The Memorist

Chapter 5

Has it occurred to you that transmigration is at once an explanation and a justification of the evil of the world? If the evils we suffer are the result of sins committed in our past lives, we can bear them with resignation and hope that if in this one we strive toward virtue our future lives will be less afflicted.

– W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

Vienna, Austria

Thursday, April 24^th-6:20 p.m.

If anyone walking down one of Leopoldstadt’s narrow cobbled streets had glimpsed Jeremy Logan hurrying up the steps to Number 122 Engerthstrasse they wouldn’t have given him or the artless building identified as the Toller Archäologiegesellschaft-the Toller Archaeology Society-a second glance. Not even the front door with its decorative lock in the shape of a peacock attracted attention. In Vienna, a lack of decoration would have been more noticeable.

Seconds after ringing the bell, Jeremy disappeared inside and went through a second door invisible from the street. As he passed under the carved letters on the entranceway’s frieze that revealed the brotherhood’s true name, the change from ordinary exterior to extravagant interior was drastic.

The Memorist Society, on whose board of directors Jeremy sat, had been secretly founded in 1809 to study the work of Austrian Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, one of the men responsible for the greatest dissemination of Eastern knowledge in late-eighteenth-century Europe. Of specific interest to the Society’s founders was reincarnation-a belief common to the newly discovered Hindu Shruti scriptures, the teachings of the Kabbalah, the mystery schools of ancient Egypt, Greek philosophers and Christian doctrine prior to the fifth century C.E.

The then undesirable land near the Prater parklands, in the midst of the Jewish ghetto, had been chosen as the Society’s location to both accommodate its many Hebraic members and keep curiosity seekers away. The architect had been given two specifications: the building should attract no undue attention and it should have at least one hidden entrance and exit.

Entering the sanctum sanctorum, Jeremy stepped into the vast assembly room where columns stood like sentries. An Egyptian mural illustrating the story of Isis and Osiris swept over the walls, and a gem-toned carpet covered the floor. The cupola ceiling was painted the cobalt of a night sky and stars-tiny mirrors that caught and reflected light from below-twinkled above. Every corner of the room was crammed with gleaming spiritual objects and artifacts, but Jeremy ignored it all as he headed purposefully toward the library and the board members meeting he’d called.

“Guten abend,” Fremont Brecht said as he put down his newspaper. Seated in a club chair as if he were a potentate and it was his throne, with thousands of leather-bound books behind him, Austria’s ex-minister of defense and head of the Memorist Society was a commanding presence.

Few members greeted Fremont as warmly as Jeremy did, but men didn’t make Jeremy cower; only mysteries he couldn’t explain.

“Will we still be able to make the concert or will this meeting take too long?” Fremont asked.

“We should be fine. And I have my car here.”

“Good, because I cancelled an appointment regarding next week’s security and technology conference for tonight’s performance of the Emperor Concerto and would hate to miss it after going through all that trouble.” He gestured across the long room to the middle-aged woman with auburn hair seated at a card table, busy scribbling notes. “Erika’s waiting for us.” Fremont was spry, despite his seventy-eight years and almost three-hundred-pound frame, and stood with surprising ease. Only a slight limp as he crossed the room suggested any concession to his age and rich diet.

In a niche, an ancient quartz Coptic jar sat on a plinth, a pinlight illuminating it with an almost iridescent glow. In a church, an object this precious would be in a gold-tooled reliquary but the Memorists’ relic had no power and promised no magic and the members took the jar for granted. But tonight, Jeremy stared at it as if he could see through the alabaster to the scattered ashes and grime that lay on its bottom.

“Does this meeting have something to do with our spy?” Erika asked when they joined her. Her amber eyes swept the room as if she was looking for someone who didn’t belong there.

“No, but I think you’ll be just as interested in what I have to say. Maybe even more so,” Jeremy answered.

