The Saberdene Variations

by Thomas Gifford

  “You’re looking great, Professor,” I said. “It’s absolutely amazing—”

  “What’s amazing, Nichols,” he croaked, “is how shameless a liar a perfectly normal, decent fellow can become when faced with an old crock like me about to push off into the great void … my body has betrayed me, young Nichols. A traitor to my brain, which remains in reasonable working order. Tragedies seem to pile up quite literally on the doorstep and still one survives. Braverman dies, my son-in-law dies, and I pedal onward, still searching out my reward. How can such things be?”

  “Beats me,” I said. “And while you look like hell you do look a lot better than you did. Okay?”

  “As always, everything’s relative. I’m glad you came. It’s about time Caro took some time off for herself. Sometimes the girl is too strong for her own good.” He sighed and gestured at a chair. “Sit down. You look like a dishrag. Have a drink of that ice water.” He looked up at the television screen. “She thinks of everything. Video recorder, stacks of movies …”

  I sank into the chair and mopped my face and felt the cold air across my wet back. “So, how do you feel?”

  “I’m coming along. Going home in another week or two. I’ll need some busybody nurse for a while, or so they tell me. I’m not prepared to debate the point. I’m an old wheezer, as my granddad used to say, and old wheezers apparently need keepers. Funny, you never think it’ll come to you and sure as the very dickens, it does. It’s a betrayal, Nichols, or did I say that already? You’ll know all about it one day.” He lifted a glass to his lips and wet them. “Victor, he’s been spared the final indignity.”

  “Caro’s handling it well,” I said. “Her resilience amazes me. I guess she’s made of the right stuff. I wonder, though, how much is she hurting inside? You know her best, now that Victor’s gone …”

  He slowly pushed himself up against the pillows, staring into the flowers on the tables all around him. Then he took a deep breath and nodded as if he were answering some unspoken question. “Oh,” he said at last, “she can handle, it. You may have noticed, she’s different from the rest of us … it’s in the chromosomes, I understand.”

  Among the vases of flowers on the bedside table was the framed photograph of Anna. I picked it up and looked at it, saw again the close resemblance to Caro. “I’ve wondered, why isn’t there a picture of Caro, too? None of my business, of course.”

  “You’re right, it’s none of your business. Or is it?” He gave me a wintry, bleak grin. “I could say it’s because she isn’t dead yet, so I don’t need a photograph to remind me of her. Or I could tell you it’s because she’s had an almost pathological fear of having her picture taken since she was little. I remember how she’d heard or read somewhere that there were savages, in New Guinea maybe, some godforsaken place, who believed that the camera stole their souls. Caro used to hide and cry when the camera came out at Fourth of July picnics or on Christmas morning. I could tell you any damn thing and you’d be none the wiser. But none of that would be quite accurate.

  “No, life never seems to be that simple, does it? The real reason is that there has always been a barrier between us. It’s not easy to explain, it’s almost as if we came from different cultures. We don’t seem to possess the same coordinates, we’re not on the same map. Similar, but not the same. There’s been a distance there that I could never travel. So we’ve never been close. Now with Anna,” his mouth made a faint smile, “I was close. Truly close.”

  Listening to him talk about his daughters I kept hearing what I’d heard one of them say.

  He wishes I’d been the one who died …

  “There’s a kind of scorn in her, Charlie,” he said, his eyes moving from Bogart and Lizabeth Scott and Morris Carnovsky to the flowers to the face of his dead daughter, back to me. “But there’s a mystery to it. Who’s it all for, this scorn? For men? Or for herself, maybe? Maybe it’s just for everybody, the human condition. Damned if I know. I’ve tried, I’ve bent over backward to make up for the distance I’ve felt between us. She’s my daughter and I love her. I honestly think she’d do just about anything on this earth for me … and I for her. But she seems to have come here from that other place where they order things differently.”

