Cemetery of the Nameless

by Rick Blechta

  “Tory,” she finally said as we stood shivering on a windy street corner, “I have no idea where we are, and we’re both freezing to death out here.”

  I just shrugged and jammed my hands further down into my pockets. “I don’t really care. Everything has turned to total crap...total crap...total crap...”

  “I think we have to get you indoors as quickly as possible,” she answered. “You’re trembling like a leaf.” Starting off again, she got three steps before realizing that I wasn’t following. “Come on!”

  “No, you go on, Elen. I think I’ll stay here awhile.”

  “Tory, for God’s sake! This area is going to be crawling with police in the next little while.”

  “What difference does it make?” I asked as I sat down on the steps of an old apartment building. The wet snow quickly melted under me, soaking my rear end.

  “You’re just shaken up by what happened,” Elen said with forced cheerfulness. “You’ll feel better as soon as you get back to the apartment and get something warm into you. We can make plans then, too.”

  I let her lead me by the hand and spent the next little while looking up at the big snowflakes as they appeared from the darkness above the street lamps: down, down, always pushing down on me as I walked along. The thought of being buried by the snow seemed immensely comforting. I could picture my carcass being revealed bit by bit as the snow melted in the spring and people would gather round, staring down at me, saying things like,“So that’s what became of her, and here we were worrying that she’d managed to escape!”

  Elen confessed to me much later that she had been pretty desperate as she’d tried to get me back to her apartment. The swirling snow served only to confuse her further. I kept wanting to sit down and wait for the snow to hide me.

  Just when she was about to give up, we stumbled into a wider street than the ones we’d been on. The buildings were bigger, too. By this time we were both trembling from the cold, so she was hurrying us along as best she could. Then Elen caught a glimpse of a streetcar about two blocks distant, and as we got closer, she realized it was the Ringstrasse, the wide boulevard which circles the first district on the spot where the city walls originally stood. She decided to take a chance and almost carried me to the nearest stop.

  As we waited for the next streetcar to pull up, I started singsonging in Welsh about snow piling up on dead bodies.

  “My friend has had a little too much wine, I am afraid,” Elen told the driver in her pidgin German as we climbed aboard.

  “She is not the only one I have seen this evening,” the driver called over his shoulder as Elen got me to a seat at the back, and the streetcar glided off down the tracks.

  Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried to keep the scream tearing away at my insides from bursting out into the Viennese night.

  ROCKY

  It was almost eleven a.m. before Roderick and I got back to our hotel. Schultz had done yeoman’s work getting us sprung from the clutches of the police. I’m certain that if we hadn’t had one of the most influential attorneys in Austria going to bat for us, we would still be languishing in jail. Several hours in a communal cell was quite enough for me, thank you.

  “Oh, man, I feel like forty miles of bad road,” I said, flopping down gratefully on my bed.

  Roderick stood by the window, looking out silently. The new room we’d been given didn’t have the same expansive view of the Stadtpark. Instead it was on the opposite side of the hotel facing a rather bleak cityscape. At least Roderick’s alma mater, the Music Academy, could be seen clearly from where we were.

  Rubbing the bridge of his nose, he turned and said, “I suggest we try to get some sleep before doing anything else.”

  I again had a pang of conscience over the fact that I’d allowed Roderick to get dragged further into Tory’s mess.

  “Roderick...”

  “I know what you’re going to say, and the answer is still no. I’m in this until the bitter end—or at least until the rehearsals for my next tour begin,” he added, smiling. “Besides, Oscar, judging by the amount of trouble you get yourself into every step of the way, you need all the help you can get.”

  “After what Müller told us, you can say that again. I have to admit it’s really knocked the stuffing out of me. You don’t think—”

  “Not for a moment!” he said, cutting me off. “I could see your wife strangling a conductor...”

  “Be serious!”

  “Sorry to make light of the situation, it’s just that we both know Tory could never, ever do something as awful as what we witnessed last night. You know that, and I know that, and we have to keep it foremost in our minds—no matter how bad things look.”

  “Too bad the cops won’t! Müller obviously thinks he’s got a multiple murderer on his hands, and that’s all he’s willing to see. Speaking of which, I better make a few phone calls home. They’re going to be climbing the walls once they hear about this! And Steve needs to know why I never called last night. That’s going to be a fun conversation.”

  Roderick sat down on his bed. “Don’t worry about keeping me awake. At the moment, I think I could sleep through a performance of Götterdämerung. Come to think of it, I can do that even when I’m not tired.”

  I threw his jibe back at him. “That’s just sour grapes because you picked the wrong instrument. You’d feel differently if you were a brass player. ”

  “And thank God for that!” Roderick lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes as I picked up the phone and began dialling. He was gently snoring by the time Tory’s mom answered.

  ***

  My eyes opened to gray light filtering through partially-closed curtains. On the bed to my left, Roderick snored softly. The bedside clock showed the time was slightly past seven p.m. Massaging my stiff neck, I also felt other ominous twinges in my back from having slept sitting up. I must have dozed off after making the last phone call. As reality flooded in, banishing completely any hope of further sleep, I realized a stiff neck was a small price to pay for more hours of sleep than I would otherwise have had.

