The Saberdene Variations

by Thomas Gifford

  I struggled to wave to her, urged her to run, but she didn’t seem to see me. I twisted my head to the side, loosened his grip, making him grunt and exhale a cloud of liquor, heard my own voice croaking at her, run, run, get out…

  He angrily yanked me harder. The blood supply to my brain was being cut off and quite abruptly my legs went rubbery and limp and I collapsed backward against him.

  His breathing roared like a storm at sea in my ear. I heard a muffled blur of sounds, my own heart pounding, the blood pulsing in my head, a chair clattering to the linoleum, her feet running, the screen door banging …

  I smelled his bay rum, I felt the hair on his arms scraping my throat, I couldn’t breathe anymore, I felt myself being twisted and thrown, felt the floor flying up to hit my face, felt my nose collapse and blood fill my mouth and his knee driving into my back and then things began to crack inside me, bones or my lungs exploding like blown-up paper bags, whatever, it was some very deep shit, like cracking a chicken open … and then I knew I was going to die …

  PART THREE

  Chapter Eighteen

  ONE

  THEY FOUND ME CURLED IN a ball under the kitchen table.

  I don’t remember how I got there. I don’t remember the beating beyond the point when the chair went over and I heard Caro running, the slam of the screen door … I don’t remember when he stopped and disappeared into the night.

  I remember the final damage assessment because I had to live with it for a while. I had three broken ribs with the boot lacerations to match. One of my eardrums was broken: he must have done a Buddy Rich solo on my head but I don’t remember that. My nose was broken and I sure as hell remember that. Christ. A close encounter of the linoleum kind. I had a severe concussion but, miraculously, no skull fracture. Something bad happened to my throat and windpipe and I could barely whisper for a couple of days. A few blood vessels had burst in my eyes which was mainly unpleasant for people who had to look at me. My kidneys had been punted into the middle of next week and I pissed blood for a week.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. I didn’t know anything about what was left of me after Varada had finished when Caro got back with the on-duty cop. She’d run all the way to town and come back in the patrol car with the only ambulance in the vicinity coming along right behind. The doctor arrived in his own car. Quite a little parade. I’m sorry I missed it. And it was nothing compared to the spectacle of the ambulance ride to Boston, red light flashing and driving like a bat out of hell. I was awake for much of that part of the night and I remember hearing the Hackett doctor in his down-east nasal twang saying that he didn’t see the point in keeping me there with God only knew what internal injuries and possible cranial “irregularities.” Well, that was sure as hell reassuring. I fainted. When I woke up I was in the ambulance, looking up into the eyes of Caro Saberdene.

  I remember the odd quality of light in the ambulance, thinking it was like being a battlefield casualty in M*A*S*H. There was a nurse the doctor had presumably routed out of bed and Caro and, following the ambulance, the doctor who wanted to deliver me and get a signed receipt.

  Caro held my hand, bent over me to kiss my cheek and tell me I was a hero even if I did get the living daylights kicked out of me. I was alert enough and coherent enough to want to know just what had happened. It took some high-powered babbling to get it out of her but I finally said that if I was going to die I had the right to know the story, I didn’t realize then how hard the story was for her to tell: I was too wrapped up in my own pain to worry about hers. It turned out to be as ugly a tale as you could imagine.

  Varada had been waiting for us when she went back to get her sweater. She had no idea how he’d found us but he’d been awfully pleased with himself. He amused himself by slapping her around, knocked her down, then held her there while he explained some of the realities of her situation. If she didn’t give him the best time of his life right then and there he was going to rearrange everything about her in the slowest way known to man and then he was going to kill me while she lay there unable to do anything but watch. He forced her to stretch out on the kitchen table. Then he’d had her and while she whispered the story to me her voice remained rock hard and steady, the tears running down her face and dripping onto mine.

