I married the English woman, Lady Hilary, who lured me out among the grouse. Salmon fishing would not have served her purpose, presumably because it’s easier to murder a husband with a shotgun than a fishhook, though drowning might have crossed her mind since my back won’t allow me to swim. Victor, well aware professionally of just which gender is the deadlier of the species, remained a bachelor. His letters assured me, however, that his spare time—limited though it was—was far from barren of women. Like the true gentleman he was, he wrote a damn fine letter when it came to recounting his amours. Though true love, he happily confessed, he saved for the chap he saw in the mirror. He said it was his nature. And it was until later on, when he’d met the woman and moved on from Turtle Bay to Seventy-third.
So when he materialized outside Lock fondling his boater, we took up right where we had left off.
THREE
One moment the rain was dimpling the surface of the dirty river, the next it had stopped and the sunshine was nudging at the purple-rimmed clouds again. We were standing outside a Thamesside pub. The wooden slatted benches were drying in the summery breeze and the fringed awnings flapped lazily. Shepherd’s pie, sausage rolls, mustard, heavy mugs of bitter. Waves lapped and sucked at the rotting pilings which dated from Shakespeare’s boyhood.
Victor licked mustard from his fingertips and drank deeply. “The idea is this,” he said, running his tongue around his teeth. “Four or five of my most important cases. All involving what we shall call, for lack of a better word, murder. Other things, too, but murder—death, anyway, sudden and violent—at the core. Two of the perpetrators I got off completely, two drew considerably lighter sentences than they no doubt deserved, and a child molester—well, I say I saved him from being dragged into the street and strung up from a lamppost. But,” he waved a finger at me, “it won’t be a book about law. Or justice, whatever that is. People. It’s a book about people. And mainly me, of course. And doing people is your strength, Charlie. The point is this. I want to do a book about the need for cynicism in dealing with an unfeeling, unfair, corrupt system. You following the bouncing ball, Charlie?” I nodded. “Then don’t look so unhappy. We’re talking about another best-seller, Charlie. The hero as a new kind of villain … the necessary villain our legal system requires. Make a good title, Necessary Villain. For instance, I had this fellow Hawthorne … civil disobedience—”
“What did he do?”
“Wasted an IRS man with a service revolver. It was like this.” He tucked into some shepherd’s pie, washed it down with more beer. “Hawthorne comes home from a day of looking for work, he sees an alarming sight in his suburban driveway. Two men with sledgehammers are demolishing his seven-year-old Honda … while his wife is inside cowering. It’s scary as hell. Hawthorne ducks behind a hedge, sneaks in the back door, gets his old forty-five automatic, loads it, and comes out the front door. Unidentified men still beating hell out of his car. Wife having a nervous breakdown inside. Hawthorne tells these clowns to stop with the hammers. They tell him to fuck himself. One waves his hammer at Hawthorne. Hawthorne sends him off to join the Choir Invisible with one shot. The other guy drops his hammer and begs for mercy. Wife sobbing, tearing her hair, Hawthorne blows most of the guy’s leg off to be on the safe side and calls the cops. Turns out they were IRS black-shirts trying to collect on thirty-two hundred dollars in back taxes. Which, it turned out, the guy didn’t owe after all. The wife has to be institutionalized for six months, loses the baby she’s pregnant with … and the D.A. calls it murder. Do you love it, Charlie? I call Hawthorne a goddamned hero of the people. Jury agrees with me. Now we sue the shit out of the Feds. How could you keep from loving this story? And there’ll be three or four more just like it. Guy murders his rich wife, poisoned her over about three years, patient guy … yeah, he did it, I suppose, but I found some holes in the case against him … and he’s got all the money in the world as well as a young girlfriend—hell, he can afford me and he’s got everything to live for. Tells me he only wants justice. I tell him justice is the last thing he wants—what he wants is to get off so he can live the rest of his life with this girl. You don’t pay me for justice, I tell him, ’cause it’s gone the way of the great bustard. It’s barely a memory. You pay me to get you off—now we’ve got to figure out how much your freedom is worth to you. I got him off and he figured his freedom was worth about two million bucks on which he pays the taxes. Seems reasonable to me.” He shrugged and munched on a sausage roll. “Make a hell of a book, Charlie. And it’s a sweetheart deal—you get all the money. Because I got all the money I want … and I want my name on a book! I want my name on the best-seller list. Like Bailey. Like Nizer. That’s why I’m making you an offer you just can’t refuse.”
