The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge

by Patricia Duncker

  ‘But some of it’s in German! We can read that.’

  She was defeated by an entire verse of poetry.

  Getrost, das Leben schreitet

  Zum ewgen Leben hin,

  Von innrer Glut geweitet

  Verklärt sich unser Sinn.

  Die Sternwelt wird zerfließen

  Zum goldnen Lebenswein,

  Wir werden sie genießen

  Und lichte Sterne sein.

  Schweigen stood over her and pointed to the words, translating on sight.

  ‘Comforted, life strides towards eternal life – clothed, or consecrated, I’m not sure which, by an inner fire, our senses are transfigured. The world of stars will melt into the golden wine of life, which we will savour and become illuminated stars. There you are, Dominique, it’s madness. That’s a hymn. It’s supposed to be sung. They all spent too much time with their eyes fixed on heaven.’

  ‘You have no grasp of mysticism, André. Stars are metaphors. And I think they did sing this. Listen. Die Außenwelt ist die Schattenwelt: sie wirft ihren Schatten in das Lichtreich. The external world is a world of shadows, which casts its shadows in the Kingdom of Light. Reality is like the veil of Maya, which hides the truth. This world is an illusion.’

  Schweigen shrugged. ‘I sometimes wish it was.’

  So this was the core, a cult of death as the gateway and the threshold. Their eyes were turned inwards, towards darkness. Death signalled the ultimate union with the soul, the end of all yearning and separation. It was that anticipation of blessedness, which had filled their hearts. For now she saw them, swinging up the mountain into darkness, carrying their children in their arms, the promise of the Faith pouring from their lips in exultation, ringing in their ears through the silence of the snowy forest. They were stepping through the wall of shadows into the brilliance of their Kingdom.

  ‘That’s where they’ve gone, André – they’ve departed, to their Kingdom of Light, and their Guide is somewhere among the stars.’

  ‘They’re all on the slab in the Institut médico-légal in Strasbourg,’ snapped Schweigen gloomily, looking up from the computer. ‘But I think I’ve found our F.G.’

  The Judge slapped down her pencil.

  ‘Well? Who is he?’

  Schweigen scrolled down.

  ‘Guess. No surprises here. But he isn’t one of the dead. Do you remember Gerhart Liebmann, the opera director? A great friend of his. And of Anton Laval. I’m willing to bet F.G. is the famous Composer with his own orchestra who spoke at the funeral. His name is Friedrich Grosz – F.G.’

  And into the doomed chalet with its polished wooden walls and floors, its Christmas-candle arrangements and untouched boxes of chocolates, fruits confits and marrons glacés, rolled a name from the past, the man who had refused to be interviewed, refused to cooperate either with the Swiss or with Schweigen. This was the Composer with the irreproachable alibi, the man who had been conducting a concert in Berlin on the night of the Swiss departure, the man who had been seen by three thousand people, who had denied all prior knowledge of the mass suicide and yet had known every single one of the dead. How dare you question me, he snapped at Schweigen. I accepted their decision to depart. Leave me alone with my grief. His high-handed arrogant face, all lines and shadows, the dramatic white hair, which stood on end when he conducted or rehearsed his orchestra, materialised before her; there he stood like a figure conjured up in ectoplasm at a séance. There he was, a man in his mid-sixties, powerful, unpleasant, enraged. And now she could hear his voice, vivid on the video of the funeral, speaking with absolute conviction: In the midst of life we are in death, but that life is ours for ever; it is that eternal life which awaits us beyond death, the glory of an eternal union with all that we have ever loved. He cannot have been speaking on behalf of his dead friend. He was speaking for himself.

  The Judge looked at André over the top of her glasses. All the scratching and sifting around them suddenly ceased. Everyone stared at the Judge.

  ‘But wait, listen,’ said Schweigen, ‘it gets better. The voice on the tape – that’s his voice. I’ve traced the mobile. He was ringing this chalet repeatedly last night. After they’d all trooped off up the mountain.’

  The forensic team began to murmur, pleased. The Judge weighed her words carefully. She tapped the great book on the table before her.

  ‘Large chunks of whatever this is are written in German. If he is F.G. and this is his handwriting, then at last we have some hard evidence of his involvement.’

