by Noel Hynd
Something passed between her and the sun. The spring day suddenly felt cold. Diana turned and went back into the library, then took the elevator back upstairs. She took the same elevator car into which she had seen the old man disappear. She thought it still carried his stench.
When Diana returned to the third floor, her material was undisturbed. She quickly re- assembled all the clippings. She walked back to Harold Milsap, the librarian. He sat at his desk and looked up expectantly from a magazine.
“May I ask you something?” she inquired. “Did you notice if anyone walked past the area where I was working? I was away for about five minutes.”
“You were away twice. Once you walked. The second time, you ran.”
“The first time,” she said.
“I didn’t see anyone. But I wasn’t watching. Something missing?” he asked.
“No. The opposite. This appeared where I was working. It wasn’t there when I left.”
He frowned. She handed him the clipping. Survival of Death. Milsap read the headline and the first paragraph.
“Well,” Milsap said. “This is uplifting.” Then he shrugged. “But I don’t suppose it should be in an Isador Rabinowitz file.”
“It wasn’t there when I went downstairs,” she repeated. “You didn’t see anyone come in and put it down?”
“No. But, look,” Harold Milsap said, “people lose clippings out of one file, then they stick them in another. Or the clipping fell to the floor from one file and someone placed it among yours. We’ll keep it at the desk till we decide where it belongs.”
Diana felt a presence appear quietly beside her. Then she realized there was a man standing next to her. She glanced at him and flinched slightly. It was the handsome man in the shirt and tie. He had been watching everything.
“Problem?” the man asked.
“You were in this room when I went out,” she said. “You didn’t see anyone place anything on my table, did you?”
“No,” he answered amiably. His long pin-striped arm reached past her. The man moved with grace and strength, she noticed. He picked up the clipping and read part of it.
“Not from my files, either,” he said to Diana. He spoke with a British accent. “Although I notice that you’re on the same topic as I.”
“I noticed, too,” she said.
“I’m finished with my file if you need it.” He offered it to her.
“No. Thank you. I’ve seen enough.”
“What are you writing?” she asked.
“A biography.”
“On Isador Rabinowitz?”
“The one and only,” he sighed. She took a long chance. “Your name isn’t Phillip Langlois, is it?”
“Yes, it is. And I assume you read it off the librarian’s register,” he said.
“No,” she said. “You’ve been trying to contact a friend of mine, Rolf Geiger.”
“You know Rolf?”
“I live with him.”
“Ah, I see,” he said thoughtfully. “Then you’re Diana Stephenson.”
“I am,” she answered.
Phillip Langlois produced a small leather case and withdrew a business card. On it, he wrote his hotel phone number in New York.
“Well, unhappily I might have guessed that such a lovely woman would not be unattached in this city,” he said. “But I’m pleased to meet you.”
“Same,” she said aloud. “What a flirt. But smooth,” she thought. She glanced at his card. She couldn’t completely decide whether he was full of charm or full of himself. She concluded it was a harmless mixture of both. So she let him get away with his flirtation.
“Look, call me,” he said. “Anything you want to know about Isador Rabinowitz, I’ll be glad to let you know. If I can help you, then maybe you could help arrange an interview with Mr. Geiger. Does that sound fair?”
“It’s a deal,” she said, accepting Langlois’s card. “Definitely a deal.”
He offered his hand and she accepted it.
On leaving the library, Diana noticed that her pendant had broken and was gone from the chain. She had worn the silver piano pendant every day since Rolf had brought it back for her.
Distraught, she retraced her steps in the library and on the street several times. She couldn’t find the pendant. Over and over, she searched the areas where she had run after the man in the tattered coat. No luck. She filed a report with the lost and found at the library but she surmised that someone must have picked it up and kept it.
Later, on West Sixty-Fourth Street, she waited for the cross-town bus that would take her home. She thought about the silver pendant and knew that she would not immediately have the heart to admit the loss to Rolf. That evening, she decided, she would stash the chain in her jewelry box. Maybe miraculously, she told herself, the pendant would reappear.
The bus arrived and soon her mind took a different direction.
As the cross-town bus entered Central Park to traverse the city to Manhattan’s East Side, Diana saw a familiar figure sitting on one of the stone walls that bordered the park.
It was the old man. The watcher. Just sitting there. His eyes were focused on the bus and seemed to lock with Diana’s eyes as the bus passed.
How he knew she was there, and how he knew where to look for her, was something she could not comprehend. And like so much else that was happening, it chilled her flesh and her soul.
Twenty-two
Diana arrived home in the late afternoon. She found Rolf in his library, playing gently at the Steinway.
“How did your day go?” he asked her, without looking up.
“In terms of what I found on Isador Rabinowitz, nothing new. Unless the fact that he once had his picture taken with J. Edgar Hoover comes as a surprise to you.”
“Nothing comes as a surprise to me,” Rolf said.
“I also met one of the writers working on a Rabinowitz biography.”
“Which one?”
“Phillip Langlois.”
“Isn’t he the one who’s been trying to interview me?”
“Yes. He told me that.” She paused. “I have his phone number,” she said. “He’s staying at a hotel in New York right now.”