One of Central Europe’s leading authorities on near-death experiences-NDEs-Erika’s personal goal was to have the scientific community take her Memorist-funded research connecting NDEs to reincarnation seriously. No matter that sixty percent of people in the world believed in past life regression, the establishment was not only suspicious of it, they were disdainful. Recently Erika had made some headway but believed someone inside the Society was spying on her when, for the second time in a year, rumors of her research were ridiculed in the press. Since then she’d been actively lobbying for Fremont to hire a detective.

“What’s on your mind, Jeremy? I really don’t want to miss the concert.” Fremont tapped one fingertip on the leather-topped table.

“Three months ago I was contacted by a woman who asked me to appraise a Torah that she’d discovered hidden in her grandmother’s apartment in the hopes our Judaica department would be interested.”

Jeremy explained how he’d walked into Helen Hoffman’s grandmother’s living room to view one treasure and literally lost his step when he noticed another, a dusty afterthought on a side table. Despite never having laid eyes on it before, he recognized the carved wooden box right away. For so many years, through long empty nights and wandering days he’d searched for this phantom, driven by the memory of his daughter as a small child with brown satin curls and doleful pale-green eyes drawing a facsimile of it over and over, exhausting herself and wearing down crayons as she struggled with the details while silvery tracks of tears stained her cheeks.

Jeremy had been astonished to stumble on an actual antique that was identical to the box his daughter drew but that had been a synchronicity he’d been able to grasp. It was the information in the letter he had discovered inside that box this morning that was unfathomable and that he was there to divulge.

“The box belonged to Antonie Brentano,” he explained.

When Erika couldn’t place the name, Fremont explained she was one of Beethoven’s closest friends, and possibly his Immortal Beloved.

“Beethoven was also a friend of two of our founders-he knew both Caspar Neidermier and Rudolph Toller,” Jeremy added. As the Society’s historian, he’d studied all the records stored in the underground vault. “In the process of preparing the chest for sale in the upcoming auction, I discovered Beethoven gave Antonie the box.”

“While I admire the labyrinthine paths you traverse in your investigations and enjoy hearing about them, I really don’t want to be late. You said something was hidden in the box?” Fremont asked. “What was it?”

“A letter written by Ludwig van Beethoven.”

In the hearth, a log cracked and hissed. Jeremy looked toward it and then over at the recess that held the Coptic urn before continuing. They all knew that in 1813, Caspar Neidermier died after finding an ancient bone flute in India. In 1814, his partner, Rudolph Toller, gave Ludwig van Beethoven that same flute and asked him to find the song believed to be encrypted in complicated markings etched on its surface.

“According to our records, that urn contains the pulverized fragments Beethoven returned…all that was left of the memory flute after he destroyed it.”

“But the letter says something else?” Fremont prodded.

“Beethoven wrote that he only told the Society he’d destroyed the instrument-that what he gave us back was an animal bone, dried out and smashed with a hammer. He kept the real flute, believing it to be too valuable to destroy and at the same time too dangerous to entrust to anyone. He wrote that he hid it. For the protection of us all, and all to come were his exact words.”

“Is the letter authentic?” Fremont asked.

“I’ll have an expert opinion by Monday.”

“Did he say where he hid the actual flute?” Erika asked.

“Not exactly.”

“Nothing is ever that easy,” Fremont said.

“Some manners of death,” she responded with a sad laugh.

“Beethoven wrote that he sent each of his closest friends one piece of information, a clue if you will, so that if it ever became necessary they would be able to pool their knowledge and find both the flute and its song.”

“You’re saying he figured out the music?” Erika held her breath.

“He says he did, and before you ask, yes, I’ve checked-without being specific-with two scholars about any finished or unfinished compositions for the flute that might be relevant and have the right dates on them. There’s nothing.”

“To go to all that trouble, what he found must have really frightened him…or…was Beethoven just paranoid?” she asked.

