Necessity Read online

  I could not count the Saturdays I had heard this same lament. This time, instead of a vague promise to consider his vague offer, I accepted on the spot.

  “It’s a great idea. I’m ready for a change. You have a deal. Give me a week or two after the trial to get everything in order. It will give me something to look forward to.”

  Albert took a deep breath and sprang forward.

  “Would you really? I had no idea… Well, let me think about it. It could be complicated. A lot of old business to unravel. But what the hell, why not?”

  I wondered if he really would, whether he could separate himself from what for more than half his long existence had defined who and what he was. There was an immediate appeal, of course, the unexpected chance to start over, to go back to a young man’s dream, build from scratch a second, better practice, one in which he would not have to be ready at a moment’s notice to sooth the ego of some old client who had, as so many of them now seemed to have, a thousand complaints and a thousand excuses.

  “You came in here for a reason,” I reminded him as he gazed past me, imagining what a change like that might mean.

  “Yes,” he replied, a little embarrassed that he had let his attention wander. “The trial. Everyone is talking about it; it’s about all they talk about. But that isn’t what I wanted to tell you. Well, yes, it is. But something quite specific: what you did on cross-examination, what you did with Jenny Ann Carruthers when she quoted that line from Fitzgerald’s Senate speech, that there was no choice but to get rid of Bridges. What everyone is marveling over is how you could that very instant quote back to her the very next line, the one that destroyed her interpretation of what he had said. I know you never stop working, that there is no end to your preparation, but how in the world did you ever do that, remember a line from a speech no one now remembers?”

  “It was easy,” I said, passing it off with a shrug. “I just made it up.”

  He jolted forward, slammed his hand on my desk and laughed so hard I thought he might cry.

  “You did what?” he sputtered. “Made it up?”

  “Sure, why not? I didn’t lie. I didn’t know what he said, but when I heard the line she was quoting, I knew he had to have said something like what I quoted back. It only made sense. What was he going to say after a sentence that, taken by itself, could seem so sinister? That the president needs to die, that someone needs to kill him? He had to give it a reasonable definition. And if he didn’t do it in the very next sentence, he would have had to have provided some clarification sometime soon after that. And what was I going to do? Ask that smug, self-satisfied and, unless I miss my guess, utterly remorseless Jenny Ann Carruthers to tell the jury what else Fitzgerald might have said? There is a rule which, unlike most rules of what you should and should not do in court, actually sometimes makes sense: when in doubt, be decisive. I was not taking much of a chance. She isn’t someone who spends any time looking at anything except what seems to her immediate advantage—none of them are, the people who worked for Bridges that I’ve seen so far. She had one line in a speech. She probably got it from someone else. She never would have thought to read the speech, the whole speech, herself. They live in their own talking points world. One thing I’m sure of: there isn’t one of them that will bother to check to see whether I quoted Fitzgerald accurately.”

  “You’ve put me in another impossible situation, Antonelli.” The laughter had faded away, moved from his voice to his eyes. He had the excited look of a secret he would have given anything to share. “I’ll have to keep listening to everyone talking about your meticulous, painstaking preparation, how you committed to memory everything Kevin Fitzgerald ever said, how you were just waiting to destroy the prosecution’s witness with a single line that no one else remembered. By the time they quit talking about it, everyone will think you know everything everyone has ever said. And all I can do is smile and never tell them all you did was guess!”

  “I have a better idea,” I said, speaking out loud the thought that had just flown through my head. “Tell them the truth. They won’t believe it, and they’ll be more convinced than they were before that I know a hell of a lot more than I really do. The truth,” I went on, with a bitterness I did not try to conceal, “is that I wish I had followed my own first judgment and never gone near this case.”

  “Why? You’ve done extremely well, better than any other lawyer could have done.”

  We had known each other too long for false modesty, or false confidence. There was no one else, no one at all, with whom I could have a conversation in which nothing was held back. There was nothing I could tell him that would make him change his mind about me, nothing that would lead him to seriously question anything I had done, nothing that would make him question anything, except how, if I were in some difficulty, he might help. Albert Craven was the only real friend I had.

  “The question isn’t whether I can win this case, whether I can persuade this jury that what Fitzgerald did does not amount to murder. If you could tell me right now that Fitzgerald was going to be acquitted, walk out of that courtroom a free man, able to resume his own political career, I couldn’t tell you that would necessarily be a good thing. It isn’t clear to me that we wouldn’t be better off—that the country wouldn’t be better off—if Fitzgerald were found guilty and sentenced to die. That would put an end to it, wouldn’t it?” I asked, wondering how much I believed of what I was saying.

  “By better off I assume you mean because it would stop people thinking it was ever okay to kill a president, whatever he might have done?”

  Sitting sideways to my desk, I stared out the window at the cloudless autumn day, and in the distance, down through the narrow street, the gray water of the bay.