  Her thoughts were less careful. Someone walked away from both of these massacres, carrying a gun. I don’t believe in his innocence or any of his protestations. He knew about the Faith, and he knew about the first mass suicide. He probably knew about this one. She looked down. At the bottom of the open page was a simple handwritten sentence in ordinary German, followed by a small set of initials: Gelobt sei uns die ew’ge Nacht. Let us praise eternal night. F.G. This book belongs to him.

  4

  NOT DEATH, BUT JUDGEMENT

  Gaëlle stood waiting beside the Air France check-in desk at Montpellier airport, banging the tickets and her carte d’identité against the handle of her suitcase. The giant metallic hangar with marble floors gleamed in the early light, substantially cooler than the outside world, where the phoenix palms, now free of winter plastic, erupted into fresh green. Midweek, and the first flight fully booked; everybody else had already clambered up the escalator, passed through security, grappling with their computers, and sailed onwards towards the gates, bound for Paris. No sign of the Judge.

  The Judge never showed up late in the normal course of things. Therefore something must have happened. If she didn’t appear in the next ten minutes they would miss the connection at Roissy, which would carry them on into Germany. Gaëlle’s mobile suddenly illuminated and thumped out Motorhead’s heavy metal retro-beat. Technically, this was the office phone, but Gaëlle had customised the theme tunes and somehow appropriated the number.

  ‘Hello. What the hell’s happened to you?’

  Gaëlle did not look at the tiny screen. She expected the Judge; it was Schweigen.

  ‘Gaëlle? She’s switched off her phone. She won’t answer. Can you give her a message from me?’ Gaëlle abandoned her suitcase and began to pace in a widening circle.

  ‘Have you had a row? I’m not a dating agency.’

  She heard a huge sigh from Schweigen, she could almost feel his breath hot against her ear.

  ‘I’m just anxious that she should have all the information she needs at her fingertips before she does the interviews.’

  ‘You mean you want to be there and do it all yourself. Just like you did last time,’ sneered Gaëlle, ‘with the same success you had in February.’ The investigation had suffered a dramatic setback when Schweigen’s aggressive technique had resulted in the withdrawal of all cooperation by the Famille Laval. A reminder about the fiasco at the Domaine, the exact details of which Schweigen had concealed from the Judge, rubbed a sufficiently raw wound to draw blood; the sigh turned into a snap of rage.

  ‘There’s no need to be so bloody rude.’

  Pause.

  ‘OK. I’ll tell her to turn her phone back on so that you can have a fight with her yourself.’ Gaëlle cut him off, then stood fidgeting with the mobile; Schweigen was capable of ringing straight back. This proved to be one of his strengths. No one ever escaped his persistence.

  * * *

  Ever since New Year’s Day, three months earlier, when Schweigen and the Judge had stood side by side, contemplating the bodies in the snow, Gaëlle’s working life had developed an unexpected dimension of emotional upheaval. Schweigen was uncontrollably in love with the Judge; concerning his feelings there could be no doubt. His passion crashed ahead like a battering ram, an obsession that he would not, or could not, abandon or disguise. I want, I need, I desire. Gaëlle expected him to rave on through all the verbs of love every time she heard his voice on the line. But what was Dominique Car
pentier’s position on the matter? And as for the history of the affair, very little information could be gathered. The Montpellier office endured a state of documentary siege, battered by e-mails, faxes and registered deliveries, avec avis de réception. Sign here, please. The Judge flicked the telephone system over to Gaëlle’s desk and so it was her Greffière who usually fielded Schweigen’s demands. Gaëlle knew that the Judge had never married and lived alone. Schweigen, however, had a wife and child, tucked away somewhere in a Strasbourg suburb. And yet he was the Lover, the ardent suitor, desperate in pursuit. The Lady hardly raised her eyes to acknowledge his fanatical insistence. Was he or had he ever been successful in claiming her attention, let alone eliciting an amenable response? Gaëlle had her suspicions, but no proof. She worked her sexual way through queues of men and occasionally women too, without making any hard and fast commitments. There was time enough for households, school runs, family holidays, and sleeping with more or less the same person later on. Time enough. But the Judge had at least fifteen years start on her Greffière in the great enterprise of life. And to Gaëlle’s fairly certain knowledge the Judge had never been swept off to the theatre in evening dress or wheedled into consuming long, exotic dinners by any man at all, during the five years since Schweigen’s first arrival in the office, and her tenure at the desk.

