* * *
Nicole stepped toward Hunter and gently touched his hand. “Hunter, would you play the piano for us?”
Hunter seemed to favor that idea in his savage, brooding way. Without a word, he lurched toward the piano, restrained only by Frank Lynch’s tight grip on his arm. The others—Avery and Susan Morgan, Bartolli, Dr. Palmer, even Dubin—glared back at Nicole as if she had made an outrageous suggestion.
“It’s all right,” said Ned Hoffmann. “He won’t do anything.”
“It’s important,” Nicole told Frank Lynch. “It’s important that you let him play.”
Finally Hunter was allowed to sit down at the piano, with Lynch crouching beside him on a small folding chair like a heavily-armed page turner. After a pause he raised his hands and set them to skittering across the keys in a fantastical whirlwind of notes which, Dubin thought, must have resembled the jagged inner landscape of his mind.
“Hunter is playing the only piece he knows,” Nicole explained. “The Kreisleriana of Robert Schumann. If it sounds a little crazy that’s because it’s Schumann’s portrait of a fictional madman created by the poet Hoffmann—the same Hoffmann who was later fictionalized as the alcoholic hero of The Tales of Hoffmann. Schumann was driven toward what Hoffmann called the spirit world, that parallel universe of absolute truth and beauty that can be entered most easily through drugs, music and madness. Schumann chose music but he ended up with madness. And this piece provides a chilling glimpse into his future.”
Dubin had been watching Avery and Susan Morgan, who sat frowning and whispering with Dr. Palmer. “Nicole,” Dr. Palmer said in his most soothing voice, as if he were humoring a child, “this is a very interesting perspective on music history which I’m sure everyone would enjoy hearing on some other occasion. But Hunter is exhausted after his ordeal and he shouldn’t stay up late playing the piano. And Dr. Bartolli”—he hesitated as he pondered a diplomatic way to address the accusation Dubin had made against his brother—“has some business to discuss with the police. Why don’t you schedule an appointment with Dr. Hoffmann for next week and you can talk about it then?”
“This isn’t just an irrelevant excursion into music history,” Nicole replied confidently, to show how she felt about being patronized. “Maria Morgan had a recording of Kreisleriana in her studio when she was rehearsing her role in The Tales of Hoffmann. She was trying to do something rarely attempted in modern times: to play all three of Hoffmann’s loves. She would be Olympia the wind-up doll, Antonia the innocent young girl, Giulietta the deceitful courtesan. For a woman who was under treatment for schizophrenia this was a dangerous undertaking. It required her to have three selves. And for the men in her life—since there was more than one—she could not be all three. She could only be the treacherous courtesan. And so the question is as Dr. Bartolli posed it: Who was Hoffmann?”
With these last words Hunter’s playing seemed to reach a climax, as the volume rose and his fingers scurried furiously over the keys. He pounded a few inconclusive chords, and then just as abruptly his agitation cooled and he wandered off into another, less violent episode.
“Maria Morgan took her work very seriously,” Nicole went on, “and she liked to steep herself in the background of whatever she was working on. That’s probably why she checked this recording out of the library. What we do know is that this was the music she was listening to in the last moments of her life. This piece, this Kreisleriana—the one that Hunter suddenly started playing a few weeks ago—is the music she was listening to right up to the end.”
Avery Morgan leaned forward, his face dark, the growling beast still lurking in his voice. “How do we know that?”
“There’s a big scratch in the record that starts about two-thirds of the way through the Kreisleriana. So when you play the record, the music comes to a sudden stop, right at the point where the turntable toppled to the floor. That was the moment when Maria Morgan died. And that’s the place where Hunter always stops playing, at the exact place where his mother died. We’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”
“But Dubin said the record was missing from the studio.”
“That’s right. It was missing. But I found it.”
The dynamics of the music had risen again as it surged toward another climax. Antonia listened with her eyes wide, her breath quickening, her color fading as if Hunter’s frenetic hands had whirled her back into a hypnotic state. If Nicole was right about the record, then he was mapping the last moments of their mother’s life. Every note he played pushed them another step closer to the catastrophe. Wasn’t there some way to stop the music, some way to turn back?
