The Memorist

Chapter 10

Saturday, April 26^th-8:17 a.m.

In the back of an impeccably clean taxi heading toward her hotel, Meer was at the same time tired and nervous. It had been an uneventful flight but she hadn’t been able to sleep. She’d come to Vienna on the spur of the moment despite serious misgivings, not because she believed, as Malachai suggested, that seeing the gaming box would trigger past life memories but because she hoped seeing it would spark a present life memory. Maybe touching the box and being able to inspect it would offer up some clue as to when she really had seen it and where.

Looking out the window at the scenery, there wasn’t much to capture her imagination until the cab reached the city’s inner limits where centuries-old buildings were crowded together on her right and the Danube flowed on her left. Familiar with the music that extolled the river, she wondered if modern-day pollution had changed its color from blue to a dark brownish-green or if Strauss had employed artistic license.

At the hotel, she learned her room wouldn’t be ready till the official check-in time at one that afternoon. She left her luggage, walked back outside and asked the doorman for a taxi. Giving the new driver her father’s address, she was aware how foreign it sounded. He’d been living in Vienna for twenty years, but she’d never visited, seeing him instead in New York once or twice a year when he returned for business. Over dinner he’d probe her personal life for clues to her well-being and she’d give him perfunctory answers about her job and whoever she was seeing and then get him to tell her stories about his latest treasure hunt. She loved listening to those stories. She always had. When she was a child, all Meer had ever wanted was to go with him on his quests, frightened and at the same time excited about the idea of being shot at, run over, attacked by guard dogs or arrested for smuggling.

Only a few minutes from the Sacher Hotel, the ride got suddenly bumpy and she looked out the window.

“Cobblestones,” the driver said, speaking passable English. “I can always tell the tourists. As soon as we start to bang around on these streets, they look confused. We’ve entered Spittleberg, a very old part of the city.”

Meer found the uneven rhythm oddly welcoming, as were the two- and three-story residences that graced the narrow streets. All painted fanciful colors, almost every house had window boxes overflowing with flowers. The area reminded her of an older, more genteel version of Greenwich Village in New York. The taxi driver pulled to a stop on the left at 83 Kirchengasse, a pale blue three-story building with dark green shutters-her father’s house.

Meer rang the bell. A wreath of dried bay leaves hung in the middle of the door and as she listened for her father’s footsteps, she counted the leaves. When she got to twelve she rang the bell a second time. At twenty-two, she assumed he wasn’t home.

Since she’d only decided to come yesterday and had booked via a travel agent at the last minute, she’d had little time to let her father know she was coming. Calling him last night from the airport while she waited to board, she’d reached his machine and left a message telling him she’d go to the hotel first and come here about eleven o’clock as long as the plane was on time. She was early, but would he have gone out so close to the time she’d be arriving? Not unless he had something he couldn’t cancel at such short notice. But then wouldn’t he have left her a note…or called on her cell? Except in her rush Meer hadn’t remembered to call and activate the overseas option so she couldn’t check.

Maybe her father hadn’t heard the bell because he was in the shower and was just getting out. Ringing for what she determined would be the last time, she listened to the slightly off-key chimes again-that flat should have been a sharp.

When Meer was a child she’d invented a language made of musical sounds; whole ideas and phrases expressed by series of notes. Living inside of sound, Meer was used to everyone else living outside it but her father had learned how to speak that language and it had been a special bond between them. She’d have to translate his chimes for him, she thought now, and almost smiled.

When the vibration stopped Meer put her ear up to the door. She could hear music playing deep inside but no footsteps coming this way. She checked her watch: 9:50 a.m.

The sound of a bee buzzing around the window box distracted her. Plump and slow, it was melodic in its own annoying way as it flew from the window box on the left to the one on the right, dipped into a red begonia then hopped onto a sprig of lavender and finally flew into the house through the open window.

The window was open? Why hadn’t she noticed? Bending over the flowers, she stuck her head inside the house and shouted hello.

