Tuesday, November 29, 2022

The Salieri Effect: Installment #42

A busy chapter, that previous installment: one of the internet's more insidious bloggers, Sid Wreckstra, sets out to ruin Dr. T. Richard Kerr, courtesy of Arcangelo Collegnano's faking of his e-mail about a stolen letter originally sent to Lorenzo daPonte back in 1816; and just when things could conceivably still get worse as the Basilikon Lab appears on the verge of collapse (physically, if not financially), who should show up but Osiris' newest employee, the massive security director, Shango. The IMP's not sure what kind of information they're getting from the freshly arrested Dr. Charles Dawson, caught trying to escape the building during the raid, but Agent Calliope-Jane makes a discovery that might help rescue Bond and the other agents still trapped inside. Will she be able to get them out before the rest of the building implodes?

= = = = = = =

CHAPTER 30

Tom heard the noise distinctly, waking up from a late-afternoon nap. Mrs. Danvers wouldn't be here this late; she's not scheduled till tomorrow. If Terry and Cameron had come back, they would've called first. No, his first thought – well, third thought – was it must be Wormwood, back for the box, and he was somewhere downstairs. He reached for his phone but it had no signal, and tiptoed around, searching for anything handy to serve as a weapon better than his cane which he figured would send the wrong signal.

If he made enough noise getting out of bed, perhaps the intruder would hear it and leave. Or, alerted there was someone in the house, maybe the guy would just run upstairs after him.

It sounded like a scuffle. Who else was there? Someone else attacked Wormwood?

“No – stop!” The voice was male, vaguely familiar.

Tom made it half-way down the steps. It was an odd sight: a young man, short, overweight and decidedly alone, flailed his arms in the air as if fending off a flock of mosquitoes. He was dressed all in black (which, Tom noted, attracted mosquitoes except it wasn't Mosquito Season yet), and wore a balaclava.

When he saw Tom, the man – apparently not Wormwood, given Mrs. Danvers' detailed description – pulled out a pistol. Tom raised his cane – not much of a struggle – and waited for the crack of gunfire.

None came. This masked fellow collapsed to his knees, hands clutched over his ears. Then another man – a third Wormwood? – charged through the door, shouting “IMP – drop the gun!” Which the second Wormwood did.

The agent quickly introduced himself as Virgil Fitzwilliam. “I'd been assigned to watch your house – and a good thing, too, apparently.”

When Fitzwilliam tore the guy's mask off, it was Mrs. Danvers' good-for-nothing nephew, Lanny Danvers, who began to whine how “the place is full of invisible music.” And yet Tom couldn't hear a thing.

What was it Lanny mumbled as Fitzwilliam hauled him away in handcuffs – “the wrong cousin got the house”? There's another cousin? Did Lanny work for someone who thought he should've inherited the cabin instead?

And was Lanny really the intruder Tom had been calling Wormwood? “You'd think Mrs. Danvers would recognize her own nephew. Unless...”

* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *

Deputy Dett watched as the jeep screamed out of the warehouse, laughing because the thing reminded him of a clown car – nine people got off of it once Calliope-Jane brought it to a halt – but then he saw the roof of the warehouse start to cave in along with much of the ground behind it. Once he noticed what was left of the jeep as it barely cleared the smaller warehouse, almost rolling on its passenger-side tires, he assumed, given everybody's horrified expressions, this was definitely no laughing matter.

The State Police put in their appearance, the Intrepid Hook & Ladder Company from Greenfield joined the local firefighters to put out the blaze, but another hour went by before it was “under control.” Even then, the Fire Chief allowed only a few agents access to the ruins, once he'd passed out some hard hats.

After Cameron relocated his heart and stomach, definitely the wildest ride he'd ever had in his life (“memo to self: don't take any road trips with Calliope-Jane in the future”), he checked his phone. Three messages from Terry explained they needed to get to some place in Missouri to check out a surprising new lead.

The last one ended “I'm in Sanza, MO, about ready to meet Rose Philips. Call me if you're not too busy...”

On that note, Cameron decided it'll wait until he'd unwound a bit more.

* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *

“No, that one's dead. This one's in shock – he'll come out of it.”

The voice, masculine and not exactly warm but efficient and appropriately fact-based, moved off as I swam back to the surface. It was overcast deep down wherever I was but the good news, ostensibly, was I was still alive, whatever had happened. All I remembered was the full-orchestra crescendo leading to the explosive percussion attack, a high sustained dissonance in the flutes and violins before everything collapsed into a low chord in the brass and strings.

The woman I heard – that would be Alice Hubbard, my driver – talked to a man who began to sound like a policeman; and the first voice I'd become aware of must have been one of the paramedics who'd arrived on the scene. The one who's dead, who'd been trying to kill me: who was he?

