It took me some time to convince him of how delighted I was for him, all in those long-ago days which seemed, in retrospect, so carefree and full of optimism. Now I rested my own foot on one of his gout stools and looked out the window at his wife. Caro had changed into ancient Levi’s and a faded Harvard sweatshirt, was on her hands and knees in the garden messing in a flowerbed with a trowel. She was removing brightly colored blooms from pots and replanting them in earth. She was wearing mud-smeared white gardener’s gloves. She was very intent on the job, blotting out the events of the afternoon. The garden was in shadow, the vine-covered brick wall and the treetops rising above her. But it was still hot, close to ninety.
I was watching her, wondering if she’d gardened as therapy when she was recovering from her breakdown, when I heard the Filipino houseman go to the front door and let someone in. There was some murmured conversation and a few moments latter Caro stood up and the maid came into view. Caro listened, nodded, made a face of surprise, dropped the trowel, and came quickly back toward the house smiling, blotting her moist forehead on the sweatshirted forearm.
It wasn’t long before she came into the library with a smallish, trim, white-haired man. She was tugging the muddy gloves off, said: “Charlie Nichols, this is my father, Andrew Thorne. Who has just dropped in unannounced from the sky!”
“Professor Thorne,” I said.
“Call me Andy. Nice to meet you, lad. Victor has spoken of you often and, I must say, interminably. And I’ve read your books, as well.” He cocked his head at me: I could see Caro in him, the shape of his face, the level eyebrows, the thickness of his hair. For an uncomfortable instant, I felt as if I were meeting the father of a woman I loved, as if I were sizing him up in just that way. He had the same tautness in his carriage. When he shook my hand he might have been a retired general. “Yes, read ’em and enjoyed ’em. You’re a bloodthirsty lad, Nichols.” He was ramrod straight but casual, familiar, easy-mannered. He wore an old safari jacket, a Brooks Brothers blue button-down, gray summer flannels that hadn’t seen a press since the Cards beat Boston in the ’46 Series. Victor had once told me Thorne was a baseball fan and the memory flashed across my mind. His white bucks were scuffed half to death. He carried a hard-sided Vuitton case that wouldn’t see fifty again and I’d have bet he wouldn’t let the houseman carry it.
“Well, judging from Victor’s conversation about you I expected you to be wearing your fly-tying hat when I first met you—”
“Ah, that goes back a few years. Victor always got an inordinate amount of pleasure out of my little eccentricities. The law school was actually rife with them, eccentric old farts everywhere. Why he settled on mine …” He shrugged. “But if we knew why the mind fixes on a given point, well, we’d know a great deal more than we do now. Fact is, I don’t fish anymore.”
“No longer a challenge?”
“Dad had a heart attack a few years ago—”
“Mark my words, young Nichols, you reach a certain age and a daughter thinks she has to answer questions for you, do your explaining for you. It’s mystifying. My heart attack, if that’s what it was—I’ve always suspected it was bad clams down on the Cape or a highly questionable burrito and tamale combination plate the same day—in any case, what passes for my heart attack did not rob me of the power of speech—”
“Oh, Dad, don’t get snippy—he’s got a pacemaker and he’s a very lucky man—”
“See how they manage to diminish a fellow?” He gave me a beseeching look, his grin the same as hers, hers a carbon copy of his. “Honest to God, she treats me like a child. Heart attack. Yes, well, have you ever heard someone insisting that fishing—fishing, for God’s sake!—is too strenuous for your heart? What, pray tell, isn’t? But so said my sawbones. Anyway, I’m in fine fettle, young Nichols—”
“Well, it’s certainly a surprise to see you,” Caro said.
“Is it? I thought Victor would have let you know I was coming. He called me this morning from the office, said he wanted me down here for a council of war. He wants to do something about Varada … thought I might have an idea or two.”
“Do you?” I asked.
“Might have. We’ll see.”
