The Rules of Dreaming (21 page)

“You talking about Dubin?”

Lynch nodded slowly.  “He’s not a writer and he’s not a detective.  But he suddenly shows up and starts asking a lot of questions about Maria Morgan and how she died, then he drives away in his BMW.  What does that sound like to you?”

“Blackmail?”  Wozniak was incredulous.  “After all this time?”

“If you’ve been covering up a crime for seven years, a little blackmail is just a cost of doing business.  Of course Dubin wouldn’t be blackmailing you unless you had enough money to make it worth his while.”

Wozniak took a long sip of coffee as he thought about the implications of what Lynch had said.  “You think Avery Morgan killed his wife?”

“Not necessarily. There’s such a thing as a psychiatric coverup.  If you have enough money and someone in your family commits a little indiscretion like killing another member of the family, you can always get your doctor to dump so many anti-psychotic drugs into the killer that it actually makes them psychotic.  Then you can lock them up and avoid the whole criminal process.  No prosecution, no trial, no guilty plea, no publicity.”

“Then it’s the kid?  You think the kid killed his mother?”

Lynch smiled maliciously.  “The same little psycho we’ve spent the last week trying to flush out of the woods.  He killed the nurse and the librarian too.  For all we know this whole disappearing act is a fake and they’ve got him stashed around here somewhere until they can spirit him out of the country.  Or maybe he’s already out of the country.”

“And how does Dubin fit in?”

“Dubin got onto him somehow.  Or onto the coverup, more likely.  That’s where the money is—the coverup.  And who would that be?  Avery Morgan and his wife and the doctors at the Institute.”

*   *   *

As Nicole rolled into the parking lot she saw Dr. Ned Hoffmann hurrying out the front door with a suitcase in his hand, so preoccupied that he didn’t seem to notice her waving to him as she parked her car.  The Institute looked grim in the late November drizzle and there was something almost desperate in the way he threw himself and his suitcase into his car and drove away.  She was tempted to follow him but it occurred to her that his absence might make it easier to carry out her plan.  When she pushed open the heavy front door she was relieved not to be greeted by the snippy Julietta.  In Julietta’s place sat a fat blond woman she had never seen before.  She strolled past the desk and down the carpeted hall.

“Can I help you?”
the woman called after her.

“Oh!”—Nicole laughed and shot a reassuring glance over her shoulder—“ I work here.”

She stepped quickly around the corner and up a flight of stairs before the receptionist could say another word.  At the end of the upstairs hallway she found Hunter’s room unlocked.  Someone had straightened it up but nothing seemed to have been removed.  His books and magazines were still there, his compact disks stacked in neat piles along the walls.  There were no old fashioned records, not surprisingly since his equipment didn’t include a turntable.  He did have a TV and a video player and a collection of videos, which Nicole was about to ignore until the title of one of them caught her eye.  It was
The Tales of Hoffmann
, directed by Michael Powell—the same beautiful, surrealistic version of the opera she had enjoyed so much when she checked it out of the library.  What a strange coincidence! she thought.  But videos were not what she’d come here for—she was interested in records.  And there was one other place she needed to look: the patient lounge, where she remembered a turntable and a collection of long-playing records that no one listened to anymore.

Back in the hallway, she eluded the stares of a sour
-faced nurse and slipped downstairs to the patient lounge, which fortunately was not in use.  This cavernous room—where she’d spent much of her time with Hunter when she was here as a patient—was really more like a library than a lounge.  The walls were lined with books, which no one but Hunter ever read.  There was a TV and a stereo and of course there was the grand piano where three months earlier he’d given the surprise performance that was still reverberating inside and outside of the Institute.  Behind the stereo stood several shelves of old fashioned records.  Nicole picked through them one by one until she found what she was looking for:
Piano Music of Robert Schumann
, played by Alicia de Larrocha.  The record, according to Dubin, that had disappeared from Maria Morgan’s studio after her death.  Nicole squinted at it in the dim light.  Was it the very same record that Maria Morgan had in her studio—or just another copy?   No, she realized, this was not just another copy—it had come from the library and it was seven years overdue.  The due date stamped on the return slip was in the month Maria Morgan died.

