“You’re running up a pretty good-sized tab,” Maguire said. “And I’m not doing anything brave, y’know?”
“Don’t worry about that,” I said.
“I’m not worried. I just hate to see you wasting money. I’m a frugal New Englander.”
“If Varada shows up, you’ll earn a whole lot real quick,” I said. “You’ll think you’re the most underpaid man in the world.”
“I hear you. Well, the son of a gun hasn’t shown up yet. I find myself hoping like hell he doesn’t.”
“You’re armed to the teeth? I hope—”
“Everything but heat-seeking missiles.”
“Stay in touch,” I said.
“Never fear.”
About a week after Maguire must have been thinking I’d decided to support him for life, things began to happen.
He called me from Logan Airport in Boston.
“Well, Charlie, she’s making a move. I’m out at the airport. She’s picked up a ticket, one way to Los Angeles. First class. What now?”
“Any Varada sightings?”
“Nary a one. The man seems to be a bad memory.”
“Let’s hope so. I want you to go to Los Angeles.”
“Can do.”
“Alec, I figure it this way. If you can keep track of her, Varada can keep track of her. Don’t lose her.”
“Rest easy. I’ll report in when she comes to rest somewhere. How are you feeling?”
“Better.”
“Remember, each deep breath is a guinea in the bank of health.”
“I’m coming out any day now.”
“I’ll call you tonight, Charlie. She’s got to sleep somewhere.”
“Let vigilance be your watchword.”
He laughed at my feeling the need to say so and hung up chortling over my popping for the first-class fare.
TWO
The letter from Caro came in the next day’s mail.
I picked it up, didn’t open it for a moment. Just stood by the window of the hospital room, ready to leave at last, hefted the letter as if I could divine the contents. Her father’s notepaper. Heavy, creamy paper.
I already knew what it had to tell me. I like to think I’m no male chauvinist. I like to think I’m a great respecter of women. I am, in fact. But each sex has its own idiosyncrasies and I’d been expecting the letter for some time.
It was simply inevitable.
So I finally went through the formality of opening it.
My darling Charlie,
As I write this I miss you so, more than I can possibly explain. You cannot imagine how daunting it is, writing to a writer. And already it seems that I’m starting out all in a muddle, as my grandmother used to say. She would tell me I was the most muddled girl she’d ever seen. How pleased she’d be to know that she was so right and that I at last realize it. Oh God—how did I get started on my grandmother?
Look, Charlie, this is the point. I’m leaving. For good, I mean.
I didn’t know if I could write that but now I have and my hand is shaking. What a mess I am!
It comes down to this and don’t argue with me, even if I’m not there.
If I stay with you, Charlie, you must know that he will surely kill you. You are innocent and brave and foolish. And in love. Can I say that? I think I can. You fell in love with me out of goodness and kindness, without knowing what I seem to bear within me like some horrible virus—the virus of sorrow and depression and loss. I try to hide it, sometimes I even convince myself that everything is all right, that I’ve made it to the sunny uplands. But until I met you I never actually climbed that last shadowy ridge and found myself safe on that sunny, happy place. For a month this summer between two unspeakably awful events, I found more happiness than I’d ever known. It ended with something too close to another death. Yours.
Victor used to talk about the variations people’s lives went through, each life repeating again and again variations on a single theme borne almost genetically within them. My theme seems to be death and sorrow, things so awful I can’t bear to describe them tho’ I am willing you to understand them. My sister, my husband, very nearly you … and what I did to that man in the courtroom so long ago was akin to a murder of his soul, was it not?
