The Privilege, page 26
Some things worse than murder? Was that going to be his defense? It was a phrase I had heard often enough, the justification used when someone killed someone and thought that, far from evil they had actually done something, if not good, at least explainable, and if explainable at least in some sense forgivable.
“Worse than murder? Are you trying to tell me that Friedrich and Fairweather both deserved to die? Is that your excuse, because if it is….”
“I could make the case, though I admit it would not likely have much influence with a jury in a court today. But there was a time, and there are still places, where adultery alone was punished with death, and whatever else you want to say about her, Allison Friedrich was certainly guilty of that, and a good many more times than once.” With a sudden, sharp, cynical glance that vanished as quickly as it appeared, he added, “And given that Justin Friedrich had lived his life pretty much the same way, it might have been better if you had not managed to win him an acquittal. As for Lucas Fairweather, who knows all the things he may have done: his flagrant abuse of power, the women he mistreated, all the allegations of sexual abuse that caused him to lose his job in Washington. Although, as far as that goes, if I were called upon to give a justification, if I had to say what he had done that was worse than murder, it would be what he tried to do, what he would have done, to Alan Boe. Isn’t the defense of others a justification for a homicide?”
“Defense of another’s life, when someone tries to stop someone from murdering someone else.”
“Which brings us full circle, doesn’t it? We think life, mere existence, the only important, or at least the most important, thing. But there might still be an argument that murdering the mind, taking away the best mind from the very place where the best minds are supposed to be left free to function, is something infinitely worse, because when you do that, when you do what Fairweather was about to do, you take not just one life, you tear the heart out of a whole generation and maybe more than just one.”
I had heard enough. I got up to go. Redfield got up with me and together we walked toward the door.
“I’m glad you came. I wanted you to see what we do, and I wanted to have the chance to tell you how much I admire what you have done. There is not anyone else I could have trusted to make sure Alan Boe was not convicted.”
“He would not have needed my help if Lucas Fairweather had not been murdered,” I reminded him, wondering as I did so why instead of anger I felt a strange, inexplicable sympathy for someone I knew was responsible for two murders. Redfield had that effect. It was uncanny, the way he could make you think that despite everything you knew, or thought you knew, there was in a way you did not yet understand, and probably never would, something just below the surface that would put a different, and a better, face on things. Perhaps it was nothing more than the sheer power of that remarkable intelligence. He seemed too much the solitary, a man who lived entirely inside himself, to have done what there was no question that he had.
“I’m not your lawyer, Mr. Redfield. You need to be very clear about that. There is no lawyer-client privilege anymore. If you do what you did again, I’ll tell everyone. There is not going to be a third trial.”
He held the door open, waiting until I passed through, waiting until I had stepped onto the wooden bridge over the softly lit pond.
“It doesn’t matter about the privilege, Mr. Antonelli. There is going to be at third trial, and no one will have to do anything to convince you to represent the defendant. I doubt very much there is anything anyone could say that could stop you. Good-night, Mr. Antonelli. It is unlikely we will ever meet again, but I hope you believe me when I tell you that it has been both a privilege and an honor. I know I can always count on you to do the right thing. I hope one day you will have reason to think the same thing of me.”
Chapter Eighteen
Tangerine, waiting at the door with a worried look, cheated her feelings with bright eyes filled with mischief. She taunted me with how inexcusably late I was.
“Three hours, Antonelli! Three hours! I could have run off with another man, changed my mind and come back, and you would never have known how close I had been to betrayal!”
I was mesmerized. The past, the future, time disappeared. I barely remembered how to talk, and the words, when I spoke them, were as new to me as they were to her.
“Sure I would,” I heard myself reply, as I set my briefcase down on the floor and took off my coat. “You would have told me. Told me! - You would have bragged about your astonishing self-restraint.”
She studied me with amused indifference.
“I can imagine what Sophia would say if Giuseppe ever said something like that to her - ‘Brag about something that commonplace? I am every day tempted to run off with someone else!’”
“‘Then why don’t you?’ - Isn’t that what Giuseppe would tell her with one of those indulgent smiles of his, letting her know that he doesn’t believe for a minute that she would ever even think once about leaving him.”
With an almost perfect imitation of an Italian woman’s sultry glance, Tangerine tossed her head and laughed.
“Why go to all the trouble, running off somewhere? Infidelity is so much easier right here, at home.”
“In that case,” I remarked with some laughing indifference of my own, “I’ll leave you here to rest while I go somewhere for dinner.”
She grabbed my arm as I walked past, tugging on it as if to stop me leaving.
“It’s almost ten. You haven’t eaten?”
“Not exactly. I was there, at dinner, in the dining hall at Redfield’s company, but I barely touched anything. I was too busy listening to what I was being told.” I pulled off my tie and picked up my coat, ready to put it on again. “Really, let’s go somewhere. I know I’m late. I know I should have called. I don’t know why I didn’t, except I could not stop thinking about what happened, what I saw, what I heard. We’ll go into the village; we’ll find something. All I want to do now is sit in some quiet restaurant, look across the table at you, have a glass of wine and get drunk as hell.”
