“And now,” I said, “you’re dashing back to New York in the morning to give her the bad news.”
He exhaled a sigh that seemed to shake the room.
“Well, that’s not quite the whole of it. No hurry about bagging dear Samantha; she’s not going anywhere, is she? No, that’s not why I’m going back. You see, there I was at the Dorchester, festering and suppurating over Samantha, mourning my weekend, when I got this call. Bad news. From the closest thing I’ve ever had to a mentor, a hero, an idol. Andy Thorne, Professor Andrew Thorne up in Massachusetts. Retired out in the Berkshires. He really took me under his great flapping wing in law school. We just hit it off, he was a relaxed guy, seemed to have things in perspective, only guy at Harvard Law who did, so far as I could tell. Used to lecture wearing this beat-up old sweater and his fishing hat. Anyway, he called me first thing this morning, shook me out of the throes of my hangover …”
Victor’s face, boulder-sized, normally pale, had taken on a grayness as he’d turned to the subject of Professor Thorne. His hand was shaking as he lit a cheroot. For a moment he stared out into the rain, lost in thought. “Terrible tragedy … young woman has been raped and murdered and they caught the son of a bitch who did it.” He sighed, looked up at me through the smoke. “Thorne wants me to come back and help put this bastard away …”
“But you’re a defense lawyer,” I observed with my fine flair for grasping the obvious.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s the point. He wants me to give the prosecutor the benefit of my expertise. He knows I’m better than anybody this bastard’s going to have defending him. So I’ll take the prosecution through the hoops and jumps … the trial should be a picnic after coping with me. Thorne wants this thing airtight. Well, who can blame him?”
“Well, I don’t know. Sounds to me like he’s going to a lot of trouble. It’s awful, granted, but women do get raped and murdered from time to time—it’s a fact—”
“True enough but this—”
“And the legal system sort of handles it without resorting to its greatest enemy—that’s you—coming back from abroad to help them out—”
“The legal system!” he snorted. “Thorne needs me precisely because he hasn’t got any more faith in the legal system man I do. Every time out it’s a crapshoot. Juries, judges … would you want to let a judge or a jury decide what kind of car you’re going to buy? What color tie you should wear? What to have for lunch? But we blithely entrust them with deciding our fates every goddamn day—it’s insane. People who have never given much of anything a serious thought get to decide if you’re guilty or innocent. With that kind of court, can you wonder at what I do for a living? I make my living getting the bastards off, planting the seeds of doubt in a juror’s mind, nurturing that seed, watching it grow big goddamn roots so it cracks the wall of the System and brings it tumbling down.” He finished his drink, and ash dribbled down the front of his suit. “Thorne needs me because he doesn’t want to risk the wisdom of the legal system. He doesn’t want the prosecution to fuck it up. He wants this guy inside for good. This one is very special—”
“Why? What’s the big deal? You have to come back from London …”
“The woman who was killed, she makes it special. Anna Thorne. Andy Thorne’s daughter …”
Chapter Two
ONE
VICTOR WENT BACK TO THE States and you know how things work out. I didn’t see him again for several years, what with one thing and another. But he did have his secretary send me quite a lot of clippings relating to the trial of Anna Thorne’s murderer. I suspected at the time that this was Victor’s way of continuing to remind me of the book project, of what an interesting chapter this would make. He never wrote me about it, though, and my own work was keeping me pinned down like enemy fire in an open field. Once the last batch of clippings arrived Victor might have dropped off the edge for all I heard from him. In a way his silence was a relief. I didn’t have the time to write his book, yet neither did I need the distraction of having to argue with his determination to have his own way.
The Anna Thorne murder made for good reading, particularly because one of the Boston Globe reporters who knew Victor from the old days had gotten wind of his involvement in preparing the prosecution’s case. Hell, Victor probably told him. He certainly granted a lengthy interview in which he discussed the curious position in which he found himself: working the other side of the legal street, giving his old mentor and friend a hand during a time of terrible tragedy. And, yes, he had met Anna during his law school days when he happened to be a guest at Professor Thorne’s home. And, yes, it was a sad day, indeed, that brought him back to the village of Earl’s Bridge in the Berkshires. Somehow, for a man who wasn’t actually a participant in the trial, Victor had managed—at least for the duration of one widely read Sunday magazine piece—to make himself the center of attention. I loved it. Vintage stuff.
