A Simple Scale

by David Llewellyn

  You spent those first few weeks scouring newspapers for reports of a body found in a southern Nevada motel. The dead man’s identity a mystery or – if Nick had any ID – his reasons for being there under a false name unknown.

  “Said they came to see the bomb,” the motel manager would tell authorities. “Said they were brothers, but now I ain’t so sure.”

  “They seemed friendly enough,” the husband and father from Utah might say. “Real strange turnout of events.”

  But how could anyone connect you with Nick? His friends don’t know you and your friends don’t know him. That is the nature of this life; the threads that bind people together simply aren’t there. Death made him an island. And if the men in the Buick were watching the whole time, they simply didn’t care.

  In the morning you drink coffee and put on the same suit you wore to Ron’s funeral, but accompanied by a blue silk tie. You take a cab from Kalorama Heights to Independence Avenue, Angie sitting next to you, but when you ask if she’ll be there in the caucus room she shakes her head.

  “Why not?”

  “Because if they say anything to you, anything hurtful, I swear to God…”

  She looks away, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, and you tell her everything will be fine. This isn’t Soviet Russia. This isn’t Nazi Germany. They can’t make you disappear, and it’s not like you sold atomic secrets. What’s the worst they can do?

  But there’s plenty they could do, and both you and Angie know it.

  At Cannon House the corridors smell of wood polish and cigar smoke. You use the men’s room several times before the hearing, the last time staring down as nothing comes out. You’re standing there with your nervous, shrivelled dick in your hand when a familiar voice says, “I’m surprised you got anything left in there. What is this? Comfort Break Number Five, or Six?”

  Roy Carmichael, Capitol’s Head of Security. His back against the wall, his arms folded across his chest. What the hell is he doing here; and not just this restroom but D.C.? You don’t even need to ask him; it’s as if he can hear your thoughts.

  “Didn’t anyone tell you?” he says. “It’s Capitol day in Washington. I think they’re going studio by studio, so Capitol sent me here.”

  “But why?”

  “To talk to those artists who are appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Such as your good self.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “Mr Conrad. Your presence here, appearing before the men of the committee, may be an inconvenience to you, but it’s a cause of embarrassment for the studio. There are many at Capitol who would rather you were cast out into the wilderness. There are others who believe the current climate is unnecessary and bad for business.”

  “Which are you?”

  “I care only about protecting the property, personnel and reputation of the studio. While you are contracted to the music department at Capitol you are my business, but your continuing employment depends upon one thing.”

  “Which is?”

  He adopts a stentorian boom, his voice echoing off the tiled walls:

  “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

  “No.”

  “See, that sounds convincing, but you and I both know that men of your, uh, persuasion are born liars. Comes with the territory. So I’ll ask again. Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

  “No.”

  “And that’s the answer you’ll give out there?”

  “It is.”

  “And there is nothing, and I mean nothing they could have dug up that’ll contradict that?”

  “No.”

  “Good. That’s good. Well, while we’re here, and we have the privacy of this delightful men’s room – and I mean that, by the way… I mean, jeez… if this is what my tax dollars pay for… But while we’re here, I should tell you that if, for whatever reason, you come out of that room stained with even the slightest hint of red, you might as well stay here on the East Coast, because you will never work in Hollywood again.”

  He turns toward the door, pauses.

  “One last thing,” he says, gesturing to your crotch. “Don’t forget to do up your fly.”

  Chapter 27:

  MANHATTAN, OCTOBER 2001

  It was a Sunday, and the park was full of families. Typical for a weekend, but this was something else. There were so many of them, and it just kept getting busier. Children in cycling helmets riding stabilised bikes, people pushing prams. Old couples holding hands and struggling to keep up with their grandchildren. An almost forced normality. Everyone making that extra bit of effort to get things back to how they were.

  She reached the restaurant before Carol and took a seat near the window, looking out across the road to the far meadow. A little boy in an orange GAP hoodie was trying to get a kite in the air, but to no avail. After a while, Natalie found herself willing the bloody thing to take flight.

  Carol arrived, and after their greetings and double kisses they spent a moment scanning their menus. Natalie waited for Carol to suggest the drinks and Carol ordered them a pot of tea to share.

  “So,” Carol said, eventually. “I have been very busy with this assignment.”

  Carol’s accent was three parts French to one part Norwegian. She wore a uniform of black t-shirt and black jeans, and today she had on a black leather jacket. She’d always reminded Natalie of the heroine from a foreign detective novel, and today more than ever.

  Carol pursed her lips and breathed heavily through her nose. Without taking her eyes off the menu she continued:

  “The name. Sergey Grekov. It was familiar. I’ve seen him mentioned here and there. In some places, a violinist. In others, a composer. Perhaps one of the ‘disappeared’. I don’t know. But then, we are talking about the Soviet Union in the late 1930s…”

  “Pavel said his grandfather was sent away, to a prison camp.”

  “And the connection is Bernard?”

  “We think Ronald Bernard may have attended a performance of his grandfather’s ballet.”

