by Rick Blechta
“Can you remember what emotion you were feeling?”
I thought for a moment. “There was shame.”
“From the act?”
“No... it was something else, but I don’t remember what. I was ashamed and...”
“And what?”
Inside my head, the darkness parted a little, and a flood of harsh emotions rushed out in an unstoppable wave. “I was enraged at what he was doing to me. Enraged that I couldn’t stop him. I wanted... I wanted...”
“Wanted to what?”
“I wanted to kill him!”
“The masses love to see the mighty (even while they’re busy loving them) brought down—for the same reason people always slow down to look at car accidents. Few have fallen as far or as fast as Victoria Morgan, and everyone is lining up to view the crash.”
—André Leduc, Entertainment Editor for Le Soleil
Chapter 24
ROCKY
I was pretty down after returning from taking Tory’s violin to her. No amount of forced cheerfulness could hide the fact that she looked worse than ever.
Roderick and Elen talked me into going out for lunch and took me to a restaurant they knew on the far side of the ring. The food and service were excellent in that restrained Viennese way, and I’d really enjoyed myself until Roderick pointed out that Beethoven himself had lived down at the end of the block and had actually written his Violin Concerto in D Major while living there.
We were a silent group on the cab ride back to the hotel Inter Continental.
While the newshounds had departed with Tory’s arrest, across the street one car still sat conspicuously, I noted sourly while paying the cabby.
People stared discreetly at the three of us as we walked to the elevators.
Ah, to hell with them all, I thought as the elevator doors finally shut.
Roderick got off with me at my floor and Elen continued on, promising to come down as soon as she’d taken care of some things.
I could hear the phone ringing as I slid my key card into the slot on the door.
“Herr Lukesh? This is the front desk. Knowing your wishes on the subject, I would not have disturbed you, except,” the voice lowered and I could imagine the desk clerk turning his back on the counter, “there is a most disagreeable man here who insists on seeing you. He is making a scene!”
“Ask him his name,” I told the clerk.
“He says his name is Terradella.”
“Send him up.”
I could almost feel the relief through the phone. “Danke, Herr Lukesh, Danke!”
A couple of moments later, someone rapped importantly on the door. I opened it, and when I turned around, Roderick was standing right behind me. When Terradella spotted him over my shoulder, the Italian music publisher practically leapt into the room, his arms spread wide.
“Whitchurch!”
“Luigi, it is good to see you,” Roderick answered back.
Terradella stepped forward to give his “dear friend” the tradition Italian male greeting, half shaking of hands, half bear hug. Roderick grunted, making a disgusted face over the shoulder of the burly man.
“It is good to find you here, my friend!” Terradella exclaimed. “Such a sad time for us all!”
“Yes, it is,” Roderick answered diplomatically. “Luigi, allow me introduce you to Oscar Lukesh.”
As we shook hands, I looked into Terradella’s eyes and spotted little warmth, despite the outward bonhomie. The Italian and I sat down on chairs, and Roderick perched on a corner of my bed.
“What brings you to Vienna today, Signore?” I asked blandly.
“I wish to find out what has become of the Beethoven manuscript.”
Give the guy this: there was no prevarication in his approach.
I smiled ruefully. “I’d like to know that, too.”
“Then you have not yet spoken to your wife about this very important thing?”
“She doesn’t have it.”
Terradella exploded. “I do not believe you!”
I shrugged. “Suit yourself. All I know is that von Heislinger got murdered, and everyone thinks Tory did it. Naturally, that’s where my concern lies.”
“And she mentioned nothing to you about the Beethoven manuscript? It was promised to me by Baron von Heislinger!”
“She does not have it,” I repeated as patiently as I could manage.
“I do not believe you!”
“I seem to hear that an awful lot,” I shot right back. “Are you aware, Signore, that you are the third person who has asked about this manuscript?”
You could almost hear the wheels turning furiously in his head. “You have spoken to Schatzader and that clown Montenegro? But it was agreed—” Terradella stopped cold, aware that his mouth had overrun his brain. He tried to cover this up with more bluster. “You will turn the manuscript over to me!”
“And why should I do that?”
His eyes shone with almost an almost fanatical gleam. “Then you have it?”
“I already told you, no. But let’s just say that I did.”
“It is the greatest musical treasure! The baron wished me to bring it to humanity through my publishing company. Now that he is gone, it is up to me to protect this precious thing and see that it is made available for the whole world to hear!”
Roderick cleared his throat. “Montenegro told us almost the same thing.”
“And Schatzader told me,” I added, “that he didn’t think it was a work by Beethoven, but that he wanted to purchase it from me as a curiosity.”
“How much did they offer? I will double it!”
I leaned forward in my chair. “Do you know where von Heislinger got it? It’s inconceivable that a major work by Beethoven could go undetected for so long.”
“I only know that it was apparently completed shortly before the maestro’s death, and that it disappeared without a trace at that time. I have been unable to find even a single reference to it in any of the records of the maestro’s final two years. His friend von Breuning never mentioned it, and he was with Beethoven much before he died. Neither is it mentioned by Schindler, who was also with the maestro almost constantly in his final illness.”
