The Touch of Treason

by Sol Stein

  “Randall,” Fuller had said, “I’ve been taking mega vitamins for years.”

  Randall had to admit to himself that Fuller, at the age of eighty-two, had the lean, physical vigor of a much younger man.

  “Does Doc know you’re taking these?” Randall asked.

  “Physicians,” Fuller said, “know as little about nutrition as about Soviet affairs.”

  It was then that Leona Fuller said, “Those eight pills are his fountain of youth. See, I take them, too.”

  Randall knew that Mrs. Fuller, that remarkable woman, was not an imitator. She had to be independently convinced of everything. If she was taking all those vitamins, they had to be safe.

  After he finished his present work, Fuller would presumably be free to loaf for the first time in his long life, to travel not out of necessity, as he’d done for the government from time to time, nor on the run, as he’d done long ago when he and Leona had been part of the movement, but to places of their choice where he and Leona could take the sun, or read the best books again, or talk to intelligent strangers who knew or cared nothing about Soviet affairs. He wanted as much time as the higher powers would give him. Ever since he had abjured authoritarianism in all its forms, he’d thought of gods in the plural, the way the Greeks did, male and female, each with a specialty in mortal affairs. Monotheism was too simple. If you examined life long enough, nothing was simple. Except the clock that ticked relentlessly over everyone, tolling each year that would not return.

  Randall knew that the President had once remarked that Martin Fuller looked like he would live forever. The President thought of Martin Fuller’s brain as a national asset of immeasurable worth to which no harm could be allowed to come. But the President’s wish was Randall’s responsibility. Few people knew that Randall had once had part of the responsibility for John Kennedy and then for Robert Kennedy. Randall was a realist; he lived in increasing fear that the successful conclusion of his assignment was ultimately impossible. Yet he found himself envying Fuller when he happened to see him emerge from his study after a fruitful morning’s work, his eyes exuberant with discovery. Fuller’s work gave Fuller life.

  Randall had to put up with Fuller’s teasing. The old man would tell him, “Go off and worry about the missile defenses with those fellows at MIT. Talk to them about laser satellites and defense screens.”

  “You are our first line of defense,” Randall would say in an attempt at banter but feeling like a manservant.

  And Fuller would answer, “I am older than the Maginot Line, and as much use.”

  Yet the time Fuller had received the Medal of Merit from the President in a private ceremony kept from the press, Fuller knew it was for that specific instance when his form of intelligence—insight based on intimate understanding of how Khrushchev thought—was said to have provided the key that enabled a red alert to be wound down so the adversaries could return to the bargaining table.

  The President had said, “You are a greater asset than our coal reserves.”

  And Fuller had replied, “Mr. President, your asset has arthritis.”

  The President had been briefed, of course, and knew that Fuller steadfastly refused to take anything stronger than aspirin so as not to numb his brain as long as the work remained unfinished.

  Nor had Randall been able to change Fuller’s lifelong habit of imbibing nourishment from interchanges with younger people, graduate students, former students, younger professors, specializing in Soviet historiography, intellectuals of the left and right who thought that debate with a mind such as Fuller’s enriched them. Randall realized that Fuller needed their adulation to sustain the rigor of daily work at his desk seven days a week, every week of the year, but Randall, like some men of his generation, distrusted young people.

  “I am not a monk,” Fuller told him. “I will not isolate myself. I was not put on earth to teach only governments. I am, like all teachers, a snitch for the young, an informer.”

  *

  It was therefore not unusual that on the evening in April, Leona Fuller, seven years younger than her husband, who had been beautiful when young, and had grown, not only in her husband’s eyes, even more beautiful when old, presided with her husband over a dinner for four acolytes.

  Leona Fuller served them arroz con pollo, which she had learned to make when they lived in Mexico. She had transfigured the recipe over the years till all of their friends renamed it Leona’s chicken. She herself had the appetite of a small bird; her pleasure was in watching others enjoy her food.

