The Memorist

by M. J. Rose

  “As was finding it. Along with the rest of what I found,” Jeremy said, and then told Malachai the stunning news about the letter that tied the chest to Beethoven and one of the lost memory tools.

  “Are you saying the flute might still exist?” Malachai asked after he’d heard the whole story. “That it could still be where Beethoven hid it?” He tried to keep his voice composed, not wanting anyone, not even his old friend, to know how much this news meant to him.

  “Extraordinary, isn’t it? I obtain information about a musical instrument purported to prompt past life memories from a letter hidden in an eighteenth-century gaming box. A box identical to an imaginary one my daughter’s been drawing since she was seven.”

  “It’s serendipity…” Malachai said by rote. It was how he began the standard lecture he gave to every baffled parent whose child was haunted by past life memories, but tonight he was the one bewildered by the connections Jeremy had just laid out for him.

  Extracting an antique deck of French gilt-edged cards from his desk drawer, he cut them once, then again, and then a third time. They were worth thousands of dollars; most collectors would have kept the treasure behind glass but Malachai liked to play with his toys. Usually it relaxed him. As he shuffled, the corners slapped against each other, making a sound that typically soothed him. Then, while asking Jeremy questions and taking note of his answers, Malachai performed a little sleight-of-hand for an invisible audience: he hid the king of diamonds in the center of the pack and with his next move revealed it at the top of the deck.

  Although a technical success, the trick had failed him. Malachai was still tense. He’d lost one of the memory tools. He was not going to lose another. And Meer was going to be his insurance.

  Chapter 8

  Vienna, Austria

  Friday, April 25th—10:30 a.m.

  Two hours after being hired via a cryptic phone call, Paul Pertzler walked toward one of only two empty tables at the Café Mozart on Albertinaplatz. Passing a young woman sitting alone, drinking a cup of coffee, his eyes dwelled on her extraordinary figure. At least the parts he could see from the waist up. Pertzler himself was very ordinary-looking, a man of medium height with light brown hair, dark brown eyes and ruddy skin—and she didn’t look up. Which was wonderful. It gave him more time to ogle the cleavage exposed by her black V-neck sweater. Focusing on it so intently, he didn’t notice that his newspaper had slipped from under his arm.

  “Excuse me—” The man holding out the paper wore a blue jean jacket and mirrored blue aviator sunglasses. “You dropped this.”

  Slightly chagrined, Pertzler thanked him, took it and continued on to the empty table. After he ordered a beer, he lit a cigarette and inspected the passing parade. The Ringstrasse was always crowded no matter what the season, the time of day or the weather. Today was no exception. Across the street the town hall took up the whole block. It was a fine architectural objet d’art, except once you got over the grandeur of it you realized how dirty it was. A century of soot. Vienna had a perverse desperation to hang on to the past even when it proved toxic. World War II had ended over sixty years before, but secrets about Vienna’s involvement kept cropping up all the time, exposing more Nazi crimes.

  When the man in the jean jacket left, Pertzler barely noticed, but when the woman in the low-cut sweater walked off, he watched every step of her exit. A few minutes after her departure he glanced at his watch, dropped some coins on the table and got up.

  Entering the Rathaus Park he took his time strolling through the well-kept gardens that included a wide variety of woody plants and unusual trees. Stopping to examine a Japanese pagoda and then a very old ginkgo, he showed great interest even though, for all he knew, he might as well have been looking at common maples. But before he opened the newspaper under his arm he had to make sure he wasn’t being followed.

  Landlines were too easy to tap, cell phones too easy to intercept, e-mail was relatively safe but left a trail, and while message boards worked well, he preferred old-fashioned methods. Pertzler had remained under the radar for twenty-five years for one reason only—he was exceedingly careful and didn’t give anyone any reason to notice or suspect him. That’s how he managed to deliver each and every time. This wouldn’t be an exception. His client was paying triple for this job to ensure it was done fast and right. And triple sounded three times as good.

