The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [179]
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In a rented car down the road, just beyond the lightly guarded perimeter of the church, a man, once a twin, said a short prayer of apology and lifted the Merkel shotgun from the passenger seat and set it across his lap. He glanced at the folded paper the lawyer had provided to see if any unused wisdom remained scribbled there and then ripped it into tiny pieces and fed them to the wind.
He had been given a date, and an approximate location. He had traded his new television to a neighborhood acquaintance, a gangster rumored to be a member of the 14K Triad, for a contact in Linz from whom a foreigner could buy a gun. He’d exchanged everything else he owned to pay for this trip.
After identifying a few members of the orchestra before they had been trucked into the forest, bribing them, imbibing with them, it had been relatively simple to follow them here, even for a conspicuous man, a young Asian man, because he was looking for the Thousand and it was not looking for him.
The last thing he had to know, the most important thing, had been whispered by the lawyer in their final phone conversation. It was not written anywhere. The lawyer’s motives for telling him this went unsaid, but he could guess.
“She’ll be wearing the mask of a wolf.”
He left the car on the side of an unpaved road, keys on the seat, and walked into the woods. When it was over, he expected to be dead as well, but this weird cult of wealth would no doubt clean up his mess. He guessed the bodies would disappear, his rental car returned. Back home, she would be missed more than he would be, and even if his absence was noted, the tenuous, long-ago connection between these missing persons might be a curiosity, but nothing more. That was all right. This was justice, not a publicity stunt. What he was about to do wouldn’t change anything. He was fine with this.
When he was close enough, he could hear music between the trees, beautiful music like his sister used to make, and he couldn’t help feel a sick thrill that he was stalking this woman the same way she must have stalked his twin, her husband’s lover. He would wait until they were leaving, until they were mingling exuberantly outside, the beautiful requiem mass sustained in the mountain air, and after he located her wolf mask, locked in on it like a missile, he would make his surprise suicide assault. Another concert, another murder.
There was symmetry to that.
Acknowledgments
I shouldn’t have to say that I have taken liberties in writing The Thousand. Nevertheless, the many fictional threads of this novel are interwoven with fact. Pythagoras was a far more interesting and important fellow than most history classes acknowledge. Much about him is a mystery, but there are some excellent books for anyone interested in discovering what we actually understand about the Pythagorean cult, the first among them, in my opinion, being Kitty Ferguson’s terrific The Music of Pythagoras: How an Ancient Brotherhood Cracked the Code of the Universe and Lit the Path from Antiquity to Outer Space. Those looking for a more succinct overview might check out Divine Harmony by John Strohmeier and Peter Westbrook. And if you really want to go hardcore into the Pythagorean influence on the history of music, read The Harmony of the Spheres edited by Joscelyn Godwin.
The translation of the fragment from Life of Pythagoras by Nichomachus of Gerasa is from Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker by Felix Jacoby.
Thanks to my early readers, including Dr. Jon Svahn, Kevin Fry, John Warner, Michele Seiler, and Peter Bormes. Thanks to Joe Dickey, as well as to Thomas and Janine Pendergast, who donated generously at charity auctions and endowed this novel with its