The Prodigy: 2014 Edition - The Ghost Stories of Noel Hynd - Number 4

by Noel Hynd

  The Prodigy

  The Ghost Stories of Noel Hynd, Number 4

  Revised 2014 Edition

  by Noel Hynd

  Red Cat Tales

  Electronic and Paperback Publishing

  Los Angeles, California

  http://www.RedCatTales.com

  for Patricia

  “When you perform Beethoven, you have to transform yourself and commit yourself. You have to believe that God exists, that there is a soul, and that you can change the world.”

  —Yo-Yo Ma

  One

  March 2009

  The Air France 777 hit severe turbulence as it climbed through the dark clouds above Normandy, ninety miles northwest of Paris. Throughout the sky there were streaks of lightning and severe wind currents. Freezing rain streaked the outer windows of the aircraft. It was a hell of a nasty flight and it had just begun.

  The thrust of the plane’s engines changed abruptly.

  The young blond man with shaggy hair, huddled into Seat 2-A by a window in the Premiere Classe cabin, looked to the flight crew for reassurance. He found none.

  The nearest stewardess—a French girl with a lovely face and slender body—was gripping one hand with the other, nervously twisting a paper tissue. She was frightened.

  The young man glanced away before she caught him watching her. He stared out the window again. His palms were sweating. No one anywhere nearby spoke. Suddenly, the plane lurched severely downward. There were loud gasps from several travelers behind him.

  “No,” he thought to himself. “No! Not today! I do not wish to die today!”

  “I want more time,” he whispered aloud. “There’s so much I want to accomplish.”

  The airplane gained altitude as it wrestled its way upward. The seat-belt signs in French and English remained lit. He sighed. He wished he still had religion, but hadn’t since he was a boy. His stomach clenched. Then—amidst more gasps, then screams—there was a loud bang, followed closely with a ripping, bursting noise. It sounded like an explosion. Transfixed, the passengers watched in horror. A ball of lightning emerged from the cabin to sizzle down the center aisle before exiting the wings. It left 152 passengers on the brink of terror.

  “So, that’s the way it’s to be,” the sandy blond man said to himself. “This will be Isador Rabinowitz’s final revenge. I’m going home to attend his funeral, but I will never reach it.”

  He searched for something to be content about and found only one thing. At least Diana was not on-board. The woman he loved was back in New York, waiting for him.

  The airplane gradually steadied. The blackness within the clouds disintegrated. A few minutes later the jet broke into a clear blue sky. The aircraft tipped its starboard wing toward the morning sun and continued to climb gently. The woman in 2-B sighed. She was in her fifties, with dark hair pulled back. She wore a smart, navy blue Donna Karan suit.

  “We were hit by lightning,” she said, still shaken. Her slight New York accent told him she was American. From her reading matter, he could guess that she was in the fashion industry. “Can you believe it? Hit.”

  “Yes, I know,” the blond man answered. His heart beat like a kettledrum. The woman shook her head.

  “It’s the second time that’s happened to me,” she said. “I fly New York to Paris and back once a month. I shouldn’t be scared. But I am. Every time.”

  “Understandably,” he answered. His accent was American, also.

  “Ha!” she said. “Well, we’re still here, aren’t we?”

  “Yes,” he said. “For now, at least,” he thought.

  He looked out the window. The clouds were far below and so was the electrical storm. He turned quickly and looked back. She was studying him.

  “You’re the concert pianist, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Yes, I am” he answered softly.

  “I’m completely enamored of your approach to music,” she said. “The way you have such fun with it. I’ve been to five of your recitals. Two in New York, one in Chicago and one in London at the Royal Albert Hall in 2003 and one at the Olympia in Paris in 2005.” It was his turn to smile.

  “Thank you,” he said. “You’re stalking me. I’m flattered.” They both laughed. She looked at him without speaking for several seconds.

  “I wonder…” she said. “No one will believe I flew back to the United States with a celebrity, unless…” She fumbled with her purse. “Do you mind if I ask you to…?”

  “I don’t mind at all,” he said politely.

  “You’re very kind” She produced a Mont Blanc pen and a fine blank note card.

  He signed the card, asking her name and autographing it personally to her. His penmanship assertive and handsome in the deep blue ink. Ten big, bold sweeping script letters.

  Rolf Geiger

  On the bottom of the card, for fun, he drew a deft sketch of a man playing a grand piano. He was skilled also as an illustrator.

  She smiled widely when he handed the card back to her. At the same moment, the seat-belt signs went off. The once-frightened stewardess was preparing the drink cart.

  Absurdly, his mind flashed back to the old joke:

  In the unlikely event that we land on water, your seat cushion doubles as a flotation device—and the drink cart can be used as a shark cage.

  “Yeah, sure,” he told himself. Thoughts of the absurd frequently followed him.

  “I’m thrilled,” the woman beside Geiger said, looking over the autograph and the sketch. “I’ll treasure this.”

  “It’s my pleasure,” he said.

  “I wonder if you could tell me something,” she asked. “I love your recitals, but I haven’t seen any advertised recently. Have you been abroad for a long time?”

