Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (16 page)

“Cesare Orsini,” Harper said, suddenly quite formal. As I leaned across the table and shook his soft, pliable hand, Harper added,

“Professor Orsini teaches at the University of Bologna. He’s the leading expert on Italian Renaissance literature. He’s here to give a series of lectures the paper is helping to sponsor.”

“Mr. Bryce overstates my qualification,” the professor remarked, an amused gleam in his eyes. “I’m just an old man who likes to read things written by people who died a long time ago. It makes me feel young.” His English was impeccable, with only a trace of an accent.

Next to Orsini was an attractive woman with quiet eyes and shoulder-length brown hair. She had the athletic look of someone who spent a lot of time on a golf course or a tennis court.

Lisa Laughlin, Harper explained, was the editor of the society page.

“It’s a great pleasure to meet you,” I said. There was something about her, something about the way she looked at me, that made me stop.

“It’s all right, Mr. Antonelli,” she said, laughing.

I tried to figure out why she was laughing, and I had the odd sense that it was something I should know.

“Joseph,” I said.

This only made her laugh more. “Joseph? Yes, of course,” she said as the laughter died away. “But, you see, Joseph, when I was thirteen and had a crush on you so bad it hurt, everyone called you Joe. Except my sister, who I hated, who called you Joey.”

I still did not know, and she took pity on my ignorance. “My maiden name was Frazier.”

I could have fallen through the floor. Suddenly I was eighteen again, with a butch haircut, two gray stripes on the sleeve of my red letterman sweater, wearing saddle shoes and peg pants, the captain of the high school football team, with a cocky smile but so pathetically self-conscious that I would not wear a short-sleeve shirt on the hottest day of the year because I thought I was skinny and that everyone would laugh. And then Jennifer Frazier, the best-looking girl in school, which meant the best-looking girl in the world, said she’d go out with me and I became a novitiate in the fine art of romantic failure.

I remembered it as if it had all just happened. We went to a party, and while everyone else ate and drank and talked, we stayed in the darkened corner of another room, dancing together as if the night was forever. She was tall and thin, with wide, almond-shaped eyes that changed color with the light, through several shades of brown, and, when everything was just right, to yellow.

She was gorgeous, and I was in love before I kissed her and doomed when I did. When I took her home, sometime after midnight, she lingered in my arms and with a bittersweet look I never forgot, told me that she would ask me to spend the night, but her mother wouldn’t like it. After Jennifer, I didn’t think I could ever fall in love again.

It took me a long time to get over Jennifer Frazier, and now that I was looking at her grown-up little sister and felt the blood rushing to my face and a surge of awkward embarrassment, I knew that I never really had.

“You were just a little kid,” I heard myself say. “A little kid with pigtails and rubber bands, braces on your teeth, a little, skinny kid who liked to play with frogs. You told me you hated boys.”

She smiled at me, and nodded. “And I haven’t changed a bit,”

she said. “And neither have you.”

Under the throbbing din, dozens of white-coated waiters, their eyes darting from large pewter-colored trays to the place on the table where they had to set the next dish, bustled around the cavernous room. At the end of a forgettable meal of lukewarm food, the dishes were removed and coffee was served.

Slowly tapping his fingers on the tablecloth, Professor Orsini seemed to be lost in thought. When he raised his eyes and found me watching, his cheeks flushed, as if he had been caught doing something he should not.

“I was just thinking about the Borgias,” he explained. His dark brown eyes sparkled and he began to gesture with his hands. “It has been said of them that they came into the world as a declaration of war against morality through incest and adultery.”

Everyone at the table stopped what they were doing. Orsini glanced from one to the other. “One of the Borgias became Pope, Alexander VI. His son, named, like myself, Cesare,” he remarked with a cunning smile, “was the one Machiavelli so much admired—or at least seemed to admire. Yes, yes, I know,” he said quickly. “It is unfortunate, but true. The Pope was not always so holy. He also had a daughter, Lucrezia, who was not so good, either.” With a sigh he opened his hands in a gesture of supplica-tion. “She had relations with several of her own family. Today, of course, the Borgias would be considered quite a dysfunctional family and no doubt required to undergo a lengthy process of psy-chological counseling. On the other hand, they did some truly amazing things. It is an interesting question, don’t you think, Mr.

