by Gerald Elias
Rosenthal was the first to reply. “Based upon Aaron’s standard MO as I understand it, Jacobus, there’s no reason to suspect foul play, hence, no reason why we would want the police involved, or why they should have any interest in being involved. Even if we did have grounds for suspicions, the quartet has been on a month’s vacation after an international tour. Kortovsky could be anywhere. Nevertheless, I grudgingly admit you have a point that the clock is ticking. So, Mr. Jacobus, since it was you who insisted on attending this meeting and you who couldn’t resist getting your two cents in—both against my explicit protest—and you who have a track record—checkered though it may be—of recovering missing violins and their owners, maybe it behooves us to have you be the one to find Mr. Kortovsky. Toot sweet.”
* * *
Jacobus and Yumi waited at the train station for the trip back to the city. It had begun to drizzle again. They sat on a peeling wooden bench under an overhang that had begun to drip over the edge. Trotsky, straining at the end of his leash, tried to catch the drops in his open mouth, all at once. Jacobus cursed himself for having opened his own mouth in Rosenthal’s office. He had continued to argue that it would make more sense to have the police locate Kortovsky, but Rosenthal countered that he could still be on vacation for all they knew. That would hardly spark the interest of the NYPD, which had enough definitely missing persons in its own jurisdiction to worry about. And certainly, the quartet didn’t need any further bad publicity. Jacobus knew Rosenthal was gaining the upper hand, and after spewing forth a few more obscenity-laced “buts,” finally was thrown to the mat when Rosenthal, who knew Jacobus’s pressure points—damn those lawyers—suggested that the successful outcome of his efforts might enable the quartet to settle quietly out of court, thereby making Yumi’s future much less bleak.
Though Jacobus no longer had the energy to pursue an enterprise of this type on his own, he could depend on Nathaniel to use his investigative expertise to supplement his own effort. The conundrum, though, was that if he found Kortovsky, and the other members decided to throw Yumi to the wolves in order to settle the suit, it might mean the end of her tenure with the quartet.
Having reluctantly accepted his new assignment, his first question had been, “How the hell is it possible none of you know where Kortovsky is?” The silence that followed suggested to Jacobus that they were staring at him openmouthed, as if that was the dumbest question imaginable.
“Mr. Jacobus,” Haagen said with soft remnants of her Danish accent, “we all lead our own lives, the four of us, even when we work every day together. And since we’ve been on holiday for so many weeks, well…”
“So how do you schedule rehearsals? How do you know when you have a damn concert?”
“Sheila the manager,” said Lenskaya. “Sheila gives us schedule. We have a question, we call Sheila.”
“Nah … nah … nah … like hell you will,” followed by a telephone handset being slammed into its receiver brought Jacobus back to the present, with his ass on a wet bench.
“Got any change?” Jacobus asked Yumi. “I want to call Nathaniel before the train gets here.”
Yumi, who had been humming “Turkey in the Straw,” memorizing the words Jacobus had taught her on the way out to Long Island, rummaged through her purse. Among her wallet, keys, and the box that had sheltered Paganini’s finger, she gathered a handful of change.
“Do you need me to take you to the phone booth?” she asked, handing him the money.
“Nah, Shakespeare back there gave me the coordinates loud and clear. Don’t worry, just take the mutt.” He handed her Trotsky’s leash and walked to the location of the previous conversation. “I’ll try not to fall on the tracks.”
Jacobus dropped in the coins, felt the buttons on the phone, and punched in the numbers. He asked Nathaniel to call Sheila Rathman and to have a chat with Pravda Lenskaya. For the latter task Jacobus figured that Nathaniel, who had been the cellist in a trio with Jacobus in their younger days, might be able to create a rapport with a kindred spirit and thereby extract some worthwhile information.
“Jake, you forgot to ask me one thing,” said Nathaniel.
“Yeah? What?”
“You forgot to ask, ‘Nathaniel, could you please help me locate Aaron Kortovsky?’”
“Well, you have something better to do?”
“Actually, yes.”
“Cancel it, then.”
He hung up.
