“All I am seeing is a future which consists of me slapping you across the face. You owe me food. Do not let that future come true.”
“Look closely. Sometimes it is not what is heard, but what is seen on the page. The notes.” Sherlock played so quickly that it nearly became a flurry of dissonant notes. “D-E-A-D-F-A-C-E.”
“It is a few chords with major sevenths. I do not understand why you are—”
“‘Dead face,’ circled approximately three times below Beethoven’s name, written in a hurry.”
“Peculiar, I admit, but what do you make of it?”
“Murder, Watson. Murder. Is it not obvious? This is revenge commissioned by Fabian himself. He is more than a little angry that he is not first-chair cellist anymore. Follow me.”
“But my drink, the café…” Watson was barely able to pick up his violin case as Sherlock dragged him excitedly by the sleeve.
• • •
Watson had scarcely begun to proclaim his appetite to the foggy, crowded streets of Vienna when Sherlock knocked on Fabian’s door. Beethoven’s fortissimos had perhaps haunted Watson—Sherlock’s knocks were soft rasps on the door, yet Watson nearly jumped at the sound.
“Remember,” Watson said, “we must not accuse Fabian of treason unless we have definite proof.”
“Must you state the obvious?” Sherlock said. “That is part of the fun, to let him announce his own guilt.”
“What guilt?” The door opened a crack, and the soft glow of candlelight danced across Fabian’s face. Sherlock would have mistaken Fabian’s expression for a scowl if it weren’t for his peculiar countenance. Fabian looked as though he were in a state of perpetual despair—and perhaps he was. His eyebrows were upside-down arches digging crevices into his skin, nearly dragging his entire forehead down beneath his eyes. Sherlock had once seen a mutt with the same visage, although the mutt was happy, unlike his colleague standing before him.
“Fabian, a minute of your time, please.”
“I do not possess many of those.” Fabian opened the door and motioned for them to come inside. “Get on with it.”
The house looked lonely, and it took no effort for Sherlock to deduce that it was a reflection of the dismal man who resided within. The floor was littered with paper, and with every step Sherlock had to lift his feet to avoid tripping. He was astounded that the candle had not fallen from the nightstand and the paper had not caught fire, burning the entire place to ruins. In one corner of the room sat a shoddy piano slanting unevenly on one leg, its keys ragged at the edges like broken wishbones. In the other corner sat a bed, its down feathers seeping through the mattress, as if a pheasant had imploded within. Sherlock would have concluded that Fabian had had an intense night of passion and love with some unseen mistress if he did not already know of Fabian’s perpetual state of isolation outside of work.
“Listen here,” Sherlock said. “We wanted to confess just how disappointed we are about the situation.”
Fabian didn’t flinch. “I know not of what you speak.”
“You are no longer first-chair cellist,” Sherlock said. “A situation that is most appalling. Especially before the premiere.”
“It is no matter.” Fabian seemed to wave this off with a flick of his hand, as if he were batting away a fly, until Sherlock noticed that indeed there were minuscule houseflies fluttering about. Sherlock felt one crawling up his neck and flicked it away. “Our beloved conductor will experience an unfortunate epiphany sometime soon.”
Watson shot a look to Sherlock, eyes wide, mouth ajar. Could Watson be any more obvious? Sherlock was highly experienced at hiding his observations, but he could tell Watson was breaking. Sherlock remained stone-faced; they could not play the game of deduction without even beginning in the first place.
“And what do you mean by that?” Sherlock asked.
“His time will come,” Fabian said. “He will realize he was wrong, but by that time it will be too late.”
Sherlock stepped closer, cornering Fabian against the wall. Now was the time to accuse.
“And by what time are you calculating this murder?”
“Murder?” Fabian’s eyes, for once, had opened up, and his expression of despair was replaced with surprise. He chuckled, as if Sherlock were simply telling a joke; Sherlock played it off as so and joined in on the laughter. “I would be lying if I said I had never dreamt such thoughts in mindless reverie, but I have no plans of the sort. I could not even hurt a fly.”