  “Well, I can’t say I know what you’re talking about,” I said. “She’s so giving, she works so hard at making life—well, good, nice … for the people around her. For Victor, for you. Even for me. She tries so damned hard—”

  “I know what you mean. How to put it? She never seems able to relax. It’s as if she’s always waiting for something bad to happen … bad. Even as a little girl she was always walking on eggshells. Maybe it was because she was so pretty and solemn as a child. She had a way, Charlie, of sort of being in the room with you and then—this sounds strange but it was strange, used to give her mother and me gooseflesh—her body remained there with you but you knew that she somehow wasn’t there anymore. Just gone, like the past. A memory.” He sighed and folded his papery arms, thin and bony, sticking from the sleeves of the hospital gown. His face wore a look of concerned satisfaction, as if he were back at Harvard Law laying out a curious, somewhat enigmatic case. “No one wanted to face that moment when she withdrew into herself. Sometimes she seemed so old, so serious, so sad … so fearless and distant …”

  Andy Thorne had finally grown weary from the thinking and the talking and I watched him slip into a doze, his breath steady and a little raspy. On the chest of drawers there was a stack of novels Caro had brought, which she read aloud to him. There was a chess set she’d bought and she played with him. She’d brought the VCR and the videocassettes stacked beside the books; Patton and Dead Reckoning and The Band Wagon and Cape Fear and Bringing Up Baby were at the top of the pile. Yet he called her distant and scornful and remote. What in the world, I wondered, did he want from his daughter? She struck me as someone else altogether, someone I’d never have recognized from Thorne’s description.

  I kept thinking about how she’d been an actress. I wished I’d asked Thorne about her acting, what kind of parts she’d played, had she been any good …

  Was she acting with me? Was she trying on a new role?

  I wondered about her charges of Victor’s infidelities and I wondered about her own life, the part played by men. Had there been anyone before me during her marriage? Had she ever been unfaithful to him?

  What had their life together been like beneath the surface? I began to realize that all I knew about their marriage was what they’d told me. And they’d given me conflicting versions. Now Andy Thorne had provided me with a third view.

  It was all confusing. Except for one thing. I knew you never knew what was really going on until it was happening to you.

  Chapter Twelve

  ONE

  THE NEXT MORNING CARO WAS up and off to the hospital as usual, though I could tell she’d had one of her bad nights. She was trying too hard to smile when she saw me in the garden. Her cup rattled in the saucer. There were dark ridges underlining her eyes, and her mouth was tugged down a fraction at the corners, as if she were clenching her teeth with determination not to let it show, not to worry me. I took one look at her, slid all the New York Times but the sports pages across the table toward her, and kept conversation to a minimum. She missed Victor’s presence, the routine, the reassurance, all the trappings of a loving husband. But she missed him all the time. The bad nights, they were something else. After the nightmare she looked drawn and red-eyed and a little shaky. She’d told me about the nightmare just once. I hadn’t required a second telling. In the nightmare she was back in the Westchester house, she was firing the gun at the figure in the rainy, windy doorway, firing again and again and again as if it were a shotgun with a hundred barrels, and Victor’s face was revealed, she knew him, he was smiling at her, but she couldn’t stop shooting and it kept on happening until the face was gone. The nightmare. No, I didn’t need to hear it all again. I didn’t need to ask. I knew.

  I sat in the gard
en reading a John le Carré novel and wondering what had gone wrong, why I no longer enjoyed his novels as I once had, until I was struck by my first urge to write something about the past few weeks. We seemed to have come to a rest stop, an oasis, allowing time to gather my thoughts. I seemed to have lived through one of my own books and now it was time to sit down and take some notes. When it’s time, it’s time, and there’s no denying the need to write something down.

  Victor’s study was dim and cool and orderly. I found a cassette of Lester Young playing with Teddy Wilson and Oscar Peterson in the fifties and popped it into his Tandberg deck. “Stardust” and “Indiana” and “These Foolish Things.” Conchita had just left with her spray gun, and drops of water were beaded on the leaves of the rubber plants and the wandering Jew and the date palms.