No response.

Meer was frustrated and tired, and this was her father’s house so it wasn’t trespassing, she thought as she raised the window and climbed inside. After the strong sunlight, it took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the darker interior. There was a pile of books by the couch and a closet door was ajar. Torn between following the music or the scent of coffee, she chose the music first and wound up in her father’s crowded library. The floor-to-ceiling shelves were crammed with so many books that if they all came down at once she was sure she’d be crushed beneath their weight.

A large pile of papers was spread out on the desk and one of the drawers gaped open like a screaming mouth. Her father was always slightly disorganized but this seemed excessive. By now the background music had worked its way into her consciousness and her right hand automatically fingered the notes. Maybe everything was fine and she’d simply fallen under the symphony’s foreboding spell. It was a fascinating mystery how humans emotionally responded to majors and minors on a level that bypassed consciousness. At the Memory Dome, one of the exhibits already underway explored Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious applied to musical memory. How a tribe of African Bushmen who had never heard a violin listened to a concerto intended to convey sadness, and started to weep. How a fifteen-year-old girl in France who’d never been to India, heard a sitar for the first time and entered into a deep meditative state without any instruction. Or how a child heard ghostly music no one else could hear and became so frightened she tried to run away from it. Over and over. Was running still.

Johannes Brahms’ Tragic Overture took on an even more ominous tenor.

“Dad?” Meer yelled out, surprised her voice sounded so panicky. Only the music answered. Melancholy clarinets giving way to a rushing and loud finish.

“…Wien Philharmonics geleitet von Simon Posner.”

Meer spun around but no one was there.

“Es ist neun Uhr fünfzig-”

Then she realized the voice was coming from a radio announcer via the stereo system nestled in the bookshelves. But why was the stereo on if no one was home? There had to be someone she could call to find out where her father was…maybe someone at the auction house. Or perhaps she would just go back to the hotel and wait for her father to call her.

In the hallway she took a right instead of a left. An open door revealed a bedroom where everything appeared orderly. Perhaps she’d overreacted. Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite played on the radio now. She stood and listened to the less foreboding music for twenty seconds, a minute, and just when she finally felt slightly more relaxed, the scent reached her. Verbena. Her father’s cologne for as long as she could remember. Not a whiff but an intense cloud of it. Stepping over the threshold, she saw a pool of golden liquid and shards of broken glass on the dresser top. Something really was wrong here.

Turning, she headed back in the direction she thought would lead to the living room and the front door but instead found herself in the kitchen where a steady and rhythmic drip attracted her attention. Meer couldn’t explain why but it seemed imperative she shut off the faucet before she left the house. On her way, she tripped and glanced down, expecting to find a chair leg in the way but instead saw a shoe. She reached down to pick it up and move it out of the way. Except it was still on a foot. Someone was lying under the table. Her father?

Meer swallowed her scream, felt her breath coming in furious gulps, got down on her hands and knees and peered under the table.

No, not her father, a woman she’d never seen. About sixty. Short gray hair curling around a sweet face. Meer noticed so many things at once: a huge purple bruise on the woman’s right cheek, a zigzag of dried blood starting at the corner of her mouth, her left leg-obviously broken-lying at an impossible angle. Could the woman have fallen this way? But why would she have crawled under the table? No. From the way the woman’s shirt and pant legs were bunched up, she’d been dragged there. A gold watch gleamed on the woman’s wrist.

“Don’t worry, I’ll get help-” Meer said to her while at the same time processing the pallid complexion, the unblinking eyes and the immovable form. Meer quickly reached out and pressed down on the woman’s outstretched wrist. Her skin was cold. As cold as Meer felt a few minutes ago. No, colder. Was she dead?

The doorbell rang and the off-key chimes broke into her consciousness. And then a man shouted out: “Hello, hello,” in a deep voice with a German accent.

It wasn’t her father’s voice.