Ghost Music

by Graham Masterton

  “Well, I’m sorry about that,” I told him. “I didn’t take anything, I swear it.”

  “Oh, you didn’t take anything? That’s good. But I’ll tell you what I think, Gideon. I think that you overheard something about me and Jack Friendly that didn’t concern you. I don’t even pretend to know what, or how. Maybe you just got extrasensitive ears. But you decided to find out more, didn’t you? And that was your big mistake.”

  I said nothing. I wasn’t going to tell him about Kate, and how she had arranged for me to fly to Stockholm and London and Venice—especially since she didn’t seem to be living with him anymore, and I had absolutely no idea where she was, or how to get in touch with her.

  Victor prodded my chest with his index finger. I really hate it when people do that, but I could hardly pretend that I hadn’t searched his apartment or phoned his office or challenged Jack Friendly when I met him in Venice.

  “Whatever you think you know, Gideon, you don’t know it no more. You get my meaning?”

  “Listen—I’ve forgotten it already.”

  “And you think I trust you? I don’t fucking trust you one inch. You’re up to something and I don’t know what it is, but whatever it is, it’s going to stop.”

  I raised both hands, as if his index finger were a gun. “It’s stopped. I promise you. Period.”

  Victor smiled. “And I’m supposed to take your word? I don’t think so. So let me tell you this. (A) You’re going to keep your nose out of my business and (B) you’re going to give me your apartment.”

  I frowned at him. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me. You are going to transfer this apartment over to me, for a nominal fee, i.e. one hundred dollars. I am going to allow you to live in this apartment for as long as you keep your lip zippered up, but the second I hear that you’ve tried to take this matter any further, you are out on your extrasensitive ear.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said. “I’m not going to give you my apartment—especially not for a hundred dollars! Do you know how much this place cost?”

  “Of course I know how much it cost. Which is why I think I’m getting myself a bargain.”

  “There is absolutely no way, Victor. No way whatsoever. I’m going to the cops.”

  “No, Gideon, you’re not.”

  “Try and stop me. What are you going to do, tell Jack Friendly to throw me in the East River, tied to a mattress? Or set fire to me, in my own backyard?”

  Victor covered his eyes with his hand for a moment, as if he were suffering from eyestrain. Then he covered his mouth, as if he didn’t know what to say. Eventually, though, he took out his cell phone, and punched in a number with his thumb. The phone rang, and he listened for a moment.

  “It’s me,” he said. “Put her on, will you?”

  With that, he handed the phone over to me. “Go on,” he coaxed me. “Ask her how she is.”

  Oh my God, I thought, it’s Kate. But then I heard a man’s voice blurting, “Talk to him, will you? Tell him we ain’t pulled your fingernails out. Not yet, anyhow!”

  “Kate?” I said.

  I heard a gasping, panicky voice. “Lalo—Lalo—it’s me! They just grabbed me, when I went to the restroom!”

  “Margot?”

  “I was waiting for you and I went to the restroom and there were two of them there and they grabbed me! Please, Lalo—help me! I don’t know where they’re taking me!”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m in a car! They’re taking me someplace but I don’t know where! Please, Lalo!”

  The phone was abruptly cut off. Victor smiled and said, “There—you didn’t think that I wasn’t going to take out some kind of insurance policy, did you? What did I say to you, Gideon? If you’re going to stick your nose into other people’s business, you need to be wilier than they are. And I’m pretty wily. I’m surprised my beloved momma didn’t christen me ‘Coyote,’ God rest her soul.”

  I was so angry that I could have hit him, very hard. I could have put him over my upraised knee and broken his back, so that he never could have walked again. I don’t know how I managed to control myself, but I guess there was something in the back of my mind that warned me what would happen to Margot, if I beat up on Victor, or called the police. I didn’t know where she was, or who had abducted her, and they could easily kill her before anybody could find her. That’s if they could ever find her at all.

  “Okay,” I heard myself saying, almost as if somebody else were talking for me. “What do you want me to do?”

