Once Victor got a look at him, his confidence began to return, replacing the shock. “I’m not sure I have anything to say to you. You’ve been given a warning. Leave us—and in particular my wife—alone! You’re scum, Varada, you have to be treated like something I occasionally have the bad luck to step in. Now, why don’t you just go away …”
Thorne and Caro had come into the foyer, like filings being drawn irresistibly to the magnet of Varada. Caro couldn’t take her eyes from the wrecked face and the bloody jacket. Her eyes were as wide as a child’s at a freak show, gaping at the bearded lady and the lizard man and the two-headed embryo in the bottle.
Victor and Varada faced each other like two eternal adversaries, both huge and threatening. No, that’s not exactly true. Victor’s hands were balled into massive fists hanging at his sides, clenching and unclenching, kneading his anger and frustration. Varada was, as always, relaxed, nonchalant. As if he already knew how it would finally turn out.
Varada turned toward Thorne and Caro. “Why, Professor, I haven’t seen you since my trial, since I got a taste of your justice.” He smiled broadly, winced, and touched his split lip. “I’ll be honest with you, Professor. I sorta hoped your heart would of given out by now … but here you are, one tough old bird. We’ll have to see what we can do about that.” He smiled ingratiatingly. “But as long as you’re here, and as an expert in the law, I’d like to consult you—for instance, what do you think of your son-in-law sending two mugs to beat on me tonight? Scare me off, that’s what they were sent to do, and you can see they surely did get their licks in … yessir, I gotta give ’em that. But what kind of thing is that for the counselor here to do? And to an innocent man, entitled to the full protection of the law? You hear me, Professor? I didn’t kill your daughter—I just did the time! I’m an innocent man! And he looses his dogs on me … now, how can he do that?”
Thorne’s voice was dry. He tried to swallow and couldn’t get the job done. “You’ve made a nuisance of yourself, Mr. Varada. You’ve threatened my daughter, you’ve waged a campaign intended to terrorize her and her husband … whatever Victor did, sending men to persuade you to leave them alone, that seems a reasonable response—”
“Reasonable? Sending these goons to kick me half to death? Why, you do surprise me, Professor! Where does the law come into all this? Or does it only apply on your side? Damn it, this is still a free country. I jes’ find myself walkin’ around, sometimes I bump into your daughter … why, hell, you’re the only folks I know in this big cruel town.” His voice had slid into the exaggerated mockery I’d heard before. It felt like a razor blade under my fingernails.
“You’d better leave us alone,” Victor said, “or what you got tonight will be only a pleasant memory—”
“Counselor, I’m gonna do just as I goddamn please,” Varada said. “I always do just as I goddamn please.” The mockery was gone, replaced by the sudden chill, a hammer of violence in his voice. “You should have told your boys to kill me ’cause that’s the only way you’ll be rid of me. I just don’t scare. And I got me some mighty big plans for you and the little missus here—”
Victor made a lunge at him and suddenly Victor was on the floor gagging, choking, gasping for breath. Caro stifled a scream and ran to him, kneeling beside him, looking up at Varada as he stepped back, drawing his fist to his side. He’d buried it in Victor’s guts. Nothing to it. Victor got up on hands and knees, head hanging down. Caro had her arm around his back, trying to help him.
Varada shook his head, chuckling. “You got real’ trouble on your hands now, folks. You send men to take care of me. Then the champ here attacks me when I come to chat. You know what you should do? I think you should talk to your boys, see what they’ve got to say about our little meeting … here, I got a number for you to call.” He took a scrap of paper from his pocket and handed it to me. “You give ’em a call, you hear their side of things …” He went slowly back to the front door. “I can let myself out. And don’t you jes’ know I’ll be seeing you real soon …”
Victor vomited on the parquet floor. Andy Thorne was pale and shaky. Caro looked up at me as if I had the answer.
FIVE
The telephone number proved to be the emergency room at Bellevue. There was a good deal of noise in the background, screams and sirens and shouting and swearing and sobbing. Three or four people talked to me, put me down, picked me up again. Finally I got someone who said he was an orderly. I asked him about Claverly and Potter.
