Cemetery of the Nameless

by Rick Blechta

  As soon as we were far enough away, Elen lifted the beret off my face and whacked me over the head with it. “I sure am stuck with the problem!”

  ***

  I was stumbling with fatigue late in the afternoon and still in a lot of pain as we made our way up the broad staircase of the building where Elen lived. Her building was near the Danube Canal in the old part of the city. It had once been the palace of some wealthy merchant, but had long since been carved up into apartments and had luckily been spared when Vienna was so punishingly bombed at the end of the Second World War.

  Even though they were somewhat shabby, Elen’s rooms still echoed what they had once been. Whoever owned it now had spent a great deal of money on antique furniture, including a magnificently carved, mahogany grand piano. The ceilings were very high in the old European tradition with decorative moulding. Thick oriental carpets covered the floors of the two main rooms.

  “I’m impressed,” I told her. “How much a month is this setting you back?”

  “Nothing. A friend is loaning it to me,” Elen said but didn’t elaborate.

  “Pretty nice to have a friend like that.”

  Too well I knew that look in my friend’s eyes, and it made me sad to see it, even though I’d only met her husband Dafydd briefly. Elen was twenty-nine, two years younger than I. Slender and exoticlooking, with long, almost black hair, pale skin, and huge brown eyes in a face dominated by a strong chin, she towered over me by a good six inches. Something about her made you think immediately of a Celtic princess. Maybe it was the way she moved. No matter how pressed she was, she never seemed to be rushing. Elen attracted stares wherever she went. Generally aloof, I didn’t think she’d succumb to the attention she usually garnered. From what she’d told me, Elen loved her husband dearly.

  “Do you want something to eat?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “Does that computer over on the desk have an Internet connection?”

  “Your husband?”

  I nodded. “The poor guy’s probably beside himself by now. I didn’t dare phone him from Trieste in case they already had a trace on our phone in Montreal.”

  “Are you certain they can’t trace an email?”

  I shrugged. “It has to be safer than using the phone.” Also more likely to get read by the person I’m sending it to, I thought. If I try calling him now, he’ll probably just hang up on me. Who could blame him?

  Even though I struggled to keep from nodding off at the keyboard, I didn’t call it quits until I had finished a long email to the Rock to whom I hoped my life was still firmly anchored. He got the complete story I’d given Elen, and he’d have to draw his own conclusions from what he learned and decide what he wanted to do about it. The only thing I knew is that he had the right to know what had happened, straight from me. There was also no way I wanted him to get involved. Better for him to cut his losses and walk away now—but I did owe him the explanation.

  Elen plied me with coffee, much as Mozart’s wife had done two hundred years earlier when he had a composing deadline to meet, a fact which wasn’t lost on either of us.

  Immediately after pressing the send command for my email, I slumped back in the chair, more weary than I’ve ever been in my life. My friend to whom I already owed so much, insisted that I take her bed for the night, a spacious king-size one in which I felt lost among the covers. I was too tired to argue as she bid me good night.

  While I fell asleep quickly, my body didn’t get any rest. Inside my head, something started uncurling, ready to go to work on me.

  ***

  The first thing to register when I woke up was that my head was resting on something very hard. The second was this God-Almighty kink in my neck. Finally, it filtered through that I wasn’t in Elen’s bed.

  The next instant I was back in the von Heislinger’s castle. The baron had me bent over a table with his hand twisted through my hair, forcing my head to the side. Pain ripped through my body as he rammed his penis into me. As I struggled wildly to break free, the garbled words in my mouth came out as an inhuman scream of anguish.

  Next thing I knew, I was lying on my side curled up in a tight ball on a carpet. Elen had slid a pillow under my head, which ached abominably. An awful sound surrounded me, making coherent thought nearly impossible.

  “Tory, can you understand me?” Elen asked first in English then in Welsh.

  I suddenly realized that the awful sound was coming from me. I stopped.

  “Can you hear me?” Elen repeated, then began to get to her feet, saying to herself, “That’s it! I’m calling an ambulance.”

  Her words filtered through to my brain as not being a very good idea. “Please...please don’t,” I gasped, then took a deep breath, willing my racing heart to slow down. “What happened? Where...”

  Elen was back down beside me in an instant. “You’re lying on the floor in my sitting room. You fell and hit your head.”

  I searched my memory. “I went to sleep in your bed.”

  “Oh, Christ, Tory! You only slept in my bed for about three hours before you got up and came out here.” Elen stopped and pulled herself together. “Are you hurt anywhere?”

  “Just my head, I think. I’m not sure...”

  “Do you think you can get up if I help you?”

  “Yes...” Unreasoning panic flooded me again as Elen pretty well lifted me to my feet. “Where are you going to take me? Not back to the baron! Don’t take me back there!” I began to struggle, pretty ineffectually, since I felt weak as a kitten.

  She held me tightly as if I were a child. “That bastard isn’t here, Tory. He can’t hurt you again. We’re going to walk to the bedroom now, and I’m going to help you lie down on the bed. You’ll be more comfortable.”

  “He’ll be there! I know he will! I don’t want to see him like that again.”

  “The baron won’t be there. I promise.”

