by D. W. Buffa
I was as lost as I was dazzled.
“Dilemma?” I said, managing to stumble over just one word alone.
“When you want me. There are no more reasons why you shouldn’t have me.” She let that thought linger for a moment, and then, getting to her feet, placed her soft, warm hand on the side of my face. “Except, of course, for one. You have work to do.”
She had taken two steps when she stopped and looked back.
“Would you mind, would it bother you, if I slept for a while on the sofa? That way I won’t feel that far away.”
“Yes, it will bother me; no, I don’t want you to go anywhere else.”
I started reading through what Reynaud had given me, each page more damning, more decisive than the last. I read slowly, stopping every few minutes to jot down a note on how best to use what I had just learned, which witnesses would now have to be called and the order in which I wanted them to testify. The pieces fell into place, the story began to tell itself. The question looming over all of it was the defendant himself, whether I should, or should not, put Kevin Fitzgerald back on the stand.
I kept working until the black night had begun to turn gray. There would be time tomorrow, and the day after that, time to go over everything until I had it all down by heart and could go into court and know everything a witness would say before the witness knew himself.
But I could not get Fitzgerald out of my mind. It did not matter that I was now all but certain he would be acquitted. He was, if anything, more of a mystery than he had been before. It seemed strange, looking across at Tangerine, the woman I was going to marry, sleeping soundly on a sofa just a few feet away, that she had once been involved with him. Though perhaps not as strange as that she was now involved with me. We like to think we know what is going to happen to us, but none of us do. We turn a corner, decide to stop somewhere for a cup of coffee, we go to a dinner, the way I did, not because I wanted to, but out of a sense of obligation, an indebtedness I felt toward Albert Craven, and the last thing we ever expected to happen becomes the central fact of our existence. I looked at her, laying asleep on the sofa, and I could not imagine what my life would have been like if I had not met her. It seemed the easiest, most natural thing in the world to do what I did next: picked her up in my arms and carried her to bed and slept with her until, late the next morning, I woke up.
“THE DEFENSE CALLS Jonathan Reece.”
The announcement that I was recalling to the stand the prosecution’s own witness, the one St. John had called first in the trial, set the court buzzing. What was the defense up to, what was I planning? St. John did not know, but he did not give any indication that he was at all surprised.
Reece took the stand, wondering why he had been called to testify again.
“Your Honor,” I said after a single glance at the witness, a glance meant to be a warning. “Mr. Reece is the first of several witnesses called by the prosecution I intend to call back. I would ask the court’s permission to treat Mr. Reece, and the others, as hostile.”
By giving his permission, Judge Silverman allowed me, in effect, to cross-examine them all over again. I got right to it.
“Mr. Reece, you testified that Senator Fitzgerald was always making false accusations about the president. Isn’t that what you said?”
Like everyone else, Jonathan Reece had been following the trial. He knew what other, subsequent witnesses had said. He knew what Fitzgerald had said, and he knew about the evidence that had been produced proving that Michael Donahue had met with the Russians. It was not difficult to guess that his main concern was to distance himself, if he could, from anything that might suggest he had been involved.
“Is that still your testimony, Mr. Reece?”
“Yes, that’s what I thought—at the time.”
Standing at the far end of the jury box, as far from the witness stand as I could, I forced him to speak loudly.
“At the time? Does that mean you no longer believe that what Senator Fitzgerald had been saying about President Bridges was untrue?”
Loyalty, even misplaced loyalty, does not simply vanish overnight. Bukharin had found the meaning of his existence in his belief in the infallibility of the Communist Party. With nothing like the same intellectual background, Jonathan Reece had found his in Walter Bridges and his vision of America. There were still limits on how much he would concede.
“There may have been more to the Russian connection, the nature of their interference, than I had been led to believe.”
“More than you were led to believe,” I mused. Folding my arms across my chest, I gazed down at the floor and took a few slow steps forward. Raising my eyes just high enough to look at him, I asked, “You also testified that Senator Fitzgerald had on several occasions requested a meeting with the president, did you not?”
“Yes, that’s right. He did.”
“Tell us again, what was the reason Senator Fitzgerald gave? Why did he want to see President Bridges?”
Reece tried to shrug off the question, as if the reason, even had he been able to remember it, was irrelevant.
“Let me remind you what you said, what you told the jury, the first time you were asked. You said that Fitzgerald wanted to tell the president what he had found. Now that you have been reminded, do you remember why, according to your sworn testimony, the president refused to see him? Never mind. Let’s not waste any time. I’ll tell you what you said: ‘The president knew it was a bluff—that the FBI didn’t have anything.’ Remember now, Mr. Reece? Now, after everything that you, along with the rest of us, have learned, do you still believe that was the reason? Do you still believe that Senator Fitzgerald was bluffing?”