“Stop!” Avery Morgan sputtered. “Please stop!”
“No,” Nicole pressed on. “Let me sketch out the scene. Maria Morgan in her studio, listening to this music as she struggles with her three conflicting roles. Maybe it arouses a self-destructive impulse in her as it did for its composer. How could she play all three of Hoffmann’s loves? How could she be an innocent young girl and a treacherous prostitute at the same time? If she was Giulietta, then who was her jealous lover? Who was the man who, though she despised him, couldn’t bear the thought of sharing her with two other men? He’s there with her in the studio; an argument breaks out. And then something terrible happens—maybe it’s this demonic music, this glimpse into the spirit world that scrapes a little too deeply into the unconscious and triggers it off; maybe it’s a fit of jealous rage; we’ll never know. In any case, the man attacks, savagely strangling her, knocking the turntable off its stand, stopping the music dead; and then, in the cold light of his guilty conscience, he ties a nylon cord around her neck and hoists her up on the light fixture and lets her drop again to make it look like suicide. He thinks no one is watching but he doesn’t know about the loft at the other end of the studio. There are two eyewitnesses in the studio.”
“And they’re both extremely ill,” Dr. Palmer said, rising slowly. “I insist that this performance stop right now.”
And then, as if the universe took its cues from Dr. Palmer, the performance stopped. It stopped as Nicole had told them it would: when Hunter, tracing the fossil record of his mother’s death struggle, arrived at the point in the music where the scratch had always blocked his way. He lifted his hands from the keyboard, as he always did, in the middle of a dissonant phrase. The deed was done, and there was nothing more he or anyone else could do about it. He dropped his hands to his lap and sat with his head hanging, breathing heavily.
“Did anyone even ask the eyewitnesses?” Nicole asked.
“This is absurd,” Dr. Palmer objected. “They don’t know what they saw.”
Bartolli turned to face Avery Morgan. “I was Maria’s lover,” he said, “but I had a rival. Two rivals, in fact. One was you, Avery, but you weren’t much of an impediment. You were only her husband.”
“Who was the other one?” Avery demanded.
“The other one—”
Bartolli turned his eyes toward Dr. Palmer and a look of infinite sadness spread across his face. “The other one was my brother.”
Before anyone knew what was happening, Hunter leaped up from the piano and threw himself on Dr. Palmer. He would have choked him to death if Dubin and Lynch hadn’t pulled him off and dragged him across the room, clawing and biting like the madman he was.
Dr. Palmer said nothing, but the terror in his eyes told them everything they needed to know. He slipped on his coat and hurried out the door.
Antonia staggered after him, rubbing her eyes. She looked as if she were waking from a dream.
Epilogue
It seems only right that I should finish this tale, since my name, my voice, even my profoundest hopes and fears, have been appropriated to its telling. As the real Ned Hoffmann, I think I have a right to be heard. Ugly rumors have swirled around the Institute, especially since I was named Acting Director, and only a policy of candor and transparency can lay them to rest. If this were a mystery novel, I would have the opportu
nity—perhaps even the obligation—to tie up all the loose ends and explain the discoveries and deductions that brought the murderer to justice, or he would have saved me the trouble by issuing a full confession before blowing his brains out. But in real life the denouement is never so neat or conclusive. Miles Palmer has not confessed his crimes and in fact has retained a firm of shameless lawyers to proclaim his innocence. They may be correct in their assessment that the eyewitness accounts of twin schizophrenics will not stand up in court (despite the dramatic improvement Hunter and Antonia have shown in the weeks since Palmer was arrested). But for the slow-burning fury of Frank Lynch, who risked everything to keep the killer of Maria Morgan from slipping through his hands a second time, Palmer might never have seen the inside of a prison cell. Lynch followed him out the door that night and arrested him before he had a chance to return to the Institute and destroy the crucial evidence: the publicity photo, the kaleidoscope—both in a locked desk drawer; a note from the librarian, Miss Whipple, warning him that a blackmailer named Dubin was trying to reach Mrs. Paterson; and a packet of love letters from Maria Morgan, dated from shortly after she became his patient until the week before her death and culminating in the revelation that she had decided to leave her husband and marry Peter Bartolli. Further investigations of a more forensic nature—DNA tests and the like—are continuing and likely to be even more persuasive.
