by Buffa, D. W.
“What would you have done if she had?” I asked suddenly. “What would you have done if this well-planned fraud of yours hadn’t worked, if she had been convicted? – Let her go prison? Waited until you read in the papers about her execution and then dismissed it as just another deal gone bad!”
His eyebrows, dyed black like his hair, shot straight up, acknowledging the possibility. He lowered his head, and with the back of two fingers scratched the side of his smooth shaven cheek, considering, as it were, whether in retrospect he might have underplayed the risk.
“There was never any real chance of that – not with you as her lawyer,” he said with the blithe assurance of someone who knew nothing about the real hazards of the courtroom.
“I haven’t always won.”
“You’ve never lost with someone innocent.”
“The whole world thinks she’s guilty,” I reminded him.
That was the last thing he cared about. The world could think what it liked.
“The whole world thinks I’m dead,” he remarked, with an impervious sneer. “But I’m still alive. And Danielle, the woman the world thinks is so guilty – she doesn’t exist anymore. We’ve both become other people. Nelson St. James is somewhere the bottom of the Pacific; Danielle St. James has disappeared. Niccolo Orsini and his wife Gabriella now sail around on a yacht – the Midnight Sun, the Blue Zephyr painted black – making rich people even richer, those lucky enough to invest in one of the Orsini enterprises, the profitable parts of this new, global economy of ours. Yes,” he added with gloating satisfaction, “thanks to you, my friend, Danielle and I now lead new and different lives.”
“Lead different lives! – You’re living the same life all over again, the same game with different players.”
I meant to offend him, call him the hypocrite he was; but he took it, if not as a compliment, then as a reasonable description of the only reality he knew. It was, for him, what it had always been: a game about money; or rather a game about winning and losing in which money was a way to count. It was, when you got right down to it, when your eye was not dazzled by all the beautiful people and all their fine clothes, by their shiny fast cars and their expensive houses, nothing but the ancient and much despised war of all against all, but without the violence, and with none of the courage.
St. James snapped his fingers, the steward materialized out of thin air and we ordered lunch. For the next hour, as course after course was served, St. James spoke with ruthless candor about what he had done; not just how he had staged his own death, but what he planned to do next. He seemed to enjoy it, the chance to tell someone, to have an audience. He thought he was the only one smart enough to figure out that the perfect murder would be the one in which the murder itself was a fiction. It was sleight of hand, the cunning trickery of a great magician. The analogy was his, and a source of pride. Everyone he had dealt with, whether the Wall Street tycoons he had forced into bankruptcy or the government officials who had come after him with a vengeance, all were a type he despised: privileged and overeducated, the kind who hung their framed degrees and credentials on the walls of their offices and thought them proof of their competence.
“I didn’t finish high school – Did you know that?” he asked, shoving his plate to the side. He laughed when he said it, but there was a hard edge, an undercurrent of injury and resentment. “A tenth grade education, two years in the army, and lots of crummy jobs. Funny thing is, when I was a kid – I wasn’t any good at sports – I used to read a lot. Adventure stories, mainly – things like that.”
He put his hand to his head and held it there, smiling at what he remembered, the threadbare books which, as he told me, he used to check out by the armload from the one room local library. “Sleight of hand, making everyone concentrate on one thing while you do something else. It was a book about Houdini. He would have them sew him into a big paper bag. A screen would be put up in front it. And then - twenty, thirty minutes later – when the screen came down, there would be Houdini, standing next to the paper bag, but the paper bag had not been opened. He had a second bag, exactly the same as the first, which he kept under his clothes. He simply cut his way out of the first one and replaced it with the other one. Then he would sit there – for twenty, thirty minutes; maybe even an hour – reading a book, but making the kind of sounds someone would be making if they were struggling to get out of something that held them prisoner. That was the genius part – not getting out of the bag, but making everyone think that he was trapped, that he could not get out. That’s what held everyone’s attention and made it believable. I could have just pretended to fall overboard, an accident at sea – but that would have concentrated everyone’s attention on my death, on me, and that would have led to questions. But if instead of an accident, I’m murdered, then everyone concentrates on the question of who did it and why. It was perfect – you have to admit that, Morrison. Harry Houdini would have been proud,” he laughed. “A high school dropout, and I beat them all!”
The more he talked, the more it seemed he wanted to. He was all puffed up with himself, recounting with smirking certainty how he had beaten everyone who had stood in his way. He told me story after story, ending finally with what had started when we first met, that weekend off the coast of California.
“It was Danielle’s idea, by the way, that we invite you along,” he added. He could not quite conceal a curiosity, an irritation that he did not know whether, or how often, she might have cheated with me.
I was curious about something else.
“Her idea I come along? Was it her idea that she go on trial for a murder that never happened – or was it yours?”
He shrugged as if it were a distinction without a difference. It was not important who first thought of it, only that it worked. He could not quite understand why I did not see that.
“It might have been her; it might have been me. I don’t really remember. I knew I might need a lawyer; she said she had heard you were one of the best. But that weekend – when we met – I had not thought of it yet, what I was going to do, become a victim of a homicide.”
