The privilege, p.27
The Privilege, page 27
I was not thinking about that; I was thinking about what I had felt during the time I was with Redfield alone.
“It’s the strangest thing,” I confessed, furrowing my brow as I struggled to clarify the thought. “I know what he did, and still, for some reason, I don’t quite believe it. Redfield is a genius, but an evil genius? - He’s too much a genius, far too intelligent, for that. There is something going on, and I have a feeling it is right in front of my eyes, but like that lecture he gave this evening, everything is too dark and I’m too blind to see it. There was something else he said. The second-best people - you had it right - there aren’t very many of them; there never are. That leaves everyone else, which means nearly everyone, all of us raised to believe what everyone else believes. Its the way we all think, the assumptions of our times. Technology has made it worse, made it more difficult to escape the prison in which, without knowing it, we all live our lives. All we see now are images, what we see on screens. Living in a world of fictional characters we become fictional as well.”
“Some things are still real,” replied Tangerine, a look of shy intimacy in her large luminous eyes.
We left the restaurant and, my arm around her shoulder, made our way up the street. We passed a quiet bar where, through a half open door, the plaintive wail of a jazz player’s trumpet filled the night with the bittersweet nostalgia of broken hearts and unbroken dreams. The waves lapped against the rocky shore, a few abbreviated lights glittered from boats moored close by in the bay. The warmth of her hand, the silky feel of her soft, clean hair against my chin, her gentle quiet breath against my face, the touch that told me everything there was to know, the midnight jazz that with a life of its own kept playing in my head, I could have walked like this forever and never noticed that I had moved. Then, in what seemed the same moment, we were home, inside looking out, the lights of the city, the lights of San Francisco, dancing barely visible in the shrouded thick gray night. We fell into bed and did not sleep until the first red rising of the early morning sun.
Two nights later we had dinner with the Gambarini’s at Albert Craven’s home in the Marina. When I described what I had seen at Redfield’s company, Giuseppe Gambarini was particularly interested in the number.
“One hundred?” His cultured mouth drew back at the corners in the curious expression of an alert inquisitor. “Exactly one hundred - not a few more, not a few less - always one hundred?”
“Is the number important?” asked Tangerine, exchanging a glance with Sophia who seemed as much in the dark as the rest of us.
Gambarini looked down at this fine, manicured hands. A serious, thoughtful look in his blue gray eyes, he considered how to explain what he was thinking. It was a look all the most important musicians of Europe had seen, the moment before he described with unparalleled precision exactly how he wanted something played. He lifted his head, smiled at Tangerine, who was sitting directly opposite him at the table, and then gazed into the middle distance as he again pulled his mouth tight at the corners.
“He has them there for five years, one hundred of the best students in the country. Now, without knowing for certain, it would seem a reasonably safe assumption that what they mainly studied in college was computer science, or some one of the other sciences, the requisite course of study for anyone who wanted to work for a technology company. And what does this Redfield do with them? He keeps them there for five years, teaching them - what? The limitations, and the dangers, of the very technology they are working on. He wants them - those chosen one hundred - to become free and independent, and not just in the financial sense. He wants them, he teaches them, to question all the assumptions of their time and place. Now, I was struck by three things. The first is the number, the one hundred. If you read certain historians, serious European historians, you will sometimes come across this number. If you read Machiavelli, you may find something similar, a reference to how much can be accomplished if you have a hundred men all dedicated to the same thing, if you have -”
“Boe told me exactly the same thing!” I interjected. “I remember every word. He was describing Redfield’s astonishing intelligence - what he had studied, what he had learned, how obsessed he had become with trying somehow to repair what he called the ‘modern mistake,’ - when he mentioned that Redfield had often remarked on what he had found ‘written by more than one great writer: how much could be accomplished by just one hundred people if they were all dedicated to the same cause.’”
Gambarini nodded in a way that suggested that we were in agreement, and that what he was about to say was only the obvious consequence.
“Everyone spends their time taking care of what they have to: themselves, their husbands, their wives, their children, people they are close to. The more ambitious among us try for office or some other, larger, fame But who looks forward into the future, the distant future? Who does that anymore?” Lifting his iron gray eyebrows, he glanced around the table, drawing us more closely into what he thought a remarkable conformity to what Redfield, a man he had never met, was trying to do. “When the great cathedrals of Europe were built, those who planned them, those who started their construction, all knew they would never see them - it was a hundred forty years for Chartres or Notre Dame. Who would think of proposing something like that now? But a hundred - if you could find them, as this Redfield may have found them - willing to build something for a future they themselves might never see? There would be great power in that. Find them, find a hundred; or, better yet, train them, teach them - what Redfield seems to be doing.”
Gambarini looked straight at me, a warning like a premonition in his even gaze.
“If he thinks in those kind of terms, then a trial, using murder as a means, becomes in the great scheme of things a matter of no great importance.”
