The Touch of Treason (24 page)

Perry was no cop, detective, prosecutor, the kind of people Thomassy put down with practiced regularity. What Perry was doing was as clever as some of the things Thomassy did in the courtroom. Perry was working a field Francine knew. “I’m a beginner,” Thomassy said.

Perry smiled. “That’s not a sin. Most people, most lawyers, judges, and politicians know very little about how this game between us and the other side really works, where to find the opportunities, where the dangers are.” He leaned forward. “Mr. Thomassy, there are a few people in State and the National Security Council who know almost as much as Fuller did. I don’t. But I know that the people who know are very concerned at this moment that any Soviet move to revive détente, even as a mood, is seized by Western sensibilities, making us vulnerable unless there are people like Fuller around to demonstrate that playing the Soviet game with our sensibilities always works to the Soviet advantage and never to ours. Moreover, we’ve got a domestic handicap that’s become a national leukemia. When we play tough it means ballooning the deficit. Do you follow me?”

“What’s that got to do with my client?” Thomassy asked.

“Another drink, George?” Widmer asked.

“No.”

“Our hope,” Perry said, “is to avoid the extremes. Just as détente lulls people, getting the electorate hot under the collar about Soviet actions adds to the pressure for the administration to do something. That’s why we hoped the Fuller affair would blow over as quickly as possible. He was a great loss, but my motto is, if you’ve got a body, bury it. This trial could swell up into an international scandal, and if it does, the media are not likely to let it go because it’s good long-haul copy, not just a one-shot. Roberts tells us you’re planning to put Tarasova on the stand. That will fuel the fire.”

“My job,” Thomassy said, his voice tremulous, “is to get my client off. If an expert in the field of Soviet affairs as high rated as Ludmilla Tarasova has something to contribute, I want her testimony.”

“Don’t you think you can get an acquittal without her testimony?”

“Only a fool would attempt to predict how a jury will react to a string of circumstantial evidence. With Tarasova’s testimony, I could build the possibility that half of the KGB was out to assassinate Martin Fuller.”

Perry glanced at Widmer. Widmer looked jumpy. Then Perry said, “We mustn’t lose perspective. A murder charge is one thing. If you put into the jury’s head the idea that this murder might have been committed at the behest of a foreign government, you’ll have opened a can of worms. He’ll never stand a chance with a jury of quite ordinary people who see treason clearly, not in the complex way, say, that intellectuals like Porter do. If he’s convicted—”

“Now wait one minute!” Thomassy interrupted. “Nobody’s getting convicted. I’m using Tarasova to show that any one of a zillion guys in the KGB could have been on an assignment to take out Fuller while my client was peaceably pursuing his research.”

Perry’s rude finger pointed straight at Thomassy. “I said
if
he’s convicted, and if you’ll let me finish, I’ll add that when and if that happens we’ll be obligated to use him. Youngsters like Porter don’t do very well in maximum-security institutions. Once he’s had a taste of prison he might listen to the kind of postsentence bargaining we very rarely get into. In other words, if you don’t get him off, Mr. Thomassy, we could get him out of prison subsequently with a sealed court order. However, the pictures you saw would indicate that Porter and the Soviets are not in tune, probably because what they wanted is what we would have wanted under similar circumstances. I can see us wanting to know what a Soviet expert on America might be thinking, but we wouldn’t want to stop his mind from working. That’s amateursville. If Porter’s convicted, the Soviets will be on edge. They know we’d visit him in prison and that every day would create pressure for him to talk to us. I assure you it’s only in the movies that men resist the chance to get out. The Russians would be afraid Porter might reveal who recruited him—we don’t know that yet—and who his control is or was. If you get Porter off without Tarasova’s testimony the publicity stops, and we can all return to the détente mirage for our own reasons.”

“What happens to Porter?”

“Who knows?” Perry shrugged. “Does it matter?”

Thomassy looked at Perry. What had he been like at Porter’s age?

Perry said, “I’m afraid that what Ned and we have got you involved in has repercussions outside the criminal justice system that outweigh the case itself. May I make a few suggestions?”

Thomassy grunted. “You can make all the suggestions you like. I’m going to be guided by my principles, not yours.”

“A declaration of a closed mind is hard to talk to.”

“I didn’t say my mind was closed to anything, Mr. Perry. I’ve been sitting here listening to stuff that makes a man’s skin crawl. I said principles. And one of them is my responsibility to my client to use every possible avenue to suggest that others might have committed the crime.”

“Whether he’s guilty or innocent?”

“How many times do you think criminal lawyers get hired by innocent people? I’ll do what I have to do for my client.”

“For your principles?”

“Now you’ve got it,” Thomassy said.

“They come ahead of your clients?”

Thomassy felt suddenly peaceful because he was beginning to understand. “I suppose your client, if we wanted to put it that way, is the United States.”

“Of course.”

“Not a particular agency, or party, or person?”

Perry didn’t like where the conversation was going. “The interests of the United States come first. Always.”

“As a matter of principle?”

“Certainly.”

“Because your principles and the principles of the United States are the same?”

“They are congruent.”

“Then do you think it was in accord with the principles of the United States, as you understand them, for you people to have helped smuggle known mass murderers from Nazi Germany into Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, Argentina, and into the United States so they could escape justice in the countries in which they committed their crimes, and to do so on the alleged grounds that they might be useful?”

“We used the mafia in Sicily to facilitate the Allied landings there.”

Thomassy wanted to stand.
This is not a courtroom,
he told himself.
Every place is a courtroom,
he answered himself.

