Symphony of Secrets, page 6
Friday evening at 5:34 p.m., true to her word, Eboni emailed him the compared files, via a secure data link. Until then he’d been working manually: a laborious task that made his eyes ache.
To celebrate, Bern was true to his promise and that evening took Eboni out for pizza in the East Village. Eboni had her own very clear views of what Good Pizza consisted of (a crisp but chewy crust that could hold toppings and not sag, for instance). The students working on the Quintet could spend only a certain number of hours at work before their ears turned to mush and their analytical abilities got fuzzy, so sometime in Bern’s second year of grad school they’d started a quest to find the Best Pizza in New York City. That meant all five boroughs—from Staten Island’s notoriously thin crust to the thick and chewy (“Cake!” Eboni would scoff. “This ain’t crust, it’s cake!”) Sicilian. The pizza was scored based on its crust, sauce, cheese, and toppings. Thus far the clear winner was Papa’s Three, a tiny take-out joint on the Upper West Side, but all such crowns were temporary and in constant need of testing.
Bern had spent the week transcribing Delaney’s music by hand, and fragments of RED’s phrasing buzzed in his ears and winged past his temples. He needed a break, needed to get Delaney out of his head in order to keep Delaney in his head tomorrow.
He packed up for the night, stashed RED back in its file cabinet, and headed out into the cool October night.
At the Foundation he’d been listening to A$AP Rocky’s “Wild for the Night,” but as he headed down into the Lincoln Center subway, with relief, he switched on Delaney’s Quicksilver. He tried not to listen to Delaney’s music while he was working. Once, in grad school, listening to Delaney’s Trio for Two Oboes and Cello, he’d somehow rearranged the soprano solo at the beginning of BLUE’s act 2—transforming it into another trio. Jacques Simon likely would have been impressed if he weren’t so furious. It had cost them two days of work to correct Bern’s blunder.
Bern had learned his lesson: no more Delaney while transcribing. It always transported him to a different place spiritually and emotionally. So during work hours he listened to 311, Geppetto’s Wüd, and a host of other eclectic rock bands and classical artists. Bach and Schubert were standard favorites, but none compared to Frederic Delaney, of course.
Baranocchi’s Pizza was a hot little hole-in-the-wall just off Tompkins Square Park: a narrow pizza counter on the right, with barely enough room in front of it to stand and order. The pizza oven—wood-burning, enormous, and seemingly Italian—consumed the entire back corner, and the heat poured over the counter and into the rest of the space. Three tables lined the left wall, but if you sat there, you’d have all the patrons’ butts in your face as you tried to eat. Most people seemed to be eating at park benches nearby.
Eboni was waiting for Bern outside. “Delaney’s love child finally shows up,” she said when she saw him.
“I’m starving,” he told her. He’d checked out the reviews of the place on the subway—very high marks, so he was psyched. “You want two?”
“Of course,” she said. “And beer.”
“The usual?”
In order to determine the Best Pizza in New York, they’d established a two-slice minimum: a baseline cheese on the pizzeria’s best-known crust, as well as another slice, which could be exotic or intriguing or perhaps the pizzeria’s calling card.
“I’ll do the margherita and then the cacio e pepe on the Neapolitan crust,” she told him. “I had the marg last time and it was good. Great seasoning balance on the sauce.”
“Fresh?” Bern asked. Some sauces were made from fresh tomatoes; others from canned. Both had their pros and cons, but Eboni was a fresh sauce kind of girl.
They stood in line, ordered, and eventually carried the pizza, in two flimsy cardboard boxes, out to a bench in Tompkins Square Park. They kept their bottles of beer in paper bags.
Until then they’d just caught up with friendly banter—no talking shop: how Eboni’s aunt was doing, how her older sister was out of rehab, how she’d hired three people for the company she was building. Now, though, as they sat on the bench and Bern bit into the baseline marg slice, he noticed Eboni giving him the side-eye. “What do you think?”
