The Embrace: Part One

The Embrace Part One: Autobiography

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All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

"Judas Iscariot" by Gabriel von Max
Prague National Gallery

Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Valery Gergiev

Chapter One
Prague

As young Father Jerzy walked across the Charles Bridge, the surreal twilight of Prague began to bathe the upper town in shades of tawny gold and gray, reflected in the river Moldau and in the translucent walls and towers of the Royal Castle. Massive sculptures of saints and angels seemed to rise everywhere, as Father Jerzy blessed himself. Tall and athletic, Jerzy genuflected at the renowned stopping point, touching the reclining figure of a saint who had brought luck to residents of Prague for centuries.

     "Dearest Father, I ask only that Thy will be done," he prayed silently. His mentor and friend, the renowned Irish exorcist, Father Erynn, was sitting in some remote prison in Romania. His crime: The young woman on whom he had performed the newly-discovered first-century rite of exorcism had died in an inexplicably violent way.
     Rising from the cold, solid stones of the bridge, Father Jerzy fingered the smeared newspaper clipping sent to him by Father Erynn: Police Baffled by Series of Unusual Murders. A New Serial Killer?
     None of the deaths had anything in common, but each one was unusual ... bizarre.   One man was found with his chest blown open; another with his internal organs liquefied. Still another man - in his early twenties - was discovered with what looked like a bullet hole in the heart. A bullet hole, however, that came from within.
    Police were convinced that Father Erynn (one of the most respected members of the Catholic community) was a serial killer. Despite the fact that a half-dozen murders had taken place when he was in police custody.
    As a twenty-four-year old, Father Jerzy had been suddenly thrust into a world that was over his head.

     His jet black hair reflecting in the lamps of the Charles Bridge, Jerzy crossed himself again under the solitary crucifix that seemed more isolated than ever. Jerzy's alabaster skin contrasted to the shadows cast by his narrow nose and delineated cheekbones and forehead, which all but hid his radiant blue eyes that had once suggested hopeful, clear skies.
     No longer.
     For Father Jerzy, it was a world gone completely mad. His secretive entry at night into the empty Strahov Klaster gave him little sense of spiritual solace, and even sent a slight shiver through his body as he gazed upward at the ineffable dark splendor of the past, reflected in dimly-lit frescoed ceilings.

     For a second, almost imperceptibly, he felt the ground under his feet tremble, as if there had been a minor tremor. "Did that really happen?" he asked himself.
     In the ancient glass case, hidden behind a sixteenth-century print of Dante's Inferno, was the precious parchment entrusted to him. Slowly, and with the greatest caution, he removed it from the case, feeling the sensation that the slightest touch would turn it to dust.
     Like a hazy January moon surrounded by clouds, it seemed to shimmer ... to radiate with a surreal energy.
     Sitting down at the reading desk, Jerzy read in Aramaic, almost whispering.
     "I command you: Depart wicked foe." The lights in the monastery library flickered. Defensively he mumbled, "A storm's coming," as a shudder reflex kicked in. Jerzy wondered if the approaching tempest might cause the monastery to lose power.
     As a child, Jerzy had always been terrified of being in "The Dark": That strange existence, that indescribable sensation of intense fear and vulnerability.
     "Accursed fiend," he read. "Your embrace is lethal."
     Inexplicably, the table beneath his hands seemed to shift. In the distance, Father Jerzy heard the rumbling of thunder. "If I have to, I'll sleep right here on the floor of the library."

     Slowly he spoke the next phrase aloud in Aramaic. The particular combination of consonants and vowels in Aramaic had an eerie resonance, almost hypnotic.
     "You are the Father of all lies! Moloch!"
     Without warning, the lights shut off. After several grueling minutes in the dark, the temporary lighting system kicked in. Jerzy glanced over his shoulder and felt a violent chill race down his spine. Huge distorted shadows of the crucified Christ bounced eerily off the walls of the monastery library, reminding him of the bat-filled caves and caverns in Bamiyan, in Afghanistan where the precious pergament had been found.
     Hesitating, he continued reading: "Wicked one! Ye mock God."
     Behind his head, Jerzy heard the deafening sound of a huge volume crashing against the wooden floors of the library. Jerzy's immediate reaction was to stop, place the parchment back in its case and leave forever.
     Instead, a feeling of anger and refusal to be intimidated swept through him. He continued undaunted: "Unclean spirit! Ye have come to plunder and waste our Father's vineyard." Behind his head, several huge books crashed to the floor.
     "And corrupt the souls of the innocent." With a deafening sound, more books continued falling to the floor. Under the massive, hollow vaults of the library, the volumes began crashing violently from their places on the shelf, one after the other, almost like machine gun fire.
     Jerzy didn't care. Hypnotized by the bizarre and unpredictable language of the pergament, he refused to stop. "Crawl, repulsive lizard."
     Suddenly, glass cabinets were shattering, sending fragments racing through the air and all over the floor of the library. Leather volumes continued flying violently and furiously off the shelves. Too much was happening, too fast. Reading loudly in Aramaic, he shouted: "In the Name of the Father, you must leave! Now!"

