by Rick Blechta
I noticed then that the piped-in music of that awful garden had changed. Now the muscular, sensuous rhythms of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring seemed to be pounding directly into my ears. The change in the repertoire only seemed to inflame the schizoid baron. He rearranged me like a rag doll on the bench so that my head was at the bottom of the Y and my legs in between the crotch. Pulling two silk handkerchiefs from his jacket pocket, he yanked my arms painfully down and tied my wrists to rings I hadn’t noticed which were embedded on either side of the base. “This is so you do not roll off again and hurt yourself,” he told me with a smile. “Of course, some women enjoy being restrained. Are you one of them?” Then he started to slowly peel off that cursed gown I’d been dumb enough to wear. Every time his hands brushed my skin, I wanted to scream. I couldn’t even cringe. I had to lie there and let him strip me naked. After he finished, he lifted my legs onto the short arms of the Y. I couldn’t prevent them from flopping apart, exposing everything. He stared down at me, his eyes slowly travelling up my body until they reached my face.
“You are really quite everything I hoped for, your hair cascading down, your milky skin, the way your breasts rise and fall as you breathe, the beautiful golden red of your sex. Exquisite!”
Then the goddamned bastard started removing his evening clothes, carefully folding each garment with almost surgical precision all the while telling me how much I was going to enjoy the wonderful things he was going to do to me.
I squeezed my eyes shut and wished that I were dead.
***
“Put that file away now, my dear,” Seidelmann said soothingly. “You’ve looked at it, and there’s nothing more there that will hurt you. Every time you get frightened about it after this, tell yourself that you’ve read the file and put it away where it can’t hurt you any more. Are there any more files you want to look at?”
There was one more file, but I had already looked at it many times. It lay out on the table in full view, not hidden away at the back of the drawer like the other one. I’d often felt recently that anyone could see its secret written on my face if they’d only looked closely enough.
“Yes, there is one more file,” I told Seidelmann.
“Would you like to look in it?”
“I already know what’s in it.”
“Then tell me about it.”
“No! I can’t! I thought I could when I came down here, but now I can’t.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s sitting on the table next to my chair.”
“You know you left it out there for a reason, Tory. You were hoping someone would find it and read it, weren’t you?”
I was breathing heavily. Seidelmann had me, and he knew it. I couldn’t lie to him. “Yes, I was! I wanted everyone to know, but now I feel too ashamed.”
“You forget that you are safe down here. Anything that’s in this room is safe to talk about. Why don’t you tell me what’s in the folder? You will feel better.”
Even though I believed Seidelmann, it took me several minutes to work up the courage to speak. If I had kept silent, it would’ve made the whole exercise that morning completely futile, because it had been my inability to face what was in this file that had been upsetting me so much all along.
“Can you tell me about the file?” Seidelmann asked again.
“I don’t think I can tell anyone right now.”
“Then here’s what we will do. We are going to leave this room and go back up the escalator. As we near the top, you will begin to wake up, and you will remember everything. When we get to the top, you will be fully awake and fully aware of everything that has happened and you will feel refreshed and good about knowing it. Then, it will be completely up to you to decide whether to tell what is in your secret folder. Is that what you would like to do?”
“Well, all right...”
Seidelmann brought me out of it, and I opened my eyes. Rocky sat like a statue on the other side of the room, and I was acutely aware that he now knew almost everything that had happened to me. I asked for a drink of water, and while Rocky got it, I thought about what I really wanted to do about this. Looking at him as he gently handed me the glass, I knew that Rocky’s trust had to be returned in kind. Only by telling him everything could I feel that I was ready to start over again and make myself into someone who deserved the love and loyalty he’d shown me.
ROCKY
After handing Tory the glass of water, I sat back down and waited.
It seemed to me that maybe it would be best to leave the room. Maybe then Tory would be able to get off her chest whatever it was she so desperately needed to.
