Death and Transfiguration

by Gerald Elias

  “Moshi-moshi,” said a semianesthetized voice.

  “Kate, are you all right?” asked Jacobus, alarmed.

  “Nothing that a good night’s sleep wouldn’t cure. Who’s this?”

  “It’s Jacobus. Shit, I forgot it’s the middle of the night there in—”

  “Jake! What a pleasure to hear from you! I was just getting up anyway. No, no, no. I always rise at three-thirty in the morning. It has been so long. And to what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”

  “I just wanted to tell you that your granddaughter won the concertmaster audition for Harmonium.”

  Jacobus expected Kate to express delight, but instead there was silence. Had she fallen asleep? They were both old, certainly, but was she getting that feeble? He held on to the receiver and listened for some sign of recognition.

  “Kate, are you still there?” Jacobus finally asked.

  “Yes, I’m still here,” said Kate. “I haven’t nodded off, if that’s what you were thinking.”

  “Of course not. It’s just that I thought you’d be excited.”

  “If there’s one thing I learned from you, the hard way, it’s that things aren’t always as they seem. And, as you like to say, there are two things.”

  “What?”

  “First, the tone of your voice isn’t particularly ebullient, to say the least, and you’d never have made the mistake of calling me in the wee hours unless something was troubling you.”

  “And second?”

  “Yumi is a big girl, a grown woman, in fact. If she were happy with the results of the audition, Keiko or I would have heard from her immediately. After all, here in Japan one honors one’s mother and grandmother.”

  “So you’re not senile.”

  “Always the flatterer.”

  Jacobus found himself blushing.

  “Now, tell me the real reason you called,” she continued.

  “Well, it’s true that Yumi won the audition,” he said, “and she should be proud of herself, but the circumstances are lousy, and I’m partly to blame.”

  “Go ahead and get it off your chest, Jake. I’ve got plenty of time. There are still several hours until our famous rising sun shows its face.”

  Jacobus explained everything, how he had tossed off Scheherazade O’Brien’s concerns as inconsequential. How, as well as Yumi played, he knew that O’Brien was a shoo-in for the job. How Herza had stabbed O’Brien in the back by making a mockery of the audition, resulting in O’Brien’s attempted suicide. Maybe if he had known that she had been abused by her father. But that shouldn’t have mattered. He had stepped off the tracks as O’Brien was being railroaded.

  “Horrific,” Kate said when he had concluded. “Absolutely horrific. And if I might be permitted to read between the lines, Jake, you are now feeling personally guilty and responsible for this tragedy because you failed to read signs in O’Brien’s story that were reminiscent of what went on when we were child participants in the Grimsley Competition in 1931.”

  “Yes, Kate. You read me like an old book. I could have prevented this if I had taken her seriously in the beginning.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Jake. Yes, we were force-fed Paganini and Wieniawski and Sarasate; and yes, we were prostituted, figuratively, anyway, and abused during that competition, paraded in front of the masses like cherubic dressed-up dolls, and made to publicly perform musical acts unnatural to toddlers. But what O’Brien was dealing with was something different entirely. She’s an adult, Jake, and even though she’s an extremely frustrated one who came up against one dead end after another, she made her choices to pursue her grievance in the face of almost guaranteed retribution.

  “I think you know this, too, Jake. I think what you’re really trying to do is change your own history. But you can’t do that. You can’t change the past. You can only make the future better. You’ve got to let the past go.”

  This time it was Jacobus who didn’t respond. Sure, she could wax poetic about their competition experience as minigladiators, dueling it out onstage until only one received the thumbs-up, but she had no idea—could have no idea—what had happened to him behind closed doors.

  “I didn’t mean to sound so harsh,” said Kate. “I can be a bitch before I put on my makeup.”

  “Nah,” said Jacobus. “That’s not it. As far as I’m concerned, you can be a bitch whenever you want to.”

  “Ah, you’ve always had a knack of knowing what a girl yearns to hear.”

  “I need your help, Kate,” Jacobus confessed.