  Elen half-carried me into the bedroom.“See? No baron anywhere. Just this big old bed, where you’ll be very comfortable and a lot warmer.”

  She eased me gently onto the bed, but even so, my head throbbed dangerously as it came into contact with the pillow. Elen pulled the covers up, then sat down next to me and began gently stroking my hair. Gradually, the knots in my brain started to relax, and I could think more clearly.

  “What happened?” I asked, looking up at my friend.

  “I think you are suffering some residual effect from what happened to you. I knew it must have been bad, even though you didn’t say much about it yesterday.”

  My hands gripped the end of the quilt Elen had covered me with. “I was back there. He was doing it to me again. I couldn’t get away. Oh, God, it hurt so much! He was laughing at me while he—”

  Elen put her hand over my mouth. “Hush. Not now. It’s too close.”

  I nodded—very carefully.“What was I doing in your living room?”

  She ignored my question by asking one of her own. “Will you be all right for a minute? I want to get something for that lump you have on the back of your head.”

  Elen returned shortly with a chunk of ice wrapped in a napkin. After a careful examination of my head, including shining a flashlight in my eyes, she gently placed the ice against the lump.

  “Oh, man, that hurts!”

  Elen frowned. “I don’t think you have a concussion.”

  “How do you know?”

  “My mum’s a nurse, and my three brothers all play rugger. You could say I’ve seen my fair share of concussions.”

  “My share, too, probably,” I said, smiling tightly.

  She returned my smile. “Feeling better?”

  “Very disoriented.”

  “It’s only to be expected after what you’ve been through.”

  “You said I got up in the middle of the night?”

  Elen nodded. “Sleepwalking. I was just nodding off on the sofa when you came out of the room fully dressed again. You went over to where you’d left your violin on the
piano, tuned it up and started playing. When I finally twigged to the fact that you were still asleep, I was scared to wake you up.”

  “What was I playing?”

  “Some piece of music I’ve never heard before. Very haunting and chillingly lonely in parts and quite beautiful. Could that have been this concerto you’ve been telling me about?”

  “Did it sound like Beethoven?”

  “How would I know? I’m no expert.” She shrugged. “It was all so surreal. You had your eyes open and—”

  “I had what?

  “You had your eyes open. That’s why it took me so long to figure out that you were asleep. Since it was getting so late, I thought my neighbours might start complaining, so I suggested that you stop. You totally ignored me, and that’s when I twigged to what was going on.”

  “Really weird. When I’m awake, I tend to play with my eyes shut. And I played this piece for how long?”

  “Almost three hours. Over and over again. The melody went like this...” and sure enough, Elen began humming one of the main themes from the Beethoven. After about four measures, she stopped.

  I tried to visualize what came next, to hear those notes internally, but nothing surfaced. With a jolt, I realized that for the first time in my life, a piece of music had fallen completely out of my head. Considering the amount of work I’d already put in on it and the fact that I’d actually performed the entire concerto on that awful night, I should have been able to rattle off the complete work.

  Trying to hold back the wave of panic threatening to engulf me, I sat up, and even though the throbbing of my head returned, I put both feet on the floor. “Elen? Could you get my violin from the living room? I don’t think I could walk without taking a header.”

  She looked concerned. “Why do you want that now?”

  “Please... Just get it.”

  In a moment, she was back and had to help me open the case. I’d been forced to dump my special custom-made, bomb-proof metal case in Trieste (something that had really bothered me) since it would have looked out of place for someone supposedly just drifting around Europe to have such an expensive case. I’d managed to talk Thekla’s “uncle” into finding something cheap and scuffed up, but it had latches that would have given a gorilla problems.

  Tristan’s strings had slipped a bit, and it took me several tries to get him back in tune. I put it down to my emotional state and tried to breathe deeply in an attempt to control my agitation. Closing my eyes, I put Tristan under my chin, held the bow over the G string to start the Beethoven and...nothing!

  Okay, get a grip on yourself, I said to myself. You’re just a bit rattled, and you got a nasty bump on the head. Don’t freak out. I figured a little Bach would be just the thing to smooth out my nerves.

  Bringing Tristan up again, I paused. What to play? How about...

  Nothing was there. Not a shred of melody. Not a note.

  My entire repertoire, over two hundred pieces of music, had vanished completely from my memory. I tried a G major scale, and even that was an effort. The easy familiarity of something so basic just wasn’t there. Since I was seven, I hadn’t had trouble playing any scale known to man.

  Elen’s eyes were wide. “Tory, what’s wrong? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost!”

  I placed Tristan carefully into his case, since I didn’t think I could trust myself to hold on to him much longer, my hands were shaking so badly. I stared down at the floor, head throbbing as waves of complete panic washed back and forth through my body. “My God, Elen. What’s happening to me? My hands feel like two blocks of wood, my brain is totally empty. Everything’s completely gone. I can’t play any more! I can’t...”

  The room tipped sideways and started to spin, and I was distantly aware of Elen forcing my head down between my knees. Too late.

  Everything disappeared into the engulfing blackness.