Putting down her glass, she looked right across the room at me and began to speak in a tightly controlled voice. “The worst part was when von Heislinger sodomized me while he stared up at that accursed nude photo of me he had in his library. That was the worst moment. I knew then that what was happening to me was my own fault.”
I couldn’t let her comment stand unchallenged. This feeling of being the cause of the attack apparently happens in a lot of rape cases. “How can you possibly say that? The man was an animal. You didn’t do anything wrong!”
Tory leaped up from the bed, her previous lethargy gone in a flash. “Nothing wrong? Nothing wrong? Don’t you understand? I posed for that picture, goddamnit! Marty arranged for the photographer to take it. He thought it would be great publicity, would be good for my career and I thought it was a great joke. Haha. When it was published in the papers and I saw your reaction, I was too ashamed to tell you about it, Rocky. Well, I didn’t know it until now, but the joke was on me. The baron became interested in me because of that photo!”
Tory ran into the bathroom and slammed the door.
I was too stunned to move. “I’m going to punch out Marty the next time I see him,” I said.
“Does being chosen to premiere the Beethoven concerto in Vienna compensate me a little for what I went through in Austria? Yeah, I guess it does—but it’s kind of like they happily cut off both my arms before they asked.”
—Victoria Morgan in a Time magazine profile
Epilogue
ROCKY
Tory came out of our cottage and walked to where I was sitting on the stone wall out front, looking down on the Strait of Menai and watching the sun setting over the Irish Sea. Handing me a glass of the red wine, she pulled herself up and we sat together, enjoying the smell of the salt air and the cry of the distant seagulls. To the left, the last rays of the sun touched the battlements of Caenarfon castle, making them look as if they’d been set on fire. I loved the sight and came out every evening the weather was nice—and luckily it had been quite often during the past month. April had been a different story.
Immediately after leaving Vienna the previous November, we’d come to North Wales, within a week buying a small, stone cottage (complete with slate roof, slate floors and an enormous fireplace you could actually cook in), perched on a hillside far from the nearest hamlet, but still fairly handy to Caenarfon and Bangor. Ertmann had been right about knowing the place we really wanted when we saw it.
There, we’d spent the past seven months slowly feeling our way back towards normalcy. The locals had been great, taking Tory in as a long-lost prodigal daughter (the Welsh always root for the underdog), fiercely protecting her from incursions by the media, and trying not to laugh at my attempts to wrap my tongue around their language.
“You were right to suggest we come here, love,” I told Tory, “even if it can be a little damp at times.”
“Mam and Tad never seemed to remember the rain when they told me stories about living in North Wales—until they came to visit us,” she chuckled, then went silent for several minutes before speaking again. “You know it already feels like we’ve lived here forever, that we finally have a home.”
I looked at Tory while she looked out over the sea, her eyes revealing that her thoughts had drifted far away. That often happened now, sometimes right in the middle o
f a conversation, and she’d seldom tell me where she’d been. Her expression revealed, though, that wherever she went off to, the experience was painful. Tory’s “black periods” could last for minutes or days, and at such times she was silent and inconsolable, often locking the door to her studio to play for hours on end. The sound of her violin trying to ease her pain.
But Tory had seemed much more at peace the past few weeks. Perhaps it was having Stefanie Ertmann around. The Ertmanns were still effusively thankful every time we spoke on the phone. We’d invited Stefanie to visit for a month, and she’d been making stellar progress under Tory’s tutelage. I never would have thought the redheaded firebrand could be such a patient teacher.
Her psychiatrist also said she was making great strides. She felt that being able to speak Welsh for her therapy helped Tory express her feelings more easily, since it gave her some needed distance from what had happened.
“I will never be free of it, though,” Tory had said during one particularly bad patch. “Regardless of what was done to me and how I was manipulated, the plain fact of the matter is that my hand ended someone’s life. I have that to live with until I die.” She had then stopped, smiling sadly at my stricken look. “Relax. I want to live to a ripe old age.”
