Ghosts of Columbia

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “And this must be the famous Minister Eschbach.” Perkins smiled warmly.

  “Scarcely famous,” I protested.

  “I’m Dan Perkins. It’s so good to meet you, Mademoiselle duBoise.” He looked first at Llysette and then in my direction. “Or is it Fraulein or Frau?”

  “She sings as Fraulein or Mademoiselle, but technically she’s both a doktor and a professor.” Somehow I’d thought he’d be bigger, but I was nearly half a head taller than he was.

  “A professional in every sense of the word.” He offered a boyish smile that belied the tinge of white in his blond hair and gestured toward the man with the blond beard beside him. “This is Brother Hansen. James V. Hansen. He’s with the culture people for now.”

  Hansen bowed from the waist. “A pleasure to meet you both.” His smile was friendly and almost as practiced as a politician’s. “You are punctual … unlike some … artists… .”

  I took Llysette’s overcoat, and she opened the folder.

  “Some questions … before we commence?”

  “Of course.” Perkins almost sounded happy that she had questions.

  I retreated back down to the hall. Standing around would only make them, or me, uncomfortable and slow things down.

  I sat in the darkened third row, just out of the lights. Hansen sat on the end of the front row, where he could survey both the empty hall and the stage, and his eyes were never still. He was solid, blond-haired like so many of the Saints seemed to be, and wore a gray suit that was conservative in cut but with a fine green stripe that would have been considered almost frivolous in Asten. I hadn’t missed the slight bulge in the coat either or the thickness around the waist. He was also older, possibly even older than I was, and that bothered me.

  Good covert agents, and I’d liked to think I had been one, had to go on feelings as much as on cold logic, but that was always hard to explain in debriefs. I’d have hated to explain in writing, even in something as frivolous as a spy novel. They always make spies out as either cold calculators or dashing romantics, when most of us were men trying to handle impossible jobs any way we could—like Hansen apparently was.

  Brother Hansen, for all his charming smiles, was the Saint equivalent of a Spazi agent, and he’d been talking to the composer and waiting for us. I tried to think as Llysette and Perkins began to go through the concert schedule but found myself drawn into the music. I could tell Perkins was as good an accompanist as I’d ever heard, and even after a few minutes I could tell the concert was going to be something special.

  When they got to his pieces, several times he stopped and talked to her, but I couldn’t really catch the words, except that he seemed to be explaining what he’d had in mind. Like most artists, he explained with his hands and his intonations, perhaps more than with his words.

  Once, right after we’d been married, I’d wondered what would happen, what could possibly happen, to two upcountry academics. Well … something had, and I wasn’t quite sure I was ready for it. The rehearsal just reemphasized the feeling I had that Llysette duBoise was about to be rediscovered—and then some.

  Hansen sat and listened and watched, seemingly ignoring me, and I sat and listened and watched all three.

  After they finished, and it must have taken nearly three hours, Llysette turned backstage, apparently heading for a dressing room or a ladies’ room or both. After a moment, Hansen walked up to Perkins. I listened in the darkness at the side of the stage, just short of the temporary stairs. I had both overcoats across my arm.

  “… you were right… .”

  Perkins grinned boyishly again and shook his head. “… better even than … they’ve got quite a surprise coming. Wait until she has an audience. I can tell.”

  “There may be a few surprises all around.”

  Perkins looked hard at the older man. “They had better all be pleasant ones, Brother Hansen.” He stressed the word “Brother.”

  “The First Counselor has already told me the same thing, Doktor.” Hansen cleared his throat. “I only meant that sopranos are supposed to be boring. I enjoyed it, and this was a rehearsal.”

  “She’s got the artistic soul or spirit of two singers—and the artistry. She could look like … a duck … and no one would notice.”

  “She’s no duck, Brother Perkins. Like I said, surprises all around.”

  I could hear Llysette’s heels coming from backstage, and the two stopped talking. She was pulling on her jacket as she walked into the light, and I stepped up onto the stage, holding her coat.

  Hansen frowned as he saw me, as though he’d forgotten I was there. I held in my own smile. One trick I had learned in the Spazi was blending into the background when I wanted to. Sometimes, though, I felt I blended whether I wanted to or not.

  “This afternoon, then?” Llysette asked as she neared the big Steinbach.

  “At four,” Perkins answered.

  I wondered if they’d scheduled another rehearsal, but I didn’t ask. Llysette would tell me, and it was her voice and concert.

  Llysette didn’t speak until we were outside, walking back toward the Lion Inn. “Doktor Perkins, he is not what I expected.”

  “How is that?”

  A messenger in a heavy coat dodged around us and kept running south.

  “He is not cold, the way his letters were, and he says what he thinks.”

  I had to wonder how Perkins had survived in a theocracy. Through absolute talent? If so, that said something about Deseret, but exactly what … I wasn’t sure. Then, I was getting less and less sure about more and more—like who wanted whom dead and who wanted Llysette to succeed and who to fail. I saw too many possibilities—one of the dubious benefits of age and experience.

  “We practice again this afternoon—at four. A short time.”

  “Here?”