When I went to sit up, my body wasn't up to the effort, so I slumped back down on the floor. The other paramedic, a young woman, came over and gently straightened my legs out, checking to see if anything was broken. It would be amazing if there wasn't. Everything sure hurt like hell... “Ouch!”

The policeman said, “according to his driver's license, the dead man's Dexter Shoad.”

“Dexter Shoad? Why'd he try to kill me?”

“Or for that matter, why would he have tried to kill Rose Philips...?”

After a short while, the woman I'd hoped to meet and discuss what I thought might be “a few loose ends” had come to as well, and the policeman, a reassuring old-fashioned soon-to-retire Irishman named Malachi Mulligan, suggested it might not go “far amiss” to have the hospital check out two “old codgers like yourselves.” The paramedics agreed if we could rest a while on the couch in her music room, we'd be okay for now. A doctor who lived “down the road” would come check on us soon.

After some brief conversation, I asked if she knew who Phillips Hawthorne was. “Does the nickname 'Trazmo' mean anything to you?”

We sat beside the piano in silence as the paramedics removed Dexter's body.

Rose sat up, sighed, and squared her shoulders. “I knew this time would come eventually. I'm surprised it's taken this long.”

She began slowly, taking a long sip of the tea Alice brought in. “I knew him once, a long time ago. He was this brilliant young musician, a genius-in-waiting, they told him, a prodigy. Not a bad pianist but he wanted to become a composer and his first works were startlingly promising for his age. He got the best teachers, his father – proud, wealthy, and arrogant – hired the best musicians to play his pieces; some said he paid to have someone write them for him, but that wasn't true.

“Maybe you're talented, with some potential for success; or maybe you're gifted with a better than average imagination, more innate skills. Then there's this huge gap between being gifted and being a genuine prodigy. The trouble is, everybody wants their talented kid to become the Next Mozart, so everyone starts marketing him as a prodigy.”

As he got older, she continued, it became more difficult for Hawthorne to compose, no longer coming so easily for him, but there were expectations (“everybody had their own expectations, they all told him”). And pretty soon, unable to compose anything at all, he fell back on just writing the same pieces over and over. That's when he realized maybe he's not a “prodigy,” maybe he's just gifted. But then he wondered if, deep down, he really had the kind of talent it took to support such a gift.

“He had learned the rules of the game but the game wasn't fun any more: it was too much like work. If it wasn't fun, why bang yourself against the wall until you're all bruised and bloody? You can quit a job... So,” she said, taking a deep breath, “he decided he would walk away.”

Some of it, she said, was hard, like what to do next; some wasn't – “like leaving his bastard of a father and all that money behind.” It took years to work out the details.

“He saved some money he kept in a secret account, actually quite a bit of it, eventually, but he knew how to lie, to play a part – that was Trazmo's role, his nasty alter-ego. This transition from Trazmo the Prodigy to the mature realization of Phillips Hawthorne would become his masterpiece! The question was when...

“Then one year, Hawthorne went to one of those artist colonies – it's somewhere in Iowa.”

“At White Hill,” I said, “right.”

“There were these four older composers, and Hawthorne had to be Trazmo, the arrogant brat who put on this braggadocious front, but he found himself envious of them, their ease and sense of security. They'd sit around the music room, playing some of their pieces for each other – Hawthorne wasn't included, they never included him – but he'd written them all down in a notebook, I'm not sure why.

“That's one thing I have of Phillips Hawthorne's, that notebook. It's there, in the bench. Dexter told me he'd found it. He thought those themes – ideas – were mine, and decided he'd use them in this piece of his as a tribute to me – but they weren't mine, and he became angry... – well, yes, about Hawthorne...

“Anyway, what else could he do but compose? He was a good-enough pianist to be a composer, but not good enough to become a concert performer (practicing took too much time away from composing). Maybe teach piano in a small town where nobody knew who he was? Where there wouldn't be that kind of pressure?”

“You seem to know quite a lot about him – Phillips Hawthorne...”

She nodded.

“Yes, you could put it like that. We sort of grew up together. You see, I used to be Phillips Hawthorne.”

Rose Philips continued with her story.

“I've known since I was about 13 that I wasn't really a boy – I mean, psychologically, the old 'woman-trapped-in-a-man's-body' thing except it seemed much more complex than that. I created Rose Philips long before I thought I'd make 'the transition,' just a female cross-dressing persona – but that wasn't enough.

“About a year after Trazmo disappeared, I went to Wisconsin for the operation, so I told people here I'm taking a 'sabbatical' to visit a sister in Connecticut who needed help dealing with cancer.”