  “If Fitzgerald were to be acquitted, it will only be because he has convinced everyone that what he did saved the country. And maybe most people will believe him, but there will be a lot of them who won’t. Fitzgerald will run for president. He’s already planning his campaign. Forget what that election will look like, forget what Jenny Ann Carruthers and everyone else backing Spencer will be saying—that the choice is between a murderer and the man who kept the country together after the assassination—imagine what it will be like if Fitzgerald wins, if he becomes president. Everyone who compares the death of Bridges to the death of Julius Caesar—how long before they start comparing the administration of Kevin Fitzgerald to Richard III?”

  “And if he isn’t acquitted?”

  “Maybe something even worse.” For a moment, I thought hard, trying to put a shape on what I had not yet been able to draw into focus. “Fitzgerald did them a favor. They admitted it. What was the situation, what did Carruthers say under oath? That Fitzgerald was their biggest problem. They thought he was almost certain to be the opponent they would face in the next election. He was winning by huge margins in the polls. Yes, it was early; yes, a lot could still happen. But, though I did not press the point with her, the only things likely to happen were things that would hurt their chances: more investigations than anyone could count, a legislative program that was never going to get off the ground. Bridges was not going to win re-election, but now Bridges is dead, and the candidate they feared the most is on trial for murder and is almost certain to lose, which means that everything Fitzgerald thought he had to stop goes forward, and anyone who so much as dares to challenge what they are doing will be accused of approving murder.”

  Craven listened intently. He did not disagree with anything I said, but, as he explained, it really did not matter that the consequences of the verdict, whatever that verdict was, might be tragic.

  “In a way, it makes everything easier. All you have to do is make sure the truth comes out. It is the only way something like this never happens again: if we understand what it was that made Kevin Fitzgerald think he had to do what he did.”

  I swung around and rested my elbows on the desk. Picking up a pencil, I held it at each end, twisting it slowly in one direction and the
n back again, watching the changing light on the smooth yellow surface, the way the six sides moved in and out of the shadows, like a trial in which you could never see everything all at once.

  “It all comes down to that, what Fitzgerald thought,” I remarked as the pencil kept turning in my hands. “What Fitzgerald thought he knew.”

  Dropping the pencil on the desk, I watched it roll away. With a rueful look, I let Craven know that Kevin Fitzgerald was like no client I had ever had.

  “I told his wife that first time you sent her in to see me that there could not be any secrets, that I had to know everything about both of them. I told her, and later I told him, that I would decide what was relevant and what was not, that there was nothing private anymore, nothing they could conceal.”

  “And?”

  “Let’s just say that he doesn’t always tell the truth. But the real problem is that he doesn’t lie. He’s evasive. I have to put him on the stand. It’s the only defense he has: what he knew, what he had learned, the reason why he had to do what he did. It is all about this Russian business, but it’s more than that. He has told me that much, but nothing more. Vague hints that Bridges was about to do something that would have changed everything, something that, once it was done, if he got away with it, could never be set right. That’s as far as he would go. It will all come out at trial, when he testifies under oath.”

  “But why won’t he tell you? You’re his lawyer. What is he worried about?”

  “I think he’s worried about what might happen to me. He told me it was better if I didn’t know; that way I wouldn’t have to lie if someone asked me. He’s too smart to think I would tell someone just because they asked. He thinks I might be in danger, that there are people out there who are worried about what he might know, what he might be getting ready to tell the world.”

  “There have been some threats,” he reminded me. “There have been letters.”

  I dismissed them for what they were: hollow threats from hollow people, not worth the trouble to report. Craven, because he had never practiced criminal law, thought they were too serious not to report and had turned them over to the police.

  “I’m in an unusual situation, Albert. Fitzgerald isn’t going to tell me what he is going to say before I call him to the witness stand. And I won’t—I can’t—tell him that I may know more than he does about what Bridges and his people were planning.”

  “Jean-Francois,” said Craven, not a bit surprised.

  “Without whom I would know almost nothing, and with whom,” I added with a wistful grin, “I cannot prove anything I know.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much. One thing I can tell you about my old friend Reynaud is that he is one of the most resourceful men I have known. If there is a way to get something done, Jean-Francois will find it.”

  Craven’s eyes grew bright. There was a glint of recognition, the sudden grasp of a new idea, a connection he had not drawn before.

  “It’s interesting, isn’t it, how little relation there is between someone’s intelligence and what happens to them in life? You don’t notice this so much at the beginning, or even through most of your career, but now, looking back, it is really quite astonishing. Jean-Francois—he should have been the French ambassador, even the French president, but he spends all these years in a consulate. True, it’s in San Francisco, and far from complaining about it, he has always acted as if there was no place, other than Paris, he would rather be. But I’ve met the French ambassador, here, at a reception a few years ago, and in terms of sheer intelligence and both breadth and depth of learning, there was no comparison, and perhaps that is the reason: his superiors understood that the comparison would never favor them. Then, at the other end of things, the sheer ignorance of Walter Bridges. You never met him, did you? I did, some years ago, here, in San Francisco. He was trying to negotiate with one of my clients the construction of a high-rise apartment building.