  “I’ve kept a limited schedule of late,” he said. “Maybe a date every few months at a small venue. I just played in San Remo, Italy, for example. Fewer than two hundred in the audience.”

  “Such a shame,” she said, shaking her head. “I loved when you used to do those huge extravaganzas,” she said. “Like you did a few years ago. Oh, they were simply wonderful!”

  “Thank you. The press and the critics used to kill me for them.”

  “People who are enthusiastic about music love you. But the classical establishment?” She opened her hands as if to dismiss the entire universe of serious criticism. “I know they have problems with you.”

  “They do,” he agreed. “Major problems. And I have major problems with them.”

  Major indeed. Following his tour in 2005, the critics all over the world had turned on him with such ferocity that he stopped playing, other than small hit-and-run recitals. The reviews about him had turned so vicious and so personal that he could barely endure reading them. He just didn’t take his gifts seriously enough, they all wrote. He just kept fooling around.

  Smiling, she leaned to him and spoke beneath the sound of the airplane’s engines.

  “My feeling is that the music establishment is full of crap!” she said cheerfully and conspiratorially. “So screw ‘em all!” she said loudly enough to be heard throughout the first-class section. “Come back to your audiences. We love you.”

  “You’re very generous,” he answered. “I’m taking some time to think things over. There may be some changes soon.”

  “I hope so,” she said. “I hope so.”

  Rolf Geiger looked away from his new best friend. He tuned into his iPod. He closed his eyes. He was tired and wanted no conversation. Actually, he felt relieved. He had been hit by lightning and lived to tell about it. Outsid
e, a brilliant sun seemed to be perched harmlessly on the tip of the 777’s wing. All in all, he told himself again, he was once again a lucky man.

  The thought helped him relax. And with the relaxation came a calming, satisfying sleep.

  Two

  Rolf Geiger came out of his sleep to the steady rhythm of the airplane’s engines, the ear buds having slipped away from his ears. Tired beyond reason, Geiger had been in Europe for only five days this March, just long enough to play as a last minute surprise guest at the annual music festival in San Remo.

  This had been such a quick trip that Diana had chosen not to accompany him. Not like the previous summer, when they had joyously explored Europe on those days when he was not required to play. There had even been four days when they had slipped away from everyone and bicycled through Provence. Best of all, no one recognized him.

  Rolf had missed Diana during the concert in San Remo. But he knew she was waiting for him in New York. In his hand luggage, he had an exquisite pair of gold and ruby earrings that he had purchased for her, plus several French perfumes unavailable in the United States, and a thin, gold neck chain with a piano pendant. It had cost him five crisp American hundred-dollar bills from a jeweler on the Via Contessa Ferrara.

  Much as he had missed Diana, however, he might have preferred to have missed her phone call that morning, the call that had compelled him to return home to New York forty-eight hours earlier than planned. The call that had put him on this aircraft.

  Isador Rabinowitz, the great concert pianist, was dead at ninety-two. The funeral was to be held at once. And there was no way, considering how the lives of the old Rabinowitz and the young Geiger had already been intertwined, that Geiger could not be present at the funeral. The descent into New York was as bumpy as the ride over Normandy. But, at least there was no lightning, and after a seven-hour flight he was safely on the ground again.

  His car and driver were waiting. So was Diana, who had come to the airport. The sight of her - a tall, slim, beautiful woman with shoulder-length dark hair - sent his spirits soaring. The couple broke into wide smiles upon spotting each other and fell into a long embrace.

  “Missed you,” she said.

  “Missed you horribly,” he said to her in return.

  Geiger finally relaxed in the car as it drove into Manhattan to his current home. The touch of melancholia upon him he assumed stemmed from the death of Rabinowitz. Diana, sensing his mood, sat close to him, her hand on his, comforting him.

  At one point in the ride, he turned and found her looking right at him. So she leaned to his ear and whispered,

  “I’m incredibly horny today.” He smiled.

  “I’m glad,” he whispered back. “Me too.”

  Mrs. Jamison, his housekeeper, had prepared dinner for them and then gone home. Rolf and Diana enjoyed the light supper. She helped him unpack. They had from time to time discussed marriage, but were both content with the present setup. There was no pressure to it, only affection. If the time ever came that one of them wanted to leave, departure would be as easy as packing a few bags.

  But tonight, there was only love. They showered together and tumbled into bed, attacking each other as if they had been apart for months. The sex, as always, was deeply physical and deeply passionate. She fell asleep beside him, wearing only the gifts that he had bought her. The earrings. The neck chain with the piano pendant. And a dab of one of the perfumes.

  He lay away for several minutes, feeling how lucky he was to love such a woman and have such a woman in love with him. But equally he was troubled. Anxious. Tomorrow would bring an occasion when he could finally escape from the stark, ominous shadow of the old man.

  Instead, what would come with the next dawn was the beginning of an unspeakable terror. Perhaps this notion was at the edge of Rolf Geiger’s consciousness. Perhaps, because something deep within his soul already dreaded the next day.

  Somehow, deep down, he knew…

  Three

  On the cold morning that followed his return from Europe, Rolf Geiger stood by the grave of Isador Rabinowitz with the other pallbearers. Rolf was by twenty-four years the youngest member of the funeral party. Inside him were anxieties that would not go away.

