Murder in A-Major (2 page)

T
hrowing my coat over my shoulders, I moved into the dimly-lit entrance hall and happened to glance up the flight of stairs that led to the second storey of the residence. To my astonishment, there on the landing at the head of the stairway stood Clara Schumann. She was clad in a long pale yellow robe tied at the waist with a simple matching satin sash. Her feet were slippered. “Good evening, Inspector,” she called down to me. Her voice conveyed a clear message: though she had written the note summoning me, my presence was not welcome.

She began to come down, lightly touching the banister rail with the tips of the fingers of her right hand while sweeping away an errant strand of hair that had fallen over her brow with her left. She held her head high and took each step with a slow thrust of her right foot. I felt as though I was watching an opening entrance by an actress.

She paused briefly at the bottom step of the staircase, and I was able now to make out her features more clearly. Her complexion had an exquisite paleness, as though illuminated by some soft inner light. Her eyes fixed me with a steadiness and self-confidence that almost caused me to look away. It occurred to me that her choice to remain standing for the moment on the bottom step was far from casual; this way we were pretty much of even height, a position more to her liking.

Then a second surprise. Suddenly her mood changed. Brightening, she said, “Now that we are face to face, sir, I believe we have met before.” She gave me a cautious smile.

I returned her smile, feeling as though my face was flushed. “Yes, indeed, madam, we have.”

“Of course, now I recall. It was at the symphony fundraiser. You were the gentleman who so generously bid at the auction for one of my autographed programs.”

“And succeeded, I'm happy to say,” I said, “but I must tell you—though God knows I'm not complaining—that the prize cost me the better part of a month's salary. Police service, I'm sorry to say, does not pay as handsomely as one might wish. At any rate, it was worth every thaler, I assure you.”

“You're too kind, Inspector. And you surprise me too.”

“How so?”

“For two reasons: first, I didn't know that charm was one of the requisites of police work. Second, I never dreamt for a moment that a crime investigator would be interested in music. Tell me honestly now, how
did
you come to be at the soirée that night?” Her voice took on a teasing inflection. “Let me guess, Inspector. You heard the rumour that Richard Wagner and Eduard Hanslick were due to attend and that one of them was going to murder the other.”

Clara Schumann punctuated her little joke with a gentle chuckle which I found totally enchanting. “Madam,” I said, “the hostility between Wagner and his arch critic is a fact that has every police force in Germany on high alert at all times. How fortunate you are, you and Maestro Schumann, that Mr. Hanslick's reviews are invariably kind.”

I was unprepared for (but amused by) Madam Schumann's next statement. “The truth is, Eduard Hanslick is as pompous as an archbishop saying Mass. Mind you, whenever he delivers last rites to Wagner in the press, my husband and I genuflect and utter a little prayer of thanks.”

She lowered her voice, as if she and I were about to exchange confidences. “Now tell me, Inspector, how did you come to be at the gala?”

I said, “Believe it or not, Madam Schumann, I
am
a music lover, though I admit that my attempts at playing the piano are at best a cut above those of an orangutan. Luckily, I've made the acquaintance of Helena Becker—”

“Ah, yes,” Clara Schumann said, her face brightening. The simple mention of Helena Becker's name seemed suddenly to elevate my stature. “She's the cellist with the Düsseldorf String Quartet. And very pretty, too.”

“Come to think of it, madam, my very first hearing of Dr. Schumann's Opus 41 Quartets—the three that he dedicated to Felix Mendelssohn—was at a performance by the Düsseldorf, and it was at a reception afterward that Miss Becker and I were introduced to each other.”

As I was telling this to his wife, Schumann appeared in the hallway. Raising his eyebrows and looking suddenly interested, he asked, “So, Inspector Preiss, and how did you like them, the quartets, I mean? The critic for the
Berliner Zeitung
called them my finest works for strings. Even compared them to Beethoven's.”

I thought the pieces marvellous and told him so without hesitation. In a flash, this turned out to be a mistake. “You hear that, Clara,” Schumann said, his arms outstretched as though pleading for justice, “everywhere people go out of their way to flatter me. I am treated by everyone as though I am some fragile hothouse plant who can't be told the truth.”

“But I
am
being perfectly honest, Maestro,” I said fervently. “Please believe me.”

Clara Schumann took the final step down to floor level. She was considerably shorter than her husband, but somehow she seemed taller, and she spoke to him in a firm, almost harsh, tone of voice. “You see, Robert, this is precisely what I've been talking about all these months. There is a side to you that is determined not to accept praise. In the bluest sky, you somehow never fail to discover black clouds.”

