by Andy Conway
So the message Selig Silverstein had received, telling him to go to Mann Fang, was from someone else. Nothing to do with the Mahlers. But Mitch had sent another message to Big Jack Zelig and pulled the tail of the nastiest tiger in New York.
“Oh, God, what have I done?” he said.
Alma.
He was down here when he should be at the Majestic, protecting Alma. He’d left her alone because of a stupid argument, after he’d thrown a brick at a gangster, a brick with Alma’s name and address on it.
— 28 —
THE ELEVATOR TOOK AN age to reach the first floor. The concertina doors barely slid to one side before Mitch shot from it and out onto Broadway like a bullet from a gun.
Freezing air hitting him like a plunge in an icy river. A row of cabs lined up, the drivers huddled around a brazier in a cloud of cigarette smoke and cheap booze.
“I need a cab. Urgently! To the Majestic.”
“Righto, sir,” said one of them, shoving a bottle in his greatcoat, rubbing his hands one last time on the warmth of the fire and sidling along to his cab where he took the nosebag off his horse.
Mitch climbed inside, sat on the edge of the seat, head in hands, waiting an age for the driver to move. The carriage swayed as he climbed up to his perch, groaning with the effort, then with a crack of a whip, they eased out into Broadway.
A motorcar puttered past and honked a horn. So much faster. Could he have hired a car? Did they even have a motor car taxi service yet? Wasn’t there a faster way to get uptown?
The metro. He dug out his metro map and tried to read the network of lines in the dim light. The El train up Eighth Avenue. It stopped behind the hotel. Of course.
Leaning his head out of the window, he yelled up at the driver. “Change of plan. Take me to the El train on Ninth!”
With a fierce jolt, the cab swerved across traffic, Mitch falling across the carriage, and down 23rd Street, a cloud of obscenities in their wake.
They picked up speed, a freezing draught pushing him back from the window. There. That was the alley where the blackmailer had fought with Alma, Gilhooly chasing him. It flashed past. Gone in the night. They rattled on and he pulled the collars of his overcoat up. How did the drivers sit up top and not freeze to death?
An El track loomed above at Sixth Avenue and they sped on through. Two more crossings, at Seventh and Eighth. He pulled a dollar bill from his pocket. It would surely be enough, with a generous tip.
The shadow of the track, a dark bridge across the next intersection. No, two bridges. A train sliding in on the lower level. Was that the one?
The carriage pulled up and he jumped out, thrusting the dollar bill at the driver. “Is that enough?”
“Wait, sir, your change.”
“Keep it!”
He ran, barely hearing the cry of ‘Thank you, sir!” behind him, seeking the signs above the steps.
Uptown.
There.
He bounded up wooden stairs, dodging passengers coming down. Ran to the ticket window and demanded a single. Ran to the barrier, punched the ticket.
Reached the platform and leapt for the doors.
Made it.
The train eased off and they were rumbling uptown before he found a seat.
He counted off the stops on the route map above the window. Nine. It would surely be faster than a horse and carriage.
They stopped at 42nd Street and most of the crowd stepped off. Theatre goers. After 50th, he spotted the flash of adjoining El track that towered above Marshall’s.
The last four stops were pure agony.
At 72nd street, he leapt off and ran down the steps, his heart thumping in his face. That way. Just the one block to the park. He set off running, his legs slowing, leaden, hoarse fire burning his windpipe.
Icy sidewalk, he skittered and smashed full face down. Stumbling, dizzy, he staggered on, a sharp stab of pain through his ankle, his palms burning.
He limped and skipped in the gutter, trying not to slip again.
The giant towers of the Majestic loomed ahead, the flags above the entrance jutting out over the sidewalk. As he came to it, deliriously gasping for frozen air that burned his lungs, a man climbed into a waiting carriage and looked behind, seeing Mitch approach. Portly. Familiar outline.
Gilhooly.
Mitch stumbled towards him, but the carriage clattered away and was turning right downtown as he reached the Majestic entrance.
