The Saberdene Variations

by Thomas Gifford

  All I could think about was Caro. And Varada.

  Every day Maguire called with the same report.

  Caro was leading a quiet, uncomplicated existence.

  So where was Varada?

  What was he waiting for?

  I thought about Braverman and Claverly and Potter and I wondered about the morality of Victor’s decision never to confide in the police. And I questioned Caro’s decision to go along with it … and my own willingness to do it her way once she’d talked to me in the ambulance on the way to Boston.

  The whole saga of Caro Thorne Saberdene was full of moral ambiguity. What ought she to have done when she’d become involved with Varada years ago? How could she have been so drawn to him in the first place? If, indeed, Andy had it right. Had Varada appealed to her because she feared she was sexually frigid? Was he a punishment she inflicted on herself? Why? From what neurotic source could so much self-loathing have come?

  Should she have tried to clear Varada by telling the court she’d been with him after he left Anna that night? But maybe she knew how cold-blooded he could be, maybe she believed he had murdered Anna and was still able to keep his date with her later … Maybe she knew the kind of man he was and knew she had to put him away and maybe she also knew it was the only way to get free of him, to break her addiction, whether or not he’d killed her sister …

  Had she lived for all these years with the knowledge that she’d sent him to prison simply to rid herself of the obsession? But what about Varada, what must have made him tick? Never mentioning her in his own defense: why had he been willing to go to prison rather than reveal their relationship? It just wouldn’t hang together for me. The story was leaking. If it were one of my books, so carefully organized and well thought out, I’d have to find the plug to fill that leak. But when I was writing a book, the story was over. The outcome was known and the explanation could be discovered. This story wasn’t over yet. That was the problem.

  What must it have meant to her when she learned he was coming out of prison? She must have reckoned the chances of his coming back to see her, must have known he’d come. They both knew he’d saved her from the ugliness he could have created by telling of their relationship: had she known why? And she must have known that there’d be some kind of due bill when he found himself a free man …

  Any of this, all of it, would surely have made her afraid of him, try as she might to act brave, which she certainly had done. God knew, she was obviously repelled by him, in some kind of inverse ratio to the love she said she felt for me …

  I spent a good deal of time reliving in my mind those days—in retrospect so exciting, so oddly enthralling because I was falling in love with her knowing I shouldn’t, knowing I was doing it anyway, knowing I was betraying Victor—when we were being stalked by Varada. It was a kind of “love by terror” and I remembered the earrings on the Venus at the Metropolitan and the blank faces of the Katz men and women and the huge face of the frightened woman who could, I imagined, hear the footsteps behind her …

  I remembered how fascinated I had been by her own black and pink pearls and what she’d told me about Zuleika Dobson. I remembered the giant dancers on stilts pirouetting before the massive lions and Varada coming from nowhere to play with the little black kid … and I remembered how the horror had begun then in earnest … I knew all that but I couldn’t quite imagine where it was leading. And in the end what finally did happen was quite literally beyond my powers of imagination, beyond anyone’s. I’m sure of that.

  FOUR

  I was jumpy as a cat.

  Where was it leading? When would it end?

  And where was the son of a bitch?

  My strength was slower coming back than I’d expected. And, I admit, I was scared to death that Varada would say the hell with Caro, and come to finish me off. At least, I might be easier to find.

  I dined with my publisher, who was suitably impressed with what had befallen me since we’d last spoken. He mourned the fact that I wasn’t interested in spilling out the story for $19.95 a copy.

  Frequently when I went for a walk my paranoia would accompany me, blossoming obscenely in my buttonhole. I would become absolutely certain that Varada was following me, determined to put some blood in the scuppers. But when I had the courage to look behind me it was never Varada. I began to believe that maybe I was going a little crazy.

  One night I walked home from a quiet solitary dinner at one of the little sidewalk tables at La Gouloue. It wasn’t a long walk but it didn’t take me long in those days to work myself into quite a state. This time I was sure it was Varada behind me. I’d gotten one look and there he’d been, the same kind of rolling John Wayne gait, the safari jacket, the mass of him in the shadows.

