The Great Conductor

Chapter 1

“Music killed my parents.”

Perhaps it was not the best answer, but there it was.

“Excuse me,” Dr. Korpacheff said, peering over her horn-rimmed glasses. “Christine, did you just say that music—”

“Killed my parents. Yes. That’s what I said . . . well, it was sort of one of the reasons why it happened,” Christine said, fiddling with the jade beads on her wrist before closing her eyes. “You asked me about my parents, and I answered your question.”

Why did I bring that up in here? Christine thought with regret.

Christine Heart, a thirty-five-year-old homicide detective, did not want to be in the shrink’s office in the middle of July while her colleagues were busy solving criminal cases with hardly any time for lunch in a stuffy office sometimes overwhelmed by BO. Granted, the air-conditioning in the doctor’s office was way better, and it felt really nice to be in the room.

The Homicide Investigation Division, which she had requested to be transferred to only two years ago, was no place for slacking and taking personal leaves. It was like the army—if you signed up for it, you had to be there day in and day out no matter what. Today, though, Christine felt like a high school student who had been sent to the principal’s office for a trivial offense, wasting her time explaining her behavior while the rest of the class depended on her in some extremely important sports event. It was an absolute waste of her time and taxpayers’ money.

“Is that why you’re here?” Dr. Korpacheff asked, adjusting her spectacles.

Christine looked at the big, fancy clock on the wall—five past two in the afternoon. She had been in the doctor’s office for only five minutes, but it felt like an eternity. She had nothing against Dr. Korpacheff. In fact, Christine kind of liked her demeanor when they had met before the session: friendly, professional, and soft-spoken.

The doctor was approximately her age, perhaps a couple of years older than Christine, who had not had time to celebrate her birthday a couple of months ago. Dr. Korpacheff had smooth, tanned skin and sported a very nice, expensive-looking beige pantsuit. Christine’s skin had not seen much sun even though it was the middle of summer—too much time in the office during the day and long, tedious hours sitting in the car during evening stakeouts. Christine’s jeans and shirt, even though clean and tidy, had been in her possession longer than she wanted to admit—no time or desire for shopping.

Christine noticed that Dr. Korpacheff kept her immaculately manicured nails short, and her forearms, which were not covered by the rolled-up sleeves of her silk blouse, looked strong. Daily workouts? No ring. Is she married? Kids?

“No, I’m here to work on my anger management skills in the workplace.” Christine shifted in the chair.

Christine had had a few issues with a couple of male colleagues—Detectives Kozminsky and O’Hara—who did not believe that she was capable of doing a good job and had tried to make sure she was assigned cases they did not want. Those poor excuses for colleagues had a good relationship with the detective sergeant who was in charge of assigning cases when he received calls from uniformed units.

Despite these attempts to undermine her, Christine had a good record of solved cases and had been pulled from the usual rotation onto some priority cases at her supervisor’s—Lieutenant Whitehead’s—discretion. That hadn’t sat well with the other detectives, and they had continued to spread antagonistic rumors about her alleged incompetence around the office, which had led to a shouting match with a lot of profanity (on their side) and a bit of body pushing (from Christine). Being in good shape, it had not been hard for Christine to put the two overweight, middle-aged men to shame. She probably should not have done that, but those jerks had deserved it.

“Do you think the reason why you are here is related to your parents?”

Christine pondered this for a second. “Well, perhaps everything that happens in anyone’s life is related to their parents one way or another. Do you think so?”

Dr. Korpacheff looked at her notes and nodded. “Well, why don’t you tell me about them? What did they do?”

Christine glanced at the doctor. She already regretted mentioning music—a subject she had been avoiding since she was fourteen years old. But as her lieutenant had told her, she needed to “go all the way and hold nothing back from the doctor to get better . . . or else” (whatever that meant), and it seemed that she had no choice but to share the pain she had been carrying inside for twenty-one years.

Christine closed her eyes and instantly imagined her mom and dad, who would always be young and healthy in her mind. She remembered her mom’s soft voice and warm hands in the evening and her dad’s upbeat demeanor in the morning. He was an early bird and used to make breakfast for everyone, humming happy tunes under his breath.

