Ghost Music (20 page)

Kate climbed into bed and pulled the comforter up to her chin. “It's time you got some sleep, if you're going to fly back to New York tomorrow.”

“You're not coming with me?”

She shook her head. “There's someplace else I have to go first—somebody I have to see. But I'll be back in the city by the weekend.”

I climbed into bed next to her. “Helena—she's not really going to burn, is she?”

“Gideon—don't worry about it. Nobody's going to hurt her.”

“The way she was screaming—I can still hear it now. I was going to break the windows with a cooking pot, but her screaming broke them first. It was like what happens when
you
scream.”

She kissed my cheek, and then my eyelids. “If that's the way you remember it. But get some sleep, okay?”

* * *

By the time I had showered and dressed the next morning, David had already left, so I didn't have the chance to say good-bye to him. But Helena was still there, taking coffee in the living room with Kate. She was wearing a cream silk blouse and she looked unusually pale, almost faded, like a black-and-white photograph of herself.

“Kate told me about the French windows,” she said, as I came in. “You're not to worry . . . it could have happened to anyone.”

“Oh, yes?”

Kate said, “I found an emergency glazier in the yellow pages. He's coming around after lunch.”

“That's good. You'll have to let me know how much it costs.”

“Oh . . . don't even think about it,” said Helena. “It was an accident, that's all. Would you like some coffee? I'll go and get another cup.”

She went into the kitchen. I sat down next to Kate and said, “What did you tell them?”

“I told them that you woke up in the middle of the night and felt like a breath of fresh air. You went out into the backyard but you accidentally left the French windows open. A gust of wind caught them and they slammed shut and broke.”

“And they
believed
you?”

“There was no reason for them not to.”

“And Helena really had no idea that she did it herself, by screaming so loud?”

“She wasn't there, remember? So of course she had no idea.”

I was about to protest that I had seen her there, whether she was there or not, but I didn't really want to get into another argument about what Kate was hiding from me and what she wasn't, especially at that time of the morning. At that moment, anyhow, Helena came back into the living room.

“Would you like a biscuit, Gideon? Or one of these scones?”

* * *

I left for Heathrow airport around eleven thirty. I gave Kate one last embrace on the front doorstep. My taxi was already waiting for me by the curb, and because it was London, it was raining.

“I'll meet you back at St. Luke's Place, then?” I asked her.

“Of course you will.”

“I don't know. I have this very bad feeling that I'm never going to see you again.”

“You will—I promise you. This is only the beginning.”

“I love you,” I told her. “Visions or no visions. Rules or no rules. And there's something I want to ask you.”

“I know,” said Kate. She touched my lips with her fingertips, as if to stop me from saying any more. “But give me a little more time.”

“I'm that transparent?”

“I can see it in your face, my darling. I can feel it in your
resonance
.”

The taxi driver tooted his horn and pointed at his watch. “Cutting it a bit fine, mate!”

I kissed Kate again, and then I went down the steps and across the sidewalk. As I opened the taxi door, I turned around to wave to her. She was already closing the front door—but in the living room window, staring at me, I saw Malkin, or the white cat that looked like Malkin.

I hesitated. I almost felt like going back. But then I thought, let's leave this mystery to unravel itself in its own time, and I climbed into the taxi and closed the door.

* * *

When I arrived back at St. Luke's Place, just after seven that evening, there were more than a dozen letters in my mailbox, mostly bills, and as many messages on my phone, including an invitation from my mother to come up to Connecticut for lunch last Sunday. She had obviously forgotten that I was in Europe, which didn't surprise me at all. When I was a kid, she regularly forgot to pick me up from school, and she never remembered my birthday.

It was a still, foggy night and my apartment was as chilly as a meat locker, so I kept my coat and my scarf on and turned up
the heating. Victor must have been at home, because through the floorboards I could faintly hear Tony Bennett singing “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams.”

I called Margot and told her that I was home.

