Ghosts of Columbia

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Llysette’s department chair—that was Dierk Geoffries—caught me in the aisle. “I didn’t think she could get better, she was so good …” He shook his mane of gray-blond hair. “I’ve heard some of the best—Delligatti, Riciarelli, Rysanek. Tonight she was better than any of them.”

  I’d never heard better, but I was no expert. From the hypercritical Dierk, that was high praise. “Best you tell her. If I did, she’d just dismiss it as the pride of a smitten spouse.”

  “I will.” Dierk laughed, and I let him head down the aisle first, listening as I did.

  “… better than korfball any day…”

  “… good … but … don’t know about that,” murmured the tall blond youth, who probably was on the university korf ball team—which had lost badly to Rensselaer the night before.

  The bearded man in the old-fashioned suit, except it seemed new, had a broad smile on his face as he bowed to Llysette backstage and murmured something before stepping away and vanishing.

  I followed Dierk and a square-faced Hans Waetjen backstage. Waetjen was the chief of the Watch for Vanderbraak Centre, and he’d avoided speaking to me ever since my actions had led to three of his officers being turned into zombies because one had been suborned by an Austrian covert agent. Dierk stepped aside, and the Watch chief bowed to Llysette. “You were magnificent.” Then he turned to me. “Almost magnificent enough to forgive you for marrying Doktor Eschbach.”

  Waetjen nodded and was gone. At least, a year after the unfortunate incident, he was speaking to me, and he hadn’t protested, so far as I knew, when the Citizenship Bureau, after years of dithering, had finally granted Llysette her citizen’s status. And I’d never known he liked singing.

  Dierk shook his head again. “Unbelievable. No wonder you were the toast of the Academie Royale. I was truly blessed tonight.” After another incredulous headshake, he, too, slipped away.

  “You were wonderful.” I hugged her, and I even had remembered chocolates and flowers—but they were waiting for her at home. “You … you’ve never been better.”

  Llysette smiled … shyly, for a moment. “Better we were, and better yet we will be…”

  “You, not we.”

  “We,” she corrected me. “And it is good, Johan. Sad … but good.”

  I swallowed and hugged her, knowing my own cheeks were suddenly damp.

  “Fräulein duBoise …”

  With others still arriving to see Llysette, I stepped back to her shoulder, nodding at Johanna and murmuring, “You played well.”

  “She sang … she sang, Johan.” The accompanist shook her head slowly. “Singing like that you seldom hear. Seldom? I’ve never heard it before.”

  “I can see that I have missed too much.” Katrinka Er Recchus, Alois stolidly behind her, smiled her broad and false smile. “You were delightful, dear, absolutely delightful.” Her eyes went to me. “You have been too modest about her. Far too modest, Johan.” As if it were my fault that the former chair of the Music and Theatre Department hadn’t bothered to come to Llysette’s recitals before?

  I forced a smile. “She has always been magnificent.”

  “Oh, I can tell now … but how was I to know?”

  I could have asked myself the same. Once I’d thought about enhancing her singing with my ghost-projection equipment, to create supporting “angels,” but after what I’d heard, that would have been too great a sin … far too great. Then, maybe, any use of the equipment to influence people would have been, and I just hadn’t understood then.

  “Enchanting,” offered Alois, stolidly easing the dean aside, for once. “Wonderfully enchanting.” Alois bowed and escorted the dean back toward the foyer.

  “Professor duBoise,” asked a red-haired student, tears streaming down her face, “how can I ever do the Perkins the way you do?”

  Llysette waited.

  “Couldn’t we change places? I’ll never be able to sing like you do.”

  “You wish to sing, Berthe? Then work you must. I will hear the Perkins on Tuesday.” Llysette softened the words with a smile and a pat on the girl’s shoulder.

  “Your coat,” I prompted as the admirers began to thin.

  “It is … in the practice room.”

  “Do you need a ride?” I asked Johanna as I started to retrieve the heavy coat.

