The Brahms Deception Page 25

  “Perhaps someone else could observe what you did.”

  “It’s possible, but the layering gets seriously complicated. I’m already there, in the past. We can’t change that now—and there would be three of us.”

  “I don’t understand this layering.”

  “It’s complicated. It has to do with too many sets of coordinates piled on top of each other.” He took up a spoon and laid it precisely on a crease in the tablecloth. “Let’s say you want this spoon to be right here, that it needs to be here.” He took another spoon, and held it in his hand. Now suppose that I want my spoon to be in that place.” He bumped the first away from the crease. “Chances are neither one of them will be in the right spot. In other words, they’ve pushed each other out of place.”

  “But isn’t that a good thing? If you . . . push . . . Frederica out of place?”

  “Yes. I think it could work. But if there are three—” He took a third spoon, and dropped it on the other two. All three moved, lying at angles to one another. “The problem is that we don’t know where they might end up. All three could be hurt.”

  “To me—” She shook her head. “To me, it is like magic. And I am a scientist!”

  “There is something about the transfer process that defies science. It’s no wonder people are afraid of it. No one really understands the way time works. Even Braunstein doesn’t understand, and the whole process is her idea.”

  “She is going to go back again.”

  “No!”

  “Sì, Kristian. After you left, she came into the transfer room and asked Elliott to set up another transfer. She said she would go back to the beginning, as you did. I think Mr. Bannister has threatened her.”

  Kristian shoved back his chair and stood up. He pulled out his credit card, and waved it at the hostess. Chiara also got up, and murmured to the woman, “Mi dispiace, signora. Abbiamo molto fretta.” The hostess looked unhappy, but she hurried to run the card. Kristian had a bad moment, in case it didn’t go through. He didn’t want that to happen in front of Chiara. He was relieved when the hostess brought back the receipt with no comment. In moments he and Chiara were in the street again, hurrying back toward the clinic.

  They were halfway through the village, just opposite Casa Giugno, when Kristian’s head suddenly swam. His vision blurred, and he staggered against the wall of the house. Chiara caught at his arm, crying, “Kristian!” but she couldn’t hold him, and he lurched to one side.

  He put his back to the wall, the only way he could steady himself. He slid slowly down until he was seated on the wet cobblestones. His stomach churned, and he knew it had nothing to do with the wine he had drunk.

  He was too late. Braunstein had done it, gone back to 1861 when Frederica was there, and he was there. He remembered it now, remembered Braunstein appearing behind him, blundering into the house, staring at him and at Frederica. He knew perfectly well he had not had that memory before. He hadn’t remembered it because it hadn’t happened.

  Lillian Braunstein had changed the time line. More important, she had interrupted his transfer, and even though he was not under the transfer cap, his brain couldn’t assimilate the disruption.

  The world gyrated around him. Bile rose in his throat, and though he swallowed and pressed his hands to his mouth, he couldn’t stop himself. In humiliation, he turned his head away from Chiara and vomited against the wall of Casa Giugno.

  Lillian Braunstein was just getting up from the transfer cot when Kristian, supporting himself with an arm around Chiara’s slender shoulders, stumbled into the transfer room. He had stopped in the bathroom to wash out his mouth and splash water over his face, but he still felt like death. Braunstein didn’t look any better. Her cheeks were ashen, and her hands trembled as she tried to smooth her hair.

  Elliott looked even more miserable than usual, and Max, with a stethoscope in his hand, was coming around the cot toward Braunstein. His freckled cheeks were flushed, his lips pressed in an angry line.

  Chiara helped Kristian to a chair, and then joined Max as they looked Braunstein over. Elliott came to crouch beside Kristian. “Are you okay?” he said in a low voice. “I was afraid you were going to feel that. I couldn’t talk her out of it.”

  Kristian said, “I’m okay. Give me a minute. Or five.”

  Braunstein said in a thready voice, “What happened? I don’t know what happened.”

  Elliott scowled up at her, but he didn’t say anything. It was Max who said, “Guess there’s really something to that whole layering thing.”

  Kristian managed a sour chuckle. “You win, Elliott. You said there would be.”

