“I'm afraid I'll have to plead guilty, your honor. The more I talk to Mrs. DeLessandro, the more I like her.”I paused, just for an instant, and then added, “But I'm not sure I'm quite ready for marriage… .”
This time Thompson used his gavel.
“And because I like her,”I went on before he could say anything, “I probably do ask some questions that strictly speaking are not directly connected with her qualifications to sit as a juror.”Flashing my best imitation of a bashful smile, I promised to try to do better.
We looked at each other, Thompson and I, and I knew that he did not believe a thing I had said, and I also knew that it made no difference at all.
“Objection overruled,”he announced as he sank back into his chair like an old man eager to get back to his nap.
Haliburton was still standing, his arms straight down at his sides, clenching his fists so tight his nails bit into his flesh.
“But your honor!”he protested.
It was as if the chair had a catapult. One minute Thompson was barely visible behind the high wooden bench; the next minute he seemed to have shot right over the top of it like some crazy-looking pop-eyed jack-in-the-box.
“Overruled, Mr. Haliburton! Overruled! Don't you ever dare question a ruling of mine again!”
Haliburton stared hard at the shiny surface of the counsel table, clenching his teeth until his head began to vibrate.
“Yes, your honor,”he said in a barely audible voice, raising his eyes just far enough to see Thompson smirk.
Shaking his head as he drew away, Thompson turned to me. “You may continue, Mr. Antonelli.”
“Thank you, your honor,”I replied with a show of formality. “Now, Mrs. DeLessandro, about those children of yours.”
I did not hesitate to take what advantage I could from the way the judge felt about the district attorney and the way the district attorney felt about the judge. I could do whatever I wanted on voir dire, and Haliburton could do nothing about it. I asked more questions of the patient Mrs. DeLessandro than I had sometimes been permitted to ask of an entire panel; and when I could not think of anything new to ask, I asked her again some of the same questions I had asked her before.
Haliburton was no fool: He understood perfectly that I was far less interested in the answers I was given than I was in doing what I could to insinuate myself into a juror's confidence. When I was finally finished with Mrs. DeLessandro, he tried to do the same thing himself. He was still talking to her when the judge announced it was time for lunch. After the jury filed out, Thompson summoned us both to a conference at the side of the bench, where he admonished the district attorney to speed things up.
“I told you how much time I have to try the case. At the rate you're going, you won't have time to call your first witness. You both need to speed things up,”Thompson added, as if the last thing he wanted to do was leave the impression that there was anything the least bit personal in any of this.
“I'll try to do better, your honor,”I said as agreeably as I could, while Haliburton, glowering, gritted his teeth.
It was nearly a quarter past twelve by the time I finally got out of the courthouse. I was not meeting anyone for lunch and I was not particularly hungry. It was a gorgeous day, the kind that makes you wonder why you ever wanted to spend your life in the lamplight of dark rooms reading in the dismal, depressing science known as the law. The courthouse had emptied out onto the steps. Scattered all around, people were eating sandwiches and then closing their eyes as they raised up their faces to get a few minutes of the sun. I saw a place at the top of the steps, but then I remembered that there were reporters around. I did not want to talk to anyone, especially someone who was going to use what I said for a story. I decided to walk and without any destination in mind started down the steps.
A block away from the courthouse, I stopped at the same intersection where I had almost been hit by a car. This time I waited until I was sure the light turned green, looked both ways, and only then stepped off the curb.
“You learn caution quickly, Mr. Antonelli.”
It was Andrei Bogdonovitch again, right next to me. I felt his hand take my arm and before I knew what I was doing found myself trying to keep up as he led me through the intersection to the other side of the street. He glanced in one direction, then the other.
“I have to see you. We have to talk.”
He kept looking around, scanning the crowded sidewalk, as if he were afraid of someone he expected at any moment to see. I started to ask him what was wrong, but he grabbed my shoulder and stared at me with a strange, urgent intensity.
