Guilty Wives (10 page)

THE HOLDING CELL
was a nondescript anteroom where the accused awaited the start of trial, handcuffed and guarded. I was the first to arrive, for no particular reason. I didn’t know where the others had been kept the last few days. I didn’t know much about my friends at all lately.

We’d barely spoken in nine months, the four of us. The investigating judge assigned to our case had ordered our provisional detention while the murder of the president and his bodyguard remained “under examination,” as the French put it. A special judge hearing questions of custody—
le juge des libertés et la détention
—had upheld the decision to keep us in custody pending the close of the investigation. All of that meant that we weren’t going anywhere until trial.

For some of this time, the four of us were detained in separate facilities. The stated reason was our personal security, as we had become rather notorious, to put it mildly, but I always figured they wanted to keep us separated so we wouldn’t communicate with each other.

Winnie was the next one in. She looked terrible, primarily because she looked so different. Her silky, flowing mane of hair had been replaced with a close crop that hung lifelessly at her shoulders. Her eyes were sunken. Overall there was a withered quality about her: she had lost at least ten pounds that she couldn’t afford to lose, and her normally confident, almost regal carriage had been replaced by a defeated, wincing expression and slumped shoulders. It was, to me, as heartbreaking as anything that had happened over the last nine months.

I smiled at her, and she at me. A moment of warmth on a day that was going to be very, very cold.

Bryah was next, and then Serena, each looking about as bad as Winnie. All of us had been run through the wringer, our lives turned upside down, our dirty laundry aired for the world to see, our families humiliated, and our futures looking very, very grim indeed. We were scared and frustrated and bewildered and exhausted. And the trial hadn’t even started yet.

But we had each other, together in the same room. We didn’t speak because we all knew by now that it was prohibited; we’d been to enough court hearings together to know the drill. But the looks on each of our faces told me that we were still a foursome; we still loved each other.

No small chore, that. They’d done everything in their power to turn us against each other from the first day we were detained.
Serena says it was all your idea. Winnie kept a lot of secrets from you. Whoever confesses first gets the most lenient sentence. Your friends won’t be your friends for very long.
The French intelligence officer Durand, and the Paris cop Rouen, had worn out the groove on those lines for four days straight.

Once the
garde à vue
had ended, the case was assigned to an investigating judge, whose role was theoretically an impartial one, seeking to discover the “truth” without favor to either the prosecution or the accused. But that judge was no different from Durand and Rouen, urging us to implicate ourselves and each other from the outset. The only “truth” I could glean from his investigation was that he wanted to confirm our guilt and get his name in the paper as often as possible.

The prosecutor, a strident, ambitious woman named Maryse Ballamont, had offered to reduce the charges if we would sign written statements implicating the others. Even my own lawyer had impressed upon me over and over again that I should not try to “shield” my friends, that we were on a sinking ship and it was every woman for herself.

“Keep your chins up, mates,” I said to my friends. One of the gendarmes clucked his tongue at me and put a hand on my shoulder. But really, what were they going to do to me—keep me in prison
beyond
my natural lifetime?

Don’t think like that, Abbie.
I had to keep alive some small semblance of hope, some kernel of possibility that there would be a break, that everyone would figure out they had the wrong suspects and we’d walk out of here free women.

“Temps de commencer,”
said one of the gendarmes, wearing his courtroom-best powder-blue shirt and navy-blue cargo pants. He was carrying a baton and firearm on his belt. The four of us stood. I winked at Bryah, who looked as if she were about to wilt. Serena blinked back tears. Winnie lowered her head and took a deep breath.

And then we began the march to the courtroom. Our trial was about to begin.

SALLE NUMÉRO TROIS
—courtroom number three—broke into a collective hiss as we entered the courtroom from the side door.

“Meurtrières!”
someone shouted.

“Assassins!”

“Monstres!”

I kept my chin up, trying to maintain a sense of dignity, taking my seat in the cage of bulletproof glass and staring forward as if nothing were happening around me. The sky-blue shirts of the gendarmes were everywhere, and they had apparently decided to let the spectators get a little venom out of their systems before enforcing the rule of silence in the courtroom.

Try as I might to remain resolute, it was impossible to ignore the spectacle; it was like trying to meditate in the midst of a tornado. One man got to his feet and charged toward us, not getting very far before being subdued by the gendarmerie. An object—a shoe—slammed against the glass cage only a few feet from where I was sitting, having been thrown from the balcony.