Christine opened her eyes and saw an encouraging smile on the doctor’s face.

“They were both engineers and were partners in a small company that made and did maintenance on elevators. They actually founded the firm right after they graduated from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. My dad—Oliver Heart—studied engineering, and my mom—Connie Heart, née Brooks—studied math.” Christine smiled. “My grandparents told me that they were a couple of geeks who had been made for each other.”

Dr. Korpacheff reciprocated with a smile and nodded.

“I used to . . . um, play the piano. And . . . I was very good at it.” Christine shook her head and took a deep breath. Touching her self-made stone bead bracelet on her left hand gave her a sense of peace—she liked to feel the stones with her fingers. “I started when I was four and got to grade eight when I was six and was ready to get to advanced levels, which was . . . um . . .”

“Impressive?” Dr. Korpacheff ventured a guess.

“I mean . . . usually, kids get to the next grade every year, so . . . I guess I was going through those grades faster than others. And . . . when I was seven, I performed my first solo concert.”

“Did your parents want you to play the piano?”

Christine’s mind went to the cozy and sunny living room of the house where she used to live with her parents. They had an old Charles M. Stieff piano that miraculously came with the house when they moved in. She could see herself sitting on the bench—her feet dangling, too short to reach the floor—chewing her lower lip while doing scales time after time.

“No,” Christine said. “I wanted to do it. As soon as I realized what that big brown wooden thing was and how it made sounds—my dad could play a bit—I just wanted to make those beautiful sounds myself. It’s like . . . the piano talked to me through those sounds, and I didn’t want that conversation to end. So . . . um, I kept banging the piano keys until my parents couldn’t take it anymore and got me a teacher who showed me how to play it properly.”

Christine took a sip of water from the glass that Dr. Korpacheff had poured for her at the beginning of their session. The glass had been placed on a coaster with a picture of the Eiffel Tower on it. The doctor’s glass was sitting on a similar coaster but in a different color—the pair was probably a set, and they didn’t look cheap. Did the good doctor bring this little souvenir back from a romantic trip to France? She does look sophisticated enough to be into the Old World. Perhaps even, God forbid, classical music.

“Music was the only thing that mattered to me. I played when I was awake and dreamed about playing when I was asleep. It was like an obsession. I wanted more of it and never felt satisfied,” Christine said.

“Did your parents support you?”

“Oh, yeah, but . . . at some point, I think they were a bit scared of the intensity with which I was tackling challenging music pieces. I would never stop before I was sure I could play some particularly difficult part correctly. Even my teachers would sometimes tell me to take it easy, but I wouldn’t listen to them. It was like . . . I had a target in front of me that I had to hit no matter what or how long it took.”

Christine took another sip. Her throat was parched, and she felt like her face was on fire. She put down the glass and turned it on the coaster so that the Eiffel Tower would point directly at the doctor, to see if Dr. Korpacheff would notice. Her father used to do that to her—Can you see anything different now, Christine?—to keep her observation skills sharp, and she had a habit of doing it to other people to see how good their attention was.

“Then, one of my teachers suggested I participate in contests to hone my skills against other kids, to see how good I objectively was.”

“And?”

“Well, I did, and I was.”

“Was what?”

“I was much better than the rest of them,” Christine said and took another sip of water. Her throat was still dry. Was the air-conditioning still on? “Anyway, I was getting to the point when I was ready for serious international competitions and . . . um, I needed money to travel, and my parents did everything they could to make it happen for me.”

Christine saw Dr. Korpacheff taking some notes with her silver pen in her leather-bound notebook and wondered which part of her story was worth noting in order to help Christine with her situation at work.

As a homicide detective, Christine carried a standard-issue, pocket-sized black leather notebook where she would jot down important highlights of the cases she was working on and significant details from interviews with people involved in her investigations. In her detective training, she learned that officers should always strive to take accurate and thorough notes. They should be made “as contemporaneously as possible.” The notes reflected what the investigator thought, what they did, and what they observed.

