A maid had draped an ivory satin nightgown on the bed, pinching the gown at the waist and then fanning the skirt over the quilt. Dane lifted the thin fabric and held it to his face. Like the scarf, it smelled of her. He closed his eyes as he rubbed the nightgown slowly against his lips. The scent of her filled his nostrils.
I want you, he thought suddenly. He dropped the gown back to the bed.
He found what he was looking for behind the Chinese screen in the far corner of the bedroom. A utility closet. Opening the door, he saw a dark, narrow storage area filled with linens and cleaning materials. He froze, jarred by a searing flash of memory.
A frightened young boy, locked in a small, suffocating closet with no light.
He fought for breath, then saw the small window high on the wall. Light. Breathe, he told himself, as he stepped slowly inside, leaving the door ajar behind him. He would be okay, as long as he controlled his breathing. As long as he could see. As long as the door wasn’t locked.
As long as he had a way out.
In the quiet shadows, waiting for Magdalena O’Shea, Dane wondered once more why Victor wanted her brought to him.
But Victor will have to wait, my angel.
CHAPTER FORTY
PARIS. LATE MORNING, JULY 7
“His name is Gideon.”
“Gideon who?”
“This is not a knock-knock joke, Colonel. Yvette said that Gideon is a music lover who befriended an Opera House usher named Jacques.” She gestured toward the Opera House across the busy square. “Let’s go find Jacques.”
Standing on the sidewalk just outside the Café de la Paix, in the bright sunlight, Beckett looked down at Maggie O’Shea. Blessed are the Cracked, he thought, for they shall let in the Light.
“Admit it, Colonel. I discovered something important from Yvette this morning.”
He glanced down at the Golden, crouched but alert, against Maggie’s leg. “Even a blind dog finds a bone once in a while, right, fella?” he muttered. “Okay.” He raised a hand to signal Henri, the French Sûreté Lieutenant working with Beckett, who now waited by the Citroën parked illegally at the curb. “Can you take the dog for awhile?”
The Golden gave a soft whine, strained away, pulling against the leash as if he didn’t want to leave.
“Go,” said Beckett firmly. The Golden limped away with the lieutenant without a backward glance.
Beckett gestured with his chin, and he and Maggie turned toward the Opera House doors.
* * *
Dane was half-asleep in the shadowed closet. Fragments of images whirled like a kaleidoscope in his mind, settling finally on the photographs he had found in Maggie’s room.
Maybe the tall red-bearded man was the O’Shea kid’s father…
Dane’s thoughts spun to his own father, who also had been a big man. They’d lived in small dark rooms, close to the docks where his father worked. In his memories, it was always dirty in Hamburg, always raining. He couldn’t remember ever celebrating a birthday. Or Christmas.
When he was very young, in the years before his mother disappeared, his father would lock him in a closet with no light, much smaller than this one. He would curl up for hours, his hands over his ears, trying not to hear the sounds in the next room. His mother’s cries in the darkness.
He was still terrified of being locked up.
And then one day she just wasn’t there when he came home from school. He’d known she was gone. The rooms had been so still. They didn’t even smell the same. He’d run from room to room, calling her name. Don’t leave me.
She hadn’t even said goodbye.
After his mother left, there were other women, other cries in the lonely night. More and more, Dane escaped into his books and imagination. Until his father began to turn his drunken violent anger on the quiet bookish boy who was his son.
Dane stopped going home after school. Often he stayed down the lane at a female neighbor’s home. It was Greta who’d introduced him to sex when he turned eleven.
Somehow, his father always found him.
Then, at fourteen, a drama coach had drafted him against his will for the part of Lucio in a school production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Sweet God, the surprising glory of it all! Not to be himself. To wear another man’s clothes, speak words not his own. To be called by a different name, and live another life, as if suddenly he had been reborn in the dark and magical world of the stage.
