He stopped, afraid he had left me with the wrong impression.
“At the same time, if there is one person I thought I could trust with a secret, it's Albert. He would never betray a confidence, I'm certain of it. But he does love gossip,”he said, talking once again with the easy assurance of someone sharing secrets of his own. “People tell him everything. And he knows so much about everyone that he can put into context, and find the meaning, of the kind of stray remark or casual observation that with anyone else would appear to have no meaning at all. When he told me the reason—the real reason—Lawrence Goldman had decided to abandon the governor—someone he had known, someone he had helped, from the beginning of his career—and do everything he could for his opponent, I knew it wasn't because Lawrence Goldman or anyone else had explained it to him. It was because Albert had put all the pieces together and figured it out on his own.”
Caught up in his admiration of Albert Craven's considerable powers of deduction, he seemed to forget that I knew nothing about the conclusions that had been reached.
“What was the real reason?”I asked.
He looked at me, a blank expression on his face. Then he blinked, and his face again became animated.
“The real reason is that Lawrence Goldman didn't care who was governor; he'd had governors. He wanted a president, and with Fullerton he had the best chance he was going to have. Albert had it all worked out.
“ 'If Goldman controls the money that Fullerton needs to get there—and the money he needs to stay there; and if his daughter—the wonderfully gifted Ariella—controls what he says; then who really controls the power of the presidency?'
“Something changed in Albert's expression when he said that. It became harder, perhaps even a little bitter, as if he thought Goldman was a little too calculating for his own good. Then he tossed his head and laughed. 'It's really rather incestuous, isn't it? And, of course,' he went on, tripping over the words in his excitement, 'Lawrence, as he always does, left himself a way out if things don't work out quite the way he hoped. If Fullerton loses, then he can tell his good friend Augustus Marshall that he was only doing his duty as a father.' ”
Bobby looked at me. “Albert had done it again, you see: forced me to ask the question that would let him show me how much he understood about the way things really worked. 'And Marshall will accept that?' I asked.
“ 'Yes, of course,' Albert assured me. 'And to show Goldman just how happy he is that they're once again on the same side, the governor will ask him to head up a major fundraiser to help him pay off the debt he ran up during the campaign. Isn't it marvelous?' ”
Turning up his hands, Bobby shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe Albert was wrong; maybe Goldman really was doing it for his daughter. It became pretty obvious that night that his daughter's interest in the good senator went way beyond politics. What a scandal! It was one of the most embarrassing things I've ever seen.”
“Something happened at the dinner?”
“No, not then—afterwards, at a private reception at Goldman's apartment; what Albert called 'an intimate gathering of two or three hundred of Lawrence's closest friends.'
“Goldman's apartment is right across the street from the Fairmont, the entire top floor of a building on the Golden Gate side of Nob Hill. He and his daughter and the senator were greeting people at the door. We had just arrived. Albert had just finished bantering with Goldman's daughter when, all of a sudden, Fullerton's wife goes up to Ariella and says, 'Tell me, what do you think is worse—a man who sleeps with a woman because it's the only way he can get to her father's money, or a woman who sleeps with a man because it's the only way she can get close to the power she so desperately needs?' ”
“She really said that?”I asked, wondering whether he had not taken something that was bad enough and exaggerated it into something that was truly awful. “In front of the woman's father?”
“And in front of her own husband,”Bobby replied. “And in front of about a hundred people standing close enough to hear.”
“What did she do—Goldman's daughter?”
Bobby lifted his chin and narrowed his eyes. A slight shudder passed through him.
“It didn't seem to faze her. She looked at Fullerton's wife the way she might have looked at someone in the street who was asking her for money. And then she said something so unbelievably cruel, so incredibly hurtful, I had to turn away. She said, 'What's worse is a woman who won't give up a man who doesn't want her anymore.'
“There was a dead silence. I looked back in time to see Meredith Fullerton looking at her husband. He would not look at her. She just shook her head and without another word walked out the door.
“Jeremy Fullerton didn't do a damn thing. He started a conversation with the next person in the line as if nothing had happened, as if his wife's outburst had been nothing more than the ignorant comment of an ill-mannered stranger.”