Shifting his weight around in the chair, Reece bit hard on his lip and rapidly blinked his eyes.
“I’m not really sure. Maybe not. Maybe he knew something about the Russian business.”
“The Russian business? Are you aware of what Senator Fitzgerald said in his testimony last week? That there was a plan to destroy our system of free elections?”
With both hands, Reece shoved himself up from the witness chair.
“I don’t believe that. I don’t know anything about that. I wouldn’t have been involved in anything—”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t have, Mr. Reece. No one is accusing you of anything. You worked for Walter Bridges, but not directly, did you? You worked for Richard Ellison, the president’s chief of staff, correct?”
“Yes, that’s right. And he never would have—”
“You used a phrase in your testimony when you were asked about the reason why the president refused to see Senator Fitzgerald, even though the senator had requested such a meeting on three different occasions. By the way, when did Senator Fitzgerald do that, when did he request those meetings?”
“The first time was ten days or so before the trip out here.”
“Which means all three requests were within that same ten-day period. Didn’t that suggest that the senator, at least, thought that whatever he wanted to talk to the president about was urgent, that this was not some routine request to discuss pending legislation?
“No one thought it was urgent.”
“Because no one in the White House trusted Senator Fitzgerald, because—and this is what you said when you testified before—he wanted a meeting with the president so he could tell everyone that he had discussed with him ‘things he could not yet reveal.’ Isn’t that what you testified.”
“Yes, but—”
“Was that what you thought, or was that what someone else thought? What I am asking, Mr. Reece, is did you come to this conclusion on your own, or did someone else—the president himself or someone on his staff—decide this was the senator’s motivation?”
“I’m not sure who first decided that. It’s what everyone believed.”
“Is it what you believe now, Mr. Reece? Or do you believe that the senator wanted to meet with the president to confront him with what he had discovered in the hopes that th
e president would change his mind and call off the attempt to subvert our democratic way of government?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Reece. “I wish I did, but I don’t. All I know is that the reason I gave you, that Fitzgerald wanted to use a meeting to publicize himself, is the reason the president said he would not see him.”
“Until he arrived in San Francisco, and Senator Fitzgerald was invited on board to meet with him on Air Force One?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“The president told you to bring Senator Fitzgerald on board. Were you alone with the president when he asked you to do this?”
“No. Ellison was there, and so was Donahue. They were both just leaving. Everyone was getting ready to leave the plane.”
“How long had you been with the others in the president’s cabin?”
“Not long. Ellison asked me to come in. The president asked me to get Fitzgerald.”
“The two of them—Ellison, who was the president’s chief of staff, and Donahue, who is now chief of staff to the new president—they did not like each other very much, did they?”
The question surprised him. He looked at me in a way that suggested he was not sure what I wanted to know. I gave him the same look back.
“They didn’t like each other? The question isn’t that difficult.”
“They worked together.”
“Rivals, and not always friendly ones, is that not a fair description? Let me be more specific. They despised one another. They hated each other. Donahue thought Ellison, the man you worked for, an intellectual lightweight, a political hack Bridges hired because he supposedly knew his way around Washington, but, as it turned out, did not know how to get anything done. Ellison, for his part, thought Donahue a pretentious egomaniac who thought he could use Bridges to change the course of history. They hated each other. It was all out war, a war Donahue has won, hasn’t he? Ellison, your boss, is on his way out, and Donahue now runs everything. How long do you think you have, Mr. Reece, before you find yourself out of a job?”
“Objection!” announced St. John, doing his best to appear confused. “I don’t know where this is going, but it doesn’t seem to have any obvious connection to any of the issues in the case.”
“I have no more questions of the witness, your Honor,” I said when Silverman looked to me for my response.
There were two people with Walter Bridges when Jonathan Reece was sent to get Fitzgerald. The jury now knew what I knew: that they despised each other and that, it was safe to assume, a power struggle had been going on behind the scenes. The jury had heard Donahue deny under oath everything with which I had confronted him about his meeting with General Rostov in that Paris restaurant. They had heard Fitzgerald testify that there had been other meetings as well. Everything Fitzgerald said had not just been sworn to, but documented. Now they were going to hear from a witness whose credibility had just been established by the sworn testimony of someone who knew that Richard Ellison and Michael Donahue were sworn enemies. I called Ellison to the stand with the warm greeting of a long-lost friend.
“Mr. Ellison, we’re glad to have you back. There are just a few questions, a few matters we need to clear up.”
It was difficult to keep a straight expression. Richard Ellison’s photograph could have been used in an illustrated dictionary next to the word “puzzlement.” That baffled expression of his was such a permanent part of who he was that it was hard not to think that every morning when he looked in the mirror to shave, his first reaction was to try to remember the name of the stranger staring back at him. He placed his elbows on the arms of the witness chair and began to rub his nervous hands together.
