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

by Noel Hynd

  “You can’t keep me in a grave,” Rabinowitz said.

  Geiger whirled, fresh as white snow now. The ghost was behind him, formally attired for a concert. He looked just as Geiger had last seen him alive, at the Kennedy Center in 2004.

  “I will always be with you,” Rabinowitz said. “You will never escape my shadow!”

  Geiger staggered forward and waved another arm at Rabinowitz. But again Geiger’s arm swiped through the specter. The young pianist lurched sideways and howled, the full terror of this second encounter sinking deeply into him. He screamed again and crashed into the closed door of his library.

  He stumbled but steadied himself. There were tears pouring from his eyes now. Tears of terror. He opened the door to escape from the library and tumbled out into the front hall.

  A beer bottle crashed at his feet and shattered. He staggered to the front door, opened it, and weaved outside. Holding the railing on his front steps, he staggered down the front steps. He hit hard against a parked car and came to a painful stop. He slumped down against the vehicle. He closed his eyes and collapsed into sobs. He knew that for the rest of his life, he would see his arms passing through the body of the dead Rabinowitz. From now on, he would always hear those haunting works by Chopin in a different way. And he would always see those hollow yellow eye sockets, coupled with the macabre smile and the distinctive touch at the keyboard.

  After a while, he got to his feet. But he was unable to move very far. He crawled to the town house two doors away. He reclined on his neighbor’s front steps. His eyes flickered a few times between then and dawn. Once was when a taxi slowed to a stop, honked, and asked him if he needed a lift home. Geiger’s eyes opened just long enough to close again.

  The cab drove on.

  At another time during the night, he saw his mother standing near him, looking down and sadly shaking her head. Then the violinist in the clown suit appeared. He put a comforting hand on Geiger’s forehead and with supernatural dexterity, executed a short scherzo by Paganini.

  “Help me,” Geiger said to him. Or her.

  The clown-musician gave an eerie low bow, filled with feline feminine movements, and vanished into the glare from a streetlamp. Toward dawn, as Rolf slept, a photographer found him. At about seven o’clock, Diana, half-frantic, half-crazed, emerged from the town house, saw him, and took him back inside.

  And it wasn’t for another hour that he was able to explain the previous evening to her—what he had seen and what he had experienced.

  Twenty-six

  Two afternoons later, Rolf was sitting in his library reading a score when Mrs. Jamison appeared. He looked up. “Detective Solderstrom is here. She needs to talk to you,” the housekeeper said.

  Geiger sighed. “Oh,” he said. “Her. All right. Send her in. “What terrible timing,” he mused. He had been making progress into his examination of the score. “Always,” he thought. “Interruptions! It’s always like this now.”

  Outside the townhouse, something passed across the sun. Then the figure of a large woman filled the doorway. Geiger caught bad vibrations from her right away. It was Diana who led her into the library.

  “Mr. Geiger,” the policewoman said.

  Unlike the first time they had met, she now felt a wave of hostility roll toward him.

  “I was in the area. I thought I’d stop in,” she said. “I was wondering whether you’d seen your intruder again.” Rolf thought for a moment.

  “Once, a few nights ago,” he answered.

  “Have a problem with him?”

  “He was outside. I saw him from my foyer.”

  “But you didn’t speak to him? Or feel yourself threatened?”

  Geiger knew that an account of what had happened, culminating in the appearance of Rabinowitz, would be useless.

  “No, and I haven’t seen him again after that,” he said.

  “Has anyone?” Solderstrom asked.

  “Diana hasn’t seen him, either, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I assumed you would have called me had there been a second incident,” she said.

  “I would have.”

  Geiger sensed something uneven about the woman. The detective took a moment. Then,

  “I’ll get right to the point there, Mr. Geiger,” she said. “I know there was one person seen sitting out on this block two nights ago and from what my witnesses tell me it wasn’t any aging homeless person. By the time a sector car came by, the individual had returned to his home on this block. He was dragged back in by the woman he lives with. Early in the morning. Know what I’m getting at here, Mr. Geiger?” Geiger knew, and suppressed a little wave of anger.

