also saw Dr. Chen. Let’s try to have a few words with him.”
The audience settled in, the concertmaster appeared, then the conductor — a bald, thin man, with very long arms and a wolfish smile. He wasted no time in getting into the first piece.
Sam recognized it as vintage mid-twentieth-century avant-garde, a dense, highly cerebral set of variations on a yowling, unpleasant theme. The variations were named after geometrical forms, but they sounded as if the forms had been sighted on some unimaginable alien landscape, or in a schizophrenic’s nightmare. He could sense the audience holding their breath, marking time, pressed firmly in their seats and bearing with it. Their patience was being sorely tried, he knew, for the piece lasted about ten minutes. It was tentative in its unfolding, sombre and entirely unlovable. Some way into this offering, after a moment of dramatic silence, Sam nudged Paul and indicated the stage with a nod of his head. There was Ginette, among the violins, plucking and slashing with the best of them.
“Mercure, but not exactly mercurial,” said Paul when it was over, punning on the composer’s name, as they waited for the tepid applause to die down.
The second item on the program was equally sombre but very different in what it communicated. It was Tapiola by Sibelius, one of Sam’s favourite pieces, a symphonic essay evoking the great northern forests. Had the programmers intended to tie it in to the conference?
The conductor tore into this unique work, Sam thought, with tremendous dynamism and energy. They were plunged into the heart of the forest, and set on a journey, at first through open spaces, forest clearings, twisting paths. Quite quickly, however, everything became more complex and at the same time closed in, as the single theme, repeated over and over, thrust them forward. Time and space interlocked; the environment was unchanging, yet infinitely varied. The damp earthen floor, the coiled roots of trees, the harsh rustle of leaves, air currents swirling and dying, shafts of bleak sunlight — all were almost tangible, as was the sense of a relentless fate, the implacable order of nature unfolding in a thousand variations.
Sam sat mesmerized, literally awestruck. The forest was delivered to his mind and senses in all its impersonal majesty and fury. Gods and goddesses were there, as powerless as men, and finally an irresistible wind howling at the heart of nature, then dying away in the saddest of descents into the darkness of non-being.
The music stopped. The audience held its breath. There was silence, then a random, uncertain clapping from some, followed by a roar of sustained and passionate applause and cheering. Something momentous had been communicated, and words could neither explain it nor repeat it. Yet everyone appeared to be deeply moved.
Paul held Sam’s arm and steered him into the aisle and toward one of the foyers. “We’ll have to talk to Ginette later. I wonder what it was like to be in the middle of all that.”
“Like being in a giant’s cauldron maybe, or in the eye of a hurricane … I have to thank you for this evening, Paul. It’s already been great. That dinner! Snails and rognons de veau like I’ve never tasted. And dessert, and that wine — what was it? Château du Grand Gaumont Corbiéres? — I’m seriously thinking of settling down here.”
“We won’t allow it. We couldn’t stand the competition.”
“Don’t forget, I mostly handle bedroom cases.”
“I know — you’d be busy here. But I can see you’re enjoying the change. This murder business suits you.”
“I take that as a compliment. But say, that plump fellow with the bushy hair and the mauve evening jacket. Is that Chen?”
“It is. I’ll introduce you. You can question him right here and catch him off guard.”
“And gape at the beautiful women, too?”
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