And After the Fire Read online

  “Yes.”

  “You should allow me to keep it here for you. It would be in a secure, climate-controlled facility, much better than a bank.”

  “He’s right, Susanna,” Dan said.

  “I’ll hold on to it for now,” she said.

  Unbelievable. He tried a different tack: “I need to do a full set of high-resolution digital photographs for study purposes. This would allow me to put the musical and verbal handwriting side by side with other examples, to work out the context I was talking about. I’ll also need images as I work to identify the nineteenth-century handwriting on the wrapper.”

  “As I’ve said to Dan, I want to wait on the photographs until we know what we’re dealing with.”

  “We already have a pretty solid idea of what we’re dealing with,” Scott said. “Frankly, it’s stupid, not to—”

  “But it’s your call, Susanna,” Dan interrupted.

  Scott paused. “Absolutely. Your call. The truth is, however, that Dan and I have every reason to keep this confidential. For us, it could be the discovery of a lifetime. The apex of our careers. We don’t want anyone else to publish on it before we do. Just like you, we don’t want the evidence spread around the world in the blink of an eye. I have to say, your approach to this is incomprehensible to me.”

  Susanna gazed at him unperturbed.

  Doing his best to sound conciliatory, Scott said, “May I at least photograph the wrapper and the first several pages?”

  “The wrapper and the first three pages only.” She sounded matter-of-fact and much more professional than he did. He was accustomed to being in charge, and she’d thrown him.

  Scott stood and retrieved a stainless-steel tray from a cabinet and placed the cantata on it. With Susanna and Dan following, he carried the manuscript out of the conference room and toward the far side of the laboratory. On the way, they passed broad sinks where documents floated in tubs of clear liquid.

  “What’s this?” Susanna asked.

  “It’s an ethanol bath. To clean the paper. Actually, this is really cool.” Scott stopped beside the sinks to explain. “These particular documents also happen to be written in iron-gall ink, which is indelible. The sulfuric acid in the ink burns through the paper, so the ink can’t be washed away.” He felt a spark of—what, exactly? The sheer pleasure of his work, replacing his previous irritation. “That’s why we’re able to soak the paper to clean it without ruining the document.”

  “Hmm, iron-gall ink is indelible. Good to know,” Susanna said.

  “I probably shouldn’t have told you.”

  “That was a definite miscalculation on your part.”

  Maybe he could grow to like her despite her exasperating attitude.

  In the narrow photography room, Scott sensed Susanna watching his every move, as if looking for mistakes. Not that she’d recognize an error even if he made one, but he felt an urge to finish as fast as possible. He’d brought his own memory card for the camera, and he loaded it. He positioned the manuscript on the stand beneath the elevated camera and made adjustments page by page. He would transfer the images onto the computer in his office later.

  Task completed. He put the memory card into his shirt pocket and returned the manuscript to the tray. Susanna and Dan followed him back to the conference room.

  “That’s it for today?” Susanna said.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Scott said.

  He watched her rewrap the cantata in the same two plastic bags she’d brought it in. She returned the package to her tote bag and patted the bag in reassurance, of herself or of the cantata, Scott wasn’t certain. What was wrong with her? Why was she so irrational?

  “What happens if you leave the cantata in a taxi?” he said.

  “I take full responsibility.”

  “What if there’s a flood at the bank?”

  “No more likely than here at the MacLean.”

  “This is crazy.” He turned to Dan for support, but Dan shook his head to tell him to stop. Scott wasn’t prepared to stop. “Here at the MacLean, as I’ve said, we have state-of-the-art—”

  “You’ve made your point.” She placed the tote bag over her shoulder. “I need to get going.”

  “Dan, do you want to stay so we can start planning the next steps in the research?”

  “I’m giving a lecture later, so I’d better go, too.”

  Scott was surprised, but he walked them to the elevator without further comment.

  As the elevator door opened, they shook hands. “Thank you again,” Susanna said.

