The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge

by Patricia Duncker

  I remain, your devoted and obedient servant,

  Friedrich Grosz

  Devoted servant? The significance of this archaic formula was beyond the Judge’s English; she was forced to look it up in her dictionary and emerged no wiser or enlightened. Connection? Relationship? They didn’t have one. But he was the principal subject of her investigation. She strode round her living room, picking up stray newspapers. Now she crackled with guilt and irritation at her colossal error – I let myself be taken by surprise, indeed almost incapacitated – by an emotional evening at the opera. And this man pounced upon her weakness. Her tears remained a shameful secret. Neither Schweigen nor Gaëlle must ever know. A faint prickle of unease tingled in her fingers as she examined the letter and its envelope. The German stamp, his address in the Effengrube, the Lübeck postmark, his firm, clear hand and the careful, precise folds. She was sought out, cornered. Yet the register of the letter was conciliatory, beseeching. He addressed her as a supplicant, not a master. The power to withhold and deny remained hers, and hers alone. But did it? The letter lay there, flaccid and inert, like a failed magic trick.

  Standing alone, drinking a bowl of black coffee in her tidy, silent kitchen, before leaving for work in the brief cool of early day, the Judge’s unease erupted and overflowed. She took up the letter and read it once more. In her hands she held a declaration of love from a perfect stranger. She possessed only the power he allowed her to have; he was tracking her down. How could this be sincere? She stood seething with anxiety and uncertainty, both unwelcome sensations, and alien to the Judge. This untoward assault upon her privacy and self-containment unsettled and disturbed her equilibrium, as much as Wagner’s music had done, many months before. Yet the Composer’s directness disarmed her utterly. She could find no words to reply.

  * * *

  She spent the early evenings of the following week fending off Schweigen’s calls and studying the coded guide. Her linguistic experts had produced no key to the blocked signs; the text remained secret and opaque. She concentrated on tiny fragments of the Book that were written in German and Greek; then she recognised the symbol for the sun – Helios. Many sects sought out myths as supporting structures for their invented faiths, and the Judge possessed an extensive research library of gods and legends. Sometimes, buried in the advertising, she found entire chunks of bogus science copied directly from the sources in her office. She contemplated prosecutions for plagiarism rather than mendacious publicity, but confined herself to a few dry comments alongside the parallel passages in her report to the Parquet. Lord, what fools these mortals be. The Judge reached for her illustrated list of sun gods, whose cults were frequently revitalised.

  The sun usually figured as the principal and most reliable source of divinity in resurrection mythologies. The Judge took a detached view of the phenomenon; that great disc of exploding hydrogen and helium meant no more to her than any other star; our sun, a single dying star, the force that powers all things and draws all life towards its flaming core. The most popular version of the sun god, who reappeared in her files, year after year, was Ra, also known as Re-Horakhty. The Egyptian deity crossed the sky by day in a boat rather than a chariot, only to be swallowed up by the goddess Nut, and emerge reborn as a scarab beetle on the following morning. His symbol, prominent on the cover of her dictionary of sun gods, represented a winged disc, but he reappeared on the frontispiece in the shape of a man with a falcon’s head. Ra. The sun god Ra. She tapped the curved beak of the god with her forefinger. Good evening, Great God Ra, explain your evident connection to the Faith. The ancient Egyptians appeared crucial in some respects. She had marked a carefully drawn tablet covered in hieroglyphs with the actual dimensions noted beneath, which was apparently reproduced in its entirety. The blocked code below must be some kind of commentary, because the hieroglyphs reappeared at intervals throughout the text. Here was a sequence of figures close to the symbol of the sun; this is a saros, the measurement that describes the repeating cycles of the solar eclipse. Eighteen years, eleven days and eight hours, thus each part of the globe has a chance to see a total eclipse, maybe every thousand years or so. Ra’s golden eye remained, fixed and staring; his black pupil dilated, vast. And here is a fragment of poetry:

  Ja! Ich weiß woher Ich stamme!

