Breach of Trust

by D. W. Buffa

  “The prosecution promised to tell you who covered up the murder of Annie Malreaux and the reason it was done. ‘Before this trial is over you will know how that happened and why.’ Remember? I will make you a promise as well,” I said, turning slowly until I was looking Caminetti squarely in the eye. “Before this trial is over, you will know who the people are who have conspired together to use the judicial system of the United States to knowingly bring about a wrongful conviction for murder out of a desperate need to hang on to political power and their own political careers. It is a conspiracy, ladies and gentlemen, that reaches inside the White House and before this case is over I am going to prove it!”

  With a last glance at the jury, I walked to the counsel table. Utterly exhausted, I sank into my chair, glad I had made that promise and too tired to worry about whether I could keep it.

  An immense stillness, a profound silence, filled the courtroom. No one moved, no one spoke; no one knew what to think. They had come to witness a trial in which the vice president might be implicated in a crime, or at least involved in a scandal, and found themselves confronted with an accusation that Browning was the victim of a criminal conspiracy directed perhaps by the president himself. Judge Scarborough looked suddenly tired and drawn.

  “I think this might be an appropriate place to adjourn for the day,” he said in a voice that seemed both reflective and subdued. “We’ll begin in the morning at ten. We have finished now with opening statements.

  Tomorrow the prosecution will call its first witness and begin its case.”

  I managed to get Jimmy Haviland out of the courthouse the back way. We crossed the street into Columbus Park, and before we said good-bye I cautioned him against the Irish bar.

  “There will be people in there—reporters, and not just reporters, some of those crazy bastards who think Browning ought to be dead—and the only story will be about the defendant drinking himself stupid instead of thinking about his trial. Go back to the hotel. If you need a drink, do it in your room, and do it alone.”

  Jimmy broke into a chastened grin. “I promised you I wouldn’t do that. Don’t you think I can keep my word?”

  Embarrassed, I started to apologize. “No, it’s all right,” he said . The grin softened into a vague, distant smile. He kicked at the sidewalk with the tip of his shoe. He raised his eyes and gave me a rueful glance. “If I hadn’t made that promise, that’s exactly where I would be—heading toward that bar, probably staying there until I couldn’t remember why I didn’t want to leave.” A grim expression of self-inflicted doubt creased the corners of his aging eyes. “It’s always been such a stupid thing to do.”

  I felt so sorry for him; I wanted so much to say something that might help take away just a little of the pain. I remembered what Vivian Malreaux had said, not just about what Jimmy had believed, but what because of her strange and generous nature her daughter might have done.

  “She might have married you. After a while, after she figured out what she really wanted to do, Annie might have married you. She knew how much you loved her, and that meant a lot.”

  A faint smile, tragic and nostalgic, bitter and forgiving, crossed Jimmy Haviland’s straight, narrow mouth. There was a kind of hard-won clarity in his eyes, as if he had finally realized what his weaknesses were. It was the look of someone who understands that it is too late, and that it probably always was; that the things that changed our lives, that made us who we are, that left us damaged and half destroyed, the walking wounded with our shattered dreams and our lost illusions, our bent ambitions and our broken souls, had been written from the beginning next to our names. Jimmy Haviland looked at me, tired and quietly triumphant, willing finally to accept the hand he had been dealt.

  “It was never about Annie; it was always about me. If she had married me, it would have been for all the wrong reasons—because she felt sorry for me, I suppose—and it would have ended badly, and that would have been worse; not worse than the fact that she died, but worse than if she had lived and married someone else, someone she loved a little the way I loved her. No, it wasn’t about Annie. If I hadn’t met her—the way you said in there today—if I hadn’t met Annie, do you really think my life would have been all that much different? That I would have led a normal, happy life— whatever that might be? If it hadn’t been Annie, it would have been someone else.”

  Jimmy shook his head, and I thought there was just a slight suggestion of something close to pride, a sense that he had not been willing to settle for second best, that he had not been afraid to risk staking everything on the way he felt.

  “I was a lot like you that way,” he remarked with a sympathetic glance that caught me completely off guard.

  “Always wanting something I knew I could never have.

  What’s that old line—‘your reach should exceed your grasp, else what’s a heaven for?’” Haviland laughed.

  “And they wonder why the Irish drink.”

  He said good-bye and started to walk away, heading up the street. He stopped, turned around and came toward me again.

  “Browning was right about one thing. He was right about you. What you did in there today—that opening of yours…” He smiled, and in a gesture that meant more than words, nodded his approval. Then he quickly turned on his heel and vanished in the swarming crowd marching endlessly up and down the narrow, noisy, shouting street.

  I turned around, ready to go the other way, when I saw her standing there, waiting right in front of me. I tried to hide my surprise.

  “Are you here as a reporter, or as the woman I tried to invite to dinner but who did not return my call?”

