The Memorist (24 page)

Wednesday, April 30
^th
—11:55 a.m.

N
one of them spoke as they walked down the stairs until they were out on Mölker Bastei and then Malachai and Sebastian proceeded to have a totally innocuous conversation about other Austrian cities within driving distance that were worth visiting.

Meer soon realized they were obfuscating in case someone was following them or listening to their conversation with wireless microphones. She stopped paying attention. All that mattered was whether or not they were in danger.

Crossing the street, they entered a park. Meer noticed mothers watching their children and elderly people sitting on benches. A woman called out to a dog. Where was Sebastian taking them? A couple strolled by holding hands. A little boy zoomed by them on a bike, so close she could feel a
whoosh
of air as he passed.

Suddenly Sebastian gripped Meer’s shoulder and he steered her to the right. Exiting the park, they continued on down the street toward the corner where a tram waited.
Sebastian sped up, pulling her with him. They were almost at the corner. The tram’s door was closing. Sebastian’s grip tightened. He was going to try for it. Not sensing Malachai on her other side, she glanced over. He wasn’t keeping up with them. He wasn’t going to make it. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to either. What if the door shut on her bag? The flute could be crushed if—

Sebastian jumped on the tram, turned and lifted Meer up and through the door just as it closed behind her. Dazed but unhurt, she looked around the car at the standing-room-only crowd.

“Hold on to me,” Sebastian said.

“But Malachai?” She strained to look out the window but the tram had already pulled away from the corner. “Will he be all right?”

“He’ll be fine,” Sebastian said, speaking softly. “We’ll call him as soon as we get to where we’re going. It’s better this way. Three of us together were too easy to notice.”

“But we can’t just—” Then she realized what he’d said. “You did it on purpose?”

“Are you all right?” He ignored her question, his eyes telling her this wasn’t the place to discuss it. “Did I pull your arm too hard?”

Meer shrugged, not telling him how much it hurt. “Where are we going?”

“To get lost,” he whispered, so low she wasn’t sure she’d heard him right.

She almost told him that she already was lost and had been for a long time. But like the pain, she didn’t want to admit it, and she wasn’t sure why.

Wednesday, April 30
^th
—2:08 p.m.

S
winging 200 feet above the ground in the enclosed space of the Ferris wheel’s red cabin, Meer looked out over the city sprawl. “This is crazy.”

“It was our best chance. The way the two trains were sitting there, even if someone had followed us from the tram stop, there wouldn’t be any way they could have seen us get off the first train and onto the second one.”

“And now?”

“And now we’re waiting. Catching our breath. Letting the sun set.”

“And then?”

“A hotel.”

“You mean a different hotel?”

“Yes, not the Sacher where you’re registered. We’ll find someplace else.”

“When can we call Malachai? And my father? We have to let my dad know what’s going on.”

“Once we get to the hotel.”

The cabin swung in the wind and Meer felt her center of gravity shift.

“I remember this scene from
The Third Man
,” she said. “We studied that movie for its zither score in a film scoring class I took at Juilliard.”

“That’s what everyone remembers, the zither and this scene.”

“It was a frightening movie, but Vienna really is a frightening city, isn’t it?”

“Yes, behind the facades of these elegant buildings are ugly secrets and dirty shadows. Like a beautiful woman holding a gun behind her back.”

His voice crawled on her skin and she glanced away from him and down at the miniature city below them.

“What was that famous line from the movie about this view?” she asked.

“It’s one of my favorite movies. By the time they’re here, Holly Martins knows all about the diluted penicillin and that Harry Lime has destroyed people for his own gain. The corrupt man as metaphor for the corrupt state. Sitting in one of these cabins—looking out at this same view, Lime tells Martins to look down and asks him if he’d feel pity if any of those dots stopped moving forever? ‘If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep the money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?’”

“That’s not the line I remember.”

The wind picked up outside and the cabin swayed back and forth. Sebastian smiled and she saw something of Orson Welles’s character’s devilishness in his eyes as he recited the line: “‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and the
Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’”

“That’s it. We used to play a game at Juilliard. What would you give up to create something brilliant and timeless?”

“We’ve all played a version of that game.”

Or what would you give up to save someone you loved?
she thought but didn’t say as the car started on its downward cycle with a hard jerk. They were returning to earth, the people on the ground getting larger, and then there was a clap of thunder as the clouds broke open and fat, heavy drops streaked the windows. Minutes later, the car came to a stop.

“All safe now,” Sebastian said.

Wednesday, April 30
^th
—5:45 p.m.