“And yet you believe that Beethoven wrote it,” Roderick said.
Terradella gave a generous Italian shrug. “Only the genius of Beethoven could have written the music I heard at Baron von Heislinger’s. It is obvious,” he said to Roderick, inclining his head in my direction, “that this man’s wife has the manuscript in her possession. It was not at the castle. I do not have it, Montenegro does not and neither does Schatzader. That leaves only Signorina Morgan. It must be turned over to me for publication!” Here Terradella wagged his finger at both of us. “Those pages are fragile and must be protected by experts.”
“People might kill for something like that,” I said pointedly.
“Of course they would, and someone has!” Terradella answered, then paused when he realized what his words intimated. “Well, that is, I mean to say...”
“I think we both know what you mean to say, Luigi,” Roderick said stiffly.
“And I also think that it’s time you left,” I added, getting to my feet.
At the door, Terradella turned to me and said in a voice shaking with anger. “It is time, Signor Lukesh, that you accept what your wife is capable of. I myself saw her enter her room in the presence of Baron Rudolph, and the police tell me that an hour later he was dead.”
“The way I heard it, he was carrying her.”
“You may make jokes at me if you wish, but I say you are a fool! I would not permit my wife to do a thing like that to me. And I will tell you this: if something happens to that manuscript which your wife has stolen, Terradella will declare your guilt before the entire world!”
The hot-head stormed out of the room, and as the door swung shut, we could hear him stomping down the hall, muttering to himself.
I was already thinking about what Marty had told me
when we’d last spoken. He had heard from one of his contacts in Italy that Luigi Terradella’s publishing business was in major financial trouble. He also had some staggering personal debts.
If Terradella was to be believed, none of the others who had been present the night von Heislinger was killed had the concerto. And I believed that, because they were all still circling me like vultures. But it was also clear that they’d made some sort of agreement between themselves, probably along the line of “everyone will keep quiet about the concerto’s existence, and we’ll agree to share in the proceeds if one of us comes up with it.”
***
I stepped out of the shower and noticed the phone’s message light flashing.
Roderick, after we’d spent a few hours going through the files I’d gotten from Ertmann, had returned to his friend’s apartment, said friend having agreed to drive over to pick him up. The Viennese, while seemingly never owning a car, were uncannily adept at being able to borrow them.
Slipping into some clean underwear, I noticed a slip of paper left by the phone. “Get some sleep. You look terrible—R”
The message needed attending to first. “Hello, ah, Mr. Lukesh. This is Anton Seidelmann speaking. I was wondering if I could, ah, personally speak with you. Please give me a call at home any time this evening.”
After writing down the number, I spent several minutes wondering what all this was about, then with a sigh I got dressed to go find yet another out-of-the-way payphone in case the good doctor had information I might possibly not want to share with anyone else.
***
“And you’re saying that Tory’s problem could go on for quite some time?”
Seidelmann nodded gravely. “The solution to your wife’s inability to play is not as simple as I had at first assumed.”
“But knowing that she can still do it should help her, shouldn’t it?”
“Not necessarily. She had already told me that she had played while apparently walking in her sleep—I think you call it that in English?— the night she arrived back in Vienna. After the hypnosis session, I asked if she would try playing for me, and while I believe I am excellent at my profession, your wife did not respond in the slightest to the post-hypnotic suggestion I had made while she was hypnotized. The difference in her playing during hypnosis and then afterwards was truly staggering.”
After I’d told the psychiatrist that I preferred not to meet at the hotel, he had said he would drive over to pick me up.“It will be most convenient since I want you to listen to something I recorded today.”
At the moment, we were parked on a quiet side street in the district south and east of my hotel.
“I did not want to meet with you at the hospital,” he’d continued, “since I have already had trouble because of this morning when you brought the violin and met with your wife without the permission of the examining magistrate.”
“You have an informer on your staff.”
Seidelmann had smiled ruefully. “My, ah, transgression was reported very swiftly, and I was informed that I might be removed from my assignment if I did not follow the guidelines set out.”
“You don’t seem particularly worried.”
“I am not. I was thinking of resigning it anyway.”
I raised an eyebrow. “The reason?”
Seidelmann took a cassette out of his inside jacket pocket and popped it into the car’s tape deck. “This is a recording I made this afternoon of your wife playing while under hypnosis.”
First the sound of Tory’s familiar tuning ritual, then silence filled the car for a moment before a torrent of notes burst out of the car’s speakers as if a musical tap had suddenly been turned on full blast.
Scales, dramatic arpeggios, trills, double and triple stops, you name it, Tory played it as she loosened up at a positively manic pace. Silence again, this time much longer as if she were gathering her strength.
Tory began a long doublestop on B and D# followed by a torturous run up the fingerboard. I didn’t recognize the piece but then the hair literally stood up on my neck as I realized what it probably was.