“Good crust,” he said. “I think the sauce is a little too sweet. Wish it had more spice to it.”
“The cheese balance work for you?” she said.
“Yeah, cheese is pretty good.” He chewed thoughtfully. “Really good, actually. It’s just the sauce that feels a little flimsy.”
“What is it?” she said, and her tone had shifted. “What’s on your mind?”
“Maybe there’s a hint of too much olive oil,” he said. “It seems a little bitter.” He wiped his lips.
“Kevin, seriously, what is it?” Eboni said. No smile. No chewing.
“Um,” Bern started. Eboni had only called Bern by his first name, Kevin, a handful of times, when she was being serious.
“No, I’m really glad I could bring you in on this project,” he said, as if she’d objected to something.
“I’m sure you are, hotshot,” she told him. “But what’s going on? Is something wrong? You got your files from me. You can work all weekend now.”
He took a breath. “So, I saw something on one of the scans that I’m not sure about.”
“What?” Eboni finished her first slice, dug around in the box for her second—this one with double pecorino, vodka sauce, banana peppers, and Impossible Meatballs. “And don’t say it’s nothing.”
Bern thought a moment, put down his slice, wiped his hands with thirty of the skimpy napkins that pizza parlors always provide. He made a mental note, yet again, to bring his own paper towels or wet wipes. “Something about one of those pages had been bugging me.”
“Bugging you how? And you missed a spot.” She pointed to sauce on the edge of Bern’s sleeve.
“I’m not totally sure, but there was a word—jar—on one of the pages. No idea why he would have written jar, and it’s been bugging me.”
“Wait,” Eboni said mid-chew. “You’re wigging out over a jar?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know!” Bern said. “It just doesn’t make sense. No reason for jar to be written anywhere. It’s actually on a page of his Doodles, not on a page of the score. I didn’t send it over to you because there’s nothing to compare it to, plus the Foundation doesn’t want it to get out at all, I’m sure. I’ve never seen it before. On anything he’s done. It doesn’t seem to correspond to anything in any of his works. The closest thing I can think of is in YELLOW, when the warlord requests the jars of mountain honey. But that doesn’t seem like it should matter, and it came long before RED was ever even written, anyway.”
“Please don’t go all Scooby-Doo on me,” Eboni said, snapping her fingers in his face. “You probably have it halfway figured out by now, don’t you?”
Bern smiled, shook his head. “I don’t. Not this one. It’s weird.”
“When can I see it?” she asked.
“You’ll probably have it all figured out the first time you look at it,” he said. “You’re the queen of crosswords, right?”
“I’m just ‘the queen’ to you,” she said. “And you know something? I’m gonna get me a slice to go. Tomorrow’s lunch. I haven’t told you about this woman I hired, Colleen. Nosey as hell. Tries to figure out where I’ve been by checking out what I bring in for lunch. Then she tells me about her imaginary boyfriend, Luis—maybe he’s real, but he sure seems like a figment of her imagination—taking her to that same spot. Always trying to outdo me. I can’t wait to rub this one in her face.”
Bern knew that she was taking his mind off work. “I’ll get an extra slice for Colleen,” he said. “The Foundation’s treat.” He maneuvered his way back inside. What was it about this jar that was so unusual? Did it have something to do with the reason the original RED had disappeared? Was Bern fixating on nothing, or was there something here? He didn’t know, but knew the word jar would, again, keep him up late tonight.
* * *
—
Saturday morning, back at the Delaney Foundation with Eboni’s compared files, he dug in. The days spun on, one after another, with Bern coding and analyzing a minimum of five pages a day, seven days a week. Sometimes he got seven pages done, but usually he struggled to finish just five pages by the end of the day. The process was laborious and meticulous, but every page became more thrilling than the one before: going so deep into the music, comparing every note, every annotation, and every phrase made it feel as if he were plunging deeper into the genius that had been Frederic Delaney. It was as if Delaney were communicating with Bern, solely and singly, across the span of a century.