A fly was crawling across Fabian’s cheek and was poking its legs around the corners of his lips. Fabian slapped himself and the fly’s body fell to the floor.
“Well, most of the time,” Fabian said, shrugging.
“Tell us, what do you make of this?” Sherlock pulled the musical score out of his pocket and held it beneath the candlelight.
Fabian walked over to the piano and strummed the melody. The piano was severely out of tune, each note in a key of its own, the entire instrument playing tritones and hideous chords from the underworld.
“This melody belongs on the floors of a pigsty.”
“That is exactly what I said.” Watson walked over and played the piano with Fabian. “We speak the same language. Musicians.”
“Pleading ignorance leads you nowhere, Fabian.” Sherlock closed in on Fabian and studied his face. Near the candlelight, everything was illuminated, including the fear plaguing Fabian’s face. “You wrote this melody yourself. It is your own handwriting. Your floor is covered with your own penmanship, and the strokes of the quill on this page match perfectly with those littering your floor.”
“I do not deny that. Yes, Marcos hummed this to me and had me write it down the day he arrived. I believe it is a secret love letter Marcos had me write for his man-lover, Beethoven. They are infatuated with each other, you know, because why else would Marcos arrive from Berlin, completely unannounced, and replace the most respected virtuoso string player in Vienna?” Fabian put his thumbs up to his chest, reveling in his pride. “You must stop their rabid desire for each other before they run off and have children together. Sure, Marcos acts as though he blows me out of the water, but that is only because he was blowing something else.”
Sherlock studied the message again; he hadn’t considered that perhaps Fabian had been told to write this.
“And you know nothing else?” Sherlock asked.
“Oh, one more thing,” Fabian added. “He said his melody was linked to proper fingering with piano or something intellectual like that. Berlin piece of shit, trying to act regal all the time. Not that he knows how to finger any woman, though, unless it is up somebody’s—”
“Watson,” Sherlock said, stopping Fabian from sharing any more of his theories. “Tell me, what fingers do you use to play the melody that belongs at the bottom of a pigsty?”
Watson struck the piano keys. “D is on the fifth in the scale. So five.”
“Or fourth,” Sherlock said, “if you are counting the letters of the alphabet. Yes. D is fourth. E is third. Keep playing.”
Sherlock ran over to Fabian’s nightstand, picked up a quill, and started writing. Sherlock scribbled on the score, drawing arrows and lines correlating the notes to the alphabet.
“Listen here. D-E-A-D-F-A-C-E correlates to numbers 4314 and 6135 in the alphabet. Or, combining the two lexicons, it is 4314 face, or, when the letters are unscrambled, F-A-C-E can spell cafe. Yes, that is it—4314 Cafe Street, hidden in the slums of our city. I know that area. You ass, Sherlock. You pure ass. Should have known.”
“So Marcos is trying to kill Beethoven?” Fabian’s face lit up with joy. “He will be demoted from first-chair cellist again?”
“No reason to celebrate yet,” Sherlock said. “If you keep quiet about this mess, you will regain your position in the orchestra.”
“But if we know Marcos is to blame, why not simply expose him?” Watson asked.
“On the contrary,” Sherlock said. “He is carrying out orders from someone ab
ove. Let us follow his accidental trail of clues and subvert his expectations by going straight to his superiors.”
“So to the cafe, then, finally?” Watson asked.
“Not the typical cafe you are thinking of,” Sherlock said.
“But you promised…”
Lost in excitement, Sherlock stormed triumphantly out the door.
“Run along, then,” Fabian said, and Watson tried his best to keep up.
• • •
Sherlock and Watson had discovered the apothecary’s workroom right where the conspirator had not wanted them to be found, directly at 4314 Cafe Street, near the southern shores of the Danube River. It was almost too easy, Sherlock noted, and the irresponsible breadcrumbs this madman had left behind seemed almost purposeful.