“What did he seem like?” Rolf stopped playing.
“He seemed okay. Are you going to give him the interview?” Geiger shrugged. “Probably. Maybe that will give me one friendly writer.”
“I thought maybe I’d meet him again,” she said. “See about his book he’s doing. Then I can give you a better idea about whether you really want to be interviewed by him.”
“Makes sense, I suppose,” he said.
“I also had another ‘incident’ at the library.” She paused, then added, “The old codger who’s been watching this building. I think he followed me.” Geiger stiffened.
“What?” he asked.
“I thought I saw him on the research floor of the performing annex. Then an extra clipping turned up in my research material. Something creepy about survival of death.”
A little surge of fear went through Rolf, and he imagined that he felt a pair of icy hands brush the nape of his neck. Goose bumps followed. What Diana was telling him seemed unreal. He tried to find some plausibility somewhere but couldn’t.”
“And you’re sure it was the same man?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He thought about it for a moment, then gave her hand a squeeze.
“What is he, Rolf?” she asked. “Some demented old fan?”
“Yes. Probably,” he said. “Every performer attracts a few screwballs. This one’s mine.”
“He scares me, Tiger,” she said.
“We’ll have to deal with him,” Geiger said, thinking aloud. “We can’t let him bother us. Maybe I’ll talk to the police. Maybe I’ll pay him to stay away. I don’t know but I promise you we’ll get rid of him. Okay?”
He put an arm around her shoulders and hugged her.
“Okay,” she said.
A few minutes later, Diana
went upstairs to dress for the evening at the museum. Rolf stayed at his Steinway. He gathered his concentration and settled into a score for Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A. The work was a favorite. He was thinking ahead and would play the piece at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia if the date could be secured. He felt his concentration on music sharpen for the first time in several days. He stayed at the Steinway till after six.
When Diana was ready to leave, she came downstairs. She was beautiful in a dark green dress. Rolf told her so. Rolf threw on a sports jacket and they were gone. They both scanned their block for the watcher when they left, but—to their relief—he was nowhere to be seen. So they walked along Seventy-Third Street to Fifth Avenue, then up Fifth to the museum.
The evening was pleasant and the walk took twenty minutes. There were photographers outside the main entrance to the Met. They spotted Rolf immediately as he started up the long stone steps. He managed a smile as he entered with Diana. The showing this evening was a private one for invited guests, two of whom—both young women—asked Geiger to autograph their programs. He obliged.
This was a Monday night and Broadway was dark. Two well-known Broadway actors were there. Geiger appreciated their presence because they drew attention away from him and allowed him to walk through the gallery with Diana with a minimum of fuss.
Diana ran into one person she knew, a female magazine editor with whom she had had her difficulties. The editor gave her an icy hello until she realized whom Diana was with. At that point her attitude warmed remarkably.
There were fifty-eight Renoir canvases, drawn from collections all over the world. Geiger and Diana took their time looking at the entire show, though Diana’s insights into the works were far more astute than Rolf’s.
Diana was partial to many of Renoir’s earlier works, the portraits of men and women from the 1870’s. Those who had been immortalized in oil had wonderful Gallic names which resounded over the century:
The graying, bearded Victor Chocquet. A hauntingly pretty Jeanne Samary. A fresh-complexioned young man names Georges Riviere. A sultry but innocent young woman named Therèse Berard. And the nameless, but equally beautiful lady with a veil, turned three-quarters away from the artist and the world.
Geiger shared Diana’s fascination. But what arrested his attention was a canvas titled Les Filles de Catulle Mendes.
He stood for many minutes before it.
The work was a warm, elegant 1888 composition of three young girls gathered around a fortepiano. Two of the girls were small. The third, whose left hand was on the keyboard had beautiful, long golden hair. The middle child carried a violin. It occurred to Geiger that the music of these three girls had long ceased to be heard. They had lived their lives and gone to their graves. And yet, two of the girls were stared into his eyes from more than a century ago.
It wasn’t creepy. It was rather beautiful, the way the artist had captured some part of their souls. But Geiger also wondered where their lives had gone, or to where their spirits had flown. He wondered if anyone anywhere still heard their music. He was reminded of the tapes of Raoul Pugno that he had listened to at Julliard. Diana joined him.
“Penny for your thoughts, Tiger,” she said. He hunched his shoulders.
“I like the pictures of semi-naked women bathing, if that’s what you’re wondering,” he said. She elbowed him.
“You would,” she said.
But his actual thoughts—on three little girls and their music from 110 years ago—were too complicated to unravel. As Diana and Rolf exited a few minutes later, Diana steered him to a quote in French from Renoir on a plaque near the entrance. In it, the artist referred to “the instincts of my fingertips.”
It was an interesting point. Like great music, the creation of fine art demanded not only spiritual instincts and grand creativity, but also physical and tactile ones.
They left the museum at half past eight and headed home. When they were within a few blocks of 112 East Seventy-Third Street, they stopped at a favorite restaurant on Madison Avenue.
They had a light but satisfying dinner, then returned to the home they shared. Again, no watcher. Geiger carefully activated his alarm system and locked the front door behind him.
