Ghost Music

by Graham Masterton

  “Mr. Lake? My assistant Signorina Cappadona called me. She told me that somehow you had found entry into the Palazzetto Di Nerezza.”

  “That’s right. But I didn’t break in. I was a guest of the Cesarettis and I was given a key.”

  “The Cesarettis . . . yes, she told me that, too. But the Cesarettis have not lived in the Palazzatto Di Nerezza for more than two years. Dottore Cesaretti made over the title of the property to a holding company and then as far as we know he emigrated to Africa.”

  “This holding company,” I asked him. “Can you tell me who owns it?”

  He stared at me with protuberant eyes. He reminded me of a cartoon frog. “Who are you, signore?” he said. “What is it exactly that you want?”

  “I’m a friend of the Cesarettis, that’s all. I want to find out exactly what happened to them.”

  “You are not from SEC?”

  “The Securities and Exchange Commission? Of course not. I’m a musician. I’m not trying to cause any trouble here.”

  Ettore Gavazzi said nothing for a while, but kept on blowing out his cheeks, which made him look even more like a frog. There were no flies buzzing around the office, but I had the feeling that if there had been one, his tongue would have whipped out and caught it.

  “You told Signorina Cappadona that you had dinner with the Cesarettis last night.”

  “I guess she must have misunderstood me. I said that it was the Cesarettis’ wedding anniversary yesterday, and that, on their wedding anniversary, we always used to have dinner together.”

  Even as I told him that, I thought of the waiter at Al Assassini, telling me that today was St. Baltazar’s Day, the day of lies.

  “If you were such a good friend of the Cesarettis, why did they not tell you that they had sold their apartment and gone to Africa?”

  “I don’t know. We haven’t been in contact for a while. Sometimes, friends become estranged, don’t they? I guess Enrico was too busy being a surgeon and I was too busy writing music. You know how it is.”

  Again, Ettore Gavazzi stayed silent, and blew his cheeks in and out. Eventually, though, he opened his desk drawer, took out a plain white card, and a blue enameled pen, and scribbled down a name for me.

  “There . . . these are the owners of the Palazzetto Di Nerezza. If you have any questions about the Cesarettis, you should ask them.”

  He waved the card backward and forward to dry the ink, and then he passed it across to me, without looking up.

  “Is there something you’re not telling me?” I asked him.

  He still didn’t raise his eyes. “I can give you no more information than that. But it was not usual, the way in which the property was transferred.”

  “Not usual? What do you mean?”

  “The Cesarettis’ lawyers were concerned because he wanted to sell the property so quick. What was the hurry? The palazzetto had been owned by the Cesaretti family for generations. They did not even have to sell it. My agency could have rented it for them, while they were away, and they could have returned to it when they came back from Africa. His lawyers advised Dottore Cesaretti to consider that option most seriously.”

  “But?”

  “But he said absolutely no. He wanted to give it up completely. And by Venetian standards the transfer of deeds was very quick. Usually, it takes the notary at least six weeks to go through all the preliminare, the searches and so forth, especially with such an historical building. But Dottore Cesaretti’s lawyers told me that from the first proposta to the final rogito notarile, the sale took less than a month.”

  “I see.” I looked down at the card which he had given me. It read PENUMBRA INTERNATIONAL PROPERTY, NEW YORK.

  Ettore Gavazzi said, “Maybe . . . if you discover more about your friends, you would be kind enough to contact me again. I had the sensation from the very beginning that something was not quite right about the way in which they sold out so fast.”

  I thanked him and shook his hand. Outside, heavy gray clouds were moving across the city from the northwest, and rain began to sprinkle the windows.

  By the time I was sitting in a water taxi, making my way back across the lagoon to Marco Polo airport, it was raining heavily. I had to sit inside, with my suitcase pressing hard against my knees.

  * * *

  At the Alitalia desk, I changed my flight so that I could catch the 14:40 Swiss International flight to Stockholm, changing planes at Zurich. Then I went to the airport’s shiny new wine bar, bought myself a large pinot grigio, and perched on a high stool to drink it.

