The Saberdene Variations

by Thomas Gifford

  I didn’t have anything to say. Finally she smiled sort of sadly at me, patted my hand. “Charlie, my poor Charlie. What next?” I didn’t have an answer to that one either.

  Mainly I was thinking about her. I was going to be alone with her while Victor waited to kill a man. The gears were grinding us very small, indeed. The thing was, looking at her, tired and with circles under her eyes and worry etched across her face, I wanted her.

  And now it seemed I’d have her to myself. She’d said she was frigid, an oddly antiquated term. I wondered if she was telling me the truth.

  The longer I looked at her the more ashamed of myself I was.

  Chapter Nine

  ONE

  THE HOUSE WAS MUCH AS advertised, tucked well off that narrow country road, about a mile from an apple orchard, surrounded at a great distance by hedges thick enough to stop a panzer division. The driveway wound past and through a stand of beeches. There was a pool with a changing house, yellow-and-green-striped awnings and sunning chairs that matched. There was a tennis court behind a high fence with wisteria clinging to it. There was nothing to show who owned it.

  I carried our gear inside and she went upstairs to change clothes. I turned on the air conditioners, took off the seersucker jacket with the sweat-soaked back, and made myself a gin and tonic with Boodles and lots of ice. I pulled open the heavy sliding glass doors leading from the huge living room onto a patio looking out across the lawn, the pool, the court. It all seemed so peaceful in the late afternoon, one of the playgrounds of the rich and powerful, so very far from Carl Varada and Abe Braverman’s corpse in its ocean of blood. I was thinking about the lawn parties, the beautiful women in big hats or tiny swimsuits, the ghosts of all those who had lived there before and seasoned the place and got it ready for the Saberdenes, when I heard her coming down the stairway from the balcony that circled the room.

  We’d driven up from the city in nervous, self-conscious silence. I wasn’t quite sure if we were worrying about Varada and the way he had of maiming and killing people, or if it was just the fact that we were going to be alone together with no one to remind us to mind our manners. Maybe she was worried about one thing and I was getting bent out of shape by the other.

  She was wearing madras Bermuda shorts and a white blouse, a duplicate of the slim, straight-legged, tanned girls of my youth. She’d brushed her long hair back. She wore a gold bracelet. It slid up and down her arm while she poured herself a glass of white wine. She showed me the house and took a couple of steaks from the freezer, and then we had another drink while she walked me around the grounds. It was hot and humid. The birds in the beeches and the elms just sat there muttering. It was too hot to fly. We had skipped lunch so I lit the gas barbecue grill. She tossed a salad and I grilled the steaks. The perfect suburban couple. I couldn’t pay any attention to whatever we were saying. It was like watching a silent movie.

  She was, under the circumstances, a good hostess. She was trying hard. She did all the talking and I did all the watching. She wasn’t saying anything important: she was just filling the space. I watched her face, the curve of her mouth, the delicacy of her long lashes. I watched her legs, the way she stood leaning against a tree with her hands behind her, the way she walked, the way she kind of loped barefoot back to the house to fetch ice and lime for the gin and tonic. I had the same sensation again, that of feeling young, like a Harvard man in pursuit of the perfect Wellesley girl from Mademoiselle’s college issue twenty years ago. If I’d had my way time would have been frozen somewhere back then and now she seemed like the spirit of that past I’d longed for but never really had, Victor’s past of evening clothes and dancing pumps and holidays at some shore with girls like Caro.

  Tasting the gin and feeling the sweat trickling down my back and watching her tan thighs and the pull of the madras across her hips and hearing the soft thunder behind the purple clouds creeping toward us from the west, I knew how completely I’d fallen under her spell. And how envious I actually was of Victor’s life and his woman. I couldn’t ignore the promise of the heat and the way she blotted her forehead with a napkin and the big house we had to ourselves.

  Finally she fell silent. We sat at the white wrought-iron table with candles flickering in the moist breeze and the leaves rustling in the trees. I felt like Nick Carraway messing around with Daisy Buchanan on Gatsby’s time. All I needed was a dock and a blinking light. I’d watched her long enough and downed enough gin not to be ashamed of myself anymore. Everybody was having lots of trouble and I was trying to take advantage of the bad nerves that were going around. There’d be time for sermons and soda water in the morning.

  We’d finished eating and the sun had slipped down below the forested ridge. The first drops of summer rain were beginning to patter in the swimming pool. I couldn’t wait any longer.

  I got up and went around the table. She stood up and I grabbed her and held her against me. She looked up at me, eyes wide, and I kissed her. Her mouth opened and I kissed her harder, feeling her body straining against me. I held her for a long time, until she knew I was getting serious, and then she took a step backward. I let her go. I put my hand out to steady myself against the tabletop. There was a sudden heavy clatter on the flagstones. In the candlelight’s flickering shadow, I saw the Purdey. I’d knocked it over.

  We both stood there looking at it. The noise and the reality of the gun’s presence had effectively shattered the scene we’d been building. I’d broken the mirror. Instead of Caro and me starting up something that would have its own life right away, I looked through the mirror and saw Victor sitting with his gun across his knees, waiting for Varada. My passion was wilting, a casualty.

