Unfinished Sympathy

by Andy Conway

  They skidded to a stop and peered down.

  A drop to the roof of the next building. Only fifteen feet.

  “We have to jump down,” said Mitch. “It’s the only way out.”

  “I’ll go first,” said Gustav. “Then you lower Alma to me.”

  He gripped the edge of the roof, swung round and hung for a moment, then dropped with a crash to the roof below with a cry of, “Ach!”

  “Turn to me, Alma. Take my hands.”

  She turned and squatted on the edge of the roof, as if she might roll back. Mitch gripped her hands and thought of the night she’d taken his hands and planted the kiss on his lips. He felt a sudden bloom of desire for her touch again.

  Alma edged back and slipped off the edge, scraping her knees and crying out in pain. She hung there and Mitch juddered forward, trying to hold her weight.

  “Let go!” Gustav cried from below.

  Mitch opened his palms and Alma screamed and dropped.

  Falling to his knees with a gasp, Mitch peered over the edge and saw her in Gustav’s arms.

  An explosion behind. Glass shattering and falling to the street. A window bursting with the heat. The smoke plumes enveloping the building at the rear as well as the front now.

  A cloud of smoke billowed towards him and he couldn’t shake off the feeling that it was a malevolent cloud of evil, chasing him.

  He turned and gripped the gutter and hung there, watching the black cloud scud across the roof for his face.

  Then he let go and dropped.

  — 40 —

  THEY RAN ACROSS THE lower roof frantically searching for a way out.

  “There!” Alma cried, pointing to the corner of the building.

  The top of a ladder, lipping the edge of the roof. They ran towards it. A rickety old wrought iron ladder that led all the way down to the floor of an alley between this building and the next — the mirror to the alley they had gone up to find a back entrance to the warehouse.

  Gustav touched the ladder and gasped, pulling his hand back like he’d been burnt.

  “Ice,” he said, pulling his gloves from his pocket. “Almschi, do you have gloves?”

  She dug in her overcoat pocket and pulled out a pair of velvet gloves.

  “Good,” said Gustav. “This is going to be treacherous. Adagio.”

  Mitch had no gloves. He wondered how easy it would be or if his hands would stick to the metal. Perhaps if both Gustav and Alma went down first wearing their gloves, they would scrape off most of the ice.

  He knew they wouldn’t.

  Gustav took the ladder, inching down, ponderous, coughing, and Mitch wondered if the composer had the strength to hold on till the end.

  When Gustav was a good twenty rungs down, Alma turned and embraced Mitch, holding him tight to her body.

  He felt the lick of desire inside himself again, as he’d felt it the night she’d kissed him. He gripped her closer.

  “Thank you,” she said. “For rescuing me.”

  “It was all Gustav,” he said.

  “I know it was you.”

  She pulled her face away from his chest and he wanted to pull her back to him.

  Her eyes roamed his face and she sank to his lips.

  Her lips on his.

  The taste of her.

  Sweet surrender.

  He swooned with the desire to sink into her, onto her.

  “Come on!” Gustav shouted from below.

  She stepped away from him, awkward, her velvet-gloved fingers lingering across his cheek. Gripping her skirts, she edged around and mounted the ladder, taking each rung one careful step at a time.

  Mitch glanced back across the roof. Flames now licking the edge of the building. He sank to his hands and knees and peered down. Gustav was at the bottom, looking up anxiously. Alma’s hat blew off her head and fluttered to the dank alley below. The ladder vibrated with her steps.

  A crash of glass and a great boom from the warehouse. A floor collapsing. He wondered how soon the inferno might creep across to this building.

  Alma was twenty feet from the bottom.

  He pulled down his shirt cuffs to cover his palms, stood on the edge of the building, turned his back to the alley and clambered onto the ladder. It shuddered under his weight and Alma shrieked below.

  Looking down, she took the last steps and Gustav rushed to catch her. She was safe.

  Mitch took the ladder and an icy shock stung his hands. Ice cold. He clambered down as fast as he could, taking the rungs two at a time, wondering if he could grip the sides and slide down, knowing he would slip and plummet to his death if he tried it.

