The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge Read online

  ‘Madame Carpentier?’

  The Composer’s assistant whisked her away to a small table in the restaurant attached to the theatre, where she was awaited by a light salmon salad and a bottle of champagne.

  ‘Are you enjoying the performance?’ The Judge decided to take pleasure in the bribe. She had suffered quite enough. And so, mellowed by supper and the expensive champagne, which had the decency and intelligence to be French, the Judge sauntered back through the well-dressed crowds and reclaimed her central position, to await the final denouement. These desperate lovers are surely doomed.

  Wagner always comes home to roost. There is a method that underwrites his power: complicate, prevaricate, withhold. Let the water’s seepage through the dam become palpable, visible, viscous to the touch. Then unleash all that has been promised and desired in a mighty flood. Deliver the goods. The Judge had already sat through a lot of noisy, worthless posturing. She expected more of the same and nothing unforeseen. Yet she paid attention, much against her better judgement.

  Das Schiff? Das Schiff?

  Isoldes Schiff?

  Du mußt es sehen!

  Mußt es sehen!

  Das Schiff? Sähst du’s noch nicht?

  Can you not see Isolde’s ship?

  The last act of Tristan and Isolde is about waiting, waiting in impatience and frustration, waiting, waiting for life to ebb, waiting for the dawn, waiting to see the one you love for the last time, waiting for death. And the music makes you wait. Was it simply the effect of the champagne? The Judge felt the tension easing from her jaw and shoulders. She let the cashmere shawl slip down across her back. Let go. Let go of everything. Like loosening a rope. Is that the right metaphor? Yes, let go. And this was her undoing. The action of the piece remained static and improbable, but the music began to tell another story. We will not always be condemned to wait, forgotten at the gates. This forbidden love, which we have sacrificed, will be returned to us tenfold. We see the one we love, the one who has gone on before us, striding ahead, stepping away into darkness, but we know in our flesh, in the kingdom of this world, that we have but to take one step, one single step across that threshold, to seize the glory that awaits us in that eternal, endless night.

  The young soprano had a voice not yet sufficiently confident or powerful to sing the Liebestod upon her knees beside the body of her dead beloved, as it is usually performed. And so the ending of the opera took the audience by surprise. A soft screen descended between the singer and the spectacle of the assembled court, mourning the hero’s death, their heads bowed in grief. The soprano stepped forward and the house lights glowed. She stood, no longer an actress in an opera, but a real, breathing human being, a woman whose beloved had died in her arms, less than two metres away from the Judge.

  Mild und leise

  wie er lächelt …

  O Death where is thy sting? O Grave, thy victory?

  Seht ihr’s, Freunde? Seht ihr’s nicht?

  Immer lichter

  wie er leuchtet,

  stern-umstrahlet

  hoch sich hebt?

  Now she was speaking directly to the audience, her arms outstretched, her face radiant with joy. For the Night beckoned, that Endless Night of pleasure, the lavish promise of eternity and the enraptured dream. The girl reached out towards the audience, begging for their blessing and consent. For what awaits us on the other side of death? Glory, glory, glory: I have seen it with my own eyes and I give you my word. The darkness behind the young singer opened out into a windy dawn, so that the figures, silent as statues, stood dark against the transfigured light, and the Judge, no longer able to see or breathe, found her face awash with tears.

  She imagined that the endless curtain calls would give her time to recover her equanimity, but the soft tired face of the young soprano, overflowing with exhaustion and delight, her blonde hair slicked against her cheeks, moved the Judge still more deeply. When the audience rose to acclaim her, the Judge rose too, her rushing tears in free fall. She saw the Composer, applauding his own cast and orchestra, the same exhausted satisfaction on his features, through an uncontrollable blur of tears.

  Then it was all over.