“Fullerton was having an affair with Goldman's daughter, and his wife found out about it?”I asked intently.
Bobby was still thinking about what Fullerton had done, or rather, what he had not done.
“He just let her go like that, let her walk away. He didn't care what she felt; all he cared about was to somehow smooth it all over, treat it as if it were some minor unpleasantness best forgotten.”He paused and, with a significant look, added, “Yes, she knew he was having an affair. And if you had seen the expression on her face—the torment, the outrage—you knew she had known about it for a long time.”
For a moment we just stared at each other.
“Are you thinking that Fullerton's wife could have killed him?”asked Bobby.
“He was sleeping with another woman, and he had just finished humiliating her in front of a couple hundred people. Yes, I could imagine that might be a motive for murder.”
A
lbert Craven lived in the Marina, directly across the street from a small grass-filled park and a thin strip of sandy beach. A few blocks down the shore, white-hulled boats bobbed lazily at a gray cement dock. In the other direction, a black-funneled freighter steamed under the Golden Gate, bound for somewhere the other side of the Pacific, somewhere the other side of the world, where San Francisco, like Mecca and Marrakech, was the name of other men's dreams.
I stood on the doorstep of the pale yellow stucco house, beginning to regret that I had accepted the invitation to dinner. It was a gorgeous Saturday late afternoon, the warm air crisp and clean. I would rather have spent the time wandering in the city by myself than sitting around a table with strangers engaged in the kind of meaningless small talk that passed for polite conversation and that usually made me self-conscious and tense.
The door swung open before I had rung the bell. Albert Craven's pink face was beaming.
“I was afraid you might decide not to come after all. I saw you through the window,”he explained as he took me by the arm and led me inside.
I had been the last to arrive, and Craven, a smile floating on his oval mouth, introduced me to his other guests, gathered together in the living room. Robert Sanders—or Sandy, as he insisted I call him—was in his early sixties but shook hands with the firm grip of a man who had taken care of himself. As I gathered from Craven's endless commentary, Sanders was an investment banker who had grown rich through the acquisition of large holdings in small start-up companies that had gone on to become famous names in the high-tech industry. Sanders had dark, intelligent eyes, and when he spoke used the fewest words he could find to make his point. He was someone used to saving time.
His wife, Naomi, had nothing of her husband's easy precision. With large, cavernous eyes and high, sharp cheekbones, she held out her hand with a rigid, wincing smile. Certain we had not met, she thought it unlikely I was anyone she wanted to know.
“And this is my date,”Craven announced as I let go of Naomi Sanders's tepid hand.
With a shrewd smile, Ruth Winthrop lifted her wrinkled red-splotched hand from the black-lacquered cane she held in front of her and fixed me with her ancient rheumy blue eyes.
“Don't let Albert fool you,”she said in a voice that had more life in it than I would have expected. “I'm much too young for him.”
“They say she was already here when Sir Francis Drake first sailed into the bay,”Craven whispered cheerfully under his breath as he moved me from one side of the living room to the other. “Old San Francisco in every sense,”he added. “She loathes the nouveau riche, which of course includes everyone who made their money after the Second World War. She positively hates Naomi Sanders.”He hesitated just long enough to wink. “Which of course is the reason I invited them both.”
Craven introduced me next to a couple that looked more like brother and sister than husband and wife. Charles and Dana Hendricks each had chubby friendly faces and tiny hands and feet. They ran an art gallery where Craven apparently was a frequent client. After the Hendrickses, I met Clifford Overbeck, a young associate in Craven's firm, and his wife, Nancy.
With a few well-chosen words, Craven described the essential trait or the major accomplishment of each of his guests and, with a slight change in the way he said it, introduced me as the famous lawyer who was about to conduct the most famous case in San Francisco. It was flattery, pure and simple, but Albert Craven had a gift for it. He made you feel far more important than you were and did it in a way that made you start to believe that you had perhaps seriously underestimated your own achievements. He appealed to your vanity and made you think yourself modest in the bargain.
