The Master Key

by Masako Togawa

  These words, the reverse of the real truth, stirred Suwa’s heart. Once again she felt the anguish of having come second in the contest. How bitter it had been for her! She wanted to blurt out the truth, to say,

  ‘I didn’t fail from want of skill. It was just that I didn’t have a decent instrument. Now she was all right—she had an Italian violin. Her parents were rich, whilst I was poor. I was beaten by money…’

  For thirty years, this speech had been on the tip of Suwa’s tongue. Now once again it floated around her mind.

  Well, she thought, as a result she went to Europe to complete her studies, whilst I was doomed to spend my days teaching children the fundamentals of music from Holman’s Primer. People would call it destiny, but I can’t just accept it like that. The old French Professor at the Conservatory—what was it he was always saying—’C’est la vie, c’est la vie’… But I’m not a fatalist—I resisted to the end. I felt sure that I would win.

  She looked up at the corner cupboard that hung in her room. On top of it, covered in dust, she saw a battered old violin case. The renewed sense of defeat which had suffused her mind began to fade. She had not realised before how much the real answer to the question lay in that old violin case which had altered her whole life.

  ‘Well, let’s get back to practice. Now I’ve told you the reason, you’ll see that I can only play with three fingers whilst you can use four. So you should be able to do better than me, shouldn’t you?’

  The child nodded his head. For the remaining thirty minutes of the lesson, he could not tear his eyes away from that frozen middle finger, the object of witchcraft and a curse.

  When he had left, Suwa sat in a trance in the chilly classroom, which was divided from the rest of her room by a curtain.

  On top of the piano there were several classical-style busts of famous composers. They glared down at Suwa, their features contorted by the agonies of genius, their hair wild and ruffled. She looked back at them, reflecting that artistic genius brings torments in its train, and that therefore much must be forgiven those who suffer it. The busts seemed to agree with her, and their expression towards her changed to one of soft forgiveness.

  Ishiyama Noriko squeezed through a gap in the slate wall and made her way back into the inner garden of the building. It was five am and still half-dark, but a glow in the eastern sky and the crisp freshness of the air proclaimed that dawn was at hand. She was carrying a bottle of milk that had only just been delivered. At first it had chilled the palm of her hand, but now the temperature had risen to match her own and a light dew had formed on the glass. Certain sounds still echoed in her ears—the sound of the milkman sliding open the wooden gate, the jangle of bottles, the tinkle of the bell fixed to the gate. She was still trembling with excitement, and felt that she never wanted to take such risks again, but in her heart she knew that before the week was out she would steal another bottle of milk. Every day she would creep out as was her custom and forage for wood shavings for her stove; sometime soon she would again chance upon a freshly delivered bottle of milk that had carelessly been left within her reach. Just like a ripe fruit growing in someone’s garden, hanging over the wall, waiting to be picked… But sometime she would surely be caught by a furious householder—crime always brought punishment in its wake. She thought back to the first time when she had chanced upon a milk bottle waiting for her in a delivery box with a broken lock. She had not meant to steal it at all. She had slipped her fingernail under the cap, opened the bottle and just drunk a mouthful. But so small a quantity seemed to lack flavour. She replaced the cap; it seemed to her that no one would be able to detect what she had done. All would be well, she thought, and was about to return the bottle to its box when suddenly the first rays of the sun appeared, shining directly onto the bottle in her hand. They lit up the glass revealing her fingerprints which she felt had been etched onto the bottle so that they could never be removed.

  There was nothing for it but to take the bottle home. And since then, every morning, she felt the challenge of milk bottles tempting her to do the same again.

  ‘Fingerprints.’ Few other words in the language seemed to exercise such a deep hold upon her. Two years earlier, when she had picked up a man’s wooden clog which had been abandoned by a dog, she had fallen into the hands of the owner, a cross-grained old gentleman who had dragged her off to the nearest policeman and accused her of theft. In order to scare her, the officer had told her that it would be a simple matter to apply a little powder to the clog, and that the fingerprints of the culprit would invariably be revealed. He had then released her with a caution, but his words had left their effect. The thought that a little powder could reveal her fingerprints on anything that she had touched unnerved her so much that the words burned themselves into her subconscious. Calcium… Fingerprints…

  The inner garden was surrounded on three sides by the brick building. There were a few flowerbeds, but apart from a small greenhouse everything was covered by straw matting in winter. There was a large incinerator with a chimney in the middle of the garden. She skirted the garden along its eastern edge and made her way to the fire escape. Her room was just next to the window giving access to the third floor, and by placing an old wooden box on the stair she could get in and out with ease and without being observed. Such was her regular custom, and today was no different. She made her way quietly up the stairs, treading the iron steps cautiously with her rubber-soled shoes, and then, when she reached the second floor, she chanced to glance back and catch sight of something she had not noticed before. On top of the incinerator was a pile of old newspapers. Their whiteness was picked out by the early-morning sun.

  She made her way back down the stairway and retrieved them. They were bound neatly with string, with a sheet of cardboard at the top and the bottom to hold them in shape. The cardboard in particular would come in useful for kindling her stove. Thinking no more of the matter, she returned with them to her room. It was not until that evening that she discovered something of significance in her find.