Wheezing for breath, Mitch staggered through the lobby and hit the elevator.
Clarence shrank back. “Are you all right, sir? You’re bleeding.”
Mitch touched his face. Blood. His cheek burning. “I slipped on the ice just now. It’s nothing.”
“I can call for help, send a doctor to your room.”
“It’s all right. I’ll be fine. Thanks.”
He ran out as soon as the eleventh chimed and hammered at the Mahlers’ door.
Gustav opened the door and turned, pacing up and down the Persian rug. He was gaunt, as if a bat had spent the night gently sucking the life from him. “Where were you?” he croaked. “Mein Gott! What have you done?”
“What is it, Gustav?”
“She’s gone. She’s gone.”
“Who’s gone?” he asked, though he knew, with a sick dread that punched him in the stomach. “Where?”
“My Alma. My Almschi. They’ve taken her.”
He handed Mitch a note. A crumpled scrap of paper, scribbled with a child’s hand.
We have kidnapt your wife. Wait for instructions. If you pay up she will be safe. Don’t go to the cops.
— 29 —
“WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN?”
“What?” Gustav asked.
“Tell me how it happened.”
Mitch pushed him into the sofa, the sofa where Gilhooly had slapped him awake a lifetime ago. Gustav nodded and whimpered, his feeble hand shaking as he brushed back his hair. This was the old Mahler, the one from that last photograph of him. A man who looked more like seventy, not fifty-three.
“Tell me what happened, Gustav.”
“I was working in my room,” he waved a bony hand to the right, to the second lounge and his bedroom beyond it. “Studying the score for Don Giovanni. Ach, all day I obsessed over it, when I should have been with my wife and my child! If I had been a proper husband, a proper father, I might have stopped it.”
Mitch patted Gustav’s hand and sat beside him. “Tell me what happened.”
“I was in my study. I even took my dinner there. She ate alone. I was still angry at the intrusion. Your Negro with that awful cacophony. Alma was alone for the evening. I heard the knock on the door. Something fell. She cried out. I thought she had knocked something over. I came to shout at her for disturbing me again. That was when I found the note.”
“And when did this happen, Gustav? When did you hear the bang?”
“Moments ago,” he whimpered. “An hour, perhaps. I don’t know. I have lost touch with the world.”
He whimpered, shaking like a dog at a fireworks display.
Mitch pushed through to the other room — where he’d never been. Was this used by Alma? A lounge, much like the other two, all ornate furniture, but no piano in this one. Another door at the end. He knocked lightly and pushed it open.
A bedroom, as spacious as the Mahlers’ bedroom, but this one didn’t have two giant beds, just one single bed and a smaller child’s cot. The girl curled up asleep in her bed. The governess sitting next to it in a rocking chair, a book open on her lap. She jolted awake and jerked forward to rise.
Mitch put a hand out. “Stay. We thought we heard a noise.”
“A noise?” she whispered.
“A bang. It must have been something from the corridor. As you were. Everything is fine.”
He gave a tight smile and closed the door, hoping she would stay and not come to see Gustav weeping for his missing wife.
He made his way through the empty lounge. There was little ch
ance she would have heard anything, not through two doors and at the far end of the child’s room.
He surveyed the lounge for a while, as if its contents might offer a clue, but all it told him was that Alma did not sleep here, she slept with her husband.
Gustav was still slumped on the sofa, head in his hands. Mitch eased him to his feet and guided him through to his study.
“Come and sit in here, Gustav.”
The governess wouldn’t disturb him here. He pushed him into an armchair and took the note.
“Stay here, and say nothing to the governess or to your child about this.”
Gustav looked up, his face a blank. He nodded, though it was hard to tell if he understood.
“I’ll be back in a minute.”
He left him there, closed the door on him and paced the Persian rug in the middle room.
They had taken Alma in the last hour. Had it been Gilhooly? If Mitch had looked up earlier, stumbling up the street, he might have seen Gilhooly push her into the carriage, but he’d been staring at the ground, trying not to slip.
