The Touch of Treason Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  The Touch of Treason

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  All men should have a touch of treason in their veins.

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The Touch of Treason

  By Sol Stein

  Copyright 2014 by Sol Stein

  Cover Copyright 2014 by Untreed Reads Publishing

  Cover Design by Ginny Glass

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print, 1985.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Also by Sol Stein and Untreed Reads Publishing

  The Magician

  The Husband

  Living Room

  The Resort

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  The Touch of Treason

  Sol Stein

  For Toby with love

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Four lawyers read the manuscript of this book and provided me with advice: my friend, Judge Charles L. Brieant, who has been instructing me in the law since the time of The Magician; his son, Charles L. Brieant III; his daughter-in-law, Joy Beane Brieant; and David Bernheim, whose knowledge of courtroom tactics was as useful as his understanding that when literary necessity and judicial convention clash, literature must govern.

  Claire Smith’s comments on an early draft encouraged me in a direction I am glad I took. Patricia Day and Toby Stein both provided me with literally hundreds of notes on several drafts of this book. Finally, it was Richard Marek’s editorial reflections that as much or more than other factors influenced the publication of this book.

  —Sol Stein

  Scarborough, New York

  All men should have a touch of treason in their veins.

  —Rebecca West

  The Soviets are chess players. We play checkers.

  —Archibald Widmer

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the end you died. There could be a courtroom like this, Thomassy thought; all the good wood bleached white, the judge deaf to objections because He owned the place. The law was His, the advocacy system finished.

  If that’s what it was going to be like, George Thomassy wanted to live forever, because here on earth, God willing or not, you could fight back.

  Thomassy took in the grained thick wood of the raised perch, the bench from which the Honorable Walter Drewson would look down and judge defendant, defense counsel, prosecutor, witnesses, jury. Drewson would swivel in that now empty high-backed leather throne to see that his actors behaved according to the canons, protected from the players by a moat of flooring that no mortal crossed until he received the judge’s sign. The others, kept at bay by the promise of contempt, sought comfort in the knowledge that the judge’s vision was subject to the clouding of his contact lenses, and that under his severe black robe was hidden the ordinariness of a glen plaid suit and a spine that consisted of bones on a string.

  Some of the windowless courtrooms Thomassy had worked looked like half-deserted government offices, a prefab for the judge’s bench, and a metal desk for the clerk. No criminal wanted his freedom decided on in a place that looked like the motor vehicle bureau. He wanted the accoutrements of authority in his theater. If he made it to a court like this, the walls paneled instead of painted, seven high windows letting in the morning light, he was prepared to be judged.

  It had been some time since Thomassy had defended someone in a room this large, selected for this trial because it could accommodate more spectators and press than any other in the Westchester system. Thomassy, like everyone else who had paid attention in school, had learned that the Greeks used to kill the messengers who brought the news. But in this century, Thomassy thought, they’re killing the men who send the messages: Jack and Bobby at the height of their power; Martin Luther King when things were turning his way; Hoffa, the truckers’ hero, ready to make his comeback; and now, known only to specialists but perhaps, in the end, as influential as the others, Martin Fuller, the man who knew that you could more likely stop the Soviet spread over the earth not by the accretion of megatons but by understanding how a nation of chess players played its games. Martin Fuller had reluctantly agreed to put his system, his knowledge, the rules by which for several decades he had successfully predicted Soviet strategy, down on paper so that a few wise men might carry on his work to prevent Armageddon by insight rather than arsenals. Now Martin Fuller was dead, cut off from his work. In Washington the few who understood the import of Fuller’s death were suddenly bereft. Thomassy wondered if there was jubilation in Moscow because the wrong man had been accused of murdering Fuller, and Thomassy, who was an innocent in foreign affairs, had been picked to defend him?

  Well, this was going to be a whopper. Thomassy was a lawyer the way Robert de Niro was an actor. This courtroom was the set in which, during weeks to come, he would cross a line. Now only lawyers and judges recognized him in the street. After this, strangers would stare or stop him. You could get an unlisted phone. You could take your name off your mailbox. But you couldn’t get back across that line once your face, seen on television, turned heads in the street. The people had you.

  That’s the skirt the government hid behind. The people versus whomever he was defending.

