The Saberdene Variations

by Thomas Gifford

  “I sat on the couch, she was standing, and she kept pacing around the room and I finally looked up at her and she was poised over me, her fists clenched, her face all screwed up with frustration and hatred and rage … as much at Victor for refusing to leave me … she was just screaming at me, her face was all red and puffy … I admit it, Charlie, I kind of snapped at that point, I stood up and slapped her as hard as I could … and she was so drunk and unsteady she fell down, I remember seeing the red blotch on her cheek and along the line of her jaw, so help me I thought maybe I’d broken her jaw … I hoped I had!

  “Anyway, she was on the floor near the fireplace and I turned around and was walking out when I heard a noise and I looked back and she had the poker from the brass fireplace set in her hand and she was starting toward me. I made a very hasty retreat, slammed the door behind me. I could hear her sort of howling and screaming behind the closed door while I waited for the elevator. And that was it, Charlie.

  “Her story about Victor showing up and my having the poker and wanting to murder her—well, she’s made sure no one could set the record straight but Victor and he’s dead. Believe me, Charlie, Victor never knew anything about my seeing Samantha … at least I never mentioned any of it to him and if she told him he never let on to me.

  “And how could I be angry with Victor for having an affair with her? Really angry? I was a failure in the marriage bed and I knew it, so what could I say, Charlie?”

  THREE

  She must have thought the inquisition was over because she beckoned me to come sit beside her on a bench in the shade. A willow drooped over one of the pretty little humpbacked bridges behind us, joggers trying not to expire on the track beyond and below the boulder nearby us. The sounds of Central Park West barely reached us. Caro sat quietly, half-turned toward me. “Does that make sense to you?” she asked. “Does that put your mind at ease, Charlie? I can’t answer for what’s going on in Samantha’s head, but that’s exactly what happened.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “But there’s something else—Caro, I don’t even know how to bring it up—”

  “Just do it, then. We’ve got to get everything straightened out between us, Charlie. Don’t worry about me. What is it?” She took her sunglasses off, dangled them, and watched me. She was absolutely still, like an animal poised to face a challenge, only the glasses slowly swinging. Her face gave nothing away.

  “Judge Edel,” I said. “He had something he thought I should know about. He said Victor would want him to talk to me …”

  I told her everything about the photographs, everything about the eerie night I spent with the judge and Maguire. When she realized that Victor had had her followed, the color left her face, her lips tightened, but she said nothing else. She waited and when I’d finally finished she looked away, back at the bridge on the footpath as if it might lead to a better, safer place. Finally she sighed, stood up. She walked to the top of the bridge, looked out across the running path toward the thick stand of trees, a disk of blue lake shimmering beyond.

  “Naturally you’re upset,” she said, measuring each word. “You’d be nuts if you weren’t. But this spying is all a surprise to me, too. And I find all this simply unforgivable behavior on the judge’s part. And worse, much worse, on Victor’s. How very much like the judge, how reptilian! Why in the world didn’t he just ask me what was going on when he saw the pictures? He didn’t have to worry about my tender feelings—but instead he goes to you! He knows nothing of our relationship …”

  “He came to me because he knew Victor and I were close …”

  “Which is absurd on the face of it since Victor, being his usual cowardly self, didn’t let you in on the big secret while he was alive. Victor’s not asking me—when he saw those pictures and must have been stunned by them—is utterly despicable. There’s just no other way to say it.” She shook her head, her eyes moist with anger and frustration. “You’re the only one who just came to me and asked me, Charlie, as if I were a sane person who would have an explanation …”

  “I’m sure Victor didn’t want to upset you—”

  “Oh, you’re such a blind, loyal friend! Too good a friend, better than Victor deserved, I’m afraid. And Edel—my God, the mind reels! Why does his mind work that way? What is the enchantment of conspiracy, of going to you behind my back? Maybe I’ll never understand. Maybe it doesn’t make any difference now.”

