The Touch of Treason

by Sol Stein

  “People assume nail biters are guilty. I don’t want you nibbling at your nails in front of the jury. Let’s finish this. I don’t have much time.”

  When he phoned the hospital, they said they were moving her to a private room. That had to be good news. He’d always thought of the intensive part of intensive care: we pay a lot of attention to you here because you’re nearly dead. The hospital said the nose tube had been removed. Whatever blood or fluids had collected in her stomach were out. She could talk intelligibly. Oh could that woman talk intelligibly!

  She’d spoiled him for all the other women whose talk was so predictable he had to resist the temptation to finish their sentences. What if she said George, I really don’t think we should keep seeing each other. We’re not going anywhere. She wanted some kind of pact. We are engaged to be engaged. That’s as useless as a letter of intent. A contract was a contract when both parties signed it. What was he afraid of? Permanence? His father had said to him, If your brain talk like your enemy, go for swim in river. I would have drowned if she’d gone under. Is that what the link was, a life raft that’d stay afloat even if only one of them could manage for a time?

  “I’m waiting,” Ed said.

  Everybody wants your exclusive attention, but the brain goes its own way. He’s paying for your time, Thomassy. His father forked over a big retainer so let’s pay attention to getting his boy defended. Forget Francine for a few minutes. You’re a minister in the middle of a sermon.

  “I was just thinking,” Thomassy said.

  “Sure.” Ed nodded. He doesn’t give a damn what happens to me.

  “Tarasova is testifying without a subpoena. I’ve promised to limit her to certain areas. She’s going to be our only witness besides you. Your ass may depend on how that goes. And to handle her, I need some straight answers.”

  “From her?”

  “From you. I want you to think about your answers. People who think while they’re talking instead of ahead of time are a danger to themselves and everybody else. Ready?”

  “You’re the one who’s in a hurry.”

  “Put your hands on the table.”

  “What for?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  Porter put his hands on the table.

  “Did you kill Martin Fuller on your own or under instructions from someone else?”

  “Are you crazy?” Porter stood abruptly, knocking over his chair.

  “Pick up the chair and sit down,” Thomassy said. “If you react that way to questions from Roberts on the stand, Clarence Darrow couldn’t get you an acquittal. Cool it. Think. Did you kill Martin Fuller by—”

  “I heard the question.”

  “Keep your hands on the table.”

  “I didn’t kill Martin Fuller period. What’s the next question?”

  “There isn’t any,” said Thomassy, rising. He’d watched Ed’s hands.

  “Where are you going?”

  “You just flunked my lie-detector test.”

  Ed’s face was the color of panic. “You’re supposed to be defending me, not attacking me.”

  “I think you ought to think about getting a new lawyer, some schmuck who’ll make sure you get hung.”

  “What’s wrong? What’s changed things? You trying to hold my father up for a higher fee?”

  “You’re cutting your throat, kid, you’re losing your case,” Thomassy said, heading for the door.

  Ed yelled after him, “It’s not your case, it’s my case. Tell me what the fuck you’re doing!” but the door had already closed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The sidewalks seemed filled with people determined to get in his rushing way. Ned Widmer was the logical one to call. He’d put Thomassy on to the case, he needed to be told first that he wanted out. Ned would say You don’t quit in the middle of a game. That wasn’t Ned, that was coach’s talk. It’s important in ways you don’t understand. Please don’t quit. He understood as much as Ned understood, they were both put-up jobs, puppets for someone else’s intentions. Was that what Ed Porter was, were they three of a kind?

  In Thomassy’s head, murder cases he’d handled flipped over like cue cards. Some of his clients had disgusted him from the word go; some he’d despised only when he’d seen through their pity-me papier-mâché masks to the stinking glob of sick brain inside. You don’t quit while the patient’s on the operating table. That’s not Ned, either.

  *

  The empty phone booth smelled of recent piss. He looked down and stepped away from the stain, put his dime in, got Ned’s secretary, asked that his meeting be interrupted. He imagined Ned took the call because he suspected it was something about Francine. Thomassy said, “It’s not about Francine. I need to talk to you, Ned. I’m thinking of talking to the judge, seeing if he’ll let me off the case.”

  “What’s happened?”

  That was when he had to tell himself that nothing in itself significant had happened, just a congealing of suspicions and smells. “I don’t know what Ed Porter is guilty of,” he said.

  Widmer said, “It would be wrong under the ethics code to quit now. I’ve got people just coming in. I can’t talk. We’ll meet after Tarasova’s testimony. Okay?”

  He didn’t say goodbye. He just hung up. I thought people like Ned Widmer didn’t do things like that.

  The thought grew in his head like a balloon. Everybody did the unexpected sometime. Ned Widmer. Francine Widmer. George Thomassy. Ed Porter Sturbridge.

  If anybody was up there watching us handing out sentences to each other, He’d have a good laugh, wouldn’t He?

  *

  The clerk administering the oath to Tarasova spoke in a drone that drained meaning from the words. Tarasova seemed amused as she said “I do” and lowered her hand. She was promising to tell what no self-respecting intellectual could promise: the whole truth, never known, its bits and pieces sewn together by memory, embroidered at the interstices. When she was sixteen, an idealist wanting to right the wrongs of the world, she would have refused with derision the offer of an untrue oath. What is it one learned? One learned to live.