  “Non. In our room. I wished … the phrasing in two of his songs. I must think. He played them, and we were not together … not how I would like.”

  “That’s fine with me.”

  “You are good.”

  I still doubted that but didn’t speak for a moment, as a fiercer gust of wind whipped around us and tossed scattered snowflakes along First Street West.

  We turned the corner toward the Lion Inn, and I added, “I forgot to tell you. There was another article in the local paper about you and the concert. Brother Hansen reminded me about it when he talked to Perkins while you were backstage. Hansen was talking about a surprise, and I got to thinking about a different kind of surprise. There’s one thing you haven’t really prepared for. It might not happen.” I shrugged. “But it might.”

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

  “What if some reporter or videolink type corners you?”

  “Moi?”

  “Don’t be coy, my lady. You’re getting better and better known, and even the First Counselor here apparently wants a success. What better way than some sort of interview?”

  “And they would ask what?”

  “Anything.” I laughed, then coughed from the cold wind. The hotel was less than a half-block away. “Something like … why are you returning to performing now? Or … what do you make of singing in two national capitals in less than a month? How do you like Deseret? Was your husband really a spy?”

  Llysette shook her head. “Those, they will ask, you think?”

  “Some of them have no shame. Most of them,” I added.

  “I am performing now because they have let me.”

  I winced. “Non… .”

  Llysette grinned, and I realized she’d just been teasing. “That, I would not say, save to you. What I will say … A person who has no country has few choices. I am happy now. I will perform so long as people wish to hear.”

  “What about the spy business?”

  “Mon cher … he is a very good professor, and he was a war hero, and he is a good man. He is no spy.”

  That was true as far as it went. “If they ask more?”

  “I will say tha
t they should ask you if they do not like my words.”

  “What is the message behind your concert, Fräulein duBoise?” I asked in the snide way I’d heard from too many linkers.

  “Message?” Llysette shook her head. “You have suffered from them, Johan.”

  “Probably. But it’s the kind of question some will ask.”

  “Then I would say that music is beauty, and there is too little beauty in a cold world.” She paused, and I could see that her face had lost most of its color.

  “You need something to eat.”

  “Je crois que oui.”

  “Is the hotel all right?”

  “What is close is best.”

  We made it to The Refuge, and Llysette had chicken noodle soup, while waiting for a salad, and I munched on crackers.

  “The soup is good.” Her face was still pale.

  “I’m glad.” We didn’t have a corner booth, but, again, no one was seated at the adjacent tables, although we had a waitress, an older and gray-haired woman.

  “He is a good accompanist.”

  “As good as he is a composer?”

  “At both he is good. His art songs, they are better than the Vondel operas.”

  “The lyrics are better than Vondel’s?”

  “Dutch … it has the charm of Russian and the efficiency of Italian.”

  My Dutch ancestors would have protested, but Llysette remained pale, and I had more to worry about than Dutch opera lyrics composed centuries earlier and set to music by Doktor Perkins.

  “Like French, you mean?” I said with a grin.

  “You… .” Then she shook her head and smiled back.

  As she took another spoonful of soup, I glanced around the dining area. Most of the diners were male, in groups of two to four, and most wore gray or brown suits, especially dark brown. None looked in our direction.

  The color was beginning to return to Llysette’s face by the time the salads arrived. I’d eaten three large soda crackers. Would I have been better off with the soup? Probably, but I’d had too much soup as a sickly child.

  The salads disappeared quickly, as did the rolls that came with them. I’d barely finished when the gray-haired waitress reappeared.

  “Would you like some dessert? The lime gelatin pie is good. So is the double chocolate death cake.”

  I passed on the lime gelatin pie, and my waistline wouldn’t have stood the cake.

  “Do you want to see the Temple grounds?” I asked after signing the bill for lunch with: “duBoise/Eschbach, Room 603.”

  Llysette shrugged, then answered, “I ate too much, and a walk would be good.”

  The wind had died down by the time we left the Inn’s lobby, and with the sun out, I ended up loosening my coat after the first block. Llysette did not do the same, but she wasn’t shivering either. I did not point out the snow on the mountains to the southeast.

  To the east of the Lion Inn rose the white stone spires of the Temple and, below them, white stone walls. The air easing in from the northwest carried the faint tang of petrochemicals and of salt.

  I squeezed Llysette’s gloved hand, and she squeezed mine.

  We slowed at the corner, behind a woman with a double stroller carriage.

  Both fair-cheeked children smiled at Llysette as she bent over. “They are beautiful.”

  “Thank you.” The woman smiled, then pushed the stroller across South Temple.

  I caught the brightness in Llysette’s eyes as we waited for the signal to turn to allow us to cross the street. “I’m sorry.”

  A flash of green blotted away the incipient tears. “You did not—”

  “I can be sorry.” I reached out and put my arm around her shoulders as we walked and squeezed her gently.

  “That … it was not meant to be.”

  I didn’t know about that, only that Ferdinand had a lot to answer for, and that there wasn’t much I could do about that either. My neck twitched, an unpleasant and too-familiar feeling, and I casually looked toward the street and the maroon Browning that steamed by silently.