Nicole could hardly believe her own good luck.  She ran over to the stereo and started to put the record on.  But then she realized there was no way she could play it here—the forces of law and order, alerted by the receptionist and the sour
-faced nurse, would soon be on her trail.  She slipped the record into her backpack and hurried back out to the car, smiling a warm good-bye to the receptionist as she passed.

She
could think of only one other place with a turntable—the music listening room at the library.  She dreaded going there, repelled by memories of Miss Whipple and her gruesome death, but now that she had the record she could think of nothing else.  If Miss Whipple were still alive she would have known how the record fit into the mystery, and in fact—Nicole realized with a start—maybe that was one of the reasons Miss Whipple was no longer alive.

The morning drizzle had thickened into a misty rain, and the cars had their headlights on, beaming their way through the downpour like vis
itors from another world.  The library parking lot was almost empty and Nicole found a spot near the entrance.  She was hoping to get in and out quickly with the record in her backpack, and without seeing anyone she knew.  But as she stepped into the library she came face to face with Peter Bartolli, who was hurrying out the door with an armful of books clutched in front of him.  They greeted each other with the quizzical smiles of people trying to remember how they were acquainted, but something in Bartolli’s dark eyes told Nicole that he knew exactly who she was.  “I met you here once before,” she said.

“Yes,” he nodded.  “I remember.  You asked me about
The Tales of Hoffmann
.”

She smiled and started to walk away but Bartolli stood where he was, watching her expectantly.  “You know Hunter Morgan, don’t you?” she asked, turning back around.

He bowed slightly in his old world manner.  “I worked with him for years when I was at the Institute.”

“He’s not a killer.”

“I know that.”

She lowered her voice.  “Every night—I say every night but it’s really during the day, that’s when I sleep—I have the same dream.  Hunter comes to my apartment and plays the piano
, even though I don’t have a piano. He plays the same piece he played at the Institute, Schumann’s Kreisleriana.  He plays until he comes to the same place in the music where he always stops and then he runs away.”

“And then what happens?”

“I stand there calling after him, but he doesn’t turn around.  He just runs farther and farther away.  And I keep chasing him until I wake up.”

“You want to help him.”

“I want to help him but all I can do is dream about him.”

Bartolli glanced around to make sure no one was listening.  “Dreaming is no idle occupation,” he smiled, reaching out and clutching her wrist in his thin hand.  “It’s the way you build your world.”

For a moment Nicole felt herself transfixed by Bartolli’s fathomless eyes.  She pulled away and he dropped two of his books.  As he stooped to pick them up she murmured a quick good-bye and made her escape, glancing over her shoulder in time to see him shuffle out the door.

The new librarian—her name was Margot and she was from a neighboring town—escorted Nicole to the music listening room and showed her how to operate the old-fashioned record player.
After Margot left, she pulled the record she’d found at the Institute out of her backpack, set it on the turntable and sat back to listen to the music.  It was the same Kreisleriana she’d heard Hunter perform several times, both at the Institute and in her dreams, a skittish, disconcerting piece that made you conscious of your breathing.  The music was building toward some kind of climax when suddenly—just at the point where Hunter always stopped playing—the needle hit a scratch and bounced back.  It bounced back again and again, repeating the same annoying notes, until Nicole lifted it off the record.  The scratch began right at the point where Hunter stopped playing and continued all the way to the end.

Obviously this was how Hunter had learned to play the piano.  And the mystery of why he always stopped where he did had been solved.  He stopped when he came to the end of the music.

But why did he always run away?

