The Memorist (3 page)

New York City
Thursday, April 24
^th
—11:34 a.m.

T
he intercom buzzed to life and Special Agent Lucian Glass frowned at the interruption as he looked over to check the building’s closed-circuit monitor. People thought nothing of ringing random apartments to get into the building because they didn’t want to search for their own keys, were trying to leave takeout menus on every welcome mat or were hoping to get in so they could roam the halls and look for unlocked doors. Even in New York it was surprising how many people were burgled due to simple negligence. But this time Lucian recognized the heavyset man standing in the vestibule peering up into the camera.

The rented fourth-floor studio was sparsely decorated with a battered card table and four chairs but overwhelmed with surveillance equipment, and while Lucian walked his way through it all to reach the intercom, Douglas Comley, his supervisor and the bureau’s Director of the Art Crime
Team, or ACT as they all referred to it, pressed the buzzer again.

Within seconds of activating the downstairs door, the droning stopped and Lucian went back to what he had been doing before: listening to Malachai Samuels’ cultivated voice broadcasting from the Phoenix Foundation, across the street, via a state-of-the-art ultradirectional microphone. Since last summer, the FBI, Interpol and the Italian carabinieri had been investigating the so-called reincarnationist in an effort to prove he’d masterminded an international robbery that resulted in the brutal deaths of three adults and the kidnapping of one child. The stolen objects, a set of precious stones, were purported to be the legendary memory tools dating back to the Indus Valley in 2000 B.C.E. There was no question Malachai Samuels was obsessed to the point of fanaticism with finding absolute proof of reincarnation, proof he might have hoped the stones would yield, but neither Lucian’s team nor Interpol had yet been able to conclusively tie him to the crime. Half of the stones had been recovered by the NYPD and returned to the Italian government but the other half were still missing. Lucian believed Malachai either had the walnut-sized rubies, sapphires and emeralds in his possession or knew where they were. All they needed was for him to slip up, just once.

“I think seeing the photograph triggered the music.”
Malachai was speaking.
“As for what happens next—that’s your choice. You can cross the threshold or turn away.”

“You mean go to Vienna and see this thing?”
the woman asked in a frightened voice.

Lucian had only seen her in a blur for a few seconds—jean-clad legs and leather jacket that looked supple even from across the street, perfect posture and wavy auburn hair framing her face—before she opened the door to the
maisonette and vanished inside, but in that short time he’d sensed both her strength and loneliness. If he were going to paint wind, he’d choose this woman to stand in for the invisible power.

For nine months, Lucian had been listening to Malachai’s conversations and phone calls and reading his e-mails. He’d heard dozens of children embark on strange journeys without leaving the Foundation’s nineteenth century Upper West Side building. Astonishingly, they arrived in distress and left soothed. But the woman in the office today wasn’t a child and the conversation was different from any Lucian had heard before.

“I’ve accepted the mystery of my memories,”
Meer Logan’s tremulous voice whispered over the electronic equipment.

Lucian’s ability to quickly grasp someone’s emotional and psychological makeup had started before his FBI training but Quantico had helped hone his intuition. Listening to this woman, he wasn’t sure why but he was worried for her.

“You think that but look at how much of your life, your ambition and your passion you’ve surrendered. You’re being held hostage, your talent is being held hostage by the fears and sadness you carry around,”
Malachai said with a new urgency.

Without conscious thought, Lucian grabbed his sketchbook and started his third or fourth drawing of that hour, this one of Meer as a child. The pencil moved rapidly and a little girl emerged with dark hair, eyes wide with terror, tearstained cheeks and—

The doorbell rang and Lucian put down the book to let in his boss as Meer’s voice came over the speaker.
“How can you honestly believe that if I see the box it could make a difference?”

“Triggers work the same way, whether we’re talking about past life memories or false memories, you know that. Here, I want you to read something…”

Comley walked in, heard Malachai’s voice, nodded in the direction of the equipment and asked: “Did I interrupt something important?”

“Not to our case, I don’t think so.”

Looking around, Comley grinned. “Like what you’ve done with the place since the last time I was here.”

