Shark and Octopus Read online

  “Either of you read music?” CJ asked, smile still securely in place.

  “Nope, sorry,” Kit answered. He stood to the left of the real estate agent.

  “Neither do I,” Griffin said. He stood to CJ’s right. “But I can read English.”

  He pointed. There, in the lower right corner of the wall, written in a very shaky hand, appeared a single word:

  MOZART

  THIRTEEN

  June 12

  7:47 pm

  Griffin drove home from Gist Avenue much faster than he’d driven out. He and Kit rode in silence. Griffin knew what he needed next, but wasn’t sure how to get it.

  Annie greeted them in the living room. She was freshly showered and wearing the baggy yellow tee shirt Griffin referred to as her Pokemon shirt. In the voice of a game show host, she announced, “What do we have for the contestants, Johnny?”

  She sidestepped gracefully and with a flourish gestured to the completed bookcase.

  “Thanks, Annie. It’s really very nice.”

  “Have you thought about which book you’ll shelve here first?”

  Griffin indulged himself in a moment’s daydream: Gatsby or Camus? Couldn’t go wrong with early LeCarre…With some effort he yanked himself back into the present.

  “I need to call Saif,” Griffin said. “I have no idea if he can do what I need.”

  “Easy peasy,” was Saif’s reply. “Check your email in fifteen minutes. It’ll be on your computer.” Saif teased Griffin: “Griffin? Your computer’s the TV-shaped object in your house.”

  “Saif said fifteen minutes,” he told Annie and Kit, though neither had any idea what would be happening in that time. He started pacing.

  “You’re not going to pace for fifteen minutes, are you?” Annie asked.

  Griffin thought for a moment. “That had been the plan, yeah.”

  “How much,” Annie wanted to know, “how much shower tile grouting can you clean in fifteen minutes?”

  Quite a lot, it turned out. Griffin had worked up a sweat, scrubbing away in the close, steamy confines of the shower, when Annie called to him, “Saif’s email’s here.”

  The email came with six attachments. The text of Saif’s email read:

  SOME ASSEMBLY WAS REQUIRED. HERE ARE SIX PICTURES, ONE FOR EACH LINE OF MUSIC. WHAZZUP?

  Griffin typed: THANKS. NOT SURE WHAT’S UP. BACKATCHA.

  Griffin spread six 8 by 11 inch pictures on the dining room table. He explained to Annie how he’d taken the twelve pictures with his phone camera in the master bedroom of Hans Baeder’s house on Gist Avenue. Then Saif had worked his cutting and pasting magic, merging the twelve pictures into six, one picture for each line.

  “Saif’s work is seamless, isn’t it?” Griffin said, looking at each picture in turn. “One picture, one line of music. The notes are completely legible. Now, what does this music tell us? I’m stumped. Kit? Annie?”

  Kit shook his head. Annie said, “I don’t know either, but I know who might. Miss Paulette.”

  “Our ninth grade music teacher?” Griffin responded, greatly surprised. “Miss Paulette? I haven’t thought of her in years. What made you think of her now?”

  “I’ve run into her a few times at Kenilworth Mall. On my trips to buy nails for the bookcases I’m building. Miss Paulette’s retired now and is at the mall most nights, she told me. Why don’t we see if she can help us with this. Unless you have another idea? Or maybe you’d like to finish cleaning the shower tile grouting?”

  *

  They met Bobby in the parking lot of the Kenilworth Mall. The four of them walked inside until they reached the railing overlooking the food court.

  “There she is, by the fountain.” Annie pointed. “Miss Paulette. Same table as the other times I was here.”

  She wasn’t hard to spot. In the midst of tables full of sullen teenagers sprawling in chairs, there was Miss Paulette, sitting very upright and very much alone.

  “Think Miss P will remember me?” Griffin asked.

  She most certainly did.

  “Ah, Mr. Gilmore,” Miss Paulette said, as they approached. “Tell me, Mr. Gilmore, how did you manage it?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You cut half my classes and still managed to elude detention.”

