Sinister Shorts

His Master's Hand

I am a cultured man. I am a lonely man. I am a nefarious man. My liver is healthy, and I expect to live well into my eighties.

I have my pleasures, and I enjoy my work.

Have you heard of Peter the Gravedigger? No, you have not and you never will because if the authorities ever realized I existed, they would staple my face onto every post office wall.

My profession is a solitary one. Oh, I am not the first. There are a few rudimentary practitioners in the Valley of the Kings, where there is a long history of my line of work. And of course, there is the woman. She is not in my league yet. I am the specialist, a professional with the highest standards. My work demands a strong back and a scientist's curiosity, and… but let me give you an example.

In the summer of the year 200-, I needed funds. My bank account at the time would appear large to you, but my interests are expensive. A generous contributor to several charities and a certain political party, in that pivotal election year I had outdone myself in more ways than one. Christie's chose that moment to a

In that chilly Upstate New York village of my origin, I began my odyssey through life, my small steps accompanied by the sound of a shovel, a man grunting, moist soil, and the gaping holes that receive life's detritus. My father, whose broken English inspired such derision from the locals, taught me after school in our shack on the edge of town about Tolstoy, Stendhal, about that European culture which America has so hastily forgotten… and about Dostoyevsky.

The Master's story, the spewed-out vitriolic phrases, laying bare the hypocrisies of the Establishment in his day, had turned my staid world upside down. And now his ms. was available to the highest bidder. To me!

Gates might acquire his Leonardo for $30 million, Spielberg could keep his Holocaust memorabilia… for me, the supreme collectible has always been the paper upon which was pe

I had to have it. I contacted my New York agent for more details and found out the manuscript's probable cost. One lucrative job plus my current liquid holdings would suffice.

After driving to the library of the large university in my city one humid Sunday, I immersed myself in the academic journals. What I needed to find were the latest historical academic brouhahas. The Egyptian controversies I skipped; a one-man operation is unsuitable for an Egyptian project.

The University of Missouri Journal of American History mentioned a dispute over John Wilkes Booth's body. Certain academic factions alleged that Booth was not buried in his grave, but instead had fled to the Wild West after being-oh, please!-unjustly accused of the assassination of Lincoln. It had possibilities. Speaking of Lincoln, the old controversy as to whether he suffered from Marfan syndrome had heated up again. Then I waded through the usual Napoleona. Cause of the stout little general's death has never been indubitably established-a trip to the Isle of Elba might be pleasant.

Then I found it: a most acrimonious debate. The National Review of Musicology, a new publication of the Juilliard School with a slick cover photo of Mahler in his slippers, smoking a pipe, contained an intriguing series of letters. A Juilliard professor, Anton Sabatich, expert on eighteenth-century opera, was embroiled in a wintry and progressively more impolite exchange with Professor Arnhem of the University of Leyden concerning the cause of Mozart's death.

Sabatich refused to believe the young genius died of any illness, much less the atypical tuberculosis theory advanced by Professor Arnhem. The American, influenced perhaps too heavily by popular media, opined that Mozart had been slowly poisoned by his rival, Salieri, probably with arsenic. It's well-known that Mozart died pe

I faxed Sabatich my standard letter:

Dear Professor Sabatich:

Regarding the death of Mozart: I can make you privy to incontrovertible scientific evidence as to the causa mortis.

Please fax me to arrange a meeting.

Sincerely,

Peter C.

Before lunch I had my reply, a very good sign, and I duly flew to New York City for a consultation. We met in the VIP waiting room at La Guardia. Sabatich was a short, hawk-nosed man glinting with fanaticism behind his spectacles. He never opened the heavy briefcase, presumably full of learned papers, which he held tightly on his lap. I discussed my ways, my means, and my price, ignoring the gaping of his mouth and the paling of his skin. By the time I finished, he had recovered his normal floridity and fallen under the calming influence of his own avarice. He agreed to my terms. He had money or the intensity of his need had overpowered his good sense. Usually, they try to dicker.

I caught the next available flight to Vie

Later that morning, after a hearty Frühstuck of fresh eggs, black bread, and strawberries, I made my way along the cobbled streets, an inconspicuous if unusually broad-shouldered tourist, to St. Marxer Friedhof, where the young composer had been buried without ceremony in a pauper's unmarked grave.

Of course, it was raining. A funeral party brooded under black umbrellas, issuing low wails. Urns of red plastic flowers and a horseshoe wreath of white and yellow mums had been arranged in the general area of Mozart's final resting place, as though others had tried to pinpoint its location. A smashed can of Heineken beer formed shallow puddles over the spot that I knew, from information gathered years before by my father's father, held the body. A low black fence surrounding an area nearby invoked a grassy yard where the composer's youthful spirit might still wander.

I remained awhile paying my respects, hat in hand, rain dripping off my nose, eyes busy. A security guard drove by at 10:20 and again at 10:35 and 10:50. Out of such routines are crimes born.

After a while, the cold having prowled through my skin and taken hold of my bones, unwilling to admit a slight unease, I explored further, walking to the far end of the cemetery at the edge of a misty forest. A pile of loose earth fast turning to mud indicated recent maintenance activity-brush clippings, shreds of winding-sheet. I looked more closely, a fractured humerus and knobs of knuckle-the gardener had been tidying up, all too assiduously. The clippings, dry under a tarp, would make excellent fill, if need be.

Reductio ad absurdum.

As I replaced the tarp, I caught movement on the periphery of the forest. Something light in color, a large animal perhaps. A deer? But it was my experience that wild animals will leave if you approach them, which I did, waving my arms a little foolishly, shouting, I admit. A slow withdrawal into the murk of the dark green marked its exit, nothing more. I was loath to follow. The dark of the day and the sucking sponge of the ground below discouraged me. Can you blame me for a moment's unprofessionalism? I am not immune to the emanations of human fragility such a place provokes. I left quickly, leaving the forest to its mystery.