“He was cautious, easy to anger, but no, not irrationally paranoid,” Fremont, the musical aficionado among them, explained. “Although we can assume Herr Beethoven had heard the rumors that circulated when Mozart died only six weeks after his Magic Flute debuted. Conspiracy theorists suggested the young composer had been poisoned because of the Masonic secrets he’d revealed in his opera. It’s possible Beethoven could have worried that if Mozart had been poisoned for revealing a secret legend about a flute with unusual properties connected to the cycle of life and death, maybe he should stay away from another one.” Fremont took a sip of his brandy.

Erika’s forehead furrowed again but this time there was a light in her eyes. “What if Beethoven found out the memory flute worked? What if the people who listened to its music and heard its vibrations remembered their past lives? That could have been what he meant by dangerous,” she suggested breathlessly.

Fremont set his snifter down so hard on the marble end table a fragment of glass chipped off and the sound resonated ominously. “Until we know if Beethoven actually wrote that letter, this is all just speculation.”

“The timing was right too.” Erika was too far into her hypothesis to stop.

“Right for what?” Jeremy asked.

“The genesis of Heinrich Wilhelm Dove’s discovery of binaural beats in 1839-”

“Erika!” Fremont interrupted with a laugh. “This is useless speculation.”

But Jeremy didn’t think so. The possibility of binaural beats-low frequency tones, stimulating brain wave activity-prompting past life regressions was something he’d first looked into when Meer had started hearing music inaudible to everyone else and Erika’s recent work suggested the possibility was a probability. More than half the people in her NDE studies had heard music during their journeys, and when asked to pick out music from a dozen samples that came closest to what they’d heard, one hundred percent of them chose the sample imbedded with binaural beat frequencies.

“It’s not speculation. There’s a great deal of scientific data demonstrating the results of religious chanting, music, drumming and other sonic phenomena on the mind and the body.” Erika spoke more quickly now, racing ahead, intoxicated by the connections she was making. She believed frequencies similar to the ones people with NDEs heard could open the portal and induce the states of consciousness necessary for them to remember previous lives.

“If we found the flute and it proved that past life memories could be stimulated through sonic manipulation, we would revolutionize reincarnation theory. Not just reincarnation theory,” she insisted, “but time-space theory too. It would be a huge scientific breakthrough.”

“All thanks to our conquering Jewish hero here.” Fremont gestured to Jeremy.

“Jewish? How does that connect?” Jeremy asked.

“You’d be vilified as a twenty-first-century Pontius Pilate for proving that man alone bears responsibility for his eternal rest and it is within each person’s own control to get to heaven. The Kabbalah will be reviled. Jewish mystics everywhere will become ostracized again.” Fremont stared into his glass, swirled the liquid once, twice and then, lifting the snifter to his lips, drank the rest of the brandy down as if it were as smooth as caramel.

“The Kabbalah is hardly the only religious doctrine that supports reincarnation,” Jeremy said. “Why assume Jews would take the blame just because-”

“Fremont,” Erika interrupted, “are you actually suggesting we give up our inquiry because of a possible religious argument?” The scientist was aghast.

“Of course not,” Fremont responded. “I’m just saying that so much is at stake we need to take one step at a time, quietly and carefully.”

“Well, if the letter turns out to be authentic-” her voice regained its hopeful, yearning tone “-then the box itself might be a clue to where the flute is hidden. Shouldn’t we be prepared to buy both the gaming box and the letter at next week’s auction?”

“But the letter was hidden,” Fremont said. “No one even knows about it. You’re not announcing its existence now, are you?”

“Of course not. I had no intention of announcing it,” Jeremy answered. “Helen Hoffman has agreed to let me have it authenticated but hasn’t made any decision past that.”

Erika wasn’t paying attention to what they were saying; she’d moved beyond the auction to what would come next. “If what the letter says is true and the flute wasn’t destroyed, there might be a memory tool hidden here in Vienna. We have to find it. A memory tool…” she intoned reverentially. “It’s almost unimaginable.”

But they were all imagining it. And so was another member of the Society who, unbeknownst to them all, had been sitting in one of the darkened corners of the chamber since before the meeting began and had been listening intently to every word.