Now I know I can save you by leaving you. I beg you to put me out of your mind. Go back to London. Don’t completely forget our love but please, I beg you, forget
Caro Saberdene
THREE
It was one of those letters of renunciation that women so often seem to think somehow provides an answer and simultaneously ennobles them. I’m not knocking women, just observing them, something I’ve done quite a lot. And I was moved by her letter, too. She wrote a pretty fine letter. But I couldn’t see her plan as a solution to anything. Even if I packed my bags and went home to London, to cry in my warm beer and turn our story into one of those sad, violent, thoughtful novels—even if I bailed out, how was that going to solve her problems? I wasn’t going to take Varada with me, was I? So what was she supposed to do when he came charging out of the night with a gleam in his eye? It didn’t look to me as if she’d addressed that little problem. But, then, I’ve never claimed to know what really goes on in a woman’s mind; if I’d known right then what she was thinking, nothing on earth could have made me believe it.
Of course I wasn’t setting any records as a planner myself. Until the time she left for Los Angeles and I got her letter, I can’t see that I had any plan at all. I just kept punting and hoping somebody would fumble; I just kept thinking that the situation would somehow cure itself. I wonder now what the hell was the matter with me, but the answer is an obvious one: I’d never been caught in the middle of a psychopath’s determined attempts to dismantle the lives of a bunch of people. Who would know what to do? Victor had thought he knew and had wound up all over a flagstone patio. Abe Braverman thought he knew. Claverly and Potter didn’t have a doubt. Me? I’d just wanted to hide and at least nobody actually got killed. Now Caro looked as if she’d decided on damage control: reduce the size of the target and make herself a human sacrifice while I ran to safety. Her plan was foolproof, I suppose. I’d be safe. She’d get raped until Varada was tired of the sport and then he’d kill her. Not a great plan.
My plan was pretty embryonic but I had a goal. An abstraction.
I was going to put an end to the Saberdene variations. That would put PAID to all of it. Alec Maguire was the first part of the plan.
He called from Los Angeles. Caro had checked into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. He got a room, too, by calling on the good offices of the hotel security chief, who was an old pal from Vietnam days. She had rented a car at Alamo, driven directly to the hotel, checked in, ordered dinner from room service, and stayed inside ever since. Maguire figured she was just plain exhausted.
“Just remember one thing,” I said. “You’re protecting her from Varada. More than anything else, keep an eye out for him. Don’t let him get near her. Alec?”
“Yes, massa?”
“No matter what.”
“I grasped that point long ago, Charlie.”
The next time my telephone rang it was Andy Thorne. He wanted me to come see him in Earl’s Bridge as soon as I could get out of the hospital. He sounded weakish but very insistent.
I told him I’d be there the next day.
Chapter Twenty
ONE
BY THE TIME I’D FINISHED the paperwork of the hospital discharge and rented a car, it was past noon and as hot as high August was bound to be in Boston. I was a little shaky on my feet once I was outdoors and the sun and heat came down on me like a very heavy hammer on a tenpenny nail. The air-conditioning in the Chrysler eased my queasiness, dried the sweat lathering my face. I told myself I was just getting my sea legs back. I drove west as the sun passed its zenith, heading into the velvety greenery of the rolling Berkshires, glimpsing the occasional white steeple of a church like a beacon, the soul of New England, a finger pointing the way
to heaven.
I got to Earl’s Bridge, a few miles to the south off the Mass Turnpike with its pilgrim-hat road signs, about three o’clock. They could have used the town as an archetypal symbol, close to Tanglewood, within striking distance of Jacob’s Pillow and the Norman Rockwell Museum and all the perfect little summer theaters. I thought of Caro there as a girl, what a wonderful world in which to grow up.
It was all sun-dappled lawns and sugar maples and elms and oaks and willows with uneven narrow sidewalks and white picket fences and bright flowerbeds and sprinklers wafting trails of water across the rich, almost edible-looking lawns, dogs barking at kids on bikes, summer tourists in seersucker jackets and bow ties, busy gift shops, the big lazy white hotel with a porch running its length with swings hung on chains and potted palms and Adirondack chairs with dowagers in them.
