The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge (15 page)

They stood side by side in the warm office. The Judge noted the numbers and dates beside the record in the great ledger. The book had been returned to a person, or persons unknown, three weeks later.

‘The missing delivery note? Does this number correspond to some other record that he kept?’ The Judge had begun to have great faith in the dead patriarch’s meticulous exactitude.

‘Well, he kept everything in good order, as you see. But I don’t have access to every aspect of his system now. We computerised the accounts not long ago.’

‘But do you still have his private records of his book purchases? The ones he bought at auction and rebound?’

Herr Bardewig looked up at the rows and rows of dark and golden books above him.

‘The books are all here,’ he said. ‘Wait a minute. I’ll look in the household accounts. He managed those too. Mother never worried herself with the household bills because we always lived upstairs.’

Herr Bardewig accepted her challenge and vanished again into the company’s archive. The Judge looked at her watch. Seven o’clock already passed. She was the ferret, shaking a rat, and could not let go until she was certain that the thing was dead. The printer finally re-emerged with two large cardboard boxes and an embarrassed confession.

‘These aren’t so well filed as I imagined they would be – loose sheets and only roughly in order. But here are all the existing delivery notes and household invoices from
1956
to
1960
.’

They sat down at separate tables and began to hunt for anything relevant or the number
480
. An hour later the Judge struck gold.

‘Excuse me, Herr Bardewig, but I think I have it.’ She held up a delivery note. ‘There is no name on the ticket, which if I understand you correctly, was not your father’s usual practice. But here is the number.
480
. Would you be good enough to confirm the address for me? Is this a double S or a double F?’

‘It’s an F.
Effengrube
19
. That’s in Lübeck, near the cathedral. Do you recognise the address?’

‘Yes,’ said the Judge, glowing, ‘I do.’

But she gave nothing else away.

Herr Bardewig photocopied the delivery note for her and insisted on a small schnapps in celebration. They sat at ease, like old friends, and the printer talked on about the firm and his father’s time; how he had learned the profession from his father and uncle, how as a small child he had been allowed to sit up and listen to the music and poetry in the great salon above them, which had now been divided into two rooms. He asked very few curious questions concerning the provenance of the book and her unstinting search for its source. She rose to leave. And then it became clear that he had knowingly held his tongue.

‘Is this book part of an investigation, Madame?’

‘It is.’

‘Not anything horrible? Or criminal, I hope?’

The Judge hesitated. It was always better to say very little about her work. Outsiders became intrigued, then spellbound. The sects touched an unconscious current of fantasy; a Kraken, which unfortunately needed very few underwater currents in order to awaken. As the years passed the Judge remained unimpressed by the mental strength of most ordinary people, for, with the lightest of prods, they became irrational and unhinged. The actual content of most people’s faith beggared belief. Long used to floods of hysterical insanity poured forth upon the walls and ceilings of her office, the Judge scarcely flinched at the narratives of past lives, alien abductions, revelations from floating tablets, voices emerging from space, birds or bushes, and conclusive evidence of maternal reincarnation in the form of a sheep. She avoided precise explanations of her role as ‘la chasseuse de sectes’ whenever possible. Yet she owed this man a slice of honesty.

‘It is a little disturbing perhaps, but I am a juge d’instruction. I gather evidence. I don’t prosecute anyone. I present my reports to the Public Prosecutor, Le Procureur de la République. He decides if there is a case to answer.’

Herr Bardewig turned a little white.

‘Ah, I see. That sounds very grand. My father was always somewhat mistrustful of the law. I can’t think why. He wrote his last will and testament himself. Impeccable, unambiguous, like the ledgers. But he was a very private man. He had a secretive side.’

A tiny fragment of the puzzling labyrinth of connections before her suddenly settled in the Judge’s mind and she turned her dark-rimmed, magnified eyes upon the printer.

‘Forgive me, Herr Bardewig, if I appear intrusive. But may I ask when and how your father died?’

The generous, open-hearted face before her closed like a trap. Regret, pain and a flood of unlocked memories swept past his mouth and cheeks like a rising tide. She had given him back a man he had honoured and adored. For one half-day his father had returned to the firm in his old shape, upright, exacting and just; his love for Das Buch des Glaubens manifested itself in the careful beauty of his work, made to last for ever. Now this chilly Judge had snatched away the beloved presence and his goodness stood eclipsed.

‘It is not easy for me to speak about these things, Madame Carpentier. My father died in
1984
, by his own hand.’

6

ENDLESS NIGHT

The first letter, and she always thought of this message as the first one, the first one addressed to her, outside the investigation, for it came bearing nothing but her name on the envelope, was delivered by hand to their hotel.

Effengrube
19
,

Lübeck

Chère Madame
,

Please forgive my appalling rudeness to you and your assistant this morning. To hold, in my own hands, that book which belonged to someone I dearly loved was to bring him once more before me. It is a loss that I cannot accept and I allowed my feelings to govern my behaviour. But it is inexcusable bad manners on my part and I beg your pardon.

I enclose two tickets for tomorrow’s performance of
Tristan and Isolde
at the main theatre in the Bechergrube. I would be honoured and delighted if you were able to be my guests at this performance. Please accept my humblest apologies.

Mit vielen freundlichen Grüssen,

Friedrich Grosz

‘Well, there’s no way I’m going to sit through any opera, let alone Wagner,’ roared Gaëlle, flinging down the letter on the Judge’s bed, ‘and anyway our plane’s at midday.’

