by Gerald Elias
Jacobus felt perversely at ease sitting in Malachi’s office at the police station; being surrounded by cops going about their business on this gray Friday morning provided a sense of security that he hadn’t felt for some time. Once in a while a cop would come by and quietly say, “How ya doin’?” but he sensed those comments were directed more toward Yumi. One cop tapped him on his shoulder and handed him a paper cup of instant coffee with nondairy creamer and too much sugar. Jacobus accepted it in his left hand, as Yumi had been holding his right hand the entire time and seemed disinclined to let go for the foreseeable future. He appreciated what he was holding in each hand.
Oro had also been offered a cup and after taking one cautious sip asked politely what it was. When told it was coffee, he explained in great detail the traditional Peruvian way of serving coffee, with separate hot pitchers of thick, almost syrupy coffee, water, and milk, all combined in proportions determined by the drinker’s personal taste. One of the cops had said, “You’re just missin’ one thing.” When Oro asked what that might be, the cop said, “the doughnut!” and all the other cops started laughing, with Oro joining in.
“And what exactly is the doughnut?” he had asked.
After that was explained, it was Malachi’s turn. “Evviva il coltellino?”
“That’s what they used to shout at concerts in Italy in the eighteenth century,” Jacobus replied, “after a castrato finished a particularly virtuoso job on an opera aria. Kind of like bravo except a little more specialized.”
“That’s gross,” said Yumi.
“Sorry.”
“Not what you said. The horrible things they did to those young boys. Just to get them to sing like girls.”
“Not that I’m condoning it, but some of those boys were offered up by poor parents who thought their best chance for family survival was to have their sons undergo the operation. Some of those castrati were the rock stars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and lived the lives of the rich and famous.”
“It’s still disgusting.”
“And you say that triggered Lensky? ‘Evviva il coltellino’?” asked Malachi. “Why?”
“I guess I touched a sensitive spot, so to speak,” said Jacobus. “Peter Lensky had testicular cancer. He contracted it as a result of the Chernobyl catastrophe, the disaster that his father was blamed for, and imprisoned and died for, that his mother went into exile as a result of, and that Otkar Vasalin made his millions off of. In short, so to speak, Lensky was castrated as part of his cancer treatment. It was all kept quiet by the family. Peter recovered enough physically, and he acquired a remarkable voice—an amazing, uncanny voice—to go along with the musical talent everyone in his family had. Maybe it was even his illness and isolation that turned his talent into musical genius. Who knows? It can happen. But mentally and emotionally, he was ruined.”
“I still can’t believe those voices in the dark were all his,” said Yumi.
“Believe it. It can happen when you combine that kind of gift and that kind of insanity. Plus you were half drugged, in the darkness—”
“And scared out of my mind? What was that song he sang, Jake, when you provoked him? About the thunderbolts?” Yumi asked.
“I didn’t know at the time, but I asked Nathaniel when he met me at the ER. It’s a supposedly famous aria from the opera Berenice, which Leonardo Vinci wrote for the great—the greatest—castrato, Farinelli.”
“You did a cruel thing there, Jacobus, taunting a sick person that way,” Malachi said.
“Sick? Hey, we’ve all got our tsores. Illness, accidents, deaths. Who the hell knows what’s going to happen to us in the next minute, huh? It doesn’t mean we have to be killers just because we catch a bad break. Because of poor little Peter’s peter, Kortovsky, Haagen, Ivan, Pravda—they’re all dead. And I’m cruel?
“It’s Pravda you’ve got to feel for for taking overzealous care of him. After all, she lost her husband to Chernobyl, and almost lost Peter. She felt a maternal need to protect him from all the potential disasters of the external world, and in so doing created an internal disaster. So when I found out from Nathaniel that he had accompanied Mama on the South America tour, it began to all fit together.