Victor warmed to his subject throughout the remainder of lunch. I listened with an interest I couldn’t deny. He was a compelling talker and since that was what the book would be it was bound to be compelling. The stories he told were colorful, pungent, driven by engines of real suspense and the spirit of voracious inquiry. As he talked, the question was always present: how would he find his way out of this situation, how would he work his magic? He spoke about a family murder for money, the killing of a small-time hood by a hit man hired by his abused wife’s lover—a big-time hood, the mercy killing of a dying, cancer-ridden wife of fifty years by “the most entirely decent man” Victor had ever met. “Naturally the state wanted to cram this man into a cell for the rest of his life,” he sighed, indignant, “and let him rot away. I fixed that, by God. Fortunately he was rich. Made my job harder, of course, because I had to convince a jury that a rich man could also be a good man. I was equal to the task, I’m happy to report.”
What his character came down to, simply, was that he instinctively sided with the underdog, preferably the rich underdog but, still, any underdog. And everyone filled that bill when the state was brought to bear on them. That was how he saw it. He liked to play it tough. He liked to claim he was the necessary villain. But it wasn’t true. He was just a born defender. For all his bluster and bullshit, you had to love the guy. Anyway, I did.
“You’re not half the scoundrel you claim to be,” I said, smiling at him. “Softie.”
“Keep a civil tongue in your head.” He lit a cigarette and looked out across the river. “So how does it sound to you, Charlie?”
“Interesting. I’d have to come back to the States to work on it; I’d hate leaving London. I like my life here. I’m working on a book now, a Title poisons his wife, leaves her paralyzed, he’s discovered to be having an affair with her sister … the wife dies … the Title and the sister just vanish from the face of the earth. And it’s been four years. Good story, Victor.”
“I got a dozen like that,” he said dismissively. “Think about it. Boils down to interviewing me, getting me to open a vein and let it drip into your tape recorder. What it would be, laddie, is a damn good time for both of us.” He turned to me with a crooked grin on his huge, beefy face. I wondered if he had a blood pressure problem. “Just think about it. Be fun having you around New York. We can catch some Yankee games, I keep season tickets—you could go every night …”
He was making it sound like a vacation and I knew it wouldn’t be.
FOUR
The shotgun.
The shotgun had brought Victor Saberdene to London, had been commissioned by him long before he’d connected me to the idea of the book he wanted to bear his name. Before he’d dreamed of a book at all.
The shotgun was really where the story I’m telling you had its true beginning.
I pulled up and parked outside Audley House in Mayfair. The destination was of course Purdey, the gunmaker.
“Big moment for me, Charlie,” he said as we stood outside the door. “It’s an over-and-under, fifteen grand, ordered it damn near three years ago.” He nervously adjusted his boater like a boy presenting himself before his prom date. “Finest guns in the world. They build it to your specs, measure you like they wer
e going to run up a suit or two. Center of your back to the point of your shoulder, shoulder to the crook of your elbow, elbow to your trigger finger, on and on. It’s like being in the middle of a gavotte. They make the stock from seasoned walnut, from the Dordogne yet … When they get it all assembled, stock and barrel and action, the chairman and the managing director personally test it at the shooting ground in West London. Whatever you’re shooting at—if you can’t hit it with a Purdey, you just can’t hit it. Each gun has a number, running consecutively since 1814. All told they’ve built about twenty-five thousand guns. Darwin took his on Beagle. Khrushchev had four. Bing Crosby. Edward VII was a Purdey fanatic. When he died in 1910, nine kings attended the funeral. Every one of them was a Purdey customer.” He grinned, the great long solemn face transformed with the joy of acquisition. “Today Victor Saberdene takes delivery, Charlie.”