  Dan and Susanna returned their visitors’ passes to the security desk, and the guard checked their names off his list.

  “Let’s leave through the new atrium,” Susanna said. “I haven’t been here since the renovation.”

  The atrium, with its trees and soaring glass ceiling, was dreary in the December rain. At least it didn’t leak, or not yet. Dan watched Susanna as she looked around the space.

  “Maybe we have to see it on a sunny day,” she said.

  “I’ve been here on sunny days.”

  “And?”

  “With the sun beating down, it’s hot.”

  “I can well imagine.”

  They headed toward the Madison Avenue exit. Dan felt increasingly tense walking beside someone who carried what might well be a priceless Bach autograph in her tote bag. But if they were going to work together, he had to appear to respect her position. He put the issue aside and focused instead on asking her to have a cup of coffee with him. Asking her to have a cup of coffee had become a fixation for him these past few days, and now it was close to becoming a paralysis.

  The MacLean had a café, but it was staid and expensive, and he also wanted to escape the professional atmosphere that the MacLean represented. By chance he’d noticed a Starbucks one block south, on Madison between Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth Streets. Okay, he hadn’t noticed it by chance. He’d done a Google search and located the closest Starbucks to the MacLean. Before the meeting today, he’d walked by to make certain it had an adequate seating area.

  In a little over an hour, he had to be uptown to attend the opening reception of a Lutheran organists’ conference. He was giving a speech during the dinner that followed. He’d return to Granville late tonight. Becky had seemed happy enough at the prospect of a sleepover at the home of his colleague Katarina Kundera. He was lucky that Becky and Katarina’s daughter, Lizzie, had become close friends.

  Possibly he didn’t have time for coffee, after all.

  As they walked out of the museum, pedestrians hurried past, their umbrellas angled across their faces against the lashing rain.

  Susanna stopped about ten feet from the front doors of the MacLean. Beneath her open umbrella, her face seemed illuminated. To ask her to coffee, or not to ask? And why her, instead of the other women he knew? She was so different from Julie, that must be the reason. He wouldn’t be betraying Julie’s memory. Besides, it was only coffee.

  “I need to get to the bank before it closes,” she said.

  “That’s a good idea.” He was simultaneously relieved and disappointed that the coffee question had been resolved. “You know, though, you can still take the manuscript back inside for Scott to store. The MacLean really is the safest place.”

  “I appreciate your advice, but as far as I’m concerned, the safest place right now is with me. I’m still trying to figure out what my uncle would have wanted.”

  “Okay, I understand.” Before they parted, he felt pressed to explain himself: “Look, I’m sorry I wasn’t frank with you at the beginning. About the subject matter. I wanted to be, but I couldn’t. It’s not easy—”

  “I have to think about what I learned today. I wasn’t expecting . . . well, what you discovered about the subject matter.”

  “I wasn’t expecting it, either.”

  “I’m sure you weren’t. And don’t worry, talking about these things isn’t easy for any of us.”

  “Your family
?”

  “A story like many others.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you. And thank you for introducing me to Scott.”

  “Sometimes Scott can be testy, but he knows what he’s doing.”

  “I could see that. In spite of the testiness.” She checked her watch. He sensed her wanting to be polite. “Have your wife and daughter come to New York for the weekend?”

  “I’m not married,” he said, startled.

  “Forgive me. I’d assumed. Since you wear a wedding ring.”

  He glanced at the ring. “Yes, I do. It’s been there for so long I tend to forget about it.” He didn’t want to begin their first personal conversation by explaining about Julie. “I’m not married anymore, though.”

  “Me, neither. My divorce was finalized just recently. How long have you been apart from your wife?”

  “It’s a long story.” To shift the focus away from himself, he asked, “What about you?”

  “A long story, too. Oh, I meant to tell you,” she said, changing the subject. He sensed that she, too, was concealing experiences too difficult to talk about here on the sidewalk in the rain. “I’m trying to educate myself. I downloaded a set of Bach’s greatest hits from iTunes.”

