by D. W. Buffa
We were in Reynaud’s favorite, and, from what I could tell, his only restaurant. As usual at this hour, it was nearly deserted. An elderly couple was lingering over a passable dinner in the far corner. Two old men, probably regulars, were sitting at the bar. We were in the booth farthest from the entrance. The bartender, who at this hour doubled as the waiter, caught the signal from Reynaud and brought a bottle of California champagne. With a bittersweet glow in his eyes, Jean-Francois sipped approvingly from his glass.
“Everyone hates Pierre Laval. He helped the Germans round up the Jews. This is true. It is also true, however, that he did it as part of a deal he made to help the Germans find Jews who were not French. The Germans, in return, would not try to find or take prisoner any Jews who were. You made the point in this trial of yours that Fitzgerald was acting under the law of necessity, the law that says it is sometimes necessary to sacrifice one life to save others. Laval’s situation was similar, though, for a number of reasons, including the numbers involved, not identical. Here you talk about sacrificing one; there you were talking about thousands. But still, he had only one way to save anyone. There is another difference. Laval could not know how long the Germans would keep their word; whether when they had all the other Jews they would start taking the French Jews as well. And there is also this: Laval was trying to save lives; Fitzgerald was trying, according to what he claims, to save, to protect the basic institutions of the country. That is the difference that really caught my attention.”
Jean-Francois drank some more. His pale blue eyes had a marvelous clarity, the perfect mirror to the marvelous clarity of his mind. He put the glass down on the table. A lost memory, the hint of some long-buried thought, seemed to occupy his attention. He searched my eyes, as if he half expected me to know the answer to a question he had not asked and was not quite sure he knew how to.
“Because, you see,” he continued, “that is what Laval thought he was doing as well: saving his country, saving France, from what he was certain would be worse treatment if instead of collaborating, of trying every chance he could to get better terms, better conditions, he and the government he led tried to resist, to oppose, the Germans and what they wanted. The Germans had won; they were never going to be defeated. That is what he thought; that is what nearly everyone thought. You do what you have to do to survive; you do what you have to do so that the country can survive. The law of necessity all over again.
“But—and this is really my point—what may seem necessary at the time, may not have been necessary at all. You know,” remarked Jean-Francois with a burst of enthusiasm, “Laval, my grandfather’s mistress, Petain, some of the other generals and Admiral Darlan, they all thought they were doing what was necessary. And so did Charles deGaulle. Notice the change. For deGaulle, resistance was necessary to the honor of France, to what it meant to be French, to French history, to French culture and tradition, above all to French independence. Laval, by the way, also understood this. In one of the most poignant things I have read, Laval made the remark that if he could have been anyone, it would have been Charles deGaulle.
“So what does this have to do with Walter Bridges and Kevin Fitzgerald? Only this. There was a necessity for the death of Walter Bridges, but it was not the one that Fitzgerald talks about. What the prosecutor, Raymond St. John, said today about why Fitzgerald did what he did was absolutely correct, but still only half right.”
I looked at him in dumb amazement. I knew him well enough to know that he knew what he was talking about, but I did not know what any of it meant. He reached into his briefcase, sitting next to him, and pulled out a large, sealed envelope.
“This came in late last night. This time you can keep it. My government decided—rightly, I think—that it was too important to keep secret, whatever the cost.”
When I started to open it, he placed his hand over it.
“Take it with you. Even though it’s Friday night and you have all weekend, once you see what it is, you’ll be up all night, deciding what you should now do with the witnesses you will want to call.”
There was not any way I was going to wait, not after what he had just said. He only shrugged his shoulders when I went ahead and opened what he had given me. There were perhaps two dozen typewritten pages inside. I did not finish reading the first one. Reynaud was right. I was not going to be able to sleep.
“This is all…?”
“Oh, yes, there isn’t any doubt. And, as you will discover, it gets more interesting with every page. Fitzgerald is an even more fascinating character than I thought before. I’m not sure I’ve ever come across anyone quite like him. He is what a hundred years ago we would have called a truly historic personality. Tell me, if you can—I know there are limitations on what a lawyer can say about his client—but does he know anything? About history, I mean. Does he ever talk about Bridges’s death in those kinds of terms? I heard what he said in court, I heard what St. John said about him—his motivation, what he may have thought would happen—but has he himself put it in the broader context of history?”
I looked down at the open envelope and thought about what it meant, and what it was going to mean, and I suddenly remembered several things at once: the three revolutions that had, at different times, been used as parallels to what Fitzgerald had confessed to doing.
“He became interested in the Russian Revolution. He did not study it in college, but after he was in the Senate and he began learning things about the Russians in the Senate Intelligence Committee. We had a few discussions, starting the first time I met him, before I had decided to represent him, about the Russian show trials of the l930s when Stalin was getting rid of as many of the original leadership of the Bolsheviks as he could, the ones who had come to power with Lenin and were still committed to what they thought were the revolution’s original principles. Fitzgerald was fascinated by Bukharin in particular, the way someone could be convinced—could convince himself—that the truest thing he could ever do, the only way he had to save what he believed in, what gave meaning to his life, was to lie, to insist he had betrayed the Soviet Union when he never had.”
