The Touch of Treason
All men should have a touch of treason in their veins.
The Touch of Treason
By Sol Stein
Copyright 2014 by Sol Stein
Cover Copyright 2014 by Untreed Reads Publishing
Cover Design by Ginny Glass
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in print, 1985.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Also by Sol Stein and Untreed Reads Publishing
The Magician
The Husband
Living Room
The Resort
The Touch of Treason
Sol Stein
For Toby with love
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Four lawyers read the manuscript of this book and provided me with advice: my friend, Judge Charles L. Brieant, who has been instructing me in the law since the time of
The Magician;
his son, Charles L. Brieant III; his daughter-in-law, Joy Beane Brieant; and David Bernheim, whose knowledge of courtroom tactics was as useful as his understanding that when literary necessity and judicial convention clash, literature must govern.
Claire Smith’s comments on an early draft encouraged me in a direction I am glad I took. Patricia Day and Toby Stein both provided me with literally hundreds of notes on several drafts of this book. Finally, it was Richard Marek’s editorial reflections that as much or more than other factors influenced the publication of this book.
—Sol Stein
Scarborough, New York
All men should have a touch of treason in their veins.
—Rebecca West
The Soviets are chess players. We play checkers.
—Archibald Widmer
CHAPTER ONE
In the end you died. There could be a courtroom like this, Thomassy thought; all the good wood bleached white, the judge deaf to objections because He owned the place. The law was His, the advocacy system finished.
If that’s what it was going to be like, George Thomassy wanted to live forever, because here on earth, God willing or not, you could fight back.
Thomassy took in the grained thick wood of the raised perch, the bench from which the Honorable Walter Drewson would look down and judge defendant, defense counsel, prosecutor, witnesses, jury. Drewson would swivel in that now empty high-backed leather throne to see that his actors behaved according to the canons, protected from the players by a moat of flooring that no mortal crossed until he received the judge’s sign. The others, kept at bay by the promise of contempt, sought comfort in the knowledge that the judge’s vision was subject to the clouding of his contact lenses, and that under his severe black robe was hidden the ordinariness of a glen plaid suit and a spine that consisted of bones on a string.
Some of the windowless courtrooms Thomassy had worked looked like half-deserted government offices, a prefab for the judge’s bench, and a metal desk for the clerk. No criminal wanted his freedom decided on in a place that looked like the motor vehicle bureau. He wanted the accoutrements of authority in his theater. If he made it to a court like this, the walls paneled instead of painted, seven high windows letting in the morning light, he was prepared to be judged.
It had been some time since Thomassy had defended someone in a room this large, selected for this trial because it could accommodate more spectators and press than any other in the Westchester system. Thomassy, like everyone else who had paid attention in school, had learned that the Greeks used to kill the messengers who brought the news. But in this century, Thomassy thought, they’re killing the men who send the messages: Jack and Bobby at the height of their power; Martin Luther King when things were turning his way; Hoffa, the truckers’ hero, ready to make his comeback; and now, known only to specialists but perhaps, in the end, as influential as the others, Martin Fuller, the man who knew that you could more likely stop the Soviet spread over the earth not by the accretion of megatons but by understanding how a nation of chess players played its games. Martin Fuller had reluctantly agreed to put his system, his knowledge, the rules by which for several decades he had successfully predicted Soviet strategy, down on paper so that a few wise men might carry on his work to prevent Armageddon by insight rather than arsenals. Now Martin Fuller was dead, cut off from his work. In Washington the few who understood the import of Fuller’s death were suddenly bereft. Thomassy wondered if there was jubilation in Moscow because the wrong man had been accused of murdering Fuller, and Thomassy, who was an innocent in foreign affairs, had been picked to defend him?
Well, this was going to be a whopper. Thomassy was a lawyer the way Robert de Niro was an actor. This courtroom was the set in which, during weeks to come, he would cross a line. Now only lawyers and judges recognized him in the street. After this, strangers would stare or stop him. You could get an unlisted phone. You could take your name off your mailbox. But you couldn’t get back across that line once your face, seen on television, turned heads in the street.
The people
had you.
That’s the skirt the government hid behind.
The people
versus whomever he was defending.
