The Burden of Proof

  Stern, in response, could manage only one of his Latin shrugs. He felt for Nate, though, at the thought of him watching that tape and witnessing all the harm he had done. That truly was not in Nate’s character, the inflicting of pain. Oddly, Stern felt a bond to him, joined by the embarrassments which they’d unwittingly shared. He knew Nate’s shame, and Nate, of course, had known his for years.

  “All in all, I’d say Fiona was actually kind of spunky. You want to know what she said? This’ll tickle you. She said men still find her very attractive. She’s certain that as soon as we’re divorced there’ll be all kinds of fellas in hot pursuit. She actually mentioned your name. After tellin’ me how she’d been making up stories. Can you beat that?” Nate laughed, but something in Stern’s look made him cut himself off. “You can do what you want, you know.”

  “Of course,” said Stern. No more. It made for an uneasy moment, but he felt obliged not to join any conspiracies against Fiona. They had their own compact now, and Stern sensed from what Nate had said that Fiona and he might have matters to sort out. If so, he had only himself to blame.

  Stern saw Nate to the door. When he began to castigate himself again, Stern held up a hand.

  “I know what it means to maintain a confidence, Nate. Clara had her secret and you were obliged to keep it.”

  Nate waited. His mind seemed to be working ahead. Stern wondered if there was more that Nate had determined not to tell him out of some vestigial duty to Clara. Nate seemed to read that thought.

  “I don’t know who it was, Sandy, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  The sound of it was so gross that Stern’s impulse was to deny that he had any curiosity. But of course that was not true.

  “She told me years ago that the person, whoever, was aware of the problem. That was the only thing I had the right to be concerned about. The relationship was already over when she came to me.” Nate looked at him helplessly. “I assume it was a man. These days—” He lifted a hand.

  “Yes, of course,” said Stern. Of course. This possibility, briefly contemplated, Stern rejected.

  They shook hands. When Nate was gone, Stern returned to the solarium and the row of family photos lined up in their frames on the game table. A picture of Clara as a very young woman was at the end. She was dressed in a white blouse and pleated skirt, posing in her page boy with a hand on the newel of the central staircase of the Mittler family home. Her smile looked coaxed at best, a wrinkle of hope managed against deep currents of resistance. The world was at war then, and even at the age of thirteen or fourteen, Clara Mittler seemed to have her doubts about the future.

  40

  IF ONE THOUGHT ABOUT IT CAREFULLY, as Stern had for three days now, this was not a theft. Not legally. The property in question, the safe, was lawfully in his custody, not Dixon’s. And the risks of prosecution, in any event, were nil; neither Dixon nor Silvia would ever prefer charges. This action was simply an expediency. He had taken advantage of Silvia by asking about the safe. Involving her in its return, in light of Dixon’s iron-headed determination not to yield to the government, would compromise her unforgivably with her husband. This solution was dramatic, effective, and, given Dixon’s conduct, richly deserved. But in the car with Remo, driving from the highway through the wooded hills with their subdevelopments and residuum of baronial estates, Stern was beset with considerable anxiety—he had not made a court appearance in twenty years that had frightened him the same way. His bowels and his bladder both seemed on the verge of becoming unpredictable, and throughout his entire upper body there was a palpable tremor. Suppose the brawny German driver came in and resorted to violence? What if the police were somehow advised and entered with guns drawn? Stern, on a dozen occasions, had imagined Remo and him bloodied or massacred.

  Remo, driving his old Mercury, was cheerful. He loved his work. He had urged Stern to allow him to do this alone, but that was unthinkable. If someone intruded, Stern, whatever the embarrassment, could explain, but Remo alone might come to real grief. As it was, the risks—at least as they could be calculated—were minimal. The Hartnells would be at the club, Dixon shooting a late round of golf, Silvia sunning herself by the pool, and on a Sunday afternoon no one else would be home. The cook and the houseman were both dismissed at 2 p.m. The driver stayed with the car, cooling his heels behind the clubhouse. As long as the weather was good—and the sky was crystalline as they drove—the plan was flawless.

  Behind the wheel, Remo smoked his cigarette and chatted companionably.