“I’ve got some soda and there’s coffee—can I get you something?”

“The hostess with the mostess. Sure, I’ll take a soda.” Comley sat down at the table and noticed the sketchbook. He was glancing at the drawing of the little girl when Lucian put the soda down in front of him. “Who’s this, Mr. Painter Man? One of his clients?”

All the agents in ACT had law enforcement backgrounds but Lucian also had art school training: he was used to the nickname.

“An ex-patient, from what I’ve been able to decipher.”

“Do you ever wonder if you should have stuck with this?” Comley continued examining the drawing.

“My mother asks me that every once in a while, too.”

“And you also cleverly avoid answering her?”

Lucian didn’t dwell on his past but neither did he hide it. His art background helped him in his job and in his uniform of black jeans, black T-shirt and black blazer, he still dressed enough like a member of New York’s art scene to pass at a gallery opening. But that didn’t mean he talked much about his life before the agency.

He’d been nineteen years old, an art student at Cooper Union majoring in painting the year his future changed its direction. The Met stayed open on Friday nights and
Lucian and his girlfriend, also an art student, had plans to see the new Zurbarán exhibition. He was meeting Solange at her father’s framing store, uptown, near the museum at six o’clock after the store closed, and they were going to walk over together.

The express train hadn’t been running so Lucian took the local and that made him fifteen minutes late. When he got there, no one was in the front room, which was unusual, and no one answered when he called out. Without stopping to think whether or not it was smart, he opened the door to the workroom and walked in.

Solange’s body lay on the floor, inside a large, empty frame, her blood splattered on its silver arms. As he stared down at the horrible arrangement, a flash of movement reflected in the polished metal warned him that someone was there—someone was behind him, moving toward him—but he wasn’t fast enough. Lucian was only a skinny kid studying to be a painter. He didn’t know how to defend himself.

When the paramedics found him, Lucian had lost six pints of blood from four stab wounds and been left for dead by the thief. Except he was still alive. Or was, until in the ambulance, on the way to the hospital, he died.

It took the paramedics ninety-two seconds to bring Lucian Glass back to life and although he’d never discussed that minute and a half with anyone, he had experienced it. He didn’t allow that the near-death experience had changed his life or affected him in any way—if the world didn’t look the same to him after the attack, he blamed it on losing Solange in such a violent way. But within months he went from a boy who’d never been in a fight, to a man fixated on retribution and revenge, and the FBI was the sanctuary where he turned that desire into a career. Art
changed from something he wanted to create, to something he wanted to protect and rescue. Yes, he filled sketchbooks with unfinished portraits of people he came across during his cases, but how different was that from the way other agents took notes?

“You didn’t come all the way here to talk to me about my latent talents, did you?” Lucian asked.

Comley turned the book over to get away from the child’s sad face in the drawing. “I don’t like being the bearer of bad news but we’re shutting the case down. We can’t—”

“Why do you and my father keep trying to convince me this is all part of some great cosmic plan, that it’s my damn destiny?”
Meer’s strained voice came over the microphone and Comley broke off, unable to ignore the plaintive tone.

“Destiny just puts us on the path that leads to opportunities. What we do with those opportunities is up to each of us,”
Malachai answered.

“Yes, I know that’s what you think, but I think I’m too busy at the museum right now to go to Vienna.”

Lucian heard a child’s stubbornness in the woman’s decision. With an angry twist he turned down the volume knob and shut out the conversation going on across the street.

“I can’t justify keeping your team on this any longer without a break. You know how small our department is.”

“Let me work the case alone.” It was a request but Lucian said it more like an order.

“You’re not
working
this case anymore, my friend, you’re haunted by it, and that’s not good for either of us. No. I’m sorry. I’m shutting you down.”

Lucian walked over to the window and stared at the Phoenix Foundation. He’d been with the FBI for ten years, starting in the Art Theft Program and then being assigned
to ACT when it was formed in 2004 in the aftermath of the Iraqi looting after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Since then, he and his team had successfully recovered over a dozen precious works of art worth more than thirty-five million dollars, including a Michelangelo drawing and a set of rare coins from ancient Greece. He’d succeeded time after time and had known that sooner or later he would fail. But he didn’t want it to happen on
this
case.