His father showed up at the school on opening night, drunk, dislocating Dane’s arm as he pulled him off the stage. He’d awakened at dawn to find his father like a maddened ape in his room, eyes glassy, hot breath stinking of whiskey, thin fisherman’s knife sharp against his son’s throat.
I’ll teach you a lesson you’ll never forget.
His father had pushed him back down on the bed, torn off his pants, held him down. Shock. Pain. Revulsion. And then—
In the shadows of the closet, Dane rubbed the scar on his neck, remembering.
There had been so much blood.
By noon that day he had been fifty miles out to sea on an Italian freighter.
A sound jerked Dane awake.
Creaking gears. Someone was coming up in the lift. He shifted his position. If he cracked the door just a bit more, he could see a sliver of the shadowed room beyond the Chinese screen. He smiled. His palms still tingled with the feel of her smooth satin nightdress. Does your skin feel as soft, Magdalena O’Shea?
He flexed his powerful fingers, wanting to touch her.
The lift came to a halt, and Dane kept his eyes on the crack of light. He imagined her opening the door, sitting down on the bed, taking off her stockings.
He thought about the ivory gown laid out on the coverlet and wondered how she would look in it tonight. How her face would look at him if he raised her arms above her head, used his knife to slash the gown’s thin straps so that the satin would slide down her body to crumple on the floor at her feet.
A knife was so much more personal than a pistol.
The sound of a door opening down the hall. Not her. He rubbed the smooth scarf against his lips. “Come home to me, Magdalena O’Shea,” he whispered. “I’m waiting for you.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
PARIS. AFTERNOON, JULY 7
“That’s it, then. No Gideons. Another dead end.” In the small Opera House office, Beckett pulled off his glasses in frustration and tossed them onto the useless stack of computerized ticket orders and mailing lists.
“But we have the information from Jacques, Colonel. Isn’t that enough?”
The old usher had been more than helpful. “Ah, oui, mon ami Gid.” After a brief search of his pockets he’d resurrected a half-used matchbook advertising a café in Southern France. Les Deux Garçons. A café in Aix-en-Provence, Gid said, where everyone loves la musique. He said he would look for me there, at his favorite café, this summer.
“Aix-en-Provence,” repeated Maggie. Her hand ran down a bright poster advertising the summer’s music festivals. “Festival de Musique, Aix-en-Provence. It opened last night. And look, Colonel. Tomorrow night is a gala performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto. Zach loved that concerto.” She stopped, swung around. “Gideon. Could he be Johnny’s G. Black?”
Beckett’s head came up. “G. Black?” He thought, then remembered. “Right, the name in your husband’s calendar. Good catch.” He reached once more for the computer lists.
Fifteen minutes later, they found the name on a mailing list: G. Black, Aix-en-Provence.
“Aix-en-Provence,” said Maggie.
“Aha!” said Beckett.
“Aha?”
“All the famous detectives say that when they find a clue.”
Maggie smiled. “Zach’s there, in Aix. And Zach wouldn’t miss tomorrow’s concert. Or should I say Gideon Black. We’ve got to be there.”
“We’ll leave for Aix first thing in the morning.” Beckett handed her a card. “My cell number, if you have to reach me. Lieutenant
Henri will pick you up for tonight’s concert at seven.”
They were walking down a long hallway crowded with statues. Now Maggie stopped at the foot of the magnificent Grand Staircase.
“I came here once for Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet,” said Maggie.
“When it comes to composers, ma’am, I tend to think of John Lennon.”
“Lennon’s good. But nothing can compare to a Mozart concerto.”
“The closest I’ve come to classical music,” he grinned, “was making love on an Asian beach to a blond violinist with the USO tour.”
She took a step up the broad marble staircase, so that when she turned to face him their eyes were on the same level. “I think we can do better than that.”
His eyes met hers, glinting at the challenge, and he watched her cheeks grow pink. “I listened to Zach Law’s CD last night,” admitted Beckett. “I liked it. But you’re looking at a man who hears The William Tell Overture and thinks of the Lone Ranger.”
