by Gerald Elias
“Yes, you are correct again, Mr. Jacobus,” said Gottfried. “You are uncanny!”
“Now it’s you who’s telling a fairy tale, Ziggy,” said Jacobus. “Because Rose didn’t steal the music. That’s not what happened at all, is it?”
Gottfried was silent while Schubert’s music cheerily ambled on. Jacobus recalled the last verse of the “Trout,” because it was in that verse that the poet finally makes his metaphor, cautioning pretty young girls to be wary of the crafty angler, lest they become hooked against their will.
“Cat got your tongue, as we say in America, Ziggy?” Jacobus said. He dabbed his brow with Gottfried’s handkerchief. The bleeding seemed to have stopped. He tossed the handkerchief onto the floor.
“I’ll tell you what really happened. You stopped taking pictures of Rose after the rape because for your purposes—your ‘big idea’—her usefulness was over. And you’re absolutely right, she didn’t say a thing to anybody, except to Jesus maybe. But funny how Rose continued to work at the Bonderman for over a year even after she was raped by Allard. The answer is, she had to. She had a husband overseas in a war, and she couldn’t afford to lose her job. So why do you suppose it is that she waits for a whole year, and then one day out of the blue she decides to steal, of all things, Allard’s music? Was it for revenge? Profit?”
Gottfried remained silent. The recording had come to an end, and now the only sounds were the damp groans and sinister knockings of the underworld around them, but none of a knight in shining armor galloping to Jacobus’s rescue.
“No answer? Then let me tell you why,” continued Jacobus. “But first I have to go back in time a bit, to when your sacred elevator was defiled by Allard and Hennie. You didn’t like it, did you, when they screwed in your sanctum sanctorum and made you watch. It was pretty disgusting behavior, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was disgusting. This was their private business, but I was the one who had to clean it up.”
“But even so, that Hennie, she was something, eh? Young and wriggly. Sexy. Alluring. Watching her do what she did with Allard—you couldn’t stop thinking about her here in your dungeon, could you? The way she looked at you in the elevator. Maybe there was a spark there, eh? Maybe that’s what got you started peeping at Rose, taking pictures. If the Frenchies could be so kinky, why couldn’t the Germans join the fun? Right, Ziggy?”
“I know little about women, Mr. Jacobus,” said Gottfried. “The only one I have ever understood is Seglinde.”
“Yes, sisterly love, Ziggy. So pure. But still, you continued to do little favors for Hennie over the years—kept the flame alive—and then when Allard and Hennie became alienated—we’ll get to that in a minute—you thought, Oh, boy, this is my big chance with the lady. Then one hot summer day, lo and behold, Hennie asks you to bring groceries to her apartment, and there she is, standing half naked in front of you with that cunning little smile on her pouting lips and the curl of her wet hair clinging to her cheek. What else could she mean, you thought, other than that she wanted you?
“This was your big moment, Ziggy, the climax of all your dungeon dreams. You took her in your arms, embraced her, and what did she do? She disappointed you, didn’t she, Ziggy?”
“She laughed,” said Gottfried. “And the other one—”
“Ah, the omnipresent Mabel Bidwell! She was there, and she laughed too. What is interesting about this, Ziggy, is the timing of this little tryst gone awry. One day before Rose was fired. One day! Coincidence? I think not. What I think happened is that you were so humiliated, enraged even—and who could blame you?—that when you saw the sumptuous Rose down there in the basement—a woman you could trust, a woman of your station—your frustrations and your urges won out over your reason. Remember, Rose had no idea you had ever seen her dressing or showering, no idea that she had been one of your secret fantasies. No idea you had seen her bosom. She still thought you were her friend.”
“Yes, I was her friend.”
“So when she saw you there, when she was changing her clothes at the end of a long, sweaty day at the office, she never suspected you’d do the same thing to her that your mentor did. But, hey, why not? After all, you emulated him in so many other ways. You followed him in the smuggling business. You followed him in your adoration of the irresistible Hennie. You couldn’t actually play the violin, but you collected all his recordings and pretended. Raping Rose Grimes was just one more way to be René Allard himself, wasn’t it?”