Shortly thereafter Caro hustled him away to get him installed in his room. The brownstone seemed to have a limitless supply of bedrooms. I sank back into the chair, sat looking down into the garden. Not much later Caro reappeared, began systematically cleaning up after herself, hosing the wet earth from the flagstones, lining up the plants she hadn’t transplanted from their pots. I thought about the mess we were in and faced the real reason I was hiding out in the library. I’d never been so frightened of another human being—just by his presence, the way he carried himself, the tone of his voice, the hooded lizard’s eyes as if he were a giant Komodo dragon waiting for his prey—as I was of Carl Varada. And I didn’t find much solace when I considered us. A harried, sedentary, albeit large, lawyer; a skittish woman who’d had a nervous breakdown precipitated in part by the man himself and who was probably feeling some guilt about having been instrumental in convicting him; an old man with a bad heart; and one cowardly writer who hadn’t faced death since a wife in his past had or hadn’t taken a shot at him …
The fact was, Carl Varada outnumbered us. I hoped Andy Thorne’s idea was a good one.
TWO
I was on my way to the garden, passing through the dining room which opened into the flagstones, when I caught a flicker of movement in the corner of my eye. Victor and Caro were alone in the kitchen, clearly visible, and he had enveloped her in his long arms. He was still wearing a charcoal-gray pin-striped suit, straight from the office. One gigantic hand gently stroked her hair. She was resting her cheek against his lapel. I felt as if I were trespassing on the privacy of their lives, like an eavesdropper at the keyhole. I was frozen, not wanting to watch, unable to look away. Suddenly her eyes, like a doll’s, clicked open. She saw me at once, standing there in the dim dining room like a thief, someone stealing a moment of her privacy.
Instinct told me she’d look away or close her eyes, allowing me to slip away, papering over the crack, but my instincts were exactly wrong. Instead, she locked her eyes to mine, an acknowledgment of a kind I couldn’t name. The moment stretched interminably, his great pale hand caressing her hair, calming her, but she seemed so deathly calm on her own. Her eyes weren’t challenging me. She was just staring at me. Finally I went away, went on into the garden with the cascading fountain and the shadows of the trees lengthening.
I sat down at a glass-topped table with the wisteria tendrils curling away from the wall, flicking curiously at the back of my neck like tongues of serpents. I saw the two faces before me. A candle had been lit in a hurricane lamp on the table. Victor’s face, tired, pained, fearing for his wife, remembering her breakdown, remembering the man he’d helped put away for a ghastly crime, but one he hadn’t after all committed, however capable of murder he might be. And Caro’s face, unlined, almost uninvolved, as he patted her hair, her face so remote for such a tender, loving moment. I remembered the Katz face with the footsteps behind her drawing ever closer …
But looking at her I saw no histrionics: Was she acting still? Was she acting unafraid, pushing herself to give the performance of her life?
THREE
Victor’s hands wrenched one another, fingers intertwined, while he tried to stay calm otherwise. Caro was the performer in the family: Victor was an open book here in private, unlike his work in the courtroom. We were all sitting in the garden. Caro had asked me to tell Victor the story of our confrontation with Varada at Rock Center. When I wrapped it up, he stared at me, his hands working as if Varada’s throat were in his grasp.
Finally he said: “You know what I hate most? Not the dirty-minded schoolboy mouthing off—that’s offensive, I’m sure it’s unnerving to you, honey,” he touched Caro’s knee, petting her, “but it’s standard stuff from any crap artist. No. What bothers me is his ability to just invade our lives!
At will! He seems to know every goddamn thing about us—”
“As if he’s stealing our signs,” Thorne said. Caro looked at him quizzically. “Baseball talk,” he said.
“Exactly,” Victor said. “Did you see him at the Katz show, Charlie? Caro? No. But he knew you’d been there. So how the hell did he know? He’s like a ghost, right here with us, listening. Where does he pick you up on your excursions?” He threw up his hands and stared up through the trees at the heavy, humid night sky.
“Tell me,” Thorne said, fumbling for a pipe in the pocket of the rumpled safari jacket, “did he make any specific threats? Did he say he was actually intending to do anything particular?”
