Coincidence

by David Ambrose

  Actually, it didn’t quite come out of nowhere. It came out of one of Nadia’s kitchen drawers. I was searching around for a corkscrew one night when I came across, at the back of a jumble of matchboxes, balls of string, nail-clippers, Band-Aids, and Aspirin, a curled and cracked Polaroid that sent my mind reeling.

  My first thought was of something else I’d read in George’s notes—the theory that just by thinking about synchronicity you can make strange things start happening around you. George had written that he didn’t believe that. Looking at the photograph in my hand, I wondered briefly if I hadn’t become more of a believer than George.

  I was looking at a picture of Nadia with her arms around none other than Steve Coleman—the very same Steve Coleman who, only a few days earlier, had stood in the door of “my” house in the Berkshires and told me I was history.

  In the picture they were on the deck of what looked like a luxury yacht. They wore casual clothes, and there was nothing improper in the pose—except it shouldn’t have existed. They weren’t supposed to know each other. This, truly, was an impossible coincidence.

  Yet there it was.

  I took the photograph back into the bedroom, where Nadia lay propped against a bank of pillows, one wrist hooked lazily over a raised knee.

  “What have you got there?” she asked.

  I showed her. She gave a dismissive little laugh.

  “Where did you find that?”

  “Kitchen drawer.”

  “God—I thought I’d thrown everything out.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  She looked up at me with a hint of amusement. “What’s the matter? Jealous?”

  “Maybe. Tell me.”

  “His name was Steve.”

  “And?”

  “Why d’you want to know?”

  “Just… interested.”

  I leaned across and kissed her, then climbed back into bed with her. It took a while, but little by little I got the whole story out of her. They had met eighteen months ago and their affair had lasted a year—until, obviously, Steve had become involved with Sara. But she knew nothing of Sara. He had told Nadia he was going back to his wife, that he was trying to save his marriage—for the sake of the children more than his political career. So far as she knew, that was what had happened. She accepted it, but I sensed a lingering sadness in her, a regret for what might have been, though she wouldn’t admit it.

  Nor did I tell her what my real interest was in this man. I suspected that I would in time, but as a general rule I never volunteer information spontaneously. I need to think about it first. I remembered reading something in another of George’s notebooks, about the meaning of a brush with syn-chronicity. I looked it up later:

  [It is] as if some mute power were tugging at your sleeve. It is then up to you to decipher the meaning of the inchoate message. If you ignore it, nothing at all will probably happen; but you may have missed a chance to remake your life, have passed a potential turning point without noticing it.

  I wasn’t going to let that happen.

  Chapter 25

  The final catalyst was when Nadia found my passport—the one in the name of Larry Hart. We were at my apartment and it fell accidentally out of my briefcase when she pushed it across the table to make room for a Chinese takeout she had ordered.

  Accidentally? What a suspect word that had become in the light of everything that had been happening. Could I have unconsciously created a chain of events that had led to that “accident” and her discovery? Or had she somehow intuited the truth and engineered this accident to confirm it? Why did she open the passport instead of just handing it back with an apology for her carelessness? Do we all automatically open one another’s passports when we find them? I don’t know.

  But she did, and it sealed her fate, my fate, Steve Coleman’s, and my wife’s. It was, in short, a turning point in which a previously uncertain future took clear shape.

  She needed a moment to absorb the significance of what she was looking at. Then her eyes connected with mine. There was a hint of suspicion and even accusation in her gaze.

  “What’s this? ‘Laurence Hart’?”

  I tried to look unconcerned and merely held my hand out for the document. But she pulled back as though I would have grabbed it if I could.

  “Wait a minute,” she said, frowning as she searched her memory, “wasn’t that the name of the man you were looking for when you came to the agency?”

  “No, I was looking for his parents. They were friends of my parents. If you remember, it turned out they were dead, but they had a son called Larry Hart.”

  “That’s right, I remember now. And you didn’t want us to go on looking for him.” She looked at the passport photograph again, and then at me, her head slightly to one side and her eyes narrowing. “So what are you doing with your picture in his passport?”

  “It’s my passport,” I said.

  “You’re Larry Hart?”

  I managed a smile, as though she was making more out of a trivial matter than it was worth.

  “I’ve used the name Larry Hart for years as a pen name under which I write from time to time. Then, when my father died, I discovered that he and my mother used to have some friends called Hart, and I was curious about them. I’d no memory of ever hearing them mentioned, and certainly nothing about them having a son called Larry. But obviously I must have heard something in childhood, which is where the name Larry Hart surfaced from later.”

  She looked unconvinced. “Didn’t anyone tell you that you can get in trouble for having a false passport?”

  I shrugged. “It comes in handy when I don’t want people to know what I’m up to.”

  She looked at me for a while with open, almost mocking skepticism, then held the passport out for me to take. “Whatever you’re doing, big boy, you’re not lying about it very well. But it’s your business. Now let’s eat before this Peking duck gets cold.”