  “I understand that murder, danger, the threat of violence—all that stuff excites people sexually.” She knelt and picked up the shotgun, handed it to me. “And we’ve taken such care not to talk about it … only made it worse—”

  “Maybe that’s it,” I said. “Just a psychological phenomenon, doesn’t have anything to do with us—”

  “Don’t laugh at me,” she said softly.

  “Don’t be so funny, then.”

  “Look, this is all too crazy. We’re not ourselves. Damn it, Charlie, you know everything about me. I’ve told you things I’ve never told anyone before. Maybe it was because I like you, Charlie … or maybe it was because of what we’re going through. Maybe because you were a stranger with a sympathetic manner. But now I’ve told you things and that makes you something else. Not a stranger. Everything’s changed. But not quite everything, understand? I’m still married, Victor’s still my husband. I’ve still got the life I had before you turned up and sort of stirred things up—”

  “I know, Caro. I’ve taken advantage of this crazy situation, taken advantage of you when you’ve been at your most vulnerable. I’m not overwhelmingly proud of myself … for wanting you, for betraying my old friend. So maybe we should just pretend none of this happened—”

  “Oh, Charlie my boy! We can’t do that … we’ve almost got our cards on the table. It did happen. It happened to both of us. These last few days have changed everything. You aren’t the only one who feels things … but let’s wait until this mess is over and then—well, let’s not worry about it now—”

  “We’ll wait and then everything goes back the way it was.”

  “Oh no, forget that. It’s never going to be the same again.”

  It was raining harder by then. We were both all wet.

  TWO

  Caro went to bed. Early and by herself, thank God. I like to tell myself that I wouldn’t have slept with her even if she’d wanted to. A harmless lie on my part, right?

  I sat up watching the Yankees game on television while the humidity built up in the air-conditioned room and ran down those vast glass doors, as if it were raining indoors, too. I didn’t know the score or what inning it was or who they were playing. My mind wasn’t on baseball. My mind was upstairs in her bedroom, which was a hell of a place for it.

/>   What the devil was I doing out in the middle of nowhere, a place Varada couldn’t possibly find, a place where Caro was completely insulated and safe, when I should have been back in New York with Victor laying a trap for Varada? Or better yet, talking him into letting the police handle the whole thing?

  About ten-thirty I couldn’t sit still any longer.

  I picked up the Purdey, making sure it was loaded, and slid the glass doors open. The rain was drumming on the patio, but the hell with it, I decided to make a tour of the grounds. That’s what the guard does. Maybe I thought Varada was lurking behind a hedge. It was ridiculous. It was something to do. The hair was standing up and waving its tiny hands on the back of my neck. I wasn’t scared: there was nothing to be scared of, if you didn’t count the girl upstairs. But I was as tight as the fat lady’s girdle. A night patrol, a stroll in the gentle rain, was in order.

  I bisected the lawn, which was about the size of a square football field. The wind had come up harder and the rain falling into the pool was dancing along the crests of little waves. The underwater lights made an aqua glow, cast peculiar shadows. Puddles were forming on the tennis courts. Rain was whispering in the stand of beeches. Through the rain the house looked cozy and comforting, the windows turned to shining yellow invitations. A dog was howling in the distance. A bird, maybe an owl—how the hell would I know? I wasn’t nature boy—said something behind me and I damn near levitated. I swung around with the shotgun, came within a twitch of blowing holes in a few trees. It was crazy. Finally I made a circumference of the lawn, rain streaming into my eyes, and was panting by the time I got back to the house.

  I went to bed about midnight. I was exhausted. Sleep overtook me even more quickly than was normal. The rain on the roof and against the window made a steady white noise, enveloping me. At the far end of the bedroom the air conditioner was humming smoothly. My sleep was deep and dark.

  Lousy dream. I was back in the foyer twenty-four hours ago. Braverman was on the floor again but the blood was pumping exaggeratedly, leaping like a geyser, and the parquet floor was ankle-deep in it. His throat gaped like a screaming mouth. I couldn’t tear my eyes away and I wanted to throw up but I couldn’t. Then I saw a huge clock suspended over me, ticking so loudly I couldn’t think. Caro was standing in midair, beside the clock, moving the hands this way and that, as if she might push time backward and Braverman wouldn’t be dead anymore …

  I came awake soaked with sweat, dying of thirst, and lay still for a moment trying to get my bearings, struggling up out of the dream. I halfway thought I’d heard something that had awakened me but it was fuzzy and maybe there hadn’t been anything after all. It seemed to take a long time to wake up.

  And by then I couldn’t hear anything out of the ordinary. Just the rain and the steady hum. Still, something told me to get up. It was raining harder, thunder cracking like heavy fireworks.

  I sighed to myself, went out to the balcony, and looked down into the living room. I’d left a table lamp turned on low. It still cast a dim glow. Everything was as I’d left it.

  Then without warning the glass doors were thrown open and the wind blew the curtain wildly and the rain swept into the room.

  What happened next couldn’t have taken more than five seconds, possibly ten at the outside. I’ve replayed it in my mind a thousand times. But no matter what I do, I can’t change what happened, can’t make it better.

