Danse Macabre

by Gerald Elias

  “And you know what? I talked to BTower last week, and I’m sure he still loves you,” Jacobus said. Even though he had no idea if this was true, he wanted to say it because the lack of oxygen was quickly depriving him of his ability to speak.

  “Now I’m gonna tell you something I never told anyone, even Nathaniel. Y’know, it was my parents, my mother and my father, sent me to New York. Sent me here to study violin when I was a kid. They stayed in Germany. They died in Auschwitz. In the incinerators. I lived and they died. Every time I played the violin . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “ ‘Blessed be the God of all comfort,” whispered Rose in short gasps, “ ‘who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.’ ”

  Then Jacobus started to tell her something he rarely admitted even to himself, something that had happened to him when he was a participant in a violin competition as a youth—what one of the judges had done to him—when he realized Rose was no longer conscious. He kissed her forehead and then leaned back against the cold iron wall. In his mind’s ear he began to listen to the most beautiful performance of the Mozart G-Minor String Quintet he ever heard, and he thanked Gottfried for ending his life’s struggle.

  CODA

  THIRTY-TWO

  DAY 7: WEDNESDAY

  “Is he sleeping?” asked Gundacker.

  “Nah,” said Haskell. “He just contemplatin’.”

  It was early morning, well before dawn, and it was quiet. BTower lay on his back with both hands behind his head, eyes closed, a trace of a smile on his lips.

  “He just be practicing that first chord of Beethoven in his head,” Haskell added by way of explanation. “He’s ready to play the whole thing now.”

  “But he’s been doing that for hours,” said Gundacker.

  Haskell ignored the comment, following his own train of thought.

  “That young man play in all the concert halls of the world, connecting with folks. And what’s the difference between a violin and concert hall anyway, Gruber? One’s a small box, one’s a big box, but they both vibrate when the music’s going, now don’t they? That means the audience is vibrating too, so when I say connecting, I mean connecting.

  “But now his concert hall is in his head, and you know, I think he’s connecting with more people than ever. I think he’s connecting with his mama, with that old blind Jacobus, with Beethoven, and with George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower himself. Just from that one A-Major chord. And you know what else, Gruber, I think they can hear him. That’s just my personal opinion, of course. Mr. BTower looks to me like he’s ready to die a happy man.”

  Haskell turned off the monitor. He and Gundacker, both dressed in their uniforms, which Haskell had insisted they clean and press for the occasion, met BTower’s lawyer, Cy Rosenthal, outside the surveillance office. In a way it was a comical sight as the three men silently, contemplatively made their way through the quiet corridor to BTower’s cell, with the brawny Haskell and Gundacker flanking the diminutive lawyer in the middle.

  “Go ahead, Gruber,” said Haskell. “It’s time.”

  Gundacker moved forward to insert the key to BTower’s cell door, giving Haskell the opportunity to wipe away a silent tear. The heavy door opened smoothly on well-oiled hinges.

  “Ah, my posse,” said BTower, smiling. Rosenthal smiled back. “Cy, I just want to tell you, I know you did your best. I’m ready.”

  “I have some news for you, BTower,” said Rosenthal. “Good news. You’re a free man.”

  BTower looked at them a moment before his eyes lost their focus. Haskell caught him before he hit the ground.

  THIRTY-THREE

  It had been billed the “recital of the century.” The energized audience had arrived at Carnegie Recital Hall hoping for—expecting—fireworks. Now it was almost intermission. The performance had been one long fizzle, and even the fizzle was sputtering.

  BTower and Lavender had begun the program with the Handel Sonata in D Major, a wonderful piece of music imbued with operatic lyricism contrasting with joyful ebullience that was nevertheless not too technically challenging. As this was the first time the pair was performing together and only a month after BTower had been freed, the thinking was that this piece would be ideal to get them off to a good start, settling any jitters before embarking upon more demanding fare.

  BTower had decided to play this recital “straight”—no light shows, no jazzy contortions, no special effects—intent on claiming the mantle of a serious musician that Allard had left behind and that Jacobus had challenged him to grasp.

