The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge (22 page)

There was a long humming silence. If the Composer had known about the planned departure surely he would not have kept ringing and ringing? But if he was as close to the Faith as she believed him to be how could he not have known? The Judge could no longer construct the emotional jigsaw before her eyes. The snowy mountains of the Jura seemed far away in the past; they leered at her like apparitions from another world, already extinguished, only faintly remembered.

‘Marie-T, look at me. What did your mother mean when she gave you that gift?
Suis-moi
? Why did she say
follow me
?’

The green girl seemed to rise up stronger in her mother’s garden when she turned to face her Judge. She drew a huge tight breath.

‘Maman? What did she mean? Ah – that I couldn’t say.’

Her eyes were red and shining. The Judge registered at once the ambiguity of this reply. For the first time Marie-Thérèse was not being entirely frank; something was being withheld rather than concealed. And now her manner seemed prim and restrained, the good little Catholic girl, entertaining an important guest.

‘I’m so pleased that you saw my mother’s garden. Shall we go back to Friedrich?’

10

CONSEQUENCES

There were consequences, of course. The Judge was not the only person bristling with indignation and reproaches. Gaëlle sulked all the way back to the office in breathtaking heat with a ferocity at once disconcerting, unprofessional and just. A dim cloud hung around her heavy metal ears and the Judge was forced to ask every question twice. She rang Schweigen’s mobile from the office. He pulled off the motorway, ignored her attempt to describe her private interview with Marie-Thérèse Laval, and began screaming.

‘I don’t understand you. You sleep with me the night before and then dismiss me as if I meant nothing to you and you don’t need me. You go on and conduct your own damned investigation. You aren’t kind, Dominique, you aren’t fair, you aren’t even rational.’

She froze him out.

‘When you have remembered your manners, André, send me an e-mail. But don’t, I repeat, don’t try ringing me back.’ And she slammed down the phone. Gaëlle, who had listened in to every word, strolled off to the photocopier, whistling.

The high cool of the office enfolded the Judge as if she were an exhibit in a cabinet, mummified and arranged in orderly calm. She sat very still. This must be Schweigen’s first and only affair with another woman; he was possessive as a husband, and as potentially unhinged. He now rang her at least twice a day; his voice clanging down the lines like a distant chorus of howls. The Judge flicked the phone into silence and began to write out a chilly factual account of her encounter with the Composer and his god-daughter, a report so bald and disengaged that the business might as well have been conducted in her office. The judicial narrative was therefore not entirely accurate. Like an old-fashioned anthropologist, lost somewhere on the Dark Continent, she wrote herself out of her research, and ceased to be a presence, influencing her own findings. The occupants of the Domaine Laval emerged as foreigners in their own land, a race observed. But in the days following this encounter, just as the holidays immersed them like a great wave, the supposed foreigners were also on the case.

Marie-Thérèse sent her a brief, warm note, longing to see her again soon. The plea was formal, ardent, heartfelt, as if two currents struggled in the young girl’s heart. The Judge read them correctly: the need for secrecy and the longing to tell.

The Composer sent her flowers.

A purple twisted installation of orchids, with copious instructions on their needs and welfare, arrived at her home, arranged on twigs, with their roots sunk in a solution that kept them alive for all eternity. She inspected the strange, exotic shapes with curiosity and suspicion. How had he discovered her private address? Yet, after all, she had seen where he lived in Northern Germany, and perhaps the source was innocent enough – her uncle, Myriam, even her parents could have provided the information. But living flowers? Orchids, whose very shapes appeared obscene? The gesture seemed too intimate. Here she was, trying to inculpate this man, for, at the very least, non-assistance à personne en danger, or at the worst, moral corruption, fraudulent diversion of funds and being an accessory to murder. Yet he courted her with orchids. Their colour, livid and suggestive, took up residence on the kitchen table. She tried not to look at them.

Then the second letter arrived; the second letter addressed exclusively to her.

Dear Madame Carpentier
, he wrote formally in English,

Please forgive me for not writing to you in your language. My French, as you know, is very stiff and limited to arguing with singers and musicians. I will return to the Midi for the Avignon Festival within a week and hope very much to see you again. I realise that our initial meetings have taken place within the strange, sad context of the loss of my friends. But I do not wish this relationship to remain constrained by the legal boundaries of your investigation. I have not ceased to think of you since I saw you standing in my theatre with the tears flooding your face. I could not bear it if our connection were to cease now. I must see you again. Chère Madame, please allow me to visit you, speak to you, face to face.

I remain, your devoted and obedient servant
,

Friedrich Grosz

Devoted servant? The significance of this archaic formula was beyond the Judge’s English; she was forced to look it up in her dictionary and emerged no wiser or enlightened. Connection? Relationship? They didn’t have one. But he was the principal subject of her investigation. She strode round her living room, picking up stray newspapers. Now she crackled with guilt and irritation at her colossal error – I let myself be taken by surprise, indeed almost incapacitated – by an emotional evening at the opera. And this man pounced upon her weakness. Her tears remained a shameful secret. Neither Schweigen nor Gaëlle must ever know. A faint prickle of unease tingled in her fingers as she examined the letter and its envelope. The German stamp, his address in the Effengrube, the Lübeck postmark, his firm, clear hand and the careful, precise folds. She was sought out, cornered. Yet the register of the letter was conciliatory, beseeching. He addressed her as a supplicant, not a master. The power to withhold and deny remained hers, and hers alone. But did it? The letter lay there, flaccid and inert, like a failed magic trick.