The Judge pursed her lips.

‘Go and take off those wet clothes, Gaëlle, you’ve been sitting around in them quite long enough. I’m sorry that you had a fruitless search through the bookshops. But I’m afraid that I’ve already postponed our flight back until Friday.’

‘You didn’t! Without asking me?’

‘Remember that you’re on a mission for the French Republic, which may not require your services on the weekend, but certainly does so throughout the week.’

‘How can you do this to me? I hate the food.’

‘We will eat at a splendid, expensive restaurant tonight, I promise. And if you absolutely can’t stand Wagner I won’t make you go.’

Gaëlle collapsed flat across the duvets and let out a mighty cry of relief. She kicked off her soaking boots. The Judge rescued the Composer’s letter and slipped it into a plastic envelope reserved for evidence. The phone rang, and there at the other end, baying like an abandoned hound, was André Schweigen.

‘Alors? Dis-moi où tu es,’ he yelled. Gaëlle snatched up her boots and fled, banging the door shut behind her.

_{*  *  *}

DEM WARHREN, GUTEN, SCHÖNEN

The Judge arrived at the Lübeck Stadttheater forty minutes before the performance was due to begin, and stood on the pavement opposite, looking up. The theatre was dedicated to truth, goodness and beauty or rather, given the grammar of its declaration and the declension of the abstract nouns, to that which is true, good and beautiful. Not only are those three things not the same, thought the Judge, they are also rarely united in the same object or person at the same time. Musical performances were probably no different. And, so far as the Judge was concerned, only truth shone unambiguous, and non-negotiable. Beauty and goodness were up for grabs.

The Beckergrube was, or had once been, one of the more grandiose streets in Lübeck, with large and pompous houses, lumbering upwards from the Trave on either side. Most were now down-at-heel business premises, a tobacconist, an artistic flower shop with improbable dead pods arranged in the window, a mobile phone company which had placed a gigantic plastic ‘Handy’ on the pavement to entice passing customers, and several evil-looking cafés. In the midst of this stood the temple to dramatic art. Comedy and Tragedy flanked Apollo and the Nine Muses, a great frieze of figures beneath the pediment bearing the dedication to truth, goodness and beauty, in their individual or collective manifestations. The entire bombastic monument, a mountainous construction in art nouveau, dated
1908
, with a solid brown stone face, and two handsome wings with tall windows, squatted before her, vast, bulbous and murky, with the odd glittering tile, in silvery diamond green. The Judge braced herself for battle, settled the tortoiseshell clamp in her black coil, steadied her glasses with her right forefinger, pulled her cashmere shawl more firmly around her, against the crisp spring dusk, and then marched across the road and into the theatre.

She gave up one of the two tickets at the box office, now besieged by a lurking queue for returns, where it was promptly sold to the first of the waiting Wagner fanatics. The opening performance, duly greeted with rapturous notices from all the local papers, sucked in the public from distant provinces. Roars of eulogy, now stuck up on giant boards all around the foyer, dwarfed the Judge. Vast black-and-white photographs showed desperate figures with their mouths open and their arms outstretched.
An Isolde for our times: Fräulein Maria Bayer in the title role, ravishing, passionate, seductive, nobly supported by Gerhard Klingmann as the knight torn between his love for Isolde and his loyalty to the King
. The Judge yawned and gave up trying to translate the superlatives. She decided to find her seat and read the programme.

Her knowledge of the plot was somewhat hazy, for while she knew the general outlines of the legend she entertained the common delusion that all operas were the same: ludicrous incidents, irrational behaviour, uncontrollable passions, overblown orchestration, and four fat folk bellowing at the footlights. The point of the evening was to spy upon the Composer, openly and at his own invitation, to exploit his repentance if at all possible, by gaining his confidence, then squeezing whatever information, or better still, confessions, could be extracted from this powerful, but slippery source. This man was a living connection to the Faith. Of that she was certain. But she knew now that she was dealing with something far more ancient and sinister than the usual run of sects, which, if they survived at all, became bourgeois, visible and liable to fiscal inspection. The Faith now assumed an ancestry that smelt of Masonic ritual and a hidden, deeper past than she had first suspected. The Faith remained uppermost in her mind. The opera was neither here nor there.

Dominique Carpentier disliked all manifestations of excess: older women who wore far too many trinkets, happy people, drunk and singing, love letters that made free with words like ‘for ever’ and ‘all eternity’, men who thought sport was significant. This deep and innate hostility to all those trivial joys which keep the advancing shadows at bay, tinged with a sharp, ironic tongue, led many of her colleagues to think of her as heartless and a little cruel. This was unjust. The Judge cherished a deeper passion, one that was as surprising as it was laudable: the desire to defend and protect the vulnerable, the feeble-minded and the mad from every predator, and, if necessary, from themselves. Through her office trailed a sad procession of victims, frail beings whose desperate need for security and belonging trapped them in narratives of faith, largely of their own imagining. The Judge pared away the delusions, leaving the people on whose behalf she felt compelled to act naked, defenceless and ashamed. Reason is neither gentle nor kind, and the Judge believed in Reason with as intemperate a commitment to her own credo as any of the secret initiates who had given their hearts to the suicide Faith. She sought the Truth, and nothing but the Truth. Yet the Truth is not, and cannot be, the instrument of freedom for every one of us; and to know the Truth may well imprison gentle souls in wretchedness for ever.