  It was the way she stayed off the subject for the rest of the evening that made me realize I couldn’t trust her. She had become a threat, one that I had to somehow neutralize. By the time I brought in two cups of espresso from my machine in the kitchen, I had figured out how to do it.

  “There’s another little matter I’ve been holding out on you about,” I said casually, placing a steaming cup next to her. “Your ex-lover, Steve Coleman, is planning to marry my wife.”

  I will never forget the look on her face at that moment—abject and total disbelief, mixed with the kind of this can’ the happening denial that the plane you’re in has just lost a wing, or that the eight-wheeled truck skidding gracefully toward your car is about to turn you, three seconds from now, into a greasy smear on the surface of the road.

  “What did you say?” was all she could manage.

  “You heard,” I said, with the hint of a smile of apology that I hoped would soften the blow that my remark had delivered. “He dumped you because he began an affair with my wife, Sara, six months ago.”

  She stared at me with her mouth hanging open. It was the first time I’d ever seen her lose such a degree of physical control. Nadia was a very centered woman, always poised and conscious of the impression she created. Now, for a moment, she was like a puppet whose strings had been cut; she just hung there, loose, at a loss, uncoordinated. Then she made an effort to collect herself.

  “And you’ve known this all along… ?”

  “Only since the other night, when I found that photograph of you and him.”

  “Why didn’t you say something then?”

  “Because I was as shocked then as you are now. I didn’t know what to make of it. I needed to figure out what was going on.”

  “And have you? Figured out? What’s going on?”

  I spread my hands in a gesture that acknowledged how little I really knew. “All I can tell you is that the more we become conscious of the coincidences that go on around us all the time, the more of them seem to happen.”

  “Oh, co
me on, this is more than a coincidence. It’s”

  “It’s what?”

  “It’s…”

  She gave up trying to find the word and finally burst out with, “It’s too fucking incredible to be a coincidence!”

  “So what is it? A conspiracy?”

  “I don’t know what it is. But things like this just don’t happen.”

  I leaned closer to her, like someone imparting a confidence. “Things like this happen all the time,” I said. “I know, because I’m writing a book on the subject.”

  “You are? George Daly? Or Larry Hart?”

  There was a hardness in her challenge. Distrust had bitten very suddenly and deeply into her.

  “I am—George Daly. Forget the Larry Hart thing. It really isn’t a big deal. We’ve both got bigger things to think about.”

  “We do?”

  She still didn’t take her gaze off me. She knew damn well that I was up to something. The only problem was she couldn’t figure out what.

  “The reason I didn’t mention anything about Steve Cole man and my wife was that it took me a day or two to figure out just what fate was handing us here.”

  Her gaze lost none of its hardness, but I saw a flicker of new interest as she picked up the scent of opportunity. She had a larcenous soul, little Miss Shelley, and a vindictive one. I’d always sensed it in her.

  Now I was counting on it.

  Chapter 26

  The story I sold her was of how, as a man romantically and passionately in love with his wife, I had blindly signed whatever papers her lawyers had put in front of me. Only later, when the marital vows began to wear thin, did I realize what a miserly settlement I had committed myself to in the event of divorce.

  Frankly, I exaggerated considerably the degree of meanness with which I—George, that is—had been treated. Even though the settlement would have sounded no more acceptable to Nadia’s ears than it did to mine, it had to be said—I had said it myself already—that by the lights of a mousy academic like George, it was perfectly adequate.

  Nadia bought that part of the story without a problem. What she needed, however, was proof positive of the relationship between Steve and Sara. It still seemed to her beyond the bounds of all possibility that such a coincidence could have arisen. I dispelled her doubts, however, in a single call to Sara that I had Nadia listen to on a second phone.

  Don’t be misled by my tone of voice,” I warned her beforehand. “I’ve made a point of staying on good terms with Sara just for practical reasons. There’s no way I can break that prenuptial agreement, so my best bet is appealing to whatever better nature and potential generosity she may have.”

  Nadia understood that well enough. Strategy and tactics were second nature to her. Life was not something simply to be lived, but a progress to be negotiated, like a complex deal, or a tricky passage through some channel where every turn of the wheel had to be executed to the precise inch if the vessel was not to founder on hidden rocks. Nadia understood the need for subterfuge and lies. The tone of brotherly affection with which I addressed my soon-to-be-ex-wife on the phone caused her no problems.

  “Hi, it’s me. How’s everything?” I began.

  “Fine. A little tired. Went to an opening last night, the new John Guare play. It turned into a late night.”

  “Was Steve there?”

  “No. We still avoid chance meetings if we can.”

  “By the way,” I said, seeming to change the subject but catching Nadia’s tight-lipped expression out of the corner of my eye, “I signed that other stuff your lawyers sent over. I guess that’s about it now.”

  “I guess. You okay? Everything working out all right?”

  “I’m fine. How about you? Things going as planned?”

  “’How d’you mean?”

  “Well, Steve’s got his nomination now. He’s going to have to talk to Linda sometime soon, isn’t he?”

  “Hey, we’re on the phone—remember? Talk about something else.”

