Devil's Trill

by Gerald Elias

  “And exactly why do the police think I killed Victoria?” asked Jacobus.

  He could smell prestorm ozone in the air. Calm now, he thought, but it’s gonna come down in buckets pretty soon. He remembered there used to be lightning bugs in his yard. He wished he could see them and catch them, like he did when he was a kid. Put them in a jar and watch the whole thing glow. He rubbed the cigarette on the stoop, flicked it into the night, and lit another.

  “Well, Jake, it’s kind of a crazy theory, if you ask me. But the police down there are convinced of it. You know these New York cops. I used to be a big Kojak fan myself. Malachi thinks you could’ve stolen the violin the night of Kamryn Vander’s recital from that little room in Carnegie Hall, but somehow you had an idea that Victoria Jablonski had seen you do it, so you set up an interview with the lady under the pretext of questioning her about trying to recover it. To throw everyone off, you know.”

  “If that were true, Roy, wouldn’t I have avoided having a public argument with her?”

  “I would say so, but the NYPD thinks that’s just where you screwed up. You lost your cool, killed her, and got the heck out of Dodge.”

  Jacobus sat in silence for several moments, shoulder to shoulder with Roy. He had said enough for now. A cricket started chirping.

  “They say Victoria Jablonski never performed,” said Miller.

  “That’s right.”

  “Doesn’t it seem kind of strange that someone who teaches people how to stand up there on a big stage and play in front of thousands of people never did it herself?”

  Jacobus forced himself to choke up a phlegmy cough in order to avoid saying anything disparaging about Victoria—whatever truth there might be in his opinions would only help land him in jail at this point.

  “The thought has occurred to me many times, Roy.”

  “You used to perform a lot, didn’t you, Jake? Even after you lost your sight?”

  “Yeah. Not so much recently, though. I’ve pretty much settled into teaching lately.”

  “Can you really teach someone how to perform, though? I don’t mean just how to play, but how to perform. How you go up there onstage and not be nervous. You know my son, Roy Jr. He plays the trumpet. He’s in school band, but he’s always telling me how he screws up at concerts even though he sounded great at home. Is there anything I can tell him so he won’t get so nervous?”

  “When you walk onto the stage,” Jacobus said, “even if there are only twenty people in the audience, you get this rush of adrenaline, you think about all the things you think you can’t do, you say to yourself, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ Only one shot to get it right or you get skewered by the critics. No way can you say to yourself, ‘I’m just going to pretend that I’m at home in my nice comfy living room.’ ”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “On the other hand, I tell my students, ‘At the end of your daily practice session, practice performing.’ Take a piece of music, even a scale, and try to get cranked up as much as possible, and under no circumstances stop. If the phone rings, if your music falls on the floor, if the dog pisses on your foot, keep going as best you can.”

  “Well, I certainly appreciate the advice, Jake, and I’m sure Roy Jr. will also, though getting him to play for the relatives will take some doing. So you’re saying that when you perform, or performed, you didn’t get nervous?”

  “Not so much nervous—I really enjoyed performing, the challenge, you know—more of a sense of exhilaration, nervous energy. Lucky, I guess, because even though there was that sense of anxiety, even fear, it was a positive experience for me. In a way, one part of me, the thinking part, always stayed calm.”

  Jacobus thought for a moment and said with a sad, tired smile, “You are one smart cop, Roy. You just got me to describe a psychological profile of a murderer.”

  “Now Jake, as I was saying before, I know you didn’t do it. That’s why I knew I wouldn’t find anything when they told me to search your house for that stolen violin.”

  “You searched my house?”

  “No, Jake. You keep putting words in my mouth. I just said they told me to. I don’t have any need to search your house. But you know, this whole business about missing violins makes me real curious. About violins themselves. Did you take your violin with you to New York?”

  “Yeah. I wasn’t sure how long I’d be there and figured I might need it to give Yumi a lesson . . . the girl who threw up. She’s my student.”

  “Poor kid. Well, that sounds logical to me,” said Roy Miller. “So your violin must still be in the car then.”