In the meantime, the folder of those extra pages that weren’t part of the original RED score still clamored in the top drawer of the locked file cabinet. He pulled them out every so often, reread that tantalizing sentence from the conjure woman character’s “Song of the Trees”: Sorrow is everything here. He couldn’t wait to dig deeper into the research. Decoding the secret of the Delaney Doodles had the potential to be game-changing.
A few days after Eboni delivered the files, he took a midafternoon break and leaned into Stephanie’s office, a few doors down from his own. He suspected she didn’t like being in the basement, but she didn’t say anything to him about it. She looked up when she saw him in the doorway, smiled that awkward smile of hers. It seemed a little more forced than it usually did.
“Hey,” he said, “I was wondering…Any news from the tech team about that Doodle page? The one with jar on it? Mallory told me to talk to Julie Akers, but Julie wouldn’t give me any details. I’d really like to get this sorted out in case it impacts the work I’m doing on RED.”
Stephanie angled toward her keyboard, typed something. Then she said, “It looks like IT is doing a complete search for any mention of jar or jars in the entire Delaney archive, which is fully digitized and searchable.” She added, “The mandate’s been given. This is top priority.”
“Fully searchable?”
She shrugged. “Well, as fully searchable as we can make it. Everything has been OCR’d, but of course the scanning is imperfect. We’re doing our best to fill in the holes.”
Optical character recognition software recognized text, allowing computer programs to find an actual word within a digital image. So, theoretically, if the letters J, A, and R appeared anywhere in that order in any of the Delaney materials, they should be findable at the click of a button. In practice, however, OCR technology, no matter how advanced, could still miss recognizing a letter or misread an R as a B, for instance.
“Can you keep me posted if you find anything?” he said.
“Of course. For future reference, the subset of anything other than the score can be found in folder G-17.”
“You’re not just looking for jar, though, right? You’re looking for—oh, I don’t know—bottle and tub and pot?”
She explained that the IT team was hunting for any kind of jar references: from mugs to vessels, bottles to bins. Two dozen eyes were scrutinizing any time that Frederic Delaney even thought about any receptacle.
But that was just the beginning. They’d hired two Fellows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art who specialized in the ’20s and ’30s, to see if Delaney had utilized the geometric motifs from expressionism and art deco on the Doodles.
Finally, they’d reached out to Columbia’s legendary Lomax Cuellar, one of the top linguistic authorities in the world. Jacques Simon had worked with Cuellar on the Quintet, which also had a few scattered Doodles. Cuellar hadn’t had any luck decoding them, but hopefully now that he had two full pages of Doodles, he’d make more headway in deciphering their purpose.
In the meantime, Bern confirmed that Eboni, too, could be hired to cross-check any jar references, since she could reload the original RED back onto her server, plus the other four Rings from her time with Jacques Simon.
Mallory wrote him an email approving Eboni’s additional work. Immediately he texted Eboni.
Bern: Hey I have another job for you.
Eboni: With the same people? Gonna cost you a few more slices
Bern: Deal. Upside Down pizza in Jersey?
Eboni: Too far. 5 boros. New place in Brooklyn
Bern: Tell me when. Can you come to the DF?
Eboni: Not done til 6 tonight but will be down in Chelsea. I’ll send address, get a car to pick me up
Eboni arrived a few minutes after six thirty, after most of the DF staff had left for the day. He showed her the Doodles page with JAR on it.
She remembered the Doodles from the Quintet—it had frustrated her then, that she couldn’t figure out their meaning. “Remind me again when they first appeared?” she asked. “I always say you got to start at the beginning.”
Bern checked his files. “1923. We have them on the original manuscript of the Spider Web Waltz. Just two little Doodles.”
“Show me,” she said.
