Swindlers (32 page)

“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 Sicily, 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 forgivable 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.”