The Touch of Treason (2 page)

“Good morning, Mr. Thomassy,” said the white-haired woman who was clerk of the court, setting down her armload of folders. Of course he was glad to be recognized, and not at all surprised at the clerk’s big smile because the grapevine always carried the news when Thomassy would appear for the defense and every clerk in the system knew that you could count on Thomassy to deliver the kind of show that made you eager to get up mornings.

If the clerk had been a young woman, he would merely have answered “Good morning” across the room. But he had watched his father being courtly to older women and had eventually understood the nature of this courtesy.

He walked briskly down the aisle to the lady, stretched out his hand, and when she took it, he lifted her from her daily anonymity by saying, “I’m afraid I don’t know your name?”

“Marian O’Connor,” she said, blushing, for attorneys do not usually shake hands or ask your name. She’d never seen a picture of him. He looked younger than she’d imagined him, tall, lean, relaxed-limbed, loose, clean-shaven, and his firm hand had been warm. His gray eyes looked at her as if to ask they once been lovers.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” he said, his voice husky.

They both heard the double doors at the back of the courtroom squeak open.

“Excuse me,” Marian O’Connor said quickly when she recognized the district attorney and hurried away through the door next to the judge’s bench. Thomassy could see Roberts’s handshake coming at him all the way down the aisle, above it that freckled face proclaiming
I can be friendly to everybody, I was born rich.

Roberts’s smile, Thomassy thought, is an implant.
I’m not a voter,
he wanted to say.
Save it.

“I
heard you get down to look things over on day one,” Roberts said. “I thought we might chat a bit before we officially become adversaries.”

“How’s your wife?” Thomassy asked, pumping Roberts’s unavoidable hand once, though he’d rather have let the embarrassing object drop unshaken.

Roberts was wearing his uniform, a vested gray suit, white shirt, striped school tie, Phi Beta key hanging from a watch chain across the vest. Thomassy didn’t like any kind of uniforms—cops, soldiers, hospital attendants, businessmen. He had his dark blue suits made because he liked a touch of European flair in the jackets, nipped in at the waist, beltless pants, extra pockets for sunglasses and for the small cards on which he wrote the cues he wanted to remember. He couldn’t imagine a woman going for a man’s zipper if he had a watch chain across his vest.

“Janet’s fine,” Roberts said. “How’s the girl who’s eroded your bachelorhood? Same one nearly a year, isn’t it?”

She’s not a girl, Thomassy thought, she’s a woman. “My bachelorhood’s intact,” he said.

“I heard—”

“I wouldn’t pay attention to gossip, Roberts. What’s on your mind?”

Roberts, shrewd as his Yankee forebears, preferred to plea-bargain away tough cases and bring the easy ones to trial. If he thought this one was going to be easy, Thomassy thought, he’s lost his touch; or has the preelection fever got him in heat, ready to play Gary Cooper Lawman for his constituents? What pissed Thomassy was that Roberts built his cases on other people’s backs—the investigators paid for by taxes, the paralegals paid for by taxes, the young assistant DAs paid for by taxes. He’d heard about how they brought their neatly organized garbage to Roberts’s desk, with the menu on top, option A, option B, option C, so Roberts could check his choice of strategy and think he was a lawyer.

Thomassy pictured Roberts at the side of his swimming pool, swim trunks the length of Bermuda shorts, a beach jacket hiding the rest of his body from public view. Wonder if he lets other people do his swimming for him?

“What got you out of bed so early?” he asked the district attorney.

Here it comes, Thomassy thought. Roberts planned everything, like his career, like using this courtroom as a way station to a more suitable arena, the House of Representatives, the Senate. A man like Roberts fantasized about his inauguration day. If, like Thomassy, you were the only son of an Armenian immigrant horse trainer from Oswego, New York, you concentrated on the chinks in human nature, the space between a man’s ribs. The fantasy guys, on the way to the White House, could trip on a cracked sidewalk. Roberts hadn’t tripped yet because he was a peg smarter than the others. He collected paintings. The story was he didn’t like paintings, he liked the way Nelson Rockefeller had got away with shit because he collected art.

