Necessity Read online

  “He was, under the current medical definition, obese, correct?” I asked, as if this was only to establish the necessary biological background.

  “Yes, somewhat, I would say.”

  “A heavy man, not easy to push around; someone, for example, that a normal-size person could not simply lift out of his chair and throw across his desk.”

  I could sense a slight unease, the glimmer of a doubt, of suspicion, as St. John began to wonder what I could possibly be after. The line of inquiry did not, on the surface, make any sense. What St. John did not know was that I agreed: I did not know what I was after, only that I had to keep searching, asking questions that would bring out every fact I could, and hope that at some point something would happen that might give meaning to what would otherwise have no significance at all.

  “So what we know for sure is that, whatever happened inside the president’s cabin, the defendant—look at him, he isn’t big enough, is he?—didn’t attack the president and throw him on the ground. That seems a safe assumption, doesn’t it, Dr. Rudner?”

  I looked at the jury and let them wonder what it might mean. I had no more questions and Dr. Rudner was excused. Reminding the jury that they were not to discuss the case with anyone, Judge Patterson adjourned the trial until tomorrow.

  Something had been bothering me since the testimony of the day before: those ten minutes that Bridges had insisted were the absolute limit on the time he would spend meeting with Fitzgerald alone. Had they talked for a while, had that talk become an argument, had the argument turned violent? Where had Fitzgerald gotten the knife, and why had he brought it with him if he had no reason to think he might be invited on board to meet the president alone? Fitzgerald dismissed it all with considerable impatience.

  “Why are you so damn concerned with things like that? This isn’t a murder trial where you try to prove I didn’t do it. This is the trial—I keep telling you this—where you let me show everyone that I did what I had to do, that stopping Bridges was no more murder than killing someone on the battlefield.”

  The analogy disturbed me, not because of the comparison it drew, but because he had not seen the fatal flaw.

  “You don’t kill someone on the battlefield after you have taken him prisoner.”

  He laughed at my strange innocence. The guards who stood talking to each other the other side of the empty courtroom looked over for a moment, decided everything was all right and went back to their own conversation.

  “Prisoner? It was the other way round. I know what some people are saying: that if he was as guilty as I said he was, if he had committed crimes against the nation, I didn’t need to kill him. There was impeachment, there was the twenty-fifth amendment.” He laughed again, but quietly and with a bitter edge. “The last person in the world who would have invoked the twenty-fifth was the vice-president, and he’s the one who has to start it. Impeachment was impossible. Even if there had been enough support in the House and Senate, there wasn’t time. That’s what no one seems to understand—yet. Because I’m going to tell them, I’m going to make them understand what they were planning, what was going to happen next. There wasn’t time.” And then he said something so ominous I shuddered. “It may already be too late.”

  I MET JEAN-FRANCOIS Reynaud in the same dark bar and grille where, weeks earlier, we had lunch. This time we met for dinner. It was not a very popular place at night. The daytime clientele, the businessmen and women with offices in the newer high-rise buildings, who crowded the bar for an hour or so after work, had long since left. The place was all but deserted.

  “I’ve been there, in court, almost every day,” remarked Reynaud, blowing gently on a bowl of soup. “It’s an interesting thing, an American trial. Are you winning?”

  I broke off a piece of French bread and took a bite. I had not noticed him in court, but then, I had not noticed anyone. The crowd was background, nothing more. I could have looked at my best friend, if I had one, and not known who he was.

  “Winning? At this point, I’m not sure I could even tell what that means. But if you’ve been there, you can probably answer that question better than I could.”

  Nodding, Reynaud raised another spoonful to his mouth. There was a sly look in his eyes, as if he were enjoying a secret of his own.

  “You’re better, much better, than anything I expected. I know your reputation, I know what Albert told me, but until I saw myself what you do, the way you ask questions…it isn’t what you ask, but how you do it. I watched the witnesses. It was fascinating. Three questions into it and you have them thinking that the answers they gave are exactly—and I mean this—word for word what you knew already they would say. I could almost imagine that they start to wonder whether, somehow, you had written the answers yourself and they were, without knowing how it happened, simply reading what you wrote. You should have gone into politics.”

  I was not sure that I had anything like that kind of effect, much less that kind of control, with the witnesses I cross-examined. In any event, it did not matter. There was only one way to win, and the odds against it seemed immense. Reynaud knew what I was thinking, what I wanted and had to have.

  “I’m not sure I can do what you ask,” he said, setting down the spoon.

  He wiped his mouth with a white linen napkin, crumpled it up and then, thinking better of what he had done, folded it neatly and placed it on the table next to his plate. He studied it a moment, decided it was not quite right and pushed it first one way, then the other, watching with a slight, world-weary smile the inching movement toward a perfect alignment. Pressing his lips together, he nodded his head in a measured beat, keeping time to the two-sided argument going on inside. He stopped and looked across the table.

  “It’s the only chance I have,” I reminded him. “What you gave me, what I read, it’s devastating, proof beyond anything anyone here has ever thought about what Bridges, what his people, were doing with the Russians. But without the documents themselves, and without someone to testify that they are authentic, there isn’t much I can do.”

