“A hamburger and a chocolate shake,”I said, drawing back.
Her eyes flared and a smile ran quickly across her wide mouth.
“And is that what you prefer, Mr. Antonelli—instead of what we're having here this evening?”
It was a simple, straightforward question, but she made it sound like a dare, an invitation to something unconventional. I tried to turn it back on her.
“And I'll bet you would, too.”
There was a slight twist of her head, a brief quiver at the corner of her mouth.
“You'll have to ask,”she said.
I did not think about it; it was all instinct.
“Would you like to get out of here?”I began, reaching for the napkin on my lap.
“Mr. Antonelli.”
I turned and looked down the other side of the table. Andrei Bogdonovitch nodded politely.
“I'm very much interested in this case of yours. Perhaps you could tell us something about it.”
Sitting next to him, Naomi Sanders threw up her hands. “Now I remember!”she exclaimed, quite pleased with herself. “You're Andrei Bogdonovitch,”she announced as if she had somehow discovered that very public fact on her own. He looked at her, amused and slightly embarrassed.
“You're the one who defected,”she cried, glancing all around the table. “I saw you interviewed on television. You were with the KGB, weren't you?”
Noiselessly, the maid and another, younger woman began to serve the first course.
Bogdonovitch tried to dismiss what had been said with a wave of his hand.
“I'm afraid you make me out to be far more important than I ever really was,”he protested with a smile meant to disarm any further suspicion. “I did not even really defect: I simply did not go home again. When, as you say, the wall came down and the Soviet Union dissolved, I just decided to make my stay here a permanent one.”
Naomi Sanders was not in the habit of being put off. “But you were given asylum here. Isn't that what happened? You gave information to the CIA about Soviet espionage, isn't that right?”
“The newspapers, the media, write and say a lot of things,”Bogdonovitch replied, attempting to deflect her inquiry with a show of urbanity. “Sometimes,”he said with a laugh, “they even get it right.”
“He just can't talk about it,”Naomi Sanders's husband interjected. “It's all secret,”he explained, as he started on his salad. “Isn't that right, Mr. Bogdonovitch?”
“Please, call me Andrei. But no, there's nothing secret. Your wife is right. I did refuse to go back to Russia, and your government was kind enough to let me stay. And while I would be glad to tell you, or your government, or anyone else, everything I know, the unfortunate fact is that I don't know very much. And besides, the Soviet Union no longer exists.”
The soft heavy lids that hung down over his eyes closed a little tighter. A cryptic smile crawled over his soft malleable mouth.
“History finally caught up with it,”he said with a sigh. “The past no longer concerns me. I'm much more interested in the future,”he added, brightening. “And, as I was saying,”he went on, turning toward me, “I'm particularly fascinated by this case of yours, Mr. Antonelli.”
Andrei Bogdonovitch was just a little too polished, a little too practiced in the art of saying things he did not mean for the effect he wanted to produce. I was put on my guard, or thought I was. Perhaps it was precisely by making you think you were watching him closely that Bogdonovitch could most easily manipulate you in the way he wanted. It is a measure of just how subtle, how serpentine he could be that even now I cannot be completely sure.
“Why would you be particularly interested in that?”I inquired, affecting a certain indifference.
“Despite what I just said,”he began, brushing with his hand the side of his face, “I can't completely escape my past. I'm interested in this case of yours because, from what I've read in the papers, the young man you represent is accused of killing a United States senator, a man expected by many people to one day become a serious contender for the presidency. They say this happened during the course of a robbery. The case interests me, not only of course because someone of the stature of Senator Fullerton was killed, but because this is the sort of thing I was trained to believe could never happen.
“You must understand, we believed—believed absolutely— in history. Everything that happened was either in the service of history or was part of an organized attempt to delay and subvert the movement of history. Chance had no part in any of it, because, you see, if it did, then nothing was inevitable and there would be no such thing as necessity. History would be as meaningless as a lunatic's dream.”
Bogdonovitch paused long enough to drink from his wineglass. He set it down and for a moment stared pensively at the gold band that ran around the edge. He lifted his gaze until our eyes met.