  “Some victory,” Elliott said in an undertone. “If either of you, or Frederica, suffers permanent damage—”

  “Frederica’s stable,” Max said in a hard voice. “She’s the only one, I guess.” Every head turned toward the screens above Frederica’s head. The lights blinked steadily, amber and white.

  Lillian Braunstein said in a choked voice, “She didn’t see me. I was careful about that.”

  “But not so careful about Kris?” Max snapped.

  “I didn’t think it would matter,” Braunstein said. “Since he wasn’t really there.” She rubbed her temples with her fingers. “God. This feels awful.”

  “Imagine how Kris feels,” Max said. He closed his mouth hard, as if to stop himself saying anything further, and turned away.

  Chiara stepped back from Braunstein. She put her hands on her hips and said, in a voice of authority, “Dr. Braunstein must go to bed for a time. Kristian should do the same. Max, please make a note of all their vital signs now. We will check them again after they have rested.”

  “I’m not sure anymore what’s really happened and what hasn’t,” Kristian said.

  “It will pass,” Braunstein said, in a tone more hopeful than certain.

  Max said, “You’d better hope so. That lawsuit is getting worse by the moment.”

  He plucked a notepad from his pocket, with a pen.

  Kristian’s head still spun, and he wasn’t sure he knew where his hands and feet were. It all seemed ridiculous. And hopeless. He slumped forward, his elbows on his knees, his swimming head resting in his hands.

  Chiara said, “Bed. Both of you.”

  Braunstein began shakily, “Wait. I . . . I want to—”

  Chiara interrupted her. “No more. Not now.”

  Frederica sat at the fortepiano, idly playing through the movement Hannes had been working on that morning. She loved this piece, and as she picked out the theme she remembered the last time she had heard it, in a concert hall at Oberlin as she was finishing her master’s degree. There had been a violinist in the ensemble, a tall, gawky young man with long, delicate fingers. He had played this very theme with sensitivity and a brooding musicality. She had longed for him to notice her, to like her. She had fantasized playing a duet with him, a duet that would lead to something more.

  It never happened, of course. It was just a crush like so many others, born of loneliness and hunger only to die of neglect and hopelessness.

  Hannes came in through the French windows, where a freshening breeze rippled the gauzy curtains so they tangled around his long legs. He pushed them aside, laughing, and crossed the room to drop a kiss on her forehead. She closed her eyes to savor the feel of his lips on her skin, the scent of bay rum from his shave, the slight scratchiness of his wool coat against her arm.

  He said, “What do you think?”

  She opened her eyes. “What?”

  He nodded toward his manuscript. “The progression. I’m trying a different one.”

  She bit her lip, looking up at the score. She hadn’t been thinking of the music at all. Now that she looked at it, she could see that he still had not settled on the final harmonization. She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s better, Hannes. What about this?”

  From memory, she played the chord progression as she knew he would one day write it. He exclaimed, and slid onto the bench bes
ide her. “Clara, that’s perfect! That’s so much better. How did you think of it?” He seized his pen and ink bottle, and began scratching out notes and writing in others. “This? Is this what you played?”

  “Yes, that’s it. And here.” She pointed to the score, and he wrote in the notes.

  “Wonderful, that’s wonderful. I’ve been looking for just that, a smoother transition. It supports the melody, but it doesn’t drown it. Viele Dank!”

  She smiled up at him. “I love helping you, Hannes. I like it better than struggling so with my own compositions.”

  “I will send you the final version to look over,” he said. “Before the premiere.”

  “Hannes . . . ,” she began, and then stopped. She had to say it, had to do something. She was running out of time.

  Absently, he said, “Yes? What is it?” with his eyes still on the music.

  She put her hand on his sleeve. “Hannes, I . . . about tomorrow—”

  “Yes, I’ve just spoken to Claudio. It’s all arranged. He will be here in the morning with the cart.”

  “I am so sad to leave!” she burst out. She had meant to be more cautious, to approach the subject with delicacy, but now the idea of parting from Hannes—of arriving in Berlin to be met by strangers, to pretend maternal affection for children whose names she didn’t even know—terrified her. And she couldn’t bear to be parted from him. She really couldn’t bear it.