  “I ain’ done houses much,” said Remo. “Not since I’m young. There ain’t no good guys to work with. Them burglars, they’re all crazy. I’ll never forget, I’m eighteen, nineteen, a guy got me on a job, one of them places down near the river. You know, real fancy apartment. Knocked the door right off the hinges. Jesus, the stuff these people had, real nice stuff, beautiful.” Remo lifted two fingertips to his lips and made a kiss. “We got what we got, and I come in the living room and this son of a buck, Sangretti his name is, he’s got his pants down and he’s taking a shit, right there on the rug. I says, What the fuck is this? You know, and since, I heard all the time about burglars do stuff like that. In somebody’s house, for Chrissake?”

  Stern, too nervous to respond directly, nodded and for whatever reason felt obliged to explain again that this was not a burglary. The house was his sister’s; it was a practical joke of sorts within the family. An ironic glimmer came into Remo’s eyes. He needed no excuses; he knew how it was. Everybody wanted things and did what they had to. Remo was one of those crooks who believe that they are no worse than anyone else.

  Sensing this judgment, Stern nearly spoke up in his own defense. He was not one of those lawyers, the state court sharpies with the razor cuts who worked only for the Boys, and who took payment in cocaine, or hot artwork, or, in one instance Stern had heard of years before, a hit on his wife. As a young lawyer, he had done things for money on occasion, some of them nasty enough that he no longer cared to recall them. But one of the clearest grains in his character as a lawyer was the desire to let his clients know that he did not wade in the same polluted waters they did. The utter meanness of this conviction—and its dubious basis—came home to him with sudden disturbing clarity: a visit to yet one more unattractive aspect of his soul. These months of gazing inward had been a little like a trip to a freak show, with the sheer ugliness of what he found never quite overcoming his compulsion to look.

  Following Stern’s directions, Remo proceeded down the narrow wooded road fronting Dixon and Silvia’s home. The house itself, erected more than a century ago of stone and heavy joints of mortar, was below them, behind a quarter mile of lawn, which itself was interrupted by a lighted tennis court. Behind the house, Lake Fowler twinkled, dotted with speedboats and small craft under sail.

  “Nice,” Remo said. He turned the car around and parked so that it was partially obscured by the untamed shrubbery that grew up with summer lushness along the roadside. They would walk in, Remo said, down the long gravel drive. After they had the safe, one of them could bring the car down. Never park, Remo told him, where it was easy to cut you off. Stern absorbed these lessons in silence, noting that Remo accepted none of his reassurances about the safety of the job.

  They walked to the rear of the house, Remo appreciatively examining the grounds. A number of large blue spruce rose throughout the sloping lawn, and the air was freshened somehow by the clear water of the lake. Behind the patio, the gardeners this year had laid out a bright patch of small summer flowers, most so exotic that Stern did not know their names. He looked down to the lake. The boathouse was below and, beside it, a waterfront cottage that Dixon had winterized and filled with athletic equipment. Last year, he had also added a lap pool, and the long finger of still, blue water glimmered. Beside a large screened porch, Remo now looked the great house up and down. Following Remo’s eye, Stern saw that it was the power and phone lines, not the architecture, Remo was assessing. He questioned S
tern again about the burglar alarm. Remo had a hand on the metal junction box, and he reached to his back pocket for a tool. He worked there awhile, then waved a number of wires that he had pulled free.

  “Is that all?” asked Stern across the yard.

  “That’s it.”

  Remo entered through the screen porch. He had a slap hammer with him, inserted like the other tools in various pockets and covered by the tails of a long velour shirt. For his day on Lake Fowler, Remo had worn blue jeans and cowboy boots. Stern thought he looked very much like a burglar, thickset, with bulky arms and bowed legs.

  Remo had driven the lock through the barrel of the doorknob by the time Stern had followed him onto the porch. The back door was secured by a chain. Remo asked if he should pull it free or break the glass. Whichever was more authentic, Stern answered. It was important that it look like a burglary, not for Dixon’s sake—he would know what had happened—but for everyone else’s. After the break-in was discovered, the police would comb the house but find nothing missing. Only Dixon, eventually, would recognize what was gone and he was in no position to file a police report admitting that the safe had ever been here. Stern regretted upsetting his sister—he might let her know somehow that he was involved—but Dixon’s consternation he would savor. Done in on his own turf. Dixon would be livid, unhinged with rage. Standing in the shade of the porch, Stern actually chuckled.