  The cool, dark eyes of Gisela Hoffman had that slightly baffled expression they had each time she tried to translate into English something she thought important. An embarrassed smile started onto her mouth, and then, embarrassed even more, tried to turn back. With a helpless laugh, she gripped the strap of the large leather purse slung over her shoulder, plunged her other hand into the deep pocket of the camel-hair coat she wore, and bent her head at a delicate angle to the side.

  “I don’t know why I’m like this around you, a tongue-tied adolescent, a stammering fool. Yes, that’s the reason,” said Gisela as her eyes shot wide open into a shining accusatory glance. “It’s what you do—the way you do that… Tease me with your eyes, make fun of me like that!”

  I took her by the arm, turning her around, moving her with me through the jostling crowd. The air was cold, clear, crisp; the sky a hard brittle blue. The delicate white skin on her cheeks was glowing red like the spots on a child’s painted doll.

  “It’s too early for dinner,” I remarked as we turned the corner at the end of the park. “But I haven’t eaten all day. Let’s find someplace quiet, where we can talk.”

  In the back of a dimly lit café, I devoured a sandwich while Gisela sipped on a cappuccino and tried to explain why we kept missing each other.

  “There is so much going on in Washington. I couldn’t leave until the trial started.” She wrinkled her nose, a puzzled expression in her night-colored eyes. “The way you start…” She shook her head. “No, I mean the questions they ask…”

  “Voir dire? Jury selection?” I suggested between hungry bites.

  Her eyes lit up. “Yes; voire dire. I assumed that would go on for quite a while—until the end of the week. Yes?”

  My mouth was full. I nodded.

  “But then it’s over, all in one day. So when I heard that, that today you and the prosecutor would make your opening speeches… Speeches? Opening statements.

  I didn’t have time to do anything except pack a bag and catch an early-morning flight.”

  A smile, tentative, intelligent and shy, slipped across her fine, graceful mouth. “When I heard your voice on the machine last night, I…”

  Shoving the plate to the side, I leaned forward on my arms. “I looked for you the other day, when the trial started. I thought you would be there, and I was disappointed when you were n
ot. So last night I thought I’d call, and find out what happened and whether you were going to be in New York or not.”

  “I didn’t call back because it was late, and because I think I wanted to sneak up on you the way I did and surprise you.” She frowned and shook her head, scolding herself, as it seemed, for telling less than the truth. “I was scared; I wasn’t sure I should. I wasn’t sure it was safe to call you back.”

  “Safe?”

  Gisela reached into the purse she had placed next to her in the booth. It was nearly the size of an attaché case, large enough for the unmarked manila envelope she pushed across the table.

  “This is for you.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure. The man who gave me the documents would not tell me what they meant. He asked me to give them to you, to make sure you got them before the prosecution called its first witness. He said he thought you would know what they meant.”

  “‘The man’?”

  “A friend of mine.” She paused, and then with a serious look added: “Someone I used to know.”

  A former lover who was now a friend, someone who knew she knew me.

  “Someone you used to know,” I remarked with a pensive stare.

  “We’ve become good friends. He trusts me. He wanted you to have this.” She nodded toward the manila envelope that I had begun to open. “He knows I won’t tell anyone who he is.”

  I did not know who he was, but I thought I knew where he worked.

  “Your White House source? The one who told you about the investigation and about the indictment?” she threw me a glance of disapproval. I mumbled an apology and emptied the envelope. There were a half dozen sheets of paper inside, printed copies of messages downloaded from someone’s computer. The same e-mail address was plainly visible across the top.

  “WH.EOP.GOV.” I looked at Gisela. “EOP?”

  “Executive Office of the President.”

  “WH… White House? And GOV… government?”

  “Yes,” she replied, leaning forward, bursting with curiosity. “It comes from someone’s computer inside the White House. But I checked the name—Lincoln Edwards. No one by that name is listed in the White House directory.”

  I began to examine the documents, reading through each one and then checking them against each other, comparing both the dates and the sequence of the transactions recorded.

  “Do you know what they are?” asked Gisela, anxious and intense.

  I put the documents back in the envelope and placed the envelope next to me on the seat. “I think so.”

  I glanced around the restaurant to see if there was someone I had seen before. If this was what I thought it was, I knew I had to be careful.

  “I know you’re not going to tell me who your friend is, but it has to be someone inside the White House.

  Only someone who worked there could get something off a White House computer. Why would someone on the White House staff, someone who works for the president, want to give me this?”

  “What is it? What do those numbers mean?”

  “Numbers and names,” I reminded her. “You were there today when Caminetti talked about his witnesses and what they were going to say. Didn’t two of those names sound familiar?”

  “I didn’t understand the numbers; I didn’t pay much attention to the names,” she said, shaking her head.

  Then, suddenly, she looked at me with intense curiosity.

  “You mean, two of the witnesses for the prosecution…

  What do the numbers mean?”

  “It’s a record of a routing sequence, money moved from one bank to another, moved through offshore accounts to make the source of it virtually untraceable.

  It’s a record of money paid to six different people, two of them key witnesses in a murder trial.”

