The Privilege, page 13
“Were they - of the same opinion?”
“They didn’t think so - at first.”
Boe was a prisoner, accused of murder, sitting in a windowless room that seemed to have been constructed for the specific purpose of producing a sense of utter hopelessness, and he was as full of energy and enthusiasm, as full of life, as anyone I had ever seen. Every word, every eager sentence, careened off the walls like a jazz player’s brass trumpet.
“They didn’t think so - at first?” I asked, as I began to shake with laughter.
Boe threw up his hands, his astonishing eyes darting in what seemed a dozen different directions at once.
“Yes, of course; because it is obvious that murder is sometimes not merely justifiable, but worthy of the highest praise. Hitler. If someone had murdered him, would anyone call that wrong? Rules are important, Mr. Antonelli, as I need not tell you; but the exceptions are what have to be understood.”
I picked up my pen and tapped it gently on the thick legal pad on which I had yet to write a line.
“Was that the end of it? Did the detectives now start to ask you questions about what had happened, what you were doing the night of the murder?”
He quickly shook his head, eager to go on with his story.
“I asked them that, given that I was innocent, that I had not killed the chancellor, or anyone else, how they would feel if I were nevertheless convicted. Judging from the look on their faces, I think no one had ever asked them this before. They said - and I thought this quite honorable - that if I was innocent they hoped I would not be convicted. They explained that they were only following the evidence. I had been seen coming out of the building.”
“You were in the building, at the time of the murder, sometime between eleven and midnight?”
“Yes, I was there. I’m there, near there, almost every night at that time. It’s when I walk across campus and try to think about whatever I have been studying that evening.”
“But why did you happen to go into the building? I take it you don’t do that every night when you are out for your walk? You need a key.”
“I was just passing in front when I heard a woman scream from somewhere inside. That’s the reason I went in: to see what was going on, to see if I could help. And it was not locked. I had just started up the stairs when a woman bolted past me in the dark, bumped into me, almost knocked me over. I started after her; I thought she must be panic-stricken, that she must need help, someone to call 911. But suddenly the alarm bell went off and all the lights came on and security guards were running toward me. I explained what had happened. They took down my information, and then let me go on my way.”
Chapter Nine
Giuseppe Gambarini thought the whole thing criminal.
“I knew Professor Boe, not personally - we’ve never met - but by reputation. No one here seems to know much about him - the newspaper reports refer to him only as a teacher in the philosophy department - but in Europe, where we still take seriously the great minds of the past, everyone knows him as the greatest living authority on German philosophy from Hegel to Nietzsche. There isn’t a graduate student in philosophy or political science who has not studied his writings.”
Gambarini’s gorgeous wife, Sophia, flashed a brilliant smile.
“But Giuseppe, just because someone isn’t Italian doesn’t mean he cannot be an extremely intelligent murderer. I mean,” she asked, exchanging a glance with Tangerine, “the only murderers who are very interesting are….Well, perhaps Giuseppe is right. We Italians are a little spoiled. We had the Borgias, and as if that weren’t enough, Machiavelli then taught the world murder as policy. Yes, I agree: in America it doesn’t seem likely that someone as well-educated, as deeply learned as….”
The four of us were having dinner in a small restaurant in North Beach, one of those out of the way places only people who live in the city know about. It was Sunday, the night before the trial of Alan Boe for the murder of Lucas Fairweather was scheduled to start. I was grateful to get away from the frenzied anticipation of what might happen, the endless questions and answers that might occur at trial, - what a witness might say, all the different ways what he said might be dealt with - everything a kaleidoscope of shifting images and sounds, the fragments of what became, as the trial drew closer, my own disordered mind. Giuseppe’s remarks, and Sophia’s response, gave me something to think about, a central thread that held everything together.
“I should have done that,”I blurted out. “I should have read what Boe has written.”
“Why?” asked Tangerine, tilting her head in curiosity. “What would you learn from what he wrote about l9th century German philosophy that would help you defend him?”
“It might help me understand why he was chosen.”
“Chosen?” asked Sophia, tilting her head exactly the way Tangerine had done.
It was uncanny, how the two of them, a generation apart, sometimes seemed the mirror image of each other. They laughed at the same things, and usually at the same time, and then, with a kind of sixth sense, would look at each other in silent confirmation of their shared reaction to what someone else had just said.
“Chosen,” she repeated. “Someone chose Professor Boe to be the accused, the defendant in the trial you start tomorrow?”
“Yes,” said Tangerine, with a flash of anger in her eyes. “Chosen by the one responsible, the man who was behind the murder of Allison Friedrich. This is the second murder he has either committed himself or arranged to have done. Someone who….” She turned to me, afraid she might have gone too far, but not sorry if she had. “It isn’t anything Joseph has told me. I promise that it isn’t. I’ve met him, listened to what he said about why Allison Friedrich was murdered and why her innocent husband was put on trial.” Turning to me again, Tangerine smiled softly. “That’s all right, isn’t it? You haven’t told me anything you shouldn’t; I can tell them what I know myself?”