“When the Soviet Union was still in existence, and particularly during the time of Stalin, if someone as close to the center of power as Senator Fullerton had been murdered, it would never have occurred to anyone that it was, as the newspapers keep insisting, just a 'random act of violence.' That would not have been an acceptable suggestion,”he added with a thin smile of cynicism and nostalgia. “A killing like that would have immediately been seen as part of a conspiracy aimed directly at the heart of the Soviet Union. A thorough investigation would have been made; anyone thought to be even a potential enemy of the state would have been interrogated; if there had been any doubt about their innocence, they would have been punished.”
“Punished?”I asked.
Bogdonovitch smiled and stroked his chin. “Shot in the back of the head. Or perhaps,”he said, relenting in the face of an audible gasp, “sent to Siberia.”
“Sounds like something we should try here,”Robert Sanders muttered cheerfully as he continued to eat his salad.
Ignoring him, Bogdonovitch flashed an apologetic smile. “All I meant to say, Mr. Antonelli, is that I've been struck by the differences between the way people here are so willing to believe that the murder of a prominent official like Senator Fullerton could have happened so to speak by chance and what would have happened in the Soviet Union, where it was believed that nothing—at least nothing important—could ever happen by chance.”
Putting down his fork, Robert Sanders wiped his mouth with a napkin. With his lips pressed tightly together, he shook his head abruptly.
“You seem to forget that this country has had a few murders of high officials that were not, as you put it, matters of chance. Surely you don't believe that the Kennedy assassination was some 'random act of violence'? Everybody knows there was a plan, that there was a conspiracy, and everyone knows who was involved,”he declared, inviting Bogdonovitch to disagree.
Bogdonovitch, a blank stare on his face, said nothing.
“Everybody knows it was the CIA and the Mafia,”Sanders explained, quickly running out of patience.
His wife rolled her eyes. “I thought it was Lee Harvey Oswald,”she said dryly. She closed her mouth and, adopting an attitude of bored disbelief, sucked in her cheeks until they were tight up against her teeth.
Her husband was not amused. He shot her a quick, withering glance.
“Of course it was Lee Harvey Oswald,”he snapped. “Everybody knows that, and everybody knows he didn't act alone.”
“Ah, but it appears that he was acting alone,”said Albert Craven, leaning forward from his place at the head of the table. “Andrei may perhaps have something to add, but if I'm not mistaken, now that at least some of the Soviet archives have become available, we know that the Russians thought Oswald might actually be an American agent and that even if he wasn't, they thought he was dangerous and unstable.”
I watched Bogdonovitch as Craven talked. His thick lips were parted slightly, as he clicked his front teeth together while he followed each word. The folds of skin at the outside corners of his eyelids cut across at a somewhat sharper angle than I had noticed before, giving him a slightly Asian, or to be more precise, Mongolian aspect. I had seen pictures of Lenin that conveyed that same impression.
Bogdonovitch's response was oblique.
“I used to hear from some of my old colleagues in Russia,”he said, staring at his hands, which were touching the edge of the table. When he lifted his gaze, his eyes were glittering. “Do you know what they wanted to ask me about?”he inquired with an expansive gesture that took in the whole table. “They wanted to know what kind of story would bring the most money when someone—a writer, a producer—wanted them to tell what they knew about the Kennedy assassination. It's ironic, don't you think?”he remarked, as he raised his glass to his mouth. He took a drink, then looked around the room. “When we were adversaries, you wouldn't believe anything we said. And then, when we weren't, you were willing to believe almost anything!”
Stabbing the air with her arthritic finger, the ancient Ruth Winthrop suddenly announced with absolute certainty, “The Russians killed Kennedy. Oswald was working for them.”
Bogdonovitch laughed heartily. “Why would we have done that? There was no reason.”
“The Cuban missile crisis,”Robert Sanders said alertly, apparently intrigued by the possibility that it had been the Russians and not the CIA, after all. “Kennedy forced Khrushchev to back down. They killed him in retaliation.”
Bogdonovitch laughed even harder. “If we would have killed anyone over that, it would have been Castro!”he roared. “That idiot would have killed us all!”He threw up his hands. “Do you really believe we wanted to get into a nuclear war with the United States over Cuba?”
