The Touch of Treason

by Sol Stein

“Anything?”

  Thomassy shook his head again, then said, “What are we going to do with this case?”

  What did he mean by that, he was the lawyer? He knows I have no one else. Of course, he wants more money. That’s how they do it, just before the summations they ask for more money, is that it?

  Finally Ed said, “You want more money.”

  Thomassy laughed. Ed didn’t want to be laughed at. “Leave it to me in your will,” he said. He must have seen the expression on Ed’s face. “They don’t have capital punishment in this state,” he said.

  “How does it look?” Ed asked.

  “If you were the lawyer,” Thomassy said, “how would it look to you?”

  Ed couldn’t answer that, knowing what was in his head.

  Thomassy saw Ed as a rabbit chased up against a fence, turning, eyes frantic for another escape route. “What happened to the key to Fuller’s study?”

  Ed said nothing.

  “Don’t tell me How should I know? His wife didn’t take it out of his burning bathrobe pocket. She was trying to save his life.”

  “So was I!”

  “Listen, kid, nobody hears what you say to me. It’s privileged client-lawyer talk. What did you do with the fucking key?”

  The rabbit, unable to run, whispered, “I threw it in the toilet.”

  “Which toilet, upstairs or downstairs?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “Suppose they’d taken apart the soil pipe, top to bottom?”

  “I wrapped it in toilet tissue. I flushed the toilet fifteen times. That’s nearly a hundred gallons of water. Even if they’d found it, they could never prove I’d thrown it in. I’m not stupid.”

  Thomassy felt heady, like the time he’d taken Francine to climb the two hundred rickety steps to the fire tower in Pound Ridge. The fire tower shook in the wind. It was like looking down from the top of a swaying toothpick. The people versus whomever he was defending. Look what he was defending. “If you were a juror,” he said, “what would you be thinking?”

  “About the key?”

  “They don’t know about the key! About the case!”

  “I would want to be fair.” Thomassy, you are my Clarence Darrow, my brilliant advocate, my hope.

  “Were you fair to Fuller?”

  Ed could hear screaming inside his skull.

  He could hear Thomassy saying, “Don’t tell me you were only following orders.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Was Trushenko your control?”

  Ed couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “I said was Trushenko your control, yes or no?”

  “No, of course not!” Ed said, summoning strength.

  “Will you sign an affidavit saying that he was not your control?”

  “I won’t sign any affidavits for anyone. Who put you up to this? Are you my lawyer or are you working for someone else?”

  “You’ve lied on the stand. You’ve lied to me.”

  “What lies?” Ed stood up.

  “Sit down!” Thomassy yelled. “Tomorrow I’m supposed to summarize this fucking case to the jury. If you were a child molester, I’d let them have you because I wouldn’t want to see you on the streets again until your cock withered. Putting you away isn’t going to bring Fuller back. The kind of rehabilitation you need you won’t get in prison. You know what I hate most about this case?”

  He didn’t want an answer from Ed.

  “I’m supposed to go in front of the jury and conjure those people, lie to them the way you lied to me. Like hell I will.”

  “You can’t abandon me!”

  “Like hell I can’t!” Thomassy said. “My father loved this country because it took him in. I take it for granted. But you’d give it to the barbarians. I came here to tell you face to face. You stink.”

  Ed’s eyes blurred. He put his arm up in front of his face, thinking Thomassy was about to strike him. Then he heard the terrible thud of the wood door slammed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Thomassy’s anger was like a black ball of acid corroding his gut. He walked in belligerent rage through the streets of New York, unnoticed.

  I will not appear in court tomorrow. They won’t find me.

  He glanced up at the night sky, expecting stars, stumbled badly over a crack in the sidewalk. An old bagwoman noticed, squealed through a harpie’s missing teeth, “You could have broken your head, mister.”

  Insane. As if there aren’t enough murders, we kill ourselves.

  He stopped to lean against a parked car, breathless, dared look up again. His view, blocked by buildings ablaze with rectangles of artificial light, showed in the narrow patch of permitted sky, not one star, nothing. Haig Thomassian had drummed into the young boy’s head that his Armenian forebears were the first Christians. Was he now making waste of his life among the last?

  Faced with an impossible choice, he put tomorrow off till tomorrow and rushed to find the aphrodisiac of life today.

  *

  When Thomassy got to the hospital, the round-faced lady at the desk said it was after visiting hours. When he was younger he would have raised his battering voice, telling her who he was, threatening wrath from above…. He glanced to his left. In front of the elevators a uniformed guard was at his post.

  He left without a word, went once more around the periphery of the building to the door marked “Staff Entrance.” Inside, a starched white-garbed woman said, “Doctor?” with a question at the end of her voice.

  “Yes?”

  “I didn’t recognize you.”

  “Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t recognize you either,” and went straight for the staff elevator.

  “One minute, please,” she said too late for the doors of the elevator closed on her prey before she could reach it.