“There are some things you need to know. You may be in danger—very serious danger. I have to talk to you. Please,”he begged. “It's very important. Could you come to my shop at the end of the day—about six?”
His eyes began to dart all around again, searching for God knows what, as he reached inside his coat pocket for a card, which he then shoved into my hand. He looked at me one last time.
“About six, then,”he said. Without waiting for a reply, he let go of me and vanished around the corner.
If I had ever doubted that fear was contagious, I did not doubt it now. Bogdonovitch had disappeared, but whoever he had been so terribly afraid of seeing during our brief encounter on the street might have seen us. Gazing out over the swirling mass of pedestrians crowding the sidewalks in the noon-hour crush, I began to look all around, somehow certain I would recognize who I was looking for, though I had never seen them before and would not have known if I had.
I started to walk, and I kept walking, block after block, seeing over and over again the expression on the Russian's face, wondering what it meant and how it could have anything to do with me. I hardly knew anyone in San Francisco. I had not done anything. It was like being accused of a crime you have not committed: You know you didn't do it—or you think you know.
I walked long enough, and hard enough, finally to convince myself that I must have overreacted and that Bogdonovitch, who, after all, I did not know very well, had been overdramatic. I remembered the things he had said at dinner and the way in which he seemed quite willing to surprise, and even shock, Albert Craven's other guests. I also remembered that this was not the first time that instead of approaching me directly, he had followed me out of the courthouse and caught up with me in a crowd to tell me we had to talk. Even at dinner, when he seemed so eager to question everyone's assumptions and contradict some of their most cherished convictions, I had thought he was holding something back. After all the years he had spent not only as a citizen but as a political operative of the Soviet Union, perhaps it was only natural that he had become a deeply secretive and suspicious man.
I slowed my pace and began to relax, looking in the windows of the shops, no longer concerned about whether I might suddenly see someone's face reflected in the glass. When I checked my watch, I found I had just enough time to make it back to court.
Settled comfortably in my chair, I exchanged a few words with Jamaal and waited for the jury panel to be brought back into the room. As I began to get ready for the next round of voir dire, I was almost ready to laugh at the exaggerated importance I had attributed to the strange mannerisms of Andrei Bog-donovitch. Then I began to concentrate on trying to convince the next juror I was someone he could trust.
We moved faster that afternoon than we had in the morning, though not by much. Instead of only one prospective juror, we managed to question two. This was not nearly good enough for the progressively impatient Judge Thompson. He refused to waste any more warnings on two lawyers who seemed not to understand the plain meaning of the English language. Instead, at the end of the day, after he admonished the jury in the most friendly way imaginable not to discuss anything about the case, he told them that things always went faster on the second day and that he could promise them that jury selection would be finished no later than the end of the week. Without a glance at either Haliburton or me, he picked up the papers he had brought into court and left the bench.
It was a few minutes after five o'clock. I said good-bye to Jamaal and gathered up my things. I was outside on the courthouse steps when I remembered. I found the card inside my suit coat pocket and checked the address, wondering what it was that Andrei Bogdonovitch thought so important.
T
he address Andrei Bogdonovitch had given me was on Sutter Street, not far from Union Square and the St. Francis Hotel. I dropped my briefcase in my room and walked four blocks until I found it, a narrow storefront with the words IMPORT-EXPORT written in faded gold letters on the window. The sign in the door read CLOSED, and there were no lights on inside. I checked my watch to see if I was either a little early or a little late. It was exactly six o'clock, the time he had asked me to come. I was annoyed but also a little relieved. Whatever Bogdonovitch had wanted to talk to me about had apparently not been that urgent after all.
I turned to go, eager to get back to the hotel and get ready for a dinner date I had with Marissa Kane. I had not taken more than two steps when I heard the door open behind me and the remarkable voice of Andrei Bogdonovitch whisper my name. Half hidden in the shadows, he waved his hand, beckoning me to come in without delay. He shut the door quickly behind me and ushered me inside.