Sanders was sure of it now. “Then it was the CIA?”
Removing his handkerchief from his breast pocket, Bog-donovitch blew his nose. “The CIA!”he mumbled disparagingly. “Yes, I've seen your movies and I've read your books. It's all very entertaining.”
Sanders made no response, concentrating instead on the food in front of him. The discussion had apparently reached its end, but Albert Craven, as I was beginning to learn, seldom missed a chance to stir up controversy—at least polite contro-versy—whenever he could.
“But Andrei,”he remarked amiably, “you must have a theory. It's almost a condition of citizenship to have a theory about how and why John F. Kennedy was killed.”
Andrei Bogdonovitch lifted his eyebrows and smiled. “Unfortunately,”he drawled, “I'm not a citizen, and I really don't have a theory about who killed John F. Kennedy.”
Turning away from Albert Craven, he looked across the table at me.
“It is odd, though, isn't it? All these people who make all these movies and write all these books: They always ask who had what to gain from Kennedy's death, but they're so fascinated by Vietnam they forget how strongly J. Edgar Hoover opposed what the Kennedys were trying to do in civil rights.”
“Are you suggesting that J. Edgar Hoover had John F. Kennedy murdered?”I asked while everyone around me looked on in disbelief.
His eyes stayed on me, and I had the feeling he was studying me, trying to find out how far I was willing to go in drawing out the conclusions, no matter how controversial, that followed from what he had said.
“No, of course not,”he replied. “I'm just trying to show how far-fetched these conspiracy theories can become. As I said before,”he added, trying to dismiss the whole thing as a harmless dinner table diversion, “I'm sure I know less about it than anyone here.”
Another course was served, and another one after that, an endless succession of dishes, each of them accompanied by a running commentary begun by one person, taken up by another, everyone trying to find something to say that none of the others knew about the food and its preparation. Things were put in categories; distinctions were drawn; conclusions were reached; propositions were advanced, only to be questioned, argued, refuted; and all of it done with the kind of intellectual effort and emotional zeal with which churchmen in the Middle Ages once debated the number of angels that could sit on the head of a pin.
I felt a hand on my sleeve and bent my head toward Marissa Kane.
“Did you know you were coming to a seminar on the metaphysics of Gorgonzola?”
I brought my eyes around until they met hers. “Head of the Jesuit Order, l563 to l576. Tortured as a heretic by making him listen to endless readings from the cookbook of a French abbott, St. Antoine the Glutton. Is he the one you mean?”
“I must have,”she said, suppressing a grin.
After the last course had finally been served, critiqued, and eaten, coffee was poured.
“I'm afraid that we earlier became distracted by our discussion of the relative workings of history and chance,”Bog-donovitch began as he stirred the silver spoon slowly around the red and gold translucent china cup. “I really am interested in your case, Mr. Antonelli. What can you tell us about it? Was the murder of Jeremy Fullerton a matter of chance, or did it perhaps have in some way something to do with history? What do you think, Mr. Antonelli?”
Behind his bluff, affable manner, there seemed to be something more at work than simple curiosity. I was almost beginning to believe that he knew something about the case, or about Fullerton, or about something I myself did not yet know.
“He can't talk about it,”Robert Sanders interjected when I did not immediately reply. He looked down the table to where Bogdonovitch was sitting. “A lawyer can't tell you that his client did it,”he explained.
“My client didn't do it,”I said, trying not to show my irritation with Sanders's smug self-assurance. “In answer to your question,”I went on, pushing back from the table, “I don't know if it had anything to do with history; it certainly had a lot to do with chance, at least with respect to the involvement of my client, a remarkable young man by the name of Jamaal Washington.”
“He just happened to be in Fullerton's car?”Sanders asked sarcastically.
“No, he didn't just happen to be in the car,”I replied, letting more of my annoyance show than I should have. “He happened to be in the car because, after working late into the night, he was walking down the street, heard what he thought was a shot, heard a car door slam and the footsteps of someone running away. He happened to be in the car because he thought someone might be hurt and that he might be able to help.”