  At Francine’s floor, Thomassy stepped out of the elevator, saw in a second that he’d never get by the nurses’ station. Quickly, he stepped back into the elevator, went down one floor. Francine’s room would be all the way down the corridor, just before the stairway at the end. If he went to the end of this floor and took the stairway up…

  The floor was like a holding pen for old people, milling around, chattering. They looked gregarious, not sick. He moved through them as a doctor might, smiling here and there, and they smiled back, watching the friendly newcomer’s back as he bounded for the far stairway, and unlike the other doctors, who always took the elevator, went up the stairs with the kind of energy some of them remembered once having.

  On Francine’s floor, Thomassy opened the stairway door slowly. He was not ten feet from Francine’s room. All the way down the hall at the nurses’ station the white, starched birds fluttered over what, a joke? He walked the ten steps, opened the door. Safely inside, he went quickly to her bed. He watched her face. She seemed a child, too young for him. The gap of seventeen years would never narrow. When she grew older, he’d be old. He lifted a chair silently, silently set it down next to her bed, and without a sound, he sat down.

  She couldn’t have heard him, yet her eyes opened, first small slits, then large and alive. “How long have you been in here?” she breathed, quickly darting her good hand to him.

  “Missed visiting hours. Had to sneak in like jail.” He stood up, bent over her, kissed her forehead.

  “That’s what my father did.”

  “What?”

  “Kissed my forehead.”

  And so he kissed her the way he had been used to kissing her. “You’re looking better,” he said.

  She touched the front of his pants with her fingers.

  “It’s still there,” he said.

  “Can you hang a sign on it, like the real-estate people do, saying sold or something like that.”

  “How about rented?”

  “Always the lawyer. George?” She clenched his warm hand.

  “What?”

  “Last night, in the middle of the night, I woke up and thought I was dead for a minute. They’d gi
ven me some stupid sleeping pills. George, just because you’re older, that doesn’t mean you have to die first.”

  “What kind of dope have they been giving you?”

  “I never really believed I could die before the accident. And if I can die, you can, too. You run so fast I bet you never think about it.”

  “I think about it.”

  “I’m getting out in two days.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “I’ll have to take it easy for a couple or three weeks. My mother says I should stay with them so she can watch me daytimes. You can’t stay there at night.” She sighed. “This is getting impossible. Half the time it’s death on my mind and the other half sex.”

  “That’s the standard battle.”

  “Can you make love to me now? Gently? The nurses don’t come by at this hour. You could put a chair under the door handle. George, make love to me so the dying will go away.”

  *

  Thomassy glanced at his wristwatch. Francine was peacefully asleep, her face just barely visible from the blue-gray light filtering through the window blinds.

  He got dressed quickly. He wanted to leave her a message. Nothing to write on. He started to scribble something on the back of a calling card, scratched it out. Words were no longer good enough. Gently, he removed the chair from the door, looked back once at the undulations under the sheet, the face now turned away from him. It could have gone the other way, Tilly husbandless in the hospital, Francine husbandless in the morgue. Who watches us when we are not watching over ourselves?

  Out the door, without thinking he turned left, realizing the direction he’d taken only as he passed the nurses’ station, and the solitary night guardian looked up.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Thomassy leaned over her desk, his hands flat within inches of her hands. “I was ministering to the lady in six-oh-eight. She’s one of this country’s great women. Please care for her.”

  He removed his hands, stood straight, turned to go.

  “Are you a doctor?” the nurse said.

  “Tonight,” Thomassy said, “I think I was.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Thomassy began, before you stands a lawyer who last night, after visiting hours, sneaked illegitimately into the hospital room of a female of the species, and in acts that some of you would condemn, held hands, kissed multiple times with great intensity, and finally achieved the most gentle, wonderful illicit sexual union. This holy act—and I say this because only a god could have invented nerve endings suited to such a grand binge of heartburst and semenspurt—this holy act not only did the recumbent, injured lady in question no harm, but she was restored, renewed, and overjoyed to be fully orgasmic and alive after beginning to recover from a brutal car crash deliberately arranged by three Spanish-speaking males who confused courtship with a cock fight. I am here to tell you that in the not-so-long-ago, I was myself a mere man like them, brought up on locker-room language and only belatedly learned that all those man-to-man descriptions of humping, thumping, pumping, and so on, are fraudulently inaccurate renderings of what can and does take place when a man and a woman are ready for each other. Gentlemen of the jury, if any of you have not experienced the feeling of frenzied butterflies around the corona of your penis caused by the purposeful circling of a skilled, loving, grasping vagina, you are missing something Napoleon would have given Europe for. And what an anticlimax it is for me to be with you this morning to speak ostensibly in defense of mere murder.

  “Mr. Thomassy,” Judge Drewson said, “are you ready for your summation?”

  I am ready to walk out of this courtroom.

  “I said are you ready for your summation!”

  I have been giving my summation! “No, Your Honor,” he said aloud. And not aloud, Francine, I love you. Then Thomassy turned to the courtroom in which every seat was filled, his gaze on the doors at the back, trying not to see the more than a hundred pairs of eyes looking at him.

  Through his paralysis he could hear the murmur of the spectators and then the judge’s gavel.

  “The court will stand in recess,” the judge said. “Mr. Thomassy, can you hear me?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “Will you step into chambers, please.”