  Ungesättigt gleich der Flamme

  Yes! I know where I began!

  Insatiable as flame

  The phrase sounded eerily familiar. This is part of something else, something longer. I read this when I was studying philosophy. But who wrote these words? She could not identify the source. She copied out the lines and the two linked coordinates immediately following, then looked up the figures, which were clearly measurements.

  Altarf (Mag 3.5) RA 8h 16m 38s Dec 09º 10´ 43´´

  Sirius (Mag 1.47)RA 6h 45m 15s Dec 16º 43´ 07´´

  Cancer and Canis Major – the faintest of the constellations and the one containing the brightest star visible in the sky. In what ways are these opposing things significant? How are they linked? The stars in the constellation of Cancer were actually dimmer than one of the deep-sky star clusters, known as the beehive cluster or as M44, an open cluster of seventy-five stars at the centre of the constellation. We use the stars to calculate distance and time. The stars we see, or think we see, may no longer exist, for the light that brings them to us travels across billions of years. Therefore we are looking directly into the past.

  The Judge spread out her astral charts and stood up, the better to gaze at the heavens, now flattened beneath her fingertips. We have only begun to map this endless void, this image of eternity itself, uncharted matter that spans hundreds and billions of light years. It is beyond all our imagining. The Judge inspected the little pool of swirling bugs circulating in the beam of her desk lamp. Her mind balked before infinity, even as she contemplated the Great Wall of Galaxies, some five hundred million light years long, two hundred million light years wide, fifteen million light years deep. She floated outwards between these unimaginable masses of helium, hydrogen gas, and dust spinning out into the massy void; if matter accounts for a mere ten per cent of space then for the most part the universe is simply empty, great chasms of non-being, where nothing is. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness upon the face of the deep. Nothing will come of nothing. Speak. She issued her command out loud, her voice hollow in the warm air.

  How is Cancer linked to Canis Major within the philosophy of the Faith? The Romans called the time when Sirius rose before the sun the ‘Dog Days’, because it was the hottest time of year. She looked up Sirius in the Egyptian calendar. Sirius was Sothus, the god who caused the Nile to flood. Sirius is one of the stars closest to the sun. The sun is supposedly located in Cancer during the summer solstice. The Judge scrabbled through Schweigen’s report on the first departure, the mass suicide from the mountaintop in Switzerland. Yes, the 21st of June 1994, Midsummer’s Night. All right, but the solstice is sacred to dozens of sects, including the Druids, who are now immensely respectable. She looked up the latest charts. The sun in fact reaches the summer solstice in Gemini. And if all these numbers are just lists of stars, why are they there? It doesn’t get me any further if I can’t crack the code.

  But the Judge had noticed something strange and interesting, which she stored away for future reflection. The Guide had been compiled at different times, before being beautifully rebound by Herr Bardewig’s father. Some of the oldest designations for the constellations appeared to be based on Ptolemy’s Almagest and the star magnitude system devised by Hipparchus in the second century. But there were more recent twentieth-century designations. And even one or two handwritten annotations containing information that could only have come from the Cassini mission, still under way, and due to reach Saturn’s system in 2004. And here was some data clearly credited to the Hubble Space Telescope. Followers of the Faith were still studying the stars and noting all the latest information. But why? Suddenly she found a passage in English, the famili
ar letters blossomed amidst the code. Who art thou? That we may give an answer to them that sent us. What sayest thou of thyself? He said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness. ‘St John.’ The Judge breathed his name softly again and again, ‘St John.’