  “Ah, yes yes yes!” said Carol, slamming down her menu. “April 1938.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The Kirov staged a ballet, based on Lermontov’s Un héros de notre temps, ah… A Hero of Our Time. Very unusual for the Kirov to stage a debut composer. This suggests perhaps the ballet was considered a prestige work, the sort of thing they staged for visiting dignitaries. And we know that Bernard was in Russia at this time. But typically, Modern Music has no online archive.”

  The tea arrived, and Carol poured them each a cup, very aware that she was keeping Natalie in suspense. Only when she had finished did she go on.

  “Fortunately, Columbia has the microfiche of the entire back catalogue.”

  Natalie breathed out.

  “So I looked up the fall issue of 1938. And yes – Ronald Bernard writes about new Soviet music. And he mentions a… wait, I have written it down…”

  Carol lifted her handbag onto the table and began rooting around in its contents. The chaos of that bag and the personal organiser she kept – its elastic band straining against notes and receipts – was surely a part of the act; the illusion of disorder, when Carol was anything but disorganised. She flicked through her notebook, found the page she was looking for, and read aloud:

  “‘Though their Union of Composers frowns upon atonality, there is a great deal of invention to be found in Russian music, and from the next generation of Soviet composers. In Leningrad, formerly St Petersburg, this reviewer saw an excellent new ballet based on a chapter from Lermontov’s novel A Hero of Our Time.’”

  “That’s it. That’s his grandfather’s ballet.”

  “Well, you see, that’s the interesting part. I searched everywhere, and do you think I could find any mention of the composer? No, I could not. There are mentions of the ballet, but no mention of who wrote it. You’d almost think Bernard liked the ballet but not th
e composer.”

  “But you’re saying it was the ballet that Bernard saw at the Kirov?”

  “Certainly. Geroy nashego vremeni. A few people have wondered who the composer was over the years, so we’re not the first. Some thought it was adapted from music for a play by Meyerhold, before he was…” Carol drew her finger across her throat and pulled a face. “Impossible to say, of course, without there being a score. Talking of which…”

  Natalie nodded and reached into her handbag. As she placed the score on the table she heard Carol draw breath.

  “May I…?”

  Natalie pushed the manuscript towards her, as if passing an enveloped bribe. Carol opened it and began leafing through the pages. Her breath trembled and her eyes glistened.

  “It’s genuine, yes? Not some… some hoax?”

  “I think it’s real.”

  “This could be very important. You do realise that?”

  Natalie nodded.

  “A composer hardly anyone has heard of. A piece of music very few people will have heard. Remarkable.”

  Natalie’s pulse quickened. With each page, Carol drew closer to the Pechorin March. If she saw it, she would recognise it and she would know. No alternative then but to announce this to the world. Journalists would begin scratching away at the story. Sol might not be a household name, but he had one claim to posterity and it was right there, on the page.

  But how? Natalie thought she had it. She had spent much of her walk from Midtown to the park going over everything she knew, until it came together, each piece slotting neatly with the last.

  “And the man who wrote this. You say his grandson is here, in New York?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why did he come to you?”

  Natalie thought she detected a note of envy.

  “Mr Conrad,” she replied.

  “It’s very sweet, you still calling him that.”

  “It would feel strange calling him anything else.”

  “But still, it is sweet. So… Sol Conrad. Ronald Bernard. I see.”

  “Pavel thought perhaps Bernard may have mentioned the ballet while they were together.”

  “Of course. But Mr Conrad remembers nothing?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “This is tragic.”

  “It is.”

  “I wonder,” said Carol. “What is left when the memory goes? Not a person, surely.”

  “Oh, he’s in there. It’s still him.”

  They ate their food and settled the bill. Outside the Tavern on the Green they hugged. Carol was effervescent.

  “This is so exciting,” she said. “Please. Let me know what happens, and if you need any more help… oh! This is wonderful. Formidable! Incroyable! Joyeux!”

  They embraced once more and headed off in their separate directions; Carol going to the nearest subway and Natalie to the nearest bar. Her cell phone showed three missed calls from Pavel. He’d left a voicemail asking where she’d taken his grandfather’s score. She thumbed a short reply, telling him that she and her friend were spending the rest of the day at Columbia; that she would take good care of the manuscript and return it to him the following day. As soon as the message was sent she turned off her phone and left it at the bottom of her handbag.

  The bar was an “Irish Pub”. Neon shamrock in the window. Bare brick walls, wooden floors. The music just a little too loud for anyone to hold a conversation. The clientele consisted largely of tourists with Bloomingdales bags, ordering platters of overpriced, under-fleshed Buffalo wings. The jukebox was playing a strange medley of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Britney Spears and Chuck Berry.

  Natalie drank a beer and chased it down with vodka. The song on the jukebox came to an end and she heard familiar strings. It was the same Sinatra song they’d danced to on the pier.

  She wasn’t superstitious. It couldn’t mean anything. Just coincidence. She turned to face an emptier part of the bar, away from the tourists and the bartenders, her jaw trembling and her eyes beginning to burn. Why couldn’t Pavel have told her he was in it for the money and nothing else? It would have been easier then.