For a week after she’d been released from custody, Tory had refused to go near her violin. Seidelmann had told me not to push her, to let her find her own way, but I knew he was as anxious as I to see if her mental block about playing had been removed with that final confession. One evening, I left the hotel to take a quick stroll, and on returning, when the elevator doors opened at our floor, I could hear the glorious strains of the Beethoven wafting down the hallway. Two guests were outside their rooms, listening with broad smiles on their faces. Those didn’t remotely come close to the enormous one on my face or the flood of relief I experienced. Since then, it had been business as usual, except that Tory’s playing seemed even more introspective and heartfelt.
She looked better, too, very fit from days spent walking the hills alone, and she’d put back on all the weight she’d lost. Her hair, now free of that awful dye job, had grown almost to her shoulders but we’d have to wait another two years before it became the wild red mane everyone was accustomed to. There was something lean about her, though, which had nothing to do with weight. The planes and angles of her face seemed more defined; her eyes burned with a brightness that made me think of the fire she had walked through. Tory was changed, and even though I’d faced death for a second time, she’d faced something far worse, something inside herself. That battle was still raging, although the skirmishes were thankfully growing less frequent. How would it end? No one could tell me, least of all Tory. Some days we had hope and some days we didn’t.
She still wore loose-fitting clothes as if wanting to hide her body, but Seidelmann and her local psychiatrist assured me this wasn’t unusual. Two days earlier, though, after sleeping in late, Tory had walked into the kitchen with nothing on but one of my shirts—and it didn’t hide much.
As she went back to our room with her morning coffee, Tory looked over her shoulder, winked at me and said, “Just thought you’d like to know.”
What had followed in the bedroom had been a lot closer to the old Tory than I would have thought possible even a few weeks earlier.
As we sat on the wall that fine evening, Tory leaned against me with her head on my shoulder, watching the clouds out over the sea begin their slow shift from an intense salmon color to rich purples and blues.
“I didn’t think I could ever feel this peaceful again. Everything that happened to me seems like a nightmare. This feels like waking up.”
In her bedroom, I could hear Stef still sawing away on a Paganini “Caprice” Tory had given her to work on that morning. “I should go in and ask her to join us out here for a glass of wine.”
Tory shook her head. “No. She’s got a fire in her belly right now, and she’s only going to be able to stay another week. Let her practise. Besides, you couldn’t pry Tristan out of her hands with a crowbar.”
“I never imagined you would ever be so generous with your instrument. The thought of someone playing one of my trumpets makes me cringe.”
“She’s a lot like me... The way I was, I mean. She’s got what it takes, and I’m going to make damned sure she doesn’t fall into the same holes.”
“We’ll see her in Vienna in two weeks anyway, Tory. She can play it some more then.”
“Do you really think there’ll be time for that? First I’ve got all those rehearsals, then the concert, and somewhere in there I’m going to have to face the world’s press again.” Tory sighed and looked up at me. “Do you still think I’m nuts to insist that the first recording of the concerto be done live? Stefanie thinks it’s stupid. She told me that as baldly as you please during her lesson today.”
“Reminds me of someone else,” I answered under my breath.
“What did you say?” Tory said and began tickling me unmercifully. “Just because you’re my manager and husband doesn’t mean you can say anything you want!”
I jumped from the wall and she chased me around the yard, both of us laughing like a couple of kids.
When we finally ran out of breath, I reminded her, “That’s not going to carry on indefinitely. I have to be back at my job at McGill next fall. Thank the Lord they were so understanding.”
“It also might have something to do with the fact that I will be their artist-in-residence now that I’m not going to be touring as much,” Tory returned tartly.
The past seven months, managerially speaking, had been difficult and taken a great deal of my time as I’d felt my way along. I’d accepted only a few of the hundreds of requests for bookings so far, and there had been a new record contract to negotiate. The uproar over the appearance of a new work by Beethoven still hadn’t died down, and I’d had to deal with that, too.