“I'm so relieved,” she said. “I had such a bad nightmare about you last night.”

“I've told you before about eating pizza just before you go to bed,” I told her, but even as I said it, I thought about Helena blazing and screaming in her backyard, and Elsa standing in the moonlight, glistening wet, and those nightmares had been real, as far as I was concerned.

“You were dead,” said Margot. “I went into this cellar and you were sitting on a chair, and your face was white. In fact it was so white it was almost
blue
.”

“Margot, I'm alive, and I'm fine, and if you want to take a look for yourself, I'll take you to The Pinch tomorrow for a drink.”

“Okay. I have to give a piano lesson at two o'clock, but after that. Did you have a good time in London?”

“I did and I didn't. I'll tell you all about it if you come over later.”

“Who are those people with you?”

“Nobody. Only Tony Bennett, God help me.”

“No . . . I can hear that crackling noise and somebody whispering. Is it Kate?”

“Margot,” I told her, “there's nobody here but me.”

“Maybe it's your cell. It's exactly like that whispering I heard when you called me from London.”

“I'm not using my cell. This is my regular phone.” “Listen, Lalo, I'm not being nosy. If you have somebody there and you don't want to tell me about it, that's perfectly okay with me. It's not that young guy you met at the Dance Theater Workshop, is it?”

“Margot
—
”

“Okay, okay. Don't get your panties in a twist.”

* * *

By the time I had finished unpacking my case and throwing my shirts and shorts into the washing machine, my apartment was a whole lot warmer, and I could take off my coat and my scarf. I popped open a can of Dr Pepper, kicked off my Timberland loafers and sprawled out on one of the couches. The strange thing was that I didn't feel as if I had been away at all. If it hadn't been for the Wasa Museum guidebook on the table, and the postcards of Peter Pan's statue in Kensington Gardens, I could easily have been convinced that the past few days had been nothing but a series of disconnected dreams.

It was still only five
PM
out on the coast, so I called up Dick Bortolotti at the DDB Agency and Jeanette Hirsch at Thunder Music and my old friend Randy Spelman, who was helping me to arrange the theme music for a new NBC comedy series called
Jack the Snipper
, set in a small-town barbershop someplace in the Midwest.

I was still talking to my L.A. agent Hazel McCall when I heard bumping and shouting below me in Victor's apartment. The Tony Bennett music abruptly stopped, and then there was a crash that sounded like a side table tipping over, maybe with a lamp on it.

“Sorry about this, Hazel,” I told her. “I'm going to have to call you back. It sounds like my neighbor is starting World War Three.”

There was more shouting, and then I heard a woman screaming. I sat up straight. She screamed again, and then again, and this time I was sure of it. It was Kate.

I couldn't think how she had managed to get back to New York so quickly, but that wasn't really what worried me. It sounded like Victor was yelling at her and hitting her and throwing things at her, and she was trying to get away from him.

I pulled open my apartment door and hurried downstairs. Kate had stopped screaming but I could still hear Victor shouting. I
thumped on his door and called out, “Victor! Victor, it's Gideon, from upstairs! What the hell is going on, man?”

Inside the Solway apartment everything went quiet. I waited for a few seconds, and then I knocked again.

Victor opened the door. He had a cell phone in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other. He was obviously still talking to somebody, because he said, “Hold up a moment, Ken.” Then he smiled at me and said, “Gideon! Back from your travels? What seems to be the problem?”

I tried to look past him into his apartment. “I heard screaming. It sounded like you two were having a fight.”

“You heard
screaming
?”

“That's right. Screaming. And yelling. And furniture falling over.”

Victor opened the door wider, so that I could see into the living room. None of the chairs or tables had been disturbed. The redhaired woman was sitting on one of the couches, wearing a blue satin robe. She was watching some TV show about movie stars' homes. When she saw me, she gave me a little finger-wave and called out, “Hi, there!”

