The schumann proof, p.17
The Schumann Proof, page 17
“I guess so.”
I said thank you—something else I have the idea you should always do with children, even when it’s not really called for—and walked round to the back.
Ulrike was there, as Tessa had promised, sitting alone on her flagstone patio. A vine-covered pergola provided shade on a day when no sun shone. Her gaze was directed at a linden tree, dimly visible at the far end of the lawn.
I let myself in through the gate. She turned at the sound of the latch. The movement was slow, dreamlike.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” I said, approaching from in front so she could see me better.
“Vikkan,” she said, her voice spectral. “How thoughtful.”
It took a moment to fathom her meaning: she thought I’d come to offer condolences. “I’m very sorry,” I temporized, not sure what to say. “I know you were close to Herr Mann.”
“Ja. Very close.”
She sank back and looked beyond me to the linden. I sat down beside her at a low, wrought-iron table and turned my gaze in what I hoped was respectful silence toward the tree. After a few minutes, taking my cue from the object of our contemplation, I recited from Schubert: “Die Lindendufte sind erwacht...”
“...Sie seufzen und weben Tag und Nacht,” she finished. “Yes. I cannot look at that tree without thinking of Schubert.” She smiled weakly. “I have been staring at it all day. As yesterday. I have no will for anything else.”
“I understand.”
She gestured to an empty glass on the table. “If you wouldn’t mind, some water. I’m sorry, I should be doing this for you. So...rücksichtsvoll...considerate of you to come by.”
I remembered from my previous visit that she drank mineral water. I went in through the French doors, traversed her long studio, and climbed the stairs up to the kitchen. The refrigerator held several bottles of Evian and a lemon with a wedge notched out. I found a knife in one of the drawers and cut the rest of the lemon, arranging it on a clean plate from the dishrack. I checked the cupboards and located a small serving tray. Ulrike struck me as someone who’d appreciate the niceties.
“The police came by,” she said when I came back outside. She was still staring straight ahead.
“When?”
“Gestern. Yesterday. In the morning.”
“Did you know then what had happened?”
“Yes. Anna called, on Friday. From Vienna. You know of Anna?”
“Herr Mann’s daughter? Yes. He told me that you and she are friends.”
“Since we were children.” Ulrike unscrewed the bottle and poured half a glass, ignoring the lemon. Her hands trembled slightly. A parchment thinness of skin at the knuckles betrayed years not evident in her face. “The police must have gotten Anna’s name from someone. Miss Gardiner, vielleicht? Anna telephoned me. She thought I knew.”
“An unfortunate way to find out.”
“Ja.” She took a sip of water.
I wished I knew her well enough to make condoling small talk. In the presence of her grief, I felt like an intruder. After a period of silence, I asked what the police had wanted.
“To know my whereabouts on Thursday night.”
“Why?”
“Because I knew where Dieter was.”
So March had acted quickly on his supposition that the break-in wasn’t random. “That’s my fault,” I said. “I told them you and David Bryce knew he was in Elly’s studio. You remember—you gave me a cheque? When Elly was signing out?”
“I remember. But I was at home when...it happened. Alone.”
“I was by myself, too.”
Ulrike rewarded me with a furtive smile, as if the fact of our two solitary natures formed a momentary bond. I decided to approach the question I’d come to ask. “You don’t suppose the Schumann has anything to do with this?”
She turned her head sharply, the first sudden movement she’d made since I arrived. “The Liederkreis? But I thought what happened was a—” she sought the word “—Vandalismus. That the deaths were ohne Sinn und Verstand. Without reason.”
“I thought so, too,” I said, “but the police believe otherwise. The man in charge thinks the murders were intentional.”
“But the proofs? They weren’t stolen? Or damaged?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Then why...?”
I looked out over the expanse of lawn before us. In the pearly grey light, the cropped grass glowed lambent green. A birdbath off to one side had attracted two sparrows. I watched them jockey for position in the shallow water.
