The Prodigy: 2014 Edition - The Ghost Stories of Noel Hynd - Number 4

by Noel Hynd

  Her eyes flickered for a second, then opened. She saw Rolf and smiled in the mistiness of her half-sleep.

  “Come to bed,” she whispered invitingly. He said he would. I just want to feel you on top of me. And inside me,” she said.

  He undressed. Rabinowitz is dead, he reminded himself. That chapter in my life is over. It’s finished. A new reality begins tomorrow.

  He settled into bed next to Diana. He put his arm around her and she responded warmly to him, moving her body as close to him as possible. She smelled wonderful. She always showered before bed and he had no idea what she used on her skin, but it aroused him to no end.

  She came fully awake. Her lips met his and her arms wrapped themselves around him.

  Half an hour later, everyone in the house was asleep. There were no disturbances overnight. No intrusions from outside the house.

  At one point, however, Rolf Geiger had in his mind the realistic image of himself on his feet and moving through the house. He was walking as if in a trance, taking himself back downstairs to where he stood in front of his Steinway for several seconds. Thinking. Ruminating. His head filled with music, his soul filled with challenge.

  He was gently rubbing his fingers across the keyboard, so lightly that not a single note was struck. He felt that the eyes of his master were upon him, which was silly, because Rabinowitz was neither any longer his master nor alive. But in a chilling moment, Geiger struck a chord with his right hand. No music sounded from his piano.

  He stared at the instrument and didn’t understand. When he raised his eyes, Rabinowitz was smiling. Gloating. Then, like the grin of the Cheshire cat, Rabinowitz receded into nothing.

  I’m dreaming, Geiger was conscious of thinking. This is okay, but only because I’m dreaming. He opened his eyes in the dark, quiet bedroom, re-assured himself, and then snuggled in closer to Diana. He drifted back to a more peaceful sleep.

  Six

  Outside on East Seventy-Third Street, on the opposite side of the block from Geiger’s town house, late on the cold evening that followed the funeral, a new presence, a watcher, had taken up position.

  The figure that had Number 112 under surveillance was a small and sinewy, little whisper of a man. His eyes were intense and dark, the same color as his spirit, the same color as the night.

  He sat in the shadow of a big old tree several houses away from Geiger’s. He was one of the feral figures of a New York night time, the type of human form that lurks in shadows and doorways and startles passersby with sudden movements. The type of figure that New Yorkers steel themselves against, the sort of presence that keeps one’s eye upon, but never allows to catch one’s eyes—though his own eyes had widened significantly when he had spotted Rolf Geiger standing in the frame of his second-story window, if only for a minute.

  The figure down on the street was heavily into tobacco. Puff. Puff, smoke, smoke, hack, hack, cough, cough.

  The watcher sat on the steps of a house with three brick front steps, working a pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes through the night. A little orange glow pinpointed him in the shadows, a glow on the end of his cancer stick.

  He kept his eyes on the second floor of 112 East Seventy-Third. He had already noted the times that the downstairs lights went off and the upstairs lights went on.

  There was an old woman who worked in the house, the watcher had noted, and a twenty-something woman who lived there with the famous pianist. These people were young and beautiful, both the man and the woman, the figure in the shadows had decided, and were undoubtedly undeserving of their wealth. Well, they had ways of paying. Already, the watcher knew much of their schedule. The old lady arrived in the late morning and often stayed until seven-thirty or even later. Then she left and didn’t come back until the next day.

  What made the house unusual was the unpredictable pianist and his girlfriend. The only thing that was predictable was that when they went out during the day, they usually would leave the neighborhood and they tended to stay out for several hours. Knowledge of that helped.

  The watcher noted that this morning, the lights had gone out at one-fifteen. A nighttime pattern would eventually emerge too.

  The watcher stayed until 3:00 A.M. Then, with the streets quiet, he was certain that no further activity would occur in the pianist’s home that night. He looked down at the small pile of cigarette butts that he had created. He brushed them out onto the sidewalk and rose.