SIX
Jacobus wiped up the remaining gravy in his bowl with a piece of white bread. Limited somewhat by blindness but more by indifference, Jacobus was a horrible cook. He enjoyed good food, as he defined “good,” but had no interest in spending the time to prepare it. He preferred complaining that there was never anything to eat in his house. But as bad as his own cooking was compared to Nathaniel’s, the isolation of his own hovel in the Berkshires nevertheless beckoned to him. Though by no means a nature lover, he appreciated the psychological buffer the forest surrounding his home provided from situations like the one in which he was at present enmeshed. Ziggy Gottfried had once said, “How I yearn for the exhilaration of solitude,” or something to that effect, and at that moment Jacobus had almost felt sympathy for that little bastard. In the old days Jacobus stayed at a budget hotel while in the city, preferring inexpensive seclusion to enforced companionship, and though his proclivities hadn’t changed, his ability to get around on his own, especially with the mutt, had, so he had grudgingly accepted Nathaniel’s invitation to spend the night at his spacious, if unkempt, apartment on Ninety-sixth Street.
“Let me get you some more stew before you wear a hole in that bowl,” said Nathaniel. “I spoke to Rathman today, and I have an appointment to see Lenskaya at her house in Flushing tomorrow morning.”
Jacobus heard the clatter as Nathaniel lifted the pot off the stove, followed immediately in Pavlovian predictability by the clicking of Trotsky’s claws on the old parquet floor as he slid into the kitchen from the living room.
“Atta boy,” said Nathaniel. “Here’s some for you too.”
“You waste good food on that mongrel? I’m meeting Haagen at Dedubian’s tomorrow. She’s got some viola business with him. What’s in the stew?”
“Mama’s recipe. Originally it was squirrel, but I use rabbit.”
“Squirrel, huh? Why don’t you just go shoot some in Central Park? She and I are doing lunch, then they have a rehearsal tomorrow afternoon with that egomaniac freak, Power Ramsey. What did Rathman have to say?”
“Mostly what everyone else said. She’s command central for the group. She had notified everyone by phone and e-mail about the rehearsal schedule, so Kortovsky certainly would have known.”
“And when’s the last time Rathman heard from him?”
“Just before the end of their summer concert tour. He told her he was planning on going rock climbing in the Andes—”
“Rock climbing!” interrupted Jacobus. “Jesus Christ! No wonder he’s missing! What kind of musician goes rock climbing?”
“One with strong hands and a death wish maybe,” said Nathaniel.
An image popped into Jacobus’s head of the corpulent virtuoso Isaac Stern hanging by his fingertips on the side of a cliff, his trademark towel still draped over his shoulder. Stern lets go of the precipice with one hand in order to wipe the sweat off his brow with the towel … Jacobus, wondering how such an image would enter his perverse cranium, and why, even more, he would find it humorous, shook his head to bring himself back to reality, not caring to imagine the denouement.
“What’s so funny?” asked Nathaniel.
“You wouldn’t want to know,” said Jacobus.
“Just before the tour,” Nathaniel continued, “he even bought some state-of-the-art high-tech gear at a place called Future Tents near his brownstone on Columbus. I found the salesperson who sold the stuff to him. She remembered him and said she gathered from the questions he asked that he knew what he was doing. She also mentioned how much she appreciated his
‘buns of steel.’”
“Well, that’s dandy, but what if Kortovsky got his ass stuck in a crevasse? How do we find out?”
“I suppose we could call the American embassy down there,” offered Nathaniel, “but we don’t even know which country he’d be in. The Andes are pretty big.”
“And that’s the last Rathman’s heard?”
“Yep.”
“Doesn’t Rathman, as their manager, book their travel?”
“I asked her that. She does for her other clients, but the guys in the New Magini all fly separately and stay in different hotels. She said it was easier all around for them to make their own arrangements and send her the bills for reimbursement. Besides, it was the last tour of the season, and she wouldn’t have made their vacation arrangements in any case.”
