The schumann proof, p.16
The Schumann Proof, page 16
“What I think, Vikkan,” he said, massaging a kink, “and what you should start considering, is that someone was watching the studio, waiting for an opportunity to break in. They could see it was occupied and knew who was in it. Nothing was stolen, nothing seriously damaged. Two people are dead. Doesn’t that suggest an intent rather more malicious than vandalism?”
Now who sounded as if he read too many mysteries? The wording came easily. Perhaps it was standard phrasing in police-inspector argot.
“But why?” I said, more to myself than expecting an answer. “And who were they after? Laura or Mann?”
“Like I said, Vikkan—I’ll be needing your cooperation.”
It was raining when I left Fifty-two Division, a sluicing downpour that washed cigarette butts and gum wrappers into the gutter. I was drenched by the time I reached the Rover. The door wouldn’t shut, and the engine wouldn’t start. Rovers are supposed to do well in any climate, but I suspect they prefer the Sahara to the Amazon.
I wasn’t sure where to go next. Saturdays I usually make the trek to St. Lawrence Market, but I didn’t feel like facing bright stalls filled with produce and delicatessen. A peculiar apathy follows on death, a lethargic protest against life-supporting tasks like procuring food. I sat in the Rover with the heater on, clearing steam from the windows, thinking about what March had said. Death by random violence is said to be the hardest to accept, but for me, it was preferable to believe that chance or fate had simply placed Mann and Laura in the wrong place at the wrong time. To know they were intended victims, deliberately sought out for murder, seemed to implicate them, in some twisted fashion, in their own demise.
I wondered if March realized that I didn’t want to think this way, that I wouldn’t easily accept that someone had had reason to batter Mann’s and Laura’s skulls until that reason vanished with the passing of their memories, their personalities, their lives. If not, what was the point of his asking for my cooperation? A palliative? A cheap way of making me feel I could do something pro-active?
While the last of the condensation crept up and off the windscreen, I considered that maybe he’d been trying to help, forcing me to see things as they were.
If so, I hoped he didn’t want gratitude in return.
“One year ago Thursday night,” I said to Léo. He was sitting across from me on an off-white linen couch, feet up on the coffee table. I was nursing the bottom finger of the Scotch he’d poured when I arrived, unannounced, at his condominium on Glen Road. “One year to the day. I wasn’t going to say anything, you know.”
“Why not?”
“To prove something, I guess.”
He took a sip of his brandy and tonic. “Like you’d gotten over it?”
“Not exactly. More like not wanting to let you down. Wanting you to see you’d made a difference. You and Evelyn both. I can’t imagine what it must have been like, dealing with your own grief, helping me through mine.”
“We had each other. That helps, a little. And we had some inkling. Christian was our son, after all. In a way, we’d been given time to prepare.”
“For his suicide? I don’t think so.”
Léo studied the frozen strawberry at the bottom of his drink. “We knew he was troubled.”
“I didn’t see it, Léo. I honestly thought it was something else.”
He pressed his lips together as if he would say something, then thought better of it. I finished my drink. “Have I ever thanked you for not interfering?” I asked. “For letting me know Christian the way I did? Not as...”
“Schizophrenic? You’ve got it backwards, Vikkan. You loved our son. We’re the ones with a debt of gratitude.” He stood up and went to a highboy, taking out a bottle of Talisker.
“I don’t want to get drunk, you know,” I said.
He sat and poured, ignoring me. “It might do you some good.”
I swirled the amber liquid around in my glass, inhaling peat-iodine-apricots-peaches. “Thursday night,” I said, taking a sip, “I drove out to the Beaches. There aren’t many places in the city we ever went together, but that was one of them. It seemed right, somehow, to give in, to remember...”
Léo nodded.
“And while I was out there, someone was killing Laura and Mann.”
