Juice (7 page)

Because he was a lawyer, yes, with a lawyer's instincts; because Landauer was moderately famous and entirely fascinating; because the case had been prejudged, which angered Davis; even because Davis loved—there were more correct words, but none was sufficient—Mozart; because he sensed that there was much more here than met the world's jaded eye. The reasons were not altogether convincing, even to Davis.

Landauer too had wanted reasons. The men had met in the office of the county prosecutor. They had measured each other, Landauer a foot shorter, slightly contemptuous, Davis entirely professional. Davis had offered his hand; Landauer had clasped and released it wearily. “How do you do,” Landauer said. “Why bother?”

“Sit down,” Davis said. They were in a small conference room; they had leather-upholstered chairs and a scratched mahogany table; there were ash trays, the walls were lined with law books, the light was bad. Landauer was tired. Since his walk down the mountain to the police station he had barely slept; he had walked in, told the sergeant, gone back to the house with them, and then resigned himself. For two days he had not changed his clothes, shaved, or washed. He had food and cigars. He made no demands.

“Why bother?” Davis echoed. “I don't know. The studio doesn't care. They never heard of you.”

“Ah.” Landauer almost smiled.

“And you don't care,” Davis went on. “So what difference does it make to you why I bother? Fame, maybe. Say I want my name associated with Landauer's.”

“Your timing is bad,” Landauer said.

Davis smiled.

Landauer returned the smile. “You see what you have done,” he said softly. “I like you. I was not really resigned; only the illusion was there. Now you come and the illusion is gone. You represent some hope, I suppose.” His voice was sweet, faintly accented.

They were silent; they sat, incompatible, Davis tall and dark, intense, energetic, Landauer a wispy, colorless man with a jumpy left eye.

“Why did it happen?” Davis asked gently.

Landauer sighed, looked away, turned a futile palm upward. “Isn't it obvious?”

“That isn't what I mean,” Davis said steadily, still gently. “Why did you love him? Why was there nothing else? How could you give the world for him? Do you know what you've given up for him? Not the people you work for, the people you play for, the idiots, the ones who call you crazy. But the rest, man, the rest. Lully. The sound of cellos. Mozart. That was yours, not theirs.”

Landauer shook his head and hid his eyes behind one hand. “Why do you start that way?” he said heavily. “No lectures, no head-shaking.”

“Because I have time only for what will help us.”

“Us,” Landauer said.

“Yes,” Davis said. “Maybe you were right. I don't think so. But if
you
thought so, if it was all so rotten, if there was' so little left, that you could give up even that, then we have a chance. Do you understand me?”

“I think so,” Landauer said.

“I'll have to know everything,” Davis said. “No prudery. No false pride. You may be damned, called a monster, in every newspaper. But it's the only chance.”

Landauer nodded.

Davis had twenty days with Kuno Landauer. They started with the early years in Vienna: the carriages, the Emperor, the sizzling geese and the whipped-cream desserts, the child prodigy, the visit to Joachim. And then the tours, the preparations, the nervous family fluttering and weeping, Prague, Berlin, Stuttgart, Amsterdam—Landauer's eye relaxed as he talked; Davis smoked cigars with him, drank beer with him—London, Paris, Rome, Geneva, Vienna again. “At the Colonne—do you know the Colonne?” Davis nodded. “At the Colonne I had my great failure, doing the Brahms, 1908, I think, the year after Joachim died, and the audiences were not ready.”

“Even now Brahms has a hard time in Paris,” Davis said. “But they like the violin concerto. Oistrakh did it in '53. Brought the house down. But they don't know the solo piano work.”

“Neither does anyone else. Only recitals in Vienna. Your Huneker loved it. He had a good deal to say about music. When were you first in Paris?”

Davis grinned. “In 1926. I joined the Navy very young. I had six months in the Mediterranean. You'll be disappointed in me: I saw few concerts.”

“Of course.” Landauer smiled. “And then?”

“Then the Philippines, and then Panama. One thing: I learned languages. French, Italian, Spanish. I was in Panama for a year. Fell in love. She was twenty-seven, a madam, retired from active work, too old for that sort of thing. I almost married her. She was too old. What was it Fitzgerald said? ‘She was an aging but still beautiful woman of twenty-eight'? Something like that. I wish I had, sometimes. I could be drinking cold beer on a veranda, smoking this same cigar and decomposing gracefully.”