She turned to me. “Inspector Preiss, what my husband needs is a doctor, not a detective. Despite what he's told you, this is a
medical
case, not a criminal case.”

This brought an outburst from the maestro. “How in hell, woman, do you know what I've told Inspector Preiss?”

“If you must know, Robert, even from the top of the stairway I could hear every word.”

“In other words, you were eavesdropping on a confidential conversation.”

“I'm your
wife
, for God's sake. Wives don't ‘eavesdrop' on so-called confidential talk involving their sick husbands.”

She turned back to me. “And you believe, sir,” she said, “that my husband's condition…this business about the ‘A' sound…you really believe there is some deliberate evil being done to Robert?” Though she did not put this question to me with open sarcasm, she left no doubt that she considered the whole affair ridiculous.

“Madam, you ask if I ‘believe' this or ‘believe‘ that. I avoid elevating suspicion to the level of belief until there's a foundation of solid facts. But I
have
heard and seen enough this past hour so that I could not for the life of me walk out that door without promising to look into Dr. Schumann's suspicions. And the sooner the better.”

“Then it's obvious, Inspector,” Madam Schumann said, her manner indignant now, “that nothing I say can convince you not to interfere.” She turned her gaze on her husband, giving him a look that bore a mixture of pity and contempt. Without taking her eyes from him, she said, “But I warn you, sir, you will
not
like what you find.”

“As a matter of fact, I never do,” I said.

I let myself out and noted that the chill in the street was only a touch more penetrating than the chill in the house from which I had just departed.

B
ack in my rooms, I poured myself a healthy portion of schnapps, which I downed in a single draught. The strong liquor burned its way through my system like a fine stream of lava, but instead of calming me as I'd hoped, it left me with a restless feeling. It was now just past one o'clock in the morning, and yet I felt totally awake. I moved across the sitting room to the large bay window, parted the heavy curtains and looked down to the small park directly across from my dwelling. Despite the bleakness outdoors, the ornate wrought-iron gateposts at the park entrance, bracketed by tall gas lamps, their yellow light gallantly flickering, presented a warm and satisfying picture. My rooms could not be called lavish, but they were comfortably furnished and a source of pleasure to me.

What was even more pleasing to me was the thought that I had just been admitted to the private world of one of the most illustrious couples in Germany and indeed the whole of Europe, a world light years removed from my origins.

The town of Zwicken, where I was born in 1820, was located in the heart of poor farming country. To characterize our town as “the heart” was not exactly appropriate, for it was a heart that pumped very little blood. The place was not much more than a collection of humble houses and shops leaning against one another for support in their old age. From backyards one could hear chickens and geese clucking away meaninglessly, like village idiots. Occasionally a sow could be heard grunting as she rolled over on her side, inviting her piglets to feed. Horses and cows left their calling cards on the unpaved roadways, obliging pedestrians to step gingerly when crossing, like children learning to walk.

Not long before I was born, Napoleon Bonaparte's infantry and artillery had shuffled and rattled into our town, confusing Zwicken with another and more important centre nearby, Zwickau. Disgruntled over their mistake, the Frenchmen had taken their unhappiness out on the local townsfolk. While their officers turned a blind eye, the troops proceeded to ransack the shops until every shelf was bare. Worse still, with the kind of brute desperation known only to conquering soldiers far from home, they harassed or raped any young woman who could not run fast enough to escape their hungry pursuit.

On the day of their departure for Zwickau, Napoleon's heroes left behind them a town drained of its energy, its resources, and above all its dignity. The populace licked their wounds and patched their scars as best they could. But Zwicken's reason for existence had pretty much petered out, like the footprints of the last French militiamen.

My father, Wolfgang Preiss, operated a small tailor shop on the main thoroughfare of Zwicken, an occupation which, given the state of affairs in the town, left him with much time on his hands. This permitted him to indulge every day and most nights in the labour that was dearest to his heart—writing novels. Though not well-educated, he had read the works of Goethe, Schiller, and several other distinguished German authors and poets, and dreamed of joining their ranks with his tales one day, when the literary world would finally wake up and recognize his own peculiar genius.

He fashioned himself a writer of what came to be known years after his passing as speculative tales of the fantastic. Being a dreamer, he convinced himself, could have its rewards if only he could transcribe his visions into words. These conceptions, and many more, he incorporated into novels in which the protagonist, an inventor, being a prophet of sorts, existed without honour in his own land only to be acknowledged as a true visionary after he was dead and gone. To my father, this theme constituted life's ultimate tragedy.