  “Pietr is already getting the steamer.” The accompanist smiled briefly at Llysette. “Even he was touched, but he won’t admit it.”

  “That, that is quelque chose incredible.”

  After ensuring that Llysette was wrapped in the coat, I managed to ease the three boxes of chocolates and several sprays of flowers under my free arm and to escort her to the side door. “You wait here, and I’ll bring the Stanley around.”

  “That is fine with me.” She shivered, as she often did after heavy exertion, and wrapped the heavy coat around her.

  The Stanley started easily, despite the streaks of ice and cold water, and the rain had turned to tiny frozen pellets. Llysette almost slipped getting into the steamer. Before long, the road and car park would be black ice.

  The town square was mostly deserted, except for the lights in the Watch station, and I wondered if Chief Waetjen had stopped by on his way home, that is, if he had one besides the station.

  “Who was the bearded fellow?” I asked. “I’ve never seen him before.”

  “The … bearded … oh, the man with the ancient cravat?” Llysette shrugged under the heavy wool coat. “Never have I seen him. He offered his name … James … Jacob … Jensen. He said … we would be hearing from him. Then he was gone.

  “That’s all?”

  “He said my singing, it was as grand as any.”

  “It was.” I laughed, but I wondered about Herr Jensen. When unknown admirers promise that you’ll hear from them, you have to wonder in what context.

  The River Wijk was dark even under the new lights from the bridge. On the other side, I had to go into four-wheel drive once we started up Deacon’s Lane because the narrow uphill road had a thin layer of ice and slush. I had the feeling we were in for an early and hard winter, unlike the previous year.

  I dropped Llysette by the door while I manuevered the steamer into the car barn.

  She glanced up the stairs as we stepped into the front foyer. Force of habit, still, I suspected, from the days when Carolynne, the family ghost, had lurked there. That had been before my efforts with ghosting technology had ended up grafting her into both our souls. It hadn’t been planned that way, and it had saved us from worse, but it wasn’t always easy living with feelings and memories you knew weren’t yours. I felt it was even harder for Llysette and, for that reason, didn’t mention Carolynne much.

  “Good it is for there to be no ghosts looking down the stairs. I would dread looking up there.”

  “I know. I always looked first.” I locked the door and took off my topcoat, then led her back to the sitting room. “You just sit here in front of the stove.” Although I’d loaded the woodstove before we’d left and the sitting room off the terrace was warm, I opened the stove door and added another two lengths of oak. The heat welled out, and Llysette leaned forward to get warm.

  “I’ll get your wine … or would you like chocolate?” As I turned, I could see the piano in the rear parlor—I’d never really used that space before, but it had turned out to be the best place for the piano, and the room was warm.

  “The wine… . I am warmer, already.” She looked up at me, her green eyes wide. “You are good to me … to us.”

  “After … everything … you say that…” I swallowed. It was still hard. “I love you.”

  A smile crinkled her lips. “Dutch you are. For all your words, mon ami, some you find difficult.”

  She was right. I did.

  “The wine?” Her voice was softer now when she spoke, softer than when we had first met, but neither of us needed to discuss that.

  I ducked downstairs—there was a relatively new case of Bajan red, a mountai
n Sebastopol. Probably not so good as a really good French wine, but better than anything else, and the French hadn’t been producing good wines for the last fifteen years or so, not since Ferdinand had reduced the French population by more than 30 percent in his infamous March.

  Once I’d opened the bottle, I brought her a glass, with my chocolates. They were the fourth box, but how would I have known?

  “Here is the wine … and my small offering.” I didn’t tell her about the roses up in the bedroom. She’d see those later.

  “Good.” She smiled, and her eyes smiled with her mouth. “French it is not—”

  “But almost as good,” I finished. Llysette would never admit that Columbian wine would match that of her vanquished homeland, but we could laugh about it—about the wine, not about her terrors, nor the torture under Ferdinand, nor the hard years after.