Standing alone, drinking a bowl of black coffee in her tidy, silent kitchen, before leaving for work in the brief cool of early day, the Judge’s unease erupted and overflowed. She took up the letter and read it once more. In her hands she held a declaration of love from a perfect stranger. She possessed only the power he allowed her to have; he was tracking her down. How could this be sincere? She stood seething with anxiety and uncertainty, both unwelcome sensations, and alien to the Judge. This untoward assault upon her privacy and self-containment unsettled and disturbed her equilibrium, as much as Wagner’s music had done, many months before. Yet the Composer’s directness disarmed her utterly. She could find no words to reply.

_{*  *  *}

She spent the early evenings of the following week fending off Schweigen’s calls and studying the coded guide. Her linguistic experts had produced no key to the blocked signs; the text remained secret and opaque. She concentrated on tiny fragments of the Book that were written in German and Greek; then she recognised the symbol for the sun – Helios. Many sects sought out myths as supporting structures for their invented faiths, and the Judge possessed an extensive research library of gods and legends. Sometimes, buried in the advertising, she found entire chunks of bogus science copied directly from the sources in her office. She contemplated prosecutions for plagiarism rather than mendacious publicity, but confined herself to a few dry comments alongside the parallel passages in her report to the Parquet. Lord, what fools these mortals be. The Judge reached for her illustrated list of sun gods, whose cults were frequently revitalised.

The sun usually figured as the principal and most reliable source of divinity in resurrection mythologies. The Judge took a detached view of the phenomenon; that great disc of exploding hydrogen and helium meant no more to her than any other star; our sun, a single dying star, the force that powers all things and draws all life towards its flaming core. The most popular version of the sun god, who reappeared in her files, year after year, was Ra, also known as Re-Horakhty. The Egyptian deity crossed the sky by day in a boat rather than a chariot, only to be swallowed up by the goddess Nut, and emerge reborn as a scarab beetle on the following morning. His symbol, prominent on the cover of her dictionary of sun gods, represented a winged disc, but he reappeared on the frontispiece in the shape of a man with a falcon’s head. Ra. The sun god Ra. She tapped the curved beak of the god with her forefinger. Good evening, Great God Ra, explain your evident connection to the Faith. The ancient Egyptians appeared crucial in some respects. She had marked a carefully drawn tablet covered in hieroglyphs with the actual dimensions noted beneath, which was apparently reproduced in its entirety. The blocked code below must be some kind of commentary, because the hieroglyphs reappeared at intervals throughout the text. Here was a sequence of figures close to the symbol of the sun; this is a saros, the measurement that describes the repeating cycles of the solar eclipse. Eighteen years, eleven days and eight hours, thus each part of the globe has a chance to see a total eclipse, maybe every thousand years or so. Ra’s golden eye remained, fixed and staring; his black pupil dilated, vast. And here is a fragment of poetry:

Ja! Ich weiß woher Ich stamme!

Ungesättigt gleich der Flamme

Yes! I know where I began!

Insatiable as flame

The phrase sounded eerily familiar. This is part of something else, something longer. I read this when I was studying philosophy. But who wrote these words? She could not identify the source. She copied out the lines and the two linked coordinates immediately following, then looked up the figures, which were clearly measurements.

Altarf (Mag
3
.
5
) RA
8
h
16
m
38
s Dec
09
º
10
´
43
´´

Sirius (Mag
1
.
47
)RA
6
h
45
m
15
s Dec
16
º
43
´
07
´´

Cancer and Canis Major – the faintest of the constellations and the one containing the brightest star visible in the sky. In what ways are these opposing things significant? How are they linked? The stars in the constellation of Cancer were actually dimmer than one of the deep-sky star clusters, known as the beehive cluster or as M
44
, an open cluster of seventy-five stars at the centre of the constellation. We use the stars to calculate distance and time. The stars we see, or think we see, may no longer exist, for the light that brings them to us travels across billions of years. Therefore we are looking directly into the past.

The Judge spread out her astral charts and stood up, the better to gaze at the heavens, now flattened beneath her fingertips. We have only begun to map this endless void, this image of eternity itself, uncharted matter that spans hundreds and billions of light years. It is beyond all our imagining. The Judge inspected the little pool of swirling bugs circulating in the beam of her desk lamp. Her mind balked before infinity, even as she contemplated the Great Wall of Galaxies, some five hundred million light years long, two hundred million light years wide, fifteen million light years deep. She floated outwards between these unimaginable masses of helium, hydrogen gas, and dust spinning out into the massy void; if matter accounts for a mere ten per cent of space then for the most part the universe is simply empty, great chasms of non-being, where nothing is. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness upon the face of the deep. Nothing will come of nothing. Speak. She issued her command out loud, her voice hollow in the warm air.