The Prodigy

The Ghost Stories of Noel Hynd, Number 4

Revised 2014 Edition

by Noel Hynd

Red Cat Tales

Electronic and Paperback Publishing

Los Angeles, California

http://www.RedCatTales.com

for Patricia

“When you perform Beethoven, you have to transform yourself and commit yourself. You have to believe that God exists, that there is a soul, and that you can change the world.”

—Yo-Yo Ma

One

March 2009

The Air France 777 hit severe turbulence as it climbed through the dark clouds above Normandy, ninety miles northwest of Paris. Throughout the sky there were streaks of lightning and severe wind currents. Freezing rain streaked the outer windows of the aircraft. It was a hell of a nasty flight and it had just begun.

The thrust of the plane’s engines changed abruptly.

The young blond man with shaggy hair, huddled into Seat 2-A by a window in the Premiere Classe cabin, looked to the flight crew for reassurance. He found none.

The nearest stewardess—a French girl with a lovely face and slender body—was gripping one hand with the other, nervously twisting a paper tissue. She was frightened.

The young man glanced away before she caught him watching her. He stared out the window again. His palms were sweating. No one anywhere nearby spoke. Suddenly, the plane lurched severely downward. There were loud gasps from several travelers behind him.

“No,” he thought to himself. “No! Not today! I do not wish to die today!”

“I want more time,” he whispered aloud. “There’s so much I want to accomplish.”

The airplane gained altitude as it wrestled its way upward. The seat-belt signs in French and English remained lit. He sighed. He wished he still had religion, but hadn’t since he was a boy. His stomach clenched. Then—amidst more gasps, then screams—there was a loud bang, followed closely with a ripping, bursting noise. It sounded like an explosion. Transfixed, the passengers watched in horror. A ball of lightning emerged from the cabin to sizzle down the center aisle before exiting the wings. It left 152 passengers on the brink of terror.

“So, that’s the way it’s to be,” the sandy blond man said to himself. “This will be Isador Rabinowitz’s final revenge. I’m going home to attend his funeral, but I will never reach it.”

He searched for something to be content about and found only one thing. At least Diana was not on-board. The woman he loved was back in New York, waiting for him.

The airplane gradually steadied. The blackness within the clouds disintegrated. A few minutes later the jet broke into a clear blue sky. The aircraft tipped its starboard wing toward the morning sun and continued to climb gently. The woman in 2-B sighed. She was in her fifties, with dark hair pulled back. She wore a smart, navy blue Donna Karan suit.

“We were hit by lightning,” she said, still shaken. Her slight New York accent told him she was American. From her reading matter, he could guess that she was in the fashion industry. “Can you believe it? Hit.”

“Yes, I know,” the blond man answered. His heart beat like a kettledrum. The woman shook her head.

“It’s the second time that’s happened to me,” she said. “I fly New York to Paris and back once a month. I shouldn’t be scared. But I am. Every time.”

“Understandably,” he answered. His accent was American, also.

“Ha!” she said. “Well, we’re still here, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” he said. “For now, at least,” he thought.

He looked out the window. The clouds were far below and so was the electrical storm. He turned quickly and looked back. She was studying him.

“You’re the concert pianist, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Yes, I am” he answered softly.

“I’m completely enamored of your approach to music,” she said. “The way you have such fun with it. I’ve been to five of your recitals. Two in New York, one in Chicago and one in London at the Royal Albert Hall in 2003 and one at the Olympia in Paris in 2005.” It was his turn to smile.

“Thank you,” he said. “You’re stalking me. I’m flattered.” They both laughed. She looked at him without speaking for several seconds.

“I wonder…” she said. “No one will believe I flew back to the United States with a celebrity, unless…” She fumbled with her purse. “Do you mind if I ask you to…?”

“I don’t mind at all,” he said politely.

“You’re very kind” She produced a Mont Blanc pen and a fine blank note card.

He signed the card, asking her name and autographing it personally to her. His penmanship assertive and handsome in the deep blue ink. Ten big, bold sweeping script letters.

Rolf Geiger

On the bottom of the card, for fun, he drew a deft sketch of a man playing a grand piano. He was skilled also as an illustrator.

She smiled widely when he handed the card back to her. At the same moment, the seat-belt signs went off. The once-frightened stewardess was preparing the drink cart.

Absurdly, his mind flashed back to the old joke:

In the unlikely event that we land on water, your seat cushion doubles as a flotation device—and the drink cart can be used as a shark cage.

“Yeah, sure,” he told himself. Thoughts of the absurd frequently followed him.

“I’m thrilled,” the woman beside Geiger said, looking over the autograph and the sketch. “I’ll treasure this.”

“It’s my pleasure,” he said.

“I wonder if you could tell me something,” she asked. “I love your recitals, but I haven’t seen any advertised recently. Have you been abroad for a long time?”

“I’ve kept a limited schedule of late,” he said. “Maybe a date every few months at a small venue. I just played in San Remo, Italy, for example. Fewer than two hundred in the audience.”

“Such a shame,” she said, shaking her head. “I loved when you used to do those huge extravaganzas,” she said. “Like you did a few years ago. Oh, they were simply wonderful!”

“Thank you. The press and the critics used to kill me for them.”

“People who are enthusiastic about music love you. But the classical establishment?” She opened her hands as if to dismiss the entire universe of serious criticism. “I know they have problems with you.”

“They do,” he agreed. “Major problems. And I have major problems with them.”

Major indeed. Following his tour in 2005, the critics all over the world had turned on him with such ferocity that he stopped playing, other than small hit-and-run recitals. The reviews about him had turned so vicious and so personal that he could barely endure reading them. He just didn’t take his gifts seriously enough, they all wrote. He just kept fooling around.

Smiling, she leaned to him and spoke beneath the sound of the airplane’s engines.

“My feeling is that the music establishment is full of crap!” she said cheerfully and conspiratorially. “So screw ‘em all!” she said loudly enough to be heard throughout the first-class section. “Come back to your audiences. We love you.”

“You’re very generous,” he answered. “I’m taking some time to think things over. There may be some changes soon.”

“I hope so,” she said. “I hope so.”

Rolf Geiger looked away from his new best friend. He tuned into his iPod. He closed his eyes. He was tired and wanted no conversation. Actually, he felt relieved. He had been hit by lightning and lived to tell about it. Outside, a brilliant sun seemed to be perched harmlessly on the tip of the 777’s wing. All in all, he told himself again, he was once again a lucky man.

The thought helped him relax. And with the relaxation came a calming, satisfying sleep.

Two

Rolf Geiger came out of his sleep to the steady rhythm of the airplane’s engines, the ear buds having slipped away from his ears. Tired beyond reason, Geiger had been in Europe for only five days this March, just long enough to play as a last minute surprise guest at the annual music festival in San Remo.

This had been such a quick trip that Diana had chosen not to accompany him. Not like the previous summer, when they had joyously explored Europe on those days when he was not required to play. There had even been four days when they had slipped away from everyone and bicycled through Provence. Best of all, no one recognized him.

Rolf had missed Diana during the concert in San Remo. But he knew she was waiting for him in New York. In his hand luggage, he had an exquisite pair of gold and ruby earrings that he had purchased for her, plus several French perfumes unavailable in the United States, and a thin, gold neck chain with a piano pendant. It had cost him five crisp American hundred-dollar bills from a jeweler on the Via Contessa Ferrara.

Much as he had missed Diana, however, he might have preferred to have missed her phone call that morning, the call that had compelled him to return home to New York forty-eight hours earlier than planned. The call that had put him on this aircraft.

Isador Rabinowitz, the great concert pianist, was dead at ninety-two. The funeral was to be held at once. And there was no way, considering how the lives of the old Rabinowitz and the young Geiger had already been intertwined, that Geiger could not be present at the funeral. The descent into New York was as bumpy as the ride over Normandy. But, at least there was no lightning, and after a seven-hour flight he was safely on the ground again.

His car and driver were waiting. So was Diana, who had come to the airport. The sight of her - a tall, slim, beautiful woman with shoulder-length dark hair - sent his spirits soaring. The couple broke into wide smiles upon spotting each other and fell into a long embrace.

“Missed you,” she said.

“Missed you horribly,” he said to her in return.

Geiger finally relaxed in the car as it drove into Manhattan to his current home. The touch of melancholia upon him he assumed stemmed from the death of Rabinowitz. Diana, sensing his mood, sat close to him, her hand on his, comforting him.

At one point in the ride, he turned and found her looking right at him. So she leaned to his ear and whispered,

“I’m incredibly horny today.” He smiled.

“I’m glad,” he whispered back. “Me too.”

Mrs. Jamison, his housekeeper, had prepared dinner for them and then gone home. Rolf and Diana enjoyed the light supper. She helped him unpack. They had from time to time discussed marriage, but were both content with the present setup. There was no pressure to it, only affection. If the time ever came that one of them wanted to leave, departure would be as easy as packing a few bags.

But tonight, there was only love. They showered together and tumbled into bed, attacking each other as if they had been apart for months. The sex, as always, was deeply physical and deeply passionate. She fell asleep beside him, wearing only the gifts that he had bought her. The earrings. The neck chain with the piano pendant. And a dab of one of the perfumes.

He lay away for several minutes, feeling how lucky he was to love such a woman and have such a woman in love with him. But equally he was troubled. Anxious. Tomorrow would bring an occasion when he could finally escape from the stark, ominous shadow of the old man.

Instead, what would come with the next dawn was the beginning of an unspeakable terror. Perhaps this notion was at the edge of Rolf Geiger’s consciousness. Perhaps, because something deep within his soul already dreaded the next day.

Somehow, deep down, he knew…

Three

On the cold morning that followed his return from Europe, Rolf Geiger stood by the grave of Isador Rabinowitz with the other pallbearers. Rolf was by twenty-four years the youngest member of the funeral party. Inside him were anxieties that would not go away.

The world would lay Isador Rabinowitz to rest this day in an aging Jewish cemetery in upper Manhattan among people whom he had never known and where the burial sites were so crowded together that they screamed out for relief. But that was the physical part. Already Geiger knew the downside: Burying a soul was impossible.

Isador Rabinowitz. The so-called Dark Angel of the modern piano. Lucifer of the black and white keys. No one who knew music had a neutral position on the man.

Until the coming of Rolf Geiger, Rabinowitz had been the most renowned classical musician in the world, probably the greatest pianist of the twentieth century. There had been Arthur Rubinstein before Rabinowitz and Vladimir Horowitz. For technique, earlier in the century, there had also been Rachmaninoff, as well as Prokofiev, nineteenth-century men who played their own compositions and who had wandered into the twentieth century by accident.

Rabinowitz had been the younger Geiger’s onetime mentor and teacher. Rabinowitz had been a towering figure in his time, a man who had sacrificed his own humanity for his art. Now, as Rolf stood in a cemetery in Upper Manhattan on this cold day in March, a sharp wind off the Hudson River slashed through his overcoat. Rolf Geiger was not a happy young man.

Geiger’s blue eyes were wells of sorrow, mixed with fear. When he raised his eyes again and the rabbi was still talking at the graveside, Geiger’s gaze settled upon the pine coffin.

As the service continued, Geiger held in his mind an old vision of Rabinowitz. It was sepia-toned and came from an old family snapshot that Hilda Rabinowitz—the old man’s third and final wife, who had died two years earlier—had once displayed. In the photograph, one saw a handsome young man, a citizen of Vienna in the late 1940’s, having returned to Central Europe after spending the war years in London. This was before Rabinowitz’s emigration to Montreal in 1950 and then to the United States in 1956, where he had found both celebrity and wealth.

In the old photo, Rabinowitz’s head is thrown backward in laughter, his hair is thick and dark, and his eyes are merry. His strong right arm is wrapped tightly around a pretty young Viennese woman who eventually became his first wife.

A nice slice of the past. But the reality had been different. Two marriages had failed and five children—two outside the two early marriages—grew up hating him, as did both women whom he had divorced. These and the other women in Rabinowitz’s life called him cruel, manipulative, tyrannical and abusive. Of the five Rabinowitz offspring, all disliked him so intensely that they made a point of not owning any of his recordings.

The mature Rabinowitz—arguably the greatest pianist of the century by the time he was thirty in 1956—had been tortured by a thousand demons. Over the years, something glacial had replaced the merry face. He wore a mask in his later years, an aloof, icy public expression frozen from the absence of humanity. One of his quirks was a massive six-carat emerald ring worn on his left hand. He had worn it when he played, signature jewelry on signature hands.

Some of his fans tried to explain his surliness. Rabinowitz, some said, had never fully shaken the horror and paranoia of a European Jew who had survived World War II. Nor did any of these fans expect him to. The man’s passion was his music and was in his music. So what if he was also known as the Dark Angel of modern classical music?

“Greatness exacts an incalculable price,” Rabinowitz had said to Geiger when Geiger was seventeen. This was a much-referred-to statement that had been reported when The New Yorker had profiled the man. “I paid it, Rolf. And so will you.”

“No, sir. I won’t,” Geiger had responded.

“Don’t be an idiot. Eventually we all do. Genius is a blessing and a curse.” The split between the two men was often attributed in public to that particular exchange.

Rabinowitz was impossible personally and professionally. He frequently broke concert dates and recording contracts and then everything would be set right again because of who he was. He was once arrested for trying to throttle a man who had beaten him to a parking place in New Canaan, Connecticut. Charges were dropped because this was, after all, the great Rabinowitz, and the “assault” was settled out of court.

In the latter years of his life, he insulated himself from the public with “assistants” and secretaries, all of whom were dedicated to him and most of whom, in appreciation of their loyalty, he would eventually dismiss. He lived on a remote converted farm in Northwestern Connecticut—a farm with no animals, for the great man hated animals. The property was surrounded by an electrified fence. In his enclave, he practiced in a soundproof studio away from all ears. He had been dead for a week when his body was found by his maid.

In the last thirty years of his life, Rabinowitz had only one student. One protégé. One young man to whom he wished to pass the torch of genius. Rolf Geiger.

“He will be greater than I but only if I counsel to teach him how,” Rabinowitz once said in his never-quite-perfect English. “And then only Rolf Geiger will be great if he wants to be.”

Rabinowitz had taken on Geiger as a student when the young man was fourteen and had won a full scholarship to Julliard. Even at that point, when Rabinowitz was seventy-seven years old, he only allowed himself to be grudgingly impressed with the younger pianist. Geiger played with evident romanticism and a hauntingly crystal clearness which never failed him, even in the most technically complicated passages. It was not something that anyone could ever learn. It was intuitive.

“This boy is very good.” Rabinowitz remarked at the time. “It is as if he can photograph extraordinarily complex pieces and exactly imprint them inside the ear of the listener.”

The maestro thought further. Then he pronounced further.

“It is apparent that he will soon master his piano. We will eventually learn if he can know how to make music.” This was said after Geiger had won the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow. And these were the first words of praise that Rabinowitz had been known to utter for anyone other than himself for several decades.

Rabinowitz would spend weekly two-hour master class with Geiger at Rabinowitz’s place in Connecticut. He would stand behind the young man, his powerful hands on Rolf’s shoulders. If Geiger made a critical mistake, the hands would move roughly toward Geiger’s neck in a gesture of potential strangulation—Rabinowitz’s way of saying that Geiger had profaned something holy. This technique persisted for a year until Geiger threatened to stop coming unless the hands-on-neck technique ceased. Nonetheless, Rabinowitz was part of the younger man’s life for seven years as an instructor, professor, and on-the-spot tormentor.

Seven years. There even seemed to be something Biblical about that number. Eventually, the relationship between Rabinowitz and Geiger became more than mentor-protégé. It was also love-hate. Over the last years, the men had parted company. Rabinowitz criticized Geiger relentlessly in the press. He said he was turning into a latter day Liberace, not serious about his work. His art. His craft. His music. His life. His gift. Not taking what talent he had—and Rabinowitz began to question whether Geiger had any—seriously.

The old man and the young man had encountered each other at the Kennedy Center in October 2005.

Unsolicited, Rabinowitz had approached Geiger.

“It’s all right, these things you’re doing,” Rabinowitz had said to Geiger before a dozen witnesses. “I wouldn’t want you to be as great as I. Not that you ever would be. Not that you ever could be, the way you remorselessly destroy great music. On the best day in your life you will never approach the artistry I could command on the worst day in mine.”

The old man had snorted and walked off. Geiger had held his tongue. The young man had performed live before close to three million people on his latest tour. He had made two theatrical simulcasts of concerts and three television specials, loved by audiences and reviled by critics, and commanded more than five million dollars to make a single compact disc. There were those who suggested that the aging Rabinowitz was jealous.

Thus had concluded their last in-person meeting. Since then, Rabinowitz had been Geiger’s harshest and most savage critic. Geiger had never understood if these were the master’s true final sentiments. Or were these his methods, his way of goading him onward to more celestial things?

Geiger would never know. But he—and the rest of the classical music world—would endlessly hypothesize.

“If being like Rabinowitz—old, angry, and alone—afraid to play in public, is what it takes for greatness, then maybe I question whether I do want it,” an unusually irritated Geiger told Gramophone magazine in a celebrated interview before Christmas 2005.

The statement was not meant as a counterattack. But it was received as one. Rabinowitz read the article and filed a ten-million-dollar lawsuit for defamation of character, a suit that he had no chance of winning, and which still remained unsettled at the time of his death.

The men never spoke again. When Rabinowitz died suddenly and the instructions for his funeral were read, there were gasps. The old man had never changed his instructions from five years earlier, before the rift, even though Rabinowitz had updated his will monthly. He had many ways of always having the last word.

So the burden—one of many—then fell to Rolf Geiger. What to do? Avoid the funeral? Or participate?

Geiger felt he should honor Rabinowitz’s written request. Perhaps the young virtuoso could use this final association with Rabinowitz to make peace. So, Rolf Geiger stood on the hard earth of Upper Manhattan on a raw March day, freezing as the wind tore into him, clutching his long navy topcoat to himself as tightly as possible.

Geiger was dazzling handsome. Tall, lean, athletic with dark blond, shaggy hair and gorgeous blue eyes. His all-American looks made him stand out like a mannequin among the rumpled, middle-aged and old European men who were the other five pallbearers. Geiger wondered if Rabinowitz had orchestrated that, too, and decided that he had.

Geiger’s gaze involuntarily drifted back to the pine casket time and time again. The rabbi whom Geiger had never met spoke briefly about the artistry of Rabinowitz, the “hidden humanity” of Rabinowitz. The wind off the Hudson increased and the one thing Geiger could be glad about was that he could barely hear. The ferocity of the wind made the occasion even colder, darker, and more unpleasant. There were brief snow flurries. The sun went behind the clouds at the moment the mourners assembled at the cemetery. It was as if, from somewhere, Rabinowitz was suggesting that the world would be a diminished place without his music.

Geiger scanned the other mourners and found the face in which he could always find solace: Diana’s. On this cold, dismal day, Geiger found comfort in her eyes for several seconds. His thoughts drifted. Suddenly the wind subsided and Geiger realized that the rabbi finished the burial service.

Geiger shifted his feet and moved slightly to get warm. He was increasingly uncomfortable. He felt too many eyes were on him. A few moments later, the pine coffin was on its final journey, and so was Rabinowitz. The great one’s remains were lowered into a small dirt chamber. Four walls without windows, down, down, down, contained by a simple wooden box until it rested.

Geiger heard the sobbing of Rabinowitz’s sister, the last human who could muster a tear for him. At the appropriate moment, Geiger moved forward to throw a flower into the open grave. Other members of the party stepped to the graveside to throw a shovelful of dirt upon the deceased. With reservations, and understanding the heavy irony of his act, Geiger also took a shovel and gently threw dirt to his onetime mentor’s grave.

Moments later, everyone stepped in different directions. There were condolences exchanged and handshakes. Solemn looks and words of support. There were dozens of renowned conductors and orchestra members present. Some of them were of Rabinowitz’s generation and had come to the United States at about the same time. Geiger sensed hostility from this quarter of the music world, but ignored it. He was used to it from them.

Phrases floated everywhere. One stayed with Geiger.

“The torch is passed, Rolf,” said William Baumann, the arts editor from the New York Times. “Now you’re the greatest alive.”

The critic spoke softly, but his words were tinged with a whiff of breakfast gin.

“You’re very kind,” Geiger answered.

“Rabinowitz would have said so himself,” Baumann continued.

“He also would have said that I ‘need to be more serious.’ ‘Not prostitute my talent for popularity.’ Not only would he have said that, but he did say that on several occasions.”

Baumann shrugged. “He wasn’t alone in that notion.”

“I know. I’m quoting your reviews in the Times, Bill.”

“He would also say that you should start playing again. Real concerts without all the show business claptrap. In big halls. Before demanding audiences. Instead of sneaking off to Europe to play a date or two in some remote music hall.”

“San Remo is hardly remote.”

“You know what I mean,” Baumann said.

“Yes, I suppose I do. Are you looking for a quote?” Geiger finally asked.

“Have one?”

“Rabinowitz hated me,” Geiger said. “He wanted me to fail.”

“If he hated you and wanted you to fail,” Baumann proposed, “why would Rabinowitz have had you hear today as a pall…?”

“I’m not at ease with this conversation,” Geiger said softly. “Not here. Not now.” He walked away. He moved through the crowd. Unlike the deceased, and notwithstanding the coterie of Rabinowitz’s remaining peers, Geiger was personally well-liked, even if he drove the music establishment batty. He felt many hands of comfort upon his shoulders as he moved among scores of people he knew from concerts all over the world.

He nodded to several. He heard many kind words. None negative. The eyes and face of strangers followed him as he walked. But that was nothing new.

More words floating on the wind. Thoughts. Snippets of overheard conversations.

“Do you think the old man was secretly gay?”

“I heard he was into whips and chains.”

“He cross-dressed privately, you know.”

Rolf ignored it. Then there was a discussion of the massive emerald ring that the old man used to wear. The mourners had heard that Rabinowitz had been buried with the ring on his finger. There was also a rumor that a pair of biographies of Rabinowitz had been commissioned this year by competing London publishers. Again, Geiger kept his eyes low, the better not to catch anyone’s eye. Then another phrase came to him.

A thought. Or a particularly intrusive overheard line. Amidst all the voices, he really didn’t know which it had been—a thought or something someone had said—though it was male in origin and tinged with a mitteleuropa accent strangely suggestive of Rabinowitz’s.

“…the greatest pianist in the world. And now, it’s Rolf Geiger. If he wants to be.”

The same old mantra. The same old suggestions, over and over. The legend to live up to. The talent to never live down. The apparent obligation to be “serious” about great music rather than to have fun with it. Unhappily, the old man had been correct about a lot of things. Among them, genius was a blessing and a curse.

“…if only he would start doing serious recitals again…”

“…if only he would concentrate on the classics….”

Geiger spotted his agent in the crowd: Brian Greenstone, an affable Englishman in his fifties. Greenstone had also represented Rabinowitz. Geiger’s eyes found Diana next. He went to her and took her hand. He paused to say the right things to Lena Rabinowitz, the one attending daughter. Lena embraced him. Rabinowitz’s son Jonathan, who lived with a clothing designer and scored art films in San Francisco, had not seen fit to attend. Nor had the others.

Geiger felt a gentle hand take his elbow. He turned.

“Hello, Rolf.” It was Brian Greenstone.

“Hello, Brian.”

“I know you’re uncomfortable here, but you were wise to come,” Greenstone said.

“I’m here because I thought I should be,” Rolf answered.

“You thought correctly. Hello, Diana.”

Greenstone gave Diana an embrace and a kiss on the cheek.

Rolf’s agent was a heavyset man with dark hair, graying only at the temples. He was gracefully navigating his mid-fifties with slightly rounded shoulders, some extra pounds and an extra chin. A good hairstylist and an excellent tailor hid many of the unfortunate signs of aging.

“I’m glad you’re back,” Greenstone said. “We need to talk soon.” He spoke in the faded cadences and tones of South London. “How was San Remo? It went as planned?”

“Yes, I guess.” Geiger said. “I didn’t plan anything, so I guess it went as planned.”

“I read a press clipping from Corrierre della Sera. Or at least I read the English-language clipping that my London office sent me. You behaved yourself and played Mozart. Only Mozart. Bravo.”

Rolf nodded. He enjoyed banter with Brian. Brian was a trusted friend and advisor.

“You felt good with it?” Brian asked.

“Yes, I did. Why wouldn’t I? Mozart wrote some good music, you know.”

“So did Billy Joel.”

“I like Billy Joel,” Rolf said. “But he’s alive and can play his own music.”

“Will you have dinner with Sarah and me sometime? Soon. How about tomorrow?”

“Perfect. I might be hungry tomorrow,” Rolf said. “Come over to my place. I owe you a few dinners and we need to talk, anyway.”

“We could go out, you know,” Greenstone said.

“We could also not do it at all,” Rolf said. “Come over at seven thirty. I’ll put an extra cup of water in the soup for you. Bring your wife. In fact, you can’t come unless she brings you,” Rolf said. “How’s that, you doddering old Englishman?”

“As charming as always. Take care of him, Diana,” Greenstone said, turning to her. “God knows he’s demented and can’t take care of himself. By the way, you’re looking beautiful.”

“Thank you, Brian.”

Then Rolf Geiger found his limousine and driver. Across the street, a group of fans spotted Geiger and screamed. They yelled to him, seeking autographs. Geiger normally would have obliged. This time he shook his head.

“No. Sorry,” he called back. “Any day except today.”

His fans, moments ago so expectant, looked at him with disappointment. Geiger felt bad. There were only a few dozen of them, and they had waited for him specifically in this dismal cold weather. So he darted across the street and walked to them.

Diana stood outside the car and waited.

The legion of Geiger fans were mostly young, a multi-culti mix; a heavy concentration of college students. They handed Rolf programs and pictures and magazine covers. He patiently signed them all. .The crowd slowly thinned as the autograph seekers reverentially stepped back. Then an uneasy feeling overtook him. Rolf felt a presence. Something strange. Something not quite right.

“Rolf Geiger?” a male, raspy voice asked, startling him.

Amid all the teenagers was a much older man. At first he looked as if he were aging and homeless. Geiger was taken aback. He felt as if he were about to be accosted for a few dollars. He prepared quickly to fish into his picket for a five-dollar bill to buy his escape. Then he realized that he wasn’t confronting a homeless individual at all. Rather, just a strange man, in his sixties or even older.

“You’re the best now, aren’t you?” the man said.

“That depends on who you ask. And that’s not for me to determine.”

“Oh, yes it is,” the old man affirmed. “I’ve spent my life in concerts and music halls. Seen all the great ones. You’re the best alive today.”

“You’re very generous” Geiger said, signing the last item pushed toward him.

“No, I’m not.”

Geiger turned fully toward him. The man gave him the creeps. He smelled bad. An offensive mixture of tobacco, alcohol and poor hygiene. He wore a rumpled brown coat and looked like he lived in it. Very slightly, Geiger recoiled.

“Did you want me to sign something?” Geiger asked.

“No,” the man said, as if thinking it over. “No. What would I do with an autograph?”

“Sell it, maybe,” Geiger said.

Some of the kids smirked. There were a few twitters of laughter. The man didn’t answer for several seconds. Then,

“I’m going to follow your career,” he said. “Carefully.”

His old eyes were upon Geiger like those of a terrier. Geiger had difficulty pulling his eyes away and breaking contact. But he managed.

“Thank you,” he said. “That’s very nice of you.”

The man grunted and said something unintelligible. Geiger thought he caught part of it.

“…not nice. It’s an obligation…”

It sounded half-crazy. Geiger left his admirers with a short wave and crossed the street again. He could feel the strange man’s gaze upon him. Then Geiger heard footsteps. A handful of late arrivals, spotting Geiger, had fallen into stride with him and pursued him for signatures.

Geiger hastily accepted programs and pictures as he walked. He arrived at his limousine and the driver held the rear door open.

“It’s all right,” Geiger said to the driver. “I’ll sign, then we go.” He nodded to the chauffeur to go back to the driver’s seat. The driver did, leaving the rear door open for him.

Geiger signed for his fans. He was now trying to leave. He had been in situations like this so many times before and knew how they could get out of control. Sometimes he could feel a hand brush against him. A caress. A touch. A little shove. Fans liked live contact.

The crowd pushed in on him. He steadied himself with his free hand by resting it in the doorframe. He felt a surge in the crowd. Then two of his female fans screamed. The limo door slammed so violently that the entire vehicle shuddered. It just missed Geiger’s right hand, which had been in the doorframe.

Rolf was so stunned that he said nothing. But when he searched the faces of those near him, all expressed shock and terror. No one had seen who had pushed the door. But the bizarre gnarled man in the brown coat had a piercing look in his eyes as he stared at Geiger.

Their eyes locked upon one another. And there was something there that bothered Geiger anew. Something familiar? Hatred? Or just intensity?

Had the man pushed it? Or had he not even understood what had happened? Geiger didn’t wish to stay long enough to find out.

“Rolf! Rolf!” Diana’s voice beckoned him from within the car. She reached across the backseat, unlatched the door, and pushed it open. Geiger slid to safety into the backseat.

“Good God!” he gasped. “Did you see what nearly happened? Did you see how close that came to my hand?”

“I saw,” she said. “Did someone do that intentionally?”

“I don’t know!” he answered, calming slightly. “I thought someone slammed the door at me but I don’t know.” He nodded to his driver. His fans continued to wave from across the street. Even the police who were maintaining the traffic line glanced for a final look. Then his vehicle moved and was safely away from the crowd within seconds.

Geiger flexed his hands and fingers before him and shook his head.

“What a world when your fans just about to maim you.” He leaned back into the leather seat and slowly gathered himself.

“Who was that?” she asked. “The man who looked like an aging degenerate. “Did you see that rumpled old coat? I thought he was going to flash us.” Rolf allowed himself the thinnest of smiles.

“I have no idea,” Geiger said.

“Creepy fans scare me,” she said. “Ever since John Lennon. And Selena. And that soap-opera star who got killed by a fan.” Diana leaned against him in the back of the limousine. Her once-frigid hand, now warming, came to rest on his knee.

God, Rolf thought, how he hated that cold, and how funerals depressed him! And god, he thought, how he loved the warmth of Diana next to him.

“Let’s not dwell on this, Tiger,” she said to him. He smiled.

“Wish granted,” he said. The vehicle moved from a side street in Morningside Heights to Upper Broadway and turned downtown.

Tiger. The nickname that Diana had accidentally invented for him and which she alone called him. The first night they’d gone to bed together, she had said afterward that he made love to her “like a tiger.”

“You mean I smell like a big cat?” he had asked, teasing her. “A litter box?”

“I mean you drove this girl wild,” she had said. “‘Tiger.’”

The nickname had stuck.

He had no nickname for her. “Diana” fit as if it had been tailored. In Roman mythology Diana was the goddess of the hunt and also of the moon. Fittingly, they had first met in Rome on a terrace in moonlight, following a recital. He had fallen in love with her instantly.

Rolf put his hand on hers and wrapped an arm around her shoulder. She snuggled close. The thought arose within him that love and kindness might be more important than any score or any performance. He smiled. The old man would have skewered him alive for such a soggy thought.

Love—the word, the thought, the very notion—had never been in the crabby old man’s lexicon. Many times Geiger heard Rabinowitz speak of his passion for music, his enthrallment with his instrument, his dedication to the art of the piano.

But Rabinowitz had never spoken of love. Not in front of Geiger. Not even once.

Four

From the cemetery in upper Manhattan, the drive back to East Seventy-Third Street began in silence. Geiger watched the city go past him. The limousine cut through deteriorated sections of Morningside Heights, old neighborhoods that once were famous for kosher pickles, pastrami, and egg creams, but which now were marked by multicultural storefronts. Signs in Spanish, Hindi and Vietnamese announced the newest wave of merchants.

The driver came to a stoplight. Geiger studied a trio of men sitting on the steps of a crumbling tenement, drinking beer from quart bottles covered with paper bags.

Geiger’s eyes left the men and he stared off into the middle distance. In his mind, a montage of bitter, unhappy memories appeared; one long, lingering, aching recollection of an unhappy childhood in West Virginian coal country, fifteen miles west of the Pennsylvania border. Intellectually, an American Siberia.

He shuddered. He turned to Diana and began to tell her about the beauty of the Italian coastline around San Remo and how much he hoped she’d accompany him on his next trip.

But just as one note or counterpoint leads to another in a composition, one memory primed another. For Rolf, the past always caused a pain that was never far away.

He had endured a childhood of abuse and poverty. A home with plastic sheeting across the broken glass of his bedroom window, sheeting that failed miserably against the brutal winters of West Virginia. He could remember lying in bed at night and feeling the wind seeping through the walls. The winters had been like an enemy that always had one surrounded.

Rickety furniture. Sears, previously owned. Naked light bulbs. Heat from a failing coal stove. Threadbare carpets from Goodwill. Chipped paint throughout the house. Not enough food many nights. He was the only child, and for his first years he thought everyone lived like this.

Frank Geiger, his father, was a drunken, violence-prone man who worked in an anthracite coal mine when he worked at all. Half the time he drank his weekly paycheck. He had so opposed Rolf’s musical affinities that he had once taken a miner’s hammer and smashed his grandmother’s piano, the only object of worth the family owned.

“Pianos are for fairies. Music is for fairies. No son of mine grows up to be a fairy.”

Frank Geiger figured that if cracking coal was good enough for him, it was good enough for his kid. The boy had been an accident anyway.

So Rolf had played at Catholic school, the one his mother insisted he go to and for whom his mother’s parents paid. Dorothy, Rolf’s mother, was the Catholic in the family. Frank worshiped only beer.

The nuns thought Rolf had good musical instincts. Sister Mary William arranged some time each week with the school piano. There was no teacher, so Rolf figured it out by himself, with help from library books. The nuns also familiarized him with the great composers.

Dorothy Geiger was a plain, woman who walked with a limp and always carried a plastic rosary in her pocket. She might have been able to keep a job if her husband hadn’t beat her more times than anyone suspected, enough times to have caused the limp. She grew old with sinus damage which contributed to breathing problems which brought on respiratory problems which—along with too many packs of Marlboros and lousy health care—brought on sinusitis which would bring on a blood infection. Her death came at age forty-four. At least Rolf was grown by that time. Her son was the one thing that legitimized her life. Rolf sent her money, but by that time a mild form of derangement had set in, and she wouldn’t spend any of it.

Smashing things. That was always Rolf’s father’s solution to everything.

Once he had even given such instruction to his son.

At age eleven, Rolf was to change schools, going from a lower middle class district in Shenandoah City to a tougher, grittier blue-collar junior-senior high school in Wales Valley.

St. Agnes’ School. Parochial. Franciscan.

His father dropped him at the new schoolyard at six-fifty on the first morning.

“Find the biggest toughest kid in the schoolyard at recess,” Geiger told his son. “Then go up to him and punch him in his fat Irish face.”

“What?”

“Do it and everyone will leave you alone.”

“But…?” Geiger slapped his son.

“Do it or don’t come home.” Then he shoved Rolf out of the car. Rolf agonized. He stood on the empty asphalt of the playground. He waited. School started. Then recess. Eventually he saw a good-looking but rugged young man throwing a football. Rolf worked up his courage. Then he walked up to the young man and smacked him. A sucker punch from the left, hard and across the jaw. Just as his father had requested.

It loosened two of the recipient’s teeth and drew blood from a cut lip. It was quite a shot. The young man stared at him in shock. He didn’t retaliate. The recipient of the punch had been a young seminarian, Brother Matthew, just assigned to teach at St. Agnes’.

Rolf found himself sitting in the school’s front hall five minutes later. He was terrified, waiting for an audience with the school’s principal, Monsignor Kelly. He expected to be beaten in return, because that’s how it would have gone at home.

He finally had his audience. Monsignor Kelly listened. Rolf explained what he’d done. And why. The priest looked at him thoughtfully, then spoke.

“Go into the next room, young man, and think about your actions,” Kelly said. “There’s a lesson to be learned today.”

“Yes, sir.”

Rolf went into the next room, a small study. There was a piano. Geiger looked at it and stood near it, running his hands across the keyboard but afraid to sound a note. It had been a long time since he’d had access to an instrument.

A few minutes later, Brother Matthew came into the room. Rolf looked up quickly and abruptly pulled his hands away from the piano. Rolf was frightened. He looked at the young brother. Matthew smiled. They talked for several minutes. Then the brother picked up on the way Geiger’s eyes frequently slid sideways to the piano.

“You like music?” the brother asked. Geiger nodded.

“Can you play?” Matthew opened the keyboard.

“A little.”

“Do you have an instrument at home?”

“I used to.”

“What happened to it?” Geiger shrugged.

“It got broken.”

Matthew reached to the keyboard. With one strong white hand, he found the melody from a concerto by Mozart. It lasted fifteen seconds. “Can you do that?” Matthew asked.

Geiger looked at the keyboard. He hadn’t touched one in years. He set his hands haltingly to it and repeated the melody. The second time through, he added chords.

“Impressive,” said Brother Matthew. “And I think God would say that this is a much better use of your hands—creating something beautiful instead of perpetrating violence. Okay?”

In great relief, Rolf nodded.

“Okay,” he said.

“We’re friends?” Matthew asked. Rolf nodded.

“I’m sorry.”

They shook hands. Monsignor Kelly went to the Geiger home to discuss the incident. Frank Geiger came to the door. He didn’t like the look of the cassock. Profanely and drunkenly Frank Geiger took a swing at the priest. The school then understood what Rolf faced at home.

Sometimes in dark moments, Rolf Geiger thought back to the crushing oppression in which he had been raised. And when he did, he wondered whether his piano playing was some colossal act of fraud. Deep down he questioned if he was really as good as he thought he was.

Of course, he’d then pose the next question: one which defied a logical answer. He thought of Frank Geiger, who died at forty-seven with a sixteen-ounce can of Old Milwaukee in his hand, eight crumpled bucks in his pocket, and a bullet in his neck. A white-trash life and a white-trash death. So, the question: how in heaven’s name had Rolf’s mind and hands been touched with such genius? Where had it come from? And where, for that matter, was it leading?

Today the future and the past seemed to be concurrently on his mind. He shuddered when he thought of his childhood. The ten block walks to school in the winter in a coat that was threadbare and a pair of shoes with no insulation. Shirt and pants that were repaired beyond belief, that other children in the school ridiculed.

Time spiraled. As his limousine moved through upper Manhattan on the day of the Rabinowitz funeral, now passing Columbia University, his mind continued to drift.

Brother Matthew had been the first to show Rolf how this one black dot on the treble clef corresponded to C on the keyboard. The same dot, or note, on the bass clef corresponded to the E. Within a few minutes, Rolf could plunk a tune from the paper. The next time he sat down, he could pull a tune out of the air, then write it down with all the proper notation.

Eventually, Brother Matthew sent Rolf to see Stanley Kraus, who lived in the next town. Kraus was a man in his seventies, retired, gentle, with wise old-world eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, a kindly Yiddish version of Benjamin Franklin. He had built a career in Philadelphia, giving lessons and playing with The Philadelphia Orchestra.

“So? You’re going to play the piano for me?” Kraus inquired, settling into a chair by the side of a baby grand that consumed all of his living room. “Did you bring your sheet music?

“No.”

“Then how will you play?”

“From memory.”

The old man raised another eyebrow. He smiled indulgently, expecting little. “Then what will you play?” Kraus asked. “Do you have a favorite piece?”

“Fur Elise,” Geiger answered after a moment’s thought.

“Ah. Well, then. By all means, please play.”

Mr. Kraus settled into his Queen Anne chair. He closed his eyes and waited. Twelve-year-old Rolf Geiger sat down at the piano bench. He smiled sweetly. His fingers found the keyboard. Then, gently, he began.

A few measures and Kraus felt his pulse quicken. He looked at the intensity on the boy’s face, the knowing run of the fingers across the keys. There was a clearness, a precision, and a facility to Geiger’s playing which were beyond astonishing. It filled the room.

Goosebumps traveled up and down the teacher’s arms. Stanley Kraus was swept away by the feeling, the passion, and the immense talent. The raw talent, the genius, was prodigious. And no one seemed to have picked up on it yet.

Geiger came to the end of the piece. He turned to the old man.

“Was that all right?” Rolf Asked.

“Young man… Are you unaware of how good you are?” Geiger shrugged.

“I just like to play the piano,” Rolf said.

Kraus reached into a pile of music books that lay nearby in casual disarray.

“I would like you to try something else,” he said. He prowled through the books. “Have you played a lot of Beethoven? Moonlight Sonata, for example.” Kraus found the book. “I’d like you to play the last movement,” the teacher said. He opened some sheet music.

“I don’t need the books,” Geiger said. “I know the piece.”

The boy played. Again Kraus froze, barely moving until Geiger had finished. Eventually the boy looked up and saw the teacher staring at him.

“Was that good?” Geiger asked.

‘I expected ‘good’. What you demonstrated was in another realm.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Has anyone heard you play other than the priests and nuns in your hometown?”

“No, sir.” Kraus waited for a moment as he formed the next question.

“I want you to tell me something,” Kraus asked at length. “The piece you just played was not a child’s piece. I want to know: how do you grasp so thoroughly the poetry and passion of Beethoven? How is it possible in one so young?”

“The music speaks to me, sir. It communicates.”

“What does it say?”

“I don’t know how to explain it. But I feel something in it.” Kraus thought for a moment.

“But how do you know how to interpret a certain piece?”

“It’s clear to me, sir. It’s obvious.”

“But if no one has showed you? Or if you have never heard it before?”

“It’s still obvious, sir. When I start to play, I begin to understand what I think the composer felt. So I go with it.”

Kraus settled back. He looked down for a moment and seemed to be thinking. Then he raised his eyes, having arrived at a decision.

“I’m going to telephone a friend who is a conductor in New York City,” Kraus said softly. “He will need to hear you play also.”

Geiger felt confused, almost as if he had done something wrong. Mr. Kraus seemed like a kind, intelligent man. Why couldn’t he stay here? Why must he be again passed along?

“You should be taught by one of the current masters,” Kraus said. “A Rubinstein. Or a Horowitz. Or a Rabinowitz. Have you heard of them?”

“I think I heard their names a little.”

“Have you heard their recordings?”

Geiger shook his head.

“I will find you some CD’s. This will be my gift to you. Rubinstein, Horowitz, and Rabinowitz were the greatest pianists of the last half of the twentieth century,” Kraus explained. “Rabinowitz is the last one alive. He must instruct you. You will have to go to New York.”

“Oh.” Geiger thought about it. “Does he give lessons?” The teacher laughed.

“In your case, he will be unable to resist.”

Stanley Kraus was right. But it took almost eighteen months to move Geiger to the proper audience. During this time, Rolf’s academic studies at St. Agnes’ were accelerated.

Geiger went to New York. The Julliard School prepared a special program for him. The word ‘prodigy’ was used for the first time. A few notes appeared about him in newspapers that covered the classical music world.

Eventually, he found an audience with Isador Rabinowitz in a rehearsal chamber at Carnegie Hall on a sultry August afternoon. Rabinowitz was stunned at what he heard on his first meeting with the young man. Even more astonishing was that at age fourteen, Geiger remained self-taught, unspoiled by the techniques and philosophies of others.

On their first meeting, Rabinowitz listened to Rolf play ten different pieces, five of them new. Toward the end of the visit, Rabinowitz presented Geiger with a pair of fantasias he had never seen before—both by the difficult Sigismund Thalberg. One featured a cantabile section with rugged right hand arpeggios and left hand octaves. The other was marked by Thalberg’s usual lack of harmonic imagination, and was exceedingly obtuse, with a section of leggierissimo octaves that passed from the left hand to the right, while its theme still rang in the tenor range.

Giving the piece to a young pianist was the musical equivalent of a bear trap. It had been written for a mature virtuoso for the sake of showing off his virtuosity.

Geiger played flawlessly and with the skill that Thalberg had demanded, filling the rehearsal space with an explosively brilliant rendition. Rabinowitz sat silently as the final notes resounded. The boy turned toward him and waited.

“Any good?” the boy finally asked. After another moment, almost grudgingly, Rabinowitz answered.

“Yes. It was considerably skilled. Highly competent,” Rabinowitz said calmly. The maestro pondered for a longer moment, then replied in his never-quite-perfect English.

“But you have much for to be learned. For example, you hold yourself the fingers rather too high. You must hold them closer to the keys, in especially the legato passages. You will that way make the music more completely finished, with a rounder and more ringing tone.”

“Oh.” The boy shrugged, deciphering the man’s strange accent. “All right.”

“More than ‘all right,’” snapped Rabinowitz. “This you will do!”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t,” Geiger answered. Obediently, Rolf placed both his hands above the keyboard again, measuring the new placement with his eyes. Then he dropped his fingertips an eighth of an inch. The gesture would have been imperceptible to most observers.

“Yes! There! Better! No farther!” Rabinowitz snapped.

Rolf smiled and turned to the maestro, expecting at least a smile of approval. None came.

Rabinowitz’s eyes were already lowered. The old man was carefully studying the unusual academic resume that Rolf had brought with him. Two remote parochial schools. Lessons from the nuns. Acceptance to Julliard. Rabinowitz turned back to Rolf with a cold, calculating eye.

The old man then spent twenty minutes describing the indignities and persecutions he had suffered as a Jew in Europe, frequently with a wink from the local Catholic clergy in Poland, Hungary and Russia, he said. All this through the briar patch of Rabinowitz’s English, which was always laden with false stops, strange words and consonants. Much to the boy’s shock, the maestro’s English was strewn with obscenities and blasphemies, bitten off sharply like an angry owner of a delicatessen.

Faced with Rabinowitz, Rolf knew enough to sit, listen, and absorb, but not to disagree yet or take issue, any more than he would have corrected grammar or punctuation. At the end, Rabinowitz made another pronouncement.

“I will take you now on as a student,” he said. “Not because I so want to. Not because I so need to. But because I see no one else alive would be capable. It will be my burden.” He paused. “Don’t ever take that to mean that I like you, because I don’t.”

Then he left the room. He slammed the door. Geiger wondered what he had done to offend the great but formidably intimidating man.

Today, years later, as he ruminated through Manhattan in the aftermath of Rabinowitz’s funeral, the image came galloping back to Rolf Geiger. He could still see Rabinowitz charging angrily out of the rehearsal chamber following their first encounter. It was an image that recurred to him a lot over the years. Sometimes on cold lonely nights, he could hear all these echoes simultaneously, wheezing through the chambers of his heart like an ill-directed wind.

Spooks. That’s what they were, he mused to himself. Little mental spooks.

They were like the unanswered questions that also resided in that quarter of his mind. Where, for example, had Rabinowitz’s soul gone? Where had the talent gone that was in the dead man’s head? Or his hands?

Was it out there somewhere, waiting to inhabit another human being? Or was it gone for good, disintegrating with Rabinowitz’s remains?

Geiger’s attention drifted back to the present. The limo driver cut through Central Park at Ninety-Sixth Street. When they emerged on the east side, they passed a small French bistro that Rolf liked. Seeing it, Geiger recalled his first trip to Europe a dozen summers ago.

There had been an overnight flight to Paris and then a plane ride to Nice. Then a car and driver had taken him into Niece, where he would compete for the prestigious Grand Prix du Piano de Nice, the French city’s most competitive musical award.

But there had been much more than the music and the competition.

There had been the sun. The excitement. The people. The sex. He had gotten his first taste of sex when he was seventeen years old and was seeing the world for the first time.

Nearing the end of the competition, he had sat on the seaside veranda of the Hotel Negresco one afternoon and gazed at the blue Mediterranean. He watched the lithe girls in bikinis walking along the beach, flirting with young men in cars, young men not too much older than he. He glanced back up over his shoulder to a balconied suite he had been blessed with in the hotel. To live a life like this it was necessary to not just have simply money, but to possess real wealth. But he smiled slightly at the time because, sitting on a terrace in the south of France, one of three finalists in the competition and the only non-Russian, he realized that his life could be different than the lives of the blue-collar drudgery that lay before his one-time tormentors.

He had sampled enough nice clothes, fine hotels, expensive restaurants, and air travel to know that there was another universe out there, one for which he now felt he was destined. This gift in his hands would take him there.

And how about all the elegant women who were always hanging around? He could already see how habit-forming all of this could become. And he knew that for Rolf Geiger, there was just one key to the vault.

Music. But not just music.

No, Geiger mused, he would have to be the not just the best alive, but the best ever. Accomplishing that, he would have to take it to an even higher level. He would have to entertain. He would have to be the most exciting keyboard artist ever to draw breath.

There were armadas of musicians in the world, and legions of fine pianists. Geiger had nothing against these other artists. They were free to live their lives and play their music as they saw fit. Many of these others had been born into musical families, having taking training from the time they were two years old. No, he would have to arrive from a different directions. He would listen to his mentor, Rabinowitz. He would entertain what the old man had to say. But he would do things his way.

Chopin mixed with Roger Daltry. Liszt mingled with Elton John.

Beethoven with Elvis. That would get him where he wanted to go in life.

Well, he thought to himself at age seventeen, why not? The previous night, he had knocked the European music world flat on its derriere.

Geiger had played Tchaikovsky with a bold sexiness that had pianists in the audience studying his fingering to try to decipher how he did what he did. The pyrotechnical conclusion had sparked the audience to its feet in a standing ovation.

But he wasn’t finished. As an encore and as a near conceit, he administered a knockout punch at the Salles des Philosophes. He treated the audience to a rousing improvised piano transcription of Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever, intermingling it into the melody of Auprès de Ma Blonde, before morphing both themes into a fiery but sweetly beautiful impromptu composition based on romantic themes—eternally popular in France—of Camille Saint-Saëns.

The encore precipitated a fifteen-minute ovation to end the evening. No one present had ever seen, much less heard, anything of the sort. Thereupon, the latter-day Elvis left the building.

The next morning, as Geiger sat on the terrace of the Negresco, the daily Nice-Matin carried Rolf Geiger’s picture on its front page, breathlessly proclaiming him le jeune chevalier américain du piano, sans peur et sans reproche. And with one taste of world-class adulation, he never doubted the direction he wanted his life to take.

Rolf emerged from his memories. Their vehicle was traveling down Fifth Avenue in the Eighties. Diana nodded to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, indicating a huge sweeping blue-and-yellow banner above its front steps. The museum was one of her favorite places. The banner had just been raised that morning. It proclaimed the opening of a Renoir exhibit, several weeks hence, which she wished to attend. “Renoir! Will you go with me?” she asked. “If you’re not interested, my art teacher will go with me.”

“Is he gay or straight?”

“Very straight.”

“Then I’ll go with you,” he said. They laughed. She squeezed his hand again.

“Thought so,” she said with a wink.

Five

Twenty minutes later, the limousine came to a stop in front of Geiger’s town house. He stepped out. Diana followed. There were two photographers waiting, plus a woman with a television camera who worked for the local news.

Geiger acquiesced to giving a brief on-camera statement. His words were kind, recalling an earlier time when Rabinowitz was still Geiger’s teacher.

“In the past few years you’d been apart,” the reporter stated. “Some unkind things were said by Isador Rabinowitz about you. Do you have any thoughts on that today?”

“I’ve already forgotten the unpleasant things,” Geiger said. “Isador Rabinowitz was one of the giants of modern music. I prefer to remember him that way, just like everyone else.”

“Was he a great teacher?”

“I learned more from him than anyone, so, yes. I’d have to say so.”

“And he was the greatest pianist of his time?” she pressed.

“Indisputably,” he answered.

“And now, maybe you’re the greatest,” she said.

“That’s not for me to decide or even discuss.” Geiger tried to move away.

“One final question?” she pressed. “With all that he said about you, why do you suppose he selected you as a pallbearer?”

“I would interpret it as a final gesture of kindness and friendship from a great man,” Geiger said diplomatically.

“But he selected you in the place of his son, who’s your age,” she said. “Was he suggesting something by that?”

“I couldn’t speculate,” Geiger said, “and you shouldn’t either. Thank you.”

He finally won his freedom.

Geiger had long ago decided he would always handle himself in public with grace. He was proud to remind himself of that decision here. Yet in his mind, even as he was fishing his house keys from his pocket, he felt the heat of a television camera upon his back. And an inner thought was warning him.

“Rabinowitz, too, had been kind and charitable as a young man,” the interior voice said. Then something in the maestro had changed as the years had gone by. Rabinowitz had probably not set out to transform himself into the monstrous bitter man he had eventually become. But he had become it, anyway.

“I will not turn out the way he did,” Geiger found himself thinking. Thinking, but not saying. “I will not sacrifice life for art.” It was his mini-mantra and had been for years.

He and Diana entered the town house. They both drew long breaths and felt relieved as the door closed behind them. And at least this door missed his fingers by several feet.

“I don’t know why you even speak to people like that,” Diana said, irritated. “You should have earned membership in the Vatican diplomatic corps from the way you handled that bitch.”

He kissed her on the cheek.

“I’ll settle for sainthood,” he answered. “Hello Edythe.”

Mrs. Edythe Jamison, his housekeeper, appeared and collected their coats. She was a nicely mannered woman in her late fifties who came in for six hours, five days a week. Today, she had a light lunch waiting.

The house felt warm and splendid. It had a large foyer on the first floor, flanked by a living room and dining room on one side and a large room behind two oak doors which Geiger had converted into a library.

The room was a library, a den and his studio, too. His personal Steinway sat in it, jet-black, dominating the room. The walls were lined with bookcases overflowing with biographies, works on music, and books about the great composers. There were also scores, and essays on theater, art, and cinema. There was even a sprinkling of books on sports—tennis and baseball in particular. Geiger had been fascinated by the New York Yankees since he was a kid growing up in West Virginia. Lou Gehrig was his favorite historical player, Bobby Murcer had been his favorite as he had grown. He loved to read about their wonderful history as it transported him into another world and another time. There was also a collection of books on world politics and an extensive collection of European graphic novels in various languages.

Geiger sometimes liked to buy books by the armful, and this room reflected that penchant. Unseen, behind all the books, Geiger had had special soundproofing installed. If he wished to, he could completely contain the sound of his music. Or he could leave open the doors and windows and fill the air with his playing.

A stairway in the front hall led to the second floor, where there were three bedrooms. One had been converted into his home office. The master bedroom was at the front of the house, overlooking the tree-lined Seventy-Third Street. The guest bedroom was rarely used. The third floor was almost empty—two large rooms whose fate had been left undecided. One room, however, had recently taken purpose with paints and an easel: Diana had begun art lessons. She studied twice a week in SoHo with a handsome Lebanese expatriate named Maurice Sahadi. Rolf liked her work and encouraged her.

