So when the engines on the plane suddenly revved down, or whatever they were not supposed to do, and Maria Grazia answered a call from the pilots over the intercom and then said to Malory in lightly accented English that she was very sorry but the flight would be delayed, that the pilot was turning the plane back to the terminal and would he like another cup of tea, Malory began to plot how he might drive, as quickly as possible, to TiborTina and find out what had happened.
It was easier than he’d thought. While he was pondering a strategy, the Driver and Maria Grazia chatted in a rapid, half-whispered Italian that was full of concern, but which Malory imagined had to do with liaisons either past or future and didn’t concern him. So when they returned to the terminal — although shortly thereafter things would be forever changed in airports public and private after this moment — it was only a matter of a quick trip to the bathroom and a mistaken turn to the left, and Malory was in a New Jersey taxicab heading north to River Road.
The cabdriver was a heavyset Kodiak bear of a man, who made no attempt to help Malory into the taxi. A full pelt of hair pressed his head onto his chin and his chin onto a chest wrapped in a multi-pocketed vest full of pens and pads and things covered in feathers and fur that Malory couldn’t begin to identify from the back seat. The cabdriver was playing a CD on his audio system—La Chanson de Roland by Louis Couperin — which meant that he and Malory could travel the roads up the Hudson unencumbered by knowledge of events only a few miles to the south.
“Like music?”
“Sorry?” Malory thought he had heard.
“I asked if you like music,” the cabdriver said again, with a punctuated crescendo on every syllable.
“Mmm,” Malory answered, since an explanation would be too long.
Malory not only knew the piece, he knew the recording — E. Power Biggs on the organ of Saint Sulpice in Paris. Baroque Biggs was one of the few treasures left behind by his mother, a gift for his ninth birthday. The Couperin was not a difficult piece — he had persuaded the organist in Narbonne to teach it to him that next summer. His favorite part was towards the end when Roland calls for help. He blows his horn of elephant tusk so hard — the young Malory had to stand up on the pedals and reach high with both his arms to produce the effect on the organ — that his brain explodes and he dies on the spot. But another memory struck Malory with greater force as the taxi headed up the river. When Haroun first met Aldana in the stables below the house of the Jewish shochet Yehoshua, he had spoken of the death of Roland, Charlemagne’s cousin and best friend. Roland had stayed at the rear of the retreat of the Franks from Spain. He had died in the Battle of Roncesvalles deep in the Pyrenees, cut off from the rest of the troops by the betrayal of one of his kinsmen. Was Malory himself guilty of such treachery? He had left his own friend behind, if not the night before, then twenty-three years of nights before. And if a large part of Malory knew that Tibor was already dead, an equally large part was determined to return to TiborTina and at least put the body to rest.
And find Louiza.
And Ottavia.
If not the Pip.
“I began to dig organ back in the Navy,” the cabdriver said.
“Mmm,” Malory said again, not convinced he understood but certain he would find out.
“Moms put me in Language School. Keep me from going to Vietnam. Spruce Cape. Alaska. Not much to do up there except throw rocks at seagulls and study Russian. One of the SEALs training for cold weather combat had a Nakamichi reel-to-reel and about a hundred hours of tape — Karl Richter, Olivier Messiaen, that showboat Virgil Fox and the blind Kraut Helmut Walcha. But my favorite was Edward George Power Biggs. Man, I couldn’t get enough of E. Power.”
Malory thought about telling the Driver that he had met Biggs once, had taken him on a tour of the Father Smith organ in Trinity, with its forty-two ranks refurbished by Metzler Söhne. One ear was listening to the Chanson de Roland and the other for clues as they drove onto the toll bridge across the Hudson.
“Listened to so much E. Power,” the cabdriver said, as he threw some change into the basket, “that I failed my language exams. They stuck me in a booth with a set of headphones and played a tape — a simulation of a couple or three Russian MiGs in attack mode. The back and forth of the voices, the hiss of the switches going on and off. Lots of Russian. And above everything, the sound of air, like a giant bellows. Something about the voices reminded me of E. Power’s recording of the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor, you know, the second section where everything goes haywire. And then suddenly — silence. ‘Hey’ I told the examiner, ‘your tape broke.’ ‘Nope’ the guy told me. ‘My tape didn’t break. Your fighter just got shot down.’” The cabdriver turned the wheel to the left by the round barn. Malory looked out through a window, greasy with New Jersey. Half a dozen people were gathered around a TV plugged into one of the lights in the parking lot. “So I came back here and started driving.”
They stopped at the fieldstone fence at the top of the dirt road that led down the hill to Ottavia’s yellow cabin by the creek. Malory handed the cabdriver his wallet, furnished by Settimio with enough American money and discreet identification to last him several days. It was almost noon, less than twenty-four hours after Malory first strolled with Ottavia down the road and up the tractor path to the Blue House. Malory was returning to TiborTina. For Louiza? Did he really expect she would be there? For Tibor? Did he really believe he was still alive? For Ottavia? She had spoken to Malory of Haroun and his own return to Rome for the coronation of Charlemagne. Haroun came back for Aldana, Ottavia told him, for the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, for love. The driver took what he needed and handed the wallet back to Malory. The Couperin had trickled down into a runnel of sixteenth notes, a soothing anesthetic for his arrival. The driver backed into the dirt road, turned the way he came, and drove off over the last of the organ.
It wasn’t until Malory crested the hill to the pond that he saw any signs of life. There were no cars parked by the Blue House, none by the Red Barn. The pond at noon was still and gray and nearly invisible. Whatever traces Louiza had left in the loam around the edges were merely the residue of his imagination. Malory turned. He hadn’t climbed up the terrace the evening before, hadn’t been invited yet up to the White House. Tibor had left him by the pond while he went to cook dinner, Ottavia had run off to pick herbs, and then there had been Louiza and the explosion and all that followed.
Had the explosion come from the White House?
Nothing was out of place. The potted pines or ferns or whatever Cristina had set in whitewashed uniformity on the steps of the terrace were as Malory remembered — as he remembered as Ottavia ran up the steps of the terrace to pick herbs for Tibor’s pasta. Only the gun was gone — the gun Tibor had handed to him and that Malory had placed back into the plastic bag and set on the table by the pond. And there was a yellow ribbon, barring the way up the first step of the terrace. A plastic yellow ribbon with writing.
When he thought back to the terrace — the lifting of the yellow ribbon, the walk up the steps, the arrival at the top, the discovery of the table holding the half-drunk glass of red wine, the wire-rimmed glasses he had first seen Tibor tweak over his ears twenty-three years earlier as he emerged from the organ case in the loft of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the Adirondack chair that must have held Tibor in the final moment before he shot a bullet through the roof of his mouth and spattered the ceiling that overhung the terrace and parts of the deck with what had once been his divided mind — Malory couldn’t remember reading the writing on the yellow tape: its warning, its infernal admonition from the police to abandon hope all ye who cross this line. All he remembered was the pull, the pull up the steps. And the music, the noise, the hum, the buzz, the ascent and descent of thousands of flies from roof to deck, from deck to roof, thousands of tiny angels, like the Jacob’s ladder of dust motes he had seen in another organ loft in another lifetime. The message of the flies — this was clear, this he understood.