  “Yeah. That’s right.”

  “Those violins. They say they all look a little bit different. Is that true?”

  It’s amazing how little most people know about violins, Jacobus thought. Sometimes he thought otherwise intelligent people were just pulling his leg.

  Jacobus blew out some smoke. “Anything handmade like a violin is unique, but I personally am much more interested in how they sound.”

  “Sure, I can understand that, you being a musician. Nevertheless, I’d be curious to see a real good violin close up. Think I could take a look at yours, Jake?”

  “Right now? In the dark?”

  “It wouldn’t take but a minute. I’ve got my flashlight. Come on, I’ll help you over to the car to get it.”

  “Ah, what the hell. But Roy, if you think I’ve got the Piccolino, you’re way off base.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you, Jake, I know you didn’t steal that violin.”

  The two of them trudged over the gravel in the darkness. Roy gave Jacobus a hand opening the trunk of the hatchback, but he didn’t help as Jacobus felt around the luggage and removed the violin case. Jacobus heard the hatchback click closed. They returned to the stoop, which was dimly illuminated by a moth-attracting porch light. Jacobus sat down again, setting the case on his lap.

  “Now, Jake, if you wouldn’t mind opening it up. I’d hate to pick up a violin the wrong way and break something.”

  Jacobus felt for zippers and the clasps, opened the case, and pulled out his violin.

  “There,” he said. “You can easily see this is not the Piccolino Stradivarius.”

  “As I said, I’m no expert, and I’m sure you’re right. But I should tell you, Jake, your violin happens to be missing a string. I’m pretty sure it would be the G-string.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Jacobus had convinced Miller to let him spend the night in his own home. After all, he wasn’t under arrest. They would meet the next morning, after a good night’s sleep, when Jacobus would go to Roy’s house for coffee and questioning.

  As soon as Miller left, Jacobus called to Nathaniel.

  Jacobus grabbed his shoulders.

  “Nathaniel, I need to go to Japan. Now. And I need you and Yumi to go with me.”

  “Jake, you must be crazier than I gave you credit for! You know what it’ll look like if you take off?”

  “Goddammit, of course I know.”

  His cigarette breath was right in Nathaniel’s face.

  “Look at me! What do I look like, a fucking moron? It’s the only chance I have. If I stay here, there is no chance. Can’t you understand that?”

  “And what do you expect to find in Japan? And why do I need to go?”

  “The person responsible for the theft is there. I know it. If I can convince that person to return the violin, then I can come back and find Jablonski’s killer. Hey, I know you’ve got damn good reasons not to want to go to Japan, but I need you to go, dammit, to tell them that I wasn’t trying to escape justice. That I was trying to find the violin. They trust you.”

  If Nathaniel read Yumi into that equation, so be it, Jacobus thought. Time had run out far faster than he expected.

  “Jake, I gotta tell you something. We’ve known each other a long time. I’ve always believed everything you’ve told me. But the way things look now, if you did have a reason to disappear in Japan there’s no way I coul
d find you, and you damn well know that too. You’d be a ninja in the night. That’s exactly what Jablonski’s killer would do. So why don’t we just report the name of the person you’re so sure stole the violin and be done with it, man? Why drag the three of us to find a phantom in Japan, making me an accessory to something in the bargain? I don’t like it.”

  “You don’t like it! You don’t like it!” said Jacobus in a venomous whisper. “You think I like it?”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “All right, I’ll answer your fucking question. Two things . . .”

  “Jesus Christ, Jake!”

  “Shut up. Number one, I’m not reporting the person’s name because for me that person’s a hero, not a criminal. And I’m not telling you the name in order to protect you as well. Number two, that person had nothing to do with Jablonski’s murder. Now decide, Nathaniel. Now!”

  Jacobus felt the sweat streaming down the crevices of his tired face. His hands were trembling on Nathaniel’s shoulders. He couldn’t tell Nathaniel the truth. He had to know for sure first. But he had no plan. He no longer had weeks to trace Yumi’s path back to her home. He knew only that he had to get to Japan to buy precious time.