At the Institute, things are almost back to normal. Poor Jeff Gottlieb was terminated after being caught in flagrante with Julietta, who had the audacity to file a sexual harassment charge against the Institute. I like Jeff—he’s not nearly as bad as Hunter portrayed him—and I hope he lands on his feet. With both Palmer and Gottlieb out of the picture, I am the only serious candidate for Director other than Dr. Neuberger (a staff psychiatrist who also treated Hunter before I arrived). Peter Bartolli would like to come back, but that is a change I intend to resist. The twins, as I’ve said, are doing amazingly well. Antonia chatters incessantly and she seems to be edging closer and closer to reality. Hunter swings between poles of depression and exhilaration, as he always has, but his speech is coherent and his memory is like a steel trap. He can describe in exhaustive detail not only his mother’s murder but everything that happened since, including the way Palmer set him up for the deaths of Mrs. Paterson and Miss Whipple (after battering and strangling Mrs. Paterson, he roused Hunter and dropped him off in the mountains, taking care to use the same methods two days later when he murdered the poor librarian). From the moment Hunter found the old recording of Kreisleriana in the patient lounge—where Palmer had apparently left it—and began, note by note, second by second, to reconstruct his memory of the hour his mother died, to the dramatic epiphany in Peter Bartolli’s basement theater when he finally broke through the years of fear and guilt to confront his memory of who the killer really was, and continuing since then as he has struggled to replace those years of drug-induced oblivion with something approximating reality—his recovery has been one of the most remarkable in the annals of psychiatry. I expect that in a few months he will be able to leave the Institute and begin a new life on his own.
As for me, in the past weeks I’ve spent many hours alone in my room trying to make sense of my life as seen through the lens of Hunter’s tape-recorded narration. In the transcript, which I’ve read half a dozen times, his voice is so convincingly my own that even for me the events of that period have become impossible to unscramble completely. To anyone having the same problem I will say only this: If you think something happened because Hunter said it did, you should think very carefully about what happened to the people in his story when they weren’t in his story—that is, when they were living in the third person, as it were. That’s when they were real—and I include myself among them. Yet still I can’t help thinking about Hunter’s imagined history of my three “loves”: Olympia, Julietta, and Antonia—three women I scarcely knew but will surely never forget. Antonia I loved in her innocence, in her very inability to connect with this miserable world. At the opposite pole stood Julietta, sensual, worldly, the embodiment of everything Antonia could never be; in fact I knew her only in my fantasies, which (I’m embarrassed to admit) Hunter captured with a certain degree of accuracy. Somewhere in the middle was Olympia, the artiste—both of this world and not of this world, ultimately incomprehensible, as if she were under the control of powers beyond my imagination. I loved them all, each in her own way; but they were impossible loves, mad loves, because each of them was absolute and therefore incomplete. And the more I thought about it, the closer I came to understanding the message Hunter was trying to send me, a message I had been doing everything in my power to resist: that all three of my loves were really the same woman. And that woman was Nicole.
I confessed this to Nicole one afternoon in a gloomy corridor in the county courthouse, where we waited for some proceedings against Palmer to grind on in a nearby courtroom. Unfortunately she was standing next to Dubin, a man I have come to despise not least because he and Nicole will soon be living together in New York. I’ve tried to counsel her against this relationship—a newly-reformed blackmailer hardly seems an improvement over the abusive Richard—but she remains adamantly loyal. “Of course all your loves were the same,” she said. “Even to Hunter it was obvious that you were in love with me.”
“It’s ironic, isn’t it?” I murmured, sidling closer as Dubin seemed to be distracted by some disturbance in the corridor. “I’m the one who’s crazy. Or at the very least a fool. How am I going to get on with my life?”
