His eyes still on me, he sat down and reached inside his jacket for his glasses. He read the first page, then the second, and as he turned to the third, he looked at me in astonishment.
I stayed for almost an hour and then left him alone with the written confession of Andrei Bogdonovitch and the translated summaries of the unexpurgated KGB file on Jeremy Fullerton. I took the elevator down to the lobby and wandered into the bar.
“Haven't seen you in a while,”said the bartender.
He put a napkin down on the gleaming mahogany bar and placed on top of it a scotch and soda. I wished my memory were as good as his.
“Tell me something,”I said after I took a sip. “Who's going to win the election?”
He had picked up a towel and started to dry a glass.
“Not much question,”he replied with a shrug, his eyes on the glass, “especially after tonight.”
I took another drink and glanced around the room. A young couple was holding hands at the table where Jeremy Fullerton and Ariella Goldman had sat, drinking, the last night of his life.
“Hard to figure,”the bartender was saying. “He's down by seven, eight points, and he walks out of a fundraiser. I just heard about it—just before you came in. He has a crowd of people waiting and he sends someone in his place.”
He wiped the glass clean and picked up another one. “Sounds like he's quit to me.”
I glanced at my watch, took one last drink, and tossed a tip on the bar. “You play the horses?”
“Once in a while.”
“Take the odds. Bet on Marshall to win.”
He looked at me like I was crazy.
I left the St. Francis and went to see the one person who more than anyone else deserved an answer. Then I went to Marissa's and slept better than I had slept in a very long time.
The next morning a courier delivered to Albert Craven's office the document Augustus Marshall had promised. At eight o'clock the next evening, I sat next to Marissa on the davenport in her living room and, as the twilight danced red and gold on the bay below, watched Augustus Marshall announce on television that it was his solemn duty to correct a gross miscarriage of justice and to make public a scandal that had threatened the very core of American democracy.
When it was over, I walked to the open glass door that led out to the deck and breathed in the cool autumn air. Beyond the last few sailboats making their way home, the lights of the city flickered in the dusk.
“What's going to happen now?”asked Marissa.
I looked over my shoulder. Sitting on the davenport, her long legs pulled up underneath her, she stared at me with those large open eyes that always somehow managed to dissolve the distance between us.
“Jamaal will be released tomorrow. He should have been released yesterday, but the governor of course wanted to make sure the press would be there. After everything that's happened, I suppose I can't blame him. Jamaal will be a free man, with a full pardon and a trust fund of no insubstantial amount. Thanks to the generosity of the 'late' Andrei Bogdonovitch, he'll be able to go to school without having to work weekends anymore.”
I gazed out toward the city beckoning across the bay, promising to make come true all the dreams you had.
“I feel like Jeremy Fullerton,”I said without looking around. “I know everyone's secrets, and I tell everyone lies.”
The air was getting cooler and the night was getting darker. I shoved my hands down deep into my pockets and thought about the ways in which I had hidden the truth.
“I had to tell Jamaal that Bogdonovitch left him the money in his will as an act of contrition, because I could not tell him it was part of the price I made Bogdonovitch pay to get the rest of the money he was inheriting from himself. I had to tell Albert Craven that Andrei Bogdonovitch's brother gave me his confession, because if I had told him that Bogdonovitch was still alive, I would have made him a party to a fraud. And then, of course, I could not tell Jamaal anything at all about Albert Craven, because … well, because I just could not.”
From across the room, Marissa's voice seemed to whisper in my ear. “Do you think in his whole life Jeremy Fullerton ever did anything that produced the kind of effect you have? What do you imagine Ariella Goldman is thinking right now? Lawrence Goldman's grandfather may have put your grandfather in jail, but that isn't anything like what you've now done to him.”
I had forgotten all about what had happened to my grandfather and the crooked cop who was chief of police, but Marissa was right about what had now happened to Lawrence Goldman and his daughter. Jeremy Fullerton, the reputed father of Ariella Goldman's child, had in the space of a few minutes gone from an American martyr to an American traitor. More importantly to the limitless ambitions of Lawrence and Ariella Goldman, Jeremy Fullerton had become a major political embarrassment.
“What can they do now?”asked Marissa rhetorically. “Claim she must have been mistaken; that instead of carrying the child of someone who turns out to have been a spy, she must have been made pregnant by some other powerful man with whom she had committed adultery?”
It reminded me of something. I turned around, smiling to myself.
“I once heard someone say something like that about the Borgias; that they had come into the world as 'a declaration of war against morality through incest and adultery.' ”
“But, unlike the Borgias, the Goldmans haven't killed anyone,”she reminded me with an uneasy laugh.
I could still see the confident face of Augustus Marshall on the television screen, revealing to the world what Jeremy Fullerton had done and the reason he had been killed. He was now so certain he was going to win. First the attorney general had died, and now this. Old Hiram Green had been right: These people all thought they were destined to be president.
“Would you want to be the only person standing in the way of what Ariella Goldman wants?”I wondered aloud.
After we had dinner, after Marissa had gone to sleep, after all the tourists had gone and the narrow streets of Sausalito were deserted, I took a long walk along the bay. I stood for a while at the water's edge, the way his widow had told me Jeremy Fullerton used to do, staring out across the water at the city, shimmering in the night, drawing everything toward it. How close it looked; so close you started to think that all you had to do was lift your hand and it would come closer still, close enough to touch. I kept watching it, thinking about what it must have been like for him, thinking about how far he was going to go and what great things he was going to do. He was in love with what he was going to become and lived so much in the future that the things he had to do to get there were buried in the past, almost before he had done them. I stood there, the only sound in the vast silence the water lapping quietly against the rocks just beneath my feet. I kept looking at the lights of the city, the lights that never grew dim, and I started to see everything the way he must have seen it; and for a brief, fleeting moment I think I felt more of what it must have been like to be him than I've ever known about what it must be like to be me.