For the next forty minutes, sitting in a car parked on a rather grungy sidestreet in Vienna, I heard some of the most sublime music imaginable as Tory played the solo violin part for the entire concerto. Occasionally, she’d pause, listening in her inner ear to the missing musical accompaniment or possibly jump ahead to the next section where the violin played when the gap was longer, but her performance was so cohesive, I began to almost expect to hear the orchestra joining in. When the final phrase drifted off into what seemed like the nothingness of eternity, I sat, totally stunned. Neither of us even moved as the tape ran on to its end, the music replaced by the soft hiss of empty tape. I finally understood what had driven Tory to do something as stupidly rash as shutting down a concert tour and running off to meet someone she knew nothing about.
I finally believed as she did.
“What music is this?” Seidelmann asked. “I have not heard it before.”
I shook my head in wonder at the magnitude of it all. “No one has.”
***
By the time I finally got to bed, everything that had happened over the past three days churned hopelessly in my head and sleep remained very far away.
Nothing I’d learned since arriving in Vienna seemed to connect into a thread that we could follow, and no matter how much I tried to sort it all out, it remained a hopeless jumble. My hope for saving Tory rested on being able to put together the pieces. What if I never found that one bit of information which would start all the pieces falling into place? What if I had it now but simply hadn’t recognized it?
I couldn’t bear to think about that. Not after hearing that crushingly beautiful music. It was up to me and Tory’s two other friends to discover a way through the dense thicket of facts and surmises that stretched before us.
Gradually, though, sleep began to creep up on me, and I heard distant echoes of this masterwork by Beethoven. What must he have been feeling as he wrote this piece—his final composition? Had he been aware of that? He had to have been. No one could have written so much pain and frustration and sadness and gone on to such peace in the end without first confronting his own mortality. It was as if Beethoven had tried to leave behind a musical canvas of his life’s end for those capable of understanding.
In that clarity of thought which sometimes happens as one hovers on the very edge of sleep, it suddenly came to me that I now had two quests: to find out who had set up my wife and to retrieve Beethoven’s gift from beyond the grave so that it could be shared with the rest of humanity.
Come off it, Lukesh! I chided myself. You’re beginning to sound like the idiot Terradella!
***
I woke up shortly after eight the next morning actually feeling refreshed. After ordering some good old ham and eggs from the hotel kitchen, I took a quick shower, answered a few messages which had come in overnight (Marty sounded increasingly frantic as almost all Tory’s bookings had been cancelled) and thought about what I’d decided to do the night before.
At nine, I called Elen in her room and Roderick at his friend’s place, and we agreed to meet there since we wouldn’t be heard by any prying ears. It was a very easy subway ride away.
Meeting Elen in the lobby, I noticed right away that she looked terrible, very drawn and haggard.
“Is anything wrong?”
I thought she might actually break down. “Everything,” is what she finally answered. “I got a call from my husband last night.”
“And?” I asked innocently.
“Someone from Vienna had rung him. He identified himself as a reporter.” She stopped and took a deep breath. “He asked Dai for his feelings about my affair with the landlord of my apartment.”
“Oh, Jesus. You weren’t...” But I could see from her face that she had been.
“It’s been terrible. You can’t imagine how upset and humiliated Dai is. He had no idea. I—” Elen suddenly looked
up at me with an embarrassed smile. “Oh, God, Rocky, of course, you must understand what he feels like! I’m so sorry to have brought it up!”
I put my arm around Elen and steered her towards the front door of the hotel. “Nonsense. Having been there a few times, I know my way around these things.” I stopped just after we went through the door. “How many other media outlets have picked up on the story?”
“None so far, but my whole family is in a total uproar. I don’t know which way to turn.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about it earlier?”
She shook her head. “I think you have enough problems at the moment.”
“Can I ask you something personal?”
She shrugged. “Sure.”
“Do you still love your husband?”
Elen looked even more troubled. “Last week, I could have said no and meant it. Now I’m not so certain. Since Max betrayed me... Now I don’t know what I think.” We started to walk across the street to the U-Bahn station. “If my marriage did have to end, I just didn’t want it to end like this. Not in public. Not with this kind of humiliation for Dai. There’s something else you need to know, though, and that’s the only reason I’m telling you about this.”
“What’s that?”
“The person who called Dai wasn’t a reporter. I called the newspaper he said he works for. I wanted to find out if there were some way to stop him, some way to keep the story from spreading.”
“That never works with these people. It only makes it worse. I know. I’ve tried.”
“That’s not going to happen in this case either, but for a different reason. The newspaper had no idea who I was talking about.”
***
Roderick’s friend Hugo lived just outside of the First District on Mariahilfer Street, slightly west of the Neubaugasse U-Bahn station. Hugo’s building was one of the older ones which had survived the bombing at the end of the last world war, and the rather out-of-place metal entranceway caused us to think it was a business and so walk right on by. Doubling back, we stopped in front of it; a sign off to the side announced that the European Sex Shop could be found on the second floor.