  “Now, that’s true flattery,” Kate said in earnest. “I’m all yours. What can I do?”

  “Psychoanalysis aside, I want to honor O’Brien’s request. She wanted me to find out if there’s been a pattern of abusive behavior by Herza. Not just a conductor being an asshole, which goes without saying, but something that would hold up in court. In my mind, it’s one thing for a conductor to insult a musician; it’s another to premeditatedly rig an audition in order to effectively terminate someone’s career.”

  “A worthy endeavor, no doubt,” said Kate, “but conductors are generally immune from retribution, especially the great ones like Herza. They can say whatever they want and the musicians still have to ‘kiss my arse, if you please.’”

  “You sound like me.”

  “Not a good sign. In any event, how do I fit in, the dowager violin teacher of the rice paddy?”

  “Like you say, Herza’s a demigod in Japan, and is almost as revered in China and Korea. Well, I don’t know anyone in China and Korea, so I thought I’d start with Japan. I’d like to ask you to find out if there’s anything…”

  “Unsavory?”

  “Yes, unsavory, in Herza’s history in Japan. From what I’ve been told, he’s been there with his own orchestra and as a guest conductor more often than anywhere else.”

  “Jake, I would love to help, truly. But I don’t know if I’m up for this. I’d have to go to Tokyo, and I haven’t been there in decades. I find even the prospect of shopping on the Ginza overwhelming. I don’t know anyone there and wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” said Jacobus. “Maybe it was a stupid idea to begin with.”

  “But wait!” she responded. “Why don’t you come here and we could investigate together?”

  Jacobus’s face reddened as he considered the implications of the invitation.

  “Maybe when this is all over,” he said, “I could come for a visit. But right now, I’ve got stuff to do here as well.”

  “Well, Jake, I hate to disappoint you, but … Wait, here’s another brilliant idea! I could ask Max to do it.”

  Makoto Furukawa, the preeminent violin teacher on Kyushu before his retirement about a decade earlier, had befriended Jacobus during a long-ago Boston Symphony tour to Japan. Shortly after the formal introductions and polite bows, the two violinists dropped the cultural pretensions and became drinking buddies. Though neither spoke the other’s language, a mixture of music and Suntory whiskey brought them together. Yumi, in fact, had been Max’s student before he sent her off to the United States for advanced studies with Jacobus.

  “Yes, that might work,” said Jacobus. “He could do the legwork, and you could translate back to me whatever he comes up with. But do you think he’d go for it? The last I heard, he was loving his retirement.”

  “I have a feeling,” said Kate, “that Max will be happy to take a break from pruning his fruit trees and singing karaoke to himself.”

  * * *

  Jacobus made one more call, to the Berkshire Medical Center, and asked about Sherry O’Brien’s condition. “Are we family members?” the receptionist asked, and he made the mistake of answering honestly rather than correctly. He was told that the patient was unavailable “at this time.” Jacobus hung up, suddenly very tired, not from age itself but from the effort of living.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Lilburn had discovered that in order to successfully stop drinking, an issue of
some urgency, he desperately needed something to replace it, something equally tempting but more user-friendly. At first the chocolates seemed harmless enough—weren’t they even now touting their salubrious qualities? Oxidants or antioxidants, one of those, whatever they were. But he found that the more anxious he was, the more chocolate he consumed. Now, as he sat at his desk attempting to finish his story before the deadline while simultaneously helping Jacobus, he saw that there were only three Godiva truffles left in the box. The thought of yet another twelve-step program depressed him.

  Blast it! Lilburn thought. How did that gadfly Jacobus talk me into this fool’s errand? His desk overflowing with material for his own story, he had wasted hours rummaging through the New York Times archives seeking dirt on Vaclav Herza. And among the hundreds of articles written about Herza over the decades—including dozens by Lilburn himself—what had been the result? Nothing.