The decision to face that, to go through with all that surgery, had been even more momentous than leaving Trazmo behind. There were many adjustments and it took time to get used to everything, but in the end, the results were “exhilarating.” For once in this lifetime, Rose Philips admitted, she was now officially happy.

“Surprisingly, Dexter fell in love with me. Then when he realized I was 'trans,' became disgusted, thinking that made him 'queer.' I don't think he meant to hurt me, he just pushed me, like, to get out of his sight, but I lost my balance and fell – probably hit my head on the piano bench.

“That's apparently when you showed up and he must've panicked. Alice said he had tried to strangle you?” Rose seemed incredulous.

“He wasn't 'trying'...” My neck still showed the marks from his make-shift garrotte.

“Yes, well... fortunately Alice was here, then.”

“Fortunately, Alice had a gun and is an expert shot,” I added, “but I'm sorry he died.”

“You would've been sorrier if you'd died, don't you think?”

Officer Mulligan of Sanza's finest came in, knocked quietly, and wanted to know if we're ready to make our statements, now.

“Would you give us a few more minutes, please, Malachi? We're almost done. Oh, Alice, how're you doing, dear? You both must be terribly rattled by all this. Can I get you more tea?”

Rose made an attempt to stand up but leaned against the piano for support. “I'm sorry, I'm still a bit woozy.” Sitting back down, she admitted hardly a day went by she didn't think back on that past life, about “what if.”

“But at what cost? No, I don't miss Trazmo – not in the least.

“I'd watched everybody else get back on that bus once the roads were opened and said good-bye to Trazmo, Boy Wonder. I seriously didn't think anybody would ever miss him – I knew I wouldn't! But I had no idea what'd happen next, that they'd think I'd been murdered or Thomas Purdue would be a suspect!

“There was this boarding house about five blocks from the motel – Mrs. Hubbard's...”

“Alice's Mom? So – what... you know each other?”

“We kept in touch but no,” Rose explained, “she didn't know my secrets.

“Anyway, I rented a room for about a month; then, once spring rolled around, I took a bus and headed south. And there was this pretty little house for sale next to this pleasant little park with a bandstand, and I thought, 'what a nice spot to start over.' So I got off the bus.”

I called Sheriff Diddon, told her where I was, and what, briefly, had happened, just steam-rolling through the basic facts before I introduced Rose Philips and put her on speaker to conclude the tale. Needless to say, as it unfolded, Diddon was suitably amazed, eventually dumbfounded: this was not the outcome anyone even remotely anticipated.

“Well, Doctor, pending the investigation's official verification, looks like your friend Purdue will no longer be a suspect in the murder or disappearance of Phillips Hawthorne. But you should know what's going on here...”

* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *

Nobody knew exactly how many died between the gunfight, the fire, and the building's collapse, beyond two IMP agents unaccounted for. Sam knew Bond was reliving Shendo's death, too, and their own narrow escape. But there had been no sign of Osiris, her main objective, beyond the charred remains of his highly distinguishable wheelchair – again.

The bigger question for Sam was what happened to the hundreds of drones? They should've failed once the smoke contaminated the sensors, no longer able to receive signals, and just dropped like dead flies.

He couldn't get it out of his mind, that moment when he realized the drones might have become self-aware. If everybody's dead except for him and Dawson, then who'd be left to control them? Then, too, where'd they go? They knew enough to hide. Can they increase the size of the swarm? Could they... reproduce?

Back in the lab's burned-out shell, Sam found what little was left of his work area, but at least the small safe in one of his storage cabinets was intact and he could open it. His back-up remote control device still worked.

“Look, Agent Mbira,” he said, holding it up. “This by-passes the main servers...”

But once he got into the program, it took so long to get past all the encryption codes, everything ground to a halt as soon as he finally clicked on the “Abort” Command.

“Frozen?”

Mbira looked at him and they both frowned. If he can't shut the program down – unless he did shut it down but that caused it to freeze...? Unless another controller somehow overrode his command?

“Or did the drones...,” Mbira said, looking at him skeptically, afraid to suggest it, “countermand it themselves? Maybe out of self-defense?”

It didn't bode well if the Mobots could still carry out their own directives, if he can't even shut them down.

But it was time to take a break. It'd been a busy-enough day.

Fortunately at that point, his phone rang. It was Cameron, on his way down to Missouri, but they'd talk more, later.

“Yeah, looks like I'll be filling out lots of paperwork for awhile, anyway. So,” Sam said, turning away from the others, “you know a decent place in this town to go grab that drink?”

= = = = = = =

to be concluded...

©2022 by Dick Strawser for Thoughts on a Train

 

 

 

 

 

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