S.V. Redkin – The Great Conductor (страница 2)

Christine saw Dr. Korpacheff taking some notes with her silver pen in her leather-bound notebook and wondered which part of her story was worth noting in order to help Christine with her situation at work.

As a homicide detective, Christine carried a standard-issue, pocket-sized black leather notebook where she would jot down important highlights of the cases she was working on and significant details from interviews with people involved in her investigations. In her detective training, she learned that officers should always strive to take accurate and thorough notes. They should be made “as contemporaneously as possible.” The notes reflected what the investigator thought, what they did, and what they observed.

What is Dr. Korpacheff thinking and observing? Does she still have her parents around? Does she get along with them?

“Anyway,” Christine said. “My parents were quite successful, and they had no financial problems paying for my music trips and my teachers. They even got me a used Steinway baby grand piano that cost as much as a small car when I was ten. They had to take out the window frame in our living room to bring that instrument into the house. My parents arranged it as a surprise when I was away at my grandparents’, and I was so happy when I saw it.”

“Do you still have it?”

“I do.”

“Do you play it?”

“No.”

“Which brings us to . . .”

“Yes.” Christine smiled ruefully. “I was scheduled to play at an important music contest that was going to open many exciting opportunities for me as a performer, and I wanted my parents to be there to watch me. They couldn’t go with me because of a work emergency and promised to be in their seats by the time I was on the stage.”

Dr. Korpacheff nodded without saying anything.

“It’s difficult to see who is in the audience when you’re on the stage because of the bright lights. I played my piece well, and I remember thunderous applause. I stood up, exhilarated by my own performance. The piece was challenging—Trois mouvements de Pétrouchka by Stravinsky—but I thought that I did a good job. It was eerily ironic that my teacher and I had chosen it. I went to the edge of the stage to wave to my parents, only to see that their seats were empty.”

Christine took a deep breath.

“Anyway, when I saw they weren’t there, I got mad at them for missing such an important event in my life, and that’s when I noticed a police officer walking in and pointing at me while talking to my teacher.”

Christine remembered her knees getting weak and all the sounds around her turning into white noise. She still felt some of that every time she remembered that watershed moment.

“When I got off the stage, I learned about the car accident that took the lives of my mom and dad. They’d just parked not too far from the concert hall and were getting a bouquet of flowers out of the car when a big black pickup truck slammed into their Lexus, killing my father instantly. My mother lived long enough to tell the ambulance doctors my name and the place where I was performing before losing consciousness and dying later in the emergency room before I could get there.”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen.”

“What happened after that?”

“I stopped playing music and have never played the piano ever since.”

Dr. Korpacheff pondered for a minute. “Why did you say the choice of the music piece was eerily ironic?”

Christine gave another rueful smile. “It’s said that when writing that piece, Stravinsky had a picture of a puppet exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios. I remember fixating on the word ‘diabolic’ when it happened and feeling that I had brought a curse on my parents with my music.”

“What happened to the person who had caused the accident?”

“Don’t know.”

“Why?”

“They never found the car or the person who drove it. There were no CCTV cameras on the street, and the witnesses didn’t see the license plate.”

Dr. Korpacheff pondered for a moment. “Do you think your parents’ untimely demise was the reason why you joined the force?”

Christine readjusted her bracelet and looked at the coaster under her glass—the Eiffel Tower was still aiming at the doctor. It seemed that Dr. Korpacheff had not noticed it.

“I don’t think. I know it was,” Christine said and glanced at the clock. There were another twenty minutes to go.

Chapter 2

The old coffee machine made its usual gurgling sound, announcing that a fresh brew was ready. Sebastian Copeland, a thirty-six-year-old man with a pair of dreamy blue eyes, a long, disheveled mane of brown hair with a touch of grey, and a protruding belly, slowly walked into the kitchen of the rowhouse he shared with his mother, Lydia Hasselbach, to get himself his first caffeine fix of the day. It was six thirty in the morning—the time when he started his daily cello practice that sometimes went all the way to noon.

Unlike so many classical musicians, Sebastian was not a night owl and preferred to catch the worm. Another reason for getting up early was the lack of a stable job in an orchestra that would require a different daily schedule. He made his living by teaching cello to a few kids and getting some money from music stores for referring his students to buy their instruments. There were also occasional gigs—weddings, cocktail parties, fancy corporate events—that sometimes brought a bit of extra cash.

“Get me a cup,” came his mother’s demanding voice from the living room. “And don’t forget the sugar this time. Martha never forgets. You should’ve learned from her already.”

Martha Smith was a fifty-seven-year-old social worker who came three days a week to help Lydia around the house. An organization that assisted retired musicians had arranged this for her. Though grateful for Martha’s assistance, Sebastian did not interact with her much, as he was usually busy when she was around.

“Yes, Mother,” Sebastian answered absentmindedly, being used to his mother’s hourly requests, following them without even thinking.

He was going over Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in his head—in Rostropovich’s rendition, of course, for whom the concerto had been written in the first place—when he poured two cups of coffee and went to the living room to find his mother sitting in her favorite armchair with well-worn upholstery, watching the news on TV.

Lydia Hasselbach was a seventy-two-year-old wiry woman with an ever-judging expression on her face that made her look like a strict schoolteacher. Her salt-and-pepper hair was neatly tied in a small bun on the back of her head, there was a hint of powder on her parchment-like facial skin, and her hawk eyes followed every move Sebastian made.

“This bunch of idiots is going to ruin this country, and nobody is doing a damn thing about it,” she said, giving her take on the political report presented by a dramatically enthusiastic TV pundit, and took her cup. She looked at Sebastian. “You mark my words—the end of the world is near, and don’t you think about bringing any children into this satanic bonfire. You hear me?”

“Yes, Mother.” One part of his brain was giving orders to reply with generic answers to Lydia’s ever-negative comments on whatever she happened to watch on TV, and the other part was going through an elegiac second movement of the concerto where the cello played its second theme and became progressively more agitated, building to a climax in bar 148. He always enjoyed this change of pace after the marching allegretto in the first movement. A faint tremor of amusement appeared on his lips for a second and disappeared without a trace. He did not want Lydia to think that he was not really listening to her or, God forbid, laughing at her.

“That’s right. No more new children for this godforsaken country. They’ll be brainwashed and turned into zombies or cannon fodder,” Lydia said, drinking her coffee and getting agitated herself. “Only music can save us. Music can save this rotten world. Or could . . . I don’t know.” She looked at Sebastian as if to make sure he was not going to say anything contradictory and, seeing no visible reaction from her submissive son, she turned back to the TV. “Have I ever told you that I was on the short list for going to the USSR with the Cleveland Orchestra?” she said, without taking her eyes off yet another TV expert on the screen.

Sebastian, who had heard the story only a few dozen times, shook his head to indulge his mother once again, letting her dive into the past that was so precious to her.

“That’s right,” Lydia said proudly. “I could’ve been the first American harpist to play for those poor people. I could’ve changed history and, God knows, things could’ve been different if I had gotten on that tour.”

Sebastian knew better than to ask his mother—the former professional harpist who had stopped playing on the stage for just about as long as Sebastian was alive—why she had never gotten the position back in 1965 and what kind of things could have been different had she indeed been a part of that orchestra.

He knew that Lydia would get into a thousand reasons why the world had been unfair to her and how men, including “that loser father of yours,” ruined her prospects of becoming the greatest harp player in the world. Despite the fact that they both lived in the house that Sebastian’s late father, Stephen Copeland, had owned and left them, along with some money that paid all their bills, Lydia still considered her marriage to “the man who didn’t know anything about music” the biggest mistake of her life.