The Glory Hand (29 page)

Because the tape she had stolen from Jake's cabin hadn't been blank. On the surface it had been a barrage of electronic sounds, like Jake's earlier works. But with a disturbing difference. This time it was fused with a primal, primitive reel, a blending of instruments and voices she couldn't identify. It was clearly his most brilliant composition. But when she had heard it, when she had closed her eyes and listened to it over and over in their apartment until dawn, a single image had filled her mind: the painting Jake had brought into the cabin with him. The fierce, wild strokes of green and gray, the distorted figures with their sinister energy - the music on the tape had the same cutting edge of madness. And the music's violence revealed a part of Jake she hadn't known existed. She read it as a cry for help.

The massive bronze doors of the Met were locked - the museum would not open for another hour - so she hurried through the employees' entrance. A gray-haired guard eyed her tape recorder, made a note of it, and pushed the button of the turnstyle to let her in. 'Didn't see you yesterday, Mrs Lazarus . . .'

'I was sick.'

'First day you took off all year.'

Barbara didn't reply. Her obsession with her work seemed irrelevant now. Preserving dried parchment and beaten gold meant nothing. She was out to save a life.

A spindly black janitor in the elevator grinned at Barbara as the doors slid open. He was about to push the button for her office floor when she stabbed it first. He noticed that her hand was trembling. 'You okay?'

She tried to smile back. 'Do I look that bad?' She knew she must, after staying up all night listening to the tape. She couldn't even remember if she'd combed her hair this morning.

The elevator door slid open to reveal the music from a sepulchral woodwind. She strode quickly down the corridor towards it. Bach ... He was no doubt playing it by heart. Bach ... A bad sign. If it had been Debussy or Chopin, it would have meant he was receiving visitors. But no one who had experienced his wrath dared interrupt Otto Kuns-tler when he was playing Bach. She pushed open the frosted glass door stenciled
Curator - European Musical Instruments
without knocking.

'Otto?'

The portly man sitting behind a cluttered desk winced when he saw her, but didn't stop blowing into what looked like an ancient recorder with elephantiasis. Six feet long, it was carved from walnut and adorned with flowers and cupids in mother-of-pearl. The melody he coaxed from it had a stately timbre.

'Otto . . . I've got to play something for you.'

He shut his eyes and pressed on with the fugue, his thick silver beard glistening with drops of spit. She clamped a lid on her impatience and waited until the piece finally ended.

'Otto

'Shame on you, Barbara.' His harsh Viennese
accent
made him sound hoarse. He removed
a
handkerchief from the pocket of his coat, mopped the perspiration from his bald head with it, and patted his lips. 'Can't you leave a man to fondle his woodwinds in peace?'

'I needed to speak with the world's leading expert on musical instruments. Where else could I go?'

'Flattery, Barbara, shameless flattery. Is that how a young lady rises so quickly through the ranks in this incorruptible institution?' He wiped his lips again, this time, she guessed, to hide his smile.

'Otto, please . . .' He licked the reed, and teased her with another, more sprightly cantatas. 'Otto, it's terribly important.'

He spat out the mouthpiece. 'My hearing . . . Every day, the doctor tells me, it grows weaker.' He tapped the hearing aid on his left ear. 'My days with my harem are numbered, Barbara.' He riffled through the pages of the Met instrument catalogue on his desk. 'Before it's too late, I intend to feast on all their sounds. Every last one of them. So spare me the interruptions. Is that too much for an old man to ask?'

She slid the tape recorder onto the table beside him. 'Please . . . listen to this.'

He caressed the instrument in his hands. 'With this cornucopia of sound at my bidding, must you inflict on me an abomination that comes from transistors and tape?'

'Yes.'

He eyed the tape recorder suspiciously. 'By your husband, I presume. The electronic
wunderkindV

Barbara considered cutting his sarcasm short, then thought better of it. 'Yes, it's Jake's. And you've got to listen.'