  Why was the gray-uniformed guard holding the door to the judge’s chambers open for him, did the man think he couldn’t open it himself? The back of his scalp felt wet. Thomassy touched his forehead with the back of his left hand; it came away damp. How clearly he remembered losing his patience with the students, snapping There’s nothing that says you have to take on a client, but once you take him on, it’s like giving birth, the case is yours until the client doesn’t need you anymore. And the young, tall, shy boy way back in the lecture hall had held up his hand and said, “Sir, how do you know ahead of time it’s a case you want?” And Thomassy had replied, “Because you have the perception of a god!” which got a laugh, but was a lie, so he added, “Sometimes you get stuck!”

  Where did he get that crap about children? He had been a child. If he felt helpless now, where was his Thomassy to rescue him?

  Judge Drewson, sitting opposite him at the end of the long walnut conference table, hadn’t said a word.

  Thomassy took out his handkerchief and carefully wiped his forehead and then the palms of his hands. But he couldn’t meet the judge’s eyes for fear he would betray the banging terror in his chest.

  At last the judge said, “Mr. Thomassy, I’ve had counsel unprepared for summations before this but I’ve never heard one admit it.”

  Thomassy said nothing.

  “Are you ill?”

  A loud, distracting knock on the door was followed by Roberts entering. “Your Honor, I was wondering—”

  “Come in, come in and sit down, Mr. Roberts. I was not discussing anything relevant to the case with defense counsel. I was inquiring about his health.”

  Thomassy shook his head as if to clear it. “I’m okay, Your Honor. I apologize.”

  Why the hell was Roberts staring at him like that?

  “Nothing like this has happened to me before,” Thomassy said to the judge. “I’m sorry. I’ve been under a strain.”

  “I understand your fiancée was in a bad auto accident.”

  “It’s not Miss Widmer, Your Honor. I had a very difficult conversation with my client yesterday…” How could he talk with Roberts present?

  There was another brief knock on the door. When it swung open, Thomassy could see the court attendant trying to block Jackson Perry from entering the room.

  “Your Honor,” Perry was saying, trying to get the guard to lower his arm, “I was concerned that—”

  Judge Drewson interrupted him. “Mr. Perry, do you understand plain English?”

  The guard lowered his arm.

  Perry nodded.

  “Then stay the hell out of here!” snapped the judge. Then he turned to Roberts and said, “I think you’d better leave too. You have my word that nothing affecting the evidence will be discussed between us.”

  Roberts, his face flushed, rose. “Your Honor, I must protest—”

  “All you like, to whomever you like, but I want to have a few words with Mr. Thomassy in private. Understood?”

  When Roberts left, the judge, his voice calmed, said, “I’m not a doctor, but you looked a bit out of it in the courtroom as if you had suddenly been taken ill…” He spoke slowly, choosing words carefully. “Or were having a garden-variety anxiety attack. In how many murder cases have you acted for the defendant?”

  “Sixty-one, Your Honor. This would be the sixty-second.”

  “Let me hazard something. I believe you accepted this case not in your normal routine but at the instigation of others, that you expected to be defending, as you have in the past, a defendant accused of murder. I could make an educated guess and suggest that in the course of this trial you have yourself formed an indictment different from the one handed
down by the Grand Jury. Please don’t acknowledge by word or even headshake whether I am correct. There are some attorneys who shirk no case that produces income for them. You are in the unusual position of having elected to defend a man whom you have turned against on knowledge of the nature of his actual crime. Mr. Thomassy, to desert that defendant now, for any cause, would be an act of treason.”

  The word reverberated in the room like a curse. I know, Thomassy wanted to say, I know.

  Judge Drewson was saying, “When I was a young man I was in love with a woman who was aspiring to be an actress. We went to the theater a lot, upstairs in the cheaper seats. I remember how one night we managed to get to the theater in a snowstorm because we didn’t want the tickets to go unused. I really couldn’t afford to buy them again. We got there ten minutes late, wet and cold, but the curtain wasn’t up because the star had canceled, ostensibly over illness. The audience was thinned out, but of those that had gotten to the theater, not one person believed the star was ill. We thought she had chickened out. There are certain roles in life that require our appearance no matter the weather outside. Or inside.”

  Judge Drewson suddenly seemed embarrassed by his turn of phrase. “It wouldn’t be like you to quit,” he said.

  Thomassy looked at Drewson and saw the man behind the courtesy. Even if he made up that story about the theater, it was an act of kindness. Thomassy had always thought of judges as the people up there, politicians, hacks willing to be bored in exchange for the mantle of authority. Not this man. He is civilizing me, like Francine.

  “I’m sorry,” Thomassy said, his voice a shroud.

  “I will not find you in contempt if you walk out of this courtroom,” the judge said, “but I believe that you will find yourself in contempt of yourself for the rest of your career as a lawyer if you don’t get out there and do the kind of job you have a reputation for. The only tolerable decision is that of the jury. And you and I and the defendant will have to live with their determination. Now, if you want some time, I’ll recess till this afternoon.”

  Thomassy felt shame for the wetness in his eyes.

  “You can use my bathroom to wash up,” the judge said, pointing.