  Certain he wasn’t under surveillance, Pertzler sat down on a wooden bench, unfolded his International Herald Tribune and scanned the front page.

  Rare Beethoven Letter Found After 200 Years

  By Susan Essex—Vienna, Austria

  Hidden inside a concealed false drawer in an antique gaming box, an expert at the Dorotheum auction house here has discovered a two-page letter possibly written by Ludwig van Beethoven. If the letter’s provenance is validated and the handwriting guaranteed, the find could be worth more than 750,000 euros.

  The information was delivered to this paper’s office by unnamed sources. Jeremy Logan, curator of the Judaica department and the man who found the letter, could not be reached for comment but the auction house confirmed the letter’s existence.

  Experts agree that, considering the gaming box belonged to Antonie Brentano, a well-known friend of Beethoven’s and possibly his “Immortal Beloved,” there is a good chance the letter will be authenticated.

  The gaming box, which was given to Brentano by the composer, will be sold at auction next week but the letter will not be included in that sale.

  Estimates place the value of the box at approximately 100,000 euros.

  Millions of people who read the article would all glean the same information from it but in his version a few dozen characters were underlined. Once Pertzler decoded them they’d spell out everything he needed to know about the job he’d agreed to take on from the caller who’d given him a name he was certain wasn’t half as real as the antique letter he’d been hired to steal.

  Chapter 9

  I did not begin when I was born, nor when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable myriads of millenniums. All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in me. Oh, incalculable times again shall I be born.

  —Jack London, The Star Rover

  Vienna, Austria

  Saturday, April 26th—7:30 a.m.

  At the very front of the carousel, waiting for their baggage to appear, a man and a woman huddled together in the midst of a tense conversation.

  “Well, then, what time do we get access to the concert hall?” The speaker was a very tall man wearing a gold Rolex watch, blue blazer with bright gold buttons, white shirt, jeans and lizard boots. Despite the casual clothes and easygoing Texas drawl, his voice was stressed and his eyes continuously swept the area around them, assessing everyone he saw as if they might be a possible threat.

  “We’re set to go there tomorrow—” The woman’s drawl was softer than her companion’s and while she was dressed as casually, her clothes weren’t as expensive as his. Interrupting herself, she reached over to grab a piece of luggage. A silver cross on a thin chain fell forward and swung in the air, catching the light. By the time Tom Paxton reached out to help, she’d already lifted the large piece and dropped it at her feet.

  On the luggage tag, circling a stylized gold globe insignia, were the words Global Security Inc. And below them was the woman’s name in bold: Kerri Nelson, Web site URL, phone number and address in Houston, Texas.

  “Tomorrow? Are you serious?” Tom ran his hand through his sun-bleached hair and did another survey of the area. “What’s the holdup? The concert is in five days. You’ve read the reports on the building. It’s a security nightmare. We can’t wait.”

  “Our team has been living there for the last four weeks straight and there are no surprises left that we haven’t—”

  “Even if we had a hundred men here for a hundred days, it wouldn’t be enough. And I don’t care about the team right now. I want to see the area.” The edg
e in his voice sharpened. “Everyone in the industry is watching us…investors are watching us. Terrorists are drooling over this concert. Heads of government security agencies all over the world, hundreds of VIPs and experts who—”

  “What do you think? That I plan for us to go sightseeing at the Vienna Zoo?” Her expression was like that of a mother with a two-year-old in the throes of a tantrum. “We’re working today. We’re just not going to the concert hall. A driver is waiting to take us to the hotel where we’re meeting with ISTA’s head of security, then the concert hall’s security team, who are coming to us, and finally we’re meeting with the head of the police department who—” Kerri spotted Tom’s luggage tumbling down the ramp and circling toward her.

  This time he noticed her reaching for it and beat her to the bag. “Okay, let’s get going.”

