by Rick Blechta
I nodded. “One look at her this afternoon, and it was obvious she had to have been involved.”
“Ja... She was hiding in the bathroom. After von Heislinger and...” Ertmann faltered, then began again. “After von Heislinger had taken his pleasure yet again, he was lying back against the headboard of the bed. Your wife was face down beside him. She seemed nearly unconscious. I do not think she really knew what had been done to her by then, if that gives you comfort. Gertrud Schatzader simply walked up next to von Heislinger and slit his throat, much as she did to Hauser this afternoon: coldly and with totally no feelings evident in her expression, except what was in her eyes— that horrible faraway look. I have seen it before in other killers, but never in a woman.
“When the deed was done, she went off the camera for a moment. I think she opened the door to let her husband in. He stood looking at the dying man then spoke to your wife. They put the knife into Tory’s hand and helped her to a sitting position. With Schatzader holding her hand around the handle and whispering in her ear, Fräulein Morgan pushed the knife into von Heislinger’s heart. It is very likely he may already have been dead, my friend, so you need not worry. For Fräulein Morgan, it is no longer a matter of murder—even for that ass Müller.”
“How did the door to the room come to be locked from the inside?”
“Quite simply. They asked your wife to lock it after them. It is amazing that she made it back to the bed again. She seemed very drugged throughout the whole tape.” He nodded. “From what I saw, though, it is better that your wife has lost her memory of those events.”
“That video could never make it out to the public, could it?” I asked with some alarm.
Ertmann shook his head. “Things are not done like that in this country, Herr Lukesh. It will be sealed by the court, and I do not believe the Schatzaders will be contesting the charges. Considering what is on that video tape, they are done for. Your wife should not even have to testify.”
“Thank heaven!” I’d said as Tory had returned to the room, pretending at the time that she hadn’t heard every word.
***
We sat at the window for another few minutes before Tory again broke the silence. “I don’t want to go home. Not now. I can’t face it: the staring, the whispers, the media, people prying into everything we do. Even in Canada, they’ll be curious, and the American press will probably come up and swarm us regardless.”
“Do you have any place in mind that we could go?”
She shrugged. “Maybe North Wales, where my folks come from. Someplace where there aren’t a lot of people. I want hills and wide open spaces. I feel like I need to walk for miles and miles without stopping and without seeing or speaking to anyone.”
“Does that include me?”
Tory smiled sadly. “Where would I ever be without you, you big goof!”
“You know you can’t walk away from your problems—no matter how much you want to.”
“I know... and I’m having a lot of trouble facing that.”
“Seidelmann told me. What do you want to do?”
“Sleep on it.”
I made sure I was in the bathroom when Tory took off her clothes. Seidelmann had brought something for her to wear to bed, but Tory insisted that she didn’t want it. Still, I knew she felt very self-conscious about her body—and being naked, but she was also obviously desperate to appear normal.
Her back was to me when I slipped into bed and turned out the light. She felt even more bony than I had expected, and she was shivering although it wasn’t cold. Cuddling against her with my arm under her head, I stroked her hair until her breathing grew deeper.
I was drifting off myself when she said, “These last few days I’ve been having dreams about Beethoven. I know how you react to anything that smacks of the paranormal, but it felt to me like he was trying to tell me about his concerto.”
She spoke quietly for a long time, telling me what the dreams had been about and though it seemed pretty far-fetched to me, I kept silent. It gave her comfort, and it did make sense in an odd sort of way.
“You see, he wrote the Concert Rhapsody for two reasons. It’s common knowledge that people thought he was washed up, even after the triumph of the Ninth Symphony. The last five string quartets had barely been heard, and he was becoming old and sick. He knew what was being whispered about him, and he was a proud man. The other reason he struggled to complete the Rhapsody was because he wanted to play a last joke on everyone. Beethoven speaks one last time from beyond the grave, and all that. That’s also why he dedicated it to Spohr.
“Ludwig Spohr, a well-known Viennese violinist, was one of the loudest of the whisperers, so Beethoven wrote a beautiful work—I truly think his most beautiful—but he purposely made it too difficult for Spohr to be able play it. Beethoven had worked with him many times, of course, and knew his technical limitations well.” She sighed heavily. “Beethoven wasn’t a bad person—just very unhappy.”
I felt a prickling sensation down my back. A lot of what Tory was telling me agreed with what Elen had found out in her research, and what I already knew. Beethoven was fond of practical jokes and equally fond of puncturing the balloons of fatuous people. There had been talk in Viennese music circles that the maestro’s best days were behind him. After everything that had happened over the past two weeks, Beethoven speaking to Tory in her dreams seemed to be almost believable.
Beginning to scratch Tory’s back very gently, I said, “Did you know that Beethoven had a servant named Thekla whom he fired shortly before he died? Elen found it out while she was trying to uncover some historical trace of the concerto. We think it might have been this Thekla who stole it from Beethoven. Finding out what happened to her is Elen’s next task.”
