The Clairvoyant Countess (15 page)

When he swam back to consciousness again the ceiling was dark and the room was in shadow except for one light on a table. Next to the table sat Swope, wearing a rakish white hat.

“Yes, it’s me, Lieutenant,” Swope said, looking up from a magazine.

“What the hell,” said Pruden, staring, “Hat?”

“Hat! This is no hat, it’s a bandage,” Swope growled. I just got out of the hospital five days ago and I’ve got to wear this damn thing until Friday when the last stitches come out. We’ve both been out of action, Lieutenant, but you gave us a real scare. You’ve been here two weeks.”

This galvanized Pruden. “
How
long?”

“Surgery,” Swope said, nodding. “Bullet near your heart. Top man in the country took you apart and put you together again. A quarter of an inch closer and it would have been curtains.”

Pruden frowned. “It was in the popsicles,” he said abruptly.

Swope nodded. “If you’re able to remember how it started I’ll tell you how it ended. After you disappeared down that elevator I phoned in a ten-thirteen to headquarters and ran back to find you, except they were waiting for me. Damn near killed me, too. I was unconscious when the Chief got there so it took a while for them to realize you were in trouble too, and then they had to get a search warrant. That’s what slowed things up. You don’t have to worry about the popsicles, though, they made a clean sweep. The drugs came up from South America in the masks Ramon sold. Came in by truck, went out in popsicles.”

A nurse came in and stopped Swope from saying any more. “We don’t want to tire him now, do we?”

Pruden loathed her cheerful voice but was nevertheless grateful and immediately fell asleep. When he awoke again his head was clear for the first time and
he felt almost himself again. It was late morning, and in the chair beside his bed sat Madame Karitska.

“Well,” he said, looking at her.

“Well,” she returned, her eyes twinkling at him. “You are quite a hero, Lieutenant, I actually went out and bought newspapers to read about you.”

“I met your Buddha, too, you know.”

“So Mr. Faber-Jones told me yesterday,” she said, nodding. “I am not surprised. That Mr. Ramon—” She shook her head. “Sometime when you are better I shall tell you what I saw in him. Never,” she said simply, “have I felt such evil in a man, or encountered such power, such brilliance or such a twisted soul.”

“He was like you,” Pruden said in a wondering voice. “I mean, he spoke of the same things you do but he had it all twisted, he’d turned it upside down. He
knew.
”

“Knew?”

Pruden shivered. “Motives. Weaknesses. People. Most of all people, I think. How to bend and destroy them.”

“Satanic,” said Madame Karitska, nodding, “but let us not speak of him today, for the sun is shining and you are alive and I have good news for you.”

“Good. What is it?”

“The willow tree has died,” she said. “It died quite suddenly the morning after you were shot, and Luis is back at work driving his ice-cream truck. As a matter of fact he plans one day to come in personally to thank you, and for this he is learning a speech in English.”

“Well, now,” he said, pleased, “I’m certainly glad to hear that. In fact if you—” But Pruden’s eyes had wandered to the window and he was abruptly silent.
Someone had moved the yellow flowers to the window sill, where they were capturing the morning’s brilliant sunshine in their petals and creating a blaze of gold. He thought he had never seen such color in his life, nor really looked at a flower before, and he could feel tears rising to his eyes at the impact of their beauty. A simple bouquet of daffodils in a white pottery vase … He had always assumed white was colorless but in the snow-like pottery he could trace reflections of yellow, and one tender blue shadow that exactly matched the blue of the sky beyond the flowers. “My God,” he said in astonishment, “I’m alive. I don’t think I ever understood before what it means.”

“Ah,” said Madame Karitska.

“Those flowers. Did you notice them, do you see the sun in them?”

“Tell me,” she said, watching him closely.

“They’re alive, too, in the most incredible—” He stopped, his voice unsteady. “I sound like a nut.”

She shook her head. Very softly she said, “I think the patterns in the kaleidoscope have shifted a little for you, my dear Lieutenant. You have heard the expression that to nearly lose your life is to find it? You will be changed, perhaps. Aware.”