“I loved Maestro Allard. Who understood the ways of the world better than Maestro? Not me, Mr. Jacobus. I lived my life in my elevator and here in my room. It was all I knew. Who else was there to learn from? What better example? All the world loved him. All the magazines and all the newspapers with his picture, all the parties—there were always women, and they were always smiling at him. He made them all smile, and I thought when Rose saw how I felt, she would smile at me too. Why shouldn’t I follow his example?”
“Why not indeed, Krinkelmeier? Oh, I’m sorry, I bet you don’t care to be called that.”
“Names don’t offend me, Mr. Jacobus.”
“I’m glad, Krinkelmeier, because I’m sure Hennie and Allard just called you that in jest. Why would that offend anyone?
“But, to answer your question, you realized after you raped Rose that you weren’t as immune to tattling as your idol—or should I say former idol. That if Rose went to the cops and accused you of what you did to her, you could conceivably lose not only your job but also your liberty. Maybe mean Mr. Zipolito would not want to keep a rapist on staff. This, after all, was the civil rights era. What better way to show off the new American justice than to convict the son-of-a-Nazi rapist of a hardworking black woman whose husband was a disabled Vietnam War hero?
“So you were shaking in your boots, weren’t you, Krinkelmeier? You went back to 4B and got your hands on Allard’s ‘Danse Macabre’ music. You then planted it among Rose’s belongings, reported her to Zipolito, and voilà! as the French say so well, Rose is history.”
It was clear to Jacobus that Gottfried had been caught off guard by how much he knew, but whether it would help prolong his own life was up in the air. It could even shorten it.
Gottfried broke the silence. “I have one more record for you, Mr. Jacobus. It’s very special, one of the few in existence of Maestro Allard playing chamber music.”
Again there was a pause as Gottfried went to retrieve the recording, which from the established pattern Jacobus gauged was in a stack located between the old Victrola and Gottfried’s seat on his bed, all within a few feet of each other. Jacobus was losing the battle of endurance over the stalemate with this madman. In fact, he didn’t think it would be a stalemate much longer. The story was coming to an end, and then what? He would have to do something soon. He would have to act, even if it killed him.
THIRTY
The music began. It was the last completed work of Jacobus’s only hero, Beethoven, the final movement of his string quartet, Opus 135. Beethoven had been totally deaf for years when he wrote this masterpiece shortly before his death. He was also violently sick and socially reviled, yet the music had the freshness and vitality of one who had overcome all obstacles.
This movement in particular had its own unique message. Above the score Beethoven had written, “Der Schwer gefasste Enschluss.” “The difficult decision.” The music begins slowly and ominously with a questioning three-note motive based upon words Beethoven wrote, “Muss es sein?” “Must it be?” Then, from out of nowhere comes the affirmative Allegro, the main motive here twice inverting the original question. “Es muss sein! Es muss sein!” “It must be! It must be!”
No one knew for certain what Beethoven intended with these words. Scholars and music historians have postulated everything from death’s inevitability to having to pay an unwanted laundry bill. Whatever Beethoven’s reason, Jacobus asked himself, what was Gottfried’s reason for playing it?
“And so,” Gottfried asked, retuning to th
e subject, “how do you know Rose did not steal the music, Mr. Jacobus? Or the violin?”
“I asked myself, Ziggy, if Rose were to risk her job by stealing something, why would she steal sheet music? Sheet music has no value to her, even music owned by the great René Allard. She knows nothing about music except for listening to her gospel on the radio. Hennie was right when she told me that only someone who knew music could appreciate the value of something like that.
“So the next question I asked was, if Rose didn’t steal it, and someone else planted it on her, for whom would that music have value? The answer was you. No one on earth prized that music as much as you—‘Danse Macabre’ owned by René Allard and signed by Saint-Saëns himself. And who other than Rose had easy access to Allard’s apartment? The fact that you were the one who reported the theft to Zipolito made it that much easier for me to understand the whole picture.
