The Brahms Deception Read online

  “Yup.” Kristian shrugged.

  Max glanced back at the door to make certain it was closed. “Is Mr. Bannister in bed?”

  “Yes,” Chiara said. “He just went up a couple of hours ago.”

  “And Mrs. Bannister is asleep in her chair next to the transfer cot.” Max pulled out one of the high stools for Kristian. “You need coffee first? Or are you ready to tell us?”

  “I’ll start some fresh,” Chiara said. “But I can listen at the same time.”

  “Thank you. Coffee would be good.” Kristian stepped around to the sink and ran himself a glass of water. He carried it back to the island, and took the stool Max had offered him, using the bits of business to give himself time to think.

  He sipped from the glass, and set it down. Chiara was busy at the counter with coffee grounds and steaming water. Elliott and Max were watching him, Elliott looking tense and unhappy, Max with eyes bright with curiosity. “I saw her arrive,” Kristian said. “And I watched her through the afternoon.”

  “Yes? So she was still there, everything was okay,” Elliott said.

  “Yeah. Everything was fine until—” Chiara set a cup of coffee in front of Kristian, and he nodded his thanks.

  “Until what?” Elliott pressed.

  Kristian picked up the coffee cup, thinking of Clara. She had been much maligned over the years. They criticized her for being a distant mother when she had had to work so hard to support her children. They said she refused to visit Robert when he was ill when, in fact, it was the doctors who forbade her, thinking it would upset him more. They accused her of selfishness, of the ego of the star performer, of greed in trying to publish Robert’s music after his death, when the truth was that her entire career—as performer and most particularly as a composer in her own right—had been subverted, suppressed, first by Robert and then by the demands of her family. It wasn’t fair. And Kristian couldn’t bring himself to this final betrayal.

  He took a sip of coffee. When he tried to set the cup down, he had a bit of trouble. He felt as if the countertop moved slightly, as if his hand couldn’t find it. He felt Max’s gaze on him sharpen. When Kristian succeeded in finally releasing the cup, he dropped his hand to his lap to hide its shaking. He said, “It was strange.”

  Chiara said, “What was strange?”

  “She—Frederica—she disappeared. She vanished.” Kristian tried to speak calmly, but fury built in his chest. How could she? The cruelty of it, the sheer selfishness, made him want to stamp into the transfer clinic and rip the cap off her homely head.

  Everyone was staring at him. “Look, I can’t explain it,” he said.

  “But you were there!” Elliott said plaintively. “What did you see? For God’s sake, Kris, she couldn’t just disappear. She has to be someplace!” Tears reddened his eyes, and he put both fists to his face to hide them. Behind his hands, he gulped back a sob. Chiara crossed to stand behind him, and put her steadying hands on his shoulders.

  Kristian said, “It isn’t your fault, Elliott. It wasn’t anything you did, or didn’t do.”

  “Then what is it?” Max asked. “What the hell’s going on there?”

  Kristian gritted his teeth, trying for Elliott’s sake to cool his temper. His face felt hot at the lie he was about to tell. It was for Clara’s sake, not his own, but he still hated doing it. He said, “I can’t tell you that.” He remembered his mother, standing beside the window of his bedroom on the night she died, disappearing into the gloom. “She was there, and then she . . . she sort of . . . faded.”

  “What does that mean?” Elliott cried. “She can’t fade!”

  Chiara had taken her seat, and was gazing at Kristian, her small chin propped in one hand. Her hair had come out of its combs again, and dropped in curling hanks around her cheeks. Absently, she pushed at one of the strands with her free hand, but her eyes never left Kristian’s face. “Were you watching closely?”

  “I was looking right at her.” Chiara’s bright dark eyes seemed to see through him, and he wondered if she knew he was inventing something. “She was there, observing Brahms at the fortepiano. She . . . she was there and then—” The lie caught in his throat, and he coughed. “She was gone.”

  “But where could she go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This makes no sense!” Elliott’s voice was rough, but he had regained control.