Caro said: “No. Just his awful hints. Dragging Victor into the conversation … the way he looks at me, it’s like being violated. When he talked about the look he put in that young man’s eyes before he pictured him killing himself …” She swallowed hard. “It made me think about what he might do to me if he got me alone …” She couldn’t go on with that and sipped iced tea to get a grip on her composure.
“Do you think he carries a weapon?” Thorne was pushing tobacco into the bowl of his pipe from a yellowing, cracked oilskin pouch.
“He is a weapon,” I said.
Thorne nodded, lit his pipe with a wooden match from another of his pockets. He puffed reassuringly, calmly. “He’s scaring us. He intrudes on us, he says offensive things to us, his presence is a threat. Somehow we’ve got to scare him off, threaten him. We’ve got to turn the tables on him. Take the play away from him. As I see it,” he sucked the pipe contentedly, as if it were an aid to thought, “the problem is we’re on the defensive—they’re stealing on us, we can’t throw anybody out. So we’ve got to go on the offensive ourselves. We’ve got to watch him! We’ve got to let him know if he’s so much as one more step out of line, we’ll be all over him. We’ve got him on the answering machine tapes … We’ve got to have our own people taking pictures of him following Caro and talking to her, our people shadowing him everywhere—bugging him until he gets tired of the aggravation and just goes away—”
“But how?” Caro said.
Victor sighed heavily. “Abe Braverman, I suppose.”
FOUR
Abe Braverman was about fifty, balding, and had small restless eyes moving in the face of a prosperous, careworn partner in a good firm of accountants. He wore a gray suit in a 48 Portly, a good-sized diamond ring, and pointy black shoes. He stood about five-seven, looked like he was lugging around 230 pounds. The backs of his hands were covered with wiry black hair. He was a private detective and he’d conducted many investigations for Victor. Victor said he was the toughest, most ruthless, most relentless man he’d ever known. He also charged like a Park Avenue lawyer and that, Victor reasoned, was somehow reassuring.
“No problem with surveillance,” Braverman said, his stubby legs crossed, ankle over knee. We’d adjourned to the study and it was past ten o’clock. Andy Thorne was looking tired. We were all worn out.
“But we don’t know where he lives. How can we follow him?” Caro was leaning forward in her chair, casting an occasional anxious glance at the telephone, as if it might ring at any moment and drag her back into Varada’s world. Andy Thorne had turned the television on while waiting for Braverman, and Baltimore was beating the Yankees, 7-0.
“No, Mrs. Saberdene, we go at it the other way round. I put a couple of my best operatives on you, don’t you see? And we wait for Mr. Varada to come to us … or to you, so to speak. Then we’ve got him, don’t you see? Then we stick to him like a bad debt. We’ll find out where he lives, how he’s conducting himself when he isn’t following you.”
“And then?” she said.
“Then we’ll have a discussion with Mr. Varada. We’ll suggest that he absent himself from your life. Maybe even our fair city. He’s making a nuisance of himself. We’ll suggest he’s had his fun and now he should run along. Most people in his position do exactly that.”
“Not Varada,” Victor said gloomily. “He’s going to laugh at us. He’s not breaking any laws. I thought about getting a restraining order but it’s a joke, thinking it would stop him. It would just make him mad …”
“Then he’ll require some coercion,” Thorne said, looking away from the ball game. He looked at me and smiled thinly. “Look, the law is one thing and family is something else entirely. Victor’s right. Varada’s the kind of man who’ll push this right to the end—his whole history says the same thing. He just doesn’t care. We’ll have to make him see the light.”
“That can be arranged if need be,” Braverman said.
“But then,” Caro said, “we’ll be no better than Varada—”
“At a certain level of human behavior,” Braverman said, “we are all more or less prey to animal behavior. Animals tend to deal in necessities. You, Mrs. Saberdene, are in a fight which may well be a fight for your life, your own survival. In such a case, a great many means which we would normally find repellent are morally justifiable … and that hardly means you are no better than Mr. Varada. Indeed, he sounds like a genetic oddment of human refuse. A mistake.” He belched softly behind his hand and fished a Rolaid from his pocket. “In brief, we’ll do what we have to do.”