“As far as the Garimberti was concerned, yeah, I thought Rose stole it. She had no plausible explanation for how she got it. But then again, she chose not to profit from it when she could easily have.”
“That is surprising,” said Gottfried. “It was a good violin. It should have been no problem to sell.”
“Exactly. But she chose not to sell. She gave it to BTower when he was a kid and then broke it when he wouldn’t join her in praising the Lord.”
“BTower? How did she know BTower?” asked Gottfried.
“It’s a small world, isn’t it, Ziggy? BTower just happens to be Rose Grimes’s son, a prodigal son maybe, but definitely her flesh and blood. And when he went astray and she broke the fiddle, she could have made an insurance claim but didn’t. So, unlikely as it may seem, Rose Grimes was indeed telling the truth.
“And here’s a simple, simple truth that took me too long to figure—Rose is not capable of stealing. To her, one sin is as bad as another, and stealing would send her to hell just as quickly as murder or rape, wouldn’t it, Ziggy? You were the one who left the violin on her doorstep, aren’t you? Out of guilt for what you had done. No note, no acknowledgment, no way to trace it. Until I found Novak.”
“You see? That was my weakness,” said Gottfried. “I was too soft with poor Rose. She had lost her job, and then her husband came back with his injury. But it is so ironic. If I hadn’t given her the violin, which I bought with my own money, neither you nor I would be here now having our conversation. You would never have come to Salt Lake City to ask me if I knew Rose, and I would never have had to eradicate you. I failed at that once, I admit, and so had to make myself disappear and return here for the time being. It is a very difficult situation for me, I tell you, being a very wealthy man and having to hide here.
“But who could have guessed? Who can read the future, Mr. Jacobus? I accept my fate, but it is so sad that my momentary lapse with the Garimberti will be responsible for your demise. But, these minor indiscretions of mine aside, we are still a long way from your accusation of murder. Are we not?”
“We’re getting there,” replied Jacobus, hoping to talk until something—preferably something good—happened.
“Back when Allard had his heart attack, the one that almost killed him, you thought, My God, everything is fitting into place. This is my opportunity of a lifetime. I can trade these photos of Maestro raping Rose for his ex Hawkins del Gesù, and the day after he dies, which everyone thought would be any moment, I’ll get three times the million dollars it’s worth.”
“Yes!” said Gottfried. “Yes! Mr. Jacobus, you understand me totally! Maestro Allard was not so easily persuaded, though. I showed him the photos there in his hospital bed and suggested how much his reputation would suffer were they to be seen. At first he couldn’t believe someone had seen him with Rose. He was sure no one knew. I must commend him, though. For a Frenchman he tried very hard to be brave and sturdy, especially in his weakened condition. For that I must give him credit.
“ ‘You can’t blackmail me . . .’ he said. His voice was like a whisper and he had to work so hard for each word. ‘I’m going to die anyway. What do I care what happens to my reputation when I’m dead?’ He thought he had me there. He smiled the smile of a skull. I confess I had to think.
“ ‘True,’ I said to him. ‘But what if you don’t die? Then what?’ And so, Mr. Jacobus, Maestro really had little choice, because if he survived and the pictures were known, his life would have been hell, which for him, without the adoration and the fast living, would have been worse than death. So he gave me the violin. When he told Hennie it was gone—of course he didn’t say to whom—she was furious. She was planning on that for their retirement in Paris. That made me doubly happy.”
“And you kept the photos anyway,” said Jacobus. “For insurance against him saying something in the unlikely event he survived his heart attack. Which, amazingly, he did. And that was your problem, wasn’t it, Ziggy? His will to thwart you was so great that he lived on and on and on. He understood you and your greed. Of course, he cut off your lunch money. No more wheeling and dealing violins for you. No more quick trips to Laszlo Novak, eh, Mr. Oehlschlager? And Allard knew you’d be too stubborn to sell the ex Hawkins until the day he died because that’s when you’d really cash in, but he figured the longer his life, the shorter yours would be to enjoy the fruits of your hard-earned extortion. And that’s why you had to kill him on that particular night, isn’t it? Because you knew the day after that final Carnegie recital he was going to leave for France forever, and this was your last chance.”