The case, as reported during the trial, was certainly replete with personal tragedies on all sides.
Anna Thorne, twenty-two years old, a recent graduate of Wellesley College, had been working as a stagehand at a summer theater, one of several scattered throughout the Berkshires. The Avon Playhouse was located just on the outskirts of Earl’s Bridge, in view of the bridge itself, which must once have been famed for something or other. Her older sister, Caroline, was an actress and dancer who performed at the same theater. This sister was described in one article as the “willowy, winsome, always winning local favorite” but bad writing wasn’t on trial, I guess. The third leading character in the real-life drama was a drifter by the name of Carl Varada, who seemed to get a uniformly bad—indeed, prejudicially bad—press.
The story itself seemed fairly straightforward. Maybe Victor was right: his participation probably was its most interesting facet. The rest of it was just sad.
Carl Varada had been seeing Anna Thorne. In fact he’d established very quickly a reputation as something of a chaser. He certainly caught Anna. He was described as a large, powerfully built young man, a onetime body builder with what appeared in the newspaper photographs to be long wavy blond hair, a long faintly aquiline nose, arrogant eyebrows arching over sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes. Every father’s nightmare. He was said to be in his late twenties, veteran of the Texas oil fields, onetime trucker, a carny barker through the hot dusty country towns of the Deep South, a gambler, a survivor of Vietnam. He’d apparently packed a lot of living into his three decades without ever finding his niche. The more I read about him the more the word “drifter” seemed an accurate summation of an alarming life. A kind of rampant, threatening ego, so attractive to certain—often rather sheltered—young women, was stamped on that face as if by a branding iron.
On the night in question, after the evening’s performance, Anna hadn’t returned to the Thorne home on the quiet elm-shaded Main Street of Earl’s Bridge. The next morning her body, raped and strangled, was found in a thicket bordering a lovers’ lane.
The investigation turned up the fact that Anna’s sister, Caroline, had seen Varada and Anna arguing earlier that evening. Later, after the show, a couple backing their car from the parking lot had seen her going off toward the secluded path behind the scene shed with the large man’s arm around her shoulders. When her corpse was examined, shreds of skin were found dried beneath her fingernails. Varada’s scratched face was a match.
Varada’s fate was sealed when a search of his past turned up a record of several assaults, two of which included accusations of rape and sodomy. He was obviously one very bad dude who said nothing more in his own defense than that he certainly never had to rape Anna Thorne because “the chick couldn’t get enough of it. She begged me for more.” He looked out from those blank hooded eyes and said he didn’t kill her. “What good was she to me dead? Dead meat’s not my thing.”
Victor must have made a good devil’s advocate. The prosecutor built an overwhelming case, hammering away on Varada’s past sins, his life-style, and the testimony of An
na’s sister.
The jury was out for four hours. Varada went inside for life.
The final act of the tragedy came when the sister collapsed upon hearing the verdict and was removed to a Boston hospital.
You’d have thought the story was over. It must have seemed that way.
TWO
A couple of years later I returned to London from a holiday in the south of France and began the ritual reading of the newspapers which had accumulated in my absence. Beating my way through the underbrush of IRA outrages and terrorist bombing atrocities, I was surprised and delighted to come upon Victor’s name in both the social and literary columns.
He had been in London for an American Bar Association convention, during which time he had made the rounds plugging the English publication of his memoir Necessary Villain. There was no collaborator credited but I couldn’t help wondering who it might have been. In any case, I was glad he’d done the book and wouldn’t be showing up to bug me about it. Victor was my oldest friend but I didn’t want him ever thinking he was my boss, however remote. I did go out and buy the book. Seemed okay, but naturally I figured I’d have done better with the material. Oddly, considering his unique role, there was no mention of the Anna Thorne murder.