“On one glass of wine?”
“I don’t need to drink anything to get drunk with you.”
She rose up on her tip toes and kissed me on the side of my face.
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said. I’ll run off with you, anywhere you want to go, anytime you want - Tonight, if you like.”
It made me remember the first night we met, at a dinner at Albert Craven’s house, when she waited outside for me in her car.
“Like the night I said I might drive out to the airport and fly off to London or New York, and asked if you thought you might like to go?”
“And I might have gone, if I had thought you serious.”
“You didn’t think I was serious when I told you that I might not come back?”
A shy, teasing smile slipped cautiously over her mouth.
“I wasn’t sure you were serious when you asked me to marry you.”
“When I suggested you divorce your husband and marry me instead? I had not been that serious about anything in my whole life.”
“Is that why you looked so surprised?” she asked, with a shrewd, knowing glance. “The first you thought about it was when you heard yourself saying it. It’s true, isn’t it?”
“Which proves just how serious I was. I didn’t need to think about it; there was nothing to consider. Those words, that night, when I said them, came as naturally as breathing.”
We walked down the narrow, twisting road to the main street of town. The towers on the Golden Gate were barely visible in the fog; the houses we passed were hidden behind a heavy gray swirling mist. Tangerine held my arm with both hands and every so often, for no reason at all, with a quick, easy step got in front of me and smiled with her eyes as she walked backward like a happy child.
“Look over there!” she cried suddenly. “What do you see?”
We were just the other side of the street from the marina, filled with power boats, and sailboats, motor boats and yachts, boats of every size and description .
“I have been on a lot of sailboats, other people’s boats, never one of my own. Why don’t we get one?” Grabbing my hand, she pulled me along behind her as she dashed across the street. “Get one ourselves and sail off somewhere, just the two of us, go wherever we want, stay as long as we like any place we feel like staying?”
I could think of nothing better. I was tired of spending my time worrying about what would happen if I lost a trial; tired of the endless back and forth: the questions I might have to ask, the answers that might, or might not, be given, the days of mind-numbing preparation for every hour I might have to be in court. I was a fool and I knew it; a fool to spend any time at all away from her.
“We might not be able to go too far,” I replied, with a helpless grin. “I’ve never sailed in my life.”
“We’ll learn,” she insisted, quite in earnest. “It can’t be that difficult. I’ve seen enough of those who can to know.”
It was late, but the Spinnaker was open and we found a small table next to the window in the bar. I was almost used to it, the first looks when we entered a room, then the second, more intense and longer stare, when they tried to remember who she was. Anyone that looked like her had to be someone they had seen before, in the movies, or on television, somewhere in that world of shining screen images that nearly everyone thought more real than what they saw in a restaurant or out in the street.
“It’s what Redfield does,” I said to her confusion. “His company, where I was today - artificial intelligence. The new way of teaching: every child with an electronic tutor, a face, a body, on a screen, everything generated by a computer program. That face - that artificial person - will become everyone’s best friend, their most trusted advisor. And everyone will live abstracted from what is real.”
The waiter took our order - a sandwich for me, a salad for her - and, as starstruck as everyone else, tried not to look, afraid that he might stare. I watched him make his way across to the kitchen and, just before he went through the door, glance back across his shoulder. He was lucky not to stumble.
“I think it’s a very good idea,” I said, suddenly.
“What is a very good idea?”
“Get a sailboat and just go.”
“When?”
“We’ll start looking tomorrow. Albert keeps that boat of his in the Marina. He’ll know someone who can start to teach me how to do it. He might even know someone with a sailboat to sell.”
“We don’t have to go anywhere,” she said, taking hold of my hand. “We can keep it here, in Sausalito; take it out whenever we feel like it, sail out on the bay all day long and then come home and sleep in the comfort of our own bed, and wake up in the morning and decide if we want to go out again.”
Never have San Francisco out of view, whether out on the bay or up on the hill. It was sounding better all the time.
The waiter brought our food and wine and Tangerine thanked him in such a friendly voice he almost blushed.
“You made one man happy tonight,” I remarked, as I sipped gratefully on my glass.
“Maybe not as happy as I might make another one later this evening. - Now, you promised, tell me everything,” she said, leaning closer. “Tell me about your meeting with Redfield. Tell me he isn’t going to bother you - bother us - anymore.”
I told her what I had seen, and what I had learned, during my private, guided tour.
“Carruthers told me -”
“Carruthers?”
“I don’t know her first name; everyone uses last names only. There are a hundred people - that’s all - who run the place. It’s remarkable. They create the world’s most advanced technology and use that same technology to create even more. A hundred men and women, young men and women, all of them in their twenties; they don’t just work together, they live together; they have children together.”