While he continued watching, the Foundation’s front door opened and Meer exited. Pulling up her collar, she stood impossibly straight, facing into the wind coming off the park as if she were gathering strength from the gusting air, and then walked down the steps and away from him.

“What’s the date on my eviction notice?”

“Two weeks from today,” Comley answered.

“Two weeks,” Lucian repeated with determination, as if making both a bargain and a promise.

Vienna, Austria
Thursday, April 24
^th
—6:20 p.m.

I
f anyone walking down one of Leopoldstadt’s narrow cobbled streets had glimpsed Jeremy Logan hurrying up the steps to Number 122 Engerthstrasse they wouldn’t have given him or the artless building identified as the Toller Archäologiegesellschaft—the Toller Archaeology Society—a second glance. Not even the front door with its decorative lock in the shape of a peacock attracted attention. In Vienna, a lack of decoration would have been more noticeable.

Seconds after ringing the bell, Jeremy disappeared inside and went through a second door invisible from the street. As he passed under the carved letters on the entranceway’s frieze that revealed the brotherhood’s true name, the change from ordinary exterior to extravagant interior was drastic.

The Memorist Society, on whose board of directors Jeremy sat, had been secretly founded in 1809 to study the work of Austrian Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, one of the men responsible for the greatest dissemination of Eastern knowledge in late-eighteenth-century Europe. Of specific interest to the Society’s founders was reincarnation—a belief common to the newly discovered Hindu Shruti scriptures, the teachings of the Kabbalah, the mystery schools of ancient Egypt, Greek philosophers and Christian doctrine prior to the fifth century C.E.

The then undesirable land near the Prater parklands, in the midst of the Jewish ghetto, had been chosen as the Society’s location to both accommodate its many Hebraic members and keep curiosity seekers away. The architect had been given two specifications: the building should attract no undue attention and it should have at least one hidden entrance and exit.

Entering the sanctum sanctorum, Jeremy stepped into the vast assembly room where columns stood like sentries. An Egyptian mural illustrating the story of Isis and Osiris swept over the walls, and a gem-toned carpet covered the floor. The cupola ceiling was painted the cobalt of a night sky and stars—tiny mirrors that caught and reflected light from below—twinkled above. Every corner of the room was crammed with gleaming spiritual objects and artifacts, but Jeremy ignored it all as he headed purposefully
toward the library and the board members meeting he’d called.

“Guten abend,”
Fremont Brecht said as he put down his newspaper. Seated in a club chair as if he were a potentate and it was his throne, with thousands of leather-bound books behind him, Austria’s ex-minister of defense and head of the Memorist Society was a commanding presence.

Few members greeted Fremont as warmly as Jeremy did, but men didn’t make Jeremy cower; only mysteries he couldn’t explain.

“Will we still be able to make the concert or will this meeting take too long?” Fremont asked.

“We should be fine. And I have my car here.”

“Good, because I cancelled an appointment regarding next week’s security and technology conference for tonight’s performance of the
Emperor Concerto
and would hate to miss it after going through all that trouble.” He gestured across the long room to the middle-aged woman with auburn hair seated at a card table, busy scribbling notes. “Erika’s waiting for us.” Fremont was spry, despite his seventy-eight years and almost three-hundred-pound frame, and stood with surprising ease. Only a slight limp as he crossed the room suggested any concession to his age and rich diet.

In a niche, an ancient quartz Coptic jar sat on a plinth, a pinlight illuminating it with an almost iridescent glow. In a church, an object this precious would be in a gold-tooled reliquary but the Memorists’ relic had no power and promised no magic and the members took the jar for granted. But tonight, Jeremy stared at it as if he could see through the alabaster to the scattered ashes and grime that lay on its bottom.

“Does this meeting have something to do with our spy?” Erika asked when they joined her. Her amber eyes swept the room as if she was looking for someone who didn’t belong there.