With his hand on my arm, Craven steered me toward a large, round-shouldered man with a few strands of gray hair combed neatly over his gleaming round head. There was a curious indentation high on the upper right corner of his forehead, as if he had been dropped as a baby or cruelly beaten as a young man. He had a full face that at first gave the impression of someone slow-moving and lethargic. I say at first, because as soon as he looked at you with those piercing blue eyes you knew you were in the presence of someone with a mind as quick as anyone you were ever likely to meet.
Holding a drink in his hand, he was engaged in conversation with a woman whom he had apparently just met. She had large dark oval eyes and a rather long straight nose. Her hair, shiny black, was pulled tightly back and her head was tilted high. Her mouth seemed always on the verge of laughter. She was tall, with long elegant fingers. She stood with her weight on one foot rather than balanced on both, the posture of a ballerina at rest. She was interesting and exotic, like something out of a painting by Gauguin: one of those silky-eyed women of the South Seas, graceful, seductive, more mysterious than any product of a civilized education.
“Joseph,”said Craven with a gleam in his eye, “allow me to introduce Marissa Kane. Marissa is a wonderful dinner partner. I thought you two would enjoy each other.”
“Hello, Joseph Antonelli,”she said as she held out her hand.
I kept looking at her, holding her hand, watching the laughter in her eyes, while Craven began to introduce me to the man next to her.
“Andrei Bogdonovitch,”Craven was saying. “Andrei,”he went on as I finally turned toward him, “is—or I suppose I should say was—a Russian spy.”
I glanced at Craven to see if he was serious. Then I looked again at the imposing figure directly in front of me and realized without quite knowing why that what Craven had just said was probably true. Bogdonovitch denied it.
“It's not true—what Albert said. I am not a spy,”he insisted in a dark, deep voice that seemed to come from all around me. He glanced at Marissa Kane. “I never was,”he assured her, beaming with the amused indifference of someone for whom the truth and the lie are merely different aspects of the same thing. “I was only a lowly member of the Soviet Consulate.”He turned back to me and explained, “Albert likes to exaggerate my importance.”
It was time to go in to dinner. Wedged between the living room in front and its view of the bay, and the kitchen in back where the chef had been working for hours, the dining room had no windows. The absence of natural light had been remedied by hanging a crystal chandelier between mirror-covered walls. Whichever way you looked, you saw your own endless repetition, and the room, barely large enough for a table for twelve, seemed to center on a privileged few whose every gesture became a model for imitation by the crowd of admirers swirling all around them.
The table was set with Limoges china and Waterford crystal and two-hundred-year-old silverware acquired at a London auction. When everyone was seated, Craven announced with a flourish that dinner had been prepared by Angelo DelFranco, the chef at what was then the most talked-about and, it went without saying, the most expensive restaurant in the city. Patting his side pockets as if he had misplaced something, he reached inside his jacket and pulled out a small piece of paper folded neatly in half.
“Here it is,”he said as he put on his glasses. “The menu.”He said it like a lawyer reading the last will and testament of a wealthy man to a roomful of expectant heirs. Each item was greeted with a gasp of delight followed by a burst of embarrassed laughter.
I had been seated next to Marissa Kane. Halfway through Craven's recitation, she whispered, “Why are you smiling?”
“I was just thinking about what I had for lunch and wondering whether this would be as good,”I whispered back.
When Craven finished reading, he placed the paper on the table, removed his glasses, and then motioned toward the maid who had been waiting next to the door to the kitchen. She was a young and rather pretty white woman. The maid turned and pushed open the door, letting in behind her the warm aroma of a dozen different scents. Around the table, the upturned faces of Craven's guests were each a study in concentration as they tried to be the first to identify what each one meant.
“And just what did you have for lunch you liked so much?”
Her elbows on the table and her fingers intertwined, Marissa lifted her chin. A whimsical expression floated over her lips as she waited for my reply. For a moment I could not say anything. The longer I looked at her eyes, the larger they seemed to be, until, finally, the only thing I could see at all was a small picture of myself staring back at me.