     A violent moan seemed to arise around Father Jerzy, coming up from the ground more like a wave than a voice.  A deep primal groan, unrecognizable in any language:
     Die!
     Jerzy didn't believe his ears. All of this cannot be happening.
     But Jerzy had long ago lost any desire to live in a world swimming in evil. And he had decided, "Never again to live in fear."
     "Get out, accursed one," he continued reading. "Get out!"
     At once, with the sound of a bomb going off, all the doors in the monastery library blew open, sending an icy blast of air racing through the chamber. Shaken from his trance, Jerzy jumped up from his seat and realized, "It's time to go."
     Holding the parchment close to his heart, Jerzy ran from the room, almost afraid to see what was happening behind him. Defiantly, he looked back as all the glass in the library erupted in a massive, volcanic explosion.
     I'm not finished with you yet.

Chapter Two
St. Petersburg

Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Riccardo Muti

Bizarre circumstances, to say the least. For once in his life, Matthew Pierce had agreed to buy a page of a diary with only a brief glimpse possible. And after dark, no less.

"This is madness," Matthew thought as he headed toward the park of the Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood, built on the site where the great reformer who freed the Russian serfs, Czar Alexander II, had been assassinated. "On spilled blood," Matthew repeated to himself, wondering why the peculiar name left him feeling so uncomfortable.

Winter had smiled wryly on the splendid city, leaving an opulent mink mantle that shimmered with the ebony pearls and antique silver of a thousand Orthodox icons. Passing canals and bridges with elaborate wrought-iron railings in the imperial city of St. Petersburg, Matthew watched as cerulean sky faded into the somber shadows of the canals, while night began to descend slowly on the pastel façades in an ominous shroud of amber gray mist.

Matthew found himself on snowy streets, sporting a dark felt Fedora - as he had been instructed - and heading to meet a man wearing a red carnation at the ornate wrought-iron fence of the park adjacent to the Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood. Reflecting in the moonlight, the playful onion domes of the church displayed their colorful facets like Gaudiesque pinwheels swimming in a dark Catalan sky.
Because of the potential importance of the find, the viscount, René de Laguerelle, also for the first time, had agreed to pay the initial sum of $10,000, sight unseen. The bearded Turk with the red carnation in his coat lapel whom Matthew was supposed to meet, spotted him first and guided the young musicologist silently into the park adjacent to the huge church.

Immediately after they arrived, the man showed Matthew the packet with the single leaf of the manuscript. "You bring the money?" he asked in heavily accented English. When Matthew nodded, he insisted, "All of it?" Opening his jacket to show a revolver strapped to his chest, he added brusquely, "Good."

"I'd like to see the diary first," Matthew said calmly. Looking around nervously, the Kurdish Turk begrudgingly handed him the packet, and Matthew began his examination of the handwritten leaf.

As Matthew scanned the page, his conclusion was instant - it was unmistakably Tchaikovsky's hand. If the diary had truly been stolen from a secret Russian archive in St. Petersburg, it was priceless.

"The money," the dark Muslim barked, looking over his shoulder.
As he took out the envelope from his suit jacket with $10,000 in hundred dollar bills, Matthew tried to mask his excitement. No pleasantries, no polite conversation. Grabbing the envelope and looking nervously inside, the Kurd opened his coat again with a threatening expression that said, "There'd better not be anything missing."

"So next time, we meet in Istanbul," Matthew said. "For more of the diary."

The bearded man nodded, looking for the best direction to disappear into the winter night. He was gone so quickly, Matthew had the fleeting sensation he had imagined the entire encounter. But the leaf of the diary was still in his hands, burning with a feverish energy.

Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, Movement I/1, performed by Van Cliburn, Kiril Kondrashin conducting

The young sailors of the Imperial Navy are in the city and many will be at the park in front of Pushkin Theater tonight, near the monument to our beloved sovereign, Catherine. In the moonlight, their white uniforms will be reflecting youth and athletic beauty and, after months away from shore, I suspect they will be impatient and eager for human contact. And although I'm sure that I am being followed by at least one or two agents of the Czar's police, this annoyance will not prevent me from enjoying one of the best nighttime playgrounds in the world. More exciting even than Paris.

Although separated from the composer by a century and a half, Matthew was irresistibly swept back in time, into Pyotr Ilyich's world, and found himself accompanying Tchaikovsky on his brisk walk toward the park on Nevsky Prospect.

* * *

"Rubinstein!" Pyotr Ilyich mumbled angrily under his breath as he began to piece events together. "It was almost immediately after I played my piano concerto for Nikolai (and after his inexcusable tirade), that I started to notice I was being harassed and followed."

       "That infernal Khazar!" Tchaikovsky said aloud, as he remembered all the "tribesmen" that Rubinstein had set upon him like hyenas. They weren't agents of the police - just students and colleagues at the conservatory, always waiting with some sly, rehearsed comment about the vast number of sailors on shore leave in the city, or about the irate Count Stenbock-Fermor, uncle of his favorite young protégé, Alexander.
     Always with the same agenda ... to disparage and discourage Pyotr Ilyich. To cause him to lose hope in himself, in his music. "Death by a thousand cuts," he thought bitterly.
     Pyotr Ilyich's extreme sensitivity - which had been a lifetime battle - now manifested itself as anxiety, even panic. After months of nuanced attacks from Nikolai Rubinstein's "collaborators," Pyotr Ilyich came to understand exactly what was happening. Then it was replaced by the Czar's secret police, sometimes letting him know that he was being followed by deliberately staring at him. A silent form of implied blackmail. Other times they sought complete anonymity by avoiding eye contact. But Pyotr Ilyich had come to recognize them in all their fiendish dissimulations.