  Kristian felt a stab of compunction over Elliott’s misery. “You have to believe me, Elliott,” he said. “Everything was fine until she . . . until she did—whatever she did.”

  Chiara turned to the other men. “She could disappear, if she wanted to. It’s just coordinates, non é vero? She could alter them, perhaps? Change them so she could hide herself. So you couldn’t bring her back.”

  “It’s insane,” Elliott said.

  “It’s crazy,” Max said. “Why would she want to do it?”

  “To stay,” Kristian said. “To have more time.”

  “How much fucking time does she need?” Elliott said. Max shook his head, scowling.

  Chiara said, “Does the Foundation do psychological profiles?”

  “They certainly did on me,” Kristian said. “It felt like a hundred interviews before I was accepted.”

  “She seemed perfectly normal,” Max said. “I talked to her before the transfer. She was a little nervous, but she didn’t seem unbalanced.”

  Kristian looked away, unable to meet anyone’s gaze, painfully aware that the excuse he had just given them had a hundred holes in it. And afraid the lie would show in his eyes.

  Elliott said, “God, it would be such a relief to think she was just—just a head case.”

  Chiara said, “Head case? A case of the head?”

  Max gave a sour laugh. “Person with mental illness,” he said.

  “Ah.”

  “I don’t want to be the guy who has to tell the Bannisters their daughter went to 1861 and lost her mind.”

  “I have to go back again,” Kristian said. “A little rest, and then go back. I have to figure this out.”

  A scratchy voice demanded, “Figure what out? What’s happened?”

  Every eye turned to the door. Frederick Bannister stood there, his sparse hair rumpled, his shirt wrinkled beyond recognition, his face marked with sleep lines. He said again, “Mr. North? Figure what out?”

  Frederica knew she would have to think about all of this, think of what it meant, what she would do next, what she wanted. For the moment, though, it was enough to lie beside Brahms, savoring the warmth of his body, of the afternoon sunlight streaming into the bedroom. Of these delightful new physical sensations.

  She lifted one arm above the bed, and contemplated the soft white skin. She spread the fingers of her hand in the gentle light, admiring the length and strength of them. Hannes turned on his side, away from her, and his breathing grew shallow and slow as he drifted to sleep. He snored lightly, and she cast him an indulgent smile.

  Gingerly, careful not to wake him, Frederica sat up and slid her feet to the floor. She found a dressing gown on a hook, and though she wasn’t sure if it was Clara’s or Brahms’s, she pulled it around her. She moved to the dressing table, and sat down before the oval mirror. It was old-fashioned and the glass was murky, but she could see well enough.

  She let the dressing gown fall open, and lifted the loose hem of the chemise to examine her body. Clara’s body. Not now, it’s not. For the moment, it was hers. And she liked it. She liked it very much indeed.

  The breasts were small, depleted, she supposed, by so many babies. Despite the pregnancies, the waist was also small, the belly flat, with only a faint looseness of skin beneath the belly button. The neck was smooth, and the face was, too, the chin gently pointed, the skin flawless. Frederica touched her cheeks, traced the unusual shape of her eyes. A silver-backed brush lay on the dressing table, and she picked it up. Her hair was so thick she could barely get the bristles of the brush to penetrate it. It must take a long time to bru
sh such hair each day, to tame it into the fashionable rolls at each side, held there by tortoiseshell combs.

  She would not, she told herself, think about the face and figure of that unfortunate girl lying on the transfer cot a century and a half in the future. That girl had not yet been born. She would not compare the porcelain skin she saw now with the sallowness of that skin to come, or think of the receding chin, the lumpy forehead, the ungainly body. She would live in this moment. She would take pleasure in what she saw before her. She was—for now—beautiful. She was beloved by the great Brahms. She had not meant for this to happen, but now that it had—was it so evil to enjoy it?

  Deep within her, below her heart, she felt Clara striving to surface. The ruthlessness with which she pressed her down was, perhaps, a little disturbing. She was surprised at herself, but of course her reaction was reflexive. Automatic. It was not that she intended to be cruel. It was, rather, instinctive. She was defending herself—who could object to that?