I was seated at the end of the cage farthest from the spectators, and from this vantage point I could see the expressions of each of my friends. Bryah shrunk back, looking positively terrified. Serena watched with horror, tears falling down her cheeks. Winnie kept her head down and her eyes squeezed shut.

I bit my lip and recalled the stern warnings of my lawyer: don’t show emotion. Don’t get mad. French judges don’t like outbursts from the defendants. It took all my will not to react as I watched the crowd rise up against us.

I’m innocent!
I wanted to scream.
How could you possibly think we’re killers?

Surely something would happen, I told myself throughout the investigation. Surely some piece of evidence would appear, some lead would crystallize—surely they’d realize they have the wrong people!

More gendarmes entered the courtroom. Several surrounded our glass cage and soon there was at least one gendarme standing at each row of spectators. Their batons were drawn but their firearms remained holstered.

It became a mob mentality, a feeding frenzy, all decorum discarded as the gendarmes called out for silence and people shouted their opinions and gestured in our direction. Some were supportive, including a couple who looked like American students, shouting something about saving France’s ass during World War II. People were yelling at us and at each other, the small minority who supported our cause trying to shout over the majority without success. The reporters filling most of the front two rows and seated in the folding chairs in the back were trying to take this all in and scribble some notes.

Our husbands, all four of them—Jeffrey, Simon, Christien, and Colton—turned from their perch in the front row and watched the brewing rugby scrum, with Simon shielding his four-year-old adopted daughter, Katie Mei, and Christien placing a protective arm across his two children. After a time Simon got into the fray, not moving from his seat but yelling back at the protesters. He was hardly a threatening presence, but he was pointing his finger menacingly and working himself up in his frustration and concern.

Then the wheels came off: from one of the middle rows, a guy in a leather jacket and spiky hair, who I assumed to be British, pushed someone, knocking him into a gendarme. A number of gendarmes rushed to separate and restrain the two people, and at some point, not surprisingly, someone overreacted to someone else’s overreaction and before long the scuffle involved a number of spectators and police.

“Allons, allons!”
The gendarmes inside our cage lifted us to our feet and hurried us out of the courtroom. The door closed behind us. We were ushered into the holding area and placed in handcuffs again.

Each of my friends looked shell-shocked. We were accustomed to being the subject of strong opinions. We’d all read the various accounts of our case in the international media, stories from every continent, the most ridiculous rumors and speculation, even Facebook and Internet sites devoted to us. But this was different. This was our first encounter, up close and personal, with the reaction of ordinary French citizens.

Even though we’d read the papers and heard the stories—the overwhelming consensus of the French people was that we were guilty, guilty, guilty—it was still shocking to see it firsthand. They wanted our blood.

“We’re screwed,” said Serena. “We are so screwed.”

UPON OUR SECOND
entrance into the courtroom, the mood was decidedly reserved. There were more uniformed gendarmes than members of the public. Some of the original onlookers were no longer there, replaced with others who had been waiting in line to come in—a line that, from what I’d been told, wound through the hallways of the Palais de Justice and out onto the street.

The courtroom was fairly modern, and distinctly non-American. The back half of the courtroom was for the spectators, half a dozen benches of blond wood and some chairs placed along the back for additional seating. Over the spectators on the ground level was a balcony holding several additional rows of seating.

We were on the left side of the courtroom, enclosed in bulletproof glass that had one rectangular slit that allowed us to communicate with our attorneys, who sat in front of our cage. On the side opposite us was the prosecutor, Maryse Ballamont, seated behind a long pine table much like the one in front of the defense attorneys. At a right angle to us, seated in front of the spectators, was the
partie civile
—the civil party—in this case the former first lady of France, Geneviève Devereux, a stunning and fashionable redhead who once held the crown of Miss France.

The judges hadn’t yet appeared, but all the lawyers were dressed in black robes and thin white scarves that hung straight down from the center of their collars like glorified bibs. All that was missing were the old-fashioned wigs.

I turned and looked at my husband, Jeffrey, in the front row among the spectators. The families of the accused had the right to attend the trial, and all four of the husbands were there. Winnie’s two gorgeous children sat next to Christien, and Simon held his and Serena’s daughter, Katie Mei, on his lap. Bryah’s son wasn’t there and neither were my kids, at my insistence. This entire ordeal had been devastating enough for Richie and Elena—it was unbearable for me to even think about it—and they didn’t need to see this trial firsthand.