“Were you aware that Laura Erskine had seen the Liederkreis?” I asked. “Had sung it?”
She either missed the implications of my question, or chose to ignore them. “I did not,” she replied simply. “Laura Erskine’s doings ceased to be my concern the day she chose to leave me.”
It was clear from her statement that whatever sorrow she felt, it encompassed only Mann. Laura had forsaken her, and ceased to exist some time before. I can’t say I found her attitude odd. Grief is selfish; even murder is no cause for forgiveness.
We sat silent again, surveying the day’s gloom. “Will you go ahead with the Liederkreis premiere?” I asked at length.
“Dieter wanted me to sing it. As does Anna.”
“It’s a beautiful work. I’ve always loved Schumann. I wish you the best with it.”
“Thank you.”
I had no further reason to stay. I had found out what I wanted and sensed that Ulrike would prefer to be alone. I got up and said goodbye. I was almost at the gate when she called out: “Vikkan, what did Dieter tell you of the Liederkreis?”
I looked back. She’d half-risen from her chair. “A bit about its history, not much more. Why?”
“You didn’t know, then.” She sank down into her chair. “I suppose it doesn’t matter now.”
“Know what?”
She hesitated. I stood where I was, my hand on the gate.
“It’s not Schumann,” she said finally.
“I don’t understand.”
“The Liederkreis. It’s not by Schumann. It was written by his wife, Clara.”
PART II
Was heut’ gehet müde unter
Hebt sich morgen neu geboren.
(“What at day’s end sinks downhearted
Rises newborn with the morning.”)
—Liederkreis, Opus 39, X
Eight
Es weiß und rät es doch keiner.
(“But none can guess or explain it.”)
—Liederkreis, Opus 39, VI
I couldn’t get the plastic pail—$2.99 on special at Zellers—to fit under the antique faucets. I resigned myself to filling it halfway. An enervated stream of water bled down the sides and met with Pine Sol in the bottom. The resulting liquid had the milky quality of Pernod over ice.
I carried the pungent solution from the women’s washroom on the second floor of the Conservatory back to Elly’s studio, knocked and waited. The devastation inside was scarcely visible. The most noticeable object, the glassed-in bookcase with Elly’s Great Composers, hadn’t been touched. A passerby wouldn’t have given the studio a second glance.
Presently, Elly’s face appeared at the window, or rather, her salt-and-pepper bun, looking wispier than usual. “I forgot to tell you,” she said, opening up, “the men’s is out of order.”
“I know. I went up there first. So, how shall we do this? You straighten up while I play charwoman?”
Her mouth tightened at the cross-gender quip. “Why don’t you start on the window?” she said. A more manly task.
I set the pail down next to a scrub brush and a pile of rags and picked up the plywood, hammer and nails I’d left on her desk. “You’re sure this is okay? Don’t the police need things left undisturbed?”
“I spoke to Inspector March earlier today. He said it would be all right. They’ve been over everything thoroughly.”
It wasn’t hard to believe. Aside from the general shambles, fingerprint powder bloomed like mildew everywhere.
“You’re certain you want to teach in here again so soon?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t have called you otherwise,” she replied. “I hope you didn’t have anything planned.”
Truth was, I’d wanted to do some practising before I started at Evelyn.
I picked my way through the scattered music, avoiding the Turkish rug so I wouldn’t grind soil into the nap. “Did you bring garbage bags? We should clear up this mess under the window first.”
She came over with some plastic grocery sacks—what did people do for garbage before them?—along with a broom and dustpan. I crouched down and started picking glass off the shattered remains of her potted flowers.
“Too bad about these,” I said. “Can any of them be saved?”
Elly bent over, studying them, lips pursed. “No.” She removed a lethal-looking shard from a limp gloxinia. “They’ll never recover from the shock.”
“Seems a shame to throw them out.”
“It can’t be helped.”