  “Almost.”

  I sat down beside her on the new sofa—we’d redecorated a great deal in the six months since we’d been married—with my own glass of Sebastopol.

  Outside, the ice pellets turned into snow, and the wind gusted. I eased back to enjoy warmth of the stove, of the Sebastopol, of the coming weekend, and mostly of Llysette.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The ice and snow that had intermittently fallen over the weekend and into Monday had long since vanished under Tuesday’s sun. Only a light frost remained on the browned grasses of my neighbor Benjamin’s fields as I drove the Stanley across the gray waters of the River Wijk and into Vanderbraak Centre just before nine on Wednesday morning. Llysette and I were cutting it close, since she had a student at nine o’clock for applied voice.

  “Mercredi, c’est le jour du diable.” Llysette had come to speak a bit more French in the months since we had been married, and I wondered how much strain always speaking English had been.

  “The midweek peak,” I agreed.

  “I talk, and they listen, and still I must beat the notes. Nod they do, but understand they do not.”

  The ever-present Constable Gerhardt waved and smiled above his sweeping mustaches as we slowed on our way around the square that held the Watch building, the Dutch Reformed church, the post centre, and McArdles’, the sole full grocery emporium in the area. Then we were past the good constable and headed uphill toward the Music and Theatre building.

  “Lunch at Delft’s, right after noon?” I asked.

  “Mais oui, mon cher.” At least I got a dazzling smile before the more somber look clouded her face as she turned toward the Music and Theatre building and her hapless, and probably clueless, young Dutch student.

  Dutch students were no different from any other students in thinking that mere mental effort should effect physical results. It doesn’t work that way in singing—or in anything—but that’s a lesson that almost never can be passed from generation to generation but must be learned the hard way. As Llysette kept saying, “The head, it is smart, but the muscles are dumb.” But all too many students didn’t want to put in the mental and physical effort required to train dumb muscles.

  Before I headed to my own office, I stopped outside Samaha’s to pick up the Asten Post-Courier. While “Samaha’s Factorium and Emporium” had been on the corner opposite the bridge for well over a century, so had far too much of the inventory. The proprietor, one Louis Samaha, not only refused to answer to anything except “Louie,” but he was also the only shopkeeper left in town who had individual narrow paper boxes for his special customers. I continued to have a fondness for some traditions, even as I had watched them unravel all around me.

  The decor of Samaha’s consisted of dark wooden counters and rough-paneled walls that contained fine cracks older than any current living beings in Vanderbraak Centre, perhaps even older than some of the ghosts. The modern glow panels in the ceiling had so far failed to shed light on the store’s history or the inventory in the deeper counter shelves.

  I ignored the bakery counter and the breads and rolls heavy enough to sink a dreadnought or serve as ballast for a dirigible and pulled my paper from its slot, fifth down in the first row, right below the empty slot labeled: “Derkin.” In the three years since I had returned to Vanderbraak Centre, I’d seen Mister Derkin exactly twice.

  I left my dime on the counter, since Louie was nowhere to be seen. Although the Post-Courier was only seven cents, I kept giving Louie the other three as a fee for saving back issues for me when I was away from Vanderbraak Centre.

  The left front-page story above the fold was a rehash—more on the continuing political fight between landing rights at the Asten aerodrome between turbos and dirigibles. I sighed in spite of myself. Some things didn’t seem to change.

  I folded the paper into my case and climbed back into the Stanley for the short drive to the upper faculty car park, not the lower one where I had dropped Llysette, but the larger one closer to my office. The old Dutch Republican house had been converted to the Offices of the Natural Resources Department—rather, I corrected myself, the expanded and renamed Department of Political and Natural Resource Sciences—dear David’s political coup and brainchild.

