“No, must to see.” He jittered and twitched beside me like a nervous bird, the breath whistling in his throat.
“But it won’t open, dammit!”
“Yeh! Must open! Must try!”
Why was I letting him force me to do this pointless thing? Here I was in the middle of the biggest crisis in my life, trying to break open a package of old letters written in Hungarian, or something else equally thrilling. I jabbed at the key, tugged furiously, and suddenly the strap scraped out of the lock with an explosion of dust. “Here, dammit!” I said, coughing as I thrust it at him.
“No, no you! Is you do it!” His hands were quivering too spasmodically now to hold onto anything. The grin made a relief map out of his cheeks and turned his eyes into hairline slits.
I reached into the satchel. Even before pulling them out, I could sense the age of the papers inside. They felt almost as thin and fragile as newspaper ash. I lay them carefully on the desk. They were yellow in the lamplight, the edges cracked and crumbling away like powder. The blotched and scribbled musical notation had faded almost—but not quite—to the point of illegibility.
“Well? What is it?” I said, turning to him.
“Only look! Must look careful!”
I looked.
The room faded away, the old man, the house itself, Vienna, even Humphrey faded. One by one I turned over the sheets. And awe boomed around me, a great bell whose vibrations entered my bones from within the earth.
“When … ?” I said.
“In last month of life, before go to Düsseldorf. I keep; I save; No one see; no one know exist. Is never publish.”
There were, of course, the few notes Luc had made me change. But except for those discrepancies, this music and my own compositions were absolutely the same.
13
THE NOTES before me, and the sensation of awe, these I could perceive with perfect clarity. Everything else was a mess. Was I disappointed, because in some inexplicable way I really hadn’t written my music after all? Or was I elated for having been the medium through which this supernatural mystery had been accomplished? I didn’t know. All I knew was that the music was the same, that my own hands had diligently reproduced these secret, unpublished scores. I looked at the stubby little fingers that I had always hated. I had the uncanny feeling that they didn’t really belong to me at all, and at any moment might decide to crawl away and never return.
“Is interesting, yeh?” He gazed at me with an expression of bliss, awaiting my response like a puppy eager to be stroked.
I cleared my throat. “Yeah, well, at least nobody can say I didn’t do a good job of imitating a certain dead composer,” I feebly cracked.
“What? I no understand.”
I didn’t bother to explain. It occurred to me briefly that it might be a trick. I suppose it was remotely possible that after hearing Humphrey perform the first three pieces he could have written them out by memory and somehow made them look old. But Humphrey had never performed the rest of the music, which had been composed for the Vienna concerts. The old man had never heard it. “But what does it mean?” I said.
“Who knows what mean? Only is humor, yeh? You think to fake my father. Only happen that is maybe no fake after all, yeh?”
“Yes, but … It wasn’t as though I went into a trance or anything. It wasn’t like automatic writing or speaking in tongues. I was conscious the whole time; I was aware of deciding what notes to write. At a seance the medium is supposed to pass out and not know what she does.”
“Peh!” he expostulated with a grimace of contempt. “Seance is fake, is act. This real, yeh?”
“I don’t know.” I was beginning to feel rather desperate. I turned back to the music. I knew I had never seen it or heard it. How could I have? Yet how could I have reproduced it so perfectly? I wasn’t prepared to start believing in ghosts at a moment’s notice.
“But what about you?” I said, turning back to the old man. “What did you think when Humphrey started playing this stuff?”
“I?” He thoughtfully scratched his scabby head. “Hard remember now …”
“In Venice. What did you think in Venice?”
“Huh? In Venice … Oh, yeh, yeh. I go concert; Humpy play like pig, then say he play piece by my father, new piece. Yeh, I am angry, think then fake, of course, to use, unfair. Then he play. Music is same. For one minute, I think Humpy steal somehow from here.” He patted the satchel. “But yet, I know is not so. No one can look, no one know is unpublished music ever at all. I great confused, angry and mean and lost Then I see in newspaper. Is boy talk about ghost. Then not mad, is very big interest. I follow.”