He pulled them up from the DF archive: the musical score of the Spider Web Waltz, which was originally written for a Broadway revue. On the right side of the second page, near the paper’s edge, hung three triangles, interconnected, with a series of wavy lines on the left side.
“What about his earlier stuff? When did he start composing?”
“In 1918,” Bern said. “He was working for a music publisher, plugging songs, and wrote one that was a hit.”
“But no Doodles?”
“Nope.”
“What was special about Spider-Man Waltz?” she said. “What made him put them on that one?”
“John Sloan at Purdue wrote a three-hundred-page dissertation about it in the 1970s,” Bern said. “I can get you a copy if you need some light afternoon reading. He has a theory that they’re dynamic references, but that still doesn’t make much sense to me. Why draw all that stuff when you can just put a P or an F when you want to make the music softer or louder? That’s how he always did it.”
“All right, chief, let me see what I can come up with,” Eboni said, staring hard at the Doodle pages.
“That’s it? The Eboni Michelle Washington is stumped? Can’t figure out a pattern?”
She shot him another side-eye. “Yet. I just got it two minutes ago. I’ll have it decoded by tomorrow.”
“Despite hundreds of scholars not being able to figure it out?”
“Hundreds of scholars weren’t Eboni Michelle Washington,” she told him. “Amateur hour is over. Time for the pros.”
But she had no more luck than the DF IT team decoding the meaning of JaR: there were altogether over five thousand references to jar, basin, bottle, can, flask, jug, chalice, crock, cruet, decanter, ewer, and so forth. And then the other dozens of spelling variations of jar, like jab, job, ear. None seemed to be associated with wings, or leaves, or whatever the trilobe symbol was, and no one could figure the way in.
Eboni, however, was up for a challenge.
7
Wearing Gloves
Bern
The following week, Eboni stormed in unannounced. “I’m sick of this,” she said, shrugging out of her coat—New York was in the middle of an unusual late October freeze—and throwing herself on the couch. “Let me see those Doodle pages with my own eyes. The originals. I don’t care how good your scans are, I’m sure they missed something.”
Bern had forgotten to charge his earbuds, and had left his headphones at the Foundation apartment that Stephanie had set him up in. So now his music was ringing through his basement office: Santana’s “The Game of Love.” He’d been singing along. Now he turned it down.
“Hey,” he said. “Now’s not the best time. What’re you doing here in the middle of the afternoon anyway? I have a meeting with the executive director in, like, five minutes and—”
“Why’s it taking so long to look at a hundred-year-old piece of paper? I’d get it if it were the Magna Carta, but jeez.” She rubbed her eyes. “This is driving me nuts.”
“You and me both,” he said. “I keep asking. They say they’re being preserved. But as soon as they’re done they’ll let us take a look.”
“Who’s this ‘they’? What kind of preservation are ‘they’ doing? If you’re meeting with the boss, then let’s ask her personally.”
“Ask who personally?” came Mallory’s voice from the door. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything too important?”
“Not at all,” Bern said. “This is—”
“This must be Ms. Washington. How do you do. I’m Mallory Delaney Roberts.” Something about Mallory’s tone—in the drawn-out way she said “Delaney”—made Bern immediately want to shoot Eboni a warning look not to go off on this woman. Eboni didn’t do well around people who put on airs—and he knew she was frustrated with the delays and her inability to figure out jar. It wouldn’t take much more to set her off.
“I’ve heard so much about you,” Mallory gushed as she extended a well-manicured hand. “You’re just a miracle worker. Thank you for all that you’ve done.”
Eboni smiled even harder, her very white teeth glittering. “Hello, dear,” she said. “It is positively thrilling to see you again.”
“I believe you know my good friend Elon?” Mallory said. “He couldn’t stop raving about you. We’d really love to lure you over here.”
“Yes, well.” Eboni shrugged. “I took him to a great pizza joint in Brooklyn. He needs to get out more. I told him that he might be able to buy and sell the entire planet, but a great slice is really priceless.”