  Melissa Troob, as usual, had positioned herself on Martin Fuller’s right. Long ago Leona Fuller had guessed correctly that Melissa’s barely epicanthic eyelids suggested an Oriental grandparent. In fact, her Chinese grandfather had taught Asian history at Stanford, where Melissa had also taken two degrees. A specialist in Soviet history, she’d heard Martin Fuller lecture at Stanford during his happy half year in northern California and had fallen in love with Fuller’s mind. If Fuller had been twenty years younger, Leona believed, the situation might have developed dangerously, for Melissa had not only a sharp mind, and an incredible memory, but was what she thought of as beautifully boned. Melissa’s cheekbones were as visible as an Indian’s, always touched with a blush of color. And whatever dress she wore, Melissa’s hips revealed their bony understructure in a way that Leona Fuller knew Martin would find erotic. Other men viewed women as laymen viewed buildings. They saw the exterior. Martin, like an architect, saw structure in beautiful things.

  Melissa, Leona suspected, had moved East for her doctorate less for the benefits of Columbia University than to continue to sit at Martin’s feet, sucking in his wisdom as only a graduate student still in a fever of learning could do. Fortunately, the man sitting across from her, Scott Melling, had found Melissa attractive. And Scott, who was six-feet-two with a very black mustache carefully trimmed, was angularly handsome in a way that seemed to complement Melissa’s beauty perfectly. Scott, now twenty-nine or thirty, Leona guessed, was lecturing at Columbia, his degrees behind him. He was said to be an instructor who each hour inspired rapture anew by a consciously thespian manner of teaching political science as if it were a dramatic combat between us and them. She liked him. Martin liked him. And Melissa, thank God, was probably in love with him, though Scott had a wife, and Leona Fuller, despite her long exposure to the young, still had difficulties with the looseness of that kind of tie. She and Martin, despite his long, now-dead affair with Tarasova, had remained an indivisible coupling, though they no longer spent the nights in each other’s arms. Other people’s bonds were children who grew away; theirs was the work, her thoughts enmeshed in his like threads in cloth. She was the coauthor of his life.

  At Leona’s right sat Ed Porter, who, though only twenty-four, had three degrees and was the brightest of the lot, a dimpled ferret who went after small facts that turned out to be the last pieces of the puzzle. Unlike the others, he seemed street-smart, something the Fullers themselves had never been. Ed was short, perhaps no more than five-seven or so, with tousled brown hair in the style one has come to accept among young people, not unattractive, not unkempt, what they call natural and some call wild. His hands as well as his face were quite freckled. He wore the standard uniform for his age, jeans and a sweater, though the tan sweater looked as if it might have been of camel’s hair or cashmere, and Leona had long suspected what Ed had never acknowledged, that he came from a family that was very rich. Ed, unlike the others who had published only in learned journals, had written a book that had been well received. It was called Lenin’s Grandchildren, and dealt with the lives of the Latin American and African revolutionaries of the last thirty years. But what mattered most to Leona was that when Sniffer, their Methuselah of a cocker spaniel, died, their friends conveyed their regrets with the special care one took with people who had no children, but it was Ed Porter who Leona had found sitting in the yard, rocking the dead dog in his arms.

  Barry Heskowitz, who sat on Leona’s left,
was not one of the acolytes Leona cared for. A heavy-set young man with curly black hair, and eyes that were constantly busy, he had acquired the habit of compliments. He would admire Leona’s dress, or a bouquet of flowers she had arranged; he would tell Martin, who rarely looked to see what tie he was putting on, that his tie was perfect for his suit. Leona had little patience with such sycophants. Martin liked to be congratulated on his perceptions, not his ties—but he’d made an exception for Barry because the young man, still working for his master’s, understood the historic origins of Soviet intransigence better than any student he’d had in a long time.

  Melissa was arguing that the most important member of the Politburo to track carefully was what she called the Gletkin, the pure Soviet man unsusceptible to the negotiating wiles of the West.

  “If that’s the case,” Ed Porter interrupted, “we should have paid more attention to Suslov than to Khrushchev or Brezhnev, but Suslov died and your contention goes up in smoke.”