  * * *

  The audience in her row separated like the Red Sea before Aaron’s rod and set out home, half in one direction, half in the other. The Judge was left, hesitating and worn out, gathering up her bag and shawl, flattened, as if she had been prodded through an emotional mangle. Then the Composer reappeared at the end of the row of red seats. Several people spoke to him, one man shook his hand; he brushed them aside and stormed towards her like a crusading knight who has at last spotted a maiden in distress and need of rescue. She felt his hands upon her face, wiping away her tears. He said nothing for a moment, but pressed a large, folded white handkerchief upon her, then spoke, almost in a whisper.

  ‘Thank you, Madame Carpentier. Your tears are the dearest compliment we could wish for. You have believed in us and heard us truly. We cannot honour you enough.’

  The Judge wrestled with her feelings, which had been sliced to ribbons, and fought like a tiger to regain her distance and composure. She looked up at the Composer, but could not tell if his savage blue eyes had really softened into a shifting grey mist or if she was still mastered by unpardonable emotions. Something was missing.

  ‘My glasses! I’ve lost my glasses.’

  He turned all the neighbouring seats upside down and found the still undamaged spectacles beneath the preceding row. At what point had she lost them and ceased to see clearly? She had no idea.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured, ‘I’m not usually so uncontrolled.’ She felt his giant hands gentle upon her shoulders.

  ‘We are now spending all our time apologising to one another, Madame Carpentier. But there is no need to be sorry. For these tears you must never apologise. Never.’

  He uttered these last words with such vehemence and intensity that a precise thought crystallised in the Judge’s mind. She had lost this night’s battle. On enemy territory she had been vanquished. I must escape from this man. Now.

  ‘Would you be so kind as to call me a taxi?’

  He swept her out into the foyer and began to negotiate with one of his assistants. She realised that she had mislaid the russet cashmere shawl, excused herself and darted back inside the theatre. The shawl lay draped upon the carpet at the end of her row like a healing wound. The Judge snatched it up, unfolded the Composer’s handkerchief and blew her nose, hard. As she settled her glasses and her vision cleared, she saw a thick folded book, the size of a college lecture folder or an artist’s sketch pad, resting on the seat before her. It was the Composer’s score, the full score of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. She picked up the volume with the intention of giving it back to him, slowly turning the pages as she made her way past the vestiaire. The theatre was packing itself away for the night. She heard bangs, thumps and voices filtering out from behind the closed tabs: the set was either being dismantled or reconstructed in another form. The spare programmes, the spring Spielplan, listing all the forthcoming attractions, and the Music Festival brochures stood in neat stacks along the counter. The bar and snacks had already vanished. The adjoining doors leading to the restaurant stood darkened, locked. The Judge glanced down at the blue marks and odd comments written in German down the margins of the music; it seemed that the Composer was answering back, responding to the score.

  Suddenly she stood still and stared. A bleak, lost fragment of her brain that had been muffled, dulled and silenced snapped aggressively back into life. For there, beside the Liebestod, that terrible hymn to extinction and eternity, scratched along the blank gaps at the edge, gleamed a sequence of blocked-out letters, which resembled unaccented Hebrew. There, in the Composer’s own hand, shone the living, secret language of the Faith.

  7

  SERVANTS OF ISIS

  ‘What bothers me most,’ said Gaëlle, chewing her upper lip, ‘is that you haven’t had him arrested yet.’

&n
bsp; ‘On what charge?’ replied the Judge. ‘Planning to bump himself off at some future date? Knowing that his friends also intended to kill themselves? Hard to prove. And anyway, non-assistance à personne en danger is all I’d have. Being able to read and write an ancient secret language? Behaving like a maniac and then being excessively charming to make up for it? None of these things are crimes, Gaëlle. In his law or ours. And I haven’t even got enough on the Faith yet to nail the whole thing as a sect. I have no official members, no legal or associative structure, no registration or documentation. And no trace of the money. We haven’t even found the gun that was used to kill Madame Laval.’

  Gaëlle rummaged in her dossiers, mutinous.

  ‘Well, trump something up. Plant the gun on him. Like they do on TV.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll get Schweigen on to it at once. But in order to plant the gun on Friedrich Grosz we have to find it first.’

