“I cannot describe anything more horrible than seeing her face as she realized what had happened. She died very quickly. I cannot describe…” A funny distance came over the German’s undistinguished little face. “And yet, gentlemen, I do not know that I have ever played better. I felt I was playing for her.”
The story they eventually teased out of Muller was much longer than this, and went back to the history of his initial meeting with Katharina Schiller in Berlin. There were a hundred details that Nicholson pursued, while Muller was in a cooperative mood: how Greville had helped, how the pianist had hidden Miss Schiller’s body.
The essentials of the tale never deviated from the original version, first to last, and finally, Nicholson, sighing, said, “Regardless of intent, I must inform you that you are under arrest.”
Muller stood up immediately and drank the rest of the brandy. “Of course. Let us go now. The hour is late.”
They left. In order to depart from the baths, they passed back through the rooms of the bathhouse in reverse order.
Muller joined uncomplainingly in this unusual procession. Only when they were in the antechamber to the baths did he pause. “Mr. Muller?” said Lenox.
They all followed his gaze, which was trained on a pianoforte in the corner, with a broken wooden back. “Gentlemen,” he said, “might I have a moment to play? It may be some time before I am seated at my instrument again.”
They looked at each other uncertainly. He was a diminished figure, and had come along so quietly.
Still, it seemed wrong. But Muller took advantage of their silence to go sit at the piano, and nobody stopped him. Testingly, he played a note. It sounded very uncertain — an instrument meant for drinking songs, jangly, probably warped by the steam in the baths, certainly not what he was used to. Muller ran his fingertips along the keys noiselessly, feeling them. It was only now that Lenox noticed the single remarkable thing about the fellow: his hands, which were extraordinarily delicate, long, slender, and muscular.
Muller began to play. He started with a few notes that sounded unrelated, but which resolved into a tentative chord. Another followed it, three simple notes. Then the initial chord again, held, sustained.
He played a short run from the first chord back to the second, then paused, then played a few more stray notes, seemingly unrelated.
And then suddenly they were in the midst of it.
Lenox had only an intermittent relationship with music, but he was enthralled. As Muller played, the room, the world, were transformed. The unassuming little German seemed to melt into the piano, his body wholly connected to it. The music was fluid, major, then minor, irreducibly magical.
“Bach,” murmured Dallington, who knew more about the subject than Lenox did. “For organ, usually. A variation.”
Muller played on and on, and even Cartwright, who had taken the heat of the baths worse than the rest of them, couldn’t pull his eyes away. Thurley’s mouth hung open. As for Lenox — well, as the music went on he felt as if he were in a room with everyone he had ever loved, his brother, his parents, Lady Jane, Sophia. It was the strangest thing. When Muller began to play more softly, in a minor key, it was almost intolerably moving. When he moved back into the major key, all of them felt the strength and suppleness of the emotion behind it, neither triumphant nor defeated. Loss — the loss of Katharina Schiller — was present in all of the notes, but so was life, the force of life.
At last he began to soften his playing back toward those first chords, the notes quieter and quieter, fewer and fewer.
When he had finished there were tears in Dallington’s eyes. “My goodness,” he said.
Muller let his hands rest silently on the piano for a moment, and then he stood up. Lenox would never forget the look on his face. He looked renewed, not exhausted. He bowed. “Thank you,” he said, and then, after only a few seconds, he was again the absurd little German man he had been before he played.
Genius! Who could explain it?
In the front room they met Polly and Pointilleux, who had been listening to the piano music, too. They watched Nicholson and Cartwright put Muller into a police dray, promising they would call in the morning to inquire after his status.
“He did it, then?” said Polly.
“Yes, he admitted it straightaway,” said Dallington.
She shook her head. “How beautiful that music was, though.”
“Was it Pascal who said that all of man’s miseries come from not being able to sit alone quietly in a room?” said Lenox.
“Very odd. Still, the good news is that we shall be famous throughout Britain tomorrow, fellows. We found him.”
“And thoroughly routed LeMaire,” said Dallington.
Yet none of them could feel quite as enthusiastic as they ought to, watching the dray — and after they parted, agreeing to meet early the next morning, Lenox, for his part, carried that melancholy all the way home, hoping that Lady Jane, who could always cheer him up again, would still be awake.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Two weeks later it was truly winter at last, and Lenox, more fool he, was sitting outside on a public bench near Wallace Street very early in the morning, as slow, heavy snowflakes drifted down in the windless air, whitening the awnings, dotting the streets. He was warmly bundled, though, and the company was fair: Graham sat next to him, just as deeply buried in warm cloaks and wrappers and gloves, only their eyes and mouths exposed to the cold. Between them on the bench was a large stone bottle of hot tea that Lenox had brought, from which they frequently replenished their small tin cups.
“There he goes, meeting that gentleman in the carriage,” said Graham.
“Damn him,” said Lenox.
“The third time.”
They watched as Obadiah Smith stood at the door of the carriage for a few moments, then, after receiving a piece of paper, ducked back into the begrimed public house that served as his headquarters — the sort of backstreet establishment, not uncongenial, that would put your cut of beef on the gridiron if you bought a drink, and bring it to you with mustard and walnut ketchup.
“What is he doing, I wonder?” Lenox asked for the tenth time.
“All three carriages have been well appointed.”
“I noticed.”
Smith was a long-term quarry of Lenox’s, a score he intended to settle on his own time, and this sort of casual ongoing observation of him wasn’t unpleasant, a piece of the puzzle, not a moment of urgent action. The afternoon before, Graham had asked him to breakfast, and Lenox had invited him instead on this escapade — a dirty trick, to be sure, except that Graham had always enjoyed this extracurricular aspect of his work, when he’d been Lenox’s butler, and they’d had the better part of an hour to talk.
“Back to the subject we were discussing — spring, you are fairly sure?” asked Lenox.
“I think so,” said Graham.
“In that case we will have the supper outdoors.”
“Supper?” Graham said, raising his eyebrows.
“Myself, Jane, you, Miss Winston of course, McConnell, Dallington, Lord Cabot—” Cabot was an old political ally of Lenox’s, in failing health but still stubbornly sociable, who had become extremely intimate with Graham in the past year—“and anyone else you care to invite.”