The Eighty-eighth Key Ch. 26

Part IV

Chapter 26

____________________________________

As soon as the Israeli C-9 was 'wheels up' Callahan walked forward, and was surprised to find a complete operating room just forward of the wings; two surgeons were working on "Mickey" Rooney while a nurse finished bandaging the wounded Army Ranger. Harry looked-on through a little plastic window set in a metal door, completely mesmerized that surgeons were working on an airplane...in flight. He stood there until Rooney appeared to be 'out of the woods' - then he walked back to Colonel Goodman's seat and stood there, waiting for him to look up - or in some other way acknowledge his presence.

"Sit down, Harry," the Colonel said after a few minutes. He had not once looked up, which Harry found annoying.

"So, you were in Japan?"

"Yes. And I spoke with your father."

"Really? What about?"

"Lots of things, really, but first on my mind was his safety...and yours."

"His safety?"

"Yes. What we've uncovered so far is astonishing in its depth and complexity. Not only law enforcement agencies, but as you discovered, a whole new ecosystem of criminal enterprises, and all of them set up by this Escobar character. Astonishingly, we've found Escobar's 'fingerprints' on new operations showing up in Florida, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, and New Jersey; more troubling for us is that within the past week we've uncovered his agents operating in Marseilles, Istanbul, and Beirut. We have agents trying to run down possible new evidence that Escobar is funneling money to Arafat and the PLO, and if this is true then we are all in for a world of hurt."

"Swell."

"Yes. Swell, indeed. Very well put, Harry."

"You know what I mean."

"Yes, I suppose I do. But more to the point, just about everyone in the Bay Area knows where you live now, and even more to the point, they know where your father lives, too; I'm simply not prepared to leave him staked out on his front lawn like a tethered goat left to draw in the predators. No, I want him with us for the foreseeable future."

"With...us?"

"The team."

"Speaking of? Where's Stacy?"

"On the Jetstar. She left Boston about an hour ago."

"Did she...?"

"Yes, the suspected mole in the Bureau is no more."

"Jesus."

"Yes, just so. And I doubt she'll return to work there anytime soon."

"You mean like forever, don't you?"

Goodman shrugged. "Perhaps. I just don't know, and it's far too soon to tell."

"What will she do?"

"I'll offer her employment with us, of course. A new life, if she wants it."

"So, where am I headed?"

"To the compound."

"Listen, Goodman, I told you I'm not going to see her again."

"And you won't, my boy. Now, I want you to listen to me very carefully..."

And the colonel talked to Harry for an hour or so, told him about his mother's passing, and Avi's, and that after they arrived in Tel Aviv he would meet with lawyers to settle their estates. For now, the Israeli government was extending his use of the residence in the compound for the teams' purposes, and Avi's house in Davos was Harry's now - should he want it. They talked about von Karajan's conducting his mother's final piece, the Fourth Piano Concerto, in a few months time, in June. And how the government hoped that Harry would attend...

But Goodman noticed a subtle transformation while he talked to Callahan. His eyes had cleared, his shoulders stiffened like he was preparing to assume new burdens, and yet he had not spoken much...

"After all the legal documents have been presented to you, Harry, Avi instructed me to give you further instructions...but these will not be in writing. All I can tell you is that they are important. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"

"Yes, Colonel."

"Call me Ben from now on, would you? You and I will necessarily be in close proximity for the foreseeable future, and we'll have no further use for unnecessary formalities..."

"I take it you and Avi were friends?"

"Yes, from the time we arrived in Palestine. We have been through much together."

"What about my dad?"

"We are making arrangements to remove him from the California when she docks in Honolulu. He should be with us by the weekend."

"And he knows about my mom?"

Goodman nodded, took a deep breath.

"How did he take it?"

"Like a man, Harry."

"What does that mean?"

"The news crushed him, but that only made him stand taller."

Harry chuckled. "You sound like John Wayne."

Which caused Ben to lean back and sigh. "An interesting man, Mr. Wayne. I enjoyed his company immensely."

"You what?"

"Are you familiar with the film 'Cast a Giant Shadow?'"

"No."

"I'm not at all surprised. Mr. Wayne helped the producer secure financing for the project, and Avi and myself worked with him in another capacity. I suggest you see the film someday. You might appreciate those events a little better...what life was like after the war. And after the U.N. mandate."

