The Touch of Treason (25 page)

“George,” she said, “you’ve been conditioned by years of trying crazy cases that people either win or lose. Even trial marriage is not like a trial. Either both win or both lose.”

“Yes, Spinoza.”

“Don’t play high school with me. I am not lecturing. This is the beginning of what I hope you will allow to become a conversation.”

At last the muscles in his cheeks relaxed, boyish belligerence fled.

“I’ve never seen a trial except in the movies,” she said, “but the impression I get is that each side makes points for the benefit of the judge or the jurors, correct?”

“Go on.”

“There are no third parties in a marriage. Making points is only useful if you’re keeping score. There’s no score in marriage. It has ups and downs, but if in general it’s going right, there’s no judge, no jury, and no witness to anything that’s important in it. The minute partners start assembling witnesses, the fracture’s there.”

“Who’s talking marriage?”

“It applies to living together, married or not,” she said. Was she trying to box him in, do what men did to women in the game?

Thomassy stared at her profile, lit by the fire.

Was this his way of deflecting himself from what she was saying? “I thought we were headed
somewhere.
Are you listening, George?”

He nodded. Throughout his childhood, having seen his father’s horses die, he had thought that one of his ongoing duties was to prepare himself for the death, first, of beloved horses, then people, including his father, and then himself. He had taken his mother, Marya, for granted, just as his father had, and she had died first, even before the horses, and he had realized how out of control life was in its ending and that what even a kid had to seize on was
this day.
For many years now the joys of this day were winning: motions, battles, courtroom cases, women; settling for the joy or work well done or a woman who would be glad to come back again. The Future—he always envisioned it with a capital letter—was in whatever breach of luck God flung down. A career was too long range. A permanent woman was equally long range. Before Francine he hadn’t prepared himself to meet a woman whose mind was crisp in places his was sodden, who could percolate an idea freshly that he’d long ago segregated in a drawer like his socks and handkerchiefs. Whenever he thought of her, present or absent, he felt her sense of life. If Marya had known her, she would have had to live longer.

Francine touched his hand. “You aren’t listening!”

“Sorry,” he said. “I was listening to myself.”

“That’s an improvement over some of the people you listen to,” she laughed. Even her laugh was a death-dispeller. He’d come in wanting to vent his anger.

“George,” she was saying, “when a couple starts producing evidence of the malfunctions of one side or the other, they’ve put themselves on trial, but we’ve done something better. We’ve put ourselves into a kind of trial first. We’re exchanging information, experience, getting to know, filtering in stuff from the past. I’ve got all that primordial WASP junk, you’ve got all the Neanderthal Armenian ready-to-be-massacred-unless-you-fight-back-first junk. We’re exchanging junk now so that if we end up living together more than a year, we won’t get sandbagged the way my friends did who got married five or six years ago, innocent about everything except sex and money. You know what I’m afraid of, George?”

“Not sex.”

“Not money either. I’m scared of palpitations because I can’t control them. Love sure fuzzes up a clear picture, which is why, I suppose, the palpitations vanish after a time so you can get used to seeing the other person without the damned glow.”

“Finished?”

“Those are my views, and I’m not ready to be cross-examined on them. Before you respond, maybe you should spend three days thinking about it the way I have.”

“Why did you set me up tonight?”

Francine got up slowly. “You’d rather fight than fuck, wouldn’t you?” she said, striding across the room.

Thomassy wanted to shout
Sit down!
loud enough to shatter glass, letting the irrational roar like a rocket taking off. He wanted to yell
The most important thing you want from a friend is not to betray you.

He cut the switch. The WASPS thrived everywhere on
control.

She’d gone into the bathroom, slamming the door.
You see,
he wanted to tell the invisible jury,
they go bananas just like Armenians and Italians and Jews.

The fire glared back at him. Was the courtroom the place he hid from his own life?

Did she think she could set him up with impunity because he loved her? Did Porter pretend to admire Martin Fuller in order to betray him? Or did he really love Fuller and betray him anyway? Thomassy, he told himself, you’re thinking sick. The only thing you’re supposed to be thinking about is that they can’t prove their case. Photographs don’t make a case. You’ve had photos submitted in other cases and made fuzzy pretzels out of them for the jury. And Roberts doesn’t have the photos, the Feds do, and they’re ready to deal.

He sipped the wine. He put a pine wood log on the fire because he wanted to hear the sizzle. When the wine in his glass was gone, he finished Francine’s.

Why did you set me up tonight?
was a lawyer’s question, an accusation. If he learned to be civil to her, would it hurt his courtroom style? That is sick thinking, Thomassy. Like screaming at somebody. Had the Widmers learned that it was inappropriate or merely useless?

He stretched his left foot toward the fire, the foot that worked the clutch when he’d had a gearshift car. You needed to be able to disengage the clutch that left you vulnerable to your own emotion. You can’t drive around life with automatic transmission.

He got up and in his stockinged feet went to the bathroom door and knocked on it.

“Please come out,” he said, thinking that in all the courtroom trials of twenty years he had never heard the word please.

*

When she came out Francine looked like she’d washed her face after crying. He took her hand and tried to lead her into the bedroom, but she said, “Sex doesn’t cure everything.”

And so he led her back into the living room. He stretched out in front of the fire. She insisted on sitting in a chair.

“Tell me your version of how I ended up at your father’s with the National Security Council instead of you.”