Thorne’s house was a two-story job with white siding and green shutters and rosebushes and begonias and daisies and violets and a sidewalk made of stone islands wavering from the sidewalk to the front door, deep in the grass. The lawn was neatly mowed and carefully clipped. The standard-issue sprinkler wetted down the shady greenness. The trees looked a thousand years old. Andy Hardy or Ozzie and Harriet or Ward, June, Wally, and the Beaver would have felt right at home. It was a house where it was always good-humored inside and maybe it had truly been that way once, a long time ago in another world altogether, and maybe it would be again when there were no more Thornes, when the house had passed on, as houses do, to someone else, another family with kids and dogs and bikes on the lawn and a hopeful future. You could bet things wouldn’t turn out quite right for them either, because things never do, but there was always that hopeful future. A future was what the household lacked now. A future and maybe that happy past that never was.
The woman who acted as Thorne’s nurse/companion/therapist came to the door expecting me and led me through the quiet dark, immaculate house and out the back door to the lawn where Andy Thorne sat in one of the ubiquitous white slatted Adirondack chairs. He was in the shade with a pitcher of lemonade and a couple of glasses on a table beside the chair. He looked thin and wasted. His bare arms were skeletal. His skin was pale and the Foster Grants with the extra-dark lenses were too big for his face. His hair was thinner, still snow white, like moss clinging to the skull showing beneath the slightly stretched skin like a death’s head. His eyes were bright and alert, still. They moved quickly, taking me in, and one of the thin arms rose in greeting. In person he sounded stronger than he looked. Maybe he just needed to get some weight back. I hoped so.
“I know, I know,” he said sharply, “I look like what you find when you unwrap the mummy, but the amazing thing is I’m not represented by a fistful of wilted daisies and a headstone. And what else is amazing, laddie, is that I can talk, I know my own name and I seem continually to amaze one and all, including the moronic sawbones, by telling them, yes, yes, I know who is president of these United States. Warren Gamaliel Harding of Ohio. Come, get out of the sun. Take off your jacket. Have a lemonade. Tell me how you’re feeling. I’ve been led to believe that you got off easier than most who duke it out with our chum Varada.”
“We didn’t actually duke it out, Andy,” I said. I draped my coat over the back of one of the chairs, sat down, heard myself sighing with the twinges I was going to have for a long time. “He did all the duking, you might say. He was well along the road to killing me when Caro ran for help, at which time he decided he couldn’t take the time to finish the job. Caro saved my life … he’d been pretty rough with her.” I didn’t see the point of going into it. Maybe she’d spared him the details.
“So she told me.” In the quiet of the backyard the sounds of a perplexed bird and a dog barking down the street seemed strangely mechanical. There was the constant hum of busy insects. “But—and you may not have learned this yet, laddie—you can’t always be absolutely sure about what Caro tells you.”
“Now, Professor—”
“Just hear me out, I merely want to have a word with you before I clutch my chest and topple off the parapet. I’m not looking for an argument.” He smiled at me as if asking me to humor him. “Doctors tell me I’m not supposed to get worked up. Nursie will come out and break you in half if either of us misbehaves.”
“She wouldn’t find me much of a challenge,” I said.
“All I’m saying about Caro is that … let’s say she gets confused sometimes.”
“I’ve never noticed that,” I said.
“Tell me, did you ever ask her about the accusations that Barber woman made? And those pictures of Caro with Varada? Seems to me that that was about the time I had my little collapse in the hospital.” He nodded toward the table. “Will you top up my lemonade, laddie?”
I ran through Caro’s explanations for him while we worked on the lemonade and he listened quietly, nodding from time to time during the recitation. When I was done we sat slowly sweating, smelling the summer, hearing the bees. The grass had been mown lately, releasing the essential scent.
“Do you recall my telling you that we were never very close, Caro and me?”
I nodded,
“Well, if you wouldn’t mind listening to an old man who is suddenly wondering how much time—in days and weeks, mind you—how much time he has left, I’d appreciate your letting me go on unburdening myself a bit. Now, let’s see … you love my daughter, is that still an operative assumption?”