Diana had appointments in the afternoon. Geiger stayed within his home, reading scores, occasionally listening to music on compact discs. He didn’t touch his piano all day.

In the evening, toward eight, he met with Diana at Audrey’s, a small pub on Madison at Seventy-Fifth Street. He sat in the back with her. The only people to recognize him were regulars, who didn’t approach him. On the jukebox someone kept playing Sinatra.

It wasn’t Upbeat Frank. It was Point-of-No-Return Sinatra. Geiger loved Sinatra and the music fit his mood almost too perfectly. Rolf fell silent. Sometimes when Geiger brooded too much, he felt that Diana was his lifeline to reality. “A penny for your thoughts,” she said, trying to draw him out. She placed a hand on his, her usual gesture when she saw that he needed support. He shrugged.

“When Isador Rabinowitz gets into your head, you’re finished,” he said to her. “You never get him out. Imagine how deeply he’s already in mine.”

“He’s gone now. Maybe it’s time to work on getting him out,” Diana suggested.

He smiled. She reciprocated. She leaned to him and kissed him on the cheek. He placed am arm around her and held her tightly, then released.

They left Audrey’s between nine and ten and walked home. The night was raw and a drizzle had begun. They shared an umbrella. Geiger had three locks on the front door of his home, but once past them, his home again felt warm and secure. This was his redoubt, his secure sanctuaries from the outside world.

Diana went upstairs and retired towards eleven. Sometime after that, as was his daily habit when he was in New York and not performing, Geiger wandered into his library.

He closed the windows and closed the doors. Tonight he would make music away from all human ears, other than his own. He sat down at his Steinway and thought for a moment. Then he began to play. He liked to play at night, when no one would disturb him.

To get in the proper mood, he played melodies from Paul Simon and Leonard Bernstein. Then he played some Scott Joplin and, to fool around, some Kander and Ebb. To mess around a little more before getting serious, he played Chopin interlaced with themes from Springsteen, and then Beethoven with motifs from Jerry Garcia.

He smiled. He felt better. Acid-natured old Rabinowitz would probably have already been kicking at the lid of his coffin if he could have heard this.

“You have mongrelized some masters!” the old man would have said. “You are a slut, young man! You have the morality of a musical whore!”

“How is that?” Geiger answered aloud.

“You go to bed with many and embrace none!” Rabinowitz raged in his imagination.

“Maybe,” Rolf answered. “But musical promiscuity is its own reward.”

He had an image of the departed maestro slamming down the lid above the keyboard. Slamming it down and locking it, lest further sacrilege occur. A similar incident had occurred at a lesson that Geiger had taken at age nineteen when he had sprinkled themes from Led Zeppelin into some Schubert, which Geiger had announced impetuously, “needs to get a life.”

The old man had stormed from the practice chamber. As Geiger thought back, he broke into a full smile for the first time that day—even though he could almost feel the old man’s hands on his neck.

Several minutes passed.

After a few measures of introduction, Geiger took one of the dramatic themes from Wagner’s Tannhauser and by degrees worked himself up into a cyclone of rain-like runs, hail-like trills, lightning arpeggios, and thunder chords. But these were mere exercises, physical and technical. Only when he was satisfied that his hands were limber enough, did he settle down to serious business, alternately attacking and caressing some Chopin.

The music soared in the enclosed room. He was pleased, though aware that he had no audience. He knew that he had picked up that one small trait from Rabinowitz—playing where no one could hear, lest there be a witness to a mistake or a badly turned phrase. It bothered him when he found himself doing things that the old maestro had done.

Now, sufficiently warmed up, he sank deeply into a major work by Chopin, The Fantasie in F Minor. He spent an hour on it, occasionally toying with or improvising on certain themes. Before he grew too tired, he switched to Beethoven. The Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major. One of his favorite works, as well as one of the composer’s favorites.

Fatigue wrapped itself around him. He thought of Diana sleeping one floor above him. He was anxious to shower and slide into bed with her. If he felt like making love, he would wake her. She never turned him down, and he loved her all the more for it.

His gaze drifted around the room. There were awards and photographs, plaques and souvenirs, loot from his many artistic triumphs on five different continents; unending testimonials to his brilliance, a thousand memories and not a bad one among them.

He took stock. He was young. He felt increasingly good about life. The anxieties and fears that he had entertained earlier in the day didn’t seem so monumental now that he was back in his own place, comforted by his own possessions, secure in his Manhattan fortress.

Life was fine, he decided. Just fine.

Aside from the challenges of his few small upcoming appearances, which were significant, he had nothing in the world to worry about. Or at least, that’s what he kept telling himself. But deep down, he knew something was troubling him. He glanced at his watch. It was 1:30 a.m. He finally admitted to himself what it was.

Against all reason, he didn’t believe the old man was dead. That’s what was bothering him. There were so many things left unfinished, and not all of them were symphonies. He rose from the piano and walked quietly across his library.

His hand found the light switch. He turned it off.

Simultaneously, one of the strings within the piano—he recognized it as the A above middle C—snapped of its own accord.

Geiger flicked the light back on and turned toward the Steinway. He stared for a moment.

Strings snapped all the time, he told himself. But he continued to stare.

Uneasily, Geiger clicked off the light again. He left his library and walked up the steps to his bedroom. Diana was sleeping soundly, breathing evenly.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and gazed at her. She was the woman of any man’s lifetime. She wore a blue silk nightgown. It was bunched up high on her thighs as she slept. The neckline had fallen away and one of her breasts was visible.

Sometimes, when sleeping next to her, he would awaken slightly and look at her. He thought his emotions were the purest at these moments, before the other complexities and complications of his present life could crown in upon him. At these moments, all he could feel was his love for her. He leaned forward and gently kissed her on the lips.

Her eyes flickered for a second, then opened. She saw Rolf and smiled in the mistiness of her half-sleep.

“Come to bed,” she whispered invitingly. He said he would. I just want to feel you on top of me. And inside me,” she said.

He undressed. Rabinowitz is dead, he reminded himself. That chapter in my life is over. It’s finished. A new reality begins tomorrow.

He settled into bed next to Diana. He put his arm around her and she responded warmly to him, moving her body as close to him as possible. She smelled wonderful. She always showered before bed and he had no idea what she used on her skin, but it aroused him to no end.

She came fully awake. Her lips met his and her arms wrapped themselves around him.

Half an hour later, everyone in the house was asleep. There were no disturbances overnight. No intrusions from outside the house.

At one point, however, Rolf Geiger had in his mind the realistic image of himself on his feet and moving through the house. He was walking as if in a trance, taking himself back downstairs to where he stood in front of his Steinway for several seconds. Thinking. Ruminating. His head filled with music, his soul filled with challenge.

He was gently rubbing his fingers across the keyboard, so lightly that not a single note was struck. He felt that the eyes of his master were upon him, which was silly, because Rabinowitz was neither any longer his master nor alive. But in a chilling moment, Geiger struck a chord with his right hand. No music sounded from his piano.

He stared at the instrument and didn’t understand. When he raised his eyes, Rabinowitz was smiling. Gloating. Then, like the grin of the Cheshire cat, Rabinowitz receded into nothing.

I’m dreaming, Geiger was conscious of thinking. This is okay, but only because I’m dreaming. He opened his eyes in the dark, quiet bedroom, re-assured himself, and then snuggled in closer to Diana. He drifted back to a more peaceful sleep.

Six

Outside on East Seventy-Third Street, on the opposite side of the block from Geiger’s town house, late on the cold evening that followed the funeral, a new presence, a watcher, had taken up position.

The figure that had Number 112 under surveillance was a small and sinewy, little whisper of a man. His eyes were intense and dark, the same color as his spirit, the same color as the night.

He sat in the shadow of a big old tree several houses away from Geiger’s. He was one of the feral figures of a New York night time, the type of human form that lurks in shadows and doorways and startles passersby with sudden movements. The type of figure that New Yorkers steel themselves against, the sort of presence that keeps one’s eye upon, but never allows to catch one’s eyes—though his own eyes had widened significantly when he had spotted Rolf Geiger standing in the frame of his second-story window, if only for a minute.

The figure down on the street was heavily into tobacco. Puff. Puff, smoke, smoke, hack, hack, cough, cough.

The watcher sat on the steps of a house with three brick front steps, working a pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes through the night. A little orange glow pinpointed him in the shadows, a glow on the end of his cancer stick.

He kept his eyes on the second floor of 112 East Seventy-Third. He had already noted the times that the downstairs lights went off and the upstairs lights went on.

There was an old woman who worked in the house, the watcher had noted, and a twenty-something woman who lived there with the famous pianist. These people were young and beautiful, both the man and the woman, the figure in the shadows had decided, and were undoubtedly undeserving of their wealth. Well, they had ways of paying. Already, the watcher knew much of their schedule. The old lady arrived in the late morning and often stayed until seven-thirty or even later. Then she left and didn’t come back until the next day.

What made the house unusual was the unpredictable pianist and his girlfriend. The only thing that was predictable was that when they went out during the day, they usually would leave the neighborhood and they tended to stay out for several hours. Knowledge of that helped.

The watcher noted that this morning, the lights had gone out at one-fifteen. A nighttime pattern would eventually emerge too.

The watcher stayed until 3:00 A.M. Then, with the streets quiet, he was certain that no further activity would occur in the pianist’s home that night. He looked down at the small pile of cigarette butts that he had created. He brushed them out onto the sidewalk and rose.

He walked westward toward Madison Avenue, thinking of how if he had nudged the limousine door just a little harder, a little faster, he could have crushed that too-talented right hand and ended Rolf Geiger’s career the afternoon of the funeral.

Tsk, tsk, he mused. What a shame he had missed.

Oh well, he told himself. There’s always the next time.

Seven

Up until two years earlier when he decided to withdraw from most public performances, Rolf Geiger had been the splashiest, most dynamic, most famous musician in the world.

When the young American virtuoso played the piano, women often hurled bouquets, candy and even lingerie onto the stage. They shrieked and fainted. When he played New York, London, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Rome or any of the other great cities of the world, audiences surged toward he stage following his recitals. His fans wanted to be as close as possible to the most handsome, talented, and engaging musician of his generation.

In Prague, during his world tour of 2005, the stage was overrun with fans following a rocked-up performance of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No.3 in C Major. Geiger’s fans pulled apart the Steinway and fought for broken strings and keys. Someone made away with the white tie that he had worn during his performance.

Geiger knew the hold he had over his fans. He was a rock star in a field of classical music. He was not averse to adding his own sense of impact to a concert. In Stockholm, on the same tour, he played for five days at the majestic new state theater. During his booking, the stage was lit entirely by candles—a special dispensation from the fire marshal.

The candles were powder blue, matching his eye-candy formal suit. Then he continued on to Paris, where on Bastille Day 2005, accompanied by l’Orchestre Nationale de Paris he played a superb jazzed-up Debussy on a tricolor Steinway super-grande. The instrument had been specially constructed for the occasion, the only one of its kind in the world—right down to the alternating red, white and blue keys.

But that was only the beginning.

His stage in Paris had been built at the northern base of the Eiffel tower. The tower itself was backlit as he performed, and his roof was a canopy of radiant stars. Before an audience of one million, giant projection television screens were set in every direction across the Champ-de-Mars all the way to the Seine. As an encore, he played an impromptu La Marseilles, seamlessly weaving in and out of it alternating strains of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and Gershwin’s An American in Paris. Fireworks followed, igniting the sky a second time. It was the most dramatic appearance of a Yank in the French capital since Lindberg in 1927 and Kennedy in 1962.

Even if purists hated what he was doing, Geiger had a way of taking the music of a nation and bringing it to its citizen in ways that made it pulse with new life. In Warsaw, he was followed by a mob of one hundred Polish women on the street after he played his own variations on Chopin. In Prague, he was hailed as the philosophical descendant of Dvo&rcaron;ák as he, visitor from the new world, played his own piano transcription of the New World Symphony, interpreting Dvo&rcaron;ák in ways that had never before been heard.

In Vienna, his arrival was akin to the second coming of Mozart. There were also whispers in the Austrian capital that Geiger was the reincarnation of Franz Liszt and that he possessed the resurrected genius of Beethoven. Around the world, he was more popular than Presley, Sinatra or the Beatles had ever been. Grenada, where Rolf Geiger had played for free at a charity event against world hunger in 2000, put him on a series of postage stamps.

All this for a young classical pianist, though Geiger was far from a classicist. He was unafraid to experiment or popularize venerated works. His arrival on the music scene had reversed the trend of popular music for the last half century. By the time he was twenty-one, he had been on the covers of two hundred publications around the world.

From Rolf Geiger’s fingers, musicologists heard sounds that they said had been dead for two centuries. His performances of Beethoven caused hardened critics across the world, seated in dark music halls, to look up from their notebooks and feel the hair rise on the backs of their necks. That was standard, and that was why the critics hated it so much when he extemporized. Also standard was the eye contact he would often establish with his audiences. He would sometimes play an entire concerto or sonata without glancing at the keyboard.

Once, as a stunt at one of the big gambling places in Atlantic City, on a balmy June evening, he played his own transcription of Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture while blindfolded. He didn’t miss a note.

Rolf Geiger was that good. And Geiger, who had grown up poor in a failing industrial town in West Virginia for the first years of his life, had a problem with none of this.

Sometimes he would perform with three pianos on stage, using them as his whims dictated during a performance. He played every important city in the world. Concert halls were not large enough to hold his audience. Sometimes stadia weren’t either. His performances were events that transcended music.

He played Beethoven and Rachmaninoff in full formal attire. But every bit as often, he played in white tie, tails and blue jeans, depending upon the venue. He played in green velvet in Dublin. He wore a tri-cornered Minuteman hat and a Red Sox jersey when he played Sousa on the Fourth of July 2002, on the Esplanade in Boston. And once, when he played Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, he performed in tight black patent leather jacket and jeans, no shirt, and sequined boots. He liked to perform on blue Steinways and red Yamahas. It barely mattered.

Equally, he was given to the odd acerbic one-liner, occasionally even off-the-cuff comments to his audience during concerts. At the Dodger Stadium concert, he noted that the great Beethoven physically stood only five-feet-four in his lifetime.

“In the film business,” Geiger told the Hollywood audience, “that would have made him an Outstanding Short Subject.”

Geiger’s face was ruled by his eyes—blue, darting and intense. Yet his eyes were also romantic and mysterious, at once drawing you in but not letting you past. His cheekbones were high—”Czarist” cheekbones, Rabinowitz once called them—and his hair was shaggy as it fell just past the top of his ears.

His hands were powerful. Large and strong, yet sensitive. Veined and fleshed versions of something sculpted by Michelangelo. He could reach a twelfth on a standard keyboard. His legs were long. His body was athletic.

He could do everything with a piano except make it fly. His music, his musicianship, his showmanship, the persona of Rolf Geiger soared by itself. At the end of his 2005 European tour, as a conceit for European television, he presented himself at a television studio in Monaco and played Chopin’s Etude for Black Keys with a lit votive candle balanced on the back of each hand.

Sometimes his talent could scare everyone, including himself. But eventually such events caused the fiery backlash among the self-anointed “serious music critics” of the world. They had turned on him with a pyrotechnic vengeance, almost to the point where some would no longer even consider him an artist.

“One doesn’t hear the one time prodigy, Rolf Geiger, play so much as one sees him play,” wrote the arts editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, putting in words what many musicologists privately felt. “This whole ‘cult performance’ thing has gotten completely out of control. Geiger has become the sociopath of classical music.”

“Rolf Geiger,” wrote another scribbler in Time, “is ruining classical music when he could be saving it. Because of his enormous popularity, much of the concert going public knows the great music only by the corrupt variations Geiger plays. They know it not by the way it was written. He uses great music the way Mike Tyson used a sparring partner.”

“A fraud,” wrote the Toronto Globe & Mail.

“An out and out sym-phony,” maintained the Dallas Morning News.

“If all these people knew so much about music,” Geiger was once quoted in response, “they’d be creating music instead of writing about it.”

But, over the last two dozen months, and as he viewed the distant approach of his thirtieth birthday, Geiger had become elusive, then reclusive. Militantly so, playing only at small dates in remote concert halls while he sorted out his life, his talent and his art.

“Time to think,” he called it. “Time to consider the direction of my life.”

Time to decide what he wanted to be. At least now, he had made that decision. And the passing of Rabinowitz had only underscored what he felt to be the correctness of his choice.

The morning after Rabinowitz’s interment, Geiger turned his attention back to his Steinway. He had become adept at applying emergency first aid to his own equipment. He replaced the ruptured string and fiddled with the tuning.

After forty minutes he was pleased. He selected several of Beethoven’s sonatas from his library and reconsidered several movements for the rest of the morning.

Shortly after noon, he went to a health club in the East fifties where he worked out three times a week when not on tour. Playing concerts was as physically demanding as it was mentally exhausting. It was imperative to stay in top physical shape.

He returned home for lunch and a short nap. The jet lag and the end of the trip to San Remo were still having their effects. He dealt with some business matters over the phone during the afternoon. Diana had an assignment to write a long article for The New Yorker and was out doing interviews and research.

Toward five, he went out into his neighborhood for a brief walk, mentally running through his feelings toward the possible proposals that his agent was likely to make that evening. Obviously, Greenstone wanted to nudge him back toward the major recital halls. A lot of time had passed since Geiger had performed on a major tour.

Walking on Madison Avenue in a light rain, Rolf brooded. He needed to make an important decision. Was it time to play again? Was it time to embrace big audiences again and let them embrace him? Moreover, was it time to drop the jazz, pizzazz, and rock and try to take his place among the finest pianists of the century?

He had never really become what he had shown promise of becoming. Something about the situation scared the living hell out of him. But then again, there had been the most recent trip to Europe…the lightning on the airplane…the death of Rabinowitz…all this coupled with his long absence from the world’s most demanding recital halls.

Today in New York City, walking a final block on East Seventy-Third Street, he thought of the conversation he would have with his agent this evening. He had been detoured from his long-term ambitions over the last few years, but now his rightful time had come. Even his hands seemed to be itching to play again.

To play and really play. No horsing around this time.

He would listen carefully to what Brian Greenstone had to say. Then when Brian was talked out, he would say yes or no to whatever direction for his future Brian wished to propose. Then they would discuss. Well, that’s how he reasoned it would go.

His thoughts were so intent, as he walked down his own block, that he wasn’t even bothered by the gnarled man in a rumpled coat sitting in a doorway across the street, watching Geiger.

Eight

Sarah and Brian Greenstone arrived punctually for dinner Friday evening at seven-thirty. Sarah Greenstone was a third wife, the most recent in a succession of pretty brides who increasingly got prettier, younger and thinner as Greenstone got wealthier, older and heavier. Sarah was twenty-three years younger than her husband. She was a petite contemplative woman with black hair. She was in her mid-thirties but could pass for her early late twenties with her gentle, unlined face.

Intellectually, she was as sharp as a razor. She had an MBA from the University of Chicago and held a challenging job in public relations for a famous Swiss pharmaceutical company that always seemed to be under indictment for one thing or another.

Geiger invited his guests into his library. Mrs. Jamison had filled the town house with excellent cooking aromas. Dinner was served shortly before eight.

Geiger and his agent spent the meal speaking about social matters and the dire state of the classical concert business. Sarah and Diana talked quietly between themselves, tuning out the men’s conversation when it suited them.

After the meal, Mrs. Jamison cleared, amidst compliments from all four diners. Over dessert and coffee, Brian Greenstone moved to the purpose of the meeting.

“Obviously, Rolf,” Greenstone began, “I’d like to suggest to you a very specific career move. May I tell you exactly without you falling out of your chair?”

Greenstone had moved to the United States as a nineteen-year-old, entering the country on a six-month visa and staying a lifetime. His speech still bore the cadences of South London.

“Please do,” Geiger said.

“I think the time is right for you to start performing again. But in a different way than ever before. I think you should perform a world tour on a grand scale. But you should drop the pizzazz and the pop music. Just do classical, my lad. Pure and simple. The world’s greatest music by the world’s greatest pianist.”

Geiger smiled slightly. His round blue eyes glided sideways, and he looked at the two women. Then he looked back to his agent.

“Flatter me anymore, Brian, and I’ll throw your fine English butt out of here” Geiger answered.

“Good. At least we’re speaking. Look, from me as a friend and from me as your most trusted business advisor, Rolf,” Greenstone said. “I’d like you to do a world tour in which you finally establish your rightful place at the pinnacle of pianists.”

A moment passed. Greenstone paused slightly, then set down his coffee.

“What are we talking about, Brian” Geiger asked.

“I’m talking about—strictly classical music—a tour to end all tours. The principle is simple. I want you to establish yourself as the greatest concert pianist who ever lived. And I know bloody full well that the same thought has gone through your head. Hasn’t it? Be honest.”

“Maybe,” Geiger said, being half-honest.

“It’s attainable, Rolf. It’s attainable now. And the current equation is perfect. The passing of Rabinowitz. The dreadful state of the classical music industry which desperately needs a new hero with some sex appeal. Your age. Your current following. Your immense talent.”

Geiger thought things through for a moment. Then,

“I want to hear your own words, Brian. What exactly are we talking about? What music would I play, for example?”

“All the great works for piano. Every one. The great sonatas and concertos. Beethoven. Prokofiev. Mozart. Schubert. Ravel. Liszt. Rachmaninoff,” Greenstone answered. “God! Why are you asking me, my boy? You’d know better than I!”

Geiger glanced around as Greenstone spoke. Both women had their eyes set firmly upon him like a pair of terriers.

“You would circle the world and play the greatest works by the greatest composers in the history of Western civilization,” Greenstone said. “Perhaps three dozen dates. Or four dozen. Whichever is necessary. All the greatest piano concertos. All the finest sonatas. Everything. Different dates all over the world, backed by the greatest orchestras and conductors alive. North America. South America. Europe and Asia. Maybe even a date or two in China and at least one date in Africa. Probably Egypt at the base of the pyramids, right? Maybe that would be the final date. Still with me?”

“Yes.”

“Is this making sense?” Greenstone asked. “And we’d do the whole package. Simulcasts. DVD’s in a boxed set. CD’s.” He paused. “I think it could generate two hundred fifty million dollars, conservatively speaking, maybe much more. You’d walk away with maybe forty percent of that.”

“Money like that is obscene for one person,” Geiger said. “I’d want to set up some charities, some music scholarships. Not just here in the U.S. but, say, in every country where we played. Someday some other kid is going to come along, maybe a kid who isn’t even born yet, and put me to shame. He or she will bury me like I buried the old man yesterday. You know what, I want to help that kid do it.”

“More power to you, my friend,” Greenstone said. “All of that can be easily set up.”

“For the sake of argument,” Geiger mused, warming quickly to the concept, “I could play Saint-Saëns’s Egyptian Concerto in Egypt. Or maybe I would want to close that tour with Beethoven. The Emperor Concerto at Luxor with the Valley of the Kings as my backdrop.”

Rolf paused for a moment and savored the thought. “I’m wondering if we could draw a live audience of half a million people to that one.”

“Maybe not in Egypt where they get nervous over big crowds. But Michel Polnareff drew a million to the Eiffel Tower a few years ago. You can beat him.”

“I like Polnareff,” Rolf said. “Didn’t he once have a picture of his bare butt on an album cover?”

“Yes, he did, and I would strongly advise not going in that direction.”

“I’m merely invoking an image, Brian. “You’ll forgive me, right, ladies?”

Sarah and Diana laughed.

Greenstone shook his head in admiration as well as astonishment.

“I love this man,” he said to the two women. “The Pyramids. You don’t think on a small scale, do you, Rolf?”

“Certain pieces lend themselves to certain venues,” Geiger said, thinking the idea further along. “I would play Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev in Russia, Chopin in Warsaw and Paris. I would play Mozart in Vienna. Scarlatti in Milan and Rome. Beethoven in Berlin, Munich, and Tokyo.” He smiled wryly. “Maybe even some Aaron Copland in New York and some Scott Joplin in Kansas City.” He paused. “Am I getting the right idea?” he asked.

“There you go,” the agent said in admiration. “You have exactly the idea. Not even Isador Rabinowitz would have dared to do something like this.”

“Exactly.”

“Then you find the idea attractive?”

“I’m starting to.”

The two women exchanged a wary glance.

“Hell, Brian,” Geiger continued, “you read the press I get. You know what people say in the industry: I quote bastardize unquote my quote immense unquote talents. I got ripped like hell the last time I played big venues, and it shut me down for two years.”

“I dare say, Rolf,” Greenstone said, “that when your encore in London mixed themes from Madonna with themes from Mozart, you may have titillated your audience but you did indeed bloody some snooty noses in the classical music world.”

“I thought that was brilliant,” Diana said. “Particularly since Madonna was in the audience and the whole repertoire was spontaneous.”

“I agree,” Sarah Greenstone chipped in.

Geiger shrugged in self-effacement.

“Look, I agree also,” Brian said. “But it’s no mystery why Rolf gets the impertinent reviews he gets, even though every woman in the audience seems to want to have his children.”

“Well, I’m tired of hearing about it too, Brian,” Rolf continued, remaining serious. “Maybe it is time to shut people up. What you’re suggesting is so challenging and so spectacular that it would establish my place forever it the history of the piano.”

“Sure. Your place as ‘the greatest who ever lived.’ That’s what you mean, right?” Greenstone asked. “You’d be happy with something as humble as that?”

“That’s correct.” Geiger paused.

“Would this also indicate that you will agree not to—dare I say?—monkey around on this tour? No mixing Presley with Paderewski?”

“No mixing,” Geiger said.

“And no red satin suits with string-ties when you play Rome. I saw a picture of you when you just played San Remo. You may have played the music straight, but you looked like a pimp. You looked as if you were performing at the topless 10 PM revue at the Sahara in Las Vegas.”

“I’ll dress appropriately on this tour,” Geiger promised.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Greenstone said.

“The greatest music ever created played by the greatest musician who ever lived,” Geiger said thoughtfully, looking at Diana. “I like this” I’m aboard,” he said.

For a moment, Geiger glanced at Diana, reading her thoughts, making sure he had her support. When he saw that he did, Geiger pondered further for a moment. Then he asked Greenstone,

“What do you think old Rabinowitz would have thought of a tour like this?”

“Why do you ask me that?”

“You represented him. And you were his friend as much as anyone.”

“He would have hated it,” Greenstone said.

“Why?”

A slight chill held the room.

“Because Isador always hated the fact that you could eventually supplant him. He was jealous of his position. He didn’t want anyone to be greater. You know that as well as I do.”

“Is that why you waited until he was dead to proposed this?”

Greenstone shrugged.

“Maybe,” the agent said. “The atmosphere wasn’t right while Isador was aging ungraciously.” He paused. “But I’m suggesting this first as a friend, then as a businessman. Long-term, this is what you need to do even if you had no relationship with Isador Rabinowitz. A huge tour makes creative sense, and it makes business sense. And right now is the time.”

Diana saw a shadow come over her lover’s face. The entire room was eerily silent for several long seconds. Greenstone finally broke it.

“So tell me your thoughts, Rolf,” the agent asked gently. “If you’re not up to this, it’s not going to work.”

Geiger looked away for a moment, then came back.

“If I did this, I could be ready to play the first date in the fall,” Geiger answered softly. “Maybe spread the performances and travel into the spring.”

“You feel that you could be ready to make the emotional, physical and intellectual commitment?” Geiger shrugged.

“What if I were?”

“Then I would get on the phone Monday,” said Greenstone. “I make the right calls locally here in New York first. Then I call Paris, London, Tokyo, Vienna, and Rome and start talking to people. I’ll try to keep things quiet for a while, but I’m under no illusion. We’ll start seeing things in the press about this within a week.” Geiger grimaced good-naturedly.

“That’s all right,” he said.

“So, what do you think?” Greenstone asked. “If we did this right and if you succeeded creatively with your playing, you would be hailed as the greatest pianist who ever lived.”

“And what if I failed?” Geiger asked.

“You won’t, Rolf.”

“But what if I did?”

“If a tour like this failed,” Greenstone said, speaking cautiously, “if it were a catastrophe, if the critics savaged you and the audiences felt ripped-off, or if it failed to generate the excitement that we’re anticipating…I suppose it could destroy your reputation. It could also wreck you musically, destroy your nerves, and demolish your creativity. But I’m sure you could always find a job playing at bar mitzvahs.”

“Very funny, Brian.” Greenstone studied his client as he continued.

“Thinking back upon the unfortunate fact that Mozart died at age thirty-five and was buried in a pauper’s grave, and that Beethoven himself also died a sick, broken, unhappy man, I suppose it could physically kill you too. That’s what happens when immensely talented men overstep their own mortality.” Greenstone paused. “You would leave an enormous estate, however,” he concluded with an irreverent twinkle in his eye. “Many charities would erect tacky plaster statues of you in loving fiduciary memory.”

Geiger ignored Greenstone’s humor. He looked coldly at his agent for a moment. Then his expression lightened. He smiled and scoffed.

“This is the tour I’ve always wanted to do someday.” Greenstone smiled.

“‘Someday’ is now, Rolf.”

“I know. So let’s do it.”

“Excellent! You know what? Forget Monday. I’ll start making calls tomorrow,” the agent said. “Never mind that it’s Saturday. If you change your mind, let me know before 10 A.M.”

For a few moments, a queasy, frightened feeling was upon Rolf Geiger. He credited it to nerves. And excitement. Then, moments later, it was gone.

“I plan to be asleep tomorrow at ten, Brian,” he said mischievously. “Give me the weekend to brood on it. Then feel free to make your calls Monday if I don’t chicken out.”

Nine

After his guests had gone, Geiger sat down again at the Steinway in his library. He felt refreshed. A new and immense challenge was before him, and he loved that feeling.

He began his warm-up exercises. He had played only a measure or two when he realized something was wrong with his instrument.

“What the…?”

Another string was badly out of tune. The coincidence, on top of fixing the first broken string that morning, was startling. He stood and looked into the interior of the piano, wondering if he had damaged the second string while repairing the first.

Diana stopped by on her way upstairs. She sat down next to him on the bench. Her fingers found the piano chain and pendant that hung from her neck.

“Where did you find this little guy?” she asked, indicating the pendant.

“I had it made by one of the finest goldsmiths in Europe,” he said with a straight face. He continued to play. He loved to have her sit next to him as he played. “Okay, a little jeweler in Florence,” he amended.

“I love it,” she said. “Not as much as I love you, but I love it.”

He patted her on the knee, a touch that was enough to arouse both of them.

“You’re precious,” he said. She kissed him.

“Does this tour scare you?” she asked.

“No,” he said thoughtfully. Six bars of Chopin blended together nicely. The music was immense when he played. Or, if he wished, soft as a lover’s promise whispered on a spring breeze. “What scares me now is not doing something like this. I need to show what I can really do with great music. Then, my lady, I can do anything I wish with my life.”

“And what would that be?” she asked.

His fingers shifted to a melody from Andrew Lloyd Webber. Just for fun.

“Don’t know yet,” he said. “But I was hoping you’d help me decide.”

She smiled and leaned on him.

“Deal?” he asked

“Deal,” she said.

He played the theme from Dragnet and made her laugh.

“Was anyone in here today?” Geiger asked next.

“I was,” she said. I put out some fan mail for you.”

“At the piano, I mean,” he said.

“No one that I know of. Why?”

“I have two busted wires in one day. I don’t think that’s ever happened before.”

He tapped at the key with the out-of-tune string. The string hadn’t broken like the other. It has been stretched to the point where it had lost all its tension. That was so unusual, it defied ready explanation.

“One of those things,” Geiger eventually said. “Like two light bulbs that flash and disintegrate within minutes of each other. It happens. But it’s a remarkable coincidence.”

Something made him think of the lightning on the Air France jet that had brought him home. The lightning and the woman next to him who had been struck by lightning twice.

A scary, uncanny coincidence, once again.

“You coming upstairs soon?” Diana asked.

“Not for an hour. Maybe two.”

“Good night then,” she said.

He held her and kissed her. Then she went upstairs.

He repaired the second string and made a mental note to call the professional tuner in the morning. The Steinway Company always sent their best man right away, even on weekends. Geiger was, obviously, an esteemed customer. He wanted the piano tuned perfectly by noon.

Later, he read for a while in the quiet sanctity of his library. But he found his mind drifting. First, it tiptoed to the late Rabinowitz and then it gave itself to his world tour. That’s how he now conceived of it. His World Tour.

What would the old man have said, he wondered. What would the old tyrant have thought? They had never perfectly agreed on the interpretations of many composers. They had once nearly come to physical blows over Beethoven, particularly the Hammerklavier and the Pathetique.

Well, Geiger concluded, who cared about Rabinowitz’s opinion any longer?

A disquieting notion followed: Why did he keep asking himself who cared?

Rolf turned the lights off in his study and sat for a moment in the darkness. He had always found the darkness consoling, not frightening. Darkness reminded him of a perfectly blank sheet of music, before the written notes created a new composition. He sometimes thought of a quiet keyboard as a sort of darkness, too, a black-and-white evenness out of which a new reality could be carved.

Geiger stood.

He functioned well in darkness. He liked to take the stage in darkness during a concert, seat himself at the piano, and let the lights slowly rise as he played, creating a unique world, a one-time-only experience. At no two times did he ever dress alike, feel alike, or play alike. Every appearance was unique. And every appearance was redefined out of that same darkness.

Come critics called it showbiz. Pizzazz. Showing off.

The critics like to beat him up in this area. He conceded that they had a point. Yet Geiger felt a philosophical bond to it, also. Out of blankness, he created a new musical reality.

A line always came back to him. Victor Hugo. “D’avoir été Lutèce et d’être Paris.”

To have been mud, and to have become Paris.

He walked through the den and entered the front hall. He went to the stairs, found and climbed them. He walked to the bedroom.

Still no lights. But a window shade was slightly askew.

He went to the shade. As he began to adjust it, he looked down onto the street. Something caught his eye. A pair of lovers, it appeared, were leaning against a parked car. The young man was kissing a woman, who was reciprocating the kiss with equal passion.

Geiger stood at the unlit window for several seconds watching them, almost envying the newness and freshness of their ardor. He wondered sometimes how people married and made a life together and somehow kept the passion going. A little dismal feeling overtook him, wondering whether over the years, his love for Diana, or hers for him would run its course.

Or would they even have years together? Would it be only months? He believed in the future but was old enough to know that there were never any assurances.

Where, he wondered, were self-destructive thoughts like that coming from? He shook his head and tuned out the young couple who were still smooching down below. He reached to the window shade to pull it down for the night.

Then something remarkable and memorable happened.

As Geiger watched from above, a clown suddenly appeared on the block. Geiger couldn’t tell if he were watching a male or a female, as the figure had a graceful feline glide to its gait.

There was something else strange about this clown, too, something intensely surreal. There was something out of sync for this time and place.

It didn’t look like an American clown, for example.

Geiger studied the figure carefully. The clown increasingly reminded him of pictures of European circuses from the middle part of the century, or something from a Fellini movie. The clown’s outfit was dark, either black or navy, pattered with large white dots all over the baggy, sack-shaped outfit. The individual had grossly oversized shoes, a floppy hat that matched the suit and carried a violin. It was in white face, which was part of what held Geiger’s attention. The individual’s whole appearance had been in stark black-and-white and almost seemed to be illuminated unnaturally, like a winter landscape of dead trees, snow, and moonlight.

The clown walked halfway down the block with obvious deliberation. The visitor appeared to know exactly where he or she was headed. Geiger was startled when the figure stopped right across the street.

The clown turned and faced Geiger’s building, looking up almost directly at the second-floor window so carefully that Geiger felt as if he were the intended audience. Then the clown turned into a street musician. He mounted the violin, which was as white as his face, at his shoulder. He made the motions of playing.

Geiger cocked his head.

Strange! He couldn’t hear anything.

Fascinated, Rolf reasoned that the clown was going through the gestures of playing, but was not really creating any music. Who knew? The city streets saw many strange things at night. This was no weirder than a lot of others, though it did have that unnatural aura around it.

The bizarre display went on for a minute, this soundless near-hypnotic mime show with a vanilla violin. The minute seemed to Geiger like a very long stretch of time.

And who, Geiger wondered, was the intended audience?

Amused slightly, Geiger smiled. He lifted his gaze. He saw a three-quarter moon hanging in the sky above the buildings across the street. Then he looked back down to the sidewalk and the clown was gone.

Geiger knew he had not dreamed this. As he scanned the block, he couldn’t find the clown a second time. The apparition had vanished as strangely as it had appeared, though Geiger did note some sort of vagrant sitting down the block, smoking on the doorstep of another two-million-dollar property. But the clown had left one thing behind: a notion in Geiger’s head.

Recalling the vision of the polka-dotted clown, Geiger felt a name form at the forefront of his mind. Umberto. The clown was Italian and his name was Umberto. Re Umberto. King of Italy.

“Well, who knew?” He shrugged. The clown looked like a refugee from a production of I Pagliacci, Geiger mused. So why shouldn’t Geiger have assigned him a nice Italian name?

Umberto. As red, white and green as a fresh, cholesterol-laden cannoli.

Geiger tried to assimilate all that he had just seen. But his mind felt foggy. His body felt sleepy. The night felt bumpy. Sometimes there was no explanation for what one saw on the streets of New York. Searching for explanations was a waste of time.

So, why bother? Geiger finally pushed the shade back into place, blocking the light and the city out of his bedroom. He climbed into bed beside Diana. He felt the warmth of her sleeping body and pulled her to him. He thought about how much he loved her and how precious she was to him.

She responded slightly and her body moved to his. He put an arm around her and started to enjoy a relaxing descent into sleep.

She kissed him lightly and he thought again of how much he loved her. It was a reassuring notion. It was the last thought in his mind as he drifted comfortably off to sleep.

Ten

Diana Stephenson, the most important woman in Rolf Geiger’s life, was from Northern California, where her father had been a lecturer in music at Stanford and her mother had been in real estate. An only child, she had been a gawky adolescent. She went to schools for gifted children, but remembered them more for her lack of popularity than for their curriculum.

She had a long graceful body with a bright beautiful face. Brown eyes that were always alive. Though she had yet to see her twenty-sixth birthday, her shoulder-length brown hair was touched with a tiny bit of gray, as if at one point some extreme shock or trauma had touched her.

She read a lot. She listened to a lot of music. She was very plain for the first sixteen years of her life, had no serious boyfriends, no inseparable female pals. Other kids in her classes, when they had nothing else to do, made fun of her.

First for being so plain. Next for being smart.

Then something happened. She blossomed.

The awkwardness of the teen years suddenly gave way to grace. Features that had been ordinary evolved into beauty. She learned tricks of style and makeup, jettisoned her glasses, and got a better haircut.

Some of the boys who used to tease her now called her and wanted her company. She turned them down. Girls who had once ridiculed her now wanted her help in homework and social advice. Simultaneously, she finished first in her high school class, and blew out of California to Wellesley.

There she developed a niche. She was a smart, pretty, well-spoken loner. A little quirky. She taught herself the flute well enough to play in a chamber music quintet. She read pop French novels in her free time, minored in art, and majored in music appreciation. She began to write about it and soon sold articles professionally.

She was first published in a jazz magazine in Boston. Then the Boston Phoenix hired her to cover the music scene in Eastern Massachusetts. The pay was so-so, but the perks were great.

She scribbled with style. Once she was sent to a country and western bar that functioned for wayward cowboys in Brookline.

“My dog came home, the bank returned my farm, and my boyfriend gave me my virginity back,” she wrote at the top of her review. “I have just listened to a dreadful C and W band in reverse.” Diana, the world soon learned, had a tongue as sharp as her intellect.

She kicked around Boston for a couple of years after Wellesley, then married an aspiring actor named Gary who was short on talent but long on charm. He led her to New York, then to Los Angeles. He had trouble finding work. He encouraged Diana to act or model, but she wasn’t interested. She fell out of the orbit of music review. She worked as a waitress in SoHo and then again in Sunset Plaza in Los Angeles. She was very pretty by this time, but adrift.

Gary discovered cocaine and developed a temper. He hauled off and belted Diana one night. An hour later, she moved out of their crappy apartment in North Hollywood, drove overnight to Palo Alto, and crashed on her parents’ doorstep. Literally.

“Oh,” her father said when he discovered her the next morning. “You’re back.”

“I’m back.”

“I’m not surprised. What’s new?” He hadn’t seen her in a year. The early stage of Diana Stephenson’s life was over, and so was an unlovely first marriage.

While living at home, she worked evenings in a sports bar, putting her beauty on a paying basis. Halter top and short shorts. Her tips were astronomical and when customers got out of line, she flashed a fake wedding ring at them.

She barely spent a penny. She earned her master’s degree from Berkeley and headed back to New York, looking to write music criticism for anyone who would hire her.

Any music. Bluegrass. Alternative. Classical. She knew it all. Along the way, she went to a Rolf Geiger concert. She was bowled over. The looks. The charm. The attitude. The playfully disrespectful way he could pirouette from Brahms to U2 then back again.

She wondered what made him tick, and decided she would find out and get paid for it at the same time. That meant an interview. It took two months, but she finally wrangled one.

The interview happened in New York. She had gone to talk to Geiger after a concert at Carnegie Hall. She had been working on a freelance article about him and was trying hard to peddle it to The Atlantic, a periodical which had not treated him kindly.

Rolf wasn’t giving interviews in those days. He was living alone and carrying on a full calendar of recitals. He was also trying to escape the long shadow of his mentor, Rabinowitz.

At the time, Rolf was weary of being skewered in the press. Yet he liked the way Diana looked. So he granted an interview to her, partially to see what she would do with it, partially to have someone to speak to after a recital, and partially because he thought she was as sexy as any women he had ever met.

Rolf found her easy to talk to. Diana could converse readily on a wide range of subjects, ranging from the New York Yankees to the art of Edward Hopper to the music of Hank Williams Sr. In the interview, she allowed him to open up and explain himself. Rolf liked her, right from the start. He quickly realized that they were both isolated loners.

Diana was one of the first people he had ever met who also knew that Don’t Worry, Baby was actually written for the Ronettes as a follow-up to Be My Baby, an obscure bit of sugar-fix cultural trivia that escaped most musicologists.

“Very few people know that,” he commented during their first chat.

“I know a lot about popular culture,” she said. “Classics blending with pop. That’s why I’m the perfect person to profile you. You’re also fascinated with both,”

“But I know more than you do,” he said. She laughed.

“You might think so,” she said. “And I might even let you think so.”

“Who was the first to sing Are You Lonesome Tonight? before a live audience?” he asked.

“Al Jolson,” she answered correctly. “In 1928.”

“Very good,” he allowed. “Now name the most recent two-sided hit by Elvis Presley and give me the year.”

“Flaming Star and Wooden Heart. Nineteen sixty-one.”

“Impressive. Are you as good on the classics?” he asked.

“Try me,” she teased.

“How did Chopin die?”

“Slowly. Of tuberculosis.”

“Very good. What was the relationship between Chopin and the French sculptor, Auguste Clésinger?”

“There were two,” Diana answered. “Clésinger was the son-in-law of George Sand, with whom Chopin had an affair. He also molded Chopin’s death mask in Paris in 1850.” Rolf blinked.

“Wow! What nineteenth-century pianist did George Bernard Shaw meet and pronounce, ‘Nobly beautiful and poetic’?” he asked next.

“Clara Schumann, wife of the composer, Robert Schumann,” Diana answered, “and herself a better technician at the keyboard than her frequently clumsy husband.” She smiled. Rolf laughed.

“Is there anything you don’t know?” he asked.

“Sure,” Diana said. “Plenty. And I won’t tell you any of it.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to.”

She knew a lot of odd stuff and, as a journalist, knew how to pull it together. He liked that, too. So he let her hang around for a few longer interviews, discussing at some length some of the dichotomies of his life, how he wished to be taken seriously as a musician, knew he had a great gift, but couldn’t resist having fun at the same time. He let her watch him practice. When her article was finished, he asked her to join him for dinner sometime when he was in New York.

She declined. He kept calling. She continued to decline. He called some more.

He reasoned that somewhere a beautiful woman like Diana must already have an appreciative boyfriend. So he gave up.

The Atlantic printed it prominently, emblazoning a picture of Geiger on the cover of the magazine. The photo was a hot, sexy shot from a 2004 recital in Stockholm. In it, Geiger, his flowing dark blond hair illuminated like a halo by friendly backlighting, intently played Liszt at a baby grand while wearing blue jeans, a pink formal jacket, and a black velvet bow tie.

He was as gorgeous as a hot fudge sundae. Within the magazine, under a similar photo, Geiger was quoted as saying, “I have fun dressing goofy and playing loud music.”

He also named Little Deuce Coupe as one of his favorite pieces of music, right up there with Die Meistersinger. The title on the article, which was also on the cover of the magazine, was The Prodigy Grows Up. Or Tries To, Real Hard. Honest!

“The title was the editor’s title, not mine,” Diana explained when Rolf called her to congratulate her on the placement of the work. “I wanted to just call it, Fingers.”

“I couldn’t care less about the title,” he said. “I called to ask you to dinner again” A slight change of tone, and,

“You don’t give up, do you? Not ever?”

“Not if I want something. Tell me your favorite restaurant.”

“It’s called Le Rossignol,” she answered. It was a test.

“The one in Boston or the one in Washington?” he asked. “I don’t know one in New York by that name.”

“The one in Boston.”

“Say ‘yes’ for Friday night,” he said. “I’ll do the rest.”

“Okay,” she said after long thought. “All right. But we’re in New York, not Boston, so you can choose any restaurant.”

“I already have,” he said.

Friday night arrived. Geiger arrived with a car, a driver and two dozen roses. The car took them to La Guardia. A private plane took them to Boston. Another car took them to Le Rossignol on Newbury Street. The restaurant recognized him and gave them their best table.

“You certainly know,” she said, “how to impress a woman on the first date.”

“I know,” he said.

“I know you know,” she answered.

The article led to other assignments. The next time they had dinner together, she slept over at his place. Three months later, she had moved in with him. Then came his big tour of 2005. He made a fortune and was reviled by the critics.

Now they shared a gracious eight-million-dollar town house in Manhattan. Meanwhile he had stopped performing and had no idea in which direction to take his life. He only knew that he had found a special woman and eventually, with her, he would find that direction again. He felt, and she felt, that anything they had could be taken away from them. But as long as they had each other, they could survive or even recover. They were a rare couple in love without qualification.

At this point in their lives, as Geiger got used to the idea that he would soon return to a tour of the world’s most prestigious concert halls, it was difficult for either him or Diana to image that there could be any force in nature—known or unknown—that could drive a wedge between them. But then again, the unknown, the forces that lurk just outside day-to-day reality, always constitute a special terror.

Eleven

The Monday following his dinner with Rolf, Brian Greenstone was in his office early, busy with a calendar and a globe.

His client’s tour would be anchored by mega-dates, he had decided. New York, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, London, Tokyo. Paris. Munich. Rome. He tentatively prepared a twenty-four week calendar which would allow Geiger to plan an average of two dates a week, using these cities as the focal points of the tour. Greenstone e-mailed the top classical promoters in each city, suggesting the possibility of a concert date by Rolf Geiger.

Within minutes, his e-mail account was cluttered with incoming responses. The promoters in each city were adamant on wanting Geiger for the dates proposed. Concert halls or stadia could be arranged easily. The promoters requested information on how to contract for the dates and what deposit would be necessary. The World tour had its first shape and agenda.

Geiger stopped by Greenstone’s office in the early afternoon. Greenstone’s inner office was paneled by dark wood and deep leather chairs with theatrical, concert, and classic-film posters, all of them flamboyantly autographed by one of Greenstone’s clients. Included was one by Rabinowitz from when he played Covent Garden, and one by Geiger when he had played Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center.

“So, we’re off to a good start?” Geiger asked.

“Couldn’t be better,” Greenstone said.

“There are a few other details,” Geiger explained. “I want these dates to be accessible to everyone. I want to make sure that whenever possible the cheapest tickets are maybe only fifteen dollars. The balance can be made up by the wealthy people who’ll pay more to sit up close.”

Greenstone rolled his eyes in would-be annoyance. Such requests were rare from most clients, but they were de rigueur from Geiger, who liked to be ‘accessible’ to all his fans, even if it kept his concert grosses lower than they might have been. If he ever became too rich, Geiger maintained, he would only have to spend undue amounts of time giving the money away. It was also not unusual at a Geiger recital for a pair of cheap rows to be positioned right through prime real estate at the center of the orchestra, rather than in—as he referred to it—the ‘nosebleed section’ way up in the rafters. At other times, the cheap seats were sprinkled randomly through the house.

“The usual quixotic pseudo-democratic Rolf Geiger price scale,” Greenstone chided good-naturedly. “I’d already thought of this idiocy of yours, so don’t even mention it.”

“You get ten percent of the money I make as well as the money I don’t make,” Geiger answered. “That’s fair, isn’t it?”

“Bloody populist,” muttered Greenstone. “For the matrons who have to sit with unwashed young people, you are both admired in principle and rebuked in practice. Accountants and business people consider you a Bolshevik. We would have you executed if we weren’t getting fat on your concerts, recordings and deplorable T-shirts. We don’t know whether to love you or hate you.”

“Try both.”

“I do. Every day.”

“Fine with me,” said Geiger, keeping the banter going.

Claire, Greenstone’s new assistant, entered the office bearing a just-received fax. Claire was young and pretty. She had shoulder-length dark hair and jewel blue eyes. She wore a simple blouse and a red skirt several inches above the knee. Like most young women who encountered Geiger, she could barely take her eyes off him.

“Have you met Rolf Geiger?” Greenstone asked her. Then quickly seeing the way she was looking at the pianist, Greenstone answered his own question. “No, apparently you haven’t, but you would certainly like to.”

“Hello,” Rolf said to her, rising and accepting her hand in greeting.

“Hi,” she answered, mildly embarrassed by Greenstone’s introduction. She handed the fax to Greenstone.

“Claire just graduated from Smith this past June. She’ll be working here as my assistant until she engineers a revolution, has me decapitated, and takes over the place later this month.”

She laughed.

“It will take me longer than a month,” she said, playing along.

“Well, please keep me as a client,” Geiger said to her. “And I don’t think you should shoot Brian after you seize control. Deportation would be more appropriate. He’s here illegally, you know. Came here to work a black market in body parts but became an agent, instead.”

“For starters, I’m just trying to learn the business,” Claire said. Greenstone fumbled with a pair of reading spectacles for a moment.

“Yes. Right. These Smith girls are such slow learners,” he said without intonation. He arched his eyebrows with the irony of the remark and pushed his eyeglasses into place.

“What did you study at Smith?” Geiger asked, turning back to Claire and making small talk as Greenstone read.

“Psychology,” she said. “Primarily the psychology of early adults and disturbed adolescents. Nasty nutty little brats, in other words.” Geiger nodded.

“You’re in the right place. With musicians and booking agents, you’ll do very well.”

She smiled again. She reminded Geiger of a younger version of Diana. Greenstone’s eyes remained on the fax before him, but spoke, anyway.

“Maybe there should be a Rolf Geiger action figure also. So you could sit on shelves like a Transformer,” Greenstone teased absently. Then he removed his glasses. Greenstone hefted the fax in his hand. “The drumbeats are carried quickly across Manhattan,” Greenstone said. “Look at this.”

He handed the fax to Geiger. Already the news of a new concert tour had escaped the offices of the few promoters who had been informed just that morning. Geiger read the message. A music video network was already offering him a weekend of guest appearances.

“Interesting,” said Geiger.

“Yes. It could be,” Greenstone said. “A touch of missionary work, bringing an awareness of Beethoven and Mozart to the proles.”

“Mr. Greenstone?” Claire asked. “You wanted me to remind you about the writer who called.” The agent frowned for a second, not remembering. “The one who wanted to speak to Mr. Geiger?” she continued. “You said we’d inquire and call him back.”

“Oh. Yes. Right.” Greenstone said. Claire stood by and waited. The agent turned back to his client. “An English journalist called yesterday from London. Said he was going to be in New York and wanted to interview you.”

“Magazine? Newspaper? Internet?” Geiger asked.

Greenstone glanced to his assistant again.

“Claire? What was the bugger’s name?”

“Phillip Langlois. He says he’s writing a biography of Isador Rabinowitz,” she said. “He wanted to interview you for the book.” Geiger turned to Greenstone.

“Ever heard of him?”

“Oh, right. Yes, I checked on him. He’s a solid biographer, actually. Not your usual British tabloid sleaze. Done respectable newspaper work in the U.K.”

“How come I’ve never heard of him?”

“He hasn’t been published in the U.S. yet,” Greenstone said. “His book has a contract in the U.K., but none here. Your call on whether you wish to be helpful or not.” Geiger blew out a breath.

“I don’t feel like talking to anyone right now.” Greenstone turned mischievously to Claire.

“Phone Mr. Langlois collect in London and tell him that Maestro Geiger cordially asked him to blow it out his butt.” Claire blushed slightly. “Actually,” Greenstone amended, “be slightly more polite. Tell him Mr. Geiger is unavailable for interviews right now as he is in the planning stages of a major new series of recitals. But we might be able to arrange some time if Mr. Langlois happens to be in New York.” Greenstone looked to Geiger for approval. Rolf nodded.

“Who knows?” Greenstone asked. “Langlois writes for the Telegraph in London. It’s a fascist rag, as you may know, but it has readers who buy books, recordings and concert tickets. So you might want to do him a favor down the road.”

“Okay,” said Geiger.

“Plus he might nail a good publishing contract here and end up my client someday. So again, who knows?” He looked to Claire. “So we stroke him. Can you follow up on that?”

Claire nodded and left the room. Greenstone intently watched her go.

“Lord above,” he said after the door was closed. “Did you see those legs? If I weren’t married and paying for two ex-wives already…and if I were only forty-five again…” His voice trailed off. “Oh, Rolf, my lad,” he concluded. “If I were only you.”

Twelve

Geiger left Greenstone’s office shortly after three. He went on his way, taking a detour down Fifth Avenue to browse through some of the stores and buy a pair of new CD’s and a new biography of Picasso. On impulse, he stopped in Tiffany and Company and fancied a small golden penguin on a gold chain. The penguin had a slight smile and a diamond for an eye. It was just under two thousand dollars.

The saleswoman recognized him after a few moments and addressed him as “Mr. Geiger,” though she made no small talk about music or concerts. Instead, she explained that part of the proceeds from these particular items went toward a world wildlife preservation fund.

Geiger liked the pendant and also liked buying presents for Diana. He bought it, took it home, and placed it on the pillow on her side of the bed. Fun surprises made him happy.