  I called Margot.

  “Lalo—do you know what time it is?” she protested.

  “Sure. It’s six twenty AM. Time you were up and at ’em.”

  “I didn’t go to bed till three, you sadistic bastard. I was at Megafly, having a party with all of my friends from high school. Plus a few gorgeous men. Well, they looked gorgeous, after five tequilas. What do you want?”

  “This whole Kate thing is beginning to make sense. I’m flying to Stockholm and then I’m going on to London. I should be back sometime Sunday, but I need you to do something for me.”

  “Go on,” she said, suspiciously.

  “I need you to check out a real estate company called Penumbra International Properties, based in New York. You got that? Penumbra. But don’t contact the company directly and don’t give them any indication that you’re checking up on them.”

  “What?”

  “Please, Margot. Do this one thing for me.”

  “You know I will. I love you, Lalo.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I love you, too.”

  And the strange thing was, as I switched off my cell, I knew that I did love her. Not in the same way that I loved Kate. There was no danger in it, no edge-of-the-seat stuff. But when I had finished talking to Margot, I always felt warmer about the world, and the people who can do that are very few and far between.

  * * *

  My flight was due for boarding so I finished my glass of wine and went to the men’s room. I was standing in front of the mirror trying to work out how to turn on the high-tech Italian-style faucet when the door opened and Jack Friendly walked in.

  He was wearing his black overcoat and his black sunglasses, but as he came up behind me, he took off his sunglasses and tucked them into his inside pocket.

  “Well, well,” he said. “Fancy meeting you here.” He looked more like a predatory hawk than ever.

  “What are you going to do, Jack?” I asked him, trying to keep my voice steady. “Give me another whack on the nose?”

  “Just wanted to give you a tip, Gideon. That’s all.”

  “Oh, yes?” I suddenly managed to turn on the faucet, and cold water sprayed all over the front of my pants.

  Jack managed a sloping, superior smile. “Kind of accident-prone, aren’t you, Gideon? So if I was you, I’d keep my nose out of other people’s business.”

  “Oh, really? And what particular business is that?”

  “You know what business I’m talking about. I know people who know people, and those people tell me everything that’s going on. You know why? Because they like what I give them if they do and they don’t like what I give them if they don’t. You went to see Ettore Gavazzi this morning, didn’t you?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “You were asking questions about a certain property, that’s what. And that property and who owns it is none of your concern.”

  “Supposing I was interested in renting it?”

  “It’s taken.”

  I turned to face him. “Supposing I wanted to know why the Cesarettis sold it so quickly? You know—just out of academic interest.”

  Without warning, Jack took hold of my throat. At the same time, he grabbed me between the legs, and squeezed me hard. I yelped like a puppy whose tail has been accidentally slammed in an automobile door, but he didn’t let go. Instead, he kept on gripping me until my eyes began to water.

  “You have no fucking inter
est in that property, academic or any other kind. Capisca?”

  I could hardly breathe. “Okay, okay, I have no fucking interest in that property.”

  “Not now, not ever. Got it?”

  “Got it. Now let me go, will you, for Christ’s sake! That hurts!”

  He gave me one more vicious squeeze, and let me go, but he still didn’t relax his grip on my throat. He reached into his coat pocket and took out a craft knife. He held it up in front of my face and used his thumb to slide out the blade. It was narrow, and triangular, with a sharp tapered point.

  Very slowly and deliberately, he moved the blade toward my right eye, until the point was less than a half inch away from my eyeball. I was blinking furiously, even though I didn’t want to.

  “That Beethoven—he was deaf, right?—but he wrote music, didn’t he? I wonder how difficult you’d find it, if you were blind?”

  I didn’t know what to say to him. I was whining for breath, and I felt as if my knees were going to give way under me.

  “You understand what I’m saying to you, Gideon?” said Jack. The blade didn’t waver, and I was sure that he was going to stick it straight into my eyeball. “You carry on your life like a good little jingle-writer, and you don’t look right and you don’t look left, and in particular you don’t go looking into dark corners, because some dark corners have some real nasty surprises hiding inside of them.”

