The schumann proof, p.22
The Schumann Proof, page 22
“That wasn’t Janssen’s point. ‘Once procedure’s established, it must be followed.’ ” She made a notation on the card and put it back. “I’m starting to have second thoughts about that man. You know I was on the committee that elected him?”
“I think you told me.”
“He seemed so right at the time: former registrar, knowledgeable, efficient, diplomatic. And with a vision of the Conservatory as a real player in the international music world. It’s a lofty ideal, Vikkan, but you know? I think it’s gone to his head. Would you believe he even had the temerity to suggest the murders might generate some useful publicity?”
“He said as much to me. It could just be the times we live in. Spin is everything. Some people might congratulate him on his marketing savvy.”
Elly shook her head and began flipping through her file again.
“There’s something about Janssen that’s bothering me, too,” I said.
“Oh, what’s that?” she asked distractedly.
“This idea of his that I should come on staff. I know he consulted you about it.”
“He did.”
“Then maybe you can tell me: why does he want me? There must be dozens more suitable who could fill the post.”
“He wants the best. He believes you’re it. And whatever else I may think of him,” she said darkly, “he’s right about that.”
It sounded like a prelude to one of her usual reproaches for everything I’m not doing with my life, so I answered back lightly: “Let’s not go there today,” or some similarly overused phrase.
She stopped fiddling with her Rolodex and turned around. “And why not?” Her look was not the one of good-humoured exasperation I expected. “Isn’t it about time we had this out? What’s the matter with you, Vikkan? Don’t you realize most people would kill for what you have?”
I could see in her face that she regretted the choice of words, but she wasn’t ready to back down.
“Dare I say I never asked for it?” I asked, startled.
“That’s a stupid, wilful comment, and you know it, like saying you didn’t ask to be born. You have talent, and like it or not, that entails responsibility.”
“Maybe in your books.”
“Well, if not in yours, then all I can say is you must have a library full of very selfish literature. As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been dickering around, avoiding your obligations, waffling over opportunities like this one, distancing yourself from people who are trying to help. What do you intend to do? Go back to your little cabin in the woods and play Chopin at the chipmunks for the rest of your life? What’s the good of playing the piano if you won’t share it with anyone? That’s not being a musician. It’s—”
“Onanism?”
She slammed her hand on the desk. “Why, do you have to do that? Always look for something clever to say? Do you like keeping people at arm’s length, or is it something you developed to protect yourself from Berényi?”
“That’s way below the belt, Elly.”
“And I hope it hurt! Or at least got your attention!”
Why was she doing this? And why now? We’d always only danced around the subject of my future in music, or at least negotiated a way to keep the issue alive without ever coming to blows.
I looked off to my right, at the window with plywood still in the frame, the sill with circular stains where Elly’s flowerpots had sat for years. With nothing to brighten the space where Mildred and Chastity and their floral friends used to sit, the room had a transient, unwelcoming feel, like an apartment before moving day with all the pictures taken down. The bare linoleum tiles, minus the Turkish rug, added to the coldness.
A movement at the desk caused me to look back. Elly was pulling a hankie from her sleeve. She sniffled into the balled-up cotton, her eyes strained and bright. “I’m sorry, Vikkan. Really. Forgive me. I didn’t mean it to come out that way.”
It felt as if someone had just stabbed me in the chest. Mais, mais, voir un ami pleurer... The Jacques Brel refrain surfaced unbidden. To see a friend cry... Worse than the tears was the apology. “Elly—”
“It’s all right.” She wiped her nose. “I’ll be fine. Just give me a moment.”
I stayed put while she drew herself together, dabbing at her eyes. Finally, she stuffed the hankie back into her sleeve. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what came over me.” A rueful smile accompanied the time-honoured cliché.
To discuss it further, or not? To make comforting noises about the emotional toll of the past week? To excuse, pretend, talk away the last few minutes?
“You know, Elly,” I said carefully, “I think I liked it better when we left these things unsaid.”