Tory turned her head and looked back at me. “That is too weird! Maybe we were all just caught up in one huge psychic circle. It’s closed now because you found the manuscript again.”
“I tried so hard to recover it, because I knew what it meant to you, what you’d sacrificed for it.” I scratched her back silently for a moment or two longer. “I also hope it will help you get better.”
“I’d like to think so, Rocky. I’d really like to think so.”
TORY
The morning after I’d been let out of jail, I woke up way before Rocky. I longed more than anything else to get out of that hotel room, but knew it was not in the cards at the moment. For all intents and purposes, I was still in prison. This one had nicer furniture and room service and a warm husband, but it was still prison. If I even stuck my nose out of the hotel, I’d be mobbed by the media, and I could not handle that.
For someone who’d spent so much of her life in public, I found myself terrified having even half-a-dozen people around. Would I ever be able to stand in front of an audience again and not be totally panic-stricken? And if that was the case, what was I supposed to do for the rest of my life? I still wanted to make music more than anything else, and I felt as if I were on the brink of a much deeper understanding of my medium, but music is, above all, communication and you aren’t really communicating if you only play in the privacy of your practice room. It’s like talking to yourself. And there was still my inability to play to be sorted out—if it ever would be. Life still seemed awfully bleak.
The feeling was growing in me that there was something I had to do here in Vienna before I could escape, no matter how much I longed to be on my way.
Just what the hell was it, though?
***
Two hours later, I was still sitting in front of the window. Far in the distance I could see the hills to the north and west of the city, tree-covered hills that would be great for walking, but I was trapped indoors. I wondered if all prisoners experienced what I was feeling when they were finally released.
Rocky sat up in bed. “You got up early. How do you feel?”
“Like I’m on the edge of a cliff, and while I can’t turn away yet, at least I don’t want to jump off at the moment.�
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“That’s a good thing,” he answered, “the not-jumping-off part, I mean. Do you want to move on today? We could fly to London or maybe Birmingham and rent a car.”
“After what you told me last night, the only reason I can see for going to London would be to personally kick Easterbrook in the nuts.”
Later, over breakfast, Rocky said out of the blue, “We both learned a lot of things here, I guess.”
I thought about that for a second before asking, “What’s the most important thing you learned?”
“That with only one exception, I should never completely trust anyone but myself.”
“Pretty cynical way to go through life,” I observed. “And who’s the exception?”
Rocky smiled. “You.”
“Me? Aren’t I about the last person you should trust? I mean, I’m untrustworthy to myself! That’s probably the most important thing I learned. How am I ever going to learn to trust myself again? What a laugh! We’ve reversed our roles. And why do you suddenly trust me so much? If anything, you should boot my ass out the door.”
Rocky smiled to himself while pouring each of us another cup of coffee. “I’ll be blunt. There were many times when I thought the worst of you. As far as anyone knew, you’d run off from your tour to be with some guy you’d never told me about. I was wrong. Then you supposedly murdered him and ran away again. Same response from me, and you proved me wrong again. Then you didn’t contact me, and so on. God! I was wrong about you every step of the way. Every time you deserved my trust, yet I just couldn’t give it unquestioningly, because I didn’t believe in you enough.”
“That makes sense. In the past I’ve certainly given you ample reason not to trust me.”
“But that’s the point. It was in the past. I know how much you wanted to be the first to play that concerto, anybody would want that. You could have easily taken von Heislinger up on his offer. Roll over on your back, let him have his way, and the deal would be done. Tons of people, maybe most people, would have done it in that situation. You didn’t, and that’s what is so important to me.”
Even though he wasn’t yelling and screaming or crying, I could tell that Rocky was more passionate about what he was saying than anything he’d ever said to me before. Cutting through all the words, this man, who held so much inside himself, was telling me that he loved me utterly and completely.
Tears began streaming down my face. I didn’t deserve that kind of devotion.
ROCKY
It took me a long time to get Tory calmed down. Normally, even when she’s at her most upset, believe me, she is very verbal. This time she wouldn’t tell me anything. I couldn’t comfort her. Nothing. The tears just flowed down her face in an unending stream.
In the middle of all this, Roderick and Elen knocked on the door. Still giddy from their success in Moscow and thrilled over what had happened the previous day, they were totally unprepared for what met them when they entered the room.
They didn’t have any better success with Tory’s tears than I’d had, but Elen persisted, holding Tory who clung to her like a drowning child thrown a life preserver. Roderick and I went into the hall to talk.
“How long has Tory been like this?” he asked.
“She’s been in tears three or four times so far, but not this bad.”
“What did Doc Seidelmann say about her?”
“He said what he saw was normal, considering what she’s gone through. I’m not so sure, though. It seems to me like she’s still scared of something.”
The pianist threw up his hands. “What is there left? She’s off the hook! From what I just read in the papers on the plane, about fifteen constables heard that Schatzader woman confess to both killings. You got the concerto, and Elen and I have proof that it’s the genuine article. What more does Tory need?”
I slumped against the wall, shaking my head. “Damned if I know.”