“Is that what life is?”

“It is what it
can
be,” she said, “Seeing, really seeing, and then at last—at last the understanding.” She rose and picked up her purse and smiled down at him. “As the French say, ‘One must draw back in order to leap the better.’ My French grows rusty, how do they phrase it?
‘Il faut reculer pour mieux sauter.’
Rest well, my friend, I will see you again tomorrow.”

While Lieutenant Pruden was in the hospital fighting for his life Madame Karitska and Mr. Faber-Jones became, surprisingly, rather good friends. He arrived one evening at her apartment to announce that he had grown intolerably bored with his attempts to escape clairvoyance. “My wife left me last week,” he said, standing in the doorway and refusing to sit down until he had made his confession. “I’m drinking too much and I’ve come to realize that I’m nothing but a selfish, shallow, egotistical stuffed shirt.”

“Good,” said Madame Karitska promptly.

“Good?”

Smiling, she said, “You are suffering from a severe case of creative discontent, my dear Mr. Faber-Jones. How else do you think people can look for something new unless they become thoroughly oppressed and sated
by the old? This is very promising.”

“It doesn’t feel promising,” he said miserably. “It hurts. Can you suggest anything at all?”

“But of course,” she told him. “You can begin by coming with me to the hospital to sit with Lieutenant Pruden. His father isn’t well enough to go frequently and I feel someone should be with him as much as possible.”

“That’s
all?
”

He was so clearly disappointed in her that Madame Karitska laughed. “You would prefer something more dramatic, like work among the lepers, or giving all your money to the poor? Do not be disappointed, Mr. Faber-Jones, that too could be asked of you one day but not now, I assure you.”

Faber-Jones was an eminently practical man, and for the moment a depleted one; he accepted Madame Karitska’s prescription without further protest. After one visit, and learning how near death Pruden had been, he suggested with surprising humility that he take turns with Madame Karitska at the hospital. Out of the hours spent quietly at Pruden’s bedside Mr. Faber-Jones received something in return: he arrived at several decisions which he put into action at once. He placed his Cavendish Square house on the market for sale, moved into a nearby apartment, and granted his wife a very generous separation allowance.

“Do you love her?” asked Madame Karitska curiously.

“Actually yes, very much,” he said. “Does that sound odd from an old duffer like me? I’ve given her everything except myself, though, and I can’t blame her for leaving. She doesn’t want a divorce—she said
so—and that leaves me with some hope.”

“One must always have hope,” Madame Karitska agreed, nodding.

“I’ve also decided to give a dinner party,” he told her, brightening. “A new sort of dinner party, to christen my new apartment and new life. Will you come?”

“I shall look forward to it,” she promised him, and on the night before Pruden was to be discharged from the hospital she presented herself at Faber-Jones’ door, looking splendid in damask brocade.

He had invited four other guests, three men and a woman. Dr. Jane Tennison was a striking woman of about forty, blond and deeply tanned; she was an archaeologist, a childhood friend of Faber-Jones’ and on easy terms with him. There was Peter Zoehfeld, a heavily bearded, distinguished-looking man from the United Nations. “Met him only two weeks ago,” chuckled Faber-Jones. “Day I went to New York on business. We were both caught in a subway fire and stuck underground for two hours.”

“Nothing,” said Zoehfeld with a charming smile and a flash of dark eyes, “breaks down barriers faster than a soupçon of danger. I am delighted to meet you, Madame Karitska. My friend Mr. Faber-Jones told me I would find you a fascinating woman but he neglected to mention your beauty.”

Madame Karitska gave him an amused second glance before moving on.

“And this is Dr. Berkowitz, our family medical doctor,” continued Faber-Jones.

Dr. Berkowitz was a small, rather nondescript man in a baggy gray suit. His smile was genuine and warm,
however, and his handshake firm; she thought he must be a very good doctor.