  Martin raised his right hand slightly from the table, a sign they all knew meant he was about to speak. “The gods, for those who believe, took care of Suslov by removing him. They have less time for studying these men than we have. Therefore, we always need to know who the backup man is. Sometimes the next-in-line for any ideological role is not only a standby, but an assassin.”

  *

  After dinner, the talk continued in the living room, advancing in waves of contention, and then receding as the ocean does when it cannot push the shore. At one point Leona Fuller said, “We should know more about their women.” Only Melissa did not smile.

  Shortly after eleven Barry excused himself. “I live in the West Side combat zone. I don’t want to tempt fate.”

  What he meant, of course, was that he had to be in class in the morning, as the others did not. He offered Ed Porter a ride. Ed said it was too early.

  Less than an hour after Barry’s departure, Leona closed the discussion. “It’s midnight. Martin must get his sleep. You know how early he rises.”

  She knew that Melissa and Scott would use the lateness of the hour to take advantage of the standing offer of the upstairs bedrooms, in which, over the years, dozens of late-staying students had camped for the night. Ed Porter had missed the last train and he didn’t have a car. So when Leona Fuller made her ritual offer of an upstairs bedroom, he, too, accepted with a show of reluctance, as if he had not in fact done so a dozen times within the last month. Ed cut the grass without being asked. He had combed Sniffer’s coat. He split wood for winter.

  Within fifteen minutes, the house was quiet. Leona, sliding into the huge bed in the large room at the rear of the house, remembered when Martin told her that lovemaking robbed him of some fraction of his intellectual vitality the morning after, that he would absent himself from the temptation by sleeping in a separate bedroom. That was thirty years ago and she had not believed his reason. When she saw him with Tarasova, both so aggressively pretending to be merely infatuated with each other’s brains, she told herself that like a kidney stone, it too would pass. But the memory remained. Leona put her arms around her second pillow. You get used to anything in time.

  In the morning, at first light, Martin Fuller opened his eyes. Immediately his thought was on the work at the point he had left off on the preceding day when he stowed his manuscript in the safe. Daily life was an impediment, showering, dressing, breakfasting. His body, he sometimes thought, was too elaborate a machine for housing his brain, required too much attention. He put his heavy robe around his cold frame and headed for his bathroom down the hall.

  The bath off Leona’s bedroom was far more elaborate and spacious than the one he called his own. But this way he could keep the kerosene heater in place since no one else used his bathroom and only he felt the chill before the steam from the shower warmed the room.

  He turned the hot water on in the shower stall. It usually had to run a full minute before the tepid water in the pipes was pushed out of the showerhead to make room for the hot water from the basement tank.

  He bent to turn the knob on the kerosene heater. As every morning, he took the packet of matches he kept in the bathroom cabinet, struck one on the back of the pack, and touched it to the proper place in the heater. Suddenly, the heater, which he always thought of as an accomplice against the morning cold, roared forth with a ball of flame that engulfed him. The floor-length robe was transformed instantly into a torch, and as Martin Fuller screamed from within the incendiary mass, he had the presence of mind to unlock the door so help could reach him, thinking the one word: they.

  *

  Leona Fuller had heard Martin going down the hall, of course, but as usual picked up a book to read in bed so that Martin would continue to believe she was still asleep. Human contact before he got to work always interfered. He awoke thinking of the next paragraph he would write: the precise formation of his thought would take shape while he sipped at his orange juice and spooned the cereal into his mouth. It was his habit to take his coffee with him into his study, holding the cup carefully in his left hand as with his right he unlocked the door with the key that never left his possession.

  She heard the loud vroom a moment before Martin’s terrible cry. Her first thought was that something had made Martin fall. He’d broken his hip three years earlier when he’d slipped from the library ladder while trying to get a book from a high shelf, and she imagined him in bed for eight weeks again, demanding and restless to get back to work. She damned the fragility of old bones as she got quickly out of bed, slipped on her robe, and rushed down the hall, glad that some of the acolytes had stayed overnight because Martin was twice her size and she knew she wouldn’t have the strength to pick him up off the floor. But then she heard him screaming again and again and realized that this was something more than a fall, that something was still happening, and then she saw the flames through the slit between the bathroom door and the jamb.