  She had spent the whole afternoon disguising the milk bottle she had stolen earlier. It was her habit to turn them into Mexican-style pitchers, or flower vases, or pot-bellied containers by covering them with papier mâché and decorating them with distemper and water-colours.

  ‘This should do it,’ she would mutter. ‘Must hide the fingerprints, or else…’

  By the time it was dusk, she had completed yet another little handicraft to join those she had made before. She looked at it with pleasure, wiping her paint-stained fingers on an old newspaper. Then she suddenly noticed the date on the page.

  It was ridiculously old—26 January 1933. It was one of the newspapers in the bundle she had found that morning. It had been folded in four, and the edges were yellow with age.

  If it had just been old, that in itself would have amounted to nothing much. But somehow the date seemed to ring a bell in her head—was it not the same as that appearing on the main noticeboard downstairs? A few days earlier, someone had put a notice there offering a high price for a newspaper of about that date. If it was, then her morning find was just like a prize-winning lottery ticket. Could her luck have taken such a turn for the better? Pausing only to wash her hands, and to smooth the paper out and press it flat between a pile of magazines, she hurried down to the noticeboard in the entrance hall. She read the notice carefully.

  HIGH PRICE PAID

  I am seeking a copy of any daily newspaper dated Monday, 26 January 1933. If you have such a paper, please leave it with the clerk on duty, and I will collect it and leave a good reward with her.

  It was the same date! Her mind full of mixed emotions, she paced up and down the hall wondering what to do. If she received any income, she was supposed to report it to the Social Security office. What exactly was meant by ‘High Price’? Until she knew, would it not be better to keep her find to herself? She felt the gaze of Miss Tojo burning into her back from where she sat behind the window and so hurrie
d back upstairs before she could be drawn into conversation.

  That night, as she lay curled up in her lair inside the cupboard, it suddenly occurred to her that she had not yet even read the paper. Why on earth would anyone want such an old newspaper? What could be its value? It wasn’t as if anything of particular historical interest had happened on 26 January 1933. She got the paper out from the pile of magazines and, placing it close to the 5-watt bulb, read it with mounting emotion.

  The clue was on the crime page. Under a headline ‘Famous Guarnerius violin stolen’ there appeared a large photograph of a balding middle-aged foreigner dressed in a greatcoat and carrying a violin case.

  The text that followed described how André Dore, having completed a five-year contract as a professor at a musical academy, was about to return home. He had been invited to give two farewell concerts in the Hibiya Concert Hall, but on returning to his hotel at the end of the first one he had opened his violin case and discovered that someone had substituted a cheap instrument for his precious Guarnerius. It was probable, but by no means certain, that the crime had occurred in the Concert Hall. The police had no clues as to the criminal’s identity. As M. Dore had gone straight back to his hotel by car, and had not let go of the violin case throughout the journey, it seemed clear that the switch had taken place during the few short minutes he had placed the case on a table in his dressing room after the concert. Of course, there were many visitors, so to have taken the violin, case and all, would have been no particular achievement in itself, but to exchange the contents of the case without being detected seemed little short of a conjuring trick, if not impossible.

  What really caught Noriko’s attention was one of the names at the bottom of the column. Various people had been interviewed, and amongst them was a name known to her—Suwa Yatabe, who lived on the first floor of the same apartment block. She was quoted as follows:

  ‘It truly grieves me that my teacher should suffer this tragic loss, just as he was leaving Japan, a country he has grown to love. I hope the thief will hasten to return the violin. The only person who can get the full effect from that violin is the Professor himself.’

  The article went on to say that Suwa Yatabe was the Professor’s favourite pupil. As she read this, Noriko pictured Suwa in her mind as she always saw her in the corridor of the building, holding herself erect and looking every inch a musician.

  And for the first time she realised why she had always felt some unconscious affinity for Suwa. It was because they were both thieves.

  Noriko felt sure of it. Thirty years ago, Suwa had left her fingerprints on the violin. And how could she hope to remove them from that varnished surface? She felt an overwhelming desire to see those fingerprints for herself. And just as earlier, Miss Tamura had been tempted to pry in the room of her classmate, Toyoko Munekata, and had turned to the master key, so now was Noriko drawn by the same magnetic force of the key which was in her possession. She took it out of the tea caddy; suddenly it had become a treasure beyond worth. She squeezed it between her fingers, examining it minutely from every angle as she imagined herself using it to enter Suwa’s room. She saw herself looking at the stolen violin. And after her long day’s work decorating the milk bottle, she fell asleep with these pleasant thoughts on her mind.

  The unending rain which had washed the bricks of the apartment all day persisted into the evening. The damp spread up the staircase and along the corridors, making the air heavy and oppressive. Suwa Yatabe finished the last lesson of the day and led her pupil to the front porch. She opened the child’s umbrella.

  ‘Take care how you go!’

  ‘Yes, Teacher. Bye bye!’

  She watched the small figure bobbing through the rain as far as the tram stop. The cold rain occasionally blew in under the eaves, dampening her face. The chill of the stone floor crept up into her body. Age seemed to have blunted her sense of hot and cold. She felt lethargic, with no particular desire to go back to her room and make supper. After seeing the last child off every day, particularly on rainy evenings, she felt overwhelmed by an unpleasant sadness.