  “I’d had a few beers,” he said, “and felt like sitting out.”

  “You’ve got a world tour coming, and you’re sitting out on the stoops in your neighborhood? I’m having trouble understanding that,” she said.

  “However strange you think that is,” Diana offered from the back of the room, “the original intrusion happened. This old man was at a funeral, he followed me to the public library, he had a piece of my jewelry, and he’s been watching this house.”

  Detective Solderstrom’s eyes went from Rolf to Diana, then back to Rolf. She sighed.

  “Let me ask you this,” Janet Solderstrom said. “I spoke to a couple of the other detectives who used to work Lincoln Center and the theater district. One of the men on Manhattan South knew an old guy who used to hang around after concerts. Sort of matches the description you gave. You want me to follow up on this? Or do we let it slide?”

  “I want you to follow up,” Diana said before Rolf could answer.

  “I do, too,” Geiger said. She looked at both of them.

  “Okay,” she said. “If I were you, I’d remain alert. But there’s a good chance you scared away the old man. I don’t know. I just thought I’d check with you.”

  “I appreciate it,” Geiger said.

  The policewoman excused herself and departed. She took her chilly attitude with her.

  Then the evening arrived.

  Rolf and Diana waited for something else unpleasant to happen. But nothing did, and soon, one normal day followed another.

  Strangely enough, as Rolf and Diana remained poised for another haunting within their home there was no next episode. Just when they expected the worst, a big empty nothing transpired. Yet Rolf lived in a constant state of tension, waiting for the moment when something terrifying would happen again.

  But after dark, his nightmares were gone, replaced by real fears and real sleeplessness. He felt helpless. He spent much of the time around the house, preoccupied by fear and anxiety, and trying to concentrate on practicing.

  April gave way to May. Then the date to play in Philadelphia was only two weeks away.

  Brian Greenstone reported that tickets in Philadelphia had sold out within two days. Requests came in for interviews from the local newspapers—the same newspapers that had pilloried Geiger for his last rock-and-classics appearance at Convention Hall near the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. Cautiously, Geiger spoke to some of the interviewers over the telephone. One of the newspapers sent a woman to New York to interview him in person. Geiger obliged, though he was not helped by a tabloid publication of the picture of him sitting on his neighbor’s front steps, apparently drunk.

  Diana had her own bout with print journalism, too.

  She met Phillip Langlois for lunch. He was gracious and told her all the superficial things about Isador Rabinowitz that she already knew. She realized he was picking her brain for information, asking questions slyly, trying to evoke answers that would have involved Rolf. Despite Langlois’s charm, she built a wall against him and his questions.

  Yet, no matter how sturdy the wall was, it didn’t go high enough. She could tell Langlois was attracted to her sexually. He was a nice looking man, but she wanted no part of it.

  Langlois confirmed her suspicions as they left the restaurant.

  “Look,” he said,
“I really appreciate your coming out and spending time.” They stopped on the corner and he bought half a dozen long-stemmed red roses from a flower merchant. He handed them to her.

  “That’s not necessary,” she said. “Please don’t.”

  “It’s an innocent thank you,” Phillip said. “Nothing more.”

  She wasn’t certain how innocent it was. But the flowers were pretty.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “If I think of something further about Rabinowitz which might interest you, how can I get in touch?” he asked.

  “Through Rolf’s agent.” He sighed and smiled.

  “Look, I’m not an ax murderer,” he said. “If you don’t want to give a phone number, I happen to know your address. I know it because the bloody tabloids are always printing pictures of you or Rolf coming out of your building. So would it be all right if I just dropped you a note at 112 East Seventy-Third Street?”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “As long as that’s the only thing going through your mind.”

  “What else would be?” he scoffed.

  “I have no idea.” He smiled.

  “Me, neither,” he said.