A curious half smile quivered for a brief moment on the lips of Jean-Francois Reynaud.
“Bukharin knew when he did that that his death was unavoidable,” he remarked. “He believed in history, history with a capital H, and believed that his death would contribute to history reaching its desired, and inevitable, end. Fitzgerald wants to make history of his own.”
“Which you can only do if you seize the moment, if you act when history—if you want to call it that—has created the circumstances the makes it possible,” I replied. “If there had not been a French Revolution, if there had not been the Terror, if there had not been the kind of chaos that made everyone desperate for a new order, Napoleon could never have become emperor of France. If there had not been a revolution in Rome, if Caesar had not become dictator in everything but name, he would not have been assassinated and the civil wars would not have happened and Augustus could not have destroyed the Roman republic once and for all.”
“Yes, precisely. In all these cases, the same result. Someone emerges—Augustus, Napoleon, Lenin—who seizes the moment and is swept into power by what in effect is popular acclamation. Fitzgerald, whether he knows any history or not, understood what the death, the murder, of Walter Bridges could bring about, the chance that might not occur for another hundred years, the chance to become in the eyes of his country the only one they could trust to restore what they thought they were in danger of losing. St. John was right in what he said about Fitzgerald, but he had no idea the real dimension of Fitzgerald’s incredible ambition.”
Reynaud finished off his glass, poured himself another and watched with eyes that became nostalgic the endless lines of soft rising bubbles.
“When this is over, I’m going back to France. My wife is there now, getting everything ready.” He put the glass back on the table and, leaning over it, glanced at the envelope. “You might w
ant to come over for a long vacation. You and your bride to be. Things may get difficult here. This really is what everyone said it was going to be: the trial of the century, the trial that will change history—just not in the way everyone thought it would.”
“You’re going back to your castle, somewhere in the south of France?”
Reynaud emitted a modest, self-effacing laugh.
“A castle? Well, yes, with respect to its historical classification. But that is a little like calling something a house in the country without making any distinction between a twelve-hundred-square-foot house in Carmel, or a twenty-thousand-square-foot monstrosity in the hills above Palo Alto. Yes, we own a castle, a very nice six-bedroom home, built five hundred years ago in a place called Pont-du-Casse a few miles outside Agen, which is four hours southwest of Paris on the high-speed train. Albert stayed there, as I told you, years ago, with one of his wives. But come, you and the beautiful Tangerine, and while you look at the French countryside, I’ll look at her. And we can sit around at dinner—my wife is one of the best cooks in France—and talk about everything that happened at the trial and everything that happened after. Whatever it is, it will certainly be worth talking about.”
I said I was grateful for the offer, and that I knew it was something Tangerine would want to do. He stopped me with a sudden look of the utmost seriousness.
“You don’t understand. You don’t know it yet, but when the trial is over, the one thing you will want more than anything else is to get out of the country. You won’t be able to avoid the questions. Everyone will want to know everything. You won’t have a minute to yourself. There won’t be any privacy. Don’t regard this as an invitation; regard it as a means of escape.”
The whole time we were talking, I kept thinking about what he had done for me: the intelligence reports—the secret intelligence reports—he had allowed me to see, and to use.
“All right, we’ll come. And thank you,” I added quite seriously. “But there is a condition. Tell me why you have done this, given me this help, and tell me how you got them. They can’t all have been from French intelligence. Those photographs of Walter Bridges in that Moscow hotel—they had to come from the Russians.”
It seemed to amuse him. He drank more champagne. His face lit up at the memory of what he had been able to do. It was not so much that he wanted to share as to explain the secret of his accomplishment.
“No one speaks any more, especially in this country, of old money and new money. Now it’s only money, the only difference how much of it you happen to have. But, at least in France, there are still old families. There used to be two hundred of them that, whatever form the government took, decided everything of importance. That isn’t true anymore. But as I was saying, there are still old families. My family is one of them. We all know each other, we help one another when we’re asked, and when we can. When this first happened, when Bridges was murdered, when Fitzgerald confessed, when, despite that confession, I learned there was going to be a trial, it was not difficult to anticipate what was going to happen, that the country would be divided, and that the only thing that could keep that division from becoming a permanent condition, an endless source of bitterness and hatred and suspicion, was if everyone learned the full truth of what had happened. Whatever that truth turned out to be. That was the reason I was there that night at Albert’s place. I wanted to meet you, to make my own judgment, to decide how far we—not just my government, but people I know—should go in giving whatever assistance we could. But again, always for that one purpose—the truth, whatever it was. Fitzgerald had confessed. The truth had to be found in the reasons. With you as his attorney, I felt confident that these reasons, and all the evidence connected with them, would be brought out into the light.