“I got the distinct feeling that Peter didn’t care for his mother traipsing through the privacy of his fortress of solitude in Flushing. Plus, he was a big boy and she was making enough dough, so for these three reasons of course they had separate rooms in Lima. This enabled Peter to come and go as he pleased, and she had no idea that Peter was off carving up Kortovsky. Why should she have? On one hand, he loved it that Mama was taking care of all his creature comforts. He could sit in his little world all day, day after day, performing his Schubert and Porpora to his heart’s content and not have to worry about where his next meal would come from. On the other hand, he resented the shit out of her for treating him like a cripple, though mentally he was, or at least became one after playing the part for so many years—”
“If I may say so,” Oro interjected, “from what you have told about Señor Peter, he never went to the concerts. Therefore, when he went to the concert in Lima, it must have been not because of his love affair with Mozart and Beethoven but only to stalk and kill Señor Kortovsky. You tell me no one in the quartet knew where any of the others were staying, so the only way he could follow Señor Kortovsky was from the concert hall. When the quartet was taking its well-deserved bows, Señor Peter went backstage, hid there in the darkness, and when the opportunity presented itself, removed the end pin from his mother’s cello, which he then hid with ingenuity down the leg of his trouser. This was the cause of his limp, though I did not realize the significance of this at the time.
“Señor Peter then followed Señor Kortovsky and, dare I say, Señorita Shinagawa in a cab to his hotel. The Hotel Maury.”
“I’m so sorry, Jake,” said Yumi. “It was only a fling, really.”
“Hey, no need to apologize, my dear. I hope Kortovsky is thankful, wherever he is, but he didn’t deserve you. It did manage to get you onto Malachi’s shit list, and I guess he had half the NYPD circle your apartment last night ready to arrest you for Annika’s death.”
Malachi grunted. “Go on,” he said.
“So Peter followed Kortovsky and Yumi to the Maury Hotel,” Jacobus continued. “From what Oro here told me, according to Angelita the receptionist, Lensky waited until Yumi departed and then invited Kortovsky to the historic hotel bar, where, according to the bartender, Peter plied him with a bevy of their famous shaken pisco sours and engaged in polite conversation. Yumi had told me about Kortovsky’s telltale breath, so it’s not unlikely Mama also had regaled Peter with stories of Kortovsky’s penchant for overindulging.
“When Kortovsky was in a state that made him pliable, Lensky led him to a nearby tenement, where he tied him to a chair, maybe giving him the spiel about him being Death, and he then rotisseried him using Mama’s end pin as a harpoon, which he considerately wiped off and replaced in her cello soon after, before it was loaded onto the plane.”
“We’ll be checking on that end pin,” said Malachi, “to see if there is any residue.”
“A very resourceful of you,” said Oro.
“Poking someone through the gut, though,” Jacobus continued, “was not as easy as Lensky thought, and like his mind, the end pin ended up bent, so when Mama tried to extract it from the cello in the very room where I attended their first rehearsal after the tour, it got stuck.”
“This is all very melodramatic,” said Malachi. “And you’re connecting the dots with a lot of speculation.”
“Perhaps,” said Oro, “but Maestro Yacovis has the gift of perception and I believe he is correct. When Señor Peter killed Señor Kortovsky, he took several steps to conceal the identity, with the hope that I, Espartaco Asunción Ochoa Romero, would interpret the mutilation as torture. First, he found a discarded piece of broken glass and attempted to disconnect Señor Kortovsky’s left hand. I thought this was interes
ting, because uno, from the evidence forensic I was able to determine that Señor Kortovsky was already dead when it was attempted, and dos, it is more the custom to amputate the right hand when the victim is still alive as it installs more of the fear. However, Maestro Yacovis had the perseptive of the violin expert; he found it interesting because it was the left hand, and if the body was indeed Señor Kortovsky, there were those toldtale grooves on his fingertips from pressing so hard on the strings. Señor Peter would have known that about him—Maestro tells me it was Señor Kortovsky’s claim to his fame. Has it been possible, Lieutenant, with your art-of-the-stage forensic science, to determine if the fingers you have gathered had the toldtale grooves?”
“Given the condition of the fingers, it would be easier to find Neil Armstrong’s footprints on the moon with a pair of binoculars,” said Malachi. “This groove business also seems a little too far-fetched to me.”
“Don’t worry,” said Jacobus. “I’m getting closer-fetched, because next Lensky started hacking away at Kortovsky’s neck from the left side and then stopped.”
