Requiem for Ashes

by David Crossman

So did Albert. He'd never been on a witness stand before. He'd never been in court. He seemed to say all the wrong things, like always. Usually no one paid attention, but they did in court. The memory made him cringe. Most memories made him cringe.

  They were sitting in the No Smoking section. Wraiths of fragrant smoke wafted from the counter area. Albert had forgotten his cigarettes. His lungs ached. He inhaled deeply. Miss Bjork's eyes were watering. "He didn't act like someone who'd just killed somebody."

  "Who knows what a murderer acts like?" said Bjork philosophically.

  It was a rhetorical question. She wasn't prepared for the response.

  "Cigarettes," said Albert.

  When she looked at him his eyes were riveted on hers, but they were looking inward. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

  "What?"

  "All he could think about was cigarettes."

  "What do you mean?"

  "When he came to my apartment all he could think about was cigarettes," Albert explained. "He'd quit smoking. Somebody who's planning to murder someone doesn't quit smoking." Albert was sure of that. He'd tried to quit smoking once. He could certainly imagine committing murder in that state, butplanning such a thing was out of the question.

  "Did he ask for a cigarette?"

  "No. He took one. He asked me for a light, but I don't think he would have smoked it. He liked teasing himself."

  '"How long ago . . . how long before the murder . . . did he quit?"

  "I don't know. A week?" He nodded. "A long time."

  "You didn't give him a light?"

  An unfathomable trace of amusement visited the edges of Albert's mouth. "No."

  It was Miss Bjork's turn to be jarred. It wasn't evidence, of course. But psychologically it was profound. Would someone who was contemplating murder quit smoking? Would someone who had committed murder "tease" himself with a cigarette?

  "Besides," said Albert, "Tewksbury won the argument."

  "What argument?"

  "The one everybody was talking about at the trial. Everybody said they had an argument ."

  "A fight."

  "But it started as an argument. About Etruscans."

  "We went over that at the trial."

  "Not really," Albert said quietly. "You just talked about the fight. Nobody mentioned that Tewksbury won the argument, all that about Etruscans. Someone wrote a paper that proved he was right."

  Pause and effect. "Steidigger." Miss Bjork wondered who was in the cocoon, and whether the light was shining in or out.

  "Winners don't kill losers, do they?" said Albert.

  Miss Bjork stood up and threw her coat around her. "Why didn't you say any of this at the trial?"

  Albert looked up at her. She felt her hair tense again. Those eyes.

  "In court . . . they only let you answer what you’re asked. I was waiting for someone to ask."

  The phone rang in the middle of the night. Albert sat bolt upright as if someone had spilled herring on him. He blinked and picked at his ears. The ringing happened again. He blinked again, cocked his head like a bemused puppy, and sat cross-legged with one foot caught in the sheets. Eventually the regularity of the rings reminded him of the telephone which couldn't have had more than a ring or two left in it by the time it was disinterred. No one called Albert at night. No one called Albert in the daytime. No one ever called Albert.

  A musical emergency?

  The phone was cold on his ear. "Hello?"

  "Damn you!" said the caller, a woman.

  Albert squinted, but it didn't help his comprehension. He frisked the bed for his glasses. "I, h’mm." He didn't know what to say. Even a conventional greeting would have been challenging enough at this hour.

  She said it again, with somewhat less vehemence. He found his glasses. "Did I do something? I don't understand. Is this Miss Bjork?" He knew it was. He knew voices.

  "I haven't been able to sleep, thanks to you. So I didn't think it was fair you should." She sounded tired. "I've got a confession to make."

  He waited. She hesitated. "I shouldn't." He waited. "I thought he was guilty all along."

  Albert's glasses dangled from the corner of his mouth. "That's what he said."

  "Who said?"

  "Tewksbury."

  She was surprised; she prided herself on inscrutability, that quality lawyers so prize in one another. "He knew?"

  Silence in the affirmative. Maybe it shouldn't bother her, but it did.

  "Cigarettes," she said.

