It was after he'd checked into the Bristol in April of 1998--Jack was eating dinner alone in that quiet, old restaurant--when he realized he'd actually seen his father in that gloomy room.
"Maybe some other time," William had said; then Jack had reached for his mother's hand, and she'd taken the boy away.
William would have other sightings of Jack--in Helsinki and in Amsterdam, no doubt--but this might have been Jack's first and last look at his dad, and Jack had not known who William was!
But who was the young woman, and why had William brought her? Were they really in love? William must have known he was going to see his son; Jack's father just hadn't expected the boy to speak. William wasn't prepared for that--neither was Alice. Obviously, Jack had s
urprised them both.
It unnerved Jack to think he'd correctly remembered the meeting, but that he'd been wrong about when it happened; this made Jack not trust the seeming chronology of things. If he'd met his own father--not knowing that William was his father--on Jack and his mom's last night in Oslo instead of their first, when had his mother encountered Andreas Breivik? When had she offered Andreas a free tattoo? And when had Jack and Alice met the beautiful young girl with the speech impediment, Ingrid Moe?
Jack recognized the Oslo Cathedral when the taxi dropped him at the front entrance to the Bristol--the dome that greenish color of turned copper, the clock tower large and imposing. He decided he would go there in the morning and speak with the organist; that the organist would turn out to be Andreas Breivik was not the only surprise in store for Jack.
There was a new organ now--not the German-made Walcker, which Jack remembered had a hundred and two stops. (Even the organ that replaced the Walcker had been replaced.) The new one was special in its own way; Andreas Breivik told Jack all about it. If Breivik had been sixteen or seventeen when Alice seduced him--or gave him an invisible tattoo, as Alice might have put it--he was not a day over forty-five when he spoke with Jack in the Domkirke. But Andreas Breivik had made something of a maestro of himself, and his success had made him pompous.
His blond, blue-eyed good looks had not endured. A man with delicate features had to be careful. Breivik's face was slightly puffy; perhaps he drank. He gave Jack a virtual lecture on the subject of the cathedral's new organ, which had been completed only a month before Jack's arrival in Oslo--by a Finn living in Norway. (Jack couldn't have cared less about the organ, or the Finn.)
With a grandiose gesture to the green-and-gold instrument, which positively shimmered, Breivik said: "We have the funeral of King Olav the Fifth to thank for this. January 1991--I'll never forget it. The old Jorgensen was such a disgrace. The Prime Minister himself insisted that money be raised for a new organ."
"I see," Jack said.
Andreas Breivik had studied choral music in Stuttgart; he'd furthered his organ studies in London. (This hardly mattered to Jack, but he nodded politely; Breivik's education, not to mention his mastery of English, meant a great deal to Breivik.)
"I've seen your films, of course--very entertaining! But you don't seem to have followed in your father's musical footsteps, so to speak."
"No--no musical footsteps," Jack said. "I took after my mother, it seems."
"Are you tattooed?" Breivik asked.
"No. Are you?"
"Good Lord, no!" Andreas Breivik said. "Your dad was a talented musician, a generous teacher, an engaging man. But his tattoos were his own business. We didn't discuss them. I never saw them."
"Mr. Breivik, please tell me what happened. I don't understand what happened."
Jack remembered the cleaning woman in the church--how horrified she'd been to see him and his mom. He recalled what little he'd understood of his mom's seduction of Andreas Breivik, and how Ingrid Moe had come to her for a tattoo--how Ingrid had wanted a broken heart and Alice had given the girl a whole one. But why had Alice insisted on talking to Ingrid Moe in the first place, and what information about Jack's father could either Ingrid or Andreas possibly have given Jack's mom? His dad hadn't run away; Alice hadn't been trying to find William. What was there about William that Alice didn't already know?
Andreas Breivik was less pompous in relating this story; he wasn't proud of it, nor was it an easy story for him to tell. But the pattern, which Jack had failed to grasp till now, was really rather simple.
Everywhere Jack and his mom went, after Copenhagen, they arrived ahead of his dad. Alice not only expected William to follow them--she knew how much William wanted to see his son--but Alice also knew ahead of time where William would be inclined to travel next. You didn't just choose a church and an organ, Breivik told Jack; these appointments took time to arrange. There was always an experienced organist with whom a relatively inexperienced organist wanted to study next, and the church where that mentor played had its own hierarchical way of choosing apprentices.
No organist wanted more than a few students, and only the most gifted students were chosen. With an organ, because of how many notes there were to play, sight reading was mandatory. Students with very narrow tastes, or those who disliked certain core composers, were generally discouraged; most younger students were irritating, because they liked to practice only loud or flashy music.
"You had to have a few irons in the fire," Andreas Breivik said. He meant that you had to be making plans way ahead of yourself. Where was the next organist you wanted to study with? What church? Which organ? In this world, you were both an apprentice and a teacher; as an apprentice, you also needed to go where you'd have students. (Not too many, but enough to pay the rent.)
This was the way it worked: when William was still playing the organ at the Citadel Church in Denmark, he was already thinking about Sweden--about apprenticing himself to Torvald Toren, about playing the organ at the Hedvig Eleonora in Stockholm--and all the while he was in Stockholm, William was planning to come (eventually) to Oslo, where he could study with Rolf Karlsen and play the organ at the Domkirke.
What Alice did, starting in Copenhagen, was to find out which irons in the fire were the hottest--what city was the next in line for William. Jack and his mom would go there, and Alice would establish herself; she would set up shop and wait for William to arrive. Then, systematically, Alice would set out to destroy the relationships William valued most. First of all, those friends he might have made in the church--possibly even the organist who was his mentor. But Alice more often chose easier targets; in the case of Oslo, she chose William's two best students, Andreas Breivik and Ingrid Moe.
Contrary to what Jack had believed for twenty-eight years, his dad hadn't seduced Ingrid Moe. She was sixteen at the time, and engaged to be married to young Andreas Breivik. They'd been childhood sweethearts; they even played the same instruments, first the piano and then the organ. And William prized them as students--not only because they were talented and hardworking, but also because they were in love. (Having been in love with Karin Ringhof, William Burns had a high regard for young musicians in love.)
"Your father was more than a terrific organist and a great teacher," Andreas Breivik told Jack. "In Oslo, the story of what had happened to him in Copenhagen preceded him. He was already a tragic figure."
"So my mother seduced you?" Jack asked him.
His once delicate, now slightly puffy features hardened. "I had known only Ingrid," Breivik said. "A young man who's had only one girlfriend is vulnerable to an older woman--perhaps especially to a woman with a reputation. Your mother put it to me rather bluntly: she said--she was teasing me, of course--'Andreas, you're really just another kind of virgin, aren't you?' "
"Where did you tattoo him?" Jack remembered asking his mom.