Bogdonovitch got to his feet, a little unsteady. When he had his balance, he shoved his hands into his pants pocket and kicked the dirt with the toe of his shoe.
“Come, let's walk a little.”
We went back up to the gravel driveway and followed it down toward the black iron gate at the bottom. Through the olive trees, the shoreline stretched into the distance until it gradually disappeared under the gathering haze.
“The last time Fullerton and I talked, he told me things you would only tell someone you trusted completely.”
Bogdonovitch paused, a hard shrewd glint in his eye, the look of someone who had spent a lifetime studying his enemies and never quite trusting his friends.
“The kind of things you only tell someone when you want to make sure they trust you.”
We reached the gate, closed together by the rusty chain, and turned back, trudging slowly up the curving drive.
“What kind of things did he tell you?”I asked, watching him out of the corner of my eye.
“He told me about the young woman, Ariella. I had met her once.”He stopped still. “He brought her here, last spring. This is where we used to meet; never—or almost never—in San Francisco or any other place in the United States. It was too dangerous, too easy for someone to see us together. It was safe here. Everyone comes to Italy, but Americans never come to Bordighera. He brought her, last spring, and introduced me as the owner of this place where he liked to spend a few days once in a while.
“As I say, the last time we talked, he told me about her: how he had used her to get to her father. It was astonishing how sure he was of himself. He knew that once he had Goldman's money behind him, nothing could stop him. He told me everything, things he could never tell anyone else. He was on the verge of getting everything he wanted, and all because of things he could never tell anyone but me. I was the only audience he had; and he knew already that he was not going to have me for too much longer. We had in that last conversation the strange close camaraderie of the victim and his executioner. He knew he had to kill me.”
A breeze suddenly kicked up from the south, an African wind that bestowed a restless touch and then, like a brief reminder of mortality, moved on.
Bogdonovitch was standing in front of me, but so lost in the memory of what had happened that he might as well have been alone, talking to himself.
“The woman, Ariella, had told him she was pregnant. He thought it was the most hilarious thing he had ever heard.”
Bogdonovitch seemed to remember that I was there. His eyes came back into focus, a puzzled expression on his face.
“It was really quite strange. I didn't know—I still don't know—quite what to make of it. He told me he was not the father, that he was certain of it, but that he had not told her yet. He was stringing her along, making her wait until he had everything he needed and it would be too late for the Goldmans to change their minds.”
We reached the top of the drive and lingered by the granite steps in front of the villa.
“Jeremy had nothing but contempt for those people—not just the Goldmans; for almost everybody. In one degree or another, it happens to a lot of ambitious men who start out with none of the advantages. At first they look up to the wealthy, privileged people who seem to have everything and always seem to know what they're doing. Then, when they actually get to know them, when they realize that most of the people they looked up to have few talents and fewer qualities, they are so disgusted they cannot help but look down on them.”
Bogdonovitch studied me carefully before he added with a rueful look, “Jeremy reached that conclusion far faster than most other men. I think he knew from the beginning that he was better; if he was surprised at all, it was only by how much better. When you add to this that he believed in nothing, nothing at all, it's not so difficult to understand the reason for his astonishing success. Jeremy knew how to give everyone what they wanted and how to convince them that it was something they had every right to have. He made them think he was doing them a favor while he took away what little dignity—what little independence—they still had left. I've known a great many dangerous men in my life, but I believe that he was the most dangerous of them all. Jeremy Fullerton was the complete nihilist. He was what history left us when history came to a stop.”
Abruptly, Bogdonovitch waved his hand in front of him, as if he were trying to rid himself of an unfortunate thought that, no matter how hard he tried to ignore it, kept coming back.
“And despite all that, despite everything I knew about him, I found him irresistible. He had an instinct, the likes of which I have never seen, for knowing just how far anyone would go to get what they wanted. No one better recognizes the moral limitations that, usually without knowing it, we place on our own conduct than someone who has no morality at all. In that sense he was a completely free agent, alone in a world made up of people who one way or the other live their lives under some form of necessity.”
A self-conscious smile stole across Bogdonovitch's deeply troubled countenance. “You must forgive the digressions of an old man. I now know what it must have been like for Jeremy when he was talking that last time to me, eager to tell everything to the one person he could trust.
“He told me things about himself that day that, in all the years of our 'special relationship,' he had never told me before— things about the way he grew up, things he did when he first went into politics: the way he had taken advantage of people who thought he believed in the same things they did. It was, if you leave out the complete and utter absence of remorse, like a deathbed confession. Except, as I well understood, it was not his deathbed, it was mine.
“He was going to kill me; or, more likely, have me killed. He had no choice. It is what I told you before—on the day of my death: The files of the KGB were open; it was only a matter of time before someone found something that would point to his involvement. But it would not matter what anyone found if the only KGB agent who had ever had any contact with him, the only agent who could supply the kind of detail—the narrative of dates and places—that would make it impossible to dismiss what was in those files as a crude attempt at political blackmail was already dead. I knew when I first learned that American agents were poring through those records that Fullerton would know what he had to do; and I knew when we had that conversation that I had only a little time left.
“Yes, Mr. Antonelli, I killed Jeremy Fullerton. I waited outside the Goldman apartment, and I followed the two of them to the St. Francis Hotel, and I followed them from there. She pulled up next to his car. I could just see the taillights through the fog. I drove past them and parked around the corner, a half a block above. They sat in her car, talking for a few minutes before he finally got out. You could barely see in that fog, but she drove off fast, squealing her tires as she left. She must have been angry.
“He was standing at the door, reaching for his key, when I called his name. He seemed almost glad to see me. He got inside and opened the other door for me. He was laughing, and he started to tell me what he had just finished telling her, that woman, Ariella Goldman: that not only was he not going to marry her, he knew damn well it wasn't his child and that she knew it, too. He was still laughing when I shot him.