“I have not read Fitzgerald,” Landauer said. “After that?”

“I left the Navy after three years,” Davis said. “Intellectual pretensions. Law school. The depression. Back to Europe. A couple of years of drifting around. Then I was ready for concerts, Mozart. I wasn't so happy with people any more, with life. You know the feeling. I had scars from fights. Once I'd thought of them as badges of honor: courage, the man who risks. Now they were stupid: man's bestiality to man. And the poverty, I was sick of poverty, mine and everybody else's. So I came back finally and came here. I used what I had, the languages and foreign ports and funny stories about whores and drinking and foreigners. They thought I was cute. You know the word. Cute. So one cute thing led to another, and I was a success. I was also—still am—a damn good lawyer. And here a good lawyer has spectacular clients. If he does well by them he's rich and famous. So I'm rich and famous.”

“And no wife,” Landauer said. “No children.”

Davis shrugged. “Afraid, I suppose. All bachelors want to marry; all married men wish they hadn't. It must mean something.”

“But children,” Landauer objected.

“I know. I have nothing against them.” Davis shrugged again. “It happened this way. Why complain? And who's defending whom, by the way?”

“Perfectly right,” Landauer said, smiling, “although I have a right to know these things. I will tell you now about the death of a prodigy.”

It was not a new story. The reviews were the same for three years; the war came and passed; after the war the reviews were no different. Landauer had ceased to progress. “I retired,” he said. “For five years I did not play publicly. During this time I began to compose. I also began to think. Vienna after the war was unpleasant, you know. And what made it worse was that so many tried to pretend that nothing had happened. So we were all at our worst, even I, locked away and composing. When I walked out and looked around me I saw a desolation. A true desolation, you understand? Courage had turned to greed; modesty had turned to cleverness; love had turned to self-love; sacrifice had become bargaining. The women were whores and the men liked them for it. And to me, who had been so long isolated, it was horrible. I saw at once that the virtues I had known had never been virtues at all; but in good times it was easier to disguise them. Now they were naked; this was the world. So I took my money and I came here. Not expecting to find anything better; simply unable to bear Europe without her disguise, like marrying a beautiful woman and waking up the next morning to see her without make-up, without hair, without teeth.

“So I came here, and moved to the mountains and composed, and a film composer, the son of an old friend, eventually asked me to do something for him. It was not bad work. The limitations are severe, and many producers are too literal: they want music to accompany the opening of a door, music to accompany a kiss—I did variations on the
Liebestod
for a Flavia Montrose seduction scene. No one but the musicians recognized it. It was a great joke.” Landauer laughed at his joke. “What did it matter? And I lived among my books, my records, my photographs, the old newspapers. And slowly my music began to be played: New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Louisville. And I went to the parties where they put up with me because I would play for them and there was cachet to having me. So I exaggerated, of course. I ate spaghetti with my hands because they would put up with it. I wanted to find out how far they would let me go, you see. I thought of seducing a hostess; but I am not the seductive type. Once I kicked a dog, a poodle. I was asked to play just the same, and was treated just as politely. I was very sorry for the poodle and gave him six canapés afterward, of
pâté de foie gras.
In my home if I had a dog and someone kicked him I would slap the man and throw him out. I have no dog. I have a cat, a big Siamese monster named Henry Purcell, sent to me by an admirer. I call him Harry. I like him very much because he hated that housekeeper.” Landauer sat upright suddenly. “My God! He has not eaten! He will die! You must take care of him, my friend. You will, please. As soon as you leave me, go fetch him. Take him to your own place.”

“All right,” Davis said. “If he'll come.”

“He'll be hungry,” Landauer said. “You can bribe him. Take liver.” Landauer exhaled a smoke ring and beat time through it with one finger: one, two, three, four. “I also like Henry Purcell, the real one. When I was only four I played the second viola part in a fantasia of his. Yes, yes. It consists of the C. The second viola plays one unbroken C throughout the movement. I was quite good. I played it with considerable feeling. My bowing was perfect.” He grinned. “Boccherini I do not like. I am afraid I may be the Boccherini of my time.”