“No murder weapon was ever found, Mr. Jacobus. And there is no proof. There were no witnesses, except to see BTower with blood on his hands. All that you say is mere fantasy.”
“But I do know the murder weapon, and I have proof,” said Jacobus. “You can tell me what happened in the elevator that night, Krinkelmeier, or I can tell you. It doesn’t matter to me.”
“Very well, Mr. Jacobus. We will see what you think you know.”
Gottfried paused. Beethoven’s Allegro was electric and Allard’s playing commanding. What are they telling me? Jacobus asked himself. What’s the message? “It must be! It must be!” What must be?
“I answered the buzzer to go to the lobby,” Gottfried resumed. “It was midnight. When the elevator door slid open, the two of them were standing there. ‘Good evening, Ziggy,’ Maestro Allard said to me, and he stepped in with his violin case in his hand. He turned his back to me, as he always did. BTower stayed in the lobby.
“ ‘Good evening, Maestro,’ I said to the back of Allard’s head. ‘Congratulations on your great triumph tonight.’
“ ‘What are you to me?’ he said. ‘You are nobody and your words mean nothing. Good-bye, Ziggy. You will die your proud little German death here in your precious little castle, and I will live forever. I will outlive you and you will never see a pfennig from my violin.’ I let him talk this way if it made him feel better. I didn’t care. That is all that happened. I will admit this.”
“That’s all that happened,” said Jacobus, “until the elevator arrived at the fourth floor, Allard’s floor. You see, I went up to the fourth floor a couple days ago to see Hennie. Your building superintendent, Fuente, took me up there. Fuente’s not the artist you are when it comes to operating the Stradivarius of elevators, and so I got my finger stuck in the grate when he slid the safety door only partially open. That’s when it occurred to me. When you opened the door for Allard, you intentionally opened the safety grate only partially. As Allard began to step forward, you quickly looked up and down the corridor as if routinely to see if anyone needed a ride, but really to make one hundred percent sure no one was there, which wasn’t likely anyway, since it was midnight on Halloween and all the revelers were still out and about. Seeing no one, you stepped back into the elevator, behind Allard, as was customary. As Allard began to exit the elevator, you lunged at him from behind and with your gloved hands rammed his head through one of the diamonds of space in the safety door lattice, lacerating his scalp. He wasn’t dead yet. Only inj
ured, dazed, and trapped. Next you slammed the safety door closed again, in doing so reconfiguring the diamonds so that the one around Allard’s neck closed like a vise, choking him, rendering him incapable of calling out. Then you thrust forward the lever to ascend, jolting the elevator up toward the fifth floor. As it shot toward the top of the door opening, Allard’s exposed neck was crushed instantly with the force of a reverse guillotine as he hit the top of the elevator doorway. His neck broke and his windpipe collapsed. That done, you immediately put the brake on the elevator and lowered it back to the fourth floor. You yanked Allard’s almost disconnected head back through the grate, holding on to his collar as you opened the elevator door. You then shoved Allard, still gripping his violin case, out into the corridor. How long would that all take? Not long, I bet.”
“That would have taken less than a minute, Mr. Jacobus, if it had happened that way. And for the sake of argument, what would I have done then? Perhaps if I were a clever person I might then have gone back in the elevator and ascended at normal speed to the top floor. You can imagine I probably would have been panting from exertion if not exhilaration, but otherwise I might have been quite calm. I might then have removed my white gloves, taken a cloth and a spray bottle of all-purpose cleaner from my tool kit, and wiped the grate and the floor. I might have put the cloth into a plastic bag, returned it to my kit with the cleaner, and put my gloves back on.”
“And then, Krinkelmeier, you might have returned to your routine, and until Fuente needed you to take him to the fourth floor after the emergency call came in, you just went about your job. When you went back down to your apartment, you were so terribly upset, but you still had time to toss the plastic bag into the incinerator, which was then still burning like hell. That’s why the missing bits of scalp and hair were never found.