More interesting than the book was one of the notes in the society pages. Mr. and Mrs. Victor Saberdene had hosted what sounded like a lavish cocktail publication party at the Dorchester for the lawyers, or at least a good many of them. I got the impression that there was a considerable contingent of English lawyers as well. But what mattered to me was the mention of Mrs. Saberdene.
So Victor had taken the plunge. A little late for a first marriage but he’d always done things his own way, according to his own timetable. I sat back trying to imagine the woman he’d married. And I remembered the boozy conversation we’d had that night years before on the damp grass with the plane trees all around us. I still thought I’d given him good advice though I’d hardly expected it to shake him up the way it had at the time. Although her name was not given in the papers I knew damn well he’d gone home, thought things over, given her fanny further attention, and married Samantha just as he’d intended in the first place. He wouldn’t have had time to find another girl. Hell, Victor was a very busy man.
THREE
It had been eight years since our chat in Berkeley Square and I felt as if a lifetime had passed since I’d returned to my own country. Of course, in a way it was a lifetime ago that I’d left, not really having a clue as to what the future held. As I’d said to Victor, the roll of the dice had been good to each of us. When I’d left for England I’d never have allowed myself to hope for what had in the ensuing years come to pass for me. But I’d just as surely hoped that I’d come back to New York someday, just as I found myself doing.
I’d come home to sign a lucrative new contract with my American publisher. I was also doing my media bit shilling my latest book, the true story of Con McElway, a celebrity cat burglar who had, much to his surprise, one day found himself blackmailed into working for the Russian intelligence services in London. Disconcerted, Con realized the Russians were now choosing his “clients” for him, as well as substituting sensitive documents for his normal swag—that is, jewels and the odd objet d’art. Con was an intensely engaging man who’d been quietly turned by the Brits and was now living, bored and antsy, in retirement on the Isle of Man surrounded by very touchy dogs and an armed guard. His was a funny, exciting, adventurous story and I was able to convey enough of it during TV interviews to keep people moderately amused.
It seemed to me I’d made a good day’s work out of it and I was relaxing alone in the late afternoon in the Peacock Alley lounge in the lobby of the Waldorf. I’d taken a first sip of my dry Rob Roy when I heard my name, looked up, and saw Victor looming over me, all in gray, like a pillar. He’d seen me on The Today Show that morning and run me down with a few phone calls. He was grinning at me. “I knew you’d show up eventually,” he rumbled at me, chuckling, “just in time for my second book. Of course, I can’t offer you the same generous deal now that I’ve got a best-seller behind me—”
“Once a shyster, always a shyster,” I said. When I stood up he gave me a bear hug that would have frightened a lesser man. I struggled free and we stood there grinning like a couple of schoolboys.
“Damn, it’s good to see you.” He sat down and ordered a martini. His hair was iron gray now. He was heavier but still solid, more massive and indestructible than ever. Those big feet looked like paving slabs. A thick wedding band was embedded in the meat of his ring finger.
“Crime still paying, I assume?”
He looked at me from beneath eyebrows which had grown furiously, like twisted, barbed vines, and said: “You should know. Without crime, you and I, old boy, would be exactly nowhere.” He lifted his glass. “To crime.”
I mentioned the wedding ring and he looked down, a massive parody of shyness, the vast face blushing slightly. “I’ll bet it’s Samantha,” I said. “Your anima figure after all.”
Victor snorted gruffly. “At least you’re right about my finding my anima. I feel complete for the first time in my life.” This was not the Victor I was used to: he’d kept his feelings masked, always assuming he had the feelings which connected the rest of us mortals to the outside world. At times I’d wondered. “Much as I hate to give you credit,” he went on, grinning sourly, “I’ve got to admit you’ve been right occasionally. Never more so than that night in Berkeley Square. Though I seem to recall I wasn’t overjoyed at the time. You were complicating my life.” He paused with his martini, sipping, staring at the olive. “I’ve never forgotten that talk, Charlie.”