  Remo, preoccupied, raised one heavy boot, bracing himself against the wall of the porch, and gave the door a tremendous kick. It flew open with an explosion of plaster dust and the breaking of glass. “Shit,” said Remo. The back window had shattered from the impact as the door sprang back. The first plan, thought Stern in spite of himself, gone awry.

  Like much of the house, the hallways were stone; the taps on Remo’s heels resounded. He looked about freely as Stern showed him to the staircase. The home had been built in the 1870s, with period elegance—twelve-foot ceilings and tiered moldings. In the dining room a circular mosaic of Venetian tiles was laid in the stone floor. The stillness of the unoccupied house set a shiver in the bottom of Stern’s spine. He thought about using the toilet, but he wanted to get in and out quickly. This was a bad idea, he thought suddenly. Terrible. Something was sure to go wrong. Remo leaned into a front parlor to admire the French antiques and the pictures on the walls, English watercolors mounted in heavy frames. “Beautiful, beautiful,” said Remo. The wealth of the house, perfectly composed here in its unoccupied state, impressed even Stern.

  Upstairs, they moved into the enormous master suite. Dixon years ago had combined three or four rooms to get what he wanted, a bedroom area on the palatial scale of Beverly Hills. There were two baths, his and hers. Dixon’s, through which they walked, a cavern of travertine, held a Jacuzzi the size of a small swimming pool, and a one-bay wooden sauna attached to the shower. The bedroom itself was not particularly large, but it was festooned with various gizmos—intercoms, a telescope, an old market ticker, a large projection TV which pivoted on a remote control over the bed. A deck out the French doors provided a commanding view of the lake. On the side of the bed where Dixon slept, the antique night table was stacked with business magazines and a number of thrillers. An ashtray held the butts of three cigarettes. Stern felt oddly thrilled by the chance to spy.

  “Here,” Remo called. He had entered the walk-in closet on Dixon’s side of the room and cleared away his suits. “That it?”

  The safe was right there, dull gray, the color of seawater under clouds, turned on its back, so that the silver numerical dial was face up. A set of free weights was beside it, the plates haphazardly stacked; a bar, with three dishes on each side, had been rolled to the wall.

  “Just so,” said Stern.

  “Get back,” said Remo. Stern moved into the room. “Oh, my fucking God.” Remo swung the safe out the door and set it down promptly. “That’s a fuckin ton.” He stood up straight to rub his back. “We shoulda brought help.”

  Both men stared at the safe.

  “Thing’s open,” said Remo. With the safe set on its bottom again, its small door indeed hung open a dark fingerbreadth. Dixon, evidently, had checked the contents, perhaps to be certain that Stern had left them undisturbed. Or could it be that whatever the government was seeking had been removed? With this thought, that the safe had been emptied, Stern knelt immediately and pulled the door wider. The light was poor, but he could see that there was a wad of papers inside, folded, doubled and tripled over.

  There, on his hands and knees, even before he made out the sound, Stern could feel the vibration of the garage door opening.

  “Oh, my Lord.” He rose awkwardly and ran a few steps to the doorway to listen. He faced Remo. “Someone is here.” Outside, he had heard the gravel crunching, but by the time he reached the bedroom window he could see only the rear fender of a Mercedes as it pulled into the farthest bay of the four-car garage.

  “Oh, for Godsake,” said Stern. He had not fully imagined how humiliating this was going to be. It was a shocking breach of decorum—inexcusable, inexplicable—breaking into someone’s home.

  “Hide,” said Stern.

  “Hide?” asked Remo. “What for?” An eyebrow lowered. “You mean this ain’ really your sister’s?”

  “Of course it is. But I prefer not to be apprehended in this silly exercise.”

  “I been caught,” said Remo. “Lots. I don’t never hide. Guys get shot like that. Just siddown. Be quiet. Maybe they ain’t comin upstairs.” Following his own advice, Remo found one of the eighteenth-century French chairs beside Silvia’s writing desk. He crossed his legs and smiled patiently at Stern. He reached to his pocket for a cigarette, then thought better of that.

