The Memorist

by M. J. Rose

  Tucker’s head was still down.

  “Tucker?”

  “What?”

  “I said I think we need to get more men down and search all that uncharted terrain.”

  “Okay, I’ll get more men on it.”

  “But? I hear a but in your voice.”

  Tucker hesitated; no one liked giving Paxton no for an answer.

  “What is it?”

  “We’re on top of fucking Roman ruins that no one’s ever excavated. There are entire cities down there that we couldn’t find, even if we had dozens of teams and months to work. Why didn’t we know about this before we bid on this job?”

  “None of that matters now,” Paxton snapped. “If you can’t get the job done, tell me and I’ll find someone who can.”

  Kerri looked up sharply at the tone and the threat in Tom’s voice. She was the only one who really got him. But there were too many other sparks right now; far more dangerous ones he had to make sure didn’t burst into full-blown fires. “Is there anything we need to worry about before we move on?” He threw out the signature line and then added a coda. “As if we don’t already have enough to worry about.”

  Chapter 51

  Tuesday, April 29th—2:30 p.m.

  After spending an hour at the library, Malachai hurried off to keep a prearranged meeting with Fremont Brecht at the Memorist Society and Meer sat with Sebastian in his car and called her father. If he was finished with his tests, Sebastian had offered to pick him up and drive him home.

  “They’re not done with me yet,” Jeremy told her. “It seems as if I might not get out until tomorrow. What did you find out?”

  Cradling the phone between her chin and shoulder Meer looked out the window at the busy street and told her father about the letters they’d found, including one from Beethoven to Stephan von Breuning that referenced various instruments the maestro had given him as a gift for his young son. “I copied the end of it. This is what Beethoven wrote: If, my friend, my own music continues to be played, and my reputation continues to grow after my death, this silver flute and oboe will have added value for your son. He will have instruments of mine from the past that can give him pleasure in the future if he learns to play them and unlock their treasures.”

  “Lots of innuendo there,” Jeremy mused.

  “Except it refers to a silver flute. Not an ancient bone flute. We didn’t find any obvious clues to where Beethoven might have hidden an ancient flute.”

  Jeremy laughed. “Sweetheart, if they were obvious they wouldn’t be clues.”

  For the next few minutes he quizzed her about the content of the letters and then pointed out a pattern she and Sebastian and Malachai had all missed. “Sounds like he wrote about the woods a few too many times. Tomorrow once I’m out of here, we’re going to have to make a study of the areas he might have visited during 1813–1815.”

  Once Meer got off the phone she asked Sebastian where Beethoven had lived that was close to the woods.

  “Mödling, Penzing, Döbling, Heiligenstadt…” he listed the towns.

  Meer didn’t know what she expected. They were all just foreign sounding words to her.

  “Jedlesee and Baden,” he finished.

  “I don’t know where to start.”

  “Well, Baden literally borders the Vienna Woods.”

  “Can I take a train there?”

  Even though it was almost four, Baden was a popular destination and that afternoon it was crowded with tourists. Sebastian, who didn’t have a rehearsal that day, had insisted he come with her. He studied the map at the town’s information center. “It’s only a short distance from here to the entrance to the woods.”

  “That’s fine.” Meer was wearing jeans and her black leather blazer and boots with low heels so she wasn’t worried. She relished the idea of trekking through the woods and stretching her legs.

  “Would you give me a moment? I need to call and check on Nicolas. I do every afternoon around this time.”

  “Of course.” Meer walked a short distance away and looked down the street at the picturesque town that seemed frozen in the past, giving it a storybook feeling. Sebastian joined her only minutes later, looking troubled.

  “Is he all right?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t get through, which is unusual. I left a message though. The nurses are usually good at calling me back.”

  “Tell me about the town,” she asked, hoping to distract him, and he gave her a hint of a smile that suggested he’d noticed her effort.

  “I don’t know much. Baden has been a rich resort for the people of Vienna for centuries. In Beethoven’s time, they arrived with their servants and their china services, their music and their paintings and left it very cultured.”

  Sightseers made their way in and out of stores on either side of the street, but Sebastian led Meer across the epicenter, past a fountain and to the right while keeping up a running commentary. “The ancient Roman-built baths here rise up from springs rich with sulphur and lime. When they were rediscovered in the 1700s they became famous for their restorative properties and it was those baths that first brought Beethoven here. His doctors recommended the waters as a cure for his hearing and stomach problems.”

  “Of course, it didn’t help.”

  He shrugged. “Nothing worked for any length of time. He was a very sick man but he composed well here. He loved the forest.” He pointed to the lush green hills rising beyond the town. “Those are the real Vienna woods. After we see the house we can walk through them if you like. We still have at least two hours before dusk.”

  “Yes,” she answered immediately, despite the slight shivers that ran down her arms. Something was wrong. The air shimmered; the cars were becoming translucent, the people walking down the street looked different. She steeled herself against the unwelcome onslaught.

  Sebastian must have sensed something, because he stopped and put his hand on her shoulder. “What is it?”