  For a while, he thought he had discovered a thread. He researched the car accident that almost cost Herza his life. Celebrating after the final concert of his first year at the helm of Harmonium, Herza had drunk too much and was driving wildly in his Alfa Romeo convertible when he lost control around a mountain curve in the Lago di Garda region of northern Italy. The car slammed into a tree and burst into flames. It was the era before mandatory seat belts, which probably saved Herza’s life because he was ejected from the car, landing in a bed of moss that dampened his burning clothes. The other passenger, Zerlina DiFiori, a famous international model and his fiancée, was trapped in the car that plummeted three hundred feet down the mountainside.

  Why did Lilburn go to the trouble of spending hours to track down the family of Zerlina DiFiori when he had more pressing work to do? Maybe because this might have been Herza’s Chappaquiddick moment. Or maybe Jacobus pegged him correctly as a sucker for a story. But he finally did get hold of DiFiori’s sister, Paola, in a suburb of Milan, and to Lilburn’s relief she spoke passable English, though what she had to say was not music to his ears. Paola, the younger sister, now in her sixties, scolded him for stoking the coals of a family tragedy that they had spent most of their lives trying to forget. She called him an ass and some things in Italian that he didn’t need a translation to understand but that seemed to make reference to certain pork products. When he tried to ask if the family retained hard feelings toward Herza, Paola hung up on him. Ah, the life of a journalist!

  If there had been other reasons for the accident, they were buried with Zerlina. What was certainly true, however, was that Herza’s jet-set lifestyle ended with his accident. He never married. As far as anyone knew, he never even socialized. And he never drove again.

  * * *

  The next call Lilburn made was to Lieutenant Alan Malachi of the NYPD. Over the years, he and Malachi had crossed paths on several crimes involving the arts, each investigating in his own way. There was the slaying of violin teacher Victoria Jablonski that followed upon the heels of the theft of the Piccolino Stradivarius. There was the murder of legendary violinist René Allard. Most recently was the brutal dismantling, a mass assassination, really, of the New Magini String Quartet. When Lilburn thought about it, which he tried not to, it occurred to him that somehow Daniel Jacobus had ended up at the center of all those investigations.

  Lilburn also knew Malachi’s parents, Bernard and Lillian, who were on the boards of any number of art museums in the city. From time to time, they and Lilburn bumped into each other at wine-and-cheese receptions for an exhibit opening or fund-raiser. On each occasion they conversed, the elder Malachis lamented that their child—“our only son!”—went into law enforcement rather than the rabbinate, their first choice, or classical music, their second. “What did we send him to Yeshiva for? To be a narcolept?” Lilburn shook his head along with them, commiserating but understanding exactly why young Alan took the path he did.

  But young Alan did not commiserate with Lilburn when he heard his request to research police records to dig into Vaclav Herza’s past. In fact, his first question was, “Did Daniel Jacobus put you up to this?” Lilburn did not want to lie to a policeman, at least to such an astute one, so he responded with a neutral, “Why should I do something as stupid as that?” and did manage to twist Malachi’s arm to have a rookie patrolman do the homework.

  * * *

  Lilburn rummaged through the bottom drawer of his desk and extracted the ICSOM Directory. The International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians annually publishes the contact information for every major American orchestra’s members. It was a handy resource for Lilburn, who occasionally had to go straight to the horse’s mouth to get accurate information.

  “Is this Sigurd Larsen?” he asked, after dialing the first number. After the way Larsen had been treated by Herza, Lilburn was hopeful he would be talkative.

  “Who is this, please?”

  “This is Martin Lilburn of the New York Times. I’m doing a story on Harmonium. I was at the rehearsal at Tanglewood the—”

  “I have nothing to say.”

  “But—”

  “I refer you to Junior Parsley, our orchestra committee chairman.”

  “But it’s not about the contract negotiations.”

  The line went dead.

  Lilburn decided to try another tack.

  “Casper Lulich?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m a friend of Daniel Jacobus.”

  “Oh, hi! What can I do for you?”

  “I’m Martin Lilburn from the Times, and—”

  “I refer you to Junior Parsley, our orchestra committee chairman.”

  Lulich hung up.