  “He didn’t give me a chance,” she said. “He’d have killed you for sure, probably me, too. And if you’d come back while he was doing it to me he’d have killed you then … I got it over as soon as I could, then I begged him to leave. But he said he wasn’t through with me … he told me he was going to stay near town, he’d call on me regularly and I’d better make him happy or he’d kill you, Charlie … then you came in, I’d gotten my clothing straightened as best I could, I’m stinking of him now, he wasn’t drunk but he’d had a lot to drink, and he was telling me what else he was going to do to me … then you came in and I didn’t know what to do, I tried to yell at you but I knew you wouldn’t have run away … oh, Charlie, I didn’t know what to do, he was so brutal, so cruel, everything about him is cruel … and I thought he was going to kill you, then you told me to run and I realized … that if I did run away he might think twice about staying there too long, he might stop working on you in case I found someone right away … and I guess that’s what did happen … there wasn’t a trace of him when we got back to the house … Oh, Charlie, he’s not quite human, I told the cops he was a stranger, I said it was dark and, oh, I don’t know, I kept remembering how Victor didn’t want to identify him and I thought that if I told about him now, then everything would be opened up again and I didn’t know what all would happen, so I lied … oh, Charlie, when will it come to an end?”

  And she squeezed my hand and sat on the floor of the ambulance with her face next to mine, brushing her lips against my cheek, not wanting to hurt me. In her own awful agony she didn’t forget mine.

  TWO

  The doctor from Hackett was an old Harvard Medical School man with plenty of connections at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, which was, in some way that I never quite straightened out, allied with Harvard. Anyway that was where I wound up that first night and where I remained for almost three weeks, doubtless as a perfect teaching example of one hell of a whipping.

  Eventually my eyes got resynchronized and the headache receded to the bearable and the broken ribs didn’t puncture the lung and only hurt when I tried to do something drastic like breathing. It would have been unendurable if it hadn’t been for Caro, who came every day and tried to pretend that she wasn’t being torn to pieces by fear and worry. She was falling back on her acting background: I could see it this time. She didn’t have the resources of determination that had gotten her through Varada stalking her in New York and the shooting of Victor. She’d overdrawn that account. At first I thought it had to be the rape. But I was underestimating her. She had the kind of steely, sinewy resolve, the hardheadedness that made her see the violation of her person as a vicious crime of violence, not the destruction of her soul. Not something that had soiled her inner self. But something that could and did happen to unfortunate women every day, everywhere. No, it wasn’t the rape.

  What cut the heart out of Caro was the destruction of our dream. She no longer saw herself as a survivor and, while I don’t want to sound any sappier than I normally do, I swear I saw what I can only describe as the light—it was a light, a positive glow—go out of her eyes. Her fears that she didn’t deserve happiness, didn’t deserve the fulfillment we’d found in each other up in Maine. Night after night, once she’d left my bedside, the thoughts that ganged up on me as I tried to fall asleep were not of the encounter with Varada that had put me in the hospital. They weren’t even of finding her on the rain-beaten porch with the shotgun, which I’d subsequently dreamed she was going to use on herself, not on me. No … what I couldn’t get out of my mind was the night she told me it wouldn’t last, that she didn’t deserve to be happy. It made no sense to me. But she believed it and that was what mattered.

  After a
week of staying near the hospital in a motel, she took to spending the nights back in Earl’s Bridge with her father and his nurse. In her fragile state of mind I had doubts about that particular venue as a source for bucking her up but I wasn’t really consulted. She felt her place was as much with her father as with me. Who could blame her for that?

  Her father was still weak but daily exercise and therapy was at the core of his recovery and as he put it, he didn’t seem to have anything better to do. She said he looked rather hellish and walked with a cane but, thank God, he was alive.

  She sat beside my bed and put down the John O’Hara novel, Ourselves to Know, she’d been reading to me, and stared out the window at the steaming streets beyond. “He’s just waiting, you know,” she said at last. “He’s just waiting to die. He doesn’t see his friends anymore. All the people he loved are dead … so he’s got his nurse and me, that’s all. And he sits there tying flies he’ll never use, nobody will ever use … and he waits. Sometimes he and I sit there for two hours and we never say a word, Charlie. It makes me feel like I’m waiting to die, too.” She shook her head, flicking the honey-brown mane, clearing the troublesome thought away. “He’ll die soon. And then I’ll be alone. God, how I hate that idea …”

  “You’ll never be alone,” I said, “as long as I’m alive. I love you, Caro, and nothing can change that. Nothing. Not ever.”