Chapter
25

I come now to the part of the story I’d been hoping I would never have to tell.  By the time Julietta and Gottlie
b flew off to Venice for their “Getaway Vacation for Two,” my symptoms had reached the tipping point: unbearable anxiety, sleeplessness, a growing sense of not knowing who I was—and finally the sensation, at all hours, that there was a radio playing in the next room in a language I couldn’t understand.  Someone or something was trying to send me a message, or to send a message through me to someone else—as if indeed, as Nicole had warned, I had been taken over by some external force.  Should I have tried to get help from Dr. Neuberger?  Should I feel guilty for what I did?  We all do exactly what we have to do, no more, no less, especially when it comes to the basic instincts.  Apeneck Gottlieb deserved no better than he got, though Julietta herself probably deserved better.  She was an innocent, in spite of her sluttish ways.  And Nicole—well, for obvious reasons I’ll say as little as possible about Nicole.  All I can say is that I wish none of it ever happened.

I arrived in Venice on a Thursday morning after a long, uncomfortable flight and scarcely two hours of sleep.  It was raining, as it always is at that time of year, and the airport was shrouded in fog.  I had booked a room in the
same luxurious hotel where the “Getaway Vacation for Two” was unfolding in all its unsavory splendor, with a choice location on the Grand Canal, and quickly confirmed that “Dr. and Mrs. Gottlieb” were registered as guests.  The mere knowledge that Julietta was in the hotel put me in a state of excitement that made it hard to think coherently.  And the prospect of a confrontation with Gottlieb—especially one where I would have the advantage of surprise and embarrassment—triggered a sensation of anxious anticipation.  Of course I’d brought my knife along on the trip, though without any intention of using it.  I removed it from my suitcase, wrapped it in a handkerchief and stuck it in my jacket pocket.  In retrospect that was a reckless and unnecessary thing to do.  But at the time all I could think about was how large and obnoxious Gottlieb was and how angry he would be to find me there.

That first day I spent the better part of the afternoon sitting in the lobby behind a newspaper which I could raise in front of my face if either of them made an appearance.  It was a gilded, high-ceilinged room in the style of a baroque palazzo, and the guests who tramped in and out had the bored, predatory look of habitual tourists, weary with the ennui of exhausted itineraries.  After nearly two hours I spotted my quarry: Gottlieb, unshaven, characteristically oafish in a baseball cap and a windbreaker half-coverin
g a New York Mets T-shirt; and Julietta, sensuous and faux baroque like everything else in the room, parading the spoils of what must have been an expensive shopping spree at his expense—a low-cut dress, a slinky raincoat, a pair of black leather boots laced up to her knees, and a necklace that sparkled like a string of diamonds.  Without glancing in my direction, they joined a group gathering on the terrace, where a motor launch stood ready to take them on an excursion.  When the boat had puttered a safe distance away I asked the ticket taker where it was going.

“San Marco,” he said, offering me a ticket for the next vaporetto.

The vast piazza of San Marco was teeming with tourists and I knew I would never find Julietta and Gottlieb in that throng.  Wandering past the campanile and the Doge’s Palace, I bought a pastry from a street vendor and made my way to the enormous domed basilica.  As I entered the church I was plunged into darkness, as if I had stepped into a vast, cavernous underworld, echoing with the muffled cruelty of time.  High above my head, like sunlight playing on the ocean’s surface, shimmered a mosaic of the Last Judgment.  Its reflection lighted my way as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, along with the hundreds of tiny candles burning in the chapels that lined the church’s perimeter.  There was St. Mark, there St. Peter—and there, suddenly, was Gottlieb, still wearing his Mets cap, stalking around the nave pretending to look up at the mosaics as he ogled the women.  Where was Julietta?  I raced through the shadows until I found her in the Chapel of the Madonna, kneeling in prayer—her head bowed, her hands clasped in front of her, her lips moving slightly, the light from the votive candles flickering on her painted face.