S
ebastian paid the taxi driver, got out, offered his hand and helped her exit. Her back had stiffened up and she needed the assistance. Despite steeling herself not to, she winced with the exertion. It was only drizzling and there was no reason to rush but they hurried across the street and quickly slipped through the frosted glass doors of the Thonet Hotel. Both of them were stressed and anxious. They’d spent the afternoon at the Prater, making sure they weren’t being followed, trying out alternative plans for what to do and where to go.

The eighteenth-century villa’s ancient wooden beams, old stone floors, vaulted ceilings and six-foot-tall leaded glass Gothic windows had been restored so that the modernized space exuded character. Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 in G Minor played in the background and the air was scented with apples and burning wood. Under any other circumstances, it would be very pleasant here.

Sebastian nodded toward a small seating area where maroon velvet club chairs nestled around a roaring fire.

“Have a seat, let me see if there’s any room at the inn,” Sebastian said, smiling.

Watching his tall figure cut across the room as he headed over to the reception desk, she wondered at his calm demeanor. A few minutes ago he’d been just as jittery as she was. Which Sebastian was real? Meer’s anxiety level accelerated at the thought that she didn’t know him at all. Not really.

Her internal metronome kept swinging wildly from the sense that everything would work out to the certainty that disaster was imminent and she should take off and run away now, even from Sebastian. Meer had suffered free-floating anxiety before, first when she was a child and then again in college and knew the symptoms: sweating, trembling and a racing heart.

Five minutes later the manager opened the door to room 23, a junior suite painted dusty blue that had high ceilings, parquet floors and large double windows overlooking the church across the street. And in front of those windows, almost as if it waited for Meer, was a shining black lacquer Bösendorfer piano. Its surface was like satin. Its keys gleamed. The instrument was begging her to sit down and play.

For the first time in four hours Meer put her handbag down, actually let go, placed it on the piano bench and sat down beside it. Placing her fingers on the keys, she shut her eyes and sat there quietly, just feeling the smooth ivory.

Somewhere behind her, Sebastian talked to the hotelier but Meer wasn’t paying attention to them or thinking about the priceless treasure in her bag as she began to move her fingers about the keyboard. She hadn’t chosen the
Appassionata
Sonata as much as it had chosen her. Nothing mattered in that moment but the blanket of sound that
blocked all her thoughts, chased away her physical awareness of herself, picked her up in its arms and flew her away, soared with her into another plane where there was only sound. Rich, full, rounded-note sound.

Meer only became aware that Sebastian was talking to her when he put his hand on her shoulder but she didn’t want to return to the moment, she wanted to—no, needed to—finish at least this one piece. Afraid the piano was the bridge to her nightmares, she’d avoided it for so long but now that she couldn’t escape her memory lurches anyway, there was no reason to hold back.

Finished, she lowered her head and listened to the last notes lingering in the air, to the metamorphosis from sound to silence, from timbre and tone to only vibration. She didn’t feel any less worried when she stopped, but she was better prepared now for what was coming next, as if the music had fortified her.

With a sigh, she pulled her bag toward her. It was time. Opening the oversized leather satchel, she reached inside, felt the handkerchief she’d wrapped the flute in, and pulled it out. The thin object was covered in the cotton, inert, yet her fingers experienced something living, with potential. Not unlike how the keyboard had felt to her.

“Meer? You haven’t heard a word I’ve said for five minutes. Are you all right?” He sat beside her and put his arm around her shoulder. “You’re shivering.” He stroked her hair as if she were a child in need of calming. “I’m afraid for you. Look at you—and you’re just holding it.”

“That doesn’t matter. This could mean so much to so many people. Including you. What if this is the one thing that could pull Nicolas out of the abyss?”

He leaned in, kissing her lightly on the lips. To Meer it felt as if he were transferring fire from his mouth to hers,
that where he’d touched her would be indelibly scarred and she pulled back lest he scorch her more.

“I need to do this,” Meer said. “I can’t be scared of it.” Unfolding the handkerchief, she exposed the flute and they both stared down at the ancient human bone engraved with hundreds of complicated, exotic symbols.

Wednesday, April 30
^th
—8:45 p.m.

T
hey were still studying the flute and its mysterious markings when the rain started to beat harder on the windows. The thunder was so loud the building vibrated with each new crack. Sebastian drew the drapes and returned to where Meer was sitting on the couch. And then the lights went out.

The darkness was immediate and complete. Meer was aware of Sebastian getting up; she heard him knock something over and curse under his breath, and then she smelled the distinct odor of sulphur.

Suddenly candlelight glowed, illuminating his face and the part of the room where he stood. Light from another time and place. It might have been the nineteenth century. This could be Archer Wells holding the candelabra. But it wasn’t, Meer reminded herself, as Sebastian walked over to the phone and lifted the receiver.

“No dial tone but this is a remote. It wouldn’t work in a power failure. I don’t know if there’s a wall phone in the suite. Did you notice?”

