Finally, the train I wanted pulled in. I dashed on board and then, certain that someone must be following me, watching me, waited until the doors began to close and at the very last moment jumped out. Ten minutes later, when the next one arrived, I wedged myself into the crush of standing passengers and, reaching between sweaty, tired hands, grabbed on to the overhead bar to keep from falling. The train rushed out of the station and into the black tunnel that passed under the city and under the bay. Swaying in tandem with the others, I peered through the tangle of lifted arms and drooping heads, wondering whether among all these strangers there was someone who meant me harm. As the train sped forward, the clicking cadence of the rolling iron wheels began to seem to my overheated imagination like the sound of my own heartbeat, the sound that when it stopped meant not only silence but death.
On the other side of the bay, the train shot out of the darkness and into the burnished bronze light of the evening sun. The train slowed down, and my heartbeat with it; the fear that had twisted every certainty into a doubt, and every doubt into a certainty, began to dissolve of itself, replaced with a growing sense of relief. I was safe; I had nothing to fear. At the next stop, I got off, walked underneath to the other side, and waited on the platform for the train back to San Francisco. When it arrived, nearly empty, I took a seat next to the window. On the seat next to the aisle, someone had left the front section of the afternoon paper. Halfway down, just below the fold, a picture of Jeremy Fullerton caught my eye. The lead line in the story announced that the Democratic candidate for governor, Ariella Goldman, the former “top assistant”to the murdered senator, had gradually narrowed the gap between herself and the incumbent, Augustus Marshall. They were now in a statistical dead heat.
As the train slid down into the tunnel under the bay, I wondered when someone first put together the plan that left only one man between Lawrence Goldman's daughter and the governor's office. Jeremy Fullerton's widow was certain that it had begun the moment the death of her husband first became known. After everything that had happened, I wondered if it might not have begun even earlier than that.
My arms folded across my chest, I slouched against the corner of the seat, watching my own reflection in the glass as the train raced through the enveloping darkness. Nothing made any sense, and I was ready to believe that it was because I was trying to find a meaning where there was not any. It was like the feeling I used to have when I found myself walking down some deserted street in the gray silence just before dawn, after drinking for days with people whose faces I could not remember and whose names I had never known. All the late-night enthusiasms and all the great, grandiose plans had died their deaths and turned to ashes, leaving behind nothing except a dim sense of embarrassment and a feeling of loneliness so vast that, once I fell down inside it, I knew I might never be able to pull myself out of it again.
I
dashed up the steps to the St. Francis and saw her waiting in the lobby.
“I'm sorry,”I began to apologize as she got up from a chair and began to walk toward me.
She had every right to be furious, but there was not a trace of annoyance in her eyes. She seemed much more worried about what might have happened to me.
“I waited at the restaurant for a while, but then, when you didn't come, I had this strange feeling that something might have happened,”she said as she came close to me and looked in my eyes, searching to see if something was wrong. “I don't know why, but when I heard what happened tonight to poor Andrei Bogdonovitch—”
“You heard … ? On the news? Do they know what happened?”I asked. “Was it an accident?”
Ignoring my questions, she took my hand. “Are you all right?”asked Marissa intently. “You don't look right. What's the matter? What happened?”
I let go of her hand and took her by the arm. “I'll tell you all about it,”I said as I guided her toward the entrance I had just come through. “Now tell me: Was it an accident, a gas line, something like that?”
She shook her head. “No, they think it was some kind of bomb. Someone did it deliberately.”
“And Bogdonovitch?”I asked, just to be sure.
At first she could not bring herself to say it. “They found his body,”she said finally. “Or what was left of it.”
We walked two blocks down the street to the restaurant where we had had dinner several times before. Beginning the day nearly four months ago when we had driven through the Napa Valley, we had gradually become in our middle-aged way very good friends. That was all, just friends. I was not looking for a new romance; and, so far as I knew, neither was she. I liked being with her, and I was glad that she seemed to like being with me. Marissa saw the absurdity in the things most people thought important; and, in what only seemed a paradox, understood there were some things so serious they had to be taken lightly.
