Death's Witness (28 page)

the bottom of the montage was the name Cassie Barnes, the author of the article.

So intent was the expression on Julie’s face that Saddam, himself picking up a copy of
New York
, looked at the same cover. He was enough of a reader to know that the article was about the dead husband of the distracted woman he saw immobilized on the sidewalk. He was also enough of a wary, patient observer of life in places like Beirut and Manhattan to see that two men in sport jackets and ties standing across Madison Avenue, beyond the noisy flow of car and bus traffic, were also staring at her. They left when she finally left. And Saddam was enough of a realist to know instinctively that what he had just seen—two men watching a woman and following her—was none of his business.

* * *

Two days earlier Julie had been alerted to the fact that
New
York
was about to carry a long story on Tom, the Fonseca trial, and Tom’s murder. She was also tipped off that Cassie Barnes was the author of the article, that Tom would be described as having been a conduit for passing millions of dollars over the last two years between the United States and Latin America, and that he had been killed because the people he dealt with had become concerned about his loyalty.

“That’s crazy,” Julie said, her voice shaking, to Liz Braun, the woman from
Newsweek
who had called to explain what she
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described as the “real” reason Julie was rejected when she applied for work as a copy editor. “Absolutely crazy, Liz, you know that.”

There was no reassurance, no agreement from Liz, a competitive woman with whom Julie had once worked on a newspaper and who had arranged a job interview for her at
Newsweek
. Liz’s only words in response were, “I just didn’t want you to believe the bullshit they told you when they told you that you were too far from print journalism. That was, in a word, a pretext.”

In the relative quiet on 89th Street, in the late Thursday after-232

noon light of the fall evening, Julie sat on the steps of the small Church of St. Thomas More, installed like a jewel between two large apartment buildings. The stone steps were cool, hard, well-worn: Julie welcomed the feeling of cold austerity and privacy they gave. But despite the unusual comfort of the stone, her mind was racing as she tried to absorb the words, the messages, of the article.

In that encounter with
New York
’s slick pages and the chatty style of Cassie Barnes’s writing, Julie could absorb very little. She could focus only on a series of pictures of herself, one with Tom (taken on a street sometime before Kim was born) and the other of her alone, obviously taken after Tom’s death. And there were five playing-card-sized pictures of men with Latin names, arrayed as in a hand of poker.

One picture was of Luis Madrigal de Souza. The tag line below the pictures read: “Federal prosecutors believe Perini handled money for all of these South American money men, and that one or more wanted him out of the way.”

A picture of Selig Klein carried the line: “A security hit? Mafia trucking king may have been caught in the crossfire, killed on a guess that he knew too much because of his contacts with Perini.”

And, under Julie’s second, lonely-looking picture: “Prosecutors wonder whether she knows where the money is, or whether she may even have it.”

…
Hateful
. The word formed in her mind as she looked away D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

from the magazine at the surfaces of the perfect church.
These are
hateful people, writing words like this
…
Hateful
…
Hurtful
…She tried to concentrate on something, anything else: what did she remember of Saint Thomas More? Images of a persecuted, steadfast, thoughtful man sped through her mind and then she thought,
But that was
Becket, Thomas Becket. Or was it Sir Thomas Browne?
She had learned these names, now jumbled in her mind, at Wellesley. Why had she ever learned anything? Had she in fact learned anything?
Nothing
I have ever learned is of any use to me,
she thought.
I don’t know a thing
about how to deal with my life. Experience, living, has taught me nothing
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useful—no lessons, no preparation, no foresight, nothing…

When Julie reached the apartment, Kim was watching the late afternoon television shows for children—those artificial fantasies constantly projecting lessons of humaneness, sweetness, harmony, and cooperation (what a misleading lesson for life, Julie thought). Elena was starting dinner. Julie quickly kissed Kim, who was absorbed by the program, and closed the French-louvre doors behind her so that she and Elena were alone in the kitchen. Elena, turning from the oven, saw with one look at Julie that another event, unsettling and new, had happened to this woman.