  Lavender’s solo recital two weeks before in the same hall had been a qualified success. Martin Lilburn of the Times had described it as “workmanlike, in the most positive sense,” but no one was knocking down doors to engage Lavender for future engagements.

  Their Handel strategy, though sound in concept, backfired. BTower and Lavender tried so hard to be calm and collected that the music went nowhere. The interpretation was tentative, dry, and lifeless. Each of them waited for the other to do something to get the music off the ground, but neither took it upon himself to carry the flag. BTower, the younger of the two, deferred to Lavender, the veteran accompanist of René Allard, for leadership. Lavender, considering himself the subordinate, waited for BTower. The audience fidgeted as they sleepwalked from one movement to the next.

  BTower had vowed to perform within a week of his release from prison, but upon his return to practicing with a real instrument, he realized just how much he had lost in his two-year incarceration. What had been natural now had to be relearned, but worse, the youthful swagger he had acquired during his soaring career was in abeyance.

  The second piece on the program, the Brahms Sonata in A Major, began where the Handel left off. Brahms uses the unique term “Allegro amabile” for the first-movement tempo indication: an Allegro that’s lovable, pleasant, kind. In the hands of the BTower/Lavender duo, unfortunately, it became more of an Allegro funebre. By the time they neared the end of the last movement, Allegretto grazioso, rather than spinning out the goldenhued radiance that Brahms intended, they fumbled over notes amid phrases that were vacuous and meandering, ending in almost apologetic relief.

  “That’s enough!” Jacobus muttered more to himself than to Yumi, as the disgruntled audience headed for the lobby, and some for the exit. This was more painful than his broken teeth (now reassembled with temporary crowns) and cracked ribs. He kicked himself for having come up with the idea of putting the two musicians together. More than merely for the blatant poetic justice of it, he had thought a joint recital would resurrect both of their careers in one fell swoop, so he brought them together and coaxed them into the enterprise. But rather than killing two birds with one stone, he now thought, he was just killing two birds. So much for trying to be a do-gooder.

  “What will you do?” asked Yumi. She had squeezed his arm in dismay every time the duo, particularly BTower, had blundered. Jacobus was sure he was now black and blue.

  “You mean before or after I throw up?” he said. He rose from his seat on the aisle, where he always sat so as not to trip on people’s feet, and, feeling for the seats one by one in front of him, made his way backstage.

  It had been a difficult, bittersweet month for Jacobus. The day after his rescue, Pit Bull Brown had hastily organized a press conference on the steps of City Hall, claiming victory over the forces of darkness. Tireless police work and a race against time, she reported, had uncovered the identity of the true killer of René Allard. At her urgent behest, the governor’s eleventh-hour decree had spared the life of BTower. “Justice never sleeps, and mercy never falters” were the words with which she ended the session, a line calculated to vault her to the DA’s office.

  A week later, by which time Jacobus had sufficiently recovered, he met with Detective Al Malachi at the Carnegie Deli. Malachi reluctantly admitted to Jacobus over a chopped-liv
er sandwich that he never would have, nor could have, figured out that Allard’s death pose was in reality a violin position, let alone an indictment of the murderer.

  “All that money my parents paid for my violin lessons,” said Malachi, “and what good did it do me?”

  “I gotta confess, Malachi, it wasn’t really my idea either,” said Jacobus. “It was BTower’s.”

  “BTower? What are you talking about?”

  “When Rosenthal told me he had observed BTower doing mental practicing, holding an imaginary violin, it got me to thinking about Allard’s arm. In the end, it was BTower who freed himself.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe you can get him to figure out how you freed yourself from that damn incinerator. We just don’t know how the hell you did it. There was no handle on the inside of the door, no way for you to open it. But there you were, you and her, lying there next to each other like a pair of corpses, outside the incinerator. We thought you were a goner, but Nathaniel wouldn’t let the EMTs stop. They finally got your pulse going.”

  Jacobus took a sip of his chicken soup, but he wasn’t hungry.

