Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (25 page)

“Much better,” he remarked as he swept the remaining pieces into a cigar box and folded up the board. Reaching for the teapot, he filled my cup and then his own. Holding the saucer in his hand, he sipped the tea, his eyes focused on me. “Now, tell me, what do you think about this business of a second judge being murdered? Is there perhaps a connection?”

My own suspicions suddenly seemed groundless and I found myself telling Chicherin what Flynn had told me. “The first one may have given the idea to someone else to do the second. Beyond that, no. The man who murdered Judge Jeffries confessed and then killed himself, so it can’t be the same person responsible for both.”

I said it as if it was simply self-evident, but his instincts were too good: He detected my doubt. “You’re not completely convinced that the man who confessed was telling the truth?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “There’s no reason to doubt it. He didn’t just confess, he committed suicide. Why would he have done that if he had confessed to something he had not done?”

His eyes on me, Chicherin ran his finger back and forth over his lower lip. “My father could have given you an answer to that,”

he said presently. “He once confessed to a crime he didn’t commit.”

“In Russia?” I asked, meeting his gaze. “What was the crime?”

A faraway look came into his eyes and his mouth twisted to the side. His head began slowly to move from side to side, and I was left with the feeling that there was not much in the past that he wanted to remember. “Treason,” he replied, as he sipped more tea. “Treason against the Revolution. My father was part of the generation that came of age during the October Revolution of 1917, the generation that believed in Lenin and thought the Communist Party was history’s chosen instrument.” A shrewd smile crossed Chicherin’s small moist mouth. “Communism was the religion of the intellectuals. They believed in it the way a true Catholic believes in the Church, without question or condition.

“The problem, of course, was that when Lenin died, Stalin took over, and Stalin was interested only in people who were loyal to him. He got rid of everyone who had come into positions of power under Lenin. Stalin was very shrewd. Instead of having them shot, which might have made martyrs of them, he accused them of crimes against the Soviet Union; he said they had spied for the capitalist powers that had sent troops to defeat the Red Army after the October Revolution. The charges were false, but most of the people accused, confessed, including Bukharin, the most famous of those put on trial. In open court Bukharin confessed to things he had never done.”

Bending forward, Chicherin looked at me intently and struck the table three times with his knuckles. “He didn’t confess to avoid his own death. He knew that once he made that confession, the only thing left was his execution. His confession was suicide. He didn’t do it to save his life. He did it because he believed that without that confession his life would have no meaning.

“Bukharin believed—they all believed—in the infallibility of the Communist Party. The party was in the service of history, and history,” Chicherin said with a rueful look, “was the one true God. If they denied the party, they would be denying the only God they had. Bukharin was put in the following position: He believed in the party, but the party insisted on his guilt. The only way he could deny his guilt was to deny that the party was right.

But how could the party—how could God—be wrong? Bukharin chose to remain a believer. He confessed and he was sentenced to death.”

Chicherin leaned against the back of the armless chair and folded his arms across his chest. He lowered his eyes, and placed one hand on the back of his neck. For a long time he stared down at the floor, a brooding look on his mouth. Finally, he tilted his head to the side far enough to cast a sideways glance at me.

“Have you never represented someone who confessed to something he did not do because of something he believed in?” he asked.

“I’ve had a few cases where someone made a false confession, but it was always to protect someone else. I’ve never had one where someone did it because of something they believed in.”

Removing his glasses, Chicherin closed his eyes and grasped the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry,” he said when he opened his eyes. There was a trace of weariness in his voice. “What you said made me think of how the world has changed. You find it perfectly reasonable that someone would be willing to take the blame for something they didn’t do to protect someone they loved. I remember the time when millions of people were in love with an idea, a cause, and were willing to die for it, Communism, democ-racy, Fascism, whatever it was, that was larger than themselves.

First God died, then Fascism, then Communism, and now what is there left to die for? Has the world become less insane, or perhaps more so?”