Jeffrey slowly nodded his head in my direction and gave me a warm smile. It was weird, to say the least, between us now. Neither of us was sure how to handle it. Like the rest of the world, he knew of my fling with Damon Kodiak, but he hadn’t so much as acknowledged it—I’d like to think because of the dire circumstances I faced, but probably also because his own infidelity had spanned some two years, not one night, so he could hardly throw stones from his glass house.

Regardless, Jeffrey had been decent to me over these last months. I knew this had been hard for him, too, both professionally and personally. He’d been accustomed to my caring for the home and children, when they were around, and now with our kids transferring to a school in Bern while my case was pending, Jeffrey was trying to run a household for them while managing to keep afloat at work. And that was just the day-to-day part; the emotional aspect was doubly difficult. It was Jeffrey who saw the effects of this case on our children; he was the one who held their hands as they cried themselves to sleep; he had suffered some embarrassment of his own. The list of casualties from our weekend in Monte Carlo seemed to have no end.

A high-pitched bell sounded. From the long table in the front of the courtroom, the
huissier
—the bailiff—stood and announced,
“Le Cour.”

I stole one more glance at my husband, then the entire courtroom got to its feet as the judges entered.

IN A TYPICAL
French murder trial, the case would be heard by three judges and nine laypersons. But this wasn’t a typical murder trial. The murder of the French president was being treated as a terrorist act, something with which our lawyers took issue. So they brought our case all the way up to the Cour de Cassation, France’s supreme court—which decided that trying us as terrorists sounded like a perfectly good idea.

That meant that our case would be heard not by a combination of judges and ordinary citizens but rather by a panel composed exclusively of judges. I didn’t know if that was good or bad. My lawyer, always trying to buoy my spirits, never directly said that our chances were diminished because of the all-judge panel. But the fact that he fought the decision all the way to the nation’s highest court told me that it wasn’t the preferred outcome for us.

The long table where the judges sat was raised about two steps higher than the rest of the courtroom, but it wasn’t like the judge’s bench in an American courtroom. It was just one long table, with ordinary goosenecked desk lamps in front of each seat. I was used to the courtrooms I saw on American television; this looked more like a city council meeting.

From behind the wood-paneled wall, a door opened, and the judges entered the courtroom. Like the lawyers, they were wearing black robes and thin white scarves. The presiding judge—who was the only one wearing a red robe—sat in the center, and everyone in the courtroom took their seats after he did.

The four of us put on headphones, old-fashioned, clunky models with thick cushions on the ears. The presiding judge—
le président juge
—began to speak in French to the courtroom, but what we heard through the headphones was a woman’s voice, translating his words to English. It added just another odd element to the completely bizarre package of horrors that was the last nine months of my life.

The lawyers formally announced themselves—the lawyers representing the four defendants as well as the lawyer for the president’s widow, the civil party. The
président juge
then asked if there were any applications regarding “publicity,” which I didn’t understand initially but then I remembered: trials are open to the public in France unless there is a determination that allowing them to be open would constitute a danger. After what had happened thirty minutes ago, a decent case could be made that the trial should be closed. But none of the lawyers so requested, and it wasn’t likely that the judge would have granted the request, anyway. To the French citizenry, this was the most important trial in memory. It needed to take place in the open. Besides, by now there were enough gendarmes in the courtroom to invade a small country.

“The clerk will read the transfer judgment,” said the woman in her calm, soothing voice in my ear, translating the words of the
président juge.
This had been explained to me as the French equivalent of an indictment. After the investigating judge determines that there is a basis to charge the accused with a crime, a panel of judges hears the matter and makes the ultimate determination about whether the case should be transferred to the trial court—the Cour d’Assises. My lawyer told me that this written transfer order was typically a rather dry exposition of the evidence, but in this instance, maybe because of the high profile of this case, the panel of judges used very forceful language in describing the case against us.

I’d had the judges’ order read to me several times previously, but it was no less painful hearing it again, especially through the maddeningly moderate tone of the female translator. And it was more than painful—utterly mind-blowing, worthy of Kafka, the words delivered so gently but landing with such a damning impact. The gunpowder residue. The fingerprints. The DNA. The incriminating admissions. The misleading and deceptive statements (for which I was singled out several times). The eyewitnesses. The immoral behavior. The blackmail.

When the reading was completed, I thought to myself, This isn’t the greatest way to start a trial.
Here’s everything bad we think about you…now let’s get started!

I let out a sigh and looked up at the ceiling of the courtroom, at the narrow skylight that provided the only natural light in the windowless room.

A miracle, I thought. God, please give me a miracle.

“Before we begin, I would like to say a few words,” said the presiding judge.