“Well, tell me about this anima of yours.”
“First, after our meeting at your place, I went back to New York on my way up to Massachusetts and got Samantha’s attention long enough to tell her it just wasn’t going to work, that I was a workaholic, that she needed a man who was better at traipsing around nightclubs with her. I mean, can you imagine me, leaving the courtroom, dressing up like an Italian coke dealer, and lounging around the Palladium and Limelight all night?”
“I’ve never heard of them—”
“Good grief, what a sheltered life you lead over there! They’re not your milieu, trust me. Dancing spots—”
“But dancing was always your sport—”
“Well, you’ll be gratified to know I’ve hung up my dancing shoes. I’ve done my last Monkey, whatever they call them now.”
“Samantha was a dancer then.”
“My God, yes, thrashing about all night long. But she’s nothing to do with me anymore. No, I married someone very different.”
“So who is this poor unfortunate?”
“Well, this is one of the reasons I was so determined to track you down, Charlie. There’s something going on at home. Pretty upsetting … it has to do with my wife … and, well, you’re my oldest, best friend. It’s best friend time, Charlie.” He frowned at me, jowls drooping like the cement of a statue, solid. “Someone from the past has come back to haunt her. Melodramatic. Damn strange. And she’s a little, well, delicate. Psychologically. It sounds corny but apparently she’s been getting these telephone calls—”
“Apparently?”
“Well, no, not just apparently. The first couple of times I thought maybe she was exaggerating some of these weird wrong numbers you get in New York. But then she taped one of his calls on the answering machine. It was all too real.” He shifted his great bulk and lit a cigarette. A man had begun playing Cole Porter’s gilt and white piano.
“Obscene?”
“Not dirty words. Just … well, the man’s presence is an obscenity in itself. That he would call her, her … it’s, it’s—”
“Wait a minute, Victor. I’m completely in the dark about this.”
“I know, I know. Forgive me. I’m very sensitive about this. I want you to meet her, get to know her. You’ll like her, Charlie. And maybe you can help get her out of
this depression. This fear … The thing is, she had a breakdown once, years ago, just when I met her. Listen, Charlie, I’m telling you the God’s own truth, I couldn’t resist her. She’s so damn beautiful, so good, so vulnerable, so hurt—not damaged goods, but she’s been pretty badly hurt … I was there waiting for her when she came out of the, ah, hospital, and that says it all. You know me, Charlie, I’m a goddamn busy man. But this girl, she’d been through such hell.”
“Victor, what had she been through? You always do this, you forget I don’t know what you’re talking about—”
“I’m sorry.” He shook the great head and squinted at me through the smoke. I’d never seen his face quite so worried, so furrowed with deep concern. I was looking into the core of his psyche. He was in love.
“My wife,” he said softly. “Her name is Caro.” He caressed the name as he spoke it, sighed. His deep-set eyes softened. Everything about his face changed. Caro. “She was Caroline Thorne. It was her sister, Anna, who was murdered. Caro’s testimony sent Carl Varada to prison. Now—oh hell, Charlie! Now Varada’s out and he’s come back for Caro!”
Chapter Three
ONE
THEY ALL CALLED HER CARO.
I look back on that night, my first sight of Caro Saberdene, and I wonder still if I had an inkling of the fates out there conspiring on the heath. Beginning with the moment I stood in the foyer of the town house on Seventy-third Street and saw her come through the drawing room’s double doorway, her face wearing a somewhat dutiful smile, her bare arm extended to shake my hand, to greet her husband’s inevitable old friend, I knew I was slipping, robbed of my will in a strange, almost pleasurable way, into an entirely new existence which swirled like a natural force around the woman everyone called Caro. What did I guess in those moments? Did a voice speak to me, warn me, and was I heedless? I don’t really think so. Not consciously so, anyway. But I felt something visceral. I could hear voices in the room behind her but we were alone in the foyer, with graceful dipping palms and the parquet floor and the paneled walls gleaming with polish.
The Saberdene Variations Page 3
