Irresistible Impulse (8 page)

“I could close the door while we play, if you absolutely
hate
chamber music,” said Wooten, in what Marlene thought a positive surfeit of good manners.

“Not at all,” said Marlene quickly; although she was no fan, she thought this would come under the heading of “know the client.”

The young woman smiled, showing the perfect teeth of the rich, and returned the way she had come. Her shoulder-length fine hair bounced fetchingly. Through the open door Marlene could see that the room it led into was large, floored in polished oak, and held nothing but a grand piano, music stands, and two straight chairs, one occupied by a thin, angular-faced young man with long, fair hair and a violin, and the other occupied by a leaning cello. Wooten sat on this chair and took up her instrument. From her seat on the sofa Marlene could not see who was at the piano.

They began. The cello voiced the weird, unbearably pathetic harmonics of the Andante of Shostakovich’s
Trio in E Minor
. Marlene listened, at first repelled, then captivated, at last devastated. She was still dabbing her eyes when Edie Wooten came back into the room. The other two musicians were talking. Real Life had resumed. Wooten shut the door, sat down across from Marlene, and sighed, wiping the dampness from her face with a handkerchief. She looked as if she had just run a mile.

“That was incredible!” Marlene exclaimed. “Is that on a record?”

“Yes, but not by us,” said Wooten, smiling. “You liked it?”

“
Like
is not the word. I’m dog food.”

“Yes, it
is
a remarkable piece, isn’t it? Shostakovich wrote it during the war. Music to stack frozen corpses by. It’s what you write when most of your friends have been murdered, and the up side of your life is you work for Stalin, who killed them. The odd thing is, this … person, it’s one of his favorites. He wants me to play it. Actually, he, well, he
demanded
it in his last letter.”

“And you’re obliging him?”

“Oh, no! We’d planned to do the piece anyway. We’re at Juilliard next week as part of the New York Chamber Society festival. It was just a coincidence.”

Marlene took a steno pad out of her bag. “So. When did this guy start to write to you?”

A smile. “It could be a woman, you know.”

“Yes, and with a little practice I could play the cello like you. It’s a guy, Ms. Wooten.”

“Please … Edie.”

“Okay. I’m Marlene. About when was it?”

“Let me see. It must have started this summer, after we got back from Edinburgh. There are lots of letters, of course, from fans. I have a secretary, but I try to answer as many as I can. Most just ask for photographs. Then there are the critics, we call them ‘music lovers,’ people who have something to say about the actual performances. Praise mostly, in rare cases nasty—you’re not as good as … whoever. But this one was different.”

“How so?”

“Oh, it was personal.” A blush darkened the pink of her cheeks. “You know.”

“I don’t know. You have to tell me.”

“Well, like, ‘I could play your body like you play the cello. I feel your legs around me when you play.’ Like that.” She let out an embarrassed laugh. “It’s the position when we play. Women, that is. There’s that old joke, the conductor yells at the lady cellist, ‘Madam, don’t you realize you have one of the world’s greatest treasures between your thighs?’ And musical things too. He knows the cello literature. He writes lists of what he wants me to play at each concert, and of course, as here with the Shostakovish trio, sometimes he gets it right, and then in the next letter he praises me for playing the piece. He thinks I’m doing it for him. He says things like, ‘When you played the scherzo in the Beethoven
Sonato in A
, I knew you were playing only for me, my darling, our eyes met,’ and nonsense like that. And when I don’t play what he wants, he gets angry. Crude. He doesn’t want me to travel either. It’s like having a jealous lover.”

“I’ll need every physical object he’s sent you.”

“Oh, God, I didn’t
keep
any of it!”

“Well, please do in the future and hand it over. We need it if we ever get to build a harassment case.”

“He spies on me too,” said the cellist. She had twisted her handkerchief into a tight rope. “That’s why I called you. The letters are one thing, but the idea that he’s following me …” She shuddered delicately.

Marlene looked up from her notebook. “How do you know he’s following you?”