“I did not have to depend on my sources in French intelligence. Or rather, to be quite clear about it, they did not have to depend on French intelligence. We were responsible for the surveillance of Donahue, and some others, when they were meeting with someone in a Paris restaurant or a Paris hotel. But we get things from German intelligence, British intelligence, most intelligence services in Europe. No one trusted the Americans anymore. We did not—we could not—share anything with them. We could never be certain what might be passed to the Russians, or what the Russians could find out on their own. The photographs of Bridges in the Moscow hotel. They came through German intelligence who got them from a Russian double agent they employed.”
I tapped my hand on his latest, and last, offering.
“And these?”
Jean-Francois clasped his hands behind his head and stared up the ceiling.
“Someone in American intelligence who works for us. But that is a secret I never told you,” he added as his gaze descended to my own, waiting, eyes.
He picked up his glass and took a long, slow drink, then checked his watch, decided it was time to go and signaled the bartender to bring the bill.
“How does it feel?” he asked as we shook hands outside the restaurant.
“How does it—”
“To know that there is now no chance, no chance whatsoever, that you are going to lose this case?”
I did not doubt Reynaud was right. Although I had seen only the first page, there was no question what the verdict would be. How I felt about it, however, was a question I was not sure how to answer. Perhaps it would answer itself as the trial, with the evidence I now had, told the story no one would have thought possible.
It was nearly midnight when I got back to Tangerine’s place on the hillside in Sausalito. I could see her through the window as I started down the steps to her chocolate shingle-sided home, running barefoot to the door to greet me as if I had been away for months. And in that moment, when she threw her arms around my neck and told me that she loved me and missed me, I felt almost as if I had.
“We’ve been invited to France,” I told her as I tossed my jacket on the chair and settled into the corner of the sofa. “That’s not really true. You’ve been invited to France, the guest of Jean-Francois and his wife, Chantal, at their castle somewhere south of Bordeaux. He said I could come along, but only if you didn’t object.”
She did not hesitate; she did not stop to think. Things worth considering she decided immediately.
“I can be packed and ready to go in an hour.” Her legs stretched straight out in front of her, she slid lower in the chair facing me, and mocked me with her laughing eyes. “The only question is can you be ready that soon?”
“As soon as the trial is over. One more week should do it.”
I got up and went toward the kitchen. She grabbed my hand as I passed and held me there.
“One more week? Do you mean it, we’ll go to France, to anywhere, when it’s over?” She let go of my hand and stood up. “Do you want something to drink?”
“No. Yes. I have to make coffee.”
“I’ll make it. Why do you need it? You’re going to be up all night. The reason Jean-Francois had to see you. It’s that important?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“It’s bad? It hurts your case?”
“I don’t know if it’s bad or not. All I know is that it means I’m going to win.”
She did not ask me to explain, she did not ask why I was so equivocal about this sudden certainty that the verdict was all but assured. She brushed past me and made the coffee.
“Is there a lot to do before Monday?” she asked when she brought me a cup of coffee at the dining room table where I had put down a long yellow legal pad and my fountain pen. The documents Reynaud had given me, still in the envelope, lay just to the side.
“What was he like, I mean really like?”
“You mean Kevin, don’t you?”
“I know you never knew anyone by that name, I know you never knew anyone, before you met me, but, yes, what was he like? What did he care about when he was mayor?”
“Is it important? Is it about the trial?”
“It could be. There are thing
s I don’t understand, things about him that might make a difference. If you were asked to describe him, what is the first thing you think of, the one overriding fact that leaps out?”
“Ambition. I know, a lot of people have that, especially if they’re in politics. But that wasn’t the kind he had. I tried to tell you before. Remember? When I said he wanted to be president, and maybe something more than that. Don’t ask me what more than that means. Maybe it’s what he has been saying all along: that he wanted to save the country. There was always this sense of dissatisfaction with him. It was not just that nothing was ever enough—that whatever office he had was just a step farther along the path he wanted to go. You had the feeling that nothing would ever be enough. If he had been a writer, a really great one, he would have thought the Nobel Prize for literature somehow, not exactly below him, but not the measure of what he really could do.”
She looked at me with cool, limpid eyes, gently berating herself for her failure to find a better way to explain someone who remained, for her, essentially an enigma.
“I don’t think he ever knew what he wanted, except the next rung on a ladder you could never stop climbing.”
It seemed to me to explain a lot more than she thought.
“But always within the rules, the accepted way in which things are done?”
“Yes; until now, of course. I never would have thought him capable—I think I told you that. However necessary he might have thought it was. I suppose it only proves you can never know what someone is capable of. But you’re going to win, Antonelli,” she said with a smile that insisted she had never doubted that I would. “And you’re not sure that you should? I think I knew that about you that first time we met, at Albert’s home, when, harlot that I am, I waited for you outside, hoping to seduce you. Imagine my astonishment when I discovered that it was more interesting when I failed. I learned that you see both sides of everything—even what you want and why you shouldn’t have it. But at least that is one dilemma you’ll never have to face again.”