  Was there a childhood sweetheart? When Gaëlle stalked off home or out to the bar, the Judge plunged onwards through the giant paper valleys created by her dossiers. She was last seen at six-thirty on the previous night, calmly reading a book in English about the Apocalypse sect at Waco. Gaëlle peered over her shoulder: she discovered the Judge in the midst of a three-cornered negotiation between the FBI, the Branch Davidians and God. Did she pick up the telephone, come dinnertime, and summon her lovers? No personal photographs decorated the office. If there was anyone important to her she kept him well hidden. Gaëlle suspected that the Judge was absorbed by exactly what she appeared to be doing – researching the sects. An eclectic collection of books dappled the tall cream shelves and a lavish series of technical volumes on astronomy and primitive myths of the universe and its origins, in several languages, had recently appeared.

  ‘Most ancient peoples chose their own names for the stars,’ explained the Judge, when questioned about the textbooks in Arabic. ‘I may as well acquire them all. Look, here is the night sky in January, with Orion’s belt very visible, follow the line here and you come to Canis Major and this is the brightest star, the greatest in this constellation.’ Her fingers spread gently across the map of glimmering dots. ‘This is Sirius, here in the south. And far over there within Taurus are the sister stars, the Pleiades.’

  Gaëlle gazed at the astronomical maps in baffled wonder. Here was the universe – labelled, gendered, painted, named. Wherein lay the significance of this charted mass of stars? Why did the Judge take them so seriously? Surely the Faith was no more than another batch of suicidal lunatics with someone, somewhere, creaming off the cash? Had the Judge scented something rich and strange in this fabulous emptiness? She puzzled for hours over the books and patterns. The stars glittered with their own immortality, a gift from the loving gods. Mortal lives were inscribed in the heavens, transformed into fragments of eternity by the immortals, who had been forced, through extraordinary circumstances, to turn their eyes earthwards and remember how to love.

  ‘The love between a mortal and an immortal being is always doomed,’ explained the Judge. ‘This accounts for the terrible disappointment of the saints. Sacrifice your life to God and take up meditation in a desert with only lizards and scorpions for company, and your reward will be grief and unending loneliness.’

  The importuned gods never listen when they are besieged with petitions and laments. They withdraw to great distances. Wait, wait in faithfulness and patience or pick your way through the meadows of Illyria and their all-seeing eyes will rest upon you. Here comes the god, in a rush of foul breath and black wings. His fatal embrace will be the last thing you know in your mortal flesh; and then the stone doors of your predetermined fate will roll shut behind you, and the tomb will be for ever sealed. What remains for infatuated mortals in passion’s wake, when the weeping deity retreats to Olympus, the charred ashes of his lover still warm upon the altars built to worship him? A frigid immortality stretched out between the stars.

  That’s Schweigen’s fate, grinned Gaëlle to herself. Cold stars, cold distant stars. She looked down at the mobile. One missed call. Schweigen’s at the office. Numéro masqué. Number withheld.

  Will all passengers for Air France Flight 306 please proceed to Gate 22 where boarding has begun. And here she comes, scudding through the shifting groups of business suits, smart deep-green jacket and black trousers, her glasses slightly dark against the dull electric glare. Here she comes, the Judge and her whirling suitcase, smouldering flashes of aluminium light glinting from her polished chariot wheels. She slammed the case down on the conveyer belt.

  ‘Excusez-moi, Gaëlle. I had André Schweigen on the phone.’

  ‘So did I.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ The Judge wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s more or less your private number now, isn’t it? He shouldn’t ring that number.’

  ‘But he does. Frequently.’

  They assailed the escalator at a gallop. The security men at the top wore white like the angels of the Apocalypse: white shirts, white coats, white gloves. They beckoned to the racing women. Hurry, hurry, hurry.

  ‘Well?’ said the Judge, as they stood breathless before the voracious machine, which guzzled down their boarding passes. ‘What did he want? I expect there will be a message from him waiting for us at the hotel in Lübeck.’