As on all mornings before a trial was to begin, Thomassy had arrived early to survey the field of battle. The defendant’s table was always farther away from the jury than the prosecutor’s table on the assumption that
the people
could be trusted. Thomassy preferred some distance from the defense table to the jury box so that he could saunter over, letting the line loose until he was right in front of them for the rhetorical question that would implant
reasonable doubt, reasonable doubt, reasonable doubt
like an echo that he could count on to reverberate when they were sequestered in the jury room out of his reach. If the courtroom was a tight fit, with perhaps only fifteen feet between his sitting self and the jury box, he’d have to spring to his feet for objection and in five strides be in front of them. Though he was addressing the judge, he’d be talking from the jury’s position as if he were one of them, suggesting that the prosecutor was on the other side, a government worker. Thomassy helped the jurors understand that it was the government’s heinous role in human affairs to assert itself in opposition to citizens against whom there were only unproved allegations to which other citizens, chosen as jurors, could assert the technicality of innocence. Surrounded by people behaving like people, how could anyone stay innocent for long?
Kids somehow did. When he was invited to give one of the Mellon Lectures on Criminal Practice at New York University’s law school, the students were surprised to see that their legend was only in his mid-forties, and didn’t look like an Armenian but was as straight-nosed as someone from Amherst in the good old days. Thomassy’s gray eyes surveyed his packed audience, surprised by the number of women now taking to the law and by how much younger all the students looked. Their naiveté reminded him of his at that age.
But Mr. Thomassy,
one of them had questioned,
aren’t most criminal defendants guilty
? With a straight face he had answered: “It is the job of other departments in this university—psychology and religion—to train people to deal with guilt. Our job is to give those of us who are apprehended a defense so skillful that when prosecutors roll innuendo and circumstance at the jury we can say
No dice. You haven’t proved it.
Some of you will become prosecutors. Well, I guess somebody has to work for the government.” The students laughed of course, but one of them could be counted on to ask, as one did,
Isn’t the end result supposed to be not just winning but justice?
Thomassy knew you had to be patient with kids. He said, “Never talk to anyone of Armenian descent about justice.” He waited for the laugh and added, “You don’t tell your football team to go out there and get justice. You tell them to win.” Then looking at one student in particular, the way he always at moments like this looked at one juror, he said, “When you go out with a young woman on Saturday night, are you worried about feeling guilty afterwards? Are you looking for justice or success?” And he turned his gaze to the dark-haired female law student in the first row, walked around the lectern and strode over to just a few feet in front of her and said, “Is there a woman alive in this world who wants justice more than she wants success?” Then his gaze lifted to them all. “If you want to lose cases, I suggest you switch to the medical school,” and he sat down to a roar of laughter and the aphrodisiac of applause.
When he eased out of the lecture hall, nearly a dozen students clustered around him, most of them young women basking in his vitality who could not imagine, for all their quickening fantasies, that Thomassy lived alone.
Thomassy saw his life as a progression from innocence. As a boy he had thought himself cleverer than other boys because he provided favors before he might expect one in return. One evening, going to his house by a path that was shorter than going by road, he was accosted by four teenagers who were out to get the Armenian kid. Only one friend had ever accompanied him that way, a fat boy he had several times protected in the schoolyard from one or another of the four who were now blocking his way. In the distance, barely visible, he saw the fat boy, who had turned informer to curry favor with his enemies. Thomassy brought home a bloodied lip, a torn shirt, and the knowledge that boys do not bank favors.
When he began to practice law, on each occasion in which he had found himself surprised or vulnerable, he recorded a terse sentence or two in a notebook he kept in a locked desk drawer.
I believed Julio’s story. Julio brought his mother in to confirm it. His mother didn’t lie as well as he did. To get at the truth, question the accomplice.
Some time later he added:
Question the accomplice first. It saves a lot of time.
Once his secretary Alice referred to it as his devil book. Sometimes he was tempted to carry it with him for ready reference. Why do we forget what we learn? Life had snipers up in the trees. If God was as smart as He was cracked up to be, He’d have put eyes in back of your head, too. When he was a kid he’d foolishly thought WASPS like Judge Drewson were invulnerable. Drewson must be scared. He’d never had a case in County Court attended by reporters from abroad. He’ll want to appear fair. He’ll try not to allow more conniving by one side than the other. He’ll be distracted by the television artists sketching him, and by his daughter, the bright beauty of his late middle age, home from law school for the recess and insistent on being slipped in as a spectator so she might judge him. This may be the fairest place on earth, Thomassy thought. Everybody’s at risk.