“When you were here before, a witness for the prosecution, you testified that you spoke to Senator Fitzgerald when he came on Air Force One.”
Richard Ellison’s wavy hair, a black shiny hue in the courtroom lights, made his pale face seem paler still. The dark suit he wore, though different than the one in which he had testified before, was still a size too large. He nodded slowly, and carefully, in response to my question, before, finally, he answered that he had.
“You said you were standing just outside the president’s cabin, and that the two of you exchanged a few words. You said—and this is what struck me at the time—that he was nicer than you expected, a ‘much nicer person’—those were your exact words—than you had thought before. You said he suggested you ought to come to San Francisco sometime for a few days, and that if you did, you might never leave. Do I remember what you said accurately?”
“Yes, that’s what I said. And that’s what he said—about San Francisco, I mean.”
“Well, Mr. Ellison, we all hope you have that chance,” I said in as friendly a manner as I could. “But now, we need to get a better understanding of some things than we had before. I want to go back a little, before the election. You weren’t directly involved in the Bridges campaign, were you?”
“No, I was with the national party.”
“When Bridges was elected, you became his chief of staff?”
“Yes, he asked me, and I was glad to do it.”
“Part of your job was to hire the rest of the White House staff?” I asked, as if the question answered itself, though I knew it did not.
“Yes, and no. There were people the president had already asked to serve in various positions, people—”
“Like Michael Donahue?”
“He was one; there were others.”
“Others like Jenny Ann Carruthers.” It was not a question. “In fact, the White House was divided from the very beginning between those like Donahue and Carruthers who had been involved in the campaign, many of them close to Bridges before he ever became a candidate for public office, and those, like yourself and Jonathan Reece, who had not been involved with the campaign but had spent years in politics and government. And is it not true, Mr. Ellison, that this division was characterized by a strong antipathy: that you wanted a government that got things done in the normal, traditional way, while, on the other side, the side that Michael Donahue was part of, wanted to break up everything, destroy the old political alliances, start all over, build everything from the bottom up?”
“There were differences, differences of approach, that’s true, but I’m not sure I would go that far, that I would—”
I turned on him with a vengeance.
“You know what has happened in this courtroom!” I shouted. “You know that there is now evidence of massive collusion with the Russians! You know that the president of the United States was involved in a plot to stop the next election from even taking place! The question, Mr. Ellison, the only question, is how far you were involved? The question, Mr. Ellison, the only question, is were you, or were you not, a co-conspirator? Did you, or did you not, participate with Walter Bridges and Michael Donahue in a plot to destroy the basic institutions of this country?”
“No, I did not!” he bellowed, rising straight up from the witness chair. “The first I heard about this, the first I ever heard that anything like this was even possible, was when I heard what Senator Fitzgerald said in his testimony last Friday!”
“And when you heard it, you believed it, didn’t you?” I asked, so quickly, and with the same friendly smile I had shown just a moment before, that he just looked at me and for a moment did not know what to say.
“His testimony, the evidence…it seems impossible. I wouldn’t have believed it, but—”
“But if anyone could have been involved in something like this, Michael Donahue would be the first one you would think of, wouldn’t he?”
Ellison did not want to believe it about anyone, but he could believe it about Donahue. He would not believe it about Bridges without more proof.
“But Donahue had a lot of influence with him, didn’t he?”
Reluctantly, he agreed.
“It was Donahue who did not want him to meet with Senator Fitzgerald in Washington, wasn’t it?”
“He didn’t w
ant Fitzgerald to get anything we didn’t have to give him. Fitzgerald was the enemy. But there was another reason. I think he was afraid what the president might do, what he might say. And that if he said anything he shouldn’t, Fitzgerald would use it.”
“About the Russians?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I didn’t know, until now, anything about it. I believed what we were told, that it was all a fabrication, things taken out of context, twisted, misinterpreted.” With a plaintive look, he added, “What else could we believe? We were working for the president of the United States. He was being attacked by his political opponents. And those people would do or say anything!”
“The day you came out here, had there been any discussions about having Senator Fitzgerald meet with the president when you arrived?”
“No, no discussions I was involved in.”
“It’s a six-hour flight. What did you discuss with the president?”
“Not that much, really. We went over the speech he was going to give; we spent some time talking about the legislation we were trying to get Congress to start working on. We talked about a couple of appointments he wanted to make, whether there would be a problem getting them confirmed.”
“When did you have this conversation?” I asked, pacing slowly in front of the jury box.
“Right after we took off. Thirty, forty minutes, then he had other things he wanted to do, other people he wanted to talk to. Half an hour, forty-five minutes, that was about all you could ever get. He did not like to spend too much time on any one thing.”
“The early part of the flight…but you saw him again, when you landed?”