“Oh shit!” he exclaimed. “Them dudes been through the wringer, man. Hey, you know them dudes? You better call next a kin, man. They in surgery now, y’know. Lemme tell ya, they lookin’ like somebody dumped ’em in a cement mixer and turned it on high, my man. On high! We got your knife wounds, your cracked skulls, your broken cheekbones and collarbones and armbones, we got your abdominal bleeding, broken ribs, we got your eyeball hangin’ down on your cheek—they tryin’ to put all the pieces back in the right places now but it’s gonna take all night. Man, you know what happened to them dudes?”
“Yes,” I said, “I do.”
Chapter Seven
ONE
ABE BRAVERMAN LEANED BACK IN the leather swivel chair and made it squeak. He puffed his Dunhill pipe. In his office he looked more than ever like a successful accountant. He wore a gray suit with a gray-and-cream-striped tie and an off-white shirt with French cuffs. He was scowling behind the smoke. He was doodling on a pad of pink paper shaped like a dinosaur. The gold pencil was tracing and retracing the block letters forming the word paralyzed.
“Paralyzed, Victor,” he said for the eighth or ninth time. Behind him through the open Venetian blinds the Empire State Building was shimmering like an illusion in the midday heat. “Mr. Varada broke Horace Claverly’s neck and now he’s paralyzed from the neck down. I’d have bet there wasn’t a man alive who could put Claverly down like that … And Potter.” The thought of what had befallen his two operatives seemed to overwhelm him for the moment. The air conditioner was making my sinuses angry. “Potter’s lost an eye. Skull’s fractured. Honest to God, Victor, this guy is one fucking brute.” He spoke quietly, in an oddly reverential tone.
Victor stood up and began pacing the width of the office. The door was closed, the typist beyond swatting away at her word processor. I watched her through the window. “Abe, what can I say? I got you into this mess—I’m sorry as hell. I blame myself—”
“I don’t,” Braverman said abruptly. “I blame Mr. Varada.”
“I know, I know,” Victor began, his face sagging, but Braverman cut him off.
“Look, they were big boys, they could handle themselves, they were armed. Now Mr. Varada must have their guns. Christ, he’s a nightmare waiting to happen—he happened to these men last night. I just can’t imagine how he did it. Victor, from a purely professional standpoint, it must have been something to see.”
“If I were you, I’d be crazy, I’d—”
“Oh, I’m going to redress the balance,” Braverman said. “Mr. Varada is all through. I promise you.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Don’t bother yourself about it, Victor.”
“He keeps telling us about these big plans he has for us. Us, Abe. I’m afraid for Caro. She’s right on the edge. I think about—you know, rape, murder, this man’s capable of any goddamn thing—”
“Like I say, put it out of your mind.” He got up and walked us to the door. Before opening it he said: “If I wind up needing a lawyer after this is over …”
“You’ve got one, Abe. You’ve got the best in the world.”
TWO
In the subdued gleam of cutlery and crystal and white linen we lunched at the Harvard Club. The crowd had thinned and we sat in a corner. I didn’t have much appetite but Victor, looking gray and weary again after his single ebullient day which had ended so badly, was wolfing down well-done roast beef. Disconcertingly, he was the same color as his lunch. We were the same age but I kn
ew I looked a decade younger. Maybe writing kept you young. Or maybe the courtroom piled on the years.
I put my knife and fork down and sipped some iced tea and figured I had better speak up or forever hold my peace. “Victor, just what the hell do you think you’re doing? You decide all by yourself to have two guys get tough with Varada, not—repeat not—just talk to him, threaten him a little … but beat hell out of him—not exactly cricket, you’ll agree—”
“Fuck cricket. This is not the playing field at Winchester—”
“And it all blows up in your face. Varada practically kills both of them. So what’s Braverman supposed to do that Claverly and Potter didn’t do? Get a posse?”
“Abe knows what he’s getting into. They didn’t.”