The apothecary’s room smelled of lavender, rosemary, and sweet tea; for an institution that held such desperate clients of the mad, the depressed, and the dying, Sherlock was surprised that Raphael Czerny, the apothecary, had kept the place smelling so sweet. Such exact sanitization was not normal. Perhaps he was hiding something—the stench of a corpse, the rot of decaying limbs, or perhaps even the fumes of a dangerous lie.
Underneath the candelabra, Sherlock held his magnifying glass in one hand, a vial in the other. Translucent liquid bubbled to the top of the vial and exploded in tiny eruptions within. It was odd, the way the liquid reflected Sherlock’s face in steep curves, his eyes transforming into bulbous and gelatinous bubbles, only to have his reflection blow up and dissolve back into the liquid as if it were never there in the first place.
“You will have to pardon my friend for his poor manners.” Watson stood at the other end of the room, leaning wearily against the wall. “When he is seized upon his work, he acts with the chivalry of a fool. Is that not so, Sherlock? He does not even listen. But I can assure you—he is not as rude as he seems.”
“Seems pretty rude to touch what’s not yours.” Raphael ran to Sherlock, snatched the vial from his hands, and set it in a wooden container next to four other glass vials. “An emergency, you said. Emergency my ass. Are you going to purchase your medicines, or aren’t you?”
Sherlock reached for the vial again but Raphael grabbed his wrist. Sherlock glared at Raphael, and Raphael almost recoiled. Sherlock was venomous when he allowed himself to be.
“Tell me,” Sherlock said. “If somebody were to come here seeking something lethal, what would you say?”
“Would tell ’em they’re looking in the wrong place.”
“And if they were to request anything other than medicine, perhaps something to kill a few rodents—arsenic—how would you go about providing this?”
“Haven’t sold that shit in years.”
“Tell me, then, why is every other substance displayed in even numbers of vials, whereas this rat repellent is displayed in the odd? There are only five of them.”
Raphael’s eyes flittered nervously across from Sherlock to the vial then back to Sherlock again.
“Who was it?” Sherlock asked.
“Some ex-members of the Committee of Public Safety needed some stuff to clear paths on the Alps. Needed to prepare themselves for a journey through winter, they said, and needed something strong.”
“They supply their own arsenic, their own licensed apothecary. Do not lie to me, Raphael. I can close this place down with the snap of my fingers if I so desire.”
That was partly true, partly false, but Sherlock remained silent as Raphael thought this over.
“You step through my door and threaten me?”
“Not only would you become a criminal if you chose to withhold such key information, you would also be a treasonous murderer of your dear country, eradicating patriotism and nationalism for eternity.”
Raphael twiddled the arsenic between his fingers. “About a fortnight ago, a man came in here requesting some. Said his house was infested with rats, didn’t want to wait for the rats in office to give him the go-ahead to clear them himself.”
“Tell me who he is.”
“Truth is, well, I was too high to tell. I sell opium, use the stuff. Happy? Looked like a murderer to me, this man. But the next morning, I found this on the floor. Figured it belonged to him. You can have it, as long as you get the hell out of here.”
Raphael pulled open a cupboard and held an object under the candelabra. Sherlock’s heart started clanging against his ribcage—had his theories all been wrong? It couldn’t be.
It was Beethoven’s baton.
• • •
“But he would never lose his lucky baton the night before the concert,” Watson said. He was trailing behind, and Sherlock began to grow annoyed. “A man that anxious practically views his baton as a part of himself.”
“That is because he does not know it is missing. Someone has duplicated it. Someone who does not want King Leopold to enjoy the show. Keep up.”
Sherlock rolled the baton and felt the imprint of the company’s sigil beneath his thumb; the official seal of East Orderly, the woodworking plant of Vienna, was emblazoned into the bottom of the baton, and it matched the seal on the door.
Although the midnight air was cold, Sherlock felt himself breaking out in a sweat; time was of the essence, and, for once, Sherlock began to feel the prevention of this murder was slipping entirely out of his grasp. If Vienna were to lose Ludwig van Beethoven, one of its greatest artistic, sociological, and political assets, the streets would erupt in chaos, riot, and destruction, and Sherlock would feel entirely responsible.