  Lilburn quickly dialed Ebeneezer Frumkin’s number. He knew from experience that once the musicians caught on that a reporter was on the trail of a story, they’d circle the wagons. Not that he blamed them. They didn’t have a PR budget, while management had paid professionals on their staff who knew how to spin the media. Having only one representative from among the musicians to speak to the press kept the message unified, and it prevented individual musicians from incurring retribution from the likes of Vaclav Herza. It wasn’t a bad idea. It was just frustrating.

  A woman answered.

  “Hello, Mrs. Frumkin? This is—”

  “Mr. Lilburn, hello!” she said, with a welcoming Midwestern voice chock-full of “sit here and rest a bit while I bring you a slice of warm apple pie.” But that’s not what she said.

  “Beanie says to refer you to—”

  “Junior Parsley, the committee chairman.”

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Frumkin said cheerily. “Have a nice day, now. Good-bye!”

  Lilburn dialed Junior Parsley and not unexpectedly got his answering machine. He hung up, ate a chocolate truffle, opened his notebook, and had a severe case of writer’s block.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  FRIDAY

  “Dress rehearsal” is a bit of a misnomer. Though it is indeed the last rehearsal, concert attire is not required. The term simply suggests something of a hybrid: There can be stopping and starting as in a regular rehearsal, but more often than not it is a straight run-through, like a concert. The conductor makes few, if any, comments, preferring to let the orchestra acclimate to the flow of the music, rather than nitpick his way from one detail to another. If the rehearsal is on the morning of the concert, and particularly if the main work on the program is exceptionally taxing, the conductor, if he has a degree of humanity, will permit the musicians to play on reduced throttle, reserving their energy for the performance.

  On the occasion of the dress rehearsal for Harmonium Hall, Vaclav Herza concedes not one inch and browbeats the musicians mercilessly. In the middle of the magnificent tone poem The Moldau by Bedřich Smetana is an episode in which the river cascades tumultuously over the rocks of the St. John Rapids. When played by the entire orchestra, the overall effect is impressively staggering; when played individually, especially by the string players, it is also staggering but in a very different way, as the fast tempo and awk
wardness of Smetana’s part writing make it as perilous to navigate as the rapids themselves.

  Vaclav Herza lowers his arms and the orchestra comes to a grinding halt. He peers at the back of the viola section and points to one of the musicians.

  “If you are going to fake, my dear friend, at least move your fingers.”

  Casper Lulich, still holding his viola to his chin, whispers to his stand partner, “Beanie, who’s he talking to?”

  “Who is talking?” demands Herza. “I want to know who is talking.”

  Cappy has fallen into a trap and knows it. Since the first year of his tenure as music director, Herza made it clear, via a memo to the personnel manager that has remained posted on the bulletin board, that no one may speak at rehearsals unless directly spoken to. If Lulich confesses, he will be admitting violating that draconian stricture. If he doesn’t, Maestro will go on a tirade. In either case, there will be hell to pay.

  “Maestro, I just wanted to know to whom you were referring,” says Lulich.

  “Why? Are there others who are faking as well?”

  “I wasn’t faking, Maestro.” This comment silences whatever other sound there is in the hall. Not accustomed to being contradicted, especially by a tutti player, even Herza is caught short. He believes his authority hinges on his reply.

  “Well, then,” he says, “perhaps you will be kind enough to prove that to us. Please stand up and play from the beginning of the passage.”

  Another catch-22. Smetana, like Wagner and other nineteenth-century Romantic composers, knew perfectly well the difference between writing a string part for the orchestra, where the mass of orchestral sound occasionally preempted individual accuracy, and one for a quartet, where every note is heard with crystal clarity. Lulich also knows that it is not permitted for a conductor to ask a string player to either stand up or to play alone. Furthermore, he knows that Herza knows both of these things, and also that this unwieldy passage had just been approximated not only by him but by all the string players. But of course he cannot say any of that because it would indict his colleagues. To contradict the music director in front of the orchestra could mean the end of his career.