     On Christmas Eve, when I played my piano concerto for the first time for Nikolai, I had taken it for granted he would be flattered that I would want him to premiere the work. Instead, after the first movement, he sat in glacial silence and I saw an expression of the most rabid jealousy sweep across his face. When I rose from the piano and asked him for his thoughts, he didn't say a word, but continued silently amassing a storm of the greatest magnitude. Finally, when he deigned to speak to me, it was with the most deliberately false and indifferent tone, combined with an overbearing superiority that would have been inappropriate for the scribblings of a ten-year-old.
     To my face, he announced that the concerto was "worthless and clumsy." He even used the word "unplayable." Worst of all, he pontificated that it was unimaginably vulgar, with the exception of a few passages that I had stolen from other composers.
     "Perhaps two or three pages can be salvaged," he continued with a condescending sneer. "As for the rest, it belongs ... in the trash."
     Like a man possessed, he then lunged for the piano with a wild, demonic smile on his face and began a caricature of my concerto, turning even my most beautiful melodies into a macabre Totentanz, revelling with sardonic satisfaction as if he were the guest of honor at a Witches' Sabbat. "What is this?" he shouted in my face in the midst of his cacaphonic frenzy, as he started imitating my octave passages, even banging out a few with his elbows.
     Without a word, I stood up and left the room, agitated and, frankly, stunned. Nikolai Grigoryevich followed in hot pursuit of his prey and invited me into a distant room. His tone seemed placating at first: "However, if you revise 'your thing' in a limited amount of time, 'exactly the way I say,' then I'll perform it in 'one of your little concerts'."
     That was the last straw. "Not one note," I replied. "I refuse to change even a single note."

"And to think that I behaved like a complete gentleman during that interminable outburst," Tchaikovsky thought bitterly as he stopped to observe the shadowy onion domes of the Vladimirskaya Church, bathing in reflections of white lead and Roman ochre under the ethereal light of a resilient and undaunted autumn moon. "But what really turned Nikolai Grigoryevich against me was the immediate demand for performance scores all over the world after the Boston premiere. My publishers told me they had never seen anything like it: Overnight, my concerto became the most performed work in the entire repertoire."

His eyes welling up like a dam threatening to burst, Piotr Ilyich continued walking in the direction of the monument of Catherine the Great. "And to imagine, for that, Rubinstein would unleash his pack of jackals on me, to nip incessantly at my heels and at my flesh." Pyotr Ilyich bitterly recalled their knowing smiles and deliberate acts of petty sabotage and mischief.

Placido Domingo sings Lensky's Act II aria from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin

     After months of this fiendish treatment, Tchaikovsky had come to realize that even government officials - the infamous "Russian bureaucracy" - were taking part in the vicious game. Tchaikovsky's respected reputation in the world had been torn asunder like the rent garments of the Elders in the Temple. His charmed and vibrant life, full of beauty and abundance, had become a living nightmare taken directly from the pages of Dante's Inferno.
     "Where have you vanished, good fortune of my youth?" Piotr Ilyich asked himself, remembering the words from Lensky's aria in Eugene Onegin. Lensky, the character in Pushkin's play would die at dawn in a gun duel, but he nevertheless proclaimed, like Tchaikovsky, "Despite everything, I seek first to sing." The music Piotr Ilyich had composed burst forth from his memories of brilliant success throughout Europe as tenors sang, "What will this new day, shrouded in mystery, bring?"
     Tchaikovsky felt the first warm release of a tear on his cheek, as he tried to comprehend the insane cruelty and injustice he was experiencing. "I know not what my fate is. Perhaps it is my lot to die." Ashamed at having allowed his emotions to overcome him, Piotr Ilyich wiped the brief torrent of tears with the cuffs of his shirt. There had been occasions in his life when he had felt on the verge of nervous collapse, but with this latest assault on his reputation and integrity, Tchaikovsky had almost lost his sanity.

"It does not matter whether I become Death's prey, or if I am spared the enemy's bullet."

Tchaikovsky took a deep breath. "No, I'm not going to let them defeat me," he said defiantly as he continued his walk in the brisk autumn air. "Everything comes from God," he remembered Mikhail Medvedyev singing passionately at the premiere of Onegin in Moscow: "Love, and the deepest peace."
Swept into an ecstatic trance from the poignant beauty of his aria, Piotr Ilyich sang Pushkin's poetry softly with Medvedyev in the radiant Russian night: "He sends us the golden day, he also sends us the darkest night."

* * *

In the icy burn of the December night, Matthew contemplated Tchaikovsky's plight wistfully, and yet felt the impalpable exhilaration of being alive. "This diary is going to finally explain the mystery surrounding Tchaikovsky's death," he realized, as he looked up to see a proud and defiant crescent moon, reaching toward a single radiant star, reminiscent of the Turkish flag. "So tomorrow I'm off to Istanbul," he thought.

His eyes still raised toward the sky, Matthew felt the painful sensation of frozen steel pressed firmly against the back of his head. Before he had time to think or react, he heard, "One move and you're dead."

Matthew froze. Within seconds, he was surrounded by a group of rough street hoodlums, and he heard the sharp snaps of switchblades punctuating the night.

The man with the gun at Matthew's head said, "Don't try anything foolish," as another walked up and removed the leaf of the diary from his hands. "You never saw that."

Heart pounding in overdrive, Matthew found himself literally nose-to-nose with the leader, a surprisingly well-dressed, clean-shaven young man with slick raven hair. "Say one word about it," he said calmly with a thick accent, "and they'll find you face down in the water with a bullet in your head."