He spent the final part of the afternoon browsing through some music at his piano. There was also a fresh stack of fan mail waiting in his downstairs library and half a dozen new CD’s sent over by courier from the offices of his recording label.

Diana arrived home after seven and immediately found the small blue box with a white ribbon on her pillow. She opened her gift immediately and loved it, putting it on right away.

Mrs. Jamison stayed late enough to prepare dinner. Toward eight, Mrs. Jamison went home and Diana and Rolf spent a quiet evening undisturbed.

A few hours after midnight, after falling fitfully to sleep, Rolf Geiger tumbled in a dream to one of the most unsettling points in his life. His father, Frank Geiger had died not long after his wife, Dorothy. Rolf had been in New York at the time. One of Frank’s brothers phoned collect.

“Your pa’s been shot dead, Rolf,” the uncle said. “I think a colored guy done it, but nobody knows.” The venue was a bar in Wheeling. The event surprised no one.

Silence from Rolf. He had long since stopped searching for love or acceptance from a father who had none to impart.

“Ain’t you got nothing to say, Rolf?” the uncle asked.

“No. I don’t have anything to say.”

“Your pa gets whacked in a bar by a nigger? Ain’t you at least sorry?”

There was a horrible silence from Rolf. Then a much deeper sorrow followed when he realized there was such a void within him. He turned in his bed. He had no love for a man who had never had any love for him, and it would forever haunt him.

“There’s a funeral service we got scheduled,” the uncle began slowly. “This next Saturday.”

“I have a performance in Boston.”

“See, the thing is, Rolf. Your dad’s gonna be buried in a potter’s field if somebody don’t do something. The libtards in Washington closed down the mines and your pa died with eight dollars in his pocket.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Now, listen. Your pa’s at a dago funeral home in Wheeling, but they won’t release no corpse until…”

“Give me the phone number,” Rolf said. “I hear you. I’ll take care of it.” Rolf paid for the funeral, but didn’t attend. He never heard from any family member again. Except in dreams. In dreams he attended the funeral over and over. And his father would emerge from blackness to berate him.

Tonight, it was a double funeral—a deathly double feature!—because Rolf stood again at the edge of Rabinowitz’s grave.

Or was it Frank Geiger’s grave? Or were they in the same grave?

Images merged and meshed. He shook himself in his sleep, but the dream images were so real. He gazed down. The bitter wind off Morningside Heights tore into him again, colder and icier than ever before. Icy as his childhood bedroom with the flapping, useless, depressing plastic on the window. The cold cut through his flesh and knifed into his soul.

It wasn’t day or night, but all around him was a cold gray, gray as the icy West Virginia mornings that he hated as a boy.

West Virginia on Morningside Heights.

He could hear the music in the background. He could hear Rabinowitz playing. Grand, sweeping music. Beethoven. A melody standing out in bold relief. A wonderful unique sonority.

In the background, his father was shouting in a drunken profane rage.

As Geiger stared at the marker above Rabinowitz’s tomb the marker seemed to quiver. Then it broke away. The pine coffin rose to the surface of the earth, broke open with a sickening, threatening creak. Frank Geiger shut up and Isador Rabinowitz stepped angrily from his tomb.

Rolf cried out. He trembled.

“Why are you back?” Rolf asked.

“I’m not dead,” Rabinowitz insisted.

“You are dead!”

“Not for you! Never for you!”

Rolf turned away. He closed his eyes so tightly that they hurt. He could hear his own voice cry out. And he could hear music in the background. Beautiful melodies turning hellish.

The piano. The master’s hands upon the keyboard. He would recognize that legato, that cantabile anywhere.

Geiger opened his eyes again.

Blackness. He was in the blackness of his bedroom.

He closed his eyes, trying to settle comfortably, but he returned to the same dream, unable to escape it.

Rolf was in a strange, uncharted territory. It was between 3 and 4 A.M., and he tossed incessantly midway between wakefulness and sleep. The dream pursued him like a demon.

He saw Rabinowitz standing before him.

Rabinowitz laughing.

Rabinowitz suddenly behind him with his hands on the young man’s shoulders, powerful hands moving toward Rolf’s neck.

The hands of an artist. The hands of a strangler.

Which was it?

Something in Geiger’s head flashed. An ominous bright whiteness. Then it dissolved and Rabinowitz appeared before him in a new vision. This time, the old master was sitting placidly in the conservatory at Julliard, sipping tea from a green-and-white porcelain cup, the emerald ring glistening.

“Which am I?” Rabinowitz asked rhetorically. “Artist or strangler?”

He sipped more tea. The strong Russian jasmine tea. Geiger remembered the powerful aroma from many afternoon lessons. Tea so pungent you could run a car on it.

“Why both of course,” Rabinowitz answered. “I’m a musician and a murderer.”

“No,” Geiger called out in his sleep.

“Yes,” Rabinowitz answered. “And you will be too.”

Fitfully, Geiger rolled over in his bed. He tossed. The Manhattan night outside his home was quiet. The last thing Rolf Geiger had seen when he had looked out the window was stars, plus a yellow-white moon hanging in surrealistic splendor in the sky above New York.

A big, fat wafer in the sky. Communion for eight million. This is the Body, this is the blood. This is your curse, Rolf.

Brother Matthew was standing in front of him again, blood running out of his nose, mystification and incredulity upon his face. “Why did you do that?” Matthew demanded.

“Do what? Hit you?”

“No. Become a musician?”

Geiger bolted upright in his bed, coming awake with a tremor in the present day. His brow was wet. All around him, the darkness of the familiar room was as comfort. The wonderful thick blackness, the consoling nothingness of the night.

So why couldn’t he sleep? He was safe in his home, wasn’t he? Diana was near him. But a lover and a home were physical protections within the tangible world. It occurred to him now that what was approaching him was emanating from another plane of reality. The one inside his head. Or an unfathomable one that could travel through walls, doors, or even flesh.

It was a thought. A notion. A feeling. A vision.

A horrible one was coming together in his subconscious mind, and he didn’t like it.

Nightmare stuff. The vision of Rabinowitz as an old man much as he’d looked in the final days of his life. But in the vision, Rabinowitz was as spry as a fifteen-year-old. And he was dancing on his own grave.

Dancing!

Lord! Rolf thought to himself. He was awake but the nightmare in his head would not cut off. He turned again, lay back and forced the pillow against his face. He could almost hear himself thinking. “Oh, God…help me…………Someone. Help me!”

Geiger experienced the sensation of rapidly tumbling and he knew he was drifting off into the scarier regions of sleep. There was a musical leitmotif. There were strains of Wagner. Götterdämmerung. Acid-spirited old Rabinowitz’s valentine to a world that he hated.

Then Geiger’s eyes flashed open. It was unmistakable! Music. Someone was downstairs in his library, playing his piano! Playing brilliantly.

“What the…?”

He looked around the dark room and realized that he was not dreaming! Not anymore.

He was no longer in the bizarre nightmare that had placed him at the enchanted graveside of Rabinowitz. He was in his home. And he did—or thought he did—hear music.

It was coming from downstairs, from his Steinway. Rabinowitz, the dead Rabinowitz, was playing. Rolf sat upright in his bed. He placed a hand on Diana next to him. She was an anchor of love in a harsh reality. She was there, breathing evenly. But the tinkling of the piano was still emanating from downstairs. He held his eyes shut, trying to escape.

It was Chopin. Other than Rubinstein, no one ever played Chopin like Rabinowitz. The touch on the keys was as distinctive as a fingerprint.

“What am I hearing?” Geiger whispered to himself. “It can’t be? No, it can’t be?”

He thought he heard a voice whisper from nearby.

“Yes, it is!”

Rolf’s eyes popped fully open again, a jarring full reentry into the real world, the dream still in his mind, that insane graveside image dancing through his head.

“Isador Rabinowitz,” Rolf said aloud. The words formed on Geiger’s lips and escaped in a soft whisper, a password at the hour of the wolf.

“Yes, it is…!”

In the darkness, someone had twice whispered to him.

“He had even recognized the voice.” As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, no one was there. Or, no one he could see.

Yet that voice had come to him so clearly. Those words had summoned him so boldly from the realm of bad dreams, that he could have sworn the voice had been real. In all its insanity, he was certain that someone had spoken something.

“Diana?” he whispered.

She didn’t answer.

“Anyone?” he asked, coming up on his elbows in bed. “Who’s here?”

Abruptly, the music downstairs ceased in mid-phrase. Like hands frozen at a keyboard. Or lifted suddenly in distraction.

Or dropped lifelessly to the player’s side.

Distantly, almost subliminally, Geiger thought he heard laughter.

But Diana was silent, other than an even heavy breathing. She was soundly asleep.

“Anyone?” he asked a second time.

Another whisper. Inside his head or within the bedroom?

“I’m here, Rolf! I’m back!”

He broke into a violent sweat. But he was too frightened even to reach for the bedside lamp. For several seconds he waited, scanning the darkness of his own bedroom.

Waiting. Waiting. For what?

Geiger glanced again at his clock radio. It was 3:36 A.M. The city was still. And through this quirk in the night, oozing through some window left a quarter inch ajar, the distant unseen melodies of a lonely, insomniac musician were seeping into his home.

That, and some attendant conversation, perhaps from people on the street, perhaps just passing by, and most likely unrelated to the solitary distant music.

Rolf Geiger’s fear dissolved. Then it surged back, for the music downstairs started again. This time, it was clear that the piano music emanated from his own home, his own library.

What was it? A radio that he had left on? A tape? A CD? There had to be an explanation.

As he picked up the unmistakable cadences of the music thoughts flew at him in milliseconds. On, no! Impossible, he said to himself. He recognized the finger work.

“What is this?” he demanded.

Again Chopin. Played by Rabinowitz. Chopin’s master. Rolf heard it clearly.

He rose from bed. He walked to the doorway of his bedroom. The hall beyond was dim. The only illumination was from the night-light from a hallway bathroom.

“Rabinowitz?” he asked softly. No answer. But downstairs the unseen hands continued to play the Steinway. He stepped into the hallway.

“Rabinowitz!” he asked aloud. Again, no answer.

Geiger moved to the top of the steps. He placed his hand on the banister and summoned his courage. He walked slowly downstairs. His eyes, as he looked ahead, reconnoitered his intended path to the closed door of his library. He was shocked and increasingly fearful when he saw light from underneath the doorframe.

“Had a friend entered his home to play music? As a prank? At this insane hour? Who?”

Still no rational explanation presented itself.

He reached the bottom of the stairs. He went quietly to the door to the library. The playing continued. Softer now. Almost as if it were receding as he approached.

He stood at the door. His heart continued to kick within him. The touch on the keyboard was undeniably, unmistakably, unarguably that of Rabinowitz. That, or the greatest imposter Geiger had ever heard.

Unless, of course, someone had teed up a recording. But who would do that?

He slowly began to turn the doorknob. For a moment, it resisted, almost as if there were a grip on the other side.

Chopin continued. Then, with a loud click, the latch gave. The door opened to the library.

Instantaneously the music stopped. As if an invisible conductor had arrested his baton.

Geiger pushed the door and it opened. The room lights, which only a moment ago had appeared to be on, were off. The room was pitch-black.

Rolf reached to the light switch, and before anything could spring forth from the darkness, his hand flicked it on. A line of track lighting across the ceiling brought sudden artificial daylight to the library.

The piano stood mute and alone. Geiger stared. The keyboard was closed.

Nothing moved in the room. All the furniture was in place. But he thought he heard a male voice whisper.

“Yes, Rolf. Thank you.”

There was no one he could see. He stepped farther into his library.

“Thank you for what?” Geiger asked aloud. “Is something here or not? Where was the music coming from?”

Distant laughter. Like an old man. A rasping, mocking voice. He didn’t have to hear any further answer. His gaze examined the piano.

“Was someone here or not?” Geiger asked.

Silence answered. Cold, dead silence. Then,

“Thank you for coming.” It wasn’t a voice this time, it was a thought, a notion that seemed to take shape inside his head.

“Coming where?” he asked. “Here?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

No answer. Not the slightest. No voice. No Chopin. No thought from outer space slipping into his head.

Nothing. He waited. Still nothing.

“To pay respect to your mentor.”

The words formed in his head, same as the last ones had. A message from somewhere? Or Geiger’s own psyche conducting a dialogue within him. Rolf wasn’t certain.

He scanned the room. Something creaked behind him. Something made a noise. Like a foot on a floorboard. But he couldn’t see anyone.

Rolf drew a deep breath and steadied himself. This was his home, after all, he reminded himself. And though it was late at night, the thoughts he was entertaining were crazy.

Rabinowitz was dead. Rolf had personally helped carry the man’s coffin and seen the coffin go into the earth.

“Rest in peace, you old bastard,” he told his mentor. “You can scream all you want, just stay dead.”

Geiger managed a slight smile. He was starting to recognize the folly of his own thoughts. As he walked to the piano and examined it, he saw no indication that anyone had touched it since he had finished with it a few hours earlier.

“Ghosts do not play pianos,” he said aloud.

Then a little surge of fear went through him.

“Ghosts?” Why was he even thinking in that direction? “Ghosts?”

“Yes!”

Rarely before in his life had he even thought much about their existence. Why now?

From somewhere in his subconscious, a distant recollection formed and came to him. When studying at Julliard, he had found in the music library, early recordings of a nineteenth-century French pianist named Raoul Pugno.

Pugno, too, had been a prodigy, making his debut in 1858 at the age of six and winning his first international competitions in Paris at fourteen. Like Geiger, Pugno had virtually no formal training until his teen years. Later he became a teacher, a composer, and a recitalist of chamber music. He had made many appearances with a Belgian named Eugène Ysaÿe.

Both Pugno and Ysaÿe were huge, heavy men, exceptional in size and talent. “The two colossi on the stage together almost made it buckle,” observed one writer from the New York Times in December of 1878.

In Paris in 1903, Pugno had been asked to come to the studio of La Grande Compagnie de Gramophone to attempt to make recordings. Pugno had accepted the invitation, spending the next several weeks in the studio at an unexceptional old upright. He performed a variety of works and ultimately made eighteen highly noteworthy recordings. All were well preserved.

Thirteen years afterward, Pugno died in Moscow. But the recordings remained in Paris. Later they were transferred to modern tapes and discs with remarkable clarity. In the 1940’s, the Julliard School acquired a set.

At age twenty, Rolf Geiger spent all of his free time one week listening over and over to the recordings of the long-dead Raoul Pugno. The latter’s touch had been surprisingly light and agile, particularly for a legendarily ursine man. But what was most remarkable to Geiger was that he was listening to Pugno at all.

As Rolf sat in a library lounge chair with headphones across his shaggy blonde head, he heard the brilliant finger work and distinctive technique of a man who had died seventy-three years earlier. Even more eerie, Geiger was listening to a man who had been born during the Second Republic in France and the presidency of Millard Fillmore in the United States.

Geiger at the time had entertained an uneasy feeling listening to the recordings, a feeling made even more so since apparently—according to the tape’s history at Julliard—no previous student had listened to them in thirty years: He was listening to a ghost.

Or at least, that was his feeling.

He had the sense of listening not to just a recording, but to an actual ghost play the piano. The feeling within him was that somehow by teeing up these old tapes on a recording system, he had raised a human spirit to make music.

When he closed his eyes one night, bringing his entire being and consciousness into a parochial world beneath those headphones, he held before him a mental image of the long-deceased Pugno playing—a heavy, bearded, bespectacled man in a primitive Paris studio transferring elements of his soul into an old upright.

The image stayed with him with such clarity that Geiger almost had trouble opening his eyes. There was something almost supernatural about the long-deceased Pugno and his music.

Geiger had managed to open his eyes and return to the present day.

Now, a little less than a decade later, Geiger found himself listening to this strange piano music that either was or wasn’t emanating from the Steinway in his own home. And Geiger had the same creepy reaction.

He was again listening to a ghost. But this time, without electronic assistance.

It all seemed so logical that it was taking a huge effort to pull himself away from it. Or wasn’t it logical at all? Was he actually just being swept away with emotion and musicality?

He wondered. He agonized.

Rolf was thinking in that direction, the direction of ghosts and raised spirits, he told himself, because of the trauma of having buried old Rabinowitz, the man who, for better or worse, had been such a focal point of his life. Wasn’t it rational for an intelligent man to belabor the ramifications of such a man’s passing?

He drew another breath and calmed himself. He was buried in thought and reflection about Pugno and Rabinowitz, life and death.

And spiritual survival. Absently, he thought back to Brother Matthew at St. Agnes’ School in West Virginia more than two decades earlier. Matthew had loved to hold long discourses on fate and existence of the spirit. Like the tapes of Pugno, Geiger wished he could replay some of those discussions now.

Geiger’s thoughts drifted back to the present.

He ran his hand over the closed keyboard of his Steinway. He opened the panel that covered the keyboard. He gently traced his fingers across the smooth ivory and ebony surface of the keys. The touch of the keyboard comforted him.

This room was empty, Rolf finally concluded. There had been no music. Rather, all he had heard had been an extension of his bad dream. This walk downstairs had not been much different than the imagined nocturnal stroll he had taken a few nights earlier.

Geiger sat down at the piano bench. He was comfortable there too.

His gaze settled upon the keys. He had the impulse to play. Maybe just a few warm-up exercises to get the Chopin out of his head.

He tried to decide. What would he play? His concentration deepened and he nearly jumped out of his skin when he felt a hand settle on his shoulder.

“Rolf?” His heart kicked and his entire body convulsed in fear. Geiger screamed. His head shot to the right and there was a human form there! It took a second for the full impact to register. A long second.

“Rolf, honey, are you all right?”

He exhaled in relief, looking up at Diana, who had arrived so quietly next to him.

“Sorry,” she said. “Did I startle you?”

“Yes. I didn’t expect you.” She let her hand drift to his shoulders.

“I saw you get up. I was worried. Can’t sleep?” She hugged him.

“A little restless,” he answered.

“Want to play? It won’t bother me. It’s like a lullaby. I could fall asleep listening to you.”

He smiled.

“You’re wonderful,” he said.

“You sure nothing’s bothering you?” He smiled again.

“Did you hear any music already?” he asked.

“Music?”

“The piano,” he said.

“No,” she answered, a little mystified. “Were you playing?”

“No.”

“Then, Tiger, how could I have…?” He shook his head.

“I was having a dream,” he explained. “A bad one. When I came out of it, I thought I heard piano music coming from somewhere.”

“We’re alone in this house,” she teased. “So, your imagination is working overtime.”

“I know,” he said. He pulled her to the bench. “What do you want to hear?”

“Brahms. Lullaby,” she said.

He played a minor theme from the lullaby. A mournful one. He played it with sadness and reflection.

“Sometimes,” he said to her, “I feel overwhelmed by things. By music. By life. By death. I think you’re my lifeboat, my safety valve, my access to sanity.” She smiled and returned his hug. “If I pray about anything in this world, it’s that you’ll always be with me,” he said.

Gently, he played for her. She kissed him and went back upstairs. Two minutes later, he exhaled deeply. Then he joined her upstairs, and slept perfectly through the remainder of the night.

Thirteen

Five days later, Brian Greenstone called a press conference in a private room at Le Champlain Restaurant near Lincoln Center. Following a buffet luncheon, with Rolf Geiger present, he made the official announcement of Geiger’s World Tour. Two dozen reporters were present from media that covered classical music.

“The schedule of the tour is evolving quickly,” said Greenstone, heightening his accent to give the proceedings as much class as possible. “Several of the dates remain to be finalized but the basic structure of the tour is set.”

Claire handed out the two-page press release. The tour closely resembled Greenstone’s original proposal, both in length and ambition.

The inescapable William Baumann of the New York Times asked the first question.

“What has suddenly changed?” he asked, crusty as ever. “For a couple of years, Rolf Geiger barely performed in public. Now Mr. Geiger wants a live audience of half the world.”

Greenstone and Geiger both hesitated before picking up Baumann’s live grenade. In the corner of Geiger’s line of view, Diana made an angry expression and turned away from Baumann, whom she found insufferable.

“I’m suddenly in a good mood, thank you, William,” Geiger said, seeking to keep the discussion upbeat. “And I’d like the entire world, not just half of it.”

“Any reason, Rolf?” Baumann pressed. “Why a tour of this size and why now?”

“Why not?”

“Mr. Geiger has suddenly felt himself to be in an immeasurably creative and productive frame of mind,” Greenstone said. “He wishes to bring his music before the public as soon as possible. Hence, a grand tour starting in the early fall.”

“Isn’t that rushing things?” Baumann asked. “Often tours like this take years to arrange. Orchestras need to be contracted, halls booked, conductors signed.”

“Bill, generally you’re right,” Greenstone answered. “But because of the unique nature of Rolf Geiger’s abilities, many of the top people and halls wish to make themselves available when they otherwise might not.”

Baumann gave an arched eyebrow and turned his attention to a plate of shrimp Dijonaise.

Greenstone continued, saying that dates in the major cities had already been set. The concert series would begin in New York and then travel to Europe. South America would be next, then Asia. The concluding concert might be in Egypt in March, billed as a “Concert for World Peace,” it would be played in the Valley of the Kings with the pyramids as the backdrop.

“The Egyptian government has been contacted and is supportive and encouraging,” Greenstone said. “We are hoping for the largest live audience ever to witness any music event. Perhaps one million people. But again, this part has not yet been arranged.”

“What else will you play?” a reporter asked Geiger.

“I’ll be playing a heavy concentration of Beethoven. But the tour will focus on music suitable for the particular venues. Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky in Russia for example. Mozart in Vienna. And so on.”

“Will you play Chopin?” someone asked.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Wouldn’t that beg a comparison with Isador Rabinowitz?”

“Probably,” said Geiger. He felt compelled to add, “If you want to make a comparison, go ahead. Recitalists are compared all the time. It’s part of the music world.”

He exchanged a look with Diana.

“Mr. Geiger, are you certain you won’t relent somewhere along the line and sprinkle some pop into the repertoire?” another writer asked. “What if audiences demand it?”

“These will be dignified, ambitious, strictly classical concerts,” Geiger answered. “No one should attend expecting otherwise. I want to demonstrate what I can do as a classicist. The repertoire will be limited. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun: Beethoven, for example, used his own compositions merely as starting points for his own recitals, then improvised on his own work. Hopefully, I can also draw large audiences.”

Julie Byers of Downbeat said,

“This concert tour has already had the opportunity to draw some criticism.”

Geiger knew what was coming.

“The criticisms are the same ones that you’ve heard for many years: You’ve bastardized ‘great music’ in the past. Now you’re turning around and deciding to play in a manner that you’ve rejected in the past. Some say this whole tour is an exercise in greed. You stand to make about twenty million dollars.”

“Really?” Geiger said, holding a straight face and pretending to be alarmed. He turned to his agent. “I thought it was fifty million, Brian. I’ve been misled. I want out!”

There was some laughter.

“But how can you be taken as a serious musician under those circumstances of formerly playing with such a ‘pop showbiz’ atmosphere,” she asked. “And doesn’t a tour like this underscore all those criticisms as well as add some credibility to them?”

“Julie,” Geiger asked with a sigh, “I never ‘rejected’ the more traditional approaches to music. I merely didn’t employ them. Maybe I didn’t feel I was ready yet. Nor I am.”

“How much does the death of Isador Rabinowitz have anything to do with the timing of this,” Baumann asked.

“It’s coincidental,” Greenstone answered.

“Come on,” Baumann pressed.

“Serge Prokofiev died on the same day in 1953 that Rabinowitz signed his first contract with RCA Victor. Does anyone look for cause and effect in that?”

The laughter around the room defused the point.

“Mr. Geiger enjoys unparalleled popularity worldwide,” Greenstone said, continuing while he had the momentum. “A tour like this does not come along often. We’re trying to use venues that will allow millions of people to attend.” Still the piranhas swarmed.

“Speaking of millions, Brian,” asked Maxine Walton of the New York Observer. “How much is this tour really worth to your client? Twenty million? Fifty million?”

Greenstone started to deflect the subject again. But Geiger cut him off.

“It’s okay. I need to address this,” Rolf said. Geiger turned the full warmth of his charm upon his questioner.

“First, no one criticizes performers like The Rolling Stones or Springsteen when they do world tours with extravagant grosses. There seems to be something written somewhere that says classical artists have to play to smaller elite houses and shouldn’t seek large audiences. I don’t believe that. The late Pavarotti played to worldwide audiences and no one seemed to object. The great tenors Caruso and John McCormack became wealthy playing to the largest audiences they could find as did many modern recital pianists from Liszt and Paderewski in the last century to Horowitz and Rubinstein in this century. I’m creating a venue that increases interest and awareness in the greatest music of the greatest composers. No one is forced to buy a ticket.”

The writers scribbled and let their handheld tape recorders roll.

“And at least two of the largest concerts will be largely for charity,” said Greenstone. “One of the European dates, probably the one at Wembley, we’ll do for world famine relief. One of the American dates will also be for U.S. charities that Mr. Geiger favors.”

“What about recordings?” someone else asked. Geiger arched his eyebrows.

“Well I would hope there might be some,” he said innocently. He smiled slyly and looked to Greenstone as a small ripple of laughter went around the room.

“Mr. Geiger’s present label, Aurora Records, has indicated that they will issue the entire tour in a boxed set of ten CD’s next autumn. We’re close to a formal agreement. Aurora will make the announcement when we have the contracts.”

“What will top ticket prices be?” someone from the rear of the room asked.

“Maybe as high as four hundred dollars in London and New York, and five hundred in Tokyo,” Greenstone answered.

“Then what about the charge that this is an exercise in greed?” asked Baumann again. “If you figure that the tour will net tens of millions dollars, you could actually cut ticket prices and viewing and recording costs by fifty percent and come away with a fortune. Charities notwithstanding, you’re still freezing out a lot of people.”

“Why don’t you ask Alex Rodriguez why he charges so much to hit a baseball?” Brian Greenstone answered. “Could we change the subject?”

“My primary interest is music, my performance as a musician,” Geiger said. “There will be low-cost rows interspersed with the expensive rows in many halls. The five-hundred-dollar seats underwrite the ten-dollar seats. “

“You’re still making a fortune,” Baumann said.

“It’s legal, you know, Bill,” Geiger finally said. “Why doesn’t your paper cut the costs of a daily print edition to fifty cents to bring truth and knowledge to a larger audience?”

“Not analogous,” Baumann insisted. “We’re trying to stay in business.”

“Rolf, do you think you could have done a tour like this when Isador Rabinowitz was alive?” someone else asked. Geiger looked at the man.

“What are you asking?”

“Well, Rabinowitz was not only your mentor but your harshest critic. Wouldn’t he…?”

“There’s no relation between this tour and the death of Isador Rabinowitz,” Geiger explained. “I’m in my late twenties, and I was weighing the possibility of a tour like this while I was in Italy a few weeks ago. This is the time I want to do this tour.”

“Do you think you’ll be more at ease now that Rabinowitz is gone?” asked Ken Oster of New York Magazine. Oster, too, had found the shrimp tray and reloaded a plate.

Geiger felt a certain impatience building within him. He looked to Diana again. She winked at him, and his nerves eased slightly.

“No more questions involving Rabinowitz,” Greenstone said.

Geiger glanced around. Mercifully, there were no more hands in the air.

“Is that it?” Greenstone asked hopefully. Julie Byers raised her hand again.

“Mr. Geiger, is Isador Rabinowitz still a presence for you?” she asked. Brian Greenstone was angered by the question. Particularly the wording of it.

“Julie, didn’t I just ask…?”

“It’s all right,” Geiger said. He turned back to Julie Byers.

“I’m not sure what you mean by that,” he said. “Presence, how?”

“I don’t mean a physical presence, obviously,” she said. “I mean his memory.”

“I think about him, yes. But I have to play my own music and define myself as an artist.”

“And you’d even dare to challenge him by playing some Chopin?”

The question disquieted Geiger. He gave it some thought, then a thorough answer.

“Rubinstein played Chopin too. Rubinstein redefined Chopin with a more direct approach and then Rabinowitz reinterpreted him once again. I’ll play Chopin my own way, which is probably closer to the way Arthur Rubinstein played him than the way Isador Rabinowitz played him. But it will be my way. No one owns Chopin.”

“But you’ll play mostly Beethoven?” came another question. “Why? Anything specific?”

“What can I say?” Geiger said. “My name is Rolf Geiger. I like the German composers. Ludwig wrote great stuff. I can’t explain much more than that.”

He got the laugh. Geiger surveyed the room. A final question emerged from someone he didn’t know. She was a petite, intense, dark-haired woman. She identified herself as Anita Zwerdling from Rolling Stone.

“Would it be correct to say that this is the landmark tour for you?” she asked. “The tour that your critics have always been asking for?” He thought about it.

“I think you could say that,” he said. “But it’s the grand world tour that I’ve always wanted to do. The greatest music of the greatest composers. Even Chopin.”

“Thank you all for coming,” Greenstone said, ending the press conference. “Catch me now or call my office if you have further questions. My new assistant, Claire, can help you also.”

The press conference was over and, for the first time in his life, Geiger discovered that he was soaked through with sweat from meeting the press. There had been much about the questions—and their implications—that had bothered him.

“Hard to believe, Rolf,” Greenstone said in a whispered aside when they had a moment away from all other ears. “All that you’ve accomplished in music, all the originality and expertise that you’ve brought to your instrument, and still these people come in here to rip you.”

“I’m not serious enough for them,” Geiger said. “Well, maybe this tour will change that.”

Diana joined Rolf. He put an arm around her.

Then, before he could make his exit, Julie Byers, one of the more hostile reporters, stopped him near the door. She had brought two recent CD’s and a felt-tipped pen. Geiger patiently autographed both before leaving with Diana.

The next morning, the spin from the press conference was clear. The headline on the first page of the Arts section in the New York Times would foreshadow other write-ups to follow.

A HIGH OCTAVE SURPRISE! ROLF GEIGER

ANNOUNCES WORLD TOUR IN THE FALL.

HE’LL ASPIRE TO BE ‘FINEST PIANEST EVER.

Fortunately the general public received the news of the tour with a more favorable impression than the press and musicologists. Switchboards were swamped with early demands for tickets.

In Zurich, where a first box office was set up first, all tickets were gone in fifty-two minutes. It was a new record for a classical sellout in that city. Curiously it was a city where Isador Rabinowitz had lived for five months during World War II. He had always hated the place and had never sold out a recital there. Some of the old man’s friends conjectured that upon the Morningside Heights, in the crowded old cemetery where Rabinowitz had been buried, presumably for keeps, the departed maestro was rolling in his grave.

Others disagreed: they said he was probably kicking at the lid of his coffin, he would have been so angry.

Fourteen

Mezzaforte.

Mezzaluna.

Mezzanotte.

Midnight.

Several midnights later, in fact.

Geiger was home, trying to sleep. There had barely been a peaceful night since the funeral. Odd associations kept flitting through his semi-waking mind, darting like malevolent fireflies. Geiger rolled in his bed. His arm went out and he sat up when it couldn’t find Diana. He opened his eyes and saw that she was there after all. He pulled her to him for security.

He wanted so badly to sleep and rest, but nasty contrary thoughts kept bedeviling him.

More rambling associations…

Mezzosopranos.

Mess of sopranos.

Mezzatinto.

Mesopotamia. Mosquito.

Mesquite. Tex Mex.

Mezzanotte.

Yeah. Mezzanotte. Midnight again.

He closed his eyes. Something else out of the past forcibly replayed itself.

It was a decade earlier and he was back in Nice, sitting on the Hotel Negresco’s terrace. It was the moment of his first international piano triumph. The sun provided a pleasurable warmth, as did the sound of a soft, new female voice.

“Bonjour,” she had said. “Ça va?”

He had been startled by her presence. He didn’t know anyone had moved that close to him, so far away had he been in his thoughts.

He turned to see a young woman in her early twenties. He was startled a second time when he had a few moments to appraise her. She was stunningly beautiful, with the smoldering good looks of a Botticelli painting.

“Hello,” he said.

“She smiled. “Vous parlez un peu de français, peut-être? Ou Italien?”

“I’m sorry. No. I don’t speak French,” he answered.

“You are the American pianist,” she said switching to English. “Rolf.”

“That’s me. Yes.” Still awkward.

“May I join you?” He corrected his posture and sat up.

“Of course,” he said. She seated herself and lay her purse on the table. The purse: luxurious black alligator with twenty-four-karat gold buckle that dazzled in the Côte d’Azur sunlight. Hermès. Her purse cost more than Frank Geiger earned in a month, on those odd occasions when he was employed.

She introduced herself. Everything she did, she did beautifully. Her English was smooth as silk.

Her name was Anila, she said. She was an Italian citizen and a fashion model from Rome. She worked on the most expensive runways in both Rome and Paris. But recently, she said, she had also landed a few movie roles in Europe.. When Geiger confessed that he had never heard of any of her films, she smiled indulgently.

“Well, you might not know cinema, but you certainly know your music,” Anila said. “You played magnificently last night.”

“Thank you,” he said.

There was a charming colonial lilt to her English. She was East Indian, she explained, and educated at British schools. She had come to Rome when she was fifteen.

It all sounded incredibly exotic. For lack of anything better to say, he admired her purse, though he’d never heard of Hermès back in West Virginia.

“It was a gift,” she said. “From a friend.”

“Oh.”

“But I don’t see him anymore.” She laughed. “Long gone. Is that the phrase in English? ‘Long gone.’” She laughed again. “And good riddance, too. He was a cheater.”

He nodded and smiled dumbly in return.

“How did you learn to play the piano so well?” she asked picking up the silence.

“I taught myself.”

“You were tremendous,” she said. He had been and he knew it.

“Thank you,” he said again.

Anila looked at him. Rolf looked at her.

Then his naïveté getting the best of him, he finally confessed what was in his head.

“Look,” he stumbled. “You’re very pretty and you’ve been all over the world. I’ve never been out of the United States before. I have no idea what to even talk to you about.”

Anila smiled again.

“Who needs to talk?” she asked. “I want to go to bed with you.”

He was more nervous with her, however, than he had been on the stage the previous evening. That night they became lovers, commencing an intense seven-day fling. The next day, soaring emotionally, Geiger won the piano competition in Nice.

In his town house, his eyes opened again. Anila was gone and Diana was there. The memory of Anila had aroused him. So should he turn on Diana with lust that had been incited by another woman? He felt disgusted with himself. Distantly, he could have sworn he sensed the spirit of Rabinowitz reading his thoughts. He could have sworn he heard the old man laughing.

“Have sex with them both, Rolf. Pretend you’re making love to one while you’re penetrating the other. Infidelity is that easy!”

Rolf refused even to acknowledge that thought.

Several midnights had arrived and passed after the press conference. Geiger was deeply engaged now in selecting his music. He had organized scores, left them stacked by his Steinway downstairs, studied many of them, eliminated some, and even spent some time hacking around by working the primary theme from Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys into Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto.

Oh, he wouldn’t dare! He laughed. Yes, he was going to play the Hollywood Bowl and yes, it would be a real howl to do that. But the classical music mafia would never forgive him for something like that, particularly having promised to stay away from such stunts.

But nonetheless, Geiger fantasized: Ludwig von B? Meet Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, plus Al Jardine and Mike Love here. And, boys, pay attention to Ludwig because he composed while deaf and with Paget’s disease.

Good Vibes with the Ode to Joy. The Beach goes to Bavaria. Brian Wilson at Das Bauhaus. Well, once again, why the hell not? At least in private.

He also had a little companion piece, fusing Van Halen with van Beethoven. The two Vans: Together Again for the First Time!

He played it for Diana. Then there was his standing joke in which, while giving a narration of his music he intentionally confused sentences with “Emanuel Ax” and “a man with an axe,” during which he played in a hatchet chopping motion and—as would be the result with an ax—hit no note more than once.

They had been beside themselves with amusement. Laughter was wonderful. He loved to sit her at the piano next to him and play for her, a special audience of one. In some ways, Moonlight Sonata and the theme from Swan Lake were now songs that belonged to her, because he either played them special ways for her or when he was in public, they were meant for her whenever he played.

They would goof around at the piano and laugh some more. There was too little laughter these days because the nights were increasingly dark.

Mezzanotte, after all. Mezzanotte meant more than the hour of midnight. It meant, the middle of the night. The real dark watches.

“The hour when spirits rise and walk, Rolf. It’s when the dead visit the living. We all know that.” He sprang up in bed again.

“Who said that?” Geiger demanded, frightened. This time, he could not dismiss the thought.

“I did.”

The voice was at the edge of his consciousness, a faint but insistent whisper.

“I said, the dead visit the living sometimes, Rolf. Is that so hard to understand?”

Diana rolled over in her sleep.

“What?” he demanded again. Now she found him. Her eyes half opened, joining him in the jagged unsettling darkness.

“Tiger?” Diana asked sleepily. “You’re talking in your sleep again.” He was as agitated as a dozen scared cats.

“Yeah,” he said. “Sorry.” He eased down again into the warmth of his bed. He closed his eyes. Or tried to.

The first part of the night had come easily. It had been restful and calm. But as the dark hours of the morning progressed, other forces began to pilfer the peacefulness of Geiger’s sleeping hours.

Some force was again taking control of his head. Rolf settled back into bed, but involuntarily he began to dream. The sequences of the reverie made no sense, but the dreams were alive with disturbing images.

He envisioned his mother’s grave. It was set in the middle of a highway and a team of construction workers were digging it up. When they opened the coffin, his mother climbed up to the roadway and swore at her son for not burying her in a more restful setting.

“Absurdity of life and death”, a voice told him.

A second image: Rabinowitz wandered through the cemetery on Morningside Heights. He turned to look into the eyes of Geiger. “Don’t think for a moment I’ll stay buried here,” the maestro said. There were no eyes in his eye sockets. Just hollows.

“‘Rest in peace’! What a macabre joke that is! Ever done any research on how many subterranean creatures burrow through old cemeteries?”

Hollows where the eyes had been. No more windows to the soul. Just windows to the fleshless skull and an empty soul.

The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out…

Everything went black. Geiger twisted again in bed, pursued now by childhood parochial-school doggerel.

They crawl up our nose and out your spout…

The unlinked visions continued.

A brightness came upon his subconscious, then a blackness—much more like a movie screen going from full light to no light in an instant. When light was present again, the grave of Isador Rabinowitz was peaceful one minute, then swirling with dirt a moment later, as if blasted up from underneath the ground.

“He’s coming back again,” Geiger thought. “Just like the dream the other night. The old bastard won’t stay dead!”

In bed, something tapped Rolf on the shoulder.

“Greetings, Rolf! I’m here! I’m in your home tonight.”

Geiger shook in his bed. In his dream there was a cold, firm hand on his shoulder.

He shook again. His eyes fluttered open into the darkness.

“Oh, Lord!” The hand was still on his shoulder.

He bolted up from sleep and flailed. The feeling suddenly lifted, as if the hand had released Rolf Geiger’s shoulder. Once again, his heart beat like a war drum.

He turned the light on and examined the room. He and Diana were alone. Or at least he couldn’t see anyone else. She was sleeping peacefully, the little piano pendant hanging between her breasts.

He looked back around the room. He was aware of the wetness on his brow. Then he settled back trying to sleep. He turned the light off. He held his eyes open in narrow slits in the darkness of his bedroom and waited to see if any images came to him.

None did. Not right away, at least.

His eyes closed, and he drifted again.

More thoughts came to him from a dark ominous somewhere. Now it was as if some other forces were guiding his consciousness, throttling his thoughts sharply into reverse, sending the kaleidoscopic patterns of his mind spiraling backward into his own youth.

Technicolor nightmares. The recurrent multihued terrors of his youth. When he had been a boy, he endured many of them. Some recurring. They hadn’t recurred for ages.

The first nightmare:

He was a boy again, sleeping in the decrepit small house in West Virginia. He heard a violent dispute. A man shouting, a woman screaming. He emerged from bed and ran to the top of the steps. It was winter. It was cold as death. He looked down the steps and saw the front door open, wind and snow pouring in, his father drunk and his mother on the floor as her husband flailed at her with his fists. Rolf’s feet were rooted in place. He couldn’t help her. In his nightmare, he turned away and played the piano to cover her screams…

Then the second vision. Pure terror this time:

He walked through the same childhood house. At the end of a long hallway, there was his grandfather’s piano. He sat down and started to play. A wonderful feeling enveloped him. A feeling of escape, beauty and freedom. Then there was a pounding sound.

Knocking.

Hammering.

“Hey! What’s that noise?”

He looked up. His father was smashing the piano as Rolf played. Then his father’s face dissolved and it was Isador Rabinowitz smashing the instrument. “You are not worthy of such great music,” the old man said.

But which old man?

“Noise.”

That’s what his father had called it when he played.

“Noise.”

That’s what Rabinowitz had called it when he played. Sometimes. There were moments when life had a terrible symmetry.

In his bed, Geiger twisted in anguish.

A third dream rose up:

He was standing on some sort of burial ground and it was night. Above him, the stars burned like a million tiny torches. The moon was pasted in the sky like a wafer. The wafer.

“Are you Catholic?” someone asked.

He cringed.

“I’m not anything anymore. I lost my religion long ago,” he answered. “Shed it the way a snake sheds its skin. Just crawled out of it one day. Happier without it, if you want to know.”

“Well, look at what you’ve done,” the someone continued. “You’ve killed the most precious thing you ever had.”

“My music?” Rolf asked aloud in his sleep.

“Your woman.”

In the dream, Rolf turned to the coffin. Simple pine. Like a spinet. The setting was the same as Rabinowitz’s funeral. But it was Diana who was in the coffin.

“You murdered her!” someone said.

Geiger screamed out in his sleep, “No!”

“Strangled her.”

“No!” He yelled out again.

He saw her in the coffin. Her skin was white as marble. A sleeping angel. Something from a churchyard on a winter evening.

Lifeless as ice.

Rolf turned to the speaker. It was Rabinowitz in the garb of a priest.

“Monsignor Kelly, where are you? Brother Matthew, I need you. Where is Sister Mary William? Someone help me!”

Rabinowitz smiled.

The music in the background was discordant. There was insane laugher taunting him. A hell of a nightmare from his youth, except…

“This will be real, Rolf.”

Geiger’s eyes flashed opened. A hell of a nightmare. He felt himself turn in bed, as if startled.

“Still here, Rolf!”

In the darkness, he tried to sit up. There was an inexplicable force upon his upper body. It was as if a strong man had placed two hands on Geiger’s shoulders and shaken him.

Geiger felt himself cry out, as in a nightmare. The unseen hands gripped him hard. He felt himself pulled off his bed and onto the floor, where he landed hard. Then the force was gone and he looked up.

“Oh, my God…Oh my God…!” He was certain that he saw a human form before him, hovering in the room. Something absolutely terrifying and not of this world. The image came and went. It was gone in an instant. Rolf raised his hand and found the light switch by his bedside. He clicked it on. As far as he could see, the room was empty of intruders. It contained only himself, awake, and Diana, sleeping, barely roused by the light.

He took several seconds to let his heart and nerves settle. His senses were on full alert, waiting for something unexpected. But the something didn’t come. Or at least it didn’t come now. Gradually, Rolf Geiger got to his feet. He walked to the door and looked into the hallway.

He put on the hall lights. Nothing there either.

He froze again as the music began again downstairs. The same beautiful but terrifying melodies he thought he had heard once before. They rose from his own Steinway.

Chopin. Technically impeccable. A polonaise expressed in a gorgeous tone.

“Oh, God above…,” Geiger whispered aloud with a trembling voice. He would recognize that technique, that touch, anywhere. A thousand years could pass and it would be equally unmistakable.

“Yes, Rolf. That’s true.”

“It’s Rabinowitz,” whispered Geiger. “He’s back.”

Geiger felt his forehead wet with perspiration. He felt one bead of sweat moving slowly down his left temple. He imagined that it could have been not just sweat, but a drop of blood.

“Come downstairs, Rolf. Come listen to your master. A special recital. Just for you.”

“No. I don’t want to,” Geiger said.

“Oh, but you must…unless you’re scared of your superior.”

His gaze drifted downstairs again. There was a light seeping out from underneath the door to his library again. The same as the other night when he had also though he heard a mezzanotte nocturne.

Rolf Geiger spoke bravely to whatever presence was there.

“Where are you?” Rolf Geiger demanded. “In my library? At my piano? If you’re there, I want to see you.”

A beat. Nothing happened. He waited.

“Not bloody likely. Until I’m ready.”

A moment of tension and anticipation dissolved into nothing. Aside from the music, the only sounds Rolf Geiger was aware of was the rhythmic thumping of his heart in his chest.

“Hey,” called a nearby female voice. “Tiger?” Diana. From the still-lit bedroom. He looked back toward her. She was sitting up in bed.

“What’s going on in that head of yours tonight?” she asked softly. “This is the second time you’ve been up.”

Downstairs, the music continued.

“You don’t hear anything?” Geiger asked.

“What?” She listened.

“Outside?” she asked. “From the street?”

“No. From downstairs in my library.” She shook her head.

“Did you leave something on?” she asked. “Radio? CD player?”

“Someone’s playing my piano,” he said. She listened again.

“Now?” she asked, mystified.

“Now.”

“You hear it now?” she asked. He nodded. He heard it.

“Rolf,” she said, “I don’t hear anything.”

“You must!” he said.

The music was resonating in his ears, the volume pumping up as if to irritate him. Geiger held a mental image of the old man aggressively pounding the keys.

“But I don’t,” she pleaded. “There’s nothing there.”

“It stopped,” Geiger said. Diana’s expression showed concern.

“Why don’t you climb into my side of the bed,” she said. “Come in and hold me, okay?”

Geiger withdrew slightly. He looked disappointed. “You didn’t hear anything?” he asked.

“No.” He sighed. He felt a tumbling sensation within him.

“Let me at least go down and turn the light off,” he said. “Then I’ll climb in with you.”

“It’s a deal,” she said. “Hurry back.”

Geiger left his bedroom and went again to the top of the stairs. No music played down below. But as he looked down, he could have sworn he saw the door to the library closing, as if someone had been in there, come out to the front hall to eavesdrop, then had returned.

The light still showed under the door. He felt himself age ten years on the spot.

‘Something’s there,” he told himself. “Something’s there.” Bravely, he started down the steps.

His own footfall was silent in the darkness. His hand glided on the banister as he descended. Halfway down. Then two steps from the bottom of the stairs. Then he was in the middle of the downstairs entrance hall and only a few feet from the closed door to his library.

The music commenced again. An étude.

It sent a shiver through Geiger. He recognized the piece. Aeolian Harp. This étude had been one of Rabinowitz’s favorite pieces. The old master had played it at their first meeting. Now Rolf was hearing it again.

The artistry staggered Geiger anew. He followed the wondrous melody, in the middle of which a tenor voice broke from the chords and joined the principal theme. It was rather like an undulation of the A flat major chord, brought out more resonantly here and there with Rabinowitz’s foot on the pedal.

“Rabinowitz’s foot?” What was he telling himself?

The thought distracted Geiger from the music and back to the reality in front of him. He wasn’t listening to his onetime teacher; he was listening to a ghost at his piano.

Yes, a ghost. That’s what was confronting him mow. Geiger accepted it. That was the new reality of what was opposing him.

The ghost of Isador Rabinowitz was in his home.

The worst part about it was that now it all seemed so normal. Within the context of everything else that had transpired, it was so logical. The only explanation for what he was seeing, feeling, and hearing was a supernatural one.

Geiger, still standing in the half darkness, wondered how soon he would look directly at the specter. Would it be there when he pushed open the door to his library, busy at the keyboard?

Maybe.

Would it be ghastly white? Translucent? Indistinguishable from a living creature?

All three.

A moment passed. Perspiration burst again from Geiger’s forehead, this time as if someone had opened a thousand tiny faucets.

Rolf Geiger wasn’t able to speak. There remained a dreamlike, surreal quality to all of this. It reminded him of a bad dream in which one is riveted in place with a great evil approaching, but one is unable to move or scream. Rolf Geiger also felt as if something—some force—had wrapped its tentacles around him, much in the way a piece of music can capture a music hall.

Yet Rolf Geiger knew “this was real!”

The music resounded in his ears. Beauty and horror at the same time. It was as if his head were in a bell and a gigantic new clapper had gone berserk.

“Hell’s bells, Rolf. Just for you, my lad!”

Geiger could wait no longer. Whatever was waiting for him, whatever form Rabinowitz was in, Geiger was prepared for the confrontation.

He threw open the door to his piano room. Instantly the music stopped.

The lights went out. Quickly, Geiger reached for the light switch.

The lights along the ceiling fired bright beams in each direction.

He waited. His heart was racing again. He stared at his room and searched for movement.

There was none. For almost a full minute, Geiger stood in place. He felt himself a stranger in his own home. He waited anew for a movement or a sign that would not satisfy him in coming.

Then slowly, cautiously, Geiger crossed the room.

To his suspicious eyes, his Steinway seemed to have a strange aura around it, almost an extra glow. He drew back for a second and took a deep breath. Then he spent several seconds trying to convince himself that he had been imagining all of this.

He went to the keys of the piano. Somehow, music was still ringing in his ears. He put his hand on the piano, trying to sense any sort of vibration from having just been played.

“My God!” He thought he detected something. Someone had been playing here. Someone had just stopped. He reached into the well and placed his hands on the strings. Sure as hell. He thought he detected a vibration, be it ever so slight.

Then Rolf noticed something else.

When he looked at the score on the table beside his Steinway, he grimaced. Who the hell had been messing with his music?

Diana? Edythe Jamison? Had they dislodged things earlier in the day and he hadn’t noticed? Or had the music been rearranged after he had left the room at eleven that evening?

If so, by whom? He had no objection to either Diana or Mrs. Jamison going through any part of his home. But he wished that if either touched any scores, the music should be returned to exactly the same spot.

He had left things as he had for a reason. It vexed him that the music had been disturbed. It was the type of thing that Rabinowitz used to do with rivals—rearrange their music—just to distract them. Just so there would possibly be that little extra hitch in their performance.

He sighed. Whoever had arranged things had also placed a piece by Mussorgsky in the bow. He glanced at it. Pictures at an Exhibition.

Geiger shuddered anew. Coincidence or cruel joke. This was one of Rabinowitz’s signature pieces. In giving an informal performance, he would throw this one off with the Aeolian Harp étude and a polonaise.

Geiger stared at the music for several seconds. He felt an enormous shudder of fear. What was that doing out? Yes he had looked at it earlier in the evening, but he thought he had put it away. He thought he had buried it deeply, in fact.

And now that he thought of it, this was exactly the Chopin that he thought he had heard playing. “How in hell did that get there?” he mumbled aloud.

“What?” an invisible voice asked.

“I said, ‘How the hell…?’”

“That’s what I thought you said.”

A heavy momentary silence came across the room and enveloped Geiger. A complete stillness, almost like a picture freezing on a movie screen.

He shook himself. He still must be half-asleep, he told himself. Because he was having this conversation with himself.

“It all seems logical,” he told himself. There was logic to everything.

Geiger reached to the music and folded it carefully, placing it back in its folder. The funny thing was, he thought he remembered doing this already.

He calmed slightly. He looked around the room and tried to attach himself to his old concept of sanity and rationality. Moments earlier he had been thinking in terms of confronting a ghost. Now all he had before him was some disturbed sheets of music and an empty room.

Of course no ghost was in here, he told himself bravely. There was no way to leave other than the window and the door. He glanced to each. The window remains locked and the door was in front of me. No one passed through it.

The light, he decided, had been some sort of optical illusion. The music had been an overworked imagination. He wanted to be rational. Ghosts didn’t exist.

He rose from the piano, put everything away, and walked across the room to leave. For a moment, he thought he was aware of something at the edge of his senses. But then he dismissed that, too. He stood in the doorway, fidgeted slightly, waited and scanned the room.

Nothing.

He turned the light off. He walked through the dark hall. He found the steps that would lead him back upstairs.

Then a horrible feeling was upon him as his foot found the bottom step of the staircase. The mood of the darkness around him had palpably turned against him. No longer was it friendly cozy or comforting. It felt malevolent and oppressive. It felt like something unspeakable had turned against him.

He stopped. From deep within him came the overwhelming feeling that he should not climb the stairs. Something horrible would happen if he did. But he took another step upward. Then a second one.

One step at a time. Each step higher than the next.

He was as frightened as he had ever been in his adult life. Subliminally, deep down, he thought he heard something resembling a low snarling sound. Like an animal. A wolf or dog, warning not to approach.

He broke into another sweat. He felt as if he had a foot in each of two worlds, both of them fraught with terror. One world that he understood, another that he could barely comprehend. And the two worlds were rushing together right here, on the staircase, with a horrifying, gripping confluence.

“Oh God…God protect me!” he thought. Empty words. He hadn’t prayed for years. Why look for protection or salvation here?

He took a third step upward. Then a fourth. Only seven more, he knew, to the landing of the second floor. Only seven more and he already knew he would never make them.

He knew because there was a force upon him now. Those invisible hands again. Hands. Leaning down in the dark. Pressing hard on his shoulders, forcing him back. And a coldness enveloped him, too. He felt as if a window had just been opened onto one of those icy gray winter mornings in the West Virginia of his childhood.

“No! Leave me alone! No!” he cried out.

“Impudent!” came the response. “You said you wanted to see me!”

“No!” Geiger answered aloud. “I’ve changed my mind. Stay dead!”

“I can’t!”

In the darkness, Geiger forged upward. The fifth step. The sixth.

Then he felt himself break free. The force was no longer pushing downward upon him. He had his mobility back. His feet moved nimbly for the final steps. He reached the landing of the second floor.

He drew a huge sigh. Whatever presence had been there, whatever aspect of his onetime mentor, Geiger had escaped it.

He steadied himself and took one step toward the bedroom.

Then he noticed that there was a figure outlined against a window at the end of the hall. The human figure of an aged man. A man who was dead and whom Geiger had buried.

Geiger felt the disbelief sweep away from him. The figure moved toward him in the dark.

“Maestro…?” he asked in horror.

The one word response was spoken clearly. Rolf wasn’t imagining. He heard an actual voice.

“Yes,” the visitor said.

The frigid cold returned and the figure came at him in a rush, traveling several feet in less than a second. In the dark, Geiger felt the dead man’s body whack up against his own with a tremendous force.

The limbs flailed and the knees moved and the body of Rabinowitz was as icy as one would have expected from being in the cold ground for weeks.

Geiger screamed like a man being murdered.

His eyes came wide open and the face took shape right in front of him. Rabinowitz’s face. Inches from his own. Back from the dead. Malevolence written all over it and eye sockets as hollow and horrible as they were in nightmare.