  I didn’t say anything and finally she leaned away from the bridge railing and smiled at me. “Now, those photographs—okay, here’s what happened.” She took a deep breath. “I got a telephone call from Varada one day and I guess if you look at it from his point of view it wasn’t such a crazy idea, calling me, I mean. After all, he hadn’t killed Anna … and I can only tell you that he wasn’t at all threatening. He just said he’d appreciate it if I’d meet him. In a completely public place, in case I didn’t feel safe. He wanted to talk to me. He asked me, he pleaded with me, not to tell Victor. He wanted no part of Victor. Frankly, Charlie, I felt so guilty about my testimony helping send him to prison, I thought I owed him something. What harm could it do to go talk to the guy? I know it’s hard to believe now, but he wasn’t the same man you’ve seen … I may not have been thinking too clearly, I’m willing to admit that, but I was so overcome with guilt at the whole tragic mess—well, I told him I’d meet him.

  “So I went to that diner way over on the West Side. And there he was, coming to the table, after all those years, and I was afraid. Just plain afraid … but he sat down like anybody would and he only wanted to talk. While Victor’s little man was snapping his pictures. He talked about how he endured prison, how he’d prayed that someday the real killer would be found—and then he told me how it had felt when his prayers had been answered. Then he said he felt we owed him something, Victor and I, for all the horror we’d caused him, all the lost years.

  “But then he began to talk a little wildly, he said my sister had loved him, he said he thought that maybe if I tried I could be in love with him, too … he said he wanted me to meet him at a hotel and go to bed with him, that I should take Anna’s place …” Her voice was trembling and she didn’t say anything for a few moments. Then she forged ahead. “I tried to stay calm and speak reasonably with him, which was stupid, I suppose, but any peaceful alternative to what he had in mind seemed worth going for. Well, finally he went away after he told me to think it over.

  “Then a few days later he called again, told me he wanted to talk to me again. He said if I didn’t come, or if I told Victor, he’d make sure that both Victor and I were very, very sorry. He was very sincere, So, okay. Since he wanted to meet in another public place, that bar over on Columbus, I decided I’d meet him one more time and try to convince him that he was making a big mistake if he thought Victor wouldn’t strike back at him. Well, that was the wrong thing to say. He got sort of quietly angry, said he hated to be threatened. Then he gave me a little demonstration. He took two hard-boiled eggs and cracked them on the bar. He said it would be just as easy to crack Victor and me—then he leaned over and whispered to me what he wanted to do to me, said if I let him he wouldn’t bother Victor … but I just couldn’t, Charlie, I couldn’t go with him, not even to spare Victor.” Tears were streaking her face. Her teeth chattered while she tried to control herself. She wiped the tears away with my handkerchief.

  “And then you came into it. You know the rest.” She gulped back a sob. “Maybe I should have let him do what he wanted with me. Sooner or later he’d have gotten tired of me and gone away and Victor wouldn’t be dead—”

  “And we might have gone to your funeral, not Victor’s,” I said, “Why didn’t you tell Victor?”

  “I don’t know anymore. Except I thought I might still bargain with Varada, my body for Victor’s life or something … I don’t know, Charlie. It’s just one of those things, you lose either way.”

  I put my arm around her, pulled her to me, felt her shaking. “I call Victor a coward,” she wh
ispered, her face moist against my chest, “and I’m the biggest coward of all. Oh, Charlie, Charlie, it’s all too late for me, isn’t it?”

  I held her, stroking her long tan hair, telling her that the bad times were all over. Later she said: “Don’t let me think you believed whatever the judge was implying about me … please don’t, Charlie. I couldn’t live with that, I just couldn’t bear it.”

  An hour later we were out on the lake with the towers of Manhattan rising over us beyond the thick greenery of the summer trees. I stopped rowing and let the rowboat sit, slowly drifting, barely moving. Clouds had piled up over the city, pale gray and rich purple. Caro was dozing on a pillow, her eyelids fluttering, one hand tight in a tiny fist.