“Maybe what you heard was the people next door,” Victor suggested.

“Well, yes, maybe. But it really sounded like it was coming from down here.”

“These old buildings . . . it's the cavity walls, and the air vents. Funny how sound can carry.”

“I guess,” I conceded. “Sorry I bothered you.”

“That's okay, Gideon. Glad to know you're so concerned. If you ever hear us fighting for real, make sure you come down quick, before Monica murders me.”

He gave me a toothy laugh and closed the door.

I went slowly back upstairs. I was convinced that I had heard Kate screaming, yet Victor must have been right. All that commotion must have come from the couple next door, although
I had never heard them before. Apart from that, Kate had still been in London at eleven this morning, and when I left her, she hadn't even started to pack.

When I reached the landing, I found Malkin waiting for me. She was sitting beside my front door, her paws neatly tucked together, and she was purring loudly.

“Okay, puss,” I told her. “Why don't you come inside for a can of anchovies, and tell me what in God's name is going on around here?”

Margot came around the following day and I took her to The Pinch on Sullivan Street for Guinness and shepherd's pie. The Pinch is a scruffy Irish-style pub: two narrow red-brick rooms, with a huge flat-screen TV and a well-worn dartboard. But the atmosphere is always cheery and boisterous, and that was just what I needed after my trip to Europe.

“Lalo—you've changed so much since you and Kate have been together,” said Margot. “You're worried about something, aren't you?”

“Yes, frankly. But I don't know what it is.”

“I don't understand. How can you be worried about something and not know what it is?”

As soberly and as factually as I could, I told her about my experiences at the Westerlunds' apartment in Stockholm and the Philipses' apartment in London. I told her about Elsa and Felicia being in two places at once and Helena Philips burning, and about Malkin, too. I wasn't sure why, but I was beginning to think that in some way, Malkin held some kind of key to all of this, like the missing piece of sky in a jigsaw.

“Maybe I
was
seeing things,” I told Margot. “Like hallucinations, or optical illusions. But I know I'm not crazy. I don't
feel
crazy and everything else in my life is perfectly sane and logical.”

“But Kate knows what this weirdness is all about? Or you think she does?”

“She's pretty much admitted that she does. But no matter how often I ask her, she flat-out won't tell me. Or
can't
, for some reason.”

Margot forked up another mouthful of shepherds' pie. “Maybe you need to give her an ultimatum. I mean, you have enough on your plate, don't you, without inexplicable hallucinations to contend with? Tell her that she
has
to explain what's going on, or else you're going to walk.”

“I've done that already. Twice.”

Margot narrowed her eyes. “And she still wouldn't tell you? But you still didn't walk? You're madly in love with her, Lalo. Don't try to deny it.”

“Okay, yes. She makes me feel that I can do anything. Some of the new scores I've written, since I've met her, they're so damn brilliant that even
I'm
blown away.”

“And does
she
love you?”

“I think so.”

“Enough to leave the vile and horrible Victor?”

I shrugged. “I don't know. She says she can't, not yet, although I don't have any idea why. Not ‘won't.' Not ‘doesn't want to.' But ‘
can't
.' How about another one of those Pinch Bull cocktails?”

Margot shook her head. “If I have another, I won't be able to play ‘Chopsticks,' let alone Chopin.”

We walked back to St. Luke's Place together, arm in arm. It was a sharp, breezy day and dozens of sheets of newspaper scampered across James J. Walker Park and clung to the fencing.

“You want to come up for a coffee or something?” I asked her.

“No, thanks. I have another piano lesson at four thirty, a little Chinese boy who actually plays better than I do. But I could see you tomorrow.”

I gave her a hug and a kiss and climbed up the front steps. I opened the front door, and there, waiting for me, was Kate. She looked very pale, and her pallor was emphasized by the gray
button-through dress she was wearing, and the gray silk scarf she wore on her head.

“Hello, darling,” she said, and reached out both her hands to me.