The Touch of Treason

by Sol Stein

  “I don’t know,” Thomassy said.

  And then the three people between the stocky man and the aisle scampered into the aisle out of the way and the guard moved in, pointing his gun at the man’s head. The second guard had now drawn his weapon also.

  The stocky man stood up and raised both hands above his head. “My name is Ivan Christov,” he said at the top of his voice. “I am employee Soviet delegation to United Nations. I not have gun.” He continued talking loudly in Russian. It sounded like a speech he had prepared.

  Carefully, the court officer came close enough to reach the Russian’s jacket. He unbuttoned it, and reached under the man’s left arm. Surprise registered on the guard’s face. He withdrew a handful of balled paper. He motioned to the other guard to cover for him, and with care he motioned the Russian to lower his arms and remove his jacket. The man was wearing a shoulder holster, the leather straps clearly visible. Sticking out of the holster was the rest of the paper wadding.

  Judge Drewson turned to Tarasova. “What is he saying? Please translate what he is saying.”

  Tarasova, her face impassive, said, “He wishes to seek political asylum in the United States. He says he has much information of vital importance to the United States that he is willing to reveal to the proper authorities if his defection is greeted with political asylum.”

  The judge gaveled for silence. “The jurors will return to the jury room. They are not to draw any inferences from this event to this case and are not to discuss this incident among themselves or with others.” As soon as the jurors were out, the judge instructed the guards to bring the Russian forward. There was no stopping the activity in the press section.

  “Ask him why he chose this courtroom as a place to defect,” the judge said to Tarasova.

  Tarasova asked the question in Russian. The stocky man replied.

  “He says it is safest for him to do so in a public place with many witnesses, particularly newspaper people from this country and many other countries present. He apologizes for the intrusion and wishes to be turned over to the proper authorities.”

  The judge saw that the reporters couldn’t be contained a moment longer. “The court is in recess until tomorrow morning,” he said, as the reporters headed for the phones.

  The judge indicated to Tarasova that she could leave the witness box. He beckoned her closer. He also asked Thomassy and Roberts to approach the bench. Thomassy turned to the ashen-faced Ed. “Take it easy, kid,” he said, “you’ll pop a blood vessel.”

  One man who had not been bidden approached the bench. Perry said, “Your Honor,” and laid a plastic ID card in front of the judge. “This event was not entirely unexpected. I took the precaution of arranging for a warrant for Mr. Christov’s arrest from a judge in the Southern District. I am prepared to take him into custody. I have two federal marshals outside.”

  Judge Drewson jerked the lapels of his robe. “You mean to say you knew ahead of time this might happen?”

  “Mr. Christov sought the advice of others as to the safest way to defect. He didn’t want to be stopped. He didn’t want to chance being drugged and taken to an Aeroflot plane at Kennedy on a stretcher. The people he talked to apparently advised him to make his declaration in a public place with the press present.”

  “You had the nerve to suggest this courtroom for your purposes?”

  “I don’t know who made that specific suggestion, Your Honor.”

  “Are you usually a casual visitor at county trials? What are you doing here, Mr. Perry?”

  “I have been delegated as an observer on this case.”

  “By whom?” Judge Drewson’s anger had not abated.

  Perry glanced down at his ID card.

  “Your presence here, Mr. Perry, could be prejudicial to the outcome of this trial. And your seeming foreknowledge of this interruption—I don’t believe you didn’t know more than you are saying—is an intolerable interference. I will reserve judgment as to whether you are in contempt of this court. I am going to require a lot more information from appropriate authorities before I will consider condoning what appears to me to be a staged public arrest in the midst of an important trial that may have been severely compromised by this action.”

  “Your Honor,” Perry said. “I am sure everything can be explained to your satisfaction.”

  “Miss Tarasova,” the judge asked, “would you be good enough to ask Mr. Christov where he got the idea of making a public defection in this courtroom?”