There was silence. Jacobus chewed appreciatively on a morsel of rabbit, imagining it was squirrel. Though his sense of taste was compromised by his cold, he relished the savory combination of meat with the boiled pearl onions and turnips in a sauce of red wine, rosemary, and…”
“What’s the secret ingredient?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“In the stew.”
“Oh, yeah. Juniper berries.”
Jacobus gave silent thanks to Nathaniel’s mother from the bottom of his heart.
“Maybe we could call the police in Lima,” said Nathaniel. “That was their last stop, wasn’t it?”
“You speak Spanish?”
“No.”
“So what are you going to do, dial the number and pant?”
“Maybe they speak English.”
“Well, suppose they do. What are you going to ask them, ‘Excuse me, señor officer, you don’t know us but could you please help us find a violinist who might be missing, but then again, might not? He may be up in the mountains somewhere, but he also could be anywhere between the South Pole and the North Pole?’”
“But,” countered Nathaniel, “what if you said, ‘We have reason to believe a world-famous American musician, who has been missing for several weeks, is still in Peru and his last known location is Lima, where he still might be? And if you don’t cooperate with us we’ll be forced to contact the American embassy and register a complaint’?”
Jacobus leaned back in his chair with the sigh of someone who had eaten well and in copious quantity, a sigh of satisfaction tinged with regret that reminded him of how he felt at the conclusion of Brahms’ Third Symphony. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and unbuttoned his pants.
“Well, if you put it like that … You remember that Times story? They mention the name of a cop?”
“Don’t know. You didn’t let me read past the first sentence, but I have the article right here.”
“I thought I told you to throw it in the fire.”
“I must’ve missed,” said Nathaniel.
“What are you, blind?”
“Bad aim.”
“Read me the whole damn thing since you’ve got it.”
He heard Nathaniel flatten out the crumpled newspaper. Bad aim!
“An uneasy quiet reigns over Lima where a body, apparently the victim of torture, was discovered only two blocks from the presidential palace in the Plaza Mayor, reviving nightmares of drug wars and political killings in this strife-weary country. None of the Peruvian drug cartels, which have until now limited their activities to the difficult terrain north and east of the capital, have so far claimed responsibility. Nevertheless, fears of their expansion into the heart of the teeming capital have sent a tide of concern rippling through corridors of local and national government. At the same time, human rights organizations, led by Amnesty International, have stepped up their campaign to hold these very administrators accountable for political reprisal, fearing a return to Peru’s wholesale and at times arbitrary violence of the 1980s, spurred by the war between the Maoist Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, and the oft-times heavy-handed administration of president Alberto Fujimori.
“The killing is being investigated by the chief of police in Lima, Colonel Espartaco Asunción Ochoa Romero. Popularly nicknamed Oro, a contraction of his surnames that also means ‘gold,’ for his glowing record of successfully prosecuted arrests, Col. Ochoa Romero commented that he will approach the investigation as ‘one more homicide in our city of eight million people, where a crime occurs every three minutes. We do our best to solve them all.’”
“So, what do you think?” asked Nathaniel. “I didn’t know Lima had eight million people.”
“Eight million minus one, you mean. What the hell? You find the phone number of this Spartacus Ocho and I’ll make the call. Tomorrow. Now I’ve gotta pass out from gastrointestinal overabundance.”
SEVEN
TUESDAY
The next morning Jacobus and Trotsky saw Nathaniel off at the Ninety-sixth and Lexington subway stop, where he embarked upon his visit with cellist Pravda Lenskaya in Queens. Jacobus grunted his promise to call the Lima police with the number that Nathaniel had obtained after laboring for an hour with international operators, one of whom fervently insisted that, since she could find no listed number, Lima could not possibly have a police force. After Jacobus’s appointment with violist Annika Haagen, he and Nathaniel would reconvene at Carnegie Hall for the quartet’s two o’clock rehearsal, where they would compare notes.
Dragged back along Ninety-sixth Street by Trotsky, they were just a few steps from Nathaniel’s apartment when Jacobus was distracted from his mental machinations by the familiar jingling of a tin cup at ground level and made an arc around the beggar.