  Meer was afraid to say anything. Afraid too, she realized, of the drastic wave of cold wind that blew her long lavender-and-navy lace dress around her legs at her ankles…

  Crossing the road to the maestro’s house, Margaux overheard two men gossiping about the Tsar Alexander’s showdown with Prince Metternich. Apparently the day before, the Austrian representative at the Congress had accused the Russian monarch of excessive spying and the Tsar had threatened to pull out of negotiations over the Polish Grand Duchy of Warsaw, which remained one of the most problematic areas. Alexander had desired the territory for years, but Austria and Prussia were both vying for the old Polish kingdom. If the news was true and the Tsar stormed off and left Austria, it would destroy Margaux’s plans to sell him the flute. Hurrying on, ever more anxious to reach Beethoven, she was about to enter his house when she sensed someone watching her again. Was it Toller or someone he’d sent to spy on her? Trying not to be obvious she turned and called out a last-minute instruction to her coachman and noticed the sudden movement of a man’s shadow shifting on the street as he ducked into a doorway to avoid being seen.

  Meer forced herself back. To Baden in the present. Like breaking free from thick ropes, it took all her effort. The first thing she did was look down to check on her jeans and boots. Yes, the lavender dress was gone.

  Each time one of these memories overwhelmed her, her anger increased. Uninvited, they mocked any illusion that she was in control of her own life. She couldn’t prevent them and couldn’t make sense of them. All she could do was collect the varied sequences and hope that at some point they’d tell a cohesive story and then maybe leave her alone.

  Glancing around, getting her bearings, she noticed a movement to the left. Was someone hiding in the doorway of a building across the road? Was someone following her in the present as well as the past? Or could something she’d sensed in the here and now bleed over into her unconscious?

  “Are you all right?” Sebastian asked as he took her arm and led her to a bench. “You have that express
ion again, like you saw a ghost. Let me get you some water.”

  She started to say no but he was gone before she could stop him. Sitting on one of the numerous white wooden benches in the Kurpark she barely noticed the carefully laid out rows of trees and the precisely landscaped gardens. There were people around her talking and birds singing to distract her from the strange sense she still had that she was being watched.

  Sebastian returned offering a bottle of ice-cold water and nodding toward the violinist. “He’s not bad.” While she drank, they listened for a few minutes and then he asked, “You’re still shaken up, aren’t you? Maybe we should skip the sightseeing.”

  “Hell, no. We came all this way. I want to see what’s inside the house and what the woods are like.”

  “You believe there’s something out there, don’t you?” He nodded toward the hills. “Waiting for you to find it?”

  The sky was a clear cool blue without any clouds. “I don’t know what I believe. That’s what makes my father so unhappy.”

  “Nothing about you makes your father unhappy, Meer. Don’t you see that—the way he looks at you, speaks to you? You’re his joy.”

  On Sebastian’s face, Meer saw his parental suffering. His son’s long, drawn-out illness weighed on him, and she wondered how similar this was to what her father had felt. “You want me to find the flute so you can play it for your son, don’t you?” She finally voiced what she’d been thinking. “That’s why you’re so devoted to helping me, why you befriended my father?”

  “Your father befriended me.”

  “Because of your son, though.”

  “You’re saying that as if it’s wrong of your father to help me and wrong of me to want to help Nicolas. Of course, that’s how I met your father…looking for a way to try to bring my child back. Is that a bad thing?”

  “No, I’m sorry.” She was confused again. One minute she saw him in a dark haze, the next with it lifted.

  “But yes, if—when—you find the flute I want to play it for my son. Wouldn’t you? Don’t you want to play it and finally find out the rest of what you’re remembering?”

  “You’re that sure that if the flute exists it works?”

  “No, but are you that sure it doesn’t?”

  “I’m certain only of my uncertainty. After a long time of searching, I’ve accepted that.”

  “Until now?”

  She shrugged. She just didn’t know.

  He stood so close to her she could smell his ginger-and-orange scent and again felt the need to get even closer and also to stay away.

  “How far is Beethoven’s house from here?” she asked, anxious to get there. To get to any destination even if it was yet one more maze.

  The small building at Rathausgasse 10 was a sandy pink color with green window shutters. Two stories high, it had a sloping roof, and the waving flag and plaque next to the door were similar to those at the Beethoven house in Vienna.

  Upstairs, a group of tourists filled the foyer and Meer glanced at Sebastian in dismay.

  “We can wait a few minutes until some of them have gone, if you’d like.”

  “Yes.”

  But it turned out the group was leaving so only a minute later Sebastian and Meer went inside and over to the desk where a teenage girl wearing earbuds and nodding to her personal music was selling tickets. Here, as at the apartment in Vienna, there was almost no security and overly relaxed students managed the property. Strains of Beethoven’s music filled the room and while Sebastian bought the tickets, Meer wondered what music the girl preferred to this glorious sonata.

  Meer stood on the threshold of the first room, which was dominated by a Broadwood piano. Facing the windows, its mahogany surface gleamed in the late afternoon light. It took Meer five steps—steps that began hesitantly but ended with a kind of authority, as without any vacillation she walked toward it and sat on its bench.