“That was the Sicilian mafia in Sicily to save American lives during a war. What’s that got to do with rescuing Nazi criminals after the war? Do you think the American people would have ever voted for anybody who proposed such a move? Do you people think that you aren’t responsible to anyone? I’ve got one lousy client in court at a time, and I try to get him a fair shake before the law, but I don’t try to spirit him out of the country. My clients stand trial. Your fucking clients are living it up all over South America and you dare talk to me about my principles against your principles?”

Thomassy stared straight at Ned Widmer, who looked like a man whose candle was barely flickering. “Ned, what’s your role in this? You’re not working for the government the way these people are, are you?”

“No,” Widmer said, sighing. “Not in any sense except in which all citizens give something of their lives to it from time to time. Perhaps in error. I think we ought to go in to dinner now, George.”

“Where’s Francine?” Thomassy asked.

“I believe she’s at your house, as a matter of fact.”

“Mind if I skip dinner, Ned,” Thomassy said. “Please convey my regrets to Priscilla.”

“She’s gone visiting to some friends for the evening. I’m doing the serving,” Widmer said.

“I’m sure you and your friends from Washington will have some things to discuss,” Thomassy said, heading for the door.

*

“Well,” Widmer said, “I guess he’s going to call Tarasova. I’m sorry you couldn’t persuade him not to.”

“On the contrary,” Perry said. “The best way to reinforce an obstinate man’s decision, is to try to talk him out of it.”

“You
wanted
him to call Tarasova?”

Perry didn’t answer. He turned to Randall. “Tell the boys we’ve got a green light.”

*

Thomassy drove home keeping his speedometer at exactly seven miles over the speed limit. If you spoke friendly to a cop, not arrogantly, not scared, he’d never known one to give a ticket for seven miles over. Ten maybe, not seven. That’s what his grade-B head was full of, junk facts. Francine, trying to puff up his ego, had said,
George, the UN is a big stage, with nothing going on. You’re on a small stage, with a lot going on.
He’d believed her for the wrong reasons. He’d accepted the justice system as a game he could play as well as anyone. All those years since Oswego he had let himself believe that crap about law. He had always worked his way around the law on behalf of his clients. He had worked his way around something that didn’t exist. The courts were as much a pretense as diplomacy. There was no law. And if that was true, what the hell was he practicing?

He’d always worked crime. Now he was in Madison Square Garden working something else. He had been yanked out of orbit. He wasn’t up against Roberts. He was up against two governments, neither of which was on trial.
They both ought to be.

He couldn’t pull his car into its usual place in his driveway because Francine’s car was already there, blocking the way.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Thomassy remembered coming home with his parents from his first sleep-over trip away from Oswego, a Thanksgiving weekend visit with his aunt and uncle Thomassian in Binghamton. He’d slept in his mother’s arms most of the way home in the Model-A his father called “the rattletrap,” but as they neared home, he stirred and woke as if he knew it was almost time and then he saw their house, isolated from all other houses, outlined in the moonlight, and he’d asked his mother in alarm, “Why aren’t there any lights on in the house?” And his mother had patted him on the head, and in her Armenian accent he could still hear, said, “Because we not there.”

For the fourteen years that he’d been practicing law in Westchester, Thomassy had arrived home to a darkened house. Known to all of his women as a bachelor by choice who did not want to share his life the way he saw other people sharing theirs, he had sometimes thought that if he’d had a family, at least there’d be a light on in the house when he came home. Once he’d mentioned that to Alice and she’d said, “You could leave one lamp on. It wouldn’t cost that much.” He’d told her, “I don’t want to advertise an empty house. One steady light says nobody’s home. A darkened house might have a security system on. I’ve defended burglars. I know how they think.”

In the last year he’d usually gotten home before Francine since she commuted all the way from the city. But five or six times she’d been there first. And the inside lights had been on, as now.

Thomassy turned his key in the familiar lock as if it were to a vault he was opening for the first time, unsure of what he would see when he swung the door open.

He saw Francine in front of a fire she did not need except as a focus for attention outside herself as she sat, legs up on a hassock.

“Hello, George,” she said.

He wished she didn’t look so painfully attractive. “You set me up at your father’s.”

Francine swung her legs off the hassock. “Before we start that argument, I have something to say. Let’s talk first and fight afterward.”

Thomassy, his anger thwarted, loosened his tie, slipped his jacket off his shoulders and onto the back of a chair. Over on the counter an uncorked bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and two empty glasses caught his attention. He poured some wine slowly into each, brought one to his antagonist, slipped into the other chair in front of the fire. His shoes felt weighted. Would it seem too domestic if he took them off? Hell, her feet were bare.

“You are pouting,” she said.

“I am not pouting. I’m angry. You shared this place for most of nearly twelve goddamn months and you left on two seconds’ notice.”

“They weren’t goddamn. I didn’t leave. I went away to think.”

“You could have done your thinking here.”

“Maybe some people can meditate in the middle of Times Square. I can’t be around you when I’m thinking about us.”

“And what conclusions have you come to, Your Honor?”

She smiled. The trouble with most of the men she’d met is that they behaved like boys when ostensibly courting, a game with goals, a kiss, a feel, a grope, a lay. And when they talked, it wasn’t for the fun of it but for points in the game. They played tough but had no sinew. They spent their ambition climbing a ladder that ended in the sky, nowhere, instead of living rung by rung. There was some of that in Thomassy, too, maybe in all men, hunters who went out to feed a family and got trapped in the skills of the hunt. Thomassy wasn’t interested in feeding anybody, including himself. He wasn’t out to get richer lawyering like daddy’s friends. He wasn’t a spectator. The play he was interested in was the one he was playing, in the courtroom, or with her in bed, or out walking on Sunday. Thomassy was the first to give her hope of a partnership. Their game would be them against the others, whoever the others turned out to be. She soared on thoughts like that, and then he’d say things like
Your Honor
to her and he was suddenly a boy like the rest. Maybe she wanted too much too fast.