Léo had read about the murders but hadn’t known about my connection to the victims. Nor that I’d been one of the two “Conservatory teachers” who had found them. The papers, as always, had compressed the facts to fit their columns.
“It must seem like a ghastly practical joke.”
I took a deeper swallow of Scotch. “I know it’s vanity to think there’s an intelligence out there interested enough in any one human being to inflict this sort of misfortune deliberately, but, yes, that’s exactly what it feels like.”
“Coincidence happens.”
He was right, of course, but that didn’t stop my brain from seeing a connection between Christian’s suicide and Thursday’s murders, if only as an imaginary line of pain joining two dots of sorrow in some complex, abstruse puzzle.
“Have the police got any leads?” he asked, steering me away from metaphysical reflection. “The papers said something about other incidents at the Conservatory.”
“The detective in charge doesn’t think this is related. He thinks whoever broke into the studio meant to kill Laura or Mann.”
“Premeditated, in other words.”
“That’s the assumption he’s working from.” I outlined what March had said earlier about the unlikelihood of someone targeting an occupied studio for hooliganism.
Léo concurred. “It’s true. A delinquent wouldn’t take those kinds of risks.”
“I know, but I’m having trouble believing it. And I can’t figure out how he thinks I can help if this is more than just a case of interrupted vandalism. Twice today he said he’d be needing my ‘cooperation’.”
“Sounds like a veiled threat. Does he suspect you’re involved somehow?”
“Hard to say. He’s not the easiest man to read. Mostly, I get the impression he thinks I know more than I’m telling him. No, correct that—it’s more as if he thinks he knows more about me than I’m telling him.”
“Have you been completely open with him?”
“It’s not easy. He’s like something out of a TV show—the beefed-up detective who’s a little too full of himself.”
“So there are things you haven’t told him.” Léo didn’t even bother to make it a question.
I took another mouthful of Scotch and set my glass on the table. Léo watched patiently. “Three things,” I said finally. “One of them...how can I put this?...its significance might be lost on March, or misconstrued. The other two, well, one is speculation, and the other’s something that happened on Wednesday night.”
I told Léo first about the Liederkreis, pointing out before he drew any conclusions that the proofs had neither been harmed or stolen. “Getting at the thing itself wasn’t behind the break-in, which is why I didn’t mention it to March. Now I’m worried that if I tell him, he’ll ascribe some sort of sinister importance to my not having said something before.”
“Is he really so bad?”
“What can I say? He’s a policeman.”
“Meaning?”
“I couldn’t like someone who’d even want to be in the police, let alone someone who already was.”
“That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?” He held up his hand. “Don’t answer. It’s not important. What else is there?”
“This woman, Ulrike Vogel? The one I played for on Monday? Originally, Mann had asked her to premiere the Liederkreis. She hasn’t performed in years, and she’s planning a comeback. He wanted to help out. Trouble is, and I know this firsthand, he was having second thoughts.”
“Shall I venture a guess? He was considering your friend Laura instead?”
“You’re quick.”
“No, Vikkan, I know you. Well enough to figure out what you wouldn’t tell this man, March.” He got up to replenish his drink. “Ambition makes you uneasy, whether it’s your own—and I can’t believe you don’t have any—or other people’s. I think you have this idea it sullies your art, which is romantic, and foolish, and utterly you. I’d expect you to insulate yourself from even considering that your friends had been murdered because of someone else’s hopes for glory.”
His comment got my back up. “You’re wrong there, Léo. The only reason I didn’t tell him was because I thought some sicko had broken into the studio, not someone out to get Laura and Mann. Besides, Elly will have said something already.”
“That doesn’t remove your own obligations.”
“But I don’t even know whether Ulrike was aware of what Mann was doing.”
“That’s not the point.” Léo cracked ice cubes sharply out of a tray. I lit a cigarette and waited while he took longer than usual to fix his brandy and tonic. When he turned around, I could see he was upset, worried that he’d spoken out of turn. “How are you feeling?” he asked gently. “I mean, really?”