“All right,” she said, “you’ve made your point.”
“Who are you going to use, Abe?” Victor yawned, shook his head to loosen the cobwebs.
“Al Potter and Horace Claverly.”
Victor nodded. “A pair of imposing specimens—”
“I’ve always found it best to send a man to do a man’s job.” He crunched the digestive tablet. “Now, shall we make a plan for tomorrow?”
FIVE
I woke up in the middle of the night, light rain tapping on the vines outside my open window. It was one of those secret summer rains of which, next day, there is no hint but the effulgent greenery. I hadn’t been dreaming of Varada but he sure as hell popped into my mind the minute I was awake. The act of thinking about the man made me literally sick to my stomach. I had the feeling that he could have closed his hand, as big as Victor’s, around my skull and crushed it like a beer can. This line was not, I realized with customary acuity, the way to get back to sleep.
I got up, put on my robe, and looked out the window. My bedroom was on the top floor. I looked down into the street half-expecting the worst. But Carl Varada was not there, not keeping watch over us as we slept. Would Abe Braverman and his minions be able to convince him to leave the Saberdenes in peace? How far would they go to make their point? If Varada lived by the rule of the jungle, were Potter and Claverly sufficiently adept? Why didn’t Varada just want some money? If the guilt of the Saberdenes coupled with their fear was sufficient, why not just take a hundred grand and get on with rebuilding your life? How much satisfaction could there be in terrorizing people? But, of course, terror-implied was only the prelude to whatever Varada presumably had in store for Victor and Caro later on …
I went downstairs in search of I-knew-not-what, poking through the darkness lit only by the glow from the streetlamps outside. Like most walkers in the night I was drawn toward the kitchen but stopped short when I saw a light.
For the second time in a matter of hours I was suddenly cast in the role of First Voyeur.
Andy Thorne and his daughter were sitting at the long trestle table around which the kitchen centered. They sat in a vast silence, like two strangers. She wore a navy-blue robe with white piping. He was in pajamas. They each stared into coffee cups. The rain dripped on the flagstones beyond the French doors. Two people who had nothing to say to one another.
The tragedy in their family seemed to be a physical presence, standing between them, crowding out anything else. I looked at them and I couldn’t help thinking of them as characters in one of my investigations of a murder case. The tragedy had all been brought back to life, back from Anna’s grave, by the discovery that Varada was innocent of her murder. Now the horror of the incorrect verdict was compounded by
Varada’s return … What was Andy Thorne thinking? What did he want to do with Varada? If I were writing the book, what thoughts would I attribute to this old man with only one daughter left?
I was frozen again, not wanting to draw attention to myself, not wanting to be noticed, not wanting to join them—and then something must have flickered at the edge of Thorne’s consciousness. He looked up, saw me.
“Charlie, come on, join the party.” His smile locked in place. “Pretty quiet party, I’m afraid. Thunder woke me up.”
I went into the kitchen. Caro smiled distantly, picked up the remains of her father’s tuna salad sandwich, and rinsed the plate. Thorne said something, I replied, Caro silently watched us, and finally Thorne said he was going back to bed.
When we were alone I said: “Everything all right? Did I interrupt any—”
She shook her head. “My father and I have little to say to one another. Anna was his favorite … and his attitude is sort of a resigned wouldn’t-you-know-it-would-be-Anna-who’d-get-herself-murdered—”
“I’m sure he doesn’t feel that way—”
“Charlie, you don’t know a damned thing about it.”
I felt myself flush, embarrassed, but she seemed to be stating a fact, nothing more.
“I’m worried about Victor,” she said. “I’m afraid he has some plan of his own he’s not telling us about. I’m afraid he might decide to go after Varada … and he’s no match for a man like Varada … oh, damn it, Charlie …”
She took a step toward me. I saw she was crying. She wiped her sleeve across her cheek. She leaned against me, I heard her voice muffled against my chest. “Just hold me for a minute, okay?”
The Saberdene Variations Page 6
