Читать книгу Victim Impact - Mel Bradshaw - Страница 5

As late as mid-afternoon, Ted Boudreau thought he had plenty of time. He lingered over waxing and polishing the painted surfaces of his second-hand Yamaha. He replaced the spark plugs. Then he found he had a burned-out headlamp and had to go back to the shop. He still would have been in good time if he hadn’t, at the last moment, had to remove and patch a tire. On the first motorcycle-riding day of the 1998 season, he was to attend a recital at the Royal Conservatory of Music.

This disorganization was not like Ted, but then neither was it like him to be looking forward to an evening of Beethoven cello sonatas. Bill Nikolic’s son Dan was playing the piano accompaniment, and Bill had heard from Dan that the cellist was pretty. Ted had been in town nine years, as graduate student and lecturer at the University of Toronto, and had dated intermittently over that time. Currently, though, he was between girlfriends—as his colleague Bill Nikolic well knew.

Once the wheel was back on the bike, Ted had to shower and dress. His parents owned a dry cleaners in Montreal, in which Ted and his siblings had all at one time worked. None had escaped with an indifferent attitude to clothes. What, Ted wondered, would a cellist playing at the Royal Conservatory be wearing? He thought back to pictures of the Queen in floral print dresses with matching jackets and feathered hats. That called at the very least for grey flannels and a blue blazer. It was only March, however, and he was riding a motorcycle, so Ted settled on dress chinos, a turtleneck sweater and a ski jacket.

The recital was well begun by the time he arrived, and he was asked to wait outside the auditorium till intermission. All the printed programs had by this time been handed out. Ted prowled the Conservatory halls pretending to look at the hanging photos of past directors.

When the doors opened, Ted spotted Bill by the piano in conversation with a young man still seated at the keyboard and a breathtaking red-haired being from another planet. Pretty didn’t begin to cover it. Why, Ted wondered, was everyone in the room not staring at her? It couldn’t be that the first half of the recital had already given them their fill. Maybe they were just too polite to deny her a break from non-stop admiration. He tried to rise to the occasion and go meet her. She was wearing a full, floor-length black skirt and a sleeveless, high-collared gold lamé top that fastened somehow in the back and made the most of her trim figure.

Introductions were made. Introductions were repeated. Ted took in nothing the first time, so busy was he apologizing for being late. To get over his nervousness, he half-seriously remarked that Beethoven was his favourite classical composer after ABBA. Unfortunately, ABBA was the serious half.

Karin looked him over with cool green eyes.

“Which Beethoven do you particularly like?” Dan asked.

“Oh, everything. The lullaby, The Barber of Seville . . .”

Bill came to the rescue by taking some photos with his digital camera. Dan and Karin made an attractive pair. To avoid feeling extra, Ted offered to snap the other three. They put Bill in the middle, his head rising above the musicians’ like a snow-capped mountain peak, and Karin laced her arm through his. Ted liked the way these pictures turned out when he checked them on the screen.

Lights in the auditorium and corridors were flicked on and off a few times to signal that the recital was resuming. The room was high-ceilinged but narrow and intimate, with rows of wooden chairs in place of fixed plush seats. Bill had saved Ted a chair and lent him his program. Sonata No. 3 in A Major, it seemed, was to be the featured work of the second half.

For Ted’s taste, it got off to a slow start. The long first movement was marked Allegro, ma non tanto. He guessed he’d have liked tanto better, though every so often there were passages of higher energy, interludes he began to look forward to. At the same time, the sound of Karin’s cello—an instrument he’d never paid any attention to—was stealing into his gut and setting up home there. Not doing much yet, just announcing its presence.

The second movement, Scherzo (Allegro molto), was more like it. Red hair was starting to fly around the soloist’s face. Ted thought he had a handle on Beethoven now. Wasn’t Beethoven the one that always gave you a storm if you waited long enough? Now the interludes were the slow bits, and here the rumbling strings could really churn you up before the tune raced off again in all directions.