  Thomassy, from twenty feet away, observed her curious combination of dress. A skirt and jacket of bristly wool were set off by her white ruffled shirtwaist blouse, femininity accentuating authority. She turned to face him, as if to give him his cue. A gazelle, Thomassy thought, with a steel trap at her feet in case anyone ventures too close. There were women you could win by charm. Tarasova’s demands were more severe: brains, wit, strength.

  Thomassy began, “Would the witness please tell the court her name, place of birth, and occupation.”

  The TV artists were already sketching her in case her testimony should prove short.

  “My name is Ludmilla Tarasova, I was born in Odessa. I am sixty-two years of age, and I am a professor at the School of Soviet Studies at Columbia University.”

  He hadn’t asked her age. Was she getting her seniority on the record?

  “Professor Tarasova, would you tell the court where Odessa is?”

  She looked at him as if he had asked where Chicago was.

  In the Mellon Lectures, he had told the class the essence of examining a clever witness was to establish control. Sassy answers would be stopped by the judge. But facial expressions disdaining the ignorance of the questioner would be seen by the jury.

  She said, “When I was born, Odessa was in Russia. The country is now called the Soviet Union.” Naive young man. She might as well have said it. Her expression conveyed it.

  It was time for his gamble. He wanted the jurors to believe her. She was his witness. If he attacked her, their instincts would rally to her corner. If he destroyed her credibility in the process, he’d lose his gamble. He had to enhance her credibility by pinning down one lie that would make him seem the enemy.

  He looked at Tarasova and hoped she would forgive him. Then he said, “Professor Tarasova, are you now a citizen of the United States?”

  “Yes. I was
naturalized in 1945.”

  “When you filled out your naturalization application, did you answer all the questions truthfully?”

  She turned to the judge, as if for help. Or was it the district attorney she should look to? She was Thomassy’s witness. What was he trying to do, impeach the testimony she had not yet given?

  “I can’t remember,” she said. “It was a very long time ago.”

  “Professor Tarasova, a moment ago you took an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Was it your habit to tell the truth in 1945?”

  “My dear Mr. Thomassy,” she began. No one had ever addressed him in court that way. “What one imagines to be the truth when one is young is often altered by experience. I will tell you the truth as best I can today and not look back to when you and I had less experience of the world. May we go on?”

  In the courtroom, Thomassy did what most men try to do: to subdue. But when alone with a woman, she was at the center of his attention, his eyes, his words, his mouth, his tongue, his strength, his care. He decided to make love to her.

  “Madame Tarasova,” he said, almost in a whisper, then turning his back to her and walking toward the jury, he continued, “you have been asked to appear here because of what you know. If we could turn to someone more expert for the answers we are seeking, I assure you I would have done so.” Leaning back against the jury box, he faced her. “Because it is to your expertise we have come, my questions are directed toward establishing your qualifications and your authority, please understand that.” He moved across the space between them. Truce. She could be herself.

  Tarasova’s nod was that of an empress giving permission to her minister to visit her quarters privately. The rules were agreed.

  “Well then,” Thomassy said, “can you please tell the court when you left the Soviet Union.”

  “After the Moscow trials and before the Nazi-Soviet Pact.”

  Women normally dated things from the births of their children. “Would you please be more specific?”

  “The year was 1937. I cannot be precise about the month. It was a long walk, not in a straight line. I am not sure when I crossed the border.”

  The remark drew a small laugh from some of the reporters.

  “And where and how did you enter the United States?”

  “Hmmmmm. A bit complicated. Let us say that the legal time was from Canada. I have been a legal resident for more than two-thirds of my life.”

  “Where were you educated?”

  “In Odessa, through gymnasium, high school, and here Barnard, and Columbia.”

  “Professor Tarasova, you said you teach at the School of Soviet Studies at Columbia University. Do you have a specialty within that broad scope, a specialty perhaps characterized by the subjects of your books?”

  Roberts stood, objecting. “Counsel is leading the witness, Your Honor.”

  “I withdraw the second part of the question, Your Honor,” Thomassy said. It didn’t matter. He’d got his message across.

  “I have perhaps two specialties,” she said. “The KGB, which, now that the former leader of the USSR has had the same specialty, makes it less of a specialty.”

  The judge didn’t do anything about the laughter in the courtroom because he couldn’t help laughing himself.

  “My second specialty,” she continued, “may be said to be the evaluation of data in order to attempt to predict future conduct.”

  “Without going into great detail, Professor Tarasova, can you tell us what kind of data?”

  “Certainly. We know more about Joan of Arc than we know about most of our contemporaries because everyone who ever knew her, from infancy on, was interrogated at great length during two trials. By comparison we know very little about the leaders of a closed society. However, there are bits and pieces gleaned from the press, defectors, other sources.”

  “Do you mean intelligence sources?” Thomassy glanced at the third row, where Perry and Widmer were sitting as strangers, separated by others.