  She seemed smaller than Griffin remembered; then again, teachers seen for the first time years after graduation inevitably did. She gave her head an exasperated shake. Griffin had forgotten how effectively she could do that.

  “I’ve often wondered how you pulled it off, Mr. Gilmore. Cutting all those classes. Somehow you must have gotten into the Assistant Principal’s office and rewritten the attendance reports. That much I can figure out. But how did you manage it? Could you enlighten your old teacher?”

  “Couldn’t it be my charm?” Griffin suggested.

  “You were a bright young man. Still are, I assume. Though you have a good bit more brains than charm.”

  “A backhanded compliment if I ever heard one, Miss P,” was Griffin’s response.

  Her hair was greyer than he recalled – it’d been 15 years since Griffin had seen her, so no surprise – and precisely brushed. Her half moon glasses hung on a silver chain around her neck. Her face was rescued from ordinariness by piercing blue eyes.

  “Do you remember my cohorts?” Griffin said, waving a hand at Kit and Bobby flanking him.

  “I’m a cohort now?” said Kit. “What exactly does a cohort do?”

  Miss Paulette said, “Mr. Covington, I certainly recall you. And this would be Mr. Lowell, I presume.”

  Bobby bowed, taking an imaginary curtain call. “It would be,” he said.

  “Why don’t you all pull up a chair,” Miss Paulette offered. She sat in a stiff-backed style that made midshipmen look wimpy. “If you can spare your old teacher a few minutes on a Saturday night. Though I suspect this is not merely a social call.”

  “You suspect right,” said Griffin.

  *

  As he put the pictures of Hans Baeder’s wall on the table in front of Miss Paulette, Griffin explained the origin of the pictures, careful to give as few specifics as possible: “I took these pictures with my phone. They are from a wall in an empty house in west Baltimore. I believe this was done by the previous owner, who has died. He must have been a classical musician.”

  Miss Paulette slid her half moon glasses onto her nose. Eyes on the pictures, she replied, “A fair assumption.”

  “See at the bottom of this picture?”

  “Mozart.”

  “Did he – Mozart – compose this music?”

  Miss Paulette did not answer at first. Her head moved slightly from side to side. Griffin could tell she was hearing and enjoying the music in her mind. Her blue eyes sparkled with pleasure.

  After looking at one picture then another, until she had studied all six, she finally said, “Some of it, Mr. Gilmore. Mozart composed some of it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Griffin said. “I don’t understand. Then again, I’m afraid I’m not very musical-”

  “Oh, that I remember.”

  “I’m not musical and I’m not following. How could Mozart compose only some of this? Where there are musical notes and the name Mozart, one would think all the notes were composed by Mozart.”

  “In this case, one would be wrong. Mozart composed only some of this. Here, look at this picture.” The four of them did as instructed. Miss Paulette had lost none of her front of the classroom command. “I recognize this. This entire line is from Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.”

  “Night Music,” Griffin promptly translated.

  “That’s correct. Even you would recognize the opening notes of Night Music. The start of this other line is from Night Music also. As is the last half of these two lines. The rest I don’t recognize, so I assume someone composed it. Perhaps the owner of the house, as you have surmised. Your problem was never insufficient IQ, Mr. Gilmore. It’s what you did with your considerable talents that’s so troubli
ng.”

  She concluded: “Taken as a whole, these six lines are a mixture of Mozart and someone else.”

  “What does that tell us?”

  Miss Paulette looked up from the pictures. Her face was a blend of pleasure and puzzlement.

  “What does what tell us about what or whom precisely?”

  “What does the music tell us about the composer – the one who isn’t Mozart?” Griffin asked, referring to Hans Baeder.

  Miss Paulette took off her glasses and gave Griffin a direct glare. “You’ve always done this, Mr. Gilmore.” Her voice as well as her face were rigid. “You make leaps of thinking without explaining exactly where you are.”

  “It’s my superpower,” Griffin said, a joke which yielded only a glare.