  He brushed some sleep from his eyes and sucked on his glasses. She draped some random thoughts on the silence and studied them at arm's length. "I don't know if he's innocent," she said. "But . . . "

  "You don't know he's guilty."

  "I don't know he's guilty."

  Albert's tongue tasted awful. He wanted to evict it from his mouth. He un-crinkled the butt end of a cigarette from the ashtray and lit it.

  She continued. "It sickened me to have to defend him. I figured everything he said was a lie, until you said that about the cigarette." She jumped to the defense of her conscience. "That doesn't mean I let him down. I did everything I could think of to get him off."

  Albert probably shouldn't have been struck by yet another oddity in the odd world of law, but he was. "Even though you thought he was guilty?" he said, still mistaking law for justice.

  For a long time the only sound was the soft hiss of the open phone line.

  Albert put his glasses on. "What happens now? Will they let him out of jail?"

  Ms. Bjork wasn't sure what to make of the music teacher's naïveté. "It's not that easy," she said. "We've got to come up with some solid evidence. The fact that he'd quit smoking doesn't automatically exonerate him."

  "It would if the judge smokes," Albert suggested.

  "I'm afraid not," Miss Bjork said. "We need something a lot more concrete than that."

  Albert couldn’t imagine anything more concrete. "Like what?"

  "I don't know," she said. "If he's really innocent, we have to find someone else with a reason for wanting Glenly dead."

  "Someone else?"

  "What do you know about Glenly's lifestyle?"

  Albert had hardly been aware of the man's existence. "Nothing," he said flatly. "I'm not . . . I don't know many . . . "

  "You need to find out."

  Albert took his glasses off and looked at them closely. He wasn't hearing properly. "Find out?" he repeated.

  "Chat up your colleagues. Get them talking about Glenly. About Tewksbury. You'll be able to get a good idea if anybody had something against him or something to gain by his death."

  Albert protested. "But isn't that your job?"

  "I'm a lawyer, not a detective," said Miss Bjork.

  "And I teach music!"

  "Besides," she continued, ignoring him to City Hall perfection, "you're less likely to arouse suspicion than a stranger would. People will talk more freely to you."

  Albert could think of nothing half as suspicious as him going around "chatting people up." There was something unnatural in the very suggestion. Some eternal balance would be upset. Surely Albert would be. He was honing the words of his rebuttal when she terminated the conversation.

  "I feel better already," she said. Albert's lips moved like a fish's but nothing came out. "Tell me as soon as you find out anything," she concluded, "and if it’s something backed by solid evidence, I'll get the police on it." Sigh. "I think I'll be able to sleep now. Thanks. Good night, Professor." Click.

  Having deposited her demons on his doorstep, Miss Bjork vanished into the ether. She would sleep better; Albert would sleep no more.

  Only one thing terrified Albert more than talking to people; thethought of talking to them. He hung up his glasses, put the phone in his slipper, and laid down. For a long time he stared holes in the ceiling, unable to fend off the memory of another night like this.

  Early in his career, The New England Conservatory of Music had invited him to lecture and give a rec
ital of original work. Lecture? The shock inverted Albert's entire nervous system. He couldn't imagine what hat his name had been picked from, but they assured him he had been selected on purpose. By committee. That partway explained it. Still, he felt there was some misunderstanding. He knew that when he showed up they would say "You're not the Albert we wanted. You must have got his mail by mistake."

  Perhaps they'd turn him in; there was a penalty for opening other people's mail. "We don't want you." It would be high school athletics all over again. Nobody wanted Albert except to play the piano.

  Four days before the lecture he had lost his appetite. Three days before the lecture he lost control of the index finger of his left hand and his right eye started twitching. He lost his lunch. He lost his nerve. Nevertheless, thanks to the school - which had apparently entered into some dark, Satanic agreement with the annoyingly persistent Huffy - he found himself alone on stage at the appointed time. The auditorium was packed to the rafters . . . with people. They applauded, even though he hadn't done anything yet. When were they going to realize their mistake?