Gambarini did not understand, and when I explained what the lawyer-client privilege meant he tapped his fingers together as he thought through the consequences.
“The priest in the confessional. Although not quite,” he remarked, remembering a distinction. “A priest can never tell anything a penitent tells him, even if he hears him confess that he is planning to murder someone; or even, for that matter, blow up a city. There is a reason for the difference.” A slight smile signifying grudging admiration for the consistency of a belief that, though raised a Catholic, he no longer shared, curled across his mouth. “When you confess to a priest, you are confessing to God. If you tell the priest you are going to commit a crime, you are telling God, and God has the power to stop it.”
“Which means, my dear Antonelli,” said Sophia, “that you may have to play God yourself.”
Her husband looked at her with curiosity. He knew she understood the distinction he had just drawn between the obligations of a priest and a lawyer; she knew that, unlike the priest, the lawyer could, and in certain circumstances was required, to reveal what a client said concerning what he intended to do, as opposed to what he had done.
“Someone who doesn’t tell you what they’re going to do,” she explained, a shrewd glint in her large, luminous eyes, “but tells you about the intricate scheme by which someone was murdered and an innocent man was put on trial, and gives you every reason to think he is doing it again. God isn’t going to do anything about it.”
Lifting an eyebrow, Giuseppe nodded his agreement, the way, I imagined, he would have responded to a musician in an orchestra with a thoughtful suggestion about how something should be played. Gambarini was an orchestra in himself. Everything - his hands, his fingers, his eyes - was always in motion, keeping time, as it were, with the measured movement of his words. Long, lean, with gray hair that curled over his collar in back, wearing a dark tailored suit with an open collar white dress shirt, as elegant sitting in a cafe as on the podium in a concert hall, he spoke in a slow, unhurried voice that seemed to echo with five centuries of music, history, and culture.
“Two murders, two trials, both men innocent, the first one acquitted, and you’re the attorney in each. That cannot be coincidental. It would seem that you are the central character in a drama still being written.” He looked at me with a new, and different, interest. “Your situation seems to be extremely precarious. You have become a character in someone else’s work of fiction.”
“Someone else’s?” asked Sophia, puzzled, but also, because she knew the subtlety of his mind, more than a little amused.
“What I learned from Alan Boe’s remarkable book, what he wrote about Nietzsche: we invent ourselves, or someone else does.”
“Nietzsche!” laughed Sophia. “That’s all he talked about for months! You should have seen him,” she said, waving her hand back in front of her face as she tossed her head. “Nietzsche this, Nietzsche that! He was like a schoolboy suddenly, passionately, in love - not with a girl, that would be too prosaic, but something as godlike as God himself!”
Giuseppe Gambarini watched with amused affection the antic exaggerations of the woman whose exuberance had, ever since he first met her, made even dull things seem exciting.
“It wasn’t my fault,” he insisted, dryly. “Ten, or twelve, years ago - I don’t remember exactly when, except that I was scheduled to conduct the Berlin philharmonic orchestra the next season. One of the selections was to be Richard Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathustra. Like everyone else of my generation, I had read some of Nietzsche when I was a university student. I had perhaps read a few pages, a few sections, of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. But now I thought I should try to get a deeper understanding of what Zarathustra meant. Let me explain. I could read what Richard Strauss had written - the music, his composition; and I could take an orchestra through it. But what if there was more to it than what Richard Strauss thought; what if he had in some important respect failed to get hold of what Nietzsche was trying to say? This may seem unnecessary and even beside the point. The music is there. Anyone who can read music can play it. But music is the universal language, the only one we have, and Richard Strauss had written what, by the title alone, is an interpretation of one of the great works of the human mind, one of the last great works ever written. Strauss interpreted Nietzsche. I now had to interpret Strauss. That meant, or at least it seemed to me, that I had to go back to the original source to see whether what Strauss had done should be, not exactly corrected, but changed in emphasis. Boe helped me see this. It was something he said about translations in that book of his. Too many translations, especially translations from the ancient Greek, try to put everything in terms of the way things are understood at present. Instead of a literal translation, using the same English word for each Greek word, we end up with a translator’s interpretation of what he thinks Plato, for example, must have meant. That helped me see the problem. Did Richard Strauss give a literal translation of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, or was his composition his own interpretation of what Nietzsche wrote? It is music, not a philosophical critique; but music, great music, is always philosophical. It is always a search for wisdom, an attempt to plumb the depths of the mystery of our existence. So, yes, I studied Nietzsche and, among other things, discovered how close great writing is to great music. Read Nietzsche, listen to Beethoven, you sit there, mesmerized by what you hear, carried to places you did not know existed, transported out of yourself and then brought back, changed into someone different, better, than you were before, determined, in ways you had never thought possible, to try to do something great yourself. Because you now know that you will never again be satisfied with settling for anything less than that.”
Her fingers spread as wide as they would go, Sophia was gesturing with her hands, smiling and laughing at the same time.
