The Legacy (22 page)

“I'm not speaking about theoretical generalities, Mr. Antonelli,”he said as he raised his eyes from the glass. “I'm speaking about something quite specific. You see, Mr. Antonelli, I knew Jeremy Fullerton; I believe in some ways I knew him better than anyone else did.”

How could he have known Fullerton, I wondered; and how could he have known him that well? Again, Bogdonovitch seemed to read my mind.

“I knew him from the time he was first elected to Congress, and I can tell you for a certainty that beneath that boyish charm of his, Jeremy Fullerton was utterly ruthless, without any conscience at all.”

A tight cynical smile flashed across his mouth, and I had the feeling that Andrei Bogdonovitch would have once fallen into the same regrettable category into which he had just placed Jeremy Fullerton.

“It isn't as easy as most people think, Mr. Antonelli—to betray people who trust you. Most of us, I've found, do it, if we do it at all, only with reluctance, and then try to rationalize what we've done by telling ourselves that we had no other choice: that it was a matter of survival; a question of protecting someone else; that it was any one of a hundred other things that will give us some excuse for what we have done. Jeremy Fullerton never worried about any of that. He could betray someone without a second thought. He had a truly remarkable capacity to simply forget people, forget them as if they had never existed—once they had served his purposes.”

I began gradually to realize what I was being told, though I had as yet no conception of what it meant or how far it might go.

“Are you suggesting that Jeremy Fullerton, a United States Senator, was recruited by the KGB?”

“No, Mr. Antonelli, I'm not suggesting anything of the sort. We didn't recruit Jeremy Fullerton; he came to us. It happened within a year of the time he was first elected to the House. He was a young congressman from California, without seniority, without any significant committee assignments—just another inconsequential member of the House no one outside his own district had ever heard of. But he had ambition to be more— much more—than just another congressman. And it was not just that he was ambitious—Washington is filled with ambitious people—he was impatient. He was the kind of man for whom everything is a means to something else. There is no doubt in my mind—none whatsoever—that even before he first knew he had been elected to the House he was already thinking about how he was going to get elected to the Senate.

“He came to us, Mr. Antonelli; we didn't recruit him. At first he said he wanted to open private discussions in the hope they might eventually lead to better relations between the two countries. It was quite the most astonishing thing I'd ever seen: a freshman congressman who talked like he was the American secretary of state engaged in back-channel negotiations. That may have been what first got my interest: how easily he assumed his own importance. He was also surprisingly well informed; not just about the current state of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, but about Russian history, the Russian Revolution, the workings of Soviet economics. He tried to pass it off as a lifelong interest, and perhaps it was, but, as I came to learn, he was what you Americans call a 'quick study.' He was ruthless, but he also had an extraordinary intelligence.

“We began to have discussions—oh, dozens of them, Mr. Antonelli!—wide-ranging discussions over every conceivable topic, but never anything that would put him in a compromising position. Then, months after they began, he started talking about his frustration in the House, his inability to exercise any serious influence over policy, talking about how much more he could to do to bring about a better understanding between our two countries if he was in the Senate.”

Bogdonovitch gave me a shrewd look. “We were not children, Mr. Antonelli. We knew he was spending a lot of time talking to people in California about a possible Senate campaign; we knew the only thing holding him back was money.”

Pausing, Bogdonovitch took another drink. He set down the glass and slowly wiped his mouth.

“We were, I suppose, in what you might call a mating ritual: We danced around what we both knew we wanted and let things take their course. We gave him money; we gave him a lot of money—millions of dollars over the years. We financed his campaign, or rather we financed enough of it to make him the kind of credible candidate who could then attract money on his own. How much of what we gave him was always spent on his campaign, and how much he spent on himself, I don't know. It doesn't matter. From the moment he took the first dollar we gave him, we both understood that the dance had ended and that we were married for life. Fullerton had made his pact with the devil. Or perhaps we were the ones who had made a pact with the devil,”he added, looking off into the distance.