“And Lucas Johns,” concluded Faber-Jones. “Used to be in the recording business, now he manages rock stars.”

“Oh, do you handle John Painter?” asked Madame Karitska.

Mr. Johns grinned. He was perhaps fifty, with a superb mane of gray hair, very tousled, and he was wearing a fringed buckskin shirt over suede slacks. “No, but I wish I did.”

“He’s been tremendously helpful,” put in Faber-Jones. “Didn’t have to be, either. Very generous man.”

“Well, don’t let it get around, Jonesy,” said Lucas Johns, making a face.

They sat down to a magnificent dinner, for although Faber-Jones had stripped himself of many of the accouterments of his past he had kept his cook and the cook’s husband, who served dinner. The conversation was typical of dinner parties attended by people who had never met before: it was exploratory, impersonal, and of necessity superficial, but in this case very intelligent. Dr. Tennison talked with enthusiasm of her latest archaeological expedition. Dr. Berkowitz had recently visited the Middle East on his vacation, and he and Madame Karitska compared impressions of Afghanistan, where she had lived at one time. At the other end of the table Peter Zoehfeld talked to Lucas Johns of famines and world food shortages.

It was entirely by accident that over coffee the subject of fate arose. Madame Karitska had mentioned the Persian word
kismet
to Dr. Berkowitz, and he had nodded thoughtfully. “This is always a difficult subject
philosophically,” he said, “and of course the East regards fate or destiny in a very different manner from the West.”

“But you,” inquired Madame Karitska with interest, “do you believe in destiny?”

He hesitated and then he said quietly, “For a long period in my life I refuted everything in the way of faith or meaning. You might say I collected—even exulted in—every nihilistic book, thought, and person, and this is not difficult for we live in a very depersonalizing and negative age. But I realized one day that if I believed faith and God were mere illusions—puerile longings, you might say, for reassurance and immortality—then it was equally possible that the cult of meaninglessness and despair could also be illusory, no more nor less than the rage of adolescents who fail to understand. Have we proof of either? And disliking necrophilia I chose—as Pindar put it—to ‘become what I am.’ ”

“And that is—?”

“A man who believes in something beyond himself even when he cannot touch it.”

“What Kierkegaard calls ‘the leap of faith,’ ” she said, smiling.

“Yes. Because, you see, as a doctor I have sometimes been in the presence of miracles. I have sat beside a patient whose recovery was scientifically impossible and he has recovered. Yes, I believe in fate. Do you, Madame Karitska?”

“Oh, definitely,” she said, and briefly closing her eyes she quoted, “ ‘Thy lot or portion in life,’ said the Caliph Ali, ‘is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.’ ”

When she opened her eyes she saw that everyone at the table was looking at them, their conversation stilled. “Do you really believe that?” asked Lucas Johns, frowning. “It certainly presupposes a rather fixed destiny, doesn’t it, with no freedom of choice?”

“There is always choice, but within a certain framework,” said Madame Karitska.

“Nonsense,” Peter Zoehfeld said flatly. “We make our own destinies.”

“Are you so sure?” Madame Karitska asked, smiling at him.

“If you accept the theory that we’ve lived many lives it could become possible,” Lucas Johns admitted. “Sometimes I’ve had the feeling I’ve lived before. Greece did that to me when I visited it.”

“For myself I agree with Mr. Zoehfeld that this is nonsense,” Dr. Tennison said briskly. “As a woman I’ve had to fight very hard to succeed in my profession, which is, I might add, a very scientific one, as well as one difficult to make a name in. I certainly refuse to believe that I didn’t have full control over it myself.”

Faber-Jones said cautiously, “Maybe it’s rather like being dealt a certain number of cards of varying quality, and a matter of how one plays those cards. That’s called karma, isn’t it? Choice, as Madame Karitska says, but within limits.”

“To a rational mind this is preposterous,” Zoehfeld said flatly.

“Frankly, I think we’ve had an overdose of rational minds in the world lately,” put in Lucas Johns. “They seem to create as many problems as they solve.”