The Legacy (8 page)

“You seem to forget,”said Sanders, “your client had a gun— the gun that killed Fullerton. Not only that, he tried to shoot a police officer with it.”

I could feel myself growing angry. I waved my hand impatiently and shook my head.

“First, he didn't try to shoot anyone. Second, he picked up the gun—if he picked it up—”I added darkly, “out of panic when he heard what he thought might be the murderer coming back to the car.”

An investment banker, Sanders made money by understanding the way numbers worked; he had little capacity, and even less tolerance, for facts that were subject to more than a single interpretation. With a sense of triumph he reminded me of what I had obviously forgotten:

“He also had the senator's wallet.”

I stared back at him. “He goes to the car to help. He checks for a pulse: The man is dead. He sees the gun on the floor. He picks up the car phone to call for help, but then decides he better find out the identity of the man who has just been killed. He takes the dead man's wallet out of his coat, and just at that moment a light shines through the window. He crouches down, still clutching the wallet in his hand. He thinks the murderer may have come back; he thinks the murderer may have heard him open the car door; he thinks the murderer may have thought he was a witness; he decides to make a run for it.”

Sanders was not impressed. He lifted his eyebrows and flared his nostrils, a picture of condescension.

“Yes, well, I suppose you have to come up with some kind of theory. That's your job, isn't it?”He bent over his coffee and began to stir.

Bogdonovitch had watched closely, an amused expression on his mouth, the detached spectator who enjoys the game even when played by amateurs.

“Tell us, then, Mr. Antonelli: If your client didn't do it, who did? Was that also a matter of chance, or did it have something to do with history?”

With both thumbs under my chin, I tapped my fingers together, searching Bogdonovitch's narrow eyes. What was it about him that made me want to trust him at the same time some other, perhaps deeper, instinct kept telling me I should not? I put my hands down and shifted position until I was nearly sideways to the table.

“I don't know who killed him,”I admitted. “One possibility is that it was just what the newspapers have said it was: a robbery gone bad, only instead of Jamaal Washington it was someone else.”

I glanced up at Marissa Kane and felt that same strange magnetism I had felt before. I shifted my gaze to Robert Sanders, expecting to see some reaction to what I had said. He was just putting down his cup. I watched him push back his sleeve, trying surreptitiously to check the time.

“Fullerton got into his car,”I went on, turning back to Bog-donovitch.

There was, I thought, a glimmer of recognition, a shared understanding, an instantaneous acknowledgment that Robert Sanders was not a very interesting man. I paused just long enough to smile.

“Fullerton gets into his car. Somebody slips in the passenger side with a gun. Fullerton resists—or refuses—or does something—and the robber shoots him. That would explain why he leaves both the gun and the wallet: panic. He has to get away. He knows someone will come, and in that fog, someone, even the police, might be just around the corner.”

“If it was a robbery gone bad,”said Robert Sanders, staring at the ceiling and doing his best to sound bored, “and the guy is in such a hurry to get away that he doesn't bother to take the wallet, and he's in such a panic that he manages to leave the gun behind, how does it happen that he apparently had the presence of mind to wipe the murder weapon clean of his own fingerprints?”

He knew everything he needed to know about the case: He had read it in the newspapers.

“Maybe he wore gloves,”I replied with a shrug. “Jamaal Washington had them on that night. It was very cold.”

“You said that was one possibility,”Bogdonovitch reminded me. “There is another?”

“Yes. Suppose it was not a robbery at all. Suppose someone intended to kill Fullerton. Then what?”

“I'm not sure I follow,”Bogdonovitch replied, leaning forward, his eyes still on me.

“You still have the same sequence,”I explained. “Someone shoots him, doesn't take the wallet, and leaves the gun.”

Bogdonovitch threw up his hands and laughed. “I still don't quite follow.”

“Suppose someone killed him and tried to make it look like a robbery. What is your first question?”

He twisted his head slightly to the side. A shadow came over his eyes as he thought about it. “Why didn't he take the wallet?”

Then his face brightened and I knew he had the answer to his own question.