  Reynaud’s nostrils flared open as if he were sniffing the air to discover the source of some strange scent. He darted a glance, first in one direction, then another, searching, as it seemed, for the best way to explain his dilemma.

  “I asked for approval before I gave you that briefcase full of documents assembled by French intelligence, and I was given that approval, but with the understanding that that approval had never been given. Not only that, never requested.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.” Then I thought I did. “It was all right to do what you did, but only so long as no one ever discovered what you had done.”

  “Yes, precisely; which was the reason I was in such a hurry to have them back. If you need to go through them again, I could arrange that. It might have to be at my office in the consulate. But as to whether you can have any of them for use in court, whether anyone would testify how they were obtained…that would have to be decided at the highest level.”

  “Why? If you think it important—if the French government thinks it is important—that the whole truth of what happened come out, if you believe what you said that first time we met, that night at Albert’s house, that everything had to be brought out into ‘the clear light of day,’ and what you told me later, when we were here before, sitting in this same restaurant, that the importance of what happened was not the murder, but what happened before, what made the death of the president all but inevitable. No one will ever know that unless I can bring it all out in court.”

  “I agree. Perhaps there is a chance. But you must understand the difficult position the government is in.”

  He glanced around the nearly empty restaurant, the habitual reaction of someone trained to the belief that he is never safe from surveillance and has to watch every word.

  “You read the transcripts of what was said, meetings between several different members of Bridges’s inner circle and certain well-placed people connected wi
th Russian bankers and other men of business. What you don’t know—and I can give you this—are where those conversations took place.”

  Reynaud sat back against the corner of the booth and folded his arms across his chest. A smile of grudging admiration cut sideways across his face.

  “If you walk the streets of London, there are cameras everywhere; if you sleep in a Moscow hotel, everything you say or do in bed is recorded. If you use a computer anywhere in the world, the Americans are aware of what you are doing. We are not so indiscriminate in France. We have at least that much respect left for the private rights of individuals. But if you happen to be a Russian oligarch meeting an American public figure in a Paris restaurant, or a Paris hotel, we think it only prudent to learn what we can about any potential threat to what we in the West think important to preserve. So, to be more precise, when the president’s son-in-law decides to have dinner with Oleg Kryshenko, the head of one of the biggest Russian banks and one of Vladimir Putin’s closest friends, we, so to speak, invited ourselves along. And are very glad we did. Nor was that the only dinner between someone close to Bridges and a Russian we surreptitiously attended. Fitzgerald was right, more right, I think, than he knew. But no one knows—not the Russians, not the Americans—what we have. They don’t know, and we don’t want them to know, that they are always under surveillance when they visit France. If you use this, I must rely on your discretion not to reveal your source.”

  “If I don’t have the documents, the transcripts of those meetings, I may not be able to make any use of them at all.”

  Reynaud gave me a knowing look.

  “I have a feeling you will be able to find a way.”

  “But if I can’t, if it’s the only way to bring out the truth, the whole truth, about what was going on, what made it… What did you mean, a moment ago, when you said that Fitzgerald was more right than he knew?” I asked, suddenly grasping the potential importance of that seemingly chance remark.

  Reynaud tapped two fingers on the table as his gaze drew inward. The look on his face was as serious as I had seen.

  “I can’t tell you that. Not yet, anyway.” He reached across and for a moment held my wrist, and with a penetrating gaze tried to assure me that it was not because he did not trust me. “I may know in a few days. It is a question of current debate.” He let go of my wrist. “There is another conversation, one that involves someone else in Bridges’s inner circle. All I can tell you for the present is that it took place just a week before the assassination and that it involves what you might call double treason.”

  “Double treason? If it happened just a week before the murder, is that what you meant when you said Fitzgerald was more right than he knew, because he did not know about what was said in that conversation?”

  Twisting his head to the side, Reynaud studied me as if I had not understood a thing.

  “Fitzgerald did not know anything about what we know. You’re the only one outside French intelligence who has seen any of this. Fitzgerald had his own sources in American intelligence. We stopped sharing with the Americans almost two years ago, when we learned what they were doing, or beginning to do: the destruction of the Western alliance, this new notions of theirs that diplomacy, like business, was a series of deals, each one independent of the others, with no other consequence except the terms of each arrangement. These people have no understanding of history, their own or anyone else’s. They cling to this belief of theirs that flies in the face of all the evidence, that there are no permanent interests, no permanent values, that the only serious obligation is to take advantage of the next opportunity, whenever that might arise; this belief that there are no limitations, that history starts with them, that history is whatever they want it to be; this childlike delusion that you can have whatever you want simply because you want it.”

  Reynaud gave me a long, searching look. He sat back and shook his head.