“Jesus, Victor! Wouldn’t you say this is getting way the hell out of hand? Like, whatever happened about going to the police?”
Victor fixed me with a baleful stare from the eyes sunk so deep beneath the overhang of his brow. He swirled claret around his glass, took a mouthful, and swallowed it carefully, savoring it. “I urge you,” he said at last, “to put away childish things, ideals, for example, grow up, and join the real world. It’s about time, Charlie. You’re looking at everything backward. In the first place, Varada’s the injured party here. Oh sure, he’s bugged us on the phone, been a nuisance, but for Christ’s sake, anybody’s gonna look at us and say he’s been wrongfully imprisoned for all these years and my wife and I teamed up to do it to him … and if that’s not bad enough I send a couple of guys to work him over, two against one and the one is this innocent guy—but whattaya know, this innocent guy gets lucky, fighting for his life, and whips the two mercenaries … and if this comes out the very least that happens to me is I get disbarred. You with me so far, Charlie? All right, then, in the second place it will be one very cold day in hell before the police look kindly on any requests for favors from Victor Saberdene. I have spent my career making a great deal of money seeing to it that the bad guys get away with it—mat’s what it comes down to, Charlie.” He leaned back, pushing his empty plate away, and finished his wine. “Take away the cases of legitimate injustice which I do for my own reasons, God knows not for the money—why is it always the poor who are innocent?—take them away and what has my life added up to? Representing clients who, for the most part, are guilty as sin … that’s what a criminal lawyer does. I’m good at it. Well, that makes it a little tough for me to go to the cops and ask them to bend the rules, protect me and my wife.”
“You paint a bleak picture,” I said.
“Sometimes it’s a bleak world. Sometimes you get caught in a situation for which society hasn’t given you a convenient answer. I’ve got to take care of this my own way. It’s me against Varada and the deck’s stacked in his favor. So I have to get an edge. Claverly and Potter, they were an edge. Not a big enough edge as it turned out. I’ve got a lot at stake here, Charlie. My wife’s terrified, working her way through a lifetime supply of Valium, she could come unglued at any moment … it’s me against him now …”
“You and Abe Braverman,” I said.
“Abe’s the only edge I’ve got. And Abe’s not a good guy to get pissed off. And he’s mad about what happened to his men last night …”
THREE
Victor and Andy Thorne were sitting in the garden with gin and tonics and the oscillating fans blowing. The six o’clock heat was the highest of the day. The radio in the bathroom where I was taking a cool shower said it was ninety-two in Central Park. The heat and the tension running through the brownstone made you want to stay in the shower and hide from everything until it was over. I finally got out and dried off and shaved for the second time that day. I was halfway down the hallway to my room, wrapped in my old seersucker robe from Brooks, when I heard her crying.
The door to their bedroom was open. Caro sat in a small chintz-covered chair by the window, in shorts and blouse, her bare legs tucked underneath her. She was gnawing a thumbnail and sobbing, her body shaking. I was frozen in place again, caught watching her in a private moment. This time she looked up, shook her head at me, waved me away. I nodded, wondering what I might have done to help, and went on toward my room. Then I heard her voice behind me.
“Charlie,” she sniffled, “I’m okay. Just giving in to things for a moment.” She hiccuped and a faint smile played across her beautiful face. She wiped tears away with her fingertips. “Once I started, like an idiot I couldn’t seem to stop.” She leaned against her doorway, curling her bare toes into the carpet. Her legs were straight and tan like the girls at summer camp a long time ago.
“I wish I could help—”
“Look, Charlie, you’re the only volunteer in our little band. You could get out of it … maybe you’re a sucker if you don’t. I don’t know.”
“Well, Victor’s got his ace in the hole,” I said. “It’ll be all right.”
“Braverman.” She shrugged. “What can he do? That’s what gets to me, that’s why I was crying. I just don’t see what anyone can do … maybe if Victor just talked to him without all the anger—oh hell, I’m babbling. Thank God for Valium.” She dredged up another faint smile. “We’d better get dressed. Victor wants a night out.” I turned and she spoke again. “Sometimes I long for … for a good clean feeling. Some kind of triumph. Virtue as its own reward.” She closed her eyes. “That good clean feeling when you’re young. I guess that’s it.”
