The Touch of Treason (36 page)

“Oh many people have written about the KGB, sometimes unknowingly,” she smiled, “but in my second field very few, most notably the late Professor Martin Fuller.”

“Did you ever study with Professor Fuller?”

Eggshells.

“Yes. We worked together for many years.”

“Were you surprised to learn that he died suddenly under unusual circumstances?”

“Objection!” Roberts was adamant.

Judge Drewson called Roberts and Thomassy for a brief conference at the bench. When they were back in place, Thomassy said, “I withdraw the question.” He removed a sheaf of paper from the manila folder he picked up from the defense table. “Professor Tarasova, can you identify the contents of these pages?”

Roberts was on his feet again. “May I see those before they are shown to the witness?”

“Of course,” Thomassy said. “As soon as they are identified, I expect to have them entered into evidence as Defense Exhibit H.”

Roberts glanced at the top page, flipped through the rest. “In that case,” he said, handing them back.

Thomassy handed the papers to Tarasova. “Can you identify these?”

“Oh yes,” she said, “they are illegal photocopies of pages from one of my books.”

“If it please Your Honor,” Thomassy said, “I could enter a copy of the book. I thought entering just the relevant pages would make life easier for the duplication of exhibits if it becomes necessary. I don’t mean to get into matters of copyright law.”

Judge Drewson addressed the witness. “Professor Tarasova, I understand your feelings about having pages from your book copied without permission.”

“It’s all right,” she said.

“Then,” Thomassy said, “will you summarize what is on those pages?”

Roberts objected again. “Your Honor, the jury is perfectly capable of examining those pages and reaching its own summary conclusions as to their contents.”

The judge tapped his impatience. “I see nothing wrong with the author characterizing her own pages, if that will speed the process of this court. Overruled. Will the court reporter repeat the question for the witness.”

Tarasova didn’t need the repetition. She said, “This is a list of known executions within the continental United States from 1931 to the present.”

“Executions by whom?”

“By the KGB, of course, and its predecessor organizations.”

“Executions of?”

“Americans. And other nationals living here.”

In the press section, pens wrote rapidly. Judge Drewson asked to examine the pages.

In Thomassy’s peripheral vision he could see Roberts standing.
The son-of-a-bitch is ready to rip.

Judge Drewson handed the pages down to the clerk. “Admit Defendant’s Exhibit H for marking.”

“Your Honor,” Roberts said, his Adam’s apple bobbing, “I don’t see the relevance of the line of questioning unless defense counsel is implying that the defendant’s name will appear on that list in the next edition of Professor Tarasova’s book.”

You jerk,
Thomassy thought. He didn’t have to object. Judge Drewson, trying to restrain his reaction to Roberts’s outburst, summoned them both to the bench.

Before the judge could speak, Thomassy said, “I move for a mistrial, Your Honor.”

“I tried to head that off. Motion denied.” The judge turned his wrath toward Roberts. “I would appreciate it greatly, Mr. Roberts, if you would remember that I am here to judge relevance, and the implication in your remark was—”

He stopped in mid-sentence to see what the commotion was about. Thomassy and Roberts turned.

A stocky, blond-haired man of forty with tortoise-shell eyeglasses had entered the rear of the courtroom after it had been closed to further spectators because of the absence of seats. The court officer at the door attempted to stop the man, who brushed the guard’s hand away and moved across the rear of the room and down the right-hand aisle, the court officer hurrying after him. Everyone in the news section had by now also turned around to watch the source of the interruption.

The intruder attempted to move into the one row that had an empty seat.

“Your Honor,” the court officer said at the top of his voice, “I have reason to believe this gentleman has a concealed weapon on his person.”

The judge used his gavel to quiet the courtroom. He nodded to the court officer who’d administered the oaths, a signal to aid the other officer.

Quickly Thomassy strode back to the defense table, stood between Ed and the spectators.

Even at a distance Thomassy could see what had attracted the alert guard’s attention. The man seemed to have some bulk under his jacket in the vicinity of his left armpit. Suddenly Thomassy’s gaze caught an anomaly. Everyone in the courtroom was now watching the stocky man, who had managed to squeeze by other spectators and seat himself, the people next to him visibly pulling away from him. Yet Perry, unperturbed, was staring not at the man but at Thomassy. Just for an instant. And then, turning his attention in the same direction as everyone else’s.

The first officer had removed his weapon from his holster with his right hand, and with his left was gesturing vigorously to the interloper to come back out to the aisle. Thomassy thought
Some innocent people are going to get hurt.
Then he felt the tug on his jacket and looked down. Ed Porter, still seated, was trying to attract his attention, make him bend down. When he did, Ed, terrified, whispered, “Who is that man?”

“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.