He tugged at his sleeve and, shifting position, craned his neck to stare up at a blank, cloudless sky. There was not a sound anywhere, nothing to break the eerie silence that was even more oppressive than the heat.
“Remember what I told you, that first time we met - ? For some reason, even then, I felt comfortable telling you things I haven’t told anyone. It’s a gift you have - .” He laughed suddenly, and to no apparent purpose; but then his expression changed into the eager satisfaction of having just discovered the secret of another man’s success. “Even when someone is lying, they look at you and want to tell the truth! Poor Danielle!” And he laughed again.
We were finished with lunch. The steward began to clear away the dishes. St. James checked his watch.
“Tell Mustafa to get underway,” he said to the steward. Then he turned to me. “We took the liberty of having your things brought on board. We’re going to sail around the island – around Sicily – and I insist you come along.”
Mustafa Nastasis, the witness to St. James’s murder, the lying witness to Danielle’s guilt, had been waiting for the order. The deck began to vibrate with the motion of the ship’s engine. I was a guest, that meant a prisoner, on the Midnight Sun, and there was nothing I could do about it. I do not know if St. James had decided what he was going to do, whether he thought he had to kill me to keep his secret safe, but he now had me in his power, and yet I did not feel any fear at all. Call it what you will – and I suppose madness must be the first thing that comes to mind: that I was crazy, driven half insane by what they had done to me – but I was glad I was back out on the Blue Zephyr, eager to see where we were all going and what would happen when we got there. When St. James told me I was going with them, I told him I was looking forward to the voyage. Perhaps I really was crazy.
CHAPTER Twenty
As the Midnight Sun raced along the northern shore of Sic
ily, I leaned against the starboard railing, remembering from my long vanished youth Homer’s description of the ‘wine-tinted sea.’ Somewhere ahead in the crowding darkness lay the straits of Messina and, as I had once read, the unenviable choice of the swirling whirlpool of Charybdis and the jagged rocks of Scylla, a choice that, as I thought of it, seemed not that much worse than the one I knew I would eventually have to make. There were three of us tangled together in this web of deceit, this murder that never happened and a trial that had from start to finish been a fraud. I had a feeling bordering on certainty that sometime soon there would be only two of us left.
Perhaps it was that sense of danger that made me start to sense things before they happened. I knew, for example, without turning around, that Danielle was coming, that in another moment she would be here, leaning against the railing next to me. Our shoulders touched; her arm pressed against mine. I stared out at the sea, growing darker in the last light of dusk, waiting for her to speak, but she said nothing and the only sound I heard was the slight breeze that brushed past my ear.
“It was your idea, wasn’t it?” I asked quietly and without a hint of anger. I felt tired, weary of the whole charade; tired, really, of who I was, of what I had become. “Husband murdered, wife accused, and all the evidence – if you have a lawyer smart enough, or dumb enough, to see it – that there’s as much a proof that her husband shot himself as that she killed him.” Finally, I turned my head just far enough to see her. “Because, after all, the point is to have everyone think he’s dead.”
She started to deny it, but I would not listen. I changed positions, moved my back against the railing, so I could catch each new expression, each new reaction, in her eyes.
“You played your part too well not to have written it yourself. You made him think it was his idea, but it was really yours. You’re good at that: making people think they’re only doing what they must have thought of first. You’ve convinced him that he’s Harry Houdini, making fools of everyone; you had me convinced that I had to let you lie under oath because it was the only way to save the woman who wanted to spend the rest of her life with me.”
She looked at me with what, if I had not known her, or if I had known her some other way, I would have taken as injured innocence. The innocence, I knew, did not exist; but the sense of injury, of something lost, somehow seemed real.
“I didn’t have to sleep with you to get you to take the case,” she reminded me in a low, mournful voice.
Had I injured her pride? My injury went much deeper than that.
“You had to ‘almost sleep with me’ – that weekend on the yacht – to make me think that you were scared of him, afraid of things he might do; to make me believe, later on, that if you killed him, you had a reason for what you did.”
I was scared of him,” she insisted. “I’m still scared of him…more than ever.”
A bitter smile whipped across my mouth. I stood straight up.
“Scared of him, but willing to risk your own life to keep him out of prison!”
She took hold of my arm.
“But I didn’t have to sleep with you – don’t you understand?” she asked, pleading with her eyes. “If we’d never gone to bed together, that wouldn’t have changed anything you did at trial. You would have tried just as hard to win.”
The shadows darkened. A warm wind, restless and chaotic, came from first one direction, then another. I felt my gaze weaken, and instead of weariness I began to feel lost. Nothing seemed worth doing.
“It would have changed how I felt…” I whispered into the night.
She heard the bittersweet nostalgia in my distant voice, the sense of my own innocence lost, innocence of a kind I had not known I had until Danielle had taught me how to abandon all inhibition in the intimacy we had shared. She seemed to teach me freedom and, as I only later understood, she made me more a slave.
Danielle’s grasp moved from my arm down to my hand.