How had Gilhooly taken her through the lobby without anyone noticing? Perhaps a gun in his pocket, threatening to shoot her if she made a scene.
He wedged the door open and went to the elevator, called it. A clock hand arced to show the lift rising to the top. A single ding as it arrived.
Clarence pulled the concertina gate across. “Mr Mitchell, sir. Would you like me to send a doctor?”
His cheek was still bleeding. The governess would have noticed.
“No, it’s fine. I was wondering if you’d seen Mrs Mahler leaving?”
“Oh yes, sir. She left with two gentlemen.”
“What time was that?”
“Oh, let me see. Shortly before you arrived. I would say about fifteen minutes before.”
“Do you remember Mr Gilhooly?”
Clarence glanced at the floor. “Yessir, I do.”
Something about it told Mitch he didn’t like the memory. “Was he one of the gentlemen with Mrs Mahler?”
“No sir. I haven’t seen him for a few days. Since Thursday.”
“Right. Thank you. Just one other thing...” He thought to ask Clarence to describe the men with Alma, but no. It would raise too much suspicion.
“What is it, sir?”
“Nothing.”
“Is everything all right, sir?”
“Yes, Clarence. Everything’s fine.” Mitch shrugged and smiled and lowered his voice, as if taking him into his confidence. “Between you and me, I was supposed to be accompanying Mrs Mahler on her trip to the theatre, but I was late. Due to the fall. I guess I’m in trouble.”
“Oh,” said Clarence.
Mitch dug out a dollar bill from his pocket and handed it to him, giving him a wink, and then wondering why.
“Thank you, sir,” Clarence said.
Mitch stepped back and Clarence closed the gate.
Two men. Fifteen minutes ago. So it hadn’t been Gilhooly, unless he’d been waiting in the lobby while the other two came up and took Alma, and he’d been the last one into the carriage.
Mitch had missed it by moments. If he’d been a little quicker coming back from the Flatiron, or even hadn’t bothered to meet Izzy Berlin there at all.
If he’d come straight back from the East Village he might have saved Alma.
— 30 —
GUSTAV STARED AT THE New York night, though there was nothing to see through the net curtains. He tapped a drumbeat on his thigh and hummed to himself. Lost to the world.
Mitch went to the side table and poured two glasses of amber from a decanter. Brandy. Gustav came out of his reverie and stared at the glass in his hand, as if he’d never seen one before, then took a sip and seemed to remember it all. A grimace of despair.
“What are we to do?”
“We wait. They will send instructions, they said. We wait and see what they say.”
“If they harm my Almschi...” He let out a sob and masked it with a slug of brandy.
“We’ll get her back, Gustav, I promise. But for the moment let’s wait and see what they demand.”
Silence fell between them and Gustav began to tap and hum again. Mitch drained his brandy and examined the kidnap note.
Kidnapt.
Surely not the same pen as the blackmail letter. He eased out of his armchair and fetched it from the drum table in the middle room, placing the two side by side. The handwriting wasn’t the same. The education was different, that was clear. The kidnap note was scribbled by someone barely literate, whereas the blackmail letter was in neat cursive; formal.
He dug out the card for Marshall’s from his pocket. The name Selig Silverstein written on it.
The S was similar to those on the blackmail letter. The same curl to round off, but the style was slightly different — a harsher slant to the letters, and the L hung lower. It was similar, but you wouldn’t bet your life on it being the same person.
Alma’s life.
The kidnap note was neither. If two different people had written the blackmail letter and Selig Silverstein’s name, then it was clear that neither of them could have written the kidnap note. Not unless they’d switched to their left hand and written it upside down and blindfold.
The letters swarmed and blurred as if they were insects taking flight from the pages. He squinted and looked across to find Gustav was dozing, slumped to one side in the armchair, his mouth slack, as if he’d died right there and then. Only the steady rise and fall of his chest made it clear he was alive.