“What?” Elena said. “What is it?”

Julie handed the
New York
article to Elena and quietly asked her to stop cooking and read it. “Then I want you to tell me what it says. I just can’t read it all myself.”

Elena looked almost bashful. “I read English so slowly, so poorly.”

“You read it well. And I can trust you to tell me what it says.”

Elena did read it, leaving Julie in the kitchen behind the closed, slatted doors. Elena sat in the living room, near the fading autumn light from the large, high windows. She read the article, and when she finished she walked back to the kitchen and told Julie what the article said, as though she were translating from another language into English, as she often did in the immigrant community in which she lived.

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When Elena finished, as they stood in the kitchen and faced each other, separated by the distance of the refrigerator, the sound of Kim’s program brightly and artificially resonating in another room, Julie quietly asked, “Do you want to leave me?”

Elena’s frank eyes concentrated on Julie. “Is that what you want?”

“No, you know I don’t. I will,” Julie said, articulating this for the first time to anyone, “run out of money. I have less than two hundred thousand dollars from Tom’s life insurance, we had almost no savings, and no one—no one—will hire me. I am unem-234

ployable. With this apartment, food, car fare, health insurance, all the rest, I am spending close to ten thousand dollars each month.

I will run out of money.”

Elena stared at her. “I could take less.”

“I would never let that happen. That’s not why I mentioned this. I mention it because I have to face it.”

“Do you know where the money Tom took is?” Elena’s straightforward asking of the question—a question raised in at least three separate places by the Cassie Barnes article she had just read—came as a relief to Julie because she wanted to answer it.

“I wish I did, I’d be tempted, God knows, to take it, and disappear.” Julie almost laughed. “I never thought, when I was growing up and in school, I never imagined how important money is. I never had it—my father was flashy but broke. I never prepared myself for spending every waking minute, and every sleepless hour, calculating, falling short, worrying. I used to want to believe that other things were more important than money: love, respect, thinking, intangible qualities…Tom seemed to share that with me.

We never talked about money. But I guess Tom must have had a deep need for it. So deep that I was either blind to it or he was so devious, so crafty, that he placed it beyond what I could see.”

Elena said, “You are too unhappy.”

“I’m not as unhappy as I seem. In a way, I’ve never felt so alive.

I see things more clearly now. Mornings, especially clear ones, mean more: I want to be awake to see them. I look at people D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

around me, standing at street corners, self-absorbed, as all people are, and I see them in a way that’s sharper, more realistic, more precise. I think back and I see connections between events I overlooked when they were happening.”

“Tell me,” Elena said.

“Take Sy Klein. I
did
talk to him the afternoon before he was shot, just as the article says. I felt he might know something about Tom’s killing that I didn’t know. I knew he was speaking to me from his boat, off Montauk, a hundred and twenty-five miles away. I should have known at the time—but I didn’t—that people
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were eavesdropping on what we said.”

“I think,” Elena said quietly, “that it goes deeper than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t be sure what I mean. But how, I wonder, did the woman who writes this article know that you talked with that man? Why would she be told that?”

“That’s what people in her line of work, my line of work, do, push until somebody tells us something, usually those things they believe we want to hear.”

Kim began to make her way from her bedroom to the kitchen.

Children speak when they move, they have no stealth. Kim was murmuring “Mommy, Mommy…” Hurried, whispering, Elena leaned forward to Julie and, face to face with her, said, “I love you, I worry about you. I worry that whoever the people are who have been out there are still out there.”

Julie had no time to answer or to absorb what Elena had said.

Kim, diminutive and adorable-sounding, was on the other side of the louvre doors, anxious to touch her mother.

18.

A purple-and-white-lettered banner was suspended from the two spires over the main entrance to the Church of the Heavenly Rest at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 90th Street. The banner bore the word “Celebrate.”