  She pushed the heavy door to and made her way back into the apartment block. She could see Miss Tamura at her desk behind the receptionist’s window. She was knitting; the needles seemed to be moving unduly slowly.

  As Suwa passed the noticeboard, her eye fell on a new notice that she had not observed before. She hardly took it in until the date mentioned—26 January—struck home. This notice which so coolly required a copy of a thirty-year-old newspaper seemed to her to have a deeper motive. Clearly it was aimed at her. That was the date which had been burned into her memory for thirty years. In fact, that particular day’s paper lay hidden in the recesses of her chest of drawers together with the newspapers in which she had first made her appearance on the music page all those years ago.

  Her astonishment gradually changed to a blend of anger and unease. Even when the woman who lived next to her greeted her as she returned from work, Suwa didn’t seem to notice. She just stood in front of the board as if blind and deaf to the world. She sensed that the great and final drama of her life had hung over her head for all those years, but had never seemed as if it was about to break until today.

  She went back to her room and sat down in front of the piano. She remained there in that position all night without getting a wink of sleep. Every now and again she would look up at the old violin case on top of the three-cornered bookshelf. The famous Guarnerius had slept away the last thirty years up there. A few times each year, Suwa had taken it down and played a few notes on it, just to confirm that its tone was as beautiful as ever.

  She had become quite convinced of the propriety of her actions in stealing the Guarnerius. She felt that she had been in the right, and suppressed the guilty feelings in her innermost heart by assuring herself that should the truth ever come out her defence would be artistic justification. Yet deep down she knew better. She only had to close her eyes to see again those events of thirty years before when she had acquired the violin.

  Her respected teacher, André Dore, was on the brink of his departure from Japan. His final recitals were due to commence on the next day, but in spite of that he was giving Suwa her usual private lesson. She had begun to entertain sentimental feelings about him because of her admiration for him as an artist. And as she pictured once again his deep-set gentle eyes and his finely drawn high-bridged nose, she once again embarked upon the soliloquy which she had composed for herself in the role of a tragic heroine.

  ‘When that last lesson came to an end, André Dore gazed at me. His eyes seemed at the same time to convey both passion and melancholy. I wonder—was I truly in love for the first time, or was I just pretending in order to make a pretext for getting hold of that violin I had desired for so long? He took me in his strong arms, and I closed my eyes and let him feel the smallness and softness of my body. When it was all over, I wept—I wonder why that was? Just at that moment, a car arrived to take him off for a newspaper interview; was that mere chance, or was it an intercession of God? He told me to wait there for him; after he left, I sat for a long time on the bed, and doubt gradually took possession of my mind. Did he respect me as an artist, or had he only been interested in me as a woman? It made me feel miserable. Whichever was true, in the end I could only be sad, but secretly I preferred the thought of his admiring me as a musician.

  ‘His favourite violin, that famous Guarnerius, was just where he had left it in the room. He had not worried about it, feeling that it would be safe with me. But I left before his return, taking the Guarnerius away in my violin case… I still can’t explain why I did it. Was it to hinder his departure, to have him with me a little longer? Or was it that I was overcome by the desire for a classic Italian violin? A bit of both, I suspect.

  ‘I thought he would have to cancel his farewell recitals, but he didn’t. He just carried on as if nothing had happened; as if the instrument in his hand was the Guarnerius. Neither the critics nor the audie
nce seemed to notice that it was not so. If they did observe any poor quality in the tone, they must have put it down to the rainy weather.

  ‘He announced the theft of his violin after that concert. Just before he left Japan, he carefully parcelled my violin, the one I had substituted for the Guarnerius, and posted it to me. It was plain he knew that I was the thief, and that he was not demanding the return of his violin. Instead, he put the blame on “some visitor unknown”; was it because he was afraid of the scandal if our brief affair came to light, or was it that he truly admired me as a violinist, or was it just that he pitied me?

  ‘On the day he left Japan, I went down to Yokohama and stood in the crowd seeing him off. It was most unlikely that he noticed me in all that throng, but I somehow sensed in the sad glance he directed towards us a message of personal forgiveness for me. At that moment I wanted to shout out to him “I love you”, but I didn’t. Well, he may have forgiven me, but some months later, while trying to play the Guarnerius I noticed that the middle finger of my left hand had become paralysed. I, who had vowed to devote my whole life to playing the violin…’

  With that, her soliloquy was brought to an end by her overwhelming feelings of sorrow and self-pity. She looked up once more at the violin case on the shelf. There could be no doubt that the notice asking for a copy of that day’s paper, thirty years after the event, was linked with the stolen violin. She resolved to find out who it was who was now trying to track down her stolen prize.

  The day after she saw the notice, she went to the receptionist’s office to try and find out who was its author. Rather than attract suspicion by asking outright, she masked her intention under the guise of paying a call on whoever was on duty to pass the time of day. She reasoned that her best hope lay in picking a time when the good-natured Miss Tamura was on duty, which was from noon onward on that day.