“I don’t know. I’m having trouble sorting things out. I didn’t know Mann well. Laura and I...we were only just starting to get close. We had dinner on Wednesday.” I shook my head.
“Do you need some time off? You were planning to go up to Caledon. Evelyn would still love to see you.”
“I imagine I’m supposed to stay in town. As long as I’m here, I might as well work.”
We sat again without speaking, Léo content to let me drink his single malt for as long as I needed.
“The other thing,” I said, finishing my cigarette, “was this woman who used to be a professor of mine, Bernice Morris-Jones. Mann wrote a critique of her research in Piano Quarterly, and she had a mammoth hate-on for him.”
Léo couldn’t help smiling while I described Morris-Jones’ antics during Wednesday’s master class. “She sounds like quite the character,” he said afterward, “but somehow, I can’t imagine anyone so unhinged they’d kill over a magazine article.”
“Me either.”
“You said she’s a historian. Did she by any chance know about this Schumann piece?”
“I can’t see how. Mann’s not likely to have told her, and the number of people who know about it is pretty small. Why?”
“Oh, I was just thinking if it weren’t genuine, or she’d been tracking it down, and he beat her to it...”
“Somehow, I don’t think so.”
My words came out listless. The drinks were starting to have an effect. I didn’t have the energy or the will for this kind of speculation. Léo saw it and dropped the matter. After a moment, he asked if I wanted something to eat.
“What have you got?”
“I’ll check.”
He left and came back with a plate of cretom—coarse québécois pâté loaded with pork fat—sliced French bread, a jar of mustard, and some dill pickles. “Comfort food,” he said.
“Only in Québec.”
The afternoon stretched on into evening. Leo’s company was like a balm to the past two days. It felt good just to sit, relax, let someone take care of me. Our conversation petered out, but he gave no indication of wanting me to leave.
Finally, I drank the watery remains of a last Scotch and picked crumbs off the plate.
“Don’t forget,” he said as I stood up, “you can take time off if you need it.”
“Thanks, but I’ll be in tomorrow night.”
“The show must go on?”
“Something like that.”
The Rover was in a visitors’ lot off to one side of the drive circling up to Léo’s condo. Pink granite boulders and a few low shrubs embellished the half-moon centre. The arrangement brought to mind Christian’s work in Caledon. A landscaper, an artist of the earth, his paint and canvas had been rock and tree, slope and plain, light and shade. He’d done Léo’s property first, then some of Léo’s acquaintances, then others. His creations were austere, beautiful and very much in demand. Who was tending them now that he was gone?
The rain had let up. A breeze from the south carried green, decaying odours from the lake. On a whim, I left the Rover where it was and walked to Craigleigh Gardens, four blocks away. The greyness of the evening, the early streetlamps shimmering off the rain-dark pavement, put me in a mood to sit by myself, out of doors, in the humid dusk.
After rain, Christian used to sit—often for hours, unmoving, impossible to speak to—beside a stretch of the Credit River running through Léo’s property. I never knew what transfixed him so completely in the spooling currents and doubted I could ever muster the intensity of sadness or peace that kept him rooted in one place for so long, but surely my frame of mind just then was something similar, however diluted.
The park wasn’t deserted, as I’d hoped. Some dog owners had brought their wards to frolic on the grass. The animals ran and skidded while their guardians conversed in a tight little clique. Periodically, a raincoated figure would break away from the group and zero in on a squatting mutt, plastic bag in hand.
I found a bench away from the activity, swiped water from the back, and sat with my shoes on the seat. The city’s background murmur, cotton-wooled by venerable oaks and maples, had a lulling effect. Without meaning to, I started turning over my conversation with Léo.
Ambition makes you uneasy.