  Before replying, Christov glanced at Perry, then mumbled something in Russian, which Tarasova had to ask him to repeat before she understood.

  “He says, Your Honor, that he cannot say more. He is afraid for his life.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The trial had begun to disassemble Thomassy’s view of the functional world. If you went to see a musical comedy, he thought, and a pretty girl came out on one side of the stage and a handsome fellow on the other, you knew the plot. They’d be kept apart by some villain, and get together at the end. That’s the way people like things, good guys and bad guys. Perry Mason in the courtroom. You always knew how it would come out.

  In actual courtrooms Thomassy was used to surprises engineered by him. Who had arranged that defection right in the middle of Tarasova’s testimony? Was Perry still pulling the strings?

  Whatever Tarasova thought, he was not naive. When he came up against an assistant DA like Scotty, as he had several times, a decent man bewildered by ambiguity, you could see the man’s eyes pleading with the priest on the bench to relieve the strain on the altar boys. If you comforted Scotty, if you attacked everybody but him, he became grateful, a bit careless, and you won your case.

  Or if you tried a case in front of a judge like Humberto Maldonado, anxious to be accepted by the gringos and to maintain his composure, looking like he’d died up there with his eyes propped open, all you had to do was goad the prosecution’s chief witness to explode like a spic, and the judge would come to life on your side, coming down on whoever was behaving just the way the judge’s mother and father had probably behaved, riding every emotion like a killer wave.

  And then you’d run into a young lawyer playing Henry at Agincourt with such verbal resonance he missed seeing the naked belly in front of him when he had a skewer in his hands. Thomassy saw courtroom moves like a chess player, building questions two, three, four, and springing the zinger, check. Though the boy in him sometimes longed to revert to the days when you always knew which side everyone was on, he’d remember the fat boy he had protected and who had betrayed him. In life, if Perry Mason didn’t cover his ass, plan, prepare, dissimulate, purposefully obfuscate, then clarify on his terms, Perry Mason would lose. Haig Thomassian had fled the Turks for the safety of Oswego, New

  York, where they didn’t massacre Armenians, just beat their sons up, and gave them an incentive for moving on. Would Francine some day think him a fool for not wanting to be a DA or a judge or running for some political office because ambiguities unsettled the other guys, and he didn’t want to get caught in the same trap? Would she damn him for cloistering himself? For living in Dickens’s world of the easily tagged? Or was he himself, because of this damned trial, suddenly vulnerable to the icebergs that were rising all of the way out of the sea to confront him, with all the world’s television eyes watching.

  That had been his dream on waking that morning: George Thomassy with a harpoon trying to spear ice.

  *

  Walking down the hospital corridor looking for Francine’s room number, Thomassy thought To hell with the trial. Everything is gravitating toward her. Charles Darwin, you son-of-a-bitch, is this how the species survives?

  Thomassy opened the door of the room, but did not cross the threshold. For a second he’d expected to see her propped up on pillows reading, as she’d been on some weekend mornings when he’d gotten out of the shower.

  She was lying flat, staring at the ceiling. The light was streaming in the window on her face. He
remembered how dark it had seemed in the intensive-care unit.

  She’d heard the door open, turned her head slightly.

  “It’s me,” he said. She looked shrunken under the sheet, a thin mummy in a large bed.

  She said almost inaudibly, “Come in.” Her voice reached him as if from across water.

  Her broken left arm was no longer suspended from the ceiling. Without realizing it, he had stopped halfway to her bed. She cleared her throat. “It’s not contagious.”

  He came the rest of the way quickly and took her right hand. It was like someone else’s hand, without warmth, damp.

  “I look terrible,” she said.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “The nurse let me have a mirror.”

  “You look fine. It’s a miracle you weren’t smashed worse. What do the doctors say?”

  “The damage wasn’t divided equally between Tilly and myself.”

  “The doctors didn’t say that.”

  “I said it.”