  Suddenly it was raining, big soft drops at first, and lightning cracked to the south over midtown. I began rowing us back to the boathouse. I felt drained and simultaneously relieved beyond my wildest dreams. There was nothing wrong. I could hardly believe it. We were getting wet and she was still half-dozing, smiling at the rain touching her face.

  We were outside the boathouse and it was raining harder and people were scurrying around giggling and screeching and laughing. We were huddled under a tree, soaked to the skin, our mutual relief so powerful we could hardly handle it.

  We decided to just say the hell with it and walk home in the downpour. For some reason I looked behind us—maybe I was checking the sky, or looking for the little trolley car, I don’t know—but I shouldn’t have.

  My eyes swept along past the boathouse, past the low rambling restaurant, and came to rest on a huge boulder, bald and gray and rain-blown, overlooking the lake.

  Carl Varada was standing on the boulder. He was wearing the same Panama hat, the safari jacket slung over his shoulder, the bush shirt plastered to his immense chest.

  He was watching us. Not moving. Just watching.

  Caro didn’t see him. I didn’t look back at him. We walked all the way home and the shower ended on the way. Caro walked close beside me, holding my hand.

  But I was thinking about Varada. I thought about all that he represented in our lives, all the fear and evil and the distrust I’d felt toward Caro. I thought about Victor dying because of Varada. I thought about my almost leaving Caro because of Varada’s forcing his way back into her life. I thought about Varada whispering film into her ear …

  And I just wanted the chance to kill him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ONE

  THE SIGHT OF CARL VARADA standing on that rock, the rain pelting down on him with the purple clouds rolling up behind him, made me figure the special effects couldn’t be far away. I didn’t want to put up with Varada and, more important, I did not intend to put up with Caro having to deal with him anymore. I wanted to kill the son of a bitch but, of course, I’m just a guy and just guys don’t actually want to kill people. They want them dead, mind you. They just don’t want to have to do it themselves.

  Alternatively they want to get the hell out, which is what I decided we had to do. Fortunately I had just the place, a place which had nothing to do with the Saberdenes, a place Varada could not possibly find. A place where we could be alone.

  It was a ramshackle old house up north—or down east, if you prefer—on the Maine coast, an easy drive from Boston but far enough away to free you from urban life. The name of the town was Hackett. At one time it was a busy fishing community but I had the impression that a couple of small industries had been added along with a resort quality, and the fishing was now less crucial to the local economy. This information was derived entirely from letters I’d had from Cousin Helen. A great-uncle of mine had once lived in the place. He died ten years ago, leaving the house to his only daughter, who had in turn left it to her daughter Helen, who got married and moved to Atlanta. I heard she was trying to unload the old place so I wrote to her. She sent me snapshots since I’d never seen the house and wrote glowingly of its virtues. I had made some money by then and decided to buy it. Still sight unseen I arranged from London to have it rented out in summer as a vacation home, primarily to Bostonians. Although it was possible to live in year round, if you were good with fireplaces and storm windows, it had no basement and no central heating plant. Helen did tell me that if I were ever to use it in summer myself I should have plenty of firewood on hand because July can be a long cold month on the coast of Maine.

  Knowing I was visiting America that summer I’d told the real estate agent in Hackett to take it off the market and spruce it up for me. However, all that had overtaken us in New York pushed the house and the thought of using it completely out of my mind. Now it was back. Now it seemed the perfect hideaway, as well as a secluded and romantic setting for us to get to know one another. It sounded like something from an old movie and that was fine by me. Caro loved the idea. She said she’d never heard of a better idea. Nothing on earth could have made me happier.

  I knew everything was going to get better now. The clouds Samantha Barber and Judge Edel had hung on Caro were gone. Varada wouldn’t be able to find us. Andy Thorne was making good progress. And Caro was fresh and new and shiny. “I feel positively dewy,” she said.

  We took the shuttle to Boston, rented a car at Logan, and drove up the coast to Hackett.

  It felt like going home. It almost felt like a honeymoon.