The force of the impact registered upon Geiger, driving him backward until he tumbled against the wall, screaming.

He screamed so loud that it could have raised any other souls that were walking that night. He hit the wall hard and slumped low and screamed again.

There was no precedent for what he had seen and experienced.

A collision with a ghost. Icy cold impact. A head-on collision with a dead man’s spirit.

Geiger slumped low to the floor and his screams repeated themselves. He looked up again and saw the figure rushing toward him again, and then the hands landed on his arms.

Shaking him. Calling his name. Rolf screamed and he screamed and he screamed until the hands left him and the lights flashed on again and then the hands found him a second time.

“Rolf! Rolf! Rolf…!”

The voice called his name. It was the harsh voice of Rabinowitz until magically, it changed into a female voice. He managed to open his eyes again. He was still slumped against the wall of the second-floor hallway. But it was Diana who was upon him, holding him and trying to bring him to rationality.

He stopped screaming. His heart was thundering. There was fear all over her face too.

Rabinowitz was gone.

For several seconds, once he started to calm, she looked at him. His eyes spun like marbles, searching for the danger that had been there seconds earlier. He couldn’t find it.

“Rolf?” She finally said. “Wake up! Wake up!”

“I am awake.”

“You couldn’t have been.”

“I was awake,” he said, sitting up against the wall. “And I saw him. I saw him in the dark!”

“Who?”

“And I felt his body next to mine.” He looked her directly in her eyes. “I saw his face,” he said.

“Rolf, who?” she asked, her own fear evident.

“Rabinowitz,” he said. A long pause as he read the skepticism in her eyes. “He’s here,” Geiger said. “Rabinowitz is in this house! His ghost!”

“Rolf. This is crazy. And you know it.” He searched for proof. He couldn’t find it.

“I know I heard something,” Geiger insisted. “I heard Isador Rabinowitz playing Chopin on my piano. And I saw him. He’s here. Or his ghost is here. That’s why I hear him playing.”

“Rolf. Don’t be ridiculous. You’re scaring me.”

“I’m scared too,” he said softly.

“Rolf,” she said patiently. “Calm yourself. You and I are the only ones in this house. There is no ghost here, and we are both safe and secure.”

His breathing steadied and he listened to her. He wanted desperately to believe. He put a hand on her arm and tried to absorb her calm. Several moments passed. The terror seemed to lift.

But from downstairs he heard the piano again. It struck up a mazurka. A pair of supernatural hands played Chopin with brilliance and cunning. Amazing harmonies and modulation, a piquancy within the rubato that would have been the envy of Chopin himself.

“See?” Geiger whispered. “See! He’s doing it again!”

“Doing what?”

“Playing! Listen!”

The music thundered. It was as big as the night, as dark as the worst evil a man could imagine.

“Rolf,” she said, “there’s nothing there. There’s nothing happening downstairs.”

“There’s music! Rabinowitz is playing.”

“I don’t hear anything,” she said. She shook him. “And you don’t either.”

His eyes went wide as saucers. The music down below stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Geiger’s eyes wandered over Diana’s shoulder, only to find that there, within his home, visible under the electric lights of the hallway, the silent figure of the late Isador Rabinowitz climbed the stairs.

Rabinowitz, or his ghost, was bold and vivid, not translucent at all, substantive and immaculately groomed and dressed, beaming with the same embalmed smile that he had worn for the latter years of his life.

Geiger began to scream again, and he screamed until the specter retreated. It was only a few seconds, but it seemed much longer.

Still no eyes. Just empty sockets.

Like the music that she could not hear, the vision of Rabinowitz was not something Diana could share. She looked exactly where Rolf was looking and did not see anything.

Which didn’t mean it wasn’t there. It only meant that she couldn’t see it. The contact, it seemed, remained one of mentor and protégé.

Rolf Geiger lifted his voice to the heavens and screamed like he had never before screamed in his life. And he would not stop. As Diana cradled his head and held him tightly, the world’s finest living concert pianist howled like a man coming out of a delirium trauma.

Even though he had closed his eyes and refused to look at the specter at the top of his stairs, in his mind Rolf was still seeing the cunning face, the mad-staring wolfish expression and deathly features of his onetime mentor.

He screamed and cried until he fainted, and Diana laboriously dragged him back into the bedroom and returned him to bed.

Fifteen

Over the next several days, as late March gave way to early April, Rolf Geiger’s nerves were on a sharp edge. Something had changed within him and around him, he knew.

Something within him said to keep moving. So he went for long walks during the day and early evening and sometimes even during the night. He started his hikes in his own neighborhood and sometimes ranged all the way down to SoHo, Tribeca, Greenwich Village, or Chelsea. On these lengthy journeys, he was often lost hopelessly in thought and reflection.

Once, in a maze of wandering that bordered on the dangerous, he strolled all the way up to Columbia University on West 112th Street and Broadway to visit a well-known candy store. The owner recognized Geiger. He made a huge fuss over him.

Geiger responded courteously. He autographed a candy box and further promised the proprietor a specially signed black-and-white picture which he did later send. Rolf bought half a pound of butter crunch. Then, bag of candy in hand, he wandered through the university campus for half an hour before starting back to mid-Manhattan. By the time Geiger arrived home, he had knocked back the entire bag. He had taken a six-mile hike, just for some candy, instead of sitting down to practice at the piano. Was there not a world tour in the planning stages?

One press photographer spotted Geiger on his walk and snapped several shots of him, following him in Central Park while Geiger did his best to ignore the man. The photos would appear the next day with the caption referring to Rolf as the “reclusive piano prodigy.”

Rolf spent enormous amounts of time on small inconsequential things. Reading fan mail, for example. Repairing a faulty electrical switch in his library was another small task which newly obsessed him. In contrast, the big things, such as his devotion to music, he dropped altogether. The entire day after Rolf had his 5 A.M. encounter with the spirit of Isador Rabinowitz, he did not touch the piano. The same absence from practice occurred again the second day. And the third.

While the long walks through Manhattan were the new order of the day for Rolf, Diana continued meeting her own professional obligations.

She attended her evening art classes. The lesson that week for Maurice Sahadi’s four students was sketching a handsome male nude, something none of the female students missed. But Diana could not give her full attention to this. She was constantly calling home to see if Rolf was okay. When he answered the phone, he politely responded that he was fine.

Almost as bad was the staring, empty look she saw on his face several time when she watched him unaware. Again, this was something that emerged in the hours after “the encounter,” as she now thought of it. It was as if he were listening to a distant symphony, did not like the way it was being played, but was helpless to tune it out.

“The encounter.” Or, “the imaginary encounter.” Whichever it had been.

Once, in the evening, before a fire in the living-room hearth, she went to Rolf and snuggled into his lap. Then she leaned forward and whispered in his ear.

“A penny for your thoughts, Tiger.”

“I love you very much,” he said. She kissed him.

“Then what else is on your mind?” She asked. “Please tell me.”

“I’ve never before so much thought of the piano as a weapon,” he said cryptically. “But it exists also as an instrument of fear and terror. That’s how I see it now. Sometimes.” She considered his words. Her deliberation lasted almost a minute.

“Tell me what you mean by that,” she finally said.

“The piano. A weapon,” he said. “Fear. It makes perfect sense. Music can raise any emotion. Including fear. Musicians make music, no one else. The piano is the tool.”

“Uh-huh,” she answered. He had the faraway look again, the one she didn’t like.

“So, if music can raise an emotion,” he proposed, “do you think it could also raise a spirit? Or a soul?”

“An emotion and a soul are not the same thing,” she said.

“No? I find them similar,” he answered.

She let it go. It was a scary time for Diana Stephenson. Funny ideas were creeping into her head, too, from somewhere. For example, this was the first time in her life that she had ever considered the possibility of coming home to find someone she loved dead. Perhaps she was picking up odd vibrations from 112 East Seventh-third Street, too, just as Rolf asserted he was. It was as if a little unseen voice were maliciously whispering bad things to her.

Might she be better off, she wondered, with a different man? Rolf had an artist’s temperament, including the occasional arrogance and volatility that went with the territory.

Diana was a beautiful young woman. Intelligent and strong. If she moved out and was available again, there would probably be hundreds of attractive men who…

She stopped herself in mid-thought.

All of this was nonsense. She was here with Rolf because she loved him and wanted to be here. He was exciting and good to her. He loved her and told her so frequently. He was unselfish and contained none of the brutality that characterized so many men. If he were having emotional problems dealing with the passing of Isador Rabinowitz, it was her mission to be there for him.

Even to think of leaving was nonsense. Yet, Rolf continued with his own brand of nonsense—insisting adamantly that he had seen the ghost of Isador Rabinowitz in their home.

The subject of the ghost came up several times over the course of the ensuing days. Rolf maintained that he knew what he had seen and that “it”, meaning Isador Rabinowitz, was frequently there. Not in the flesh, maybe, but surely in spirit.

Rabinowitz was much the way he had been in his lifetime. Rolf still insisted that he occasionally heard the piano come to life, with no one in his library and no one at the keyboard.

“Sometimes I’m sitting right there in the library and it starts to play,” Geiger said out of the blue one evening. “It just starts to play. La da. La da dee da. Can you imagine that?”

“No. But I think you imagined something, Tiger,” she answered.

In continuing the discussion, hoping to purge it with daylight, she in turn had said all the right things. Diana had been in the house for all those times and had seen and heard nothing, she reminded him. No ghost. No music.

She even insisted that it had been she who had switched around the sheet music on his piano, though she didn’t remember having the Pictures at an Exhibition out and atop the piano.

“Of course, you can’t remember that,” Rolf had insisted. “Rabinowitz made that switch. You didn’t.”

“A dead man made that switch? That’s what you’re telling me?”

“Yes. I know what I saw,” he said. The logic and the conversation went in circles. So did a few other things.

Rolf’s language became sprinkled with the odd obscenity, something he had rarely done until these recent and troubling times. Diana remembered how he had complained about old Rabinowitz’s purple tongue and how he found it embarrassing and distasteful. Now the odd curse flew easily and readily from Geiger’s mouth as if thrown by a foreign tongue.

Something else also made little sense to Diana.

As confusion ran rampant in her mind, elements of involuntary suspicion replaced it. Again, it was as if some foreign agent were putting alien thoughts in her ear. She began to consider the nature of Geiger’s long, unexplained absences in the afternoon. It occurred to Diana that another woman might be involved.

The absence of sex in her relationship with Rolf smarted doubly for Diana. There was that artist’s model she and her fellow students were drawing at night at Maurice Sahadi’s studio.

The model was highly attractive. He was a dark, muscular man from Wyoming, who was proportioned both handsomely and generously. He was just beginning to make a name for himself in New York as a model in print ads. Diana returned home from a few hours of sketching this body on Mondays and Thursdays looking for more than a shower before going to sleep. Some raw physical lust would have fit into her evening just fine.

But Rolf was uninterested. Somehow, viewing a ghost managed to have a depressive effect on an otherwise healthy libido.

Yet over the course of another ten days, Rolf became alert again and seemed to return to earth. The shadow of Rabinowitz withdrew, and Rolf maintained that the ghost had not visited again, even though the piano—to his mind, at least—still played the occasional phantom few bars from time to time. It sounded like someone sitting down to practice, then changing his mind, getting up, and angrily leaving the room. Better still, Rolf started to tinker—just tinker—with the piano again, sort of as if he had been waiting for a reservoir to fill up again and now it had.

To signal that the “recovery” was well under way, Rolf reached for Diana’s hand one afternoon when Mrs. Jamison was out for an hour. He pulled her to the sofa in the living room.

“I want you,” he said. “Right now.”

“You want to go upstairs?” she asked after a few kisses.

“No. Here on the sofa is fine.”

He made love to her without even completely undressing her.

Uncharacteristically, he said little to her while having sex. His conquest of her was fast and vigorous, which she did not mind. And yet, on the downside, the lovemaking seemed almost forced. Not routine, but not as intimate as usual.

If she looked at it the wrong say, it was almost as if it was a physical release for him more than intimacy or an act of affection. Had it been an act of affection she wondered, or a male act of staking his claim or reestablishing dominance?

And then there were his hands, which for some reason, he chose to keep firmly on her shoulders and almost upon her neck while he was on top of her. It was a strange bit of positioning and almost scared her. Like his newfound love of profanity, this almost seemed as if it were coming from somewhere else.

But she put aside her thoughts. Despite everything, there on the sofa, he had led her to a series of spectacular orgasms, just minutes before Mrs. Jamison had come back into the town house. So, straightening out her skirt and her hair, still enjoying the rush of excitement that came from the suddenness and spontaneity of their act, still feeling as if she had been joyously ravished by a man she loved, why complain?

Also exciting was the easing of Rolf’s mood.

Diana had been playing with the idea of their getting away for a few days. To anywhere. Just to get out of the city and away from that house where “the encounter” had occurred.

She had thought he would nix the idea. But when she proposed a short trip, that same evening, he welcomed the notion.

“Where to? And for how long?”

“Ever been to Nantucket Island?” she asked.

A moment’s thought. “Yes. But it was a while ago,” he said.

“Interested? You and me? For the weekend?”

His smile was the first one in days that looked almost right. His first since the master had purportedly visited.

“Sure. Great idea. Make the arrangements,” he said.

“Thanks, Tiger,” Diana said. “And welcome back.”

“Back from where?” Rolf asked, not understanding. He shrugged. He still didn’t understand. But some cloud had lifted, or appeared to have lifted, at least temporarily.

Rolf spent about an hour in the library that evening playing exercises on the piano. His touch on the keyboard was crisp and filled with authority. That was a good sign, too. The house was filled with music again. This time there was no question as to the provenance of the finger work on the keyboard.

Outside, on East Seventy-Third Street, in the darkness of the rarely used stone stoop across the street, the watcher had again materialized.

With gloved hands, he still puffed on the carcinogenic Lucky Strikes. He watched the lights go on and off in the windows of 112 East Seventy-Third Street and he smiled to Diana or Rolf whenever they looked his way on the street.

Both of them had by now recognized him from the funeral of Isador Rabinowitz, and both had come to the same conclusion. He was a classical version of a Deadhead. In conversation with Rolf and Diana, the old man said that he had been present at all of Isador Rabinowitz’s concerts for as long as he could remember. But now with Rabinowitz dead, his attention shifted to Geiger. He was a fan. That was all he was in life now, he said. A diehard fan. Rolf had seen the type many times before. And he was wary of them. Mark David Chapman, the assassin of John Lennon, had been an adoring head case, also.

He was mildly demented, they concluded, perilously fixated, but not dangerous. He looked to be too frail to obtain a weapon, much less point one and use it. So occasionally, because he looked so forlorn, they gave him food. Better to befriend him than make him even crazier.

“So, you’ll come to some of the dates on my tour?” Geiger asked the watcher one morning.

“The first ones. Definitely the first ones,” the man said.

“Not going to travel to Europe and Asia with me, are you?” Geiger asked. The old man shrugged.

“No. But I can watch your place here while you’re gone.” Geiger looked at him carefully.

“Yeah. Great idea,” he said without meaning it.

There was something in the watcher’s remark that Geiger did not like, yet he let it go. In the same way, he let his newly converted “number one fan” remain there on the block, despite the fact that the New York City police one day offered to make the man move.

“Better that I know where he is than where he isn’t,” Rolf said. And so the watcher was left to his sentry duty. There, as the days passed, he maintained his solitary seemingly meaningless vigil.

Abruptly, Geiger’s kindness was rewarded with a slight change of logistics. The watcher moved closer to Rolf’s home and took up a position on the sidewalk directly across from Number 112. He settled into his new location and now seemed to be waiting for something.

Sixteen

Thirteen mornings after the appearance of Rabinowitz’s ghost, mid-way through an April that was proving to be gloriously balmy, Rolf Geiger phoned Brian Greenstone’s office. Claire put him through to his agent.

“Working hard for me?” Geiger asked.

“Sweat is rolling off my forehead, my fingers are white from gripping the phone and my blood pressure is three-eighty over two-fifty,” Greenstone said cheerfully. “Sufficient?”

“Your fingers are only white?” quipped Rolf, backtracking. “They should be bleeding.”

“When I feel like opening a vein, Rolf, I shall let you and the rest of my client list know. Now. How are things, what’s on your mind, and why aren’t you hunched over an atonal keyboard somewhere bringing tears to the eyes of the so-called cognoscenti?”

“Frankly, Brian, I have a problem,” Geiger said.

“A big one?”

“No, not a big one. But I wonder if we could arrange something impromptu.”

“Oh, Rolf, my boy. Name it. Ruin my day.”

“I need an immediate concert date. I know it’s short notice. But I want to take a dry run. See where I am right now. Test the audiences before the world tour. Test myself.”

“What are we talking about? This evening?” Greenstone asked with obvious irony.

“Something within the next few weeks, if you can arrange it.”

“Hmmm. Spring training? A warm-up?”

“Sort of.

“You do this all the time, don’t you? You worry about your skills when you needn’t.”

“This is different.”

“A concert date should be no trouble. I’m equally confident that your playing has never been better,” Greenstone said. “So tell me what you need. Large House? Small? You wish to play in front of twelve or twelve-hundred? Speak.”

“I want a critical but friendly audience,” said Geiger. “I need a tune-up. Know what I mean. The house can be big. A concert hall, though, not an arena.”

“Where do you want to play? New York?”

“No, definitely not New York. I want it to be a travel date, yet not too far. Too much pressure and part of the local press will rip me just for sport. Plus anything I do becomes too much of an ‘event’ in New York.”

Greenstone knew that all he had to do was find the date and the venue. An ‘added’ concert by Rolf Geiger would sell out within a day in any large city in the world.

“What would you play?” Greenstone asked. “In case any of the unwashed out-of-town promoters have the temerity to ask.”

Geiger thought. “Beethoven. Maybe Opus 109 in E Major. Then the Tchaikovsky piano concerto. If it’s a nice early summer night and we need to tart things up to sell tickets, I could play some Chopin or do the Moonlight Sonata. Or maybe use it as an encore.”

“Keep talking,” the agent said. “It sounds orgasmic.”

“The repertoire would depend on the quality of the orchestra available, the conductor, and how much rehearsal time we would have. The pieces should be well-known so that the orchestra would be ready to play.”

“Of course, of course,” Greenstone said thoughtfully. “Let me see what I can do. I have to be the diplomat as to where this concert is initially offered. This is the first time in two years you’ll have played to an audience larger than two or three hundred. So it’s a very significant event. A lot of people are going to have their knickers in a twist if I don’t ask them first.”

“I understand,” Geiger said.

“But that’s my problem,” Greenstone added quickly. “Let me see what I can do. Give me a day.” He paused. “Now I need something from you.”

“What’s that?”

“Your handwriting. There’s some contractual material here from Aurora Records for you to sign, hopefully after you go through the pretense of reading it. Should I send it over or would you care to make another memorable in-person appearance in my office?”

“I was in your office as recently as two and a half weeks ago.”

“And all the girls in the building are still buzzing like queen bees. Does that mean, ‘send it over’?”

“No,” Geiger said. “I’ll come by. I’ve been getting out doing a lot of walking recently.”

“Don’t I know it? Don’t I know it” Greenstone muttered. “You were most recently seen in the deplorably vile and disreputable pages of the New York Post, wandering aimlessly through Central Park and carrying a bag of candy like some would-be child molester.”

“You saw that?”

“The whole city saw it, Rolf. Come by this afternoon and please duck the photographers if you are able.”

Seventeen

Geiger stopped by his agent’s office toward four the next afternoon.

He sat in the big red leather chair in Greenstone’s inner office for several minutes, signing papers sent over by Aurora Records, efficiently presented by Claire. Rolf’s eye followed her in and out of the room every time she moved. He noted everything about her, her earrings, her skirt, her blouse, her jewelry and her shoes. The curve of her calves, the way her skirt showed off her figure. In return, Claire gave him a friendly hello and a cordial smile.

“We have some money for you, too,” said Greenstone at length. “Filthy lucre, of which I have siphoned off the filthiest fifteen percent.”

The income was royalty money from recording contracts in France, Italy and Germany. It had come in at lunchtime, Greenstone said merrily. Fifty-eight thousand dollars and change. Greenstone’s office would deposit it for Rolf, saving him the tacky troubling effort of walking a check to a busy New York bank.

“Given the concert date any more thought?” Rolf asked.

“I’ve given it thought and I’ve made preliminary calls,” Greenstone answered. “And I’m not telling you a thing for another few days. Do me a favor, okay? Shut up and be patient. Trust me. I want things to settle. All right?”

“All right.”

“What else?” Greenstone asked. Brian was, when all was said and done, a remarkably perceptive human, both in business and in personal relationships. Rolf hunched his shoulders.

“Nothing else,” he said.

“You’re bothered by something,” Greenstone continued. “I see it in your eyes and your expression. It hangs on you like a cheap suit. It’s not concentration, that’s different. So what might this be? Is it just this concert business? This tour? Your music?”

Geiger was momentarily taken aback. He didn’t know how to answer.

“You don’t wander around the city for no reason, my boy,” Greenstone said. “Now talk.”

The sentences started to form in Rolf’s mind.

“Well, yes, Brian. You see, my mentor Isador? The fellow I laid in a grave a few weeks back? The man you used to call ‘the most unbearable pianist of the twentieth century”? Well, he’s not completely dead. Rabinowitz haunts my home, terrifies me with deathly images, bangs on my piano, frightens my beautiful woman, and swears that I will never pull off this tour properly. That’s all that’s troubling me. Doesn’t sound like much when I explain it, does it?”

“Rolf?” Greenstone pressed, lowering his head and waving a hand slightly as if to catch Geiger’s lost attention. “Are you having a brain fart? What planet are we on today?”

“What?” Geiger said, shaking himself back to the present.

“Sorry. I was distracted.”

“I was asking you what’s wrong,” Greenstone said. “And you were about to tell me, unless of course you weren’t.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Geiger said sullenly, getting to his feet. “I just want to perform again. Soon. So, I’m anxious for you to set things up.”

“When you’re ready to play, we’ll have a venue,” Greenstone said. “Count on it.”

“I will.”

The two men embraced, then Rolf left the office.

Several minutes later, Geiger was out on Fifty-Seventh Street again. The skies had opened finally and rain was falling steadily. He pulled his tan Burberry raincoat tightly to him against the rain, but still resisted the use of the umbrella he had carried. He had moved a hundred feet down the sidewalk away from Greenstone’s office Building when he heard a woman call his name. “Mr. Geiger? Mr. Geiger?”

He almost didn’t turn and look. His friends knew to call him by his first name, and he could do without any strangers today. But there was something familiar about the voice. He glanced over his shoulder and stopped short.

He turned as Claire trotted quickly toward him from Greenstone’s office. Her arms were folded against the wet blustery day. Her navy blue skirt only made it half way to her knees. As she moved, she was a flurry of beautiful young limbs darting amidst the wind and the raindrops.

“Claire?” he asked, surprised. She came toward him and arrived breathlessly.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she said. “I completely forgot. Please don’t be angry with me.”

She panted for breath.

“Must be important,” he said. “And you’re all wet so I couldn’t possibly be angry.”

“That writer. The one I mentioned,” Clair said, still panting. She was not only out of breath, but she was also getting soaked.

“Sorry?” Rolf asked.

“Remember? Phillip Langlois? That was his name. The man who wanted to write a biography of Isador Rabinowitz?”

“Oh. Yes. Him. I remember. That pest.”

“He phoned again,” Claire said. “He’s going to be in New York.” Geiger sighed.

“I’m really not in the mood for him or anyone else,” he said.

“He says it’s important,” she said. “Apparently he’s racing two other biographies to press. He wants to interview you as soon as possible.”

Geiger rolled his eyes. Then he looked back at her. He could see a certain disappointment in her expression. She had, she realized, come out here for nothing.

“You’re getting wet,” he said. Raindrops made round gray marks on her blouse. They splashed on her face, arms and bare legs.

“It’s all right,” she said.

“No, it’s not,” he answered. He pulled up the umbrella and pressed a button to open it. It whooshed into the air. He held it forward, but she stepped closer to him to be under it.

“Thanks,” she giggled.

There was something that intrigued him about Claire, but something that set off warning signals, also. He had the notion that she might have wanted more than she was asking for.

“You have his phone number?” Geiger asked. “This Englishman with a French name?”

The number was on a piece of paper in her hand. It was already wet. Rain swept across her face as he looked at her. She smiled back as he took the number. Never, when he was growing up in West Virginia, did he ever imagine how many beautiful women there were in the world and how many of them would at one time or another stand before him.

“Thanks,” she said. “He sounded nice on the phone. He really did. “

“They all do when they want something.” She looked at him with apprehension.

“I’m sorry. Did I do the wrong thing?” He smiled.

“No. You’re fine,” he said.

She was getting even wetter. But she wouldn’t turn and go back to the office. Instead, she and Rolf spent a moment, looking each other over. Her eyes were wide and merry, which set off her short dark hair to great effect. The beads of rain that ran against her skin made her flesh look satiny and perfect.

“Tell me something,” Geiger said. “Did mean old Brian send you out in the rain just to hand me a piece of paper?” Geiger asked.

“Not exactly,” she answered.

“Well, you’re not on your way home at four-thirty in the afternoon.”

“Mr. Greenstone said I could phone you,” Claire said. “But since you had just left…”

Rolf was catching on.

“You said you’d trot after me?” he guessed. She nodded enthusiastically, trying not to laugh.

“And trot you did,” he said. “Right?” She waited for a second.

“Right,” she said.

He let a few more seconds pass. He was aware of people watching him with Claire as they passed, then talking among themselves. Someone took a picture with his phone. Rolf lived his life, it sometimes seemed, against a background curtain of people watching.

“So, tell me something else,” Rolf said to her. “Something I don’t know.” She sighed and seemed ready to bare her soul for him, or anything else he wanted.

“Okay, I’ll tell you. I have all your CD’s,” she said, almost as a confession. “Sometimes I put on your music for hours, and I just listen and listen, and I imagine that I’m in the front row of one of your concerts.” She paused. “Your music, the way you play, oh my god, it really moves me.” She paused. “I even have some bootlegged video. Does that make you mad?” He shook his head.

“Not at all.”

“I’m a huge fan, Mr. Geiger. I couldn’t believe it when I came to work for Mr. Greenstone and discovered you were his top client.” She paused and added as a coda, “You take my breath away.”

“You’re also getting soaked, Claire. You’re going to be wet and breathless.”

“Yeah. Yes. I know.” She hunched her shoulders. “Well,” she said, “it was worth it. I wanted to tell you. Thanks.”

She started to turn. He spoke impetuously. He wasn’t even sure where his words came from.

“The least I can do is buy you coffee,” he said. She was momentarily flustered.

“Well, oh, sure. Whenever you have the time and…”

“I meant now,” he said.

“Oh, but… “ He took her arm.

“Come on. Brian won’t mind. You’re helping a client.”

“Helping a client do what?” she asked.

“Keep dry. Stay in a good productive mood. Remain sane. Come along.”

He did not let her protest further. Instead, he steered her to a bistro that was a few doors down the block. It was an expensive snooty white-tablecloth two-star joint which actually Geiger didn’t much care for due to its pretensions. He had been taken there a few times and stuffed with an overpriced lunch by recording executives. The maître d’ recognized Geiger immediately and snapped to attention even though he was eating his own late lunch.

“A table up front or something in the rear, sir?” the maître d asked.

“Up front is fine,” Geiger said. “We just want coffee.”

The staff was starting to set up for the cocktail and dinner hours, but a table was quickly arranged. It was a small cozy one. Fresh flowers landed in the center almost immediately.

The staff also provided Claire with a fresh, dry shawl. The gesture surprised her. She didn’t know whether or not to accept and so she looked to him for help.

Rolf nodded slightly and thanked the waiter.

Claire put the shawl around her. Geiger deduced that she had not been in New York too long and was not yet accustomed to being taken to the better places by her dates. He pictured her in a sweatshirt and jeans with a guy her own age wearing a reversed baseball cap. Then he pictured her in a snug T-shirt and cut-off jeans and had to catch himself and issue a course correction. She was a bright young girl. As they spoke, she reminded him of Diana four years younger.

Geiger ordered coffee. Claire ordered tea. The restaurant provided a plate of small freshly baked cookies. Two diners, a man and a woman, leaving their off-hour lunch, glanced at the celebrity pianist seated in the front of the restaurant as they exited.

Claire spoke of college and moving from graduate school into the world of entertainment. Her full name was Claire Graham, she said, and she was from San Francisco. This was her first job in New York. She said she was still thrilled with everything in the city and in awe of it at the same time.

“So, am I the first ‘famous person’ you’ve met?” he asked.

“Almost, Mr. Geiger,” she said. “My girlfriend and I went to a bar in SoHo the other night and two of the New York Rangers tried to hit on us. And one time my suitcase came open in an airport and George Clooney stopped and helped me. But you’re the first famous guy to buy me tea.”

He shrugged and kept a straight face.

“Who said I was paying?” he asked. “I can’t afford a clip joint like this and I never carry money.”

She looked stricken, then realized he was kidding and laughed. He kept up the conversation. He listened to what she had to say.

As she chatted, the front of Geiger’s mind was processing music, the art of the piano, how much he enjoyed playing, and how much he needed to practice. Meanwhile, the back of his mind played with the notion of how easy it would be to get Claire into bed. He didn’t often have such impulses with women he had just met and was shocked that he was having them here. He was involved with someone he loved and cared about, Diana. He encountered great-looking woman all the time. So why was this different?

After thirty minutes, he paid and they got up to leave.

The rain had subsided when they stepped outdoors. But as a special gift, he pulled her into a small store and bought her an umbrella. It was an exceptionally nice fold-up one, yellow, with a good wooden handle and a plush leather case, extravagant, and imported from Spain.

Then, unable to keep her awe in check, she asked him to follow her into the newsstand of her office building. She bought a copy of a classical music magazine which had his picture in it and insisted that he autograph it for her.

She produced a Sharpie. He signed.

“I can’t wait to tell my parents about this, Mr. Geiger,” she said, which almost twice ruined the moment.

All of this happened to the amusement of the Bengali news dealer, who barged into the conversation, and then asked him to autograph a copy of People magazine. The latest edition had contained the picture of him wandering through Central Park with the bag of butter crunch.

“Do me a favor. Stop calling me, ‘Mr. Geiger,’” he finally requested of Claire. “Okay?”

“Okay,” she said. But she was as yet unable to call him by his first name.

“You know what else?” she asked.

“What else, Claire?”

“Would you sign the umbrella, too? It’s my souvenir of today.” He grinned.

“Sure,” he said. She handed him the Sharpie again. For fun, in big bold strokes, he wrote in black upon a yellow pane of the umbrella.

To Claire,

You're a symphony!

Rolf Geiger

Claire walked back to work. He watched her go. When she went through the revolving door, she turned and looked his way. Rolf was still watching her.

She gave him a wave and a motion with the umbrella. It was sort of like a friendly salute. He raised his hand slightly and waved back.

Then he turned and walked home. The rain eventually stopped and the sun broke through.

He felt excited about something and couldn’t even tell what. Thoughts of Claire ran through his mind. If nothing else, she had diverted him from the memory of “the encounter.”

But his suppressed thoughts about Claire shamed him. In spite of himself, he felt a physical attraction. But he would keep his interest in Claire in check, he vowed. She probably had a boyfriend. He shouldn’t confuse her interest in his music with an interest in everything else. She had been fun to have a cup of coffee with, that’s where he needed to leave it.

He kept telling himself all of this. He kept repeating it because he wasn’t convinced.

Eighteen

Three days later, on a Friday morning late in April, Rolf and Diana flew to Nantucket Island for the weekend. They arrived in the early afternoon, rented a jeep at the airport and registered at the Gray Lady Inn on Federal Street.

Both Rolf and Diana were looking for relaxation and escape. Blessed with longer daylight at this time in the spring, they took the jeep out to a secluded beach on the south shore and shared a long walk.

Much of the time, Rolf was silent, though he held Diana’s hand as they strolled. The ocean crashed within twenty feet of them and Geiger constantly thought he heard music and a rhythm in the surf. Then he held her firmly, arm around her, for several hundred yards. The beach was nearly deserted. At one point, a black Labrador ran to them, barked playfully, and then ran at full speed to join its owner, a tiny male figure far down the beach.

The day was blustery and the sun darted in and out. But being away from New York, and being able to force the visions of Rabinowitz to a distance were important.

When they stopped walking, they found a long log, the wreckage of an unearthed tree that had fallen into the ocean during a storm. It had drifted and dried.

They sat down on it. Diana found a small flat piece of driftwood that was a few feet away. She picked it up and looked at her lover.

“Hold still,” she said.

He did.

She sat a few feet from him and pulled out the small set of colored pencils that she always kept with her. With a few lines and strokes, she drew a profile and a caricature of Rolf, sitting on the beach, the ocean in the background in blue.

She labeled it, “Nantucket. April 2009,” and handed it to him.

“I love it,” he said. “And I love you, too.”

“Mmm,” she answered. “Let’s not get back to the room too late tonight, okay?”

They were back to the inn by six. On a previous trip to Nantucket, Geiger had dined at the restaurant at 21 Federal Street. The restaurant’s address was also its name: Twenty-one Federal. The restaurant had been excellent three years earlier and was equally excellent on this evening. Then they took a short walk through the main center of town.

At this time of the year, most of the stores were closed in the evening, but Nantucket Bookworks had its doors wide-open, inviting them in. They spent a half hour browsing. At one point, Rolf looked up and his heart skipped a beat. There was a back room in the bookstore, filled with books for children. A young woman with short dark hair, moving just at the edge of Geiger’s vision, had just walked into the room.

Geiger blinked. He had gotten a good look at her. He was sure it was Claire.

He glanced at Diana, who was at a section of art books near the front door. Then he glanced to the rear chamber again, moving slightly closer. The woman’s back was to him now, but from the three-quarters profile he had glimpsed, she had looked just like Claire. Or at least he thought she had. Rolf went to Diana’s side.

“I want to leave,” he whispered.

She looked up in surprise. “We just got here,” she said.

“It’s not that. I just saw someone I want to avoid.”

“Who?”

“A girl named Claire.” He nodded in the direction of the back of the room.

“A former one night stand, I assume, Tiger.”

“Nothing of the sort,” he answered. “She works for Brian.”

“Is she a bitch or something?”

“No. Quite the opposite. She seems very young and very nice.”

“Then go say hello. I don’t mind. If you don’t come back,” she kidded cheerfully, “I’ll know she was a very special woman to steal you from me. Don’t be antisocial. Go give the girl her cheap thrill, then come back here and I’ll slip you some sex in the open Jeep.”

He sighed doubly. Diana was one of the best teases he ever met.

Rolf walked slowly to the rear of the store. He turned a corner and found himself in the small section of the store where children’s books were kept.

No Claire. But there was an adjoining area where there was collection of greeting cards. Geiger saw the woman’s shadow through the doorway. He could tell by the silhouette that it was the woman he had taken to be Claire.

He drew a breath. What was going on? Why was this making him apprehensive? It was just a simple hello to a girl who worked for Brian. That’s all.

He turned the corner and saw the short dark hair, green parka and jeans. He took two steps forward, reached and tapped the woman on the shoulder.

“Hi,” he said.

The woman turned. Geiger felt a wave of shock go through him. He didn’t understand. How could he have been so wrong? The woman who faced him was not Claire. Nor did she look like her. She had a pale, pretty face. She looked familiar, but Rolf couldn’t place her. It was as if he had seen her in a dream, or a famous painting. She was equally surprised to be looking at him.

“Yes?” she asked.

He began to answer, but before his eyes, the features of the woman’s face rearranged themselves for a moment and he saw his own mother as an old woman, had she lived. He flinched in deep shock as he stared into her sorrowful hurt eyes.

“Yes?” the woman asked again. “Yes?”

“What?” Rolf asked, shaking himself. The woman’s face flew apart again. It reassembled into something less familiar and with less emotional baggage. Now she was amused.

“You tapped me on the shoulder,” she said. “Remember?”

“I, uh, I’m sorry,” he fumbled. “I thought I recognized you. But I’m mistaken.” Her lips parted in a smile.

“Quite all right,” she said politely. “No harm.” He could tell: she recognized him.

“I love your music,” she said. “Coldplay with Mozart. What a hoot.” He managed a smile.

“Thank you,” he muttered. “You’re very kind.”

“I hope you start performing again,” she said.

“Yes. Yes,” he struggled to get away. “Well, thank you. I’m planning to.”

“I enjoyed meeting you,” she answered.

She gave him a smile that suggested that she wished he could stay longer.

He walked back through the store, confused. He arrived by Diana’s side. She had a large book in her hands.

“Look at this,” she said. “Isn’t this fantastic?” It was a thick, fifty-dollar book of Nantucket photographs, taken and compiled by an outstanding local photographer. He gave it a look.

“I like it,” he said, visions of Claire still in one part of his mind, the identity of the mystery woman in another part.

“It’s gorgeous,” she said. “It has pictures of everything we’ve seen today.”

“There’s empty space in the bookcase back in New York.”

“You’re a doll,” she said.

But his focus was still far away. He was craning his head looking toward the back rooms again. Was he was just plain losing his mind?

They stayed at Bookworks another few minutes. Rolf bought two hardcover novels and Diana bought the book of photographs of Nantucket. They returned to the inn by ten.

When the door to their room closed, the bag of books slipped from his hand and dropped to the floor with a heavy thud. Rolf took Diana in his arms. He drew her very tightly to him.

“Still horny?” she asked.

“I’m desperate for you?” he said.

He began to kiss her. Her response to him was as passionate as his advance. They tumbled enthusiastically into bed and made love. Toward midnight, they both fell asleep, Diana tucked closely under his arm.

The next morning, on Saturday, they rose after sleeping late and had brunch in town. In the afternoon, they explored other parts of the island: ‘Sconset, Madaket, and Smith’s Point. The island remained quiet and sleepy. The wind off the ocean still had a sharp edge to it.

Late in the afternoon, when they were concluding a walk along the oceanfront in Madaket, another black dog appeared. Like the previous day, it was a Labrador. It ran to them and barked, though not as playfully this time.

Geiger shooed the dog away. The animal recoiled looked as if it were positioning itself to attack them. It started to lunge toward Diana. Geiger quickly stepped between her and the animal and blocked the dog with a hard knee to its shoulder. The animal turned on Rolf and snapped, barely missing his left hand, the hand he needed to play the bass clef sections on a world tour.

“Hey! Get away!” Geiger shouted at the dog. He hit the animal with a knee again, much harder this time, sending it sprawling. A second snap by the beast barely missed his right wrist. The dog had no license and no collar. Geiger cursed and fumed.

“If people own an animal like this, can’t they keep it on a leash?”

The animal turned in a looping pattern and came back a third time. Diana ducked behind Rolf. Before the animal could jump, however, Geiger formed an open palm and whacked the dog as hard as he could on the side of its head. The Lab yelped, snarled, and spun backwards, landing hard in the sand. The animal barked furiously at Geiger, then, as if in response to a command that only it could hear, it turned and ran away, sprinting down the beach as far as it could go.

“Incredible!” Diana said breathlessly. “Why would anyone own an animal like that?”

“Let’s hope the dog’s not going for reinforcements,” Geiger said, watching the dog escape. He stared at the fleeting animal. For a moment, it looked like a wolf racing over a field.

Then Geiger’s eyes widened anew.

“My God,” he said. “Look at that!”

Now they both stared down the beach, seeing the same figure in the distanced as on the previous day. The same old man.

“Was that the same dog as yesterday?” Diana asked incredulously.

“It sure looks like it,” Geiger answered. “Didn’t act like it, though.”

She shook her head. Geiger’s hands found hers. In the distance they saw the old man put his dog on a leash. The distant figure, with its dog, stood and watched them.

Rolf felt a surge of recognition, then fear.

“Wait here,” he said to her.

He walked slowly down the beach. He drew within a hundred yards, feeling his heartbeat accelerate. There was little doubt in his mind. This was the same man he saw on East Seventy-Third Street in New York, the same man who was at the funeral of Rabinowitz. Geiger drew close enough to almost make the identification for certain. This old man wasn’t just watching him, he was stalking him. Geiger moved within twenty-five yards.

Yes! Positively! It was the same person.

In indignation, in fear, Geiger shouted at him.

“Hey!”

Rolf quickened his pace.

The old man turned abruptly. He walked briskly toward the inland side of the beach and slipped behind a high dune. Geiger accelerated and followed. He caught a glimpse of the man on a path that led farther away from the shore, before he turned a corner by an old shack. But when Rolf reached that point several seconds later, the man and his animal were nowhere to be seen.

Geiger stood for almost a full minute, looking in every direction. But the old man and his animal had vanished. Completely.

He settled himself. He tried to tell himself that he had imagined the identity, just as he had apparently thought he had seen Claire in Nantucket Bookworks the night before, only to be proved wrong.

He walked back to Diana and took her hand.

“They’re gone,” he said.

“Good riddance.”

“If we’re lucky,” Rolf commented, “they both got torn apart by a pack of rabid seagulls.”

The remark struck Diana as particularly funny and removed much of the tension from the incident. As they walked back to their jeep, they were already laughing about the distant old geezer and his ill-mannered mutt.

They returned to their guesthouse and changed for dinner. They ate at Twenty-one Federal again and, once again that evening after dinner, Geiger’s eyes and subconscious seemed to be perpetrating devilish tricks on him.

On Main Street on Saturday night, they encountered a series of street performers. From a block away and across the street, Geiger thought he recognized something.

“Incredible,” he muttered. “I don’t believe this!”

What he thought he had seen was the same clown-violinist he had seen a few weeks earlier on East Seventy-Third Street, the performer with the ghostly white visage and the vanilla violin to match. To Rolf, the musician in Nantucket even appeared to be wearing the same clown suit with the large polka dots.

Without explanation, Geiger took Diana by the hand and pulled her through some parked cars.

“What’s going on, Rolf?” she asked. “What is it now?”

“I have to see this! And so do you!”

He pulled her along with great urgency, walking down the block to take a closer look at the player. When they arrived, however, the musician looked differently than Geiger had expected. There was no white on his face and the violin was actually an electric fiddle. His shirt bore polka dots, but they were smaller than those of the clown on East Seventy-Third Street, and this violinist wore jeans and a fedora.

He turned to Geiger when Geiger arrived and winked at him, as if he knew him. He didn’t. He wished them a good evening. When he spoke he had a Southern accent.

“I love a good mystery, Rolf,” Diana said. “But would you mind telling me what you dragged me down here for?”

Geiger looked at the fiddler as he started to play. Then he told a lie.

“I thought I knew the fellow from Julliard,” he said.

“Like you thought you knew the girl from last night?” she asked.

“Very similar,” he conceded.

But the inexplicable events did not stop. When they returned to the Gray Lady Inn, they were surprised to see a police car sitting outside. They were even more surprised after they walked in.

It was past 10 P.M. but the lobby was loud with animated voices. There were about two dozen people there, half of them in shock, the others morbidly amused. Everyone seemed to know everyone else, even the other guests.

There was a uniformed policeman named DaSilva and a sandy-haired detective named Timothy Brooks who seemed to be in charge. Geiger read their names off nametags.

“What happened?” Geiger asked.

Brooks raised his eyebrows.

“Have a look for yourself, if you’d like a sight you’ll never forget,” he answered. He motioned into the sitting room where Rolf and Diana had been a few hours earlier.

Diana and Rolf glanced at each other, then walked through the crowded lobby to the doorway which led to the sitting room.

“Just go to the door. No farther,” Brooks called after them. “There’s a veterinarian at work in thee. With a patient.”

“A vet?” Geiger asked.

Rolf and Diana moved to the doorway. Other people gave way so that they could see. The big plate-glass window that overlooked the meadow had been shattered. On the floor was the perpetrator.

A deer.

A mature buck lay on the carpet, with dark red blood running from cuts to its head, neck and shoulders. The animal was on its left side, obviously sedated, but breathing hard. Several piles of shattered plate glass—big, dangerous, jagged shards of it—lay around the room.

“What happened?” Diana asked.

There had been a handful of witnesses. The best among them were a honeymooning couple named Basilio from Weymouth. They had been sitting in the solarium when the buck, had charged out of the nature preserve on the west edge of the meadow behind the inn. The animal had raced across the meadow as if pursued by something that had frightened it terribly. It ran in a circular pattern for several seconds, moving in giant, frantic leaps. Several witnesses thought it might have been injured, but, as it turned out, it hadn’t been.

But no one could see anything pursuing it and no one could imagine what might have so scared it. Deer hunting was forbidden on the island, no one had heard any shots, and there were no large dogs or other predators. The animal had run around in a final circle, then turned abruptly—again, almost in response to some unseen foe—and charged directly at the inn.

“I mean, directly,” Luanne Basilio said. “That deer never swerved once it turned toward the inn. Just came straight at the plate glass window.”

There had been a tremendous crash when the deer hit the plate glass. The collision with the window had stunned the buck, at the very least, and it had collapsed panting and bleeding onto the carpet, where it still lay.

“How long ago did this happen?” Geiger asked.

“About twenty minutes,” Brooks answered.

By chance, the vet lived a few doors away and, summoned by Mrs. Irwin, had rushed over right away. Dr. Lee Goran had already tranquilized the animal and was examining its wounds. A woman from the Nantucket ASPCA stood by also, looking over the vet’s shoulder. A decision was being made as to whether the animal would have to be euthanized or released. Meanwhile, an accumulation of curious onlookers stood by in the next room, standing vigil.

Geiger looked to Diana. “Incredible,” he said.

“Poor thing,” she said, shaking her head.

They were both thinking the same. The second lunatic animal accident in a matter of hours. Coincidence?

Rolf put his hand on hers. Neither he nor Diana could hear the conversation around the deer but from the way the vet was working on the animal’s cuts, things seemed to be going in the buck’s direction. The vet wouldn’t have been stitching cuts if the animal was going to be put down.

Geiger and Diana stayed and watched. A few minutes later, the deer wobbled to its feet. Miraculously, Dr. Goran led the animal back out through the hole created by the shattered glass. The animal wobbled to its feet outdoors and then sat down again.

“The tranquilizer wears off in fifteen minutes. The deer will wander off again. As long as it stays away from cars it will steady itself and survive.”

Rolf and Diana went back up to their room. Geiger went into the bathroom and showered. He was soaping himself, with eyes closed, when he felt something touch him.

Nerves tingling, he jumped. Then he smiled.

“Room enough for two?” she asked.

“Always,” he said. “If it’s you.”

It was Diana, completely undressed, stepping in to join him. He liked to shower with her. He massaged her back and pulled her into a tight embrace as the water splashed them.

He pulled her wet body as tightly to him as he could. For the first time in several days, he thought of nothing other than her and the female physical presence in front of him.

He reached for the water and turned it off.

“Should I carry you to bed or throw you in bed from here?” he asked.

“You may carry me, then put me down gently. Then you can be as forceful as you want.”

She kissed him.

“But dry me off first.”

“Of course.”

They shared a towel, then tumbled into bed. He again pulled her as tightly to him as he could before making love to her as passionately as if this were their first time together. It was as if, in each other’s physical presence, they were taking refuge from an ominous day.

Nineteen

Toward 2 A.M., Rolf came awake in the soft blue light of the room. For several minutes, he lay quietly thinking.

Actually, he was half-awake, dozing more than sleeping, in a comfortable inn on a quiet island. Around him in the room were objects and furniture which, if not familiar, were conducive to rest.

His hands were behind his head, folded on the pillow as he stared above him and let his gaze drift around the room.

He was struggling again, trying to put events in order. What had driven the deer to charge into the windowpane downstairs? By anyone’s account, this was no ordinary event. Was it unrelated to what was going on in Geiger’s life? Or had he drawn something to this inn, something that had made a wild animal go into a frenzy of fear?

What had been lurking in those woods beyond the meadow? Something half-dead? Something half-human? Something with a foot in two different worlds?

Like the ghost of Isador Rabinowitz?

A powerful shudder went through him.

Why had he thought he had seen Claire in Nantucket Bookworks? He reviewed what was in his memory and, by God, he was sure it had been her. Few twenty-two-year-olds are quite that alluring. He began to entertain a funny hunch that his strange feelings toward her were somehow associated with his haunting by Rabinowitz.

Yes, he was sure it had been her.

He recognized the shape of her backside, the legs that she walked upon so saucily in her short skirts. The curve of her neck and cheek. How could it have been her one minute and another woman the next? Why had he imagined the other woman’s face as his mother’s?

He had imagined that, hadn’t he? The dead didn’t inhabit living forms to revisit the world, did they?

“Did they?”

His thoughts drifted. Then there had been the violinist. The street musician. Once again, Rolf had been sure of what he had seen. That incident had been even stranger. He had rushed across the street and the musician he had seen wasn’t even there! How was he to interpret that?

Had he seen something from another world? Another reality? Or had it just been some weird coincidence. A street performer whom he had once seen from his window on East Seventy-Third Street in Manhattan turns up in Nantucket, then slips away before Geiger can rush up and speak.

Well, come to think of it, those events weren’t so far-fetched. The explanation was not that irrational. But the combination of all three?

He shuddered again. This one was a deep shiver. It roused Diana, who opened her eyes.

“Tiger?” she asked.

“Yes, honey?”

“Why are you awake?”

“Thinking,” he said.

“Don’t think too much,” she said sweetly. “Unless it’s about me.”

She closed her eyes and snuggled close to him. A moment later, she opened her eyes and looked at him. She propped her head up on her hand.

“Hey,” she said. “I want to know something.”

“What’s that?”

“What kind of man was he? What kind of life did he have? Before you knew him.”

“Who?” he asked.

“The man whom you’re always thinking about. Rabinowitz.”

He felt a sinking sensation. “Why are you asking me that?”

“Because sometimes I feel that he’s here with us.”

“What?”

“What I mean is, Tiger, that he’s gotten into your psyche so deeply,” Diana said. “I live with you. I sleep with you. I’m intimate with you. I want to know what kind of man got so far into your mind.”

Several seconds passed before Geiger could answer.

“Sometimes I think I never knew him at all,” Geiger said to the dark room. “I knew the sour old musician, the great recitalist who wanted me to fail. I don’t know what was further inside that. He didn’t permit people to see inside him.”

“Do you think he was dangerous? Devious? Mean?” she asked.

Geiger deflected the question. In the corner of the room something shifted. A crack on an old floorboard. All four of their eyes settled upon the spot for a beat. Nothing was visible.

“A lot of people thought so,” Rolf answered.

“But what do you think?” she asked.

“I think all those adjectives applied in one way or another.”

“But where did all that malice come from?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Where does evil come from? Where does genius come from?” he asked.

Another second passed.

“So he was like those Russian dolls. The matruskas,” she suggested. “One inside another inside another, till you get to the last one.”

“Sort of,” he said. “What I never understood about the dolls was which one was real. The outermost or the innermost? Or was one a reflection of the other?”

“And one never can see into the final one, either. That one doesn’t open,” she said. He sighed.

“You think too much,” he said to her. He pulled her close and kissed her. He savored the touch of her head against his shoulder.

“Know what I’m going to do?” she said sleepily. “I’m going to go over to Lincoln Center next week when we get back to New York. I’m going to find out everything there is to know about Isador Rabinowitz.”

`”Why?”

“I want to know why he’s gotten so deeply into your head,” she said. “I want to know so that I can help you chase him out.”

She closed her eyes and settled back to sleep. He tried to do the same, but he was still bothered. Shortly thereafter, with Diana breathing evenly as she slept, Geiger’s eyes came open.

He heard piano music. It sounded like Rachmaninoff, played by a master. He lay still and listened. It was at the edge of his consciousness, but it was there. It was right there!

The music grew louder and the room, it seemed to him, grew cold. It was as if someone had opened a door to the winter. He thought he sensed a presence in the room.

When Geiger had been a teenager, Rabinowitz had always wondered about Rolf’s sex life. He had frequently asked to hear about it. Standard questions sprinkled through a recital, attempting to test his concentration: “Do you now make love with a girl, Rolf? Is she good?”

Was the spirit of the old master now here to watch him make love to Diana?

Of course he was, Rolf decided. It made perfect sense! Geiger whispered aloud.

“You’ve followed me!”

Then, a voice emerged from the darkness.

“Yes.”

Geiger’s nerves surged.

Rolf was sure he had heard an answer! The old man was present somewhere nearby. The music continued. A Chopin étude, this one played with a sad and sinister touch.

“What do you want?” Rolf asked.

“Your Diana. She makes love to another man these days, you know,” the voice told him.

“What?” Geiger asked.

“The woman lying next to you. Another man mounts her and penetrates her.” Rolf recognized the voice. The old master.

“Go away!” Rolf whispered in return.

“No woman is true to a single man. Diana is unfaithful. You’re sharing her. She accepts another man’s seeds.”

“Lies!”

“She wants him to impregnate her since you won’t.”

“Burn in hell, Isador,” Rolf thought in return. Geiger shifted in his bed, trying to banish the ugly thoughts.

“Think about it. Think where this would be taking place.”

“I refuse,” Geiger said. Rabinowitz must have leaned harder on the keys, because the volume stepped up.

“Then I will show you.”

An unwanted image accosted Rolf’s sleepy brain. He envisioned Maurice Sahadi’s art studio, crowded with young male artists. But tonight it was Diana who was the model. She was completely undressed before a dozen strong men, none of them painting, each of them madly desiring her.

“Exactly!” …and Geiger was completely shaken by the idea.

“Sharing her. That’s right, Rolf. You are sharing her. Many enjoy the beauty of her body, and several of them partake in it. Am I clear?

Geiger shuddered violently, one of those weird nighttime shakes that brings a man out of sleep.

“The only solution will be for you to murder her.”

Rolf bolted upright. His eyes were wide-open. The image, the thought, of Diana in death was too much for him to bear. And he could still hear the music. Distantly.

“I am imagining you,” Geiger said to Rabinowitz.

“No. I’m real.”

“Prove it!” Geiger demanded. “Prove that I’m not imagining you!”

He heard the old man laugh.

Incredibly, Geiger thought he sensed movement in the dark room. Low movement that he couldn’t see. Like the movement of an animal. It was coming near him.

Very near. Then it was there.

Something tugged at his scalp. An invisible cold hand seemed to close around his heart. He felt an icy fear sweep along the back of his neck and he flinched. For half a second, the foul odor of the dog on the beach assaulted him. Then it was gone. The sensation threw him into shock.

“Proof enough?” Rabinowitz asked.

Speechless, his heart kicking, Geiger threw his left hand to the lamp at his bedside. He jarred it, then fumbled with it, trying to turn it on.