Albert Craven, sitting in his accustomed place at the head of the table, drank slowly from a glass of one of the expensive wines he served his guest and that he privately insisted was no better than what you could get in any halfway decent grocery store. He liked and admired Giuseppe Gambarini and was fascinated by the range of his interests and the breadth of his knowledge. He reminded him that he had forgotten something.
“You said you were struck by three things.”
“The number, yes; but also the way the hundred live, an equal number of men and women; everything, including each other, held in common. The children born out of these temporary liaison raised in common, until they leave, when the mother takes her child -” He cast a quick glance at his wife, Sophia, sitting on the other side of the table next to me. “She decides if she wants the father to have any responsibility. But, did you notice, there is no mention of how she is quite certain who among the fifty men, the father might be? But leaving that little detail aside, when you consider everything else about the arrangements the remarkable Mr. Redfield has put in place, you realize that what he has done is so far from original, it goes back more than two thousand years. He has stolen a page out of Plato - Plato’s Republic, to be precise - communism of, not just property, but women and children. And like Plato,” he added with a look of shrewd appraisal, “he has - a point often missed in the discussion - restricted this having everything in common to what we might call a governing class: one hundred people who, with their money and their new education, can have an influence in the world out of all proportion to their numbers, an influence that might even, at some point in the future, become dominant.”
“The third thing,” insisted Craven when Gambarini, thinking about what he had just said, seemed to forget.
“Yes,” he replied, his eyes glistening with the triumph of his own discovery, “the darkness, the way he and his audience - his students - sit unseen when he lectures. It is how Pythagoras taught his students, students who, by the way, were also students for five years. No one saw him, and everyone he taught swore an oath never to reveal to anyone what they had learned there.”
I was about to ask Guiseppe what had happened to Pythagoras and his school, when Albert Craven got a telephone call.
“Yes, yes, I understand. I’ll make sure he knows.”
Craven put his phone away. There was a strange, puzzled look in his eyes. He turned to me as if I might know the answer to the riddle.
“It was someone who works in the district attorney’s office. They have been trying to reach you, and when they couldn’t, thought they should call me here, at home, tonight. Someone has been arrested for the murder of Lucas Fairweather.”
“The trial - you represented Professor Boe, who was innocent,” said Sophia Gambarini with a look of surprise.
I felt a sudden coldness run down my spine. My mouth went dry. I could barely get out the words.
“Did they tell you who it was, who was arrested?”
Craven shrugged his shoulders. Whoever it was, the name had meant nothing to him.
“A woman. Someone named Carruthers.”
Chapter Nineteen
Redfield was right: I did not want anyone else to be the attorney for the defense. I had thought I knew why Alan Boe had been put on trial, why he had been chosen to play a part, an important part, in the lesson about corruption Redfield was so determined to teach. But then why had Cynthia Carruthers simply walked into the police station and confessed to the murder of Lucas Fairweather. And why, having admitted the crime, had she insisted she would not say another word until she met with her attorney? When they asked for the name of her attorney, she said that she did not have one yet, but that someone would probably be there soon. And I was, first thing the next morning.
Even in a prisoner’s orange jumpsuit, Carruthers looked free. It was the clear, undaunted expression in her eyes. She may have just confessed to murder, but she seemed, not just indifferent, but almost oblivious of what might happen.
“It’s good of you to come, Mr. Antonelli,” she said with what I swear was the same expression with which she had greeted me when I stepped out of my car just days earlier at AIE. For a moment I thought she might start describing to me the new facility in which she now found herself a temporary guest.
We sat a small metal table bolted to the floor. There was a chair on each side. There were no windows. A guard stood outside a metal door with a small, square, thick wire protected glass opening, through which he could see, but not hear, what was going on inside. I did not bother to take out a legal pad from my briefcase. There were only a few questions I wanted, or needed, to ask. I asked the first one with the same formality with which I would have cross-examined a hostile witness. I wanted her to understand who was in charge, and that I had no tinterest whatsoever in what might happen to anyone else.
“Am I correct in believing that when you murdered Lucas Fairweather you were acting on the instruction of James Michael Redfield?”
Carruthers did not bat an eyelash; she did not hesitate at all.
“No, you are not: I acted entirely on my own. I did what I did for what I thought good and sufficient reason.”
I must have shown my surprise. She was looking right at me, she had not once looked away, but her eyes flashed with sympathy for what she knew I had never understood and could not possibly have known.
“You decided…? But even if you did, you didn’t decide to implicate Alan Boe! You didn’t decide to commit murder in a way - at a time and place - when he would become the main suspect! You didn’t decide that Alan Boe should stand trial for something he didn’t do!” I insisted, growing warmer as I spoke. I was angry, as angry as I had ever been, though not as much with her, as with Redfield, for what now seemed even worse than it had before. “You didn’t decide to wait until now to make your confession, instead of when it would have prevented an innocent man from being charged with murder!”
Carruthers was unfazed, unmoved, almost uninterested. She sat there, listening politely and respectfully, as if she were again sitting in the dark, part of Redfield’s blind audience. The sympathy I had seen in her eyes was still there, the anger I had just displayed treated as nothing more than an error of judgment, as understandable, and as easily forgiven, as a student’s grammatical mistake in a language he was only just starting to learn.