Her response was a wry look that made me want to get up and hug her.
“Me, too,” she said. “Me, too.”
The elevator beckoned with gaping doors at the end of Elly’s hall. Hard to tell if it was stuck, or merely catching its breath before heaving off elsewhere. I took a chance and stepped inside.
In the time it took to ride down one floor, I could have served a formal supper—and cleaned up afterward. The cabin’s scarred wooden floor needed work, though. Definitely not suitable for dining. A little Indian Sand and some paste wax, maybe?
I should probably have used the slow descent to think over Elly’s outburst. In a way, I suppose I did, by displacing my feelings onto Janssen. Who did he think he was, chastising her about her key as if she were a junior member of staff? And how had he known she’d left it with Mann and Laura? Was it from things the police had told him, or had he taken to spot-checking the key sheet to find out who was disobeying his edict?
My churlish thoughts must have worked some kind of voodoo, because when the elevator’s long double-doors finally slid back, the man himself stood before me, in double-breasted blue today instead of grey. Perhaps his dry cleaners hadn’t come through on time.
“Have you got a minute?” I asked.
He looked mildly surprised. “Yes, I think so. I’m just on my way up to the office. Would you like to talk there?” He made to get on the elevator.
“Going down,” I said. “We’d better take the stairs.”
He frowned. I wondered if the sluggish behemoth was on his to-do list of Conservatory reforms.
Inside his office, I got straight to the point. “It’s about Thursday night. I understand you chastised Elly for leaving her key with Mann and Laura.”
His eyebrows went up. “That’s not at all what I expected. I was hoping you’d reconsidered my offer to work here.”
“Not if it means being called on the carpet for petty infractions.”
“Miss Gardiner is not the only one I’ve spoken to,” he said stiffly.
“I have no doubt, but in her case, your timing was lousy.”
He looked amused. “I had no idea she had such a loyal champion. But perhaps you’re right; it could have waited. Was that all?”
“No, there’s something else. Did you happen to know specifically who was in Elly’s studio that night?”
“Doing a little amateur sleuthing?” he inquired, studying his nails. The sarcasm was polite, carefully modulated, and landed right where he meant it to. Asking questions about the murders, I felt like a character in Agatha Christie. “Laura Erskine was my friend,” I said evenly. “I’d like to find out what happened.”
“I see.” He leaned back in his chair, elbows on the arms, fingers steepled in front of him. “Russell Spiers dropped by shortly after seven. We had scheduling conflicts to resolve. As you know, some teachers do double duty here and over at the Faculty. Spiers mentioned something about going to see Laura Erskine and Dieter Mann afterward, in Miss Gardiner’s studio. So, yes, I did know they were there. And I suspected—quite rightly, as it turned out—that Miss Gardiner had left them her key.”
“Which you found out by...?”
“Checking the key sheet. It wouldn’t have done to barge in on Herr Professor Mann for something like that. Understand, it isn’t that I don’t trust Miss Gardiner. I’d merely been expecting some staff to have difficulty adjusting to the new precautions. Security is no longer something about which we can afford to be lax.”
“Indeed. First petty vandalism, and now murder. Very bad for the image.” Two could play this game of genteel sarcasm.
There was nothing more I wanted, so I glanced at my watch. Janssen accepted the gambit and rose. “Please,” he said, showing me out, “if you’re talking to Miss Gardiner, explain what I’ve just said. I wouldn’t want her to think my reprimand was personal.”
He shut the door and left me in the company of his predecessors, ranged in frames up and down the hall. Their expressions were benign, if a little smug and stuffy. Janssen’s keen gaze would look out of place here. These principals had governed a staid institution, but one whose influence reached across the country. There were branches in nearly every major city. Its graded exam system allowed teachers in communities as remote as Glace Bay and Puvungnituk to lead their students from musical infancy to full-blown Conservatory Associateship. One didn’t even have to enter the building to be granted that honour. Statistics alone ensured that a good percentage of the country’s gifted studied, if not at, at least through the Conservatory. Had any of these men felt that wasn’t enough?
