by Shoshi
magic.”
At that moment three late arrivals hurried down the center aisle to seats near the front. Carol might not have noticed them except that one of them, an older man with a shock of white hair turned around in his seat and slowly surveyed the audience. “Holy cow,” she whispered. “It’s Mr. Ishmail.”
He looked right at her, must have recognized her but acted as though he had never seen her before. She half-smiled and tentatively waggled her fingers at him. Still no sign of recognition. He turned back around and said something to the two people who had come in with him. After a moment one of them, a boy her age who was dressed all in white, turned around and stared right at her.
“Mathew,” she whispered, “isn’t that the guy who played the angel in the time travel show?”
Mathew looked at him. “Could be,” he said. “Why’s he staring at you?”
Now the second person who had come in with Mr. Ishmail turned around. He was also dressed in white. In perfect unison the two of them smiled and waved to her, and it was instantly clear that they were identical twins.
They turned back around, and Mathew burst out laughing. He couldn’t help it. “So that’s how they did it,” he said.
“I can’t believe this,” said Carol. “How can you just sit there and laugh?”
“The joke’s on us,” he said, “but it’s pretty funny.”
Carol wasn’t laughing. She was furious. “Dad, I can’t stay here with these creeps sitting right in front of us. I’ll see you later when it’s over.” She jumped up and bolted up the aisle to the exit.
“I see you met Ishmail,” said Dr. Pindler, smiling. “I guess he played his time travel trick on you---with the twins.”
“He’s a big-time faker,” said Mathew. “He wanted to charge us major bucks to time travel to Mozart.”
“Nah, he’s harmless,” said the doctor. “A little batty, but it’s all a joke with him. All he has is that twins trick. He’s been doing it for years. He would have come up to us after the lecture and told you he was just kidding. He would never actually cheat you.”
• SIX •
Carol had flopped down on a chair in the lobby to wait for the lecture to be over and get a ride home with her dad. Mathew emerged from the lecture hall and joined her. He passed on what Dr. Pindler had told him.
“I think we just learned a big lesson,” he said. “Only electrons know how to time travel.”
“What do we do now?” she said sadly. “We’ve been had, and we’ve been had, and we’ve almost run out of time to help Mozart.
“Tomorrow,” she spoke in a whisper,” he’s a goner.” She looked imploringly at Mathew. “I want so badly to get him to finish the Reckie---now you’ve got me saying it—so I can give it to Dad.”
They moped for a while, and, then, Mathew perked up. “Hey, remember? Your dad told us to look at his books.”
“He does have a whole lot just on Mozart.”
“Let’s check them out,” he said. “We might hit on something.”
She wasn’t very enthusiastic about it. “What are we going to do---read a thousand pages before midnight?” She breathed a long sigh of exasperation. “One thing we don’t want to do is figure out how to go there just to watch him---pop off. He’s got to feel well enough to finish the Requiem.”
“Let’s at least have a look,” he said. “It’s all we’ve got left.”
Mathew thought the doctor’s library was pretty neat. In a separate room on the top floor of their house, it was all paneled in dark wood with streaks and squiggles in it. “That’s how you know it’s rosewood,” she said. “Comes from India. Dad ordered it specially.”
He nodded. Being a doctor definitely paid well. He also thought about the simple little apartment he and his mom rented. The wall in the kitchen still had a hole in it where his dad had kicked it in.
“Cheest, he must have every Mozart book ever written,” he said. As he pulled out books and riffled through them, he found one in which the pages were all yellow. “That means it’s old, right?”
“Probably,” she said.
“Here’s a chapter on his health.” He ran his finger down a page. “It says they aren’t sure what made him die. Kidney problems maybe. Or maybe—how the heck do you pronounce this?” He showed her the word.
Carol peered over his shoulder. “Endo---card—itis,” she said slowly. “What the heck is that?”
“You said he might have some medical books, too. Better yet, I’ll bet your Dad’s got a computer. He must have.”
“On his desk,” she said. They walked over to it and turned it on.