“Divine is the art of forgetting,” she smiled.
“I’d suggest you take up heavy drinking,” Dubin said without turning around. “It can work wonders.”
Just then Peter Bartolli emerged from the courtroom and huddled toward us with his overcoat hunched around his shoulders. He seemed a diminished figure, unsure in his movements and hesitant in his approach, with the indelible stamp of sadness in his dark, distant eyes. “Miles has pleaded not guilty,” he reported.
“That’s no surprise,” Dubin said.
“I wonder”—Bartolli glanced sharply at Dubin, then let his gaze drift into the gloom of the empty corridor—“how the rest of us would plead if we were asked.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know how I would plead. Miles has always been insanely jealous of me—I should have known that I was playing with fire carrying on an affair with his mistress. But at the time I had no inkling of what had really happened to Maria. It was only years later, when he ran me out of the Institute on a flimsy pretext after I started making progress with Antonia, that I began to suspect the truth.”
“Were you the one who asked the librarian for her news clippings about Maria Morgan’s death?”
“Yes; and then last year I foolishly set the stage for the whole tragedy to unfold again. I gave Hunter that video of The Tales of Hoffmann and sent my daughter to perform her interpretive dance, acting out the murder as I envisioned it taking place. I thought that by reviving unconscious memories I could not only cure Hunter and Antonia but expose the truth—and isn’t that always a good thing?”
“Then when you started this…,” Nicole hesitated.
“I had no idea what I was setting in motion,” Bartolli completed her thought. “Even at the end I was groping in the dark: I had no inkling of the mad operatic fantasy Hunter would relate about my daughter and Julietta when Dr. Klein sat him in front of the tape recorder—and no expectation that my own desperate plan for Antonia would be the last act of that bizarre melodrama. Above all I had no idea how evil my brother really was. And for that reason I would plead guilty.”
“Then the priests were right,” Nicole said. “Denial of the Devil is a mortal sin, worse than denying God.”
“Possibly,” Bartolli agreed. “Because God forgives and the Devil doesn’t.”
“That’s what Hoffmann was guilty of, isn’t it?” Nicole said, and before I could protest she must have noticed the sickened l
ook on my face. “I mean Hoffmann the poet,” she laughed. “Not you, Ned.”
Just a coincidence, I’m sure; nevertheless she seemed to be aiming her explanation at me. “Hoffmann was a Romantic,” she said. “He believed in the spirit world and his whole purpose in life was to find a way into that world, through music, dreams, drugs—or madness, if that was what it took. He imagined that the spirit world was not only real, but fundamentally beautiful and good. What he didn’t realize, or couldn’t acknowledge, was that evil can be unlocked as easily as goodness and beauty—only more suddenly, more powerfully, more irrevocably. He and the other Romantics unlocked an evil force that couldn’t be controlled, a hundred-year nightmare culminating in two world wars, the Holocaust and the other horrors of the modern age.”
“You sound like the other Nicole,” I said weakly, trying to change the subject. “The one in Hunter’s story.”
“No, I’m done with that Nicole. Among other vanities, I’ve given up the notion that there’s some true plot that events have to follow. If you search for what’s not there, you can be sure you’ll never find it.”
“Is that how you solved the mystery?”
“No,” she said, moving closer to Dubin. “I solved the mystery by seeing what was in front of my face. There’s nothing harder than seeing what’s in plain view.” She brushed her hand across Dubin’s cheek, smoothing his moustache with her fingertips. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Poe?”
That was the last time I saw Nicole. The next week it was Valentine’s Day and she sent me a nice card from New York, with a little note diplomatically omitting any mention of Dubin. She reassured me that she was doing well and thanked me for the many hours I had spent with her. “You made me see myself as a character in my own story,” she wrote. “I’ll see you there for a long time to come, gently guiding me in the right direction, especially when someone else is trying to be the narrator of my life. In his own way Hunter did the same thing for you, and I hope you can benefit from it as I did. Here’s a little poem I wish I could claim for my own (actually it’s by William Blake):
The Rules of Dreaming Page 27