  “Your father has a thing he quotes about the serenity to accept things you can’t change.”

  “I can’t accept. Burt called me.”

  “Who’s Burt?”

  “Tilly’s husband. He said I was a reckless driver. He’s never been in a car with me. You know how carefully I usually drive. It was those men.”

  “Sure it was. I saw the police report.”

  “Burt screamed at me. He said he didn’t know how to take care of two little girls. He said did I want to take Harriet and Frieda since I’d murdered their mother.”

  Francine was sobbing as the nurse came in, looked at them both, jumped to the wrong conclusion. “You’ll have to leave, sir. The patient can’t be upset.” The nurse was younger than Francine, a kid with a starched white cap.

  “He’s not upsetting me,” Francine said between sniffles, holding tight onto Thomassy’s hand.

  “I have to take her temperature,” the nurse said to Thomassy.

  “There’s no point to taking her temperature right now,” Thomassy said. “You can see she’s upset. It’s likely to be elevated.”

  “I have to put it down on the chart with the time.”

  Thomassy put down Francine’s hand and walked toward the nurse. “Take yourself and that thermometer out of the room,” Thomassy said. “Now.”

  “I’ll get my supervisor.”

  Thomassy tried to lock the door behind her. There was no lock. He took one of the chairs and propped its back under the handle, doubting it would hold.

  When he returned to her bedside, Francine said, “I love the way you are.” She let a suspicion of a smile show. “You don’t take shit from the world the way the rest of us mostly do.”

  Francine took a tissue from the box and touched the edges of her eyes. “How’s the trial coming?”

  “It’s getting interesting.”

  “Oh George, you’re like my father. You’re not telling me anything. They won’t let me read newspapers because the print comes off on the bedsheets. Hospitals are terrible. What’s going to happen to the men who caused the accident?”

  Thomassy let go of her hand long enough to pull his chair closer to her bedside. “Don’t strain yourself,” he said. “Whisper.”

  “Who’s doing something about it? You said you’d look into it. If you love me, don’t lie to me, George. Were they charged? What’ll happen?”

  “Nothing.”

  Francine’s face flushed. “You can make them do something. Those men caused the accident on purpose. You believe me, don’t you?”

  “You’re getting yourself worked up.”

  “You’re getting me worked up. I counted on you.”

  She dropped his hand. She turned her head away.

  He had to tell her. “I got the names of the three men in the Cadillac from the police report. I can’t ask favors of Roberts with the trial on.”

  “Favors!”

  “That’s what they call it when you poke your nose into a case that doesn’t concern you.”

  “I concern you.”

  “As far as they’re concerned, I’m not your next-of-kin or anything. Just a lawyer looking to make trouble for them. I talked to an assistant prick in Roberts’s office. The line is that the three men in the car all say that you smashed into them.”

  “They were drunks girl-chasing. They were reckless on purpose. They drove into our lane at an angle—”

  “I know, I know. But the assistant DA said there’s the three of them, and they’ll find family and friends to swear they were with them just before and they hadn’t had too much to drink and don’t chase girls in cars. They have regular jobs. There’ll be ten, twelve witnesses on their side. They don’t like to prosecute against odds like that.”

  “What about the people in the car behind me?”

  Thomassy lifted his shoulders as if to say I’m not to blame. “They’re from Kansas. They gave a statement to the police. They said they were sticking around just for the two days it took to get their car repaired. The DA’s not going to pay for them to be brought back here.”

  “But they saw what happened! I saw what happened!”

  “Take it easy, Francine. Your best corroborative witness is dead.”

  He couldn’t stop her sobbing. Someone was rattling the door from outside. A strong female voice was saying, “Open this door at once.”

  Francine tried to retrieve enough control to speak. “What about the toll booth attendant?”

  “You said he wouldn’t even put in a call to have their car stopped. He wouldn’t want that to come out. He’s not a witness you can count on.”

  “You mean they’re not going to do anything?”