Managing to choke out a barely-audible "OK," Matthew watched, almost in slow motion, as the leader nodded to another member of the gang who strode up and delivered a devastating punch deep into Matthew's gut.

Writhing in the snow in agony, unable to breathe, Matthew heard, as the gang departed, "Don't forget what I told you, asshole."

Chapter Three
Valencia

With her usual feline suppleness, the sultry Roman brunette, Nicoletta Chigi glided into the "demonstration" room in Calatrava's City of Arts and Sciences. Nicoletta had spent a lifetime capturing the attention of men and had, in fact, been universally acknowledged as one of the most beautiful women in Europe. This, however, was the first time she had been asked to literally capture a man - her unfortunate drug dealer - as a "volunteer" for the presentation.

Glancing around the room, Nicoletta was impressed by the caliber and stature of the guests: Several heads of central banks and major insurance companies, CEOs of top corporations, and even a number of high ranking members of the American and Israeli military and intelligence communities.

"A virtual Who's Who of power," Nicoletta thought as she took her seat in the elegant conference room. "The 9/11 Club," she mused, aware of the consequences of ever saying that expression aloud: It would be her death warrant.
Her "volunteer" drug dealer - his mouth covered with duct tape and his hands and torso firmly tied - struggled desperately and unsuccessfully to break free of his bonds.

"Nikki," her father-in-law said, "for Christ's sake, go calm him down."

Nicoletta obliged and slid seductively into the chair directly in front of him. The frantic "volunteer" watched in disbelief as Nicoletta crossed her long, shapely legs in front of him and, almost immediately, his expression changed from unconcealed anguish to relative calm.

After all the guests had taken their seats, a tall young man with dark blonde hair and the chiseled chin of a boxer arrived with a cumbersome set of headphones that he mounted over the head of the drug dealer, despite his renewed - and futile - protests.

"That's Martin," Nicoletta's father-in-law whispered. "He's CIA ... sort of. Doing some freelancing these days."

The agent started his demonstration by inserting a CD in the sophisticated Bang and Olufsen sound system, which only the man bound to the chair could hear. Throughout the conference room, interest was keen as the "volunteer" began to hear some kind of words or text that no one was willing to divulge to Nicoletta.

At first, the sounds entering his ears caused the captive drug dealer to listen intently, his eyes rising slowly to unearthly visions that seemed to be swimming above his head. A look of childlike fascination swept across his face as he was carried away in the stream of images that were passing before his eyes.

Abruptly, the subject sat up in his chair in a rigid pose, a frozen expression of terror on his face. Frantically, he started screaming under the duct tape and shaking the chair wildly to escape from his bonds. His face bulging in a grotesque contortion, the drug dealer continued twitching and vibrating in violent spasms, faster and faster, as the guests watched in rapt attention.

Without warning, a sound like a punctured tire shook the room, and the audience was splattered with the entire contents of the man's head, which burst out of the cavity where his face had once been.

There was a moment of stunned silence. Then Nicoletta heard her father-in-law bark, "Christ, Martin, that was disgusting." Wiping his forehead with a monogrammed handkerchief, he continued, "You didn't tell me he was going to explode all over us. This is, or was at least, a handmade silk suit."

Other guests were apparently not concerned about the voluminous spray of blood and brains on their European designer suits and uniforms, and several made a beeline for the young rogue CIA agent who was selling his new "weapon" to the highest bidders.

Only Nicoletta remained seated ... in silent shock and disbelief, dripping with the still-warm human remains of her drug dealer.

"They didn't tell me this was going to happen," was her last thought as she rose slowly from her chair, then collapsed in an incoherent blur.

Chapter Four
Prague

     Father Jerzy looked up into the Baroque vaulted ceilings of St. Nicolas Church, wondering how things could have gone so wrong.
     "Dearest Father," he prayed as he stared at the pink marble and gold pilasters reaching to the heavens exuberantly as if in ecstatic prayer, "You are the source of Light, the giver of Truth, and Hope. "
     In one hand he held his train ticket for Bucharest, where Father Erynn would soon be, after his release from prison. In the other was the accursed pergament that was meant to save desperate souls from the grip of the Evil One, yet instead caused them to die agonizing deaths, and monastery libraries to shatter with astonishing violence.
     "Your Light, beloved Father, and that of Your Son," he prayed. "More than ever I need a sign from You."
      With an immediacy that took Jerzy's breath away, a bright sunbeam suddenly penetrated the highest windows in the church, and the young priest found himself blinded.
     "More than that, Dearest Father," Jerzy prayed, "no one could ever ask."
     Covering his eyes from the dazzling rays that reflected warmth and hope throughout the church, Jerzy thought, "Isn't it strange that I've never actually looked at this in the daylight?"
     As he scrutinized the parchment with new eyes, Jerzy was intrigued to realize that there were two slightly different shades of ink in the "Bamiyan Rite of Exorcism." Intrigued, he held it up in the bright sunlight, and saw that several words had been written in a separate hand, perhaps at an earlier time.
     Careful not to pronounce the Aramaic aloud, or even to move his lips as he examined the five words that differed from the rest of the text, Jerzy silently scanned the phrase in stunned disbelief:
     I ... embrace ... You ... Moloch! Come.