“No, but I think you’ll be just as interested in what I have to say. Maybe even more so,” Jeremy answered.

One of Central Europe’s leading authorities on near-death experiences—NDEs—Erika’s personal goal was to have the scientific community take her Memorist-funded research connecting NDEs to reincarnation seriously. No matter that sixty percent of people in the world believed in past life regression, the establishment was not only suspicious of it, they were disdainful. Recently Erika had made some headway but believed someone inside the Society was spying on her when, for the second time in a year, rumors of her research were ridiculed in the press. Since then she’d been actively lobbying for Fremont to hire a detective.

“What’s on your mind, Jeremy? I really don’t want to miss the concert.” Fremont tapped one fingertip on the leather-topped table.

“Three months ago I was contacted by a woman who asked me to appraise a Torah that she’d discovered hidden in her grandmother’s apartment in the hopes our Judaica department would be interested.”

Jeremy explained how he’d walked into Helen Hoffman’s grandmother’s living room to view one treasure and literally lost his step when he noticed another, a dusty afterthought on a side table. Despite never having laid eyes on it before, he recognized the carved wooden box right away. For so many years, through long empty nights and wandering days he’d searched for this phantom, driven by the memory of his daughter as a small child with brown satin curls and doleful pale-green eyes drawing a facsim
ile of it over and over, exhausting herself and wearing down crayons as she struggled with the details while silvery tracks of tears stained her cheeks.

Jeremy had been astonished to stumble on an actual antique that was identical to the box his daughter drew but that had been a synchronicity he’d been able to grasp. It was the information in the letter he had discovered inside that box this morning that was unfathomable and that he was there to divulge.

“The box belonged to Antonie Brentano,” he explained.

When Erika couldn’t place the name, Fremont explained she was one of Beethoven’s closest friends, and possibly his Immortal Beloved.

“Beethoven was also a friend of two of our founders—he knew both Caspar Neidermier and Rudolph Toller,” Jeremy added. As the Society’s historian, he’d studied all the records stored in the underground vault. “In the process of preparing the chest for sale in the upcoming auction, I discovered Beethoven gave Antonie the box.”

“While I admire the labyrinthine paths you traverse in your investigations and enjoy hearing about them, I really don’t want to be late. You said something was hidden in the box?” Fremont asked. “What was it?”

“A letter written by Ludwig van Beethoven.”

In the hearth, a log cracked and hissed. Jeremy looked toward it and then over at the recess that held the Coptic urn before continuing. They all knew that in 1813, Caspar Neidermier died after finding an ancient bone flute in India. In 1814, his partner, Rudolph Toller, gave Ludwig van Beethoven that same flute and asked him to find the song believed to be encrypted in complicated markings etched on its surface.

“According to our records, that urn contains the pulver
ized fragments Beethoven returned…all that was left of the memory flute after he destroyed it.”

“But the letter says something else?” Fremont prodded.

“Beethoven wrote that he only
told
the Society he’d destroyed the instrument—that what he gave us back was an animal bone, dried out and smashed with a hammer. He kept the real flute, believing it to be too valuable to destroy and at the same time too dangerous to entrust to anyone. He wrote that he hid it.
For the protection of us all, and all to come
were his exact words.”

“Is the letter authentic?” Fremont asked.

“I’ll have an expert opinion by Monday.”

“Did he say where he hid the actual flute?” Erika asked.

“Not exactly.”

“Nothing is ever that easy,” Fremont said.

“Some manners of death,” she responded with a sad laugh.

“Beethoven wrote that he sent each of his closest friends one piece of information, a clue if you will, so that if it ever became necessary they would be able to pool their knowledge and find both the flute and its song.”

“You’re saying he figured out the music?” Erika held her breath.

“He says he did, and before you ask, yes, I’ve checked—without being specific—with two scholars about any finished or unfinished compositions for the flute that might be relevant and have the right dates on them. There’s nothing.”

“To go to all that trouble, what he found must have really frightened him…or…was Beethoven just paranoid?” she asked.