“Good old Internet,” he said. “Spell it again. You know me--I can’t spell anything.”
“Neanderthals can’t.” She reached over and entered “endocarditis” on the keyboard.
“Girl humor,” he said under his breath.
Even before she finished spelling it, Google brought up a bunch of entries. “I hate it when they second-guess you,” she said. “They find 233,000 entries in a hundredth of a second, and you’re still writing out the word ‘disease’.”
He grinned. “Let’s check each one of them. See if they made any mistakes.”
She tried the Wikipedia entry. “Dad says they’re reliable enough for basic stuff,” she said. “And they’re not selling you something all along the margins. See, it says it’s an infection. Just what I thought. Means you can probably cure it with antibiotics. Yeah, it says that right here.”
“I want to look in that book again,” said Mathew. “We need to know Mozart’s address---you know, where he was living on his last day.”
“Dad said it was somewhere in Vienna. Mozart loved the place. The city was full of musicians and rich guys who paid good money for music.” He thumbed through the old book looking for a chapter about Mozart’s last day. “Wait,” yelled Carol. “I saw a picture of a house. Flip back.”
He turned back a few pages, and they found themselves staring at an old black and white picture of a three-story house on a city street. A horse and carriage were frozen in place as they clip- clopped by in the foreground.
“Almost looks like a photograph,” said Mathew.
“They didn’t have cameras in his day.”
“I know that, Carol Pindler. How dumb do you think I am? Don’t answer that.”
Carol started to open her mouth. Then, she closed it. He did have a sense of humor about himself. That was another thing she liked about him.
“They had to draw or paint everything,” he said. He squinted at the words printed under the picture. The caption said Mozart’s apartment was the one at the corner of the building on the second floor. “Looks like the name of the street was Rau—ben—stein--gasse. Something like that,” he said. “Why are German words always so friggin’ long?”
“I can just imagine him in there,” said Carol. “Singing away.”
Except his voice is very weak.” She looked sadly at Mathew. “If only we could help him.” She paused a long moment. “I think you should go and get those antibiotics you never used.”
“Oh, come on, Carol. This is crazy. What are we going to do? Toss the pills up to his window? What’s-her-name-Coshtonzel’s going to lean out and catch them? Right there in the picture? She’d probably think they’re some kind of rat poison.”
“That’s true. Dad said Mozart often thought people were trying to poison him.” But she couldn’t let go of the idea, of getting a hold of Mathew’s pills. “Please,” she said. “As a favor to me. Can you just run over to your apartment and fetch your pills? In case we figure out some way to get them to him.”
“It’s goofy, Carol. I mean time traveling to Mozart’s day is one thing. Maybe we can figure out a way to do that. But how can we give this guy a pill 200 years after he died—and make him well?” He looked at her and realized she was being completely serious about it. He shook his
head. Then, he could hardly believe what came out of his mouth: “Okay, I’ll do it.” he said.
“Thanks, Mathew,” she said.
He ran down the stairs and out into the street. “Thanks for what?” he asked aloud as he jogged toward his family’s apartment. “So I’ll get her the pills. But what’s going to happen? Nothing.” It was only a few blocks away so it took him just minutes to run up to his bathroom on the top floor.
Meantime, Carol was sitting cross-legged on the floor leafing through some more Mozart books. Her dad had one that dated back to the very beginning of the 19th century. That was only a few years after Mozart died. The pages were even a darker yellow than the book with the picture of the house. She was almost afraid to open it because the pages might crumble in her hands—but her curiosity was so great she couldn’t stop herself. She opened it---a crack. How she loved its smell. It was the way old books always smelled---a romantic mixture of old leather and disintegrating paper.
And that’s when something did happen---when two pieces of paper slipped out of it into her lap. One was a page with a short hand-written note on it. The other looked like a page of music with musical notation all over it. For a golden moment she talked herself into thinking it was Mozart’s handwriting. An entry above the notes said “teneroso”. She knew it meant “tenderly” because he had used the same word on the sonata she was learning to play.
Then, she imagined this was the last unfinished page of his Requiem. But how could any of