  He walked in the other direction. She walked toward Seventy-Third Street, carrying the roses. Back in her home half an hour later, she walked in as Rolf was at the piano, working through the middle of the Tchaikovsky piano concerto he was planning for Philadelphia.

  The music swelled beautifully and greeted her as she came in the front entrance.

  The door to the library was slightly open. She poked her head through. Rolf, as was his custom, did not look up from what he was doing, but acknowledged her with a slight nod. She went to the kitchen, found a vase, and arranged the roses. She returned to the library, set the flowers on a table near the piano, and took a seat on the bench next to him.

  “Hi,” he said, still playing.

  “These buds for you,” she said.

  He managed a sly smile and worked the Anheuser-Busch theme into the Tchaikovsky. They laughed at the image of Clydesdales pulling a troika.

  “Since when do you buy yourself flowers?” he asked. “I thought I was in charge of that.”

  She found it easier to lie.

  “I bought them for you,” she said.

  “Cool. Thanks.”

  He leaned to her and kissed her, flowing seamlessly from the Clydesdales back to Tchaikovsky, never wavering in the tempo or feeling of what he was playing.

  “How am I doing?” he asked. “Aside from tacky beer commercial, am I doing justice to ‘Mr. T.’?

  Mr. T.: Rolf’s private appellation for Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Wouldn’t the music critics love that one? Rolf once called Tchaikovsky ‘Mr. T.” in front of Rabinowitz and the old man had gone sky-high ballistic.

  “You’re treating Tchaikovsky better than his own government did,” Diana answered.

  “But am I treating ‘Mr. T.’ Better than Van Cliburn?” Rolf asked slowly and with exaggerated concern. “Cliburn used to own this piece.”

  “You’re treating Comrade Tchaikovsky almost as well as Van Cliburn,” she teased. “You’ve always been my third favorite pianist after Van Cliburn and Elton John.”

  She quickly stood, and he playfully slapped her across her backside. His left hand was so fast she could barely perceive the missing notes. She scampered away with a laugh.

  She watched his concentration settle back into the music and so she left him alone.

  And so it went.

  She left for her art classes and received two article assignments from New York magazines. She kept busy during the day and allowed Rolf as much time as possible to prepare his program for Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Brian Greenstone continued to set dates for the tour that would follow. Thirty dates had been set. London would definitely open, New York would come in October, and the tour would end either at the Pyramids or in South America.

  The music program evolved, too.

  Remaining at issue was the Emperor Piano Concerto. It was perhaps Geiger’s favorite work of Beethoven, and allowed Geiger to measure himself against the greatest who had ever played. It seemed a natural to close the tour in Egypt. But, it also seemed a natural as an opening work at the Royal Albert Hall of Covent Garden in London. Promoters in both places wanted it.

  “How about if I play it to open, Brian,” Geiger suggested one afternoon over the telephone. “Then I play the recording of the opening performance when I closed. That will save me having to even show up for the final booking. Just play the tape.”

  “Very bloody funny,” Greenstone answered.

  “Just trying to help.”

  “Well, don’t try to help. Don’t think at all, for God’s sake! And don’t do any heavy lifting with your hands. Just practice your infernal instrument. Practice, practice, practice so that you hit all the right notes and don’t end up playing in whorehouses.”

  “Or Las Vegas.”

  “Same thing. Which reminds me,” Greenstone said. “Lovely Claire, your new Number One fan and potential groupie, sends her undying and most impassioned love.”

  “Don’t start trouble, Brian.”

  “Me? Start female trouble?” he sniffed. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  It was a time when earlier incidents of haunting first began to recede, and when a sense of rightful place began to reappear in the lives of Rolf and Diana.

  Even at home, Diana suddenly spent a great deal of time on small household tasks. She took the first steps for stripping and refreshing the steps that led to the small attic above their bedroom. She hated to go anywhere near the front-hall coat closet—where the watcher had first appeared within their home—but she did once, just long enough to take all of Rolf’s fan letters out, and organized them. She put something else back in order, too, taking the small silver piano pendant to a jeweler and having it reattached to its chain.

