Home by Nightfall

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

He was even smaller than Lenox remembered.

They found him in the sitting room just beyond the last of the baths, a large chamber that had been decorated marvelously, such that it could easily have been the inner sanctum of a Turkish palace, he thought. All of the men in it, as they entered, were dressed “à la Turque,” having been wrapped in robes and turbans by attendants against the cool air, then seated on comfortable sofas to be served flavored tobacco, sweet coffee, and honeyed pastries.

“There he is,” Thurley said.

Even as he said it, the little man, sitting in an armchair and reading a book, saw them.

He stood up right away, with an uncertain expression on his face. He looked absurd in his turban, his sparse graying chest hair emerging from his robe.

“Hello, gentlemen,” he said, when they approached him.

“Take word back to Polly to get going,” Lenox murmured to Pointilleux.

“Mr. Muller?” said Nicholson.

The little German nodded. He was standing up very straight. “Yes, it is I. I let her die. There is no point to deny it.”

He spoke in a squeaky German accent, which took some of the gravity away from this admission. Everyone in the room was staring at them, and Nicholson asked Smythson if they could speak somewhere more private. The manager led them to a little side room nearby, which was overly bright. Muller was extremely docile; he sat with them readily, asking only if he might have a glass of brandy. Smythson dispatched someone to bring it.

“I am Inspector Nicholson, Mr. Muller,” said the man from the Yard.

Muller sitting, nodded. “Very well.”

“You say you killed this woman? Tell us, please, who was she?” asked Nicholson.

Muller smiled. “Who was she! It is a strange thing to love a madwoman, gentlemen. Love her I did, however. She—she was Katharina Schiller, the beautiful Katharina Schiller, famous throughout Berlin society, the companion of my heart. Nobody has ever understood me as she did. Nobody ever will again, either, alas.”

“Why did you kill her?” asked Nicholson.

Muller hesitated. Lenox thought he knew why.

Poisoning—it had been on his mind all day, ever since his return to London.

It bothered him. Men who killed their lovers almost always did it out of passion, and by passionate means, a gun, a blow.

They were supposed to believe that Muller, on the other hand, had murdered this woman by the most premeditated of methods, and at the theater no less, the place and time when having to dispose of a body would be least convenient to him.

He stepped forward. “Mr. Muller didn’t say that he killed Miss Schiller. He said that he let her die.”

Nicholson looked at the pianist quizzically. “Mr. Muller? You’ve given us all a great deal of trouble — I do think you might favor us with an explanation of what you did and where you’ve been.”

At that moment the glass of brandy arrived, and Muller drank most of it in a single draft. Then he studied the glass for a moment, before taking a deep breath and responding.

“I could never have broken it off with her in Berlin,” he said. “Her father … her personality … well, I could never have broken it off with her in Berlin, gentlemen. Yet if I was to survive another day with my sanity intact, I had to leave her.

“And here, with the success that has met me in London, far from home, I felt — finally, I could tell her that it was finished, our affair. The day she died, I informed her that I would be traveling on to Paris alone, to meet my real sister, which meant that it would not be convenient to me to have her travel with me any longer. I was very tender, you know! I told her that we would always be friends.

“She left my dressing room without a word. Just before I was to go on that night, however, I found her there again. She had her own key to the theater and to the room. She had insisted on that when we arrived. In my dressing room she had poured two glasses of wine from a bottle she had brought with her.

“Little did she know how transparent her offer of a final glass of wine in friendship was! She had told me many times that she would rather kill me than lose me. When her back was turned for an instant at a knock at the door, I switched our glasses. Yes, it was thus that I killed her. I expected her to take a sip and taste the bitterness, and see that I had found her out. Instead, when I took a sip, she laughed like the madwoman she was and drank the entire glass before I could stop her.

“I cannot describe anything more horrible than seeing her face as she realized what had happened. She died very quickly. I cannot describe…” A funny distance came over the German’s undistinguished little face. “And yet, gentlemen, I do not know that I have ever played better. I felt I was playing for her.”