  The Judge set aside three fat dossiers dealing with the Faith, which dominated the left-hand side of her desk, and drew down the bulging folders on Agape: Healing through Love, which presented a far simpler profile. All our illnesses result from a dearth of fraternal love and the care of healing hands. Be prepared to part with an initial subscription fee of three thousand francs, non-returnable, and after a sequence of six sessions with a self-help group of like-minded believers, led by a specialist, anything – even miracles – will be possible. The publicity contained testimonies of those who had signed up as doubting Thomases and still been cured of everything from psoriasis to cancer. One woman suffered from ‘tingling in the knees’, but the faith of her Agape group had lifted her mind to greater, higher things and the tingling miraculously disappeared. The guru, Thucydides Magistos, supposedly Greek, turned out to be one of her usual suspects. The Judge had encountered him once before as the leader of an Egyptian cult, the Servants of Isis – We are the servants of Isis, sworn to obey Her commands – which sought to restore the ancient religion in the Western world. The guru, then accompanied by an ample matriarch, proclaimed her holy, the true reincarnation of the Goddess Herself. The lady, at least, believed him. She turned out to be not fraudulent, but mad. Isis suffered from fantasies of immediate deification and demanded a human sacrifice, preferably a handsome Osiris, whom she would rip to pieces with her own mighty hands and teeth, and then reconstitute, using sacred tears as glue. The willing initiate was rescued, the Goddess Isis locked up in an asylum, and the guru fined prodigious sums. The Judge could produce no conclusive evidence to prove that he was party to the sacrifice plot, and he denied it before the tribunal with convincing passion, claiming that Isis held him in thrall.

  Now Thucydides Magistos narrated, in thrilling detail, his own conversion experience, remarkably similar to St Paul’s uncomfortable encounter with Our Saviour on the road to Damascus, as recounted in the Acts of the Apostles, a tale the Judge suspected of being the source. I was proud, I would not believe, but God’s humbling hand pointed out the Way. He told me to arise and enter the city, for I am His chosen vessel to bear His name before the gentiles and kings and the Children of Israel. His whispered prayers in Greek proved extraordinarily efficacious and even arrested the progress of gangrene in one old lady’s foot. The Judge sifted through the specialist reports from the doctors. Those members of Agape: Healing through Love who suffered from fatal diseases had died anyway, but in comfort and peace, accompanied by their purchased, loyal friends.

  Gaëlle typed and filed their interrupted interview with the Composer and then closed the great grey shutters of their office windows against the midday sun, which had just cleared the Church of Our Lady of Compassion, and sent a long, solid shaft of light across the dark parquet. Cool air, trapped beneath the high ceilings, kept the office temperature at a comfortable 23º C. The Judge refused to install an air-conditioning unit on principle. The planet must be defended from the misnamed ‘climatisation’. Their desks stood confronting one another, so that neither woman could see into her companion’s computer or know exactly which documents turned between the other’s fingers. Gaëlle could not distract herself from the Faith, but defended her private enquiries from the Judge’s searchlight eyes. Why could she not simply file the case, under ‘Awaiting Fresh Evidence’, like all the others, inconclusive, pending? Her difficulty arose from a personal antipathy towards both Schweigen and the Composer. She guarded Dominique Carpentier with the ferocity of a jealous god, and these men absorbed too much of her Judge’s precious attention. Gaëlle studied the ballistics reports, comparing the diagrams, graphs and figures. Finally, she risked resurrecting the debate.

  ‘Hey, listen. If the same gun killed both Anton and Marie-Cécile Laval, and yet forensics seem pretty sure they shot themselves, personally, if you see what I mean, with no outside help, but the suicide gun has vanished, doesn’t that mean that there is always one person present at these mass departures who doesn’t go too? One person who stays on? And if there’s one person unaccounted for, then one person is still available for prosecution,’ Gaëlle persisted, bent on revelation by deduction.

