The Rules of Dreaming (26 page)

“What story is that?”

“The turntable was knocked onto the floor, and the record on it was scratched when it fell.  A few days later that record disappeared, along with a couple of other items: a photograph of the victim, and a kaleidoscope.  The record was never returned to the library; instead it turned up at the Institute, where you happened to work.  You took it there, didn’t you?  And the other things that were removed from the studio?” 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.  A record?  I don’t have any record.”

“I saw the kaleidoscope when I was here before.”

“I have dozens of kaleidoscopes.  I collect them.”

“You have a cat named Nero.”

“Yes.”  Bartolli squinted back at Dubin with a look of puzzlement.   “Is my cat somehow implicated in this?”

“A man with a pet named Nero wrote a love letter to Maria Morgan a couple of days before she died.  I have the letter.”

“I was in Geneva when she died, attending—”

“You were Maria Morgan’s lover, weren’t you?”

He shook his head.  “You really don’t understand what’s going on here, do you?”

“Don’t deny it.  It’s obvious from the letter.”

There came a muffled cry and the voice of Avery Morgan, which had always sounded so colorless and thin, rumbled through the room like the growl of some enormous beast.  “You?” he bellowed.  “You... were the one she was having the affair with?”

Bartolli winced uncomfortably.  “Yes, I was her lover.  But I didn’t kill her.”

“You killed her,” Dubin said.

“I was at a conference in Geneva.  And I can prove it.”

There was something new in Dubin’s manner, an air of moral certainty that had been submerged in years of cynicism and self-indulgence.  “You went to her studio and strangled her just as your Hoffmann strangled Olympia,” he said, suppressing a triumphant smile, “and then you strung her up from the ceiling like a marionette to make it look like suicide.  And seven years later, in an attempt to cover up your crime, you did the same thing to Mrs. Paterson and Francine Whipple.”

Bartolli looked away, shaking his head. 

Dubin turned to Frank Lynch, who, along with the others, seemed as immobilized as the puppets hanging on the stage.  “This man should be arrested and charged with murder.”

Lynch reached for his cell phone to call for support.

“No,”
Nicole said, rising hesitantly.  “He didn’t kill her.”

Ten pairs of eyes bore in on her like a swarm of hornets.  “I’m sure he didn’t kill
Maria Morgan or the other women,” she said.  Her voice was dry with stage fright; she tried to smile but found that her face would not obey.  “And I know who did.”

Chapter
33

Lurching over the mountain roads beside Hunter and Ned Hoffmann in the desperate hope of arriving in time to save
Antonia, Nicole had suddenly realized that she herself was the key to the mystery.

Yes, Hunter had been trying to tell them something and it was through her that he was communicating.  She was the only person who could grasp his meaning and draw the necessary conclusions.  And she could do that by using the critical tools she used in her work and applying them to his fictional creation as she would to any other text.  Where Hunter’s narration was false a
s fact, it was true as fiction.  She asked herself: what was the hidden thread that ran through his dreams and hallucinations and bound them all together?  She thought back to his account of her final session with Dr. Hoffmann before he set off for Venice in his mad pursuit of Julietta.  Hunter had cast her in the role of Nicklausse, the faithful servant who followed Hoffmann from one disastrous affair to another and could always see through his delusions.  In that guise she’d told Ned she knew who the killer was but no one would listen to her.  That was her destiny, she realized, a Cassandra, an unheeded seer of the truth.  And to fulfill it she would have to unlock the unconscious—whose unconscious? hers or Hunter’s? or did it make any difference?—the only way she knew how: she must not only read the book of the world but deconstruct its text with all the ingenuity at her disposal.

How could she make sense of Hunter’s story?  It all began with his playing the piano: the Kreisleriana, Schumann’s portrait of the deranged composer who found in music
and madness his gateway to the spirit world.  “To find God he first had to find the Devil,” Dr. Palmer had told Ned Hoffmann in the story; and the same might have been said of Nicole, expelled from school and family—in an earlier age she would have been burned at the stake—for not believing in the Devil.  Her true crime lay in seeing her father for what he was.  Like Hamlet she feigned madness in self-defense—is that what Hunter had done? When he’d imagined another life for himself it was as his psychiatrist, the ultimate father figure.  In that persona he imagined that he’d followed Julietta to Venice and murdered her under the eye of Dappertutto, the collector of souls.  Who was Dappertutto?  Who was Hoffmann?  Ask one who was there: the boy on the balcony with the mandolin.  Ask the boy—who was the murderer?

