Necessity

by D. W. Buffa

  “I thought you might need a ride home,” said Tangerine Winslow, sitting bright and shiny in her cream-colored Bentley.

  “It must be an hour since you left.”

  “I had nothing else to do.”

  “Except wait for me?”

  “Except wait for you.”

  “Because you thought I might need a ride?

  “Because I thought you might need a ride.”

  “To my car, parked half a block from here?”

  “To wherever you decide you might like to go.”

  “I was thinking I might go to the airport and catch the next flight to London or New York.”

  The words, my words, came with all the ease of words written in advance, words half forgotten and suddenly remembered, words spoken by a stranger while I listened, wondering what he might say next.

  “And were you thinking that you might not want to go alone?”

  It was a dare, nothing more and nothing less, a way to test the limits, her limits as much, or more, than mine.

  “Either way, it doesn’t matter; but if I go, I might not be coming back.”

  “You’d stay, in London or New York? You wouldn’t come back, not ever?”

  “Not if I were running away with a woman married to someone else.”

  “You might get tired of her, married woman or not, and then run away again.”

  “I’ve been known to do that,” I admitted, “but never without regret.”

  She smiled softly in the night, and I knew that though she would not do it, run off with me, someone she had only just met, she thought it was something lacking in herself, the failure to yield to unqualified romance, to risk everything on a single, unknown chance.

  “I’ve been known to want to,” was all she said. “And, who knows, maybe one day…but there are first a few other things I need to do. One of them,” she said as she started the engine again and began to drive, “is to tell you that I don’t believe for a minute that Kevin did it.”

  I looked at her, wondering if she meant it.

  “Kevin would not have had the courage. He’s always been a coward. It’s the reason he married who he did, the reason—I’m sure you’ve heard—he wouldn’t marry me. He wanted money, lots of it, and marriage was the only way he was ever going to get it. I can’t complain. It’s what I did myself, married for money and nothing else.”

  “The papers all say he confessed,” I reminded her.

  “Kevin Fitzgerald has never told the truth about anything in his life. Now, last chance,” she whispered with a glance that suggested endless possibilities, “London or New York?”

  IT WAS NEITHER London nor New York nor any other, closer place. She dropped me at my car and I drove the short distance home, the apartment I had purchased on Nob Hill before prices became outrageous and the city started to become a place for only the richest of the rich. If I ever decided to sell, I would have a small fortune and nowhere to live. That wasn’t true. I could live, and live well, in other places, but San Francisco was home; more than home, it was the hidden secret of existence, the secret you could never solve, or even fully understand, but somehow still gave you the sense that somewhere, just beyond your fingertips, was the meaning of what you did. San Francisco was a mistress, always changing, and never changing at all. There was nowhere else I wanted to be.

  The doorman greeted me the way he always did, calling me Mr. Antonelli, though I had often asked him not to, and then hurried to the elevator to push the button and in that way reduce by all of two or three seconds the time I had to wait. It was a useless gesture, but one in which he took a certain pride, a way not so much to be helpful as to show that he was more than willing, eager, to give whatever assistance he could. He had done the same thing a thousand times before, but now, suddenly, it taught me the necessity of the choice I had to make; it taught me that I did not have any real choice at all. The doorman did his job; no one asked him if he would rather do something else. And if he had his job, I had mine. I tried cases; it was all I knew. And if I had reached the point in my career where I could pick and choose the cases I wanted, I had still the obligation not to do so on the basis of my own convenience, much less the fear that I might lose.

  By the time I met Jean-Francois Reynaud the next day for lunch, the decision had been made. I told him as we sat down in a back booth at a fashionable bar and grill a few blocks down the street from the French Consulate what I was going to do. Reynaud nodded politely, as if he had expected nothing else, caught the attention of a passing waiter, who, like everyone who worked here, must have been in his seventies, and ordered a drink. He looked as if he needed it. With his elbow on the table, he glanced up at the framed black-and-white photograph on the wall.

  “Joe DiMaggio. I like coming here. You get the feeling that nothing has changed since the l950s. You get the feeling,” he added, watching the waiter walk away, “that he, and the others, all started here and never thought to leave.” With his finger he traced a thin line across the hard, polished table. “There is so much going on, so many things I have to do,” he said quietly and without explanation. The waiter brought his drink. Reynaud picked it up, barely took a sip and set it down again. He searched my eyes.

  “I asked to meet you. I had heard about you, of course; you could even say I followed your career from a distance, though that would not tell the whole story and would, in a sense, be misleading. Part of my job is to know what goes on in the city, and not just the city; to know the principal actors, the men and women who, in their different ways, contribute to what goes on. I would have come to know something about you in the normal course of events, a well-known criminal defense attorney, but most of what I know about you is through my old friend, Albert Craven.”

  “You must have an easy job. Albert knows everyone, and if you know Albert, you wouldn’t need any other source of information.”

  “Yes, except that our mutual friend is a master of discretion. Tell him something in confidence and—I needn’t tell you this, I’m sure—it goes with him to the grave. And despite that engaging manner of his, he is not a gossip. He won’t tell you anything he doesn’t think you need to know, though perhaps he tells me things he wouldn’t tell too many others. We’ve been friends for more than twenty years.”