  “Tory is the most frustrating artist a manager ever had. At least once a week I toy with the idea of cutting her loose. Then I’d watch with glee as she drove whichever of my competitors was rash enough to sign her completely crazy. See what I mean? I can’t even talk coherently any more!”

  —Marty Bennison, Victoria Morgan’s manager, interviewed on CNN

  Chapter 11

  ROCKY

  I didn’t sleep much that night. Who could have?

  Sure, I’d almost gotten used to living on the merry-go-round which Tory inhabited, the constant bombardment of paparazzi turning up everywhere she went, the back alley reporters pestering our friends (and enemies) for any newsworthy tidbits, the whispers that began when she entered a room, the prying, peeping eyes. I’d bought a shredder when I’d caught someone going through the garbage shortly after we’d moved into the new place. That’s another thing: I often felt like a captive in my own damn apartment— certainly when Tory was in town. Then, I couldn’t even cross the sidewalk to the newspaper box without a microphone being shoved in my face. It seemed as if everything Tory did or said got dissected and discussed in the media. To make it seem even more worthwhile, lately I’d seen my wife more frequently on the covers of tabloids in the supermarket checkout line than in the flesh.

  And now this.

  All I had to do was flip on CNN with its talking heads professing to know intimate details about my wife and her psyche to understand how bad things were. Victoria Morgan and her troubles had again become the news item du jour. The only thing I could hope for, God help me, was that there would be a natural disaster, or someone would start a war and the media would turn its myopic attention elsewhere.

  Had Tory completely lost her mind? She knew quite clearly how I felt about her gallivanting around, that I was never going to put up with it again, yet she’d put herself squarely into a dicey situation. And this time something really bad had happened.

  Tory’s view on sex has always been that it’s the most enjoyable thing she can do—other than playing violin. She doesn’t put the same emotional weight on sex that the vast majority of people do, and that was something I’d had a lot of trouble trying to understand. The first night we were together, Tory had bluntly said, “It’s not like the word ‘love’ needs to be mentioned when I’m having sex with some guy. It’s a great way to spend a few hours, that’s all.”

  After England, where I’d walked in on her lying naked with some earl’s son, I’d told her bluntly that I could not tolerate it again. Period. Take it or leave it. She’d chosen to finally grow up and do the right thing, preferring her husband to a string of semi-anonymous liaisons. Since then, whenever we’d talked about it, Tory had sworn she’d been celibate—except with me.

  I had chosen to believe her, even though doubts occasionally bombarded me. One positive thing to be said about Tory was that “what you saw was what you got.” She didn’t bullshit. It just wasn’t in her nature. Sure, she played from a different rule book than most people, but she was a genuinely good person. There was none of the snooty “I’m Victoria Morgan and you’re not!” crap that too many other musicians of her stature fobbed off on people. It wasn’t a conscious choice just to appear to be a kind person when it suited her purposes, either. That’s the way Tory actually was and I think that’s what made me still love her so desperately—even with all the garbage she’d put me through. If it weren’t for her past sexual transgressions, I would say that our relationship had been a good one. Since the mess in Britain, though, I’d felt we’d actually managed to put the bad stuff behind us.

  And now this.

  As I tossed and turned, I had to keep promising myself not to judge Tory before we’d had a chance to talk face-to-face. No matter what, she wouldn’t be able to lie to me. I’d see it in her eyes immediately. What you saw was what you got, after all.

  ***

  That past evening, over dinner served in my room (for obvious reasons), Roderick and I had discussed our next move .

  “First thing is to find Tory before the coppers do,” Roderick said using his fork for emphasis. “There
’s no telling what could happen otherwise.”

  “Now there’s a comforting thought,” I answered glumly as I used my fork to push the food I had no appetite for around the plate. “So where do we start looking? She can’t leave a message on our phone machine in Montreal, since it seems to have crapped. If she calls anybody in the States, I’ve made sure they’ll pass on my number here. What else can we do? She could be anywhere by now.”

  “That is a poser. We do know that Tory crossed the border into Italy,” he said, referring to the news bulletin we’d heard earlier. It had also referred to my darling wife as “notorious” and “a Europe-wide fugitive”. “Who does she know there?”

  I got up and went over to the bed where Tory’s laptop sat. Returning to the table, I pushed my dishes to the side, fired up the machine and accessed Tory’s voluminous address database, sorting it for phone numbers in Italy.

  “Pretty impressive, old man,” Roderick said as he watched over my shoulder. “I really need to get one of these machines.”

  “I’ve had a lot of time on my hands the past two years,” I said, smiling grimly, “but what you’re actually seeing is a tribute to Tory’s organizing ability with this program, not my skill in running it. She’s way better than I am.”

  Of the twenty or so names that came up, I could quickly strike off most, because Tory didn’t know them anywhere near well enough to ask them to help her out of this kind of jam. Of the two remaining, both fiddle players, a couple of quick phone calls revealed that the first was on the road. The other professed shock and concern and offered any help he could.

  “Okay, what now?” I asked as I put down the phone.

  Roderick screwed his mouth to one side and sighed. “We use the time to find out anything we can.”

  “How do you propose to do that?”

  “Ertmann struck me as being a decent sort of bloke. Have a go at him. That would give us the official side of the investigation...”