  She saw now that the infatuations she had felt as a young girl were just that—infatuations. She had never known what it was to be deeply, thoroughly in love—to be possessed by someone, as if he held her heart in his hands, as if her body was as much his as her own, as if her life and all its myriad trivial details hardly signified. A little sob escaped her.

  “Don’t, meine Schatz,” he said. He laid down his pen, and put his arm around her waist. “We still have this evening, and a lovely dinner Nuncia is preparing for us. She wants to surprise you! I saw mussels, and a nice pot of tomatoes cooking. Let us enjoy it, and not worry about tomorrow.”

  She knew—could sense it in her bones—that his mind and heart were already on their way back to Hamburg. He felt no such terrible wrench, as she did. Was this the way it had to be between a man and a woman? When she first arrived, it seemed he could not get enough of her, could not bear to be apart from her. In the past days, though, he seemed more distant, as if—as if he had had enough.

  But she had not. Oh, she had not, and she never would! She threw her arms around his neck, looking up into his handsome face. “Hannes, I can’t—I can’t go back!”

  He drew back, and she saw his eyes narrow. He looked different that way, older, harder. The thought occurred to her that she was losing him, but she thrust it away. That couldn’t be! He loved Clara, had loved her all his life. How could that change? When he held her at night, when his body devoured hers so completely, she knew he loved her deeply, eternally, in the same way she loved him. Surely she could ask this one thing!

  “Clara, what are you saying? The children are waiting. Your concerts . . .”

  She cried, “I don’t care! I am so tired of it all, Hannes, of having nothing for myself, no freedom, no time, no—no life!”

  “I don’t understand,” he said. Bewilderment clouded the forget-me-not blue of his eyes, and the full lower lip she so loved, which made her thighs tremble and her belly dissolve, pressed thin. “You are the most devoted of mothers. The most disciplined of performers. How can you say these things?”

  She tightened her hold around his neck, and buried her face against his shoulder. “I have been all of those things for so long! Why can I not change now?”

  He didn’t respond to her embrace, didn’t pull her closer or lay his cheek against her hair as she had hoped he would. As he would have done a week ago. His voice rumbled in her ear, and it was full of doubt and confusion. “Your children,” he said. “Marie will be so glad to have you home again. And Julie, and Felix and the rest.”

  Part of Frederica knew she should pull back, should try to regain her dignity, but anxiety drove her. And need. “I want to go with you, Hannes! I want to go to Hamburg! Just for a little longer—oh, please! Take me home with you!” She burst into noisy tears.

  The tears seemed to make a difference. He dug in his pocket for an enormous white handkerchief, and made soothing noises. He smoothed her hair and dabbed at her wet cheeks. She made herself stop, fearful that tears would blotch her face and make her lips swell. Certainly in Frederica tears were ugly, distorting her features, reddening her eyelids and her nose. She didn’t know what weeping might do to Clara’s face.

  When she had composed herself, Hannes got up from the bench and held out his hand to her. “Come to dinner, Clara. We will talk. You’ll drink a glass of wine, and you’ll feel more like yourself after you’ve eaten.”

  Obediently, she rose. She smoothed the wings of her hair and resettled the combs. She followed him into the kitchen, where Nuncia was beginning to set out a lovely meal of mussels in red sauce and a salad of basil and tomato and mozzarella. She stood beside the table, gazing at the simmering pot, while Hannes found a bottle of wine and uncorked it. She accepted the glass he poured for her, and sipped it.

  She said nothing more, for the moment, but she was not done. She would not return to Berlin and a pack of demanding children. She would not risk trying to maintain Clara’s concert schedule, playing from memory reams of music she had never studied, encountering people she had never met but was supposed to recognize.

  She would go to Hamburg with Hannes. He couldn’t refuse her. And when he saw how much help she could be to him—how advanced her musical ideas, how quick her musical solutions—he would never want to part with her.

  She would make it work. The strength of her mind was a match for anyone’s. She would always get what she wanted, and no one could stand in her way.

  Not even her beloved Hannes.