  This was a surprise. Until last night, I had never heard him mention his name. Reynaud’s eyes brightened.

  “Last night was the first time you had ever heard my name. That is what I mean. He’s careful that way, you can trust him that way. We met when he was on his honeymoon—I’m not sure which one it was. Poor Albert, he has a Frenchman’s weakness without a Frenchman’s talent for self-deception. He thinks infidelity inexcusable; we think it a condition of existence. He and his new bride stayed at our castle.” He threw up his hands, dismissing the exaggerated impression this would almost certainly create. “A castle, as distinguished from a chateau; an ancient place built in the thirteenth century, but a place in which to live, not, like Carcassonne, a fortress built for war. We—my wife and I—restored it, and for a while ran it as a place for travelers to stop. It’s just outside Agen, which is about a hundred miles south and slightly east of Bordeaux, and a three-hour drive from Spain. Albert and his new wife, whose name I’m afraid I don’t remember, spent a week with us. Then, after that, for a while they came every year.”

  This, while interesting, told me nothing about why Jean-Francois Reynaud, a French diplomat, would have an interest, much less try to involve himself, in whether I would become a lawyer for Kevin Fitzgerald.

  “It’s very simple,” he remarked in response to the question I had not asked. “Albert told me he trusted you more than anyone he knew.”

  “That was nice of him to say. But what difference could that make to you? No one from your country is involved. It did not happen on French soil.”

  He raised his left eyebrow.

  “Are you sure it didn’t? Happen on French soil? Or, to be more precise, are you sure it matters where
it happened? Everything is connected. What happened here might as well have happened in France, for all the difference in the effect it will have. Yes, I know, Bridges was your president, Fitzgerald your senator; the crime—the assassination—changes, could change, the whole political dynamic in this country. But consider,” he said, leaning forward with a sudden sense of urgency, “consider the effect Bridges had on what we in Europe are faced with. Consider the situation where, for the first time since the Germans were defeated in the Second World War, we find ourselves without any reliable American guarantee. Consider what will happen if this assassination should lead a majority of your people to see Bridges as the victim of some left-wing conspiracy. Consider what will happen if they start to believe that Bridges had been right after all, that all the investigations, all the talk of some conspiracy with the Russians, was nothing more than made up lies, that he was murdered to make sure he could never be exonerated; that he wasn’t murdered to stop him doing any more damage to the county, but to stop him changing the country in the way it needed to be changed. You’ve read Shakespeare?”

  The question came so quickly, without so much as a pause to signal a new subject, a different inquiry, that it took a moment to catch up.

  “Shakespeare? Yes, some. Why?”

  “You’ve read Julius Caesar?”

  “It’s been a while.”

  “Someone—I’ve forgotten who—wrote that there was a chance, when Caesar was murdered, if someone had seized the moment, to restore the republic; that everyone was in such a state of shock, of disbelief, that they would have followed anyone who had the will to lead. But instead—civil war, thousands murdered and the beginning of the Augustan Age in which power become more absolute, more concentrated in a single man, an emperor, than it had ever been before.”

  “Do you think that is what is going to happen here? We have had the normal succession. The vice-president has been—”

  “I don’t know what is going to happen here. I only know what almost happened here. I only know that everything that came out about Bridges and the Russians only scratched the surface, that if he had lived, the world would have changed in ways no one would have thought possible.”

  “Then why the reference to Julius Caesar? What analogy are you trying to draw?”

  “Caesar was murdered because he was a threat to the continued power of the Senate; in other words, a threat to what was left of the old, established institutions of the Roman republic. Bridges, with nothing like the genius of Julius Caesar, was surrounded by people who, in the name of a new nationalism, were moving him in the same direction—government by executive order, demands that the Senate change its rules so that everything could be done by simple majority, direct appeal to the public in short, sometimes mindless, statements giving his own, authoritative opinion—opinion, not argument—about every matter of public, and even, on occasion, private concern. He is murdered, like Caesar, by a member of the Senate, murdered because of the threat he has become. Who decided whether Caesar’s murder was justified, whether it was murder or tyrannicide? It wasn’t debated in the Senate, it wasn’t brought for judgement to some court. The people of Rome were asked to decide, and they did—by backing one claimant to power or another in civil war.

  “What I said to you last night—there is more at issue here than the guilt or innocence of one lone defendant in a murder trial, more at issue than whether you or any other attorney can win an acquittal for your client. What is at issue is nothing less than the question of which way history takes us, what kind of history we make ourselves. That means, Mr. Antonelli, what kind of history we think we have already, whether what we think has happened is, or is not, true.”

  Jean-Francois Reynaud was talking with more animation and more intensity with every word. Leaning on his elbows, his face between his arms, his hands seemed to be moving in several different directions at once. He looked a little like a prisoner speaking from behind the bars of his cell. Then, just as he was about to start another sentence, another long excursion through the obscurities of time, he stopped.