  As the two of them headed toward customs, he continued scanning the crowd, even though he knew that the only people to fear were the smart ones—and the smart ones never stood out in a crowd.

  Chapter 10

  Saturday, April 26th—8:17 a.m.

  In the back of an impeccably clean taxi heading toward her hotel, Meer was at the same time tired and nervous. It had been an uneventful flight but she hadn’t been able to sleep. She’d come to Vienna on the spur of the moment despite serious misgivings, not because she believed, as Malachai suggested, that seeing the gaming box would trigger past life memories but because she hoped seeing it would spark a present life memory. Maybe touching the box and being able to inspect it would offer up some clue as to when she really had seen it and where.

  Looking out the window at the scenery, there wasn’t much to capture her imagination until the cab reached the city’s inner limits where centuries-old buildings were crowded together on her right and the Danube flowed on her left. Familiar with the music that extolled the river, she wondered if modern-day pollution had changed its color from blue to a dark brownish-green or if Strauss had employed artistic license.

  At the hotel, she learned her room wouldn’t be ready till the official check-in time at one that afternoon. She left her luggage, walked back outside and asked the doorman for a taxi. Giving the new driver her father’s address, she was aware how foreign it sounded. He’d been living in Vienna for twenty years, but she’d never visited, seeing him instead in New York once or twice a year when he returned for business. Over dinner he’d probe her personal life for clues to her well-being and she’d give him perfunctory answers about her job and whoever she was seeing and then get him to tell her stories about his latest treasure hunt. She loved listening to those stories. She always had. When she was a child, all Meer had ever wanted was to go with him on his quests, frightened and at the same time excited about the idea of being shot at, run over, attacked by guard dogs or arrested for smuggling.

  Only a few minutes from the Sacher Hotel, the ride got suddenly bumpy and she looked out the window.

  “Cobblestones,” the driver said, speaking passable English. “I can always tell the tourists. As soon as we start to bang around on these streets, they look confused. We’ve entered Spittleberg, a very old part of the city.”

  Meer found the uneven rhythm oddly welcoming, as were the two- and three-story residences that graced the narrow streets. All painted fanciful colors, almost every house had window boxes overflowing with flowers. The area reminded her of an older, more genteel version of Greenwich Village in New York. The taxi driver pulled to a stop on the left at 83 Kirchengasse, a pale blue three-story building with dark green shutters—her father’s house.

  Meer rang the bell. A wreath of dried bay leaves hung in the middle of the door and as she listened for her father’s footsteps, she counted the leaves. When she got to twelve she rang the bell a second time. At twenty-two, she assumed he wasn’t home.

  Since she’d only decided to come yesterday and had booked via a travel agent at the last minute, she’d had little time to let her father know she was coming. Calling him last night from the airport while she waited to board, she’d reached his machine and left a message telling him she’d go to the hotel first and come here about eleven o’clock as long as the plane was on time. She was early, but would he have gone out so close to the time she’d be arriving? Not unless he had something he couldn’t cancel at such short notice. But then wouldn’t he have left her a note…or called on her cell? Except in her rush Meer hadn’t remembered to call and activate the overseas option so she couldn’t check.

  Maybe her father hadn’t heard the bell because he was in the shower and was just getting out. Ringing for what she determined would be the last time, she listened to the slightly off-key chimes again—that flat should have been a sharp.

  When Meer was a child she’d invented a language made of musical sounds; whole ideas and phrases expressed by series of notes. Living inside of sound, Meer was used to everyone else living outside it but her father had learned how to speak that language and it had been a special bond between them. She’d have to translate his chimes for him, she thought now, and almost smiled.

  When the vibration stopped Meer put her ear up to the door. She could hear music playing deep inside but no footsteps coming this way. She checked her watch: 9:50 a.m.

  The sound of a bee buzzing around the window box distracted her. Plump and slow, it was melodic in its own annoying way as it flew from the window box on the left to the one on the right, dipped into a red begonia then hopped onto a sprig of lavender and finally flew into the house through the open window.

