Disillusions

by Seth Margolis

  “But…” He sounded so angry, so…humiliated. “Do you think your son is homosexual, Mr. Lawrence? Is that why you refused to see him?”

  His head slowly lifted, then fell. She was about to repeat the question when he lifted his head again and let it fall. Fred Lawrence was nodding.

  “I don’t think. I know. I saw him…I found him, him and a boy from the neighborhood…evil!” The last word splintered into a rasping cough.

  “And you made no attempt to see him, after he went to New York? Your wife made no attempt?”

  “She tried. Nicky…” He just shook his head.

  Gwen picked up the photo and showed it to him again.

  “Not him,” the old man whispered. He clasped the wheels and tried to push away from her. “Not him!”

  Agnes Marks appeared instantly and grabbed the handgrips behind him.

  “That’ll be all,” she said as she wheeled him toward the door.

  Gwen walked next to him, holding the photograph under his chin.

  “Are you positive it’s not him, Mr. Lawrence? Please look closely, it’s very, very important.”

  “No, no, no!” His hands tried to slap the photo but missed, flopping onto his lap.

  “Please, Miss Amiel, you’re disturbing him.” Agnes Marks walked faster.

  “One question, that’s all.” Gwen angled in front of the wheelchair. “Take a good look at the picture and tell me—is this your son, Mr. Lawrence?”

  He held the photo in his jittery right hand, just an inch or two from his face. “This man, in the picture, does he have a scar here?” He pointed to his upper right temple.

  “No, he was…” He was immaculate, unblemished. “Are you sure about the scar?”

  Fred Lawrence let the photo drop onto his lap.

  “Are you sure about the scar, Mr. Lawrence?”

  “I gave it to him!” The old man leaned forward, almost falling out of the chair. Gwen grabbed his shoulder, pushed lightly. He flopped back into the seat.

  “I gave it to him,” he said softly. “And others.” His chin fell onto his chest.

  No wonder Nick Lawrence, the real Nick Lawrence, wanted nothing to do with his parents. And if you needed a new identity, who better to steal from than a young boy with no family. The homosexual son of a pillar of the community, a leader of his church.

  “Come now, Mr. Lawrence, it’s lunchtime.” Agnes Marks pushed the wheelchair around Gwen.

  “Wait!” He rapped his hands on the armrests.

  “The man from the FBI, he asked me about Nicky, he told me about his wife getting killed. I knew that wasn’t my son they were talking about. They had no photograph, but I knew my son hadn’t married a rich woman, this Priscilla.” Tears trickled over the fine white stubble on his cheeks.

  “Did you tell them that?”

  He slowly shook his head. “I told them I haven’t seen my son in twenty years. That’s the truth.”

  And never would, most likely. Not the real Nick Lawrence, anyway.

  She watched as he was wheeled inside, a pitiful creature for whom she felt no pity whatsoever. And as she drove home, slowly, in no hurry to arrive anywhere, she couldn’t help glancing at that photograph every few miles, that absurd snapshot of Jimmy at bat, eyes dead serious, as if the fate of the universe depended on the next pitch, while the monster lurked behind him, scheming, even then, plotting her seduction and, eventually, her destruction.

  Had Nick—whoever he was—had Nick had the entire scheme worked out back then, all the details? Had he followed her to the game that day? He’d already stolen the identity of Nick Lawrence, probably taken his life, too. But had he already chosen her?

  Chapter 49

  He finished the final bars of the Pathetique and allowed himself a congratulatory smile. Vienna brought out a deeper passion in his playing. She always had. Even a nagging nostalgia for Gwen Amiel energized his performance. She was more emotional than rational, more sensibility than sense—he’d spotted that right away, which was one reason he’d chosen her. He knew she’d come to the Devil’s Ravine once she heard the plan on the monitor, the monitor he’d brought to the master bedroom that morning.

  He found himself thinking about her quite a bit, actually. Perhaps it was more than nostalgia. She’d been part of the plan, but she’d become…well, part of his life. Sometimes he fantasized about having her here in Vienna with him, introducing her to the places he’d loved long before he’d ever heard of Sohegan, New York.

  “Dada!”

  He turned. His daughter toddled across the large sitting room, her mother just behind.

