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.
“Over here,” someone yelled.
Absently, I turned around. Flynn was in his car, stopped in the middle of traffic, waving at me while the drivers behind him leaned on their horns.
“You were supposed to meet me in front,” I complained after I tumbled in.
“This is the front,” he muttered between his teeth as he bolted through a red light. He swerved just in time to miss a car that had started through the intersection when the light changed.
“Learn to drive!” he shouted when the driver of the car shook his fist.
“Your window is up,” I reminded him, rolling my eyes. “He can’t hear you. You’re wasting your breath.”
With both hands on top of the wheel and his eyes focused straight ahead, Flynn slowed down, content to follow the traffic ahead of him. A jaded smile flickered at the edges of his mouth.
“It doesn’t matter he can’t hear me. That’s not the point.”
I knew that look and the twisted logic that usually accompanied it. “Well, then, what is the point?”
“The point is, I can hear me. And, frankly, I thought I sounded pretty good. What did you think?” he asked with a sideways glance.
“I could have given him the finger, but, hell, everybody does that these days. I could have screamed an obscenity, but everybody does that, too. Besides, those things just show anger. I was trying to be helpful,” he explained. “I said, ‘Learn to drive.’ It was my civic duty and I did it,” he said with mocking pride. “And just what the hell have you done for your country lately, counselor?” he asked with a ruddy grin.
Ignoring him, I stared out the window at the passing buildings.
“Where we going anyway?”
“There’s someone I want you to meet. He was one of the lead investigators in the Jeffries murder. He interviewed the guy who did it. He heard his confession.”
Flynn had told me when he called that there was someone who knew something about the murder of Calvin Jeffries that I ought to hear. He had not told me it was a cop.
“But I know about the confession,” I said, trying not to sound as agitated as I felt. “The only thing I don’t know is whether the confession was true, and I won’t know that until I know the results of the DNA test.”
“I forgot to tell you. The blood on the knife belonged to Jeffries.”
“The DNA results prove it? Then that’s it. You were right.
Whoever killed Griswald was a copycat.”
“That’s why I thought you might want to talk to this fellow.
It may not be that simple after all.”
“It wasn’t a copycat killing?”
His eyes on the road, Flynn shook his head. “No. I still think that’s what happened. It’s the Jeffries murder that isn’t so simple.”
We had left the city and were going south on the freeway.
“Why aren’t we meeting him at the police station?”
He let go of the wheel with his right hand and rubbed his shoulder while he moved his head from side to side, stretching out the muscles in his neck. “He didn’t want to have to explain what he was doing having a private conversation with a defense attorney.”