  A huge figure materialized in the doorway, caught in the rain, caught in the swirling curtains, arms wind-milling like the thing your mother used to call the bogeyman.

  The gun, the Purdey! I’d left it propped on a chair by the bedroom door. I dashed back to get it, thinking I had to stop him from getting to Caro … Shit, how did he find us, how the hell did he know?

  And the gun was gone.

  I tripped over the chair, felt everywhere for the damned thing, couldn’t find it or the light switch.

  Confused, afraid, operating on the reptile brain within each of us, I ran back to the balcony, made for the stairs. Did I think I was going to attack Varada with my bare hands?

  The shape had freed itself from the curtains, had staggered to one side.

  The explosion shook the house, rattled my bones.

  The shape cried out, wobbled backward, ripped the curtain from its moorings, leaned for an instant against the glass.

  The second explosion smashed him back, the glass door exploded into the night, and the shape fell through the hole, collapsed on the patio.

  The next thing I knew I was down the stairway, standing in the living room. To my right, silhouetted in the dim light was Caro in her nightgown, holding the Purdey. She stood like a statue. The wind ruffled the nightgown, pressed it to her body. She didn’t make a sound.

  I turned left and went out onto the patio, cutting my bare feet in the broken glass but not knowing it. I was flashing back on all the horror movies I’d ever seen, where the dead guy isn’t dead after all and reaches up and grabs your leg. He lay sprawled, one arm thrown up across his face as if he hadn’t wanted to see his fate rushing at him.

  He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t breathing.

  Finally I bent down beside him. Caro had come to stand in the doorway. I pulled the lifeless arm away from the face.

  I was looking into the dead staring eyes of Victor Saberdene.

  PART TWO

  Chapter Ten

  ONE

  SOMETIMES YOU WONDER HOW MUCH tragedy one person can withstand. I watched Caro, knowing that this was one of those awful times. The murder of her sister, the horror of the trial, her own breakdown, the reappearance of Varada and the torment he brought with him, her father stricken … all was prelude to the final obscenity, the huge figure coming from out of the night, the shotgun … and her husband dead by her own hand. How much sorrow, how much despair? She may not have asked those questions, but I couldn’t ignore them. Why had the fates singled her out? What could she have done, how offended them, to be so cruelly punished?

  But of course my tendency was always to ask such questions, frequently rhetorical questions, as if I were writing the opening sentences of one of my books. Caro didn’t think that way because there seemed to be no self-pity in her nature. She was the leading performer in what seemed to be a kind of Greek tragedy. What she reminded me of was, in her own way, Jackie Kennedy living on through the dark tunnel of the sixties, beset by a sort of cruelty you could go mad trying to explain or understand. I said nothing of the kind: she would only have been embarrassed by it.

  Caro wasn’t having any of that sympathy stuff, not even in the immediate aftermath of Motor’s death. Was she still giving a performance? If so, she somehow managed to convince herself as well as make things easy for all those around her.

  There was at least a practical explanation of what had happened. In the newspaper it was treated as an accident. None of the details of the Saberdenes’ private lives was revealed. The fact was that there had been several break-ins in the vicinity of the country house as well as a case of rape. That alone provided an explanation for the shotgun, the jumpiness on our part, and my presence in the house—the old friend of the family accompanying her, with her husband expected to come up for the weekend. Somewhere a tongue or two may have wagged and clucked, a theory proposed about the family friend’s being on hand, but we never heard it.

  What really happened?

  It was recorded on Victor’s answering machine.

  Varada had called Victor at home.

  Well, Counselor, I know where you’ve tucked her away. And, wouldn’t you know, I’m feeling mighty sexy tonight … There was that long, mocking whiskey chuckle, smothering you with its arrogance. I may just have to go knock me off a juicy little piece of her pussy tonight, what do you think of that, Counselor? Honest to God, I don’t really think she’d mind … More moist, rumbling laughter.

  Victor’s shock had registered on the tape. How could you know—he’d bitten off the last word as the chuckle bubbled toward him
.

  You don’t really think that fella with her can stop me, do you, Counselor? Get serious! Give her a call, why don’t you? Warn her … the line’s out; Counselor … no way you gonna warn the lady in time, Counselor …

  Then he hung up. And Victor must have desperately called the Westchester number. To no avail. The telephone didn’t ring that night. We didn’t know until I tried to call the police that it was cut.

  Victor must have been going crazy. I’ve seen his panic and frustration again and again in my mind. The frantic drive northward from the city. Why hadn’t he called the state police or the local law up there? I don’t know, except he was dead set on keeping the law enforcement agencies out of it. Victor was Victor; he did things his way.

  He must have seen the light I left burning. He must have thought it was better not to come in the front door, must have believed some stealth and possibly surprise would come from another means of entrance. Who knows?

  And naturally Caro, having heard the odd noise at the doors, or before that from somewhere in the night, a noise that shouldn’t have been there, had failed in a try to wake me quickly, had taken the gun, had seen the terrifying figure in the doorway, had been thinking Varada, Varada, Varada, had fired in sheer terror …

  There was one aspect of the night’s events which bothered me because it alone made no sense.