  Two men wearing green jackets, from what I could see, under their gray trench coats eased up the street after us, keeping well back, but you never lose the feeling of eyes on your back.

  More Danites? I kept the half-smile on my face as we crossed to the walkway that bordered the park surrounding the Temple square proper.

  Although Great Salt Lake City had to hold more than a quarter-million souls, the streets were not thronged with steamers or steam buses. I craned but saw no haulers. Were they banned from the area around the Temple?

  The browning grass in the park around the Temple was trimmed and raked and without leaves, despite the winds of the morning and the day before. Nowhere did I see even the smallest bit of litter.

  A small group of young adults, less than a dozen, followed a young man in a charcoal gray suit, without an overcoat, who periodically stopped. For a time, we trailed the group, discretely back.

  “The building here is the genealogy center.” He gestured toward the two-story gray stone structure that bordered the street on the north side of the square. “The difference engines there have everyone’s ancestry on record. You’ll learn more about that later.”

  Then came a churchlike building.

  “This is now the performing hall. It’s called Assembly Hall. There are three concerts a week broadcast from here all over Deseret… .”

  Llysette shook her head and looked at me.

  “I know,” I whispered.

  The group marched toward another building, with a keystone declaring it the “Visitor Center,” but I didn’t feel like declaring us as visitors, even though we were.

  I glanced back. The two Danites had split up, but they were clearly continuing their vigil.

  A higher stone wall encircled the Temple proper, and those gates were barred with black iron gratework. The dome-roofed Tabernacle squatted across a flat rectangular area, half-filled with raised stone enclosures that were turned bare-earth flower beds. The flower beds were bordered with low juniper hedges.

  We walked up to one of the Tabernacle doors, where a too-hefty young man in a charcoal black suit stood. He wore a rectangular name tag that proclaimed him as “Brother Marsden.”

  “Can we look in?” I asked.

  He smiled and opened the door. “The choir won’t be practicing until tonight. There are some schedules and pamphlets on the ledge along the wall.”

  The Tabernacle was impressive—essentially an amphitheatre around a series of tiered risers and a huge organ. The walls were white and gold, and the woodwork glistened under the dome. The recording equipment was still in place, with microphones hung strategically.

  I could hear the whispers from a couple standing just before the front row of seats, a good ten feet lower than where we stood at the rear, and more than a hundred feet away.

  “… Prophet Young preached right here … before they built the Temple. …”

  “… so did Jedediah Grant and Cannon.”

  “Good acoustics,” I murmured to Llysette.

  She nodded, her eyes still on the massive organ pipes and the tiered seats for the Saints’ Choir.

  “… booms when the Saints’ Choir sings—”

  “I would go,” Llysette said abruptly.

  I took her arm. “The Tabernacle bothers you.”

  “For singing it should be, not for the preaching.”

  “I don’t know how much preaching they do there now.”

  She shook her head.

  We walked slowly back to the hotel and our suite, where Llysette eased off her shoes and stretched out on the bed. I found the hotel-provided Guide to Great Salt Lake and began to read.

  I got as far as the winter recreation areas by the time four o’clock came. The rap on the suite door was firm, and I opened it. Doktor, or Brother, Perkins stood there.

  “Come on in. She’s expecting you.”

  Beyond the composer, where the corridor turned toward
the elevator, I saw a gray coat with a fine green stripe and a blond-haired head vanish around the corner.

  Perkins saw my eyes and nodded.

  I shut the door without comment. “Could I take your coat?” I wanted to see what the composer said.

  “Brother Hansen is concerned. He insisted on ensuring that I arrived … without incident. He worries that admirers will waylay me—as if any of them would recognize me outside of formal wear.” The composer’s laugh was ironic, with a hint of what I would have called self-mockery, as he turned to Llysette. “You, lady, will reinvent my career. If you sing as you did this morning …” He shook his head.

  Llysette’s slight frown disappeared with his words, and she said, “I am but a singer, not a composer.”

  “People listen to singers, not composers.”

  Llysette shrugged, indicating that she didn’t agree, but that she wasn’t going to argue.

  I retreated to the corner chair when the slender blond man sat at the piano and played several bars—something I didn’t recognize. “It’s even in tune.” He opened one of the folders he had brought in and set the opened music on the piano’s rack.

  “Good,” answered my lovely wife, and I wished I could play. But whatever gods or ghosts determine our heritage ensured musical talent was something I lacked.

  “I thought we might try the ‘Fragments’ part first. Here… .”

  “Oui… .”

  There was a difference between their efforts in the concert hall and the suite, but one so slight to my ears that I wouldn’t have caught it without Llysette’s explanation, and I wondered how many people really would have caught the difference.

  They continued for a time, then switched to the second song. After two attempts, Perkins paused and turned to Llysette. “Could you hold this just a little longer?”

  “I did not read the phrase so. Could we sing that phrase both ways?”

  “Of course.”

  So they did.

  Afterward, the composer frowned.

  Llysette remained straight-faced.

  “I think you were right,” Perkins said. “It sounds better. That could be because no one else has … the vibrancy you do.”

  Llysette looked down. Sometimes, she still didn’t fully understand what she had become. “Encore …”