  The Judge paused to read Gaëlle’s black T-shirt, which, across her breasts, declared PEACE AND LOVE, but announced a rather different politics across the back: FUCK THE SYSTEM in fluorescent yellow. Gaëlle handed the return plane tickets over to the Judge and grinned, rueful and defiant.

  ‘I only wear it when I’m travelling.’

  The Judge merely smiled.

  * * *

  Gaëlle and the Judge touched down amidst the long shadows of a late-afternoon sun just before four o’clock, and they had other things to think about. Their alarming descent seemed like stepping back into winter. The trees were dusted with a fragile spring green and the migrating birds, in ragged mass convoys, cried above them in the gusty sky. Barely ten degrees outside and an evil wind, straight from the Baltic, crackled across the runway. They scuttled over the damp tarmac and into the dim cream buildings, which looked like an abandoned wartime installation. The Judge paused to watch her bags being unloaded on to the trailer wondering if her russet cashmere shawl was at the top or the bottom. Gaëlle’s bum-freezer jacket and black elastic miniskirt shrivelled against the gruelling wind.

  ‘I’ve got to buy new clothes. Can we take a taxi? And can I put a new coat on our expenses?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ said the Judge.

  Gaëlle moaned all the way to the baggage reclaim. ‘But I’m here on behalf of the Republic, and the state ought to save me from freezing.’

  ‘You knew where you were going, ma petite chérie,’ said the Judge peacefully. ‘North.’

  The Judge balanced her open briefcase on one knee and settled two files side by side. One was labelled GROSZ and the other, thicker file was marked LAVAL. She tapped her shivering Greffière on the nose with her fountain pen. ‘It’s up to you to dress suitably when you’re sent on a mission.’

  Gaëlle stamped up and down beside the baggage conveyor belt, pulling faces and shuddering with cold. The Judge grinned at her. At least no one could now read FUCK THE SYSTEM scrawled across her back.

  The cobblestones before their hotel glistened in the damp. The Judge decided that the first, urgent thing to do would be to get dressed all over again in a warm pullover and flat shoes, for her tiny heels skidded and stuck in the gaps between the rounded shining stones.

  ‘Sous les pavés, la plage!’ murmured the Ju
dge. Gaëlle stared. ‘Beneath the pavement, the beach! They obviously don’t have riots here, or they’d asphalt over the lot,’ explained the Judge, hauling her suitcase up the steps.

  Gaëlle shivered, gloomy, incredulous, blank-faced, as the Judge paid off the taxi and pocketed the receipt. They stood side by side at the top of the steps, gazing down the Trave at the white boats, the ducks squawking, disconsolate, along the edge; the gabled brick buildings on the opposite shore had sunk, lopsided, into the bank. Everything before them seemed alien, northern; a little city of faded wealth and past medieval glory, nevertheless game and ready to make the effort to be modern, delighted to confront the spring, by planting dozens of indestructible pansies in window boxes.

  ‘Quick! Inside!’ Gaëlle bounced through the swing doors.

  The Lübeck Music Festival was plastered all over the lobby and the wind section of the visiting Berlin Orchestra had already appropriated the third floor. The hotel proclaimed itself full, smug with artistic talent. Reception assumed they had come for the Festival and plied the Judge with brochures and programmes. Safe in her room, she flattened out the duvet, which towered up in the shape of a crown, ate the chocolate left in the middle of her pillow, and sat down to assess her collected information. For here on the cover of the Opera Spielplan was the face of the man she was hunting down, the gaunt, lined cheeks, a mass of white hair, rimless glasses and that glare of passionate intensity she had seen in the Romanesque church of her childhood, five years before. Was he much changed? Perhaps the publicity photographs had been taken years ago? No, the face was remarkable for its stillness, concentration and timelessness. He would look the same when he was eighty. She noted down the times and dates of his appearances. Friedrich Grosz will conduct a concert of his own music in the cathedral. Tickets from the Festival box office. She compared the programme with the information Gaëlle had down-loaded from the Internet. Then she laid out all the silent evidence on her puckered duvet. Here was the coded book they had found in the chalet, their only guide, unfolding the dark philosophy of the Faith, safely stowed in plastic covers. And here was the letter he had sent, agreeing to grant her a rare interview.