  He walked westward toward Madison Avenue, thinking of how if he had nudged the limousine door just a little harder, a little faster, he could have crushed that too-talented right hand and ended Rolf Geiger’s career the afternoon of the funeral.

  Tsk, tsk, he mused. What a shame he had missed.

  Oh well, he told himself. There’s always the next time.

  Seven

  Up until two years earlier when he decided to withdraw from most public performances, Rolf Geiger had been the splashiest, most dynamic, most famous musician in the world.

  When the young American virtuoso played the piano, women often hurled bouquets, candy and even lingerie onto the stage. They shrieked and fainted. When he played New York, London, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Rome or any of the other great cities of the world, audiences surged toward he stage following his recitals. His fans wanted to be as close as possible to the most handsome, talented, and engaging musician of his generation.

  In Prague, during his world tour of 2005, the stage was overrun with fans following a rocked-up performance of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No.3 in C Major. Geiger’s fans pulled apart the Steinway and fought for broken strings and keys. Someone made away with the white tie that he had worn during his performance.

  Geiger knew the hold he had over his fans. He was a rock star in a field of classical music. He was not averse to adding his own sense of impact to a concert. In Stockholm, on the same tour, he played for five days at the majestic new state theater. During his booking, the stage was lit entirely by candles—a special dispensation from the fire marshal.

  The candles were powder blue, matching his eye-candy formal suit. Then he continued on to Paris, where on Bastille Day 2005, accompanied by l’Orchestre Nationale de Paris he played a superb jazzed-up Debussy on a tricolor Steinway super-grande. The instrument had been specially constructed for the occasion, the only one of its kind in the world—right down to the alternating red, white and blue keys.

  But that was only the beginning.

  His stage in Paris had been built at the northern base of the Eiffel tower. The tower itself was backlit as he performed, and his roof was a canopy of radiant stars. Before an audience of one million, giant projection television screens were set in every direction across the Champ-de-Mars all the way to the Seine. As an encore, he played an impromptu La Marseilles, seamlessly weaving in and out of it alternating strains of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and Gershwin’s An American in Paris. Fireworks followed, igniting the sky a second time. It was the most dramatic appearance of a Yank in the French capital since Lindberg in 1927 and Kennedy in 1962.

  Even if purists hated what he was doing, Geiger had a way of taking the music of a nation and bringing it to its citizen in ways that made it pulse with new life. In Warsaw, he was followed by a mob of one hundred Polish women on the street after he played his own variations on Chopin. In Prague, he was hailed as the philosophical descendant of Dvořák as he, visitor from the new world, played his own piano transcription of the New World Symphony, interpreting Dvořák in ways that had never before been heard.

  In Vienna, his arrival was akin to the second coming of Mozart. There were also whispers in the Austrian capital that Geiger was the reincarnation of Franz Liszt and that he possessed the resurrected genius of Beethoven. Around the world, he was more popular than Presley, Sinatra or the Beatles had ever been. Grenada, where Rolf Geiger had played for free at a charity event against world hunger in 2000, put him on a series of postage stamps.

  All this for a yo
ung classical pianist, though Geiger was far from a classicist. He was unafraid to experiment or popularize venerated works. His arrival on the music scene had reversed the trend of popular music for the last half century. By the time he was twenty-one, he had been on the covers of two hundred publications around the world.

  From Rolf Geiger’s fingers, musicologists heard sounds that they said had been dead for two centuries. His performances of Beethoven caused hardened critics across the world, seated in dark music halls, to look up from their notebooks and feel the hair rise on the backs of their necks. That was standard, and that was why the critics hated it so much when he extemporized. Also standard was the eye contact he would often establish with his audiences. He would sometimes play an entire concerto or sonata without glancing at the keyboard.

  Once, as a stunt at one of the big gambling places in Atlantic City, on a balmy June evening, he played his own transcription of Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture while blindfolded. He didn’t miss a note.

