“I was there,”he said in a voice strangely subdued. “I saw what you did with the governor.”
Craven paused long enough to smile at me, and I knew then that whatever he thought about me, he did not blame me for what had happened.
“I'm not a trial lawyer, so I can't speak from any direct experience; but I've been a lawyer for a very long time, and I've watched some of the great lawyers—names that everyone still remembers. You're as good as any of them ever were. I don't think what you did with Marshall was a mistake at all, and your closing argument was one of the best things I've ever seen done.”
A pensive expression on his face, he rubbed the back of his head. Then he put his hand back in his lap and looked at me.
“The case wasn't lost because of anything you did, or didn't, do. The case was lost because of who the victim was. It would have been an enormous responsibility for that jury to decide that the person the police arrested for the murder of Jeremy Fullerton, a United States senator, the next governor, and maybe the next president, should be let go. They couldn't let a murder like that go unpunished. It was not enough to show them there was a reasonable doubt about his guilt. I think you would have had to have shown that there was no reasonable doubt about his innocence.”
I was not sure Craven was right, and on one point in particular I was almost certain he was wrong.
“Do you think any of this would have happened if he had been some white kid in a coat and tie walking home from a date, instead of a black kid in a leather jacket and a wool knit cap? I don't mean just whether that cop would have fired without first shouting a warning, but whether the jury would have believed that he only tried to help.”
Craven pressed his fingers together in front of his small round mouth. Pursing his lips, he stared straight ahead, a look of intense contemplation in his eyes as if he were weighing in his mind something of unusual importance.
“You could also ask,”he said presently, “whether any of this would have happened if I'd married his mother, twenty years ago, when she told me she was pregnant.”
He seemed surprised by the stunned expression on my face. “I thought you might have guessed.”
His voice became stronger. The color began to return to his face.
“We had what I suppose might have been called an 'arrangement,' ”explained Craven in a tone that seemed to mock the sensibilities of those who would have used the phrase. “She was what used to be called a courtesan. She sold herself—that's true—”he added as if to forestall the objection of some invisible third party, “but not just to anyone, and never except under conditions she set herself. And it was never any kind of direct exchange—nothing like it. I paid for her apartment, and I saw her once a week. She saw other men, of course—and I knew that—though who they were and how often she saw them was none of my business and was never discussed. Now, you may be wondering why I did that: why I had this fairly elaborate arrangement. All I can tell you is that she wanted it that way and I was prepared to do whatever she wanted. She was quite the most extraordinary woman I've ever known. You've seen her. Imagine her twenty years ago. She was exquisite, and, without wanting to embarrass you, let me just say she could do things—she could make love in ways—I had never imagined. That was only part of it. There was a depth to her, an honesty, I had never known before.”
Craven stopped and smiled to himself.
“I never saw her anywhere except at that apartment. She was very discreet; and I never really knew why, though I think now that it might have been a matter of pride. But one day she called me at the office and asked me to meet her that afternoon. We sat on a bench outside the Palace of Fine Arts and she told me, quite calmly, that she was pregnant and that she was almost certain I was the father. Yes: 'almost certain.' That was honest to a fault, wasn't it? She told me, again quite calmly, that she had decided to have the baby, that she wanted nothing from me, and that she had told me only because she was not going to see me again. She gave me the keys to the apartment, and I knew then that she meant it: that I was never going to see her again and that neither would anyone else she had known in the way she knew me. I did not know what to say, or even what to do.”
Craven sat forward, his arms on the desk, looking at me with the gratitude of someone who wants not so much to unburden his soul, but simply to explain fully and without fear of disapproval something he had done.
“I would have asked her to marry me if I had thought there was a chance in the world she would have said yes. I was quite in love with her—more than I ever was with any of the women I married—but she didn't feel that way about me.”
His small delicately formed head snapped up and a confident friendly smile crossed his lips.
