Stefan was in a dim room, not dissimilar to his lair back in New York. He wore jeans and a sleeveless white T-shirt, under a work shirt, dark blue. Both were tight (the meds kept his soul under control and his weight high). On his feet were running shoes. His appearance was different from what it had been in America. He’d shaved his head—common in Italy—and lost the beard and mustache. He needed to remain invisible. He was sure word would spread here, sooner or later, about the kidnapping and his “compositions.”
He rose and looked out the window into the blackness.
No police cars.
No prying eyes.
No Artemises. He’d left the red-haired policewoman behind, back in America, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be another one here—or her brother god or god cousin or whoever—looking for him. He had assumed that was the case.
But all he saw was darkness and distant lights of the Italian landscape.
Italy…
What a wonderful place, magical.
The home of Stradivarius stringed instruments, worth millions, occasionally stolen or left in the back of a taxi, generating New York Post headlines about absentminded geniuses. Appropriate at the moment, because he was winding more double-bass strings into another noose for his next composition, which he would start on shortly. Italy was, as a matter of fact, the source for the absolutely best musical strings ever made. Sheep intestine, goat, lovingly stretched and scraped. Stefan actually felt a twinge of guilt that the strings he was using for his adventure had been made in the United States.
But that was simply practical. He’d bought a supply there, concerned that a purchase here might lead the authorities to him.
Italy…
Home of the opera composers, Verdi. Puccini. Brilliant beyond reckoning.
Home of La Scala—the most perfect acoustics of any concert hall made by man.
Home of Niccolò Paganini, the famed violinist, guitarist and composer.
Stefan returned to his bench and slipped on a headset. He turned the volume up and, as he continued to twine the gut strings together and tie the noose, he listened to the sounds caressing his eardrums, his brain and his soul. Most playlists people store on iPhones or Motorolas ranged from folk to classical to pop to jazz, and everything in between. Stefan certainly had a lot of music on his hard drive. But he had far more gigabytes of pure sound. Cricket chirps, bird wings, pile drivers, steam kettles, blood coursing through veins, wind and water…He collected them from everywhere. He had millions—nearly as many as the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.
When a mood was on him, Black Screams threatening, he sometimes grew depressed that his collection was limited to sounds dating back to merely a short time ago: the late nineteenth century. Oh, the Banū Mūsā brothers had created automated musical instruments, a water organ and a flute, in the ninth century in Baghdad, and music boxes still played the identical melodies they did when built in medieval days. But they were like music played from scores, re-creations.
Cheating.
Not the real thing.
Oh, we could marvel at a Rembrandt portrait. But it was—right?—fake. It was the artist’s conception of the subject. If Stefan had been moved by the visual, he would have traded a hundred Dutch masters’ works for a single Mathew Brady photograph. Frank Capra. Diane Arbus.
The first actual recordings of the human voice were made in the 1850s by édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a French inventor, who came up with the phonautograph, yet it didn’t actually capture sounds but merely made graphic representations of them, like lines of a seismograph. (Stefan was aware of rumors that de Martinville had recorded Abraham Lincoln’s voice; he’d tried desperately to find if this was true and where it might be. But he’d learned that, no, the recording never happened, sending the young man into a bout of depression.) Nearly as troubling to him was the circumstance surrounding the paleophone, invented by another Frenchman, Charles Cros, twenty years later; it had the capability of creating recordings but none had ever been found. The first device to make recordings that survived to the present day was Edison’s phonograph, 1878. Stefan owned every recording made by Edison.
What Stefan would have given for phonographs to have been invented two thousand years ago! Or three or four!
In his gloved hands he tested the noose, pulling it hard—though he was careful not to break the latex gloves.
On his playlist, a series of swishes came on. The sound of a knife blade being swiped against a sharpening steel. One of Stefan’s favorites, and he closed his eyes to listen. Like many, if not most, sounds, this could be heard in several ways. A threat, a workman’s task, a mother, preparing dinner for her children.
When this track ended, he pulled off the headphones and took another look outside.
No lights.
No Artemis.
He turned on his new Casio keyboard and began to play. Stefan knew this waltz quite well and played it from memory once, then again. Once more. In playing the third version, he began to slow the piece halfway through until, at the end, it tapered to a stop and remained a single sustained D note.
He lifted his hand off the keyboard. He played back the recording of the piece and was satisfied.
Now on to the rhythm section.
That would be easy, he thought, looking into the tiny den off the living room, where Ali Maziq, late of Tripoli, Libya, lay limp as a rag doll.
Thursday, September 23
III
The Aqueduct
Chapter 13
The Questura, the Police of State’s main headquarters in Naples, at Via Medina, 75, is an impressive pale stone building in the fascist style. The letters of the word “Questura” are in a font any Latin student would recognize (the “U”s harshly carved as “V”s), and the building’s architectural elements include nods to Rome (eagles, for instance).
Squinting up at the imposing structure, Ercole Benelli paused on the doorstep and straightened his gray uniform, brushing at dust. Heart thudding with a curious mixture of joy and trepidation, he stepped inside.
He approached an administrative officer, who said, “You are Benelli?”
“I…Well, yes.” Surprised to have been recognized. Surprised too that Rossi was apparently still desirous of his presence.
Her unsmiling face regarded him and, upon examining his ID cards—national and Forestry—she handed him a pass, then told him a room number.