“Children? Together? What do you mean?” she asked, intensely curious.
“Nothing is private, everything is in common. They sleep with whomever they want, and if they have children they all take care of them. Until they leave, and then the mother takes them.”
“What about the father?”
“It’s up to her - if she wants the father to live with her. And its up to him - if he wants to. It isn’t a question of support. Good God, they’re all rich! They get paid millions from the day they start. And if they want to start a company of their own, AIE provides all the financing they need. When they leave they never have to worry about money; but five years they have nothing in private, nothing that, strictly speaking, is their own. It is all to make them think less of themselves and think more of how they should live - more of what Redfield teaches them about how they should want to live - with an endless curiosity, a willingness to look at things without any preconceptions. They learn not to be the slaves of what everyone else thinks and feels. That is the word I kept hearing - slavery, the slavery of the modern mind. One of them made the remark - it might have been Redfield, it might have been someone else - that the serious question is not freedom from, but freedom for, i.e. freedom to act in accordance with what the greatest minds have taught.”
I had started speaking too fast. I smiled an apology.
“I wish you had been there, sitting with me in the dark, listening to Redfield speak, when no one could see him, when no one could -”
“No one could see him?”
“After dinner, five, six times a week, they sit in a small amphitheater and listen to Redfield lecture. He does it in the dark; you can’t see him. It has a remarkable effect. It makes you listen more clearly, more intently, that you have ever listened to anyone before. Remarkable, that’s all I can say. And they do it, for five years, every week of every month of every year. They listen to what Redfield wants to tell them, and they do it willingly, eagerly; they look forward to it. This isn’t some kind of cult, there isn’t any indoctrination; Redfield doesn’t insist that they agree to anything he says. There isn’t any official program, no party line. He teaches them the history of human thought: the conversation, as he put it, that has been going on for twenty-five hundred years, beginning with the ancient Greeks, the dozen or so great minds that have helped determine what, and how, we think; the conversation that, according to him, we are in danger of destroying by our own stupidity. And so, every evening, for an hour, sometimes two or three, sometimes even four, they sit listening, enthralled, by a voice, a voice from a man none of them has ever seen.”
The fork in her hand suspended just above her salad, Tangerine listened in open-mouthed astonishment.
“No one has ever seen him? Yes, he would do that, wouldn’t he? - Establish a distance between himself and the others, the ones he wanted to make sure looked up to him.”
“And keep them from identifying too closely with him, or with anyone else. He doesn’t want followers, he wants them all to become what he called ‘second best.’”
I remembered with a smile Redfield’s description of the three types of human beings. With rare intuition Tangerine sensed immediately what Redfield must have meant.
“They won’t be able to add to that conversation Redfield talked about; but they will be able to follow it and judge who has the better argument. Is that what he is after: a hundred people like that?”
“As near as I was able to follow. I’m not sure I would have understood anything if Alan Boe had not told me what he did about Redfield. The ‘gift for solitude,’ was the phrase he used. Boe was not talking about the ability to live alone - Redfield has that all right; if you had been there with me, at his home, a home that looked like it was just built, a house that must be at least sixty years old - you would have seen it right away. It’s more than living a secluded, solitary life; he lives entirely within himself. He doesn’t need - he doesn’t want - anyone or anything. He would be perfectly content to live in that place, that house, and never see another soul. He almost does that now. He goes places, he sees people, but only the strangers he sees in a restaurant or passes in the street.”
Impatiently, Tangerine began to shake her head.
“None of that explains why he did what he did, why he committed two murders; why he let two other, innocent, people go on trial. None of it explains why he wanted you involved, why …?” She stared at me with something close to terror in her eyes. “There is going to be another murder, another trial, isn’t there? There is going to be…!”
Reaching across the table, I grabbed her wrist and insisted there was nothing to worry about.
“I told him I wasn’t his lawyer, that I was never going to be his lawyer, that the lawyer-client privilege didn’t exist anymore. I told him that anything he told me now, anything about any other crimes, I would report it to the police.”
She kept looking at me. . There was no accusation, no suggestion of disbelief. She just kept looking at me, telling me with her eyes that I had not finished and that I would not be finished until I told the truth.
“I told him all that,” I continued, as if I had only meant to pause, “ and I think he believed me; but, yes, there is going to be another trial. He said it was a trial that I would want, that I would not let anyone else defend whoever….”
“Whoever?”
“That when I found out who was accused of murder, I wouldn’t let anyone else come near it. That I would have to take the case.”
Tangerine knew what I was thinking and dismissed it with a gentle, teasing laugh.
“I’ll try not to murder anyone, at least for a while.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes, picking at our food, wondering what Redfield had meant, and what effect if might have on us.
“No effect at all,” she said, lifting her soft chin in a show of defiance. “Not unless we let it. And we won’t do that, will we, Joseph Antonelli? Even if we have to take our new sailboat and live somewhere far from shore.”