  He stayed behind me all the way to the house. I went up the steps like a man with the hounds of hell baying at his heels, bolted the door, stood gasping like someone from a tale by Poe.

  Half-dreading the result, I went to the far end of Victor’s study to the window overlooking the street. I concealed myself behind the drapes, peeking like a fool at the street, looking for Nemesis. But he was gone. I slumped, sweating, into Victor’s leather wing-backed chair. When, when would he come after me?

  And then the telephone rang.

  My heart leaped, began smashing itself against my ribs.

  It had to be Varada. But I had to answer it.

  Wrong again.

  It was Alec Maguire. He was out of breath, panting, calling as usual from Half Moon Lake. But that was all that was usual.

  “Charlie, you sitting down? If you’re not, grab a chair.” He stopped to suck air into his lungs. “Okay, here’s the drill. As usual I’m following the daily schedule. I staked out the lodge today from up the mountain road, using my binocs, she putters around in the yard, sunbathes on the deck—same as every other day. Come evening I follow her along to the Bay Club. Like every other night she has dinner there by herself. Coupla drinks, dinner, coffee, maybe a brandy, the slow walk along the lakefront, then home. Tonight’s the same as ever. She got home, piddled around for an hour or so, then there’s a light on in her bedroom for half an hour, then it’s sleepy time. Same thing every day.

  “So I came back here to the Bay Club for a nightcap. And guess who was sitting at the bar, Charlie?”

  Instantaneously I felt the urge to vomit. He didn’t have to say it but he did.

  “None other than our friend Carl Varada! He was sitting at the other end of the bar, considerably bigger than life … but no need to tell you how big he is. Panama hat, safari jacket—”

  “—I swear to God he must get a discount—”

  “—chino slacks, not your tremendously varied wardrobe.”

  “So what happened?” I was fighting down the bile in my throat.

  “He just had two drinks, smoking this skinny cheroot, didn’t have much to say to the bartender or anyone else. Just sat there with a very calm, quiet look on his face. He made eye contact with me once, we were the only two guys at the bar at that point, he gave me that look from those funny eyes, down that long nose, lifted his glass, and very quietly said your health, just one of those casual gestures between two guys at a bar.”

  “You’re sure he didn’t recognize you in some way?”

  “Not a chance. Just one of those things that happen at a bar. Eventually he got up and left. I didn’t want to be obvious, particularly since he’d noticed me, so I gave him a minute or so, then I got up and sauntered out to the parking lot … the son of a gun was nowhere in sight. Just evaporated. Beats me where he could have gone—”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Back at the Bay Club.”

  “For God’s sake,” I shouted, “get back to the lodge!”

  “That’s where I’ve just come from, keep your shirt on. I spent an hour keeping watch, not a sound, no lights, everything dead to the world. So I came back here to call you. Next I’m going back to the lodge and keep an eye on things through the night�
�”

  “That’s good. He’s going to go for her, you know that, Alec. He didn’t come to Half Moon Lake for the waters—”

  “I know, I know. But let us reason together, Charlie. I’m eventually going to have to get some sleep. Contrary to popular belief, I am human. So, do you want me to engage an L.A. firm? They could have somebody up here to take a shift by tomorrow—”

  “No, no, you don’t have to do that. I’ll catch a morning flight. Hang on until I get there.”

  “Then I’d better tell you how to go about it, Charlie.”

  When I hung up it was well past midnight, yet I doubted my ability to get to sleep. So I got quite a lot of Victor’s twelve-year-old Inchgower inside me and went out and sat in the garden, letting the daze overtake me.

  How the hell had Varada found her?

  Had he been watching the whole time after the attack in Maine, followed us, then chosen to follow her because old Charlie surely wasn’t going anywhere? Had he watched her go to Earl’s Bridge, watched the house, had he gone to the cemetery again?

  Had he then followed her to Los Angeles? But if he had, why the wait? Why hadn’t he shown up until now?