He pursed his lips and nodded slowly. Then he sat straight up and put on his glasses.

“The people who prosecuted my father were able to use both of these things, the cause he believed in and the people he loved.”

“What happened to him?” I asked after Chicherin fell into another long silence.

He turned up the palms of his hands. “He confessed to everything; he would have confessed to anything. He had a wife and a child. It was the only way to protect my mother and me from Siberia or worse.”

“I’m sorry,” I said sympathetically.

Chicherin smiled. “It was a long time ago. I was a small boy.

I didn’t know what happened until years later. My mother never told me. She said he had been killed in an accident.”

Finishing his tea, Chicherin sprang to his feet. “There’s something I should give you, something I think you should read.”

When he opened the door, the dim light from the shop dissolved the shadows that had draped the walls. I followed him as he moved briskly through the stacks. He lifted the shade on the front door and turned the sign around to announce that he was once again open for business.

With his back to me, he searched the shelves of a bookcase behind the counter. Most of the books had slips of paper sticking out the top, the name of the buyers who had ordered them or, sometimes, the address where they were to be sent. On more than one occasion he had explained to me that most of the money he made came from the rare or out-of-print books for which col-lectors were willing to pay substantial amounts. His own specialty was Russian-language first editions.

“Here it is,” he announced, tapping with his outstretched finger the spine of a small volume on the shelf second from the top.

He moved the stepladder into position and pulled it out.
“The
Possessed
, by Dostoyevsky. Have you read it?” he asked as he handed it to me across the counter.

“I’ve read
The Brothers Karamazov
and
Crime and Punishment
, but no, I haven’t read this. I may have started it once.”

As if seized by a sudden impulse, his head gave a slight jerk.

A moment later, a thin smile dashed across his mouth.

“In a certain way,” he said, “this is a companion to
Crime and
Punishment.
Raskolnikov kills the old woman with an axe because he wants her money and because he believes in nothing that would stop him. He has rejected all morality, all religion; he is a nihilist, someone for whom nothing can be more important than himself.
The Possessed
, on the other hand, is an account of what can happen when people like this band together, and decide to destroy not just one human being, but everything, because they believe in nothing except the supreme importance of replacing everything with something of their own creation. They believe they can create a better world, because they don’t believe in the one that exists.”

I was still thinking of the confessed killer of Calvin Jeffries, trying to make it fit into what Chicherin was telling me. “How does that explain someone who confesses to a crime he did not do and then commits suicide?”

“It’s what Bukharin did; it’s what my father did,” he reminded me. “This book,” he went on, nodding toward the volume in my hand, “has some extraordinary things about the way in which people who no longer believe in religion or morality, who feel betrayed by those beliefs, have nothing left but the desire to destroy everything connected with them. Dostoyevsky understands the emptiness of the soul; but he thinks it can only be filled again by a belief in a Christian God. Anything else is nihilism. And, who knows, perhaps it is, but the same thing that leads some people to Dostoyevsky’s God leads others to believe in other things, things for which they are sometimes willing to die.”

Chicherin sat down on the chair behind the counter and sighed.

Removing his glasses, he blew his breath on them until they clouded over and then wiped them clean on the arm of his gray long-sleeve shirt.

“Consider Dostoyevsky himself. He had the unique experience of being a witness to his own execution. Arrested in his youth for radical activity with organizations advocating a socialist society, he was sentenced to death. He was lined up against a wall and blindfolded. He could hear the order being given to the execution squad to raise their rifles, then the order to take aim. In the stillness of that early morning he could hear the sound of the rifles being cocked.”

Chicherin looked at me. “What do you think must have passed through his mind? Do you think it was what people so often say about the last few seconds before you’re about to die: that his whole life passed in front of his eyes?” He folded his arms and crossed his legs and began to rock back and forth. “There was a time in my life when I used to think about that: what it would be like, waiting for your own execution.” He gave me a reassuring glance. “I was in Russia then, and it was never anything imminent, just an occasional possibility. But when I did think about it, and when I’ve thought about what Dostoyevsky went through and some of the things he later wrote, I think it’s more likely that it would seem as if your whole life had been nothing—had no meaning at all—except as the prelude to this one moment, this last moment you’ll ever know.”