  16

  The time lag seemed the more pointless because he hadn’t actually transferred. Kristian could not have made it to his room without Chiara. It seemed he blinked once, in the clinic, and when he blinked again they were at the top of the stairs. There was a low murmur from down the hall as Max let Braunstein into her room and settled her with the sedative Chiara had prescribed. Kristian turned in his own doorway to speak to Max, and then, it seemed, he was already in bed, in tee shirt and shorts, and Chiara was bringing him a capsule and a glass of water.

  She had drawn the blinds against the rain-filtered afternoon light. The room was cool and pleasantly dim. Kristian lay back on his pillow after swallowing the pill. Chiara bent over him to smooth the blankets up to his shoulders, and he caught a whiff of some light scent. Her shampoo, perhaps, or skin lotion. He sniffed, and gave her a hazy grin. “You smell good, Doctor,” he said. “Like gardenias.”

  “No,” she said softly, with a small smile. “Gardenias are too spicy. It is lavender.”

  “Lavender. Delicious.” He turned on his side, and his eyelids began to droop. Without thinking, he caught her hand and held it. “I wish you could stay. The time lag—I’m losing track of what’s real.”

  “I am real,” she said. “And I will be here when you wake up.” She touched his forehead with her free hand, smoothing back his hair. “You should feel better then.”

  He squeezed her fingers, and he thought perhaps she returned the pressure of his, just a little. “Chiara,” he said sleepily. “I should call Erika. Or did I already do that?”

  “You will call her in the morning. Sleep now.”

  “Did I—did we have lunch together?”

  “We did.”

  “Did I—” He yawned, and the chaos in his head seemed to swell, to overcome him. “Did I kiss you good-bye, Catherine?” he heard himself say, and then groaned, releasing her hand, covering his eyes. “No, not Catherine. Clara?”

  “No, no,” she said, patting the coverlet. “I am Chiara, but it doesn’t matter. It will all make sense tomorrow.”


  He heard her leave, heard her small feet descend the staircase with their swift, determined rhythm. He rolled over again, and gave himself up to sleep.

  The sensation of Chiara’s cool, firm hand was still with him when he began to dream.

  He dreamed of the day he first walked into the voice studio to accompany a new student, a soprano. She was late—he was to learn Catherine was always late—and he spent ten minutes chatting with the voice teacher before she finally burst through the studio door in a whirl of long dark hair, a display of stunning legs beneath a very short skirt, and a flash of dark almond eyes as she begged their forgiveness. She tossed a stack of music on the piano, and threw her backpack onto a chair. “I’m ready!” she declared breathlessly. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. The bus was late.”

  “Strange, Miss Clark,” her voice teacher said. “Your buses are almost always late.”

  Catherine flashed a wide white smile, saying, “It’s the oddest thing, isn’t it?” and laughing.

  Kristian lost his heart in an instant. It was the essence of his dream, that rush of emotion that swallowed him whole, as if he had plunged into a lake of feeling he hadn’t known was there. He was nearly to drown in it, but he didn’t know that then.

  Catherine dazzled him. She wasn’t traditionally beautiful, with her wide cheekbones and mouth, her thick eyebrows and those tilted eyes. It was more that she was so sure of herself, sure of her path in life, and of her importance. She was the pampered daughter in a large family of sons. Her voice was glorious, a big, clear soprano. If she was a bit sloppy about her technique, she was still always vibrant in her interpretations. She claimed Octavia Voss as her role model, and when her teacher remonstrated with her that Madame Voss’s technique was the very model of classical refinement, a worthy successor to Garcia and Lamperti, Catherine flashed her grin and shrugged. “She knows what the music means,” she insisted. “That’s what’s important.”

  Catherine was as sure of herself in bed as she was in the studio or on the stage. He dreamed of that now, remembering how she liked to make love in the daylight, how she teased him to skip his classes, put off his practice, neglect his dissertation. Kristian dreamed of their lovemaking, and then he dreamed of their trip to Boston, when she sat at the bar at Angel’s for hours, listening to him play, laughing with Rosie, perching on a stool beside the piano to sing.