by John Gardner
“Okay, Lou. So you just stayed put. Let the time drift by.”
“No. Yes, for the first month. No, afterwards. I knew I had to do something. I took my airplane and flew to Athens. Talked from there to everyone who mattered. Dictated a press release for the Center in New York—‘Owing to illness and personal problems, Maestro Louis Passau is to take a sabbatical. …’ You probably read that.”
“It’s in the books. But no explanation.”
“I knew I could leave everything in other people’s hands. The orchestra, the opera, the whole business ran itself. Sometimes I talked direct, from the villa, when anything difficult came up. In Athens, that first time—I spent about a week there—I fixed things so nobody could trace me. Moved money to Switzerland, and then to Greece. Easy. The Swiss banks never gave me away, no paper trail. Nobody gave me away. I bought a phonograph, and a record collection. Manuscript paper. Bought a gun. Handgun. Still got it. Hidden in the place on Lexington. Then I flew the whole lot back to Corfu and battened down the hatches.”
“Wrote your symphony. …”
“Not straightaway, no. I did that in the third year. Most of the time I was self-indulgent. Got drunk a lot. Listened to music. Took in the view. Nikko looked after me. Never asked questions, never talked to anyone. He knew something appalling had occurred but he never talked about it. I’d eat at his place. Let the days float by. I sort of levitated. Then, I thought, this is no good, Lou. You’ve got to work. So I started to study again. Flew to Athens. Bought more recordings. Wrote the symphony. Thought about going back to New York. Take up the reins again. Three times I got as far as Athens. But I turned back every time. I think I was letting things drift. Waiting for something to happen. I couldn’t make up my mind.”
“Sure, like Hamlet.”
“Just like Hamlet. I think for three years, even when I was writing the symphony, I was crazy. I guess I was waiting for events to tell me what to do. The time, Herb, the time passed very quickly. You’d think it would drag, yes?”
“Maybe.”
“Didn’t drag. Went by like a flash.”
“And then the reporter spotted you? Came and did an interview? Published it, so you came back?”
Passau gave a dry laugh, utterly barren of humor. “No.” Another laugh. “No. That came later—spring 1960. Someone else found me before then.”
Herbie thought, “Now it begins. Now he starts his new secret life.” He said nothing aloud. Asked no questions. Just sat, like a Freudian psychiatrist, waiting for his silence to nudge words out of his patient.
“Spring—early summer really—1959. That’s when I was found. That’s when I was rescued, if that’s the right word.”
He had taken to going down to Nikko’s taverna most evenings. Usually at dusk, after a swim. He swam morning and evening, knowing that, whatever else, he had to exercise. During the first years he had done nothing in the way of working out, and his body became flabby, poisoned by the ouzo and retsina. By 1959 he was in good condition again—physically, if not mentally. Then, on this particular evening he walked down to the taverna, ate, talked to Nikko. Even danced a little.
Then, as he was sitting, having a last drink before walking back up the road and climbing up to the villa, a man—a tourist—came over and sat down next to him.
(“Never said a word in English until he sat down next to me and ordered another drink for us both.”)
“No, not for me. I’ve had enough. Very kind, but I must be going home.” Passau did not want to give the stranger the brush-off. He was courteous, but firm.
“I insist, Maestro Passau. Really, I have to talk with you.” The accent was just short of being American. A sort of mid-Atlantic favored by so many businessmen who worked the transatlantic route by then.
Passau started at the sound of his name. It was the first time anyone had used the name on the island. At Nikko’s they called him “Filakas”—the Caretaker, the Watchman—because he had said that he was now only the caretaker of the villa. Looking after it for the lady who would return and live there, as he had planned.
(“For a long while I really imagined she would come back. Just be with me. Father and daughter; you understand that, Herb?”)
“What did you call me?” he asked, back then in 1959 at Nikko’s taverna.
“I used your name. Louis Passau.”
“That who you think I am?”
“No, that’s who I know you are.”
“Really. I must be going.”