  This put him on firmer ground. “How are you liking it?”

  “It’s terrific.”

  “Who are the performers?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t recognize the names. And some of the pieces aren’t complete; only individual movements are included.”

  “I might be able to help you to find a collection that’s better.”

  “Thank you, I’d like that. It’s not easy to reconcile such astonishing music with what we’ve been discussing today.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  She gazed at him steadily, as if expecting more. He said nothing. Nothing seemed sufficient.

  “I’d better go.”

  “And I should sit down somewhere and figure out what I’m going to say to the Lutheran organists I’m lecturing to this evening.”

  This provoked an unexpectedly warm smile from her. “That sounds like a good idea. And thank you again for your help.”

  “We’ll talk soon,” he said.

  She put out her hand to him, and he shook it.

  With this recognition of gratitude and budding friendship, she turned. Dan watched her as she headed off uptown.

  Chapter 14

  Today, a cold, quiet Sunday morning, Scott Schiffman decided to stay home and do the research he’d been itching to get to since his meeting with Susanna Kessler two days before. He made coffee and went to his desk.

  Because of his family’s wealth, Scott was able to make choices. Most of his peers lived on their salaries, meager in comparison with his own resources. He never wanted them to feel ill at ease in his presence, so he made certain his choices appeared ordinary even when they were very fine. He kept his clothing simple. He limited what he discussed at work. His terrific vacations, including his family’s yearly reunion between Christmas and New Year’s at Caneel Bay on St. John, in the Virgin Islands, and the annual ski trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in March with his siblings, their spouses and children, remained unmentioned.

  When it came to his apartment, however, concealing his resources was impossible. The apartment was his private refuge anyway, and he was glad to give himself an excuse to keep it that way. He invited only close friends to visit him. Dan stayed in the guest room on occasion. Now and then Scott’s girlfriends stayed over, although in general Scott preferred to stay at their apartments so he could make a graceful exit at breakfast time and be home alone in the morning.

  Scott lived in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood chosen primarily because it was far from his family’s town house on the Upper East Side. He’d picked a postwar building because he’d grown up in a historic one. He’d opted for modern décor because upholstered antiques had filled his family home. His apartment was an expansive three-bedroom (one of the bedrooms served as his study) on a high floor facing north, with an open view of midtown Manhattan. Because he’d grown up in a town house, with views of the street in front and of a walled, carefully cultivated garden in back, the open view from this apartment was among its attractions for him.

  Astonishingly, from his desk he could see both the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. As he now became absorbed in his work, however, he rarely looked up and when he did, he didn’t notice the view. From his computer at home, he had immediate access via the Internet to Bach Digital, a site that provided scanned images of the autograph scores and original performing parts of Bach’s works. Another site supplied a searchable database of the texts to Bach’s vocal works in their original languages. These resources provided a good beginning, and their very existence was terrific and exciting. Nevertheless, some questions could be researched only in major libraries, which he’d need to visit in due course.

  He wanted to compare both the musical and verbal scripts in the cantata that Susanna Kessler had discovered with those of Bach’s works from the 1720s and 1730s. He opened several windows showing the works of the 1720s, so that he could move easily among them. He cautioned himself that he must keep a critical eye. After several hours of work, he was forced to conclude that the scripts in the Exaudi cantata really did appear exactly the same as those in Bach’s works of the late 1720s.

  So where did that put matters? The Tintenfrass—such a great word—that he’d observed at the MacLean had shown that the manuscript, with its rare watermark pairing of the deer and the initials IAI, must indeed be old, and now the handwriting analysis showed that the cantata had most probably been notated by Bach.

  Next, he needed to determine identifications for the handwriting on the wrapper (the handwriting that didn’t appear to be Bach’s, that is). This was a needle-in-a-haystack assignment of laughable magnitude.