  Victor laid his hand on my shoulder. “You don’t have to do nothing, Gideon. Nothing at all. I’ll have all of the paperwork drawn up, and all you have to do is sign.”

  “I’m not signing unless you let Margot go free.”

  “Oh . . . we won’t keep her for longer than we have to. But you don’t go to the cops, Gideon. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever. This is one of those secrets that you carry to the grave, you got me?”

  I looked at him. I felt utterly defeated. I had never been in the presence of pure evil before, and it was like that moment when you’ve been climbing a very steep hill and you realize that you simply don’t have the strength to climb any farther. Your legs just won’t work.

  “What would your beloved momma think of you, Victor?” I asked him, in disgust. “What would your beloved momma think of you, if she could see you now?”

  “My beloved momma was a fat stupid cow,” he replied. “If there’s one thing she taught me, it was greed. Take what you want, and as much as you want, and never ever feel guilty about it.

  “But I think my beloved poppa taught me an even better lesson than that. My beloved poppa taught me that if anybody ever does you harm, you should never let them get away with it, ever. Never forgive nobody for nothing, that was my poppa’s motto. And make sure you do a hundred times worse to them as they ever did to you. If they take something away from you, you make sure you take everything away from them.”

  I took a deep breath. “If you hurt Margot, I will kill you. I don’t care what happens to me. I don’t care if they give me the death sentence. But I swear to God that I will kill you.”

  Victor let out a sharp bark of laughter, and squeezed my shoulder again. “No, you won’t, Gideon. It takes a very special sort of selfishness to kill people, and you just don’t have it.”

  * * *

  What else could I do but take off my coat and my scarf and my gloves and pour myself a very large glass of wine? Victor had said that he would arrange for the property transfer as soon as possible, but it would still take several days, and he wasn’t going to let Margot go free until I had signed it.

  Several times during the evening I picked up the phone and thought about dialing 911. I knew that it was the right thing to do. But I kept thinking of Margot, broken and covered in blood or drowned or cremated, and I simply couldn’t risk her getting hurt. I had seen what Jack Friendly had done to the Westerlunds and the Philipses and the Cesarettis. I was sure that he wouldn’t have the slightest compunction about doing the same to Margot.

  The nightmarish visions that I had seen in Stockholm and London and Venice had been frightening enough, but at least they had seemed detached from reality, and Kate had been there to reassure me that they had some kind of a purpose. This was real, and I had nobody that I could turn to for help.

  * * *

  I refilled my glass and switched on my laptop. For at least the twentieth time, I Googled the Westerlunds and the Philipses and the Cesarettis, searching through their backgrounds for any fragment of information that might connect them with Victor Solway or Penumbra Property.

  I came across a BBC website story about the disappearance of the Philips family, and how their relatives had made a brokenhearted appeal for anybody who had seen them to get in touch. But the Westerlunds and the Cesarettis had disappeared so completely that it was just like they had evaporated, like patterns of steam on a window.

  For the first time, I looked for the famili
es on Google Image, too, to see if there were any photographs of them. I found six or seven pictures of Axel Westerlund on a tour of hospitals in Angola; and a blurry black-and-white image of David Philips to accompany some Financial Times article about international investment. But I almost missed the most important photograph.

  It was a group picture of thirty-five delegates at a conference in Geneva in June 1997, hosted by Worldwide Surgical Solutions, Inc. I enlarged it, and there was David Philips standing on the right-hand side of the picture, looking younger and trimmer and smiling broadly. But right next to him, in a smart gray suit, was Enrico Cesaretti; and on the other side of the same group—wearing a neatly trimmed beard but still instantly recognizable—was Axel Westerlund. I peered at the picture even more closely, and then I printed it out. This was no coincidence, it couldn’t be. These three men knew each other.