  She didn’t look back to see if anyone was paying attention. If the young woman came over and chastised her, she’d get up. But this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance and she had to know what it felt like to play one of the maestro’s own pianos. To hear what music sounded like to him—when he could hear it.

  Lifting the plastic cover over the keys she put her fingers on the yellowed ivory and began. The piano had obviously been kept tuned and she was surprised at how differently this two-hundred-year-old instrument played from the ones she was used to. There was more power and feel to its sound, less control, less sustaining power and it seemed she could do more with its loudness and softness.

  Finishing the Moonlight Sonata, she let her fingers improvise on the keyboard.

  Suddenly the music seemed to be playing itself, her fingers moving on their own. The song sucked the air out of the room. Out of her chest. It dipped and soared and caressed and soothed and aroused and carried her up into the nighttime sky where she flew in the stars, on the wings of this sound, on the notes of this song. It was the melody—the same melody—she’d been hearing for all of her life but had never been able to grab hold of.

  “What is that you’re playing?” Beethoven asked.

  The maestro sat close to the piano with his head resting on the wooden body: the only way he could hear some days was to almost be inside the instrument.

  “I don’t really know. It’s only a fragment. And I’m not even sure it works. It just arrived.”

  He smiled. “Yes, it’s like that sometimes. As if you are a conduit for the music of the planets. Now, play it once more,” he insisted.

  She complied, used to him by now, no longer surprised by his gruffness. It was a relief to be here, playing for the maestro, waiting for the music to quiet her mind but there was so much to think about, work out and plan. The Tsar was interested in buying her treasure, but would he even still be in Vienna by the time she got up the courage to steal it from Beethoven? What was stopping her? Well, for one thing when she’d told Alexander about the possibility of the memory song, the Tsar offered three times as much as she’d get from Archer. And what would Archer do if he found out she was going to sell to someone other than him? What if Toller guessed what she was trying to do and recalled the flute? Where would she get the money for the expedition to find Caspar then?

  After she completed her little ditty, Beethoven asked her to play it yet once more.

  It was an odd musical composition, simple and atonal to the point of being disturbing, but it had been in her head when she woke up that morning and she’d been so anxious to play it for Beethoven that she’d ridden out to Baden where he was taking the waters.

  “I’m not sure if you wrote that or it wrote you,” Beethoven finally said after asking to hear it a half dozen times more. Then, without explanation, he went to the china cabinet and pulled out the chamois-wrapped bundle. He unwrapped the soft suede, revealing the yellowed, ancient bone flute. Margaux hadn’t known he’d brought it with him to Baden.

  “I think the music you’ve written might work on the flute…” He answered her question before she asked it. Then, putting the bone up to his lips, he played her first three notes, but tentatively, as if he were expecting something cataclysmic to occur. When nothing did, he played the next phrase and then the next. Eighteen notes. He tried again, playing the music from the beginning straight through to the end without hesitation. Finally putting the flute down, he turned to Margaux. “Noting happened,” he said in a defeated voice. And then noticed she was silently weeping. “What is it? What’s wrong?” he asked.

  But she couldn’t tell him, couldn’t speak because she was remembering. Remembering something she had forgotten. Or something she’d never known.

  The music was inside of her now. It lifted and soared and crashed and then built up again to yet another crescendo, bringing with it images of another time and place that made no sense to her. A place unlike anywhere in Europe that she’d ever seen.

  Margaux saw a hot sun and a wide river. She felt a deep sadness, and saw many women weeping around a blazi
ng fire, all of them wearing robes, not gowns. Mountains towered over the landscape.

  Then the scene vanished and Margaux saw Beethoven again, staring at her with a disconcerted look in his eyes. She noticed the way the sun was shining in the windows. There was something important about the light, as if it were shining to show her something. She followed one beam, watched dust motes dancing. There was knowledge in the gleaming. Years and years of knowledge collected in the energy that was coursing through her. More than she needed to breathe, she needed Caspar with her now so she could tell him about this amazing discovery of his and the power it held. More than anything she wanted her husband to share in this painful yet excruciatingly beautiful truth about light and time and circles and repetition, and who we are and why we are here.

  “What is it, Margaux?” Beethoven asked. “Why does the music affect you so?”

  But she couldn’t tell him. She was still inside the light, traveling on the vibrations of the dissonant song Beethoven had coaxed from the ancient flute. She was remembering back in time.

  Chapter 52

  Indus Valley, India—2120 B.C.E.

  Stealing from the dead was a crime, stealing the dead themselves was a sin, but her desolation was stronger than her fear of the punishments, so Ohana hid behind the trunk of the tree as the sun set the river on fire, shielded her eyes and waited for the funeral service to end.

  The combined cacophony of lapping water, bells clanging and cows mooing couldn’t cloak the widow’s bitter wailing; Ohana’s painful reminder that she had no right to be here at Devadas’ Asthi-Sanchayana ceremony, that there was no one she could turn to for solace, that her mourning was the last secret in a series of secrets she would have to keep.