  Rolf Geiger was that good. And Geiger, who had grown up poor in a failing industrial town in West Virginia for the first years of his life, had a problem with none of this.

  Sometimes he would perform with three pianos on stage, using them as his whims dictated during a performance. He played every important city in the world. Concert halls were not large enough to hold his audience. Sometimes stadia weren’t either. His performances were events that transcended music.

  He played Beethoven and Rachmaninoff in full formal attire. But every bit as often, he played in white tie, tails and blue jeans, depending upon the venue. He played in green velvet in Dublin. He wore a tri-cornered Minuteman hat and a Red Sox jersey when he played Sousa on the Fourth of July 2002, on the Esplanade in Boston. And once, when he played Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, he performed in tight black patent leather jacket and jeans, no shirt, and sequined boots. He liked to perform on blue Steinways and red Yamahas. It barely mattered.

  Equally, he was given to the odd acerbic one-liner, occasionally even off-the-cuff comments to his audience during concerts. At the Dodger Stadium concert, he noted that the great Beethoven physically stood only five-feet-four in his lifetime.

  “In the film business,” Geiger told the Hollywood audience, “that would have made him an Outstanding Short Subject.”

  Geiger’s face was ruled by his eyes—blue, darting and intense. Yet his eyes were also romantic and mysterious, at once drawing you in but not letting you past. His cheekbones were high—”Czarist” cheekbones, Rabinowitz once called them—and his hair was shaggy as it fell just past the top of his ears.

  His hands were powerful. Large and strong, yet sensitive. Veined and fleshed versions of something sculpted by Michelangelo. He could reach a twelfth on a standard keyboard. His legs were long. His body was athletic.

  He could do everything with a piano except make it fly. His music, his musicianship, his showmanship, the persona of Rolf Geiger soared by itself. At the end of his 2005 European tour, as a conceit for European television, he presented himself at a television studio in Monaco and played Chopin’s Etude for Black Keys with a lit votive candle balanced on the back of each hand.

  Sometimes his talent could scare everyone, including himself. But eventually such events caused the fiery backlash among the self-anointed “serious music critics” of the world. They had turned on him with a pyrotechnic vengeance, almost to the point where some would no longer even consider him an artist.

  “One doesn’t hear the one time prodigy, Rolf Geiger, play so much as one sees him play,” wrote the arts editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, putting in words what many musicologists privately felt. “This whole ‘cult performance’ thing has gotten completely out of control. Geiger has become the sociopath of classical music.”

  “Rolf Geiger,” wrote another scribbler in Time, “is ruining classical music when he could be saving it. Because of his enormous popularity, much of the concert going public knows the great music only by the corrupt variations Geiger plays. They know it not by the way it was written. He uses great music the way Mike Tyson used a sparring partner.”

  “A fraud,” wrote the Toronto Globe & Mail.

  “An out and out sym-phony,” maintained the Dallas Morning News.

  “If all these people knew so much about music,” Geiger was once quoted in response, “they’d be creating music instead of writing about it.”

  But, over the last two dozen months, and as he viewed the distant approach of his thirtieth birthday, Geiger had become elusive, then reclusive. Militantly so, playing only at small dates in remote concert halls while he sorted out his life, his talent and his art.

  “Time to think,” he called it. “Time to consider the direction of my life.”

  Time to decide what he wanted to be. At least now, he had made that decision. And the passing of Rabinowitz had only underscored what he felt to be the correctness of his choice.

  The morning after Rabinowitz’s interment, Geiger turned his attention back to his Steinway. He had become adept at applying emergency first aid to his own equipment. He replaced the ruptured string and fiddled with the tuning.

  After forty minutes he was pleased. He selected several of Beethoven’s sonatas from his library and reconsidered several movements for the rest of the morning.