  “It was probably twenty years ago, but watching him later on television, he didn’t seem to have changed as he got older. He was polite, well-mannered, did not argue over anything. But you knew right away that he already knew exactly how things would turn out, that he would agree to so much and no more, and that if he could not get what he wanted, that was fine with him. There were always other buildings, other places. He wanted you to feel he was doing you a favor even to consider doing business with you. Part of it, of course, was the whole New York attitude: San Francisco is a nice little place to visit, but it isn’t where the action is.

  “Everyone got into the habit of talking about him, when he was in the White House, as a narcissist, as if that could not be said about half the people in America, and good deal more than half of everyone with money. He was simply narrow minded, like a lot of people who think that anything beyond their own range of interest not only isn’t important, but—and this is the point—that no one else really thinks anything else is either. This world, your world, my world, is the only world there is, and because, for the last forty years or so, we talk about the rich almost as much as they talk about themselves, if you have made money, a lot of money, that can only mean that you have more intelligence, and more talent, than anyone else around. What difference does it make whether you head a company or the country? You’re in charge: everyone has to do what you want.

  “What no one wants to believe is that people like Bridges—and God knows I’ve represented a lot of them—really think that making money proves how smart they are. They have sold the country on that idea. Everyone wants to get rich. And they believed Walter Bridges when he told them all they had to do was listen to him. He did not give political speeches before he became a candidate; he didn’t, like Ronald Reagan, go around the country talking about the country’s problems and what should be done about them. He made a fortune as a motivational speaker. He would teach you, for a price, how to be great. And then he tells you, after you have paid, that deep down you were great already. And after hearing what you have always wanted to hear, you feel good about yourself, and only later notice that, great or not, you are now in debt.”

  Craven got up from the chair and walked over to the window behind my desk. It was Saturday morning. He had a luncheon appointment, but even if he had not he would have been dressed in a suit and tie. He could not help himself. He still remembered when all the men wore coats and ties and women wore hats and gloves, when San Francisco demanded, and deserved, at least that much respect.

  “The city has gone to hell, Antonelli; nothing is as good as it used to be. Everything has changed, and yet, damn it, if anything, I love it even more. It’s like falling in love with a woman, a woman who falls in love with you, and then, without your ever quite knowing why, she isn’t in love with you anymore. It breaks your heart, but it has the curious effect of making you remember what you were in danger of forgetting, why you had fallen in love with her in the first place. You can’t make her fall in love with you again, but you don’t want to lose her.”

  He had been looking out at the skyline of the city, remembering when the clocktower on the Ferry Building could be seen from every hill in town. I thought that was what he must be thinking, but he was not thinking that at all. With his hands shoved down in his pants pockets, he turned his head just far enough that I could see the look in his eyes, the look that managed to mix a kind of grudging admiration with a warning.

  “It’s a feeling a little like what Evan Winslow must be feeling now, a feeling he has no doubt felt before when his wife was going to leave him for Kevin Fitzgerald, but perhaps not with quite the same intensity as now, when she is in process of filing for divorce.”

  I met his gaze, and waited.

  “There is no point telling you,” he continued, peering down at the floor as he kicked at the carpet, “that I’m worried about you.” A smile full of mischief flickered on his lips. “I’d be lying, and it wouldn’t change anything you’re going to do. Tangerine Winslow…I wonder where she got that name. It fits, though. But that
other rumor going around, that’s a rumor I’d never believe: that she’s getting a divorce so she can marry Joseph Antonelli, the famous lawyer. The day you get married, Antonelli, is the day I remain divorced!”

  I started to say something, though I wasn’t sure what, but he cut me off. He was having too much fun to stop. Clasping his hands behind his back, he wandered around the room.

  “It’s part of your charm, the reason women are always so intrigued: someone who isn’t married and isn’t even gay. They’re intrigued, the way you seem so detached, giving everyone the impression that you must be living the kind of life they wish they had.”

  Finished with his brief tour of my office, he took his chair. There was a more serious expression on his face.

  “I told you she was probably the most beautiful woman I had ever laid eyes on, and I also told you she might be the most dangerous. I was right, wasn’t I? Look what she has done to you, made you join the race of mortals. And I remember the story I told you, about that woman in ancient times…”

  “I haven’t promised to kill myself, Albert, but…”

  He caught my meaning, and let it go.

  “I still can’t believe it, but good for you! I have a hunch you’ll do better at marriage than I ever have. Just be careful. I have a hard time believing that Evan Winslow will just let her go. He’s never cared what she did, as long as she did not leave him. I’m serious, be careful. I’m not sure there is anything he wouldn’t do when he realizes that she means it, that the divorce is real.”

  “How did you hear that she was filing for divorce? Who told you?”

  “Her lawyer, the one she went to. He’s an old friend.”

  Everyone was his old friend.

  “And he’s the one who told you it was because she was going to marry me?”

  “Yes, and if you’re worried about anyone else finding out, he’s the only one who knows. I certainly won’t tell anyone. I’ll keep your secret as long as you want.”