'Got to? I have a hundred different kinds of bagpipes entrusted to me, my dear, harps that King David himself might have played. I have a Louis Armstrong's trumpet and Paganini's Stradivarius. Why, when the time comes for Gabriel to blow his horn, he'll have to come here to get it on loan! Otto Kunstler does not
have
to listen to anything!'

'Please . . .'

He tilted his head to the sound of her voice, and as if reading the urgency in its timbre, let out a long sigh of defeat. 'Very well.' He closed his eyes and folded his arms, tapping his thumbs impatiently against his chest.

She punched the playback button on the tape recorder. Beneath an electronic barrage of bleeps and screeches hovered a faint hint of . . . what? Strings? A horn? Even after having listened to it a dozen times, Barbara couldn't be sure. But this time she tried not to concentrate. Each time she had listened, it had taken a tighter hold over her, as if with each playing, one more instrument joined the cacophony, one more shrill voice captured her in the feverish chorus. She secretly hoped that Otto would shrug the piece off with his usual sarcasm.

At first, in jest, he pretended to turn off his hearing aid. But then he stopped, leaned closer. It surprised her that after trying so hard to get Otto's attention, his sudden, intense fascination with the music did not please her. He was no longer slouching in the chair, but sat rigidly, like a doctor who had noticed a telltale shadow on an X-ray. He pursed his lips precisely, his brow straining, his face starting to redden, as if he were playing a perverse musical instrument that refused to yield a single note. When the tape ended, he opened his eyes in a hurry, as if he did not want to face the images flickering across his closed eyelids. 'Where did you get that?'

'I told you . . . It's Jake's.'

'No, no , . . he waved his hand impatiently. 'Not that electronic junk. I know he made
that
up. The sound underneath . . . the counterpoint. Where did he record the source of the music?'

'I don't know. I mean, he's been in Maine all summer. In a cabin out in the middle of nowhere. Otto, that's the part I don't understand. He said he recorded it up there.'

'In the woods?' Without another word, Otto pushed himself away from the desk, revealing a sizable paunch. He took the tape recorder from her and rewound the tape with surprising deftness.

'I mean ... I don't understand,' she said. 'What could
make
music like that?'

'What indeed?' He clicked the tape out of the machine. 'Come.'

Otto had a limp, but perhaps to prove his stubbornness he did not use a cane. Even so, it was all Barbara could do to keep up with him as he hurried down the corridor. At the end of the hall, he unlocked a frosted-glass door and flipped on the lights to a soundproof studio. Folding chairs and music stands were arranged for a string quartet, and a small glassed-in recording booth in the corner was banked with tape decks and TEAC consoles. He took her inside the booth and threaded on the tape.

'What are you going to do?' She eyed the powerful 36-inch speakers uneasily, not sure whether she could bear hearing the music magnified to its full strength.

'The doctor has his microscope,' he said. 'I have this. There are eight separate tracks on Jake's tape, each of which he recorded one at a time. Here I can scan each of them separately.' He flipped a switch and the full composition blared from the speakers. 'All that electronic gibberish . . . I'm going to filter it out, get at the source of the music. Let's try the first track.'

He turned a knob, and as the tape glided under the magnetic head, Barbara heard a series of wheezes and bleeps. She recognized them as the percussive sounds Jake created electronically to underscore his pieces. 'Not this . . .' He grimaced, switching quickly to track two: harsh, brassy electronic sounds. 'Nor this . . .'

The next track Otto diagnosed as 'natural sounds' -waves lapping, wind through trees - sounds which, he explained scornfully, it had become fashionable for modern composers to lift directly from nature, rather than evoking them in their music, as the earlier, great composers had done.

When he turned the knob and brought up the volume on the fourth track, she heard an intermittent cawing. 'Crows?'

'Bluejays,' he corrected her.

He proceeded to the next track, and cocked his head to one side. 'Ah . . .' The wild undercurrent throbbed over the speakers, free of the electronic overlay Jake had added.