“He was cautious, easy to anger, but no, not irrationally paranoid,” Fremont, the musical aficionado among them, explained. “Although we can assume Herr Beethoven had heard the rumors that circulated when Mozart
died only six weeks after his
Magic Flute
debuted. Conspiracy theorists suggested the young composer had been poisoned because of the Masonic secrets he’d revealed in his opera. It’s possible Beethoven could have worried that if Mozart had been poisoned for revealing a secret legend about a flute with unusual properties connected to the cycle of life and death, maybe he should stay away from another one.” Fremont took a sip of his brandy.

Erika’s forehead furrowed again but this time there was a light in her eyes. “What if Beethoven found out the memory flute worked? What if the people who listened to its music and heard its vibrations remembered their past lives? That could have been what he meant by dangerous,” she suggested breathlessly.

Fremont set his snifter down so hard on the marble end table a fragment of glass chipped off and the sound resonated ominously. “Until we know if Beethoven actually wrote that letter, this is all just speculation.”

“The timing was right too.” Erika was too far into her hypothesis to stop.

“Right for what?” Jeremy asked.

“The genesis of Heinrich Wilhelm Dove’s discovery of binaural beats in 1839—”

“Erika!” Fremont interrupted with a laugh. “This is useless speculation.”

But Jeremy didn’t think so. The possibility of binaural beats—low frequency tones, stimulating brain wave activity—prompting past life regressions was something he’d first looked into when Meer had started hearing music inaudible to everyone else and Erika’s recent work suggested the possibility was a probability. More than half the people in her NDE studies had heard music during their journeys, and when asked to pick out music from a dozen
samples that came closest to what they’d heard, one hundred percent of them chose the sample imbedded with binaural beat frequencies.

“It’s not speculation. There’s a great deal of scientific data demonstrating the results of religious chanting, music, drumming and other sonic phenomena on the mind and the body.” Erika spoke more quickly now, racing ahead, intoxicated by the connections she was making. She believed frequencies similar to the ones people with NDEs heard could open the portal and induce the states of consciousness necessary for them to remember previous lives.

“If we found the flute and it proved that past life memories could be stimulated through sonic manipulation, we would revolutionize reincarnation theory. Not just reincarnation theory,” she insisted, “but time-space theory too. It would be a huge scientific breakthrough.”

“All thanks to our conquering Jewish hero here.” Fremont gestured to Jeremy.

“Jewish? How does that connect?” Jeremy asked.

“You’d be vilified as a twenty-first-century Pontius Pilate for proving that man alone bears responsibility for his eternal rest and it is within each person’s own control to get to heaven. The Kabbalah will be reviled. Jewish mystics everywhere will become ostracized again.” Fremont stared into his glass, swirled the liquid once, twice and then, lifting the snifter to his lips, drank the rest of the brandy down as if it were as smooth as caramel.

“The Kabbalah is hardly the only religious doctrine that supports reincarnation,” Jeremy said. “Why assume Jews would take the blame just because—”

“Fremont,” Erika interrupted, “are you actually suggesting we give up our inquiry because of a possible religious argument?” The scientist was aghast.

“Of course not,” Fremont responded. “I’m just saying that so much is at stake we need to take one step at a time, quietly and carefully.”

“Well, if the letter turns out to be authentic—” her voice regained its hopeful, yearning tone “—then the box itself might be a clue to where the flute is hidden. Shouldn’t we be prepared to buy both the gaming box and the letter at next week’s auction?”

“But the letter was hidden,” Fremont said. “No one even knows about it. You’re not announcing its existence now, are you?”

“Of course not. I had no intention of announcing it,” Jeremy answered. “Helen Hoffman has agreed to let me have it authenticated but hasn’t made any decision past that.”

Erika wasn’t paying attention to what they were saying; she’d moved beyond the auction to what would come next. “If what the letter says is true and the flute wasn’t destroyed, there might be a memory tool hidden here in Vienna. We have to find it. A memory tool…” she intoned reverentially. “It’s almost unimaginable.”

But they were all imagining it. And so was another member of the Society who, unbeknownst to them all, had been sitting in one of the darkened corners of the chamber since before the meeting began and had been listening intently to every word.