* * *

     As he exited the church, Father Jerzy glanced up at the familiar dome of St. Nicolas, splendid and proud under the piercing blue Prague sky. For some reason, the façade of the church seemed more roughly hewn and rustic than Jerzy had remembered it, but he attributed that to the blinding sunlight he had experienced inside.
     At his foot, holding a crutch carved out of a single piece of wood sat a beggar dressed literally in rags with his hand outstretched. Jerzy reached in his pocket and handed the man the only coin he had, a Czech five Korun piece, and the beggar, who was examining him up and down incredulously said, in a thick provincial dialect of Czech, "Thank you, Monsignor." Jerzy watched as the man reached in his pocket and handed the priest a little woven sack.
     "What's this?" Jerzy asked.
     "Dried flowers and herbs to protect you from the plague, Monsignor," the man answered.
     "What plague?"
     Indignant, the beggar replied, "Why, the Black Death, of course." Handing back the coin Jerzy had given him, the man continued, "Monsignor, this won't even buy me a potato, or a cup of milk."
     A series of ear-shattering sounds like gunfire suddenly disrupted the silence. Startled, Jerzy asked the man, "What's that noise?"
     "It's for the New Year, Monsignor. Year of Our Lord, 1711."
     Jerzy's expression of confusion was too much for the beggar, who brusquely helped himself up from the ground, made the sign of the Cross quickly, and disappeared around the corner of the church, hobbling as fast as he could to get away from the strange young cleric dressed in the most bizarre vestments he had ever seen.
     For Jerzy, it was another example of just how crazy homeless people had become in recent times. Blessing himself, he prayed for the impoverished and disinherited. "Dearest Father, what on earth is this world coming to?"

Chapter Five
St. Petersburg

Tchaikovsky String Quartet, 2nd Movement

     The elderly professor Akhillyes penned her last comments about the controversial Nikolai Rubinstein letter she had acquired at auction. Since the letter was signed with only one initial, no one but she had realized its value in a pile of miscellaneous nineteenth-century documents she had stumbled upon at the Dorotheum.
     Listening to the soulful strains of the Andante cantabile from Tchaikovsky's String Quartet, Op. 11 floating through her spacious apartment, she put her reading glasses away and looked out her window pensively.  "After a career dedicated to introducing people to the music of Nikolai Rubinstein," she wondered, "could this recent discovery have the opposite effect?"
     From her second-floor window she could see the Winter Canal as it reached toward the Neva, reflecting expansive Marian blue sky and elegant Venetian arches. Her remarkable view from the two-floor apartment left to her by her beloved husband, the late Dr. Akhillyes, stretched all the way to the marble pillar topped by angel wings and a crucifix and the classic, monumental façade of the Hermitage.

     Dr. Akhillyes, whose friends called her simply, "Laura," had just prepared her final translation in Russian of the original Nikolai Rubinstein letter that had been written, for some inexplicable reason, in Yiddish. At age ninety-one, the inveterate musicologist had undertaken a study of the Yiddish language to make sure her translation was accurate, and had even taken a few lessons of conversational Yiddish with her tutor.
     Slowly placing her glasses on her face, she scanned the final translation:

Dear Honorable Dr. Maslov,
     Please take the usual precautions that this letter does not fall into the wrong hands. Since my last correspondence with you, I have had several ideas about how we can deal with the "challenge" to my name and career, of which I recently informed you.
     As I wrote, this sodomite "composer" Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky has designs on my position at the Moscow Conservatory and seeks to usurp my reputation and my place in posterity with his cheap, wildly popular scribblings. He will not content himself to work alongside of me as a respectful junior colleague desirous of my knowledge and guidance, but rather wishes nothing less than to entice all my pupils and protégés to study with him (and perhaps to "use" them as well for his unnatural and insatiable appetites, as you remember from my past letter).
     I realized all this when he first played the tasteless trash that he called his "piano concerto" for me, on Christmas Eve no less. After the first movement, he stopped, full of smug satisfaction and brimming with contempt for me and my entire generation of learned composers, and asked me what I thought.
     Not sure what to say at first, I gently suggested that the work needed some revisions, at which point he turned furiously and stormed out of the room, enraged and offended. He then published it without accepting my generous offer to revise it, and presently it is circulating in a concert world comprised of ignoramuses in America and Europe, thus turning the entire Russian musical establishment into a laughing stock.
     Because of this, I have asked a renowned Rabbi to invoke the sacred prayer from the Kabbalah, the Pulsa diNura, against Tchaikovsky and his music:
     "May angels of destruction descend upon him.  May he be damned everywhere he goes. May his soul instantly leave his body so that he not survive another month.
       May his path be eternally dark. May God's angels chase and harm him.  May a disaster unlike any he has ever experienced befall him and may all curses known in the Torah apply to him.
     I deliver to you, angels of wrath and fury, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, so that you may smother him and the specter of his music, and cast him into hell, and dry up his wealth, and plague his thoughts to insanity, and scatter him to the wind so that he is steadily reduced in health. Then put to death the cursed Pyotr Ilyich. May he be damned, damned, damned!"
       Honorable Dr. Maslov, we have already seen to it that his sources of income, primarily that of his patron, Nadezhda von Meck, will dry up like "shriveled eggs in the womb that can no longer produce offspring." Through mutual friends, I have made her aware of his innumerable transgressions against the morals of society and the state (the man is known for his predilection for younger sexual partners, for traffic with male prostitutes and even for carnal relations with his servants), and have suggested that her funds would be better invested in a respected composer like myself. As a result of the counsel we have offered her, Madame von Meck has promised, at some future date, to cease all financial help and contact with Tchaikovsky, and has thus avoided unnecessary scandal and ridicule for herself in respectable society. And she has wisely consented to become a patron of the arts for my music.
     However, as I wrote you, we are now seeking to deliver the much-deserved coup de grace to this no-talent upstart: To have Tchaikovsky arrested and subjected to the public humiliation of trial and imprisonment, possibly even execution under our sodomy laws.
     Since you have indicated that this is unlikely because of the present political circumstances (Pyotr Ilyich has obtained a noble title and order from Czar Alexander III, and a public trial would damage the prestige of the court), I would like to suggest another method. Tchaikovsky was a graduate of your school of jurisprudence, and is therefore subject to the more secretive chastisements of an alumni with some of the most distinguished clergy, military and political figures of Russian society, including our compatriot, Nikolai Borisovich Yakobi, Senior Procurator of the Senate.
     Tchaikovsky pretends to be "sensitive and introspective" like a poet, so I have had him followed by our mutual friends and contacts in the secret police, who let him know that his every move is being recorded. Perhaps he will spare us all the trouble and choose suicide to a life of dishonor and disgrace.
     As you know well, the Divine Plan is a saga of "Gods and goyim." Pyotr Ilyich and other "cattle" like him must never ... never be allowed to usurp the place of the Gods, nor even to cause them discomfort or distress in this earthly Paradise, which is Ours alone.
     I leave these matters in your hands, my dearest colleague and brother. In your last letter, you wrote, "Don't be concerned. We'll get him!" With such clarity and conviction on your part, I will rest assured.
     With all deepest respect,