“Naturally you would.” Confusion and fear, as ever, were making me angry. “And you gave us little presents, like the book and the doll’s hands, right?”
He smiled coyly, twisting his hands. “Yeh. Why not?”
“And gave us little hints, after the concerts. Except nobody heard them but me. Did you know that?”
“Well. Is most important for you hear, yeh?” He stuck out his chin and raised his eyebrows.
“Yes, and scared me half to death and made me a complete laughingstock. Do you realize how … foolish and pitiful it all made me feel? What a dope? Nobody believed me! Why didn’t you just come out and tell us, all of us? Why didn’t you just produce this music?”
He grabbed my hand with both of his and squeezed. There was unexpected strength in those arthritic old bones. “Yeh, I want, but then I think. For once, I think. For once in life, I do right thing,” he said with fervor. “If show, then end everything. What is happening, it will stop. If I show, then we never know. And now I ask …” He brought his face close to mine, spraying me delicately with spittle. “Is other pieces you write, after those I hear? Is same, yeh?”
“Yes, yes, they’re the same, all four of them!” I said, pulling my hand away from him. He was right not to tell us any earlier, of course. It would have been unthinkably stupid to interfere with the process. But that didn’t make me any less angry. I felt somehow more taken advantage of than ever.
“Ah, yeh, yeh, I knew would be same,” he said happily.
“I’m glad you’re getting such a kick out of it,” I said. “But it sure wasn’t a whole lot of fun for me. That bundle on Humphrey’s bed, that was a real nasty jolt. What did you do, bribe the chambermaid?”
“Oh, yeh, Elsa, easy. You like?”
“Sure, I loved it; it was cuter than hell,” I said. “Is that what your father had inside his bundle? A pair of doll’s hands?”
“Oh, no, no, father have no such bundle,” he said, shaking his head. “That only another story I make up, for fun, to be interest in book. Nice touch, eh?”
For a moment I wanted to kick him. Then something hit me. “Hey, wait a minute,” I said. “The hands. Humphrey predicted that! He knew the hands were going to appear.”
“No! How Humpy know that?” He sounded just as amazed as I did.
“I don’t know. But he knew other things, too. And the way he played the—”
But before I had a chance to go on there came a terrible bleating buzz in D Flat, more painful than the most penetrating of alarm clocks. I emitted a doglike yelp. “What was that?” I cried out, my heart suddenly thumping a kettledrum tattoo.
He was already tottering toward the window. “Is … how you say? … Is door …”
“Oh, no!” I was there beside him. He was struggling to get the window open, to look down and see who it was. He couldn’t make it budge, of course. “Wait! Stop!” I said. “Don’t let them know we’re here!”
“Must see who is!” he grunted, and with heroic effort he shoved open the window, which emitted a piercing squeal. We leaned out. Bridget and Luc, illuminated by the headlights of a taxi that was waiting in the alley, heard the window and looked up. It was impossible to tell if they could see us or not
“Don’t let them in!” I whispered frantically, pulling him back into the room. “Maybe they didn’t see us.�
� “Okeh, okeh,” he muttered. “But …”
Then I distinctly heard the front door open and shut and footsteps in the downstairs hall.
“But how did they get in?” I growled, squeezing his scrawny shoulders.
“Ah!” He struck his forehead with his hand and grinned sheepishly. “Is stupid me.” He chuckled. “Never I can remember lock door.”
14
ONLY THE IMAGE of those brittle bones shattering like his old teacups kept me from dashing him to the floor.
I was totally unprepared to face Bridget and Luc. And then I thought of Humphrey. I couldn’t let them take Humphrey away from me now. I had to get to him first. “Hide us, you must hide us!” I whispered. I dragged the old man after me into the hall.
He choked and whimpered something about the music, but I was ruthless. At the stairway I hoisted him onto my rump, feeling the sharp pelvic bones under the empty flesh of his buttocks, and started blindly down. I stumbled and slipped sickeningly, careening into the banister, but by some miracle landed at the bottom on my feet.
