The Memorist

by M. J. Rose

  “The wife of the Society’s most important founder,” he said, then read the inscription on the tombstone. “Margaux Neidermier, 1779–1814. A world of memory will forever sound in this one mournful, golden chord.”

  Chapter 37

  Vienna, Austria

  Monday, April 28th—6:08 p.m.

  “Be careful,” the client on the other end of the phone warned him for the third time.

  Paul Pertzler was annoyed. Since he’d been hired, this client had lectured him as if he were a clumsy oaf. He’d stolen the Beethoven letter and the antique gaming box but he couldn’t be trusted to touch the precious items? Moving the camera, he aimed it away from the box onto an empty section of the wall, careful not to reveal anything identifying.

  “I’ve lost the picture.” The voice on the other end was restrained but frustrated.

  Smiling to himself, Pertzler just waited.

  “Are you there? I said I’ve lost the picture.”

  Pertzler thought about cutting the computer connection that allowed him to speak to the buyer and simultaneously show the item.

  “What are you doing?” the voice demanded.

  Even paying top dollar didn’t buy his employer the right to be rude.

  “Where’s the camera?”

  Repositioning the camera, Pertzler angled it back on the gaming box. “Computer glitch, so sorry.”

  “I’ve seen enough of the outside, let’s go inside,” the client said. “We need to check that everything’s intact. Give us an overview first, if you will.”

  Pertzler panned the contents, slowly moving the camera over each small compartment.

  “Now, please show us the whist markers close up.”

  Pertzler stared down at the various gaming pieces without any idea which ones were whist markers. He didn’t like the buyer’s attitude and would prefer not to ask what whist markers looked like.

  “Those chips made of mother of pearl. To your right.”

  Moving the camera right, Pertzler zoomed in and wondered if the “we” that the buyer used was a figure of speech or a ruse to give the impression there was a group involved instead of an individual. Pertzler knew better than to indulge in speculation like this. He was good at his job because he didn’t get distracted wondering about irrelevancies. Except he’d made mistakes on this job. Two people were dead. A shame for several reasons but especially because the dead attracted the authorities in a way that stolen goods didn’t.

  “Now, show us the cribbage board, that’s a scorekeeping device for a card game that dates back to the 1600s. We didn’t see it in the overview but it should be there. It’s probably made of bone or wood and has many holes in it.”

  “I think this is it, no?” Pertzler adjusted the light so it illuminated the left corner and then moved the camera across the surface of an ivory object yellowed with age.

  “Wonderful. Now there are four decks of cards, with gold edges. Can we look at each one of those more closely?”

  One after another, Pertzler focused the camera on each deck.

  “I’m afraid this is going to get a bit tedious, but I need you to go through each deck with us. Show us the front and back of every card. We’re going to be freezing the frames and keeping them as static shots.”

  “It’s your time. You’ve paid for it.”

  The buyer was amused and chortled. “So we have, so we have.”

  The process took the better part of the next two hours and was, as his client suggested it would be, laborious.

  “All right then,” the client said finally. “We’re done.”

  “Where would you like your items delivered?”

  “For now we’d like you to hold tight to both the gaming box and the letter you found in Geneva. Is that possible? We expect you can keep it as safely as anyone else.”

  Pertzler specialized in marital assets recovery. Typically, that meant stealing jewelry and artwork back from husbands who preferred their exes not keep all the spoils, or wives who wanted a family heirloom to remain on their side of the family. It was highly unusual for a client, or the group of clients, to ask him to keep possessions.

  “For how long?”

  “A week. No more. We would also like to know if you also do surveillance work?”

  “I do, yes.”

  “We are going to need you to start right away.”

  They discussed money, agreed to a price, and then the buyer described who they wanted followed and how and when they’d be calling in for updates as well as a number to call in case of emergencies. “Leave a message, if it’s necessary to get in touch with us.”

  “What would constitute an emergency?”

  “Use your judgment.”

  After ending the marathon call with that enigmatic coda, the client hung up. Pertzler rose from his desk and stretched the way his cat did after waking up from a long sleep in the sun. She sat watching him from the couch. A black cat with white markings. The apartment smelled musty from all the cigarettes he’d smoked while he was on the phone and he opened the window, standing there for a few moments, watching the sun sinking below the horizon. This time of day always depressed him and he went into the kitchen and cut a thick slice of a chocolate cake he’d bought the day before but his cell phone rang just before he could take the first bite.

  Pertzler had two phones, one on which he accepted incoming calls but never used to call out and the other, which he used to call out but never shared the number.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. Are we still going to the cinema tonight?”

  Pertzler recognized Klempt’s voice. No salutations were necessary. It was safer this way for both of them. A brief discussion ensued about what movies were playing. The two men decided on the seven-o’clock showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and planned on meeting at the theater a half hour before to get a beer at a nearby tavern.

  It was the kind of conversation no one paid attention to if they happened to overhear it but if someone had been listening and checked the movie theaters they would have discovered there were no Hitchcock films playing in all of Vienna that night. So there would be no way to figure out which theater the two men were meeting at, if they were meeting at a theater at all.