“I’m the one who decided to do what I did; I’m the one who decided I had to do it.” She studied me, wondering, as it seemed, whether to ask me a question. “What I tell you stays secret, doesn’t it?”
The privilege. It was there again. But she was not Redfield; she had confessed to murder.
“Yes, it stays secret. I can never tell anyone anything you tell me about something you have done. But be careful,” I warned, more severely, because of Redfield, than what I would normally have done. “The privilege does not apply to anything you might be planning to do, a crime you intend to commit, like perjury, lying on the stand. Now, what is it you want to tell me?”
“Redfield did not have anything to do with my decision, but he told me there would be someone walking just outside, and that if I cried for help he was certain that person would come running.”
“If Redfield was not involved in your decision, if you made the decision all on your own to murder Lucas Fairweather - why? You did not know him. You did not go to Berkeley; you’ve been at AIE for - what?- almost five years. What possible reason could you have to murder someone you did not know - unless Redfield convinced you it was something that had to be done and that you were the one who should do it?”
There was a flash, not of anger exactly, but of bitter disappointment in her eyes.
“I never said I didn’t know Lucas Fairweather.”
When I left her at the jail an hour later, I knew, or thought I knew, enough about what had happened to believe that, despite her confession, she had at least the chance of an acquittal. There was no question but that she had killed Lucas Fairweather; there was a real question whether it was murder.
“You’re going to do it? - You’re going to take the case?” With his elbows on his glass and steel desk, Albert Craven watched me with a pawnbroker’s measured glance. “Is that any different than what Redfield managed to get you to do before?”
“Maybe, maybe not; I don’t really know. But I don’t see what he gets out of this. No one innocent is being charged with a crime and forced to go to trial. Cynthia Carruthers did it. She killed Fairweather. Where is the ‘lesson’ in that?”
Albert thought my ignorance nothing short of remarkable.
“The trial won’t be about whether she did it; the trial will be about why she did it. Why am I telling you this?” He shook his head with the practiced tolerance he lavished on those too stupid to learn from their own mistakes. “Am I wrong? Is there any other choice?”
“You’re not wrong. Everything hinges on that one question: Why she did it, why she thought she had to do it. The problem,” I continued with a shrug, as I crossed my arms, sat sideways in the chair and stared out the window at the bright sunshine of the late afternoon, “is that I don’t believe her.”
“You think she’s lying ?”
“Not lying; just not telling the whole truth. It isn’t even that; it’s more a question of emphasis, how something can be interpreted. It is the reason she went there that night that, when you start to think about it, leaves something out. I didn’t catch it at first, but it’s there, and it may make the difference whether she walks out of court a free woman or spends the rest of her life in prison. It may also make a difference in what we think of Redfield and what he has done.”
With surprising agility for his years, Craven jumped up from his chair and rapped his fist on the desk in a quick, eager staccato.
“Wish I was a trial lawyer! What a great case to try! You’ve never had a trial like this, have you? - One trial a sequel to the other. You defend the innocent man charged with a murder, then you defend the guilty woman, the only one who should have been tried. Better yet, before you step inside the courtroom your client has confessed. Do you know how dull my life is compared to that? For thirty, forty…never mind how many years, all I’ve done is what they too generously call ‘office law,’ drafting documents so that rich people can get richer still,” he complained.
He walked back and forth, waving his small, fragile hand in the air, like an actor in a courtroom drama, his mouth moving in silent imitation of a speech to mesmerize every jury ever sworn. He stopped, stared at me, started to laugh, and then, still smiling, collapsed back in his chair. His arms dangling out to the side, he looked at me with the helpless guile of an old man who could still revel in older, banished dreams, dreams of what he had never really wanted to do and had always known he never would.
“Have you heard anything from Redfield?” he asked, again quite serious. Pulling himself up, he again leaned forward, his elbows back on the desk. “Anything at all?”
“Nothing since the day I met with him. I don’t really expect I will, unless he shows up to watch the trial. And even then….”
Redfield did not come to the trial, or if he did, I did not see him. Everyone else in the city seemed to be there. There was not a seat left in the courtroom when the Honorable Christopher Douglas, arrogant, sinister and sharp-witted, moved with slow, measured steps toward the bench, his shoulders slumped forward, held down by a massive bulging stomach that made that short walk seem an effort. With his hand on the the edge of the bench, he hoisted himself up to his black leather chair. Everyone held their breath, waiting to see if the chair would hold.
Douglas hated lawyers and lawyers hated him. Like most people who think more highly of themselves than they should, he thought everyone else a fool. If a lawyer said something that was not directly on point, Douglas would tell the jury why such an obvious error was only to be expected; when a lawyer said something that was directly on point, Douglas would let them know that even an idiot could sometimes guess right. Like every demagogue Christopher Douglas knew how to appeal to the prejudices of the crowd.