The shop had the stale smell of things that had never been moved from the place they had first been put. A long glass case held an assortment of cheap jewelry made from pounded copper and brass. Large Chinese vases were blanketed with dust. Oriental rugs, stacked on end, were tied with twisted hemp. A few undistinguished oil paintings hung high up on the wall, small white paper price tags attached with string to the bottom corners of wooden gilt frames. Everywhere you looked you had the feeling that nothing here ever sold and that some of these things had been here since they were first brought to San Francisco on the great high-masted sailing ships that once came from China and beyond.
In a pitch-dark alcove in the back, next to a door that presumably led to a storeroom—though why one would have been needed was itself a mystery—Bogdonovitch switched on a metal lamp atop a small wooden desk. Stacked neatly on the desk was a pile of what looked like order forms and invoices, and I assumed this tiny area must be his office. He nodded toward a chair on the side of the desk, waited until I sat down, and then took the one directly in front of it. Reaching inside a drawer, he pulled out a bottle of Russian vodka and two small glasses. Without asking me if I wanted one, he filled them both. He held his glass up, nodded toward me, and in one gulp tossed it down. I took a sip and put my glass on the corner of the desk.
“It should be kept on ice,”he said, apologizing.
I was not certain why I had come, and now that I was here, I was beginning to regret that I had. I tried to get right to the point.
“You said you wanted to see me. You said you thought I might be in some kind of danger.”
The light from the lamp fell in a small cylinder in the middle of the desk; everything above it, including Andrei Bog-donovitch, was bathed in darkness. Gradually, my eyes adjusted and I was struck again by the curious shape of his face and the strange way in which his eyes, covered with those heavy lids, seemed both to pull you in and to drive you away. He was, I thought, someone capable of both the most generous acts of friendship and the cruelest imaginable forms of brutality.
“We're both in danger, Mr. Antonelli. Since the night we had dinner together at Albert Craven's, the night I suggested to you that the murder of Jeremy Fullerton might not have been an act of random violence, people have been following me. I'm quite certain they're listening in on my telephone calls.”
I took a deep breath and slowly let it out. For the first time I felt somewhat at ease. I understood everything: why he had followed me from the courthouse—not once but twice; why he had caught up with me, exchanged a few surreptitious words insisting on the urgency of something he had to say, and then vanished into the safety of the anonymous crowd. Despite his formidable appearance, Andrei Bogdonovitch was an old man, haunted by demons of his own invention, running away from a past he could not change, a past that no one else cared about or, for that matter, even remembered. The closer I looked at him, the more certain I became: He was an old man, losing the capacity to distinguish between his own identity and the lives of the people around him. He claimed I was in danger, but everyone was following him.
Bogdonovitch's large head jerked forward. He began to laugh, a deep, hammerlike laugh that reverberated all around the darkened walls.
“No, Mr. Antonelli, I'm not suffering the paranoid delusions of a lonely old man!”
The sheer strength of his outburst took me aback. “No,”I protested, “I didn't mean to suggest anything of the sort.”
“It isn't what you're suggesting,”he said without the slightest trace of resentment. “It's what you're thinking. And why shouldn't you think it? It's a perfectly normal reaction.”An ambiguous smile crossed over his mouth, and then, almost as an aside, he added, “Though I have to confess, I have myself seldom had the luxury of viewing things from the perspective of normal people.”
The thought seemed to intrigue him. The smile lingered a moment longer. Then he blinked his eyes and nodded sharply.
“No, Mr. Antonelli, I know for a certainty that I'm being watched, and I have no doubt that this means danger for you.”
He poured another shot of vodka into his glass and invited me to join him. Unlike the first time, when he downed it all at once, he drank just a little, not much more than I did.
“You see, Mr. Antonelli,”he said, staring at the glass, “I believe I know why Jeremy Fullerton was murdered.”
Had I been invited here to sit in this dismal dark back-store corner to listen to yet another discourse on the distinction between history and chance?
“I remember you said you thought it unlikely that a United States senator would have been killed in a random act of violence.”