It was touching, but also a little shocking, to see her in that position.  I felt a thrill of sexual excitement tinged with jealousy and violence.  I wanted to throw her down on the marble floor and ravish her mercilessly, but at the same time I wanted to kneel down and pray beside her, I wanted to sense her warmth and feel her murmuring breath and touch her spirit.  Her promiscuous past, her flirtations with other men, the obscenities she whispered in Gottlieb’s ear—those I could deal with.  But this, this excited my jealousy and lust beyond anything I’d ever felt before.  She was suddenly more desirable than I could have imagined, more desirable than any woman could ever be.  I knew I would do anything to have her.

*   *   *

He wouldn’t be able to come over that night.  That was the message Dubin had left for Nicole on her answering machine.  She panicked when she heard it, pushing the “Repeat” button again and again as if she expected the message to change if she listened to it the right number of times.  He offered no explanation for not coming, and that troubled her.  Obviously it was something she’d said or done the night before.  Was it because she’d playfully mentioned him as a possible suspect in the killings?  No, he couldn’t have taken that seriously.  More likely it was because she’d unmasked him as a blackmailer.  Only a blackmailer would try to argue, even hypothetically, that he was above suspicion because he couldn’t be blackmailing someone for his own crime.  Obviously
Dubin was a troubled man, cynical yet tormented by guilt, and she was angry with herself for scaring him away.

Without Dubin, she sat in the dim light and followed the dark tangle of her own thoughts into the deepest part of the night.  She listened to the cypresses scratching the eaves in the moaning wind, the rodents scrubbing and scrambling behind the walls, the leaky faucet tormenting the bathroom sink—and strained, amidst all this, to hear a footstep on the stairs, the slow creak of an intruder who would take her out of the web of fear and despair that encircled her.  Just before dawn she imagined herself in the listening room at the library, putting a record on
the turntable.  The music of Schumann’s Kreisleriana rattled through the little room, then came the sudden halt, the scratched record insisting on its imperfection over and over again.  Hunter fled from the listening the room and Miss Whipple burst in, frowning as she bent over to lift the needle off the record.  Nicole ran out to the front desk and found Julietta sitting there, knitting a tiny blue sweater.

Nicole jolted awake and sat thinking about her dream.  It was incoherent, of course; it was a dream—all the more reason to think it had a meaning.  But what about real life?  Does anyone think
real life must have a meaning?

She reached for her notebook and started writing.  She became more and more agitated as she wrote, as if she was on the brink of a discovery she did not want to make, a momentous and inevitable discovery, like the knowledge of good and evil, that would make the space where she lived uninhabitable.  Everything that had been weighing on her mind—her dissertation, the murders, the search for Hunter, her relationships with Dubin and Dr. Hoffmann—gave way to the temptation to follow her thoughts wherever they led:

Freud imagined a dream censor, shielding us during sleep from the unwelcome attentions of the unconscious. But instead of a dream censor, maybe what we have is a reality censor that operates while we’re awake, filtering out the essential incoherence of the world so we can survive in our dreamlike state for another day.

She laid down her pen and cradled her head in her flat hands.  Tears welled up in her eyes as she read over what she had written.  “No,” she said, shaking her head.  She picked up her pen and drew a giant “X” across the page, canceling what she had written while leaving it legible for future reference.  Then she printed in bold letters at the bottom:  “KEEP FROM GOING CRAZY.”

When the sun rose she took a shower and put on fresh clothes.  She boiled some water for tea and toasted an English muffin.  When she was done eating she washed the dishes and put them away.  “Follow him,” she told herself.  “Find him.  Don’t let him destroy himself.”

She packed a small valise, carried it down the stairs and put it in her car.  Then she came back upstairs.  Before she locked the door, she poured a generous supply of dry food for the landlady’s cat and filled two bowls with fresh water.  Almost as an afterthought, she wrote Dubin a little note a
nd left it tacked to the door.

*   *   *

The next morning I rose early and slipped down to the lobby, where I learned from a solemn but accommodating room clerk that Signora Gottlieb (that was what he called Julietta) was already at the pool.  This being Italy, I did not have to make excuses to the room clerk for pursuing another man’s wife.  He could probably see the desperate gleam in my eye, imprinted there since I’d seen Julietta kneeling in the Chapel of the Madonna in those black leather boots laced to her knees.