  Next I surfed the net for any mention of Worldwide Surgical Solutions, Inc. It turned out that they were a high-tech medical research company based in Philadelphia that had gone bankrupt early in 1999. Their business plan had been to set up a worldwide database for organ donors, and at the same time to develop new ways of harvesting donor organs more quickly and transporting them more efficiently. If a patient in San Francisco suffered from catastrophic renal failure, he could be supplied within hours with a replacement kidney that came from as far away as Addis Ababa or Rio de Janeiro or Vladivostok.

  But here was the crunch: Worldwide Surgical Solutions had gone bust after accusations had been made that several of their donors had been slightly less than dead when their hearts and their livers were taken out.

  There was surprisingly little background information about it. One French newspaper had suggested that government ministers in at least three African countries had accepted substantial kickbacks in return for supplying organ donors. In one case, in Ethiopia, it was claimed that an entire village had been massacred to supply livers and lungs for private patients in the U.S. But it seemed obvious that the story had been heavily censored.

  I switched off my laptop and walked to the window. I could see my own reflection suspended out there, like a ghost.

  Everything was clicking into place. Axel Westerlund and Enrico Cesaretti and David Philips had all attended the same conference to set up an international transplant business. All three of them were wealthy men, with exceptionally fine apartments and very comfortable lifestyles. All three of them had had their children kidnapped and tortured, and all three of them had been killed in the grisliest way that anybody could imagine.

  Victor Solway had arranged for their killings, and Victor Solway had taken everything away from them: their families, their apartments, their money, their very existence.

  “You make sure you do a hundred times worse to them as they ever did to you.”

  I didn’t yet have the final piece of evidence—the reason why Victor had taken so devastating a revenge on them. But the only connection between them that I had been able to find was Worldwide Surgical Solutions, Inc.; and the only connection that I had been able to find between Victor and the medical profession was Michael, his baby son.

  What had Kate said about Victor? He was angry with God. Angry with the doctors. Just angry.

  * * *

  Shortly after 10:00 PM there was a hesitant rapping at my door. I opened it, and there was Pearl, in her old pink bathrobe. It looked as if she had tried to pin up her hair, but it was even more chaotic than usual.

  “I do live here, don’t I?” she asked me.

  “Yes, Pearl, you do. Do you want me to take you back to your apartment?”

  She peered at me closely. “You’re that Gideon Lake, aren’t you? I remember you. I shall always remember you. You’re a good man. Resonant.”

  “That’s right, Pearl. Hold on. Just let me get my keys.”

  I closed the door behind me and took hold of her elbow. I guided her to the bottom of the stairs, but she had only taken two steps up before she turned and said, “You’re worried, aren’t you? I can tell.”

  “I have a couple of things on my mind, Pearl, yes.”

  “No . . . you can’t fool me, Gideon Lake. You’re very worried. Come upstairs, I have something to show you. I think the time has come.”

  “Okay, Pearl. Whatever you say.”

  We climbed the stairs. She had left her apartment door open, and I followed her inside. It smelled even more strongly of oil paints than it had before. The artist in the pale gray smock had obviously been here, adding some more touches to his figure study.

  “Would you like a drink?” Pearl asked me. “I think I have some whiskey someplace, I think. Or is it rum? There was this black fellow, he was always bringing me rum. He used to sing Paul Robeson songs to me, in the bath. ‘Old Man River.’”

  “No—I don’t need a drink, thanks. What do you want me to see?”

  “My painting, of course! It’s almost done.”

  I circled around the easel so that I could take a look at it. I was prepared for some changes, but when I actually saw it, I felt a crawling sensation all the way down my back. There was Pearl, as before, naked and insouciant, smoking her cigarette, and there were the Westerlunds, and the Philipses, and the baby boy that Kate had been pushing in the park. But now the Cesarettis had joined them, with Enrico and Salvina standing at the very back, and their three children standing next to the ottoman, on the right-hand side.

  The painting was nearly finished, because everybody’s face was now rendered in perfect detail. Nobody was smiling, however. They all looked desperate, as if they were trapped inside this picture, and would never be able to escape.

