The Clairvoyant Countess (6 page)

“Right,” he said, and with a sigh left an extremely comfortable chair to return to work.

Madame Karitska had three appointments that day. One of them surprised even her: she had reason to speak some very tough words to a spoiled, middle-aged woman who not only accepted them with good grace but left behind twenty-five dollars in the basket by the door. Between appointments Madame Karitska accomplished her chores with one or another of the fourteen rings on her fingers. She learned from the rings a great deal about St. Bonaventure’s School and about the sort of boys who went there, as well as their grievances, affections, hatreds, and resentments, but by midnight she had learned nothing that would help Lieutenant Pruden.

“However,” she told him at nine the next morning when she telephoned him, “there is one child there who is extremely disturbed about his family. I’m sorry that I can be of no help to you about the thefts but I pick up—I can only call them
tragic
emanations—from one of the rings. I want to talk to this boy if I may. The initials on his ring are”—she held up the ring to the light—“G.U.O.”

“If it has nothing to do with the thefts,” began Lieutenant Pruden.

She said crisply, “Please give me the name of this child.”

Pruden sighed. She heard the crackling of paper; a list was apparently consulted and the lieutenant replied, “That would be Gavin Ulbright O’Connell, I daresay.”

“Thank you. Shall I visit him at school, or would you suggest bringing him here to me?” She added gently, “I can only tell you, my dear Lieutenant Pruden, that this is of far more importance than nine thefts. To Bonaventure’s as well as to the child.”

“You don’t care to explain?”

“I cannot possibly. I’m not being difficult, it is not clear to me yet, I can only compare it to reception being confused by static. But something is wrong.”

Pruden was silent and then he said, “I’ll telephone St. Bonaventure’s and see what can be arranged.”

When he called back ten minutes later it was to say that any interview would have to wait until Monday. “The office tells me that this morning the boy’s father telephoned and asked that Gavin be sent home for the weekend. They’re putting him on the four-o’clock train for Princeton.”

“Isn’t that rather unusual?”

“Yes, but the father was very firm.”

Madame Karitska felt suddenly chilled. She said, “Bring him here before he leaves, will you?”

“Madame Karitska, for heaven’s sake—”

“I think it can be managed if you yourself personally volunteer to escort him to the train afterward, don’t you?”

“Look, I’m a busy man,” growled Pruden.

“I believe you will find the stolen crosses hidden
somewhere in the chapel of St. Bonaventure’s,” she told him quietly. “You can tell me whether I’m correct when you bring the boy here at three o’clock.” She hung up.

At three o’clock there was a knock on Madame Karitska’s door and opening it she nodded to Pruden and then turned her attention to the young boy beside him. “Gavin?” she said lightly.

The boy nodded. He was slightly built, small for his fourteen years, with sensitive, finely drawn features in a face that was strikingly pale at the moment. “I have to get home,” he told her edgily. “I’m wanted. Will this take long?”

“Come in, won’t you? I want to talk to you, Gavin.”

“Why?”

“I want you to go home tomorrow, or even later. I do not wish to see you go home tonight.”

“Hey, now wait a minute,” broke in Pruden.

Madame Karitska looked at him. “Gavin knows what I mean. Gavin knows exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you, Gavin?”

The boy looked up at her in astonishment. Suddenly a look of infinite relief illuminated his face and he burst into tears. He walked into her arms and she held him.

“Let him cry,” Madame Karitska said to Pruden, and over the boy’s shoulder added, “Did you discover anything in the chapel?”

“Nothing yet, but they’ve only begun searching. Look, what is it with this boy? I talked to the school psychologist about him and he says he’s unusually bright, stable, interested in his studies—”

“He’s quite normal,” said Madame Karitska, “but he
has one—deformity, shall we say? He’s extremely psychic. I also get the impression looking at him that he’s been severely punished for it as a child. It is not something he’d mention to anyone.”

“In the meantime, if he stays here much longer it’ll be kidnapping.”

“Then arrest me,” she said tartly.