Mitch rose and crept through to the bedroom. Two beds, the sheets of both rumpled. Had Alma been sleeping when they came for her? He thought of her being taken in her nightgown and felt a pang of concern.
No, they wouldn’t have taken her through the lobby like that. Clarence would have noticed and mentioned it too. Alma would have been dressed for the evening, sitting alone in the middle room, her husband sulking and hiding behind his precious work in his study. She had been distraught over the incident with the Buddy Bolden recording and had probably kept quiet all evening. Then a knock at the door and they would have taken her without her husband even noticing.
In an ottoman at the foot of the bed, he found blankets, and draped one over Gustav. He opened the door to the middle room so he might hear the knock that would come — the message they would send — and settled himself down in his own armchair.
Sleep came quickly, with violent dreams. He was drowning in the East Village, drowning in a sea of filth, the emotions that poured from the mouths of every man, woman and child in that wretched hovel, a tide of detritus that sloshed and swayed between rising skyscrapers. Gustav conducted the crash of waves from the prow of the Flatiron, a sorcerer’s apprentice, blindfold, waving his arms at the maelstrom of souls drowning beneath him, till he slipped from the prow of the building and fell into the abyss with a great scream of horns. Then it was Alma standing up there, a ship’s figurehead. Mitch reached up to her, the riptide pulling him away. She only smiled and gazed over the ocean and didn’t see him.
He was reminding himself that she would be looking for her husband rather than Mitch, when he jolted awake.
Gustav was staring at the window, a glass of brandy in his hand, the blanket still wrapped about him. Mitch tried to remember the music of the dream. It was a lost Mahler composition and it was desperately important that he remembered it. It was clear in every detail and he only had to write it down or hum into a recorder to capture it forever. He wondered if the windows were locked and if he should take the key. Eleven floors above Eighth Avenue.
“I brought this on myself,” Gustav said.
Mitch writhed and shifted in his seat. The dream tune blurred and melted. Gone. “None of this is your fault, Gustav.”
“I wrote this tragedy. I wrote it when everything in my life was perfect.”
His superstition over the three hammer blows he’d written. A favourite of Mitch’s in his youth, before listening
to Mahler had become too draining, too dangerous.
“My Sixth Symphony,” Gustav said, as if Mitch didn’t already know. “Everything in my life was perfect when I wrote it. I was married to the most beautiful woman in Vienna, we had our first child, my career was at its zenith. I was the great director of the greatest opera in the world. All my symphonies till then had ended on the side of light. And right then, at my happiest, I decided I must write a tragic symphony. I imagined a hero struck down and felled by three great hammer blows. Pah. It seems we humans can’t have happiness. We seek out our own death.”
He took a bitter slug of brandy and winced.
“Once my Sixth Symphony was written, darling Putzi died. Then I was diagnosed with this heart condition. Two great hammer blows almost immediately. I went to the score of the sixth and took out the third hammer blow. I tried to cheat Fate. But it was no good. I was hounded out of Vienna. In a few short months I lost my child, my health and my position.”
“But it doesn’t fit,” Mitch said. “You have already suffered three tragedies. Now you say this is a fourth.”
“Perhaps one of them isn’t one of the hammer blows. But which one? Perhaps my darling Putzi’s death is not a great tragedy.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Mitch said.
“But it’s so normal. God takes them every day. I watched so many of my little brothers and sisters die. But why do I still feel such heartache for my daughter, a year later?”
“Because it is a great tragedy. You can’t pretend it’s normal and bury yourself in work to forget it. And you can’t believe that she died because you wrote a percussion note in one of your symphonies. Nor that Alma has been kidnapped for the same reason.”
“I don’t think you believe that,” Gustav said. He had that smug smile again; the one that made you think he knew some secret about the universe and would only reveal it in code through his music, for those intelligent enough to read it. “You believe the same thing about yourself. It hangs over you like a storm cloud, this guilt you carry.”