  “Who are the other four?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I still want to know why your friend gave this to me. Why is someone inside the White House—one of the president’s own men— giving me information which, if it’s true, could bring down the president? I want to talk to your friend; I want to talk to him right away. Can you arrange it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll ask.”

  We lingered in the café until well after dark, gradually talking less about the trial and more about ourselves.

  Gisela told me about growing up in Germany, in divided Berlin, and how, after university, she got a job at a Munich newspaper where she met the man she eventually married and from whom she was now officially divorced.

  “He had an affair with a woman before we had been married a year. So then I had one, too. Just some man I knew,” she said with bland indifference, as if she were explaining the opening gambit in a well-practiced game.

  A soft, enigmatic smile floated over her mouth. She looked at me with a hard, glittering stare. It was like the suggestion of innocence drawn toward, and then addicted to, sin.

  “Women enjoy it as much as men,” she announced, the smile now open, certain of itself. She seemed almost to dare me to disagree. “Sometimes more than men,” she added, mocking me with her eyes. “He thought he could sleep with every woman he wanted, but that I would stay faithful, inventing some perfect little world where, when he was home, he could play the perfect faithful husband attended by his perfect wife. Imagine his disappointment when he discovered that while he was involved in his various infidelities, I was engaged in some random promiscuity of my own. He thought I had betrayed him, that what he did was one thing, but that I didn’t have the right. He was very German about it; I was more—how shall I say?—European: willing to be married, but eager to be in love.”

  The second half, that other side of her, closed in on the first: The soft vulnerability that made you want to help her, and then this sudden and unexpected eroticism that made you want to have her, completed the circle that now enclosed me, unable to think about anything but her and what it would be like to be with her, naked and alone.

  “There is a certain charm in having an affair, being with someone when the only motive, the only reason, is that you want to be. There aren’t any of those prosaic calculations about how you are going to live, or where, or what you can look forward to when you get older. You don’t worry about things like that: You just worry about how you can arrange the next time you can steal a few hours for what makes you feel so alive.”

  I felt myself drawing closer, losing myself in her, taken over by a grasping need, a whirlpool that the faster it spun me the faster I wanted to go. I watched her, teasing me with her eyes; watched her, naked and in bed; I watched her, making love with me in my mind.

  “You were never married—yes? So you wouldn’t know what that was like, except perhaps that halfway thing for which there seems to be no word, when a man who is single is sleeping with a woman who is not. You have done that, haven’t you? Been with married women who wanted to be with you?” her dark eyes held mine close and fast. In the silky silence I could almost hear the laughter I saw dancing at the gentle, teasing corners of her mouth.

  “Now we’re just two single people, a man and a woman, wondering what it’s going to be like, a little while from now, when we start making love and make love all through the night. Would you like to do that with me, Joseph Antonelli? Would you like to take me back to where you’re staying… take me to bed… take me? I wanted to the first night we met; but then, you knew that, didn’t you?” she asked, certain she was right.

  We left the restaurant, and I put my arm around her against the chilly New York night. We got into a cab and she huddled close and then looked up at me, waiting, knowing that I had only been waiting for her. With her arm around my neck, I kissed her and lost myself in her even more. Her breath against my face was warm, willing, the whispered scent of every girl I had ever known. We did not speak a word; there was nothing to say, nothing that would not spoil the mood. There were lights everywhere, and I could not see a thing, just her face, what she looked like and how s
he moved. I watched her step out of the cab, smiling up at me, holding on to my hand, and for an instant I remembered another cab ride, one that had brought me a few blocks farther up the street, and what it had been like, at the beginning, that first time in New York, when I was still young and so was everyone else.

  She was in my arms before I had shut the door, and we were both half undressed by the time we stumbled, frantic and impassioned, across the bedroom floor. We made love, and then we made love again; we made love in ways I had not imagined, and we did it as if instead of this being our first time together, we had been making love all our lives. She taught me things I did not know; and because it all seemed so right, I knew nothing of that jealous desire to ask when she had learned. We seldom slept and almost never talked; her eyes, her touch, said all I wanted. We knew each other through the passing brevity of the night, until morning came.

  Lying in the shadowed silence of the room, her thin arms each spread across a rumpled pillow, she looked at me through barely opened eyes.

  “You’re dressed? You’re going?” she asked in a drowsy, peaceful voice.

  I pulled the white sheet from the back of her knees up to her shoulder. Turning on her side, she tugged it under her chin.

  “What time is it?” she asked, rubbing her eyes.

  Clutching the sheet, she sat up, looking around the room she had seen only in the darkness. “You live very well, Mr. Joseph Antonelli.” With a dreamy smile, she slid down until her head was below the pillows. “Do you mind if I stay a while longer? If I slept all day, perhaps you could tell me later what happened at the trial.”

  I suggested she stay longer than that. “I have this place for the duration: until the trial is over, and, if I want it, longer than that. Why don’t you stay here, too? As long as you like.” She rolled her head to the side and without any other expression stared at me with trusting, childlike eyes. “It’s nicer than a hotel; and if you’re here, I won’t have to worry so much. I’ll know you’re safe.”