  When Hannes woke, yawning, stretching like the young eagle Robert Schumann had dubbed him, she smiled at herself in the mirror, enjoying the way it lifted the lines of her face, softened the shape of those great eyes. She turned, directing the smile at Brahms. “Hannes,” she said softly. “Don’t get up. I’m coming back to bed.”

  She stood, and let the dressing gown slip from her shoulders.

  The transfer clinic was quiet in the darkness shrouding Castagno. Kristian stepped out into the fragrant night and gazed at the silhouettes of the twelve houses rising beyond the parking lot. Stars pricked the sky, and the chill air smelled faintly of gasoline. He leaned against a pillar and gazed unhappily into the night.

  Chiara emerged from the building and came to stand beside him. Her head barely reached his shoulder. “It is a very pretty place,” she said. “I think it was even better in those days of the past, before the train station, the tennis courts, the swimming pools.”

  “When it was just a village.”

  “Yes. Just the twelve houses. They are very old.” She waved her arm, including everything in her gesture. “Over there is the chiesa, dedicated to San Francesco, constructed in the sixteenth century. That tower outside of the town—” She pointed. “And the one to the south—” She pointed again. “They were for the soldiers to protect the people. The people were very good at protecting themselves, though.” She laughed, her eyes sparkling in the dim light. “They threw things out of their windows, so their attackers could not get into the houses. They are famous for this. They dropped frying pans and chamber pots on bandits who came to rob them. The bandits fell over each other trying to get away down these narrow streets.”

  “I can see how that might be.” Starlight, barely faded by the few lights showing here and there, framed the uneven silhouette of the town. More lights showed at the bottom of the hill, glowing from the distant windows of San Felice. “Such a tiny place. Everyone was surprised to learn that Brahms came here for his holiday.”

  Chiara shook her head. “That should not be so. Even in the nineteenth century, Castagno was well-known. By then, no more bands of wandering soldiers or bandits. Noble families from Pisa and Firenze came here in vacanza—for the peace and quiet and the beautiful scenery.”

  “Brahms never learned to speak Italian.”

  “You are certain of this?”

  “We think so. He didn’t even visit Julie Schumann when she married a count from Torino, and he was known to be fond of her.”

  “Allora. Learning about his visit to Castagno makes it even more strange.”

  “Well, of course, Julie wasn’t married in 1861. She was only sixteen.”

  “I thought it was the mother—Clara—Brahms was fond of.”

  “They were very close friends, the three of them. Robert, Clara, and Brahms. Brahms and Clara remained friends until her death.” Kristian suspected his voice carried some hint of the emotion he felt when he spoke of Clara. He hoped he was imagining that Chiara regarded him more closely, tipping her small face up into the starlight. Her hair was in its usual tangle, some clipped up, some falling over her forehead, with strands trailing past her collar.

  “Which house did you see when you went back? The maestro stayed in Casa Agosto, did he not?”

  “Yes. Do you know which it is?”

  “I do know this. Would you like to see it? We can walk there.”

  Kristian straightened. “I suppose there’s nothing else we can do right now.”

  “No. It is a very bad situation.”

  “I’m not sure Mr. Bannister believed what I told him.”

  She glanced up at him. Stars reflected in her eyes, tiny constellations gleaming from the depths, and Kristian caught a breath at the beauty of them. “The Bannisters are frightened,” she said. “They do not know what to believe.”

  Kristian released the breath. “Chiara—,” he began, then shook his head.

  She prompted gently, “Che cosa, Kris?”

  He looked away from her. Surely, even in the darkness, those perceptive eyes would see through him, see all the way to the secret. “I just—I just wish I could help them.”

  “You are helping them.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. They want their daughter back, and I know where she is—at least, I know where she was—but I can’t go and get her without cooperation. Elliott, and Max—”

  “They have to follow their orders, I believe.”

  “I know. But Dr. Gregson and Dr. Braunstein, and all the programmers in Chicago—they want to manage every detail. It can’t be done.”