  Malachi filled him in on the details. The police had responded to a 911 call from “a crazy guy that spoke in verse, telling him where and how to find ‘sightless Gloucester and the dusky damsel.’ ” The dispatcher had asked his name, but all he said was, “I’m but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more,” and then hung up.

  Sigmund Gottfried’s apartment had been ransacked, stripped bare like a picnic basket devoured by a swarm of famished ants. Somebody, though, had left the recording of “Danse Macabre” and the little metal box neatly arranged by Jacobus’s side.

  Following a trail of blood that began just outside the Bonderman basement and continued through the underground maze, the police had found the shriveled body of Sigmund Gottfried, eviscerated by some kind of spear or lance. Naked with several of his teeth ripped out—for the gold, Malachi surmised before being unable to look any longer—Gottfried had bled to death slowly, apparently crawling the last fifty yards before he died at the sewer, where blood and excrement merged.

  “Any idea who might have saved you or killed Gottfried? Or why?” asked Malachi.

  “Haven’t a clue,” said Jacobus.

  The rest was all follow-up stuff, Malachi explained. Laszlo Novak, in thick eyeglasses, had confirmed Gottfried’s identity from photos shown him by the police. Gottfried was indeed “the little guy” who had visited him for violin certificates. Though many years had passed, Gottfried’s appearance had changed remarkably little.

  Camille Henrique, Hennie, endured protracted meetings with the IRS, Phoebe Swallow diligently by her side, charmingly but unsuccessfully trying to explain why the profit from the sale of over two hundred violins over a twenty-year period should be tax free.

  Seglinde Oehlschlager was placed under arrest by Salt Lake City police as a coconspirator in the blackmailing and murder of René Allard, the illegal sale of the ex Hawkins del Gesù violin, and the attempted murder of Daniel Jacobus. The police were, for the moment, offering her a plea bargain if she identified the accomplice who served Jacobus the cyanide-laced cognac at Un Peu de Paris. Boris Dedubian confirmed that it was indeed Seglinde who was the anonymous seller of the ex Hawkins. The Salt Lake police also initiated an investigation into the possible slow poisoning murder of her late husband, Orin Oehlschlager. An exhumation was already under way. Seglinde’s bank account was frozen and Cy Rosenthal was in the process of having the money from the sale of the ex Hawkins transferred to Sigmund Gottfried’s closest living relative, his son, BTower, who intended to use it for the care of his stepfather, Shelby Freeman Sr., and to start the Rose Grimes School of Music for disadvantaged children of color.

  Jacobus arrived at the door to the backstage area.

  “May I help you, sir?” rang the strident voice of the usher. Jacobus ignored it.

  “Sir! Sir! Sir!!”

  “I’m going backstage.”

  “The artists have given explicit instructions. They don’t want to see anyone.”

  “I don’t care whether they want to see me or not. Let me in. You want me to start screaming that you’re abusing a blind man?”

  “Just wait here a moment, then. I’ll find out if they’ll make an exception. But may I say, sir, that you are an embarrassment to all those with your special need.”

  “May I say, madam, that your comment explains why you are backstage and not onstage.”

  Jacobus heard the indignant footsteps recede. He waited impatiently.

  “What do you say, Jacobus, of being the dean?” BTower had asked him two weeks ago over a cup of coffee at Solid Grounds. “I need someone in that position, see, who’s got the respect of everyone in the profession in order to get good teachers to come to Harlem. It won’t be an easy sell.”

  Jacobus had laughed his coughing laugh and dismissed BTower’s offer out of hand, telling BTower gruffly that the new music school would be an administrative shambles after a month if he were the dean. What BTower could not see were the tears forming behind his dark glasses. He had been wrong about BTower and wrong about Rose. He had been wrong about Allard and wrong about Lavender and wrong about Ziggy. He wondered if there was anything he had been right about, yet here was a hand being held out with an olive branch he did not deserve.