  Halfway down he paused and held on with the crooks of his arms, blowing on his frostbitten fingers, gasping short breaths that burned his chest.

  He tried a few steps using his arms embracing the ladder, but violent pain spasmed through his shoulders. He used his shirt cuffs again to protect his numb fingers and descended as fast as he could.

  When he was ten feet from the floor, he dropped, trying to roll into the fall, his knees slamming the ground and pain screeching through him.

  Gustav pulled him to his feet. Mitch cupped his frozen hands to his face and blew hot breath on burning fingers.

  Alma took one side, Gustav the other, and they walked him down the alley.

  Pushing out onto Canal Street, they slipped into the crowd watching the blaze and turned left to get away.

  Mitch shrugged them off and pushed his frozen fingers into his pockets. Alma put her hand in the crook of his arm. Gustav’s hand on his shoulder.

  He glanced back and they turned to look on the blaze.

  The entire warehouse was a wall of furious flame, bright as the white hot eye of a furnace. A couple of puny strings of water lashed at the front. Over the heads of the crowd, the firemen’s gold helmets flitted back and forth.

  There was one face turned away, not looking on the fire. One face from a sea of heads that had turned to look right at them.

  Gilhooly.

  The man’s eyes caught his and locked on for a malicious moment.

  He laughed.

  Then he was gone in the crowd.

  They left the place burning, the firemen fighting the blaze, and pushed through the crowd all along Canal Street, till it thinned out and they came out on the Bowery.

  A fat policeman standing in the street reached out for Alma as they crossed. Mitch tensed himself, ready to shove him off his feet and run. He couldn’t punch, not with his hands stinging like this.

  The policeman smiled and gently touched Alma’s elbow, passing her on across the street. As they reached the opposite curb, a streetcar swerved in and rolled through.

  Gustav stepped out and waved his arm to flag down a cab. He and Alma pushed Mitch into the carriage and with a crack of a whip they were riding back to the Majestic.

  — 41 —

  SHIVERING, GRIPPING his hands under his arms, Mitch glared out of the carriage at the blur of nickelodeons shouting their garish wares all along the Bowery.

  Nausea rising in his throat, he closed his eyes, trying to ignore the rattle that buffeted his head on the window frame. He listened to the drumming of the horses’ hooves, punctuated by Mahler’s occasional coughing. At one point he felt a hand on his forehead, the soft touch of flesh on his.

  Alma’s cool fingers lingering and for a tantalising moment running through his hair. She crooked her hand and pressed her knuckles gently to his cheeks, a fingertip kiss to his mouth.

  He opened his eyes a fraction and caught a blur of her outline, slumping back to her seat next to her husband.

  She said something in German he didn’t understand, though he caught the word kranken.

  Gustav coughed and wheezed and Mitch opened his eyes fully to see Alma gazing out of the carriage window at the passing streets of Manhattan, ignoring her husband.

  Gustav’s face was pale. The exertions of the morning had visibly aged him. His heart condition. What had Mitch read so
mewhere? That a simple antibiotic would cure him. With just an ounce of penicillin, Gustav Mahler could go on to write another ten symphonies. He could laugh in the face of the Curse of the Ninth. But Alexander Fleming was only a university student, and wouldn’t leave out that fated petri dish for another twenty years. Mahler would see only three more summers.

  The carriage rattled uptown through the sedate Sunday afternoon traffic, as if the inferno on Canal Street was in another world, and soon Mitch glimpsed Central Park and forced his eyes open, staring pointedly at his boots and Alma’s — one of her feet between his.

  They came to a stop outside the Majestic and he hopped out, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets, unable to stop himself shuddering with the cold.

  “What do we look like?” Mahler said, inspecting them.

  He brushed dust from Alma’s coat. Alma wiped splinters from Mitch’s jacket. From the door when Jack Zelig had shot. So close.