  As on all mornings before a trial was to begin, Thomassy had arrived early to survey the field of battle. The defendant’s table was always farther away from the jury than the prosecutor’s table on the assumption that the people could be trusted. Thomassy preferred some distance from the defense table to the jury box so that he could saunter over, letting the line loose
until he was right in front of them for the rhetorical question that would implant reasonable doubt, reasonable doubt, reasonable doubt like an echo that he could count on to reverberate when they were sequestered in the jury room out of his reach. If the courtroom was a tight fit, with perhaps only fifteen feet between his sitting self and the jury box, he’d have to spring to his feet for objection and in five strides be in front of them. Though he was addressing the judge, he’d be talking from the jury’s position as if he were one of them, suggesting that the prosecutor was on the other side, a government worker. Thomassy helped the jurors understand that it was the government’s heinous role in human affairs to assert itself in opposition to citizens against whom there were only unproved allegations to which other citizens, chosen as jurors, could assert the technicality of innocence. Surrounded by people behaving like people, how could anyone stay innocent for long?

  Kids somehow did. When he was invited to give one of the Mellon Lectures on Criminal Practice at New York University’s law school, the students were surprised to see that their legend was only in his mid-forties, and didn’t look like an Armenian but was as straight-nosed as someone from Amherst in the good old days. Thomassy’s gray eyes surveyed his packed audience, surprised by the number of women now taking to the law and by how much younger all the students looked. Their naiveté reminded him of his at that age. But Mr. Thomassy, one of them had questioned, aren’t most criminal defendants guilty? With a straight face he had answered: “It is the job of other departments in this university—psychology and religion—to train people to deal with guilt. Our job is to give those of us who are apprehended a defense so skillful that when prosecutors roll innuendo and circumstance at the jury we can say No dice. You haven’t proved it. Some of you will become prosecutors. Well, I guess somebody has to work for the government.” The students laughed of course, but one of them could be counted on to ask, as one did, Isn’t the end result supposed to be not just winning but justice?

  Thomassy knew you had to be patient with kids. He said, “Never talk to anyone of Armenian descent about justice.” He waited for the laugh and added, “You don’t tell your football team to go out there and get justice. You tell them to win.” Then looking at one student in particular, the way he always at moments like this looked at one juror, he said, “When you go out with a young woman on Saturday night, are you worried about feeling guilty afterwards? Are you looking for justice or success?” And he turned his gaze to the dark-haired female law student in the first row, walked around the lectern and strode over to just a few feet in front of her and said, “Is there a woman alive in this world who wants justice more than she wants success?” Then his gaze lifted to them all. “If you want to lose cases, I suggest you switch to the medical school,” and he sat down to a roar of laughter and the aphrodisiac of applause.

  When he eased out of the lecture hall, nearly a dozen students clustered around him, most of them young women basking in his vitality who could not imagine, for all their quickening fantasies, that Thomassy lived alone.

  Thomassy saw his life as a progression from innocence. As a boy he had thought himself cleverer than other boys because he provided favors before he might expect one in return. One evening, going to his house by a path that was shorter than going by road, he was accosted by four teenagers who were out to get the Armenian kid. Only one friend had ever accompanied him that way, a fat boy he had several times protected in the schoolyard from one or another of the four who were now blocking his way. In the distance, barely visible, he saw the fat boy, who had turned informer to curry favor with his enemies. Thomassy brought home a bloodied lip, a torn shirt, and the knowledge that boys do not bank favors.

  When he began to practice law, on each occasion in which he had found himself surprised or vulnerable, he recorded a terse sentence or two in a notebook he kept in a locked desk drawer.

  I believed Julio’s story. Julio brought his mother in to confirm it. His mother didn’t lie as well as he did. To get at the truth, question the accomplice.

  Some time later he added:

  Question the accomplice first. It saves a lot of time.

  Once his secretary Alice referred to it as his devil book. Sometimes he was tempted to carry it with him for ready reference. Why do we forget what we learn? Life had snipers up in the trees. If God was as smart as He was cracked up to be, He’d have put eyes in back of your head, too. When he was a kid he’d foolishly thought WASPS like Judge Drewson were invulnerable. Drewson must be scared. He’d never had a case in County Court attended by reporters from abroad. He’ll want to appear fair. He’ll try not to allow more conniving by one side than the other. He’ll be distracted by the television artists sketching him, and by his daughter, the bright beauty of his late middle age, home from law school for the recess and insistent on being slipped in as a spectator so she might judge him. This may be the fairest place on earth, Thomassy thought. Everybody’s at risk.

  “Good morning, Mr. Thomassy,” said the white-haired woman who was clerk of the court, setting down her armload of folders. Of course he was glad to be recognized, and not at all surprised at the clerk’s big smile because the grapevine always carried the news when Thomassy would appear for the defense and every clerk in the system knew that you could count on Thomassy to deliver the kind of show that made you eager to get up mornings.