Alas, publisher after publisher rejected my father's novels. Somewhere between the tailor shop and his wished-for career as an author, our family's meagre finances steadily leaked away.

For years, my mother suffered anxious days and restless nights waiting for the sky to fall and put an end to our seemingly endless miseries. So ramshackle was our house that it became the subject of a local joke: neighbours, it was said, pleaded with us in winter to keep our doors and windows shut tight to prevent the cold within from escaping into the outdoors.

It was after one particularly bitter January day that the boundaries of my mother's vast patience were at last breached, and she could no longer restrain her fury. “Look at this house!” she cried. “It is a desolate place, windswept by hopelessness and neglect!”

Father pondered this for a moment, then nodded appreciatively. “I like it, Emma…yes indeed, I think it's quite wonderful.”

Mother eyed her husband with disbelief. “You
like
this house?”

“No, no,” Father replied quickly, “I mean the sentence, the way you expressed yourself just then.” He paused, gazing up at the crumbling ceilings. “Ah yes, ‘a desolate place…windswept by hopelessness and neglect'…” Excusing himself, he dashed off to his writing table to jot down my mother's words in his small, tattered notebook.

Leaping after him, my mother continued at the top of her lungs: “Wolfgang, listen to me, this family cannot go on much longer clinging by our fingertips to the unsteady ledge of your ambitions! Do you hear what I am saying?”

“Please, Emma,
please
,” my father begged, “speak more slowly. I cannot write so fast. What came after ‘unsteady ledge?'”

So it went: my mother uttering printable sentences that seemed to flow naturally from her tongue; my father keeping up the pretense that
he
was the literate one in the family, while at the same time increasingly unable to distinguish fiction from reality.

As for my little sister Ilse and me, we played games of make-believe in which we imagined ourselves the offspring of German nobility, dispatched to this shabby household by a vengeful wicked witch, whose amorous advances our handsome princely father had once made the mistake of spurning. Soon, very soon, we told ourselves, a carriage drawn by eight white horses would clatter up to our doorstep, and our father—the prince, that is—would sweep us off to our rightful palatial chambers.

During much of my childhood and early youth, then, that was how our days were spent. My father nourished his fantasy that any day now the name “Wolfgang Preiss” would replace “Goethe” on the lips of Europe's literati. My mother nourished her fantasy that any day now she would become a widow and, with her looks still miraculously intact, attract a solid provider as a second husband. My sister and I shared a dream that, restored to noble surroundings, we would be brought up as all well-born children should be—by doting servants.

The one fortunate aspect of my childhood was my scholastic prowess, especially in the sciences. My instructors in chemistry and physics at the Gymnasium discerned that I possessed an extraordinary aptitude for scientific investigation. In my senior year, they encouraged me to apply for the only scholarship available to a youth of my social station. And so it was that, shortly before my eighteenth birthday, I found myself at the tiny railway station in Zwicken, about to leave home for the first time. I was to attend the National Police Academy in Hamburg. At last, liberation!

Overcome with uncontrollable grief, my mother and sister could not bring themselves to accompany me to the depot. (In moments when I feel less than charitable, I cannot resist the feeling that their recipe for uncontrollable grief consisted of one part sorrow and ninety-nine parts envy.)

It was while I stood on the station platform awaiting the train that my father drew me aside, seized me by the shoulders and, gazing deeply into my eyes, intoned, “My boy, this above all—”

He halted in mid-sentence. Whatever thought was on his mind seemed to be momentarily suspended above us like some enormous mudslide.

“Yes, father?” I said.

“This above all,” he repeated. Again there was a pause while he glanced about him to make certain there were no eavesdroppers, though we were the only people at the depot. Lowering his voice, he said, “If you remember nothing else, Hermann, remember this: avoid surprises!”

Our relationship up to this point was such that I never questioned or challenged my father's advice or his perceptions about the world around us. This was so at first because of the strict rules of filial respect and obedience that prevailed in the God-fearing households of the day. Later it was so because the man was such a patent fool that there seemed no point in taking issue with him on any subject. Still, as we waited now for my train, the grave expression on his carelessly shaven face suggested that it was possible, just barely possible, that the man knew something I didn't. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I repeated dutifully, “Avoid surprises.”