He’d hit the nail on the head with that. In a world of my own making, the urge for fame would never outweigh the desire simply to do what you loved, and do it well. But I wasn’t as naïve as he imagined. I did understand that talent and ambition had to be allied, otherwise a person’s gifts frittered into—what had Elly called it?—dilettantism. The problem was, I couldn’t make the nexus in myself. I was indifferent about getting ahead, jockeying for my share of the spotlight. Worse, my apathy didn’t even have the decency to cloak itself in lofty moral precepts. Regardless of Léo’s crack about sullying my art, I didn’t judge people who were ambitious. I merely shied away from them.
“I’d expect you to insulate yourself from even considering that your friends might have been murdered because of someone else’s hopes for glory,” he’d said, and he’d gotten that right, too. Now that he’d planted the idea in my head, I couldn’t just ignore it. What if Ulrike had discovered that Mann was considering Laura for the Liederkreis premiere? Had she staked so much on her comeback ticket that she’d kill to hold onto it? I found it hard to believe. The scenario sounded too much like something out of opera: Ulrike, betrayed, wreaking vengeance on Mann and Laura, he for his treachery, she for the perfidious usurping of a second chance at fame.
Still, something niggled—a stirring of anger, the need for answers. Someone had killed a friend I had every right to have gone on knowing longer and robbed the world of a great man whose affection and respect I’d only just begun to enjoy. Ulrike’s house wasn’t far from Léo’s. I could drive over before heading home.
I got off my bench and started back to Glen Road. Along the way, I recalled Mann telling me about Ulrike’s public suicide attempt a decade before. What had happened that evening in Vienna? Had she been wearing long gloves? Did she remove them one finger at a time, like a burlesque dancer, or draw a razor and slice through silk or satin before anyone could stop her?
And did violence to herself make her capable of murder?
Ulrike wasn’t in when I drove by—a relief, since I hadn’t figured out how to ask what I wanted to know. It wasn’t my place to be making enquiries. Questions like that were better left to the police.
Just the same, when I got home, I debated leaving her a message to call. I made it as far as picking up the phone.
Sunday crept in still overcast and damp, inspiring me to further procrastination. Midafternoon had arrived before I drove back to Rosedale.
Fog shrouded the cypresses beside Ulrike’s driveway, turning them into gloomy spires worthy of a canvas by Kaspar David Friederich. The house itself was completely dark. A rumour of chimes echoed within when I rang, but no footsteps sounded down the hall. I waited a few minutes, then gave up.
“Do you want to see the lady who lives there?”
I looked around for the voice that had addressed me. It seemed to have come from a gap between Ulrike’s house and the one on the left. “Yes,” I called out. “I don’t suppose you know when she’ll be back?”
A small figure emerged from the shadows: a girl of about seven or eight, dressed like Paddington Bear in yellow boots and a rain hat to match. “Are you her friend?”
“Not really, but I would like to see her.”
“If you’re not her friend, why do you want to see her?”
“I want to ask her something.” I have this idea it’s best to answer children’s questions candidly. It’s a notion I should lose; their literal inquisitiveness gets tedious quickly.
“She’s in her back yard. Sitting. I was watching her. She’s all alone. Is that yours?” She pointed to the Rover.
“Yes.”
“My name’s Tessa. What’s yours?” Tessa seemed to have difficulty concentrating on one thing at a time.
“Vikkan.”
She furrowed her brow in that winsome way only the very young can get away with. “How come your parents called you that?”
“How come yours called you Tessa?”
Never answer a question with a question, especially around children. “That’s easy,” she giggled. “I have an aunt, well, not really my aunt because she and Uncle Brian aren’t married the way they’re supposed to be, but Mommy says...”
“And you’re named after her?” I cut in.
She nodded, wide-eyed. My powers of deduction must have impressed her. Her attention went back to the Rover. “Can you take me for a drive in your truck?”
So much for never accept rides from a stranger. “You’ll have to ask your parents. And not today. I need to talk to the lady in the back yard. Do you think it’s all right if I go around?”