  Remo was right, Stern thought. His own reactions were juvenile. Particularly if it was the houseman or the driver, there would be real danger in some effort to avoid him. But Stern’s skin still crawled. Dixon would never let him live this down. He would ridicule, threaten—whatever advantage he could wring from having caught Stern in flagrante burglary would be utilized repeatedly. Stern crept into the carpeted corridor, stepping forward with breathtaking precision, like a pantomime character. In some unconscious japery of this task, he had dressed all in black, in slacks and a cotton golf shirt, and he hung back now in the shadows.

  He could hear the steps rapping out in the stone hallways downstairs, an even slapping rather than the sharp clack of a woman’s high heels. Would Dixon be violent? His temper with Stern was ordinarily restrained, but this was a much different setting. If someone popped out of the shadows in Stern’s home, what would his reaction be? Probably to run. But that was Stern.

  The footfalls drew near the stairs. Stern pushed back into one of the doorways. Whoever was down there lingered, then walked away. With a desperate plunge of his heart, Stern recalled the kitchen. The narrow hall from the garage emerged right beside it; if the person who’d entered noticed the broken glass, he would surely hale the police. Stern listened intently; if there was a voice on the phone, he was determined to run. He looked about to see where he was—Dixon’s den. Fax, computers, three telephones. The old rolltop desk was heaped with papers, and the shades, for whatever reason, were drawn. A pillow and a blanket were on the sofa. Dixon, he took it, was not sleeping well. This room, more than the rest of the house, was rank with the rancid smell of cigarettes.

  The footsteps came back. Then nothing. After a short time, he realized the visitor had started up the carpeted stairs. Stern pushed back farther, so that he could see only the landing. The person was upstairs now, but Stern had not yet caught sight of the figure. Then Silvia, in a graffiti-patterned beach cover-up and flat shoes, passed by, looking about, wholly abstracted, mumbling to herself. She pushed her sunglasses up so they sat atop her upswept hairdo. Like Dixon, she was richly tanned. She was headed for the bedroom where Remo waited.

  Stern held his head and, after one more second’s faltering, called his sister’s name.

  She shrieked—not for long,
but at a high, hysterical pitch.

  “Oh, my God,” said Silvia. She had laid one hand, with its polished nails, over her heart and the other touched the wall. She was breathing deeply. “Sender,” she said. “You nearly killed me.”

  “Forgive me.”

  “What in the world?” she asked.

  Stern actually deliberated saying that he had come to go swimming. But enough was enough.

  “I am stealing something,” he answered.

  She took only a second with that. “The safe?”

  He nodded. Silvia’s expression became cross—powerfully irritated. She spoke to him in Spanish for the first time in probably forty years: What is in the safe?

  “¿Qué es lo que contiene la caja de seguridad?”

  “No sé.’” I do not know.

  “¿Esto es para ayudarlo?” This is to help him?

  Stern shrugged. “I believe so,” he answered in English. “I must do this, in any event.”

  “Give me a moment. I want to speak with you about all of this. I came back for a book.” She turned again toward her room, but Stern took her hand. There was a man he had brought with him in there, he told her.

  “Oh, Alejandro!” She shook her head in severest reproof. “You are like two boys, you and Dixon.”

  “This is a serious matter.”

  She made a disgusted sound. She refused to believe it.

  Stern led her downstairs to the living room. Silvia, unfailingly polite, offered him a drink, and he asked for soda. She tapped her shoe for a moment on the servant’s button in the carpet beside the sofa, then, recalling it was Sunday, went off by herself. Stern looked about the vast living room. Silvia and her decorator had strived for a crowded, almost Egyptian effect; the colors were dark, with many eruptions of gold in the fabrics, and there was furniture in all corners—chaises, heavy drapes, twin antimacassars with a whiskery fringe, adorned, for no apparent reason, with voile shawls. On a table was a huge vase of woolly protea, dark desert plants with a primeval look. The far wall of the room was all stone, like the facing walls of the house, with an enormous hearth of double-width beams. An original oil by a well-known Spanish artist—one of his savage women, purchased years ago by Dixon, with his inevitably astute eye—hung fearsomely over the fireplace. In the winter, logs the size of tree trunks burned here all day. They left, even now, a smoky residue, as if the air had been cured.