Once we’d dealt with the bigger pieces of glass, I held the dustpan while she resolutely swept up. Afterward, she went to work salvaging music from the floor while I started peeling duct tape off the cardboard covering the window.
“I paid a visit to Ulrike today,” I said over my shoulder.
“That was thoughtful,” she said, echoing Ulrike’s sentiments. “How did she seem?”
“Pretty out of it.” I tore off a long strip of tape, taking some paint with it. “Understandable, I guess, given her history with Mann.”
“She had a history with Laura, too, you know.”
“You’d never have guessed it.” I removed the cardboard, folded it in half and hoisted up my plywood. “Actually, it was more than a sympathy call. I had something I wanted to ask her. Whether she knew Mann had had Laura sing through the Liederkreis.”
“Why?”
“You do know the police think that what happened in here wasn’t just a break-in gone wrong?”
“Surely you’re not suggesting Ulrike—”
“Not really, and in any case, she didn’t know.” I toed in a first nail. “However, she did tell me something interesting.”
“Oh, what’s that?”
“Were you aware that the Liederkreis wasn’t composed by Schumann?”
Had I thought I could surprise Elly? “You didn’t know, then?” she asked, again echoing Ulrike’s words.
“No, I didn’t. Why the hell didn’t someone tell me?” I hammered in another nail in two exasperated blows. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
I stopped and turned around. Elly had cleared a little circle on the floor and was sitting cross-legged in the middle, skirt over her knees like a wool-clad Buddha. “Why didn’t you or Mann tell me the Liederkreis was by Clara?”
She blew some dirt off a sheet of music. “It wasn’t my place. If Dieter wanted you to know, I’m sure he’d have said something. Perhaps he hoped you’d work it out for yourself.”
“How was I supposed to do that? All I saw were the proofs. The title page says Schumann. The story Mann told me sounded convincing. What was I supposed to think? That he wasn’t telling the truth?”
She sighed and looked up. “To be honest, Vikkan, I don’t know. Dieter only said he had some sort of document proving it had been written by Clara. He never told me what.”
“And of course you didn’t ask.”
“I assumed he’d show it to me when I saw him. Besides, he asked me not to say anything.”
“But musicologists have been arguing for over a century whether Clara published under her husband’s name. A chance to settle the debate isn’t just something you keep under your hat!”
“That’s always been an interesting speculation, hasn’t it?” she responded. I could have throttled her. “Robert and Clara did write those Rückert songs together in 1841. You really can’t tell which is by whom.”
I turned back to the window, feeling like the butt of a private joke. “Morris-Jones might not have raised such a stink in Mann’s class if she’d heard about this, you know.”
All I got for an answer was a noncommittal “Mmm.”
I finished hammering in the plywood. Elly came over to the armoire with a load of music. I got out of her way and addressed myself to the overturned cachepots on the other side of the room. Unlike the potted flowers, the larger plants had survived three days of horizontal neglect.
“You might be interested to know,” I said, uprighting an aspidistra, “that I did at least a little research on the songs.”
“Oh?” she said distractedly. “What?”
“I tracked down the poet. Ebert. Did you recognize the name?”
“No. I wondered about that.”
“It’s actually Schumann.”
She stopped what she was doing. “Really?”
“According to Fischer-Dieskau’s Words and Music, anyway. It’s a nom de plume he used on occasion when he wrote words for his own songs.”
“How conscientious of you to have looked it up.”
The faint praise told me she didn’t like being one-upped in the you didn’t know, then? department.
We returned to working in silence. I swept up earth and deposited it back in the big plants’ plastic surrounds. Elly finished putting away her first batch of music. I went back to the corner by the window to take care of her philodendrons. Most people prefer one to a pot. Elly had six, trained around a pipe organ-like set of bamboo poles. The arrangement leaned against the armoire, which had prevented it from toppling completely. Getting behind to set it straight, I lost sight of Elly. When I came out, she’d gone over to her desk, taking a break. I sat on the piano bench and pulled out my cigarettes. She waggled a warning finger.