  “Liebchen,” he said. “Kamm zum Papa.” He extended his arms and she jumped into them. Her mother smiled warmly.

  “We had a lovely stroll in the Rathaus Park, Tess and I,” she said. “I mean Uta and I. The air is like silver, so clear and fresh.”

  “Ein Deutche, Schatz.” He’d warned her a thousand times—they were Austrian now, Austrian again. And how else would Uta—not Tess—learn her native tongue? True, his own mother, Uta’s grandmother, had been English, and he’d grown up speaking both languages, but in the future it was German, only German.

  “Angewohnheit,” she said. Yes, the English habit was hard to break. No German for two years, not even when the two of them were alone together. How else to perfect their unaccented English, though admittedly neither had had much difficulty. For Analiese, speaking English without an American accent was simply a question of acting; she could also do a passable Cockney, and an excellent French. All acting. For him, the German accent had never been a problem; expunging a British accent, his mother’s legacy, had been the only challenge. He still agonized over the slips that Gwen had noticed, and corrected. Gravy boat. Break a fuse.

  “Vien ist wie gemacht fur Dich.”

  She smiled at the compliment and began to massage his shoulders. Of course she looked her best in Vienna. She loved the city even more than he, having grown up there. He adored Vienna far more than his native Stuttgart—this was Beethoven’s home for many years, after all—but he could easily imagine a life elsewhere with his music, his wife, their money. Their child.

  “Beethoven moved seventeen times in Vienna alone,” he said in German. “He lived in this place only a month or two.” He glanced around the room, still thrilled beyond reason to be inhabiting the very flat where Ludwig van Beethoven lived and composed. Number 45 Teinfalstrasse had not inspired Beethoven in the few months he lived there; no major compositions had been written at this address. But that kept the place from becoming a museum, like so many other Beethoven residences. He’d been able to rent the top floor for a reasonable amount, just over a year ago, when Tess was born. It had been waiting for them ever since.

  “And our lawyer says we are completely safe here,” she said in her beautiful German. She’d cut her hair very short and dyed it back to its original dark brown. When the collagen in her lips began to dissipate she’d lose the poutiness that he’d come to treasure since she’d started having the injections two years ago, but every victory had its price.

  Yes, he missed Gwen, but Valerie—Analiese—had done so much. She’d found Priscilla at the clinic, she’d persuaded Barry Amiel to help them out, she’d taken care of him at the warehouse in Queens. An inspiration, luring him to the very place where Gwen used to pick up her furniture. She’d had so many good ideas—like paying off the Amiels’ back maintenance, just to cast further suspicion on Gwen. Trying to run Gwen down on the East Side, well, that had been rash. Gwen Amiel was no threat to them, then or now.

  He’d found Nick Lawrence on his own, while hanging around Lincoln Center. No family, few friends, a diploma from Julliard that did little for him professionally other than secure a handful of piano students. What a pathetic creature; he’d practically had his tongue out the entire cab ride to the pier on the Hudson River, groping with sweaty hands. His wallet had contained only twenty dollars—a small down payment, in a way. But he had a driver’s license, among ot
her identification. A few “Have you seen this man?” flyers had been taped to streetlight poles on the West Side—perhaps one of his students was concerned. But they disappeared soon enough. Nick Lawrence was dead. Long live Nick Lawrence.

  He vividly recalled Gwen’s fine-boned face, but Priscilla’s somehow eluded him. She’d never been his, really. Priscilla had another life, internal and external, that he’d never quite fathomed. Secrets—so many secrets, all those absences, and that damn thistle she’d been clutching at the ravine like a talisman. What was that about? But Priscilla’s secrets would go to the grave with her, where they belonged.

  Valerie, as he still thought of her sometimes, was so much like him: talented, but no genius. She, too, possessed the absolutely cruelest of gifts: a knowledge of one’s own limitations. He’d known for some time that he’d amount to nothing. Julliard had taken the real Nick Lawrence, but after he’d been rejected by the academy in Vienna, he hadn’t even bothered to apply in New York. No, fate had begrudged him even the dubious pleasure of fooling himself for a few years. And Valerie? A talented actress without the spark of genius that ignites success.