The story they eventually teased out of Muller was much longer than this, and went back to the history of his initial meeting with Katharina Schiller in Berlin. There were a hundred details that Nicholson pursued, while Muller was in a cooperative mood: how Greville had helped, how the pianist had hidden Miss Schiller’s body.

The essentials of the tale never deviated from the original version, first to last, and finally, Nicholson, sighing, said, “Regardless of intent, I must inform you that you are under arrest.”

Muller stood up immediately and drank the rest of the brandy. “Of course. Let us go now. The hour is late.”

They left. In order to depart from the baths, they passed back through the rooms of the bathhouse in reverse order.

Muller joined uncomplainingly in this unusual procession. Only when they were in the antechamber to the baths did he pause. “Mr. Muller?” said Lenox.

They all followed his gaze, which was trained on a pianoforte in the corner, with a broken wooden back. “Gentlemen,” he said, “might I have a moment to play? It may be some time before I am seated at my instrument again.”

They looked at each other uncertainly. He was a diminished figure, and had come along so quietly.

Still, it seemed wrong. But Muller took advantage of their silence to go sit at the piano, and nobody stopped him. Testingly, he played a note. It sounded very uncertain — an instrument meant for drinking songs, jangly, probably warped by the steam in the baths, certainly not what he was used to. Muller ran his fingertips along the keys noiselessly, feeling them. It was only now that Lenox noticed the single remarkable thing about the fellow: his hands, which were extraordinarily delicate, long, slender, and muscular.

Muller began to play. He started with a few notes that sounded unrelated, but which resolved into a tentative chord. Another followed it, three simple notes. Then the initial chord again, held, sustained.

He played a short run from the first chord back to the second, then paused, then played a few more stray notes, seemingly unrelated.

And then suddenly they were in the midst of it.

Lenox had only an intermittent relationship with music, but he was enthralled. As Muller played, the room, the world, were transformed. The unassuming little German seemed to melt into the piano, his body wholly connected to it. The music was fluid, major, then minor, irreducibly magical.

“Bach,” murmured Dallington, who knew more about the subject than Lenox did. “For organ, usually. A variation.”

Muller played on and on, and even Cartwright, who had taken the heat of the baths worse than the rest of them, couldn’t pull his eyes away. Thurley’s mouth hung open. As for Lenox — well, as the music went on he felt as if he were in a room with everyone he had ever loved, his brother, his parents, Lady Jane, Sophia. It was the strangest thing. When Muller began to play more softly, in a minor key, it was almost intolerably moving. When he moved back into the major key, all of them felt the strength and suppleness of the emotion behind it, neither triumphant nor defeated. Loss — the loss of Katharina Schiller — was present in all of the notes, but so was life, the force of life.

At last he began to soften his playing back toward those first chords, the notes quieter and quieter, fewer and fewer.

When he had finished there were tears in Dallington’s eyes. “My goodness,” he said.

Muller let his hands rest silently on the piano for a moment, and then he stood up. Lenox would never forget the look on his face. He looked renewed, not exhausted. He bowed. “Thank you,” he said, and then, after only a few seconds, he was again the absurd little German man he had been before he played.

Genius! Who could explain it?

In the front room they met Polly and Pointilleux, who had been listening to the piano music, too. They watched Nicholson and Cartwright put Muller into a police dray, promising they would call in the morning to inquire after his status.

“He did it, then?” said Polly.

“Yes, he admitted it straightaway,” said Dallington.

She shook her head. “How beautiful that music was, though.”

“Was it Pascal who said that all of man’s miseries come from not being able to sit alone quietly in a room?” said Lenox.

“Very odd. Still, the good news is that we shall be famous throughout Britain tomorrow, fellows. We found him.”

“And thoroughly routed LeMaire,” said Dallington.

Yet none of them could feel quite as enthusiastic as they ought to, watching the dray — and after they parted, agreeing to meet early the next morning, Lenox, for his part, carried that melancholy all the way home, hoping that Lady Jane, who could always cheer him up again, would still be awake.