  Jacobus did agree that if BTower wanted to send him any of the students he deemed worthy, “even the little runts still in first position,” he would teach them at his home in the Berkshires, tuition free. And, thinking of Yumi, he told BTower he had a former student whom he should hire to be on the faculty. But, Jacobus warned BTower, he would never teach a student to do the watusi while they were playing, like BTower did on the stage. BTower had laughed.

  “You’ve got a deal,” said BTower, and they shook hands. “And I already have a student signed up. He’s kind of a ‘special student,’ and he’s still in first position, but he ain’t no runt. Name of Haskell. Bailey Haskell.”

  It was at that point that Jacobus made the suggestion, springing from somewhere deep inside that he hadn’t even consciously thought about it, that BTower and Lavender perform together. It had seemed like a match made in heaven.

  The usher returned.

  “The artists will meet with you now.”

  Jacobus heard the two soloists talking in the greenroom. He banged on the door and barged in.

  “What the hell is going on out there?” he raged.

  “I don’t know, Jake,” said BTower. “I just can’t get juiced.”

  “Juiced! You can’t get juiced! I paid forty bucks for a damn ticket to hear you jokers play. You’re professional musicians. You owe me—you owe the public—a good performance. It’s your job to be juiced.

  “And you, Virgil! Why don’t you give him something to go on, Mr. Osfa? You play like a limp dick.”

  “What can I do, Jake? Ever since René died—”

  “Bullshit! Did it ever occur to you, even for a moment, in all those thirty years with Allard that maybe, just maybe, he was feeding off of you? Off of your musicality? That in fact it was a true collaboration? That the only difference between the two of you was his savoir faire, not musicianship? That if not for you he wouldn’t have been the success he was?”

  He returned to BTower. “So what’s the problem? You’re playing like you’re in a trance. Where’s the energy? Where’s the passion?”

  “I know. I know. But, see, when I was practicing there in prison, in my head, it sounded so perfect. It was pure sound. I went over every detail to get it just right. No moving around, the way you like it, no show. I was so sure I got it. Just pure sound. But now, it just isn’t working.”

  “Hey, in case anyone hasn’t told you, you’re not a Buddhist monk. Music’s a living thing, but it’s the performer who has to get its pulse going. So forget the mantra. Go out there and be BTower. I gotta go take a leak.” He left, slamming the door beh
ind him.

  A few minutes later, Jacobus returned to his seat. He was supposed to have had a date, not Yumi, sitting next to him. Earlier that evening, as the elevator ascended to the fourth floor, Fuente commented on how natty Jacobus looked. Clean shaven for once, and wearing his dark glasses, his steel wool shock of thinning gray hair vaguely brushed, dressed in a new pair of blue corduroy pants and wearing his cleanest flannel shirt, Jacobus was on his way to Apartment 4C. He had made what for him was an unprecedented gesture—a dinner reservation at the trendy and expensive Columbus Avenue restaurant Nouvelle Dijon, and concert tickets, as a thank-you to Mabel Bidwell for her enthusiastic assistance.

  The elevator rose in more fits and starts than ever.

  “Don’t worry. Today’s the last day,” said Fuente, reading Jacobus’s thoughts. “Then they’re shutting this baby down forever. I still can’t believe about Ziggy. He was such a nice guy. To think, all those years . . .”

  “ ‘All those years’ is right,” Jacobus said. “All those years in an elevator and in an underground hole. Alone. It wasn’t a life. It was an imitation of a life. Imitating Allard, he and his sister imitating their parents. Y’know what separates a great musician from a second-rate, Lon? A real life from a fake life? A true maestro interprets. A fly-by-night imitates. An Allard from a BTower. But now BTower has a chance to be an Allard on the violin. He’s already the better man.”

  They arrived at the fourth floor and Fuente slid the door open. Jacobus almost recoiled at the sound—the serpentlike smooth metallic sound of the weapon used to murder René Allard—and the elevator seemed to groan.

  “There are ghosts of a lot of musicians in this building, Mr. Jacobus.”

  “And of one guy who was a ghost, dead and alive.”

  Jacobus knocked on the door of 4C.

  “Ready?” he asked when the door opened.