“Because if he had taken the wallet—if he had taken the time to take the wallet—then why would he leave the gun?”

“Yes,”I agreed. “And the gun was a cheap Saturday night special—not the kind an assassin would use, but the kind of gun everyone would expect to find if some kid had tried to rob someone he didn't know.”

“Isn't there another possibility?”Sanders interjected. “It happened just the way the police said it did. Your client did it and they shot him when he tried to get away.”

“No, Mr. Sanders, I can assure you, that is not a possibility.”

Sanders crossed his legs and extended his arm over the back corner of his chair. He raised his head until he was looking at me down the length of his nose.

“This has all been very interesting, Mr. Antonelli, and I'm sure you're a very good attorney, but I knew Jeremy Fullerton, so you'll have to forgive me if I don't have a great deal of sympathy for the young punk who killed him. You're going to lose this case, Mr. Antonelli, just as surely as our friend here lost,”he said with a dismissive nod in the general direction of Andrei Bog-donovitch.

“Lost? I'm sorry,”Bogdonovitch inquired, “precisely what is it I'm supposed to have lost?”

Sanders waved his hand in the air. “You, the Soviet Union, the fall of communism—that's what I meant,”he explained irritably.

Quite deliberately, Naomi Sanders rolled her eyes. She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could, Andrei Bog-donovitch said something that caused an immediate sensation.

“What makes you think we lost?”

Robert Sanders stared at Bogdonovitch as if he had lost his mind.

“I'll grant you,”Bogdonovitch remarked with an affable smile, “it certainly seems that the West, that capitalism, has won.”

“Seems!”Sanders blustered. He planted both feet on the floor and both elbows on the table. “Seems that capitalism has won. Let me tell you something. We generate more wealth in a year in Silicon Valley alone than the entire Russian economy is likely to produce in the next decade.”He shook his head with contempt. “Seems!”

“But what if this isn't the end of history at all, but just a stage? What if Marx wasn't wrong after all? What if the Soviet Union had to be destroyed before history could move beyond capitalism to communism? What does this new world market economy—the economy that has made you all so fabulously wealthy—what does it mean if not the abolition of all those national boundaries and policies which for Marx were impediments to history, vestiges of the late stages of capitalism? Whether you know it or not, you have all become Marxists.”

Lowering his eyes, Bogdonovitch ran the tip of his thick middle finger around the circumference of the thin cup in front of him. A shrewd, subtle smile etched itself on the left corner of his mouth.

“The last stage before communism was not the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat; it was what Marx called the 'withering away of the state,' ”he said, turning his head to take a glimpse of Robert Sanders. “Isn't that what you people really want: no government at all? Isn't that what you people really believe: that economics is the only thing that matters? Isn't that it, Mr. Sanders—politics doesn't matter, government doesn't matter, only the unrestricted access to worldwide markets? Now, Mr. Sanders, consider if you will that by doing this, by turning everything into a question of economics and worldwide markets, by producing through science everything everyone needs, have you not moved closer to the end of history the way Marx meant it: not by the victory of state socialism—which is what the Soviet Union represented—but through the victory of what for lack of a better phrase I'll simply call 'market socialism'?”

Though Sanders tried to strike a pose of unruffled urbanity, he could scarcely contain the rage that was boiling up within him. “That's very interesting, Mr. Bogdonovitch,”he said in a peremptory tone. “But of course it makes no sense at all. The simple fact is that the Cold War is over and we won it.”

“Yes,”Bogdonovitch acknowledged, “you're perfectly correct: The Cold War is over.”

He paused and seemed to consider what he was going to say or if he was going to say anything more at all. He had been speaking in a voice that enveloped the room, speaking with tremendous energy and force; but now, when he began to speak again, his voice was little more than a whisper, and instead of the large gestures he had made with his hands and the lively expression that had taken possession of his features, he shrugged his shoulders with a sort of weary indifference and folded his hands in his lap.