  It felt presumptuous, looking at Victor’s desk and the leather swivel chair as if it had passed to me, along with his wife. But that was ridiculous. It was a desk. I needed a desk.

  It was when I slid the drawer out, looking for a pen and a pad of paper, that I took one step too many into Victor’s world.

  There were date books, notepads, desk diaries, checkbooks, envelopes, stamps, paper clips, stick-on pads, all the junk everyone collects. But this was Victor’s junk and like an inquisitive jerk, prying into a dead man’s secrets; I began to flip through the bits and pieces.

  Varada’s name was jotted down, beside the words Release date 21 April. This on the page of a desk agenda dated 1 March. Which meant that Victor had known seven weeks before the time Varada was actually coming out.

  The name Alec Maguire was written on a separate sheet of lined notepaper with a telephone number. The area code was for Boston. Following Maguire’s name was an arrow drawn to Varada which had been circled again and again until the paper was worn through.

  Later on in the diary, on the day before he had found me in the Waldorf lobby, he had written: Nichols = Stalking Horse. Escort Caro. Bait the Hook. I didn’t like the implications of any of that. It didn’t take much insight to see that Victor had planned our meeting rather more carefully than he said. My immediate assumption was that he’d used me to give Caro the appearance of a safety net while using her as bait to draw Varada into the open. Victor had apparently expected trouble from the start. My guilt at betraying him with his wife was not quite so imposing as it had been a quarter of an hour before.

  In the checkbook which was Victor’s alone there was a record of four checks totaling $5,600 made out to this Alec Maguire. The first was dated one week previous to Varada’s release date.

  I dialed the Boston number.

  “Maguire Agency. May I help you?”

  “Sure. I was given a number to call in Boston but I may have transposed a digit or two. Are you the shop which has made the dried apple a gourmet’s delight?”

  “Oh, I’m afraid not. What you’re looking for is probably down at the Quincy Market. Dried apples, sure, Quincy Market.”

  “No kidding. Well, my mistake. What do you do? Maybe I need you more than I need dried apples—”

  “You never know,” she giggled. “Mr. Maguire is a very well regarded private investigator. Boston magazine said he was Boston’s answer to Sam Spade!”

  “A private eye,” I said.

  “True story. A shamus.” She sounded very proud.

  “Well, does Mr. Maguire happen to be in? My need for a shamus far surpasses a need for those dried apples.”

  “Gosh, I’m sorry. He’s in New York City today. Working on a case. Could I have him call you when he gets back?”

  “I’m in New York myself. Do you know who he’s seeing down here? I could call—”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s confidential. But I could have him give you a call when he picks up his messages—”

  “It’s okay. I’ll get back to you.”

  Victor seemed to have had a detective for every occasion.

  TWO

  Samantha Barber was waiting for me at the St. Regis. She was sitting at one of the little tables off to the right, surrounded by the sepulchral calm of such places at midafternoon. She was wearing a sleeveless linen dress in pale lime green. Her lipstick was pale, too, and her tan was like pink gold. Her hair was the color of champagne. Watching her was making me pale. She looked almost entirely artificial but the parts had been assembled by someone who loved the work.

  “Mrs. Barber, I presume. I’m Charlie Nichols.”

  “Have a chair.” She looked at my face. “Hot, isn’t it?”

  “Keeps getting worse.”

  “It’s just that we’re weakening instead of getting used to it.” She inclined her elegant jaw and the waiter went away to get us more gin, more tonic. She was wearing a gold pin and earrings, all barely there. Her nails were peachy, matched her mouth. Watching, waiting, I remembered how her mouth had been a red slash at the Algonquin that night and her laughter had carried across the crowd. She wasn’t for me but I could imagine what Victor must have seen in her. But it made no particular sense to me. She was hard in every way that Caro was soft, brittle where Caro was supple. She looked as if she needed a daily buffing to maintain the shine. New York is full of them, I suppose. Carefully tended New York women, whatever that may actually mean. Her looks were Samantha’s stock-in-trade, her capital, and she’d obviously conserved it, though not without a breathtaking expenditure of her effort and men’s money.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” she said. Inevitably she produced a gold case and a gold lighter, inquired down the length of her nose, inquired with a voice that had taken on a whiskey crack over the years. Sexy voice.