As Otto adjusted the tone, Barbara felt the urge to back away, to flee the recording booth. The notes phased in and out as if they had been recorded across a great distance, surging, slashing like knives. A dozen or more shrill voices meshed with the unknown instruments, building to a crescendo, as though the music were somehow the recording of a violent crime.

The tape clicked off. At first neither of them spoke. Then Otto began his question slowly, as if to avoid any possibility of her misunderstanding. 'You said Jake was in Maine?' She nodded. 'Where . . .? Why . . .?'

'He's staying in this cabin he rented a few hours north of Bangor . . . near a lake. He went up there to work. He felt the city just wasn't doing it for him anymore. He needed some new . . .'

'Inspiration?' Again, the sarcasm. But something else had entered Otto's tone. Was it a note of concern?

'I couldn't leave work to go with him, but I was supposed to visit him this weekend. Then he called yesterday and told me not to come. He sounded so strange on the phone ... it frightened me. I caught the next plane, rented a car in Bangor and drove like hell. When I got there all he could talk about was this music he'd been hearing, music from the forest ... at night. At first I didn't believe him. I thought he'd gone off the deep end. But I mean . . .' She glanced uneasily at the tape. 'He didn't imagine that.'

'I'm afraid he didn't.' Otto gave his beard a vicious tug and winced fron the self-inflicted pain. Then he took her arm and led her hastily towards the door. He almost shoved her into the staff elevator, then stabbed the button for the second sub-basement. On the ride down in the padded cubicle, he avoided her eyes and ignored her questions, staring at the glowing numbers that flickered past as if reading an ominous message.

When the doors slid open, they picked their way down a narrow corridor, a darkened labyrinth of spinets and harpsichords, bass violas and tubas and tympani, some on display in glass cases, others shrouded in canvas drapes like corpses in a morgue. Odd, she thought, that in this Fort

Knox of the world's most magnificent musical treasures, the only sound was the insectlike hum of the humidifiers.

He flicked a combination lock to a vault marked
Musical Instruments, Occidental.
When the massive steel fire-door clicked open, he turned on the fluorescent lights. She followed him inside, past storage cabinets which housed gilt harps and ivory-inlaid flutes, until at last he unlocked a glass case with a key from his pocket. Delicately, he removed a horn that had been hollowed from a single ivory tusk, carved with a geometric pattern of skulls. When he took a deep breath and blew, it emitted a mournful moan.

'That's on the tape,' Barbara murmured. The heavy timbre of the instrument lingered in the air.

'An oliphant,' Otto said, holding it up to the light. 'Carved in North Africa. Made its way to Italy with the Phoenicians, until it reached the court of King Philip IV of Spain. It was never played by the court musicians, however, for it usually had a . . . symbolic significance.' He replaced it hastily in its case, as though glad to be locking it away. Then he looked at her. 'Musical instruments are like women, Barbara. Sometimes the most beautiful must be approached with caution.' Without explaining what he meant, he removed what looked like a hand-carved lute of mahogany inlaid with ebony from a bell-shaped leather case. He plucked the strings, tuning it, then he reached back into the case for a horsehair bow. When he drew the bow across the strings the sound was muted, as if decades, perhaps even centuries of silence, had dulled its tone. But Barbara recognized the plaintive resonance from the tape.

'What is it?'

'A gamba, predecessor of symphonic instruments like the cello, and less refined ones, like the guitar. It hasn't been included in performances for two hundred years, except by musicians in medieval consort groups, or by . . .' he cleared his throat and, instead of finishing his sentence, opened another case displaying a collection of bagpipes: animal skins, withered and lifeless, the largest one with a

ragged fox head wrapped around the wooden tubing. 'That reedy sound, that bleating on the tape,' Otto said, 'it was undoubtedly made by an instrument very much like this one.'

'I thought bagpipes were played only in Scotland.'

'On the contrary. It's a quite universal instrument. . . one that has changed little since it was first devised, centuries before Christ. During the Dark Ages, and in medieval times,! it was played in remote villages throughout Europe.'