As soon as we sat down I ordered a scotch and soda. I started to drink it straight down.
“What happened?”Marissa kept asking, growing more alarmed.
“I was there when it happened. I was with him, talking to him.”
Reaching across the table, she put her hand on my arm and held it there until I put down the glass.
“Who were you with? Who were you talking to?”
“I was with him—when it happened,”I said, wondering why she did not seem to understand.
“Slow down, Joseph. Just tell me. Where were you?”she asked in a calm, measured voice.
I realized that nothing I had been saying could possibly have made any sense; and I wondered how I could describe to her even a little of what I had seen and what I had felt.
“This afternoon, after I left the courthouse at lunch, Andrei Bogdonovitch showed up. He said he had to see me; he told me I was in danger. I didn't believe him—at least not after I thought about it for a while. But he said he had to see me, and he asked me to come by at the end of the day—six o'clock.”
Marissa's eyes grew larger. “That's where you were? That's who you were with—Andrei Bogdonovitch?”
“Yes. That's where I was: with him. I left—I was just at the corner—when it happened. It was awful. I could not believe it was happening, especially after what he had just finished telling me. That's what happened. That's why I thought I had to get away.”
Marissa tilted her head to the side, a look of doubt in her eyes. “Get away?”
I was thinking about something else, something I had started to think about while I was still on the train, coming back to the city.
“How much do you really know about Jeremy Fullerton?”
Surprised by the intensity with which I had asked, she had to think a moment about the question, and even then did not know quite how to answer.
“Just what I told you before,”she began tentatively. “I knew him, but not very well. I met him when he first ran for Congress. I did some volunteer work in his campaign. I knew him well enough that whenever I saw him at some event—like the night at Lawrence Goldman's—he remembered me. But that isn't what you're asking, is it?”
“When you first knew him—when he was running for Congress that first time—did he have money?”
Marissa drew her eyebrows close together and pursed her lips, trying hard to remember.
“No,”she said finally. “They had enough to get by, but they didn't have what you would call money. He drove around in an old car, a four-door; I remember because the back seat was always filled up with boxes of campaign literature. They owned a house, but it was a small one—nothing special. Why? Why is it important?”
The waiter came to take our order. I handed him my empty glass and asked for another scotch. Marissa gave me a worried look.
“I never have more than two,”I assured her. “Not for a long time, anyway.”
Marissa knew I had not told the whole truth. She opened those large mysterious eyes of hers and with her lips slightly parted waited for me to tell her what I had left out.
“A year ago,”I admitted. “For a while before that I was drinking quite a lot.”
The waiter came back with our order and with my second scotch. I took a sip but discovered I had suddenly lost the taste for it. As I put it down, I remembered the way Leonard Levine had first reacted when Bobby told him he was drinking too much; and I remembered how the congressman seemed to blame even that on Jeremy Fullerton.
My mind, which for the last few hours had been racing from one thing to the next, began under Marissa's calming influence to grow less frantic. I suddenly realized I was famished.
“How do you think Fullerton came by the kind of money he ended up with?”I asked as I shoveled a forkful of spaghetti into my mouth.
I took three mouthfuls in succession before I paused and waited for her to answer. With a steady and fastidious hand, she reached across the table and with the corner of her napkin wiped the tomato sauce from my lips.
“I don't know how the Fullertons got their money. I suppose I just assumed that when you're in that position—a United States senator—you have helpful friends, people who put you into the right kind of investments, that kind of thing.”
“Bogdonovitch told me Fullerton got his money from the Russians, that they paid him millions,”I said, the words tumbling out. “Do you think that's possible? You knew him—do you think it's possible he would have done that: sold himself to the Soviets?”
Her first reaction was to deny it, or at least to doubt it; but then, reluctantly, she changed her mind.
“I told you once how he reminded me of that boy I knew in school—that with both of them you thought they had poetry in their soul, but you also thought that they might turn out to be frauds. If Jeremy Fullerton thought it was the only way …”
Marissa slowly raised her chin. A melancholy smile floated across her mouth.