“Spare some change for the blind, my friend?” The cup jingled again with a rarely requited optimism.
“Forget it,” said Jacobus. “And I’m not your friend.”
“Ain’t you got no symphathy, fella?” he asked, indignation leaching through slurred speech.
“I ain’t got no symphathy for drunken bums,” mimicked Jacobus.
Jacobus extended his cane to bypass the beggar. The path seemed clear, but suddenly he went sprawling, entangled in the beggar’s outstretched legs, and landed painfully on his hands and knees. Trotsky began to bark, making the sound of a hacksaw biting through plywood comparatively easy on the ears.
A pedestrian hollered, “Hey, mister, control your animal!” A little girl shrieked at a frequency almost too high for even the dog to hear.
“Clumsy asshole,” said the beggar, his voice choked with street living. “Serves you right. That mutt eat better’n I do.”
Jacobus’s palms were scratched by the cement and his hip throbbed.
“Count your luck I’ll never know what your face looks like.”
“What do you mean?” asked the blind beggar. Then in a moment of revelation through his personal fog, he exclaimed, “So you’re blind too, huh? Well, you deserve it!” he said, and spat.
Jacobus felt for his cane, pushed himself awkwardly to his feet, and wiped off his pants. He homed in on Trotsky’s bark and managed to grasp the leash close to his collar before the dog ran off. Then, with great deliberation, with the tip of his cane he probed the space in front of him until found the seated beggar’s chest and leaned into it, pinning the beggar hard against the side of the building, undecided whether to push even harder.
“Hey!” screamed the blind beggar. “Are you crazy?”
“Rot in hell,” Jacobus said and released the pressure.
He entered Nathaniel’s apartment and slammed the door behind him, trembling with rage. Part of it was the humiliation of being seen, helpless, on his hands and knees. The other part, he knew, though he tried to deny it, was that when he had the end of his cane pressed against the heart of the blind beggar he was attacking himself. No matter what he had accomplished, no matter what he had done to overcome his affliction, in everyone’s eyes he was the blind beggar. If the cane had been a spear, he would have killed him. Jacobus poured himself a cup of lukewarm coffee from the coffeemaker, spilling half of it on the kitchen counter, considered the
hour of the day, and added a thumb of Jack Daniel’s. Two thumbs. Fuck the cop in Lima. Fuck Kortovsky. He decided instead to try to get WQXR on the radio. Maybe some music would make his day endurable. He knew the general vicinity of Nathaniel’s kitchen radio and fumbled around the counter for the correct appliance. Damn! So many fucking Nathaniel gizmos. Jacobus didn’t know whether he was turning on the radio or the toaster oven.
After several abortive attempts with knobs and dials, he slammed whatever appliance it was that had not cooperated and gave up.
“Dammit,” he said. “Somebody’s trying to tell me something.”
Downing his coffee, he dialed the memorized fourteen-digit phone number Nathaniel had unearthed. A recorded voice told him he was an idiot for having dialed the 0 after the country code. He roundly cursed the voice—that it was recorded was neither here nor there—before strangling the receiver. He poured himself another coffee and Jack Daniel’s, but without the coffee, and tried again, this time without the 0. After the eleventh ring he was about to hang up when he heard several clicks and then a voice.
“Oro.”
“You speak English?”
“Yes, sir. How can I help you?”
“You the police?”
“Once again you are correct in your assumption, sir.”
“I’m looking for a missing person.”
“No doubt.”
“How’s that?”
“If he wasn’t missing, surely you would not be looking for him.”
“Are you from New York City, by any chance?” asked Jacobus.
“I have not yet had the pleasure of visiting that legendary metropolis. Why do you ask?”
“Because that’s where the biggest wiseasses are from.”
“If that is true, señor,” said Ochoa Romero, “then you must hold the key to that fair city. So perhaps you will be kind enough to tell me your name and your concerns.”
“The name is Jacobus, but I’m not as sure about the concerns.” Jacobus spent the next several minutes explaining the situation. That he wasn’t even certain Kortovsky was actually missing made it difficult for him to present a convincing case for the officer to do anything at all.