  They shared the same dream…the same disappointment. The best they could hope for was a comfortable life filled with music, and a child who would grow up free from the disillusionment they’d both known. When Priscilla Cunningham walked into the fertility clinic two years ago, they discovered the means to that end.

  Sometimes he replayed the Devil’s Ravine in his mind like a favorite passage from a sonata. He heard his own voice calling Priscilla’s name, saw her turn toward him, enabling him to hit her in the chest, the way the kidnapper would have. He felt the gun explode in his gloved hand, saw the look on her face, the knowledge, as the bullet sailed through her heart. He’d have preferred that Barry Amiel do the actual shooting. But Barry was drunk most of the time—which made him a pliant coconspirator, but an unreliable marksman. He’d been there, of course, in that ridiculous ski mask, but just to grab the duffel bag and fire a few shots into the air with his own gun. Valerie—Analiese—had kept Tess. Uta, their child.

  Analiese sighed and ran her fingers through his hair.

  “I miss you as a brunette,” she said. “Even your eyebrows are blond again. And that moustache…”

  He ran a finger across the hair on his upper lip, still not quite used to it. He wondered what Gwen would make of his new look—the old look, actually. Why couldn’t he get her out of his mind? It’s because she resisted you early on, Analiese had told him, back in America, when he’d confessed to a passing fascination with her. You had to fight for a change, and you like that.

  “Uta, mein Liebes?” he said quietly.

  She didn’t look up from the little jigsaw puzzle they’d bought her.

  “Uta.”

  She finally turned, drawn by the firmness of his voice, he supposed, not the name. Soon enough she’d forget all about “Tess Lawrence.” She smiled at him, her eyes so richly brown, so much like her mother’s, that his chest suddenly felt too small to contain his heart.

  “Uta, wurdest du gern Klavier spielen wie dein, Papa?”

  She answered by banging both hands on the second-rate piano that had come with the furnished apartment.

  “Nein, Liebes, nicht so. So!” Like this: He held her right index finger and picked out the first notes of the Pathetique.

  “Sie ist Genie, Analiese,” he said. And maybe she was a genius. The genes were good.

  Analiese smiled affectionately and caressed his cheek.

  “Klaus,” she said, and he felt a shiver of pleasure at being addressed, finally, by his own name. “Lieber, lieber Klaus.”

  Chapter 50

  The ringing phone interrupted a dreamless sleep. Gwen hadn’t dreamt in two weeks, not since the day she returned from Lansburg, Pennsylvania, knowing what she’d never know: the identity of the man who’d seduced her by playing on her tenderest vulnerabilities. She’d given the photograph to Dwight Hawkins, and told him what she had learned from Fred Lawrence. Hawkins said that Interpol was focusing its search on London, where “Nick Lawrence” had flown from New York. He could have gone anywhere from there—this was a man who had stolen another person’s identity, after all. Forging a passport would be child’s play. But the trail ended at Heathrow; Interpol had little hope of finding him.

  She’d expected nightmares, but sleep had been seamless, and deep. “Nick Lawrence” had become a void, a faceless, nameless void. Perhaps he did inhabit her sleep, but in an empty place without color or texture.

  It was the daylight hours she had trouble with. Nick had ruined so many lives, almost ruined hers and Jimmy’s. Yet what tormented her was that she’d let it happen. She’d learned nothing, apparently, from the disintegration of her marriage. She put Jimmy’s well-being in jeopardy a second time. She had, not Nick. Lust, love, loneliness—whatever the reason, she’d been weak when she’d needed to be strong.

  And even now, when she thought of Nick, which she did with agonizing, she sensed something soft around the edges of her rage, a residue of longing that stoked her anger all the more. To be consumed by hatred is debilitating enough. But when some of that hatred is self-directed, it’s almost crippling.

  “Mommy?” Jimmy stood in the doorway to her bedroom, silhouetted by the nightlight in the hallway, a tiny figure in T-shirt and underpants. Nick Lawrence used to stand there before entering the room, silhouetted in just that way. No, not Nick Lawrence. The monster without a name.

  “Mommy, the phone’s ringing.”