  “I don’t care if you burn,” I said. “Sorry, sometimes I can’t help myself.”

  “You should try, Mr. Nichols.”

  “There are always so many other thing that seem more important. Like being summoned to rendezvous with snappy blondes who have heavy things to tell me.” I watched the flame dancing at the tip of the Merit 100. She didn’t inhale much. It might have undone some of that work. “Let’s get to it. I’m a busy man.”

  She burst into that ravishing, tinkly laugh. Up close I got the disappointing impression that it was the result of a lot of practice. “Oh, don’t be so tough.”

  “We’re not on a date, Mrs. Barber. And I’m curious about what’s so important that I’ll need to take it with a drink. What’s the story?”

  All of a sudden the veneer started to peel. The hardness went out of her voice and it fell to a sort of breathy whisper. I’d interviewed people about murders and when they came to the absolute cream of the jest, the bloodletting, their voices dropped the same way. It was fear. But what could this specimen be afraid of except the onrush of time?

  “Look, Victor Saberdene was very special to me, a very old friend. When he was killed I did some long hard thinking about my life, what I owed him. We had some good times and some not so good times but for .years we’d been dear friends again … I could just keep my mouth shut now or I could do him one last favor.” The drinks arrived and she plucked the lime from hers and bit into it, sucked the bitterness. “I decided to do the last favor. I’m afraid. Do you understand that? There’s someone I’m afraid of … but I owe Victor.”

  “Fine. But what could any of this have to do with me?”

  “Quite a lot.”

  “Well, why not get it off your chest? Who are you afraid of?”

  “I’m afraid of Caro Saberdene. That’s what I thought Victor would want me to tell you.”

  “Mrs. Barber, are you serious? What’s the point? If you have some vendetta you’re pursuing against Victor’s wife—widow, I should say—then take it up with her. Just leave me out of it—”

  “You must listen to me … please. It won’t cost you a thing and it means a good deal to me. There’s no one else I can tell. You must be aware of Caro’s past. She’s known to be mentally unbalanced. I mean, she has a history of it. Let’s face facts. It’s not just me saying that she’s got problems, believe me. Victor has talked
about it many times, how worried he’s been about her state of mind, how she’s even turned her irrational anger on him—”

  “Oh, please!” I smiled at her. “You can really save your breath, Mrs. Barber—”

  “She tried to kill me, you idiot!”

  She turned away after saying it, her face suddenly flushed.

  “That’s quite an accusation. I’d be careful where I said it, if I were you.”

  “Just listen. Give me some credit. I’m not the one who’s crazy. She came to my home … she came after me. We have a co-op on Park Avenue, she came into my own home, in a cold rage, and accused me of having an affair with her husband. You should have seen her eyes—I’ve never seen anything so … so empty. There was nothing human in them. It was like she wasn’t actually there at all … I was terrified. I knew her history of mental illness—”

  “That’s absolute rot,” I said, trying not to respond in her own distraught manner. “You should know better. Under a hell of a lot of pressure, nearly a decade ago, she had a crack-up. She came out of it and went on with her life. Which happened to include falling in love with Victor Saberdene and marrying him.”

  She shook her head. “No. You weren’t there, she hit me, I bled. She’d have killed me—”

  “So why didn’t she?”

  “Because Victor had followed her, burst in, and pulled her off me …” She took a long drink and ran her tongue along her lips. “Victor saved my life. I only wish I could have returned the favor.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “What does it sound like, Mr. Nichols? It means that I believe Caro Saberdene killed him.”

  “Of course she killed him, it’s common knowledge—”