by Sol Stein
He saw the red light late, jammed the power brakes. His tires screeched. Pedestrians looked at him, crazy driver.
Roberts was doing to him what he always did to others. Get them angry so they can’t think straight.
The honking behind him made him see the light had turned green. Go. Starts like that use half a gallon of gas.
Maybe it was all Fuller’s fault. He was eighty-two, wasn’t he? Maybe he poured some of the wrong fluid in, a mistake. It could have been one of the others upstairs. God knows what the truth is, my job is to defend. Did a surgeon check to see who was under the anesthesiologist’s mask in the middle of an operation? He’d told the kids at NYU You are not the law, you are a tool of the law. Every last son-of-a-bitch in the world is entitled to the best defense you can give him. And that black-haired girl in the front row had raised her hand and asked What about Eichmann?
He’d been cool with the kids. It isn’t the dimension of the crime that matters. Mothers who bash their babies’ heads against the wall have a right to a lawyer. The black-haired girl had persisted. What if you’re sure the defendant is guilty? He had answered How can you be sure until you’ve heard every last word the jury hears, and even then?
Thomassy, who knew when a witness sounded unconvincing, was unconvincing to himself. He pulled off the road, onto the shoulder, hearing the gravel thrown up against muffler and tailpipe, stopping, taking out his handkerchief to mop his brow, and to let the hammer of his heart slow down.
*
When he turned into the splendid, curving driveway of the Widmer house, it was a quarter to eight. He didn’t want to kill time for fifteen minutes, but when he rang the bell, there was a delay as if his early arrival presented a problem inside.
Finally, it was Priscilla Widmer who came to the door, gave him a pleasant smile touched with frost, led him into the living room, where Ned rose and Thomassy saw the two others, Perry and Randall, the men from Washington. What the hell kind of family dinner was this? Where was Francine?
Thomassy the Pigeon shook hands all around. Was Francine in the kitchen, ashamed to have maneuvered him here under a pretext?
Mrs. Widmer disappeared as if on cue, and the lead man from Washington came right out with it. “Please don’t hold this meeting against any of the Widmers, Mr. Thomassy,” Perry said. “We thought it might be awkward to meet with you in your office or anywhere around the courthouse. If we’re ever asked about this meeting, it was a social occasion, unexpected by you, unexpected by us. It was very kind of the Widmers to provide the circumstances.”
Thomassy sat in the armchair pointed out to him, an unrehearsed witness brought into the courtroom where everyone knew his role except him.
Ned Widmer offered drinks. Thomassy noticed that Perry and Randall were having refills. They must have been here for some time discussing strategy. That’s why Francine hadn’t wanted an early dinner.
“Mr. Thomassy,” Perry said. “How much do you know about your client, Edward Porter Sturbridge?”
Thomassy looked over at Ned Widmer. “Where’s Francine?”
“Oh George,” Widmer said, “I’m afraid she’s not here this evening.”
Thomassy stood up. “Perhaps I’d better leave.” He turned to Perry. “I don’t discuss my cases or clients with strangers.”
Perry and Randall looked to Widmer to speak.
“George,” Widmer said. “These gentlemen, whom you’ve met earlier, are not strangers in any sense, especially not to this case. You’ll recall it was I who asked you to represent young Sturbridge in the first instance. It was Mr. Perry who asked me to recommend someone like you.”
“What does ‘like you’ mean?”
It was Perry who interjected. “An able defense counsel. As near perfect a track record as possible defending the guilty.”
“Mr. Perry,” Thomassy heard himself saying, “the prosecutor is a long way from proving guilt in this case.” That was robot talk. Inside, his lungs were ballooning against his ribs. “They are going to have one helluva impossible time,” he heard his voice go on, “sticking anything to my client only. There were others staying right there in the house.”
“Do sit down,” Widmer said.
Thomassy eased himself back down into the armchair. “There’re at least half a hundred other lawyers you could have picked.”
“With your record for acquittals?” Widmer said.
“Why’s the government so itchy for Sturbridge to get off? His father a heavy campaign contributor?”
“No,” Perry said. “Definitely not. May I show you something, Mr. Thomassy?”
Perry removed a five-by-seven photograph from a manila clasp envelope. He didn’t pass it over. He stood up and held the photo in front of Thomassy.
Though an enlargement, it seemed blurry. Thomassy thought it might be his vision misting. Then it seemed to clear. There were twenty or thirty people walking in both directions in what looked like the large lobby of an office building.
Randall passed a circular magnifying lens to Perry who handed it to Thomassy. “Look at the people who aren’t walking.”