  She bit her lip, sat still. “It’s not going to work, Charlie. I’m such a mess, such a nightmare. I try to fix it but it never lasts. I think it’s getting better but—it never does. There’s always the nightmare at the end. Maybe—I don’t know, maybe there are women who are just like that.” She smiled at me. There was something like pity—or was it resignation?—in her eyes. “You may not see it yet, Charlie, but I’m used to it, I can see it beginning in the way you look at me. I’ve seen it in my father’s eyes, and in Victor’s, and now I can see it beginning in you … you’re beginning to see that I’m that sad, sorry burden that kept Victor from leaving me—

  “Are you sure you’re not seeing just a reflection of what you fear the most? You’re no burden, Caro—”

  “Oh, that’s a good try, Charlie. But you’re ignoring all the facts of your life. Love makes people blind … but if I’m blind to the truth I’m going to get you killed. There’s no way to protect me, no way to put a twenty-four-hour-a-day bodyguard on me for the rest of my life … Look, you must run for your life, that’s what you’ve got to do. Your life was just fine until you got mixed up with me. But when I came into your life you betrayed your friend by falling in love with his wife, you found yourself in the middle of all this grisly horror with Varada, I killed Victor, and the happiness we found afterward ended with your almost getting killed … It’s as if somebody’s playing a record way too fast, life is speeding by too quickly to get hold of it, it’s speeding past and death is waiting at the end and we’re being robbed of what’s supposed to come first …

  “I drew you into this and it just won’t stop. He found us in Maine, he’ll find us anywhere …” She sighed and looked back at me. Through it all I’d never seen her resigned before. “Maybe Victor knew I meant death, yet he knew fate had singled him out to protect me from things, from the effect I seem to have, from myself, from what goes on in my head … from what happened to people who came close to me … Anna, Dad, Victor, you, that Abe fellow, the two bodyguards who were supposed to protect us … even Varada himself, look what happened to him when he crossed my path … it’s a bad, bad joke, Charlie.”

  “Caro, you’ve got every right and reason in the world to feel down and whipped but you can’t go on this way, you’ve got to realize there’s a way out … We’re going to find it. Just give us the time.”

  “You don’t really believe that,” she said softly. “You’re trying awfully hard to believe it but you can’t quite do it. I can see it in your eyes, Charlie. Now you’re looking at me in that same pitying way Victor did … the way the doctors did when I was in the hospital years ago, I heard them say in the hallway outside my room, ‘It’s too bad, she’s such a pretty girl,’ and my God, how that’s haunted me through the years, wondering what did they mean … why was it too bad? … Well, maybe I’ve known all along, maybe I just didn’t want to admit that there’s something about me …”

  I tried to talk her out of it but she was inconsolable, not in a weepy way, but as if she’d seen the truth and there was no longer any point in pretending it wasn’t true. I told her that time might make her see things differently. How empty that looks to me now as I write it and how hopeless it must have sounded to her when I said it.

  She grinned at me ruefully. “But what can we do about Varada? He’s just one more psychotic out there, the woods are full of them, and there’s no way to stop him. I’ve thought about the police but then it would all come alive again, Anna and the trial and my breakdown and on and on—they could try to find him, maybe they would find him but they’d never be able to prove he killed Braverman and beat up Claverly and Potter. My God, Victor’s the one who sent them to mug him! So even if he had no alibi, all he was doing was defending himself against my husband’s thugs … and if I said he raped me and tried to kill you, he’d have been somewhere else and he’d say what has this crazy broad got against me? First she pins a false murder rap on me, now she’s having another shot—you thought she was crazy men, you should hear her now! Well, Charlie, that’s just about where it stands, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “How can he be so impregnable?” My head was throbbing. I couldn’t think.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” she said. “Except wait for him to come again. Then …” She shrugged. “You’ve had enough of me for a while. I’m going out and help take care of Dad for a few weeks. God help him.” She smiled, turning the corners of her mouth down. Then she kissed me and left.