  And so the Judge gave up on heavenly bodies, and turned her attention to earthly things: bank accounts. For at last Schweigen had procured copies of the Composer’s most recent bank statements and the most recent set of audited accounts in the name of his orchestra. This material, not all of it legally acquired, and therefore inadmissible in court, had just arrived in two huge folders. She skimmed Friedrich Grosz’s bank statements, curious, surprised. He was a very rich man. No doubt he had filed those orchids under general expenses. She calculated huge regular payments to the orchestra, which was run as a non-profit-making artistic enterprise and performed regularly at benefits for excellent causes: typhoons in Bengal, the Iranian earthquake, the widows of a mining disaster in China. She paused over the orchestra’s name – An die Freude, that means joy – the orchestra of joy. There was no management company, but a benevolent association, chaired by Grosz himself. An die Freude Freunde – the friends of joy. The committee met twice a year to receive the forthcoming programmes, travel plans, lists of guest artists and to check the budget. The same names appeared, again and again. The association Secretary played in the orchestra – the first violin. The Treasurer performed as one of their regular bass-baritones, a handsome black man with distinguished features who also made popular commercial CDs, featuring gospel songs (Swing Low Sweet Chariot), calypsos (Jamaica Farewell), and cover versions of Frank Sinatra’s greatest hits (I Did It My Way). The profits from all these productions sank straight back into the orchestra’s accounts.

  If in doubt follow the trail left by hard cash. Follow the money moving silently across frontiers and through unknown cities, seek out the dark accounts headed by acronyms and no human names. The Judge steadied her spectacles, poured herself another glass of still, cold water and set about her long slow task of charting the transfer of money. And it was all there: there before her on the green screen and in the long printouts with serrated edges provided by Interpol. Here are the large sums marked as private donations, bequests exempt from all tax obligations or upon which the orchestra’s administration recuperated the tax. These accounts have been approved and cleared. She set out the list of names in both departures and studied Gaëlle’s careful double columns: donations made in sterling, dollars, Deutschmarks, Swiss francs. Gaëlle had left each amount in the original currency but translated the sums into French francs and euros so that the Judge could distinguish between contributions that were regular payments and others that appeared as special gifts.

  A small flurry of capital sums, often substantial, leaped out at her; like faint but visible galaxies of stars – 1992, 1993, 1994, 1997, 1998, 1999. She began cross-referencing the amounts passed through the orchestra’s audited accounts with the donations and bequests left behind by the suicide dead – the only known members of the Faith. And the truth shone brightly back from the scroll of figures. The anonymous cash donations, like stolen antiques, began to acquire identities, histories and a specific provenance. This was where some at least of the vanished sums of money had come to rest. The orchestra was the hidden host, the financial façade for the Faith; this was their siège social, their legal entity. And at the core of this structure stood the Composer, solid and fixed as the sun in the Ptolemaic universe.

  So this is how the whole thing is financed. Look where the money goes. And here a strange surprise awaited her. This is a secret charity; these acts of benevolence and goodness take place in silence and darkness. The money is passed onwards through music to heal the wounds of this world. The Judge had never encountered a sect that was financially above reproach. Someone, somewhere, must be lining his pockets. And so she continued, into the cooler small hours of the early morning, her computer illuminated, checking websites, charities, hospitals, desert clinics, schools, scholarships, foundations dedicated to scientific research, a lifeboat in Norway, helicopter-rescue services, housing, farming, rural development projects. She found a network of names, logical as a labyrinth, to which she now clasped the key. By three in the morning she had garnered one hundred and twenty names, the quick and the dead, a harvest of the educated, privileged elite, powerful, well-placed women and men, all of whom were linked to a curious array of good causes. But the colossal sums that had vanished in the aftermath of the New Year’s Eve suicides did not appear and could not be found. She stood up cautiously, closed her eyes and stretched her back; her acumen and energy had drained away, as if the Faith, intent on drawing her into the net, had leeched all her strength. It would soon be day.

  She drove home through the glimmering streets, watching the dawn people heading for work. The biblical quotations spattered throughout the Guide now crystallised into a strange maze of significance, a latticework of goodness, accessible to rational intelligence. Take heed that you do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father, which is in heaven. Members of the Faith operated like the Masons, their creed a secret temple, dedicated to righteousness and salvation. The Judge stamped on her accelerator and all her plastic water bottles, stowed in the pockets of her car doors, shivered and rattled. I don’t believe this, it doesn’t add up: a secret society of suicides dedicated to Justice, Truth and Mercy? Something else is here before me, something I can’t see. And I can’t see it because I am too tired to think. If they want to save this world why are they so anxious to abandon us? What other course are they plotting in the stars? But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth. I am God’s eye. I wish to see both the left hand and the right.