  They didn’t, in fact, meet at a theater, but at the Hummer bar. If they’d said they were going to see a Godard movie they would have met at the bar called the Guess Club II. If they’d chosen a Fellini film it would have been the Fledermaus and so forth. There were ten bars coded, so they could avoid being seen at the same one too often.

  Klempt was already nursing a beer when Pertzler arrived.

  “I got a call about a freelance job,” Klempt reported after some small talk. A computer hacker and corporate espionage specialist, he and Pertzler worked together often, availing each other of their specific expertise.

  “Will it pay well?”

  “Very well.”

  “You want another?” Pertzler asked, noticing Klempt’s empty tankard.

  He checked his watch. “My wife…I’d better not.”

  Pertzler made a joke about his friend being under his wife’s thumb and the two laughed.

  Only there was no wife. It was more code they’d perfected over the past fifteen years of working together. If they erred on the side of being too careful, it served them well.

  Out on the street they headed toward the same subway station and only then, after they were both sure they weren’t being followed, did Pertzler ask about the job.

  “I have a client who would like to hire you to find something that has been lost,” Klempt said.

  “Lost?”

  The light changed and even though there was little traffic, they stopped at the curb.

  “Interesting word, no? The client said lost. I questioned him and asked if it had been stolen. He said he preferred lost.”

  “Sounds like a fruitcake.”

  Klempt shrugged. “Lost. Stolen. It doesn’t matter. I need you to steal it back.”

 
“How much?”

  Klempt named a substantial five-figure sum.

  Pertzler nodded. “Do you have a photograph?”

  Klempt pulled an envelope from his pocket.

  “Good night,” Pertzler said, taking it and walking off in the opposite direction.

  Fifteen minutes later, back in his kitchen, Pertzler opened the envelope and found page 16 from the Dorotheum auction house catalog. All the information he needed was written in the margins but he wasn’t reading the words, he was staring at the photograph.

  Page 16 showed an antique gaming box, circa 1790. The very same one that he had been hired to steal last week.

  That he had stolen. And that was in his living room, right now.

  Chapter 38

  Vienna, Austria

  Monday, April 28th—8:10 p.m.

  As the silver-and-navy Smart Car sped along the Graben, Inspector Alex Kalfus, dressed in civilian khaki pants, white shirt and a blue windbreaker that had seen better days, navigated with his right hand while smoking with his left. There was a Van Gogh portrait hanging in Amsterdam of a farmer who had the same curious expression on his face, Lucian Glass thought. Amazing how much of a man’s soul could be captured in rough strokes and applied color. There was a rough scar on Kalfus’s neck running from behind his ear down to his collarbone. So, the Austrian detective was a traveler on the same rough road Lucian had been stuck on his whole adult life.

  Hanging a left, Kalfus drove into traffic, cursed and blew smoke out the window but the wind pushed it back into the car and Lucian inhaled it. He wanted to bum a cigarette off the Austrian, could already imagine how satisfying the first drag would be…except all it took to be a smoker again was one cigarette.

  “I’m coming up to a corner,” Kalfus prompted.

  Checking the monitor built into the briefcase open on his lap, Lucian directed him to take a right turn at the next light. “As long as this surveillance equipment’s performing properly,” he added.

  After landing that morning, Lucian had hooked up with Kalfus and together they’d waited an hour for Malachai Samuels to arrive from New York. From the minute the reincarnationist walked off the plane, picked up his luggage and got into a limo, the two lawmen had been tracking him. Lucian preferred working with his own team but the Austrian government had insisted this was the only way they’d allow the FBI to work on their soil.

  “And now a left,” Lucian said.

  Kalfus made the turn. A few blocks later another left and then a right. “I know where he’s headed now. This is the way to Jeremy Logan’s house which makes sense since you said he’d come here to see what Logan found.”

  “And lost,” Lucian agreed.

  For the last hour Lucian and Kalfus had filled each other in on the actual criminal activity and suspected criminal activity that had put them both on the same case.

  “How did you plant the bug?” Kalfus asked.

  “We had a few men take over airport security during the hours before the flight and when Samuels went through the screening process, one pulled him out of the line to check out why he set off the machines—which bought us some time. While he was being inspected, an agent inserted the transistor chip inside his billfold.”

  “He won’t find it?”

  “It’s microscopic and hidden inside a seam.”

  “You have been doing surveillance on this man for how long now?”

  “Nine months.”

  “So even if Langley’s techniques are state-of-the-art, their efforts to find any hard evidence against Malachai have failed?”

  “Not their efforts…my efforts. It’s been my case and I’m its last lone crusader.”

  “Why haven’t you given up by now?”

  “The man is a psychologist and amateur illusionist. He understands how to misdirect and manipulate. It’s more than just making coins disappear or disguising himself, he tricks everyone. I refuse to allow him to trick me.”

  “Has he been calling many people here in the last few days?”

  “Jeremy Logan several times and your ex-minister of defense, Fremont Brecht, twice. We think Brecht and Logan are members of the same Society. The Memorist Society. A small, nonpolitical organization with no criminal associations as far as we can determine. Originally it was formed as an offshoot of the Freemasons.”