  She hadn’t planned to answer it. Now more than ever before, her entire life was encompassed by the house; news from outside could neither harm nor assist her. But Jimmy hadn’t been sleeping well since her one night in jail; she should have guessed he’d hear the phone.

  “Hello?” She glanced at the digital clock: 3:16 A.M.

  She heard a very faint, rhythmic hum, like a respirator, then a dull rustling, as if someone was moving. Then—

  Piano music, familiar as her own voice, the composition and the performance. She wanted to hang up but the music was insistent, somehow, beautiful and cruel. She motioned with her free hand for Jimmy, who hadn’t moved from the doorway. He climbed onto the far side of the bed, but she pulled him to her and held him close as she listened. The melody flowed effortlessly, like water over smooth stones. Jimmy wiped tears from her face with his fingertips.

  “Who are you?” she whispered into the phone, her voice as faltering as the performance was steady and confident. “Who are you?”

  She hung up and held Jimmy closer. He was asleep within moments, but not she. As the faint light of dawn began to shimmer around the edges of the drawn shades of her bedroom, she wondered if the music would ever stop, if she’d ever enjoy a dreamless sleep again.

  Every time she closed her eyes she heard it, so beautiful, so cruel. The Lebewohl Sonata. The farewell.

  More from Seth Margolis

  Perfect Angel

  Back at college in the '70s, they called themselves "The Madison Seven"—a close circle of friends inseparably linked by trust, loyalty, and love. Then one night, years later, they gathered at Julia Mallet's Manhattan apartment for a "Come-As-You-Were Party" and decided to play a game...

  Tough, beautiful and independent, Julia Mallet feels her life is nearly perfect. She holds a high-profile executive position in an important advertising firm. She is raising a beautiful little daughter, Emily, without the inconvenience of a husband. And now "The Madison Seven" have come together once again to celebrate her thirty-fifth birthday...and to bring back a past that should have been left dead and forgotten.

  Less than twenty-four hours later, a woman Julia barely knows is brutally and senselessly slain by a faceless psychopath. NYPD Detective Ray Burgess is a man pursued by shadows, a good cop who has stared too deeply into the face of evil, and his obsessive dedication is drawing him closer to Julia, even as a crazed killer strikes again and again.

  The maniac has left
a calling card behind that only Julia Mallet can read: the result of a post-hypnotic suggestion inadvertently lodged in six subconscious minds—the dark residue of a harmless party game gone terribly wrong. Now Julia knows without question that one of her six dearest friends is a murderer...and is coming after her next.

  Vanishing Act

  When retail tycoon George Samson appears in detective Joe DiGregorio's office asking for help in faking his own death, the wary private eye knows enough to refuse. Joe D. has been having second thoughts about his move from the Long Island police force, where he'd been a lieutenant, to trying to make it as a private detective in Manhattan. Joe had made the move to be with Alison Rosen, whom he met while working a homicide case on Fire Island (FALSE FACES). Though wonderful in many ways, their relationship is strained by Joe D.'s lack of work and income. The Big City doesn't seem to need one more private investigator.

  But George Samson’s proposition isn't easy to forget. So when Samson is found murdered, the struggling P.I. is convinced that his would-be client found another "killer." Thing is, there's no doubt the man is dead. What happened?

  Intent on the truth, Joe D. offers his investigative talents to the new CEO of Samson Stores, who accepts, and Joe D. embarks on a case that could be the making of his new career—or the end of him.

  False Faces

  Alison Rosen, a young, single Manhattan department-store buyer, first met Linda Levinson seven years ago when both answered the same Village Voice classified ad for a Fire Island "share." Since then, they've been returning to Seaside Harbor every summer weekend.

  One night, after leaving Crane's, the singles bar that often serves as a pickup place, Linda Levinson is found murdered. Is her killer a spurned suitor whose advances Linda rejected? What about the mysterious lover back in the city about whom Linda had spoken but whom Alison has never met?

  Long Island police officer Joe DiGregorio is assigned to work undercover on the case, posing as a yuppie accountant. Together, Joe and Alison, who is unaware of Joe's masquerade, set out to find the murderer before he strikes again. In the process, they find out that Linda was a woman of many secrets—and find themselves falling in love in an atmosphere in which nobody can be trusted.