The sight of Magyar’s hands had been a delightful joke compared to the horror of hearing Bridget’s voice hoarsely calling our names. They were still on the first floor, but it would be only moments before the noise I was making brought them up to us. Still lugging the old man I lurched toward the bedroom, crashing into the wall before making it through the doorway. The lamp sputtered dimly. Humphrey was sitting up in bed, his mouth opening to answer Bridget
I raced to the bed and covered his mouth with my hand, letting go of the old man in the process. He saved himself from falling to the floor by clinging to my neck with jagged fingernails. “Shhhh! Don’t answer, Humphrey!” I croaked. “They mustn’t find us!”
Humphrey’s lips writhed, his furiously expelled breath making wet noises against the skin of my hand as he struggled to speak.
“Come on, Luc, they’re upstairs!” said Bridget.
“But … but what if … ?”
“Just come on!” One of them bumped into a piece of furniture, and then there were the first careful footsteps on the stairs.
“Listen to me, Humphrey!” I pleaded. “You’ve got to believe me. It’s true after all! I mean it! Everything’s changed. That music really did come from Magyar. There’s proof, real physical proof. Bridget will destroy it if she finds out!”
He was grinding my skin beneath his teeth now. The old man was still digging his fingers into my neck.
“Trust me, Humphrey! This one last time, just please, please trust me now. It’s our last chance to—”
Humphrey’s body was a weak pile of flab, but for two major exceptions. Now he took hold of my wrist with his powerful hands and twisted. I bellowed in agony and wrenched myself away from him, knocking his head back against the window. The old man saved himself from being trampled as I staggered backwards by flinging himself onto the bed with perfect timing. My feet slid into a pile of books and my coccyx hit the floor.
“We’re upstairs! Sam’s hurting me!” Humphrey screamed unnecessarily as Bridget and Luc plunged into the room. The towel over the window was draped around Humphrey’s face like a grimy bridal veil, the old man nestled kittenlike against his belly, and I reclined amid scattered volumes on the floor.
No one spoke. A couple of cats from downstairs came padding over to sniff at my face. I shoved them rudely away. My backbone was killing me. I pushed myself up to a sitting position. The old man uncurled himself from Humphrey and struggled to his feet. Humphrey pushed the towel away from his face.
“What in hell is going on here?” Bridget said at last.
“Sam was hurting me,” Humphrey whined.
“Oh, my poor baby!” Bridget rushed over to the bed, knelt beside him, and began stroking his hair. “What happened to you? Are you all right, sweetheart?”
“I feel funny,” Humphrey said, sniffling.
“It’s only the drug,” I said, standing up and rubbing my rear end. “He’s been treated fine.”
Then Luc had my hands pinned behind my back. “He’d better be all right, you little swine,” he said. “What have you done to him? Tell us!”
“Get your fat hands off me!” I twisted away from him, knocking over another pile of books. “You might as well stop pushing me around, it’s too late now.” I gestured at the little old man. “Don’t you want to meet our host?”
They both looked at him as if they hadn’t noticed him before. He was adjusting his frayed lapels with an attempt at dignity, regarding them staunchly. “Allow me,” he began, with a stiff little bow. “I am—”
“What the hell is this place, anyway?” Bridget interrupted, turning away from him. “How did you and Humphrey both get here?”
“If you’d listen to him, you might figure it out,” I said. “Don’t you even recognize him?”
But his appearance was too unprepossessing to be of any interest to Bridget. She barely gave him a second glance. “Answer my question, Sam!” she demanded.
But Humphrey was watching him. “I think I … I remember him. He was the one … He was nice to me, when I ran away, before I woke up here. I think he helped me. He told me something.” Even though Humphrey dwarfed Bridget on the little bed, he was managing to snuggle up against her. “Who is he, Mama?”
Now Luc was studying the old man as well, adjusting his glasses. “Yes, Sam. Who is he?” he said uncomfortably. “There’s something …”
“Why don’t you let him tell you himself?” I said. “I’ve already mentioned him oodles of times.”
“Well?” Bridget asked him rudely.
The old man seemed dejected now, for the first time since I had laid eyes on him. He watched me, not them, as he spoke. “My name,” he said sadly, “my name, is Laszlo Magyar.”
Bridget’s snort was highly unladylike. “Very funny,” she said.