  THREE

  The next day I had Alec Maguire stop by the hospital. He came in, did a double take when he saw me, and asked what in the world had happened to me. I said one word: Varada. Then he gave me a sideways look, made an O with his mouth, and slipped his heavy spectacles off. He plucked the crimson square from his blazer pocket and began polishing the lenses. I gave him the whole story. His gentle smile drifted away and was replaced with a look of grim distaste. He put his glasses back on, the large red stone in the class ring twinkling in the morning sunlight flowing through the window behind him.

  “Well, I will definitely be a monkey’s uncle,” he said when I’d finished. “This is the same guy I saw putting flowers on the girl’s grave … y’know something, Nichols, the more I learn about my fellow bipeds the more I realize that the human psyche is one very unpredictable, very treacherous swamp. Talk to me about this guy. Victor never really told me much about him. So far as I know, he’s a rapist, he’s capable of vicious assault, and he’s not a killer. And I’ve seen him chatting with Caro Saberdene in a couple of restaurants … now, what’s the rest of the story?”

  I told him the whole thing. “In the first place, be warned, my friend,” I said, “he is a murderer.” It took a while to run through the Varada dossier.

  “I’ve got a job for you,” I said. “And you need the whole story before you take it on. Now you’ve got it.”

  “And now you’d better tell me what you’ve got for me to do.”

  “I’m very worried about Caro.”

  “I’m with you so far.” He was looking out the window. His shoulders were beefier than I’d realized and he must have had an eighteen-inch neck.

  “I’m afraid Varada will appear out of nowhere. That seems to be his M.O. I realize there’s only so much you can do but whatever that is, I want you to do it. Stay close to her. She’s going to be staying with her father but I don’t know for how long.”

  “Back to that pretty little town,” Maguire mused, stroking his tight curly hair as if to check that it was still there.

  “Protect her from Varada,” I said.

  “I think
we’d better go into a few of the particulars,” he said. He sounded worried, which was just how I wanted him to sound. He had to realize what he was getting into.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ONE

  WITHOUT CARO COMING TO SPEND hours at my bedside every day the waiting for my injuries to heal seemed endless. I watched some Red Sox games on television, did some cursory reading, and shot the breeze with the doctors and nurses. It was impossible: I was helpless, waiting for Varada to lash out at us again. At her. I could walk around and the pain was a little less agonizing as the days passed. I was still short of breath, the one ear was pretty well shot to hell, they kept X-raying my kidneys and my spinal column, which had been slightly rearranged by Varada’s knee and boot. It was up to me, the doctors told me, if I wanted an operation on a disk. I said I’d wait to see if it got better on its own. They nodded sagely but said it was more likely to get worse. But I could always have the surgery later. They consulted me about the ear. It went on forever.

  Caro called me most days. She didn’t sound like herself. She didn’t seem to have much to say and none of it was about the future, about us. Her voice was uncharacteristically lifeless, no matter how hard she seemed to try. She sounded as if she had been magically trapped in a state of suspended animation. More than anything else she sounded like someone stranded in a waiting room with no place to go, no means of getting there. I heard it all in her voice and I recognized it because I heard it in my own.

  There were also daily calls from Alec Maguire. Everything he said confirmed the impression I was getting from her. Nothing was happening. She sunned in a lawn chair, she took walks around the lawn with her father, she would walk the shady streets to do errands, she visited the cemetery once, a couple of times she went to the picturesque Earl’s Bridge Inn for lunch by herself. One night she went to a movie. She didn’t go near the theater where she’d once acted, where everything bad had begun to happen. It was a very reserved Massachusetts village, in the heart of the Berkshires, and no one paid much attention to her coming home. People tended to mind their own business.