“This is what I had to listen to - for months! He never stops. You won’t believe this,” she cried, looking first at Tangerine and then at me, “but he means what he says! Once he started, he could not stop. The next year, he was scheduled to perform Wagner. So what does he do? He has us stay in the same hotel - the same suite - where Wagner wrote the opera he was going to play! You think this isn’t strange? The hotel is in Palermo. We live in Palermo. We stayed there for a month. Sometimes I walked home, just to remind myself what it was like to live in more than two rooms.”
“But you always came back at night,” Giuseppe reminded her.
Throwing back her head, she gave him a wicked, scornful look.
“I was always tired - after the way I had spent my afternoons.”
“Not that tired, as I remember,” he replied, with a droll, roguish grin of his own.
“At your age, it’s a wonder you remember anything !” she shot back, her eyes full of excitement and full of life.
“Did it help, staying where Wagner stayed when he wrote the opera you were going to be conducting?” I asked, seriously interested.
He glanced around the small, neighborhood restaurant. There were perhaps a dozen tables, all of them, and the chairs as well, a hard, burnished black; all the tablecloths a soft white, almost almond, color. The pictures on the walls were scenes of the Italian countryside and the Italian sea.
“This is an Italian restaurant. The food here is very good. That would tell you two things of importance if you have not been here, but nothing close to what you know - what you feel - sitting here. If I didn’t know Wagner’s music, if I hadn’t known something about Wagner’s life, if I had not read what Nietzsche wrote about what he finally realized Wagner was trying to do - make the kind of large, grandiose music that would attract the attention, by appealing to the emotions, of the crowd, use music to create a mass movement and become a popular idol - staying in Wagner’s room in a hotel would have been little more than a tourist’s curiosity. As it was, it gave me a sense - and I cannot explain this any better than to say it was like tracing someone’s footsteps along a path you have never traveled - of how all the things that have the greatest effect, the things that change how people think, how they feel, are always done in private, someone working alone where no one can intrude. I would sit there for hours, listening in my mind to the music he wrote; listening as if, as in a way I was, I was hearing each new note as it first came into existence. You do the same thing,” he said, smiling at me with the certainty of a thing foretold. “You know what it feels like to be in a courtroom, what it is like to ask questions of a witness, to talk to juries. The place where something happens - you can describe it to someone, but you can only know what it feels like to be there, doing that kind of work, by being there yourself. Don’t you agree?”
“Giuseppe is right, isn’t he?” asked Tangerine, eager, as always, to see the connections that often pass unnoticed. “But more than the courtroom - where the crime took place. How long did you spend on the sailboat where Allison Friedrich was murdered? Hours, half a day, and now…Berkeley, the chancellor’s office.”
“You were there? Of course, you would have done that,” said Gasparini. “Did you discover anything that helps?”
“Yes.”
They all looked at me, waiting to hear what it was. I started on my dinner, as if there was nothing left to say.
“Joseph Antonelli - you’re the worst!” laughed Tangerine.
“Yes, I discovered something; no, I won’t tell you. I save all surprises for trial.”
“You’re worse than the worst!”
“That means,” said Sophia, with a sly smile of approval, “that he is best at being bad. And if that is true, my dear Tangerine, I think you have nothing to complain about. But now, prove it, Joseph - be the worst of the worst, or the best of the bad, and tell us, reveal your secret, so we can all become silent conspirators in whatever plot you are preparing, this surprise you are going to spring on everyone in court.”
She was so much like what I imagined Tangerine might be like in twenty years, I almost wished I was suddenly much older.
“Scuff marks,” I reported matter of factly and went back to my dinner.
“Scuff marks? On the floor?” asked Giuseppe, wondering why that might be significant.
“On the chancellor’s desk.”
They looked at one another, thoroughly confused.
“I’m sorry; I really can’t say more than that.”
“You mean you won’t.”
“Sophia will be there watching; I’ll come whenever I don’t have rehearsal. So, I agree, Joseph: don’t spoil the surprise. But that isn’t the only thing you discovered, is it? How do I know this?” he said, turning suddenly to Tangerine. “I don’t know. It’s the music, perhaps. After a while you know before you hear it that a note isn’t right, that something is missing. Am I right, is there something else?” he asked, perfectly confident I would agree.
“It’s possible; it depends on what the scuff mark means. I’m not trying to be difficult, but it isn’t as straightforward as you might think. It depends on whether I can use those scuff marks to get a witness for the prosecution to change his story.”
Giuseppe studied me with a kind of cheerful intensity.
“Change his story to tell the truth, or change his story in a way that by showing he has been deceptive will discredit his testimony?”
“Both, I think; but I won’t know until it starts. You’re right, by the way: being there, having a sense of how things work, of what goes on when someone has a thought or takes an action, makes all the difference. I could tell you who the witness is, I could tell you what he is going to say; I could tell you what I am going to ask him, how that single scuff mark will - or might - change everything, but it would not be half the truth of the way it will happen. I don’t know that yet, and I won’t know - I can’t know - until I am right in the middle of it.”
A strange look of what seemed nostalgia took possession of Gasparini’s kind, thoughtful eyes.
