I think I must have, at one time or another. I’ve broken all the other rules, I don’t know why I wouldn’t have br
oken that one.”
“Have you really? Broken all the rules?”
“In court, and in life. But I promise, lying bastard that I am, I’ll always be faithful to you.”
I sometimes marveled at my own weak-minded stupidity. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She took my breath away every time I looked at her. And I was promising I’d be faithful to her, as if it could ever have occurred to her that I would not. I started laughing.
“Why? What did I…?”
We had almost reached the other side of the Golden Gate.
“That story Albert told me, that story I told you—that woman in ancient Greece, or ancient Rome, the one—”
“Who would sleep with any man who promised to kill himself in the morning.” She said this in a way that left no doubt she not only understood but approved of the conditions.
“That’s the one. Do you think any of the men she was with also promised they would be faithful until—”
“Until the day they died. Wouldn’t that have been implicit? But do you know what I think? I think that story isn’t a true story and it wasn’t meant to be one. I think it has a hidden meaning, that it is a kind of riddle.” Her eyes got brighter, her smile got bigger. “She’s asking if the men who want her are willing to die. Whether they are willing, but able as well. Remember, they are asked to commit suicide, not to let someone else kill them, to experience death. Remember what some people used to call it when a man finished, that is to say, completed the act—a ‘little death.’ So, maybe what it means is that what she really wants is a man who just looking at her knows that when they make love, she can give him the complete satisfaction he may never have known before.”
I could not help myself.
“Thank God. Now I can kill myself more than once.”
Her eyes were full of excitement.
“Only more than once?”
“I’ve been in trial all day.”