“He leaves things. A rose in my cello case at a recital. Notes in rehearsal rooms. I get phone calls and no one answers when I pick up. In one letter he said he liked my nightgown, so somehow he can see in my window, even though it’s sixteen stories up. And now I keep the curtains closed.” She made a helpless gesture. “I’m starting to be quite frightened, John Lennon and all that. Should I be? Frightened?”

“Concerned, I think,” said Marlene judiciously. “It would depend, of course, on several things. We have to determine if this guy is a genuine stranger or someone who has actual access, someone you know.”

“Oh, no, it can’t be anyone I know,” said Wooten with blithe confidence. “I mean, I
know
them, don’t I? I don’t know anyone who would do something like this.”

“Well, Edie,” said Marlene, in a tone usually reserved for explaining the ontology of the tooth fairy, “I didn’t actually mean your most intimate friends. Nevertheless, you have contacts who can get at you. The people who work in the building? The people who move you around and take care of you when you’re on tour? The musicians, the orchestra players, your accompanists? You say this guy knows music; it might be the place to look.”

“What, you mean people like …” She gestured toward the door to the music room, frank disbelief on her face. “I’m sorry, that’s ridiculous.”

“Well, I hope so,” said Marlene. “But you know, people do have secret lives, sometimes really nasty secret lives. You would be surprised at the number of quite distinguished citizens, many of them happily married, who every once in a while like to pay some lady to tie them up and urinate on their face. Or get a transvestite whore to give them a blow job. Or worse.”

Wooten was looking at her with a peculiar expression, which Marlene thought represented a war between her good nature and primal disgust.
(Get out of my life, you horrible woman!)
Marlene kept her own expression bland and professional, continuing, “On the other hand, you’re what’s generally referred to as a low-risk individual.”

“That’s nice to know,” said Wooten, her smile showing faintly again. “What would a high-risk individual be like?”

“They would be like the ladies and gentlemen who render oral sex to guys around the bridge plazas downtown. Prostitutes in general. Barmaids. Cocktail waitresses. Drug users and pushers. Promiscuous people. Party people. We expect these folks to get hit on by wackos. My assumption going in is that you don’t indulge in that sort of behavior.”

Marlene paused, raising an eyebrow, open to a confession, not that she expected one at this stage. Yet something had passed across Edie Wooten’s face as she recounted this list. A vagrant fear? Sadness? Marlene was about to ask a sharper question when the door to the music room opened. It was the Dutch violinist.

“Felix and I are off, Edie,” he announced in a mild, faintly accented voice. Wooten rose and offered a formal European embrace, linked arms with him and carried him into the other room, where she presumably said farewell to the other member of the trio, whom Marlene had not yet seen. In a few minutes she was back. She seemed to be having difficulty switching between her world, the realm of delight, art, and comfort, and the dreadful city Marlene had begun to sketch for her. Marlene had seen this reaction before. In fact, she could predict what the woman was about to say next.

“I suppose I’m having a hard time dealing with all this, Marlene. I mean, why me?”

“Yes, everyone says that,” said Marlene. “Why cancer, why car crashes? It happened, it’s happening. To you. The only question is, do you want to do something about it?”

Wooten sat on the sofa and rubbed her face. “What would you suggest?” she asked.

“Well, the first thing is, as I mentioned, you have to keep anything he gives you and give it to me. I’ll need a list of people who have access to your personal space—building workers, stagehands, record people, musicians, friends and relatives.”

“Will you have to
bother
my family?”

“Not at all. I just need a sense of who’s around you, who can get to you. They’ll need to be eliminated, and if they are, we’ll know we’re dealing with a true stranger. If so, I can work up a security plan. The point, by the way, is not to have you live your life under guard. The point is to find this guy and get him to stop.”

“However will you do that?” Wooten asked with interest.

Marlene grinned. “We have our methods,” she said in a German accent.

Edie Wooten returned the grin. She really had, Marlene thought, the most marvelous disposition. “No, really,” Wooten said, “how do you?”

“Really?” said Marlene. She shrugged. “It depends. Usually I talk to them. I reason with them.”

“And it works?”

“Oh, yes,” said Marlene confidently. “I have a very forceful personality.”

