by Rick Blechta
But I knew which way I was leaning.
“...And then there’s Victoria Morgan. Since she burst upon the scene like a dazzling meteor a few years back, some of us have been waiting for her to either blow up or fizzle out. The way she apparently conducts her life, it will have to be one or the other.”
—Patricia Glover, String Player magazine
Chapter 5
ROCKY
“All passengers will please fasten their seatbelts and put their seat backs in the upright position in preparation for our landing in Vienna. We should be arriving at our scheduled time of 9:25 a.m.”
Yeah, sure. Everyone else might have been landing on schedule, but I shouldn’t have even been on this stupid flight. I let out a long sigh, attracting the annoyed glance of the businessman who’d sat silently next to me since the connecting flight from Frankfurt.
Unless she’d turned up while I was en route, Tory had been missing now for over a day and a half. Marty and I had tried to get the Viennese police to take more of an interest in the matter, but since Tory had announced to a packed concert hall that she was leaving and was (at least outwardly) an adult, the cops didn’t seem to think they needed to get involved. It wasn’t until Roderick called the next morning (for him—for me it was two a.m.) that I decided something had to be done.
“Oscar, old man,” his voice had boomed over the phone, jarring me out of the uneasy doze I’d slipped into. “Sorry to bother you at this ungodly hour, but I was wondering if you’d heard what’s happened.”
By tacit agreement, we always called each other by our proper names, ever since someone made a comment that the nicknames Tory used for us (Rocky and Roddy) “sounded like a dog and pony show.”
“No, no, it’s okay, Roderick,” I said, running my left hand through my hair, my automatic response to agitation. “I probably knew what Tory had done before the hall cleared.”
Concern filled his voice. “Have you spoken to her, then?”
“No, I haven’t. Can you please tell me what the hell is going on?”
“I wish I could,” he sighed. “Instead you’ll only get what I told that beastly little man who manages Tory. He was ringing me at the hotel as I walked into my room after the concert. Tory has been very strung up since the tour began. She has not been playing with her usual fire nor concentration, and consequently, I’m afraid a few of our performances were pretty lacklustre. Then some reviewer took it upon himself to take her to task over it. His attacks were simply vicious, way out of proportion, and there was a very bad scene with some reporters at the Vienna airport over it.”
“But Tory wouldn’t run away over something like that. She’s had bad reviews before. Not many, mind you...”
“I wouldn’t have thought so, either. As a matter of fact, I half expected her to whip out her violin on the spot, play something impossibly difficult incredibly well and wind up charming everyone, but she stood there and took everything that was dumped on her. The fact remains, Oscar, that something has been bothering Tory ever since we got over here. The night before she disappeared, her concert with the Vienna Phil was more than a little strange. Tory played the most bizarre cadenza I’ve ever heard in the Beethoven Concerto, and she was having a pretty vicious onstage tug-of-war with Ebler. After the concert, she fed me a very strange story when I pressed her about it.”
“But what happened at the concert last night?”
“We were in the middle of the Adagio movement of the Beethoven “Sonata, Opus 96”, when I noticed that Tory was weeping. Then she just stopped playing, announced to the audience that she could not continue and left the stage. I was too stunned to move for several seconds. By the time I made it backstage and past the frantic promoter, Tory was gone. She had just walked right out the stage door.” Roderick paused for a moment. “I found out afterward that someone had a limousine waiting outside.”
My stomach immediately knotted up. “What?”
“Apparently, she barely paused to put her violin away. Didn’t even take her overcoat. She just walked out the door, got into the limousine and off it drove.” Roderick stopped, and I spent the time looking out the apartment window.“There were also some notes and a bottle of champagne which she said was from some fan. Now I’m not so sure.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice sounded infinitely sad. “I think you’d better get over here right away.”
***
Although it seemed to take days because of my anxiety about Tory, I found myself getting off a plane in the capital of Austria an astonishingly brief twelve hours later. My state of mind wasn’t helped by the fact that I really dislike flying. Actually, it’s not flying; it’s airports.
Airports have to be about the most disgusting, unwelcoming, cold places ever devised by the mind of man. They all look the same. They all smell the same. They all are the same. Airports are civilization at its most stale, its most banal. I’ve never understood why Tory is always so eager to jump on the next plane to anywhere.
So there I stood waiting for my luggage and feeling thoroughly miserable. I’d missed a night’s sleep, I was worried sick about my wife, and I just flat out didn’t want to be doing this.
Fortunately, Roderick was waiting for me at the arrivals area, the lone welcoming face in a sea of strangers. It wasn’t hard to spot his scarecrow-like form in the crush of people. You couldn’t have picked a more different person for Tory to team up with. Where she was short, he was tall. She was flamboyant and happy to be the centre of attention; he was quiet and unassuming, preferring to stay in the background. She was all curves; he was all angles. With his height and long arms and legs, Roderick reminded me strongly of Ichabod Crane.
“Oscar, old man, how was your trip?” he asked, sticking out his hand.
“Fine,” I lied. “Thanks for meeting me. Any news?” I asked as we began heading for the exit.