  I didn’t even dare to nod, in case that blade went into my eye. Jack held it there for a few seconds longer, and I could smell the garlic on his breath. Then the men’s room door opened, and two Japanese came in, and he immediately released me.

  “Remember what I told you,” he said, and clapped me on the back, as if we were the best of buddies. Then he put on his sunglasses and walked out.

  I stayed where I was for a while, holding on to the washbasin and staring at myself in the mirror. I looked pale and very washed-out, and the bump on my nose had turned an odd mixture of yellow and purple. Jack hadn’t blinded me, thank God, but I didn’t have the slightest doubt that he was capable of doing it.

  I left the men’s room. Swiss International Airways were announcing the last call for flight LX 1663 for Zurich. I had a choice now. I could change my flight again, and return to New York, and forget about the Cesarettis and the Philipses and the Westerlunds, and what Kate had been trying to show me. Or I could fly to Stockholm and see what I could find out about number 44 Skeppsbron—at the very real risk of Jack Friendly coming after me. I mean—how had he found me in the men’s room at Marco Polo airport, if he hadn’t been following me?

  I covered my eyes with my hand, so that all I could see was blackness, as if I were blind. But when I took my hand away, a white Persian cat was sitting close to my stool in the wine bar. It stayed there for a few seconds, staring at me, and then it disappeared in the direction of the departure gates.

  “God help me,” I breathed, and followed it.

  Twenty-five

  I had sworn black and blue that I would never come back to Stockholm, but here I was, standing outside the Westerlunds’ apartment on Skeppsbron, at 7:30 in the evening, with thick snow whirling down all around me.

  The snow clung to my hair and the shoulders of my coat and it even clung to my eyebrows. I had booked myself a room at the Sheraton, but I had decided to walk here because it was only ten minutes away, across Kornhamnstorget, and after four hours’ flying and another hour in an overheated taxi, I was gasping for some fresh air, no matter how bitter it was.

  I had kept the keys to the Westerlunds’ apartment that Kate had given me, but I had left them back in New York. In any case, I didn’t think it would exactly be polite to let myself in, uninvited and unexpected, even if the Westerlunds were still here.

  I rang the doorbell and waited, while the snow fell faster and thicker. My shoes and socks were soaked and my toes were numb, and I wished that I had called a taxi to bring me here.

  I rang again. No answer. Maybe I would have to come back later, or early tomorrow morning. I was looking around for a taxi to take me back to the Sheraton when I heard a complicated rattling of bolts and keys, and the front door opened.

  A handsome middle-aged woman with silvery blonde hair and rimless spectacles was peering out at me. “Ah!” she said. “Herr Andersson?” I could feel the warmth flowing out of the interior of the house behind her.

  I scuffled the snow off my hair. “No, ma’am. I hope I’m not disturbing you. Do you speak English?”

  “Of course, yes. I’m sorry. I was expecting an acquaintance of my husband’s.”

  “My name is Gideon Lake and I’m a friend of Axel and Tilda Westerlund.”

  “The Westerlunds? Oh. They do not live here now, I’m afraid. They used to own our apartment—I don’t know, maybe three years ago. But they left Stockholm. I don’t know where they went. You are not the first friend who has come here looking for them.”

  “They left no forwarding address? Nothing like that?”

  She shook her head. “We still receive mail for them, even now. Not so much as we used to. But we don’t know where to send it on, so we just have to return it.”

  “I’m sorry. This is kind of intrusive, I know—but do you own the apartment? Or rent it?”

  “It is rented on our behalf by the Royal Institute of Technology. My husband is a professor.”

  “I see. Thanks. You don’t happen to know who actually owns it? They might have some idea where the Westerlunds went to.”

  “Why don’t you come in, out of the snow?” she asked me. “My husband will be home very soon and I’m sure he knows who the owners are. Our heating broke down last winter, and the agents had to contact the owners to pay for a new boiler. Come on—come inside.”

