They’d been calling him that since he’d climbed in the car: Mr. Gray. At first he’d thought it referred to his rumpled appearance, which was only worsening with the strain, the need for sleep. But he’d caught an edge of racial mockery in it too. Wasn’t it Cab Calloway, in his Hepcat’s Dictionary, who’d referred to white people as grays? But that was so very long ago, before these two were born. Christ, before even Middleton himself was born…
“I’m not playing,” he said.
“All I mean—”
“Turn on the damn radio!”
Marcus’s hand shot toward the dash and punched the On button. Middleton recoiled at the instant blast of menace, a lilting growl of bragging bullshit warring with a jackhammer bass track and droning synthesized mush, all inflicted at ear-splitting volume.
“Change the station.”
“Whoa, mack, you got a serious pushy streak.”
“Change the station. Now!”
Marcus huffed but obliged, fiddling through crackling sheets of white noise, punctuated by sudden twangy cries, garbled Bible-drunk voices…
Traci said, “You need to put a chill on, Mr. Gray. Break it back, let the little shit slide.”
Suddenly, the reedy cry of woodwinds broke through. A soprano lilting through a familiar bar of haunting Sprechstimme. Middleton shot forward. “There! Stop!”
Marcus looked like he’d been told to swallow a toad. “This?”
“Tune it in. Get rid of the static.”
“No, no. Taking us prisoner, that’s wack enough. You can’t torture us too.”
“Tune it in!”
The piece was Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg, 21 songs scored for five musicians on eight instruments, plus voice, with the lyrics half-sung, half-spoken, the first twelve-tone masterpiece of the 20th century. Incomprehensible noise to most people, but not to Middleton, not to anyone who understood, who could hear in it the last throes of Romanticism, with echoes of not just Mahler and Strauss, but Bach.
“Maybe you’re the one who should chill,” Middleton said, easing back in his seat a little. “You think your generation invented rap or hip-hop? Spoken word with musical background goes back over four hundred years. It’s called recitatif. Here, though, Schoenberg’s notes are scored, but in speech we never stay on a single pitch, our voices glide on and off a tone. That’s what the soprano’s doing. It’s left entirely up to her how she does it. Meanwhile, the instruments are conjuring up the landscape: there’s moonlight, insanity, blood…”
Traci was leaning ever so slightly toward the speaker, intrigued now.
Eyeing the Beretta with a newfound skepticism, Marcus said, “You a professor?”
“Sshhh.” It was Traci. The gaunt young coffee-skinned woman with glowing eyes and mussed Afro was rapt. “Act like you got some sense.”
Sulking, Marcus flopped back against the door, moodily scratching his scabbed arm.
Finally, they were quiet; Middleton had his chance to think. But the eerie music, with its tale of the moon-obsessed clown and his Freudian nightmares, only enhanced his dread. Where was Charley, was she safe? Who tried to kill him at Dulles, what was the man after? And what was waiting for him at 122 Fremont Avenue, in the city of Baltimore?
The possible danger to Charley only amplified the need to decipher the threat. His mind spun around and around like that, addled by the fatigue, his fear, thoughts careening against each other senselessly. Meanwhile:
Nodding toward the radio, Marcus said, “Sounds like the same old screechy shit, over and over.”
“Not if you understand German.” Middleton rubbed his burning eyes. “And you’re not listening to the accompaniment.”
“It’s edgy,” Traci offered, striving for a compliment, though she’d clearly lost interest already.
Marcus sniffed. “Sounds like some kind of secret code, you ask me.”
“Funny you should say that.” Middleton stared out the grimy window at the blurring trees. “There were rumors during World War II that the Nazis were using twelve-tone music to send messages to sympathizers in the American cultural elite. There’s no standard melody, people can’t pick out a wrong note—”
“Sounds like nothing but wrong notes.”
“Exactly. All the easier to hide a message in it. Who’s going to know when the music is off?”
He flashed on the Chopin manuscript in his briefcase, the one he’d thought the Polish authorities had wanted when they’d stopped him at the Krakow airport. His conviction it wasn’t genuine lay exactly in several passages of oddly discordant cadences, unlike the meticulously melodic Chopin. What if it’s a code, he wondered. What if it’s not the manuscript or the other music they’re after, but something far more valuable, something only to be found by decrypting the counterfeit folios?
Inspired suddenly, he reached down for his briefcase to check the manuscript — only to realize the briefcase wasn’t there.
No please, he thought. Dear God. He mentally backtracked to the St. Regis, remembered placing his cell phone in his pocket at the restroom sink, then shambling out to the bar, checking his ravaged, hopelessly memorable reflection in the mirror before dropping the cell phone into his briefcase, snapping it shut. Had he then just wandered off without it? How dementedly absent-minded. It was one more sign of how addled, scattered — moonstruck, like mad Pierrot — he’d become.
“Turn the car around.”
Traci glowered over her shoulder. “Come again?”
“Turn the car around! We’re going back to the hotel.”
The two hapless thieves glanced back and forth. Marcus said, “Check out your eyes, mack.”
Traci chimed in, “You beginning to scare me, Mr. Gray.”
Middleton lifted the Beretta, placed the tip of the barrel against the back passenger-side window, and pulled the trigger. The thundering report in the small car, topped by the piercing hiss of shattered glass, deafened him again. Traci opened her mouth in a silent scream, hunching forward in terror as she fumbled to maintain hold of the steering wheel. Marcus clutched his head, staring at the gun with wide-eyed dread. The burnt sulfur smell of cordite, fanned by the sudden gust of black wet summer heat, finally masked the stench of the car’s moldering interior.
Middleton reached forward, clutched Marcus’s collar with his free hand while jabbing the pistol forward. As before at the airport, every sound came swathed in invisible muck, and yet from somewhere deep within his thrumming skull he heard the underwater roar of his own words, shouted at Traci: “I said turn the car around or I swear to God I’ll kill him — I’ll kill him, understand? Right here. I’ll kill you too.”
Struggling weakly in Middleton’s grip, Marcus started to tremble uncontrollably. Reaching across the car, Traci tried to soothe him, the lilt of her gentling words finally beginning to register as, with a hateful glance over her shoulder, she merged right to make the coming exit.
Gradually, even the crackling radio, the abstract insistence of Pierrot Lunaire, returned. Middleton wondered: Who have I become?
Conrad the bartender held the manuscript, paging through it gingerly. It seemed very old — the paper faded and brittle, the notations handwritten, not printed like the ones he’d bought Jennifer before. She’d love this, he thought, feeling a surge of inner heat. Chopin. She’ll throw her arms around his neck, press her cheek to his.