  Taking care not to wake my friend, I slipped on my shoes and went down to the front desk to ask for messages and that day’s English papers. Several messages were ones I’d already taken care of: Marty, both sets of parents, Marty again, my brother, Marty yet again, but also one from Luigi Terradella, asking me to call at my earliest convenience. I knew that name—but he was no fan of Tory’s. What did he want?

  I grabbed the papers and headed back to the room. Roderick was in the shower, so I stood looking out the window.

  The snow of the previous evening was a fading memory as more seasonable weather returned, but it had been firmly reinforced that spring and warm sunshine were a long, cold winter away. In the past twenty-four hours, a bad situation had become considerably worse, and I realized that the way out of the mess could now be even farther off than spring.

  The bathroom door opened and Roderick, wrapped in one of the white hotel robes, came out, vigorously rubbing his hair with a towel. “Oh, you’re back. Where did you wander off to?”

  “Front desk,” I answered, handing him the two newspapers. “Read ’em and weep.”

  He was silent for a few minutes as he glanced at the lead stories. “Yes, it is pretty grim. Any idea where we go from here?”

  “It’s hard to remain positive, seeing that we’re back at square one and in worse shape than before.”

  “Have you tried emailing Tory?”

  Smacking my hand against the side of my head, I groaned, “No! I’m too stupid to think of something that intelligent.”

  “We were a little preoccupied yesterday, wouldn’t you say?” Roderick said, slapping me on the back. “Come on! Get it out of the box and fired up—or whatever one does with those damned things.”

  “You really are a bit of a Luddite, aren’t you?” I said as I opened up the carrying case for the new laptop.

  “If they’re all as bloody expensive as this one was, t
hen I’m glad I am.”

  “No. I probably paid about twice what I should have because we needed it in a hurry, but it’ll be worth every extra cent if I can get in touch with Tory before something worse happens. The cops could shoot first and ask questions later, the way they’ve been stirred up.”

  Roderick was watching over my shoulder as I fired up the machine. “Maybe we’ll be lucky, and Tory will have already gotten in touch.”

  “We’re not having that kind of luck this week.”

  ***

  An hour later, I turned off my new toy, completely discouraged, knowing that my Internet plea for Tory to get in touch had fallen on deaf cyberspace. I’d also made the mistake of going to a few websites to see what shape the Internet buzz had taken, and that experience had been quite sobering.

  Resting my chin on my palm, I looked over at Roderick, who lay opposite me on his bed, deep into the papers. “Where the hell has she gotten to?” I asked. “And why was she so stupid as to come back to Austria?”

  “I wonder who’s hiding her?”

  “Why the heck isn’t Tory trying to get in touch with me? Surely she must know that I would do anything I could to help her.”

  “That may not enter into it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Getting in touch with you might be the farthest thing from her thoughts at the moment. We both know what a fragile creature she is. After what happened last night, I can easily imagine Tory cowering in a closet somewhere.”

  “I suppose, but exactly what did happen last night? That’s what I’d like to know.”

  TORY

  I tried the two-octave D major scale in slow quarter notes one last time, no vibrato, and actually managed to make it sound passable. Wiping sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand, I felt tired but satisfied at what would have been, a mere few days before, something I could have played far better standing on my head.

  So far, so good. Elen, hearing a lapse in the almost constant flow of notes from my violin, stuck her nose in the bedroom door. “Tory?” she asked uncertainly.

  “Yeah?”

  She came a little farther into the room. “Tory, dear...”

  I frowned. “What?”

  “This can’t go on. Don’t you see that?”

  From the time we’d walked in the door to Elen’s apartment the night before, I’d been desperately trying to hold my increasingly fragile world together. The only way to accomplish that was to flood the blackness in my soul with music. I didn’t dare fall asleep, because every time I started to nod off, he was still there. No, sleep was out of the question. I couldn’t face that. Even playing music badly was better than facing that.

  Several years ago, back in Ohio for a visit, Rocky and I had been invited to dinner at an old friend’s house. She and I had taken up violin at the same time, but thankfully, she’d realized early on that she would never be good enough to make a living playing professionally. Joan was a good teacher, though, patient and thorough, and she’d naturally gravitated to her strength because she loved music as much as I.

  That evening, Joan had asked her five-year-old to “play your song for Auntie Tory so she can hear how good you are.” Now, I like kids as much as the next person and love to encourage them, but the memory of the evening’s “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” remained excruciating—until I tried to play the same piece that awful night in Vienna. I’ve seen seasoned pros try to play backward, left hand doing the bowing and right hand on the fingerboard, and at a party after a few glasses of wine, it can be hilarious. If that’s what you sound like when you play the right way around, especially when a few days earlier you could rip through any piece ever written for the violin, the weight of that awful void is absolutely devastating.

  Still I kept on. What else could I do? I had to shut out reality, keep my mind occupied, or risk having to face my inner demons.

  “Please leave me alone, Elen,” I said. “This is all I have left.”