I nodded again.
“She told me you two had a wonderful, idyllic time up there in Maine. I’m glad you gave her that. Caro hasn’t had many wonderful times in her life. Things never seemed to work out the way she hoped. She was never carefree, poor Caro … not like other girls. Not like her sister, Anna, for instance. And since you love Caro, I thought I ought to talk with you again, and that, I’m afraid, brings us back to Carl Varada.”
I watched the flowers bend under the weight of the occasional bee. The summer afternoon was going slowly bad, like fruit left to rot in the tall grass.
“You see, Charlie, there’s something only I know. I’ve never told a living soul, not even Caro, because it seemed to me that there was no need. Well, I was kidding myself then and I’ve been kidding myself ever since. Why? Because I love Caro, too, whatever she does or is, whatever she may think. But I’m near the end now and Varada’s back and you have wandered into the picture … and I’m tired of hoarding my little secret. One burden I really don’t want to carry into the sweet hereafter. It’s a load of mischief, Charlie. You’re the only person I can tell. Are you a willing listener?”
“I’ll listen,” I said. Willingness didn’t really enter into it.
“It goes back to the time of the trial, even before the trial, really. Varada’s trial, I mean, of course. Seems like yesterday and it seems a thousand years ago. You see at the heart of the case against Varada, the first cause, was the assumption, the fact, that Varada had been having an affair with my daughter Anna. There was only one real problem with that—it just wasn’t true. Varada was not having an affair with Anna.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “If he wasn’t … I mean, Andy, you’re entitled to defend your daughter’s honor, I don’t blame you—but, well, hell …”
“Just listen to me, laddie. I’m telling you a story. Pretend you’re researching one of your books. Hear me out.” He wet his lips with lemonade, lowered the glass with a trembling hand. Then he dropped his hand back into his lap. “Varada did indeed know Anna. He worked around the theater and she appealed to him. You might say that he had what we used to call a crush on her. She was a bright, pretty girl and whatever you might think about Varada he’s a bright fella.
“But what never came out in the trial was the simple fact that Varada was in love with somebody else! Aha, the plot thickens, Charlie. He was having one high-powered affair with another woman who was keeping him hopping. Somebody else altogether … but oddly enough there was a joker in the deck—God forgive me the cliché of a man of great antiquity. A
nd the joker confused the whole business … this other woman bore a certain superficial resemblance to Anna. As fate would have it.
“Now, this other woman and Varada did quite a bit of sneaking around because he wasn’t someone she was exactly proud of. He didn’t quite, fit in with her view of herself, her family—this was not a guy to bring home to Daddy. His appeal was not something she could easily explain. So they saw each other in the dark of night, in out-of-the-way places, in lovers’ lanes, in the park, even in the cemetery, which once had quite a reputation along these lines. If anyone ever saw them together, in a dark bar or in a car going by … well, it was Anna who was killed and Varada had unquestionably been seen making up to her with considerable enthusiasm and then been seen setting off down that lonely path with her and then she was found murdered with his skin under her fingernails—well, it was perfectly obvious that he’d killed her. It was like reading a road map, that was Victor’s expression at the time.
“Please let me finish this, laddie. While everyone was thinking the killing was the violent conclusion to a lovers’ quarrel, the truth lay elsewhere. It was Anna who led Varada down that path that night because she wanted to talk to him about the other woman, the one he was really having an affair with. You see, Anna knew this woman and she believed that Varada was ruining this woman’s life, had created in this woman a sexual obsession the woman couldn’t break away from … in the event, I can only assume Varada decided to make a pass at Anna and she scratched his face and he figured oh hell, this is more damn trouble than it’s worth, and left … and the poor fool who killed her had followed them, probably for a voyeuristic thrill which got off the rails when he found her alone …” He stopped, exhausted, brushed his hand across his forehead, and slowly lifted the glass to his lips once more.
The Saberdene Variations Page 19