  Looking as presentable as they could, they stuck their chins out and paraded through the Majestic lobby, for all the world looking like they were returning from a Sunday stroll, not a kidnapping, shootout and fire on the Lower East Side.

  He sought Clarence’s kind eyes but he wasn’t on duty. As the lift clanged shut, Mitch remembered the boom that had reverberated through the warehouse and the cries of dismay from the firemen. A violent shiver wracked his body and Alma pressed his arm.

  Gustav stared at the floor.

  The apartment was empty but warm, the radiators cranking out heat. He resisted the urge to grip them, just slumped on the sofa in the middle room, the sofa where Gilhooly had slapped him awake.

  Gilhooly, standing outside Mann Fang, spying on them. Mock Duck had said he knew about the warehouse — had shown great interest in it since Alma was kidnapped — and then had laughed as they escaped. Perhaps he was the Eastman gang’s lookout.

  Alma gave Mitch a pair of woollen mittens to wear, to warm his hands through, and ordered hot soup from the restaurant. They ate in silence around the table and as they were finishing, a key scraped in the lock.

  Alma jumped with fear.

  The door opened and little Anna ran in, crying with joy, he cheeks bright pink. The governess bustled in after her.

  Alma dropped to her knees, hugging her daughter like she’d been away a whole year.

  The governess frowned.

  Gustav indicated the tureen of soup and the other two dishes set at the table, but the governess shook her head and said she would like to take a nap if she may.

  Alma laughed, on her knees, smothering her child with kisses, and told her to take the rest of the day off.

  “Thank you for looking after Gucki today,” Gustav said, “while we were engaged on that important business at the Opera.”

  The governess frowned and nodded at the floor, the discreet lowering of the head that all servants must practice, and Mitch wondered if he too should do that — he was a servant just like her.

  She edged around Alma and her daughter and went through to the drawing room on the left. Mitch noticed that she took a long look at them through the crack in the door before she discreetly closed it. She wasn’t blind. She could see that all was not well with her employers. She could see that things were falling apart. Anyone could see that.

  He waited till he heard the door to the bedroom open and close again.

  “We have to talk about what happened.”

  “It is over,” said Gustav. “Almschi is safe.”

  “It’s not over. Did you hear what happened? The warehouse floor collapsed. I think there were firemen inside when it happened. We might have caused some men to die.”

  Alma rubbed her nose against her child’s, but a shadow fell across her face.

  “I’m sure no one died,” said Gustav.

  “And apart from that, what if the Eastman gang come back?”

  Alma clutched her throat. “They won’t, will they?”

  “Certainly not,” said Gustav. “They will think we’ve called the police. They will think there are a hundred policemen here.”

  “But there aren’t. We can’t go to the police.”

  Alma hugged the girl to her breast, the smiled falling from her face. “No we can’t,” she said. “And they know it. They know we fear the scandal.”

  “We have to stay here and wait till it all blows over,” said Mitch. He laughed at the cliché. As if they were a gang themselves. It was ridiculous.

  “I don’t see anything remotely funny about this,” said Gustav.

  “No. Me neither.” Mitch held up his hands in surrender and realized he was wearing mittens.

  Alma stifled a giggle.

  He tore off the mittens and threw them on the sofa. “You should send the governess away. Tonight. Give her the day off tomorrow. She suspects something is amiss and will ask questions.”

  “Yes. Once she is awake I will dismiss her.” Gustav caught Alma’s look of alarm. “For a day or two.”

  Alma rose, the girl on her hip, and went through to the drawing room on the right, where Mitch had sat with Gustav last night waiting for the second note to arrive.

  The decanter chimed and liquid sloshed into a glass. She came back in, sipping gold from crystal, roaming the room, humming, bouncing the girl, watching the last of the light through the net curtains.

  “Would you like a drink, Mitchell?” Gustav asked.

  “I wouldn’t mind. Let me.”

  “No. Stay as you are.” He rose and nodded to Mitch’s hands, still lobster raw.

  Gustav poured them brandy and they sipped it, feeling the day unwind.