“Do you read history, Mr. Antonelli?”he asked a short while later.

“Some.”

“Thucydides?”

“Yes, but it's been a while.”

“Do you remember how often Alcibiades did things for the enemies of Athens, but only so that he could eventually have the power to rule in Athens? That was Jeremy Fullerton. He made his bargain with us, but I think I knew that in the end he would find a way to turn on us without hurting himself.”

“What was his part of the bargain?”I asked as Bogdonovitch took another drink. “You gave him money—what did he give you?”

“Something no one else could have given us: an understanding of the way things really worked inside the American government. We wanted to know everything we could about the people we were dealing with: their strengths, their weaknesses, who their friends were, who their enemies were. Fullerton gave us that. There were times I think we knew more about what was going on inside your government than we knew about our own. Fullerton was a brilliant observer.”

“And in exchange,”I summarized, “he got the money he needed.”

“Oh, he got more than the money, Mr. Antonelli—though I admit that was what he wanted most of all. We also gave him the benefit of some of our own intelligence. It was no accident that after he was elected to the Senate, Jeremy Fullerton quickly became, by everyone's account, the best-informed member of the Foreign Relations Committee.”

I could not think of any reason why Bogdonovitch should make this up; but neither could I see any apparent connection between what he had just told me and Fullerton's death.

“I'm still not certain that—”

“It's obvious, isn't it? Ever since the Soviet Union destroyed itself, people have been searching through the archives, trying to find out what really went on inside the Kremlin. It was only a matter of time before someone came across a report, a transcript, some file, something where Fullerton's name was mentioned or there was an accounting of the money that had been paid out to him. The point is that someone did find out, and that's the reason he was killed.”

“But why—if he was working for the other side—and who?”

Bogdonovitch curled his lip in disdain. “Fullerton was never working for the 'other side,' Mr. Antonelli,”he said sharply. “He was always working for himself—only himself.”

It seemed a curious thing to say. He had just finished telling me that what Fullerton had given the Soviets had been invaluable; but now he seemed to have nothing but contempt for the motives that had made him do it. There was more than professional judgment involved in this. Whatever had happened between them, Bogdonovitch had for some reason come to think of it in deeply personal terms.

“He was on the Soviet payroll,”I reminded him. “That makes him a spy. The question is, who would want him dead because of it? If someone had learned about it, they could have turned him in to the government, they could have used it to blackmail him—but why kill him?”

Bogdonovitch thought I was an innocent. “What do you think would be the reaction in this country if it was discovered that not just a member of the United States Senate, but someone who might have become president, had for years been working with the Russians? The president hated Fullerton. He knew he was the only one who could defeat him for the Democratic nomination when he ran for a second term. Even if he defeated Fullerton in the primaries, he would be so weakened in the process that it would be next to impossible to win the general election.”

He had just proven my point. “In that case, if they found out about Fullerton, they could have destroyed him with what they knew. The last thing they would have done is have him killed and make a martyr out of him.”

Bogdonovitch picked up his glass and held it in front of his eyes, turning it first one way, then the other, as if he were searching for a flaw.

“Do you remember what happened in this country in the l950s? Do you remember the great wave of fear and suspicion that began with a series of unsubstantiated accusations by your Senator McCarthy? I asked you before: What do you think would have happened if Fullerton had lived and all this had come out? Do you think that the public would have believed that Fullerton was the only high official to work for the Soviet Union? What do you think the political enemies of the president would have done with information that a major member of his own party had been a traitor? The Alger Hiss case poisoned politics in this country for a generation—and who was Alger Hiss compared to Jeremy Fullerton? No, Mr. Antonelli, they couldn't use what they had against him—they had to get rid of him, once and for all, and there was only one way to do it. It works out rather neatly, doesn't it? The president no longer faces a threat to his own survival and he becomes in addition the beneficiary of all the heartache and sympathy the public feels for a fallen hero.”