  About four o’clock in the morning I went back into the empty, echoing house and began to rummage around in Victor’s collection of handguns.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  THE BROWN BUBBLE OF LOS Angeles enveloped me like one of those pretty tropical flowers that dissolve bees and spiders in their spare time. I was out of LAX and into my rented car heading toward San Bernardino and my eyes were already on fire. It was the brown haze invading me and my impulse was to get to the mountains, outrun it.

  The highway was doing a belly dance in the heat waves. Maguire’s directions lay on the seat beside me. My gut was empty. I was afraid I couldn’t keep anything down. It was all because of Varada.

  And yet I had to try to stop him. For my own sake, sure, but also for Caro. She was the reason that mattered; she was all that mattered. I didn’t give a damn anymore about what she might once have been, what she might once have done. There was one, only one, Caro Saberdene in my life and she had never been anything but what I wanted. Nothing else mattered. I had to do what I could. Maybe I could slay the dragon and rescue the maiden in the tower. And maybe I’d die trying. But watching the heat shimmer off that boiling highway I knew I didn’t have any choice.

  The road climbed five or six thousand feet in a handful of miles. The heat fell away like snakes’ skins, another couple of thousand feet and there was a sharp cool tang in the air. I stopped at a place called Bubbling Springs and checked my directions with a kid manning a gas pump. He was wearing a big hoop earring but he made sure I knew the difference between the road to Puma Lake and Little Fawn Lake and Half Moon Lake. About all that had changed since Marlowe made this trip forty years before was that earring.

  Then I was back in the car with the yellow pines all around me and a slice of blue lake to my left with motorboats and water skiers and I felt as if I’d been in such a place before and I probably had been—a very long time ago. I felt as if I were headed into the past and of course it was all a trick of the mind. I paid attention to my directions, threaded my way along the narrow road with huge boulders protruding through the skin of the mountain, poised above me, as if ready to fall. Meadows full of yellow and purple and white flowers were slung like hammocks between the rocks and pine rises. And when Puma Lake came into view it could have been a vacationland of my childhood beckoning to me.

  I saw a sign that pointed off toward Little Fawn Lake and I kept on, wheeling around Puma Lake until I saw another white arrow on a stake aiming at Half Moon Lake. The road swung into a pass trying to go unnoticed between two unfriendly granite towers which acted as a gateway to a rolling landscape of oaks and more bright flowers and a pretty little waterfall. Then another lake lay like a flat blue-gray plate below me with the town clustered around it and pine forests rising sharply on all sides.

  Half Moon Lake.

  Somewhere Varada waited. I was near him and he didn’t know I was coming.

  I pulled off the road onto a soft shoulder carpeted with pine needles. I turned off the engine. From far away, down there on the lake, I heard the angry insect whine of an outboard motor. Blue jays flickered in the pines and the aroma of the trees was almost overwhelming. They shut out the bright sunlight and a man could think if he wanted to. If he weren’t afraid to. I tried hard not to, just sat and got my bearings and saw the various lodges tucked away on the forested slopes. Across the lake the sun reflected on windows which blinked like semaphore lights at sea. Go back … go back … Well, the hell with ’em. I was wasting time. I turned the key and headed down the mountainside.

  The Bay View Motor Lodge looked like a two-story Swiss chalet. An ornate cuckoo clock, telephone-booth size, sat in the middle of the roof and was presumably decorative rather than functional. There was a sundial on the lawn which informed the observer that it had been put in place during the summer of 1936. The fellow behind the desk had probably supervised the ceremony. His eyes were as blue and as clear as the lake. And he told me that Alec Maguire hadn’t slept in his bed last night, according to the maid who’d done his room.