“This is significant?”
“Yes, sirree. Again, Oro had his theory. He thought Lensky had given up because it was just too difficult to get through all that tissue and bone to cut off his whole head with a little bitty piece of glass. My take is that he just wanted to cut out the prominent callus Kortovsky had on his neck from holding the violin the way he did. Poor guy, he had such sensitive skin. It was just lucky for Lensky they didn’t find the body for a month or else they might have ID’d Kortovsky, but by the time they got there his face was pretty much gone. So everything pointed to two conclusions: one, that the body was Kortovsky and not some cartel groupie; and two, that the killer knew about violinists’ unique physiognomy.”
“Tell us about the missing parts.”
“After Lensky cut off Kortovsky’s fingers he probably first intended to just throw them away to hide the clue that would lead to Kortovsky’s identification. But then he had an idea. He decided to keep them and stored them in his piano bench for safekeeping because he now had a new plan. Phase one, putting a finger in Annika’s case as a warning to scare off the quartet. ‘Look what happened to Aaron! And you’re next!’ Except no one else understood that that’s what it meant.”
“Not so fast!” said Malachi. “How do you know Lensky stored the fingers in the piano bench?”
“I don’t know for sure, but when I was visiting Peter, Trotsky did his Iditarod imitation and dragged me to Peter’s piano bench for a sniff-fest. You might think in my dotage my imagination has run amok, but just go and check inside the bench for any traces of dead finger residue. I think that’s where he kept his souvenirs, and who would’ve known otherwise? He wouldn’t let his mother in, and visitors were few and far between. By the way, you might also want to check his place for Kortovsky’s computer.”
“What about … the other appendage?” asked Malachi.
“You mean the you know what?”
“Whatever.”
“Aren’t we adults here?” asked Yumi. “I’m not a little girl anymore.”
“Okay. His peckerino. There, I’ve said it.”
“Jake! You’re disgusting,” said Yumi.
“So sue me. No, never mind. It was that particular amputation, along with everything else, that convinced me it had to be Peter and no one else. It all fit together. But this was not a warning. This was rage. Sheer rage over Kortovsky’s sexuality and Peter’s lack of it.”
“Let me get this straight,” Malachi said. “You’re proposing four different reasons for what you say Lensky did to Kortovsky. One, he killed him because he believed Kortovsky was a threat to music and to his mother; two, he mutilated Kortovsky’s fingers and neck to obscure ID; three, he further used the fingers to provide a warning to the quartet members; and four, he emasculated Kortovsky out of uncontrolled anger. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I couldn’t have said it better.”
“Sí,” said Oro. “This was a crime of the greatest complexity from a highly complex individuality.”
“But aren’t you forgetting the e-mail from Kortovsky to Sheila Rathman, saying he would be returning for the dress rehearsal?” asked Yumi.
“Yes.” Malachi chuckled. “What about the e-mail? If Kortovsky had no fingers, how could he have typed that e-mail?”
“Very witty, Malachi. Poe would be proud of your juxtaposition, if not your logic. I know very little about technology, and as far as I’m concerned the less the better, but it occurred to me that, unlike a real letter that you put a stamp on and an address and lick the envelope and put in a mailbox, an e-mail can be sent from any computer from anywhere and, since handwriting is not involved, can be signed by anyone. All you’d need is Kortovsky’s e-mail address, a password, and the user something, and you’re in business. But that was privileged information for the quartet. Not even Sheila Rathman had it. Peter, though, had it because after he killed Kortovsky, the ever-resourceful young lad removed Kortovsky’s clothing, found his room key in a pocket, went back to the hotel room, and stole his computer. He wanted to create the impression that Kortovsky was still alive, so the next day he sent an e-mail to Rathman saying he would be at the first rehearsal. This served two purposes: one, since the quartet was on vacation for a month, no one would ever suspect there was a problem, let alone that Kortovsky was dead; and two, when he failed to show up it would inevitably disrupt the plans for the Power Ramsey extravaganza that Peter abhorred.
“But Peter didn’t know that Kortovsky had sent an e-mail containing similar information the night before, which made the second one strangely redundant. And considering the difference in the tone of the message, it wasn’t a stretch to think that it was written by a different person.