Antonelli? I mean the connection, or perhaps I should say the tension, between conventional morality and the willingness to take great risks, to invent what Machiavelli called new modes and orders?”

He let the question hang in the air for just an instant, and then, turning away from me, went back to what he had been saying.

“You Americans come to a dinner like this, where a prominent political figure is going to make a speech, and you enjoy yourselves immensely. In my country—in Florence in particular—

no one ever wanted to be invited to dine with the Borgias. It was always dangerous to refuse and sometimes fatal to accept.”

Narrowing his eyes, he looked down at the table and shook his head. “At least I had always thought that was a great difference between Italy then and America now,” he said, lifting his gaze.

“But after eating this dinner, I’m no longer quite so sure!”

“You have nothing to worry about, Professor,” Rothstein’s wife assured him with a cadaverous grin. “In this country we don’t poison people, we shoot them.”

“Or stab them,” Harper added, an offhand allusion to what had happened to Calvin Jeffries.

Running a protective hand over the expanding stomach that sheltered her unborn child, Archie Bailey’s wife lowered her eyes.

With a shudder she shook her head in dismal silence.

Immediately, Harper regretted what he had done, but before he could apologize Otto Rothstein asked a question.

“What do you hear about the investigation? Have they got anything at all?”

Harper started to say something, then closed his mouth and wrinkled his nose. He twitched it back and forth, and then, with a hissing noise, drew in three short breaths of air. It did not work.

Pulling out his handkerchief, he blew his nose.

“No, nothing,” he said, sniffing. “They’ve got every cop in the state working on it, and so far they don’t have a thing.” Folding the handkerchief, he paused, a shrewd look in his reddened eyes.

“Or if they do, they’re not talking about it. They’re under a lot of pressure. It’s the biggest case any of them has ever worked on.”

Rothstein furrowed his brow. “It’s been almost two months.

We’ve kept it on the front page about as long as we can. If they don’t do something soon, it’ll be back in the Metro section.” He stopped and looked at me. “What do you think? You know something about criminal behavior. What do you think happened? Did somebody plan to kill him?”

“The only reason anyone thinks that is because of who the victim was. If it was anyone else—someone whose name was never in the papers—there would be no reason to think it was anything other than a random killing, a robbery gone bad.”

Rothstein liked to argue. He liked to draw people out. If you agreed with anything he said, he would change his position just to see if you were willing to stand your own ground.

“People are murdered on purpose all the time. Most of them aren’t famous.”

“That’s right. But if you plan to kill someone, you don’t usually plan to do it with a knife. Too many things can go wrong.

You have to get too close; the victim has a chance to fight; you may not be able to get it done without doing it more than once.”

I darted a glance at the Baileys. They were talking together and not paying any attention to us.

“Jeffries didn’t die right away. He almost made it back to his office. If he’d had a cell phone on him, he could have called 911.

If he’d had a gun, he could have taken a shot. A lot of things could have happened, any one of which might have saved his life or captured his killer. If someone did set out to kill him, they probably would have used a gun.” I shrugged my shoulders. “Having said that, I have to admit that most killers aren’t the smartest people in the world. It’s possible someone wanted Jeffries dead and just decided that was as good a time to do it as any other, especially if they were on something.”

“If they’re not very smart,” Samantha Rothstein wanted to know, “why is it so difficult to catch them?”

“If it wasn’t planned, if it was random, if there isn’t any direct physical evidence—fingerprints, DNA—then there is nothing to tie the killer to the victim. That’s the most difficult case to solve, and when they are solved it’s almost always because the killer tells someone what they’ve done.”

Orsini had been following every word. “Tell me, Mr. Antonelli, have you never come across someone of great intelligence who committed murder?”