Roberts said, “My people tell me you haven’t been receptive to negotiating this case.”

“I thought you might like to play this one out.”

“I wouldn’t be that glib about hard evidence or eyewitnesses,” Roberts said, his smile sheathing his words.

“You’ve got someone who was hiding in the shower and saw it all? You’re bluffing, Roberts.”

“You’re getting things mixed up. You bluff. I don’t. If you’ve changed your mind a little about negotiating, we could have a little sit-down with the judge.”

Mid-trial surprises make the headlines. That’s what Roberts was going after. “You don’t want the judge reminding you,” Thomassy said, “that we need advance warning of identification witnesses.”

“Oh sure. When I know, you’ll know. Unless we negotiate before—”

Thomassy cut in. “My client is not copping a plea under any conditions. Any.”

“That his idea or your idea?”

Thomassy was silent.

“Koppelman thinks it was your idea,” Roberts said.

“Who or what is Koppelman?”

Roberts smiled. “I thought you might remember him. A sandy-haired summa cum laude from Harvard Law who applied to you for a job last year. Brilliant kid. Said you agreed to see him because he said he was from Oswego.”

“He wasn’t from Oswego.”

“Nobody’s from Oswego,” Roberts said. “He thought you’d be impressed by his tactic since you’re reputed not to give interviews. He got in.”

“For three minutes.”

“You should have hired him,” Roberts said. “He came to me next. He’s putting in a lot of overtime on this case.”

“I work alone.”

“If you’re intent on going to trial, you might need some help on this one.”

Thomassy laughed. “You suggesting I hire Koppelman away from you?”

“Koppelman seems to have lost his admiration for you when you turned him down. I, of course, retain mine. It was Koppelman who suggested that you and I might have a little talk about keeping the witnesses down.”

“Sure,” Thomassy said. “We can keep it real short. When I move to have the case dismissed, don’t fight it.”

Roberts, the patrician, smiled at Thomassy’s little joke. In a quiet voice, laced with what Thomassy thought of as North Shore divinity, Roberts said, “Five of us looked at the evidence, separately and together, before we decided to present the Fuller case to the Grand Jury. I hope you got your fee up front.”

Thomassy moved his gaze from Roberts’s confident eyes to Roberts’s blond hair, then Roberts’s chin, then Roberts’s left ear, then Roberts’s right ear. The four points of the cross. It made witnesses nervous. They couldn’t figure out what you were doing. You
weren’t
doing anything except making them nervous.

“I wanted to save time,” Roberts said.

“You’d like to finish up before the campaign season starts.”

“You’re looking for trouble with me, Thomassy.”

“I’m looking for enough time for the jury to get used to the idea that my client is a human being. I’m out to save years of his time, not days of yours. Every slip you make, I’ll go for a mistrial until you’re dizzy.”

Roberts said, “You don’t have to play Bogart with me. I’m not a juror. Fuller’s life was taken.”

“You’ll have to prove it was taken.”

“The Grand Jury was convinced.”

“The Grand Jury eats lemon meringue out of the palm of your hand. The reason we have trials is to get you out of your closet and into a room like this where there are two sides. You’ve got the wrong defendant, Roberts.”

“That’s one mistake I’ve never made.” Roberts paused, summoning disdain from the generations that had preceded him. “I’ve always tried to be fair with you fellows who didn’t have the advantages.”

“Don’t patronize me, Roberts.”

“I’m trying to tell you this trial is over your head. Look who you’re defending.”

Thomassy knew the clenching of his right fist was a street instinct he’d hoped to leave in Oswego along with the flowered tie his mother had given him, and the wing-tipped shoes. “I’m going to whip your ass in front of the judge, the jury, the spectators, the press, and your mother’s DAR den if they’d like to come watch.”

Roberts, fingering his striped tie, said, “I’d meant this to be a friendly conversation.”

