“Ms. Ciampi!” said this person, shaking Marlene’s hand with a solid, warm grip. “I’m Edie Wooten. How good of you! I’m terribly sorry about this mess. Honestly, if you can bear to wait, I’d be so grateful.”
Marlene estimated the woman’s age at about twenty-five, although she also might have been eighteen, so fresh was her face, so mild and untroubled were her green eyes. Someone to whom nothing really bad had ever happened, was Marlene’s instant thought, followed by a pang of envy, covered by a recoil of shame: nothing until now, or else she would not have called.
“It’s no problem. You said half an hour?”
“Yes, thereabouts. One run-through. You can wait here or use the phone, whatever you like. I could have Audrey bring you some coffee? A magazine?”
“No, don’t bother.”
“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.”