  Leona pushed the door wide open and saw that Martin’s bathrobe was ablaze and that Martin himself was burning like a fireball. He was trying to get the burning robe off himself, lunging at the walls as if to try to smother the flames. Leona pushed him toward the shower stall, not realizing she was burning her right hand, understanding that only Martin’s eyes were screaming now and that the spray of water might not be enough. Then hands were seizing her from behind, and she was pulled out of the bathroom as Ed, wearing nothing—he must have been sleeping naked—pushed Martin into the shower. Half a minute later Scott came to help, and he and Ed together did whatever they had to do to beat the fire out.

  When they pulled Martin out into the hall, his lips still twitched. When the rescue squad arrived minutes after Melissa’s call, Martin Fuller was still technically alive, but Leona knew that his life, her life, and his work were over.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Archibald Widmer was the kind of lawyer whose corporate clients would appreciate the fact that his desk had no encumbrances except a signature pen in a marble holder and an appointment book that he called a diary. When a client was about to enter the paneled sanctum of his office, Widmer’s secretary, who had the demeanor of the headmistress of a school for wealthy young women, would put before him the client’s folder. On top was a discretely small memo on which an associate had summarized everything Widmer needed to know about the meeting. The telephone was located on the credenza behind him in order not to mar the concentration that a bare desk brought to the matter at hand.

  When he picked up the phone for the first time on that morning in April, his secretary asked, “Are you taking calls, Mr. Widmer?” for she knew that even when he was alone he did not always welcome interruptions.

  In fact he had been gazing out of the window of his twenty-sixth floor corner office at the magnificent view of New York harbor and thinking of his daughter Francine, who was now twenty-eight years old and had been seeing George Thomassy for almost half a year. Widmer had introduced them because Francine had been raped by a neighbor and wanted revenge
. Thomassy was the only lawyer Widmer knew who could bend a reluctant legal system to prosecute and win an uncomfortable case. In the process, Francine told him she’d found in Thomassy that combination of drive and tenderness she had not found in the young men of her generation. Whatever the ingredients, the chemistry was immediate and visible to others.

  It was not exactly the match Widmer had in mind for his brilliant daughter, who contributed ideas, phrases, paragraphs to the speeches of the U.S. ambassador to the UN and might one day herself be that ambassador. Thomassy’s family was Upstate Armenian Immigrant, and, sadly, dead. Widmer had always hoped that his daughter’s choice would lead to what his own forebears had expected, an extension of family, not a mere acquisition of a solitary son-in-law. Perhaps it was luck that Thomassy’s parents were no longer among the living; what in heaven’s name would he and Priscilla talk about to a horse trainer and his wife whose world was bounded by inadequate English and an upstate farm?

  Yet what he had wanted for his daughter was not a replica of himself. He couldn’t have managed Priscilla if she’d been like Francine, a Roman candle you held as far away from yourself as possible without letting go as each colorful outburst went off with a bang. Widmer laughed to himself. A Roman candle was such a masculine image. Was that what was happening, liberated young women turning into part-men? In a drawer at home, Widmer kept a once-crumpled nude Polaroid photograph of Francine that he’d found in a bag of things she was throwing away. He assumed it’d been taken by an errant boy friend on a lark. Though she was recumbent in it, she looked as if she was ready to spring at the photographer, or was it to bolt away? When he’d seen it, it was a bite of the apple he could not spit back. It had stirred him, just for a second. His eyes told him she was a woman with a beautiful body that he had helped create and therefore—therefore?—could not touch. Only once was he tempted to get rid of the photograph, when it brushed his memory as he was making love to Priscilla. His only fear now was that if he was to die without warning, the photograph would be found among his effects.