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When confronted with this announcement, Isaac Festung shrugged his shoulders and said that it was sad but he wasn’t surprised, that it had been inevitable that the American CIA would finally gain control of Interpol and finally be able to silence him.
Madame “Stillman,” meanwhile, back at the Piaf Mill, had gotten dressed and then driven to the telephone office in Cognac-Boeuf. There she had made several telephone calls, and had then come out to repeat more or less what her husband had said in Bordeaux: He was being persecuted by the American FBI and CIA both for being a peace activist and “for what he knew.” What he knew was not specified.
He had fled the United States, they both said, after he was arrested on a preposterous charge of murder. Furious that he had escaped their clutches, the CIA and FBI had arranged for a kangaroo trial in absentia, which had predictably found him guilty and sentenced him to death.
One of the telephone calls Madame Stillman/Mrs. Festung made was to a lawyer in Paris, who promptly called a press conference to make public what outrageous violations of law-and common decency-the barbaric American government was attempting to perpetrate.
The next day, the newspapers of France-and elsewhere in Europe-carried the story, often accompanied by outraged editorials.
For one thing, the European Convention on Human Rights had declared that an accused criminal was entitled to his day in court, which meant that he had the absolute right to be physically present in the courtroom to refute witnesses making, for example, preposterous charges that he had beaten and/or strangled his girlfriend and then stuffed her body into a trunk, which he then stored in a closet in his apartment, until the odor from there had caused his neighbors to call the police, asking them to investigate.
As astonishing an outrage as that was, the Americans had the incredibly barbaric arrogance to sentence the man illegally tried to an illegal sentence, that of being put to death by electrocution.
The death penalty was not permitted under French law. Extradition of someone sentenced to death, even in a trial at which he was present when a jury of his peers had found him guilty, was absolutely forbidden.
Many of the editorials demanded both that Mr. Festung be immediately set free and that the French government make, in the strongest possible language, their outrage known to the United States government.
The government of France wasn’t willing to go that far, possibly because the United States government suggested that if it did, the United States government would no longer honor requests of France passed to them via Interpol.
The matter would be decided, the French government announced, as soon as humanly possible, in a French court. France being France, that took six months, during which Mr. Festung remained confined in Gradnignan Prison in Bordeaux.
Mrs. Festung visited him frequently, sometimes daily, while they waited for the wheels of French judicial bureaucracy to grind inexorably.
The United States government then contracted for the services of a French law firm to represent it at the appeal hearing. There was a legal counsel, with a large support staff- more than forty people, it was said-attached to the United States Embassy in Paris, but it turned out that before he had become the legal counsel of the United States, he-and most of the members of his staff-had been special agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and were not allowed to practice law, even in the United States.
This revelation produced a plethora of editorials in the French press, on the theme that it was a gross violation of French sovereignty to have American secret policemen operating under diplomatic cover on the sacred soil of La Belle France. What was next, some editorials demanded, the CIA operating in France?
When the case-actually the appeal-was finally heard, the French lawyers representing the United States very politely made the following points:
1. Trials in absentia are permitted under the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the immediate jurisdiction, when the accused has not shown up as promised after being released on bail, and his whereabouts are unknown and undeterminable.
2. In the case of Mr. Festung, there was no sentence of death by electrocution. At the time of his trial, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had n
o provision in its laws to execute anyone, by electrocution or any other means. Mr. Festung had been sentenced to life imprisonment.
3. The government of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, on learning that Mr. Festung had been located in France, and understanding the French distaste for trials in absentia, had passed special legislation applying specifically to Mr. Festung, guaranteeing his right to a new trial if he should wish one.
4. Inasmuch as Mr. Festung had entered France illegally, on a false passport, in a false name, he was not entitled, under French law, to the protection of French law, and furthermore, French law stated that someone apprehended in France who had entered the country illegally would be immediately deported.
The three-judge bank of appeals justices considered the case for almost three-quarters of an hour before deciding to deny the request of the United States government for the extradition of Isaac David Festung, now known as Walter Stillman, resident of Cognac-Boeuf.
Isaac David Festung was free to go.
A cheering crowd greeted the Festungs both outside the court building and when they returned to their home in Cognac-Boeuf.
The United States ambassador to the French Republic decided to appeal the decision of the Court of Appeals. It was whispered that he did so somewhat reluctantly, and only at the insistence of the secretary of state personally. The story went that the secretary had been approached by the Hon. Carl Feldman, the senior senator from the state of Pennsylvania, at the urging of the Hon. Eileen McNamara Solomon, the Philadelphia district attorney.
The story whispered about went on to say that Mrs. Solomon had told Senator Feldman that she could see no way to keep out of the newspapers the fact that Senator Feldman had been this slimy sonofabitch’s lawyer and had gotten him released on $40,000 bail-a ridiculous figure for someone facing a Murder Two charge-which he had then jumped, and offered the suggestion that if the senator hoped to get reelected, it might well behoove him to also get it into the papers that, having recognized the error of his ways, he was doing everything in his power to have the murdering sonofabitch extradited.
Neither Senator Feldman nor District Attorney Solomon would comment on this story, but it was soon announced by the French Ministry of Justice that what the Court of Appeals had really meant to say when it had released Mr. Festung was that he was to be released only to Cognac-Boeuf, and there he would be under the surveillance of the Gendarmerie National, pending the results of the appeal of the U.S. Embassy of their decision to the Supreme Court of France.
When Isaac Festung woke in his bed at just about the time Officers Cubellis and Hyde were reporting themselves back in service in Philadelphia-and six months after the Ministry of Justice’s announcement-he was not at all worried about what the French Supreme Court would decide best served the interests of justice.
Not only had his lawyers told him he had nothing to be worried about, but based on his own analysis of the situation- by which he meant his analysis of France and the French mentality, intellectual and political-he did not see much- indeed, any-cause for concern.
The French, Fort Festung had concluded, had an identity problem, and an enormous capacity for self-deception. At the same time, they professed France to be a world power equal to any. They knew this wasn’t true.
They were about as important in the world, Fort Festung had concluded, as the Italians, perhaps even less important. The difference was, the Italians knew what they were, and acted accordingly, and the French refused to admit what they were, and acted accordingly.