“No, but there’s usually one in the bathroom.”

He was gone for a few moments and then called out: “Yes, you’re right.”

She heard him dialing, talking in German, and then he returned.

“There’s a blackout in the whole area. None of the trams or subways are running either. Something to do with the storm. I’m going downstairs and get more candles.”

At the door, about to leave, he hesitated, walked back to her and sat down next to her. “You understand this has nothing to do with us. No one knows where we are, but don’t open the door for anyone, all right? I’ll take the key.”

Meer had a sudden memory of being in the dark like this with him before. Of him standing just this way in a doorway some other time. Of him asking for a different promise.

No, not him.

“You’re seeing a time before, aren’t you?”

She nodded.

“And am I there?”

“No, not you.”

“But someone connected to me?”

“I’m not sure,” she equivocated.

“You don’t want to find out, do you?”

“No.” She realized it only as she said it. Realized more, too, but didn’t say it.

“Whoever he was he did something terrible to you, didn’t he? Did he hurt you? Is that why sometimes it seems as if just as you’re going to open to me you shut down?”

“Maybe,” she whispered.

“I’ve learned from your father and from Fremont Brecht that we’re here to do it right this time. We come back within the same circle of people and are given a chance to do it better. Not to make the same mistakes. I would never
hurt you, Meer. Just the opposite. I want to help you and keep you safe.” He reached out and brushed her hair off her forehead in a tender gesture.

Her conflicting emotions warned her to stay away from him and at the same time to give in to him. When she did neither he gave her a heartbreaking half smile that surged through her.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes. All right?”

She nodded.

While he was gone, Meer sat in the semidarkness. What she and Sebastian were experiencing was what her father had told her about. What ancient sages, followers of Pythagoras and Jung, early Christians, pagans and Kabbalists had identified as being connected to what was known as same soul consciousness. People are part of one great cosmic awareness, her father had tried to explain in different ways over the years. And souls who’d bonded in several lives over time and grown together through the millennia were eventually able to communicate with each other without words through that awareness. When she was old enough to understand it, she’d thought it was a hopeful concept. Even an amazing, magical idea. If it was true, the longing and loneliness plaguing so many people would be eradicated. But she never had truly believed it.

Putting the flute up to her lips, Meer tentatively blew a C note. The bone was so brittle and fragile-looking she was afraid it would shatter with the effort. The sound was awkward, trying but failing to become music. Again she played the note and waited but nothing in her rose up and presented itself. What had she expected? In her memory lurches Archer only wanted the flute if it could be delivered with the song. Without that the instrument was a cu
riosity, nothing more. Even
with
the song it might be nothing more.

The candelabra Sebastian had left on the table near the piano cast flickering shadows on the walls and in the half light Meer studied the flute.

One of her favorite paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a melancholy nocturnal scene by Georges de la Tour, called
The Penitent Magdalene.
In it a slight, brown-haired woman, her face turned away, sat in a darkened room where a single candle burned, its image reflected in an ornately framed mirror, drenching her in its mystical light. There were castoff pearls on the table and gold necklaces and bracelets dropped on the floor. In her lap, her hands clasped a skull.

In this candlelight, the flute in Meer’s hands took on the same mysterious color and portentous glow as the human bone in the painting.

Studying the hundreds of black markings engraved into the cylinder, she struggled to find just one that was familiar, but none were. Whether they were a long-lost language of ancient hieroglyphics or meaningless symbols, she didn’t know or remember from any of her memory surges. But she did remember how it felt in her hands before…somewhere in time when she’d first touched this slim bone, when she stole it from an urn hanging on a tree by the side of a sacred river in a land she couldn’t even name.

The object measured six inches long and was less than two inches around: too small to be Devadas’s ulna or radius, femur or tibia, but it could be a piece of any of them.

Devadas?

Across all the years, she’d suddenly and inexplicably remembered the name of the man who had once held her
in his arms, and it was as familiar as the elusive music she’d been almost hearing since she was a child.

She whispered it out loud:
“Devadas.”

Closing her eyes, Meer struggled to remember more of the memory surge that had presented itself to Margaux in Beethoven’s house in Baden that had something to do with a burial scene and this bone, but there was only the chaos of thousands of gossamer cobwebs connecting one time to another. Somewhere at the center of the perplexity was the certainty that the marks were ciphers that translated into the memory song.

Casper Neidermier and Rudolph Toller were right about that. Beethoven was right too.

Meer needed to call her father. These were manmade marks: an archaic alphabet of sound. Maybe he’d know something about them. Maybe they were connected to the Gematria, the reading of the Hebraic words and letters translated into mystical numbers, a holy language that he’d been studying most of his life.