What is Dr. Korpacheff thinking and observing? Does she still have her parents around? Does she get along with them?

“Anyway,” Christine said. “My parents were quite successful, and they had no financial problems paying for my music trips and my teachers. They even got me a used Steinway baby grand piano that cost as much as a small car when I was ten. They had to take out the window frame in our living room to bring that instrument into the house. My parents arranged it as a surprise when I was away at my grandparents’, and I was so happy when I saw it.”

“Do you still have it?”

“I do.”

“Do you play it?”

“No.”

“Which brings us to . . .”

“Yes.” Christine smiled ruefully. “I was scheduled to play at an important music contest that was going to open many exciting opportunities for me as a performer, and I wanted my parents to be there to watch me. They couldn’t go with me because of a work emergency and promised to be in their seats by the time I was on the stage.”

Dr. Korpacheff nodded without saying anything.

“It’s difficult to see who is in the audience when you’re on the stage because of the bright lights. I played my piece well, and I remember thunderous applause. I stood up, exhilarated by my own performance. The piece was challenging—Trois mouvements de Pétrouchka by Stravinsky—but I thought that I did a good job. It was eerily ironic that my teacher and I had chosen it. I went to the edge of the stage to wave to my parents, only to see that their seats were empty.”

Christine took a deep breath.

“Anyway, when I saw they weren’t there, I got mad at them for missing such an important event in my life, and that’s when I noticed a police officer walking in and pointing at me while talking to my teacher.”

Christine remembered her knees getting weak and all the sounds around her turning into white noise. She still felt some of that every time she remembered that watershed moment.

“When I got off the stage, I learned about the car accident that took the lives of my mom and dad. They’d just parked not too far from the concert hall and were getting a bouquet of flowers out of the car when a big black pickup truck slammed into their Lexus, killing my father instantly. My mother lived long enough to tell the ambulance doctors my name and the place where I was performing before losing consciousness and dying later in the emergency room before I could get there.”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen.”

“What happened after that?”

“I stopped playing music and have never played the piano ever since.”

Dr. Korpacheff pondered for a minute. “Why did you say the choice of the music piece was eerily ironic?”

Christine gave another rueful smile. “It’s said that when writing that piece, Stravinsky had a picture of a puppet exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios. I remember fixating on the word ‘diabolic’ when it happened and feeling that I had brought a curse on my parents with my music.”

“What happened to the person who had caused the accident?”

“Don’t know.”

“Why?”

“They never found the car or the person who drove it. There were no CCTV cameras on the street, and the witnesses didn’t see the license plate.”

Dr. Korpacheff pondered for a moment. “Do you think your parents’ untimely demise was the reason why you joined the force?”

Christine readjusted her bracelet and looked at the coaster under her glass—the Eiffel Tower was still aiming at the doctor. It seemed that Dr. Korpacheff had not noticed it.

“I don’t think. I know it was,” Christine said and glanced at the clock. There were another twenty minutes to go.

Chapter 2

The old coffee machine made its usual gurgling sound, announcing that a fresh brew was ready. Sebastian Copeland, a thirty-six-year-old man with a pair of dreamy blue eyes, a long, disheveled mane of brown hair with a touch of grey, and a protruding belly, slowly walked into the kitchen of the rowhouse he shared with his mother, Lydia Hasselbach, to get himself his first caffeine fix of the day. It was six thirty in the morning—the time when he started his daily cello practice that sometimes went all the way to noon.

Unlike so many classical musicians, Sebastian was not a night owl and preferred to catch the worm. Another reason for getting up early was the lack of a stable job in an orchestra that would require a different daily schedule. He made his living by teaching cello to a few kids and getting some money from music stores for referring his students to buy their instruments. There were also occasional gigs—weddings, cocktail parties, fancy corporate events—that sometimes brought a bit of extra cash.

“Get me a cup,” came his mother’s demanding voice from the living room. “And don’t forget the sugar this time. Martha never forgets. You should’ve learned from her already.”