Thomassy stepped closer to Roberts and lowered his voice. “I mean, in the friendliest fashion, to show that the government has to prove that the death of Martin Fuller was not accidental, that if not accidental it was accomplished by the willful act of another person, and that that person is my client, that he had a motive to kill his teacher, and that you can prove your case, if there is a case, to a jury of my peers, not yours. This isn’t going to be one of your one-two-three trials. I’ve got a footlocker full of reasonable doubt. You’re going to get very tired. You’re going to come out of this wishing you’d given it to one of your honchos.”

Roberts had no choice but to turn to go. At the double doors he said, “The calendar says the people versus your client, not me against you or you against me.”

“You don’t represent the people, Roberts. You represent the government. I represent the people. We’re all defendants.”

It was funny the way Roberts tried to slam the swinging doors. You idiot, Thomassy thought, you can’t slam swinging doors. They take their own good time.

CHAPTER TWO

On a particular morning half a year earlier Martin Fuller had caught himself thinking that before every murder, two minds are at work, the murderer’s and the victim’s. If each knew the mind of the other, if there were no miscommunication, would the murder take place?

The answer, Martin Fuller thought, was in most cases yes. Our thoughts are far worse than what we allow ourselves to say.

As he carefully put the manuscript he had just worked on inside the safe in his study, Fuller, then in his eighty-third year, thought of one particular murder. He imagined Trotsky with the small, pointed beard at his desk in his house of exile in Coyoacan, reading the manuscript of the young man who was standing behind him, looking over his shoulder. Trotsky knew the handsome fellow as Sylvia Ageloff’s lover or husband—it didn’t matter which—a Jacques Mornard who had come reportedly from a Belgian bourgeois family to succor Sylvia, and who was now beginning to seem a convert to Sylvia’s conviction that Trotsky was the redeemer of the October Revolution. As Trotsky bent over Mornard’s manuscript, the blow came, and in that millisecond Trotsky knew that Stalin’s long-awaited messenger had arrived. For Mornard, Fuller and the whole world learned soon enough, had taken a
piolet,
an ice-axe, out of his raincoat pocket, and with the energy that comes to an ideological assassin at the moment he has been living toward, had struck Stalin’s rival in the skull with the sharp point, releasing a scream that the assassin later acknowledged felt as if it were piercing his own brain.

Trotsky, Mornard reported, bit his hand as a dog might do, then stumbled out of the room, blood streaming down his face, yelling
See what
they
have done to me!

They
was the word that reverberated in Fuller’s head.

Martin Fuller had known the antagonists, Trotsky and Stalin,
and had quarreled with both. It was inevitable that Trotsky, in his Mexican exile, would be writing a biography of the man he knew had sentenced him to death. Well, Fuller’s writing was of a very different sort, a book that would never be published as a book. The stipend he received from the U.S. government, which supplemented his pension from the university, was for the creation of a manuscript intended only for the eyes of the National Security Adviser and his successors.

The man who had visited Fuller nearly a year ago to persuade him to accept the assignment was someone he had known casually for a long time, Jackson Perry. Fuller, who throughout his long life had forsworn neckties as a punishment visited upon men, thought Perry looked like a man whose necktie was as much a part of his presence as his close-cropped hair. When Fuller bade Perry sit, he noticed the tinge of pink embarrassment in Perry’s face as he unstrapped his attaché case from his wrist before he could put it down.

Fuller could remember with amusement when the attaché case had been a sign of expense and rank. Soon afterward middle-management types started carrying attachés made of rougher leathers. Young men in suits began to carry metal and plastic attachés. It was said Puerto Rican runners on Wall Street carried their lunches in them. Once the Con Edison man showed up at the Fuller home carrying an attaché case; when opened, it revealed his work tools.

Perry’s well-worn attaché looked like it might have been made of glove-soft leather darkened by wear and repeated restoration; but the leather strap, one end tied to the attaché and the other to Perry’s wrist, Fuller had seen only once before, when a courier had caught up to him in the south of France. Fuller presumed that Perry was required to make a verbal presentation, and if Fuller did not reject the assignment out of hand, only then would Perry take out of his case a written summary of what he had just said.