She laughed, a silver chain of sound. “You see, Colonel? Music can seduce anyone, even you!”
He sat down on the broad step. “Teach me, then. Exactly what is a concerto?” He gestured to her to join him.
She dropped lightly to the step beside him. “A concerto is a drama in music. There’s a soloist—and an orchestra, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy.”
“Ah. So a continually changing balance of power?”
“Can’t take the soldier out of the man, I see. Let’s say a competitive spirit.” She shifted casually to put more space between them. “A concerto typically has three movements. The first is highly dramatic. The orchestra introduces the theme while the soloist reflects upon it.”
Not unlike this mission, thought Beckett.
“The second movement has the slower, more personal melody of the soloist.”
That’s you, he told her silently.
“In the finale, the tempo picks up. Soloist and orchestra join together, pressing on to a triumphant conclusion.” He saw the heat brush her face once more as she heard the unintentional sensuality of her words.
“I could hear the passion in Law’s concerto. Somehow he changes the notes and goes from wonder to sorrow…”
She stared at him. “You really should give Mozart a try, Colonel.”
“You talk about Mozart the way I talk about a beautiful woman.” Suddenly intrigued, he flashed a look at her. “I’ll listen to Mozart, ma’am, if you’ll spend a night with B.B. King.”
“Blues?”
“The best. His albums are at my place in Virginia.”
She rose gracefully and held out her hand to him. “B.B. for Mozart. You’ve got yourself a deal, Colonel Beckett.”
They shook hands solemnly.
She said, “You remind me of my son. He’s classically trained, but loves jazz and blues.”
“A kid with taste. I’d like to meet him.”
“He’d like you, too.” He heard the sudden surprise in her words.
A sound from the balcony level caught their attention as an usher unlocked the theatre doors.
“Don’t even think about it, Mrs. O’Shea.”
But already she was running up the steps.
His eyes darkened as he followed her. Damned knee was already killing him. It was all uphill with Maggie O’Shea.
* * *
In the shadows of the storage room, Dane illuminated his watch. After three! Where was she? He stretched his legs, then clenched and unclenched his fingers. He needed to get out of this fucking closet.
Concentrate on the woman. It was always more exciting to balance on the edge. To hunt, to play a game with his prey, torture it, then perhaps let it think it was free.
* * *
Maggie and Beckett stood alone on the shadowed, dusty stage of the darkened theatre. Behind them, the balconies and courtyards of sixteenth-century Verona waited to come alive for the star-crossed young lovers. Beyond the dim footlights, the sumptuous horseshoe-shaped auditorium glinted with opera-red silks and velvet and five levels of gilded boxes.
Beckett’s breath whistled in appreciation as he raised his eyes to the color-swirled ceiling adorned by Chagall. “Beautiful,” he murmured.
“The larger operas are performed in the Bastille now.” Maggie gestured towards the great crystal chandelier. “But this theatre was the inspiration for The Phantom of the Opera. His river is still here, beneath the theatre, five levels down.” She stopped. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I was just wondering what it’s like to perform in a place like this. How do you make something so beautiful out of thin air? Where does it come from?”
“Mendelssohn was inspired by a ruined Edinburgh chapel, Villa-Lobos by birds in a Brazilian jungle. Beethoven composed the Emperor Concerto while the French bombarded Vienna. Mahler added drums to his Tenth Symphony after weeping at a funeral cortege…”
“I meant you,” said Beckett. “Where does music come from inside you?”
She was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, simply, “Music chose me, Colonel. My body pulses with music. I wake up with rhythms singing in my head. Music is the last sound I hear before I sleep.”
“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me what it’s like.”
She was still as a painting—remembering. Then she gestured toward the velvety box seats high in the shadows. “They’re empty now. But imagine the moment of darkness before the curtain goes up, the moment when anything can happen. The theatre is full of expectant faces, like stars across the night sky, anticipating the magic.”