  Finally he felt Nathaniel’s hands on his own, gently removing them from his shoulders.

  “I’ll go get your passport,” Nathaniel said. Jacobus heard him walk slowly over the gravel to the house. The screen door swung shut behind him.

  The rain had started as a drizzle as they sped past Albany in Nathaniel’s car on the way to Montreal. Suddenly, with one explosive clap of thunder, the oppressive heat wave that had been brooding for weeks erupted. Torrents of rain, searing bolts of lightning, rolling volleys of thunder rocked their car. Jacobus could hear the windshield wipers’ frantic rhythmic pounding. Nathaniel had to slow to a crawl, unable to see, intensifying Jacobus’s panic. Delay was disaster. Jacobus constantly exhorted Nathaniel to drive faster in the blinding deluge. Nathaniel did not respond.

  One interminable hour passed. Two. Three. Waves of water blinded their way. Not until they had crossed the Canadian border at about three thirty in the morning—still long before Miller would discover Jacobus’s disappearance and, with his tail between his legs, inform Detective Malachi—did the storm abandon its pursuit, grudgingly trudging off to the east. At Jacobus’s instructions, Nathaniel had previously called the airport in Montreal from a pay phone to make three reservations, not using the phone in Jacobus’s house, which would have left a record of the call and might already have been tapped. Leaving Nathaniel’s dripping car in the airport parking lot, they boarded Air Canada flight 12, which departed at 5:48 A.M. for Vancouver and from there on JAL to Nagoya.

  The Bullet Train propelled them through the night. Jacobus gathered it was night from the chorus of snoring around him, including Nathaniel’s heldentenor from the seat in front of him. That man can sleep anywhere. It almost made him smile. He felt Yumi’s head on his shoulder, gently bobbing to the rhythm of the train flying over the endless tracks.

  Night? For me, always night. I don’t know what it means anymore to sleep “when it’s dark.” What’s a day? What’s twenty-four hours? I can hardly remember. Meaningless. To see again! I’m so damn tired.

  The rhythm of the train passing over the tracks, bum-buh-dum, bum-buh-dum, bum-buh-dum, relentless, monotonous, had etched itself in Jacobus’s mind for hours now. Inexorable. Without conscious thought, Jacobus began tapping his fingers to the train’s pulse, bum-buh-dum, bum-buh-dum, on the arm of his seat. His fingers became drumsticks. The rhythm quickened, transforming his fingers into the timpanist’s thunderous hammering strokes that begin the fierce, fugal Scherzo of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

  Since he became blind, in times of duress Jacobus’s thoughts turned to Beethoven, music’s most heroic genius—the closest thing to a god Jacobus had. For Jacobus, Beethoven, plagued by deafness most of his professional life, suffered a far more devastating blow for a musician than mere blindness.

  Jacobus imagined himself at the packed Vienna premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, to hear what most knew would be the final symphony of the old, sick, totally deaf composer. What must the audience have thought to see on stage not just an orchestra but a chorus and four solo singers as well? It had never been done before. What was this eccentric visionary up to?

  The monumental Allegro, the demonic Scherzo, with the inexorable rhythm Jacobus was still tapping, the sublime Adagio. But the chorus and soloists remained silent. The dissonant eruption that began the last movement. What followed was totally innovative in the history of music, a return to the themes of each previous movement interspersed with an operatic recitation of cellos and basses. Beethoven ruminating over his past. What next? How would he culminate his life’s work? This symphony was already longer than any that had ever been written. Still no singing.

  What’s that? A march, a hymn? It lasted only a few seconds before Beethoven cut it off with yet another interruption of the cellos and basses. Yes, it was a hymn, an exquisite one, now being whispered by the cellos and basses.

  Still the singers sat.

  Then, variations on the hymn tune, growing into a march. What next? Suddenly, again the hellish blast that began the movement. The choir and soloists jumped to their feet. The baritone stepped forward. What would be the first words ever sung in a symphony?