Almost under his breath, the stranger sang Groucho Marx’s song “Hello, I must Be going.” Then he placed his hand on Passau’s shoulder: a firm grip, like a police officer about to make an arrest. “Truly, Maestro, if you leave, I shall follow. You cannot walk away from this. Not now.”
They locked eyes as stags will lock horns. “Who are you?” Passau had half risen. Now he sat down again. Nikko brought the drinks.
“Just call me Gregory.” The stranger smiled, his hands now in sight, flat on the table.
Louis did not know whether this was another piece of his past sliding in, clammily, to haunt him. For a second he wondered if this man had come from Carlo. Don Carlo Giarre. Sophie’s parting shot had been, “Carlo will be in touch. He says there will be no more warnings.” He thought of being found, in the villa, with a couple of small-caliber bullets through the back of his head.
“Okay, Gregory. What you want with me, huh?”
“We know what you did during the war.” Flat, without accusation.
“If I am Passau, I gave many concerts. Conducted an orchestra. Worked the whole time during the war.”
“You are mentioned, by name, Mr. Passau, in many documents brought out of Nazi Germany. You are mentioned in some papers which came directly from Kaltenbrunner’s department.” Ernst Kaltenbrunner had been the chain-smoking head of the Nazi Security Services from 1943. He had been tried at Nuremberg, found guilty and executed. Gregory added, “Most of the documents were old. Inherited by Kaltenbrunner. I don’t think he had much control over you. But you’re there all right, next to your funny name—Unternehmen. So we know, Mr. Passau. So really we think you should now work for us. Work for the good of mankind. Can we go back to your villa and talk about that?”
In the present, Louis Passau sighed with a great weariness. “Herbie, today has been too much for me. Please can we end there?”
“With Gregory walking back to the villa with you?”
“Yes, he came back. Please, it’s enough for one day. Difficult. Very difficult for me.”
There was no way that the Maestro was going to continue.
Herbie leaned forward and touched him on the shoulder—a touch that said “Courage. It will be well in the end.”
Aloud he said, “Just one more question, Lou. One, that’s all. Not about Constanza and the island.”
Passau shrugged.
“The night you took out the booze convoy with the Gennas,” Herb said. Matter-of-fact, no trace of slyness. “You’ve told us all about that. …”
“Sure, I gave you chapter and verse.”
“One tiny point, Lou. Something I’ve never been sure of. Who started the shooting?”
“I told you. I told you all of it.” He did not sound tired now; he was more defensive.
“Time for telling all the truth, Lou. Just for me, for the record, who started the shooting?”
An uncannily long pause. Then—
“Who d’you think started it, Herb. I didn’t want anyone in the convoy to be alive. Okay. Right, I fired the first shot, lying next to Tony Genna. That what you wanted to hear?”
“It’s what I suspected. Thanks, Lou.”
Pucky came out a few minutes later. The sun was going down and Passau looked spent. “Elizabethans had a good word for how he looks. Shakespeare used it: shent. Really means disgraced, but that’s how he looks—shent,” Kruger said as they worked together in the kitchen, preparing what Pucky called salmon fishcakes—potatoes boiled and mashed, then mixed with
two tins of salmon, bound together with eggs. They were edible if you used a lot of ketchup and pickle.
“I must go out first thing and get more supplies,” Pucky said.
“If we’re going to be here long enough,” Herb whispered. “I must plead for more time. We’re just now getting to the nub.” His English had improved beyond measure. He was past the point of playing games.
They ate in partial silence, though both Pucky and Kruger were more sympathetic and helpful with the old man than they had ever been before. They both felt that his agony lay across the table, and reached back, buried deep within his bones, so they showed small kindnesses. Pucky even kissed his smooth, babylike cheek at one point, and they thought he would weep at the gesture.
“You want to hear some music before you go to bed, Maestro?” Kruger asked as he cleared the dishes from the table.