  He mumbled some words into a microphone. People laughed and applauded, as if he’d said something funny; on purpose. His face felt like a voodoo doll, tingling with pins. He felt faint. He said something else. Something about music. He couldn't hear what it was; his ears were plugged with his heart. He couldn't lecture. The words he'd been rehearsing all week long sounded like a foreign language in his brain. His fingers went to the keys for comfort. His lover was at hand. He closed his eyes and began to play. The music was alive, a river of melodic mathematics in which he immersed himself. It surged across the keys, washing the world away.

  He played as long as the music came. Not a note of it had ever been heard before. Not by him. Not by anyone. The audience tingled in the presence of raw creative power. They were baptized.

  No one coughed. No one stirred. Some wept. They were spellbound. Dumbfounded. Albert didn't notice. He only became aware of the audience again after he'd finished playing. The last note trailed off for fifty-eight seconds, embraced by silence. Then somebody started clapping.

  He realized he wasn't in his apartment.

  As the wave of adulation intensified, so did his awareness of himself. He managed a feeble bow, raced from the stage, left the auditorium, and hid behind the tinted window of the limousine that whisked him to the hotel. It was always like that after he played.

  As lectures go, well, it hadn’t been one, had it? For years he’d been haunted by the notion that, one day, the phone would ring, or there would be a knock at the door. Someone would have tumbled to the fact that the advertised lecture had never taken place. They’d want their money back, and he didn’t know where it was.

  But tomorrow he would have to talk to people. And he wouldn't have a piano.

  Albert got up early. He filled the sink with freezing water and stuck his head in. The resulting shock usually got the music started. Not this time. When he opened his eyes the cold went straight to his brain, etching there a portrait of Tewksbury, innocent Tewksbury, languishing in jail, his cell peopled with mummies and littered with broken artifacts. No musical instruments among them.

  He put his glasses on and looked in the mirror. The water streamed down his face. There was a lot of white in his hair now. He hadn't realized that. He hadn't shaved in days. He grimaced. His teeth were yellow with nicotine. Below the purple whisker line on his neck, his body was chalk white, almost transparent. His veins showed through. He was scrawny. Anemic. For the first time in a long time . . . maybe ever . . . he was embarrassed. This is what Miss Bjork had seen. That bothered him. He wasn't sure why. That bothered him, too.

  Albert was usually late to class. Customarily he would go directly to the board, or the piano and, without directly addressing the semi-circle of students, begin thinking aloud in a sort of musical stream-of-consciousness. If someone asked him a question he would turn, eyes on the floor, and, pacing back and forth, exhaust his knowledge or opinions on the subject. The process often took the whole period.

  Albert's presence had allowed the school the luxury of selecting from among the best and brightest. They were not insensitive to his genius and were economical in their interruptions.

  Today Albert was early; meaning not nearly as late as usual. He was clean-shaven. He'd had a haircut and his skin was almost ruddy with washing. He wore his suit; the tweed outfit his mother had bought him for high school graduation, the one he wore to every formal occasion other than those requiring a tux, which the school rented for him. It had gotten a size or two small, but that's not what the students noticed. Nor the wide paisley tie or the white socks.

  It was a suit.

  There are places in the world that devout people dream of; places to which they must travel at least once in a lifetime, though it cost them all they own. The true pilgrim is not content to stop at the gates of the City of David, to cease walking with Mecca in sight, or stand at the foot of some Iberian hillside while others crawl to the summit on bloody hands and knees, achieving sanctification. Such a place was Albert's class. Its pilgrims were talented young musicians from around the world. Here, they were anointed. Here they were in the presence of the Gift.

  Albert hadn't a clue.

  It is too much to say Albert's class that day was normal. That would be impossible. Wonderful things would take place; there would be miracles. But not as many as usual. It wasn't just the clothes. Something was different about Albert. Speculation tended toward romance, since there was no overt sign of a religious awakening.

  After class, as the students left the room, he stopped the last two, one of each sex, shut the door, and asked them to sit down.