She had come to the pool alone, decorated by a tiny blue bathing suit.  I hid behind my newspaper as she swam laps with surprising gracefulness.  On her lounge chair she had left her sandals, her towel and, of all things, a book.  The book was
Cujo
, by Stephen King, and when I picked it up her room key—it was the old fashioned metal kind, not one of those plastic cards that most hotels use nowadays—jangled onto the floor.  I reached for the key and thought about sticking it in my pocket.  But at the last minute I slid the key back under the book and shuffled back to my room.   How much trouble and anguish  I could have avoided by keeping that key!

A desperate plan began to take shape in my mind.   I slipped out into the fog and made my way through a maze of narrow passageways and bridges to the train station, where I rented a car and stashed it in the parking lot.  On my way back to the hotel I bought a dozen long-stemmed roses and left them for Julietta at the front desk, with a note that read, “5:00 o’clock in the bar.
An admirer.”  

At five o’clock I waited in a dim corner booth.  A few minutes later she sidled up to the bar and perched beside an older man who acted as if he’d been expecting her.  He looked rich and charming and sinister, with a reptilian smile, a high, broad forehead and a shock of graying hair combed straight back like Count Dracula’s.  The two of them flirted shamelessly as he ordered her a drink, stroked the back of her hand and lit her cigarette with a flame that he seemed to pull out of the air.  I sat quietly sipping my wine as he droned on in words I couldn’t quite hear or understand, and after about twenty minutes he pulled out a necklace of glittering jewels, which he fastened lovingly around her neck.  She seemed delighted with the gift but disturbed by the words that accompanied it.  After a brief argument she suddenly stood up and hurried away without a backward glance.  “
A più tardi
,” the man called after her.  “Later.  At the Casino!”

What a coincidence!  I thought, downing the last of my wine.  The Casino was exactly where I planned to spend the evening.

*   *   *

Nicole’s sudden disappearance left Dubin feeling more guilty and depressed than ever.  Two women were dead because of him and he desperately wanted to stop this nightmare before it got worse.  And now it seemed as though Nicole had been swept up in it and lost to the night.  It was her playing on his guilt—pretending, as if it were a joke, that he was one of the suspects in the murders—that
made him angry and frightened and kept him away that night.  He’d left her a noncommittal phone message and stayed home drinking by himself until he fell asleep.  He wondered whether guilt could reach backwards in time, drawing in all the causes and effects that swirled around an event.  If he was responsible for the deaths of Mrs. Paterson and the librarian—as he knew he was—then wasn’t he also somehow implicated in the death of Maria Morgan?  Where had he been on the night she died?  He couldn’t answer that question, though he could cite the date.  That was the year of his breakdown and there wasn’t much he could remember.  He couldn’t even be sure whether or not he’d been to Egdon before or even to the Institute.  When he woke up he wanted to see Nicole.  He wanted to tell her how he felt and see if she had any wacky theories that could explain it. He drank a cup of black coffee and drove over to her apartment but she was gone.  All he found was her note: “There’s something I have to do.  Back in a few days.  P.S.  Hunter took the record.  I found it at the Institute.”

At the bottom of the stairs Dubin came face to face with Peter Bartolli, who jumped back from the door like a rabbit and stood eyeing him warily as if he expected him to pounce. 

“Is Nicole at home?” Bartolli asked.  “I wanted to see how she was doing.”

“She’s gone away for a few days.  I don’t know where.”

“Out searching for Hunter?”

“I don’t know,” Dubin repeated, though he’d made the same assumption.

Bartolli stayed put, as if he expected Dubin to step aside and let him pass.  Dubin stepped toward his car and Bartolli still didn’t move.

“Did I pass the test?” Bartolli asked.

“What test?”

“To be able to buy the Offenbach manuscript?”

Dubin had dreaded this moment.  “I’m afraid that doesn’t matter anymore.  The owner has decided to sell it to someone else.”