Sherlock knocked on the door. No answer. He charged his shoulder into the door; it didn’t budge. It was Watson who was finally able to open it by simply turning the knob. Watson laughed, and Sherlock pretended not to hear.
Inside, the room was torn to shreds. Fabian’s house was cleaner in comparison, and that was saying something. The tiled floor was cracked and covered with wooden planks, fallen bricks, and heaps of dust.
“Looks like someone left in a hurry,” Watson said.
“Someone who had a reason to rush off. Keep the door open. We need more moonlight.”
Watson propped open the door as Sherlock started sifting through the rubble. After a moment, Sherlock came across something cylindrical and nearly froze.
“What is it?” Watson asked.
“Erroneous revenge, Watson. This object confirms that they wanted to be discovered after the fact. That is such a shame, because we will expose them before.”
“Before when?”
“The potential murderer has been playing Beethoven’s symphony for quite some time, someone who is capable of observing Beethoven’s eccentric twitches, but this man’s heart belongs to the song of another country.”
“In plain German, please.”
“Marcos was never commissioned to play Beethoven’s symphony.”
Sherlock turned the object in his hands, and through the soft moonlight seeping through the door, he could see it was the same as the vial of arsenic in Raphael’s shop, but this one was marked with a different sigil. It was a maroon flag with a mighty lion slashing its claws.
The official sigil of King Leopold’s office.
• • •
Perhaps it was the heat of the audience that had gathered in the cramped Kärntnertortheater, or perhaps it was because he felt the future of music resting solely in his hands, but regardless of the reason, Sherlock needed to regulate his body temperature, for any slip in his plan, any erroneous mistake caused by his nervous system, would mean an abrupt ending to the concert, and an even more abrupt ending to their misunderstood yet beloved conductor.
Sherlock casually glanced at the front row, pretending to admire the royal guest. King Leopold of Berlin obviously wanted to be noticed for his grandeur and riches; he didn’t even take his box seat reserved for royalty. King Leopold sat in the center of the front row surrounded by mistresses on either side who could have passed for his granddaughters. They fought desperately for the King’s attention, rubbing their hands th
rough his milky-white hair that fell in curls to his shoulders, caressing the nape of his neck with their fingers, even going so far as to nibble his earlobe and tug it ferociously, giggling as it slung back into place.
As King Leopold lifted his hands in a wave to a Viennese admirer, golden bracelets clattered against his body, nearly as loud as the cymbals in the orchestra. His well-equipped guards behind him didn’t even flinch. Sherlock found it increasingly difficult to stop himself from running offstage and directly knocking this disgusting man unconscious himself.
The orchestra finished tuning on a lush, open A chord as the Grand Ambassador of the theater walked onstage.
The audience hushed. After a brief pause, the ambassador made his introduction.
“We introduce to you Ludwig van Beethoven and his works. Let the royal procession begin.”
The audience erupted in applause. King Leopold gently pushed his lovers away as Beethoven walked onstage. A devilish grin crept across the king’s face. Chills shot through Sherlock’s spine; he had never seen a smile so genuine. If Sherlock didn’t know any better, he might have thought the king was smiling simply because he had never been more excited to hear the newest symphony, not to watch Beethoven’s body fall lifelessly to the floor.
Beethoven ran his hands through his hair, and just as he was about to pick up the baton and chew on the arsenic, Sherlock bolted upright from his chair.
“Before the royal procession can begin,” Sherlock shouted, “we have one more important announcement. You sir, in the front row, please stand up. And, Beethoven, keep your hand off the baton.”
Confused, Beethoven looked around and muttered an incoherent curse under his breath. King Leopold stood without hesitation.
Sherlock pointed to King Leopold with his violin. “I will be blunt—your royal guest here is trying to kill you.”
King Leopold and Beethoven gasped at nearly the same time; ironically harmonious, Sherlock noted.
The king was no longer smiling. “Such accusations of treason will sentence your head to the blood-caked planks of the guillotine,” he said. “Be careful what you say.”
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