Martha Smith was a fifty-seven-year-old social worker who came three days a week to help Lydia around the house. An organization that assisted retired musicians had arranged this for her. Though grateful for Martha’s assistance, Sebastian did not interact with her much, as he was usually busy when she was around.

“Yes, Mother,” Sebastian answered absentmindedly, being used to his mother’s hourly requests, following them without even thinking.

He was going over Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in his head—in Rostropovich’s rendition, of course, for whom the concerto had been written in the first place—when he poured two cups of coffee and went to the living room to find his mother sitting in her favorite armchair with well-worn upholstery, watching the news on TV.

Lydia Hasselbach was a seventy-two-year-old wiry woman with an ever-judging expression on her face that made her look like a strict schoolteacher. Her salt-and-pepper hair was neatly tied in a small bun on the back of her head, there was a hint of powder on her parchment-like facial skin, and her hawk eyes followed every move Sebastian made.

“This bunch of idiots is going to ruin this country, and nobody is doing a damn thing about it,” she said, giving her take on the political report presented by a dramatically enthusiastic TV pundit, and took her cup. She looked at Sebastian. “You mark my words—the end of the world is near, and don’t you think about bringing any children into this satanic bonfire. You hear me?”

“Yes, Mother.” One part of his brain was giving orders to reply with generic answers to Lydia’s ever-negative comments on whatever she happened to watch on TV, and the other part was going through an elegiac second movement of the concerto where the cello played its second theme and became progressively more agitated, building to a climax in bar 148. He always enjoyed this change of pace after the marching allegretto in the first movement. A faint tremor of amusement appeared on his lips for a second and disappeared without a trace. He did not want Lydia to think that he was not really listening to her or, God forbid, laughing at her.

“That’s right. No more new children for this godforsaken country. They’ll be brainwashed and turned into zombies or cannon fodder,” Lydia said, drinking her coffee and getting agitated herself. “Only music can save us. Music can save this rotten world. Or could . . . I don’t know.” She looked at Sebastian as if to make sure he was not going to say anything contradictory and, seeing no visible reaction from her submissive son, she turned back to the TV. “Have I ever told you that I was on the short list for going to the USSR with the Cleveland Orchestra?” she said, without taking her eyes off yet another TV expert on the screen.

Sebastian, who had heard the story only a few dozen times, shook his head to indulge his mother once again, letting her dive into the past that was so precious to her.

“That’s right,” Lydia said proudly. “I could’ve been the first American harpist to play for those poor people. I could’ve changed history and, God knows, things could’ve been different if I had gotten on that tour.”

Sebastian knew better than to ask his mother—the former professional harpist who had stopped playing on the stage for just about as long as Sebastian was alive—why she had never gotten the position back in 1965 and what kind of things could have been different had she indeed been a part of that orchestra.

He knew that Lydia would get into a thousand reasons why the world had been unfair to her and how men, including “that loser father of yours,” ruined her prospects of becoming the greatest harp player in the world. Despite the fact that they both lived in the house that Sebastian’s late father, Stephen Copeland, had owned and left them, along with some money that paid all their bills, Lydia still considered her marriage to “the man who didn’t know anything about music” the biggest mistake of her life.

“Don’t just stand there; go boil some eggs before your practice. Martha never makes me tell her things. She does it before I even think about it.” Lydia’s voice was penetrating the second movement in Sebastian’s head. “I want you to pick up some pills for me in the afternoon, and we’re running out of vegetables. Don’t forget to buy some meat for dinner, and I want a bottle of decent wine this time, not that cheap garbage you got me the other day. You hear me?”

She scanned Sebastian’s outfit—an old Aloha shirt and cargo pants. “And for God’s sake, try to wear something tasteful when you’re in the house, will you? What’s wrong with you today? You’re supposed to be a musician.” She sighed dramatically. “Here I am, talking about not having children. How silly of me. What children, for God’s sake? There’s no woman in the world who will ever think about getting involved with you if you insist on dressing like a bum.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Don’t forget to take your vitamins either. Do I have to think of everything?”