  ‘Indeed,’ said the Judge, not looking up, ‘but it needn’t be the same person at both departures.’

  ‘And it wasn’t the Composer in either case,’ sighed Gaëlle, openly disappointed. ‘His alibi checks out. He was seen by at least two thousand people on both occasions.’

  There was silence in the office. The city quietened at midday.

  ‘But wouldn’t that one person have nightmares for evermore? I mean – at seeing everyone they knew and loved lying there dead?’

  The Judge looked up.

  ‘Not necessarily, Gaëlle. It all depends on your relationship to death. On what you think it means.’

  The Judge saw a young woman leaning towards an enchanted public, her arms outstretched, persuading each and every one of them that our longing for the everlasting night will never be in vain. Embrace the joy of endless, endless night and follow, follow me. The Judge shivered slightly, then fixed her Greffière with a determined stare.

  ‘Put the Faith away, Gaëlle, and help me finish off these lunatic disease-healers. We’ll come back to it soon enough.’

  * * *

  And so, the Faith, mired in several bulging dossiers, was confined to the cream cabinet in the Judge’s office – unsolved cases, affaires non classées – pending further information and fresh developments. Two months passed. Gaëlle cut out all the articles in the local and national press describing Madame Laval’s well-attended memorial service, held in the same parish church where the Judge had been baptised. There were discreet hints concerning the dreadful circumstances of her tragic demise, but no one used the word ‘suicide’, although Le Nouvel Observateur, which was running another series on contemporary sects, dared to describe the New Year’s Day departure as a massacre. The Judge rang them up and complained. That night, long after the offices had closed and the security guard had done his round, then settled down to watch the football on a secret little television that resembled a security screen, the Judge sat on before her desk, her astral charts spread out across the green leather. She could not justify any more official working hours brooding over the Faith, but she was convinced that something strange lay just beneath her fingertips, dark to her eyes, but livid with revelation to those capable of reading the haunting trails of stars.

  The republic of reason seemed in full retreat, for the annual turnover generated by clairvoyants, mediums, commercial mystics and visionaries now amounted to well over four million euros in the new currency. She tried to calculate the sum in francs, but abandoned the attempt when she read that every other person living in Martinique was actually in touch with the beyond. Dominique Carpentier’s enlightenment values of reason, justice and humane discipline were evidently out of step with the times. The little shops selling idols, crystals, fragrant candles, Buddhas, Krishnas, magic herbs in silken sachets, beads and bangles, which guaranteed health, longevity and sexual power on a scale unimaginable to ordinary mortals, flo
urished in every city, lurked in corners of bookshops, advertised in women’s magazines, could now be contacted direct via our website; one white witch, a pagan defender of Gaia, even gave astrological readings over the phone. All you need is a gullible soul and a credit card. The sects were led onwards to glory by rich men. The Greek guru enjoyed the use of a villa in Tuscany and a condo on the beach in Miami, handsome gifts from devoted followers, undeclared for tax purposes, for the guru owned nothing in his own right. He had risen above property. His spacious dojo in Paris was funded by an English aristocrat, who flew over on Wednesdays to attend the miraculous healing sessions, where, after an hour and a quarter of martial arts practice, they all got in touch with their lower abdomens. O Lord, I wander among the foolish and dawdle before the gates of Paradise, where the angel stands, bearing his drawn sword. The Judge bowed her head in unbelieving prayer and terrible exhaustion.

  Her mobile lit up and shivered across the desk without ringing. She peered at the number. Withheld. She looked up at the clock. Fifteen minutes to midnight. Then she snatched up the phone.

  ‘André? Where are you?’

  ‘Outside. Looking up at your window. Security won’t let me in.’

  The Judge rose up, stiff and joyful. She flung open the shutters and leaned out. Two floors beneath her, in the narrow cobbled street, gazing upwards through the orange shadows, stood André Schweigen. She greeted the wide smile and square features of the man who had stifled fires with his bare hands for love of her.