"Avi never talked about it."

"No. He wouldn't have found that seemly."

"Mind if I ask you a question?"

"Of course not."

"What's this all about?"

"Hate."

"Hate?"

"Yes, simply that and nothing more."

"How so?"

"Hate is the most powerful emotion on earth, Harry, because it is so easily manipulated. Hate is a useful emotion, especially for those who seek to manipulate entire nations. Hitler divided the Germans using a dormant hatred of Jewish culture as his wedge. Just a few years ago in America, George Wallace used hatred of Blacks as his wedge. Stalin used Russian hatred of Germans to arouse fear and mobilized an entire country for war...and so it goes, on and on and on. Now the Arabs hate us for asserting control over our homeland because in the process we pushed the Palestinians off some land. The sorrow is that Arabs will accept this gift of hatred without reservation, and because of this Israel will be condemned to exist in a perpetual state of fear, and that fear will give rise to even more hate. It is a vicious cycle we are trapped in, all of us, all of humanity, and simply because we are so easily manipulated."

"But, what of love, Ben? You know, as in love they neighbor?"

"Love is not so easily established, nor even manipulated. In fact, our love is rarely given."

Harry sighed. "Tell me about Avi."

And Ben shrugged. "I wouldn't even know where to begin."

"I'd like to know the reasons my mother left us and returned to him."

And Harry watched the sudden curtain that fell over Goodman's face. Total evasion, a willingness to conceal. And perhaps a willingness to kill in order to preserve a hidden truth.

"I'm not sure there is anything helpful I could tell you about those events, Harry, but perhaps you'll learn more from the lawyers. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have urgent matters that I must attend to..."

__________________________________

Callahan and the team did in fact move into the compound, but not for long.

After Stacy arrived she was on the phone with Jim Parish; he arrived a few days later. They disappeared into a bedroom and were rarely seen. Sam Bennett met the team at the airbase outside of Tel Aviv, and he was always seen with 'the Kildares' and several other members of Goodman's commando team. Sam's wife Fran was waiting for him at the compound and they could often be found sitting in the shade by a swimming pool, holding hands and talking about how they might put their lives back together.

Frank Bullitt and Cathy seemed the most upset by recent events; she wanted her life back...all of it. Her house in the Sea Ranch, her job at the firm...because it seemed all that had been taken from her and most of all she resented Bullitt for everything that had happened to her. Over the course of a few days Harry watched as the two drifted apart, at first gently but soon between painful bouts of her sudden, unpredictable anger.

Harry's trips to settle the estate were lonely affairs. Dry, stale talks about money and property, yet he suddenly found himself a very wealthy man. Avi had dozens of bank accounts in Switzerland, France, and Germany, each literally with balances in the tens of millions of dollars. He also now owned an impressive chalet in Davos, so of course, the next thing that came to mind was Sara...and how they had left things. Curiously, Harry now also owned a majority interest in The Rosenthal Music Company, with stores in Copenhagen and San Francisco, and he had no idea what to make of this, or even how to proceed. Even his mother's old home in Denmark was now his...!

Once his father arrived, Harry sat with him in Avi's lawyers' offices for hours on end, and together they arrived at a plan. Harry and his father would fly to Copenhagen and meet with the minority owners of the music business and devise a plan moving forward, then Harry would go - alone - to Davos and see how Sara was doing.

And now that he had the means, he engaged contractors to repair Cathy's house in Sea Ranch because, after all, it was his inexperience that had devastated the structure. And somehow, someway, he knew he had to repair Frank and Cathy's relationship. If only because all this had happened because of him.

"Because of me?" he asked himself one morning in Avi's lawyer's office. Or was it, in the end, just as Ben had said? Had not Hate become the master of all their destinies?

"If so, can I really fix things?"

Because now there was one more profoundly important question hanging over all their lives.

The vigilantes and the emerging connections to Pablo Escobar.

None of them would be safe in The City going forward, at least not until this new cartel was dismantled, or at least severely hurt. But realistically, Ben advised, they'd all be at risk almost anywhere in the world they chose to go, because Escobar's tentacles reached everywhere.

"You should all settle here," Ben advised.