“Till next time,” the old devil laughed. “Auf Wiedersehen!”

Geiger found the light switch. He clicked it and a yellow light bathed the room. Simultaneously, the room temperature rose again. The light swept away the image of Diana with all those men. Geiger listened to the thundering of his heart. He let things settle. The light did not wake Diana. He waited, expecting something unspeakable. Nothing happened. Then, cautiously, he turned off the light and lay back.

He closed his eyes again, letting the piano concerto, born on distant wings of questionable intent, bore him off to sleep.

The next morning he awoke shortly after nine.

Diana had dressed nicely. Tan shorts and a pale blue long-sleeved sweater. He loved the way she looked. They packed and prepared for their flight back to New York.

Checking out, Geiger asked if there were any pianos anywhere in the area. In any room or at some inn nearby that might have been playing music late.

David Corwin, at the front desk, pursed his lips and shook his head.

“Nothing that I know of, Mr. Geiger,” he said. “I hope you weren’t disturbed.”

“No. Not at all.”

“Rolf is so close to music,” Diana chimed in, “that sometimes he hears it in his head. Even when there’s none playing.” Geiger didn’t entirely appreciate the observation. Diana regretted it as soon as it was out of her mouth.

“Yeah. I’m a regular nutcase,” Geiger said dryly. “But my fans don’t worry about that. Only the people around me.”

Both Diana and David Corwin laughed awkwardly.

Outside a few minutes later, Diana asked, “Should I apologize or are you your usual testy world-class-musician self today?” He grimaced.

“I’m testy,” he said. “I thought I heard something last night. Sorry.”

“It’s forgotten,” she said.

They went to the airport and were soon on the one o’clock plane back to LaGuardia. On the flight, Geiger heard the music again. He recognized the touch of Rabinowitz and the harp of his own Steinway. The master was playing on the instrument in Geiger’s home, Geiger theorized. He was doing it right now while they were in the air 250 miles away.

Shortly before they landed in New York, Diana turned to him. Her hand settled on his.

“Feeling better, Tiger?” she asked.

“He’s pursuing me,” Geiger answered softly. “Rabinowitz follows me everywhere I go.”

For a moment she had a hopeless look in her eye. Then she turned and stared out the window. When she spoke again, she had changed the subject to her art class with Maurice Sahadi.

Neither of them mentioned the name of Isador Rabinowitz for the rest of the day. The evening back in their townhouse proved uneventful. It wasn’t until the next morning that they noticed that the watcher across the street had vanished. He had left a small pile of cigarette butts behind him, but he did seem to be gone.

“Hopefully,” Diana thought to herself, “for good.” The more she thought about the gnarled little man, the more he scared her. Just like Rolf’s increasingly irrational behavior.

Twenty

On Monday morning, shortly after Mrs. Jamison arrived, Brian Greenstone phoned.

Rolf took the call in his upstairs office. Greenstone had spoken to half a dozen out-of-town promoters about doing a mostly Beethoven concert within the next six weeks.

“I’ve narrowed it down to Boston, Washington, and Philadelphia, Rolf,” Greenstone summed up. “The dates would be in either late May or early June.”

The date in Washington was a Monday at the Kennedy Center. Monday was generally not a good evening for a recital, though Rolf Geiger with a Beethoven program would have easily sold out the Center any night of the week. After listening to the particulars, Geiger vetoed Washington. The notion of playing in the capital, Geiger felt, would put too much pressure on the date. It would seem “too official.” Greenstone agreed.

“So, where does that leave us?” Geiger asked.

“It leaves you in the cauldrons of your colonial insurrection. Boston or Philadelphia,” Greenstone said. “These are the better bets, anyway. Got a calendar in front of you?”

Geiger did. The date in Boston was the last Wednesday in May before Memorial Day. A good date. The location was Lowell Hall at Harvard. One thousand seats. Not too big, not too small. Definitely possible but not perfect.

But Boston critics were not terribly friendly, treating some visiting musicians the way the local sportswriters treated the New York Yankees.

“The Academy of Music in Philadelphia has a potential cancellation for Thursday, June 11,” Greenstone continued.

“I like Philadelphia,” Geiger said. “Does that mean the orchestra’s available, too?”

“Indeed, it does. And it’s a great orchestra, as you know.”

“Can we set it up?”

“I’ll make the calls this afternoon,” Greenstone said. “Or maybe tomorrow morning. The Academy is very anxious, so I don’t want them to think we are too anxious.”

“Perfect,” Rolf said. “Perfect.”

“Oh, and there’s something else, too,” Greenstone added. “Despite what we discussed previously, I’m looking at the possibility of starting your world tour in London.”

Geiger was surprised.

“Rather than in New York?”

“Precisely. I can get Wembley Stadium for September first. This is huge. I definitely want to start you off with very strong press notices for playing unadulterated great classical music in a mega-arena. If you’ve been watching, the British press hasn’t hit you as hard as your own American one has.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” he confessed. “I stopped reading all of them.”

“So, go there, play magnificently with traditional works, conquer London, and it gives the English press the chance to say, ‘See there! Rolf is wonderful and we here in the U.K. knew it all along!’ If we come off good press in London, we’re halfway home in New York also.”

“So what do we do with New York? End here?”

“Maybe. Or maybe we end in Cairo. The Emperor at the Valley of the Kings, as you suggested. Or Tokyo. I love Tokyo. I could retire on what we might make in Japan alone.”

Greenstone laughed.

“Anyway,” the agent continued, “This is all ‘TBA’. To Be Arranged. So we need to talk more about the back end of the trip, Rolf. The main thing is, the Brits will treat you fairly and the country will feel honored to have you commence your tour there. Pigs-in-clover. Oh, and I can probably pull a taut string or two and have Prince Charles and his current concubine, Lady Camilla attend. I already know they wish to meet you. I wouldn’t leave that to chance.”

The assertion left Geiger momentarily speechless. His last contact with royalty had been in Scandinavia on the 2005 tour when a local princess wrote down her phone number and let it be known she would be home alone after a concert. Geiger had wisely misplaced the number.

“London was Rabinowitz’s adopted city,” Geiger mused.

“Was it? Well, the old bastard is dead, so who cares? He’s easier to represent as an estate than as an individual.”

“During the war. Before coming to the U.S.”

“During the war, what?”

“Rabinowitz lived in London during the war.”

“Well, too bad the Huns missed him,” Greenstone said. “And that’s where you should debut the tour. You’ve got glamour, and you’ll draw a humongous crowd. So? Thoughts?”

“Okay,” Geiger said. “You sold me. London. I’ll do London first.”

In his home, Geiger sat down the phone. His agent could have been considered a world-class windbag were it not for the fact that he knew what he was talking about. If Brian Greenstone claimed a tour was going to be a success, he was invariably right.

Geiger went downstairs and looked for Diana, then remembered that she always went to the health club on Monday mornings. Rolf discovered that he was apparently alone in the house. Mrs. Jamison had gone back out again. She put in forty hours a week, but sometimes—like now—Rolf couldn’t figure her schedule.

But he knew he would survive the day even if she didn’t come back. He and Diana were to attend a preview that evening of the Renoir exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had received an invitation to the preview. The actual opening wasn’t until later in the week.

He moved from his office down to his library. There was a stack of fan mail that he had left near the piano. He reread some of it. Then, beginning to feel ambitious and untroubled by Rabinowitz so far today, he moved to his bookcase.

He started to select some scores. From his shelves, he pulled Beethoven’s Sonata in A Major #2. The work might be part of the program for Philadelphia if the Quaker City date worked out. Well, he reasoned. Why not? He might as well start looking at music.

Several minutes later, he put his hands to the keyboard and began to play.

Twenty-one

Diana Stephenson walked through Central Park to Lincoln Center. There she continued on to the Theater and Performing Arts annex of the New York Public Library. She went to the third floor research gallery.

There would be a wealth of material there, she knew, on Isador Rabinowitz, material not available from any on-line internet source. As a music scholar, she had her own working familiarity with the man. But she was looking for insights more than anything. She wanted to know what it was that had stayed within Rolf’s psyche. What invisible piece of the man had remained after his death?

On the third floor of the library, Diana signed in with the librarian. He was a short, wiry man with closely cut gray hair. He assigned her a work space at a long flat table. She set down a notebook and a pair of new pens at her assigned place.

Then she went to the massive old card catalogue of the theater and performing arts collection and found several listings for material on Isador Rabinowitz. Among them were several files of old clippings.

She was aware of other researchers constantly coming and going. Diana paid little attention to their movement until she had written down the call-letters of the files she wanted. Done, she turned and her gaze traveled the room to find a man of about thirty-five sitting three long tables away from her.

He was good-looking, with dark hair and a square jaw. He wore a blue pin-striped shirt and a tie. He was watching her intently. When she caught him, he lowered his eyes. Diana smiled to herself. She was both flattered and annoyed. She frequently caught men watching her. A couple of times a week, men tried to pick her up. In stores. In museums. Sometimes it was okay. Sometimes it was irritating. Never did she encourage it.

“Well,” she told herself before getting on with her work, “at least he’s nice-looking.” This was better than drawing a creep.

She filed her call-slips with the librarian, then went back to her desk table and waited.

A few minutes passed. She was facing the man at the table who had been watching her. Twice he looked up to see her looking at him. The second time, he smiled. That caused her to turn away completely. Several minutes later, the librarian reappeared. He now had a name tag which identified him as Harold Milsap, Assistant Reference Librarian. Milsap cradled several aging folders in his arms.

“Here we are,” he said as he arrived. The files she requested were contained in large envelopes, nine by twelve inches, each containing a collection of newspaper and magazine clippings. Milsap set four files upon the table in front of Diana. None had labels, other than Rabinowitz’s name, a reference code for storage, and a notation of how many clippings were in each file.

Harold Milsap arranged the files in front of Diana so that she could see the titles on their spines. The librarian then spoke in an intense hushed voice.

“You asked for five files. Subject matter, Rabinowitz, Isador. One file is still in use elsewhere here today.”

“Someone else is researching him?” she asked.

Mr. Milsap gave a nod to a research table toward the other end of the room. The dark-haired man in the blue pin-striped shirt, Diana’s newest fan, had the other file.

She glanced at him. He was sitting quietly now, intently leaning forward, his gaze studiously on the material in front of him.

“The gentleman right there,” Milsap said. “He’s doing some sort of research, also.”

“Will he want these files eventually?”

“I couldn’t say. I know he saw them yesterday. He might be finished with them.”

“He’s been here before?”

“Four days in a row,” the librarian said. “He’s reading everything we have on Isador Rabinowitz.”

“Thank you,” she said. She turned slightly and took another look at the man. He was very good looking. He still didn’t look up.

Milsap went back to his desk.

Diana opened her first file. Carefully counting out fifteen clippings, she arranged them in front of her. The top file was the thinnest. It contained clippings form recitals by Rabinowitz in the 1950’s. They were reviews and personality profiles. Mostly journalistic wet kisses.

Diana read through all of them. In keeping with the homogenized image that America wanted for itself in the fifties, each article had a similar spin: Rabinowitz, the genius, had suffered greatly in Europe before and during the war. Now he had brought his genius to the shores of North America and the nation was all the better for it.

“Oh, brother,” Diana whispered to herself, thinking back on the stories that Rolf had told her. Three wives, countless mistresses, three legitimate children and two others who weren’t, all of whom would end up hating him. Law suits all over the place, physical confrontation with critics and other musicians. Lucifer of the Larghetto, Satan of the Scherzo.

She reassembled the fifteen clippings and tucked them neatly back into the folder. She picked up the second file and waded through thirty-two more clippings. More of the same.

She found a headline from a news story,

MAESTRO RABINOWITZ

BECOMES U.S. CITIZEN

with a few paragraphs of text attached.

The item was from Time magazine in 1953. The article, which pictured Rabinowitz with a bevy of beautiful, bosomy women at the Stork Club in New York, brought the public up to speed on the great man’s arrival in America. Time pointedly reminded its readers that Rabinowitz was a Russian-Viennese Jew, though he was now as American as a hot dog. “Or at least as American as the brilliant physicist, Albert Einstein, to whom he is frequently compared.”

Rabinowitz? Einstein?

Diana almost gagged on that one.

The picture at the Stork Club, the one with all the babes, also featured J. Edgar Hoover, who had apparently helped accelerate Rabinowitz’s citizenship application. Hoover wore his usual sinister closet-creep grin.

Presumably, thought Diana, the women are with Rabinowitz. Hoover would have had no use for them, other than as props.

She checked with some notes on Rabinowitz’s life that she had made before the library visit. The pianist had been married to his second wife at the time. He hadn’t divorced her till 1957. The women in the photo were leaning toward Rabinowitz, who was handsome as a man in his late thirties.

Diana reassembled the thirty-two clippings and closed file number two. She was getting nowhere. She yawned for a moment and glanced around the research room. Idly, she wondered what it would be like to have a one-afternoon affair with a sexy stranger she met at the library. Other women she knew had done such things once or twice. So why not her?

“Concentrate!” a voice told her.

The subconscious command came into her mind so clearly that it bounced her out of her fatigue. These thoughts at the edge of her consciousness were irritating. They didn’t even feel like her own.

She leaned back into her files.

“A quick affair with a handsome anonymous stranger,” she mused further. “Never had one and probably never will.”

Diana had never just hoped into the sack quickly with a would-be lover. All of the relationships in her life had been lengthy, involving a period of getting to know the man, developing a bond, and then making the decision to go to bed with him. Quick impersonal sex was not her style. Not her way of doing things.

“But soon it will be, my fair goddess Diana,” the subconscious voice told her now.

“What?” she answered. She looked up. She was now in an inane dialogue with herself.

“Soon it will be.”

“Soon it will be what?”

No reply. She shook her head. One side of her subconscious was now in open revolt against the other. Good girl, bad girl? She yawned again. If she needed something good and stiff in the middle of this afternoon, it was a good stiff cup of coffee. A caffeine fix.

She glanced at the man two tables away. She had lost his attention completely, now it appeared. She almost felt disappointed, in spite of her better sense. She went on to the third file.

No big surprises here, either.

Looking at another batch of kiss-facey positive write-ups, Diana developed a grudging respect for the publicity people who had sanitized Rabinowitz’s public image. She knew all about the private Rabinowitz from Rolf—the tyrannical nature, the physical abuse of his family and women, the vile language, the insistent, persistent bullying of students, peers, agendas, employees. The way he placed his hands menacingly on the backs of the necks of students, suggesting that choking them to death would be appropriate if their musicianship didn’t measure up. What a monster. Then she found something else, in reference to the old bastard.

“…a personality and warmth as charming and incandescent as a waltz by Strauss…”

wrote Look magazine in 1965.

“Oh, yeah. Right,” she said.

The “Dark Angel” stuff about the man didn’t surface until he was well into his seventies. By then he was so celebrated that everyone made excuses for him. And yet, Rabinowitz still eluded journalistic justice. Esquire had done an edgy piece on him in 2004. But even that one tended to explain him away in light of his artistic brilliance.

Diana closed the third file and opened the fourth. It held nineteen clippings. She counted them out, arranged them neatly, and she stood up. She was getting tired. She left the clippings on the table and went downstairs and outside for a moment for a breath of air.

“Renoir tonight at the Metropolitan Museum,” she thought. How she looked forward to it. Renoir had established himself as a genius without being a monster. So why had Rabinowitz needed to become one? She went back upstairs to the third floor. She sifted through the final assortment of clippings and found references to Rabinowitz’s “legal difficulties” in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. Diana assumed the reference had to do with his wives or perhaps his entry into the United States. Heaven knew that Rabinowitz was not the type of man to bother with the letter of the law when he set out to do something.

She had even found a quote in the Esquire Article that summarized his attitude:

“Laws and morals, these are contemptible and thoroughly irrelevant ‘petit bourgeois’ concepts that shouldn’t inhibit those possessed by genius. I don’t put my fingers on the keys of a piano in the same way as mortal men. I don’t put my feet on the Earth in the same way, either…”

The word, egomaniacal, came to mind. The term was too mild. For the first time she started to comprehend the ‘Dark Angel’ term that had been used for years within the classical music industry and behind Rabinowitz’s back. Writers had probably shied away from using the term in print out of fear of Rabinowitz’s influence through his recording label. A music professor at Berkley had once said of him, “If he hadn’t been a Jew, he would have been an excellent Nazi.”

“My lasting beauty will be judged from my poetry at the keyboard, and…”

–Rabinowitz had been quoted in another interview, this one upon the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday–

“…not from any aspect of my personal behavior or demeanor.”

After another quarter hour, Diana was filled with a growing revulsion for the subject of her inquiry. But she did feel that a clearer picture had emerged, though not the one she had come seeking. She wondered how Rolf had managed to tolerate being his student and chosen protégé for the seven torturous years he had been under Rabinowitz’s influence.

Somehow, all of this refreshed her view of Rolf. It made her feel closer to him. And, looking at all this from one perspective, she was surprised the old man left as few emotional scars as he had. No wonder Rolf liked to weave themes from Chuck Berry—particularly Roll Over Beethoven and Brown Eyed Handsome Man—into passages of Ludwig van B. It was Rolf’s way—obviously one that he had developed under Rabinowitz’s tutelage—of retaining his own sanity. Plus, it was a nifty way of simultaneously clawing back at the old man and establishing his own independence. There were many ways to save one’s soul.

Diana was finished. She assembled the final clippings, counted them carefully and—

And?

“What?” she asked herself. Something was wrong.

Earlier she had counted out nineteen. Now there were twenty.

She looked around. No one had set down any file on her table. No one was anywhere close to her. In fact, there was virtually no change in the room between the time she had gone downstairs and the five minutes later that she had returned.

She counted the clippings again. There were twenty. Either she had miscounted the first two times—unlikely—or one had been added. She glanced through them again.

She had read them all, it seemed. What hadn’t she noticed? What was…?

Her hand froze as it settled on something that never touched upon Rabinowitz by name. She read the headline.

SURVIVAL OF DEATH

Unlike every other clipping in the folder, this one had no marking to indicate its origin. It was just there. She had carefully kept track of everything she had read, and she was certain that it hadn’t been there when she had gone downstairs.

She started to read.

OSLO, NORWAY. (AP) May 17

Seven dozen European scientists and philosophers, meeting today in an extraordinary session at the Torkelsjohen Castle in Oslo, joined together to express a strong commitment to a modern spiritualistic reinterpretation of Christianity and Judaism. Central to the theme of the communiqué is the tenet that the soul, rather than passing on to the next world, remains at least for a short time within the physical confines of this world. Several case histories and experiments were cited that signaled significant evidence of contact with individuals who had been physically dead less than a year.

Writer-philosopher and Nobel Laureate Fridtjof Nansen, who chaired the proceedings, stated that the soul…”

Diana stopped reading as she felt a funny twinge.

Where had this come from? And why was it nestled in with the other material on Rabinowitz? It was as if it had been placed there. Just for her.

She tried to ignore its implication: that the dead walk among us before they depart forever. She shivered uncontrollably. Then another strange feeling assailed her, one of being on view.

She raised her eyes and her heart jumped. She stared at the waiting area around the elevators, where three people were standing. One of them, an older man, turned quickly away from her. But she recognized the tattered soiled coat and the rumpled trousers. She knew her East Seventy-Third Street watcher when she saw him.

Suddenly the extra clipping made sense. “He had placed it there! Why”?

She bolted to her feet and moved rapidly around a corner toward the bank of elevators. She left the research room at a dead run.

One of the elevator doors opened and the three people waiting entered to descend.

“Wait! Hold it!” Diana yelled.

The metal doors slammed completely shut as she reached them. She punched the doors with her fist, then madly pressed the door “Up” and “Down” buttons. But the elevator had gone.

Several seconds later, another set of doors opened for a different elevator car.

Diana rushed in and pressed the button for the first floor. The car made one infuriating stop during which a fat woman ambled in. Then it continued. Diana ran out of the elevator, through a ground-floor reading room and around a corner toward the exit from the library.

Far up ahead of her, going through the revolving door, she thought she saw the escaping watcher.

She ran through the entrance area, through the security checkpoint, she was just seconds behind the man, and out the revolving door in pursuit. But outside, she stopped. She couldn’t find him. She looked in each direction. Somehow he had slipped away. Diana heaved a deep, angry sigh. How could he have disappeared so quickly?

Something passed between her and the sun. The spring day suddenly felt cold. Diana turned and went back into the library, then took the elevator back upstairs. She took the same elevator car into which she had seen the old man disappear. She thought it still carried his stench.

When Diana returned to the third floor, her material was undisturbed. She quickly re- assembled all the clippings. She walked back to Harold Milsap, the librarian. He sat at his desk and looked up expectantly from a magazine.

“May I ask you something?” she inquired. “Did you notice if anyone walked past the area where I was working? I was away for about five minutes.”

“You were away twice. Once you walked. The second time, you ran.”

“The first time,” she said.

“I didn’t see anyone. But I wasn’t watching. Something missing?” he asked.

“No. The opposite. This appeared where I was working. It wasn’t there when I left.”

He frowned. She handed him the clipping. Survival of Death. Milsap read the headline and the first paragraph.

“Well,” Milsap said. “This is uplifting.” Then he shrugged. “But I don’t suppose it should be in an Isador Rabinowitz file.”

“It wasn’t there when I went downstairs,” she repeated. “You didn’t see anyone come in and put it down?”

“No. But, look,” Harold Milsap said, “people lose clippings out of one file, then they stick them in another. Or the clipping fell to the floor from one file and someone placed it among yours. We’ll keep it at the desk till we decide where it belongs.”

Diana felt a presence appear quietly beside her. Then she realized there was a man standing next to her. She glanced at him and flinched slightly. It was the handsome man in the shirt and tie. He had been watching everything.

“Problem?” the man asked.

“You were in this room when I went out,” she said. “You didn’t see anyone place anything on my table, did you?”

“No,” he answered amiably. His long pin-striped arm reached past her. The man moved with grace and strength, she noticed. He picked up the clipping and read part of it.

“Not from my files, either,” he said to Diana. He spoke with a British accent. “Although I notice that you’re on the same topic as I.”

“I noticed, too,” she said.

“I’m finished with my file if you need it.” He offered it to her.

“No. Thank you. I’ve seen enough.”

“What are you writing?” she asked.

“A biography.”

“On Isador Rabinowitz?”

“The one and only,” he sighed. She took a long chance. “Your name isn’t Phillip Langlois, is it?”

“Yes, it is. And I assume you read it off the librarian’s register,” he said.

“No,” she said. “You’ve been trying to contact a friend of mine, Rolf Geiger.”

“You know Rolf?”

“I live with him.”

“Ah, I see,” he said thoughtfully. “Then you’re Diana Stephenson.”

“I am,” she answered.

Phillip Langlois produced a small leather case and withdrew a business card. On it, he wrote his hotel phone number in New York.

“Well, unhappily I might have guessed that such a lovely woman would not be unattached in this city,” he said. “But I’m pleased to meet you.”

“Same,” she said aloud. “What a flirt. But smooth,” she thought. She glanced at his card. She couldn’t completely decide whether he was full of charm or full of himself. She concluded it was a harmless mixture of both. So she let him get away with his flirtation.

“Look, call me,” he said. “Anything you want to know about Isador Rabinowitz, I’ll be glad to let you know. If I can help you, then maybe you could help arrange an interview with Mr. Geiger. Does that sound fair?”

“It’s a deal,” she said, accepting Langlois’s card. “Definitely a deal.”

He offered his hand and she accepted it.

On leaving the library, Diana noticed that her pendant had broken and was gone from the chain. She had worn the silver piano pendant every day since Rolf had brought it back for her.

Distraught, she retraced her steps in the library and on the street several times. She couldn’t find the pendant. Over and over, she searched the areas where she had run after the man in the tattered coat. No luck. She filed a report with the lost and found at the library but she surmised that someone must have picked it up and kept it.

Later, on West Sixty-Fourth Street, she waited for the cross-town bus that would take her home. She thought about the silver pendant and knew that she would not immediately have the heart to admit the loss to Rolf. That evening, she decided, she would stash the chain in her jewelry box. Maybe miraculously, she told herself, the pendant would reappear.

The bus arrived and soon her mind took a different direction.

As the cross-town bus entered Central Park to traverse the city to Manhattan’s East Side, Diana saw a familiar figure sitting on one of the stone walls that bordered the park.

It was the old man. The watcher. Just sitting there. His eyes were focused on the bus and seemed to lock with Diana’s eyes as the bus passed.

How he knew she was there, and how he knew where to look for her, was something she could not comprehend. And like so much else that was happening, it chilled her flesh and her soul.

Twenty-two

Diana arrived home in the late afternoon. She found Rolf in his library, playing gently at the Steinway.

“How did your day go?” he asked her, without looking up.

“In terms of what I found on Isador Rabinowitz, nothing new. Unless the fact that he once had his picture taken with J. Edgar Hoover comes as a surprise to you.”

“Nothing comes as a surprise to me,” Rolf said.

“I also met one of the writers working on a Rabinowitz biography.”

“Which one?”

“Phillip Langlois.”

“Isn’t he the one who’s been trying to interview me?”

“Yes. He told me that.” She paused. “I have his phone number,” she said. “He’s staying at a hotel in New York right now.”

“What did he seem like?” Rolf stopped playing.

“He seemed okay. Are you going to give him the interview?” Geiger shrugged. “Probably. Maybe that will give me one friendly writer.”

“I thought maybe I’d meet him again,” she said. “See about his book he’s doing. Then I can give you a better idea about whether you really want to be interviewed by him.”

“Makes sense, I suppose,” he said.

“I also had another ‘incident’ at the library.” She paused, then added, “The old codger who’s been watching this building. I think he followed me.” Geiger stiffened.

“What?” he asked.

“I thought I saw him on the research floor of the performing annex. Then an extra clipping turned up in my research material. Something creepy about survival of death.”

A little surge of fear went through Rolf, and he imagined that he felt a pair of icy hands brush the nape of his neck. Goose bumps followed. What Diana was telling him seemed unreal. He tried to find some plausibility somewhere but couldn’t.”

“And you’re sure it was the same man?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He thought about it for a moment, then gave her hand a squeeze.

“What is he, Rolf?” she asked. “Some demented old fan?”

“Yes. Probably,” he said. “Every performer attracts a few screwballs. This one’s mine.”

“He scares me, Tiger,” she said.

“We’ll have to deal with him,” Geiger said, thinking aloud. “We can’t let him bother us. Maybe I’ll talk to the police. Maybe I’ll pay him to stay away. I don’t know but I promise you we’ll get rid of him. Okay?”

He put an arm around her shoulders and hugged her.

“Okay,” she said.

A few minutes later, Diana went upstairs to dress for the evening at the museum. Rolf stayed at his Steinway. He gathered his concentration and settled into a score for Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A. The work was a favorite. He was thinking ahead and would play the piece at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia if the date could be secured. He felt his concentration on music sharpen for the first time in several days. He stayed at the Steinway till after six.

When Diana was ready to leave, she came downstairs. She was beautiful in a dark green dress. Rolf told her so. Rolf threw on a sports jacket and they were gone. They both scanned their block for the watcher when they left, but—to their relief—he was nowhere to be seen. So they walked along Seventy-Third Street to Fifth Avenue, then up Fifth to the museum.

The evening was pleasant and the walk took twenty minutes. There were photographers outside the main entrance to the Met. They spotted Rolf immediately as he started up the long stone steps. He managed a smile as he entered with Diana. The showing this evening was a private one for invited guests, two of whom—both young women—asked Geiger to autograph their programs. He obliged.

This was a Monday night and Broadway was dark. Two well-known Broadway actors were there. Geiger appreciated their presence because they drew attention away from him and allowed him to walk through the gallery with Diana with a minimum of fuss.

Diana ran into one person she knew, a female magazine editor with whom she had had her difficulties. The editor gave her an icy hello until she realized whom Diana was with. At that point her attitude warmed remarkably.

There were fifty-eight Renoir canvases, drawn from collections all over the world. Geiger and Diana took their time looking at the entire show, though Diana’s insights into the works were far more astute than Rolf’s.

Diana was partial to many of Renoir’s earlier works, the portraits of men and women from the 1870’s. Those who had been immortalized in oil had wonderful Gallic names which resounded over the century:

The graying, bearded Victor Chocquet. A hauntingly pretty Jeanne Samary. A fresh-complexioned young man names Georges Riviere. A sultry but innocent young woman named Therèse Berard. And the nameless, but equally beautiful lady with a veil, turned three-quarters away from the artist and the world.

Geiger shared Diana’s fascination. But what arrested his attention was a canvas titled Les Filles de Catulle Mendes.

He stood for many minutes before it.

The work was a warm, elegant 1888 composition of three young girls gathered around a fortepiano. Two of the girls were small. The third, whose left hand was on the keyboard had beautiful, long golden hair. The middle child carried a violin. It occurred to Geiger that the music of these three girls had long ceased to be heard. They had lived their lives and gone to their graves. And yet, two of the girls were stared into his eyes from more than a century ago.

It wasn’t creepy. It was rather beautiful, the way the artist had captured some part of their souls. But Geiger also wondered where their lives had gone, or to where their spirits had flown. He wondered if anyone anywhere still heard their music. He was reminded of the tapes of Raoul Pugno that he had listened to at Julliard. Diana joined him.

“Penny for your thoughts, Tiger,” she said. He hunched his shoulders.

“I like the pictures of semi-naked women bathing, if that’s what you’re wondering,” he said. She elbowed him.

“You would,” she said.

But his actual thoughts—on three little girls and their music from 110 years ago—were too complicated to unravel. As Diana and Rolf exited a few minutes later, Diana steered him to a quote in French from Renoir on a plaque near the entrance. In it, the artist referred to “the instincts of my fingertips.”

It was an interesting point. Like great music, the creation of fine art demanded not only spiritual instincts and grand creativity, but also physical and tactile ones.

They left the museum at half past eight and headed home. When they were within a few blocks of 112 East Seventy-Third Street, they stopped at a favorite restaurant on Madison Avenue.

They had a light but satisfying dinner, then returned to the home they shared. Again, no watcher. Geiger carefully activated his alarm system and locked the front door behind him.

Rolf listened to his phone messages. There were eight. Then he changed into jeans and a T-shirt. He went into the library and sat down at his Steinway. Diana joined him, snuggling onto the big comfy sofa with a book. She loved to read and have Rolf practice in the not-so-quiet background. Similarly, it pleased him to have her present. “My muse,” he liked to call her. He settled in at the keyboard and again sought to unravel the mysteries of Beethoven’s Sonata in A.

He unfolded the score and leaned forward. As he concluded some warm-up exercises and began to play, Diana rose to pick up some fan letters that he had left on a nearby table. She would put them in the back of the coat closet on the main floor, where he preferred to store them.

Moments later, just as his fingers were readying themselves, Geiger became aware that Diana was in the front alcove. He heard her opening the door to the coat closet. Then the tranquility of the evening was shattered by Diana’s scream a blood-curdling yelp of terror that propelled him from his bench at the Steinway, kicked his heart into his throat, put an image of Rabinowitz in front of him and sent him running.

“Diana! Diana!” Rolf yelled.

He burst from the library and saw her. She was recoiling against the closet door, her face white and her hands raised to her eyes in anguish. She could only gesture wildly. She pointed across the large entrance foyer to where a human figure stood just inside the front door.

The bent old figure came into focus, Geiger’s angry eyes settled on the man standing in their home, the cause of Diana’s screams.

When he recognized the man, his own stomach surged and leaped.

“What the…?” “Rabinowitz? No!” It was the watcher. Somehow he had gotten into their home. Geiger’s fear morphed into anger.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he raged.

Diana was so shaken that she was trembling. Rolf could see it. The intruder was only ten feet away from her.

“I don’t mean you any harm,” the old man said, backing slightly.

“Get out of here!” Geiger demanded. “How did you get in?”

“The door was open.”

“Like hell it was!” Geiger answered furiously. “I locked it.”

“I came right through it!” the man insisted. Geiger took up a position between him and Diana.

“It was locked,” Geiger insisted. The man smelled horrible, like fetid flesh. Geiger recoiled.

“Rolf, be careful!” Diana said.

She opened the closet hurriedly and pulled out a baseball bat. Rolf took it from her.

“Out!” Geiger insisted to the man.

“I’m returning something,” he said.”

“Outside!” Geiger said. “Anything you have to say, you say outside.”

The man protested. Geiger approached pushed him. There was something foul and awful to touching him. And something was wrong with his eyes.

At first Geiger couldn’t move him. Then the man retreated a step. For someone who looked aging and frail, he was difficult to budge. Something strong and powerful locked in an old body. Then the watcher gave way.

“All right. I’ll go,” he finally said.

Geiger held on to the man’s fetid old coat and pulled him to the front door. Geiger had the idea that he wouldn’t have been able to move him had the old man not cooperated. There was something unspeakably strong beneath the surface.

Geiger opened the door. Voluntarily, the old watcher stepped through. He lurched one step down the front steps of the town house, then turned.

He looked up and with imploring but now-gleaming eyes, eyes that seemed to change as Rolf watched.

“I found this,” the watcher said. “I wanted to return it.”

He reached out with a closed fist, then opened his hand. Geiger looked downward. In the watcher’s palm was the small silver piano pendant that Rolf had purchased in San Remo.

“Your beautiful woman lost it,” the watcher said. “See? I meant no harm. I thought I was helping.”

Geiger was startled. Then he reached forward and carefully—with two fingers—took the pendant. The old hand withdrew.

“How did you know it was hers?” Geiger asked.

“You brought it back from Europe.” Geiger felt an even deeper fear.

“How did you know that?” he asked.

“I read it in the newspapers.”

“Which one? Which newspaper. No one printed that!” The old man shrugged cryptically.

“Somehow I knew,” he said. Geiger glared at him.

“Don’t ever come into this house again.”

“Unless invited?”

“That won’t happen.”

“Unless invited?” the old man pressed.

“Yeah!” Geiger snapped, just to get rid of him. “Unless invited!” The old eyes glazed.

“Now, I’ll go,” he said. He gave Geiger an indignant look and turned away. He walked down the steps, turned, and made his way down the block. Geiger, calming now, blew out a long breath. He stood on his front step as he watched the man go a few paces from the steps of 112 East Seventy-Third Street.

The old watcher stopped and turned. There was a new expression in his eyes when he looked up at Geiger. Something new that Geiger hadn’t seen before.

“I’ll go,” the intruder said. “And you won’t see me again. Not in this form, at least.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Geiger asked. The watcher laughed quietly. A car passed.

“I have more than one piece of jewelry,” the watcher said. “More than one thing that glows or sparkles.”

Geiger was trying to decipher the intruder’s meaning when the old watcher held up his right hand. Geiger felt a bolt of shock. There was—for the briefest of moments—a dazzling sparkle from a finger on the man’s hand. Like the glimmer of an emerald. Then the man lowered his hand and the reflection of the stone—if it really had been one—was gone.

It left Geiger speechless. The watcher turned and walked to the end of the block, toward Park Avenue. There Geiger lost him in the shadows and headlights.

Diana moved next to Rolf for a moment and looked him in the eye.

“I want him removed from this block,” she said. “I don’t feel safe while he’s around. I don’t want to see him in here again or anywhere else.” She paused. “Will you call the police or should I?” he asked.

“I’ll call,” he said. “I’m not convinced it will do any good. But I’ll call.”

Twenty-three

The next morning NYPD Detective Janet Solderstrom pulled her unmarked car to the curb before 112 East Seventy-Third Street. She stepped out of her vehicle and drew a breath. She was a large woman, broad-shouldered and sturdy, standing almost six feet. She had frequently been mistaken for a man back when she walked a beat and wore a uniform.

She walked to the front door of the town house and knocked. She waited.

Solderstrom looked at the neighbors’ houses and scanned across the street. She felt a low rumbling of displeasure within her. The money these people spent. They threw around millions of dollars to live on a block like this. In some cases they hadn’t even made their own fortunes. They’d inherited. Or, she felt, ripped it off in some sleazy real estate or stock transaction. Where was justice? Janet Solderstrom ached for the opportunity to bring down one of these hotshots.

She knocked louder the second time. Several seconds after her follow-up knock, the door opened. A young man in his late twenties with a handsome but haggard, tired face loomed into view and answered.

Solderstrom pulled her gold shield from the breast pocket of her worn jacket. “Police Department,” she said. “I’m Detective Janet Solderstrom.”

She was such a large woman that she filled the doorway. Dressed in a plain brown suit which could have been a man’s, she had pulled-back hair and a hard, pinkish face. She gave Geiger a tight smile.

“Of course, of course,” Geiger said. “Come in.”

“Thank you,” the detective replied.

Geiger led Solderstrom into his home. She was ready to dislike him immediately, living in a place like this. But as she followed him, she felt her own attitude ease slightly. This young man, didn’t seem as condescending as so many of the rest. Maybe he’d be okay.

What she couldn’t figure out was why he looked familiar. There was something about him. When he led her into his library and she saw the piano, and all the awards and accolades that were scattered around, she put two and two together to get four.

Geiger was capable of being impeccably polite. After a few seconds, he turned and offered a hand.

“I’m Rolf Geiger,” he said. “Sorry if I seem upset. But I am upset. That’s why we called the police.”

Diana came into view and introduced herself. “I have no idea how many police would be involved,” Geiger said. “Are there more coming?”

“Only if I call for them,” Solderstrom answered. Her hands went on automatic pilot, pulling a ballpoint pen and a small notebook out of a jacket pocket.

“So you had an intruder last night? A burglar? What’s the story?” Solderstrom asked. “Right here is fine,” Rolf Geiger said.

He motioned toward a new sofa. They sat, and he went through the events of the previous day. They had come home from a museum exhibition and been home for a while when their house had been intruded upon by a quirky older man. A watcher. A stalker. An aging fan who looked harmless but who was growing aggressive.

“He may be harmless, but he’s starting to scare us,” Geiger said. “And I don’t know how he got in here.”

“Do you know his name?”

“I only know he follows a lot of classical music,” Geiger said.

“If he’s located, do you want to issue a trespassing complaint?” Solderstrom asked.

“No,” Geiger said. “I was hoping you could just talk to him. Get him off our block.”

The detective shrugged.

“No official complaint?” she asked.

“We want to be left alone,” Rolf said. “That’s all.” The detective thought about it.

“I can talk to him. Where can I find him?”

They led her out of the library and into the front hall. They showed her where the man had been and how he had somehow gotten past the front door. Rolf walked Detective Solderstrom to a window and pointed to the steps across the street, the watcher’s usual location.

“He sits there. Sometimes for day at a time,” Geiger said.

The detective steadily eyed the empty location. She searched the empty shadowy areas on the sidewalk across Seventy-Third Street.

“For a couple of weeks, huh? Did he threaten either of you?” Solderstrom asked.

“No,” Geiger said.

“Anything missing?”

“No. In fact, he returned something.” Geiger explained about the missing pendant.

“Of course, who knows how he got it to start with?” Diana added.

They walked away from the window and stood at the precise location in the entrance hall where the watcher had stood when Diana and Rolf had confronted him.

The detective looked back and forth, from one to the other.

“There’s not much I can do unless you file a complaint,” she said. She thought about it further. “I suppose I can have someone keep an eye on the block,” she offered. “If they see anyone camped out across the street, fitting the description you have, we’ll have a chat with him. How’s that?”

Diana and Rolf looked at each other.

“That might help quite a bit,” Geiger said. “That might work just fine.”

Detective Solderstrom again said she would see what she could do. Moments later, she was gone. Thirty minutes later, Diana and Rolf were upstairs, frightened out of their own home, which they no longer considered safe, packing a pair of small suitcases.

They moved temporarily a few blocks away to the Westbury Hotel, registering under the name of Mr. And Mrs. Raoul Pugno. The press did not discover them, and the front desk staff were discreet. Rolf gave Mrs. Jamison the next few days off with pay, and in the meantime, Geiger hired a security expert to install a new alarm system on his home. Nothing living or breathing, he vowed, would penetrate his space again.

Then in the tense days that followed, Rolf came and went from his townhouse during the afternoons. He hired a short term personal bodyguard who sat in the entrance foyer as Geiger practiced at the Steinway. He did not feel entirely safe in his own home. He was certain that the angry ghost of Rabinowitz was lurking there somewhere. But the ghost—if there was one—seemed to be in control when he made his own appearances.

And for the time being, as Rolf played afternoon recitals to a solitary armed guard, the ghost had vanished.

Twenty-four

Rolf Geiger and Diana moved back to Seventy-Third Street after a week in the Westbury.

On the first day home, the ringing of the telephone shattered an afternoon practice at the Steinway. Geiger stopped playing and stared at the phone. It wouldn’t stop. It rang sixteen times before Rolf went to answer it.

“Yes?” Geiger answered.

The benevolent voice of Brian Greenstone came over the line.

“Rolf?” he asked.

“What?”

“Sorry. Are you all right? I keep calling this number and no one answers.”

“Sorry. I’ve been out a lot,” Geiger answered flatly.

“I get worried unless you do something to annoy me every day?”

“Okay. I understand.” Geiger said. “I’ll call in every few hours. How’s that?”

“Not what I had in mind, either, lad, but listen. I have joyous tidings. The Academy of Music called back. You’re set up for June 11 in Philadelphia, as we discussed.”

The date fell upon nearly deaf ears.

“Does that still sound good for you, Rolf?”

“I think so,” Geiger answered.

“You ‘think’? You don’t know? I could call them back and see how long they can hold the date open if you’re unsure.”

Geiger thought about it.

“No. On the contrary. I’m sure,” He said, warming quickly to the certainty of the time and venue. “Now I need to play all the more.”

“I’ll still hold off on the contract for a day or two. Okay?”

“Okay, but not necessary.”

Greenstone rang off. Rolf now had an important professional date toward which he needed to point himself. The problem was, every time he sat down to play in his home, or to plan his program for Philadelphia, he felt as if the old man were somewhere close by, shaking his head in disapproval, listening with the most critical ear in the universe.

“It’s all crap, Rolf Geiger. Everything you play sounds garbage!”

The old man had once concluded a lesson by telling him that. Years later, Rabinowitz had come to a recital and said the same thing aloud from the audience at intermission.

And today, over his shoulder, beneath his consciousness, he would hear that obnoxious mitteleuropa voice saying the same thing or working variations upon it.

“Today, your playing was not so much crap. It was merely garbage,” the ghost seemed to say to him as he practiced later that afternoon.

“Gee. Thanks,” Rolf answered.

“You are welcome. Someday you should learn to play music more than noise.”

“Well, as for you, too, old man,” Geiger whispered aloud in his library one afternoon later in the week, “I hope you’re roasting in hell.”

Moments later, as if in response, the A-sharp key above middle C refused to work. The key wouldn’t move! It was as if something were within the body of the piano, freezing the action.

Rolf got up from the bench, highly agitated, and paced. When he sat down again, the key worked.

“Okay, so you’re here,” Rolf whispered aloud to Rabinowitz. “Well, fine. I’m going to ignore you.”

Sometimes, in the time that followed, entire days were the colors of the old man’s dark spirit. On some days, while dressing on the second floor, Rolf was certain that he heard piano music coming from the library, just loud enough to transcend the extensive soundproofing.

Geiger would run downstairs and look. But the library would always be empty. Or appear empty. He broke into a sweat frequently. He did not sleep well. He kept feeling for the icy touch of a pair of hands on his throat.

Every little creak in a floorboard—day or night—unleashed an armada of terrors. For the first time ever, Rolf found himself turning on the radio or television to spoken words instead of music while home alone. He even found himself leaving extra lights on to ward off the darkness.

One night, while sleeping comfortably, he was jounced by the feeling of motion in his bedroom. His eyes came open like window shades snapping upward. He realized what had roused him. Someone had been moving on his mattress and now was moving in the room.

His heart quivered and raced. His eyes settled upon a filmy figure across the room. He threw out his right arm to find Diana, but simultaneously he realized that it was she whom he was watching.

She was naked and had her back to him. Her skin looked white in the darkness. Her body was illuminated slightly by the light from the streetlamps. The glow slipped past the bedroom shades.

Now she looked like a ghost, he found himself thinking. He was horrified anew by the thought of her death, because she was as alive as he was. The thought scared him, the ease with which it could hop into his mind.

He watched her. His eyes adjusted to the minimal light. She—and this whole incident—were much like a dream. Several minutes went by. Diana stayed by the bedroom window looking downward and outside to the street.

She must have sensed his eyes on her body for she looked his way and smiled slightly. She knew his eyes were open and gazing at her.

“Tiger?” she said.

“What’s wrong, honey? Is he out there again? Our ‘watcher’?”

“No. He’s not there.”

He waited to hear what else was bothering her. Specifically he waited for her to tell him that she had seen a ghost. In the house. Outside the house. But it wasn’t quite like that. Not this night.

“I had a bad dream,” she said softly.

“Come over here and tell me about it,” he said, sitting up. He moved a hand to the bedside lamp. “Do you want light?” Rolf asked.

“No,” Diana said.

She walked back toward him. He couldn’t help but admire the lovely sexuality of her body as she approached him. Naked, she so often reminded him of an exquisite nude from a French master.

She arrived at the bed and he gently guided her back to him. Her body felt warm and safe beside his.

“So, tell me,” he said comfortingly. “Tell me about your dream.”

“No,” she said again. “It’s too horrible.”

He embraced her with one arm.

“It must have been,” he said. She was so upset she couldn’t speak immediately.

Finally…

“It was, Tiger,” she said, her voice laden with emotion.

“Will you tell me tomorrow?” he asked. “In daylight?” After a moment’s consideration, she answered.

“No. Probably not. I’m hoping it will go away. All right? I don’t ever want to tell you about this one.”

“It can’t be any worse than some of the ones I’ve had recently.”

“I don’t know,” she breathed.

“Did something bad happen to one of us in the dream?” He felt her hesitate and then nod. He was afraid to ask who died. Him or her. He was afraid to put the thought any more concisely in the air.

“Diana, it was only a dream,” he reminded her. “We’ve both been under some awful stress. When you’re stressed in your waking hours, you’re going to be stressed in your sleeping hours too. Okay?” Another long pause and she said,

“Okay.”

“That’s what’s going on.”

“I don’t want to die, Tiger,” she whispered. “And I don’t want you to die, either. And I’ve never been so scared of it in my life.”

Downstairs, something creaked in the house. It creaked loud! Heat? The furnace wasn’t on.

Another intruder? The same intruder? The ghost again? Or just one of those old house creaks. Inexplicable, day or night?

Rolf broke into a small sweat and reminded himself that he had just paid top dollar for a state-of-the-art alarm system. Whatever it was down there, he wondered, could it fly beneath the system’s radar?

“Yes, I can,” came a silky answer in the dark. Only Rolf could hear it.

Almost trembling, he held Diana for several minutes, hardly knowing what to say, not wanting to admit that he was every bit as frightened as she, maybe even more.

He tried to hum the Moonlight Sonata to her. For a while it worked. It calmed her. So he allowed several more minutes to pass.

“Do you remember that black dog on the beach in Nantucket?” she finally asked. He was surprised by the question.

“Sure. Why?” he asked.

“Did you notice anything strange about it?” she asked. He considered the question for a moment.

“Everything was strange,” he finally said. “It’s behavior. It’s awful smell. The way it was so different form one day to the next. Why?”

“It smelled like death,” she said. “Didn’t it?”

“It smelled like it had been rolling in horse manure,” he said. “And there are a couple of horse farms right nearby.”

“That was the smell of death, Rolf,” she said. “I know it was. That was the smell of rotting flesh. That wasn’t an ordinary dog.”

“Diana…The old man who broke in here had a similar stench,” he said. “And he wasn’t dead.”

“No?” she asked. “Maybe he is.”

There was something ominous in her voice, hideous in her suggestion. Worst of all, her dark thoughts were dangerously close to his own, underscoring every fear that gripped him.

“You’re still in your bad dream,” he said. “You’re making a lot of nonsense at a scary hour of the night.”

“Okay,” she whispered. “Then I’ll be quiet.” But in truth, neither of them wanted to continue this line of “reasoning” to its next logical plateau.

There was another creak from downstairs. It seemed farther away. Outside on an otherwise-empty Seventy-Third Street, a drunk was going by, singing Good Night, Irene in a magnificently resonant tenor voice to each passing doorway. As the drunk reached Park Avenue, he began a rendition of The Mighty Quinn.

“I don’t want to die, Tiger,” Diana said again. “And I don’t want you to, either. Not for a long, long time.”

Her words trailed away. The last syllables were very low.

He was about to phrase a reply, but realized that she was working up the courage to say something more. So he waited.

“Here it is,” she said. “I dreamed that you decided that I was interfering with your career. So you murdered me.” He felt as if his ability to speak had been taken away from him. He had never had a sensation like it before. “And I don’t ever wish to discuss this again,” she said. “Not a single word.”

Twenty-five

Four nights later, toward midnight, Rolf went to his library and sat down in his reading chair. He spent several minutes sitting perfectly still and thinking. Diana was upstairs sleeping.

Again, he didn’t know which was the most terrifying:

The fact that the watcher had entered his home, with no sign of forced entry.

The notion that the ghost of Isador Rabinowitz haunted him.

Or a combination of the two.

And what about the dream or vision that had so frightened Diana?

He had to know what sort of demons or ghost or spirits or quirks in the universe he was confronting. He thought back to that foul-smelling ill-mannered animal and how it seemed to have snapped at his hands. Right now, it was standing in the way of his performing.

Just when you think you have reality figured out, he pondered, a window opens to another dimension. And you don’t know if you dare to step through. Who knows what you would find on the other side.

“The other side”. He turned those words over in his head. Life used to be as simple as the infinite variations that an artist could find on a keyboard. Now it was more complex than theologians and philosophers could have ever imagined.

Geiger sighed and rose from his chair.

He wandered to the kitchen and turned on a small color television that sat at the end of one counter. He made a sandwich, then found a bottle of beer in the refrigerator. It was very cold. The way he liked it.

Deep down, he knew what he was facing. The supernatural explanation was the only one that made any sense.

He picked up the remote control, to channel surf. For one of the first times in his life, he had had enough of music.

Enough about Beethoven. Enough about Chopin and enough about whether or not he would play such and such a concerto in Paris.

Music, music, music, art, art, art. Who cares?

What, he wondered, was the value of his craft compared with the value of life? He thought back to a quote he had seen once form an artist who said that if he had been in a burning museum and could save a Vermeer or a stray cat, he would choose the stray cat.

Meow. Girl With a Pearl Earring is being broiled and baked, but meow. The thought amused him. Of course, he mused further, if the artist had owned the Vermeer his response might have been different.

Rolf cursed to himself again. He realized that he had grown much more profane over the past few weeks. He had long considered profanity highly undignified. It reminded him of his dirtball relatives in West Virginia and old foul-tempered old Rabinowitz. These days, Rolf had become profane and didn’t much care about it anymore.

Geiger kept flicking the remote control to the television.

Suddenly, bulls eye.

Baseball. The New York Yankees were playing the Philadelphia Phillies in one of the interleague games. Geiger was a baseball iconoclast. He liked the Designated Hitter, he liked the divisions, and he liked interleague play. What he didn’t like was pretentious people pontificating about some other era of the game in rusty, sweaty, cigar-stenched old parks.

The Yankees.

Geiger admired the excellence and the tradition with the passion that only adopted New Yorkers can muster. Better yet, on this evening in the new Yankee Stadium, the Yankees had no special musical significance at all, other than their insistence, after the game, on playing Sinatra’s rendition of New York, New York.

Geiger even liked that in its nervy in-your-face belligerence.

Tonight, as he finished half the sandwich and then grabbed a third beer, he was in the mood for some assertive Sinatra braggadocio. He had always liked Sinatra and loved those old Ocean’s Eleven reruns.

Make it an Italian special, he contended. From the genti who brought him Verdi, Puccini Rossini, and Vivaldi, now how about some Sinatra brio, with a touch of Rizzuto, a memory of DiMaggio, and a trace of Girardi? All this now seemed like better idea than any rubato, arpeggio, or molto vivace that he could think of.

He tried to do a pan-Italian Yankee lineup. Berra, Pepitone, DiMaggio, Crossetti, Rizzuto. Billy Martin would manage. Giambi would DH. For reasons of pure mischief, Sal Maglie—who had passed through the Bronx in the latter days of his career—would pitch.

He smiled for a moment. Then he finished the third beer. He didn’t normally quaff suds this way, but tonight he needed it. He needed to just crash out and get lost for one evening. Then he could put his mind in order and quickly prepare for the Philadelphia concert.

He settled back. Brew helped him think. Sometimes. So he grabbed a fourth.

Seeing the ghost of Rabinowitz had turned his brain inside out. It had been a liberating experience. After all, now that he knew ghosts existed, and that Rabinowitz was floating around out there along with maybe everyone else…well, was there any line of thought he couldn’t entertain now? If ghosts were possible, hadn’t the underpinnings of his religion and his sense of the rational world been completely redefined?

An image of Brother Matthew came before him again, his onetime friend and confidant. He wondered how Matthew would counsel him in this situation.

A mad urge was upon him. Pick up the phone and call the Franciscan brother. He would be easy to find as he was back at St. Agnes’ School. Of course, could a man in Rolf’s position just pick up the phone after a dozen years and glide gracefully into a chat about the supernatural?

Then again, why not?

Thoughts cascaded forth from the past. Visions of childhood. Poverty. Abuse. The ability to use his great musical gift to rise above all this.

His reverie lasted for several minutes. Then he snapped to attention. He sensed the presence of the ghost. Geiger took a long gulp of his beer. He felt combative now. Alcohol was a great equalizer.

“Hey Rabinowitz! Where are you?” he shouted. “Isador! You old bastard! Come on out!”

To any witnesses, he would have looked like a madman. One arm flailed at the air, in case the specter was within reach. Geiger listened to an echo bounce quickly around his home. Then he laughed aloud.

No response from the spirit world. Geiger looked around. Then he rose from the kitchen table and, carrying the bottle of beer with him, walked into his library.

“Anyone here?” he called out. “Anyone else here?” he demanded. “Hey!” he shouted aloud. “How’s life after death so far Isador?”

No response again. He laughed.

“You contrary old bastard!” Geiger mocked. “You want to be alive again?” he ranted as the full effects of drunkenness came upon him. “I’ll make you wish you weren’t!”

Geiger’s drunken hands found the keyboard. He zipped off a Chopin Fantasie, playing it the way Geiger wanted to play it. Then he transmogrified it into something ugly, giving it an annoying disco beat.