  TWO

  The house sat out on a wedge of land half a mile from the edge of town. It faced the water with a wide strip of our own beach falling away on two sides of the triangle. The third side was a road leading down to the two-lane highway which was becoming the main street of Hackett. There were oaks and elms and a thick stand of spruce which formed a windbreak between the house and the beach. The wind was steady and salty. It had weathered the shingles to a dark, blasted brown, permanently dampened and caked with salt. A porch wrapped around the seaward side. The paintwork was mainly a memory. Seabirds swooped and called over the surf rolling along the sand. I couldn’t quite believe I owned the place but we settled in so quickly on the first day that, by nightfall, with the breeze turned to a steady cold blow, with a fire crackling in the big living room, we were already used to it. It creaked and moaned and the fog moving in actually tasted salty, as if we were at sea and drifting on a benevolent trade wind.

  That room, where we sat and warmed ourselves and watched the sparks pop in little flurries onto the brick hearth, had won Caro’s heart. There was a mixture of ancient rattan pieces with faded flowered cushions and even older Adirondack chairs with the upholstery tied to the wide flat slats with strings. An enormous rag rug that had never seen the inside of a carpet warehouse; a vague, comforting musty smell that the scent of burning logs was dispelling. The lamps were made of twisted, aged wrought iron that looked like roots. The shades were crisp yellow parchment from the twenties with borders depicting scenes of Indian lore looking handpainted. The paneled walls were spotted with knots and framed reproductions of Maine coastal scenes cut from magazines and newspapers that had long ago gone out of business. It was old and solid and the fact that it had all been there so long told you that it was going to be there a lot longer.

  We sat on the floor before the fire sipping brandy from old chipped cups. “Charlie,” she said, “it’s perfect. It’s a dream.”

  “No,” I said, “it’s reality. The bad dream has just ended.”

  She put her cup down on the hearth and rested her head on my shoulder. “This is the first time we’ve ever really been alone. Everything else seems so far away. In time as well as space. Do you feel that, Charlie? It isn’t just that we’re miles from New York and everything that happened there … I feel like we’ve been moving forward in time, too. I suppose it’s some kind of fancy defense mechanism, but Victor and Varada and Braverman, they all seem to belong to another world where bad things happened, a long time ago … they’re fading in my memory, Charlie. I’m happy now.”

  “It’s about time you were happy,” I said. “I want to make you happy from now on, Caro. If it’s within my power.�
�� I touched her cheek, her lips with my fingertips, tracing her features, claiming them.

  Suddenly she was flushed, breathing hard. “I guess this is the time, isn’t it? We’ve waited and now it’s time. Kiss me, Charlie.”

  I kissed her for a long time and she said: “Don’t stop, please don’t stop now …”

  It was like a dam bursting. She swept me away with her passion. It was as if she’d been waiting all her life to feel secure and safe and happy and now she let go, let her emotions take over. It was the most erotic experience of my life yet it had nothing to do with the sexual acts themselves, which, I’m sure, were restrained by many people’s standards these days. If we were not entirely conventional lovers, neither were we acrobats, nor were we testing one another’s strength. We were simply making love for the first time because we were in love. The power of her emotional concentration was so visible, her intensity, her need so great: her need to love, to give herself while taking me, was the purest experience I’d ever known. I felt enfolded within her, completed by her, fulfilled because of her. It made me remember a conversation I’d once had with Victor. Anima, that was it, looking for the anima figure. I’d thought that Victor had found his anima in Caro but I’d been wrong. I was the one.

  Later on, when the fire had burned down but the glow of warmth was still all around us, casting our shadows to the corners of the room, she nuzzled my ear, whispered: “Was that all right? Was I too … cold?”

  “Nothing that a whole lot of practice won’t make perfect. Everyone knows that.” I stroked her hair. “You know how wonderful you were, my darling.”

  Her solemn face lit up in the embers’ glow. “Maybe we should start practicing right away. If you’re up to it …”