  "I'd like to ask you a question," he said. The brevity of the words belied the difficulty with which they were formed. He'd been phrasing them for fifty minutes. "Professor Glenly is dead."

  The girl was a flautist. The boy, a pianist with a lazy left hand. They looked sideways at each other. Perhaps he should rephrase the question.

  "I really didn't know him. What was he like?"

  "Slime," said the pianist. The flautist said nothing.

  "Did you take any of his classes?" Interrogation wasn't so hard, after all.

  No, he didn't, but he'd heard. The girl hadn't had him, either, but . . . she confessed hesitantly, he'd made passes at a friend of hers. "Not just passes . . . with words," said the girl. "You know what I mean?" Even Albert understood. The study of history seemed to excite the testosterone.

  "He was always after someone," she said. "A lot of the girls thought it was just in fun. Flirting, you know? I guess it's all right to say, now."

  Albert was struggling to get his knee on the next step. The bell rang in the hall.

  “Look what happened to Joanne Alter," the boy said as he collected his books.

  There was something familiar in the name. "Alter?" said Albert.

  "Professor Alter," said the girl. "Biology?"

  "Joanne's his daughter. She was a junior, and Glenly got her

  . . . "

  "You don't know that," the girl protested.

  Got her what? Flowers? Candy? "Got her what?" Albert asked.

  "Pregnant," said the boy with a defiant sneer at his classmate.

  Pollyanna had just arrived at Peyton Place. "Pregnant?" echoed Albert. “With a baby?”

  "That's why she changed schools last year," the boy continued.

  "You don't know what you're talking about," said the girl. "She hated Glenly."

  "He was all over her!"

  "That doesn't mean she liked it. Besides, her father would've killed . . . " The refrigerator door swung open and the light came on. "Oh, come on, Professor. You don't think . . . Tewksbury killed Glenly."

  "Is that what this is all about?" said the boy, standing. "That's old news, Professor. It's a done thing."

  After they left, Albert felt oddly triumphant. His very first interview had turned up a possible suspect. He did feel, though, that h
e was lacking something in interrogatory style. What did detectives do? His brain rifled through the contents of its "Detective" file, and turned up only two examples: The Hardy Boys and Sherlock Holmes.

  A cursory search of the school library came up blank on the Hardy Boys, despite boasting several million volumes. Nevertheless, they had a copy ofThe Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Ten hours later they wanted to close the library. They insisted. It never occurred to Albert to take the book home. He tucked it back on the shelf. He'd readA Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, and all the short stories fromScandal in BohemiathroughThe Musgrave Ritual. The lights went off as he stepped into the night.

  The stories all began with an impossible crime for which Holmes always found an equally impossible solution. Mysteries solved by an enigma. Albert gained nothing by osmosis. He did, however, stumble upon the fact that he and Holmes had something in common: they were both designed to do one thing to the exclusion of all else.

  One other thing was clear: successful detection lay in observation, an art that was as foreign to Albert as skydiving. He walked to the bus terminal, bought some candy from a vending machine, and sat down to observe. Try as he might, he couldn't determine a person's profession from his attire. It helped if they wore uniforms, but who knew what uniforms signified?

  Failing this, he began to study faces. Hands. Motions— expressions, and gestures—to the point where he could perceive someone who was late for something at twenty paces. Beyond that, if there was an ax-murderer among the patrons at the bus terminal, they needn't have feared detection by Albert. He did enjoy watching people, though. That was a surprise.

  It was late by the time he got home, and he still had no idea what to do next. He took off his suit, put the flimsy plastic dry-cleaner bag over it again, and hung it up. The suit hadn't been dry-cleaned in over ten years, but it could take another decade's wear at the present rate before laundering was necessary. Besides, the bag had held up well.

  In his T-shirt and boxer shorts he banged around the darkened kitchen, preparing supper. He had meant to buy a light bulb, but they didn't sell them at Dunkin' Donuts. In the past he had simply transferred bulbs from room to room. Now there was only one left, by the bed.