  “Can it not?”

  “No. And I’m afraid they’ll bring someone else in, some other researcher, who won’t know anything about the situation. They’ll have to do all this work over again.” They will learn Clara’s secret, but it won’t help.

  She took his arm. “Come, before it is too late. Let us see Casa Agosto, and then you will rest. Perhaps tomorrow you will think of something.”

  As they walked, she chattered on, and Kristian breathed a little easier. “Soon the music and art festivals begin,” she said, with a nod at the buildings around them. “Many people, many cars—it is too bad. Lucky for you to be here now, instead of then.”

  “It’s very quiet.”

  “Sì, sì, sì. Mostly old people here now. The young people have all moved to Pistoia, or Firenze or Milano.”

  She led him past the tennis courts and the swimming pool, and down a street so cramped it was obvious it had never been intended for anything larger than a wheelbarrow. The houses leaned together, nearly touching in places. Hidden courtyards glowed with lamplight. Chiara said the names of the houses as they passed them. “Novembre, Ottobre. Down that way is Dicembre.” They passed a tiny bar, where two or three people clustered at a counter drinking coffee. There were no other shops Kristian could see.

  Chiara came to a stop in front of one of the houses, saying, “Here it is. Casa Agosto. It has a very strange fresco painted by Saetti.”

  “Do all the houses have frescoes?”

  “All twelve of the original ones. The artists came here in the last century, and painted them. Not before 1861, however.”

  “No.” Kristian gazed up at the old building. The low garden wall was gone now, replaced by a courtyard with a much higher wall, topped by an iron railing. Through the gathering darkness, he could just see the French windows, but they were barred, without the gauzy drapes he remembered.

  “Is it the same, Kris?”

  “Not at all. There was an olive tree in the garden, and a low stone wall. A painted wooden bench. They all looked old even then.”

  “They are gone.”

  “Crumbled to dust, probably.”

  “Like the people,” she mused.

  “I’m afraid so.” Kristian sighed.

  Her dark eyes shone up at him. They were almost as luminous, he thought, as Clara’s. “It makes you sad?”

  He considered that. “In a way. It seems sad that things have to change
so much. And that those people—the ones I observed—have all been gone such a long time.”

  “I think they are alive for you.”

  He glanced down at her. She was as different from Catherine as he could possibly imagine. He wondered if Clara was as wise, as instinctive, as Chiara. He said quietly, “You’re right. Even before I came here, and observed Brahms and—” He caught himself. “And the others—they seemed real to me. Their music, their history, everything about them felt—intimate.”

  She frowned. “Inti—? I don’t know this word.”

  “Intimate. Close, as in close friends. Or sometimes even closer than that.”

  “Oh. Intimità. Not intimare.”

  “Sorry?”

  “It is my English, sorry. I did not understand. In-ti-mate. Intimate.” She took his arm, and they turned back toward the transfer clinic. Her fingers were strong for such a small hand.

  Full darkness now blanketed their hilltop, and a night bird sang from one of the tiny courtyards. Had Kristian not been so worried, he would have found it a romantic moment, strolling through an Italian hill town with the hand of a pretty woman under his arm. A pretty woman he liked very much.

  It seemed a very long time since he had spent an evening with a woman. It had only been six months, but his life had changed utterly since that time. It seemed much longer.

  “Tell me what you do, in America,” Chiara said as they walked. “You finished school, you said?”

  “No. I didn’t finish—I dropped out.” He was glad the darkness hid his embarrassed flush.

  “Dropped out? This means to—what?”

  He gave a sour chuckle. “In my case, it means I quit in the middle. I’m not proud of it.”

  “You must have had a reason. Perhaps you ran out of money.”

  “I did that, all right. But that’s not why.”

  “Why, then?”

  He hesitated, searching for a way to explain that wouldn’t embarrass him too much. She said hastily, “You do not have to answer. I ask too many questions. My father says that is why I became a doctor. Too much curiosity!”