Sebastian waited for a moment to see if there were any more instructions from Lydia, but when he saw that her eyes were back on the TV, lured by the talking heads as usual, he quietly left the room.

It was time for his daily practice. He went downstairs to the basement and, through the laundry room, entered his “shrine of music”—the only place in the house where he was left completely alone to his own devices and the place where his cello was waiting for him.

The floor and walls of the shrine were covered with old Persian carpets, which his father had brought back from his business trips to the Middle East. Stephen, an oil engineer who had traveled extensively for work, was known as a great admirer of the unique carpet craftsmanship found only in the East.

Sebastian had fond memories of his father, an ever-positive man who played Beatles records when Lydia wasn't home, as she hated “that crap,” and who died unexpectedly of a heart attack when he was only fifty years old.

The death of his father was difficult for Sebastian, but it brought him closer to his brother, Paul, with whom he had rarely talked before. Paul was everything Lydia wanted in a son—neat and organized. Sebastian, on the other hand, was the complete opposite. He never really cared about how he looked, which annoyed Lydia, a perfectionist in everything. She had worked hard to ensure that Sebastian’s “inherent laziness” would not hinder his progress in music as a child and had “sacrificed hundreds of hours” of her undivided attention to his practices. There were never any sleepovers at their house, and Sebastian was never invited to his classmates’ parties, as he never had time for anything other than music.

Sebastian carefully placed his still-steaming coffee cup on the old desk that was covered with piles of music sheets. He stood motionless in the middle of the room with his eyes closed, waiting for the second movement of the concerto that was still playing in his head to finish. As soon as the imaginary Mstislav Rostropovich lowered his bow, Sebastian opened his eyes and smiled. Rostropovich, imaginary or not, never failed to put Sebastian in the right mood for practice.

He picked up the coffee cup and took a few sips, enjoying the drink for a moment. After he had finished, he placed the cup back on the desk and turned his attention to the large, old, battered, but sturdy cello case with its seven silver latches, which was standing next to his chair and music stand. Inside the case was the most precious thing in Sebastian’s life—the instrument that had cost him half the money his father had left him when he became old enough to make an extremely difficult decision about purchasing the right instrument on his own. For once, Lydia had agreed with his choice.

Sebastian did a bit of a body warm-up: rolling his shoulders and stretching them out—the third movement playing in his head.

He slowly unclipped the latches of the case and opened the lid. There, inside, was his Helmuth Keller & Son cello, “Galina”–named after the wife of Mstislav Rostropovich. The moment Sebastian saw the instrument for the first time, he knew it was special. Its beauty was worthy of the name of the greatest musician’s wife. Sebastian gently touched the fingerboard and moved his fingers along the upper bout rib all the way down to the f-holes, body, and tailpiece.

“Hello, Galina,” he said quietly with a dreamy smile. “Miss me?”

Sebastian still remembered his first cello, which was made in Shanghai, China, from German wood. It was a special instrument that held a special place in his heart. But “Galina” had become his life partner, the instrument with which he created his own music.

First things first.

Sebastian took his bow out of the case. Using a nail clipper, he clipped off a torn horsehair. Then he tightened the horsehair and applied some resin. He liked to use the stuff, which was said to have golden flecks in it, which were invisible to the naked eye, but Sebastian liked the idea of it. His telescopic chair was positioned where the corners of the floor carpets almost met, revealing just enough of the hardwood floor to put a slip-stop endpin rest for his cello. He did not want to ruin his father’s carpets. He adjusted the spike “Russian style” so that “Galina” would be more horizontal against his chest—easier for his bow hand, which would give him a richer, more powerful sound.

With “Galina” across his chest, Sebastian waited until the third movement—the solo cadenza based on themes from the preceding movements—of the concerto was over in his head. He did his usual warm-up routine (finger control exercise, warming up his right hand’s wrist, crescendo and diminuendo exercises on an open string), then he reached for the metronome that was on his desk and gently pushed the pendulum.