  The window was open? Why hadn’t she noticed? Bending over the flowers, she stuck her head inside the house and shouted hello.

  No response.

  Meer was frustrated and tired, and this was her father’s house so it wasn’t trespassing, she thought as she raised the window and climbed inside. After the strong sunlight, it took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the darker interior. There was a pile of books by the couch and a closet door was ajar. Torn between following the music or the scent of coffee, she chose the music first and wound up in her father’s crowded library. The floor-to-ceiling shelves were crammed with so many books that if they all came down at once she was sure she’d be crushed beneath their weight.

  A large pile of papers was spread out on the desk and one of the drawers gaped open like a screaming mouth. Her father was always slightly disorganized but this seemed excessive. By now the background music had worked its way into her consciousness and her right hand automatically fingered the notes. Maybe everything was fine and she’d simply fallen under the symphony’s foreboding spell. It was a fascinating mystery how humans emotionally responded to majors and minors on a level that bypassed consciousness. At the Memory Dome, one of the exhibits already underway explored Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious applied to musical memory. How a tribe of African Bushmen who had never heard a violin listened to a concerto intended to convey sadness, and started to weep. How a fifteen-year-old girl in France who’d never been to India, heard a sitar for the first time and entered into a deep meditative state without any instruction. Or how a child heard ghostly music no one else could hear and became so frightened she tried to run away from it. Over and over. Was running still.

  Johannes Brahms’ Tragic Overture took on an even more ominous tenor.

  “Dad?” Meer yelled out, surprised her voice sounded so panicky. Only the music answered. Melancholy clarinets giving way to a rushing and loud finish.

  “…Wien Philharmonics geleitet von Simon Posner.”

  Meer spun around but no one was there.

  “Es ist neun Uhr fünfzig—”

  Then she realized the voice was coming from a radio announcer via the stereo system nestled in the bookshelves. But why was the stereo on if no one was home? There had to be someone she could call to find out where her father was…maybe someone at the auction house. Or perhaps she would just go back to the hotel and wait for her father to call her.

  In the hallway she took a right instead o
f a left. An open door revealed a bedroom where everything appeared orderly. Perhaps she’d overreacted. Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite played on the radio now. She stood and listened to the less foreboding music for twenty seconds, a minute, and just when she finally felt slightly more relaxed, the scent reached her. Verbena. Her father’s cologne for as long as she could remember. Not a whiff but an intense cloud of it. Stepping over the threshold, she saw a pool of golden liquid and shards of broken glass on the dresser top. Something really was wrong here.

  Turning, she headed back in the direction she thought would lead to the living room and the front door but instead found herself in the kitchen where a steady and rhythmic drip attracted her attention. Meer couldn’t explain why but it seemed imperative she shut off the faucet before she left the house. On her way, she tripped and glanced down, expecting to find a chair leg in the way but instead saw a shoe. She reached down to pick it up and move it out of the way. Except it was still on a foot. Someone was lying under the table. Her father?

  Meer swallowed her scream, felt her breath coming in furious gulps, got down on her hands and knees and peered under the table.

  No, not her father, a woman she’d never seen. About sixty. Short gray hair curling around a sweet face. Meer noticed so many things at once: a huge purple bruise on the woman’s right cheek, a zigzag of dried blood starting at the corner of her mouth, her left leg—obviously broken—lying at an impossible angle. Could the woman have fallen this way? But why would she have crawled under the table? No. From the way the woman’s shirt and pant legs were bunched up, she’d been dragged there. A gold watch gleamed on the woman’s wrist.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll get help—” Meer said to her while at the same time processing the pallid complexion, the unblinking eyes and the immovable form. Meer quickly reached out and pressed down on the woman’s outstretched wrist. Her skin was cold. As cold as Meer felt a few minutes ago. No, colder. Was she dead?