“Where’s my wine?”

“I drank it. I’ll get you another glass,” he said, starting to get up.

“Never mind. I’ll get it.”

When she came back, she sat down beside him on the floor. Be grateful for small improvements, he told himself.

“When I was twelve,” she said, “I once asked my mother if Daddy worked at two jobs. When she asked me to explain I said that he always seemed to be doing a little something for the government. I didn’t know exactly what it was. Neither did she. But we both knew that whatever it was—a few phone calls, an occasional trip to Washington on some pretext—gave him the same kind of kick other fathers got from golf. It was his thing. He didn’t parachute behind enemy lines, but on his scale of adventure, it was obviously rewarding. However busy he was, he always had time when Perry asked him to do a little something that mother and I weren’t supposed to know beans about. I remember how upset he was when Christopher Boyce escaped from jail. He doesn’t show upset easily.”

“Who is Christopher Boyce?”

“The kid from California who stole our satellite secrets from TRW and passed them, through a friend, to the Soviets in Mexico. Don’t you read the papers?”

He remembered the case vaguely. Then less vaguely as Francine filled him in.

Suddenly he said, “I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

“Because it reminds you of what kind of person you might be defending now?”

“Nobody has proved anything.”

“I love your absolute loyalty to your client. Who is your client loyal to?”

“You lied to me about tonight,” he shouted.

“I thought you were trying to learn not to shout.”

“You betrayed me. You set me up!”

“George, George, this was the first time my father included us in. He didn’t tell me what it was about, just that it would be of immense help in something important if I could get you to come to the house. I told him we were on hold, that it was a bad time, but he said it couldn’t wait, so mother cooperated by letting the cook off, fixing dinner herself, and going off to eat hers with a friend and I cooperated by inviting you to a party I wasn’t part of. Was it bad?”

Funny, he thought, how he felt the need for a lined yellow pad. In the courtroom he’d trained himself to jot down pointers for countermoves while listening.

“Why’d you come back?” he asked.

“I was coming here before this dinner thing. I said I wanted three days. I took three days.”

“Did you know,” he said, “that they showed me photographs of a scene in a UN lobby that included guess who?”

“Who?”

“You.”

Francine blanched involuntarily like any witness he’d ever surprised.

“Who photographed me?”

“They weren’t photographing you. They’ve been taking pictures of a man called Semyonov—that mean anything to you?”

“Of course.”

“And there was another one, Trushenko. That mean anything?”

Francine nodded. A flicker of memory.

“Why did you stop?” Thomassy asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone in that lobby was walking in one direction or other except Semyonov stopped and Trushenko stopped and then you stopped.”

“I saw someone come up to them and they reacted weirdly. Semyonov turned around and walked back fast in the direction he’d come from, Trushenko kept going. The young man who’d come up to them went after Trushenko, which is odd.”

“Why?”

“Because Semyonov’s the senior man. He left for Moscow the next day. My boss was surprised. He’d expected to have a sidebar with Semyonov later that week.”

“Did you recognize the young man who stopped them?”

“He didn’t stop them. Semyonov just turned and went back the way he’d come. The fellow went chasing after Trushenko.”

“You’re avoiding my question. Did you recognize him? Stop looking at your hands, look at me. Francine, please don’t lie to me. You’ve seen his picture in the papers. You’ve seen him standing next to me on television. You saw him in my office. If the DA subpoenas you to testify to where you saw Porter and the circumstances, what do I do, cross-examine to destroy your testimony or take myself off the case? You remember how I got this case, don’t you? You nudged me because your father nudged you because Perry didn’t want to see the Porter case explode because he was defended by some schmuck!”

He was letting the anger mount again. Sit on it, he told himself, hang it on the wall so you can look at it instead of just feeling it.

She said, “I can see why you would be upset.”

She stretched out on the carpet, face up, her hands behind her head. Would he ever leave himself so vulnerable to another person?

“I don’t want to get those photos as an exhibit in the record,” Thomassy said.
I don’t want you on exhibit. I don’t want you on the stand.
He took her hands. “Once you testify, or those photos get printed somewhere, some newsman will dig out the link between you and me. How we met.”
Your rape case.
“We avoided the papers when it happened. Now every goddamn camera in the world is focused on us.”

“Why did they show you those pictures?”

“It’s the line on which they can reel me in. They want me to dig some stuff out of Porter and pass it on to them.”

“Will you?”

“In violation of my lawyer-client confidentiality? Like hell I will. What I want to know is when you’ll finish filling me in—completely, everything—on Ludmilla Tarasova?”

Francine sipped at her wine. She said, “If I smoked, this is the time for me to light a cigarette.”

“What’s rattling you?”

“You, Dirty George. You want to get out of their dirty hands by making mine dirty. I’d feel like a thief ransacking government files for you to use against the government.”

“I wouldn’t be in this if it weren’t for you!”

“I didn’t push.”

“You don’t have to when it comes to me.”

“And now you’re telling me that to keep their dirt from rubbing off on me, all you want is for me to rub some dirt on myself. What the hell are you up to, George?”

“I’m planning to get my client acquitted.”

“How?”

“If I don’t tell you, you won’t be able to tell your father.”

“My father may never speak to me again if you blow this thing up.”

“Has he ever?”

“Ever what?”

“Spoken to you the way you do to me?”

“No.”

“I’m glad to hear that you have a different relationship to me than you do to him.”