I decided not to get the Rover when I left the building, but to walk a few blocks west, over to Spadina. There was a good florist there managed by a voluble Hungarian—Rose, appropriately enough—and I wanted to see what she had by way of potted plants, violets in particular.
Something began to niggle in my brain on the way over, a mental itch I couldn’t quite scratch away. It grew as I walked by the brick-walled estate of the St. George Club, and became unbearable by the time I hit Huron Street. I stopped across from the David A. Croll Apartments and tried to figure it out. Was it something I’d just heard? From Janssen? Elly?
I watched a squirrel lurch down the sidewalk. The scraggly-tailed critter had something in its mouth—last year’s acorn?—and was headed for a big maple, stopping every few feet, looking around. When it got to the tree, it scampered up partway, then fled behind the trunk with its prize. Something carried, something moved, something removed...
The penny dropped. Elly’s key. Of course.
If Mann and Laura had died in her studio, who had returned the key I’d watched her sign out on Friday morning?
Eleven
So stumm und verschwiegen sind
Die Sterne nicht in der Höh’
Als meine Gedanken sind.
(“Not nearly so speechless
Are the stars that glitter above
As my startled, spellbound thoughts.”)
—Liederkreis, Opus 39, IV
I tried to reach March as soon as I got home, my second call to Fifty-two Division that day. At this rate, I’d have to enter the number in memory-dial. A different voice from this morning’s answered, but with the same cagey, “Inspector March is unavailable.” I left my name once more and said I’d call back.
It was now six-thirty, three and a half hours before work. I hadn’t been spending much time at the carriage house recently, except to practise and sleep, and the place seemed somehow different. In the past months, I’d gotten used to the unpacked boxes against the walls, the open crates of wiring and electrical fixtures underneath the piano. Now it struck me how temporary they made the place look. Why put so much effort into renovation, then refuse to make it home? This wasn’t a stopover; there’d be no return to Caledon.
I changed into a pair of cut-offs and started in on unpacking boxes, alternating “Now where should this go?” with tidy-up work on Evelyn’s book. I’d taken a staggering number of pictures on Léo’s property. Mostly, they were in pretty good order—vetch with vetch, spurge with spurge, mallow with mallow—but there were some mix-ups. One showed up that evening. The shot I’d wanted for the chicory page, but thought I’d lost, had snuck in with the mertensia. I located the protective envelope labelled “chicory” in the filing cabinet, shook out the accompanying transparency, and extracted the calligraphed sheet. Cichorium intybus. Cholagogue...digestive ...diuretic...Chicory, I recalled, was one of the herb traces police forensics had turned up on the ledge outside Elly’s window. It seemed March’s reconstruction of Thursday night had been right about at least one thing: if Mann had been drinking a tisane with C. intybus, he might well have left the studio more than once to use the washroom. I replaced the old photograph with the one I’d just found and refiled the envelope.
Unpacking boxes went slower than I’d expected. Almost every one held some reminder of Christian: a kerosene lamp from camp-outs by the river, a pair of grass-stained work gloves, the secateurs Léo had bought for him (at the Museum of Modern Art, of all places)...little landmines of recall I hadn’t realized I’d planted. Love, it seemed, had a will of its own when it came to hanging on.
By nine-thirty, I’d emptied four boxes, and finished up picture-filing for Evelyn’s book, feeling oddly energized. I hunted around for a clean ruffled shirt, gave my tuxedo a good brushing, checked my hair—behaving itself for once—and hopped in the Rover. The contrast of bow tie and tails with scruffy Naugahyde had me humming “That’s Why the Lady Is a Tramp” as I pulled out of the driveway.