His face fell. “From Tory? No. But I’ve located the security guard who was on duty at the stage door when Tory cut out.”
“Great! What’d he tell you?”
“Nothing yet. I just have a name and a telephone number.”
“So what’s the drill?” I asked.
“We’ll try to arrange a meeting with him later today.”
By that time, we’d arrived at the taxi stand. A cab pulled forward and we got in, putting my overnight bag between us. Not knowing how long I’d be on the road, I’d thought it most expedient to pack light.
On the way into town, Roderick brought me up to speed on everything he knew.
“There was no warning whatsoever. Tory had been increasingly agitated for two days, really snappish. Before the concert, she disappeared from the hotel for several hours, and when we got to the concert hall, she paced the dressing room like a caged tigress. Onstage, everything began normally. She got a hell of an ovation when we came out, probably due to her performance the previous evening. Anyway, Tory settled right in, but her playing had a frenetic quality, as if she were trying to get the concert over in a hurry. I made signals to her that her tempi were almost on the verge of parody in the Franck sonata which closed the first half, but she didn’t seem to notice or simply chose to ignore me. The audience loved it though, and gave us another huge ovation and four curtain calls when we finished.
“Backstage during the interval, she locked herself in the dressing room and wouldn’t talk to me. I thought at the time that she was afraid I’d be angry at the way she’d played. I know now there was a different reason.”
“She was screwing up her courage to walk out in the middle of the concert,” I offered, and Roderick nodded. “That’s what really surprised me when the reporters started calling. Tory would have to have an incredibly good reason to do something like that. I once saw her do a performance where she left the stage between the second and third movements of the Brahms concerto, threw up into a garbage can and calmly went out to finish the piece.”
We sat silently for a moment with the question, “Why” hanging almost visibly in t
he air between us.
***
My first view of the most famous musical city in the world revealed something not as awe-inspiring as I had imagined. The outskirts looked pretty much the same as any other city I’ve seen.
It wasn’t until we got close to the old part of the city that things began to look up—literally. It seems like these days, every big city worth its salt has to have some sort of tall or massive structure, sometimes a building or some sort of space-needle tower-like thing. They had them back in the old days, too, only then they were called churches. Vienna has one that is simply breathtaking, with an ornate gothic spire that reaches halfway to heaven, impressive even in our age. When it was first constructed, it must have been awesome indeed.
“That’s the Stephansdom,” Roderick said when he saw the direction I was staring. “It’s the heart of the old city.”
“I know. I’m not that much of a hayseed.”
“I asked the driver to take us on the more scenic route. That place passing on the left is the Naschmarkt. Naschen means ‘nibble’, and that’s what you can do there to your heart’s content. We’ll try to visit it while you’re here. It’s the kind of place you’d like.”
“Somehow I don’t think we’ll have too much time for the tourist thing.”
Roderick had kept Tory’s room at the Hotel Intercontinental, since he had no idea whether she would be showing up again—or what to do with her stuff if she didn’t.
The cabby was thrilled to take my Canadian dollars, probably because he could get away with charging me double. I didn’t care.
***
Tory’s room in the modern style hotel looked about the way I would have expected: total chaos, with clothes and cosmetics all over the place. It never ceases to amaze me how she can personalize a place in so short a time. Roderick had asked the hotel not to clean, in case there might be clues lying around that would give us a hint about what had happened. We went through everything carefully, and as far as we could tell, Tory had left with only her fiddle and the gown she’d been wearing when she’d gotten into the limo and roared off into the night.
Knowing the circumstances of her departure, the one thing Tory had left behind that did surprise me was her laptop. When my darling wife had discovered computers, she had decided she couldn’t live without one. While I still clanked around on them, she could make the damn things dance. Since our marital blowup in Britain, I believed hers had become the crutch that helped sublimate certain “urges” while she was on the road. Now, instead of going out partying after a concert, you’d more likely find her pounding out emails to various friends and relatives around the world. She answered a good deal of her own fan mail, too—as long as it came in over the internet. Even without clothes on, Tory wouldn’t feel naked, unless she didn’t have her precious laptop around. Well, that and her fiddle, old what’s-his-name.
“What do you think about this still being here?” I asked Roderick, indicating the computer laying in the middle of the bed.
“You mean you think she might have left it on purpose?”
“Can’t hurt to look.”
The obvious place to look was Tory’s “electronic diary”, and I opened it with a great deal of trepidation, not knowing if there would be something that would signal the end of our marriage. Her last three entries gave us a good idea of her thoughts leading up to her decision to walk out, possibly ending her career. Unfortunately, what it said left me with a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Why has this happened to me? It's certainly the chance of a lifetime, but what am I giving up to get it? Something tells me I should be very careful, but can I resist the siren song calling me? The music has already wound itself so strongly around my heart, and I’ve only seen a tiny portion of it!
He's making such a stupidly unreasonable demand!! Doesn't he understand what he's asking? What to do. WHAT TO DO?! I wish I could talk to someone about it, but I gave my word and he seems to know every move I make. Damn! Maybe Roddy...