Suddenly Nicole saw herself not from the inside, the way people normally do,
even in dreams, but objectively, as if she were a character in a story.  She was standing off to one side watching herself and the others in the room: Bartolli still on the stage with Antonia tottering blankly beside him, being comforted by Ned Hoffmann; Avery and Susan Morgan, both looking angry and distraught, with Dr. Palmer frowning beside them; Frank Lynch grimacing through his broken teeth as he clamped a tight grip on Hunter’s arm and kept an eye on Bartolli; and Dubin, frozen and expressionless after Nicole’s foiling of his brilliant denouement.  This could be dangerous, she realized.  She was violating the rules of dreaming: you can’t dream yourself outside of your own mind. You might have multiple personalities—who doesn’t, in the course of a lifetime?—but there’s only one you.  It’s the eye behind the camera.  When you become so dissociated that you start seeing yourself from outside your own skin, you’re sailing close to the edge. That’s what happened to Hunter, and that’s what had been happening to her since she was fourteen, when she knew her father had killed her brother but she couldn’t bring herself to say anything.  She had never mentioned it to anyone before she told Hunter and that was only because she thought he was crazy.  Why?  Was the whole world a conspiracy to keep you from telling the truth about the Devil?  Everyone knows who it is but they will lock you up and throw away the key if you tell the truth.  Now she saw Hunter staring fiercely ahead, past her, past his father and Bartolli, past the walls to another world.

Time
stood still and in its infinite imagination lighted every corner of her life, as if this were her last moment on earth. And suddenly she was back on the inside of her skin and she knew who the killer was. 
If he but blench, I know my course.  Murder will speak.

*   *   *

Nicole stepped toward Hunter and gently touched his hand.  “Hunter, would you play the piano for us?”

Hunter seemed to favor that idea in his savage, brooding way.  Without a word, he lurched toward the piano, restrained only by Frank Lynch’s tight grip on his arm.  The others—Avery and Susan Morgan, Bartolli, Dr. Palmer, even Dubin—glared back at Nicole as if she had made an outrageous suggestion.

“It’s all right,”  said Ned Hoffmann.  “He won’t do anything.”

“It’s important,” Nicole told Frank Lynch.  “It’s important that you let him play.”

Finally Hunter was allowed to sit down at the piano, with Lynch crouching beside him on a small folding chair like a heavily-armed page turner.  After a pause he raised his hands and set them to skittering across the keys in a fantastical whirlwind of notes which, Dubin thought, must have resembled the jagged inner landscape of his mind.

“Hunter is playing the only piece he knows,” Nicole explained.
“The Kreisleriana of Robert Schumann.  If it sounds a little crazy that’s because it’s Schumann’s portrait of a fictional madman created by the poet Hoffmann—the same Hoffmann who was later fictionalized as the alcoholic hero of
The Tales of Hoffmann
.  Schumann was driven toward what Hoffmann called the spirit world, that parallel universe of absolute truth and beauty that can be entered most easily through drugs, music and madness.  Schumann chose music but he ended up with madness.  And this piece provides a chilling glimpse into his future.”

Dubin had been watching Avery and Susan Morgan, who sat frowning and whispering with Dr. Palmer.
  “Nicole,” Dr. Palmer said in his most soothing voice, as if he were humoring a child, “this is a very interesting perspective on music history which I’m sure everyone would enjoy hearing on some other occasion.  But Hunter is exhausted after his ordeal and he shouldn’t stay up late playing the piano.  And Dr. Bartolli”—he hesitated as he pondered a diplomatic way to address the accusation Dubin had made against his brother—“has some business to discuss with the police.  Why don’t you schedule an appointment with Dr. Hoffmann for next week and you can talk about it then?”

“This isn’t just an irrelevant excursion into music history,” Nicole replied confidently, to show how she felt about being patronized.  “
Maria Morgan had a recording of Kreisleriana in her studio when she was rehearsing her role in
The Tales of Hoffmann
.  She was trying to do something rarely attempted in modern times: to play all three of Hoffmann’s loves.  She would be Olympia the wind-up doll, Antonia the innocent young girl, Giulietta the deceitful courtesan.  For a woman who was under treatment for schizophrenia this was a dangerous undertaking.  It required her to have three selves.  And for the men in her life—since there was more than one—she could not be all three. She could only be the treacherous courtesan.  And so the question is as Dr. Bartolli posed it:  Who was Hoffmann?”