“She liked me; I think she liked me quite a lot; but she never would have married me. She knew I had money; she knew all about me—My God, she knew more about me than I think I knew about myself—but in the most important way I was not good enough for her. I'm not sure anyone ever was. She did one thing, just as she started to walk away, something I've never forgotten: She bent down and kissed me on the side of the face and told me she was glad I was the father. Do you know—I must have sat on that bench another hour, all by myself, and I could not stop crying.
“I never saw her again, and I never tried to see her. I did not even know whether she had gone ahead and had the child. Oh, if I had thought about it, I would have guessed that she had.
Mary wasn't the kind of person who would tell you she was going to do something like that and then change her mind. I didn't see her again until the day she walked into the office to tell me that her son—
her
son—had been arrested and almost killed for a murder he did not commit. That was the first time—the only time—she ever asked me for help.”
Albert Craven sniffed the air and arched his eyebrows. With a slightly bewildered expression, he shook his head.
“I don't have any feelings about this. I mean, I don't feel any connection, any bond of any sort, with the boy. I'm the biological parent, but I've never met him, and I know, because she told me, that he knows nothing about me. I don't know if I'm supposed to feel something—only that I don't. That troubles me, Joseph; it troubles me a great deal, but I honestly don't know what to do about it. Someone is now on death row, someone to whom I helped give life; but except for the fact I was once in love with his mother, it doesn't seem to mean anything to me. Should it?”
If there was an answer, I did not know what it was. I remembered what my mother had once told me, and I was certain that if it was true, the last person I would ever want to meet was the man who had late one night fathered me. There was no answer, and some questions should never be asked.
We both stood up.
“You did everything she allowed you to do,”I suggested as we shook hands across the desk.
I let go of his hand. As I started to turn away, it caught my eye: a large manila envelope with a mailing label in the middle of it.
“Yes,”remarked Craven when he saw what I was looking at. “I finally finished it.”
“Arkady Bogdonovitch?”I asked, glancing up.
“Andrei's brother. Everything goes to him.”
“Bogdonovitch's brother,”I repeated, thinking about something Andrei Bogdonovitch had once told me.
“Where is this going?”I asked, glancing quickly at the package again.
Craven was too astonished at the sudden, harsh tone of my voice to speak. I looked again at the package, this time at the address. It was in a place called Bordighera, which I had never heard of, somewhere inside Italy.
I did not try to explain to Albert Craven why I wanted to go, perhaps because I was not sure myself that I believed it; but when I told him that I wanted to deliver the package, not only could he think of no objection, he seemed delighted I wanted to do it. I could not blame him for thinking that a change of scene could only do me good.
Craven made all the arrangements. Bordighera, as he described it, was “very close to Monte Carlo, just the other side of the French border, part of what they call the Italian Riviera.”A friend of his, or a rather a friend of a friend of his, knew someone in Milan, who in turn knew someone who spent his summers in a small villa in Bordighera, next to a park that overlooked the Mediterranean. The villa would be available for as long as I needed it. Arkady Bogdonovitch was informed by cable that Joseph Antonelli, described euphemistically by Albert Craven as an associate of his firm, would appear in person to settle the final details of his brother's estate.
On the day of my flight, I came by the office to pick up the package of documents that Craven had kept in his care. Marissa, who had agreed to come with me because she knew I did not want to be alone, waited outside in the car.
“Everything is set,”said Albert as he handed me an attaché case inside which he had carefully organized everything I was going to need. “Have a safe trip. I hope the two of you can relax and enjoy yourselves.”
I stopped at the door and turned around.
“How did it happen that Andrei Bogdonovitch was there that evening at your house? Was there some particular reason he was invited?”
At first he seemed not to remember. Then, as he thought about it, he began to nod his head.
“Yes, yes, I remember now. It was curious, in a way. I had not seen him in probably the better part of a year. He called me up, just a few days before the dinner, and said he'd like very much to meet you.”