I’m no closer to a decision and I have to leave for the concert in half an hour! If I follow my head, I stay and finish the tour. If I follow my heart, then I will have to travel a completely different path. Which is better in the long run? Aye, there’s the rub! If I call his bluff and ignore the ultimatum, what then? Will I lose this chance forever? Something tells me yes. I know where duty lies. People paid good money to hear me play. If I was going to cancel, I should have done it hours ago. C'est la vie! It's time I got dressed. Maybe next lifetime. SIGH...
Roderick cautiously said, “I know what she wrote could be taken several ways—”
“No. You don’t need to look for excuses,” I interrupted. Maybe it was better to know the truth—but at that moment it didn’t feel very good. “It certainly looks like she ran off to be with some guy, and it’s also obvious that she’s been in touch with someone we know nothing about. And what’s this music she’s referring to?”
“That comment must refer to what she told me the other night,” Roderick offered.
I lay back on the bed. “Care to fill me in?”
“The promise I made to Tory is past due now, I guess,” Roderick said and proceeded to tell me a long and convoluted story that was pretty damn bizarre.
I was shaking my head when he’d finished. “A missing Beethoven concerto? Preposterous! And you’re saying that Tory believed it?”
“When I told her I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I’d heard in years, did she ever get angry! Normally, I would have expected Tory to be a little less gullible, but with all that she’d been through the past few days, it’s as if she’d latched onto the idea as if it were a lifeline. She seemed absolutely convinced.”
“You heard the music. Could it have been Beethoven?”
Roderick shrugged. “Who knows? It certainly sounded like something he might have written, but it was only a snippet. That’s like trying to identify a Rembrandt looking at only a square inch of a painting. She showed me the sheets she’d been sent, and the score certainly looked like Beethoven’s hand. It could be the real thing, but I don’t need to add that anything can be forged these days. Besides, Beethoven’s life has been investigated more thoroughly than any composer in the world. If something like this existed, someone would have got a whiff of it before this.”
“This could explain why Tory was so keyed up at the performance she walked out on. I’ll bet she hadn’t decided whether or not she was going to run off when she left this room. It was a last-minute decision, like too many things Tory does.”
“She gave me absolutely no indication the night before that she’d been discussing meeting this mystery man.”
We both said nothing for several minutes, and it was pretty obvious what we both were thinking. My wife was not above inviting someone into her bed—or hopping into their limo—if the fancy took her. She’d done it before, a few times that I knew about and probably more that I didn’t. I’d been aware Tory could be that way when I married her, but I’d married her anyway, eyes fully open and thinking I could handle it. I was hoping time and some nudging from me would change her. I thought that it had, but it certainly seemed I’d been wrong. Wherever Tory was now, it was pretty clear that she wasn’t alone. The realization felt like a good kick in the gut.
“What are you going to do now?” Roderick asked neutrally.
“There’s not a hell of a lot I can do until we hear from Tory! I might as well wait in Vienna rather than return to Montreal. If she has run off with another man... God! I had no idea something was going on. I feel like such a fool! I told her what would happen if she did this again, and now she’s done it. And this damned concerto she was babbling about. How does that fit in?”
Across the room, Roderick had his rear end propped against a low dresser, arms folded. “The only way we’re going to find that out is when the lady herself decides to tell us.”
I nodded in agreement. We didn’t know how wrong we were.
“As a child,
Tory was interested in only two things: playing violin and riding horses. On several occasions she even tried doing both at once! Twenty years later, there’s still a lot of that young child in her.”
—Siôn Morgan, Tory’s father, from an interview in People magazine
Chapter 6
TORY
The night slipped past the tinted windows of the limousine, and it felt as if I were riding down a long tunnel, with my normal life disappearing farther and farther behind into the darkness. With each passing mile, my nervousness increased.
If I’d made the right decision, ending my tour and turning my back on all those commitments wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference in the long run. But if I’d been had, if my emotions had led me astray over what my brain told me was a major long shot, then, oh mama, I might as well have taken everything I’d worked so hard to accomplish, dumped it into a toilet and pulled the handle.
Looking at the situation logically would lead most people to believe that I had to be certifiably nuts. Basically, I’d allowed myself to be hijacked. I’d taken it on faith that we were bound for this von Heislinger’s home to look at a long lost piece of music. But what if we weren’t? They could be driving me anywhere. Nobody knew where I was going when I’d left the theatre. Stupid of me not to have realized that sooner. I definitely had to work on this thinkingthings-through bit.
But on the other hand, I’d done things almost this hare-brained before and come out smelling like a rose, so why not trust my luck again? Still, it didn’t feel good running out on the promoters, all those people sitting in the Musikverein back in Vienna, and most of all, Roddy. And Rocky. He’d go ballistic when he found out about this.
But the opportunity to plumb the depths of an unknown violin masterwork, to be the first person to decipher and understand the musical workings of one of the greatest of all composers was something almost beyond imagining. My hands got sweaty just thinking about the magnitude of what this von Heislinger character had offered me.