I got to Evelyn a few minutes early. Rosemary Dickens was at one of the banquettes, looking elegantly sexy and anything but managerial in strapless sea-green. The thirtysomething natty-suit-and-tortoiseshell-glasses beside her was vaguely familiar. I tried to think if I’d seen them together before. Rosemary sometimes uses her tiny office as a changing room, emerging dressed so there’s no doubt she’s off on a date—nor how the date will end—but she rarely engages in preliminaries upstairs in the lounge.
I sketched a wave and made for Léo’s office. I hadn’t seen him since Saturday and wanted to check in. He was on the phone. “Evelyn,” he mouthed, hand over the receiver, pointing me to an armchair. I shook my head and signalled I’d come back later. Might as well start my set early.
For reasons I don’t understand, it happens sometimes that playing comes easily, as if my brain and body have had a lube and oil change. I think a musical thought, and out it pops, right there at the ends of my fingers, no effort involved. It was one of those nights. I played Burt Bacharach for nearly an hour, something I wouldn’t normally do for fear of scaring off the sixties-and seventies-shy, convincing myself, if no one else, that it was high time the composer of “I Say a Little Prayer for You” and “What’s It All About, Alfie?” got accorded his rightful place in the pantheon of great American songwriters.
When I finished the set, Rosemary beckoned me over, squeezed my hand, and gave me an affectionate kiss that somehow left her lipstick intact. Her gentleman friend turned out to be none other than John Sanger, Russell Spiers’ music-agent companion from Sunday.
“Rosemary wasn’t lying,” he said after introductions. “You’re better than most.”
“Most what?”
“Lounge lizards.”
I turned to Rosemary. “You said that?”
“No. John’s in professionally judicious mode. It means he’s impressed.”
“She’s been telling me for months I should give you a listen. My roster’s full, but she’s very—”
“—persuasive—”
“—insistent. I happened to be here Sunday—” he shot her a quick, intimate glance; I didn’t want to know how the rest of that evening had gone “—and came up. Now I’m back. She’s right. I’m impressed.”
“Russell Spiers said you’d been around,” I said.
He looked pained, as if he’d just bitten a piece of aluminum foil. “Does he always drink like that?”
“Luckily, I wouldn’t know.”
“He kept saying I shouldn’t waste my time on you, or words to that effect.”
“Professionally speaking, you probably shouldn’t.”
“Are you signed on with anyone?”
“Just the union.”
“You like this sort of venue?”
“It’s the only one of its kind I’ve played.”
“Do you have a contract?”
“Just an arrangement with the owner.”
“What kind of music do you play? I mean, when you’re not here?”
“Good music, of course.”
“I should have expected that. What I mean is, do you have a particular style? How do you call it?”
“Person-to-person when I’m flush, collect when I’m not.”
He hadn’t heard that one before. He winced and turned to Rosemary. “Hard to get a straight answer out of this one.”
“He’s just trying to be modest, dear.”
Rosemary, the great male mediator. I stuck my tongue out at her and felt around for a cigarette. Sanger offered me a light from a monogrammed Zippo. “Seriously,” he said, “I’d like to hear what you can do. Could we get together sometime? I represent some big names.”
He rattled off a few, and, yes, they were big. If I were anyone else, I’d have been thrilled. Instead, I felt myself backing away.
Rosemary sensed my discomfort. “John’s not name-dropping,” she said, laying her hand on my arm. “It’s his agent version of a résumé.”
“I’m aware.”
“Do you sing?” he asked.
“Yes, but not here. Not usually.”
“Your own material?”
“Generally.”
“Do you take requests?”
“Depends who’s asking.”
“I’d like to hear something you’ve written. Something with words.”
I couldn’t very well refuse, not with Rosemary sending looks my way. “All right. Stick around. I’ll try to work something in.”
Over at the bar, Toby had a Naya waiting. I would have preferred Scotch. Evelyn was my haven away from professional eyes and ears. Sanger’s presence begged something stronger than mineral water.
“You know that guy with Rosemary?” I asked.
Toby nodded. “They’ve been seeing each other for a couple of months.”