  Or was it? Only a limited number of people would have had access to the autograph, and those who did were, obviously, German-speakers. The two writers were educated, Scott concluded from the fact that their script was fluid. Most likely they were upper class, because they’d gained possession of the autograph and had the luxury of concealing it, rather than needing to sell it. Berlin, den 9. Juni 1783 gave Scott a starting point for one of the early owners. Because of the reference to cataloging, this owner might have possessed a noteworthy private music library.

  Scott loved puzzling out stories from the past. Who in Berlin had collected Bach cantata autographs in the late eighteenth and early-to-mid-nineteenth centuries? And who there, furthermore, might have indicated not to catalog this cantata? Of the two most noteworthy German collectors, Georg Poelchau moved to Berlin later, in 1813, and in any event was only ten years old in 1783; and Franz Hauser, who never lived in Berlin, wasn’t born until a decade later. Conceivably one of them might have written the subsequent inscription, keep in the private cabinet. In Bach Digital, Scott checked the entry for Franz Hauser (Poelchau didn’t have an entry) under the advanced search category Schriftproben, handwriting samples. Nothing matched. Scott looked forward to following up in an actual library—and he loved a big library, filled with, yes, books. Stocked with potential discoveries.

  Scott paused. Now he did look out and study the view. Much of the day had passed. The winter sun cast precise shadows that accentuated the architectural details of the cityscape before him. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building took on a glamour that reminded him of the music of George Gershwin. He couldn’t imagine anyplace he’d rather be than right here.

  Yesterday, he’d attended the bar mitzvah of his nephew Greg. Scott had two older sisters and an older brother, and he’d gradually acquired nine nieces and nephews. Remarkably, he managed to remember their names—which was good, because every one of them had attended Greg’s bar mitzvah. The ceremony was held at Rodeph Sholom, where Scott himself had his bar mitzvah years before. Most of his parents’ Jewish friends went to Temple Emanu-El on Fifth A
venue, but Scott’s father (no doubt trying to escape his own father) favored Rodeph Sholom.

  Scott hadn’t been to synagogue in a few years (not since the bar mitzvah of his nephew Eric), and he was surprised by the general good feeling of the place. Yesterday he’d paid closer attention to the service than he had the last time. It was affecting, especially the part when Greg, a shy, mild-mannered boy, carried the Torah around the sanctuary and the congregants, whether elderly, middle-aged, or young, reached to touch it with their prayer books. Most kissed their prayers books afterward. The scene had left him feeling a little choked up.

  During the service, Scott sat next to his mother. She’d been born in Germany, and both her parents were killed during the war. She’d escaped to Britain and then Canada via the Kindertransport when she was only four years old. Decades later, through a remarkable set of circumstances, she was surprised to learn from a survivor that her father had taken his pocket score of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion with him on the train from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, where he died. Where he was murdered.

  Why the St. Matthew Passion, Scott wondered, of all the compositions by Bach? He might have chosen The Well-Tempered Clavier, or The Art of Fugue, or one of the violin concertos. Secular pieces. Scott couldn’t comprehend why his grandfather would embrace above all a composition about the crucifixion of Jesus. And yet . . . Scott knew from his own experience that one didn’t have to accept Christian doctrine to be moved by the emotional content of Bach’s liturgical music. He’d been soothed often enough himself by the transcendent opening movement from Cantata 170. The St. Matthew Passion especially evoked a sense of promise within despair. Scott hoped his grandfather had felt the music’s consolation when he was pushed into the cattle car of his final journey.

  And here Scott was, a Jew focusing his research on the music of Bach, in addition to his daily curatorial duties at the MacLean. He’d taken years of piano lessons without developing the skill to be a professional performer. He didn’t have the instinctive generosity and patience needed to be a teacher of undergraduate music history courses. He considered himself a historian and scientist. His position at the MacLean was a perfect fit for him.