     N.

     Professor Akhillyes held the original letter, whose historical significance was known only to her ... and to those well-dressed men from the vague and mysterious "History Foundation" who had tried to negotiate with her to purchase the document.
     As she attempted to place the letter in a folder, her hands began to tremble and she watched in disbelief as it slipped down between two pieces of antique wood in her Louis XV desk. With her letter opener, she tried to extricate the folio from its elusive hiding place, when the doorbell to the apartment began to ring.
     Manoeuvring herself slowly in her wheelchair to the intercom, she asked, "Who is it?
     "Good afternoon, Dr. Akhillyes."
     Thinking she recognized their voices, the good professor asked, "Are you the gentlemen from the History Foundation?"
     After a pause, she heard, "Yes."
     Unprepared for visitors, Dr. Akhillyes raised her voice, "I wasn't expecting anyone ... I'm upstairs. Let me buzz you in, and you can find your way up."
     Immediately, she heard the men downstairs enter, and opened the door of her studio to receive them.
     However, as they came up the stairs, Dr. Akhillyes realized that these were not the same men from the History Foundation who had tried to purchase her Rubinstein letter. Instead, she saw five rather young men, dressed in street clothes instead of tailored business suits, their heads and necks draped in what seemed to be Palestinian scarves.
     "We're here for your letter," the leader of the group said, a man with slick raven-black hair who, unlike the others, was quite well dressed. As he spoke, he looked around her office, scrutinized her wheelchair, and turned to examine the expansive spiral staircase that led precipitously to the ground floor of her apartment.
     "Give it to me now. Or else, we're going to have to do something ... very, very bad to you."

Chapter Six
Istanbul

     Matthew arrived breathlessly in his hotel in Istanbul and began frantically closing all the drapes in his suite. He remembered the warning in St. Petersburg about the Tchaikovsky diary: "Say one word about it, and they'll find you face down in the water with a bullet in your head."
     According to the Kurdish Turk who sold him the new page of the diary in the park of Topkapi, the diary was, for some inexplicable reason, of interest to both the Russian Mafiya and the Israeli Mossad. But no one wanted to stay around and find out why: The Kurd had grabbed the envelope with the $10,000 and disappeared into the night like he was being chased by the devil himself.

Mikhail Pletnev plays Romance, Op. 5 by Tchaikovsky

     Double locking the door of his suite, Matthew took a seat at the desk and began reading and translating the newest page of the Tchaikovsky diary breathlessly.

     Today is the day I chose to end my life. As I walked by the palace of my friend, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, I saw that His Excellency was home, as the lights to his office are always extinguished whenever he is away. Almost without thinking, I stumbled through the snow to the bell and was welcomed into the antechamber of the Grand Duke. When Konstantin saw me, an expression of complete shock swept his face. "My dear Pyotr Ilyich," he said. "What on earth has happened to you?"
     Immediately after leading me into his office, he asked, "Have you eaten?"
     "No, Your Excellency," I replied. "Not for three days."
     Without a word, he called for a servant to bring hot soup from the kitchen, and stared at me in utter disbelief. After I had eaten, he insisted, "Tell me what happened."
     "In my pocket, I have a vial of poison, and am planning to throw myself into the Neva."
     "Why on earth would you do that, my dear Pyotr Ilyich? You're at the height of your career. You are perhaps the most beloved composer in Russia of our time."
     Gradually, I began to tell him everything ... from Nikolai Grigoryevich's denunciation of my first piano concerto, to the sudden appearance of collaborators and spies, to the hunting and mobbing by the Czar's secret police, until my life had become a nightmare too terrible to live.
     The Grand Duke, this great man, this wise and kind friend from the highest ranks of the Russian nobility, looked at me, his eyes filling with tears. "My dear Pyotr Ilyich," he said, "if you were to die, I think I myself would have little desire to live. Never before have I known a more kind, charitable person, nor a more talented and dedicated composer. Your music is the very heart of Russia."
     Suddenly he demanded, "Show me the poison."
     As I removed the glass vial of Acqua Toffana from my pocket, I said, "I have heard that it leaves no traces, and that my death could be blamed on natural causes, such as an outbreak of cholera, or even tuberculosis."
     Abruptly, he took it from my hands. "The people who are doing this to you are murderers. Vile, predatory creatures of the night without a soul or a conscience. They must be punished, in this life and the next."
       Immediately I replied, "But Your Excellency, there are dozens of them. Perhaps even hundreds."
     "It is unimportant how many there are. If they have been trying to harm the greatest composer of Mother Russia, it is treason, and they will be dealt with like traitors."
     Completely unprepared for his reaction, I remained silent.