He stopped grinning. “You see what it was like. The life. Alone. Really alone. Only the letters, from all over, and then they diminished. The concentration camps, the war, the new musicians who did not know me. Sometimes I would say something outrageous and it would be published. Then the letters would come. From virgin harpists in London. How dare you, sir? Do you not know that Tovey said this or that? I like Tovey, which is the funny part. But even the things I loved, I had to mock. Do you see that? They were too good for this world, so I would not let my own admiration lead this world to admire them. The idea that these imbeciles should love what I loved was unbearable.”

He drank, and poured more beer. Davis held his glass toward the bottle. “Thank you for bringing the imported,” Landauer said.

“And that was also the problem with Willie,” he went on. “Willie came to me after the old bitch died.
Obit anus, abit onus,
did I tell you? You know it. All right. Willie was a nothing. He was not even intelligent enough to be corrupted, at the age of sixteen. He was a Gibraltar of purity and stupidity. He was also beautiful, and he would listen to music by the hour. What else could I ask? That he be intelligent and therefore cynical? Worldly and therefore grasping? He spoke only a little English, but he was learning.” Drops of perspiration were forming on Landauer's brow. “He loved me, and did much for me. He was a human being with whom I could make some contact on
my
terms, who understood nothing but felt much. So I loved him. What did it matter? Who was hurt? Who cared?” He brooded momentarily. “But then it happened. I should have known it would. Maybe I did know. Visitors came, rare visitors, and met him, and asked me to bring him to a party. I refused; word went out that he was sweet and pretty; more people came, and women, who wanted only one thing, it was like a competition, you could see them competing. And Willie was excited by it, we quarreled, and it all came out—” Landauer's eyes were closed—“all the disgust and revulsion in me for forty years, it all came out, and even Willie was no different, and a man might as well be dead, he hangs on to life because instinct tells him to, but after a while exhaustion overcomes even the instincts. So we quarreled and I stabbed Willie. I did not mean to kill him. If we had quarreled in the living room instead of the kitchen there would have been no knife. I did not know what I was doing.” Landauer's face was streaming; his eyes were still shut. “So I killed him. I must have been crazy.”

Davis leaned forward; his eyes glittered; he chewed victoriously on his panatela.

The trial was of course sensational. The prosecution opened with a blast of rhetoric. Untold degeneracy was implied. Landauer was a foreigner, an intellectual, an atheist probably; a sodomite certainly; a murderer certainly, contemptuous all his life of a society he had failed to conquer. The spectators' benches were full; the jury was aware of its privilege, its importance.

Davis moved coldly, making a tool of whatever the prosecution offered. He opened informally and earnestly, telling the jury that there would be no speechifying, no histrionics; he would leave that to the state's attorney. He reminded the jury that Landauer was not on trial for sodomy, or atheism, or being foreign-born, or being an intellectual. He was on trial for murder, and for murder alone. He was, admittedly, an unusual man; but an ordinary man would not have committed this crime. It was essential that the jury understand how and why he was unusual; and to answer those questions the defense would examine the whole man, touching, where necessary, on sodomy, atheism, being European, being an intellectual—even a genius, some said. And if the defense had a duty to risk disgust by touching on all those areas, the jury had an added responsibility: to consider the facts soberly. To remember that this was not a contest between two lawyers; it was a trial, one of the better, though imperfect, ways man had devised to reach the truth of a crime. To remember that they, the jury, were intelligent citizens of the modern world, and that perversion, for example, was no longer a sensational issue: it was an issue discussed quietly in homes, doctors' offices, magazines, newspaper columns. The day had passed when a prosecutor could raise a hand and shout vengefully, “Outcast!” (The state's attorney had done just that.) Or “Pervert!” Or “Foreigner!” Or even “Murderer!” Murder had been committed, yes. But crime and punishment were no longer categories to be dealt with by primitive emotions. In an age of genocide; in an age of psychiatry; in an age where the value of the individual diminished daily, it was more than ever important to realize that no crime was simply a crime, that no man was simply a criminal. The defense would review the life, the emotions, the personality of the defendant, without the aid of psychiatrists. The state would doubtless prove that the defendant was now, this day, capable of performing with perfect competence all the functions of a normal human being. The defense would then demonstrate that the defendant was innocent by reason of temporary insanity. The defense would trace the course of this temporary insanity, reveal its origins, and attempt to prove to the jury that having manifested itself, it was now extinct.