“I think it never occurred to him that anyone, not even I, would be willing to go as far as he would. I won't try to tell you it was self-defense, my friend; but have you never been told that there are times that if you don't strike first, you won't have any chance to strike at all?”
It was an opening, a chance to make things right. I tried to be careful.
“From what you tell me, you could probably plead to manslaughter.”
Bogdonovitch knew what I was thinking. He dismissed it out of hand.
“No, Mr. Antonelli, that's not the kind of arrangement I had in mind. I have no interest in spending time—any time—in an American prison. Besides,”he added with a cynical glance, “do you think I would be allowed to plead to anything? Do you think I would ever see the inside of a courtroom? It is what I told you before, what I tried to warn you about. The people in power—the president's people—don't want anyone to know what Jeremy Fullerton really was; they want everyone to think he was great man, a patriot, because it makes them look so much better than they are.”
It was maddening. Andrei Bogdonovitch had murdered Jeremy Fullerton and seemed perfectly content to let an innocent young man, convicted in his place, languish on death row while he lived out his last few years in the luxury paid for by the proceeds derived from his own fraudulent death. Jeremy Fullerton was a nihilist—what we had been left with at the end of history, according to Bogdonovitch. What was Jamaal Washington—history's last victim?
“You have to come back and confess,”I said, quickly becoming angry. “It's the only way I can save an innocent man.”
Andrei Bogdonovitch placed his hand on my shoulder. A smile, subtle, crafty, and deep, etched its way over his lips.
“Months ago, just before I died in that terrible explosion, I sent a package to my brother Arkady—here, in Bordighera. I was afraid something might happen to me,”he explained, a glint of mischief in his eyes. “I sent it with instructions that it not be opened and that he hand it over to my attorney, Albert Craven, at the time he received the proceeds of my estate.”
Pausing, Bogdonovitch gave me a look of assurance. He had thought of everything, though I was fairly certain he had not thought of it at all until he received the cable from Albert Craven telling him I was coming.
“I think you'll find everything you'll need: my confession, a narrative of my dealings with Fullerton, and—oh, yes—a photocopy of the KGB file.”
He saw the surprise on my face. As he started up the steps, he slapped me hard on the back and laughed.
“Did you think I would leave the only permanent record of what I did for the KGB in the hands of some degenerate file clerk? I was a communist, Mr. Antonelli; I was never a fool.”
At the top of the steps, he turned to me, an ominous look in his experienced eyes.
“Do you know who you're going to give this to? It isn't enough to find someone with the power to do what you want. You have to find someone who wants to destroy Jeremy Fullerton, someone who wants to destroy his reputation once and for all.”
I could think of only one person.
H
e'll be in San Francisco Saturday,”reported Albert Craven the day after I returned. “He'll see you that evening at six-fifteen. You have ten minutes.”
I looked up from the desk in the temporary office that from the moment I had first agreed to become the defense attorney in the murder of Jeremy Fullerton had become my second home. My hands had begun to tighten up, cramped by the monotonous repetitive movement as I sorted through the voluminous documents that had been separated into three bulging black file folders.
“How did you manage to arrange it?”I asked, stretching my fingers.
“I promised a large contribution—a very large contribution,”replied Craven dryly. “It always seems to work.”
His eye wandered to the parallel stacks. “Is it all in Russian?”
“Along with some English summaries our friend was thoughtful enough to make.”
His hands locked together behind his back, Craven leaned forward on his toes. He stared past me, shaking his head in sorrow.
“We live in a strange world,”he said, speaking more to himself than to me. Then, as if he had just remembered something that required his immediate attention, he straightened up.
“Six-fifteen. Saturday evening.”
He nodded, smiled, and then rapped the knuckles of his left hand on the corner of the desk. “Wish I could be there with you.”
Tw o days later, at ten minutes past six, I entered the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel and, with a passing glance at the dark-paneled bar, walked briskly to the bank of elevators.
It was the same suite as the one I had come to before. This time Augustus Marshall answered the door. Without a jury to persuade, or a roomful of spectators to impress, there was none of that graceful, ingratiating manner that had been on such prominent display when he was a witness at the trial. The wirerim glasses were in perfect balance with his mouth, which was stretched straight back in a thin, rigid smile of barely controlled impatience. With a quick, cursory handshake, he directed me to the same sofa I had once briefly occupied before. He did not offer me a drink.
Marshall sat on the edge of a chair as if he were already about to get up. “What is it I can do for you, Mr. Antonelli?”
I placed the attaché case I had brought with me onto the glass coffee table and snapped open the two shiny brass locks. I was just about to open it when I changed my mind and laid it down on the table.
“Tell me, Governor, do you think you still have a chance to win?”
Marshall stiffened. “It's the third week in October. There are still two weeks left.”
“Yes, two weeks left, and thanks to what happened at the trial you're not only running against a ghost, you're running against the woman he wanted to marry and the child he was going to have. What do you do in the next two weeks to convince people that voting for Ariella Goldman isn't the only way they can honor the memory of a man as great as Jeremy Fullerton?”
Marshall rose from his chair and looked down at me from behind distant half-closed eyes. “I don't believe we have anything more to talk about, Mr. Antonelli. Just because you lost to Ms. Goldman at trial doesn't mean I'm going to lose to her in the election.”
“Yes, it does, Governor, and we both know it.”
I opened the attaché case and took out the thick folder into which I had organized what I had been given by Andrei Bog-donovitch.
“What's that?”asked Marshall as I dropped the folder heavily on top of the glass table.
“The only chance you've got to win the election.”
Marshall searched my eyes, wondering what I was after.
“Read it, and decide for yourself.”