“And then I remembered something he said when we first met, just after Trotsky almost discovered the fingers hidden in the piano bench. He said, ‘But in the large scheme of things, Kortovsky was small potatoes.’ ‘Was,’ Malachi, not ‘is.’ His linguistic skills are too good to have made that grammatical mistake. He knew Kortovsky was already dead. Then, when the third e-mail, supposedly from Kortovsky, arrived on the eve of the dress rehearsal, I remembered that I had mentioned to Peter that Ivan was going to be replacing Kortovsky for that as well. So Peter tried to pull the same stunt again, getting poor Sheila Rathman to believe lover boy was still planning on showing, in order to create what he hoped would be a fatal impediment for the concert to proceed.”
“But how was he able to put the fingers in the cases?” Yumi asked. “How did he get backstage to kill Annika and lure me out? It’s hard to believe no one at Carnegie Hall saw him.”
“I don’t know. Ask Oro. He managed to pull it off with aplomb, too. Maybe because it was dark. Or there were lots of people there who aren’t ordinarily there. Or the security guards are idiots. Or he knows his way around stages. Or he has his different voices. People think they see him but can’t be sure. The man is a chameleon. He’s known how to make himself invisible. Like Death.”
“How do you know that it was Short who told Lensky that his mother was going to be fired by Kortovsky and Haagen?” Malachi asked.
“Who else could have made him think that? Kortovsky and Haagen were keeping their plans hush-hush. They would be the last people to divulge that to anyone, let alone Pravda’s sons, if that was their plan. They knew that would only add fuel to Short’s fire with his lawsuit. So who was left that would have anything to gain by suggesting to Peter that Pravda’s job was on the line? Someone who was one of the only musicians Peter explicitly declared respect for—Crispin Short. It seems the influence Short had over Peter grew and grew over time. I started thinking this when Short referred to Annika as a strumpet, when only a day earlier Peter had referred to his mother using the same term of endearment. Who uses the word ‘strumpet’ since the time of Charles Dickens, except for the English? I think Peter’s innate ability to mimic inadvertently blew his cover. The two of them
must have been in conversation, and in Peter’s mind Short was the only counterbalance to the power of Kortovsky, which Peter viewed as corrupting both the music and his mother’s integrity. It must’ve been Peter, in fact, who told Short that Ivan had been invited to fill in for Kortovsky at the first Carnegie rehearsal, which infuriated Short, almost to the point of attacking Haagen on the street. Peter must’ve heard it first from Ivan or Pravda, and channeled it right through to Crispin.”
“What tipped you off about Lensky in the first place?” Malachi asked.
“Trotsky,” he said.
“Why’s he called Trotsky, anyway?”
“Because he can’t … never mind. Trotsky, the brain-addled bulldog, took a real shine to Lensky, and with good reason. They have a lot in common.”
“However, is it not true, Maestro,” said Oro, “that the canine has the ability to perceive evil in the people? Do you not find some strangeness that Trotsky could not do so in this case?”
“Why is it,” said an exasperated Jacobus, “that nobody can appreciate my dog’s exceptional lack of intelligence?”
“If he’s so stupid and Lensky’s so brilliant,” asked Malachi, “what do you mean when you say they’ve got a lot in common?”
“Lensky noticed immediately that Trotsky had been neutered, but Lensky called it ‘castrated.’ That seemed odd to me considering his linguistic skills, unless he had heard the term in some other context. Then I considered his vocal prowess, his remarkable range, the beauty of his upper tessitura, his fondness for music about loss, and music composed especially for castrati. So I asked myself, what does this all mean? And then I remembered. Chernobyl, 1986. Nathaniel did a little research for me. Did you know that when the power plant blew, it soaked the atmosphere with a hundred times more radiation than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945? Peter was a young boy there when it blew, when his father was made a scapegoat and died. And Peter was there to suffer all the consequences. Chernobyl produced the biggest outbreak of cancers ever from a single incident, mostly thyroid and lung cancer, but also cases of lymphoma and, as in Peter’s case, testicular cancer.”