But Harry had simply shaken his head. "I'm a Californian, Ben, through and through. I wouldn't know what to do with life here"

"California is a remarkable place," Ben conceded. "I envy you, in a way. So, when are you off to Copenhagen?"

"Tomorrow."

"Ah. Would you mind some company?"

"Dad is coming with me."

"You'll be staying at the Schwarzwald house?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Well then, I'd better come along. There are things there only Avi and I knew about, and I will need to show you."

"Alright."

"And then to Davos, I assume? Will you keep the chalet, or have you changed your mind?"

"For the time being, yes, I'll keep it."

"Excellent. Avi would be so happy to hear that. What of the girl?"

Harry shrugged.

"Shall I look into her condition?"

"Can you do that?"

"Of course, sir."

And with that one exchange Benjamin cemented his relationship to Harry, just as Avi had told him it would. "Because, my friend, he is the son I should have had...and you must treat him as such..."

The three of them left for Zurich the next morning. They made their connecting flight to Copenhagen with just minutes to spare...

________________________________

Harry walked up the ornate mahogany stairs to his mother's old room; he found that the room occupied most of the top floor of the old house, and from the first moment he entered her father's home he found that everything about it seemed familiar, yet in the oddest way possible.

She had talked about her life growing up in this room, about living in this magical city, all in a home filled with stories about fairy tales and little mermaids on rocks in the harbor...and of her father's very cultured upbringing and how he bestowed that gift upon her.

Yet none of it had made much sense to Harry, especially not as a little boy growing up in Potrero Hills, California, all her tales taking place so very far away from the things he knew...

He walked into her bedroom and discovered it had been kept much as might have been fifty years ago. He went to the huge window and looked out over a sea of red-tile rooftops that he'd heard about so often, with the harbor and the sea not so far away that a little girl's imagination could be kept from such overwhelming temptation.

He stood there for hours, and it felt to his father that Harry was soaking it all in, absorbing quite literally everything in view - like his son was suddenly thirsting for some sort of lasting connection to his mother.

'How odd,' Lloyd thought. 'To turn away from her while she was alive, and then...this...'

As afternoon turned to evening Harry went to a light switch and turned on the lights, then he walked to a bookshelf and ran his hands across the spines of the books he found there...until...

...his fingers found one that seemed to call out to him...

It was a book by Hans Christian Andersen, and though he couldn't quite make out the title he could tell that this book, among all the others on her shelves, had been read the most over the years.

So he began to pull it out and take a look.

But when he saw the cover he dropped the book.

He felt his hands...shaking uncontrollably.

Then he knelt beside the book and picked it up, carrying it to the light.

On the cover was an old man in a cape, and in the old man's hand was a cane. Harry looked closer still and saw pulsing veins of silver inside the cane, and the man was holding the cane like an orchestral conductor might hold a baton...

And in the distance? A storm over the ocean, the vast seascape a livid scene roiled by lightning and cresting waves, and to Harry the image seemed to suggest the old man in the cape was conducting a symphony within those clouds...

And then he remembered how his mother sat before her piano when storms crossed the bay, and how her playing seemed to develop strength as those storms grew near...

And as suddenly his mind roamed to Davos, to the old physician in the cape who had helped him after his sudden fall on the ice.

'This is the same man!' Callahan thought. 'The very same man who treated me on that magic mountain...'

"But how? How could that be?"

He felt a presence in the room and whirled around...

...and found nothing there...

So, with his mother's book in hand he left the room and walked down two flights of stairs to the ground floor, and he found his father sitting at a desk in what must have been Imogen's father's study, and Lloyd seemed enthralled by something he'd found.

"Dad?"

Startled, Lloyd looked up at his son. "Fascinating stuff, Harry. Correspondence between Imogen's father and Freud...most of it in English, too."

"Freud? You mean the shrink?"

"Yes indeed. As well as some notes written by Kierkegaard concerning the musical symbolism in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales. Fascinating stuff, Harry."

"Do you read Danish?"

"After a fashion, yes. When you were a toddler I found it best that I develop at least a working knowledge of it. It was easier to teach Imogen, er, your mother, English that way."

"Written notes? Isn't Kierkegaard kind of famous?"

"Yes, very. So when I found them I wondered why they might be here, and I think I've found a few clues. Apparently, Freud had them and sent them along to your grandfather, because, as far as I can tell, Freud was helping your grandfather make sense of a few key passages in your mother's first concerto."