  ROCKY

  I almost didn’t hear the knock on the door at ten o’clock that evening, the sound was so light and tentative. Looking up from my book, I shook my head, thinking that what I didn’t need at the moment was my imagination kicking up. I went back to trying to concentrate on the paperback in front of me, a present from Roderick, who thought it might help me get my mind off things for a few hours.

  The day had been an exercise in frustration. I’d had to field phone calls to the point where it felt like the receiver was taking root in my ear: parents, Marty, friends, Marty, my lawyer Schultz, Marty, a couple of Stateside journalists I got along with, Marty. I checked the Internet about five times an hour. Tory remained obstinately silent.

  On the news front, things had gone from bad to worse. Nobody seemed to be in Tory’s corner any more. To be fair, the evidence did look pretty damning, and the media played it to the hilt.

  A few hours earlier, Roderick, unable to do anything helpful, had slipped out with his friend Hugo (he of the car trip to Friesach, and the only Austrian journalist to recently write anything sympathetic about Tory). Finally, as daylight waned, I’d told the front desk to hold all but the most critical calls (meaning Tory) and had picked up the literary offering from Roderick, The Terminal Experiment, by some sci-fi writer he thought a lot of named Robert Sawyer. It was turning out to be a darn good read, even though the plot dealt with a wife who had problems being faithful.

  The knock came again, louder, slightly more insistent and not to be ignored as a figment of my imagination. Throwing my book down in disgust, I finally heaved myself off the bed.

  The woman at the door was tall, with long, dark hair and decidedly good looking.

  “Yes?” I said blankly. “What can I do for you?”

  “Mr. Lukesh, Rocky... My name is Elen Davies, and I need to speak with you.”

  Her words sent a chill down my spine. She had a distinctly Welsh accent.

  I closed the door behind me, trusting that the hallway was not bugged. “About what?”

  “Your wife. Tory has been staying with me ever since I brought her back from Italy.”

  “What in God’s name would possess her to come back?” The Davies woman gave me a quick summary of what had been happening to Tory since the morning after she fled Austria. It all sounded like the plot to some mad opera. Even though the details were pretty gruesome and filled me with great concern, what Elen told me gave me hope—and not a little guilt for thinking the worst of Tory, when truth was, I should have believed what my heart had been trying to tell me all along.

  “Does Tory know you’ve come to see me?”

  “She thinks I’m out picking up groceries.” Elen Davies looked down at her watch. “And I’ve been gone too long. With Tory in the state she’s in, I don’t like leaving her alone for even five minutes.”

  “Then why are we standing here talking?”

  My exit from the hotel was not exactly James Bond at his finest. Tory’s friend knew from all the television coverage that the press wouldn’t let me go to the washroom without filing a full report. She had borrowed a friend’s car and parked it in the hotel’s underground lot. Not wanting to take the slightest chance of anything going wrong, I let myself be talked into climbing into the trunk. As the lid closed, I had a fleeting vision of one of those gangster movies where someone steps up and fires a load of machine gun bullets through the lid. The scene closes with the body being dumped into a river in the dead of night. I shivered involuntarily, and it wasn’t from the cold.

  The things you do for love...

  ***

  With a couple of hard bumps, the car pulled to a halt. Feet clicked on stone, and the lid of my prison opened. We were parked in a darkened courtyard, surrounded by a half-dozen expensive cars.

  As I dusted off my pants legs, Elen said, “I only have a key for the front door, so I’ll have to go in that way and come around to let you in from here. You can hide in the shadows if someone comes.”

  “Are you certain we
weren’t followed?”

  “I don’t think so. But how can I be sure? It’s not like I do this for a living!”

  “I’m beginning to feel as if I do,” I observed sourly.

  Cooling my jets in the shadows for a few minutes, I spent the time gazing up at the surrounding windows, wondering which one Tory was behind, and what the hell I’d say when we finally came face-to-face.

  A shaft of light split the darkness, and I whirled, ready to make good use of my feet. It was only Elen, and I crossed over to her, chiding myself for being so jumpy.

  She held the door for me to pass. “We’ll go up by the back stairs anyway. Follow me.”

  The building was quite a structure and obviously not originally designed as an apartment building, unless polished marble and caryatids holding up staircases were the norm for such things in Vienna. The ceilings rose to an abnormal height. Even the narrow back staircase was made of stone.

  “Nice digs,” I said by way of making conversation as we ascended.

  “It used to be a palace. Many of them have been turned into apartment buildings over the years.”

  “What does an apartment in a place like this run per month?”

  “I wouldn’t know. A friend of mine owns the building, and he’s letting me stay here rent free. That was his car you were in, as well. I’m in Vienna writing my doctoral dissertation.”

  “And Tory knew you were here?”

  Elen stopped and turned. “Yes, and to be honest, I bloody well wished she hadn’t!”

  “That makes two of us.”

  On the third floor, Elen stopped before an anonymous-looking door. The muffled sound of frantic violin playing met my ears as Elen jiggled her key in the stubborn lock.

  “Sounds like she’s still at it,” Elen said over her shoulder. “I don’t know how she can can keep going. The last time Tory slept was two days ago.”