He held the glass a little higher, twisting it back and forth in his hand. “There are only two people left they have to worry about.”He put down the glass and smiled at me. “If they found out about Jeremy Fullerton, they know about me; and if they know about me, they can't take a chance with you.”

“Me? Why would they have any reason to think anything about me?”

Bogdonovitch seemed almost sympathetic. “Because you're the defense attorney in the trial for Fullerton's murder, because you're the only one with a serious interest in proving that someone other than your client is responsible—and because they know you know me. They have to assume that you know something, and they can't take a chance on what that might be. You should know that as well as anyone, Mr. Antonelli. Isn't the first rule of murder not to let any witness live? You remember the car that almost hit you when you stepped off the curb that day I first tried to talk to you? Are you certain that was just an accident?”

It was logical, and insidious, and, I was now convinced, completely delusional. I might have believed what he told me about Fullerton—it would explain where the senator had obtained his money—but now I was being asked to believe that a conspiracy that went as high as the president himself was responsible for the murder. All the years of secrecy and deception, all the years of corruption and violence, had taken their toll: Andrei Bogdonovitch was a paranoid old man, scared of his own shadow.

I glanced at my watch, pretended I had not realized it was so late, thanked him for what he had told me, and quickly got to my feet. When we got to the door, Bogdonovitch put his hand on my shoulder.

“I know you don't believe me. I want you to know I don't blame you for that. But I can prove everything I told you about Jeremy Fullerton. In the meantime,”he said as he cautiously opened the door, “be very careful.”

Out on the sidewalk, I took a deep breath, trying to get out of my nostrils all the dust and dead air. At the end of the block, people were standing on the curb, waiting for the traffic light to change. I half expected to feel Bogdonovitch grab my arm as he caught up with me from behind, the way he had twice before. I stopped and glanced back over my shoulder.

It was the strangest thing. Everything seemed to stand still. The people walking on the sidewalk looked like cardboard cutouts, set there to fill up an empty space. Cars seemed to be parked in the middle of the street. Nothing moved; everything was frozen in time; and then, before I could blink an eye, there was an enormous, ear-shattering roar and a blinding orange flash that leaped all the way across the street and high up into the sky. I stood there, mesmerized, watching in utter disbelief as fire raged through the broken glass and jagged, twisted metal that was all that was left of the shop where less than a minute before I had said good-bye to Andrei Bogdonovitch.

I stood there, paralyzed, watching helplessly as a man and a woman, dazed and bleeding, wobbled aimlessly down the street. The sound of sirens—a mournful, insistent wail—grew louder and louder. A red fire truck with two firemen clutching the railing at the rear rumbled around the corner. From the opposite direction, a police car converged on the scene. A crowd had formed and I could hear all around me the voices of people asking each other what had happened.

Bogdonovitch was dead—nobody could have survived that blast. If I had not left when I did—if I had stayed just a minute longer—I would have been blown to pieces as well. Bog-donovitch had wanted to warn me, and I had not believed a word he said. He told me the same people who killed Fullerton would try to kill him, too—and not just him.

I could feel my pulse quicken. I began to search the faces of the crowd that swirled past me, looking for anyone who might be looking for me. Moving away from the street, I walked close to the buildings, trying to be as inconspicuous as I could. I thought about going back to the hotel, but anyone who had followed me when I went to see Bogdonovitch would know where I was staying. I thought about going to the office, but it was now nearly seven, and it was unlikely anyone was still there. I could think of only one place I could go, only one place where I would be safe.

With my head down and my hands shoved into my pockets, I walked as quickly as I could, forcing myself not to run. I turned on Powell Street, passed the front of the St. Francis, and kept going until I reached Market Street and the rapid transit station. I bought a ticket and took the escalator down to the platform where I waited for the train that would take me to Orinda, where Bobby lived. Things I never would have noticed before now took on a sinister significance: the passing glance of a stranger walking past me; the accidental bump from someone standing next to me each time the throng of weary commuters surged forward as an outbound train opened its doors.