By the time the intermission came, I felt completely drained. I was sure that those alongside me had no idea of what had taken place right next to them. And that was as it should be, I thought. Grief is a solitary experience, and the presence of others can lead to discomfiture and embarrassment for all parties.
Caroline had told me that she wouldn’t be able to get out to see me during the intermission, as the directors frowned upon such behavior and she wasn’t in the mood for crossing them at the moment, not after missing the original flight. It was probably a good thing, I thought. Even though we had met only last week, Caroline knew me all too well already, and I didn’t yet feel comfortable with every one of my innermost thoughts and emotions being open to her scrutiny. So I remained in my seat and decided against buying a cardboard cup of ice cream to eat with a miniature plastic shovel, as everyone around me seemed to be doing.
The second half of the concert was the Sibelius symphony, and I didn’t find it so dark and gloomy as Caroline had warned me to expect. In fact, I loved it. Somehow, as I sat there absorbing the music, I felt released from the past and fully alive for the future. I had no house, no car and precious few belongings to worry about. I was about to embark on two new and exciting journeys, one with a new London restaurant and the other with a new companion whom I adored. And someone was trying to kill me, either for what I knew or for what I had said, neither of which seemed that important to me. I had run away to America and was now enjoying the heady excitement of having left my troubles behind. The troubles in question may not have been resolved, but they were out of sight and, for an hour or so, out of mind too.
The audience stood and cheered. They even whooped with delight and put fingers in their mouths and whistled. Anything, it seemed, to make a noise. There was no decorum or restraint here. Unlike we British, who sit and politely applaud, the Americans’ way of expressing their approval is to holler and shout and dance on their feet.
The orchestra smiled and the conductor bowed, repeatedly. The ovation lasted for at least five minutes, with the conductor leaving the stage and reappearing six or seven times. Some in the audience even bellowed for more, for an encore, as if this were a pop concert. Eventually, the conductor shook the hand of the orchestra leader, and they left the stage together, putting an end to the acclaim and allowing the players to retire gracefully for the night.
I met Caroline outside the stage door, and she was as high as a kite.
“Did you hear them?” she said breathlessly. “Did you hear the noise?”
“Hear it?” I said, laughing. “I was making it.”
She threw her arms around my neck. “I love you,” she said.
“You’re just saying that,” I said, mocking her slightly.
“I’ve never said that to anyone in my life before,” she said rather seriously. “And yet it seems so simple and obvious to say it to you.”
I kissed her. I loved her too.
“It made such a difference,” she said, “to have you in the audience. But I spent the whole concert trying to find you in the sea of faces.”
“I was behind the conductor,” I said. “I couldn’t see you either.”
“I thought you must have gone back to the hotel.”
“Never,” I said. “I really enjoyed it.”
“Now, you’re just saying that,” she said, mocking me a little too.
“I’m not,” I said. “I loved it, and…I love you.”
“Oh goodie,” she squealed, and hugged me. I hugged her back.
I STAYED the night in Caroline’s room without telling the hotel or giving them my name. Even though it was very unlikely that anyone would have traced me, I took no chances and propped the chair from the desk under the door handle when we went to bed.
No one tried to get in, at least I didn’t hear anyone trying. But, then again, by the time we finally went to sleep at midnight I was so tired that I don’t think I would have heard if someone had tried blasting their way through the wall with a hand grenade.
In the morning, we lay in bed and watched breakfast television, which wasn’t very good and full of far too many commercial breaks for my liking.
“What do you have to do today?” I asked Caroline while running my finger down her spine.
“Nothing until four o’clock,” she said. “We will have a run-through of a couple of movements. Then tonight’s performance is at seven-thirty, like last night.”
“Can I come again?” I asked.
“Oh, I hope so.” She giggled.
“I meant to the concert,” I said.
“You can if you want to,” she said. “Are you sure? It’ll be just the same as last night.”
“You could surely eat the same dinner two nights running?” I said.
“Only if you cooked it.”
“Well, then,” I said, “I want to come and hear you play again tonight.”
“I’ll see if I can find you a ticket.”
“So what do you want to do until four o’clock?” I asked.
She grinned. “We could stay in bed.”
But we didn’t. We decided to get up and go have some breakfast at the restaurant on the ninety-fifth floor of the John Hancock Building, which, according to the tourist guide in the room, was the second-highest building in the Midwest, after the Sears Tower.
I took the elevator down to the lobby while Caroline went to put a note under the door of a fellow violist with whom she had agreed to go shopping, explaining that her plans had changed. As I waited for her, I asked the concierge for a map of the area and found the John Hancock Building clearly marked. I also found O’Hare airport to the northwest of the city center. And something else on the map caught my eye.
Caroline arrived, having delivered her note.
“Are you aware,” I asked, “that the state of Wisconsin starts only a few miles north of Chicago?”
“So?” she said.
“Wisconsin is where Delafield is, and that’s where Delafield Industries, Inc., is based.”
“But how far away?” she said. “Some of the states are huge.”
I found out. The hotel concierge was most helpful. Delafield, Wisconsin, he said, was under two hours’ drive away. Yes, of course, he could arrange for a rental car, all he needed was a credit card. Caroline lent me hers. Better safe than dead.
INTERSTATE HIGHWAY 94 conveniently ran directly from Chicago to Delafield, and, as the hotel concierge had said, it took us less than two hours in our rented Buick.
We turned off the Interstate at the Delafield exit and found ourselves in an urban environment repeated thousands of times across the United States. The junction was surrounded on all sides by flat-roofed commercial and retail development, including gas stations, drugstores, supermarkets and the ubiquitous fast-food outlets, each with an over-tall sign designed to be visible for miles along the highway in each direction. I thought back to when I had opened the Hay Net and the flurry of objections that had been raised by the local planners over the modest sign I had wanted to erect next to the road. In the end, I had been given my permission, on the condition that the top of the sign be not more than two meters from the ground. I smiled to myself. The Cambridgeshire County Council planning officer would have had palpitations in this neck of the woods.
Beyond the retail areas, with their acres of tarmac parking lot, and sitting on a small hill, I could see some substantial industrial buildings with DELAFIELD INDUSTRIES, INC. in big bold black letters on a yellow sign sticking up from the roof. Below the sign, painted large on the wall of the factory in fading paint, was THE FINEST AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY IN AMERICA.
I wasn’t really sure what I hoped to achieve by coming all the way up to Delafield from Chicago. It just seemed to me to be an obvious thing to do, having discovered that it was so close. I had no idea what I would find. Indeed, I had no idea what I was even looking for. But if I was right and Delafield Industries was indeed the intended target, then if anyone knew the motive for the bombing it would surely be Rolf Schumann. Whether he would tell me or not was another matter.