“I think so, yes. Yes.” So they gathered, and nobody was surprised when he chose the only recording of his one symphony—The Demonic. They sat through it in silence, and Kruger realized that only now could he really begin to understand it. The timpani roll and the sudden huge burst of sound, the C major chords—all the strings, deep, resonant, rising and falling in the definitive phrase that Kruger knew was Passau’s mother’s laugh: four notes which passed quickly, then disappeared until the final moments of the last movement.
The opening theme, he also recognized anew, for what so often seemed to be a clash of differently coordinated sounds now emerged as a single melody. Hopeful, with an undertone of something distinctively Jewish, and with the trumpet a long way off behind the strings and woodwinds. The lone trumpet playing a bluesy countermelody that you had to strain to hear—the trumpet little Louis Packensteiner had heard on that first night in New York.
In the second movement there was joy and laughter, mixed in with the drum rattle which some critics had said sounded like demented machine guns, then a very modern version of the first theme again, turned back on itself, played again and again as a series of variations, almost as though the composer wanted it to sound like themes culled from the great music makers. There was a hint of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn. Then a reenactment of the same theme with a piano in the foreground. It could have been, but was never quite, Chopin mixed jarringly with Rachmaninov. The times were out of joint, it said.
At last, the final movement: despair, ridicule, horror leading to the big, over-the-top arrangement of the Dies Irae: the choir chanting, shouting the words, against the massed forces of the orchestra, augmented by extra brass and timpani. Then the three bars of silence and a repetition of that first striking C major chord, and the four rising and falling notes that were Gerda Packensteiner’s laugh. Another silence and the inevitable throbbing drums, decreasing into oblivion.
They were all weeping by the time it was done. For had they not now all shared in the life of Louis Passau, and its shattering decline into the last events on the island of Corfu?
They sat in silence, then Louis said he would go to bed. He was tired.
Pucky asked if he needed any help. “No, dear lady. No. No help. I’m strong enough, though tired, after today.”
At the door, he looked at Herbie and said, “Thank you, Herb. It’s been a great help.”
“I’m glad.” Then, almost as an afterthought, yet, perhaps to prepare the way, he said—“Tomorrow we’ll hear about your friend Gregory and his masters in KGB, yes?”
Passau paused, gave a tiny smile, cocked his head—almost the old, arrogant man. “I told you,” he said. “Many times, I told you, don’t make assumptions. Gregory wasn’t KGB. Gregory was CIA.”
(18)
HALF AN HOUR LATER, ART came in, dressed in a jogging suit, with a head-band which made him look like some ageing rock star. He smelled of garlic and sweat, surrounded by a lake of Dunhill eau de cologne.
“You get all that, Art? Make you think? Make you realize how lucky you are to be in this kind of work?” Kruger sounded angry and aggressive.
Art Railton dropped into a chair and looked at Herbie and Pucky with tired eyes. “Quite dramatic.” He sounded as though nothing could ever surprise him again.
“Art, you said I got three days.” Kruger had plumped himself down in a chair next to Railton. Pucky hovered, asking if they wanted coffee, which they did not.
“Yea, I said three days.” As the old song went, “He wouldn’t say yes, and he wouldn’t say no. He wouldn’t say stop, and he wouldn’t say go.”
“That mean I got tomorrow, then pouf?”
“Pouf what, Herb?”
“Pouf, the Maestro disappears. Clock strikes midnight, we all turn into pumpernickel.”
“What’s your problem, Herbie?” Art sounded more weary than aggressive.
“You heard my problem, if you were listening in. The guy’s old. Today took a lot out of him. Must have shaken up his bowels back then, as well. Now, at last, we’re getting to real object of exercise, as they used to say in training—back in the ark. I’m not going to get far in one more day, that’s my problem. You listen in, Art? You know what the poor old bugger went through?”
“I know he’s good at exit lines.”
“How long I got, Art?”
Railton sighed, and the sag of his shoulders spoke of fatigue. “You should’ve had one more day, but it’s probable you’ll get two, maybe even three. Maybe more than that. London hasn’t got its act together. Very clear on the fact that the old geezer mustn’t be handed over to the Agency or the FBI, but mushy about getting him to the U.K. The Navy is wary about pulling him out in a submarine—so’s the Foreign Office. Fears American intervention and a diplomatic incident.”