“Chop, chop. Choppin’ at your door!” Geiger proclaimed to the tune of Knock, Knock, Knockin’ at Heaven’s Door. “The man with the ax plays in concert tonight!”

The chords thundered. Geiger assaulted the keys relentlessly.

“Can I raise a ghost?” he asked. “Can I offend a sleeping spirit? Sure! I can always play a little something to raise the dead!”

He played Pictures at an Exhibition. One of Rabinowitz’s pets.

“You put the music out for me, Isador. So maybe you’d like to hear it.”

Geiger started playing the main themes, but these pictures at Rolf’s imaginary exhibition were from Mapplethorpe. That would have the old man sizzling. Geiger proclaimed it aloud as he hit noisy ugly themes:

Queer couples. Defiled Flowers. A crucifix dipped in—

Mapplethorpe, Mezzathorpe.

Heidi high, heidi ho.

The ghost of Isador,

Has gotta go!

“Hey, Isador, you frustrated old maniac! How about Pictures of an Exhibitionist instead?” Into themes from Chopin, Geiger nestled stanzas from Queen. Radio Ga-Ga intertwined around an arpeggio. Then Bohemian Rhapsody floated with great finesse through a Chopin rhapsody.

Mamma mia! Mamma mia!

Yeah. The old man could take the late, great Freddie Mercury and listen to him till he kicked the lid off his coffin. Mamma mia, indeed! Those sexy Swedish chicks from Abba ruled. Where are they to tonight, Anni-Frid and Agnetha?

“And come on, Rabinowitz,” Geiger taunted. “Where are you? Where in hell are you?” Rolf crushed the right pedal on the piano. The music filled the chamber, rattling some figurines on the nearby shelves. Geiger’s hands thundered with a power that might have pulverized the keys and harps of lesser instruments. Then Geiger burst from the bench screaming, as music echoed within the heavily sound-proofed room.

“Where are you?” he bellowed again. “Come out! I know you’re here!”

Geiger went from closet to closet in the library, throwing the doors open, tearing the contents from within. He raged around the room, knocking over books and scores, sending a standing lamp tumbling to the carpet. It hit with a crash. Its porcelain bowl shattered.

Then he felt a presence. He felt the conduit from one world to the next. He wandered out to the front foyer of his home. He went to the window and stared out. The watcher was waiting for him. The old man was waiting to be summoned.

“Unless invited,” as he had once said.

Geiger stared downward. By the shadowy illumination of the streetlamps, he could see the features of his unwanted sentry. The watcher’s eyes seemed to glow like coals as he glared upward. Geiger’s body was bathed in sweat. He could hear the kettledrum of his own heart.

Rolf averted his eyes and shook his head. A conduit from the dead and back to life.

“Invite me in,” the spirit asked.

“No.”

“Invite me in!”

Drunkenly, “Yes. I will.”

Geiger looked downward through the window to the street. The watcher’s face creased with a demonic grin. The figure on the street fixed Geiger with taunting eyes.

Geiger turned and lurched slightly. He wove his way back to his library. He went to the center of the room, breathing hard. He was there when his nose picked up again the horrible stench of decaying flesh. The air pressure in the room changed.

Geiger looked up with a start. The watcher was in his home now. He stood in the open doorway of the library. Solid and substantial. Geiger stared at him. His fear plateaued. What now could happen that hadn’t already happened? The old man’s image faded out before Geiger’s eyes. The watcher disappeared.

Or actually, he moved. Invisibly through the air. Geiger knew exactly what was to follow. With his back to the piano, ever so slightly, Rolf heard something.

A tap. A slight tapping.

It was almost inaudible. An infinitesimally soft touch to a key of the Steinway. An old Rabinowitz mannerism as a prelude to playing.

Removing specks of dust from the keys. Soft as an angel.

What hearing Geiger had! He sensed the sound of a man’s learned fingers settling upon the keyboard in preparation for playing.

Yes! Rolf knew he had heard it. The sound, barely above a silence, of the flesh—if that’s what it could be called on a ghost’s fingers—settling on the keys.

Rolf spoke aloud to the room.

“You should hold your fingers higher,” Geiger taunted. “Your fingering sucks.”

Then he cringed. He could see—he could even hear—the skin of his visitor’s face stretch into a frozen smile.

Then Geiger thought he heard a slight laughter.

“Turn around, Rolf.”

“Not till I hear you play,” Geiger answered.

“Have it your way, you young fraud!”

Geiger knew.

The ghost was now fully present. Same as he had been present all along, same as he had been present on the stairs those several nights ago.

“Present,” a drunken Rolf Geiger now said to himself. “First in my mind, then in my home.”

“Next in your cursed soul forever!”

“No,” Rolf answered. “Anything but that!”

Then Rolf did hear laughter. He heard the fingers come down on the keys. Ever so sweetly, ever so exquisitely, the late Isador Rabinowitz began to play for an audience of one. Music from heaven, played by a soul from hell!

A brilliant flourish and arpeggio to start. A rubato to bring tears to the angels. A Chopin to make women cry.

“Turn around, Rolf,” Rabinowitz said in his brittle mittel-europa accent. “Observe here the excellence of which you will every day never be capable.”

Geiger steeled his nerves. He braced himself for what he would see.

As he heard the music swell, Geiger turned.

The watcher had been transformed out of his earthly disguise. There at the keyboard was Rabinowitz, solid and substantial, dead for two months, sitting and playing Geiger’s Steinway.

Geiger didn’t scream. He didn’t bolt and didn’t faint. For some reason, after all that happened, it seemed strangely natural. The master was back from the dead.

To haunt him forever?

“Maybe,” said Rabinowitz.

Chopin continued. A ravishingly pretty polonaise. It contrasted magnificently with the terror Rolf felt.

“Next step to whereabouts, young Rolf?” Rabinowitz asked casually from the piano. “Do you know where you’re heading?”

Rolf broke into a hot sweat. “Why are you here?”

“I’m here for you, Rolf,” the master said.

“What does that mean?”

The old man made a tsking motion with his dry dead tongue. His lips moved as he spoke.

“You’ll know in time,” Rabinowitz said. The old man shrugged. He threw off a brilliant rubato.

“You learned nothing from me,” the ghost insisted. “And at least, if you had learned something from me, I would have though preferred it to be musicianship. A seriousness about your art.”

“What do you want from me,” Geiger demanded.

The old man’s eyes, alternatively shimmering and hollow, rested on Geiger. There was a skeletal grin on his lips in response to the question. Then he broke into a joyfully campy rendition of Heart and Soul.

“That’s what I’ve always wanted,” Rabinowitz said. “Your heart and your soul.”

Geiger cringed again. He began to move slowly in his library. But he had a sense of moving as if in a dream. He was floating, not touching the ground.

“Or am I staggering?” he wondered. “Drunk out of my mind?” He felt himself revolve around the piano, even though he was attempting to approach it. Obviously, he concluded quickly, he couldn’t control his own movements with the ghost present. As so often had been the case, Rabinowitz was his master.

“Are you sleeping well these days?” Rabinowitz asked.

“Hardly at all.”

“That’s good,” the ghost answered cheerfully. He raised his eyes and seemed to be focused upon his young protégé. “And I will arrange for you now to sleep even worse.”

His eyes established contact with Geiger’s. Then the eyes were gone for a flash and there was a yellow rotting emptiness in the sockets. Geiger jerked backwards and felt an equal hollowness in his gut. The sensation was half fear, half revulsion. Geiger stifled a gasp. Rabinowitz face contorted, the eye sockets filled in, the gleaming black eyes were back.

“Imagine that when you die your brain doesn’t really die,” the ghost continued evenly. “Oh, to the modern doctors your brain has ceased to have electrical charges. So they think it’s dead. But not really. Only your body is dead. So they pump you with embalming fluid, put you in a coffin, slam the lid, and let you lie there thinking, unable to move, for eternity.”

“Is that what it’s like? Death, I mean?” Rabinowitz raised a single brow. He played a few bars of a mazurka next.

“You’ll soon find out,” he answered. The master kept playing. “Let’s say, I’m familiar with death. Would you like to be familiar with it, too? Sometime soon?”

“No.”

“Your lady is going to die, you know. The girl sleeping upstairs. Only you and I can hear each other now, you know. And you will kill her. Nothing you can do to stop it. Then you will die, too. It’s all arranged. A tragedy which the tabloids will milk for years. Do you like that notion?”

For an instant Rabinowitz raised his hands, hands that used to flirt with Geiger’s neck when Geiger was a student. Then the hands descended as quickly as they had come up. Geiger had the impression that somehow Rabinowitz hadn’t even missed a beat.

“I’m going to banish you. By thinking about something else,” Geiger said.

Rabinowitz laughed again, an evil cackle.

“You will only banish me by surpassing me in greatness. And you will never do that.”

Geiger steamed. At the keyboard, the ghost changed his tempo.

“For example, do you recognize this mazurka?” Rabinowitz inquired. “Technically quite challenging. You could never perform it with justice.”

Geiger turned from the specter. The intensity of the music heightened.

“Think about this, Rolf,” Rabinowitz said. “The guillotine. You are placed in it and your head is chopped off. But the head does not lose consciousness for several seconds. Your final seconds of life are spent contemplating your head’s severance from your body.”

“Go,” said Geiger. “Leave.” Rabinowitz laughed.

“Only when I choose to. I will always be your master. I will always be your better.” He paused. “Your Diana,” Rabinowitz began slowly. “She copulates joyfully with someone else. Another man penetrates her.”

“That’s not true!”

“She has sex with the artist! He’s a filthy Arab, I believe. Very powerful loins. He’s a large man, prodigiously endowed. He pleases her considerably.” Geiger bristled.

“That’s a lie. All of it.”

“At least he’s an artist,” Rabinowitz said. “Not a pretender such as yourself.”

Geiger held back for a moment.

“He enjoys her from the back side, you know, as Arabs do. It’s a way they claim their women. They’re like sheep, the Arabs are, but when they find a nice slutty ewe-”

Geiger whirled and approached the Steinway, his movements a cross between a man in a nightmare and a belligerent drunk.

Rabinowitz laughed gleefully and held his place at the piano bench. His hands never swerved from the keyboard. He glanced up as Geiger approached.

“I’m already dead,” he said. His eyes went yellow and hollow again. But he continued to speak. “There’s nothing you can do to me. I don’t even feel pain anymore.”

As soon as those thoughts were in Geiger’s head, Rolf reached his tormentor. He lunged at him with both hands, as if to throttle him.

But there was nothing there. Geiger’s hands sailed through Rabinowitz, though he looked as solid as any man whom Geiger had ever faced. His hands, as they went into that horrible, inexplicable space that comprised the ghost, felt as though they had been plunged into ice water.

For an instant Geiger remained rigid, staring at his arms which had entered the ghost’s plane and come out the back. Another smile curled on the corners of Rabinowitz’s mean lips.

Then he was gone and there was nothing in front of Geiger. But he still heard music playing. And he still heard that voice.

“You can’t keep me in a grave,” Rabinowitz said.

Geiger whirled, fresh as white snow now. The ghost was behind him, formally attired for a concert. He looked just as Geiger had last seen him alive, at the Kennedy Center in 2004.

“I will always be with you,” Rabinowitz said. “You will never escape my shadow!”

Geiger staggered forward and waved another arm at Rabinowitz. But again Geiger’s arm swiped through the specter. The young pianist lurched sideways and howled, the full terror of this second encounter sinking deeply into him. He screamed again and crashed into the closed door of his library.

He stumbled but steadied himself. There were tears pouring from his eyes now. Tears of terror. He opened the door to escape from the library and tumbled out into the front hall.

A beer bottle crashed at his feet and shattered. He staggered to the front door, opened it, and weaved outside. Holding the railing on his front steps, he staggered down the front steps. He hit hard against a parked car and came to a painful stop. He slumped down against the vehicle. He closed his eyes and collapsed into sobs. He knew that for the rest of his life, he would see his arms passing through the body of the dead Rabinowitz. From now on, he would always hear those haunting works by Chopin in a different way. And he would always see those hollow yellow eye sockets, coupled with the macabre smile and the distinctive touch at the keyboard.

After a while, he got to his feet. But he was unable to move very far. He crawled to the town house two doors away. He reclined on his neighbor’s front steps. His eyes flickered a few times between then and dawn. Once was when a taxi slowed to a stop, honked, and asked him if he needed a lift home. Geiger’s eyes opened just long enough to close again.

The cab drove on.

At another time during the night, he saw his mother standing near him, looking down and sadly shaking her head. Then the violinist in the clown suit appeared. He put a comforting hand on Geiger’s forehead and with supernatural dexterity, executed a short scherzo by Paganini.

“Help me,” Geiger said to him. Or her.

The clown-musician gave an eerie low bow, filled with feline feminine movements, and vanished into the glare from a streetlamp. Toward dawn, as Rolf slept, a photographer found him. At about seven o’clock, Diana, half-frantic, half-crazed, emerged from the town house, saw him, and took him back inside.

And it wasn’t for another hour that he was able to explain the previous evening to her—what he had seen and what he had experienced.

Twenty-six

Two afternoons later, Rolf was sitting in his library reading a score when Mrs. Jamison appeared. He looked up. “Detective Solderstrom is here. She needs to talk to you,” the housekeeper said.

Geiger sighed. “Oh,” he said. “Her. All right. Send her in. “What terrible timing,” he mused. He had been making progress into his examination of the score. “Always,” he thought. “Interruptions! It’s always like this now.”

Outside the townhouse, something passed across the sun. Then the figure of a large woman filled the doorway. Geiger caught bad vibrations from her right away. It was Diana who led her into the library.

“Mr. Geiger,” the policewoman said.

Unlike the first time they had met, she now felt a wave of hostility roll toward him.

“I was in the area. I thought I’d stop in,” she said. “I was wondering whether you’d seen your intruder again.” Rolf thought for a moment.

“Once, a few nights ago,” he answered.

“Have a problem with him?”

“He was outside. I saw him from my foyer.”

“But you didn’t speak to him? Or feel yourself threatened?”

Geiger knew that an account of what had happened, culminating in the appearance of Rabinowitz, would be useless.

“No, and I haven’t seen him again after that,” he said.

“Has anyone?” Solderstrom asked.

“Diana hasn’t seen him, either, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I assumed you would have called me had there been a second incident,” she said.

“I would have.”

Geiger sensed something uneven about the woman. The detective took a moment. Then,

“I’ll get right to the point there, Mr. Geiger,” she said. “I know there was one person seen sitting out on this block two nights ago and from what my witnesses tell me it wasn’t any aging homeless person. By the time a sector car came by, the individual had returned to his home on this block. He was dragged back in by the woman he lives with. Early in the morning. Know what I’m getting at here, Mr. Geiger?” Geiger knew, and suppressed a little wave of anger.

“I’d had a few beers,” he said, “and felt like sitting out.”

“You’ve got a world tour coming, and you’re sitting out on the stoops in your neighborhood? I’m having trouble understanding that,” she said.

“However strange you think that is,” Diana offered from the back of the room, “the original intrusion happened. This old man was at a funeral, he followed me to the public library, he had a piece of my jewelry, and he’s been watching this house.”

Detective Solderstrom’s eyes went from Rolf to Diana, then back to Rolf. She sighed.

“Let me ask you this,” Janet Solderstrom said. “I spoke to a couple of the other detectives who used to work Lincoln Center and the theater district. One of the men on Manhattan South knew an old guy who used to hang around after concerts. Sort of matches the description you gave. You want me to follow up on this? Or do we let it slide?”

“I want you to follow up,” Diana said before Rolf could answer.

“I do, too,” Geiger said. She looked at both of them.

“Okay,” she said. “If I were you, I’d remain alert. But there’s a good chance you scared away the old man. I don’t know. I just thought I’d check with you.”

“I appreciate it,” Geiger said.

The policewoman excused herself and departed. She took her chilly attitude with her.

Then the evening arrived.

Rolf and Diana waited for something else unpleasant to happen. But nothing did, and soon, one normal day followed another.

Strangely enough, as Rolf and Diana remained poised for another haunting within their home there was no next episode. Just when they expected the worst, a big empty nothing transpired. Yet Rolf lived in a constant state of tension, waiting for the moment when something terrifying would happen again.

But after dark, his nightmares were gone, replaced by real fears and real sleeplessness. He felt helpless. He spent much of the time around the house, preoccupied by fear and anxiety, and trying to concentrate on practicing.

April gave way to May. Then the date to play in Philadelphia was only two weeks away.

Brian Greenstone reported that tickets in Philadelphia had sold out within two days. Requests came in for interviews from the local newspapers—the same newspapers that had pilloried Geiger for his last rock-and-classics appearance at Convention Hall near the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. Cautiously, Geiger spoke to some of the interviewers over the telephone. One of the newspapers sent a woman to New York to interview him in person. Geiger obliged, though he was not helped by a tabloid publication of the picture of him sitting on his neighbor’s front steps, apparently drunk.

Diana had her own bout with print journalism, too.

She met Phillip Langlois for lunch. He was gracious and told her all the superficial things about Isador Rabinowitz that she already knew. She realized he was picking her brain for information, asking questions slyly, trying to evoke answers that would have involved Rolf. Despite Langlois’s charm, she built a wall against him and his questions.

Yet, no matter how sturdy the wall was, it didn’t go high enough. She could tell Langlois was attracted to her sexually. He was a nice looking man, but she wanted no part of it.

Langlois confirmed her suspicions as they left the restaurant.

“Look,” he said, “I really appreciate your coming out and spending time.” They stopped on the corner and he bought half a dozen long-stemmed red roses from a flower merchant. He handed them to her.

“That’s not necessary,” she said. “Please don’t.”

“It’s an innocent thank you,” Phillip said. “Nothing more.”

She wasn’t certain how innocent it was. But the flowers were pretty.

“Thank you,” she said.

“If I think of something further about Rabinowitz which might interest you, how can I get in touch?” he asked.

“Through Rolf’s agent.” He sighed and smiled.

“Look, I’m not an ax murderer,” he said. “If you don’t want to give a phone number, I happen to know your address. I know it because the bloody tabloids are always printing pictures of you or Rolf coming out of your building. So would it be all right if I just dropped you a note at 112 East Seventy-Third Street?”

“That’s all right,” she said. “As long as that’s the only thing going through your mind.”

“What else would be?” he scoffed.

“I have no idea.” He smiled.

“Me, neither,” he said.

He walked in the other direction. She walked toward Seventy-Third Street, carrying the roses. Back in her home half an hour later, she walked in as Rolf was at the piano, working through the middle of the Tchaikovsky piano concerto he was planning for Philadelphia.

The music swelled beautifully and greeted her as she came in the front entrance.

The door to the library was slightly open. She poked her head through. Rolf, as was his custom, did not look up from what he was doing, but acknowledged her with a slight nod. She went to the kitchen, found a vase, and arranged the roses. She returned to the library, set the flowers on a table near the piano, and took a seat on the bench next to him.

“Hi,” he said, still playing.

“These buds for you,” she said.

He managed a sly smile and worked the Anheuser-Busch theme into the Tchaikovsky. They laughed at the image of Clydesdales pulling a troika.

“Since when do you buy yourself flowers?” he asked. “I thought I was in charge of that.”

She found it easier to lie.

“I bought them for you,” she said.

“Cool. Thanks.”

He leaned to her and kissed her, flowing seamlessly from the Clydesdales back to Tchaikovsky, never wavering in the tempo or feeling of what he was playing.

“How am I doing?” he asked. “Aside from tacky beer commercial, am I doing justice to ‘Mr. T.’?

Mr. T.: Rolf’s private appellation for Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Wouldn’t the music critics love that one? Rolf once called Tchaikovsky ‘Mr. T.” in front of Rabinowitz and the old man had gone sky-high ballistic.

“You’re treating Tchaikovsky better than his own government did,” Diana answered.

“But am I treating ‘Mr. T.’ Better than Van Cliburn?” Rolf asked slowly and with exaggerated concern. “Cliburn used to own this piece.”

“You’re treating Comrade Tchaikovsky almost as well as Van Cliburn,” she teased. “You’ve always been my third favorite pianist after Van Cliburn and Elton John.”

She quickly stood, and he playfully slapped her across her backside. His left hand was so fast she could barely perceive the missing notes. She scampered away with a laugh.

She watched his concentration settle back into the music and so she left him alone.

And so it went.

She left for her art classes and received two article assignments from New York magazines. She kept busy during the day and allowed Rolf as much time as possible to prepare his program for Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Brian Greenstone continued to set dates for the tour that would follow. Thirty dates had been set. London would definitely open, New York would come in October, and the tour would end either at the Pyramids or in South America.

The music program evolved, too.

Remaining at issue was the Emperor Piano Concerto. It was perhaps Geiger’s favorite work of Beethoven, and allowed Geiger to measure himself against the greatest who had ever played. It seemed a natural to close the tour in Egypt. But, it also seemed a natural as an opening work at the Royal Albert Hall of Covent Garden in London. Promoters in both places wanted it.

“How about if I play it to open, Brian,” Geiger suggested one afternoon over the telephone. “Then I play the recording of the opening performance when I closed. That will save me having to even show up for the final booking. Just play the tape.”

“Very bloody funny,” Greenstone answered.

“Just trying to help.”

“Well, don’t try to help. Don’t think at all, for God’s sake! And don’t do any heavy lifting with your hands. Just practice your infernal instrument. Practice, practice, practice so that you hit all the right notes and don’t end up playing in whorehouses.”

“Or Las Vegas.”

“Same thing. Which reminds me,” Greenstone said. “Lovely Claire, your new Number One fan and potential groupie, sends her undying and most impassioned love.”

“Don’t start trouble, Brian.”

“Me? Start female trouble?” he sniffed. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

It was a time when earlier incidents of haunting first began to recede, and when a sense of rightful place began to reappear in the lives of Rolf and Diana.

Even at home, Diana suddenly spent a great deal of time on small household tasks. She took the first steps for stripping and refreshing the steps that led to the small attic above their bedroom. She hated to go anywhere near the front-hall coat closet—where the watcher had first appeared within their home—but she did once, just long enough to take all of Rolf’s fan letters out, and organized them. She put something else back in order, too, taking the small silver piano pendant to a jeweler and having it reattached to its chain.

Since the watcher had held it in his hand, she also had it thoroughly cleaned with disinfectant and silver polish. She looped the chain around her neck and wore it every day.

For both Diana and Rolf, even the terrifying dreams at night seemed to have abated. Overall, the tension within their home had begun to lessen.

One evening, three days before the date in Philadelphia in early June—after no further specific poltergeist incidents in the house—Diana sidled onto the piano bench and sat next to Rolf as he was practicing and cuddled against him.

It was a calm time, a lull before a storm.

The program for Philadelphia was set. Rolf had been down and back to Philadelphia twice during the last week to rehearse with the orchestra. He would start with a short Beethoven sonata. Then a Chopin polonaise which, in a gesture of goodwill, he would dedicate to his mentor, Rabinowitz with a few words before playing. The third piece would be a sonata by Beethoven, which would take him to intermission.

The second half of the recital would be the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1, always a huge favorite in Philadelphia, a fact of which he was well aware. The great Van Cliburn used to knock the walls off the old Robin Hood Dell with his summer performances of Tchaikovsky.

“So it will be ‘Mr. T.’ to close the show?” Diana asked, one evening, sitting next to him again as he brought his hand up from the keys.

“It’s ‘Mr. T.’,” he said, keeping the A Team motif. “And I promise not to call him that. Except to you. I’m going to behave real good on this trip. Yo, fool!” he said with a smile. “How’s that?”

She laughed. She sat close to him, his arm around her while he played.

“Not that the program is planned,” he said,” here’s something for you. Your own private recital.”

He poised his hands over the keyboard, then the hands came down on the keys. Perfect height. Perfect touch. The first few notes were like a legion of fireflies on a summer night.

The Moonlight Sonata soared. He played it with a romanticism and passion that even sent shivers through Diana’s soul. It filled the room, the house, and their spirits, and promised them a magnificent tomorrow.

Twenty-seven

On the date of his recital in Philadelphia, Rolf Geiger arrived late morning by private limousine from New York. He and Diana had booked a suite at a hotel across Broad Street from the Kimmel Center. They spent an hour there while Geiger studied his scores again.

Toward four o’clock, he walked across the street to the modern concert hall and approached the stage door. Several fans were waiting. Rolf took time to speak to everyone in the line. He signed several dozen autographs.

“I hope you all realize there are no fireworks tonight, other than the music itself,” he told them. “No fooling around. This is a classical repertoire. Beethoven, Chopin and Tchaikovsky.”

“What about the encore?” a girl asked. “Smashing Pumpkins?”

“Probably more like ‘smashing cellos’ instead,” Geiger answered. “And anyway, how do I know I’ll be asked for an encore? I might stink out the joint.”

Everyone laughed.

“If you play an encore, what might it be?” asked another young man in line.

“I have no idea,” Geiger said with a wink. “I don’t even have an encore ready. But if I did, it might be Tchaikovsky. And of course,” he said, ‘by the time I’m ready to close the concert there will be moonlight, so maybe some sort of sonata would be nice.”

The crowd laughed.

“How about the first movement? Could I get away with that?” Geiger asked?

“Can we count on the first movement?” a girl asked.

“No,” said Geiger. He glanced at the sign that gave the ticket price for general admission.

“You can’t count on anything. And, hey! For ten bucks, what do you want, a CD, too?

“Can we have one?” someone quipped.

Geiger found a pair in his jacket pocket and gave them away. The mood was airy. Geiger loved the excitement and anticipation which preceded a concert. He was further encouraged by the fact that so many people had come out to hear him play great music. It was great to be out here. He felt buoyant and realized he had been away too long. And by now, dozens of passersby and tourists had stopped to watch, joining those in line. Traffic stopped and two mounted policemen came to have a look. Diana rescued him.

“I never argue with this lady,” Geiger announced. “Particularly this one. If she says it’s time to go, then it’s time to go.” He allowed Diana to pull him away. The crowd applauded him as he departed.

Geiger greeted several members of the orchestra. The conductor, Robert DaSilva, greeted Geiger with enthusiasm. DaSilva was a stocky, affable man whose accent still echoed Provincia di Caserta in Italy, where he was born, and Brooklyn, New York, where he was raised.

Rolf and his conductor made final preparations for the evening. Geiger inspected the stage and examined the Bosendorfer piano that he would be playing. In negotiations, the Kimmel Center had promised this fine instrument and they had made good. A piano tuner stood by. The instrument was in excellent order. With everything set, Rolf then took Diana around the corner to a small pub for a late but light lunch. At six, he returned to the hotel to dress.

Some performers would have taken their limousine across the street. Instead, Geiger came out as a beautiful summer evening descended on Philadelphia. Dressed in black tie and tails to play, he took Diana by the hand and crossed Broad Street. They made a beautiful couple. Traffic stopped. A few horns honked. Geiger smiled and waved. He felt once again as if he were on top of the entire world. Geiger still had the appeal of a rock star. People stepped out of cars to wave to him.

Before the concert, he sat with the musicians in the lounge. He watched the clock with a twinge of anxiety. It was seven o’clock, then seven-twenty. At seven-thirty, the concert hall’s doors opened. He waited patiently, making small talk with anyone who would approach him.

At a quarter hour before he would play his first work, Rolf went to the curtain at stage left and peered out into the audience. The building was almost full, and crackling with excitement.

“Counting the house?” Maestro DaSilva asked as he walked by.

“Just seeing if I know anyone,” Geiger replied in jest.

“You don’t,” DaSilva countered, “and none of them know you either. They just came to see me conduct.”

“Why should they watch you, Maestro? The orchestra doesn’t even watch you.”

“You got a point there,” he said, and disappeared to flirt with a pretty red-haired woman who was the second violinist.

“Tiger, you almost look nervous.” He turned and saw the most beautiful face in the world.

“Hey,” he said. He put his arms around Diana.

“Want to sit on the bench with me while I play?” he asked. “I’d like that better than going out there alone.”

“I don’t think that would be considered serious musicianship.”

“Who gives a rat’s ass about serious musicianship,” he said in a low voice. She laughed.

“One minute, Mr. Geiger,” the stage manager, Bernard Vickers, announced in passing. Vickers was a tall thin man, upon whom clothes hung loosely. Rabinowitz had once described him as “a grapevine with a suit on it.”

“I want a kiss before I go out there,” Geiger said to Diana. She gave him one. Then a second. Abruptly, she realized,

“You are a little jittery, aren’t you?” He shrugged.

“A little.” Then he added, “This is something new. In the past I always could improvise, take the pulse of the audience, and take it in any direction.”

“You still can.”

“No,” he said. “Tonight I have to take it in the right direction.”

The houselights went down.

“See you later,” he said.

She had a seat in a private box with one of the directors of the Academy.

Rolf drew in a deep breath.

Yes, he had hacked around in San Remo before an audience of two hundred giddy European admirers. Tonight, however, this was music—serious Goddamn music!—before critics and a large sophisticated audience in a major eastern city.

Then, his time had arrived. Rolf took two strides forward and felt the thrill of live concerts return in a surge. He stepped into a spotlight that brought him on to the stage.

The applause was huge. It came at him in a swell, much like a wave, and for a moment something caught in his throat. But he went to the Bosendorfer, placed a hand on it and gave the audience a smile and a slight bow. It had been a long time since he had stood this way before a comparable American audience. And he felt all the better for it.

He sat and readied his hands. They were more moist than usual. Then he began to play. Geiger came in with a perfect touch, hitting the opening allegro with vigor and spirit. He was off to a fine start. As he played, he was pleased. The music was flowing brilliantly. He hardly knew which pleased him more, the flow and continuity of the thoughts or the brilliant counterpoint that seemed to flow effortlessly from his fingers.

There was also the passion. The execution. The extraordinary expression.

The opening work passed brilliantly and the audience erupted with fabulous applause when Rolf finished.

He left the stage amid accolades. When he returned, he hushed the audience and dedicated the second.

“As you know, this is my first public performance in the U.S. in three years,” he proclaimed boldly. “It is also my first appearance since the passing of one of history’s great pianists. Isador Rabinowitz.”

There was some applause, interrupting Geiger.

“I would like to dedicate this next work in particular and this evening in general to the late Maestro Rabinowitz.”

There was applause again, though in this same building Rabinowitz had once thrown a Stradivarius - followed by a torrent of obscenities, and then by a cellist - down the steps into the dressing room when the violin’s owner had displeased him.

The Chopin polonaise went seamlessly. The audience responded and the evening was in fine form.

A Beethoven piano sonata was third on the program. Here, too, Geiger triumphed. When he stood at the conclusion, bowed and walked off stage, the entire audience was on its feet.

Geiger was smashing and the offstage activity at the intermission reflected that, also. Diana grabbed Rolf and embraced him. The orchestra congratulated him, and DaSilva—sipping a suspiciously large gin and tonic—gave him a sharp thumbs up.

Everything was cooking. The mood at the intermission was triumphant. The break passed quickly. Then, twenty-five minutes later, the orchestra filed onto the stage. The first violinist and concert master, the last orchestra member to appear, was met by a warm ovation. Conductor DaSilva, a local favorite, followed to considerable applause, taking the position on the podium so many times previously occupied by Stokowski, Ormandy, Muti and Dutoit in this city.

Then Rolf Geiger drew a standing ovation when he walked back onstage. He sat down to play. This was, without question, one of his great nights of musical victory. Perhaps this was a turning point in his career, he told himself, the moment when he could put his improvisations and variations behind him and play the piano better than any man or woman had ever played.

He felt every bit of the excitement. This significant triumph in Philadelphia would be a prelude to fifty others around the glove, he now sense. He knew he was better than any other man alive. Within another eight months, everyone in the world would know it too.

He took his place at the keyboard of the gorgeous Bosendorfer. Then something strange happened. The mood onstage seemed to shift for an instant. The atmosphere darkened as if something were passing through.

Rolf could have sworn he felt something icy—like hands or strong fingers—flirting along the line of his shoulders, toward his neck. He cringed and shivered. It was powerful, this touch! Immensely big and powerful! He looked to DaSilva, who looked back at him and waited.

Geiger gave the conductor a nervous nod. He shook himself. He attempted to drive away that eerie touch that came from behind him.

“Go away,” he muttered quietly.

DaSilva looked back, having heard the whisper. The conductor frowned slightly, not understanding. Geiger shook him off and indicated that he should begin.

The conductor authoritatively raised his baton, held it for a beat, and brought it sharply downward. Geiger’s fingers found the keys and instantly brought the concert hall back to the Russia of 1875, when this piano concerto was composed.

Geiger had a sense of hyperrealism as he was playing. He knew immediately something was wrong! His fingers knew where to go without him directing them. His touch was free, spirited, amazingly pure and accurate. His fingers rippled passionately over the keyboard.

Geiger swelled with enthusiasm. It was brilliant! His performance could not possibly have been going better. And this brilliance would only serve as a fantastic springboard to—

To what? The feeling that was within him was now something more than excitement. He listened again to the music, the music that his hands were creating. He felt the rhythm in his hands and measured the flow of his fingers.

And he realized! The music he made was not his. The interpretation was not his.

“No, no, no,” he told himself. “This cannot be! A dead man cannot be in my body. Rabinowitz cannot be playing. I am Rolf Geiger and I am alive and Isador Rabinowitz is dead and this cannot be happening!” But it was!

He heard the unmistakable touch of Rabinowitz upon the keys. In every note, in every bar and syllable. Even the touch of Geiger’s foot on the pedal reflected the execution and the interpretation of the dead man.

The legato. The cantabile. It wasn’t Geiger’s. It was Rabinowitz’s.

Who in God’s name was playing? What the living hell was going on?

Geiger tried to compensate with his fingering and he discovered he could not. His own touch on the keyboard, the brilliant touch that had been with him all his life had deserted him.

The old man’s vicious spirit was moving his hands.

Rolf’s hands barely felt like his own. Some other soul was moving them. His gaze rose to find Diana in the audience. The fear on his face told her that something terrible was happening. But she didn’t know what. But then, he was the only one who really knew who was playing.

Rolf’s eyes returned to the stage. He glanced to DaSilva. The conductor sensed something was wrong, but couldn’t tell what. Rolf gave him a slight shake of the head.

Geiger felt the audience hanging upon his performance. Brilliance poured from his fingers, but not his brilliance. He proceeded, barely missing a breath. Yet now, instead of pleasure and excitement welling within him it was fear.

Where was his own execution? Where was his own standard of playing?

Where was his own spirit? Where were his own hands?

First Rabinowitz had gotten into his head. Now is body. Next the soul?

The sheer horror of the thought made him glance down. The hands playing before him were the hands of a very old man! A dead man. Or more accurately, they were the hands of a man so excruciatingly bitter that he refused to remain dead.

They were Rabinowitz’s hands playing this Tchaikovsky. Lined, wrinkled, gnarled, and even bearing the famous green emerald ring! Rabinowitz had taken over the concert!

Geiger nearly screamed. He tried to pull his hands away, but the hands continued to play.

Tchaikovsky soared.

It soared the way Rabinowitz had always wanted it to soar. Geiger could hear the brilliance, but also recognized the lack of spontaneity and constraint.

Rabinowitz’s dark trademarks. The old bastard’s fingerprints. His death grip on music.

Geiger looked down again. The aging hands played for the aged misanthropic spirit. The emerald in the ring sparkled in the lights and winked like the eye of a demon. Geiger’s hands and body responded to a command that was not his, a possession that belonged to Rabinowitz.

Geiger fought the impulse to stand and run from the piano. Then, when he gave in to that impulse and wanted to flee, his body would not obey.

The possession was complete. In utter terror, Geiger watched for the final few seconds as the hands at the keyboard, bedecked with the emerald ring, continued to play.

Grandly! Magnificently! And now in the inspired style of the young Rabinowitz.

The delicate nuances of the work, the fingers at the keyboard, seemed like feathers. In the passages that required more strength, there was a forcible grasp and a tenacious élan that evoked gasps from the audience. Each note stood out like a cut, multifaceted emerald. The entire concerto swept and sparkled like a freshly fallen Moscow snow.

The music boomed. Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky!

One of the many composers that Rabinowitz had “owned.”

Geiger approached the final measures, a cascade of octaves and chords. The hands played across the keyboard. Geiger made no effort to play. He watched in terror as his hands moved without his control. The hands embraced the final notes and swept upward in triumph.

The emerald ring vanished as did the lines on the flesh of Geiger’s hands. He felt something unspeakable leave him. He was finished.

There was silence in the hall. Then the house erupted. Applause was instant and thunderous. It rose from downstairs and swelled upward into the general admission area just beneath the ceiling. And beneath the ovation, Rolf could hear Rabinowitz.

“Ten dollars a seat, Rolf. Your white-trash old man couldn’t even have bought one on the day he died!”

Geiger’s lips moved, trembling first, then giving rise to a curse under his breath

“Shot in the neck, wasn’t he? Maybe you should try the same.”

Geiger mouthed the profanity again.

DaSilva saw it, and, not understanding, thought it was an oath of exhilaration. Patrons in the front rows were either amused or shocked. Some, both.

Geiger pulled back his hands. He felt a tug on them, as if they were being held by something unseen. He yanked them down. The spirit of Rabinowitz released them. Geiger had control of them again.

He stood. He staggered. He looked blankly at the audience and the avalanche of flowers hurled toward him. An armada of beautiful young women rushed the stage and were held back by security people. Rolf nodded. He was bathed in sweat and emotion. He couldn’t find a smile.

The onetime prodigy stepped away from the bench upon which he had played. He gave a nod to DaSilva. He reached out, his hands trembling, to both the conductor and the first violinist. He held the violinist’s hand for a moment and thanked her.

Then Rolf turned back to the audience.

Everywhere before him were twenty-five hundred spectators standing in approval, hands upraised in tumultuous applause. The echo of “Bravo, bravo,” carried downward from the family circle. It rebounded across the parterre audience and embraced him. The applause was wildly enthusiastic and relentless. No one made a move to the exit.

Geiger stood in the midst of all this, a disbelieving figure who suddenly felt very small. The orchestra saluted him and withdrew. But he motioned to the orchestra with a sweeping gesture and demanded that they come back onstage to share the moment with him.

With trembling hands, he again thanked conductor DaSilva. DaSilva again saw something strange in the young pianist’s eyes but did not understand it.

Then Geiger fled. He exited the stage and proceeded quickly downstairs to the dressing room, catching no one’s eye as he ran.

He went into the dressing room and closed the door behind him. Above him, the applause thundered longer and steadier. He could hear the shouts for an encore and he trembled at the thought of those hands, “Rabinowitz’s hands,” returning.

He couldn’t play an encore. He couldn’t. Not tonight.

For that matter, he wondered, how could he ever play again? Was he so possessed by the spirit, even the body, of Rabinowitz, that any note he could ever plunk out at the piano would only be another man’s music? Suicide was suddenly a comforting thought. At least it would put him on an even plane with Rabinowitz—angry and dead.

Geiger collapsed into a heavy club chair. He felt his heart race. He felt the sweat all through his shirt and formal attire.

Slowly, riddled with fear, he held up his hands before his eyes. The hands that contained his genius. They were his own again. They were back. For the moment, at least.

The roar continued above him. The audience stomped its feet for more. If the tumult was changing at all, it was only getting louder.

Bad form, he thought to himself. Very bad. The audience was demanding his return for an encore and he was nowhere to be seen.

Oh, but what could he play? How could he play anything?

Moonlight Sonata? Fur Elise? And whose hands, whose spirit, would play?

Deep within him, there was a fear unlike any that he had ever known before. Then he felt something sweep past him, much like a draft from a door that had suddenly opened.

Oh, God. The spirit! It was back!

It was almost as if there was something cold playing at the nape of his neck. Something icy. Like fingers that had been dipped in snow.

He drew a long breath. It was the moment of a great triumph, yet he knew that he hadn’t even played that evening. Rabinowitz had played and Geiger had been robbed of his triumph.

What the future held, he could only conjecture.

And still the audience above him roared.

He thought of a target pistol that he kept in New York. It crossed his mind, for the first time in his life, to use it on himself.

“Why don’t you?” asked a voice. “In the neck, if you please, just like your racist Jew-baiting old man!”

“Shoot myself?”

“Why don’t you? You’ll never be as great as I. I would never permit it.”

“Where are you?” Geiger asked the empty room.

Upstairs, the audience was still stomping. Pounding. Insistent. They didn’t just want him back. They demanded him back. Or, more accurately, they wanted back whoever had mesmerized them with Tchaikovsky.

It was painfully clear to him now. Any greatness he attained would only be the legacy of Rabinowitz. He could never play again on his own. The world tour would be an exercise in humiliation, nothing more.

The gun back in New York. The pistol. One good bullet through the brain…

At least no one would know why.

The knock on the door to his dressing room startled him.

Geiger recognized the touch: Diana.

“Rolf?” He heard her voiced. Then a third rapping, insistent as the applause.

He sprang to his feet and went to the door. He unlocked it and threw it open. She stood before him, with Bernard Vickers, the Academy stage manager, several feet behind her.

“What’s going on? Are you okay?” Diana asked.

“I’m okay.”

“You’re not okay. I love you, and I can tell. What happened out there? “Did you see something?” she demanded. “Was something there?”

He knew exactly what she meant. He wouldn’t answer.

“What about you?” Rolf asked. “Did you see something?” She shook her head.

Her hand found his.

“Your audience is begging,” she said. “The orchestra is waiting.”

“As is Maestro DaSilva,” said Vickers. “So, Rolf, if you please…..

“Of course,” said Geiger, still badly shaken. “Yes, yes! Of course.” He struggled for his composure.

A million thoughts were upon Rolf. None of them good.

“Please,” he said to Diana. “I’m in your hands tonight. Lead me back.”

She guided him back toward the stage. The orchestra was in the wings. The musicians gave way when they saw him. He walked through them. They applauded also.

Snippets of conversation from his peers:

Absolutely fantastic!

As good as anyone now…

Didn’t think ‘the brat’ could be that good…

The applause from two and a half thousand people was subsiding only slightly. It exploded again when Rolf walked back onto the stage.

He appeared stunned to those who knew him. Even some customers in the front rows could see it. Geiger wobbled to the piano. His mood had changed.

He slid back onto the bench. “What should I play?” he asked aloud.

Offstage, DaSilva was surprised. A slight murmur rippled through the audience.

“Moonlight?” the conductor called softly. That was what the plan had been. Enough people heard the word to garner a smattering of applause.

“Moonlight, huh?” Geiger asked.

But again, he felt the icy hands of his master upon his shoulders.

The touch was cold and firm as usual. The presence was overwhelming.

Geiger glanced down and saw that his hands were his own—this time. But the hands remained on his neck and behind him.

“I think not,” he said. “Moonlight Sonata’s such a clichéd piece by now. Sort of for slutty teenage girls to sniff at.”

Geiger looked off stage at the orchestra. Some of the musicians were conferring. Geiger spoke in a low hiss.

“Just everyone shut up,” he snapped. “I know what I’m about. If you guys had the guts to be soloists, you’d be out here!”

Shocked, the musicians fell silent. The first rows of spectators reacted similarly.

Then Geiger turned to the audience. “The Dying Poet,” he said. “Chopin.”

He looked back to his keyboard and began to play.

His Chopin unfolded gravely, with poetry and aristocracy—a small jewel of a performance. Worthy of a Rubinstein, a Horowitz, a Liszt, or a Rabinowitz.

And all the time, he played with Rabinowitz’s hands on his shoulders, close to his neck. He could feel the eyes of the ghost peering over his shoulder.

As Geiger came to the obbligato, his music filled the grand old music hall. Though Diana, watching from the wings, saw his lips move, no one heard the words he spoke.

“I’m ready to see you again, Rabinowitz,” Rolf Geiger said to his departed mentor. “I’m ready to see you and talk to you.”

No one other than Geiger heard the response.

“Soon. When I’m ready,” Rabinowitz answered.

Geiger completed the encore with a flourish.

Then he stood and was gone again. He stalked to the dressing room with Diana. They gathered his things. The distant applause lasted for ten minutes, but they left the building before it subsided. Rolf scribbled sloppy autographs as he pushed his way to his limousine.

“Out to dinner, sir?” the driver asked.

“No. Get me back to New York! I hate this place!”

“Rolf?” Diana demanded.

“Just shut up,” he said to her. She was stunned. And hurt. When she tried to get close to him, he wouldn’t touch her.

They stayed in Philadelphia just long enough for her to go up to the hotel suite and pack. Then his driver took them back to New York. All along the way, on this night of artistic triumph, he was sullen and angry, as if a personality other than his own had taken complete control. Halfway back to Manhattan, Diana began to press the issue, but he wasn’t ready to talk about it.

“Who do you think you are?” she finally snapped at him in response. He looked at her quizzically, but when he tried to respond, she was furious.

“Forget it,” she snapped. “I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Fine with me,” he snorted.

That night, Rolf Geiger had no further explanation about what had happened on stage at the Kimmel Center. Nor was he happy, the next day, when Brian Greenstone phoned.

“I heard it was sensational, my boy,” Greenstone thundered, “but some of my intimates tell me there was some confusion at the end. Care to regale me with an explanation?”

“No, I don’t,” Geiger said. He hung up the phone on his old friend.

But the music critics came close to an explanation. Both the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, in the next morning’s editions, made the same observations.

The performance had been mature and brilliant, they agreed. The technique sounded so much like Isador Rabinowitz that a listener could picture the deceased master at the keyboard.

“Rabinowitz was Geiger’s great, if unloved, teacher,” William Baumann concluded in the New York Times. “If young Geiger has decided to get serious about this art as he now indicates that he wishes to, it perhaps says something about the young man’s intelligence that he should adopt and master his mentor’s great and distinctive technique.

Geiger, reading this, picked up his cell phone, called Baumann’s voice mail at the newspaper, and left a profane message in person.

Diana rose from breakfast when she heard his words and went back upstairs. She locked herself in her own bathroom and cried for an hour. For all this time, Rolf stayed downstairs in the library, pouring over Chopin at the piano, alternately cursing, reading the score, and playing.

Never once did he think to go upstairs to see if Diana was all right. And never once did she dare to go down. “So greatness,” grumbled Geiger to himself as he made beautiful music at his Steinway, “has its price. And I’m now willing to pay it.”

Twenty-eight

A week after the perceived triumph in Philadelphia, Rolf sat in his library on a bright summer morning. Diana had gone to her health club. Aside from the music, which flowed generously from Geiger’s Steinway, and the occasional utterance from the pianist, the town- house was silent. Anyone viewing the handsome young virtuoso at the piano would have guessed that he was alone. Rolf, however, knew otherwise.

There was no score in the music rack of the Piano. Geiger was busying himself with warm-ups—musical calisthenics. Trill exercises, simple and chromatic scales, and exercises for the throwing of the hand, for which he used a two-part fugue of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Geiger watched his powerful hands run up and down the keyboard. He listened with a demanding ear as the notes came together in the proper context. This went on thirty minutes. From there he moved to the piano passages of the Choral Fantasy by Beethoven, a probable part of his London program. He played passionately and impeccably. When he was finished, he raised his eyes from the keyboard.

To Rolf’s eyes, Rabinowitz was standing there in the suit in which he had been buried.

“Well?” Geiger asked. “What did you think?

“Competent,” said the ghost of the Maestro.

Geiger eyed him now without fear. It seemed normal that he should be there. “It was better than ‘competent,’” Geiger said

“You struck every note with rigid exactness,” Rabinowitz said. The ghost drifted around the room. “Perfection makes your interpretation frigid.” Rabinowitz continued. “Play this again. Bring out your conception of the work. Make it vivid. Happen it. Again, you young fool.”

Rolf’s hands returned to the keyboard. He attacked the piece with more swagger and increased elegance and imagination, but less precision.

“Better,” he heard the ghost say. The old man’s voice was all around him. He at one point felt his mentor’s hands settle on his shoulder, just by the neck.

“Play the pretissimo at the ending with broken octaves,” the ghost instructed.

“What?”

“Do it! For the love of God, don’t think! Just do it!” Rabinowitz ordered.

Geiger reached and followed instructions. His own hands were a flurry before him. The sound that swelled from his Steinway amazed even him. It gave him goose bumps.

He glanced up. Rabinowitz was gone. His eyes went back to the keyboard. He played through the same passage again in broken octaves. He was amazed. When his eyes rose again, Rabinowitz was a handsome young man, much the way he had looked when he fled Austria in the thirties. He was sitting on the piano. Weightlessly.

“Don’t look so much at me, explore your music!” the ghost snapped.

Geiger’s eyes returned to the score. He went back to the beginning of the piano sections of the Choral Fantasy and played the work straight through. Then at the end, he looked up.

The ghost stood there, its arms folded.

“Fair,” Rabinowitz finally said. “That was almost good.”

“What about the broken octaves?”

“Don’t use them. They don’t belong there. It’s show-offing. It will only impress American audiences who know nothing.”

“If I don’t use them there in the Choral Fantasy, where do I use them?”

“In the Totentanz,” Rabinowitz said. “Liszt’s Dance of Death.”

Geiger cringed slightly and shifted restlessly on his bench.

“What are you talking about?”

“Your London program.”

“Who’s playing it? You or me?” Geiger asked.

The ghost was suddenly gone from the piano. Geiger glanced around and found him in the chair across the room, looking to be of middle-age. He looked way he had looked as a famous performer in the 1950’s when he had frequently been Jack Paar’s guest on The Tonight Show.

“Unfortunately, you,” the ghost said. “It would be better I played, but…”

“You’re dead. You’re not here.” Rabinowitz answered.

“Then, why are you talking to me, Rolf, if not here?” The ghost’s tone was taunting. Then Rabinowitz disappeared so abruptly that Geiger felt a change in the pressure of the room. He looked around the library, all directions, and couldn’t find the ghost.

“All right,” Geiger finally said. “Come back. Show yourself.”

The face materialized inches in front of Geiger’s.

It was so intense and disagreeable an image that Geiger recoiled in horror.

“You will London under my tutelage,” said Rabinowitz. “You will achieve greatness under my instruction. Deviate, and I will take over the keyboard again, as I did in Philadelphia.”

“I can achieve greatness on my own,” Geiger said softly. “I can and I shall.”

“If you’re so sure, then why don’t you?” Rabinowitz taunted further. “You left my instruction eight years ago. Why no greatness on your own? Tell me, young man, why?”

Geiger didn’t answer. He didn’t answer because he knew. He hadn’t dared. He hadn’t aspired. Rolf had wanted to conquer the world but hadn’t dared take the first serious step until the old man was dead. And now ironically he, Rolf, was keeping the old man alive.

“Well then, there! The ghost insisted. “There we have the truth between us, yes?” He made a clucking sound like a chicken to rub it in further. Suddenly Rabinowitz was an old man again. He was sitting on the piano bench next to Geiger. “As the piano is your instrument,” he told Geiger, “you are my instrument. That much is clear, even to a fool like you.”

Geiger turned away from the ghost. When he raised his eyes again, Rabinowitz was in full view, right in front of him.

“Now, what about the London program?” Rabinowitz asked. “The Choral Fantasy is acceptable. What else?”

“It’s an all-Beethoven program.”

“Mistake. You need to show range in London. English audiences will include a few people who have some sophistication.”

“The second piece is Concerto No. 4 in G.”

“Expendable.”

“It’s a beautiful piece.”

“Maybe. Don’t play it.”

“The Emperor is the main work.”

“The Emperor is bombastic, pretentious, and pedestrian.” He paused. “Plus, it’s cheap. Cheap, cheap. It challenges no audience and thus no recitalist. You cannot play it.”

“You used to play it, Maestro.”

“When I desired to. Everyone recognizes my greatness. So I could play it and get away with it. You cannot.”

“So that’s when I’ll play it, too. When I desire to. And I desire to in London on September first.”

Geiger’s left hand went to the keyboard. He played a strain of the Emperor. Then his right hand found the keyboard and he embroidered the melody of Don’t Be Cruel and Suspicious Minds.

“What is that noise? Rabinowitz asked.

“The Emperor meets the King,” said Geiger, knowing it would annoy him.

“Which King? Martin Luther? George V?”

“Presley.”

The specter was vehemently angry, which pleased Geiger.

“You are jerking off!” Rabinowitz thundered furiously. “Intellectual masturbation. Same as you’ve always done! Whore! Slut!”

Geiger added a leitmotif from Blue Hawaii.

“You have the intellect of a honky-tonk player!” Rabinowitz insisted.

Geiger persisted. “Me and you and Blue Hawaii, Maestro,” said Geiger. He sang along in the fashion of Elvis. “Come with me, while the moon is on the sea…”

Rabinowitz roared. Furious, the ghost knocked a pile of scores from where they stood on a nearby table. Nothing offended the old man quite like catchy successful American pop music, which he considered a cultural abomination.

Geiger crooned more lyrics. The scenario was nothing new. It was the same as many of their “lessons” and “learning sessions” from fifteen years earlier.

“What else will you play?” Rabinowitz wanted to know.

Geiger was thoughtful. “Maybe I won’t play the Concerto No. 5,” he mused. “That leaves an opening. So I would still be looking for the third piece.”

“I told you, imbecile. Liszt’s Dance of Death.”

“Why the Totentanz?” Geiger asked again.

“To further embarrass yourself, it is obvious,” the ghost snarled. “Technically demanding. I played it most masterfully. Think you could rise to it?”

Geiger thought about it.

As a teenager, Rolf had seen Andre Watts Play the Totentanz at Philharmonic Hall in Lincoln Center in New York. It had been electrifying. The music had been riveting and Watts had always been a great showman. As was frequently the case, Rabinowitz had a point.

Geiger looked at the ghost. “Do you think I could?” he asked.

Rabinowitz laughed.

Outside the library, in the vestibule of the town house, there was the sound of a door closing. Diana returning home. Rolf recognized her footsteps.

“Totentanz,” he said aloud. “The Dance of Death. London 2009. Rolf Geiger’s World Tour.” He thought about it for a moment. His fingers came down on the keyboard ad he played a few bars he could remember.

Dance of Death and Diana appeared at the doorway. He glanced up.

A confluence of ideas: Diana’s Dance of Death? He mused. He liked the alliteration, though the thought made him cringe.

“How’s it going?” she asked softly.

He grunted.

She gazed into the library and saw no one other than Rolf. The muscles of his face and neck were tense with concentration. She had a packet of morning mail in her hands.

She asked again. “How is it…?”

Rolf slammed his hands down onto the keys in mid-phrase. The Steinway thundered with rage and anger.

“Don’t interrupt me, all right?” he snapped. “Can’t you see I’m rehearsing? What the hell am I doing in here, dicking around with Top 40 crap?”