“I slept with you because I wanted to sleep with you. I wanted to the very first day we met, that day off the California coast when I saw the way you looked at me and I knew you didn’t remember me. I felt something, something I had not felt before. It wasn’t some schoolgirl fantasy, the crush I had on you when you were engaged to my sister. It was more, much more, than that.”
I pulled my arm away from her.
“It didn’t stop you, though – did it? It didn’t change a thing. You went right ahead with everything – just the way you had planned!”
Angry and hurt, she stamped her foot in frustration.
“It was too late! Don’t you understand? There was nothing I could do.”
“Nothing you could do?” I fixed her with a piercing stare. “You could have told the truth: that he wasn’t dead, that it was all a hoax!”
“And if I had done that – who would have believed me? I wasn’t the only one involved. Mustafa…!”
“I was there, remember? Were you the one who rehearsed him? He lied with such effect!” I taunted her. “He heard yelling, came up on deck, saw you with the gun in your hand; saw blood all over the railing, all over the deck.” My voice was full of scorn, my gaze full of contempt. “But he didn’t see you pull the trigger, didn’t see you shoot him, didn’t see your husband fall overboard into the sea….” I bore in on her as if she were a witness on the stand, throwing back in her face every false, deceitful thing she had ever said. “You knew how important that would be, that Nastasis tell the story just that way. There couldn’t be any doubt that Nelson died, only room for doubt that you did it. The gun is in your hand, but for all he knows – which he is eager to admit the moment I ask him – you could have just picked it up from where it had fallen after Nelson shot himself.”
She shook her head in anguish, as if even now she wanted to convince me that I was wrong, that whatever she may have done, however wrong it may have been, what had happened between us had been separate and apart, unexpected, and regretted as something she could not keep.
“Do you think he would have changed his story if I had changed mine? Told the truth – that Nelson wasn’t dead? Why? – To save me? Mustafa is a lot of things, but he isn’t stupid. He was paid a lot of money to do what he did.”
“Yes, precisely: a lot of money! That excuses everything, doesn’t it? Only stupid people think the truth is something that can’t be bought and sold!”
A slight shudder, as of something painful, passed through her and for a moment she seemed desolate and alone.
“Why did you come?” she asked after a long silence. She searched my eyes for the answer. At least that is what I thought at first, because an instant later I was certain it was the other way round: that she wanted me to see in her eyes the answer to a question I had never thought to ask, a question which in its shocking simplicity made me wonder if I had not seriously misjudged her.
“Do you want to know what I really wish, what I started wishing that first night we spent together? I wish that everything the prosecution said had been true, that I had killed him just the way they said, shot him over there,” she said, nodding toward the railing on the other side. “Shot him so his body would fall overboard and could not be found, shot him after yelling loud enough to bring Mustafa so he could find me holding the gun. The same thing would have happened then, except that Nelson would be dead and the trial wouldn’t have been a fraud. I could have lied myself to an acquittal, but instead of living in a different place with a different name, I could be home, in San Francisco, living with you. Don’t you think I wish I had, wish I had -”
“Wish what, my dear?”
Nelson St. James had come up behind us. We had not seen him in the darkness. Danielle spun around.
“Wish I didn’t have to spend all my time on this damn boat!” she cried as she stormed past him.
With a raised eyebrow and an indulgent smile, St. James watched her go. But more, I thought, to shield his embarrassment than from any real feeling of affection for the occasional and forgiva
ble outbursts of someone he loved and understood. He began to rub his upper arm, something I had seen him do once or twice at lunch, and behind the shining surface of his eyes I thought I saw something like discomfort and even a little fear.
“I’m afraid I lost my temper this afternoon,” he said unexpectedly. “I came to apologize for that, and to tell you that whatever our differences over what happened, I’m sure we can work things out. But we can talk about all that later,” he remarked as he took me by the arm and started to lead me away. “In the meantime, why don’t you join us for dinner?” With a shrewd, knowing look, he added, “It’s what I liked about you the first time I met you: you’re never boring, Morrison. Of course I have a certain bias in that regard. I’d hate to think that someone who wanted to kill me wasn’t an interesting man.”
Dinner that evening was nothing like what I had experienced the first time, months earlier, when the Midnight Sun was still the Blue Zephyr and a dozen people had sat at the table. There were just the three of us and St. James did most of the talking. None of it, however, was about what they had done or what might happen because of it. If he was worried about whether I might expose him, tell the world he was still alive – if he was planning how he might stop me from revealing the fraud the two of them had committed – he kept it to himself. He spoke instead as if we were all great friends, on our way to a splendid little voyage which he could not wait to preview in advance. In another side of the resentment he felt toward all the overeducated fools, as he had described them, whom he had beaten at their own game, he could not rid himself of the insecurity he felt at his lack of a college education. He talked about Sicily and what we were going to see, but only after he had made a point of explaining that while he seldom read much anymore, he always found people who could tell him about the places he visited. He said it in a way that left no doubt that he believed you could always learn more from hearing it directly from someone who knew what they were talking about than getting it second hand from the writings of someone you had never met. And the truth was that he seemed to have learned quite a lot.