“That would blow over, Art—what the hell?”
“Doesn’t make them easier of mind. There’s another possibility that calls for all sorts of duplicity. An RAF aircraft leaving Dulles next week. Taking embassy staff and military, personnel back. They do regular runs between Dulles and Lyneham. Have to pass him through like the invisible man. Don’t see it myself.”
Suddenly, Big Herbie was full of confidence. “Give me a week and I can get him out, clean. One week. I set it up. Maybe less than a week.”
Art passed a hand over his eyes. “Wishful thinking, Herb. It would appear that he’s in genuine danger. We’ve got ourselves an old man heavy with sin, and the sinned against are after his hide. Agency people, FBI and the Mob are all combing the country. Trying to work out where we’ve got him. Everyone’s lying through their teeth, and I’m seventy percent sure they’ve started to sniff around here.”
“Tell me something new.” Then Big Herbie did one of his famous double-takes. “You’re joking? You seen ’em sniffing around here?”
“Possibly. Intuition mainly, but things have been noted. Probably simply checking out all your old contacts, Herb. Marty Foreman lives not a hundred miles from here, so I think they’re sweeping the area. Marty’s very old CIA and you were pretty close in the old days. We’ve seen two guys who look like FBI talking to the management. One of my people says he recognized an old Agency officer hanging around the pool yesterday. They’ve got a whiff of something—or, maybe, nothing.”
“So, London going to get cold feet in the end? Hand him over to the wolves?”
“I really don’t know, Herb. What we’ve got is a big enigma.”
“Complete with variations, Art.”
“Yes. This talented ancient has got a lot of people wound up. Ninety years of great music and a large dollop of chicanery. Agency, FBI, the Mob. They’re not folks who forgive and forget.”
“I can still get him out.” Kruger sounded confident as a cardsharp holding all the aces.
“Speak to me, Herb.”
Herbie talked for fifteen minutes, interrupted constantly by “But, Herb …” and “You think they’re … ?” In the end Kruger leaned back. “Just tell me if I can give it whirl?”
“If they catch you, they’ll throw you out for good, take the subject, bury him and play merry hell with the rest o
f us.”
“I been in merry hell already, Art. Makes no difference to me. I know London would deny me anyway. Maybe I do it without telling you.”
“Herbie, I …”
“There’s strings attached if I get him back.”
“What kind of strings?”
“That nobody lets Gus Keene and the Warminster wild bunch go near him. I finish the job I started.”
Art chewed his lip. “I haven’t got the authority, and you know London. They wouldn’t …”
“But I suspect that if I did it, they’d be happy as chickens in shit.”
“Pigs, Herb.”
“Chickens, pigs, what’s the difference?”
“Bacon and eggs.”
“If you do get a go-ahead to lift him out …” Herbie trailed off.
“You’ll have a good twenty-four hours’ notice. Look, I was sure it would be the day after tomorrow, but that was a couple of days ago. Two days can be an awfully long time in politics.”
“Two days can be an awfully long time in ninety years of life.”
Art Railton left without anybody knowing what was to be done. Big Herbie was disinclined to talk about the possibility of FBI or Agency people sniffing around, and he was certainly not even going to think about a possible Mob contract being out on Passau. Why should he get agitated about something he knew to be true anyway? He had been there when they last had a go, and according to the old musician that wasn’t the first time—“Carlo will be in touch. He says there will be no more warnings.” If that was what had been said so long ago, Don Carlo had taken his time: a very old man stalking another very old man as he had done down through the years. What the hell.
He cocked his head towards the bedroom. Once inside they started hacking again, using the Macintosh LC and its modem to get into two mainframes in Maryland: two super data banks which fed myriad work stations in Federal buildings in D.C. The first one was easy.
“Where’d you get all these numbers from, Herb?” Pucky asked.
“Object lesson, Puck. Never throw anything away. In this business you got to be like a jackdaw or a squirrel.”