Knowing that it wasn’t for us to keep, we’d handed the manuscript over to the Austrian State Music Library before we’d left Vienna. They could care for it properly, and it would eventually be made available for study. It was a matter of self-preservation, as well, since neither of us wanted to get involved with the inevitable flurry of lawsuits over who actually owned the damned thing. Terradella’s Edizione Roma is one of five companies that will be publishing the work, so that slimeball will get some money out of the deal.
Of course, the Austrians had felt guilty about the way they’d treated and spoken about Tory, but it had still taken us by surprise when the Vienna Phil had insisted that she should play the world premiere concert in Vienna. It would be everything Montenegro had planned it to be (too bad for him they’d arranged for someone else to do it), broadcast live from the Golden Hall of the Musikverein with the tape rolling for the audio recording at the same time. The next night, the concert would be repeated in Berlin with the Berlin Phil, the Germans having kicked up a fuss, claiming the honour of the premiere should be theirs since Beethoven had been born in Bonn.
Ernie Segurro would be on the podium. The ratings for both broadcasts would be through the roof, and Tory would be well on her way back to the top of the heap. She had joked early on that we should offer Ebler the position of assistant triangle player so he wouldn’t feel left out.
The Schatzaders, meanwhile, were at the bottom of the heap. Both had been convicted of von Heislinger’s murder, Gertrud also taking the rap for Thekla and the guard at the Schönbrunn.
Schatzader did indeed kill poor Hans Drost. Gertrud, in a stunning act of double dealing, had apparently told Von Heislinger about it, secretly arranging to split the money that would be realized through the concerto. Von Heislinger’s big mistake was reneging on the deal, at which point Gertrud rejoined her husband’s camp and plotted revenge with him—not telling the poor sap what she’d been up to, of course.
It would be good to see our Viennese friends again, and Roddy was able to take a break from the tour he was on (some “perfectly awful cellist” t
his time) to be present. Elen had decided to remain in Vienna, where she was hard at work on the story of the Concert Rhapsody in F# minor, focussing especially on what had happened after Beethoven’s death, when the original Thekla had snuck into his apartment and stolen it, through old Hans Drost discovering it in an attic, until I’d found it in the Kaiserin Elisabeth’s faience at the Schönbrunn. We had all insisted on a memorial service in Drost’s memory, and the Viennese had enthusiastically supported the idea.
It would be held on the banks of the Danube the day of the concert. Flowers would be thrown from the end of the Praterspitz, the place where I’d stood on that windy, miserable afternoon with Elen. They’d be caught by the current and released again to circle in the backwater hard against the Cemetery of the Nameless.
The number on the cross on Hans Drost’s grave would be replaced by his name.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the following people for their help in making Cemetery of the Nameless a reality: Vicki, Karel and Jan Blechta, who patiently put up with “Dad’s disappearing act” and who support me always; Timea Venesz, for her friendship and more help with Vienna “locations” than I could have imagined (or expected); Engelbert Horwath of the Bundespolizeidirektion Wien for help understanding the workings of the Viennese Gendarmarie and who unwittingly gave me the title of this book (Thanks again for the hat, too!); Robert Tidmarsh for letting me loose “backstage” in the Schönbrunn; Dr. Doris Rubik for Austrian legal advice; Dr. Hubert Steuxner for advice on the Austrian aristocracy; André Leduc for his friendship, the usual great photography and help with the cover of this book; Kal Honey for advice on matters graphic and typographical; Ddr. R. Cerwyn Davies for once again providing Welsh translations; Pat Kennedy, always generous with advice; Peter Robinson for making time in his busy schedule; and lastly, Sylvia McConnell, Allister Thompson and Adria Iwasutiak at RendezVous Press, who have faith, skill and passion. It’s been an exceptional pleasure to work with you! Thank you for your insight and help.