That night must have required all of Caro’s acting ability. It wasn’t just the Valium that pulled her through. It was something else, a strength she called on in the clutch, like a great pitcher reaching back for a little extra with the bases loading and the game on the line. When I next saw her, she was wearing a sleek black silk dress that seemed to ripple in the slightest air currents. We were gathered downstairs and Andy Thorne was begging off the evening out.
“Anyway,” he said to Victor, “I’ll be here to take any messages. Better than any machine yet devised, laddie.”
FOUR
The Oak Room at the Algonquin was dim and shiny and the crowd was glittery with their rings and necklaces and New York money. The level of conversation was low and well mannered with the tinkly laughter in which beautiful women seemed to trade so heavily. We steadfastly avoided the subject that filled our minds so completely. I suppose we drank too much and God knows we ate too much. Victor downed a chocolate sundae and then ordered brandy for all of us with the coffee.
When Michael Feinstein sat down at the piano and the lights dimmed further, Caro touched my arm, told me how wonderful he was. She applauded enthusiastically. Her eyes and smile had the kind of feverish, dangerous quality Jennifer Jones used to project on the screen. When I was a young man and first saw those movies, I’d been drawn to that quality, and watching Caro react to the clear, resolute voice of Feinstein singing the Gershwin songs, I realized that nothing had changed. I was older now and I’d been over the jumps with my share of women, but that dangerous thing they do, dancing along that emotional high wire, still entranced me. Such women were frightening and the fear you felt made them somehow—disastrously, more often than not—appealing. If we’d all been in one of those long-ago movies, Jennifer Jones would have been right on the money.
Victor, having eaten furiously, proceeded to drink two brandies with equal determination, applauded like a madman, and grew steadily grayer. In the heightened atmosphere created by Feinstein’s performance the excitement of the audience provided an adrenaline rush for all of us. In. those moments I saw Caro and Victor in new roles, unlike what I’d seen before. Suddenly they seemed almost strangers, caught and held tight in their own little cells, linked, oddly enough, by me. They looked at me rather than at one another, as if a gulf I’d never noticed before separated them. It was an impression, nothing more, though later I had reason to remember it.
When Feinstein had done his final encore and the lights had come back up, Victor excused himself and left the table. We watched him go, a massive figure, shoulders
hunched slightly, his great square head above the crowd. A couple of people waved to him and he nodded in recognition, then suddenly stopped at one of the banquettes, leaned down to talk with a couple including a strikingly elegant woman who tilted her head and delivered one of the markedly tinkly laughs just before brushing her lips against his cheek. Caro watched with a slow smile, which came and went almost without having been there at all.
“She’s exquisite, isn’t she, Charlie? Ravishing, wouldn’t you say?”
I looked at the woman and her husband exchanging small talk. “Very pretty, I suppose.”
“But?”
“A little glacial for me.”
“And what is your type, Charlie?”
“Oh, I don’t think you really want to go into this—”
“Of course I do.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ve had plenty to drink, too damn much. I’ve been listening to the most romantic music in the world in one of the most romantic places … and this whole mess we’re all in seems to create a new set of rules—doesn’t it, somehow?”
“As if nothing we say can be taken down and used in evidence against us.”
“So long as that’s all understood.” The woman Victor was bending toward threw back her head, and a diamond necklace twinkled below her wide, red smile. “You, Caro,” I said, feeling peculiarly light-headed, images of Jennifer Jones and God knows what else flitting across my mind. “You are my type. If I’d met you before Victor he’d never have gotten a chance at you.”
“Well, Charlie! What a flatterer you are!” She looked past the brandy snifter at me.
“Nothing but the plain truth, I’m afraid. And I’ve said way too much—”
“Well, what type am I, then, Charlie?”
The Saberdene Variations Page 8