  “Kennedy read Gibbon, read Churchill, read a lot of great things, and he wrote some interesting things of his own about former courageous members of the Senate who had risked and even lost their careers over a principle. If Walter Bridges ever read a serious, much less a great book, in his life, he never mentioned it. And what he wrote, or had others write in his name, isn’t worth the paper it took to print it. He knew nothing about the past, and like too many other people now lived only in the present moment. What was the nature of his appeal? It wasn’t because, like Kennedy, he could give a speech. It was his insistence that every problem would disappear because everyone else in politics was stupid and he was smart. He was going to make sure everyone had a job, everyone had healthcare they could afford, the country would have the best roads and bridges and the best transportation system the world had ever seen. The country would be safe from terrorism, there would be peace in the Middle East, peace all around the world, and all if paid of by reducing taxes and getting rid of regulation. And if it didn’t all work out the way he promised, it only proved that he was smart and everyone in Congress and in the courts were stupid, just as he had always said. Remarkable, that anyone could have thought him competent to hold any public office, much less the presidency of the Untied States. If Kennedy were alive, if he was still a young man in his forties, he might be tempted to write a sequel to Gibbon and call it The Decline and Fall of the American Empire.

  “That really is the point I am trying to make, what I think you need to understand. Remember our last conversation, what we talked about, what happened after Caesar’s death, what could have happened but did not. Instead of a return to a republic, the Romans concentrated even more power in the hands of a single man, an emperor who, whatever lip service he paid the Senate, controlled everything, even people’s private lives if they were prominent enough. Don’t misunderstand: there is no comparison between Julius Caesar and Walter Bridges. Caesar was a military and political genius who understood that Rome had changed and that the Senate had become a feeble-minded debating society without the will to concentrate on any more great endeavors, interested, most of them, only in keeping and enlarging what they owned. Bridges thought the only great thing in the world was himself. The only thing they have in common is the manner of their deaths. Although,” he said, growing hesitant, “even that isn’t quite so clear.” He shot me a quizzical glance. “It was not done in a public place in front of witnesses, and Fitzgerald, so far as we know, acted alone.

  “But, listen, listen,” he said, holding up his finger and waving it back and forth, impatient with himself. “I was wrong. There is another comparison. Or there might be. After Caesar’s death, the speech by Marc Antony: ‘I come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him.’ The speech in which he so deftly pours scorn on what Brutus, who had explained what he, with others, had done, by saying that it was not that he ‘loved Caesar less, than did other men,’ but that he ‘loved Rome more.’ The vice-president, now president, the speech he gave at the funeral, insisting that those who hated Bridges hated him because he loved America more, that it now fell to those still living to carry on the great unfinished work. This is what you need to understand. This trial, what happens here, is the hinge on which everything will turn, the door that either opens or stays closed, whether your country thinks Walter Bridges a victim, a martyr to a cause, a cause which will now be given far more power than it had before, or a traitor, a would-be tyrant that Kevin Fitzgerald stopped, the only one who knew how to stop the country from becoming a place where the old, established institutions that kept your democracy alive becomes nothing more than hollow shells, government become a private business.”

  We talked all the way through dinner, or rather Reynaud talked and I listened. It was a seminar in modern and ancient history, a series of brilliant analyses that exposed the fault lines of our existence, the unexamined but questionable assumptions on which we led our thoughtless, careless lives. It was only after the dishes had been cleared away and we were sitting over coffee that Reynaud asked a question that made me, for a moment, stare at him
in speechless wonder.

  “So, tell me,” he asked with a rare sparkle in his eyes, “how are you enjoying your affair with the ravishing Mrs. Evan Winslow?”

  With anyone else, even Albert Craven, I might have lied. But I could not lie to Jean-Francois Reynaud; he was much too French to have believed it. I took refuge in understatement.

  “It’s a pleasant way to spend a few innocent hours.”

  Reynaud’s thick eyebrows shot straight up. His head flew backward.

  “Innocent! I should think her rather more inspiring than that!”

  “What made you suspect I was having an affair with her?”

  He shrugged off even the possibility of a doubt.

  “I saw the look on her face that night at dinner when you walked into the room.”

  I had been too taken, too overwhelmed by her stunning good looks to notice any reaction, much less any response to my own.

  “If you were French, you would have known immediately. Americans always think an affair is something to be hidden, disguised, kept private from the world. We think an affair the only reasonable result of an attraction between a man and a woman, and what difference if they are married to other people. After all,” he said as he generously paid the bill, “if it gets too involved, if some jealousy occurs, the one who is jealous can always shoot their rival and, in a French court at least, have the chance of an acquittal. But don’t worry, your secret is safe with me. If you have a jealous husband on your hands, it won’t be because of anything I have said to anyone. But really,” he asked with mild astonishment, “how could anyone doubt that a woman who looks like she does could ever stay faithful for long? It is against all the laws of nature.”

  Tangerine pretended to be hurt when, later that night, I told her what Reynaud had said. I had driven over to Sausalito and her house on the steep hillside that looked out across the water to the city. They had houses everywhere, but this one, she had made it clear to her husband, was her own private retreat, the place she could come to be alone. I parked at the top of the narrow drive and walked down the wooden steps to the door of the chocolate shingle-sided home, watching the lights of San Francisco dance in the starry night darkness above the steep shingled roof. She answered the door while I was still three steps from the bell.