  When her tears had dried, Natalie turned back to her drink. She was nearing the bottom of the glass. The temptation was to order another, to keep drinking until she no longer knew where she was. That desire to numb herself was getting worse, and it wasn’t just sadness she wished to numb, but every last troubling emotion.

  Chapter 28:

  LENINGRAD, APRIL 1938

  One glass of champagne, and he’s intoxicated. The ballroom’s chandeliers spin like fireworks. The string quartet plays the Gopak with such gusto it’s as if the whole room is dancing around him. Strangers shake his hand, kiss his cheeks, tell him his ballet is a triumph, simply a triumph, but their compliments feel distant, as if they should be offering them to someone else.

  Remizov takes his arm and walks him around the room. Here are men from Moscow, “important men”, who toast his good health and tell him they expect great things in the future. Here is the committee he was telling him about. Here are the people from Ogoniok.

  Remizov smells strongly of French cologne. Whenever they stop to talk to someone new he places his hand in the small of Sergey’s back. Sergey shifts awkwardly and Remizov’s hand falls away. They move on, from a party man and his wife, and Remizov murmurs, “I’m sorry.”

  “What for?”

  “You know what. You must know. I find you very attractive.”

  He’s a comical figure when he’s like this. Desperate for affection. He could have his pick of the boys in the reserve troupe. None of them would dare turn down a union secretary. When did this infatuation begin? Sergey laughs.

  “Is that so?” he says. “I never would have guessed.”

  “I do,” says Remizov. “And I suppose it’s too much to hope you feel the same way about me.”

  He avoids giving an answer.

  “Where are these Americans you keep telling me about?” he asks.

  Remizov takes a moment to collect himself. His rigid smile returns, his chest and shoulders expand, and he takes Sergey on another breathless sweep of the room.

  Exhausting. The day began early, and he spent last night staring at the shadows on his bedroom ceiling. He should have gone to the brothel on Kazanskaya Street. They know him there, and the girls are cleaner than some other places. A quick fuck and he might have slept – it usually does the trick – but instead he lay there and imagined, over and over, everything that could possibly go wrong. An audience of bored faces. The orchestra playing out of time or out of tune. The dancers lumbering around the stage like graceless apes.

  None of that matters now that he’s the toast of the Kirov. No! Leningrad. There will be a review in tomorrow’s Pravda, of course; written by Remizov, or another of the Old Men of the Union, declaring A Hero of Our Time a triumph and its composer the heir to Mussorgsky. He will win prizes and become the youngest person accepted into the union’s inner circle. From there, it’s merely a case of biding his time. People like Remizov are politicians first, artists not even second or third, and politicians come and go. But a composer could climb the ranks quickly and stay there, if he knows how to play his hand. And Sergey has always known how to play his hand.

  “This way,” says Remizov, squeezing Sergey’s arm. “This way!”

  Another group. The peacocks from the Kirov.

  “Here,” Remizov says, and then, in English, his voice raised: “Let me introduce our young maestro. Sergey Andreievich Grekov.”

  The guests put down their drinks and applaud him again, and Sergey bows. It’s the sort of gesture that would be frowned upon elsewhere; too old fashioned, too much like the old way of doing things. But here it’s accepted, even encouraged. This whole evening is a performance; not just what happened on stage and in the orchestra pit, but here in the ballroom of the Hotel Astoria. This is a pageant of Old Russian hospitality, culture and charm, preserved for the sake of outside eyes.

  “And th
ese people,” says Remizov, switching back to Russian, but giving each person their title in English. “Meester Charles Fanshawe and Meeses Doris Fanshawe. Meester Lawrence Black. Meester Langdon Brunel. Meeses Penelope Markham-Riley. Meese Dorothy Markham. Meester William Kaufman. Meester Ronald Bernard. And Meester…”

  His mouth falls open. The last person he introduced, Ronald Bernard, smiles. Sergey has heard of him. An American composer. Not as old as he’d imagined, perhaps late thirties, but serious, professorial. Beside him, a young man with dark brown hair that falls across his eyes in a long fringe.

  “I am very sorry,” says Remizov, in English. “Your name?”

  “Solomon,” the young man replies, a little sourly. He glances at Bernard with a flicker of resentment. “Solomon Cohen.”

  Remizov beams. “Meester Solomon Cohen.”

  The young man and Sergey exchange a smile. The visitors take it in turns to approach Sergey and tell him how much they enjoyed his ballet. All in English, of course, until he comes to Bernard, who speaks in near-flawless Russian.

  “A great work,” says the American. “I mean it. If this ballet is anything to go by, you are destined for great things.”

  Great things. A world tour. Lauded in the cities of America and Europe. The deck of a steamship, sailing into the harbour of New York City. An aeroplane, taking off from Shosseinaya airfield and touching down at Le Bourget. Crowds gathering to greet him.

  “We must have a photograph!” bellows Remizov, again in English. “Photograph! We must have a photograph!”

  The photographer scurries over, attaching the flash to his camera. He jerks his head this way and that, sizing up the group.

  “Yes, yes,” he says, and then, in Russian, “Closer together. Everybody closer.”

  Remizov translates, orchestrating the group into two rows, with Sergey at the back, situated between the Americans.