The Touch of Treason (43 page)

It rained like a waterfall that afternoon. He is late, Ed thought. He even got solicited while waiting, this man no more than thirty with long blond hair and leather pants. Ed pitied the blond man, but shook his head till he went away. And then the subway cop, who’d been watching Ed, came over and told him, “No loitering.” Ed had never taken any shit from cops. He said to him, “It’s a free country,” and the cop said, “Not down here. Move on or take the next train.” Ed left by the nearest entrance and ran two blocks getting soaked in the rain, and down another entrance, hoping he hadn’t in the elapsed minutes missed Trushenko.

When eight o’clock came, he felt as if he were coming down with a terrible cold. Why had he waited for three hours? Trushenko would never come. They would not throw him a life preserver.

All I have left now, he thought, is Thomassy. Then the doorbell rang.
They have sent someone to kill me.

*

“Who is it?” Ed asked through the door.

“Open up,” replied Thomassy’s voice.

Ed took the chain lock off the door to let him in. Oh how beautiful his Armenian face suddenly seemed to him! He put out his hand. Thomassy looked at it, shook it perfunctorily. Doesn’t he shake hands with clients? Ed remembered Thomassy had never shaken hands with him.

Thomassy sat in the chair Ed usually sat in. Ed sat down opposite.

“Coffee?” Ed asked him.

Thomassy shook his head.

“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 given 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.