Chapter 57.1
Didi was first to notice the tectonic realignment between Harry and Cathy. As luck would have it very early the next morning, just after she pulled Avi's old Range Rover up to the door in front of the house in Davos. She was to drive them to the train station for the trip down to Zurich, but she saw carefully concealed changes deep within Harry's eyes as he carried luggage out to the Rover. A twinkle, perhaps? A release?
But Cathy was far less pretentious with her feelings that morning, and even the kids seemed to be skipping on air as they stepped out into the crisp winter light, so there was no question in her mind when she drove them to the station. After she dropped them off she returned to the house and put away the Rover, then she called a taxi to take her to the train station to rejoin the group.
But as it was still her duty even now she called in and reported this new development to her handlers at the Mossad, then she called Tel Aviv and talked with her father. He was not at all impressed.
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The tea house and the various music additions were complete by that time, and with all the activity surrounding these various projects at an end life above the cliffs took on quieter hues. Perhaps not quite the warm golden rays of a prolonged Northern California sunset, but fading in that direction.
Fading - because Callahan had followed through and stopped flying. At first, he'd promised he would keep his hours and ratings current so he could assist during fire season, but those words proved hollow and before too long everyone at the CatHouse understood...Harry was through flying. And so Harry remained "in charge" of things in name only, and everyone understood that in time even Harry would disappear from their ranks. And of course, DD understood the score first of all and began planning accordingly.
Curiously, Callahan maintained his status as a Reserve Inspector with the police department. He made the trek down to the department's range - and to Hogan's Alley - every month, and he still won the department's annual combat pistol competition with nauseating regularity - well, at least officers half his age remained nauseated by Callahan's prowess on the Alley. Harry went in one weekend a month and worked a solid 48-hour shift, catnapping when he could, and he opted to remain on-call status for really important incidents. For some reason Cathy seemed to understand this was a need, not a want; Harry was after all, just like Frank, a cop. They always would be, she realized, and there was by this point in her life no need to fight the unique gravity that bound Harry to this calling.
But Harry was, after his return from Davos, pulled in other less certain directions by an unexpected new gravity, and just as comets orbit their home star, Lloyd Callahan was pulled along on this new, disconcerting path. Soon, the unanswered questions posed by his mother's life and death, still waiting out there in the darkness for what seemed an inevitable collision, took on a gravity all their own.
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Once he had the original manuscript of Schwarzwald's Fourth in hand, the one von Karajan had kept under lock and key for almost twenty years, Harry placed the precious score in a safe set in the floor of the MusicHaus. There were times when he took it out and looked at key passages, yet he understood that he could never, not ever and under any circumstances, play the key final passage - at least the end his mother had created.
The end Herbert von Karajan performed at the premiere, and indeed at every performance since, had been hastily cobbled together by von Karajan himself - after he recovered from the experience of hearing Imogen's shattering conclusion in Israel...the final phrasing that had, directly, ended her life even as the last notes drifted away. When Callahan met von Karajan, and this was near the end of the famous conductor's life, the older man had explained everything in rich detail, right down to her final journey within the eighty-eight key, and perhaps the conductor hadn't known what to expect when Imogen's son heard the news, but he was utterly surprised when Callahan simply nodded understanding.
"You know of these things?" von Karajan asked, and when Callahan nodded the older man seemed taken aback - as if he had been of the impression that he alone knew the secrets contained in her music. "The Old Man in the Cape? Have you known him, as well...?"
"I have," Callahan replied. "Almost my entire life...in one way or another."
"Have you ever...?"
"I have. And there are many dangers within."
"I could never bring myself to go there. He frightened me."
They were sitting on a stone patio at von Karajan's estate in Anif, just outside of Salzburg, enjoying the afternoon sun glancing off the nearby mountains, but even so there was an air of impermanence about the meeting. Karajan was old now, his pain immense, and though he wouldn't say so the old man knew death was coming soon.
"Frightened?" Callahan asked. "Why frightened?"
"I have known the power of music all my life, or at least I thought I had, but that last afternoon with your mother was something of an epiphany. I suppose, you see, because I interpreted the music of others I rarely composed on my own, so I think I was, in effect, shackled to the past. Your mother saw the world in a different light, and the result was she experienced music quite differently than most others. I'm not talking synesthesia, Harald, but without going too deeply into something that is still a mystery to me, I think she saw music. She understood, and I think explicitly so, that music was for her a conveyance. And that, if you'll pardon the digression, is what frightened me."
"A conveyance? What do you mean by that?"
"In the final passage, Harald, in the Fourth. She found a way not into death, but beyond."
"Beyond? I'm not sure I follow..."
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Callahan left Austria in a daze, von Karajan's dazzling implications as seductive as they were troubling, but he did not return home...yet. Instead, he returned to Copenhagen - to his grandfather's house near the university.
The old red brick house, her ancient timbers fresh with several new coats of pigmented oil, had been made into a museum dedicated to his mother's life and works, yet the interior was almost blissfully untouched. The bedrooms were roped off, his mother's first piano too, but the docent let him into his mother's old bedroom on the top floor and he went to the window and looked out over the rooftops to the harbor and the ships beyond. How things have changed, he thought, but really...how little had the important things changed.
Yes, change was in the air. The wall was coming down in Berlin so Germany would be thrust into the miasma of unification, but perhaps with the Soviet Union dead and gone Europe would find herself in a new Golden Age...yet here in this little corner of the universe change was a little more hesitant, perhaps even resistant.
Gulls still wheeled about over the water and cotton-candy clouds scudded by in a majestic simplicity all their own, and as he stood there looking over the scene it was almost inevitable that soon he imagined he could hear horse-drawn carriages clip-clopping down cobblestone streets, and when he closed his eyes - standing exactly where his mother had so many times in her youth - he could almost see three-masted sailing ships gliding into the harbor.
Then in his mind he played her Second Piano Concerto and he felt the overwhelming burden of fear she had as the Gestapo followed her in the snow, then the full weight of Avi's betrayal...and in the next moment the Old Man was standing there beside him...
...in a gently falling snow.
Chapter 57.2
"You come here at great peril, young man."
"Only you would think I'm young."
"Nevertheless."
"She was young then, wasn't she?"