“But what have you won? For fifty years both sides thought they were engaged in something important. The competition between us imposed a discipline on everything we did, both of us. This of course is just my opinion, but I've lived in both countries, and I believe there is a sense in which both of them—the United States and the Soviet Union—were necessary to each other; that they were in a way mirror images of each other; that the destruction of either one had to lead to the destruction of the other. Yes, Mr. Sanders, the Cold War is over; but while it lasted, all of us were engaged in a struggle to achieve something we thought important—more important than ourselves. What do we have now? I am not being entirely ironic, Mr. Sanders, when I suggest that while we Marxists always denied that the soul existed, you Americans seem not to have noticed when you lost the soul you had.”

No one knew quite what to say. Albert Craven seized the moment to announce that we were all about to have the privilege of meeting the famous chef who had done us the honor of preparing our dinner. The mood around the table changed immediately. Everyone began to talk at once, gratified they could talk about something they understood, something that was really important. The chef, a young man in his early thirties with a small mustache, a crooked smile, and a name so obviously contrived that you hesitated to think him a fraud, made his appearance and, like a visiting dignitary, took questions from the floor.

I glanced across at Bogdonovitch. He was smiling to him-self—rather sadly, I thought—while he slowly drank what was left of his coffee. He caught my eye before I could look away, and for a moment we stared at each other like two strangers from the same country who find themselves on foreign ground.

“So you still have family in Russia?”I asked, wondering what it must have been like to become an exile.

“No,”said Bogdonovitch quietly. “I was an only child and my parents both died when I was young. There is nobody.”

At the end of the evening, while everyone said their goodbyes, Marissa Kane asked me if I was staying with friends while I was in the city.

“I'm staying at the St. Francis.”

She bent her head slightly to the side, a whimsical look on her face. “Do you have a car?”

“No,”I replied. “Do you need a ride?”

This seemed to amuse her even more. “No, I don't need a ride. I have a car. But how did you get here?”

Finally, I understood. “I took a cab.”

“I'll drop you off,”she said casually, laughing at me with her eyes.

“Is it on the way?”

I thought she was going to laugh out loud. “It's not far out of the way.”

She said we were going to take the scenic route, and from the way she said it I had a hunch it was going to be something unusual. We drove up a narrow street between three-story wood-frame buildings with garage doors facing the sidewalk and, jutting out above them, three-sided windows that let in the light and gave a distant, neck-craning view of the bay, glimmering in the darkness far below. The street seemed to get steeper with each block and it seemed to take all the power the engine had to keep us moving. When we reached the summit and stopped at the light, I tried not to think of how fast we would roll backward if the brakes did not hold.

“It's one of the things I love most about this place: driving up these hills,”she said, glancing at me as she made the turn. We had gone less than a block when she asked, “Do you know where you are?”

“We're on Nob Hill,”I replied as I looked out the window. “This isn't the first time I've been to San Francisco. When I was a kid I used to spend summers here.”

We passed the front of the Fairmont Hotel. Shiny black limousines were lined up in a row, while a bell captain in a scarlet coat and gold braid waved the next one into place.

“How well do you know Albert Craven?”I asked.

She turned onto California Street and began a precipitous descent. The pavement vibrated beneath us as, two blocks below, a cable car lurched its way along the iron tracks, heading for the top.

“ 'Climb halfway to the stars,' ”she sang under her breath. Her eyes glittered at the way she had connected the cable car and the famous song. “Some people like Tony Bennett and 'I Left My Heart in San Francisco.' Don't misunderstand me, it's wonderful, it really is. But I prefer 'San Francisco,' maybe because I always loved Judy Garland. Which do you like?”

“Judy Garland. Or do you think I'm only saying that?”

“Would you?”she asked, giving me a quick glance with her mirthful, long-lashed eyes. “Would you tell a lie because you thought that's what I wanted to hear?”

I would have told her every lie she ever wanted to hear.

“Never,”I swore, laughing. “But on a point on which I had no settled opinion, I might be tempted to yield to yours.”

“And are there many things on which you have settled opinions?”

“Only about Judy Garland. Now tell me, how long have you really known Albert Craven?”

“I've known Albert for years,”she replied, her voice suddenly soft and affectionate. “He did the legal work when I opened the first store.”