  As I eased the steamer up Highland Street, the clock on the post centre struck nine. Three spaces remained, all in the back row, but what was I to expect when the car park only contained four dozen places and nearly twice that number of faculty lived outside of walking distance? The latecomers parked where they could, but not, of course, around the square. Dean Er Recchus and the town elders had squabbled about that before the magistrates on at least two occasions, and that might recur. The dean’s memoranda on the issue threatened to revoke faculty parking privileges for any faculty member so desperate as to occupy a space designed for those shopping at the establishments around the square.

  I vented the Stanley before locking it and walking to my office. Gilda, the department secretary, glanced up, her frizzy black hair pulled back into a bun. “Marriage continues to agree with you, Doktor Eschbach. You aren’t haunting our halls every waking moment.” Her eyes flicked to David’s closed and dark door. Gilda never was warm or polite when David was around, but in her position I probably wouldn’t have been either.

  “I continue to be fortunate.” That was true, in more ways than one, and what else could I say?

  A single message graced my box, from the esteemed chairman, the most honorable Doktor David Doniger—a reminder of next Monday’s faculty meeting, on the special memo paper he used as chairman.

  Once in my office, I read through the Asten Post-Courier from front to back. Two stories intrigued me particularly. The first was about the reaction of Quebec’s president to a fishing rights issue:

  MONTREAL (WNS). Pres. Alphonse Duval announced an “agreement in principle” with New France over the allocation of catches from the Grand Banks fisheries in return for approval of the sale of three New French Santa Anna class frigates to the Navy of Quebec. The frigates are currently under construction at the San Diego, Baja, shipyards.

  Jacques Chirac, leader of the opposition Democratic Republicans, denounced the proposed agreement as an abrogation of Quebecois sovereignty over the Grand Banks and an invitation to a Columbian invasion.

  Columbian Defense Minister Holmbek refused direct comment, but Defense Ministry sources indicated that the idea of military action to deal with fisheries matters was “absurd.”

  The Alliance for World Peace asked Speaker Hartpence to begin an investigation into the charges that the frigate sale agreement was leaked to the media in order to obtain support for an increase in the Columbian military budget for the coming fiscal year.

  For some reason, the article bothered me, but I couldn’t say why. I read the WNS story again but still couldn’t identify why it bothered me. The second story bothered me, too, but for a different reason:

  ASTEN (RPI). The latest development in the Israel Ishmaad murder case is a ghost—the ghost of the child Ishmaad allegedly mutilated and murdered.

  Asten City Prosecutor Fridrich Devol yesterday used testimony from Dr.
Fitzgerald Warren as key support for his argument that Ishmaad had tortured his six-year-old stepson for an extended period of time…

  “In simple terms,” said Devol, “young children raised in a normal and loving atmosphere do not develop an awareness of death until they are much older, usually between eight and twelve. The fact that this boy barely six years old became a ghost is the strongest possible evidence that he had been repeatedly beaten, that he was aware of the possibility of death. Not only was he killed, but he was robbed of his childhood long before his death… .”

  Those close to defense attorney Edward Quiddik have suggested that Devol’s argument is “psychological poppycock with no basis in fact” and predict that Quiddik will address the issue with a battery of poltergeistic experts.

  The prosecuting attorney’s argument made sense to me. Ghosts came from violent knowledgeable death. My son Waltar had lived for nearly ten minutes on that bloody Federal District street, bleeding from bullets meant for me, and he’d been nearly eleven—and he’d never become a ghost. Elspeth had died instantly, too quickly to become a ghost, and, then, I wished I had too. I’d had to learn to live again, and every day, Llysette—and Carolynne—taught me a little more.

  At the knock at my half-open door, I set down the paper. “Come in.”

  “Johan.” Wilhelm Mondriaan still remained the junior member of the expanded department. The shirttail relative of the painter continued to inform all who conversed at length with him, in some fashion or another, that he had received his doctorate from the University of Virginia. He had trouble understanding that I had ceased to worship unquestioningly at that or any other altar of higher education, Thomas Jefferson notwithstanding.