With these last words Hunter’s playing seemed to reach a climax, as the volume rose and his fingers scurried furiously over the keys.  He pounded a few inconclusive chords, and then just as abruptly his agitation cooled and he wandered off into an
other, less violent episode.

“
Maria Morgan took her work very seriously,” Nicole went on, “and she liked to steep herself in the background of whatever she was working on.  That’s probably why she checked this recording out of the library.  What we do know is that this was the music she was listening to in the last moments of her life.  This piece, this Kreisleriana—the one that Hunter suddenly started playing a few weeks ago—is the music she was listening to right up to the end.”

Avery Morgan leaned forward, his face dark, the growling beast still lurking in his voice.  “How do we know that?”

“There’s a big scratch in the record that starts about two-thirds of the way through the Kreisleriana.  So when you play the record, the music comes to a sudden stop, right at the point where the turntable toppled to the floor.  That was the moment when Maria Morgan died.  And that’s the place where Hunter always stops playing, at the exact place where his mother died.  We’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”

“But Dubin said the recor
d was missing from the studio.”

“That’s right.  It was
missing.  But I found it.”

The dynamics of the music had risen again as it surged toward another climax.  Antonia listened with her eyes wide, her breath quickening, her color fading as if Hunter’s frenetic hands had whirled her back into a hypnotic state.  If Nicole was right about the record, then he was mapping the last moments of their mother’s life.  Every note he played pushed them another step closer to the catastrophe.  Wasn’t there some way to stop the music, some way to t
urn back?

“Stop!” Avery Morgan sputtered.  “Please stop!”

“No,” Nicole pressed on.  “Let me sketch out the scene.  Maria Morgan in her studio, listening to this music as she struggles with her three conflicting roles.  Maybe it arouses a self-destructive impulse in her as it did for its composer.  How could she play all three of Hoffmann’s loves?   How could she be an innocent young girl and a treacherous prostitute at the same time?  If she was Giulietta, then who was her jealous lover?  Who was the man who, though she despised him, couldn’t bear the thought of sharing her with two other men?  He’s there with her in the studio; an argument breaks out.  And then something terrible happens—maybe it’s this demonic music, this glimpse into the spirit world that scrapes a little too deeply into the unconscious and triggers it off; maybe it’s a fit of jealous rage; we’ll never know.  In any case, the man attacks, savagely strangling her, knocking the turntable off its stand, stopping the music dead; and then, in the cold light of his guilty conscience, he ties a nylon cord around her neck and hoists her up on the light fixture and lets her drop again to make it look like suicide.  He thinks no one is watching but he doesn’t know about the loft at the other end of the studio.  There are two eyewitnesses in the studio.”

“And th
ey’re both extremely ill,” Dr. Palmer said, rising slowly.  “I insist that this performance stop right now.”

And then, as if the universe took its cues from Dr. Palmer, the performance stopped.  It stopped as Nicole had told them it would: when Hunter, tracing the fossil record of his mother’s death struggle, arrived at the point in the music where the scratch had always blocked his way.  He lifted his hands from the keyboard, as he always did, in the middle of a dissonant phrase.  The deed was done, and there was nothing more he or anyone else could do about it.  He dropped his hands to his lap and sat with his h
ead hanging, breathing heavily.

“Did anyone even ask the eyewitnesses?” Nicole
asked.

“This is absurd,” Dr. Palmer objected.  “They don’t know what they saw.”

Bartolli turned to face Avery Morgan.  “I was Maria’s lover,” he said, “but I had a rival.  Two rivals, in fact.  One was you, Avery, but you weren’t much of an impediment.  You were only her husband.”

“Who was the other one?” Avery demanded.

“The other one—”

Bartolli turned his eyes toward Dr. Palmer and a look of infinite sadness spread across his face.  “T
he other one was my brother.”

Before anyone knew what was happening, Hunter leaped up from the piano and threw himself on Dr. Palmer.  He would have choked him to death if Dubin and Lynch hadn’t pulled him off and dragged him across the room, clawing and biting like the madman he was.

Dr. Palmer said nothing, but the terror in his eyes told them everything they needed to know.  He slipped on his coat and hurried out the door.

Antonia staggered after him, rubbing her eyes.  She looked as if
she were waking from a dream.