  The world would lay Isador Rabinowitz to rest this day in an aging Jewish cemetery in upper Manhattan among people whom he had never known and where the burial sites were so crowded together that they screamed out for relief. But that was the physical part. Already Geiger knew the downside: Burying a soul was impossible.

  Isador Rabinowitz. The so-called Dark Angel of the modern piano. Lucifer of the black and white keys. No one who knew music had a neutral position on the man.

  Until the coming of Rolf Geiger, Rabinowitz had been the most renowned classical musician in the world, probably the greatest pianist of the twentieth century. There had been Arthur Rubinstein before Rabinowitz and Vladimir Horowitz. For technique, earlier in the century, there had also been Rachmaninoff, as well as Prokofiev, nineteenth-century men who played their own compositions and who had wandered into the twentieth century by accident.

  Rabinowitz had been the younger Geiger’s onetime mentor and teacher. Rabinowitz had been a towering figure in his time, a man who had sacrificed his own humanity for his art. Now, as Rolf stood in a cemetery in Upper Manhattan on this cold day in March, a sharp wind off the Hudson River slashed through his overcoat. Rolf Geiger was not a happy young man.

  Geiger’s blue eyes were wells of sorrow, mixed with fear. When he raised his eyes again and the rabbi was still talking at the graveside, Geiger’s gaze settled upon the pine coffin.

  As the service continued, Geiger held in his mind an old vision of Rabinowitz. It was sepia-toned and came from an old family snapshot that Hilda Rabinowitz—the old man’s third and final wife, who had died two years earlier—had once displayed. In the photograph, one saw a handsome young man, a citizen of Vienna in the late 1940’s, having returned to Central Europe after spending the war years in London. This was before Rabinowitz’s emigration to Montreal in 1950 and then to the United States in 1956, where he had found both celebrity and wealth.

  In the old photo, Rabinowitz’s head is thrown backward in laughter, his hair is thick and dark, and his eyes are merry. His strong right arm is wrapped tightly around a pretty young Viennese woman who eventually became his first wife.

  A nice slice of the past. But the reality had been different. Two marriages had failed and five children—two outside the two early marriages—grew up hating him, as did both women whom he had divorced. These and the other women in Rabinowitz’s life called him cruel, manipulative, tyrannical and abusive. Of the five Rabinowitz offspring, all disliked him so intensely that they made a point of not owning any of his recordings.

  The mature Rabinowitz—arguably the greatest pianist of the century by the time he was thirty in 1956—had been tortured by a thousand demons. Over the years, something glacial had replaced the merry face. He wore a mask in his later years, an aloof, icy public expression frozen from the absence of humanity. One of his quirks was a massive six-carat emerald ring worn on his left hand. He had worn it when he played, signature jewelry on signature hands.

  Some of his fans tried to explain his surliness. Rabinowitz, some said, had never fully shaken the horror and paranoia of a European Jew who had survived World War II. Nor did any of these fans expect him to. The man’s passion was his music and was in his music. So what if he was also known as the Dark Angel of modern classical music?

  “Greatness exacts an incalculable price,” Rabinowitz had said to Geiger when Geiger was seventeen. This was a much-referred-to statement that had been reported when The New Yorker had profiled the man. “I paid it, Rolf. And so will you.”

  “No, sir. I won’t,” Geiger had responded.

  “Don’t be an idiot. Eventually we all do. Genius is a blessing and a curse.” The split between the two men was often attributed in public to that particular exchange.

  Rabinowitz wa
s impossible personally and professionally. He frequently broke concert dates and recording contracts and then everything would be set right again because of who he was. He was once arrested for trying to throttle a man who had beaten him to a parking place in New Canaan, Connecticut. Charges were dropped because this was, after all, the great Rabinowitz, and the “assault” was settled out of court.

  In the latter years of his life, he insulated himself from the public with “assistants” and secretaries, all of whom were dedicated to him and most of whom, in appreciation of their loyalty, he would eventually dismiss. He lived on a remote converted farm in Northwestern Connecticut—a farm with no animals, for the great man hated animals. The property was surrounded by an electrified fence. In his enclave, he practiced in a soundproof studio away from all ears. He had been dead for a week when his body was found by his maid.

  In the last thirty years of his life, Rabinowitz had only one student. One protégé. One young man to whom he wished to pass the torch of genius. Rolf Geiger.

  “He will be greater than I but only if I counsel to teach him how,” Rabinowitz once said in his never-quite-perfect English. “And then only Rolf Geiger will be great if he wants to be.”

  Rabinowitz had taken on Geiger as a student when the young man was fourteen and had won a full scholarship to Julliard. Even at that point, when Rabinowitz was seventy-seven years old, he only allowed himself to be grudgingly impressed with the younger pianist. Geiger played with evident romanticism and a hauntingly crystal clearness which never failed him, even in the most technically complicated passages. It was not something that anyone could ever learn. It was intuitive.

  “This boy is very good.” Rabinowitz remarked at the time. “It is as if he can photograph extraordinarily complex pieces and exactly imprint them inside the ear of the listener.”