  “But we should eat,” he remarked, and with that he beckoned to the stoic, white-haired waiter and we ordered lunch.

  “I should tell you,” he started up between bites of his salad, “that if this had happened in France—I mean if everyone involved had been French—all you would have had to do is make sure a woman was involved. We have a long history of forgiving crimes of passion. There was a trial once, early in the twentieth century, if I remember right, for a woman—I forget if it was the mistress or the wife—who showed up at the other one’s front door and shot her five times. She was acquitted of the murder. It was ruled an accidental death. Five times!” he repeated, marveling at what he seemed to think an exquisite example of fairness and good judgment.

  “But as to your question,” he said, shoving aside what was left of the salad and ignoring altogether the main course he had ordered. “The importance of what happened—not the murder, but what happened before, what made that murder almost inevitable.”

  He paused, lifted his glass and for only the second time took a drink, this one with the slow reluctance of a thought come unbidden to the surface of his mind.

  “The French Revolution. Everyone murdered everyone else, everyone who got power by killing whoever had it, then, the new possessor, murdered for the same reason. And all of it done in the name of democracy and equality, the twin standards, the two driving forces, of the last two hundred years. There is no aristocracy of any kind anymore; no hierarchy, no set of established beliefs that differentiate among the various levels of accomplishment; nothing to mark the difference between better and worse; no accepted form of argument by which to test the reasonableness, or even the necessity, of what we do, the only basis of judgment is what a majority—any majority—happens to feel at any given moment, every opinion, every belief, as good or evil, as any other. This is the world in which we live, the world that made someone like Walter Bridges possible, the world that allowed someone of such astonishing ignorance and incapacity claim to know better than anyone else how to solve problems no one had solved before, the world that made it possible to claim to be a patriot while acting the traitor. It was all true, Mr. Antonelli, every rumor, every whispered allegation. We have it all, everything, all of it on tape. It is the only chance Kevin Fitzgerald has, isn’t it, to show that he acted to save the country from something worse than murder?”

  “But what makes you think that I, or anyone, can—”

  Reynaud called the waiter over, paid the bill and got up to leave. He pointed to the tan briefcase placed next to where he had been sitting.

  “Don’t forget your briefcase, Mr. Antonelli. I know you wouldn’t want to lose what you have inside.”

  And then, before I could say a word, before I could ask a question, he was gone. Whatever was in the briefcase, it was now my possession, free, so far as I now knew, to do with as I wanted. I was tempted to open it right there and thumb through the contents to see if I had really been given what he had appeared to promise: proof that the president was everything his adversaries had said he was. Or had Reynaud given me even more than that, something no one had dared think possible? But temptation yielded to a strange, unaccountable fear. I looked around, the victim of what I tried to dismiss as paranoia, the feeling that I was being watched, that among the dozens of people sitting at dozens of tables, someone had me under surveillance. I left the restaurant and, clutching the briefcase, walked half a block, stopped and looked back. The streets were crowded, but so far as I could tell no one was following me. I laughed, or tried to laugh away my fears, but I could not quite shake the feeling that something was not right.

  The building that for more than forty years had housed the law firm that Albert Craven had begun, the law firm in which he was the only listed partner still alive, was just a few short blocks away. Built just a few years after the earthquake that had leveled the city in l906, it showed scarcely any signs of age on i
ts front facade and none at all in the plush, modern surroundings of the two floors on which the firm did its own, quiet, business representing companies it had taken care of since the beginning of their respective existence. “We were all just kids,” Craven liked to say, “usually broke and always in debt. Now we’re all old and rich and there isn’t one of us who wouldn’t give it all away if we could only go back and start all over.” It was a well-intentioned lie, but also, for that dwindling group of aging clients, a way to forget, and, as it were, make time to atone for what some of them they had cheated and stolen to acquire.

  The receptionist, a smartly dressed women of an indeterminate middle age who wore rings on her fingers and bracelets on her arms, always quick and alert, raised her hand as I passed.

  “You have a visitor waiting in your office. Kevin Fitzgerald’s wife,” she whispered as I moved closer.

  “She didn’t call? She just walked in?”

  “That’s right. She said she knew you would want to see her.”

  “Does Albert know she’s here?”

  “He’s still out,” she replied, smiling with her eyes. Craven frequently had lunches that lasted until dinner. There was always someone dying to tell him a story.

  Tricia Fitzgerald was waiting for me, all right, and she was not particularly pleased about it.

  “You didn’t see Kevin yesterday. I told him you’d be there, that you would go over to the jail and talk to him. I told him—”

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Fitzgerald,” I said as I settled into the dark blue leather chair behind my desk. I was careful to place Reynaud’s briefcase next to me on the floor as if it were my own and I put it there all the time. “What can I do for you?”

  “You know damn well what you can do for me!”

  “Represent your husband. Yes, I know. But you were here only yesterday. Did you think that I—”

  “Kevin has been in custody for more than a week!”

  She said this as if that were the limit of her patience, the limit of how long she could wait for anything. Her husband was all she cared about, but if he were convicted, I had very little doubt he would rather quickly become part of her unremembered past.