“I wouldn’t know that, either,” Marietta said. “Look, Knave, I’ve been very careful about this. I haven’t told a soul—not friends, not close friends, not anybody. I don’t want to shake up the orchestra with it, either. And how could I find out about deaths of subscribers to other events, without bringing the whole thing out in the open? I only found out about some of ours—and only some—by noticing that the subscription turnover was awfully high.”
“How did you get these printouts?” I said.
Marietta shrugged. “I’ve got a friend in Vital Statistics; I told her I was thinking of doing a death-related series—Songs and Dances of Death, Death and Transfiguration, that sort of thing—and wanted to make some guesses about how my regular audience might react.”
It sounded just nutty enough to have been plausible to a Vital Statistician. I nodded and took in a little more good coffee. “And you want me to find out about these other groups, without letting anybody know?”
“I thought you could do it, Knave,” Marietta said.
I was stung. “Of course I can do it,” I said foolishly. “I’d just like to get straight what you want here.”
“Primarily,” she said, “I want these deaths to stop happening. And I want whatever’s making them happen stopped, too.”
It all sounded perfectly reasonable. All I had to do, I reflected as I got up, was define a miasma nobody had really seen, and then put an end to it.
I told myself I’d had tougher jobs, and of course I had, though it’s surprising how little comfort that is. I was backing away from the table and turning around when a small boy rammed me.
I looked down and to my left, and by God, it wasn’t a small boy, it was a small teenager—about four-ten to five feet, with a big shock of red-brown hair, big brown eyes, and a snub nose. And freckles, which made him almost too Hucklebuddy Finn for ready belief. Very late teens, perhaps even twenty, but with a permanent, midteener look he was probably going to have at seventy.
He ignored me entirely, rushing right past the scene of the accident and burbling: “Gee—Miss Jink—gee—your Ives concert last week was just splendid, just splendid, it showed me so much about—”
“Hello, Joshua,” Marietta said. “Joshua, have you met Mr.—”
“Josh,” the teenager said. “I told you it’s Josh, didn’t I? Sure I did. I never realized before last week that there are moments in the New England Portraits that directly echo the Fourth Symphony, but your reading was so clear—”
“I’m glad you liked it,” Marietta said. “Meet Mr. Knave, Josh. Gerald Knave.”
“Hi,” he said without looking around. “I just thought I’d come over, when I saw you, and tell you how good you are, because sometimes I think you don’t really know how good you are, Miss Jink. I can hardly wait for the Jerome Moross program—wow, two whole weeks away.”
“I think you’ll enjoy it,” Marietta said, “and I’m looking forward to it myself, though I’d prefer to do Frankie and Johnny the way he wrote it, as a ballet. We’ve got some fine singers, though—”
“I know,” Josh said. “Fredi Tallman—it’s going to be a wonderful trio. Three sopranos dressed in Salvation Army uniforms—”
“Yes,” Marietta said. “That’s the way Moross wrote it—a trio walking on to sing to the dancers. And I really do have to go now, Josh, so I hope I’ll see you again some time.”
“Oh, you’ll see me at the concert,” he said. “I wouldn’t miss it for anything, Miss Jink. Gee—”
Eventually—it felt like an hour and a half and was probably about seventy seconds—we did get out of there without him, and in the AHD lobby Marietta said, in a low voice:
“He’s a terrible pest, but he really does love music, and he knows more than you’d think. I suppose everybody has a fan club like that.”
“Not quite everybody,” I said, and left it at that. Later that day, I started work on the miasma.
I didn’t realize just then that I’d already met it.
Getting statistics on the other regular events was very simple. A good rule to remember—it has exceptions, but they are exceptions—is that anybody will believe anything you tell him, if he sees no profit to you in the telling. I went around disguised as a sort of scientist—Marietta gave me some nice government-type bureau names, and I was Dr. Knave of Whatever Seemed Plausible for a few days—and collected data for a survey of personal habits as a contribution to health. You listen to Syrian music a lot, are you less likely to develop Bell’s Palsy? Damned if I know. But I collected a great many facts about a great many subscribers to a great many regular events in Petrarch Hall, and ran it by some census-bureau basics any citizen could get.
And 1 discovered that the hall was an innocent bystander; the odd deaths were occurring only to Williamson Philharmonic subscribers. There were heart attacks and so on elsewhere, of course, but in numbers that didn’t surprise me in the least. The usual number of people, in other words, were dying of the usual number of things.
Query: was the orchestra in some way killing off its listeners?
That did seem the only available alternative—for a very brief while 1 did consider the notion of somebody poisoning subscription tickets, but I tossed it out because (a) unless a mail clerk had gone mad (not unheard of, I do admit), it seemed forbiddingly difficult for anyone to get hold of the things in quantity, before delivery, and (b) and much stronger, I couldn’t come up with a poison that would imitate heart disease, aneurysm, and stroke well enough to fool 100 percent of a fairly large number of doctors, spread out over the subscribers. If the planet had been Ravenal, or some other scholarly scientific refuge, I’d have thought twice about that—but there’s very little hard science on Apelles, if you except instrument-building, pigment chemistry, toe-shoe manufacture and the like, not at all the sort of background needed.
On the other hand, what the Hell could the orchestra be doing?
It is not normally fatal to play (I choose from the Williamson programs over five years) Wagner, Moross, Shostakovich, Beethoven, Ives, Sibelius, Moussorgsky or even Bernstein. There is an old actors’ superstition about Macbeth—actors won’t name the thing, they call it “the Scottish play,” and believe that every revival of it leads to a death—but the Williamson hadn’t done Macbeth as a play, an opera or a tone poem, and besides the superstition called for only one death.
The Williamson is a classical orchestra—as its programming may have told you—and includes only classical instruments; they do carry a theremin player for the occasional specialty, but Berlioz would have recognized every instrument except the saxophones, and a few twentieth-century percussion gimmicks. (He’d have loved those, of course. There’s a passage in his Requiem for sixteen kettle-drums.) I’d had some thoughts about the effects of low-frequency sound—sixteen cycles per second, that sort of thing—on the human circulatory system, but nothing in the Williamson would produce that sort of subliminal sound except, possibly, the theremin. And Marietta would have noticed the theremin reaching down anywhere close to that far, in the few pieces for which it was scheduled; as I’ve said, she was a fine conductor, and her ear was beyond cavil.
In the natural course of events, nothing the orchestra was doing would cause longtime subscribers to keel over. Their programming hadn’t changed significantly, either; they were playing much the same sort of thing, in the last five years, that they’d been playing before that. But the deaths hadn’t been happening six years ago, or eight, or eleven.
I was slowly backing myself into a very uncomfortable corner; we were not dealing with any sort of accident. The deaths were being deliberately caused—there just wasn’t anything else to think.