  Shortly after noon, he went to a health club in the East fifties where he worked out three times a week when not on tour. Playing concerts was as physically demanding as it was mentally exhausting. It was imperative to stay in top physical shape.

  He returned home for lunch and a short nap. The jet lag and the end of the trip to San Remo were still having their effects. He dealt with some business matters over the phone during the afternoon. Diana had an assignment to write a long article for The New Yorker and was out doing interviews and research.

  Toward five, he went out into his neighborhood for a brief walk, mentally running through his feelings toward the possible proposals that his agent was likely to make that evening. Obviously, Greenstone wanted to nudge him back toward the major recital halls. A lot of time had passed since Geiger had performed on a major tour.

  Walking on Madison Avenue in a light rain, Rolf brooded. He needed to make an important decision. Was it time to play again? Was it time to embrace big audiences again and let them embrace him? Moreover, was it time to drop the jazz, pizzazz, and rock and try to take his place among the finest pianists of the century?

  He had never really become what he had shown promise of becoming. Something about the situation scared the living hell out of him. But then again, there had been the most recent trip to Europe…the lightning on the airplane…the death of Rabinowitz…all this coupled with his long absence from the world’s most demanding recital halls.

  Today in New York City, walking a final block on East Seventy-Third Street, he thought of the conversation he would have with his agent this evening. He had been detoured from his long-term ambitions over the last few years, but now his rightful time had come. Even his hands seemed to be itching to play again.

  To play and really play. No horsing around this time.

  He would listen carefully to what Brian Greenstone had to say. Then when Brian was talked out, he would say yes or no to whatever direction for his future Brian wished to propose. Then they would discuss. Well, that’s how he reasoned it would go.

  His thoughts were so intent, as he walked down his own block, that he wasn’t even bothered by the gnarled man in a rumpled coat sitting in a doorway across the street, watching Geiger.

  Eight

  Sarah and Brian Greenstone arrived punctually for dinner Friday evening at seven-thirty. Sarah Greenstone was a third wife, the most recent in a succession of pretty brides who increasingly got prettier, younger and thinner as Greenstone got wealthier, older and heavier. Sarah was twenty-three years younger than her husband. She was a petite contemplative woman with black hair. She was in her mid-thirties but could pass for her early late twenties with her gen
tle, unlined face.

  Intellectually, she was as sharp as a razor. She had an MBA from the University of Chicago and held a challenging job in public relations for a famous Swiss pharmaceutical company that always seemed to be under indictment for one thing or another.

  Geiger invited his guests into his library. Mrs. Jamison had filled the town house with excellent cooking aromas. Dinner was served shortly before eight.

  Geiger and his agent spent the meal speaking about social matters and the dire state of the classical concert business. Sarah and Diana talked quietly between themselves, tuning out the men’s conversation when it suited them.

  After the meal, Mrs. Jamison cleared, amidst compliments from all four diners. Over dessert and coffee, Brian Greenstone moved to the purpose of the meeting.

  “Obviously, Rolf,” Greenstone began, “I’d like to suggest to you a very specific career move. May I tell you exactly without you falling out of your chair?”

  Greenstone had moved to the United States as a nineteen-year-old, entering the country on a six-month visa and staying a lifetime. His speech still bore the cadences of South London.

  “Please do,” Geiger said.

  “I think the time is right for you to start performing again. But in a different way than ever before. I think you should perform a world tour on a grand scale. But you should drop the pizzazz and the pop music. Just do classical, my lad. Pure and simple. The world’s greatest music by the world’s greatest pianist.”

  Geiger smiled slightly. His round blue eyes glided sideways, and he looked at the two women. Then he looked back to his agent.

  “Flatter me anymore, Brian, and I’ll throw your fine English butt out of here” Geiger answered.

  “Good. At least we’re speaking. Look, from me as a friend and from me as your most trusted business advisor, Rolf,” Greenstone said. “I’d like you to do a world tour in which you finally establish your rightful place at the pinnacle of pianists.”