"You're losing me, Dad."

"Yeah? Well, me too. I'm no scholar but even I can understand that Sigmund Freud had Soren Kierkegaard's notes on musical structures in Andersen's fairy tales, and that your grandfather was corresponding with Freud about the matter - because he'd found similar structures in his daughter's work. I mean, really, think about it, Harry!"

"Okay Dad. I'll take your word for it...you've found something important. The most important question right now is what do we do with the material?"

Lloyd seemed to think about that for a while, then he shook his head. "A part of me says we should get this to the relevant expert...some sort of university type, I assume. Another part of me says we should maintain control of this stuff, because not only is it important, it may well be extremely valuable. We wouldn't want to turn this over to an unqualified, or worse still, an undeserving scholar; someone who might cash in on it without carrying the research forward."

"Maybe someone at the music company would know where to look?"

"Perhaps."

"Where's Ben?"

"Sitting on a bench in the garden," Lloyd said, pointing to a door that was standing open. "Out there."

Harry nodded and moved that way.

And Goodman was indeed sitting out back, seemingly adrift in the last light of their day.

"Not many flowers in bloom yet," Harry said as he approached the bench. "Hope I'm not intruding."

"Intruding? No, not at all. Besides, this is your house now."

Harry looked around, shook his head. "Kind of hard to take it all in, I guess."

"I can't imagine what it must feel like."

"Hollow, I think. Like I see all these things yet they're all out of context. I didn't know my grandfather or even know he existed until a few weeks ago. I don't even know when he died...?"

"12 August, 1955."

"You knew him?"

Goodman nodded.

"Did you know much about his work?"

"No, but Avi did," Ben said, now looking directly at Harry. Then he saw the book in Harry's hand. "Ah, I see you found it."

"Found what?"

"Have you flipped through the pages yet?"

"No?"

"Well then, you'd better take a seat." Goodman watched Callahan sit and almost groaned when Lloyd came outside, heading their way.

"Hope I'm not intruding," Lloyd said.

"It must be catching," Goodman sighed. "So, Harry, open the book...to any page."

He did so and found notes written in just about every vacant space on the two pages. "What is all this? Do you have any idea?"

Goodman shrugged. "Not in its entirety, but your mother told Avi about the book once, and he passed along what he knew, or thought he knew, to me. They are, as I understand it, her interpretations of Andersen's books, but more importantly, her annotations lay out how she wanted to transcribe Andersen's words into music. Now the odd part; at least Avi thought it strange enough to mention to me. Apparently you will find passages in there that record - well, certain, shall I say unusual conversations. Conversations she had, apparently, with the fellow on the cover."

"The old man in the cape?"

"Yes."

Lloyd's eyes lit up. "Say, Ben, isn't that the man you saw on the docks in Osaka?"

"What?!" Harry cried. "You've seen him too?"

And now it was Goodman's turn to express surprise, and he looked at Harry anew: "You have as well?"

"Yes, in Davos. Right about the time I met Sara."

"Interesting," Goodman sighed. "According to Avi, the old man in the cape always shows up as a warning. At least, he did for your mother."

"But," Lloyd interrupted, "was he warning you? In Osaka?"

"I didn't take it as such, Lloyd. It was more like advice."

"Harry," Lloyd added, "what about you? Did he warn you about something?"

"No, not at all. He was a physician, and he treated me after I fell on some ice."

"So, not really a direct warning, at least under the conditions," Goodman said. "No, maybe his warning was more indirectly circumstantial...perhaps regarding the young lady?"

"You're assuming," Harry interrupted, "that the man was something other than a physician, aren't you?"

"I am indeed," Goodman sighed, then his eyes brightened. "Did you notice anything unusual about the cane?"

Harry closed his eyes and tried to visualize the pulsing silver inlaid strands once again, as they looked that day on the mountain: "Yeah. Silver bolts of lightning - and they seemed almost alive."

"That's what I saw, too. Just like on the cover on this book."

"I assumed," Harry continued, "well, it felt like he was about to conduct an orchestra...an entire orchestra hiding up there in the clouds...with that cane. And for some reason it felt like he, or maybe the cane, possessed an otherworldly power..."