I picked up two newspapers just before we boarded the plane and after takeoff started to read. As the plane leveled off at cruising altitude, I pointed to a story on the first page of the second section.
“Look at this,”I said to Marissa.
According to the latest poll, Ariella Goldman was running ahead of Augustus Marshall in the race for governor by five percentage points.
“She never could have done it without me,”I suggested with a grim smile.
“She hasn't won yet,”Marissa reminded me with what I thought was more hope than conviction.
We passed through an orange-streaked sky, scorched by the sun as it fell behind us, and then sped through the abbreviated night. In the morning we shot beyond the barren rock-encrusted coastline and began a long slow turn over the Mediterranean as we made our descent into Nice.
In a rented yellow Fiat we drove out of Nice, heading toward the Italian border, less than twenty miles away.
“If we were going in the other direction,”remarked Marissa, a flash of illumination from the depths of her dark penetrating eyes, “we'd go right past where F. Scott Fitzgerald lived for a while, near the beach that was like a 'tan prayer rug.' ”She laughed with pleasure at the way Fitzgerald's phrase rolled off her tongue.
“He made it famous, you know,”she said, glancing across at me, both her hands on the wheel. “The Riviera, where rich Americans drank too much, and laughed too much, and thought that old age began somewhere just the other side of thirty, and that nothing really had much meaning anyway, except being young and beautiful and rich enough to do whatever you wanted.”
“And her voice 'sounded like money.' ”
“What?”she asked, laughing.
“That's how he described Daisy's voice in
The Great Gatsby,
” I said. “I just remembered. Her voice sounded like money.”
At the border we fumbled for our passports. The guard, bored with formalities, waved us through. We drove a few miles farther on a road high above steep terraced hills, looking out across the shimmering green surface of the sea. It was easy to imagine the coast of North Africa waiting, solemn and mysterious, somewhere just below the line where the sky ran straight up to the sun. Glancing back behind us, you would almost swear you could see the lights of Monte Carlo dancing in the darkness, though the night was still hours away.
The villa, hidden in a cluster of yellow and pink stone buildings, bordered the meticulously tended gardens of a tree-lined park. After we were settled, and with nothing that had to be done until morning, we strolled through the twisted streets of the village under the empty solitude of the blazing sky. Children with the faces of small adults dashed in and out in front of us, chasing one another or dribbling a soccer ball with tiny well-trained feet. We wandered aimlessly until we were finally lost in a labyrinth of jagged cobblestone steps that led through endless gray stone corridors curving between narrow four-storied walls filled with heavy shuttered windows. We followed where it led until it emptied us out into a small square and a modest, crumbling cathedral. On the left side of the square, not far from where we stood, a few cloth-covered tables were scattered outside the doorway to a restaurant.
We sat inside next to a window with a view of the high-crested rocks that, like the stepping-stones of Cyclopes, sloped down toward the sea. Banished below the horizon, the Italian sun left burning behind it an apricot-colored sky.
In a black coat and white shirt buttoned at the throat, an old man with iron-gray hair and a stiff white mustache was bent over a table at the back, a crust of bread in one hand, slowly spooning a mouthful of soup with the other. He was the only other person in the restaurant, and he had not raised his eyes when we entered. He had the unhurried look, seldom seen in America, of someone who had never left the place he had been born.
“Why don't you tell me why we have come here?”asked Marissa after the waiter brought us a bottle of red wine.
“I told you: I have to deliver some papers for Albert Craven.”
“No, the real reason.”
I watched the old man, wondering how old he was and whether, when you reached that age—whether it was seventy, or eighty, or a hundred—the idea of your own survival was as important as it had been when you were younger and thought you had a lot more life to live.
“The real reason?”persisted Marissa, grinning at me from behind the thick octagonal glass in which the wine had been served.
“The real reason?”I said, taking my eyes off the old man. “I came here to see someone I used to know, someone who died.”