     "For their terrible crimes, and complete lack of humanity, they must be banished forever to the Pale of Settlement, whence they came. Members of the secret service who participated will be purged from the Czar's ranks and forced to live in bitter exile with the same traitors and murderers they abetted. If foreigners were involved, they will be sent back to the poorest parts of their own countries to live the rest of their lives in squalor and misery." He continued, "And Nikolai Rubinstein...."
     Stunned, I managed to ask, "Nikolai Rubinstein...?"
     "The man has poisoned your life. He is a murderer, and the penalty for murder is public execution."
     "But Your Excellency," I said, choking on my words. "It could bring great harm to the prestige of the Czar and his court."
     "That is correct, Pyotr Ilyich. For this reason, it will not happen. However...."
     I waited for Grand Duke Konstantin to continue. "However, justice will be done. Nikolai Grigoryevich Rubinstein will die from the very poison he administered to you."

Chapter Seven
Prague

     Father Jerzy walked out into the streets of Prague and found himself in the midst of an apocalyptic nightmare. As women and their children cried and prayed incessantly for their departed loved ones, mountains of corpses burned everywhere. The stench of charred wood and human flesh filled Jerzy's nostrils with a diabolical frankincense that practically caused him to vomit.
     "Where is my beautiful Prague?" he asked himself, over and over again.
     In tears, Father Jerzy found himself crossing himself obsessively. In the distance, he saw a familiar figure approaching and stood up to find himself in the arms of his beloved mentor, Father Erynn.
     "Aren't you supposed to be in Bucharest?" Jerzy asked him.
     Father Erynn thought a second, then replied, "Yes. But we're here now, and we have work to do ."
     Feeling himself being pulled along with Erynn through the mad scene of pity and piety, Jerzy asked, "Where are we going?"
     "To an anatomical theater. They're doing an exorcism."
     Disoriented, Jerzy asked, "In an anatomical theater?"
     Father Erynn replied, "Yes. The greatest medical doctors in the world are gathered with the greatest theological minds on the planet. Now tell me, what did you find out about the Bamiyan pergament?"
     Suddenly, Jerzy remembered everything. "It has five words that are written in another hand, from another time. Let me show you."
     Holding the parchment up to the light, Jerzy pointed out the five Aramaic words, and Father Erynn froze like a deer caught in the headlights. "We must stop this exorcism," he shouted as he began to race toward the theater. Jerzy barely had a chance to catch his breath, as he struggled to keep up with the elderly priest.
     Entering the anatomical theater set up in St. James Church was like walking into a professional wrestling event from the eighteenth century. In one part of the theater were clergymen with their heads covered in hoods of dark cloth, holding carved, stylized crucifixes, loudly reciting prayers in unison. In another part were several dozen older priests with white, glazed eyes staring upward as they prayed.
     "Who are they?" Jerzy managed to ask.
     Erynn interrupted his push through the crowd to say: "Blind mystics. They see the future, and pray all day long for the survival of mankind, and the planet."
     Jerzy saw a large group of men and women in ceremonial graduation robes, including a figure who vaguely resembled Albert Einstein, observing the turbulent proceedings. "They're academics," Father Erynn said softly, "who have stolen other scholars' work. For their sin, they must stand silently and watch exorcisms for an eternity."
      Stunned by the choral cacaphony going on in the rest of the theater, Jerzy heard some groups chanting in unison, while others sang Latin chants in polyphony and still other sections prayed ecstatically in tongues.
     In one corner, a group of men were rocking and humming in a bizarre ritual. Anticipating Jerzy's question, Father Erynn said, "They've had their mouths sewn shut."
     "Why?" Jerzy asked.
     "For spitting on Orthodox priests, and seven-year-old girls in the Holy Land."
     Outraged, Jerzy asked, "Where have you brought me? Are we in Dante's Inferno? Or Hell?"
     Erynn stopped and reflected. "No, but in a minute or two it's going to feel like it. If you're weak of heart, then maybe you shouldn't stay."
     Jerzy took a breath, then replied, "No. I'm in this for the long run. Even Eternity. Just tell me what I have to do."
     Erynn did not hesitate. "We have to stop this exorcism.   Without realizing it, they're inviting the devil himself into this world."