“Good boy!” My father jerked his head with approval. “You see, Hermann,” he explained, “there is no such thing as a
good
surprise. Without exception they're bad, all of them. Death, infidelity, insolvency…a sudden knock on the door and—poof!—you're a corpse, or a cuckold, or some brazen bill collector makes off with your trousers. Then there are riots in the streets. And, of course, diseases. An innocent glass of water tonight, tomorrow morning your body is on fire and covered with purple spots!”

Listening to these last-minute cautions, I was willing to bet the few humble banknotes sewn into the lining of my jacket that the old gent had taken one pinch too many of his beloved snuff and sneezed his brains into his hat. Though I'd never been more than ten kilometres in any direction from Zwicken, even I knew this much: of the countless evils to be shunned in a port city like Hamburg, surely innocent glasses of water were far from foremost. It was no secret in Germany that Hamburg's waterfront was an immense open sewer, where human waste and wasted humans mingled so freely in the tides that they were often indistinguishable. The city's sidewalks and shady entrance-ways throbbed with brothel life around the clock, offering with one hand a few minutes of pleasure, and guaranteeing with the other a lifetime of embarrassing skin disorders. Innocent glasses of water indeed!

Nevertheless, I was determined that my last few minutes in Zwicken should be spent agreeably. “Thank you, father,” I said, “I will try to remember your words of wisdom. I consider myself blessed to be the son of a true sage.”

My father's eyes suddenly gazed even more deeply into my own. “Ah yes, Hermann,” he said, “that's the other thing I meant to tell you.”

“Other thing?”

“Yes. You are not my son. Your mother was pregnant by another man…possibly a French warrant officer at the time of the invasion, though there was also this commercial traveller from Potsdam…when I agreed to marry her. Since you are not my own flesh and blood, my last will and testament leaves nothing to you. I'm sure you understand that it's only fair that your dear little sister Ilse should be my sole beneficiary, bearing in mind that she is to the best of my knowledge and belief my own flesh and blood. Now then, my boy, do try to be of good cheer at all times. Goodbye and best of luck.”

The truth is that the sudden news of my disinheritance came as nothing more than a very glancing blow. After all, when there's nothing to gain, there's nothing to lose. But the revelation that my mother's egg had been fertilized by some random sperm from out of town left me profoundly unsettled not only throughout the train ride to Hamburg that night but for the many years that followed. To this day I am nagged by doubts about my origins and the taint of illegitimacy.

That I chose to remain a bachelor, despite the odd flirtation now and then, was directly attributable to that conversation at the railway station in Zwicken. Given my parents' incessant wrangling, was it any wonder that I came to regard the temple of marriage as being no more reliable than a tent in a hurricane.

Bachelorhood had its positive side in my case. It left me free to immerse myself in my work in the field of crime in general, and homicide in particular. Not for me the scheduled life…supper at six, bedtime stories for the children at seven, pipe and slippers at eight, lights out at nine. When most men were sitting down to dine, or to listen to the end-of-the-day chatter of their children, or lie snugly against the flannel of their wives' nightclothes, I found myself bending with boundless curiosity over a bludgeoned corpse, or examining a knife planted like a flagpole in someone's chest, or figuring out the trajectory of a bullet lodged in someone's skull.

There is an irony here, of course. For one who was warned to avoid surprises, I had made it my occupation to deal with those very things. The surprises I dealt with, however, happened to
others
, not to me. This fact made all the difference. No matter how heinous the crimes I encountered, I was able to view them dispassionately. Objectivity is the soul of professional crime investigation, and mine had never faltered.

In short, my work was my life.

Still, there came a point in each day when I was able to lay down the tools of my trade and say “Enough.” It was at such times that, in effect, I managed to hand the crime back to society, as one hands back to its mother an infant that has done something bothersome in its under-clothing. Once removed, if only for a few hours, from the jigsaw puzzles of my profession, I was at liberty to immerse myself in a very different kind of life, a life of good food, good wine, great music, and the company of a beautiful woman, namely my cellist friend Helena Becker.

And it was the same Helena who now—to my complete astonishment—interrupted my thoughts about the Schumanns and my own career with a discreet knock on my door.

“Do forgive this intrusion, Hermann,” she said as she swept into my suite of rooms. Her face was flushed, and there was an air of unbridled excitement about her. Before I could take her cape, she circled her arms about my waist and pulled me to her. My first instinct was to laugh with pleasure. In the several years we had known one another, I had seldom seen her in such a state of elation.

“Don't tell me, Helena, let me guess,” I said, inhaling her perfume and the natural clean scent of her hair, “you've been to the opera to see Wagner's
Lohengrin
again. I know how that opera always thrills you, especially the love scenes.”