Thomassy could feel the dampness of his shirt under his armpits. Is this what witnesses feel like on the stand when I put a photo in front of them for identification?
At the left edge of the photo he could now make out two men, annoyance—or surprise—on their faces, stopped by a short man with his back to the camera.
“The one on the left,” Perry said, “is Semyonov. He’s with the Soviet Mission to the UN.”
“Where is this?” Thomassy asked.
“Public lobby of the UN. The man with him is Trushenko. Do you recognize the man who’s stopped them in the corridor?”
“Can I hold the picture?” Thomassy asked.
“Sure,” said Perry, handing it over. Thomassy peered through the magnifier. “It could be anybody from the back,” he said, “anybody short.”
“Maybe this will help,” Perry said, and slipped a second five-by-seven out of the clasp envelope.
It was taken from a different angle. The short man could be seen from a side view.
“When was this taken?” Thomassy asked.
“Two days after Fuller died. Recognize the man?”
“Why was it taken?”
“All right,” Perry said, sitting back down. “In order to answer that we have to take you into our confidence.”
“Maybe you’d better not. I won’t make any promises that might jeopardize my client’s case.”
“I’ll take that risk,” Perry said. “The government is preparing a group of candidates for expulsion from the United States for espionage in retaliation for an expected expulsion of several U.S. diplomats from Moscow. The FBI has been photographing Semyonov surreptitiously whenever he makes contact with anyone else, Russian or otherwise. There’s a smart young assistant DA named Koppelman who’s trying to get his hands on some of these from the FBI. We have a problem in the government. When it comes to espionage, the FBI has what you’d call narrow-angle vision. They’re classy cops caught up in spy catching, not foreign policy. Our national security people have to have wide-angle vision. If these were our photos, a county DA would never get his hands on them, but that Koppelman fellow might be able to persuade some simplistic patriot in the FBI that he needed them to make the government’s case against an American working for the other side. Here, take a look at this one.”
He slipped another photo from the envelope.
“It’s blurred,” Thomassy said.
“Yes. But you can make out that Semyonov has turned away from the young man and is heading in the opposite direction. Look at this last one.”
It showed the Trushenko person, his back to the camera, hurrying away through the crowd, followed by the young man, holding his arm out as if to try and stop Trushenko.
“Now,” Perry said, “if you don’t mind, look at the left side of that last picture very carefully.”
Thomassy felt his heart’s drum pound.
“What’s Francine got to do with this?”
“It was fortuitous,” Widmer said quickly.
Nothing seemed accidental anymore. Thomassy was being hoisted up the scaffolding of a building that didn’t exist. He didn’t want to play games with Russian finks or Washington finks or anyone else. Georgie, his father had said, never show fear to a horse or worry to a man. They’ll both stomp you.
He handed the photo back, hoping the tremor in his left hand was visible only to himself.
“Does Francine know about this picture?”
“She hasn’t the slightest idea that it was taken, Mr. Thomassy,” Perry said.
“Can I see the second photo again.”
“Sure.” Perry handed it over.
The slightly blurred figure on the right had to be Francine.
“The first one again?” Thomassy asked.
Perry handed it over.
There she was. Thomassy looked up. “She saw the whole thing?”
It was Widmer who spoke. “Apparently. She would recognize Semyonov, of course, and possibly Trushenko, and must have slowed down because something in the interchange with the third person caught her eye.”
Perry leaned forward. Thomassy thought he was going to take the photo back, but he didn’t. Instead he said, “Semyonov has been her boss’s leading adversary at times. I suspect she noticed him, then Trushenko and the young man trying to stop them. Look closely at that picture, Mr. Thomassy. Look at the young man’s right hand.”
It was clear now. He was trying to hand a piece of folded paper to Semyonov, who was rejecting it, scowling, as if the young man was unknown to him, a crank.
“You’ll want to look at the second photo again,” Perry said.
It looked like the young man had tried to shove the same piece of paper at an unwilling Trushenko as Semyonov was turning away to head in the opposite direction, possibly to get away from him.
Thomassy looked up at them. His rib cage hurt. He shifted his weight in the chair. In a calm voice he said, “It would have to be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the third person is my client. Even so, there could be many grounds for his wanting to communicate with these people. If that’s Porter, please remember he’s a Soviet affairs specialist. He may have needed information for his work, anything. Surely an open contact in the lobby of the UN building…”
Perry’s upheld hand stopped Thomassy’s voice.
“There’s no need to speculate. Your client knows why he tried to pass a message to these people. I’m certain that in the context of lawyer-client confidentiality, he’d fill you in. You don’t expect clients to keep essentials from you?”