“So, what do you think?” I asked, putting them back.
She gave me a blank look.
“The Liederkreis. Is it connected with this?”
She nodded slowly, heavily. She’d been expecting me ask. “What I don’t understand, though, is why wasn’t it stolen? And why the break-in? If the police are right and someone came here planning on murder, doesn’t that imply it was someone who knew Dieter or Laura? In which case, couldn’t he or she have just knocked and come in?”
As if in response to her question, someone tapped on the studio door. Elly got up to answer. “Inspector March,” she said, louder than necessary so I’d be warned. “This is a surprise.”
“Miss Gardiner. I see you’ve started already. I thought maybe you could use a hand.”
“How kind. I never realized that ‘to serve and protect’ included cleaning detail.”
“It doesn’t, but for you, I’m making an exception.” He entered in a suit and tie and nodded in my direction. “Vikkan.”
“Well,” Elly said, “we could use an extra pair of hands. You can start by getting this fingerprint powder off everything.” She pointed at the bucket of Pine Sol and the scrub brush.
March picked them up and carried them to her desk without comment. I wasn’t sure whom I admired more: Elly for taking him at his word, or March for playing along. He shrugged off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, but instead of going at black smudges, he crouched down and begin tearing up the taped outline where Laura had fallen.
By some sort of unspoken consent, Elly and I dropped the subject of the Liederkreis, as if March had broken in on a conversation that was none of his business. I watched him a moment, then went over to the desk myself and began wiping it down. When it was gleaming, I looked for the things that went on it: the leather pencil holder, the onyx and brass letter opener, the metal flip-up phone directory, the Rolodex. All were on the floor, treated for fingerprints but left there. “We do that sometimes,” March said when I asked. Helpful.
The only thing I couldn’t find was Elly’s big glass paperweight. Since she was down on the floor again gathering music, I asked her if she could see it under the furniture.
“You won’t find it,” March answered. “We took it away.”
Elly stared at him, distraught. “You don’t mean that was what was used to...”
March shook his head. “No. According to the coroner, the weapon was something heavier. But of all the things that got knocked off your desk, only the paperweight was clean of prints. You didn’t polish it recently, did you?”
“I don’t believe so.”
He sat back on his heels and let the scrub brush he’d been using on the floor drip into the bucket. “The only other place we couldn’t raise latents was outside the window. Meaning,” he said, standing up in a single, easy motion, “that the murderer wasn’t too worried about leaving prints inside.”
Elly rose at the same time and put away some music, then turned to face him, arms crossed. “Inspector March,” she said, “if you’re implying that whoever did this was a regular to the studio, you should just come out and say it. There’s no need for sinister insinuations.”
“Who does use the studio?” March asked blandly.
“Any number of people. Students, other teachers. When I’m not here, the Conservatory rents it to whomever they please. Some teachers don’t allow that, but I’m not one of them.”
“That certainly narrows the field.”
“Don’t be sarcastic,” she shot back, only just leaving out a schoolmarmish “young man!”
“What has your investigation turned up?” I put in. “That is,” I appended, equally guilty of sarcasm, “if you feel you can tell us.”
He flashed us an angry look. “What’s the matter with you two? I’m not the enemy, you know.”
It was Elly who spoke up. “I’m sorry,” she said, not sounding in the least contrite. “We’re both on edge with you here. I’d have thought you understood people get that way when the police are around. Childish, to be sure, but there it is.”
The two of them locked eyes. March looked away after only a few seconds: two hundred pounds of law-enforcement outstared by five-feet-one of rumpled tweed. “Time out?” he suggested, more chastened than conciliatory.
Elly frowned, not quite ready to back down. She walked over to her club chair. “Help me get this thing up,” she directed. “Off the rug.”