She stood frozen at the library door. Tirades such as this one had become common in the week since Philadelphia. Once, they had never happened. Now, they happened several times a day. Unhappily, Diana was feeling increasingly as if she should just stay away from him.

But her own anger rose in her defense.

“I’m sorry!” she said. “But I heard you talking.”

He looked around the library as if she were crazy. Even Rabinowitz had turned invisible to Rolf.

“To myself, if anyone,” he said. He paused. “How was your workout? Tell me about bouncing around with all those other firm butts and six-pack abs.”

“Some other time,” she said. “Here. Your mail. From your adoring, unquestioning fans, no doubt.” She bundled it and tossed into the room, like a woman feeding a caged beast at the zoo. The mail landed with a thump, then several pieces flew in various directions.

Rolf made no move to pick anything up. Diana left the doorway. Geiger heard her go upstairs. He set his attention back to the music. He looked down. Where was he? He wondered.

“Dance of Death,” came a nearby voice.

“Yes, of course,” Rolf said aloud.

He tried to pick it up again. He struggled. He had studied the piece years ago but couldn’t remember it well. He struggled. His hands faltered.

“Need help?” Rabinowitz asked, kindly this time.

“Maybe.”

Then, before his eyes, Rolf’s hands aged again, the emerald ring appeared. His body sagged slightly but he felt a surge of brilliance course through his hands.

The old hands took over again. Technically inspired. Glowing with virtuosity, making Geiger recall the piece. He played by himself. The old hands disappeared and Geiger’s took their rightful place. He ended at mid-interval near the end of a bar. Rabinowitz was correct. Liszt would be the perfect third for London. He looked up. The ghost was before him again.

“So your program is now established for London?” Rabinowitz asked.

“Yes, it is.”

“Good. Good,” Rabinowitz muttered. His eyes drifted in the direction in which Diana had vanished. “Do you love that woman?” he asked.

“Yes, I do. Without qualification.”

“Foolish! You mustn’t.”

Geiger’s eyes burned at the ghost so censoriously that the ghost faded. Then the specter rematerialized on the other side of the library, speaking again as a handsome young man.

“Personal relationships are poison when genius is to be realized,” the ghost said.

“Spare me,” Geiger said.

“Heed my warning. She is unfaithful to you,” Rabinowitz attempted.

“Talk to me only of music,” Geiger said. “Talk to me only of the piano. Of personal relationships, you never knew anything.”

“Women cheat! This one in particular.”

“You lie. I’m tuning you out.”

Geiger went abruptly to his feet. He crossed the library and approached the window.

The ghost drifted in front of him. Geiger evaded him and stepped to the window. Rolf reached to the shade of one of the high windows, and jerked its cord. The shade shot skyward. Geiger arranged for a generous river of cleansing sunlight to flow upon the ghost.

A moment passed. The substantial image of Rabinowitz stayed in place for several seconds. A look of extreme anger and ferocity washed across the spirit’s face.

“Now vanish,” Geiger said. “You are no longer wanted.”

Then—before Geiger’s astonished eyes—the young Rabinowitz aged to his middle years, then to his sixties, then to his later years, then to the day he died.

“She cheats on you,” Rabinowitz tried again. The final image Rolf saw was the old maestro in his open coffin. Then that too disappeared, as his final words rang in Geiger’s ears.

Twenty-nine

Upstairs in the bedroom, Diana sifted through her mail. Among the day’s arrivals, she found an envelope bearing the return name and address of Phillip Langlois. She set it aside until she had read a letter from her father and another from a sister. Then she opened it.

Dear Diana,

Mr. Geiger never answered my repeated requests for interview time. I do understand that he must be terribly busy with preparations for his upcoming tour. But I hope he might reconsider. If you could mention that you and I met at the Public Library and that I’m not a monster of the tabloids, I would be most highly appreciative.

I wonder also if you might have lunch, coffee, or tea with me at your convenience. This might sound slightly mad to you, but I have a theory reflecting upon my study of Isador Rabinowitz which suggests that you, Diana, may be in personal danger. I don’t mention this to alarm you. But danger is danger and I would be negligent if I did not pass along to you what I know.

Respectfully yours,

Phillip Langlois

She read the letter twice. Enclosed with the note was another business card, marked with his hotel phone number. Her first reaction was irritation. She had a feeling that Phillip was long on charm and short on substance. He also came across as a man who was interested in her sexually. She was twenty-six and divorced, not twenty-one and unwary of men of the world. She had seen enough of primal male motivation in her time to recognize a touch of it here.

She thought about him a little more as she lay on her bed and fingered the handwritten note. Then again, might as well face it, she concluded, Phillip oozed sexuality in a hunky-guy beneath the shirt-and-tie sort of way.

She wondered about Rolf and his recent tirades. Was this, she wondered, just a glimpse of what might follow with Rolf? Her first husband had been too given to his career—or his lack of one—to pay her the respect and attention she needed. Now was Rolf set to push her into the background in a similar manner? Would he always be too busy to treat her in the wonderful way he had treated her in the past?

As she lay on the bed reading, her fingers left the letter and found the small silver piano that lived between her breasts. She twisted it thoughtfully. She asked herself, as she had asked herself more than a few times recently, what she wanted from Rolf.

How long could the relationship sustain itself?

What was she going to do, tag along as his girlfriend for a few years until she hit her mid-thirties and he replaced her with a younger version of herself? It was a nasty reverie, all brought on by Phillip’s letter. She wondered where such thought were coming from recently. Was there now something within the atmosphere of the townhouse?

Diana turned away from the thought for a moment. There was music from downstairs.

Rolf was at the keyboard.

“God! What bizarre piece was he now playing?” This was nothing she had ever heard before. “Where was this coming from? It sounded like Franz Liszt, the world’s first rock star, jacked up on amphetamines.” It continued for several minutes in all its fury. Then it stopped.

Silence from down below.

She heard Rolf on the steps coming upstairs. She tucked the letter from Phillip Langlois back into its envelope and nestled the envelope back among her other mail.

Rolf entered the room, gave her a glance and said nothing. He went to his dresser to retrieve something, but she couldn’t see what.

She sat up on the bed and watched him. When he turned around, his eyes locked on hers.

“What?” he asked uncomfortably. She shrugged.

“Just wondering if you were going to say anything,” she said.

His gaze remained firm and unyielding for a moment. Then something gave way within him. His expression changed, so did his mood, and so did his demeanor.

He walked over to her and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Yeah,” he said. “Guess I should say something. Sorry I barked at you down there.”

He gave her a hug. She responded.

“I’m sorry I interrupted you,” she said. He shrugged.

“I have a lot on my mind. London can’t be a disaster. It’s going to be a long concert. Three major works. The old goats in the music establishment will tell me I can’t do all three, or shouldn’t do all three, all in one night.”

“So why do all three?”

“Because I can,” he said. “And I want to get all the works I want to play in this one tour. So that means practically doubling up on dates in some places. Like London, to start.”

“Rolf, are you sure you should do it that way? I don’t want this to kill you,” she said.

“Why do you say that?” he asked.

“Well, because I don’t, Tiger. I love you.” He flinched slightly.

“That piece I was just playing. Did you hear it?”

“I heard it.”

“It’s the Totentanz. Franz Liszt. The Dance of Death.”

“I know,” she said.

He felt her shudder.

“What put that in your mind?” she asked. “I’ve never heard you play that. Why play it in London? Why a piece with such a macabre title?” He drew a breath and stood.

“It’s an instinct I have. The right piece of music at the appropriate time.” He seemed to think about it for another moment. “A danger I should flirt with. I live my professional life by instinct. So why go against it now?”

“It creeps me out,” she said.

“You don’t like the piece?”

“The title creeps me out,” she repeated.

“It never did before.”

“It does now.”

A thoughtful look crossed his face.

“Then it will have to creep you out,” he said. “No apologies.” He got up and he said nothing else, leaving Diana alone again in the room. She looked back to her mail. She listened to Rolf walk back downstairs to the library.

For the next several hours, music flowed from the Steinway. Some passages repeated themselves, some bars, and the occasional grand piece of music—specifically the Choral Fantasy—uninterrupted and beautiful. It almost seemed a crime that such a magnificent playing fell upon so few human ears.

In the evening, Rolf made dinner for himself. Diana went to her art class with Maurice Sahadi. She returned home around ten and Rolf was still playing. She readied for bed by herself and climbed in at eleven-thirty.

Before turning the light out, she reread the day’s mail. She still didn’t know what to do about Phillip Langlois.

Rolf came upstairs about midnight. She was almost asleep. He sat down on the edge of her side of the bed and placed a hand on her shoulder she had a funny sensation. It didn’t feel like his hand, even though it was.

It felt somehow different, though that was a silly thought.

“You want me or you just want sex?” she asked.

He smiled strangely, which added to her confusion over the moment. It was as if he had developed a new smile, one she didn’t like.

“How about both at once?” he asked.

“Okay,” she said. “Climb in here.”

He did. But the sex was perfunctory. He said little and acted like a man going through the motions. It occurred to her in the middle that he could have been with any woman and it wouldn’t have made any difference to him. It was hugely dissatisfying. When it was over, he went right to sleep. She lay there for thirty minutes wondering what was wrong.

The next two days, he spent earnestly at the piano, saying little, hardly acknowledging that Diana even lived there with him. She was willing to grant him his space and not say anything. She went to another gym class, another art class and to two movies with friends. On the third day, she telephoned a surprised Philip Langlois. She told him that she would be happy to meet with him, even though Rolf’s schedule was still enormously cluttered.

Langlois seemed pleased. Very pleased. They set a date five days away. When she set the phone down, she wondered what she had done.

“Most affairs start over lunch,’ her mother had once told her years ago. During the phone conversation Philip had given her a wide choice: breakfast, lunch, coffee, drinks, dinner. She had made her own decision.

She also wondered where the emotional intimacy she had shared with Rolf had gone and when, if ever, it would return. Meanwhile, the date was set and she found herself looking forward to it. For lunch.

Thirty

“Have you ever heard the name, Laura Aufieri?” Philip Langlois asked.

The British author sat with Diana Stephenson in one of the modest pubs on Third Avenue north of Bloomingdale’s. It was a hamburger joint with red-and-white-checked tablecloths. Diana thought for a moment. Then,

“No, I haven’t,” she said.

“I suspected you hadn’t,” he said. “Not many people have. Laura Aufieri nearly cost Isador Rabinowitz his career. Although,” he continued, “Laura lost more than Rabinowitz did.”

“I’m not following,” Diana answered him. “And this must be fairly old news.”

The waiter arrived with food. A meat pie for him. A salad with shrimp for her.

“Well, it’s an old story,” Langlois began. “But let me backtrack a minute. I have this theory that Rabinowitz and Rolf Geiger are almost identical in psychological makeup.”

She started to scoff, but he insisted that he be allowed to continue.

“You see,” Langlois said in his best analytical voice, “they were both prodigies, but came to their gifts very late. As young adults, they were romantics and iconoclasts. They experimented with their gifts, fooled around with ladies then went mentally off the rails as they reached for greatness.” He had a draft Bass ale in progress and his hand kept finding it. “This is what fascinates me,” he said. “When Rabinowitz made his move to become a world-class recitalist in the 1940’s, that’s when his personality quickly changed. For the negative. I’ve been following Rolf’s career and everything has an eerie ring. It’s like watching Rabinowitz all over again. The intensity. The lack of humor. The change of personality.”

He paused. Amid swigs of ale his tone alternated between dead calm and breathless.

“Well, come on, Diana, you live with Rolf Geiger,” he said eventually. “Am I not correct that Rolf has changed recently?”

“He has a world tour coming up. It’s not unusual for an artist to be preoccupied or even moody. Much of that is concentration. It’s to be expected.”

“Maybe,” he allowed. “And maybe not. Look, I’ve done extensive study. Rabinowitz was a student of Rachmaninoff. You can see it in their techniques: beautifully organized performances, impeccably delivered, rarely capricious, uniform from one season to the next and guided by a sense of sonority and a strong left hand. But when Rachmaninoff died in 1943, that’s when Rabinowitz started both his quest for greatness and his descent into venality. I’m not a psychologist,” he said. “I’m a journalist. And I know when I see two individuals on parallel roads.”

She thought about what he had said for several seconds, while Phillip started to eat.

“Suppose I’m listening to you,” she said. “What direction are you going with this?”

He proceeded carefully.

“I’m waiting for someone to be murdered,” he said. “Most likely you.” She bristled. “What?” she snapped.

He repeated. She felt anger first, then a wave of fear.

“I have a feeling you’re going for a cheap analogy,” she said.

“Oh?” he asked. “You know, I’ve been an investigative reporter for many years. I notice things. And I notice that you look like a frightened woman these days.”

Again, she protested. He waited.

“Hear me out, please? Without interrupting.” She crossed her arms and waited.

“In 1944 in London,” Langlois said, “the handsome young Rabinowitz was just making a name for himself. He was involved with a young woman named Laura Aufieri. Her body was found in the home in Mayfair that Rabinowitz kept. She had been strangled to death.”

She felt something sickening crawling around her stomach.

“So?”

“She was a woman with whom Rabinowitz was having an affair at the time. A long-term live-in affair.” He held the sentence a beat. “But once he was out of that romantic relationship, through the thrill of her death, he went on to bigger things in terms of his career.”

“Why wasn’t Rabinowitz arrested for the murder?”

“He was.”

“What?”

“That’s part of where this whole ‘Dark Angel’ terminology came from. Tragedy. Violence. There was another woman who died suspiciously in Rabinowitz’s past, too, way back in Russia. But all records disappeared during the Stalin era. So who’s to know what happened?”

“All of this is supposition,” Diana insisted.

“Not entirely. Even this ‘Dark Angel’ nickname has a resonance: Rachmaninoff in his lifetime was known as ‘the archangel.’”

“So did Rabinowitz go to jail?” Diana asked.

“No. Lack of evidence. And naturally, because of who he was, a young virtuoso on the piano, the police cut him a wide degree of slack. But he was questioned nonstop for two days.”

“You’re implying that Rolf will do the same thing? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

“As a reporter, I’m just noting the eerie confluence of facts. In fact, I didn’t suggest anything. You just came to the same conclusion as I did.”

“If this was such a big deal,” she asked next, “why wasn’t it in the newspapers and why isn’t the story widely known here?”

“Libel laws in England,” he said. “The stories of the death of Laura Aufieri were in the newspapers and the address in Mayfair of the Rabinowitz home was printed.” Langlois unwrapped a folder and started pulling clippings out of it. He pushed two before Diana. Across half a century, the face of a murdered woman looked out at Diana.

She cringed again. Laura Aufieri was approximately Diana’s age. The slain mistress also bore an uncanny resemblance. And she, too, Diana noted, had been a young music journalist.

Diana looked at the material for several seconds, then raised her eyes. Her salad was losing her interest.

“Why would Rabinowitz have killed her?” she asked softly.

“The theory was that Rabinowitz felt she was standing in the way of his career. The personal relationship was costing him passion from his musicianship. He realized he had no love to give to anything except the piano. Laura may have protested the end of their relationship or Rabinowitz may have lost his temper. Who knows? Maybe she was involved with another man. That rumor surfaced, too, stating that Rabinowitz murdered her in jealousy.” He paused. “Look. What’s indisputable is that Laura Aufieri was murdered.”

Diana blew out a breath, overwhelmed and still highly skeptical.

“I still don’t know what to say. Or how to react.”

“That’s what I thought you would say,” Langlois said. “But consider this: A year ago, I sued the Metropolitan London Police to have documents declassified,” Langlois continued. “Rabinowitz was the chief suspect and subject to arrest. He then moved to the United States and stayed here until the London magistrates let that case grow cold. Mostly likely, there were bribes involved. Oh, and, in this country,” Langlois added, “Rabinowitz struck up a friendship with the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover made sure that there would be no cooperation forthcoming from American police agencies in the case.”

“Fascinating,” she said. She suffered a disquieting sensation as she remembered that picture of Rabinowitz with Hoover that she had seen in the library. “But this is still a story from more than sixty years ago.”

He pursed his lips thoughtfully. He looked back down at the pictures of the dead woman.

“Is it a case from fifty years ago?” he mused. “Or is it a case from this coming autumn? You’re a beautiful woman, Diana, and whether you think so or not, I’m convinced that Rolf feels you’re in his way. I’m worried about you. Tragedy has a way of repeating itself.” He paused, then continued. “Why don’t you move out, Diana? Or go stay with your parents for a while?”

She looked back at him.

“Why don’t you go to hell?” she said.

She got to her feet and left the table.

Thirty-one

Claire’s eyes rose as a weary Rolf Geiger came through the door to Brian Greenstone’s agency. Then her face lit with a smile. “Hi,” she said.

“Hello,” Rolf Geiger said in return. “Is Brian in?” he asked.

“He’s in,” she said. “Is he expecting you?”

“I said I’d come by sometime today,” Geiger said brusquely. “See if he can see me now.”

Rather than pick up the phone, she stood, turned and walked to Brian’s door. She wore a dark blue sleeveless short summer dress. Geiger gave it an eleven out of ten.

A moment later she reemerged. Rolf was still standing by her desk. She gave him a nod and a smile. Geiger was free to go on back to Brian’s office.

“Ah, the gods stroll insouciantly among the mortals again today,” Greenstone said by way of greeting. “Probably looking to wreak havoc upon the earthy sphere.”

He indicated a chair where Geiger was to sit.

“Knock it off, Brian,” Geiger said.

“Oh, Cranky again, huh?” said Greenstone. “Well, it beats me. Young, handsome, about to become obscenely wealthy and you choose to be cranky. Right. Be that way. See if I care.”

Geiger settled into the chair.

“You wanted to confirm the musical program in London for the promoters, right?” Geiger asked.

“Yes. That would be wonderful.”

“Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy will open the program. Then Liszt’s Totentanz. The Emperor is the main piece I want to play so I’ll probably play it third, after the intermission. Or maybe I’ll take two intermissions. I don’t know right now.”

“Intermissions could be arranged later,” Greenstone allowed.

“I might even change the order of the program on the night of the performance. Depending on how I feel. Think they’d have a problem with that?”

“Well, you might want to let the musicians of the London Philharmonic know so that they have the music in the right order. I don’t think you want to play the piano solos from Totentanz in the middle of the Emperor. Aside from that, I doubt very much that they would have a problem. If you change the order of the works on the night of the performance it might be seen as quirky. But I doubt if anyone is going to run up onstage and stop you.”

“Okay. Good,” said Geiger nodding. “By the way, who’s conducting?”

“What?”

“Tell me again who’s conducting,” Rolf said. Greenstone blinked.

“Rolf, are you all right? The conductor was the first thing we arranged. We have one of the finest in the world.”

“So who is it again?”

“Heinrich von Sauer, grandson of the great pianist Emil von Sauer, as you know. He will fly to London just for this program, Heinrich not Emil, the latter being currently dead. “

“Von Sauer, huh? Who approved him?”

“You did. He’s already signed.”

“So we’re stuck with him?”

“Rolf! This was set a month ago, and even if it hadn’t been, you should jump at this. Von Sauer works with a piano virtuoso—that would be you, I believe; you are the piano virtuoso in this sentence—as well as anyone in the world. We are indeed fortunate to have him.”

“All right, all right. What venue are we playing?”

“Covent Garden, as you again well know.”

“Explain again why.”

“Because it’s there. I dare say, if it was a good enough venue for George Frederic Handel, it will suffice for you.”

“Why not play, you know, that other one? The big one over near the British Museum?”

“Is this a crude reference to the Royal Albert Hall, which is not near the British Museum, at all, but rather is in South Kensington?”

“Yes. I guess so.”

“Covent Garden has more cachet, and by osmosis, so might you, if you can behave your suddenly very dark destructive influences and do a sensational performance there.”

Geiger considered it.

“The Beatles played the Royal Albert,” said Greenstone, expanding. “McCartney before he was respectable. So did The Who. So did Rubinstein, so did Horowitz, Cliburn, and so on. That’s rather the point. I, or I should say we, since you and I decided this, we did not want any confusion over whether this was a pop or classical performance.”

“Uh-huh.”

Greenstone paused.

“Now that I think of it, you’ve played the Royal Albert, too,” he added. “At Easter 2001 in dark blue sequined jeans and a strawberry pink formal jacket. I recall that your shtick that evening was to weave seventeen separate leitmotifs from Jagger-Richard into a piano transcription based on the main themes from Parsifal.”

“I also remember I liked that stage. You know, I always also liked that line about how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.”

“Bully. Fine. Come here quoting Paul McCartney any time it flips your switch, Rolf, but Covent Garden is set this time around. It’s rented and it’s ‘SRO’, which in your case means, ‘Sold Right Out.’ So this, like Heinrich von Sauer, is an indelible part of your future.”

Geiger looked away into the far distance, then his attention returned.

“It’s tough for me to tell you this, Brian, because we’ve been friends for so long. But I don’t like the way some of this has been set up.”

“What the hell are we talking about?”

“I’ve been paying attention to the musical program. I’ve left the business arrangements to you. And I’m not happy with some of your choices.”

“Is this about money, Rolf?”

“Partially.”

Greenstone leaned back at his desk and drew a deep breath to calm himself. His ample midsection rumbled slightly. His vast wall of patience was starting to crumble.

“Well, aren’t we the greedy little prick today?” Greenstone chided. Then he chose a rational conciliatory approach. “Look,” he finally said, “what’s gotten into you?”

“Maybe some common sense,” Geiger said. “I’m going to be playing three concerto-type works in one program. Shouldn’t I be compensated for it?”

“My boy. Let Uncle Brian put a few fiduciary things in perspective. You will be making a guarantee of one hundred thousand pounds sterling, or in terms that may sound more tactile to you, a minimum of one hundred fifty thousand dollars for this single performance. This is the highest guarantee ever paid to a solo performer in the United Kingdom for anything aside from the major outdoor arenas. Do I make myself clear?”

Geiger tapped on the arm of his chair.

“Clear, sure. But what about those outdoor arenas? Tell me again why we’re not playing Wembley or some big football stadium.” Greenstone stared at him uncomfortably.

“Have you suffered a blow to the head recently, Rolf? You are not yourself.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass, Brian. You see the issue here! Why am I not booked into a larger hall? The three tenors were pulling down a million dollars each at Giants Stadium in 1996.”

Greenstone was angry. But he chose his words carefully.

“First off, you are not a tenor. No one wants to hear you croak Gershwin or Puccini or Manilow or anything else. But they do wish to hear you play Beethoven. All that’s fine. But you and I decided early on that this tour was to be a class act. No stadiums, which are highly conducive to making money and negatively conducive to fine music. This was to be the Greatest Pianist playing the greatest music, under circumstances under which the audience could hear the music and, if we are lucky, may even be in a position to appreciate it. Recall?”

“Sort of.”

Greenstone gave him a sigh and a hopeless look. There was irritation, but also concern.

“You’ve forgotten. You’ve legitimately forgotten?” Greenstone asked. “My God, Rolf! What’s going on with you? Talk to me. Tell me what’s wrong.”

Geiger slouched slightly in his chair. He ran his hand across his face and then his hair. Greenstone studied his client and knew that something was badly amiss.

“And,” Greenstone continued, “if you don’t mind my saying so, you also look awful. You appear like you need a rabies shot, that’s how you look.”

“Lay off me, Brian.”

“Rolf, I’m seeing a lot of things I don’t like, to tell you the truth. I’m seeing Rabinowitzisms, which were unseemly enough with the original cast.” Geiger glowered at his friend and agent. Greenstone continued. “I know you have probably been practicing and rehearsing intensively until the notes are running out of your ears. But you have to come up for air a bit. You will not be able to start this tour and succeed upon it if you are dead on your feet before it begins.” Geiger looked up.

“Dead, huh? On my feet? What are you talking about?”

“A figure of speech. A metaphor, I submit.”

“I didn’t care for it.” Greenstone eased considerably.

“How’s Diana?” Greenstone asked. “I want to be reassured that your private life is tranquil. Is it?”

“Diana is okay.”

“Just okay?”

“Yes. Okay. Or well, Or fine. Or lousy. Or whatever you want me to say.”

“Rolf, are there any personal problems I might help you with?”

“Personal problems?”

Geiger seemed on the point of saying something else. But then something both curious and shocking happened right before Brian Greenstone’s astonished eyes. The light from the window that faced Seventh Avenue must have hit his client from a funny angle, because Geiger suddenly looked absurdly old. It was as if the pianist had aged half a century or more in a few seconds, his face morphed into a tangled twisted road map of lines and wrinkles.

Greenstone flinched in shock at what he thought he saw.

Then Geiger moved and the disturbing vision was gone, replaced by the haggard face of the younger man, riddled with concern and preoccupation.

Geiger moved to his feet without warning.

“I guess that’s everything,” he muttered. “I have to go practice. Keep me informed.”

“I will, Rolf.” Greenstone was left dazed.

“What did I come here for this morning?” Geiger asked absently.

“To discuss your music program. London. Opening night of the world tour.”

“Ah. Yes. Did we touch on that?”

“At length,” Greenstone said, his eyes locked on his client. “Choral Fantasy, Totentanz, and the Emperor, as the various spirits so move you.”

“Yes,” Geiger nodded. “Yes, that’s right.” He smiled broadly for the first time throughout the visit. “‘as the spirits so moves me.’ That’s a good one, Brian. Very aptly put. I like that.”

Then he turned and departed, leaving Greenstone in a state of worry and abject bewilderment.

“Hi,” Clair said as Geiger emerged from Greenstone’s office.

“Hello,” Rolf answered. “Hello and god-bye.” She smiled brightly.

“I’m going to lunch,” she said. “Will you go down in the elevator with me?”

He stopped and looked at her again. She was leaning over her desk, straightening some phone messages. He reconsidered his previous scoring. In that dress she scored maybe a fifteen out of ten. And best of all, no bra. He looked directly down her dress and admired her perfect breasts. Then her eyes rose and met his, catching him and she blushed. She smiled.

“I, like, don’t really care if you look at me,” she said softly. “I’m flattered.”

“I’ll ride down in the elevator with you,” Geiger said.

Claire took Brian’s messages into his office. Then she came out, grabbed her shoulder bag, and left the office with Rolf. They went to the elevator and waited in silence for a moment.

Each time his eyes settled on her, she smiled.

“Claire?” Rolf finally asked. “What are you looking for from me?”

She shrugged impishly.

“I’d like it if you came over to where I live sometime soon,” she said. She added, ‘I’d make you feel right at home. I’d do whatever you asked me to do.”

The elevator arrived as if on cue. It was empty.

A sixteen-flight descent in an aluminum room without windows. Claire chatted the whole way down. There were no stops, no other passengers.

Claire had a place down in Greenwich Village, she said, her first pad since leaving academia. It was on West Tenth Street, not far from where it intersected with West Fourth Street. The place was on the ground floor, one tiny bedroom, a bath, one small living room and a cramped kitchen with no food in it. It was an old rent controlled apartment, illegally subleased from a disreputable college friend.

They hit the lobby. Claire remained at Rolf’s side. And at his ear.

They were outside on the sidewalk.

“Which way are you going?” Rolf asked.

“Whichever way you are,” she answered shamelessly. Her smile was now as pretty as it was mischievous. She was about five-five and her hair was honey brown with a nice glow in the summer sunlight, even on busy West Fifty-seventh. They turned east and began to walk.

“I’m going to show you something that’s special,” Claire said. “Look at this. It’s me and my no-good ex-boyfriend.”

They stopped. Claire dipped into her purse and came out with a billfold. She opened it and found a picture of herself on the beach with a handsome young man. In the picture Claire was sitting with her guy on a red beach blanket. The sand was bright around them and so was the blue sky above. Claire was wearing oversize sunglasses, a big floppy straw hat, and a wide smile. Her breasts were bare and she wore a miniscule pink bikini bottom.

Claire had beautiful skin and no tan lines.

“Do you think my breasts are pretty?” she asked.

“Well, uh, yes. Of course.”

Claire let Rolf have a good look, giggled, and then tucked the picture back into her wallet.

“Claire, are you aware that I have a live-in girlfriend?” he asked.

“Uh-huh,” she answered. “And I don’t care. If she’s dumb enough to let you walk around the city by yourself, I don’t feel sorry for her. So if you want to see more, come by in person,” she teased. “I mean, you were, like, making love to me with your eyes upstairs there, right?”

“Okay. Kind of,” he admitted.

“Then come and get me, big guy,” she said.

She leaned forward and kissed him, pressing her breasts to him as she leaned. At the same time, gently, her left hand brushed across his crotch. It had the intended effect.

Then she tucked a piece of folded note paper in his shirt pocket. “See ya,” she said.

He watched her walk away. The next thing he knew, he was unfolding the paper from his pocket and reading it. Her address and phone number.

He watched her disappear into the midday crowds on the street and watched the men whom she passed. Several of the men turned their heads to gather a second look at her.

He tucked the address back into his pocket, turned, and walked in the direction of East Seventy-Third Street, still trying to put the events of the past half hour in their proper perspective.

Thirty-two

Rolf sat at the piano in his town house and played the Dance of Death. Summer had progressed and London was only a month away. Each date of the tour was set now, from the September first opening in London to the final in March. Tokyo would be the last date on the tour and there Geiger would conclude with Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, one of the most difficult and demanding pieces ever written. It was of this he thought as he practiced the Totentanz that allowed the ghost of Rabinowitz materialize again.

“Not a good idea,” the ghost said as he stood over Rolf. “Rachmaninoff Three. You are not up for it.”

“I am,” Geiger said. He played Liszt as he argued Rachmaninoff. “Or at least, I will be.”

The ghost gave a dreadful little snort. One of anger and contempt.

“Watch your fingering! Watch! Hands. Hands lower!” Rabinowitz growled like a disgruntled wolf. “You are striking single notes with a force that makes the instrument moan,” Rabinowitz said. “Look! There! You are jabbing at the keys!”

Geiger drew a breath and corrected himself. Sometimes he could see Rabinowitz. Other times he could only hear him. Sometimes the ghost appeared as a young man, one whom Geiger could recognize from the old photographs. Other times he would appear very old and highly cantankerous. And always contentious. But unable to be pleased at any age.

Meanwhile, in rehearsals, Geiger’s fingers danced along the keys. They danced as if they had never been set so free before. The Totentanz was as demanding piece as Liszt could have imagined. Geiger knew that he was playing it with fire and passion. And he believed he had the interpretation. His ears felt hyper-alert. The piece was turning into a magnificent effort.

The ghost stood by. His hands touched upon Rolf’s neck.

“Go away,” Rolf said softly during a hushed adagio passage.

“Make me.”

“I will.”

“You cannot. You need me.”

Geiger could not see behind him and did not care to look. But he sensed that a smirk rode upon the dry, dead lips of Isador Rabinowitz.

“Maybe occasionally now. But not forever,” said Geiger.

The fingers tightened on Geiger’s shoulders. They were designed to scare. To intimidate. The fingers that had made pianos sing like angels across the world were fingers that also suggested homicide.

“Forever,” asserted Rabinowitz.

Many minutes went by. Geiger thought he heard something. But Diana had gone to the gym. Or somewhere. She was spending increasing numbers of hours away from their home. They seemed to get along better that way.

“Do you want me to leave completely,” she had asked over the Fourth of July weekend.

“Leave? Move out?” he had asked.

“Yes,” she had said.

“Why would you want to do that?”

“You don’t seem to need me,” Diana had said. “You don’t seem happy with me.”

“I sometimes don’t know what I want,” Rolf had answered after much thought.

“Me neither,” she answered.

For a period of two weeks, they barely spoke. For sleeping, she moved into the guest room. It just sort of happened one day, this mini-estrangement. Yet it was clear that it had been happening slowly all along, incrementally day by day since the tour had been scheduled and since Rabinowitz had returned.

Greatness at the keyboard, Geiger had reasoned in summation, was attainable only on old Isador’s terms. Was this why he had administered his own life the way he had, from one abusive failing personal relationship to another? Was that why he had been lowered into his grave by a core of onlookers, many of whom hated him?

But meanwhile, his piano had lifted its voice in ecstasy for six decades.

Geiger massacred a G chord. He winced.

“You’re thinking about her again,” Rabinowitz said. “You’re thinking about a woman. That is why you blasphemed your music.”

“I’m thinking about my life,” said Geiger, correcting the chord, retreating several bars and starting over.

“Your life is the keyboard. Same as mine was.”

More minutes went by. Geiger concentrated deeply. The piano was at the forefront of his mind, a multitude of thoughts and relationships at the fringes of his consciousness.

“I want to know about being dead,” Geiger said suddenly. A long hesitant pause, and then, “Is there peace? Is there joy? Is there a consciousness or a loneliness?”

His questions fit the passages he played. A weary soulfulness came forth in his voice and in the piano’s harp.

“You’ll know soon enough,” Rabinowitz said.

“That answer is unsatisfactory. You always asked me questions and posed challenges. But you don’t give me answers or solutions.”

“I do. But you are foolish and don’t assimilate.”

Geiger raised his eyes and flirted with throwing some Wilco into Franz Liszt. Rolf could use the piano as a weapon, too, he now knew. But he refrained.

As if to provoke, as if to suggest a perverse reversal of the natural order of time, Rabinowitz showed himself as a small boy. Three years old. Nineteen-eighteen. The year of the Bolsheviks, the year of the Armistice in Europe.

“I’m still waiting for an answer,” Geiger said.

“I am listening to your music. Your technique. It is almost good today.”

“It is better than that. Give me an answer or I will banish you.”

“And how would you banish me?”

“By removing you from my thoughts.”

“You will only remove me from your thoughts by surpassing me as an artist,” Rabinowitz countered. “And that you will never be capable of…”

“An answer about death, or I will abandon the piano and go watch baseball. Then you will be far from my mind.”

There was a blast of an unpleasant odor in the room. Something like the fetid flesh of a dead animal. Then there was an intense cold. Rolf steadfastly played through it.

At one point Rabinowitz’s hand, the right hand, the one with the emerald ring, appeared at the piano and tried to grasp Geiger’s. But Geiger played right through it, taking its power away, never focusing his gaze upon it.

Then on the other side of the room, two books flew from a table, landing on the floor with a loud thud. Still, Geiger played.

“Death?” said Rabinowitz. “That is what you wish me to speak of?”

“Is it lonely?” Geiger asked. “Have you met God? Have you encountered the greatest of all Jews, Jesus?”

“Such impertinent questions from so young a man.”

“Is it lonely?” Rolf repeated. “I want to know.”

“If your life was lonely, then your death is, too. You dig your own grave and die as you lived.”

“Appropriate,” said Geiger.

“The funny thing is, you no longer feel pain. Emotions, yes. But no pain. And no fear. What is there to fear after you die?” Geiger turned it over in his head. “You might fear an eternity of…of…of what?” he finally asked. “Damnation, in your case?”

“Invalid question,” answered the ghost. “There is no eternity because there is no time. If you died in 1938 or 2008 it makes no difference. You have no sense of how long you’ve been on this side.”

Geiger thought of what the ghost had said. He reached the end of the third movement of the Totentanz. He paused, then set his fingers to play the final part. His musicianship flowed.

“Now tell me what you want,” said Geiger, still busy at the keyboard. He mastered a prestissimo section.

“What I want?”

“Why are you here?” Geiger asked.

“You summoned me.”

“I did not.”

“You think you didn’t. But you did. The dead belong to those who keep them alive. So for that much, I am grateful.” Geiger considered the thought.

“You stand here and you seem to help me technically,” Geiger said. “But I think you are actually here for a different reason. To stop me from surpassing you.”

“I do not need to be here for that.”

“Yes, you do.”

Again the hand swiped at the keyboard. Geiger kept playing.

“My surpassing you did not happen in your lifetime,” Geiger said. “You helped see that it didn’t. Now? Now unless I empower you to stop me, no one will stop me.”

“Your logic is twisted. You do not have my talent.” Geiger smiled.

“In London will prove what I can do.” Rabinowitz vanished for several minutes, as if in anger. Then he was back.

“Where do you suppose your woman is?” Rabinowitz finally asked.

“Don’t start that again,” Geiger said.

“You let another man make love to your woman. That doesn’t bother you?”

“She is not…”

“It’s a disgrace,” the ghost said. “That’s what it is. You may be left with only one resort to save your honor.”

“What’s that?” Geiger asked.

“You will have to kill her,” he said. “The proper moment is near, and that is what I would suggest. There are ways of doing it that you won’t get caught. You will live well without her.”

The ghost nodded. “Yes, yes, yes. I do believe that is the only solution,” urged the ghost.

Geiger listened through a veil of exhaustion. No matter how many times he turned it over in his mind, no matter how many facets of it he counted, it all came back to the same thing. The thought horrified him.

“Do you believe I’m capable of murder?” he once asked the ghost.

The ghost roared with laughter.

“We are all capable of it under the right exigencies,” Rabinowitz answered. “You. Me. Could you kill in self-defense?”

“Probably.”

“Then why not in defense of your life’s genius?” Geiger was not convinced. Nor did he wish to be.

Meanwhile, his mind was starting to push in dark new uncharted directions, provoked incessantly by Rabinowitz’s accusations. The fantasy recurred to him of Diana being the figure model at the art gallery. He tried to picture her in the course of adultery with another man. He pictured her as another man pulled her into bed and make love to her.

He recoiled from the thought. The ghost read his thoughts and gleefully intruded.

Pure Rabinowitz:

“The horns of the cuckold rise so beautifully from your head, Rolf. He has his pleasures exactly right where you have yours.”

Geiger angrily pulled his hands from the keyboard. He rose abruptly and hurled a bookend at the specter. The bookend passed hard through the ghost and hit a wall. There it broke and shattered an antique vase.

The ghost was gone and there were shards of plaster and crystal all over the floor.

Moments later, Geiger was surprised when Diana opened the door.

“Rolf?”

“What?” he snapped.

She looked around the room. Geiger stood at his piano, the broken crystal across the room. There was a dent on the wall and a cracked marble bookend lay on the floor. As they stood staring, the unchecked books slid sideways. Several tumbled off the shelf. Rabinowitz’s invisible hand? What had given the books the push? Geiger could hear the ghost chortling.

“What happened?” Diana asked.

“Some things got broken.”

“Want me to get a broom?”

Geiger glanced at the wreckage. He saw Rabinowitz standing near it, looking down, admiring the mess he had caused.

“Tell her that if she makes love to another man again you will kill her,” he said.

“No,” Geiger said, answering both of them as one.

“She’s already goes to bed with one of them. Maybe two,” Rabinowitz said. “Accuse her now! See how she reacts!”

“No!” he snapped again.

“I heard you the first time,” Diana said.

Rolf sighed. He felt a tension mounting with both Rabinowitz and Diana present at once. He thought of how to explain the mess on the floor. There were two ways. The lie and the truth. The first option seemed easiest.

“Lousy arrangement doesn’t make much sense. I lost my temper.”

“Try to keep calm, Tiger.”

“I am calm.”

“Doesn’t look that way.”

She entered the room and moved toward him.

“May I come in?”

“If you want.”

“Whore!” said Rabinowitz.

“Do you hear anything?” Geiger asked. “A voice, maybe? An old man’s voice?”

“Something out on the street maybe?” she said. But she found nothing else audible.

Rabinowitz appeared right behind her.

“Claire is much more succulent,” Rabinowitz said. “You should stop delaying. Go down to the girl in Greenwich Village. Her hot lithe body awaits you.”

“When did you come in, anyway?” Rolf asked Diana.

“About a half hour ago.”

“Why didn’t you let me know you were back?”

“You don’t like to be bothered when you’re at the piano.”

“Well, I like to know who’s in the house.”

“Next time, I’ll…I’ll…Oh, screw it, Rolf! You’re impossible! I don’t know what to do!”

She stunned him. She turned and marched away. She slammed the door. Moments later, he felt the vibrations of the front door slamming shut. She had left again.

“Very good,” said Rabinowitz.

“So leave me alone and go burn in hell!” Geiger roared, to either, neither, or both. He picked up another piece of antique crystal and smashed it. She did not come back into the room.

And began to wonder. Why was Diana so irritable?

What was going on?

Why didn’t he go see Claire at her place?

Why wasn’t Diana here when he needed her?

Who, he wondered, had come into her life?

Whom was she seeing?

Rolf had to concede, the old man’s argument was making sense.

Thirty-three

Several days in August followed the same pattern. Rolf would practice and the ghost would visit. They would talk. As Geiger’s precision at the keyboard increased, the venom of the ghost’s tirades against Diana would intensify. He would sometimes elevate Rolf to a mean, homicidal frenzy.

When Diana was out, which was now almost always, Rolf would pour his rage into his music. When she came home, he would smolder, barely speaking to her.

“I think,” she said again one day. “I should move out.”

“No,” he said. “I want you here.”

“Will you treat me better?” she asked.

“I want you here!” Geiger said. “You know how you will be treated.”

“Oh, the abject disgrace of having your woman move directly from your bed to the bed of another man,” mused the ghost one day. “Such humiliation. Better she die somewhere than disgrace you in public like that.”

Sometimes, Geiger no longer felt the sense of horror over Diana’s death. Only a sense of sadness and inevitability.”

Added Rabinowitz boldly.

“As inevitable as Covent Garden.” Which raised the question: For the first concert of his tour, should she come with him? Several times the subject came up, alternating with whether or not she should move out. On some days, she was going, on others she was staying.

“But what do you want to do?” Rolf would ask her.

“I want you to have a tremendous appearance at Covent Garden,” she said.

“Does that mean you stay or come with me?”

“Whatever helps you more,” Diana said.

“If she stays behind she can spend the nights with her lovers,” Rabinowitz suggested.

Geiger was now hooked thoroughly into an existence defined by his piano on one side and a jealous rage on the other. One day when Diana was out, Rolf prowled through the guest room. He sifted through correspondence and found several from Phillip Langlois. He read them all. They were letters of increasing emotional intimacy and of a growing friendship. They indicated no sexual liaison, however.

Not yet.

He thought about the situation. Now he knew the identity of at least one of the men she was seeing. And knowing brought home the reality of it.

Rabinowitz stood over his shoulder as Rolf read every word of every letter. Geiger had never met Phillip Langlois. He knew nothing about the man.

“Go find out,” Rabinowitz said. “Go watch her with him.”

Two days later, when she left to have lunch with ‘a girlfriend’ Geiger followed. He saw her enter a small restaurant on the east side. He took up a position in a coffee bar across the street and waited till she emerged.

Two hours later, she emerged with a handsome man a few inches taller than she. He held Diana’s hand. He gave her a kiss and a long hug when they parted. Geiger reacted with anger and sadness. If she weren’t sleeping with this man, looked as if she soon would be.

Rolf went home and arrived an hour before she did. He never admitted that he had been out. All afternoon, all evening, he poured his attentions and his anger into his music.

“I tell you, she is sleeping with more than one,” the ghost taunted. “How long before this appears in the newspapers? There is no disgrace like being doubly cuckolded in public.”

“Vanish!” Geiger screamed.

Rabinowitz laughed. The ghost was thoroughly in his head by now, at last in full possession of his soul, his personality, his mind.

“You may play Beethoven until Heaven applauds,” Rabinowitz said, “but your woman will drag you low into the mud.”

That evening was a fertile one for suspicion, also.

Diana’s art lesson had ended at nine, and yet she had not come through the door by ten-thirty. Rolf had waited in the library, hunched at the piano, but was unable to practice properly until he had heard her come in. It was now a rainy summer evening and well after eleven-thirty.

A few minutes before midnight, she stood at the door to the library, her tall frame wrapped neatly in a trench coat, her dark hair at shoulder length, watching him, giving him a smile and waiting for a welcome in return.

“Hi, Tiger. How’s things?” she asked.

“Fine,” he said flatly. “How did it go with you?”

“It went well.”

“Stop somewhere on your way home?” he asked. No immediate answer.

“Maurice fed me,” she said.

“Fed you what?” he asked.

Instinctively, she didn’t like the tone of the question.

“Dinner,” she said. “Or a late supper. Whatever you’d call it. There’s a little place on Spring Street around the corner.”

“What did you have?”

“A bowl of soup and a glass of red wine,” she said. His questions now took such an accusatorial edge that she quickly sickened of them. She paused.

“If you don’t believe me, the name of the place is Mistinguet’s. I’ve been there before and the waiter’s name is Kevin. If you’ll call and ask if he’s seen me, he’ll remember.”

“I’m not interrogating you,” Rolf said, easing slightly.

“You could have fooled me,” she retorted. Then she eased off, and answered in a gentler voice.

“Maurice has three students. He took us all out,” she said.

“Three women? Did he sell come canvases?” Rolf asked unmoved.

“Why?”

“He’s strangely solvent for an art teacher. Last time I saw him he was angling to find other new students. He looked rather threadbare.”

“I wouldn’t know about his finances,” she said. “He treats us well. He’s a good teacher.”

“Do you like him a lot?” he asked. “As a man?”

“Rolf,” she scolded. “Don’t be a pain! It’s not like that.”

“How is it, then?”

“He’s my art teacher. That’s all.”

She left the room. He looked at her leave and imagined how he would have felt if she were leaving him for good. “It’s not like that.” The statement ricocheted around in his mind and found infinite ways to reverberate.

“It’s not like that.”

No? Lately, he didn’t know how it was. Or how it wasn’t.

He felt like he needed her more. But he had the impression that she was intentionally spending more and more time away from him. Art. Magazine articles. Lunches. She even mentioned a book she wanted to write. What ideas were Maurice This or Phillip That putting into her head? And now she seemed always to be tardy coming home from an evening meeting.

“Just long enough to jump in and out of a hot bed,” Rabinowitz chided him.

He reminded himself that there needn’t have been anything to it. But her recent behavior, her strange hours of absence, were at variance with what had once been the norm. And that was what he noticed.

One particularly eerie midnight arrived.

Rolf looked at the keyboard before him and felt somehow disappointed by its potential this evening. He sighed and felt extreme unease with a conversation that he had just had with her. But he didn’t know what to do about it. His thoughts stampeded. Then they spiraled.

Entire vistas of deceit formed in front of him, kaleidoscopic images that gained coherent shape, blew apart, and subsequently reassembled as complete truths: Maurice was Diana’s not-so-secret lover. And Philip Langlois was, also. Maybe she left Maurice Sahadi’s studio and ran around the corner to tryst with Phillip. Maybe she liked to go to bed with both of them at once, just for the intensity of the experience. He thought of her naked in the arms of the other men and felt a blind rage building within him.

“You will have to kill her,” Rabinowitz reminded him. “It is really the only logical solution.”

“It would ruin my life,” Geiger answered.

“If you do it properly, it will be a small blip in your existence. You will be free to continue playing.”

“But am I a potential murderer?” Geiger asked. The ghost laughed.

“Of course you are! That is your fate!”

Geiger stared across the library and willed the ghost to appear before him. When it did, it was fully substantial. The elderly Rabinowitz.

“You created such beautiful music in your lifetime,” Geiger said. “But you have no humanity at all.”

“Sometimes one has only a single choice, Rolf Geiger. One or the other: Artistic genius. Humanity.”

“I don’t believe you,” Geiger said.

“Name a man with both,” the ghost challenged.

“Bernstein, Rubinstein, Renoir,” Rolf answered.

“Picasso. Wagner,” Rabinowitz countered.

“Go now,” Geiger said softly.

The ghost protested, but went.

In his library, Geiger steadied himself for several minutes. A plan was falling into place now, one which would define his future.

He found the score for the Emperor and placed it in the music rack. He attacked the piano passages and commenced the opening allegro with spirit and passion. He played the first part of the concerto, and as he worked at the piano a thought formed somewhere within. He was reminded that he had never felt this sort of jealousy before, not until his conversations with Rabinowitz had put the notion in his mind.

He heard water running upstairs. Diana was showering.

“Why?” he wondered. “To wash the cologne of another man from her body?”

Then he reminded himself that she always showered at this time in the evening.

Two hours later, he tired of his music.

His hands lifted from the keys. He closed the piano and went upstairs. He found Diana in the upstairs guest rom. The light was off, and she appeared to be asleep. He stood at the doorway looking into the room. Then went and sat down on the edge of the bed beside her.

He looked down.

The old man’s voice came as if on cue. “Strangle her now.”

He admired her lovely brown hair as it was spread over the pillow. He thought back to the days before he had visualized the ghost of Isador Rabinowitz. He recalled the time when nights brought to him love and warmth and sanctity and quiet.

Back before all these demons seemed to have come forth into his world.

“Now! Do it now! Kill her!”

He placed his hands on her shoulders, looking downward at her lovely face.

Rabinowitz’s commands came like wails from a banshee.

“Before she wakes!”

Diana’s eyelids fluttered and she came awake.

“Rolf?” she asked, surprised. She was a little frightened. He could see it.

His hands were on her. Touching her hair. The soft delicious warmth of her neck and shoulders flowed into his palms.

“NOW!”

“You’re very pretty, Diana,” Rolf said. She signed deeply.

“Thank you. That’s sweet. You woke me to tell me that?”

“Any man would find you very beautiful. So few would be lucky enough to have you.”

She wasn’t certain what he meant by that. She moved her hands to his and gripped it.

“Come to London with me,” he said. “I think that would be best. For both of us.” She smiled.

“All right?” he asked.

“All right,” she said. He leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. Then he rose and left the room.

He walked back downstairs. He went back into the library. When he sat down and closed the door, Rabinowitz was present as soon as he lifted his eyes.

“When will you obey?” the specter asked. “When will you commit the murder? When will we have an end to this?”

“Soon!” Geiger fumed. “Soon, soon, soon! Soon we’ll have an end to all of this!”

The ghost seemed pleased. So Geiger began to play again.

He played through the night, over and over, until passages that had already been nearly perfect shone like jewels every time light fell upon them.

He was practicing now like a madman. And when Diana found him slumped asleep at the keyboard the next morning, that was also how he looked - like a madman.

Thirty-four

The schedule for the world tour was set by August 20. Thirty dates across the world, September through March. The dates had been arranged so that Geiger would not have to be on the road the entire time. He would do cities in clusters, then return to New York, then do another group of cities one to two weeks later. The schedule took into account breaks for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day of 2010. He would arrive in London three days before his concert at Covent Garden, for example, stay for an extra day, return to New York, then return to Europe ten days later. The schedule also allowed him time to make final preparations on scores.

There were a few final details to conclude before leaving for London. Rolf went by Brian Greenstone’s office again two weeks before departure to pick up the first class airline tickets that would take him and Diana to London.

Claire, as usual, was all smiles. Brian had provided her with the paperwork to sign and she stood dutifully by as he read and signed. Today, she was ready to give a sprained neck to any man who passed her. She wore a pair of blue jeans that were so snug that they appeared to have been spray painted on. Up top, she wore a filmy yellow blouse. Nothing else, it was apparent.

“All set,” Rolf said when he signed the final document. He stood to leave. Claire was between him and the door.

“I’m a little disappointed,” she said. “I invited you. You never came over.”

“You’re right. I didn’t.”

“The invitation still stands,” she said.

“Claire,” he said, “You’re not a woman of great subtlety, are you?” She shook her head. “Nope. I say what I think, I tell you what I want and I go after a man if I want him.”

“Then would it make sense to you,” he asked, “If I told you this: I’m on my way to London in two weeks. So the only thing I’m going to be banging on for the several days is my Steinway at home. Okay?”

She pursed her lips, smiled a little, and nodded sweetly.

“I hear you. I understand that,” she said. She thought it over. “Maybe when you get back you’ll feel different,” she suggested. “Maybe you’ll be, like, real tired and all and want to come over and settle in and let me make you feel real happy. Or maybe some evening before you leave. I’d love to just ease the tension for you.”

She made a quick little flick of her tongue upon her lips.

“Maybe,” he said. “And maybe after the first concert things will be different. We’ll see.”

“We’ll see,” she said with a smile. “So the invitation is always open.”

Thirty-five

Detective Janet Solderstrom stood in her usual brown suit in the entrance foyer of the town house. She was standing before a handsome Cape Cod seascape by John Hutchinson, the Massachusetts artist. The detective’s plump fingers were either on the frame or on the canvas. Geiger couldn’t tell and she moved her hand quickly when she heard Geiger approach.

Her back was to Rolf as he came out of the library to meet her. Diana remained in the background. Solderstrom turned to face him.

“Hello, Detective,” he said without warmth.

“So?” she said. “Playing the piano, huh? I wish you’d play something I know. But we probably don’t listen to the same type of music.”

She gave him an icy smile. Something about her made Geiger bristle. When Geiger thought further about it, he realized everything about her made him bristle.

“As you may know, I have a concert in London on September 1,” Geiger said.

“Yeah. Right. That’s part of what I’m here to discuss. I’d like to get this case closed before you take off,” the policewoman said.

She looked over his shoulder at Diana. Her pupils were little beads of animosity. Then her eyes slid forward again and stopped on Geiger.

“This trip of yours,” she said. “I’ve been reading the newspapers. You’re going to be gone for six months.”

“No,” Geiger corrected. “The tour is seven months. New York remains my home. I go to other cities. I perform. I return. I leave again. The schedule extends for seven months, but my absence does not.”

“Oh, so you leave, you come back, you leave again?”

“That’s what I just said, yes.”

“Must be very tiring.”

“It can be.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“Enjoy what? Travel?”

“Playing piano. Music. Do people notice if you hit a wrong note? I would think it would be a lot of work, trying to get all the notes right every time.” Rolf’s irritation level was rising.

“It’s what I do,” he said. “I’m a pianist.”

“You give concerts, right? I’ve seen you in People magazine. I saw you on the television one time when you were walking through central Park with some candy. What show was that on?” she asked.

Geiger refused to answer.

“Entertainment Tonight,” Diana said from where she stood by the library door.

“That’s the one!” Solderstrom said. “Did you know they were taping you?”

Geiger realized a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach.

“Detective, are you here to talk about the break-in here or about my career?”

“Well, one has a bearing on the other,” she said.

“Why is that?”

“I wanted to make sure you were only going to England on this trip.”

“What difference does it make?”

“I don’t want you to be out of touch. In case we need to ask a few more questions.”

“I’ll be available,” Geiger said. Geiger noticed that Solderstrom had a little tic to the pinkish flesh beside her left eye. It betrayed her anger when she started to get steamed.

“It bothers me,” Solderstrom continued. “You file a police report and now you’re going to travel the world. You people with money do stuff like that. Then I put in weeks of work, you’re around the globe, don’t come back, and our case goes down the sewer. Can’t blame me for getting teed off.”

Diana was becoming as angry as Rolf. She walked to his side, and the detective found herself looking at two pairs of enraged eyes instead of one.