Chapter Eight
Barcelona

Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence, 2/4 (2nd Movement)

     Martin Libby was the ideal CIA agent. Former Marine, he boasted a chiseled chin, dark blonde hair and eyes of gray steel and lapis lazuli. A thousand sit-ups a day, plus obsessive push- and pull-ups had given him a lean physique of solid hewn rock.
     Martin had been the first CIA agent to receive a perfect score on his entrance exam. "Would you kill American citizens on American soil?" he was asked.
     "Of course, Sir," he replied. "Or wherever else you tell me."
     "Would you shoot a pregnant woman?"
     "Yes, Sir. One shot, two kills." Martin had learned that answer ahead of time from his friends in the Israeli Defense Forces.
     A perfect score. An American hero - but not to women. Martin could never understand why women seemed to shun him. Maybe it was because of the "athletic" sex he preferred, where the sounds of a woman begging him to stop only excited him to more prodigious feats. "Kinda like rape," he mused. "Only legal."
     Martin Libby was the ideal CIA agent ... always ready to cooperate fully with his Mossad handlers. Until the moment he had decided to "freelance."

     Clicking on his online banking, Martin realized that his account had just risen from $978.6 million to $979 million. Over four hundred thousand dollars in twenty minutes. It was time to celebrate: He called his friend, Hervé, the doorman, and asked if he could send him up una puta, as Hervé called them: Martin was about to join the "Billionaires Club."
     Looking out of the window of his recently purchased apartment with a beachfront and harbor view of Barcelona, Martin Libby decided he was ready to marry, or at least to "fall in love" with a woman, like everyone else did. And Nicoletta Chigi was going to be that woman, whether or not she was interested.
     "But I can tell she likes me," Martin whispered, as he gazed at the splendid view of Barceloneta, where his new yacht was harbored, and listened to the romantic waves of Tchaikovsky resonating from sophisticated speakers placed throughout his 10,000 square foot residence. "She's helping me improve my education."
      When he met Nicoletta Chigi for the first time, at his "demonstration" in Valencia, Martin's striking eyes of gray blue immediately revealed that he was interested. But Nicoletta, after a lifetime of men falling for her, had acquired a repertoire of over a thousand ways to cool them down. In her melodic Roman accent, she quipped that maybe he needed a little Italian culture. So Martin was obliging her by listening to Souvenir de Florence.
     But Martin had more important things to attend to: His billion dollar financial venture - the "Aramaic rite of exorcism" - had developed some technical problems and issues, somewhat like an Israeli Stuxnet virus, designed to meltdown nuclear plants. In Valencia, the buyers of his new "weapon" (all members of "The 9/11 Club"), who had paid Martin millions for the "product" were beginning to experience bizarre phenomena associated with it: Strange tremors from the earth, doors that suddenly slammed shut and a primal, gutteral voice, barely decipherable in any language that seemed to rise up directly from the luxurious Carrara marble and Kona hardwood floors of their 24/7 secured and protected residences:
     You're mine now.

Chapter Nine
Tbilisi and Mtskheta

     As he followed his local Georgian guide on horseback, Matthew Pierce wondered if he could continue his exhausting pace across Europe. Always with an envelope in his pocket stuffed with one hundred dollar bills, Matthew could see their destination far in the distance: A remote church set high on a mountain top near Mtskheta, buillt a thousand years earlier by a Georgian King to prove to his people that his faith and devotion to Christianity were built on solid rock.
     On the telephone, when Matthew had asked the Turkish Kurd in possession of the Tchaikovsky diary why he had to make the treacherous route from Tbilisi on horseback, the Kurd had replied, "With the Russian Mafiya and the Israeli Mossad both trying to get their hands on this diary, we're not taking any chances. Just make sure you don't have any way they can track you, like a cellphone."
     The view of Georgian valleys from the ancient church took Matthew's breath away. An old woman in traditional Georgian dress brushed the path leading up to the church as a sign of respect to Matthew and his Georgian guide. Waiting for them was a distinguished older Orthodox priest, who led them them silently into the vaulted domed church.

     Without a word, the priest gestured to an opening in the stone wall interior of the sanctuary, placed Matthew's offering inside and removed a thick, padded manila envelope from among several, handing it to the young musicologist.
     When Matthew started to ask if he could see the diary, both the guide and the Orthodox priest gestured firmly not to speak. Suddenly, with an ear-shattering sound that caused the horses to panic, a helicopter appeared from nowhere and began to hover directly overhead.  Down the path, they could hear the agitated horses trying to escape, and immediately both Matthew and the guide found themselves literally running for their lives.
     In a frenetic gallop on horseback, Matthew and his guide headed for the nearest forested area to find cover. As they waited in a grove of pines, Matthew pulled out the envelope and examined the folio inside.
     It wasn't anything like the pages of Tchaikovsky's diary. Instead, Matthew found himself holding a very fine photocopy on thick paper of an ancient pergament written in Aramaic.
     "He gave me the wrong envelope," Matthew concluded. "We have to go back."
     In the distance, they heard the loud crackling of gunfire shots. Looking out cautiously from the pine forest, Matthew could see that the helicopter had landed on the mountain top near the church, and was now leaving.
     Stunned, Matthew asked his guide, who led him and the horses silently back to Tbilisi on foot, "They didn't kill the priest, did they?" When the guide didn't respond, Matthew continued, outraged, "And the old woman who was sweeping the path for us?"
     Although the guide's face revealed great pain, he put his finger firmly to his mouth, indicating not to talk. Despite his rugged resilience, the Georgian guide could not hide a tear that slipped down his cheek and splattered against the hammered rivet saddle of his horse. "That priest was my brother," he said. "And the 'old woman,' as you called her ... was my mother."

The Embrace Part Two: Prophecy