Rolf listened to his phone messages. There were eight. Then he changed into jeans and a T-shirt. He went into the library and sat down at his Steinway. Diana joined him, snuggling onto the big comfy sofa with a book. She loved to read and have Rolf practice in the not-so-quiet background. Similarly, it pleased him to have her present. “My muse,” he liked to call her. He settled in at the keyboard and again sought to unravel the mysteries of Beethoven’s Sonata in A.
He unfolded the score and leaned forward. As he concluded some warm-up exercises and began to play, Diana rose to pick up some fan letters that he had left on a nearby table. She would put them in the back of the coat closet on the main floor, where he preferred to store them.
Moments later, just as his fingers were readying themselves, Geiger became aware that Diana was in the front alcove. He heard her opening the door to the coat closet. Then the tranquility of the evening was shattered by Diana’s scream a blood-curdling yelp of terror that propelled him from his bench at the Steinway, kicked his heart into his throat, put an image of Rabinowitz in front of him and sent him running.
“Diana! Diana!” Rolf yelled.
He burst from the library and saw her. She was recoiling against the closet door, her face white and her hands raised to her eyes in anguish. She could only gesture wildly. She pointed across the large entrance foyer to where a human figure stood just inside the front door.
The bent old figure came into focus, Geiger’s angry eyes settled on the man standing in their home, the cause of Diana’s screams.
When he recognized the man, his own stomach surged and leaped.
“What the…?” “Rabinowitz? No!” It was the watcher. Somehow he had gotten into their home. Geiger’s fear morphed into anger.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he raged.
Diana was so shaken that she was trembling. Rolf could see it. The intruder was only ten feet away from her.
“I don’t mean you any harm,” the old man said, backing slightly.
“Get out of here!” Geiger demanded. “How did you get in?”
“The door was open.”
“Like hell it was!” Geiger answered furiously. “I locked it.”
“I came right through it!” the man insisted. Geiger took up a position between him and Diana.
“It was locked,” Geiger insisted. The man smelled horrible, like fetid flesh. Geiger recoiled.
“Rolf, be careful!” Diana said.
She opened the closet hurriedly and pulled out a baseball bat. Rolf took it from her.
“Out!” Geiger insisted to the man.
“I’m returning something,” he said.”
“Outside!” Geiger said. “Anything you have to say, you say outside.”
The man protested. Geiger approached pushed him. There was something foul and awful to touching him. And something was wrong with his eyes.
At first Geiger couldn’t move him. Then the man retreated a step. For someone who looked aging and frail, he was difficult to budge. Something strong and powerful locked in an old body. Then the watcher gave way.
“All right. I’ll go,” he finally said.
Geiger held on to the man’s fetid old coat and pulled him to the front door. Geiger had the idea that he wouldn’t have been able to move him had the old man not cooperated. There was something unspeakably strong beneath the surface.
Geiger opened the door. Voluntarily, the old watcher stepped through. He lurched one step down the front steps of the town house, then turned.
He looked up and with imploring but now-gleaming eyes, eyes that seemed to change as Rolf watched.
“I found this,” the watcher said. “I wanted to return it.”
He reached out with a closed fist, then opened his hand. Geiger loo
ked downward. In the watcher’s palm was the small silver piano pendant that Rolf had purchased in San Remo.
“Your beautiful woman lost it,” the watcher said. “See? I meant no harm. I thought I was helping.”
Geiger was startled. Then he reached forward and carefully—with two fingers—took the pendant. The old hand withdrew.
“How did you know it was hers?” Geiger asked.
“You brought it back from Europe.” Geiger felt an even deeper fear.
“How did you know that?” he asked.
“I read it in the newspapers.”
“Which one? Which newspaper. No one printed that!” The old man shrugged cryptically.
“Somehow I knew,” he said. Geiger glared at him.
“Don’t ever come into this house again.”
“Unless invited?”
“That won’t happen.”
“Unless invited?” the old man pressed.
“Yeah!” Geiger snapped, just to get rid of him. “Unless invited!” The old eyes glazed.
“Now, I’ll go,” he said. He gave Geiger an indignant look and turned away. He walked down the steps, turned, and made his way down the block. Geiger, calming now, blew out a long breath. He stood on his front step as he watched the man go a few paces from the steps of 112 East Seventy-Third Street.
The old watcher stopped and turned. There was a new expression in his eyes when he looked up at Geiger. Something new that Geiger hadn’t seen before.
“I’ll go,” the intruder said. “And you won’t see me again. Not in this form, at least.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Geiger asked. The watcher laughed quietly. A car passed.
“I have more than one piece of jewelry,” the watcher said. “More than one thing that glows or sparkles.”
Geiger was trying to decipher the intruder’s meaning when the old watcher held up his right hand. Geiger felt a bolt of shock. There was—for the briefest of moments—a dazzling sparkle from a finger on the man’s hand. Like the glimmer of an emerald. Then the man lowered his hand and the reflection of the stone—if it really had been one—was gone.
It left Geiger speechless. The watcher turned and walked to the end of the block, toward Park Avenue. There Geiger lost him in the shadows and headlights.