  “The three of them were banged up. By the time someone took a blood sample in the hospital, their alcohol count was below the legal limit. The one with the cleanest count claimed he was driving.”

  “What about the insurance company?”

  There was loud knocking on the door.

  “Your company will pay for your car, minus the deductible. They’ll go after their insurance company—if they’ve got insurance. Tilly’s husband could file a civil suit.”

  “He’s glad she’s dead. He won’t have to pay her alimony.” Thomassy had to take the chair away from the door. There were three of them out there, the young nurse, the supervising nurse, and a male hospital attendant.

  “We’re trying to have a private conversation,” Thomassy said. He went back over to Francine.

  “That’s some justice system you work in,” she said, pulling her hand back.

  “I never called it a justice system.” He meant the world. “They think of this as difficult-to-prosecute vehicular homicide. I’m glad you didn’t get hurt worse.”

  “What hurts worst is Tilly. We were friends for life.”

  “You’ll have to leave now,” the supervisory nurse said.

  “I’ll be back,” Thomassy said to Francine.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to pay a visit to Ramirez.”

  “Who is Ramirez?”

  “The car was registered in his name. I’ll bet he was the one driving.”

  *

  The hospital attendant, a six-foot-two ham-handed neuter, had obviously been told to see him all the way out the front door. Thomassy went straight to his car, watched the attendant in the rearview mirror. The son-of-a-bitch stayed there till Thomassy drove off.

  He drove four or five blocks till he saw a gas station with a phone booth. He pulled up, took out his wallet, checked the card on which he’d written the names. He dialed the hospital’s number. “Information,” he asked. When they came on, he said, “Room for Emilio Ramirez, please.” “Hold on,” the crisp voice said. The voice came back on. “Four-six-nine, I’ll connect you,” but Thomassy hung up.

  He drove back to the hospital, found a space in another part of the parking lot in a section that said DOCTORS PARKING ONLY. In front of it was a door marked “Staff Entrance.” He wal
ked in as if he owned the place and went straight for the stairs up to the fourth floor.

  He found 469. It was a ward with six beds, three on each side. He looked for a Puerto Rican face. There were two, next to each other. The chart of the first one indicated admission two weeks earlier. The other one was admitted the same day as Francine. And the name was Ramirez, Emilio.

  “You from the insurance company?” Ramirez asked.

  Why not? Thomassy thought. He nodded, pulled over a chair.

  “Mr. Ramirez,” he said. “You’re in trouble. The home office report says you were the driver.”

  “So? So what?”

  “One of the women died.”

  “I told the cops. Her car hit us. I tell you the same thing I told the other insurance man.”

  Thomassy would have liked to yank the pillow from under Ramirez’s head and put it over his face. The son-of-a-bitch could have killed Francine, too.

  “The story’s come out,” Thomassy said.

  “What story?”

  “About you fellows drinking.”

  “Who said?”

  “Witnesses. And another saw you nearly sideswiping the girls’ car before you came to the Hutch toll booth. They had three calls on the police special number saying your white Cadillac was parked in the right-hand lane. The car behind the girls’ had two people in it and they both swear you swerved your car in front of the girls’ on purpose to scare them.”

  “That’s lies. All lies.”

  “Keep your voice down, Mr. Ramirez. Remember, the company is on your side. I think you’d better get yourself a lawyer. You could get fifteen years.”

  “You crazy?”

  “Your lawyer ought to cop a plea and get you inside as soon as possible.”

  “Inside? You nuts.”

  “You know the girl that survived? Her father is the mob’s lawyer. You know what they’ll do to you if you’re walking around loose? They might even try to get you while you’re still here. They might even be able to get at you in jail. Mr. Ramirez, you’ll be lucky if all they do is cut your balls off. Take my advice.”

  Thomassy got up and started toward the door of the room.

  “Hey,” Ramirez called. “Insurance man, wait a minute!”