  We made sure Maguire wasn’t back in the room and I breathed a sigh of relief. He was still on the job waiting for me. I got back into my car, got my bearings straight again, and drove along the main street, hooked off toward the end of it, and swung past the lodge, 18 Bella Vista Drive, which was set well back from the street, twenty yards up a slope which looked to be an inch deep in brown pine needles. The house was weathered cedar with a screened-in porch angling away, providing a clear view over the water. The foundation was built of large gray stones. There wasn’t a sound but the chattering and skittering of squirrels and the conversation of birds hidden in the darkness of the trees. As far as I could see, there was nobody home. I sat in the car for ten minutes. I wasn’t accomplishing a damn thing.

  I circled up the steep mountain road behind 18 Bella Vista and parked above it. It sat a hundred yards below me, silhouetted against the lake in the afternoon sunshine. I spent an hour considering the various locations from which Maguire might have kept an eye on things but he wasn’t at any of them. So far as I could see, Maguire was AWOL. Unless he was in the house. But no, he wouldn’t have done that, not knowing I was on my way. He’d have waited for me. Maybe he’d gone for a bite of lunch … maybe I’d passed him on my way to the lodge.

  Looking down the slope, through the pines, I felt suddenly uncomfortable, as if I had no business being there, as if I was poking around in somebody else’s business. For just a moment I felt foolish, as if people hadn’t been dying, as if I weren’t in love with Caro …

  And then I realized it was all for Caro, that Caro was the point. Varada had found her and I wasn’t poking around in anyone else’s business. I was going to save her, damn it.

  There hadn’t been a sign of life from the house all afternoon. I drove back down to Bella Vista and pulled up across from number 18. I had Victor’s old forty-five in my waistband. If that didn’t get me up to even with Varada nothing would, so I took a deep breath, and did a remarkably stupid thing. I got out of the car, walked across the street, up the carpet of pine needles, and knocked on the door. I counted to thirty, tried the door, and thanked God it was locked. Nobody home. My knees were shaking when I got back to the car and slid in behind the wheel.

  Where the devil was everybody?

  Somehow I’d managed to lose them all, as if the jet I’d boarded at Kennedy had been a time machine that had zapped me right past where I’d wanted to go.

  Maguire had been watching Caro. I could only assume that Varada had been watching her, too. And now they were all gone.

  I went back through town and parked at the Bay View Motor Lodge. I went to Maguire’s room again but he hadn’t come back. I went back to the check-in desk and the old chap shook his head. We checked the parking lot for the car. It wasn’t there.
/>   Stymied. I went back to the street and wondered what an honest-to-God detective would have done. I didn’t have a clue. So I took a walk, but the local color wasn’t impressing me. It was a pretty place and all but as I prowled the streets I was checking out the faces, moving on, looking, hunting. There should have been some nervous sound-track music as the sun slid on down behind the mountain and the lake faded slowly to black.

  I couldn’t afford to think about where Caro was, what might be happening if Varada had found her.

  Down near the water I dropped in at the Bay Club. The bar was half-full with deeply tanned vacationers quietly warming up for a long evening’s revelry. I sat at a table looking out across the pristine docks where motorboats and sailboats bobbed at the ends of their tethers. Kids wandered up and down across my view, teenagers, lean and young and not very bright, as if their physical superiority had blotted out the power of their minds. Looking at the girls in bikinis, if that was what they still called them, made you wonder if, brains were all they were cracked up to be. Caro’s body had resisted time. I stared at the faces. Hers would have improved every one of those lean, tight bodies. But no, she wasn’t there.

  I ordered a club sandwich and a cup of coffee and stared, my mind unbelievably blank. I might as well have been on Mars for all the good I was doing anyone.

  Somewhere around the curl of the lake, back in the direction of Bella Vista Drive, a truck with a flashing light on top was kicking up a fuss. It looked like a tow truck. Some of the kids on the dock had spotted it and were pointing, shouting things I couldn’t hear. Another car with a light twirling like a sparkler went hell-bent in the same direction. A crowd on foot was heading that way. Watching the commotion I began to feel a rash.

  I put a ten on the table.

  Something interesting was going on. It was the first thing that had caught my attention since I’d arrived at Half Moon Lake. I knew I’d better have a look.