“Of course not. But I don’t see—”
“Mr. Thomassy, you don’t know what we know. The prosecutor doesn’t know what we know and we’re not about to tell him. We’re on your side in this one, please understand that. We’d rather know his version of what he was doing in private than from testimony in open court. It’s in his interest to tell you.”
“Are you implying that if I relayed to you anything he told me, that piece of information wouldn’t get to the district attorney?” Thomassy turned to Widmer. “Ned, you know the sanctity of the client-attorney relationship.”
“As I understand it, George, it’s to protect the client’s interests. It seems to me that what Mr. Perry is suggesting would protect your client because the information wouldn’t be used in the trial, don’t you agree?”
“How can I trust any of you?”
They all looked at him. Perry was the one who spoke. “You know who we’re working for, Mr. Thomassy. You are working for your client. The question is who is your client working for?”
“That’s a very serious allegation without an iota of proof!” Thomassy said, wishing he hadn’t raised his voice. “You couldn’t get a man a traffic ticket on evidence like that. Are you pushing me to throw the game?”
He knew where that came from. Joe Siston. Thomassy turned his anger on Widmer. “You got me into this to defend the kid, didn’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Please,” Perry interrupted. “We certainly don’t want you doing anything unethical or that would jeopardize your client’s case. We think if you found out what happened, it might help your client’s case.”
Thomassy remembered Joe Siston, the star of Oswego’s basketball team, invincible in 1954, suddenly playing like a broken-legged giraffe in the last quarter of the final game, missing shots he’d never missed, and when the booing started, pretending to limp, calling time, fast-talking the coach, wanting out, the coach ordering him back into the game to play like the winner he’d been all season long. Afterward Doc had said there was nothing wrong with Siston’s leg, only the inside of his head, and the coach had called the bank every day for five days until Siston deposited the bookie’s cash. They threw Siston out of school but that hadn’t helped; every last kid in Oswego High felt betrayed, and it was Armenian George who confronted him in front of the ice cream parlor and said If you needed the fucking money so bad, we’d have chipped in five bucks a piece for you to win! He’d wring Ed’s neck if what he was doing was throwing the game!
Game was the word Francine had thrown at him. Treason isn’t a game. He’d thrown back her State Department types, weren’t they playing? And he had said wasn’t that what the spy novels all missed, that the Russian players knew that if they fucked up they could be caught by either side.
They were all looking at him, the man they’d shown the photographs to.
Perry sensed Thomassy’s unease as accurately as if he’d had two fingers on his pulse. He said, “If your client was in fact involved with the Russians—that’s just hypothesis right now—I can assure you that there are other possible suspects in the Fuller case.”
“Like who?”
“Isn’t it true, Mr. Thomassy, that the more suspects, the fewer chances that the jury would find Porter solely responsible beyond a reasonable doubt?”
“I said like who?”
“The others who stayed over.” Perry leaned forward. “And others who came to visit frequently, who knew their way around the Fuller house. Maybe one or two who had it in for Ed Porter?”
“Who are these people?”
It was Randall who spoke. “We’ve been tracking all Fuller’s visitors for years.”
This is crazy, Thomassy found himself thinking. They’re playing with me. They’re making this up. “Are you talking about hard evidence? Admissible evidence?”
Randall looked at Perry.
Perry said, “Possibly.”
“Would that information be made available to me?”
“If it became necessary.”
“And what you want in exchange is whatever I find out from Porter about what transpired in the UN building?”
“We would be interested in one aspect particularly.”
“You think he’s broken with the Russians and you want to turn him,” Thomassy said.
“It’s too late for that if they distrust him, Mr. Thomassy.”
“Then why the hell are you jeopardizing my lawyer-client relationship?”
Perry sighed. “Mr. Thomassy,” he said, “if what you learned was communicated to us and we determined that we had to make immediate use of it, you could always resign the case retroactively, as it were, making your resignation effective sometime before you communicated the information to us. Porter would be in no position to tell anyone. In the measure of things, you’d be helping your country. That isn’t exactly unethical, is it?”
“Ned,” Thomassy said, “you’d better tell these fellows you picked the wrong pigeon. You know I wouldn’t do anything like that.” To Perry standing above him he said, his face flushed, “Who do you think I am?”
“An astonishingly good advocate,” Perry said, “whose knowledge of foreign affairs…” Perry took the photographs and sat back down. “If we ranked knowledge of Soviet Affairs on a scale of zero to ten, I think everyone would rank t
he late Professor Fuller as number ten, and anyone who knew Ed Porter’s work—we’ve talked to a number of people—would rate him eight or better. Where would you rate yourself, Mr. Thomassy?”
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.”