  “All sources are intelligence sources,” Tarasova said, smiling. “My role is to put these pieces together—please understand I am working on a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces—and come to some conclusions about the likely future conduct of given individuals if they act consistently with their past conduct. I know that when we speak of political science, computer people smile. I daresay that there is less downtime in the practice of our science than in the running of computers.”

  She got her laugh again. It’s okay, Thomassy thought. They’re liking her.

  “Is or was there anyone in your field, Professor Tarasova, who specialized in the same kind of work?”

  “Oh many people have written about the KGB, sometimes unknowingly,” she smiled, “but in my second field very few, most notably the late Professor Martin Fuller.”

  “Did you ever study with Professor Fuller?”

  Eggshells.

  “Yes. We worked together for many years.”

  “Were you surprised to learn that he died suddenly under unusual circumstances?”

  “Objection!” Roberts was adamant.

  Judge Drewson called Roberts and Thomassy for a brief conference at the bench. When they were back in place, Thomassy said, “I withdraw the question.” He removed a sheaf of paper from the manila folder he picked up from the defense table. “Professor Tarasova, can you identify the contents of these pages?”

  Roberts was on his feet again. “May I see those before they are shown to the witness?”

  “Of course,” Thomassy said. “As soon as they are identified, I expect to have them entered into evidence as Defense Exhibit H.”

  Roberts glanced at the top page, flipped through the rest. “In that case,” he said, handing them back.

  Thomassy handed the papers to Tarasova. “Can you identify these?”

  “Oh yes,” she said, “they are illegal photocopies of pages from one of my books.”

  “If it please Your Honor,” Thomassy said, “I could enter a copy of the book. I thought entering just the relevant pages would make life easier for the duplication of exhibits if it becomes necessary. I don’t mean to get into matters of copyright law.”

  Judge Drewson addressed the witness. “Professor Tarasova, I understand your feelings about having pages from your book copied without permission.”

  “It’s all right,” she said.

  “Then,” Thomassy said, “will you summarize what is on those pages?”

  Roberts objected again. “Your Honor, the jury is perfectly capable of examining those pages and reaching its own summary conclusions as to their contents.”

  The judge tapped his impatience. “I see nothing wrong with the author characterizing her own pages, if that will speed the process of this court. Overruled. Will the court reporter repeat the question for the witness.”

  Tarasova didn’t need the repetition. She said, “This is a list of known executions within the continental United States from 1931 to the present.”

  “Executions by whom?”

  “By the KGB, of course, and its predecessor organizations.”

  “Executions of?”

  “Americans. And other nationals living here.”

  In the press section, pens wrote rapidly. Judge Drewson asked to examine the pages.

  In Thomassy’s peripheral vision he could see Roberts standing. The son-of-a-bitch is ready to rip.

  Judge Drewson handed the pages down to the clerk. “Admit Defendant’s Exhibit H for marking.”

  “Your Honor,” Roberts said, his Adam’s apple bobbing, “I don’t see the relevance of the line of questioning unless defense counsel is implying that the defendant’s name will appear on that list in the next edition of Professor Tarasova’s book.”

  You jerk, Thomassy thought. He didn’t have to object. Judge Drewson, trying to restrain his reaction to Roberts’s outburst, summoned them both to the bench.

  Before the judge could speak, Thomassy said, “I move for
a mistrial, Your Honor.”

  “I tried to head that off. Motion denied.” The judge turned his wrath toward Roberts. “I would appreciate it greatly, Mr. Roberts, if you would remember that I am here to judge relevance, and the implication in your remark was—”

  He stopped in mid-sentence to see what the commotion was about. Thomassy and Roberts turned.

  A stocky, blond-haired man of forty with tortoise-shell eyeglasses had entered the rear of the courtroom after it had been closed to further spectators because of the absence of seats. The court officer at the door attempted to stop the man, who brushed the guard’s hand away and moved across the rear of the room and down the right-hand aisle, the court officer hurrying after him. Everyone in the news section had by now also turned around to watch the source of the interruption.

  The intruder attempted to move into the one row that had an empty seat.

  “Your Honor,” the court officer said at the top of his voice, “I have reason to believe this gentleman has a concealed weapon on his person.”

  The judge used his gavel to quiet the courtroom. He nodded to the court officer who’d administered the oaths, a signal to aid the other officer.

  Quickly Thomassy strode back to the defense table, stood between Ed and the spectators.

  Even at a distance Thomassy could see what had attracted the alert guard’s attention. The man seemed to have some bulk under his jacket in the vicinity of his left armpit. Suddenly Thomassy’s gaze caught an anomaly. Everyone in the courtroom was now watching the stocky man, who had managed to squeeze by other spectators and seat himself, the people next to him visibly pulling away from him. Yet Perry, unperturbed, was staring not at the man but at Thomassy. Just for an instant. And then, turning his attention in the same direction as everyone else’s.

  The first officer had removed his weapon from his holster with his right hand, and with his left was gesturing vigorously to the interloper to come back out to the aisle. Thomassy thought Some innocent people are going to get hurt. Then he felt the tug on his jacket and looked down. Ed Porter, still seated, was trying to attract his attention, make him bend down. When he did, Ed, terrified, whispered, “Who is that man?”