  11

  FLAMME BIN ICH SICHERLICH

  She arrived back in the office at eleven-thirty on the following day wearing a straight shift of cream silk, dark glasses with prescription lenses and a broad-brimmed black straw hat. The effect was aggressive, glamorous and eccentric. Her battered briefcase landed amidst the abandoned chaos of the orchestra’s accounts with a violent smack.

  ‘Gaëlle,’ she snapped in the tone that indicated she had no time for moods or sulks, ‘get André Schweigen on the phone for me. I need his linguistic expertise in German to make certain that I understand the tax forms and the audited accounts. We need to speak to someone high up in the Berlin tax office. And we must summon up the Composer once again.’

  Gaëlle, on her way to the water cooler in the corridor, bearing a large jug of clinking ice cubes, flung open the door. Her voice, suave and ironic, never missed a beat.

  ‘Summon the Composer? You don’t need to. He’s already here. I’ll leave you to it, shall I?’

  And she marched out, rattling her chains, past Friedrich Grosz, who stood framed in the doorway, gigantic, sunburnt, startled to find himself at once expected and announced, when he had clearly been uncertain of his welcome. He bowed and addressed her in French, opening with a sequence of carefully rehearsed sentences.

  ‘Madame Carpentier? I trust I am not disturbing you? I wondered if you would do me the honour of having lunch with me?’

  For once the Judge was grateful that she had not yet settled into her working day and was still wearing dark glasses indoors. There was a terrible pause, and both parties hesitated, baffled, embarrassed. The whirling fan above them hummed and clicked. The Judge found herself desperate to escape from the incriminating accounts spattered across her desk and Gaëlle’s malicious satisfaction at her discomfiture. She removed her hat and laid it over his name, printed and signed with his own hand, the name that leaped from a dozen documents visible before her.

  ‘Thank you for the orchids, Monsieur Grosz, and yes, I should be delighted to have lunch with you.’

  She began to advance upon him so that he was forced to retreat from her office. At the last minute she snatched up her briefcase again. She felt the Book of the Faith glowing inside, li
ke a radioactive brick.

  ‘Did you have anywhere particular in mind?’ she asked sweetly.

  It turned out that he did.

  * * *

  The Composer stowed the briefcase carefully away in the boot of his Mercedes and held the door open: sink down, sink down inside. Two low black leather seats resembled rocket-powered devices for ejecting astronauts if blast-off went wrong, and the folding sunroof had apparently vanished into the carcass of the beast. His white hair swirled about the dark glasses as he drove. She noticed that his cream shirt matched her dress, but that someone had ironed the sleeves into crisper, more elegant folds. She sensed the wind plucking at her tortoiseshell comb and leaned back, clutching her loosening black hair. She had not been driven about in a sports car for well over twenty years. The entire expedition dissolved into an irresponsible and adolescent prank, as if they were skiving off school. The Composer leaned over when they paused at the lights.

  ‘Is the wind too strong? Does it disturb you? Shall I shut the sun-roof?’

  She heard the gentle inflection in his voice; she could not be mistaken. For one small moment her stomach shrank in bewildered alarm. Lead us not into temptation, but she pushed the sensation aside. This man, with his temper and his fame, his name that means nothing to me, remains my subject, the focal point of my investigation, the creature around whom I extend my web. He must never perceive my intentions. I can withdraw, masked and cloaked, at any time. And yet still she reached, surreptitious, furtive, into her shoulder bag and switched off her mobile phone, thus closing off the safety of the abandoned office behind her. Why had she changed her mind? How did she justify the risk? The thought was precise: this man deserved, at the very least, her full attention.