  There was a note of surprise more than irritation in her voice. She wasn’t used to my being so indiscreet, but I think I made it sound more like a casual lapse than anything deliberate. I could see from Nadia’s face that it had done the trick.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I wasn’t thinking. None of my business anyway. Just so long as you’re okay. Listen, there’s somebody at the door, I have to go. We’ll talk soon.”

  I hung up. Nadia did the same, slowly and deliberately, any lingering doubt in her mind banished by what she had just heard. We looked at each other.

  “Okay?” I said.

  She nodded. “So tell me, what d’you have in mind?”

  The starting point of my plan was something that Nadia had mentioned the other night when I’d found the photograph of her with Steve. As I knew, the agency she worked for had associates who offered various kinds of financial services that no doubt dovetailed into some of the investigations they were called upon to conduct. It didn’t surprise me to learn that some of these services verged upon the shady—for example, the seeking out of investment funds from sources about which it was unwise to ask too many questions. Conversely, from time to time, sources of these unwise-to-question funds would be on the lookout for opportunities where their largesse could be profitably deposited—such as the campaign funds (and slush funds) of politicians, particularly up-and-coming ones with a longterm future in front of them. One such source of finance had targeted Steve Coleman, and Nadia had, one way or another, found herself part of the bait set to hook him.

  To his credit, he hadn’t bitten. At least not on the money, which he immediately smelled was suspect. But he had bitten on Nadia.

  She, to her credit, had neither agreed nor been asked to perform sexual favors for the benefit of her employers and their clients. However, such an eventuality was not proscribed if she chose to volunteer those favors in a private capacity on her own behalf. Such, she had decided within an hour of meeting Steve Coleman, would be the case. Nadia was not a woman to hesitate or falter when her interest was aroused.

  He had talked from the first, she told me, of leaving his wife. No direct promises, nor had she demanded any. But he made no secret of the fact that his marriage was a dreary, loveless one that he doubted could continue for very much longer. Nadia, being a free-spirited and independent individual, had extracted no undertakings and entertained no fantasies of domesticity in the event of a divorce. Indeed, when he announced that he was ending their affair in order to repair his marriage, she had accepted the decision regretfully but with good grace.

  Now, however, the discovery that she had been lied to caused her to feel simple, pure outrage. Her response to my suggestion that we concoct a document that, though it would prove nothing in a court of law, would terminally smear the candidate’s name and reputation was to seize on it with gusto. She knew enough to put together a series of memos, letters, and “notes from meetings” to suggest that Steve Coleman was in bed—metaphorically—with the kind of people whose friendship no politician could acknowledge in public.

  Payday, I persuaded her, would come when he went to my wife and told her of the mess he was in. A couple of million dollars was pocket money to Sara. I confess I painted a picture of her that was not entirely accurate: for example, that she was fiercely ambitious for her next husband’s career and would do anything to protect the future that she had in mind for them both. Linda, his present wife, was a problem that could be handled in the right way at the right time. Divorce was a minor scandal that he would recover from—it was all simply a matter of timing.

  But the suggestion of financial impropriety of the kind we could invent—that was something he would not easily talk his way out of. And it was something, I said, that my wife would gladly open her checkbook to protect him from.

  Nadia learned and rehearsed her role, which I could see she would play to perfection. The idea was that she would call Steve out of the blue and suggest that he come over to her apartment right away. He
would of course refuse, whereupon she would threaten him with a scandal involving illegal campaign funding. He would almost certainly laugh that off as being unfounded and unprovable. Whereupon she would threaten a scandal that would involve his current mistress. Naturally, he would want to know where she got her information and would probably suspect me. If he mentioned my name, she would say she had never heard of me. He would never know whether I was involved or not.

  What he would do, I was quite certain, was comply reluctantly with her demand. He would, effectively, have no choice. He would go to her apartment, alone, as she demanded. Whereupon the trap would spring.

  The only thing that Nadia didn’t know was that she was not only the bait, but as much a victim of the trap as Steve Coleman.

  Chapter 27

  A week before the big day, I boarded a scheduled British Airways flight from JFK to Heathrow, and checked into one of the largest hotels in the Bayswater district of London. The need for anonymity was paramount in my choice. I needed to be a clearly verifiable guest, but without being too familiar a face. That was where Clifford came in. Mr. Cliff Edge.

  “It’s very simple,” I said, as we walked through the darkened streets of Paddington after leaving the pub on the night we met. “I give you my key and you use my hotel room for two, maybe three nights while I’m away. There’ll be no problem with the front desk because you won’t have to talk to them, and even if you do it’s unlikely you’ll speak to anyone who’s actually set eyes on me for long enough to remember me.”

  The story I spun him was the kind that went down well with the kind of man he was. If my wife ever made inquiries, the hotel would verify I’d been a guest throughout the period when in fact I’d been enjoying a few nights in Paris with a girl from my accountant’s office. I assured him that there was little chance of my wife or anyone else trying to call me, but just in case the phone did ring he was to ignore it but pick up any messages and give them to me when I returned. For this service I would give him two and a half thousand up front, and the other half afterward.