“Wait a minute …” said Luc.
Bridget ignored him. “We have no time for games,” she said, patting Humphrey’s shoulder and pulling away from him. “Now we have to get Humphrey back to the hotel and get him rested up. Later on we can find out how you both got to this dump.”
“Oh, you dope, you dope!” I wailed, stamping my foot. “Can’t you pay attention for once? He’s not Magyar, of course he’s not! He’s his son; he’s been following us around; I kept trying to tell you!”
“My God!” said Luc, starting toward him and then quickly backing away. “There is—there is a resemblance.” He turned to Bridget. “There really is.”
Magyar had died at fifty, and Laszlo junior was a good thirty years older than that Yet his high forehead and beaky nose could have been lifted from the portrait in the front of the book. If I had noticed it before, it hadn’t been consciously. Now I could see that the resemblance was unmistakable.
But Bridget had hardly bothered to glance at the book—that wasn’t her part of the operation. She stood up. “Don’t be a fool, Luc. It’s all Sam’s sick imagination. The guy’s just an old burn.”
“But … he could be,” Luc said, shaking his head. “The resemblance … it’s amazing.”
“I don’t care who the hell he says he is,” Bridget said, still denying Laszlo the courtesy of addressing him directly. “We have a big day tomorrow, and Humphrey has to have some rest. And that cab waiting out there is costing us a fortune.”
She was on her way again, with that concentrated, headlong energy. Once again I had underestimated her, imagining the events of the night to be a hurdle even she couldn’t jump. I had simply assumed that she would have to give up now and stop pushing Humphrey.
But she hadn’t experienced what I had. The situation had no more credibility for her than all the other elephants I had dropped in her path. She was stepping easily over the carcass as though it were a squashed ant. And I couldn’t stand it. The urge I felt to stop her once and for all was uncontrollable, beyond safety or reason, the culmination of eighteen crippling years. And now I had the chance to stop her and save Humphrey from her—it
was my last chance.
“Come on, Humphrey,” she said, pulling away the rank bedclothes with an expression of disgust. “Time to go home to sleep.”
“But Mama, what if he really is?” said Humphrey.
“It doesn’t matter who he is, she doesn’t care about that,” I said. “But she might be interested to find out how much he knows.”
She spun around. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Give up, Bridget. He knows everything. Humphrey’s career is over, no matter how much you go on browbeating us. Because you can’t stop him from going to the press. I told him the whole story.”
“Do you mean that, Sam?” she said, her face blank. There was no reason to answer; she knew I was telling the truth. She turned to Laszlo then, appraising him carefully for the first time—his age, his apparent poverty, his trembling weakness. Then his eyes wavered and he looked shamefacedly down.
“Tell her!” I begged him. “Tell her you know the whole thing’s a hoax, that Magyar’s ghost is a fake. Tell her you’re going to the papers tomorrow!”
“Excuse pliz … but, but …” he said. What was the matter with him? “But is no fake, yeh? I know music is real.”
Bridget laughed. It was a sound I hadn’t heard from her in years, a real laugh, full and abandoned.
“Is no fake,” he insisted, clenching his fists. “I show. I prove.”
“No!” I shrieked. “No! Don’t!”
“Don’t what?” Bridget said, really interested now. She approached Laszlo. “Prove what?”
“I have, yeh, yeh, I have,” he said, drooling with excitement “I have real proof, to touch, to hold, to show press. Prove is truly Magyar’s music from boy. Come. I show.”
But he was wrong. Yeh, to those of us in this room, the music upstairs was proof of the supernatural. But to everyone else in the world it would be proof only of our hoax. It could be demonstrated scientifically that those manuscripts had been written by Magyar years before Humphrey had performed his first new Magyar composition. After that, there would be no doubt in anyone’s mind that our ghost was phony. The music was there. Not even the most fervent spiritualist would believe that we hadn’t worked together and plotted the whole thing out, that we hadn’t merely copied the originals. The irony was magnificent: The only real evidence of the music’s supernatural origin was at the same time the one tangible document that would show Humphrey to be a fake.
Fingers Page 14