Her low voice took on a dreamy quality. “You stand in the wings, waiting. The only sound is your heart beating in your ears. Then the heavy curtain slides open. You walk out onto the stage—always from the left, of course, the way one reads a book.” As she spoke, she walked slowly, head high, back straight, toward the front center of the stage. “Applause echoes around you. Then the bow—just an acknowledgement, really—and perhaps a small gesture toward someone in the box seat above you.”
Unable to take his eyes from her face, Beckett watched as Maggie raised a hand to her braid and shook her hair free. Caught in her memories, she bowed slowly, regally, from the waist toward the empty seats. Her hair fell forward like shining water.
He looked at her, a tiny figure in jeans and a faded blue sweatshirt on the vast empty stage. For a moment he imagined her standing in the spotlight in a long, flowing gown, with roses strewn at her feet.
“Beautiful,” he murmured once more.
Her dark eyes were dreamy, turned inward, as if she was listening to some far-away music. “He always sat in the left box seat, close to the stage,” she explained. Her hand stroked the cotton of the large sweatshirt that engulfed her. Beckett realized, suddenly, that it was a man’s shirt. Her husband’s.
“My husband was brilliant and passionate and larger than life, an Irish rogue with big gentle hands.” Her voice dropped an octave. “Death swooped down on him just like some tragic last scene of grand opera. One second, and all that incredible energy and life force suddenly disappeared.” Her words died in her throat. “He was only fifty-seven when he died. We never had a chance to say goodbye.”
“I’m…” Becket stopped, painfully aware that no words could take that look from her face.
She spun in a slow circle, as if she wanted to drink in the sight and smell and feel of the dusky stage one last time. Stopping abruptly, she moved away from him. Now what the devil?
An old practice piano, scarred and stained, keys yellowed with use, stood in the far corner of the dim stage. She seemed helpless against the force that drew her. It was as if the instrument called to her in some ancient siren’s language, drawing her to the keys the way the moon draws the tides. Inexorable. Inevitable.
Once more, her words echoed in his head. For a musician, music is essential as air.
He watched as she stopped, smoothed her hand over the wood, hesitated, finally pressed one narrow finger on an ivory key. Th
e middle C note sounded, loud and unnerving as a scream in the silent theatre.
“It’s out of tune,” she murmured to herself. She sat down on the scarred bench and let her fingers rest on the silent keyboard. “The last time I performed in concert—it was New York, early October—I played Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. The C-sharp minor. Johnny was there, and my son.” She closed her eyes. “The lights dim. You arch your hands above the keys, let everything flow out of you except the music.”
He had to will himself not to reach out and touch her.
“Sometimes, in a darkened concert hall like this, the magic takes over. It’s just you and the piano. The ceiling floats away, and the music takes you.”
Her hands dropped to her sides and she sat, still and stricken, staring at him.
“Music expresses what is too deep for words,” she said, so softly he could barely hear her. “It’s the language of the soul. The piano was my anchor, Colonel. Now I’m…adrift. There is no music for me now.”
“The music is still there, waiting. Tell me what you’ll play,” he demanded, “when the music comes back.”
“Beethoven!” she flashed at him. “The Emperor Concerto, the Eroica, the Appassionata.” He could hear the raw hurting in her voice. “Beethoven gave us anger in music. Chopin was a poet, Schumann was mad, Mozart lyrical. But Beethoven gave us rage and pain. He bared his soul. He gave us desolation.”
She bowed her head, overcome.
“Keep talking,” he urged.
“He lost his music, too.” Her eyes were stricken. “Beethoven turned completely deaf before the age of forty. Yet he insisted on conducting his own music even when his wild gestures threw the orchestra completely off course.”
Pain shimmered and broke in her voice. “When he conducted his Ninth Symphony for the first time in Vienna—his incomparable Choral—he kept conducting long after the orchestra finished. The contralto had to grasp his sleeve and direct his attention to the wildly clapping hands and waving handkerchiefs.”
“It won’t be like that for you.”
The Lost Concerto Page 16