We waited in the Long Room, which doubles as the boardroom and the showroom. A deep baronial table dominated the room, eight chairs drawn up. The dark walls were decked out with portraits. Among them all the Royals. Victor led me to inspect one while we waited for the gun to be escorted in. “The nine kings,” he said. “Haakon VII of Norway, Ferdinand of Bulgaria, Manuel II of Portugal, William II of Germany, George I of Greece, Albert of Belgium, Alfonso XIII of Spain, George V of England, Frederick VIII of Denmark.” He winked at me. “Good company, Charlie.”
The gun nestled in its case was brought in, revealed like a gigantic jewel beyond price. He hefted it gently, sighted, stroked the engraving. “Wonder how many murders have been committed by men and their Purdeys?” he mused.
The representative of the firm demurred, stroked his Guards mustache, wouldn’t take the bait, said: “None, I should hope, sir. But back in the days when we built dueling pistols … well, who can say?”
When we left, Victor cradled the case as if he were playing a cello in the front seat of the little Jag. The sun sprayed like gold through the green crowns of the trees.
“Halcyon days,” he said. “Salad days.”
“We’re lucky men,” I said. “Things have gone right for us.”
“I’m happier than I have ever been,” Victor said. “But I’m afraid.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Afraid I’ll never be this happy again.”
That night we dined at the Ritz, then went for a stroll, found ourselves in Berkeley Square listening, I suppose, for the long-ago nightingale. Staring at the shadowy outline of the Chinese roof on the little pump house at the center of the garden.
“It’s a night for romance,” he said a trifle lugubriously. The breeze rustled the leaves in the darkness above us, a summer sound. Someone once told me they were the thirty finest examples of the English plane tree. Planted on the very spot in 1789.
“You need a girl. A real girl. One to love and marry.”
“Ha! You’re a great advertisement. You know what the sage said—marriage is the death of happiness.”
“I’m serious,” I said. “You need to complete yourself. The animus requires the anima—”
“I think you’ve just struck Jung a glancing blow. I haven’t the time for a wife—”
“Sure. And that’s what we men say right up until we find the right girl—”
“Do you believe in love, Charlie?”
“Love and work, that’s all there is to life—”
“Do you believe in love at first sight?”
“I think maybe it’s the best, truest kind—”
“I’ve never been in love. I don’t have enough faith in women.”
“That usually means you haven’t got enough faith in yourself, doesn’t it? You’ve got to have some faith when it comes to love. You’ve got to have more faith than distrust—too much of what people call love is built on a fine frightened foundation of distrust. If you don’t have faith, then there’s little reason for going on with it—”
“Well, I have faith in my Purdey. It’ll do as it’s told.”
“But,” I said, “you’ve got to watch who’s giving it orders.”
“And I have faith in myself, Charlie. I have faith in you, if it comes to that.”
“It’s not enough,” I said. We’d drunk a great deal of champagne. I sat down on the grass, leaned back against a tree, and wondered if it was one of those that had been there since 1789. “If you don’t have faith in a woman, poof, nothing else really matters, life’s in ashes …”
He sank down beside me, legs out before him on the grass, huge feet jutting up far away like gravestones. “I wonder if you’re right, Charlie. Women. Are they so goddamned important? Why are they so … so—”
“Why do we breathe air? Why is gravity? Why do little replicas of ourselves enter the world from between their legs? Why did I buy the Jag knowing it wouldn’t start half the time?”
He laughed. “Listen, you’re beginning to sound like a writer. All this life-is-ashes stuff—”
“Listen to me, Victor,” I said. “I may never be so wise again. Mark my words. Tonight I am a prophet. Cherchez la femme.” I waggled a finger in his face. It was like Harvard again. We’d be talking about Chuck Berry anytime now. “And happiness will be yours. You will be complete.”
He sighed. “Balls, Charlie.”
FIVE
Victor spent the weekend with some shooting chums and his Purdey somewhere on Salisbury Plain but when he called Monday afternoon, instead of bragging about his marksmanship, he said he had to come round to my flat in Draycott Place that evening. He sounded harried and said it had to be then, couldn’t be put off, because he’d been called back to the States unexpectedly and urgently. He was leaving first thing in the morning. I told him I’d be waiting.