No one had ever asked me that before. I searched his eyes, wondering if it was just curiosity or if there was something else behind his question.

“No, I haven’t. But, then, I only meet the ones who have been caught. Cesare Borgia, if I remember correctly, died in his bed.”

Orsini’s eyes flared open and then narrowed down until he was looking at me from behind half-shut lids. “He was the unusual case, though I think not unique in this respect. I believe, Mr.

Antonelli, that there are always three kinds of people: those who obey the law; those who break it and are punished; and those, like a Borgia, who follow a law all their own and try to impose it on others.” After a brief pause, he added, “By the way, the Borgias liked knives. They do their work in silence.”

The lights dimmed and static noise ripped through the ballroom as someone switched on a microphone.

If Jeffries had died in his sleep of natural causes, another judge would have been the most likely candidate to extol his virtues and ignore his vices in a public tribute. The manner of his death had brought him a posthumous fame, and instead of someone who had known him, the governor had seized on the chance to honor the memory of a man he was not certain he had ever actually met.

William Jackson Collins had won election to a first term in a race so close that only after a recount was the result made official. Two years later nearly everyone thought he was unbeatable.

He never told the truth and he did not seem to mind that even those who agreed with him thought he was a liar. He gave his word to anyone who asked for it and then, when he broke it, explained it all away with distinctions so difficult to follow that it was easier just to forget about it. Then he would do it all over again, and no matter how many times he had lied to you before, when he looked at you with those large round boyish eyes, you just knew that this time he was telling you the truth. Deep down, however, you would have been disappointed if he had, because every instinct told you that he had only lied to you in the first place because he could not bring himself to say anything that might lose you as a friend. Everyone who knew him expected him to seek higher office.

When he rose to speak, Collins did what every politician does, the same ritual litany which, one way or the other, tells an audience how great they are and how glad he is to be there. I glanced at my watch, wishing he would speed it up. With a gracious, deferential smile, he nodded toward Jeffries’s widow, sitting three places down the dais, and made the obligatory remarks about her loss. By the earnest expression on his face it was a loss which had been felt by no one more than himself.

I slipped my shirt cuff away from my watch, decided it must have stopped, and started to wind it before I remembered it was a quartz. When I looked up, Collins was staring down at the podium. The shy, bashful smile had dissolved. He raised his eyes and stood straight up. His head began to move slowly from side to side, taking in the crowd. He began to speak, stabbing the air for emphasis, his voice rising and falling in a mesmerizing staccato. The murder of Calvin Jeffries was more than the murder of a single human being, bad as that was. It was more than the murder of a distinguished judge. It was nothing less than the attempted murder of reason itself. The law was the anchor of civilization, the only thing that separated us from the worst kind of barbarism, the only thing that kept us safe and kept us free.

The law protected us all, and we all had a moral obligation to protect the law.

I looked around the ballroom. Every face was lifted toward Collins, every eye fixed on him, as he led them from one emotion to another, building on their excitement until they had to explode. At the end, when it was over, he stood there, a triumphant smile on his face, waving into the tumultuous darkness, the center of every thought and every feeling. He had given a speech about the law and about reason, and had for the moment deprived his audience of their senses. I watched the way he kept waving at the crowd as if he could not bear the thought of being left alone without them. Suddenly I remembered the last time I had seen eyes burn with so much fire. It was when I found Elliott Winston waiting for me, at the state hospital, locked in a catatonic gaze.

The end of the governor’s speech was the end of the evening.

As the house lights went on, the vast ballroom swarmed with noise. As I was saying goodbye to Harper, I glanced across at the podium where a crowd had gathered around the governor. Jeffries’s widow was standing at his side. I had forgotten about the letter. It was the only thing Elliott had asked me to do, and it was still sitting in the desk drawer where I had put it. I promised myself to take care of it first thing Monday morning.

Lisa Laughlin touched my arm. “It was nice to see you, after all these years. By the way,” she added, as she turned to go, “Jennifer moved back a few months ago.” She said something else, but the crowd had swept her too far away and I could not hear what it was.