“Or maybe if he just thought he could get away with it. There was that about him, you know: that sense that the rules didn't apply to him. It may have been part of who he was: the need to show himself that he could get away with things most other people would not think of doing, or think of trying if they did.”
She smiled again, but there was a different meaning in it now, something I could not quite grasp.
“I think you're a little like that,”she said. “Aren't you?”
I suppose because I thought it made me sound more interesting and enigmatic, I did not deny it; but neither did I want to talk about it.
“Bogdonovitch thought that was the reason Fullerton was killed—because someone found out. That's why he wanted to see me. Bogdonovitch was convinced that whoever killed Fullerton was going to kill him—and anyone else they thought knew that Fullerton had taken money from the Russians. He thought the murder of Fullerton was a political assassination. He thought the government—the White House—was behind it.”
I ate some more and then put down my fork.
“I didn't believe him. I thought he was a paranoid old man who thought there was a conspiracy behind everything that happened. You remember that night at Albert Craven's—the night we first met—all the things he said, all those allusions to the Kennedy assassination? You remember the way he suggested—at least seemed to suggest—that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were behind it? So when he started telling me about Fullerton and why he was killed and how we were both in danger—”
“Both in danger?”she asked with a startled look.
“Bogdonovitch tried to tell me that he was in danger because he was the only one left who knew what Fullerton had done and might be able to prove it.”
“Why did he think you were in danger?”
“Because I'm the defense lawyer in the Fullerton murder trial and would try to find out everything I could about who might really have done it; and because, if they were following him, they had to know we had met and they couldn't take a chance he might have told me what he knew. I didn't believe any of it.”
“But you believe it now, don't you—after what's happened?”asked Marissa as she pushed her plate aside.
“I didn't have any doubt of it, not when that bomb went off and I saw the glass flying and the fire ripping up into the air. I didn't have a doubt about it when all I could think about was where I could go and how fast I could get there.”
Suddenly I thought of something and laughed because it seemed so completely ludicrous that I had not thought of it before.
“All I could think about was getting away. That's what Jamaal Washington told me the first time I talked to him. He's right: That's what you think, that's all you think. At least that's all I thought. He thought he could do something, help somebody. He wasn't any less afraid than I was, but he beat his fear; I didn't.”
She disagreed, or tried to.
“It isn't the same. I don't doubt he was brave, terribly brave, braver than most; but he didn't have any reason to think someone was trying to kill him, too; not until he was inside the car and the light suddenly shone. Then he thought he was in danger and then he did what anyone would have done: He tried to get away.”
The waiter came and we ordered coffee and sat in silence while he cleared away the dishes. When he left, Marissa raised her chin and tilted her head. For a while she just looked at me, as if she were trying to tell me that whatever I did, or whatever I had done, it was all right.
“You didn't tell me—and you don't have to—but why were you drinking like that, a year ago, before you stopped?”
I had never talked about it with anyone, except for a few fragmentary remarks by which I told one or two people all they needed to know. But I suddenly found that I actually wanted to tell Marissa what had happened.
“I was in love with the woman I had first fallen in love with when I was just a kid, still in high school. We had not seen each other in years, and then we did, and it was like nothing had ever changed. We were going to get married, after all that time, and then something terrible happened. Jennifer became ill, seriously ill; she just sort of disappeared inside herself, closed off the world the way someone pulls down a shade to darken a room.
“I used to visit her, once a week, at the hospital. Sometimes, when the weather was good, I'd take her for a drive. I kept thinking that something would happen, that she would suddenly come back to herself, that everything would be like it was before. When I finally knew that the doctors were right—that she was never coming back—I started to drink. It was all quite deliberate: I wanted to get drunk; I wanted to get lost, to disappear— the way she had. Maybe I thought I could find her there. And there were times, when I was in some drunken stupor, when I almost thought I had. I remember finding my way home late one night, blind drunk, tearing through the house, screaming at the top of my lungs, telling her to quit hiding and to come out from whatever room she was in.”