  Alma quickly poured another and sank into an armchair The girl played with a family of little dolls on the rug, babbling in German, but with odd English words — sidewalk, nickelodeon, streetcar — a polyglot word salad. Charmer, she kept repeating, and makinats. Was that German for machine? Maybe the governess really had been sneaking her to the nickelodeon. Who could blame her, looking after a child all day, every day?

  “Put her to bed,” said Gustav.

  “No,” said Alma. “I want my child close to me.”

  Gustav muttered in German and went to his remove his coat in the next room, returning with the decanter and his score of Don Giovanni, smelling of smoke and with pages missing. He placed the decanter on the morning table. Alma gazed at it like it was talking to her, then looked at Gustav flicking through the pages of the score.

  Mitch closed his eyes. It was too painful to see them like this. He sipped the brandy and shut out their feelings. They were an infection.

  The pages of the score. Would they survive the blaze? Four sheets of music from Don Giovanni, premiering tonight, with pencilled annotations in German that could easily be matched to Gustav’s handwriting.

  No, surely they had burned in the inferno. They couldn’t have survived that blaze. And forensics were not the same here. There would be no team of crime scene investigators poring over the ashes to detect a cause.

  They sat in brooding silence for a while and Mitch drifted off a few times, nodding, the glass still balanced on his thigh. The girl played with her dolls, making them kiss, saying charmer, surely re-enacting something she’d seen in a nickelodeon.

  Something stirred in the next room and the governess came back in. She went to pick the girl up but Gustav put up a hand.

  “It’s all right, Miss Costello. I’ve decided you should take a couple of days’ rest.”

  “Sir?”

  “You helped us so much, working all day Sunday. Why don’t you go out and enjoy yourself tonight; perhaps go see that beau of yours, eh?” He threw in a knowing grin but it fell flat.

  Alma chattered away to the girl, slurring baby talk.

  “Take Monday and Tuesday off. Perhaps go see New York or take a trip somewhere nice.”

  “Thank you,” she said, still standing, as if she didn’t quite know how to abandon her duties.

  Gustav rose and dug out his wallet from his jacket, taking out dol
lar bills and pressing them into her hand. “Here. Go and treat yourself. A bonus.”

  Miss Costello stared at the banknotes in her palm, then at each of them in turn, as if they were playing a trick on her.

  Mitch held her gaze and smiled, but felt her trying to see into him, like she was working out his secret.

  Could she have heard of the fire?

  Impossible. She had been alone in the bedroom. There was no radio. She knew nothing.

  She bowed her head to Gustav. “Thank you, sir. I’ll return Tuesday evening then?”

  “Splendid.”

  She marched through to her room and Alma waited till she heard the distant bustle of packing.

  “How am I to look after Gucki alone? Tomorrow you will be in rehearsal all day.”

  “Alma, you can be a mother for a day or two.”

  Alma flinched, like he’d slapped her.

  The governess came through, in her coat and hat, carrying a valise, and said her goodbyes, staring hard at Alma clutching the girl to her breast.

  Mitch rose and saw her to the door, thinking she might stand and stare for an hour if he didn’t. He saw her out and watched her call the elevator. She turned and glared back, cold, assessing him. Who was this stranger who had come into the Mahlers’ circle and upset everything? Perhaps she thought he’d got her sacked.

  The bell chimed and the elevator doors opened. Clarence tipped his hat.

  Mitch watched the hand above the elevator door sweep across to the ground, wait a while, and then crawl back up. He pressed the apartment door shut and walked across to greet the elevator as the door clunked open again.

  Clarence smiled. “Evening, Mr Mitchell, sir.”

  “Clarence.”

  “Is everything all right? With Mrs Mahler?”

  “She’s here, safe.”

  “Oh, that’s good news.”

  “We were downtown today, on Canal Street, and saw a fire.”

  “Oh, I heard about that. Everyone’s talking about it. Terrible tragedy.”

  “Tragedy?”

  “Yes. A fireman died, they say. Caught in the blaze when the floor collapsed. Terrible.”