  “You’re sure?” I asked her.

  She opened the door wider, and smiled. “If you were a rapist, I don’t think that you would be standing in the street with a little mountain of snow on top of your head, flapping your arms like a pingvin.”

  I stepped into the hallway. The glass lantern that Tilda Westerlund had shattered with her screaming had been repaired, but the murky mirror was still hanging there.

  The woman held out her hand. It was small and very warm. “My name is Anna-Carin Olofsson and my husband is Professor Berthil Olofsson. Berthil is quite famous for his research into global warming.”

  I brushed the melting snow from my shoulders. “Global warming? I could sure use some of that right now!”

  “Come upstairs. I have a good fire going.”

  Now that I was standing next to her, I realized how small she was. She hardly reached up to my shoulder. But she had a very trim figure, for her age, and a faded tan, and I guessed that she spent all summer swimming and all winter skiing and she probably ate two bowlfuls of muesli every morning. She made me feel seriously unhealthy.

  Upstairs, the apartment had changed very little since the last time I had visited it. The same statuette of Freya in the corridor. The same gilded sofas in the living room. The same Malmsjo piano on which I had played “The Pointing Tree” for Elsa and Felicia.

  Anna-Carin Olofsson took my overcoat and hung it up for me. “Sit down by the fire,” she said. “Would you care for some coffee?”

  “That’s kind of you. Thanks. Just black, please.”

  She went into the kitchen, and I followed her. “We love this apartment,” she said, as she spooned coffee into the percolator. “We lived in a brand-new apartment before, in Uppsala, and it had no character. But this place—sometimes my husband thinks that he can still hear the voices of the people who lived in it before us.”

  “Really? What do they say?”

  Anna-Carin Olofsson flapped her hand dismissively. “Of course it is just his imagination. For a scientist, he can be very superstitious. If he spills any salt on the table, he always throws a pinch of it over his left shoulder to protect himself from bad luck. Two pinches, in fact.”

  “Have you heard any voices?”

  “Me?
No. Not voices as such. One evening, though, when Berthil was away at one of his conferences, I thought I heard a woman crying. I went from room to room, but there was nobody here. I think it must have come from the alley, at the back, or maybe another apartment.”

  She paused, and then she took two cups down from the cupboard. “It sounded so sad. How can I say it? It sounded like a woman who is in complete despair.”

  She poured us each a cup of coffee, and we took them through to the living room. As we sat down, the front door opened and Professor Olofsson arrived home, stamping his feet on the mat.

  “Berthil!” called Anna-Carin. “We are in here, my darling!”

  A stocky, gray-bearded man appeared, wearing a brown overcoat and a long brown and white scarf. He was balding, with shiny spectacles, and cold-reddened cheeks. He almost looked like a professor out of a child’s comic book.

  “My darling, this gentleman is a friend of the Westerlunds. He came here to look for them.”

  “Gideon Lake,” I said. “Sorry for intruding, but your wife has made me very welcome.”

  Professor Olofsson tugged off his woolen glove and shook my hand.

  “God afton,” he said. “If you have come here looking for the Westerlunds, I regret that you have had a wasted journey. I hope you haven’t come too far.”

  “New York, originally. But it hasn’t been a total bust. I believe that I’m a whole lot nearer to finding out what happened to the Westerlunds than I ever was before.”

  Professor Olofsson took off his overcoat, and Anna-Carin took it into the hallway to hang it up. He said, “Nobody seems to know where the Westerlunds went. After we moved in here, we had letters and phone calls for them for months, and people calling here to ask if we knew where they had gone. Even their relatives.”

  He sat down, and unlaced his shoes. “I think Dr. Westerlund’s sister went to the police, and reported them as missing, but as far as I know nothing ever came out of that.”

  Anna-Carin came in with a mug of frothy coffee, with chocolate sprinkles, and set it down on the table.

  Professor Olofsson took two or three noisy sips, so that chocolate sprinkles clung to his beard. Then he said, “You think you might have found out where they moved to, Mr. Lake?”