  “O friends, not these tones, but let us rather sing more pleasant and joyful ones.” The hymn returns, sung first by the baritone, then by the entire chorus. The text, a plea for universal brotherhood. The symphony ended in triumph, joy, and hope.

  “Not these tones!” What courage! thought Jacobus. Deaf Beethoven, of all composers, to be the one to offer the first words to be sung in the history of symphonic music! And that those words—“not these tones!”—were instructions from a deaf man to people who could hear! What strength to say, “I, a deaf man, prefer other sounds to the ones you have just listened to (even though those were the greatest that you or anyone has ever heard)!”

  What power of will, to exist within a world of impenetrable and permanent silence, and yet be able to tell a hearing world that the sounds of harmony he has written are the very sounds of brotherhood! For Jacobus, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was his bible, and its first words were the watchwords of his life. They gave him the strength to go on.

  These were the watchwords for Jacobus that enabled him to survive the desolation he endured in his own world of darkness. And he would use them to complete the task now before him. Nothing else mattered.

  The train’s rhythmic monotony had lulled Jacobus into an uneasy sleep. His wizened cheek rested on Yumi’s head. He briefly woke when the uniformed train employee rolled the snack cart down the aisle, asking politely in her high-pitched nasal voice if anyone wanted ice cream, beer, or dried squid snack. Jacobus went back to sleep and dreamed of sitting across an empty room from Beethoven—a blind man and a deaf man—desperately trying to communicate.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Bullet Train slowed, its change in speed so smooth it was hardly perceptible. Jacobus awoke with a start, for a moment thinking he was back in the Rabbit arriving at his home. But then he quickly felt his jacket pocket for the cassette tape Nathaniel had given him, checking once again to make sure it was still there.

  He now had his plan, such as it was.

  He would have to gain access to Kate “Grandma” Padgett or Desmond—whatever her name was—through Max Furukawa, somehow coaxing him to obtain an invitation to Padgett but excluding Nathaniel. With the invitation from above, Yumi couldn’t easily refuse to take him there.

  There were two problems with the plan. One, he couldn’t let Max know of his suspicions. If he was wrong he would be spreading indelible shame and mistrust. And there was his vow to have the Piccolino returned without revealing the perpetrator’s—or, in his view, hero’s—identity. The second problem was that he would have to do all his talking to Max through Yumi, who would und
oubtedly be called upon to be his translator.

  Why the hell didn’t I learn Japanese? he asked himself. Lazy ass. How can I get what I need with Yumi assisting me? How can I get it without her?

  Getting Yumi to hate him had served its purpose, maybe too well, and the sound of Victoria slapping her still echoed in his brain. Now, though, he had to try to reverse the process. He needed to ease her mind just enough to crawl together through yet one more sticky strand of the web, clinging to her as she pursued her escape. In order to get her to do that, he asked himself whether he had the ability to be something quite alien to him. The ability to be nice.

  Yumi’s head was still resting on his shoulder. Was she asleep or, like him, just pretending? He could tell if she were pretending, he thought. But he wasn’t absolutely certain of that. She could be a good actor, another of her many talents. If she were acting, what was she thinking about now?

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  After crossing the bridge to Kyushu, the major southern island of Japan, the train arrived at the small town of Ochanomizu at 1:44 A.M., precisely on time, as always. The driver was waiting. Yumi, translating for Jacobus over the phone from Nagoya airport, had requested that Furukawa arrange for the taxi, and it was done. In keeping with the Japanese hierarchy of respect, Jacobus sat in front to the left of the driver—the driver’s seat, as in England, on the right—with Nathaniel behind Jacobus and Yumi behind the driver. As Nathaniel had never been to Japan, Yumi had instructed him not to close the car door; the driver would do that automatically from his seat.

  Nathaniel said, “This car reminds me of my grandmother’s house—just as clean, and the seats have all these doily thingies on them. Covered in plastic too.” Those were his first full sentences since reading the newspaper article at the Nagoya airport.

  “Yeah, not the shit boxes they drive in New York,” Jacobus replied, acknowledging reconciliation.

  Nathaniel seemed calmer, the rebound from their confrontation.