In the end, though, the most memorable thing about this movement was not that in these five minutes Ted became a cello fan. It was, rather, that some ass three rows in front of Ted set off a camera flash in Karin’s face. Her attention was diverted momentarily. Her eyes narrowed. Soundlessly, she mouthed a word, which Ted from where he sat was sure was “prick”. At the sudden light and his partner’s movement, Dan looked up from the keyboard. Neither musician what you’d call allegro—molto or otherwise. It could have been a disaster. True performers that they were, however, neither one missed a beat. Ted squirmed nonetheless. He would have considered the interruption adequately dealt with if only Karin had been staring down the shutterbug when she said what she said. But, dazzled and distracted as she’d been, Ted was sure she hadn’t found the right face in the crowd, and the offender had not suffered the sting of her disdain. The man didn’t take any more flash photos of Dan and Karin, but that was more likely because he had what he wanted than because he had any consciousness of what he’d done.

The sonata’s third movement again featured alternating tempi, but for Ted the music passed in a blur. At the recital’s end, he borrowed Bill’s camera and armed the electronic flash while threading his way between slower audience members to the door. Once there, he turned. It was perfect. The shutterbug was struggling into his overcoat. He was a big man in a tight suit, and tall. He grimaced as he pulled the tight Burberry over his broad shoulders. The camera caught an unflattering expression.

He lumbered forward, still not entirely into his coat. “What did you take my picture for?” he demanded.

“For the Conservatory,” said Ted. “They’re compiling a gallery of boors. You know, so they’ll know who not to admit to future recitals.”

He considered snapping off one more shot of the hot, angry face at close range, but the point after all had been made.

“Bite me,” bleated the man, attracting scowls from the departing music-lovers.

He looked ready to push Ted down, but Ted slid out of the way and back to Bill, Dan and Karin. When he showed them the photo, Karin laughingly said, “That deserves some recompense.”

She sat and drew her honey-coloured instrument between the the folds of her full, black skirt. Then she tossed off a few bars of “Chiquitita”.

Ted felt he’d been blown a kiss.

When Karin told her violist friend Nancy that she had met a guy, they were strolling to The Coffee Mill after a lecture at the Conservatory. Nancy Malik née Gallo—a clear-skinned Rubenesque goddess, peerless authority on men, and recent bride—naturally wanted to know what he was like.

“Kind of short,” Karin answered. “Well, my height, actually. Short for a man.”

“Cute?”

“Yeah.” Karin dragged the word out and gave Nancy a “well, duh” look. Would she be telling her about Ted if he weren’t cute?

“So? What’s he like?”

“Okay.” Karin’s hands started moving, as if she were conducting a group of Ted’s features, bringing each one in when required. “Nice hair—wavy, brown. Slightly cleft chin, not too much. Great smile—reserved, but warm. I mean, his eyes are this mysterious taupe colour, but they really look at you. Rides a motorcycle, without all the leather. Quiet dresser, well-pressed. Nice flat gut.”

“Musical?”

Karin touched the tips of her middle finger and thumb to make a zero. “A potential listener.”

“I can’t be hearing this.” Nancy raised her arms and eyes to the heavens. “Funny?” she ventured.

“He has a mischievous side.”

“Dare I ask his age?”

“Unimportant.”

“Uh-oh. Older or younger?”

“Nance! Would I waste my time with teenagers? He’s a prof or assistant prof of criminology, so I figure with that and the way he looks, he has to be around thirty. That’s only six years’ difference. Hey, you know that book I was reading on Chinese astrology for westerners? I’d say he fits the Tiger profile much better than I do, even if the calendar says he’s a mild-mannered Sheep.”

“A quiet dresser in orange and black? That would be a stretch, even over a flat gut.” Nancy’s hoots of laughter turned heads on both sides of Bloor Street. She enjoyed razzing Karin, but was happy for her as well. Her new husband was an academic also, so she couldn’t take too hard a line in that area. “Criminologist, eh? What’s his specialty?”

“He tells me he has a number of irons in the fire.”

“Huh, man of mystery. As you say.”