The windows were open, a light rain was pattering in the courtyard, and I was listening to an old Bunny Berrigan recording from 1936 when Victor arrived. I’d spent the day working. The place was a maze of clipped manuscript pages, newspaper cuttings, notebooks, bulging file folders in different colors from Ryman’s in the Kings Road, reference books, fountain pens, ink bottles, records and tapes. I was bleary-eyed, on my second gin and tonic, and Victor wanted one of his own right away. His suit was rumpled and rain-spotted. He sank his mighty bulk into an overstuffed, sway-bottomed chair, and drained off half the gin and tonic in one long swallow. Once we were settled I asked him what the hell was up. He sank back in his chair, took off his glasses, heavy black ones with power frames as he once referred to them, and ground his knuckles into his deep-set, cavernous eye sockets.
“It’s been a brutal weekend, Charlie, me boy, starting with you and your drunken philosophizing the other night. Screw the nightingale! You’re the one who sang in Berkeley Square …” He grimaced, drank. “You really oughta keep your mouth shut when you’re tight and in love with love. You hit a nerve, set me thinking. Ruined my whole damned shooting trip. I’m afraid I wasn’t being quite frank with you. Like I didn’t tell you about Samantha, did I? Going to marry old Samantha, that’s the part I didn’t tell you—”
“Tell me about her? You never mentioned her name. Look, Victor, what’s got you so upset?”
“Doubt, Charlie, doubt. I’m drowning in doubt all of a sudden. Listening to you jabber on about love, life is ashes without it. All palpable bullshit undoubtedly … but just maybe you’re right. … and if you are, if love is actually important—well, men, why the hell am I marrying Samantha Frost? She’s a model, a stewardess, an actress—what the hell difference does it make? Fact is, she is a model. Highly decorative woman. I never have any idea what she’s talking about, let alone thinking. And now I’m supposed to be marrying her? Christ, this could be a big mistake … we’re talking real size here, Charlie boy. It’s insane. And even if it isn’t insane it’s sure not like what you were talking about … What if you know more about love than I do? Let’s get serious—what do I know about love? I’m a busy man, for Christ’s sake. You’re a goddamn writer, you sit around on your can all day, plenty of time to think about l
ove like some dim-witted sonneteer from out of the past … Charlie, can’t you see I need another drink? Don’t be cheap …” He kept talking while I clinked ice into his glass and followed it with gin, tonic, and a thick slice of lime. “So I thought about Samantha and that great little fanny of hers and I wondered, does Samantha’s fanny add up to love? God forbid, is Samantha my anima? I broke out in a cold sweat … I wanted to weep. Me! Weep! Would this Samantha person complete me? Complete my life? Seemed unlikely. Believe me, Charlie, Samantha’s hard pressed to complete a sentence. All this going round in my head, I was a danger with that gun in my hand. Lord Harndean, the old fart, told me I looked peeky! Victor Saberdene—peeky! Oh, Charlie, Charlie, how can I marry this girl? No, no, I’ve got to dynamite this whole mad business. And it’s not going to be easy … You don’t know Samantha, she’ll kill me—”
“I do have some experience with lethal women,” I said.
“Oh, that. Lady Hilary was just a damn bad shot—”
“Ha! You saved my life—”
“She wasn’t trying to hit you—”
“The truth remains for eternity between Hilary and her confessor—”
“Listen, we’re supposed to be talking about Samantha and me—”
“Mmm. Forgive me.”
“—and I’m telling you she’ll kill me. She’s the sort of woman who’d eat her young and complain about the calories—”
“But why did you ever tell her you’d marry her?”
“Tell her? Hell’s bells, Charlie, I begged her. There I was, looking at middle age, no wife, no kids, nothing but my work, I got scared … then you get tight and start yapping at me … well, I guess I owe you a thank-you, but I’m not in much of a mood for it right now. Anyway, I’m getting out of it, this Samantha thing, and in coming to that decision I’ve kept myself half-stewed all weekend.”
The Saberdene Variations Page 2