He looked down at his pale hands, pondering another thought.

“It’s fascinating, isn’t it?” he asked, tilting his head toward me.

“The way someone who knows he will be executed stands and waits, as if, even at that last moment, he cares for nothing so much as how he looks and what others—the people who are about to take his life—will think of him. He doesn’t fall on his knees—

at least not very often—he doesn’t grovel, try to beg for mercy.

He may have thought himself a coward all his life, but now, when there is no alternative but death, he looks it calmly in the eye.

Who knows what it is? Courage, defiance, or nothing more than good manners, the belief that this is how he is supposed to act, no different in principle than knowing what to say to your host when you take your leave. Even in death we don’t want to make a bad impression.” A look of disgust spread over his face. “My father of course was not given this opportunity. They shot him in his prison cell, in the back of the head.”

He stared straight ahead for a moment and then his expression changed again. When he looked at me, his eyes, or what I could see of them through those thick lenses, seemed cheerful and alive.

“I’ve sometimes wondered what my father thought about, when he felt the cold hard steel of the revolver push against the back of his head. Did he think about my mother, about me? Did he try to let us know his last thought was for us? And what of Bukharin—was his last thought for that revolution he loved so much he was willing to tell the world he had betrayed it?

“The rifles were cocked and aimed, and the only order left was the order to fire. Dostoyevsky knew that the next word spoken would be the last word he would ever hear. It never came. There was no order to fire. The prisoners stood there, blindfolded, their hands tied behind their backs, waiting, wondering, trying not to let themselves begin to hope. Then, gradually, they knew that it was over, that there would be no execution, that they had been put out there to teach them what it would be like if they were ever sentenced to death again. Some of them went mad; the rest went to Siberia. Dostoyevsky became a deeply religious man. Instead of revolution, he now believed in the importance and the power of redemption.”

Scratching his chin, Chicherin opened a drawer and took out a ragged sheet of stationery. With slow, tedious strokes he guided the blunt point of the dark blue fountain pen back and forth across the page.

“The crucial thing to notice about Dostoyevsky,” he remarked as he wrote, “is this astonishing capacity to believe, this need to believe in something that made sense of the world.”

When he finished, he removed the cap from the end of the barrel and slid it down the nib until it clicked into place. He folded the sheet in half and, gesturing for the book I was holding in my hand, placed it inside and then handed it back.

As we shook hands, he nodded again toward the book. “All I’m suggesting is that it is by no means impossible that someone could confess to something they did not do and then commit suicide. It is not impossible at all.”

It was only when I was a few blocks away that I remembered the sheet of paper Chicherin had placed inside the book. I thought he had given me the book on loan, but when I read what he had written I knew he had made me a gift of it.

“For Joseph Antonelli, who has learned that sooner or later everyone has to lose. From his good friend, Anatoly Chicherin.”

There was a sudden chill in the air. I put the sheet of paper back inside the book and hurried down the street.

Fifteen

_______

Howard Flynn might be early, but he was never on time. I knew that as well as I knew anything, but when he asked me to meet him outside my building at two-fifteen it never occurred to me that I could be late. It was now two-thirty and there was still no sign of him.

Loosening my tie, I unbuttoned my shirt collar while I searched up and down the sidewalk. The sky was a harsh white glare and the air had the smell of something burning. It was the first hot day of the year, the day that made you believe that this might be the year when you did not have to endure yet another month of rain before the clear dry days of summer came to stay. I kept watching the sidewalk, hoping by an act of will to make Flynn appear. I concentrated so hard I could almost see him, his red face dripping with sweat as he lumbered up the street.