Lucy Karp wandered through the edges of Chinatown, growing colder, hungrier, and more miserable with each passing hour. Twice she started back to school, and twice she stopped, unwilling to contemplate the uproar that would be made over her defection: Mrs. Lawrence would have her piece of skin and then the chief gorgon, Ms. Lee, the principal, and then, worst of all, her mother would be called and come to school and all three of them would stare at her, and of course, she would have missed math and fallen even further behind.

Illness was her only hope, she concluded, a long, lingering debility that would baffle medical science—and excuse her permanently from long division. A stomach ailment would be best, she thought. Her stomach actually did ache, for it was now past her lunchtime, and her lunch was still in its box in her cubby back at school, and all she had in her parka pocket was a nickel and two pennies. She would have to upchuck, naturally, to make it convincing; then she could run back to school red faced, weeping, with vomit all over her, and say she had wandered away under the influence of a strange disease that had affected her brains and …

However, if there was one thing she couldn’t bear to do, it was puke, so she would have to really work at it. What was needed was some actual vomit to serve as an exemplar—the sight and smell would work their magic on her gut. Fortunately, finding street messes was rarely a problem in lower Manhattan.

So Lucy trod the crowded streets, looking in the gutters and in doorways, finding a good array of nauseating venues, including one bloated, stinking rat. She was gagging, well sickened, but still unable to bring up the necessary evidence. By this time she was on Canal Street, a familiar stretch. She caught sight of Tranh’s noodle shop, and at this sight, redolent of those precious afternoons with her mother, Lucy experienced the first sympathetic mental pang. As a result of her mother’s profession, there must have been few children of her age in New York as thoroughly indoctrinated as Lucy was in the dangers of kidnapping and as vividly aware of what losing a child meant. Her eyes stung with tears; she ran in desperate little circles, moaning. At last she sat on the curb and wept.

All this Tranh observed through the window of his shop. He came out and squatted down next to Lucy and said in rusty Cantonese, “Little Sister, what is the matter? Why are you crying?”

“Because—because,” answered the child in the same language, amidst the blubbering, “I ran away from school.”

“
Wah!
You ran away? Did they mean to beat you?”

“No,” answered Lucy. “I was afraid I could not do my lesson. I am a very stupid girl, and I feared to lose face in front of my friends. Now I am disgraced forever.”

Tranh pulled free the white towel that he habitually kept stuck in his waistband and gave it to Lucy. “It may not be as bad as that,” he said. “Forever is a long time. Wipe your face and come inside. First I will give you some soup with winter melon, noodles, and ham. Then we will think together about your difficulty.”

“I have no money,” said Lucy, rising, her stomach rumbling at the mention of food.

“That does not matter,” said Tranh. “You are a good customer.”

The school called Marlene’s office shortly before noon, and the answering service forwarded the call to her beeper. Edie Wooten showed her to a phone and went into the music room to play some Mozart to improve her mood. She had entered only a minute or so into that sunlit, ordered world when she heard Marlene shrieking from the other room. She put down her bow and went to see what the commotion was about. She found Marlene in the act of slamming down the phone. Her face was dead white, including the lips, which had formed a rigid line beneath flaring nostrils. Bolts shot from her eyes. She looked like a Medusa on a Renaissance medallion.

“Is something wrong?” Edie asked.

Marlene seemed to look through her. Then she took a long breath and said, “No. Actually, yes. A domestic thing. In any case, I have to go. I’ll be in touch. Work on that list of contacts. And don’t worry!”

Then she was gone.

Outside the building, Marlene did not wait for the doorman to whistle down a cab, but ran out into Park and waylaid one in full motion. It screamed off, with Marlene flapping twenties in the driver’s face.

From his vantage across the broad avenue, the Music Lover watched Marlene leave. He knew who she was and what she was doing in Edith Wooten’s building. He was much vexed. Whistling the opening theme from Boccherini’s
Cello Concerto in B-flat,
he got into his car and drove off to the south
.

Lucy finished her soup and brought the empty bowl to the counter. She sat on a stool while several customers came and picked up cartoned take-out orders of noodles. When the place was empty again, Tranh lit a cigarette and regarded his guest solemnly. He said, “Now we must decide what to do. The school must by now have found you are missing. They will call your mother. Can you imagine what she will think?”