  “Forgive me, Miss P. I’ll go step by step. First of all, what instrument was the music composed for? Can you tell that?”

  “Violin,” Miss Paulette answered confidently.

  “So the man who owned the house played the violin?”

  “Almost certainly, yes.”

  “Can you tell where the composer – the one who wasn’t named Amadeus Mozart – studied music?”

  This caused Miss Paulette to think a few seconds. She held her glasses as she stared off somewhere in the mid-distance, thinking.

  “Europe.”

  “Can you make a guess which part of Europe?”

  “I’d say the continent.” Some more thinking; more glasses holding and more staring. “But not the Mediterranean. They’re too flashy. What he is showing us here is very much in the old school style. Likely German.”

  Griffin wondered, Did Hans Baeder study in Germany? Probably.

  “Traditionally classical training,” she added. Miss Paulette looked at Griffin, a smile tugging at the corners of her brightly lipsticked mouth. Matter of factly she told him, “You wouldn’t last a week in the discipline of that schooling, Mr. Gilmore.”

  Griffin sat up straighter briefly, then abandoned the effort. “I don’t doubt it. A few last questions.”

  Griffin wanted to learn whatever he could about why Hans Baeder – who was dying at the time – wrote the music on his bedroom wall.

  “Did this man improve the Mozart?”

  The sharp teaching tone returned. “Mr. Gilmore, no one but God could improve Mozart.”

  “Is it any good? What this guy added to the Mozart?”

  “Yes, it’s very good. But…” The half moon glasses went back on. She studied the pictures more intently. “But…”

  The ‘but” – repeated – surprised Griffin. Normally, Miss Paulette organized her thoughts before speaking and wasn’t a “but” kind of person.

  “But? But what, Miss P? You’ve got that but-I-can’t-explain-it look on your face. The same one you had when talking about my cutting your classes. Which was nothing personal.”

  “But the notes that were added? They’re a little off.”

  *

  Off?” Griffin repeated, “What do you mean, off? Just a few minutes ago you seemed impressed by the skill of- “he checked himself from identifying Hans Baeder – “by the skill of the composer.”

  “Oh, I am impressed.”

  “Then what’s going on?”

  “It isn’t easily explained.”

  “Could you try?”

  Her forehead wrinkled with uncertainty. Griffin had forgotten how dramatically she could do that. She absolutely had that look of uncertainty dialed in. Deep ridges and furrows appeared on her forehead as she tried to unriddle the notes.

  “I do know this composition is not the result of ignorance or an accident. It’s skillful and deliberate.”

  She pointed to one of Saif’s photographs.

  “This line of music is entirely and accurately Mozart’s.”

  She pointed to three other pictures.

  “Parts of these lines are Mozart’s as well. Parts aren’t. The parts that aren’t don’t flow in the same way as Mozart’s do. It’s close, but not quite the same.

  “For example, these two lines,” she pointed to the last two photos, “are entirely someone else’s, not Mozart’s. The sequence of the notes is a bit off. The pace of the music: a half note where you’d expect a quarter; a note repeated which shouldn’t have been. There’s a lot of that. I can’t imagine why. It is a little off and I cannot explain it.”

  “The man who wrote those lines of music was probably dying when he did so,” Griffin observed. “Could that be the explanation?”

  The schoolmarmish sting returned to Miss Paulette’s voice.

  “No. It could not. As I stated previously, Mr. Gilmore, this composition was skillful and deliberate. This scoring is not rushed and it is not the sloppy product of someone weakened by illness.” She went on in her struggling to stay patient manner. “It’s certainly not accidental. It’s very well done.

  “There is something else that puzzles me here, Mr. Gilmore. There are many repeated notes, a kind of stutter. Mozart would never do that; no competent composer would. It’s impossible for anyone with any musical training not to notice the repetition. It’s like the skip in a record.” She smiled slightly. “Records are what we listened to music on before CDs or streaming.”