“Look, all I did was ask you to examine fourteen rings—”

“The ways of God and karma are exceeding wondrous, are they not?”

“His parents—”

“Hush. If you know the parents’ address you must send them a wire. Tell them he missed the train, tell them he has German measles, tell them he sprained his ankle. Tell them he will come tomorrow, or Sunday.”

“Madame Karitska, for heaven’s sake, I’m a policeman!”

She said stiffly, “I am a somewhat reputable person myself. Very well, give me their address and I shall send the wire myself. Gavin—?”

Sniffing and blowing his nose, Gavin blurted out the address. “But don’t you think—oh, don’t you think I
must
go?” he cried, beginning to tremble again.

Madame Karitska smiled tenderly at him. “We will speak of it later, Gavin. You are very tired but there is nothing you can do. It is cruel to say but true.” To Pruden she said, “I will send the wire, don’t worry. Come back this evening if you like, and see how we fare. In the meantime Gavin and I shall have some dinner, and I shall tell him stories about other people
with the sixth sense. He may come to feel it not a sin or a crime after all.”

“How did you know I thought it a sin?” asked Gavin.

“Ah—I too was once beaten for it,” she assured him cheerfully.

By ten o’clock that evening Gavin was restless to the point of feverishness. “Oh please,” he begged Madame Karitska. “It was my father who phoned, you know. Shouldn’t I go home?
Shouldn’t
I?”

“Perhaps you would care to talk about it now?”

The boy shivered. “No I can’t, it’s too horrible. I can’t, and anyway it can’t be true, I don’t believe it.”

She tucked him into bed and told him a few stories of yogis in the East. He was asleep when Pruden knocked at the door. It was late, nearly midnight.

“You must be very quiet,” she cautioned him, letting him inside. “It’s better for him to sleep.”

Pruden threw himself across the couch and said almost angrily, “We found every one of the stolen items in the chapel. Every one of them except the chess pieces. It took hours and I’m exhausted.”

“The chess pieces had crosses on them, didn’t they?” asked Madame Karitska.

“Yes, but how the devil did you know that?”

At that moment a terrible cry came from the bedroom, the door was suddenly snatched open, almost torn from its hinges, and Gavin stood there with burning eyes. “I have to go home!” he shouted, and then he screamed, a terrible heart-rending scream, and fainted.

As Pruden caught the boy and laid him on the couch
Madame Karitska said in a quiet voice, “It is two minutes after midnight.”

It was during his lunch hour the next day, twelve hours later, that Pruden brought her the newspaper and wearily handed it to her. “Second page, third paragraph,” he said tonelessly, and sat down rather abruptly.

Madame Karitska read the words softly aloud. “ ‘
MODEL FATHER KILLS FAMILY AND SELF
. Five Dead in Princeton.’ ”

“Shortly after midnight,” added Pruden in a strained voice. “Gavin’s the only surviving member of the family, except nobody knew he’d survived until I told the Chief this morning that he’s safe.” He added savagely, “You knew?”

“No,” she said calmly, “but Gavin did. It was his terror I picked up, his terror over something at his home.”

“ ‘Model father,’ it says,” put in Pruden.

“Yes,” said Madame Karitska sadly, “but what, after all, is a model, and who makes one? I suspect that at Christmas holidays Gavin sensed a change, a terrible change to despair. He sensed violence hanging over the house.”

“But surely something could have been done—”

“How? Would you have believed him if he was capable of explaining?”

“But he wanted to go back—”

Madame Karitska sighed. “Because he is a very warm-hearted boy who loves his family, but if he had gone he would be dead too. I wonder if I have done him such a favor after all. So many gone!” She shook her head. “What will happen to Gavin now?”

“Well, I visited the school and they plan to offer Gavin anything he needs: legal guardianship, a scholarship, counseling, surrogate parents … a rather nice outfit, Bonaventure’s. The Princeton police tell me there’s an uncle too—his mother’s brother—in the Peace Corps somewhere in Africa. He’s flying back to handle things, but under the circumstances I believe Gavin’s life will continue uninterrupted at Bonaventure’s.”