  “Here in Vienna?” Kalfus sounded miffed that the American was telling him something he didn’t know about his own city.

  “There’s no reason for you to be aware of it, it’s deep under the radar.”

  “And how does all this relate to this weekend’s murder and the robberies?”

  “Based on what we heard on our phone taps, the Society was going to bid on the gaming box and Malachai was negotiating to go in on that purchase with them, in exchange for unlimited access to the object. But it’s possible he was only saying that to get information from them and that he was behind the robberies. If that’s true, then following Malachai could lead us to the antique and the letter or to whoever has them. If it’s not true, we know he wants them and has the money to buy them on the black market if they’re for sale, which could also lead us to the antiques or whoever has them.”

  “You seem certain one way or another he’s connected to what’s gone on here.”

  Lucian nodded. He’d seen determination in Malachai’s eyes that was almost maniacal but he didn’t say that. Looking away from the monitor, he glanced out the window at the passing buildings, wondering what it would be like to actually spend a few hours being a tourist here.

  “Instincts are important,” Kalfus said.

  “What do you have so far in your investigation?” Lucian asked.

  “Many details. Many suppositions. No tangible evidence. No mistakes on the thieves’ part,” Kalfus complained.

  “No obvious mistakes, you mean.”

  Kalfus shrugged. Lucian noted the Austrian did that often and wondered if it was the way he got rid of the uncertainty that every law enforcer and investigator lived with.

  “The question I’ve never gotten a good answer to is how come it’s so easy for us to see those mistakes in retrospect?” Lucian said.

  “Self-deprecating? It’s not a personality trait I associate with American FBI agents.”

  “Left up ahead.”

  Conversation came to a halt as Kalfus reached the corner, turned and they both watched the black Mercedes at the end of the block as it slowed down and parked.

  Kalfus shifted the car into idle in front of number 59: a white stucco house with black shutters, while in front of number 83 Kirchengasse, a uniformed chauffeur got out of the car, went around to the passenger side, opened the door and helped the passenger out.

  The front door opened and a tall man with tousled hair walked down to the curb to greet his visitor. “Is that Jeremy Logan?” Lucian asked.

  “Yes.”

  Logan put his arms around Malachai then Meer stepped forward and embraced him.

  Kalfus put the car into Drive and slowly made his way down the street toward number 83. “That’s Jeremy’s daughter, Meer Logan,” Kalfus explained. “The gaming box was pulled out of her arms during the tear gas attack.”

  “Do you have surveillance tapes of what happened at the auction house?”

  “There are tapes but the smoke bombs make it impossible to see anything helpful.”

  Kalfus hadn’t told him if Meer was hurt but Lucian didn’t bother to ask. By now they were driving by and Lucian could see her clearly. She didn’t look physically hurt but he had the distinct impression that she was even more troubled than the last time he saw her.

  It must have been the jet lag that made him suddenly more tired than he could remember feeling for a long time. A bone-tired exhaustion that he imagined would take years to recover from. Kalfus was asking him something that required a response but Lucian had no idea what the Inspector had been saying for the last minute or two. That must have been the jet lag, too.

  Chapter 39

&
nbsp; Vienna, Austria

  Monday, April 28th—8:20 p.m.

  Sitting in the living room, Jeremy poured wine while he briefed Malachai on the details of what had transpired, starting with the robbery in Geneva and ending with the one at the Dorotheum. Malachai listened, sipped from the cut-crystal glass, nodded and then when Jeremy finished, asked Meer, “Now, tell me what’s been happening to you?”

  She hesitated.

  “It’s understandable that after all these years of not believing, what’s occurring is disturbing, but it will help if you can talk about it. Meer, tell me.”

  She recounted what transpired then and also what happened during the second episode when she was with Sebastian in Beethoven’s apartment. And then what happened at the cemetery.

  “Did you already know the woman in the memory lurches was named Margaux before you found the tombstone?” Malachai asked.

  She nodded.

  “Margaux’s husband found the flute in India and then died there,” Jeremy explained.

  The icy bands were encircling her, tugging at her, trying to pull her into their vortex. Meer put her head down in her hands and felt a tsunami of sorrow come over her.

  “No!” Meer almost shouted. “He’s alive. In India. That’s why I need to raise the money. To fund a search party to find him.” She missed Caspar. Missed a man whose name she never knew before Sunday. A man she would sacrifice everything for if she could just find him and save him and bring him back to her.

  Then from a distance she heard her father’s voice breaking through.

  “Malachai—stop. Look at what this is doing to her.”

  “This is important, Jeremy. She’s remembering.”

  “No!” Jeremy raised his voice in anger but Malachai ignored his friend and was talking to her again.

  “Margaux, what’s happening?”

  She made an effort and reached down into the blackness to find the answer. “Beethoven had the flute and was trying to figure out the melody from the markings carved into the bone.”

  Even from inside the icy fog, Meer was surprised. The carvings were the key to the song?