“Sorry you feel that way,” Geiger said.

“If it were up to me, I’d have your passport lifted. I don’t like your attitude, Mr. Geiger.”

“Well, that’s fine. I don’t like yours.” Janet Solderstrom eyed him harshly.

“Anyway,” she said, “I got something to show you.”

She reached into her pocket and assembled a group of five photographs.

“This is sort of a lineup,” she said. “Except it’s not in person. I’m going to show you some pictures, and you tell me if any of these people are your trespasser.”

“All right,” Geiger said.

The detective handed them five photographs of what appeared to be older men. They all looked homeless, or at least severely down on their luck. Both Diana and Rolf froze when they arrived at the fourth photo. There was their watcher. Unmistakably.

“Him,” Diana said, holding up the picture.

Detective Solderstrom looked to Geiger.

“I agree. That’s him.” The policewoman took the photographs back.

“Thought it might be,” she sniffed.

“So now what?” Diana asked.

“Now I disappear again and you wait. I might have some news for you soon. That’s if you’re in the country and not too busy.”

“We’ll be here,” Rolf said.

“Both of you?” He felt an ominous suggestion in her tone.

“Both of us,” he said. “Together.”

“Well, that’s good. Some relationships aren’t so permanent anymore. I’m glad yours is.”

The detective turned and moved back to the door. Mrs. Jamison appeared from the dining area and went to re-open the front door. But Solderstrom opened the door herself and was through it without offering them the courtesy of a good-bye.

Thirty-six

Twelve hours later, Diana tossed in her sleep. She was still in the guest room, the bedroom next to Rolf’s. The night outside was quiet. The last thing she had seen when she had looked out the window was an array of stars, plus a yellow moon.

So why couldn’t she have peace? Why was something coming for her again from another stratum of reality? What was approaching her was a thought. A notion. A feeling.

A vision. Plus something grotesque from childhood.

Another horrible image was coming together again in her subconscious mind, and she didn’t like it. She knew it was going to be frightening. She knew before the image took her over. She rolled again in bed. She could almost hear herself thinking.

“Oh, Rolf…Oh, Rolf. Lover! Please help me, Tiger…”

“Diana?”

“What?”

“Would you like to die tonight?” Rolf asked. “Or would you like to live in fear?”

“Neither,”

“‘Neither’ is not an option.”

“Then what is?” she asked. Rolf’s voice:

“I’m sorry. I have to kill you, because I love you.”

She experienced a sensation of tumbling and she knew she was drifting into the darker regions of sleep. Then she was lying somewhere. She was all dressed up and motionless on white-satin sheets. Her eyes were closed. In her dream, many people came into view around her and she suddenly realized that the people around here were dying.

Her parents. Rolf. Her sister.

Her friends.

And, to make it complete, Rabinowitz.

“He killed me and he killed you,” the old maestro said.

“Who did?”

“Rolf. Crazy bastard!” said the old master. “He gets away with everything because of who he is.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that the same Rolf Geiger who makes love to you will also kill you.”

“No. Not true,” Diana protested again.

She saw herself lying perfectly still and lifeless in a coffin, hands folded across her chest. Rolf stood by dry-eyed, stood looking as if he were pleased.

She tried to cry out. She wanted to escape. She realized that she was at her own funeral.

Diana turned sharply in her bed again, arms flailing, crying out in her sleep.

Now the old maestro’s voice intrude.

“Don’t leave now Diana. This is your future.”

Diana felt a scream in her throat, ready to break loose.

She felt herself sinking again, sinking in the manner that Isador Rabinowitz’s coffin had gone into the earth. Four cozy dirt walls forever. She gazed upward. Rolf was shoveling dirt down on her dead body.

She bolted upright in the bedroom. The room was dark. Very little light from outside.

Her eyelids flickered open.

“Diana?”

She jumped. There was a man standing in the room with her. Then, in the pale light she recognized Rolf.

“You okay?” he asked. “You were gasping and screaming and rolling all over the place. What are you dreaming about?”

It took a moment for her to realize. She had passed through a thick layer of dreams. Now she was back to a dark summer night. She leaned forward into the arms that waited for her.

She sobbed. Rolf embraced her. After several seconds she related the vision that had pursued her, how horrible it had been, and how it seemed that death had been so inevitable.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Nothing’s going to happen. I promise. Nothing.’

“Tiger, what’s going on in this house?” she asked breathlessly. “Where are these thoughts coming from?”

He turned on a light. A friendly yellow glow embraced the room.

“I wonder,” he said philosophically. “Is something supernatural really here? If we have a ghost, it’s angry and traumatized. It wants us to be the same way. So it has different ways of terrifying each of us.”

She leaned back against the wall and gathered herself. Then she embraced him again.

She sighed.

“I’d be sunk without you, Tiger,” she said.

He smiled to further comfort her, but his own smile was short-lived.

His gaze traveled the floor and found a pair the feet of Rabinowitz. The ghost was visible to him, the glow still incandescent in Rolf’s own eye. Rolf motioned to Diana. “See anything right there?” he asked. He indicated the spot where Rabinowitz stood. She looked straight at the spot.

“No,” she said.

“See?” Rolf said. “Of course you don’t. We’re alone.”

“Liar,” the ghost said. She looked away.

“When will we have some peace?” she asked Rolf.

“Peace? When will you execute this bothersome woman?” the ghost demanded.

“London,” Geiger said. “This will all get resolved in London.”

Once again, he was simultaneously answering both of them and himself in the bargain. And he knew he was telling the truth. London would grant them all eternal peace.

Thirty-seven

Rolf and Diana flew first-class to London from New York. They took the 10 A.M. British Airways flight which brought them into Heathrow at nine-thirty in the evening. A Bentley and driver picked up Rolf and Diana at the airport and drove them to Claridge’s, where they would stay. The concert was in three days.

The next morning they awoke comfortably in a roomy, solid suite on the third floor overlooking Brook Street, directly above the entrance to Claridge’s ballroom. Two huge bay windows and a narrow balcony and porch allowed them to step outside from their suite and look down at the other arrivals at the hotel.

Even though this was the end of August, the hotel was packed with the wealthy and influential from various nations: Saudi oil barons, multinational bankers, Swiss who-knew-what, beautiful multi-lingual women who seemed to wait under the canopy at the main entrance and the occasional American film director or movie star. Rolf had stayed here twice before when playing London. He was as comfortable as any man could be at $2,500 per day.

Well, it was the promoter’s money, after all, he reasoned, so why not enjoy it? Television rights to the Covent Garden concert had been sold to the public broadcasting system in the United States and various live and cable television outlets in Europe. With the package so big, only the most jaundiced of accountants could have blinked at the extortionate hotel expense.

On his first day in London, Geiger went to Covent Garden to meet his conductor, Heinrich von Sauer and members of the orchestra.

Von Sauer was a jowly man of about sixty. He had a tangle of white hair framing his sprawling face and a big low belly. He spoke many languages, but none perfectly. His German had a Swiss-Austrian lilt to it. His English had a Slavic accent but he had learned French in Germany and conveyed strange echoes of the Third Reich when he spoke of Debussy. His Italian was a disaster as he’d learned it in Belgium from a Sicilian mistress, or so he liked to explain. And on it went. Nonetheless, he was charming and intelligent in all the languages he massacred.

“There is just one thing that remains,” von Sauer said. “Order.”

“What sort of order?” Rolf asked.

“Which comes second, which comes third? Totentanz or the Emperor? There seems some confusion remains from New York.”

“Right now, I’m thinking Totentanz third, following a second intermission.

More brilliantly ruptured English:

“I’d like to tell the orchestra at certain.”

“Tell them,” Rolf said, “that we will close with Dance of Death.”

“Appropriate. And you will probably be asked for an encore. Unusual as that is, that is often you predilection, as well as that of your public. Not that it involves the orchestra, but have you an idea? I am wondering.”

“I was thinking of the final movement of the Moonlight Sonata,” Geiger explained.

Von Sauer nodded inscrutably, intrigued and impressed.

The first movements of the Moonlight Sonata, with its calm settling passages, was more a signature piece than appropriate encore material, even though Geiger had broken accepted custom in the past by playing it. The final movement of the Moonlight Sonata, a stormy, whirlwind that forced the fingers of the pianist to fly across the keyboard like a crazed bird, was an arresting choice.

“Inspired,” von Sauer said. “We are alike thinking of this.”

“Hope so,” said Geiger.

A rehearsal took place that afternoon and another was scheduled for the next morning. There would be a final one on the morning of the concert.

Diana always found things to do by herself in London. She disappeared to museums and art galleries, then went by Covent Garden to meet Rolf for dinner on their first evening after arrival. Seeing some theater on the first night might have been nice, but it was not possible in light of jet lag and the demanding nature of Rolf’s schedule.

Late on the second afternoon in London, Rolf managed to slip away to do some shopping. He purchased one item for Diana. It was a silk scarf at Liberty’s, red and blue with a montage of musical patterns on it, not the least of which was a grand piano. The scarf was a beautiful sturdy piece of fabric—both delicate and strong.

He examined it carefully in the store, even doubling it up several times and examining how well it would work if it were made into a rope or garrote. A pair of strong male hands using this could strangle a woman perfectly, he mused. Wouldn’t Rabinowitz be pleased?

Geiger paid for the scarf and, after leaving the store, threw away the packaging. He would present the scarf to her himself at just the right moment. That moment, as he now saw it, would be between the second and third works of his London Performance.

He walked back to Claridge’s from Liberty’s with his inevitable plan for Diana’s immediate future running through his mind. He crossed Regent Street carefully. The London busses, cruising close to the curb from the ‘wrong’ direction, made ghosts of more than a few inattentive foreign visitors each year.

He arrived back at Claridge’s at six. He and Diana went to a comedy in the West End that evening, then found a late supper at a small Italian trattoria in Mayfair. They returned to the hotel past midnight. They settled onto the big sofa in their living room. They opened a split of champagne that had been sent from the manager and placed it on ice.

“Want to see what I bought today?” she asked.

“Sure.”

She hopped up from the sofa, then reappeared a few moments later almost nude. She was in a soft pink peignoir, low at the throat and high at the hem. Nothing else.

“Like it?” she asked.

“What’s not to like?” Rolf asked.

She came back over and he took her in his arms.

“I bought you a little something, too,” he said. “But I’ll give it to you during the concert tomorrow.”

“During?”

“It will be more memorable that way.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. It’s time to take things off, not put them on.” She laughed.

“Your hands are so talented,” she said. “I’d never push them away.”

For both of them, it was a perfect ending to a memorable evening. They took the champagne with them to the bedroom, and made love for the first time in two weeks.

Diana took it as evidence that the dark mood that Rolf had fallen into had finally lifted. Rolf saw the act as a renewal of their relationship, a reminder of how much he loved her both spiritually and physically.

Given all of that, on the eve of the concert at Covent Garden, the scarf and his plans for the second intermission the next day, fit perfectly into place.

Thirty-eight

It was not unusual for Rolf to be restless the night before a major concert. Geiger awakened midway between 3 A.M. and 4. It was an hour when sometimes truths emerged from sleep. It was also the hour when ghostly spirits occasionally emerged from worlds unknown.

Diana slept peacefully under his arm. But from where he lay in bed, he could see that there was a strange light in the next room. And he distantly—almost subliminally—heard a magically euphoric violin. He lifted his arm and rose from the bed, leaving her warmth behind.

It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dimness in his bedroom. Then he walked to the living room. The light was a strange bluish yellow and it came from outside the hotel.

For another moment, he waited, half-expecting Rabinowitz to emerge from the night. And for half an instant, Rolf thought he felt Rabinowitz’s hand on his wrist in the darkness. But when he moved his wrist, there was no obstruction. And there was no trace of Rabinowitz anywhere else. Geiger was alone. Or assumed he was.

Something compelled him to the bay windows and doors that overlooked Brook Street. He walked to the glass doors and looked out. A fog has settled upon London. All he could see were the brick upper stories of the buildings across the street, plus their black rooftops.

He reached to the lock on the portals and opened them, stepping out on to the small balcony. He thought of Claire and for some reason he thought of Anila, the young Italian girl who had been his first lover at the Negresco in Nice many years earlier.

Then he felt a shiver. He stepped forward and looked downward. The fog dissipated. He felt another deeper shiver because something all too familiar was taking place down below him. His eyes tracked a human figure across Brook Street. Geiger was incredulous. It was the clown again. The polka-dotted clown he had seen twice before. First on a bright three-quarter-moon night on Seventy-Third Street, just before the haunting with Rabinowitz had begun. Then Rolf believed he had caught a glimpse of it again in Nantucket.

The clown wore the same getup as both previous times. A baggy jump suit, black with big white polka dots on it. White face. The violin. Oversized shoes and a wide flat hat.

Here was a complete reenactment of what Geiger had seen in New York, and he searched his soul as to why this would happen. And he looked at it in terror this time because he knew that the clown was always a harbinger of something otherworldly.

He remembered the name of the clown: Umberto. A good strong Italian name that had come straight out of nowhere.

The clown looked up at him. Then the ghostly musician cradled the violin in his left arm. He held the bow aloft and put bow to strings and began to play.

Geiger watched, transfixed. The tune the violinist played was deeply passionate. It fit all the emotions he had felt for Diana while he made love with her, while he had held her incredible body in his arms. Geiger broke into a violent sweat.

Was the clown mocking him or trying to ignite further passions? He felt a trembling within his own body. He turned quickly away. He rushed back into the hotel and closed the windowed doors. But then came the violin music again, carried on the wind, and through the closed window. The instrument was in the hands of a master, and so were Geiger’s emotions.

He turned again, reopened the doors to the balcony, and looked back down and saw that no one other than the violinist was on the street.

“No one—not one other person—was present to give any notice to the clown playing such beautiful music. It was as if this performance were just for him.”

Deep down, he knew it was. The clown kept playing.

Geiger took this in for another few seconds, then turned. He left his hotel room. He didn’t wait for an elevator. Rather, he ran down the massive staircase at the core of the hotel and made a fool out of himself as he raced out through the deserted lobby onto Brook Street.

He stood for a moment.

From the opposite side of the street, the clown-violinist watched him. There was again no doubt in Rolf’s mind that he was looking at a ghost. The ghost stared back at him and beckoned.

The music had stopped. A lone passerby watched him. The night porter from Claridge’s appeared beside Rolf. “Is there anything we can help you with, sir?” the porter asked.

“No. No,” said Geiger gently. Then he asked, “Do you see anyone across the street? Or hear any violin music?”

The porter looked across the street but obviously didn’t see anything.

“It’s all right,” Geiger said. “I know what’s there, even if no one else sees it.”

“Of course, sir.”

Rolf stepped from the sidewalk. A large taxi turned the dark corner quickly and cruised right in front of him, practically crushing his toes. Late revelers returning to the hotel, Geiger assumed. Geiger glanced into the cab and saw his suspicions more than confirmed. There was a thirty-something English rock star with three ravishing girls, all about nineteen.

Rolf didn’t wait for the hack to discharge its passengers. He moved around them and crossed the street. He was anxious to confront the clown.

But when Geiger arrived on the opposite side of the street, the musician was gone.

Geiger felt befuddled. He looked in each direction. Then he saw the hunched lonely figure of the clown walking away toward nearby Hanover Square. Geiger took off in brisk pursuit.

Once, the figure stopped and looked back at him to make sure he was following. Geiger accelerated his pace. The clown was a hundred feet away from him. Then eighty. Then fifty.

Geiger further closed the gap. He trotted after the phantom, a preposterous figure in polka dots, as it ambled through the thick murky London night. Before reaching the square, the clown turned on South Molton Street, a smart small arcade-like side street with fine shops, a block from the hotel.

Geiger continued to follow. He was reminded of the mythical supernatural beast which would take the form of a vulnerable animal to lure would-be predators to a lonely high ground. Then it would assume its real form. The hunted would turn upon, and destroy, the hunter.

Was this some sort of ghostly trick? An emissary of Isador Rabinowitz? Geiger could not stay away. The onetime prodigy was now on South Molton Street. He closed to within twenty feet of the violinist. The violinist stopped half way down the block. Then the player turned.

Cautiously, Geiger walked to the clown. The white face looked toward Geiger. It was not a face that he recognized. The ghost’s lips were thin, pink, and lifeless. A meager smile emerged from them. Geiger stood only a few feet away.

Somehow Geiger did not feel the urge to speak. He sensed no malice from this vision and he felt that whatever this spirit was seeking to relate, a message would manifest itself.

He was correct. A bizarre feeling overtook him. He realized for the first time that underneath the makeup, underneath the polka-dotted suit, the clown was a very pretty woman.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Laura Aufieri,” she said.

“Who?”

She smiled. “We have someone in common,” she said. Then the clown turned again. Geiger knew that he was to follow.

With a start—he realized where he had seen her before. In Nantucket. In the bookstore. She was the woman he had mistaken for Claire and whom he had approached. Even back then, the ghost of Laura Aufieri had been stalking him.

“Follow,” she said.

She led him farther down South Molton and into an even heavier mist. She cut through an alley and Geiger shadowed her. For a moment there was a light rain, which disoriented him. She trotted slowly. He kept pace. He made one turn, then another, and they came out on a block that was filled with an eerie light. Geiger noted where he was, on Whitlowe Street where it intersected with Folger Place.

The woman in front of him slowed. She went into a doorway that was lit differently than all others on the block. It was four doors from the corner.

Geiger followed, unable to stop. He stepped into a building that had apparently not changed since World War II. It smelled of mustiness and the furnishings in its entry areas were aged. There was thick carpeting on the steps and blackout curtains on the front windows.

He followed Laura up one flight to a landing. Now there was a spring in her step because she was a much younger woman in her twenties. She even slightly reminded Rolf of Diana.

She stopped at an unlocked door on the first floor. She entered and looked to see if Rolf was still with her. He was. He was aware of her eyes now, in particular. They were very pretty, as was she. “Come with me,” she said. “Then you’ll understand.”

“Are you a vision of death?” he asked.

She smiled. “Yes, but not yours,” she answered. “Come. Veni…”

He walked through the door. He had a sense of being in her home. She was transformed and dressed differently now, wearing a skirt and blouse that would have been fashionable during World War II. As Rolf looked further, he realized that this whole room was like that. He had stepped into an evening from fifty some years ago.

In the front hall, something took his breath away. It was a theatrical poster from 1942. The Duke of York Theatre in the West End. Laura’s name was headlined in a musical review. Her picture on the poster showed her in the clown outfit, obviously her most famous role.

Then Geiger stepped into a living room, which was warm from the glow of a small fireplace. Laura smiled to him, but Geiger’s heart gave a start because there was movement in a nearby chair.

The man in the chair, previously perfectly still an unnoticed, set down the Times of London and glared at Rolf. It was Isador Rabinowitz.

Geiger was shocked, yet strangely not frightened. He felt as if he were on the verge of a great epiphany, an understanding of all events, real and supernatural.

This before him was a Rabinowitz that he had seen in old photographs. It was a Rabinowitz of about thirty, the nasty malicious womanizing brilliant artist who had fled to England from the Continent to escape the Nazis.

“Why are you here?” Rabinowitz demanded of Geiger. “You have no right to be here!”

Geiger heard himself speak.

“But I am here. Laura asked me to follow,” he said.

“Laura did what?” Rabinowitz roared. “Laura! Laura!” Rabinowitz rose in a fury.

“Protect me!” Laura said to Geiger. Rolf was confused.

“Protect you how?” She shook her head and began to cry.

“Oh, you can’t; you can’t,” she said. “I’m already dead. But I can protect you.”

The dreamy logic, if there was any, escaped Geiger.

Rabinowitz grabbed the woman. She screamed. Geiger’s feet felt frozen in place. Rabinowitz filled the air with vilifications. He slapped Laura hard across her face. She staggered.

Geiger made a move to help her, but the deadly tableau began to play out before his eyes.

Rabinowitz dragged her into the next room. Geiger heard her screams. The light in the next room took on a pinkish macabre glow. Rabinowitz’s shouts triumphed above Laura’s.

There was no way for Rolf to measure what followed in real time. But he next found himself at the door to the bedroom, looking in. A vile vicious Rabinowitz clutched the unfortunate woman around the neck. He was shaking her and shaking her, and when Geiger made another move to interfere, he realized again that he couldn’t. He was watching an event from more than half a century ago. No more could he have interfered than he could have stepped into the canvas of a painter. Sadly, he bore witness to Laura’s murder.

Laura’s lifeless head was turned and inclined to her shoulder at an impossible angle, like a frail bird whose neck had been wrung. Rabinowitz’s powerful brilliant hands slowly released her and her body slumped to the floor.

“There,” Rabinowitz said softly and with great satisfaction. “There. Let that be a lesson for women who cheat and who interfere with a man’s art.”

Rabinowitz’s expression was grave, but confident. He turned toward Geiger. The woman on the floor looked like a slain angel. Rolf turned away. He heard Rabinowitz calling after him, but he did not stop. He departed the flat and walked down the front steps. When he left the building, he was confused as to which direction he had come. Everything seemed different, and he realized that this was because he had now passed back to the current day.

Aimlessly, Rolf wandered around the small backstreets of Mayfair for many minutes. When he found Oxford Street, he regained his bearings. He found South Molton from Oxford.

He looked at his watch. It was 5:20 A.M. and a dark blue was in the sky. He walked slowly on South Molton, his head down, his gaze lowered, and the monstrosity of all he had seen replaying in his mind.

Halfway down the block, minutes from his hotel, he found himself in front of the window of a shop that sold antique jewelry.

Geiger looked at the display. Then, gradually, he realized that he was not alone. His eyes focused slowly on the window and he saw the reflection of Laura again. She was back in her clown role and carried her violin. He wondered if she was now blessed to wander for eternity in the life form that had made her happiest.

She smiled to him.

“I’m so sorry,” Rolf said. “I understand what happened. I know he was a murderer.”

She didn’t say yes or no. Instead, the ghost looked toward the shop window, seeming to indicate something. There was a metal security lattice across the plate glass to avoid a smash-in. But a great deal of small jewelry was visible beyond the glass.

“What? What is it?” Geiger asked.

Laura’s eyes were peaceful now and deep blue. They were intensely romantic eyes, though with something vulnerable in them. Geiger held the notion that the ghost’s expression now fit the poignant violin serenade that she had played earlier.

The ghost carried her violin under her left arm. She reached out with her right. She extended an arm through the metal and through the window.

Her index finger came to a gold ring. It was a woman’s diamond ring, the main stone in a classic Tiffany setting with red rubies surrounding it.

Geiger’s eyes set upon it. He looked hard at the ring.

“What?” Rolf asked again. “What about it? I don’t understand.”

The eyes of the ghost sparkled. Rolf glanced back to the shop window. Laura withdrew her hand. Geiger blinked. The ghost did not exactly speak. But she conveyed a thought.

“Do you believe in guardian angels?” she asked.

Almost involuntarily, Geiger answered. “If I believe in ghosts, if I believe in an afterlife, I should then believe in all spirits. Including angels. Shouldn’t I?”

The thin lips smiled. Another thought passed from her to him.

“Yes. You should. Sometimes great evil can be undone before it happens.”

The clown raised a finger to her mouth to indicate Geiger should hush. The blue eyes glanced toward the ring again. Geiger’s gaze followed the lead of his companion. He looked at the ring for several seconds. The benign spirit conveyed another thought.

“You love someone, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do,” he answered aloud. He heard his words echo down South Molton Street.

“Then act upon your love,” Laura said.

He looked back to the jewelry shop. His eyes settled upon the ring. Then he raised his eyes and could no longer find Laura’s reflection in the shop window.

So he turned back to her and started to speak. But he stopped in mid-sentence, stunned.

Rolf was alone at the advent of a London dawn. It was six thirty A.M. And not another soul was anywhere near.

Thirty-nine

In New York City at the same hour, Detective Solderstrom had prowled through the labyrinth of Manhattan records on Grand Street until she had exactly what she wanted. A death certificate she wanted. She drove back uptown to her precinct.

“These rich people on the East Side,” she said to her commander. “I can’t believe the crap they put us through just for a little publicity.”

Her boss, a sergeant of detectives, was familiar with the case of the break-in at the home of Rolf Geiger. When the sergeant saw what Janet had found, he cursed right along with her. Their ‘watcher,” the man whom Geiger had insisted he had been seeing all summer, was identified as an old man named Felix Liebling who had followed the classical music scene in New York for six decades. The problem with Geiger’s story, however, the problem with his identification of the photograph that Solderstrom had shown, was that old Liebling had died in his sleep the previous February.

“Tell me,” the sergeant said. “Do you think Felix’s ghost is walking around? Or, maybe it’s just old Leibling’s corpse that’s been walking around, and some other evil spirit has been inhabiting it. We got to make distinctions here. Is it a ghost or a zombie?”

“Very funny,” said Janet Solderstrom without the smile. “Very funny,” she growled a second time. “But I don’t rule out anything in this city and with these music people.”

“Maybe your pianist just doesn’t know how to make a positive ID,” the sergeant said.

“Know what I’m going to do?” Janet Solderstrom concluded. “I’m going to wait at the airport when Geiger comes back. I’m going to give that punk kid an earful.”

“Sure, Janet. Do what you want,” the sergeant said. “Tell him he’s been getting stalked by a ghost. See if he believes that. Or, you know what? If you want to drop it completely, who’s gonna complain?”

Forty

Rolf Geiger walked onstage to play in the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. The audience greeted him warmly. The handsome old theater, with its plush red interior and dark wooden railings and facades, was alive with excitement. Rolf was ready when Heinrich von Sauer raised his baton that evening at Covent Garden.

Geiger played the Choral Fantasy with depth and emotion. He could hear the ripples of appreciation flow through the audience. He felt good playing that night, and was convinced that his own feelings were reflected in the music. The orchestra and chorus were excellent, too.

At one point in the second movement, Geiger raised his eyes and saw the ghost. Rabinowitz, ever the stern master and instructor, stood not far from the conductor. Geiger lowered his eyes again and tried to remain focused on what he was playing. From the ghost of Beethoven himself, nearly two hundred years earlier, Geiger adopted the manner of holding down particular notes and combining these with a soft gliding touch that imparted a vivid tender feeling to the fantasy, a last minute tweak to his technique.

“It’s good. It’s good.” Rabinowitz spoke toward the end.

It was better than good. The audience roared its enthusiasm after Geiger brought the piece to a close. When he stood, he was witness to more applause than he had heard for the last two years. He glanced to the critics in the stalls, however, and noted that all of them were still writing. “Ready to rip me to shreds the next day?” He wondered. He would find out when it was too late. “And for that matter, who really cares?” Tonight he would play to please himself, and let the world follow if it wished.

Diana sat in a private box this evening, guest of some air-headed duke who was a patron of the Royal Opera. Geiger didn’t mind. Diana was off to the right of the hall, and his eyes settled upon her whenever he pleased. If he felt he was playing for her, he could put more passion in the music.

Geiger went downstairs to his dressing room after the applause that marked the first intermission. Diana came down, too, and a few of the members of the orchestra were invited in, also. They stood around for several minutes, sipping soft drinks and munching pretzels.

Then the stage manager came by and gave the five-minute warning. Members of the orchestra evacuated the dressing room first. Diana was left alone with Rolf.

“Come back down at the next intermission,” he said to her. “I have something for you.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

The scarf was in his pocket, unwrapped and ready to be slipped firmly around her neck.

“What a surprise it will be, this necktie party!” Rabinowitz gleamed from across the dressing room.

“Just be here,” Rolf teased. “Just you and me. That’s how I want it.”

She gave him a kiss and said that sounded great.

Bombastic and fulsome as the Emperor might sometimes be, Geiger brilliantly played the second Beethoven offering. He accentuated the romantic elements, and created an Emperor in a beautifully expressive style. He colored the work exquisitely and resisted the temptation, which Beethoven himself often could not resist, to tinker with the changing tempo.

Rabinowitz stood by silently, appearing here on stage, then there, constantly moving around the orchestra. Only Rolf Geiger knew he was there.

But with the concerto, Geiger succeeded again. The audience was on its feet after the second work of the evening and sent the young virtuoso offstage feeling as if he were two-thirds of the way to conquering the world, or at least London.

At the second intermission, Rolf again walked down the steps toward the dressing room, intent on what he was about to do. Several stagehands watched him as he passed. Some said words of congratulations. A few applauded. All of them bore witness to the fact that when he entered his dressing room, the chamber was empty.

He went in and closed the door.

“Now?” asked a voice.

Geiger’s eyes rose. Rabinowitz was present. The spirit was by the near wall, clad in white tie and tails.

“Yes,” Geiger said. “Now.”

“Oh, lovely,” said the ghost. “Murder as a prelude for the Dance of Death. Tell me, what will you do for an encore? Theme from Die Gotterdammerung, I would hope.”

“You’ll know soon,” Geiger answered.

Rolf sat for a moment at his dressing table. He would have liked to pour himself a brandy but he never permitted himself alcohol before playing. And he wouldn’t tonight. So far, it was a triumph. He had played magnificently. The third and most demanding piece was last.

There was a knock on the door. He recognized the hand.

“Come on in!” he said aloud.

Diana opened the door and peered in.

“Tiger?” she asked.

“Enter,” he said. “And lock the door.”

His hand dipped into his pocket for the scarf.

She closed the door behind her and locked it. She looked particularly beautiful. And her neck was bare.

“What’s going on?” she smiled.

“Death is what’s going on,” said Rabinowitz. “Yours, you compromising whore.”

Rolf grinned strangely,

“Memorable night isn’t it?”

“Yes.” She paused. “Are you all right? You’re acting loco.”

“Well, I’m fine,” he said. The ghost hovered nearby. “See, the thing is, this is a big night. A triumph, I hope. I want to make it memorable for you, too.”

“It already is, Tiger,” she said.

“Even more.” He stood. “Come kiss me,” he said.

“Perfect,” said the ghost.

She came over to him as he stood. Diana closed her eyes.

“Eyes closed till I tell you to open,” he said. “This is a surprise.”

“You have talent as a murderer,” Rabinowitz said. “My hat is off to you. Now…”

Rolf pulled the scarf up around Diana’s bare neck.

“…pull it tight and strangle her!”

“You’re very beautiful, my darling,” Geiger whispered. He moved the scarf in place around her throat. Then he began to tighten it.

“Rolf?” she asked with a lilt in her voice. “What are you doing?”

“NOW!” thundered the ghost.

“It’s a present,” he said. “I bought it at Liberty’s. Look. Piano prints.”

He tightened it until it lay the way he wanted it, safely and delicately around her neck.

He stepped away from her. She looked in his mirror and admired the silk garment he had so tenderly placed upon her bare neck and shoulders. He held her protectively from behind and kissed her on the back of the neck.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“So are you. Don’t ever forget that.” From behind, he held her, his hands raised up near her neck. Rabinowitz raged impatiently. Geiger ignored him.

There was a rap on the door from the stage manager. Five minutes till the next drop of the baton.

He turned her and faced her.

“I wanted you to know,” he said, “over the last couple of months I was picturing you with other men. With Maurice. With Phillip. I was incredibly jealous. It made me realize how much I loved you and wanted you with me.”

“Rolf, honey…?”

“So I wanted to tell you that here. Tonight. When it’s important. At a time you’ll always remember.”

“You can tell me that anytime you want,” she said. “And you have to know that there is no other man in my life. It’s just you.”

“Of course I know. That’s the way I want it.”

There was a crash behind them as a lamp slid from an end table.

It caused Diana to jump. Geiger looked back and saw the glowering visage of Rabinowitz. “What was that?” she asked.

“See anything?”

“No.”

“That’s Rabinowitz spinning in his grave,” Rolf said. “Can’t stand a bit of tenderness. Can’t stand the fact that whether I succeed or fail on this trip, whether you’re still with me is the most important thing. I want you to know that. I’ve done a lot of thinking.”

She embraced him again. Long and tightly.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go upstairs. Time to play some tunes.”

He took her hand and led her to the door. At first the knob wouldn’t give. The door opened and the fearsome shimmering form of Rabinowitz stood in Rolf’s way.

Diana walked through the form first. Then Geiger passed through it. Rolf heard a tremendous wail of pity and terror. But Rolf was more anxious to get to the piano than ever before in his life. He jogged up the steps to the stage, carrying himself like an athlete who couldn’t wait to start a great game. He walked boldly out onto the stage almost before the lights were able to follow him.

The audience rose. Diana worked her way back to her private box. London gave Rolf Geiger a standing ovation as he stood near his piano. He raised his hands in appreciation and savored the applause for several seconds. When he turned to the piano, Rabinowitz was on the bench.

Geiger sat down anyway. Rabinowitz remained on the edge of the bench, or at least Geiger still saw him there, a snarling unhappy presence.

“You’ll fail with this,” Rabinowitz screamed. “Just like you’ll fail with every other major work. You’re an amateur, Rolf.”

Geiger looked at von Sauer who was eyeing him and sensed something odd. Without warning, Geiger turned to the audience and held up a hand. He indicated that he wanted complete quiet.

“We all have some ghosts to exorcise,” he said. “And ghosts can take some strange forms. I’m going to exorcise one of mine tonight. Maybe I’ll chase some others for you, also.”

There was some chuckling, but Geiger’s expression showed he was serious.

“You all right?” the conductor asked.

“Hey! I’m pumped, man,” Geiger said to his conductor. Then he turned to the audience. “I am way pumped. So let’s go!”

The audience whooped.

“Fool!” exclaimed Rabinowitz. “Fraud!”

Geiger nodded to the conductor. “Let’s do it,” he said.

Then, as the baton of Heinrich von Sauer came down, a solemn hush took over Covent Garden. The audience knew that a torch had been passed to a new generation of recitalists.

“Bloody lunatics!” Rabinowitz roared in Geiger’s ear. But the younger man could hear only his own playing. That, and the vision of Franz Liszt, who had written Totentanz more than a hundred years earlier.

Geiger played it the way he wished to interpret it.

He sat at the piano as a young master, dazzlingly handsome once again, his dark blond hair just appropriately askew, his fingers dancing along the keys like little euphoric angels. And all the time, Rabinowitz, coming from somewhere, ranted and howled at him in fury.

Geiger was prim one moment, and boiling with sensuality the next. His fingering demonstrated a degree of velocity rarely seen before, and he played the andante and presto sections with a power and mastery that sent waves of electricity through the old hall.

At one time, though only Rolf could see it, as he came to the most demanding sections of the Totentanz, the ghost tried to take charge. As Rolf looked at the hands before him on the keyboard, the skin on the backs of his hands started to wither.

Age spots appeared.

The emerald ring manifested itself and, for a few measures, the old man was back.

He had won. Rabinowitz had wrested control.

Geiger’s eyes rose to his right. They drifted to the box where Diana sat. A slight smile crept upon Rolf’s lips. “I’m playing for her,” he said. “I will play my whole life for her.”

He drew a breath as he played and with more power, with more muscle, and with intense precision and passion than even he had felt he had within him.

He tore into the final passages of the Dance of Death.

Words formed on his slips. They were not audible beyond the stage, for the orchestral accompaniment buried them. But Diana could read them. She pressed her own fingers to her face in dread. All of a sudden, she knew exactly what was transpiring.

“Go,” Rolf said to Rabinowitz. “Go now back to your grave. And stay there.”

“No,” the ghost answered. “I will never go. I will haunt you forever.”

“You will be in my thoughts and my musicianship,” Geiger said. “But you are in my past, not my future. You will never again haunt me.”

“I will!”

“You are dead. I am alive!”

“No!”

Geiger’s eyes found two cellists, a man and a woman, who were watching him curiously. They knew he was in dialogue with…with…something. He winked at the cellists, astonishing them. Their eyes shot back to their music.

He moved toward completion.

The ghost was silent now.

Rabinowitz stood by the piano, holding on to every note, listening to Geiger’s hands bring forth the intense morbid rhapsody within the piece. But the ghost knew he had lost. Geiger had brought himself to the Dance of Death. Not Rabinowitz. And he had brought the entire audience within Covent Garden with him.

“Are you Catholic, my boy?” insinuated the old man. “I hate Catholic boys.”

“You’re finished, Maestro,” Geiger whispered, wondering if any front row audience members could read lips.

“You will fail here, and you will fail at life,” the old man said. It was a final desperate effort to sabotage the performance.

“No, no, no,” Geiger calmly whispered back. “I will conquer both. Unlike you, I will conquer life, love, and music!”

“Bastard!” the ghost roared.

But all his screams, threats, and shouts were ineffectual. Geiger had passed him by.

“You are no longer in my mind,” Geiger whispered. “You are but a memory. And it’s time for you to go.”

The old man howled profanely. But he was mortally wounded in spirit. His foul image receded before Geiger’s eyes. At first Rabinowitz had been substantial and imposing. But as Geiger kicked into the final bars, and as waves of excitement pulsated through the theater, Rabinowitz—in all his grandeur, with all his accomplishment—was suddenly reduced to something small and mean.

Rabinowitz raised his eyes to Geiger and kept them yellow and hollow upon the young man. But this, as an intended distraction, also failed.

Geiger concluded the piece masterfully, bringing to it a flourish worthy of a bullfighter with flying cape and plunging sword. He started to sweat, but then stopped. He was in control. He hit the final phrases and sent a knockout blow toward the audience.

The ghost was gone. Words came to Geiger that would ring forever.

Rabinowitz’s fading, faltering voice:

“You couldn’t have done it without me.”

Geiger’s hands thundered down upon the final chords. He brought the Dance of Death to its frenzied conclusion.

“At first, no, Isador,” he said softly but aloud. But now, yes. Without you.”

Then, like a magician, Rolf pulled his hands from the keys to show that he was mortal, there were no tricks, that his hands were his own and that this inspired pianism had been the work of one young man who had worked so hard to refine and define his skills.

His hands and his soul. No one else’s.

The hall exploded with applause. Then Geiger was on his feet. And so was the entire audience within Covent Garden. Even the smattering of lords and knights in the stalls rose to acclaim the young American virtuoso.

Geiger stood onstage as flowers were hurled. A phalanx of female spectators surged toward the stage but could not get past the security people who formed a short human cordon at the ring of the stage. Vast bouquets of flowers cascaded downward from high up in the grand circle, and individual roses and lilies fluttered downward. Two dozen bouquets from the stalls landed near Geiger’s feet. The applause was so overwhelming, that Rolf almost tried to hide, turning and applauding himself for the orchestra, for Heinrich von Sauer and for various sections of the orchestra.

Twice Geiger tried to leave and twice the audience brought him back. He eventually settled in for a short encore and did the final movement of the Moonlight Sonata, as planned.

Another sixteen minutes of applause followed.

He returned to the stage once with Von Sauer and then a final time, dragging with him an involuntary female partner in a scarf and black gown. The audience roared its final approval for the night, then reluctantly, the audience finally let him.

As he left the theater, he looked everywhere for Isador Rabinowitz. But he saw no sign of the old man. Nor did he expect to ever see him again.

Forty-one

Two days later, half an hour after takeoff from Heathrow, Rolf Geiger peered out the side window of the first-class compartment of his New York-bound British Airways jet. The aircraft passed over the west country of England and found its proper highway in the sky, the flight pattern that would take Rolf back to New York for ten days.

After Labor Day, he and Diana would return to Europe. Dates in Paris, Rome, Munich, Bremen, Copenhagen, and Stockholm would follow within the next three weeks. The audiences would be knowledgeable and demanding. Geiger looked forward to the new challenges.

The sky was blue and bright outside the jet. The seat next to him was empty. Diana had gone back to the washroom. Geiger was alone with a multitude of thoughts.

Rolf had a remarkable sense of fulfillment, even though only one concert date had been completed and twenty-nine remained. The previous morning’s press in London had been unanimous and euphoric. Geiger had triumphed at Covent Garden.

“Welcome to the new master!”

—the Daily Telegraph

“Three great pieces, one paralleled performer.”

—the Guardian

“Rolf Geiger has mastered Beethoven, Liszt, London, himself and the world of classical music all on one dazzling evening at Covent Garden.”

—the Times of London

“Bravo, Mr. Geiger and welcome back! You, sir, may be the finest who ever sat down to play!”

—BBC-2

It was heady and impressive stuff. Big wet kisses in the daily British press and across the internet. Even the critics who had been so quick to trash him two years earlier now proclaimed him as the world’s greatest living pianist. And the irony was, to Rolf, it no longer mattered.

Brian Greenstone had faxed him a number of reviews that had appeared around the world following the London concert, even a rave from crusty old William Baumann at the New York Times. Rolf, while not ungrateful, had been dismissive of the accolades.

Greatness was too vague a term, Rolf had decided. And maybe too heavy a burden for any one man. Similarly, it was fleeting as a breeze. He had seen many athletes, many performers, playing long after their prime. Geiger would do his tour, do it with the highest standards of precision of which he was capable and then go on. Laurels withered, he knew. Other things were more important.

But, moreover, Rolf enjoyed the sense of finally having seen his mentor Rabinowitz in his entirety. He had the sense of having finally broken free of him and his oppressive spirit.

Geiger gazed continually out the window. As the airplane climbed into the sky, Geiger wondered about many things, just as he would always wonder about the worlds around him.

Had Rabinowitz’s ghost really been there? Or had the vision been in Geiger’s head?

Had Rabinowitz really pushed Geiger to a higher more spectacular realm of musicianship? Or had this just been Geiger’s psyche playing with itself, rationalizing and agonizing, dealing with the parallel memories of a loveless father and a loveless mentor?

Had there really been a ghost there to move Geiger’s thoughts and his musicianship along? Or had Rolf found love, peace, his future, and the salvation of his soul through the scores of long-dead composers?

After all, no one else had seen Rabinowitz since the day the old maestro died. Not even Diana, though she felt that she, too, had sensed something and had suffered her own share of bedeviling dreams.

But for that matter, didn’t a pianist raise a spirit every time he newly interpreted a score? Geiger thought back to the recordings of Raoul Pugno, those creaking tapes from ninety years ago, and thought he knew the answer.

But what of Rabinowitz personally? And what of his music, the ethereal playing, the forceful melodies, the exalted rhythms which had propelled him to the position of the greatest pianist of his age, until the young pretender had lifted the mantle from his shoulder?

What was all that? What had been his genius? Had it been a gift? A talent? A curse? Or—taking the matter further—had it all been a pernicious mask, something to cover a malevolent spirit that had never surfaced?

Geiger had the impression of having seen Rabinowitz in his lifetime the way some men see a piece of great music. Some look at the larger movements of the score, but fail to note the underlying themes, the leitmotifs upon which the melody was pegged. They play the music. They touch all the correct notes. But they don’t understand the emotion of the symphony.

The airplane climbed.

A thousand questions besieged him. A dozen answers suggested themselves to each and each answer in turn suggested a dozen new questions. Sometimes, when thinking about Rabinowitz, Geiger felt as if he were locked in a wilderness of mirrors, with each mirror held up to the next, curving, bending and reflecting onward to infinity.

Then, as the airliner leveled off eight miles in the sky, he had a quixotic, generous notion.

Rabinowitz, his personal evil aside, had been a man after all, Rolf concluded. He had had something to say, had had his place the world, and had made his statement. Undoubtedly, Rabinowitz had purchased his greatness with his humanity. But he would be remembered as one of the finest musicians ever.

But the more Rolf examined the contradictions of his mentor’s life, the more he puzzled over it. At first he tried to make his interpretation in romantic sympathetic terms, seeing the artist who had fled the gas chambers and horrors of Central Europe. Music had offered Rabinowitz’s life a symmetry he told himself, an opportunity to put events in order. Those parameters had allowed Rabinowitz’s genius to emerge.

Then Geiger rejected this. He saw that definition as too sparse and not taking enough into account, particularly the malice and viciousness with which the homicidal artist had conducted his private life. So, in the end, Rolf was left with a complex score with many elements, some aggressively attacking the others, which would emerge differently with every interpretation. He could see Rabinowitz’s spirit as something petulant: a man who could not stand the thought that someone younger could be better. So he set out to stop the younger man, even from the grave. Then again, what was the ghost doing other than defending the man’s life’s work?

Finally, Geiger thought back to the incident on Whitlowe Street, when he, Rolf, had wandered the London night on the lonely restless eve of his greatest performance. Subsequently, he had used a map to find that location again before leaving London. He had gone there on foot and alone and, to no surprise, found the house he had “visited” a few nights earlier.

The building no longer looked as it had when Rolf had visited. It had been modernized and refurbished several times over the last few decades. A young West Indian couple now lived on the second floor. The only thing that gave Rolf a further start was the round blue sign on the front of the building, noting that the great artist, Isador Rabinowitz had lived at this location from 1940 to 1945.

Geiger’s attention turned to the present. He had his own life to live, his own ears to fill. So Rolf settled for an image of Rabinowitz receding in his mind, until the image became something very small and very large at the same time. In the image, the great man himself was seated at an upright, again much like Pugno alone in a studio years earlier.

The man. The person. His music.

He would recede more as the years went by—much like the image of an angry possessed man going through the door, slamming it, and leaving for a final time.

Geiger turned his attention back within the airplane and examined a final question.

What was the burden of excellence? Of genius? Of being the best in the world at anything for a lifetime?

Was all this too much for any one man to bear? Is that what Geiger had tried to throw off, the soul-clutching aspects of that burden? Was that what he had evaded for all those years when he filtered Billy Joel into Stravinsky? And, if Rabinowitz’s ghost had driven him to escape that, could the old master have been seen as malevolent after all?

“You couldn’t have done it without me?”

Those words would replay forever in Rolf Geiger’s heart. Once again, there were wide-open areas for differing interpretations.

A woman appeared beside Geiger and slid into the seat next to him. He turned to speak, expecting Diana. He was surprised when it wasn’t she.

“Hello,” said the woman. Geiger had seen the face before.

“Hi,” he said. He wasn’t sure who this was.

“I know there was a lovely lady sitting next to you,” the visitor said. “Your fiancée, I’m sure. Well, I’m sitting two rows behind you on the left. I just came over to say hello. It seems this is the only place we ever meet.”

She was in her fifties, dark hair and American. Nicely dressed. A Donna Karan suit.

“Do you remember me?” she asked.

For a moment, he didn’t. Then he had it.

“Oh, right,” he said. “Yes, of course. Air France. Paris to New York. Last March.”

“That’s correct. With all the fans you meet, what a fabulous memory!”

“We had a fireball rolling down the aisle,” he recalled. “Not that we needed one.”

She nodded and smiled.

“I guess I’m your Fireball Lady,” she said cheerfully.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“Do for me?” the Fireball Lady asked. “Nothing. I just…Oh, I went to your concert the other evening. Covent Garden. Sat right in the stalls. Fifth row! You were just…just…” She shook her head, searching for the right accolade. “Just tremendous!” she finally said. “That Liszt! That Beethoven! You knocked me out!”

“Thank you.”

“And that part about ghosts that you mentioned in regard to the Liszt music? She said. “Dance of Death Was that it?”

“That was it.”

“Do you actually believe in ghosts?” she asked. “You know, whether they exist or not?”

He sighed, smiled and shook his head.

“I’ve had some experiences,” he said. “Too complicated to mention.” She nodded. “Well, look,” she said. “I don’t want to intrude. But there’s just one thing…”

Once again, he knew exactly what was coming.

“I have a niece named Barbi Ann,” his fan said. “She lives up in Scarsdale, New York, and loves that piano sketch and autograph you did for me last March. Remember it? I promised her that if I ever ran into you again—and I really didn’t think I would!—that I’d see if maybe…”

“I don’t mind at all,” he said gently. “I’d be honored. Do you have a pen?”

“Oh, wonderful.”

She found another thick note card and her Mont Blanc pen. He signed.

To Barbi Ann,

Much Love,

and drew another piano. Life did have a funny way of repeating itself.

He looked at his signature. It hadn’t changed much since March, and yet he felt so different.

Rolf Geiger

He handed the card back to her.

“Thanks so much,” she said, savoring the fresh souvenir. Then in her usual conspiratorial whisper,

“Clear skies today. No lighting. No turbulence, let’s hope”

“Let’s hope,” he agreed.

She excused herself and went back to the row two behind him. The seat next to him was vacant again. He reached to his luggage and found a small box from the jeweler on South Molton Street, the one that the ghost of Laura Aufieri seemed to have led him to. He placed the box on his lap under a newspaper. He looked around.

He remembered the fireball that had ripped down the aisle of his Air France jet six months earlier. A man now given to new insights and superstitions about the world around him, he wondered about the provenance of the lightning.

There were rational scientific explanations, and they would satisfy most people. Electricity in the atmosphere. Moisture in the clouds. Thunder. Lightning. Manifestations of a physical rational world.

But Geiger wondered if rational reasoning could explain everything. If a ghost could take various quasi-human forms—its own form at different ages, a nightmare man-wolf figure, and a watcher—could it also have taken the form of the fireball?

As a warning perhaps?

As a bit of ghostly pyrotechnics?

There was a movement near him. He looked up. Diana was back.

“Hey,” she said, sliding back into her set.

“Hey,” he said. He gave her hand a squeeze.

“What’s going on back there?”

“An Israeli film director tried to pick me up. Then a French guy who claims he’s a Rothschild. Next time I go with you.”

“It’s a deal,” he said. He thought for a moment. “How’d you get rid of them?” he asked.

A sly smile crossed her face.

“I told them I was engaged.” He laughed.

“What made you tell him that?”

“It sounded good,” she said. “And I figured it would work.”

“What a coincidence,” he said. He pulled the box out from under the newspaper.

“I was going to have trouble getting this through customs, anyway. So I needed to give it to you now.”

Astonished, hesitating slightly, she stared at the box.

“See, the thing is,” he said thoughtfully, “I wouldn’t have gotten through the past few months without you. I wouldn’t have buried the ghost of Rabinowitz, I wouldn’t have played as well in London, and I wouldn’t have learned how to love again.” He paused. “Sometimes life is very simple.”

She took the box in her hand.

“So open it,” he said.

Her eyes found his.

She pulled away the blue ribbon and lifted the lid. There was a small jewelry case within. It was brilliant red velvet. She opened it and they both looked at the ring. A beautiful diamond was surrounded by small rubies in antique gold filigree.

She looked at it for several seconds, a sea of thoughts and emotions overcoming her.

“There’s at least one story that goes with it. Franz Liszt once owned it and gave it to a woman he loved.”

“Wow,” she said. “That’s priceless.”

“So are you,” he said.

She looked at him and nearly melted.

“I want you with me all the time on this tour,” he said. She blinked.

“All twenty-nine more dates?” she laughed.

“It’s a much longer tour than that,” he said. “Time was when I thought I’d retire once I did this tour. Well, I don’t know if I’m going to conquer the world in thirty shots. And if I do or I don’t, it doesn’t matter, because I’m not going to retire. I want to share music with you and I want to share a life with you. So it’s a long tour, Diana. It’s more than seven months.”

She was not able to speak. She gave his hand a squeeze. Intimacy eight miles aloft, 880 feet per second now over Scotland, pondering a rapidly accelerating future.

“If you accept, try it on.”

She did. She held out her hand to see how it looked. It looked better than any other ring possibly could have. She leaned to him and kissed him.

“I love it,” she said. After several moments she noticed there was no marking on the box.

“Where did you find it?” she asked.

“In a jewelry store on South Molton Street.”

“It’s a beautiful ring,” she said.

Diana looked upon it with fascination. He looked at the thrill and glow in her eyes.

“I hardly know what to say,” She said.

Then she thought further about it.

“What made you go there?” she asked. “How’d you find that particular store?”

He smiled. He told her a short ghost story, one involving a white-face clown with a violin and a funny polka-dotted outfit. She recognized the name of Laura Aufieri.

It was a story that she listened to with rapture and which he would retell to her again over the course of many years. But it was their story, a private one, and a footnote to a larger episode of restless spirits, a grander tale which was not as pleasant as the shorter one that it contained.

It was a story that only they could share and completely understand.

Their section of the aircraft became bright with the sun. The engines eased to a quieter hum as the aircraft settled into its cruising speed. The sky around them was a limitless blue, and like the sky, the tour before them stretched without limit.

THE END

To the reader:

Thanks for reading The Prodigy. Your thoughts and comments are always appreciated. You can contact me at NH1212f@yahoo.com or on Facebook. I welcome communications. If you found errors or format problems in the text, please advise me. Through the ‘miracle’ of e-publishing, fixes can be made in subsequent downloads.

Noel Hynd

And, if you enjoyed this book, you might consider…

Ghosts – 2014 Edition

The classic ghost story by Noel Hynd, perhaps one of the scariest books ever written. Re-edited for e-Readers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sleepy Nantucket Island has become a homicide hotspot, with two unexplained deaths. While the murders appear to local cops to be unrelated, Detective Timothy Brooks, a recent transplant to the island, sees similarities in the corpses’ wounds. Meanwhile, spectral disturbances, including sightings and eerie moving furniture, are plaguing both locals as well as the summer crowd. Hollywood star Annette Carlson, who bought a place following a stint in drug rehab, is besieged by visitations that she is certain are not figments of her overtaxed imagination. Brooks begins to see parallels between the recent killings and Carlson’s bizarre accounts. He contacts his buddy, Lutheran minister and spiritualist George Osaro, to help identify the evil spirit—the ghost of Henry Flaherty, a no-account lothario and stage actor who was killed in the late 1920s. Soon, Osaro, Brooks and Carlson are pressed into service as “ghostbusters” to save Nantucket from a paranormal meltdown. Alternately playful and somber in tone, written in spare prose, Hynd’s story will arouse fear and suspicion in any reader who has ever heard things go “bump”—day or night.

Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A malevolent spirit is haunting the Nantucket house of actress Annette Carlson. It has killed at least three people with sickening viciousness. It now insinuates itself inside the head of policeman Timothy Brooks, a skeptical investigator forced against his will to recognize the existence of the occult. Brooks must lay this spirit to rest before it tires of toying with him and Annette and kills them both. With this novel, espionage writer Hynd makes his debut in the realm of the supernatural. A ghost novel needs to convince unbelieving readers against their will and scare the liver out of them, and Ghosts does this in spades. The atmosphere builds steadily, moving from reality to an utterly convincing realm of the supernatural. Public libraries need to buy this.

–Marylaine Block, St. Ambrose Univ. Lib., Davenport, Ia.

Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

(Six reasons to leave the light on at night)

The Ghost Stories of Noel Hynd:

Ghosts

Cemetery of Angels

Rage of Spirits

A Room for the Dead

The Lost Boy

The Prodigy

Table of Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

Thirty-four

Thirty-five

Thirty-six

Thirty-seven

Thirty-eight

Thirty-nine

Forty

Forty-one