Hutchinson was in a talkative, exuberant mood. He pointed at the banner. “I wonder when the stern old Protestant church started all this bright-life, Moonie stuff? Do you know? When I was growing up, churches were hardwood, chilly, disciplined places.”

“Jonathan Edwards was a formative influence for you?” Kiyo asked, an inflection of impatience in her voice. For more than half an hour she had been trying to focus him on the conversation she wanted to have and he had cavorted and deflected her, insisting that they leave the hotel and walk the streets and avenues around the Upper East Side.

“Jonathan Edwards,” he repeated. “How long has it been since somebody, anybody mentioned that name? When I was a sopho-more, I took, of all things, a course on religion in America, and I wrote a long, turgid paper on Jonathan Edwards. I remember how caught up I was in his rhetoric, all that fear, guilt, and salvation language, the imagery, spiders burning, sinful men and women turning into ash in the brick-kilns of God…You must be the only person in my adult life who ever brought up the name.”

Kiyo answered, “It doesn’t come up that often in Manhattan cocktail conversation.” They walked by the entrance of the D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

Engineers’ Gate into Central Park, across Fifth Avenue from the church. People on racing bicycles sped by on the park’s internal roadway. An oversize statue of Fred Lebow, the legendary runner, rose from the nearby shrubbery.

“I got the classic gentleman’s C on that paper. The experience taught me not to dabble in things, like Jonathan Edwards’s rhetoric, that I was not cut out to handle.”

She laughed at that comment, conflicted by two thoughts: a desire to stop him so that he could begin to answer the questions she intended to ask and a desire to spend time with him, a reluc-237

tant pleasure she continued to have in the company of this tall man who was still attractive to her despite his recent accretions of weight and eccentricity.

Finally, as Hutchinson continued a quick pace uptown on Fifth Avenue on this cold, clear late November morning, after a weekend of wet weather which had finally stripped all the remaining leaves from the trees, Kiyo said, “Enough of the exercise. Let’s stop and talk. I want to find out more about what you were cut out to handle.”

She saw that he gave her one of those sexually suggestive, droll expressions that a comment like that could elicit. She was grati-fied by the expression but didn’t respond to it.

They sat in the warming November sunshine on a bench across from the red-brick, collegiate bulk of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, whose leaf-strewn yard was surrounded by a stone-and-iron wall.

The scene, she thought, had to remind him of the Harvard campus; it certainly reminded her of a lovely, hundred-year-old corner of the Mount Holyoke campus in November, before the snow came.

She held the tape recorder aloft between them as she asked, all business now, each word distinct so that the sound of their voices would rise above the background noise of car and bus traffic flowing downtown on Fifth Avenue. “Tell me about the time you flew up to New York for legal advice from Perini.”

“Legal advice? Everybody bought that load of shit from Steinman. Even you. And certainly the judge. When Sorrentino—that
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smart Eye-talian fella—asked that question about what lawyers I talked to after I first went in front of the Grand Jury, I thought, shit, how will this turn out? Neil hadn’t prepared me for this one.”

“Why did you mention Perini’s name?”

“Hey, I was sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The question was what lawyers had I seen after I went before the Grand Jury. I had seen Tom Perini. He was a lawyer. I had no way of knowing whether Sorrentino was stumbling around, or whether he knew I had seen Perini, and could catch me in a lie if I didn’t mention Perini. So I answered the
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question I was asked. Had I seen a lawyer? Yes. Who? Tom Perini.”

“And then Sorrentino asked what you said to him and what he said to you. I remember that.”

“And Neil was, as ever, quick, quick, quick. I remember admiring how quick he was, the agile little man. Legal advice, he said, attorney-client communication. And the judge bought it. Now there’s one dumb NAACP lady.”

Kiyo detested any kind of prejudice, and she winced at this slur and wondered how she still found this effete, snobbish man attractive. She restrained herself. She asked, “Don’t tell me: you hadn’t gone to him for legal advice?”