She nodded. “At least you can assure them, Lieutenant, that there will be no more thefts at the school. I can safely guarantee that now.”

Pruden looked at her in astonishment. “You mean Gavin
did
—? You mean
he
—? But I thought you said—”

“When I first saw the list I began to wonder,” she said. “I thought at first of someone with a fetish. Did you not find it odd that so many of the stolen objects were crosses? Perhaps you assumed they were stolen only because they had monetary value. Gavin took them for protection, not for profit.”

“Protection?”

“The cross is still believed to be a protection against evil, is it not? Gavin believed he was doomed to die, and by some kind of demonic violence. Oh, he stole several other items to make it less obvious, but he stole the crosses to carry about with him on his person.”

“But with all that he would have gone
willingly
home?” protested Pruden. “For God’s sake, why?”

“How is your father these days?” asked Madame Karitska gently. “I trust he is recovering well?”

Pruden looked startled and then thoughtful, and was silent.

Madame Karitska was going shopping this morning at Banmaker’s, a delight very new to her, and although she intended to buy only a few yards of silk she had arranged her adventure as if it were a trip to Europe. She agreed with Gurdjieff, whom she had known at one point in her life, that one of the most important foods, second only to plant foods, was the ingestion of new impressions to stimulate and nourish the spirit. She chose to walk to the store by a route that was colorful to the eye, and upon arriving at Banmaker’s she stood transfixed at the entrance, absorbing the marvels before her: broad aisles, brilliant lights and colors; books in bright jackets with letters fairly catapulting from the page to catch the eye; purses of leather and velvet and tapestry heaped in piles; a ribbon counter dazzling
with stripes of fuchsia, melon, scarlet, pink, orange, blues.

Like a bazaar in Samarkand, she thought, taken back to her youth for a moment. Dreamily she began to stroll the aisles in search of her silks until bolt after bolt of rich fabric caught her eye near the Eighteenth Street entrance. As she moved toward them her mind was already sketching the long skirt she would cut and stitch out of an as-yet-unmet rainbow color. The essential problem behind frugality and poverty, she reflected, was that it denied such whims as these small ventures into elegance. She planned to feel very elegant indeed soon.

She fingered the materials: there was a taffeta that moved with a sound like running water, a velvet that lay warmly, solidly, in the hand.… Abruptly Madame Karitska turned, aware of a crackling hostility in the air, an almost physical feeling of tension nearby.

She saw a man standing not far away from her in the niche beside the elevators. He was solidly built, coatless, and narrow-eyed. He wore a dark suit with a carnation in his lapel and he stood his ground with an air of authority. His gaze was fixed upon someone in the aisle beyond. Turning further, Madame Karitska followed his gaze to the next aisle and saw that it was the jewelry counter. At one end a sleek woman in mink was slanting her head to study more closely the effect of a glittering bracelet on her wrist. The salesclerk fluttered over her effusively. At the other end of the counter a young man stood in front of a display of ornate necklaces.

There was no doubt that it was the young man who was under surveillance, and certainly his presence at
such a counter was conspicuous. He wore bleached, mended blue-jeans and a wrinkled, navy-blue wool shirt. When he turned his head—rather furtively, thought Madame Karitska, as if to be sure no one was watching—she noted an unkempt dark beard. There was also a great deal of unkempt hair above the nape of his neck. He looked as if he had not washed in a week; he definitely looked as if he lacked the money to buy his lunch, yet he was rooted squarely in front of an array of semiprecious stones set artistically into silver. Oh, very suspicious indeed!

Impulsively Madame Karitska moved toward him, following silks into wools and then cottons. She arrived beside the young man just as he leaned over the glass surface that protected the necklaces, and just as he boldly pulled out half a dozen from beneath. His movement was so swift, so sure, that the necklaces were almost in his pocket before Madame Karitska could reach him.