  If the clerk had been a young woman, he would merely have answered “Good morning” across the room. But he had watched his father being courtly to older women and had eventually understood the nature of this courtesy.

  He walked briskly down the aisle to the lady, stretched out his hand, and when she took it, he lifted her from her daily anonymity by saying, “I’m afraid I don’t know your name?”

  “Marian O’Connor,” she said, blushing, for attorneys do not usually shake hands or ask your name. She’d never seen a picture of him. He looked younger than she’d imagined him, tall, lean, relaxed-limbed, loose, clean-shaven, and his firm hand had been warm. His gray eyes looked at her as if to ask they once been lovers.

  “I’m pleased to meet you,” he said, his voice husky.

  They both heard the double doors at the back of the courtroom squeak open.

  “Excuse me,” Marian O’Connor said quickly when she recognized the district attorney and hurried away through the door next to the judge’s bench. Thomassy could see Roberts’s handshake coming at him all the way down the aisle, above it that freckled face proclaiming I can be friendly to everybody, I was born rich.

  Roberts’s smile, Thomassy thought, is an implant. I’m not a voter, he wanted to say. Save it.

  “I heard you get down to look things over on day one,” Roberts said. “I thought we might chat a bit before we officially become adversaries.”

  “How’s your wife?” Thomassy asked, pumping Roberts’s unavoidable hand once, though he’d rather have let the embarrassing object drop unshaken.

  Roberts was wearing his uniform, a vested gray suit, white shirt, striped school tie, Phi Beta key hanging from a watch chain across the vest. Thomassy didn’t like any kind of uniforms—cops, soldiers, hospital attendants, businessmen. He had his dark blue suits made because he liked a touch of European flair in the jackets, nipped in at the waist, beltless pants, extra pockets for sunglasses and for the small cards on which he wrote the cues he wanted to remember. He couldn’t imagine a woman going for a man’s zipper if he had a watch chain across his vest.

  “Janet’s fine,” Roberts said. “How’s the girl who’s eroded your bachelorhood? Same one nearly a year, isn’t it?”

  She’s not a girl, Thomassy thought, she’s a woman. “My bachelorhood’s intact,” he said.

  “I heard—”

  “I wouldn’t pay attention to gossip, Roberts. What’s on your mind?”

  Roberts, shrewd as his Yankee forebears, preferred to plea-bargain away tough cases and bring the easy ones to trial. If he thought this one was going to be easy, Thomassy thought, he’s lost his
touch; or has the preelection fever got him in heat, ready to play Gary Cooper Lawman for his constituents? What pissed Thomassy was that Roberts built his cases on other people’s backs—the investigators paid for by taxes, the paralegals paid for by taxes, the young assistant DAs paid for by taxes. He’d heard about how they brought their neatly organized garbage to Roberts’s desk, with the menu on top, option A, option B, option C, so Roberts could check his choice of strategy and think he was a lawyer.

  Thomassy pictured Roberts at the side of his swimming pool, swim trunks the length of Bermuda shorts, a beach jacket hiding the rest of his body from public view. Wonder if he lets other people do his swimming for him?

  “What got you out of bed so early?” he asked the district attorney.

  Here it comes, Thomassy thought. Roberts planned everything, like his career, like using this courtroom as a way station to a more suitable arena, the House of Representatives, the Senate. A man like Roberts fantasized about his inauguration day. If, like Thomassy, you were the only son of an Armenian immigrant horse trainer from Oswego, New York, you concentrated on the chinks in human nature, the space between a man’s ribs. The fantasy guys, on the way to the White House, could trip on a cracked sidewalk. Roberts hadn’t tripped yet because he was a peg smarter than the others. He collected paintings. The story was he didn’t like paintings, he liked the way Nelson Rockefeller had got away with shit because he collected art.

  Roberts said, “My people tell me you haven’t been receptive to negotiating this case.”

  “I thought you might like to play this one out.”

  “I wouldn’t be that glib about hard evidence or eyewitnesses,” Roberts said, his smile sheathing his words.

  “You’ve got someone who was hiding in the shower and saw it all? You’re bluffing, Roberts.”

  “You’re getting things mixed up. You bluff. I don’t. If you’ve changed your mind a little about negotiating, we could have a little sit-down with the judge.”

  Mid-trial surprises make the headlines. That’s what Roberts was going after. “You don’t want the judge reminding you,” Thomassy said, “that we need advance warning of identification witnesses.”