  Since the watcher had held it in his hand, she also had it thoroughly cleaned with disinfectant and silver polish. She looped the chain around her neck and wore it every day.

  For both Diana and Rolf, even the terrifying dreams at night seemed to have abated. Overall, the tension within their home had begun to lessen.

  One evening, three days before the date in Philadelphia in early June—after no further specific poltergeist incidents in the house—Diana sidled onto the piano bench and sat next to Rolf as he was practicing and cuddled against him.

  It was a calm time, a lull before a storm.

  The program for Philadelphia was set. Rolf had been down and back to Philadelphia twice during the last week to rehearse with the orchestra. He would start with a short Beethoven sonata. Then a Chopin polonaise which, in a gesture of goodwill, he would dedicate to his mentor, Rabinowitz with a few words before playing. The third piece would be a sonata by Beethoven, which would take him to intermission.

  The second half of the recital would be the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1, always a huge favorite in Philadelphia, a fact of which he was well aware. The great Van Cliburn used to knock the walls off the old Robin Hood Dell with his summer performances of Tchaikovsky.

  “So it will be ‘Mr. T.’ to close the show?” Diana asked, one evening, sitting next to him again as he brought his hand up from the keys.

  “It’s ‘Mr. T.’,” he said, keeping the A Team motif. “And I promise not to call him that. Except to you. I’m going to behave real good on this trip. Yo, fool!” he said with a smile. “How’s that?”

  She laughed. She sat close to him, his arm around her while he played.

  “Not that the program is planned,” he said,” here’s something for you. Your own private recital.”

  He poised his hands over the keyboard, then the hands came down on the keys. Perfect height. Perfect touch. The first few notes were like a legion of fireflies on a summer night.

  The Moonlight Sonata soared. He played it with a romanticism and passion that even sent shivers through Diana’s soul. It filled the room, the house, a
nd their spirits, and promised them a magnificent tomorrow.

  Twenty-seven

  On the date of his recital in Philadelphia, Rolf Geiger arrived late morning by private limousine from New York. He and Diana had booked a suite at a hotel across Broad Street from the Kimmel Center. They spent an hour there while Geiger studied his scores again.

  Toward four o’clock, he walked across the street to the modern concert hall and approached the stage door. Several fans were waiting. Rolf took time to speak to everyone in the line. He signed several dozen autographs.

  “I hope you all realize there are no fireworks tonight, other than the music itself,” he told them. “No fooling around. This is a classical repertoire. Beethoven, Chopin and Tchaikovsky.”

  “What about the encore?” a girl asked. “Smashing Pumpkins?”

  “Probably more like ‘smashing cellos’ instead,” Geiger answered. “And anyway, how do I know I’ll be asked for an encore? I might stink out the joint.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “If you play an encore, what might it be?” asked another young man in line.

  “I have no idea,” Geiger said with a wink. “I don’t even have an encore ready. But if I did, it might be Tchaikovsky. And of course,” he said, ‘by the time I’m ready to close the concert there will be moonlight, so maybe some sort of sonata would be nice.”

  The crowd laughed.

  “How about the first movement? Could I get away with that?” Geiger asked?

  “Can we count on the first movement?” a girl asked.

  “No,” said Geiger. He glanced at the sign that gave the ticket price for general admission.

  “You can’t count on anything. And, hey! For ten bucks, what do you want, a CD, too?

  “Can we have one?” someone quipped.

  Geiger found a pair in his jacket pocket and gave them away. The mood was airy. Geiger loved the excitement and anticipation which preceded a concert. He was further encouraged by the fact that so many people had come out to hear him play great music. It was great to be out here. He felt buoyant and realized he had been away too long. And by now, dozens of passersby and tourists had stopped to watch, joining those in line. Traffic stopped and two mounted policemen came to have a look. Diana rescued him.