  I stared at the canvas for a long time, and then I turned to Pearl and said, “What?”

  Pearl was lighting a cigarette. She blew out a long stream of smoke, and then she said, “Don’t tell me you still don’t get it? You know who murdered all of these people, don’t you, Gideon? You and you alone. But if only one living person knows who did it, that’s enough.”

  I looked back at the painting. “I still don’t understand. I know who murdered them all, yes. But what am I supposed to do about it? I can’t go to the police because I don’t have any evidence. Besides, they’re holding my friend Margot, and if I go the police, they say that they’ll hurt her, or worse.”

  Pearl said, very gently, “I can see these people, too, Gideon. I used to be a singer, when I was young. I have resonance, too. I doubt if I can see them as clearly as you do, but I can see them, coming and going, opening doors and closing them again.”

  She paused, and smoked. “The problem is that once they’ve passed over, the dead can’t accuse the living of any crime or misdemeanor, even if it’s torture or murder. The dead can’t name the people who killed them. Heaven is not a place for people to seek revenge. Heaven is a place for forgiveness—for new beginnings.”

  “I’m sorry, Pearl. I don’t actually believe in heaven.”

  Pearl shrugged. “That doesn’t matter. You can call it whatever you like. But it’s the world beyond, where all of us go when we die.”

  “You say that dead people can’t name their killers?”

  “If they could, think how many living people would be wrongly accused, by dead people who were bitter and resentful. Death is a time to move on, no matter what happened in your previous life. Death is not just the end . . . it’s a brand-new beginning.”

  “But all of these dead people, I saw them. I talked to them, I touched them.”

  Pearl smiled, and nodded “That’s because you’re so receptive. When you stand close to them, they reappear, they take on flesh, and substance, just like they did when they were alive. You can feel them, you can kiss them, and while you’re close to them, other people can see them, too. It’s a very great gift.”

  “But I saw what happened to them,” I told her. “I saw how they were tortured, and how they were killed.”

  “Of course. Because they wanted you to know how they died, and who murdered them. Like I say, they c
an’t make any accusations. They’re dead. But they did the next best thing, and they showed you. Those horrible things you witnessed, they’re always there, waiting for anybody who has the sensitivity to pick them up. It’s no different than listening to an Elvis record. He’s dead, but we can still hear him singing. Or watching a Buster Keaton movie. He’s dead, too, but he can still make us laugh.”

  “What about this baby? This is Kate’s baby, right? The baby she had with Victor?”

  “Little Michael, that’s right. Michael-Row-The-Boat-Ashore.”

  “How did he die? Do you know that?”

  Pearl laid a hand on her left breast. “It was his heart. I can’t remember exactly what they call it, but it’s something to do with the blood pumping all the wrong way.”

  “Did he have a heart transplant? Is that it?”

  Pearl nodded. “Kate was against it, for some reason. I remember that. There was a lot of shouting. A lot of crying. A lot of slamming doors.”

  “But Michael did have the transplant?”

  Pearl blew out smoke. “Columbia University Hospital. The very best. But he died, anyhow.”

  “And Victor?”

  “Hmmh,” she said, almost in amusement. “I never saw a man in such a rage. It was the rage from hell.”

  I said, “You knew all about this, right from the beginning, didn’t you? You’re not half as bananas as you pretend to be, if you’ll forgive my saying so.”

  “You had to find out for yourself, my dear. You couldn’t be told.”

  “You knew what Kate was doing, didn’t you? You knew that she was going to fly me to Stockholm and London and Venice, to see these people? And not only that—you knew why.”

  “I did try to warn you, my dear. I didn’t let you go into it with your eyes closed. What did I say to you? She’s only using you, for her own purposes. She’s only using you to do something that she can’t do. But what did you say? It’s only about pleasure, you said. It’s only about affection, and friendship. But it was always much more than that. And now it’s time for you to do what she wanted you to do, and you have no choice, not if you’re going to save your Margot. In her own way, your Kate is holding her hostage just as much as Victor.”