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Stefan returned to his bench and slipped on a headset. He turned the volume up and, as he continued to twine the gut strings together and tie the noose, he listened to the sounds caressing his eardrums, his brain and his soul. Most playlists people store on iPhones or Motorolas ranged from folk to classical to pop to jazz, and everything in between. Stefan certainly had a lot of music on his hard drive. But he had far more gigabytes of pure sound. Cricket chirps, bird wings, pile drivers, steam kettles, blood coursing through veins, wind and water...He collected them from everywhere. He had millions--nearly as many as the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry.
When a mood was on him, Black Screams threatening, he sometimes grew depressed that his collection was limited to sounds dating back to merely a short time ago: the late nineteenth century. Oh, the Banu Musa brothers had created automated musical instruments, a water organ and a flute, in the ninth century in Baghdad, and music boxes still played the identical melodies they did when built in medieval days. But they were like music played from scores, re-creations.
Cheating.
Not the real thing.
Oh, we could marvel at a Rembrandt portrait. But it was--right?--fake. It was the artist's conception of the subject. If Stefan had been moved by the visual, he would have traded a hundred Dutch masters' works for a single Mathew Brady photograph. Frank Capra. Diane Arbus.
The first actual recordings of the human voice were made in the 1850s by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, a French inventor, who came up with the phonautograph, yet it didn't actually capture sounds but merely made graphic representations of them, like lines of a seismograph. (Stefan was aware of rumors that de Martinville had recorded Abraham Lincoln's voice; he'd tried desperately to find if this was true and where it might be. But he'd learned that, no, the recording never happened, sending the young man into a bout of depression.) Nearly as troubling to him was the circumstance surrounding the paleophone, invented by another Frenchman, Charles Cros, twenty years later; it had the capability of creating recordings but none had ever been found. The first device to make recordings that survived to the present day was Edison's phonograph, 1878. Stefan owned every recording made by Edison.
What Stefan would have given for phonographs to have been invented two thousand years ago! Or three or four!
In his gloved hands he tested the noose, pulling it hard--though he was careful not to break the latex gloves.
On his playlist, a series of swishes came on. The sound of a knife blade being swiped against a sharpening steel. One of Stefan's favorites, and he closed his eyes to listen. Like many, if not most, sounds, this could be heard in several ways. A threat, a workman's task, a mother, preparing dinner for her children.
When this track ended, he pulled off the headphones and took another look outside.
No lights.
No Artemis.
He turned on his new Casio keyboard and began to play. Stefan knew this waltz quite well and played it from memory once, then again. Once more. In playing the third version, he began to slow the piece halfway through until, at the end, it tapered to a stop and remained a single sustained D note.
He lifted his hand off the keyboard. He played back the recording of the piece and was satisfied.
Now on to the rhythm section.
That would be easy, he thought, looking into the tiny den off the living room, where Ali Maziq, late of Tripoli, Libya, lay limp as a rag doll.
Thursday, September 23
III
The Aqueduct
Chapter 13
The Questura, the Police of State's main headquarters in Naples, at Via Medina, 75, is an impressive pale stone building in the fascist style. The letters of the word "Questura" are in a font any Latin student would recognize (the "U"s harshly carved as "V"s), and the building's architectural elements include nods to Rome (eagles, for instance).
Squinting up at the imposing structure, Ercole Benelli paused on the doorstep and straightened his gray uniform, brushing at dust. Heart thudding with a curious mixture of joy and trepidation, he stepped inside.
He approached an administrative officer, who said, "You are Benelli?"
"I...Well, yes." Surprised to have been recognized. Surprised too that Rossi was apparently still desirous of his presence.
Her unsmiling face regarded him and, upon examining his ID cards--national and Forestry--she handed him a pass, then told him a room number.
> Five minutes later he entered what might be called a situation room for the kidnapping operation. It was a cramped space, the sun sliced into strips by dusty Venetian blinds. The floor was scuffed, the walls too, and a bulletin board was decorated with curling notices of new police procedures replacing old police procedures, and forthcoming assemblies...or, when he read closely, assemblies that had occurred months, or years, ago. Not so very different, Ercole thought, from the Forestry Corps facilities, the large conference room where the officers would meet before a joint raid on an olive oil adulterer, before a mountain rescue, before an assault on a forest fire.
An easel held a large white tablet with photos and notes in black marker. Another--a joke certainly--held a "Wanted" picture of a square-headed Minecraft character, which Ercole was aware of because he played the game with his older brother's ten-year-old son. The boy had promptly and delightedly slaughtered Ercole in a recent game; young Andrea had switched to Survival--combat--mode, without telling Uncle Ercole.
Two people were in the room. Massimo Rossi was talking to a round young woman with thick wavy black hair, shiny, and loud green-framed eyeglasses. She wore a white jacket that said Scientific Police on the ample breast.
Rossi looked up. "Ah, Ercole. Come in, come in. You found us all right."
"Yes, sir."