“Do you think Seidelmann would? We should get him over here to talk to Tory right away.”
We didn’t have to do that, as it turned out. The man came over on his own. It seems he wasn’t prepared to wait for us to call him.
TORY
Rocky would have left with Elen and Roddy if I’d asked him, but he had been through so much on my behalf, that I thought he deserved to be in for the very end of it all. It was wrong to think of it that way, certainly counterproductive, but that’s the way my brain formulated the idea. I’ve always heard that you can fool your conscious, but it’s impossible to fool your subconscious. My idea must have come straight from there.
The curtains had been pulled, Rocky had found a radio station with some soft music (“Sounds like Mozart, so it must be Haydn,” he’d said, quoting our long-running, inside joke) and he’d pulled his chair back to the far corner of the room. Seidelmann had me lie on the bed, and he sat down next to me. I knew the hypnosis drill pretty well by then, and it didn’t take him long to put me under. This time we went way down deep. He was searching for the real me, and she’d withdrawn to the outer boundaries of my psyche.
“You are going down a very, very long escalator,” Seidelmann intoned, “down to the deepest sub-basement of your personality. Now you’re walking down a corridor. At the very end is a door, and that door leads into a small room filled with filing cabinets. Each one contains your most secret thoughts. There’s also a chair and a floor lamp. When you lock the door to the room, nothing can hurt you, nobody knows what you’re doing and everything is very, very safe. Do you believe you are safe in this room?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now I want you to go to one of the filing cabinets, the one with your most recent experiences. I want you to open the bottom drawer and take out the file marked von Heislinger.”
Tory hesitated. “Do I have to?”
“Yes, you do.”
“Okay. I’ve got it.”
“Are you worried about what it contains?”
“Yes.”
“So you know what’s in it?”
“Some... but it’s all very confused. I couldn’t really see clearly that night.”
“That’s because of the drug von Heislinger gave you. I’m going to count backwards from five, and when I get to zero, you’re going to be able to see the events of that night much more clearly. Is that what you want to do now?”
“Yes!”
“There are things you want to remember?”
“No...Yes... Christ! It’s such a hopeless muddle.”
“We can clear that muddle away, but you have to be prepared to see what it will reveal. That is what I need to know. Are you prepared?”
“I guess so.”
“You have to be sure, or you may not see anything.”
“Then I’m sure.”
“Good. Now open up the file, and inside you’ll find the story of what happened that night, the part you haven’t been able to remember until now...”
***
The glass just slipped through my fingers and shattered into a thousand pieces on a rock. But there was something abnormal about it. As if time had slowed down, I watched the champagne flute tumbling slowly end over end until it struck the rock, bursting outward in a million glittering splinters. I watched each one of the crystal sparks as they gently settled to the earth and winked out.
I stared down at the mess in puzzlement, wondering what was happening to me. But before I could say or do anything, the baron was all over me again, catching me completely off guard. I wrenched myself clumsily from his grasp and slapped him as hard as I could. The outline of my hand showed redly on his neck. I’d meant to nail Rudy’s aristocratic cheek.
Von Heislinger’s eyes narrowed, but they were pulsing with intense excitement. “That was not wise, my dear,” he said slowly, “and you will have to suffer for it.”
I was really pissed off after all the crap and shot right back, “What you did was not wise!” That’s what I meant to say, but it came out all garbled, as if my brain weren’t properly connected to my
vocal chords. I started to head for the exit and only made it two steps before collapsing to my knees. “What’s wrong with me?” I tried to say, but my mouth continued to refuse to work properly.
The baron leaned over and plopped me onto one of the benches with about as much feeling as if I were a sack of potatoes. “Having a little trouble controlling your body, my dear?” he asked sweetly, but his eyes reflected no soft emotion. “I am afraid that I put something special in that last glass of champagne. It is affecting the muscles of your body just enough so that you must... stay for a while. It is a special combination of drugs I have had made up for my use, and I like to employ it for the effect it produces. You will soon be able to move only a little, just enough for me, but of course you will feel everything most exquisitely. You may find that being totally at the mercy of someone produces a most wonderful aphrodisiac effect.”
I cannot tell you how frightened I was, and also, how much I cursed myself for being such a gullible fool.
“I must get a fresh bottle of champagne, however. It wouldn’t do for me to drink from this bottle now, would it?” The baron walked off up the steps, and I struggled to get up and run for help. When he returned, he found me lying face down in the dirt next to the bench. After lifting me back onto the bench yet again, he moistened his handkerchief in the pool and spoke to me as he carefully wiped the dirt from my face. “That was foolish, my dear, but it shows the intensity that drives you, the fire! I cannot tell you how much that excites me.”
I looked up at him and managed to get out reasonably intelligibly, “You’re crazy.”
“A few might say that,” he answered as he poured himself some bubbly and held the glass up to the light. “Have you ever wondered why it is that champagne and love go so well together? I think that it is the little bubbles which sparkle so gaily in the light.” He drained the glass in one gulp then threw it violently to the ground to join the remains of my shattered glass.