  A little off? A stutter? Repetition impossible to ignore? Why, Griffin asked himself. Why was it done? Why did a dying Hans – who was getting a monthly phone call from Future-Ride at the time – go to this much effort to rewrite Mozart in this strange manner?

  “Thanks, Miss P,” Griffin said.

  “I’m guessing you’ll be back,” she said.

  “I’m guessing we will, too.”

  FOURTEEN

  June 15

  9:45 am

  Monday morning rain clouds rolled in, angry grey and moving fast, with a chilling breeze. Griffin, Annie, Kit, Bobby and Saif were meeting on the patio outside the Panera at nine. The sky reminded Griffin of the tornado at the beginning of The Wizard of Oz. He checked the sky without spotting an old biddy on a bike.

  For a long moment Griffin listened to the swishing sound of traffic passing on York Road. He swirled his cappuccino, sipped, and said, “You know, for a while I thought this thing with the Duke and his key and the man in white and Hans Baeder was all tangled like a hairball some cat coughed up. I don’t think that anymore. I now think there’s a symmetry, a kind of elegance even, to all this.”

  “An elegant hairball?” Kit asked.

  Griffin swirled his cappuccino again. This time he did not sip. “Here’s where I think we are. Let’s review the tape.”

  He put a pad of paper on the table and withdrew a pen from his shirt pocket. The others leaned closer to watch. Griffin drew a box on the left side of the page.

  “This box,” he explained, “represents the man in white. “We know next to nothing about him. Other than: probably Spanish, certainly refined, knowledgeable about the history of European nobility, extremely well prepared, good marksman.

  “He desperately wanted a key – he was willing to kill me for it, if necessary. Using the information he got from the Duke’s blondes, he did what was necessary to get the key. Which opened a room at the back of the Arazzo Castle dungeon. But the room turned out to be empty, much to his disappointment. What does he want that key for? What did he expect to find in that room at the back of the dungeon? We’d love to know.

  “Down here,” Griffin drew another box, at the bottom of the page, “is Hans Baeder. We don’t know much about him either. We do know he was a classical musician, a violinist, probably studied in Germany. He survived World War Two as a German soldier, never rising above private. He came to this country, worked as a carpenter. Lived modestly in a west Baltimore duplex for half a century.

  “For reasons I cannot begin to fathom, Hans, a man with very little money, was called 19 times by someone in Future-Ride, a Manhattan investment company. Nor can I explain why Hans went to the considerable effort of filling his bedroom wall with notes that are a combination of Mozart and his own musical comp
osition. A composition which our old music teacher Miss Paulette described as ‘a little off.’ A knowledgeable musician and his work is a little off? Any reason for that?

  “And, perhaps most strangely, he was a Nazi. Probably ninety percent of all the Germans in the military during the war were not Nazis. Why was Hans? Our cup runneth over with questions.”

  Griffin drew a box on the right side of the page.

  “This third box is Future-Ride. We know a bit about the company and some about Alexandria Webb and De-BOR-ah Miller. Future-Ride is a Manhattan investment company and these are the ladies who run it. One of those ladies called Hans Baeder once a month for 19 months. Kit and I checked out Hans’ house. What a Manhattan investment company could possibly want with the man who lived there, I cannot begin to guess.

  “At the top here,” Griffin drew a circle at the top of the page, “is Duke Ferlinghetti. It was his request to recover the key that started all this. He felt his family honor was at stake. But all the Duke is interested in is a key and this has advanced well past that key.”

  Griffin put an X through the Duke’s box.

  “I think we can comfortably remove the Duke. For all his royal turdishness, he plays no role in our quest, other than awaiting the return of his family’s key.”

  Griffin stared at the remaining two boxes he had drawn. He started to sip his cappuccino, then abandoned the effort, lost in thought. At last he said, “Here are the most intriguing facts about the connections between these two boxes.”

  *

  Griffin drew one line between the Future-Ride and Hans Baeder boxes and another line between the Future-Ride and man in white boxes.