Seated in the front row of the auction room, Verner could hardly contain himself. With clammy hands he clutched his catalogue, willing the auctioneer to move faster through the lots, an endless stream of clocks and mechanical toys in which he had no interest whatsoever.
Over and over he read the description: Rare Polyphon disc-playing music box known as ‘The Schönwald’, set in a hand-built walnut cabinet with latticework and painted Danube motif. Leipzig, 1875.
Twenty-eight years ago he had sat in this same seat, only to watch Oscar Persson from Malmö outbid him. But Persson was dead now, and Verner was old, with liver spots creeping across his hands and enough money to buy anything he wanted.
He looked over his shoulder at the packed room, satisfied to recognise no more than a couple of small-time collectors in the crowd. As he had learnt to his cost, you could not win at auction against someone willing to pay any price, and he had instructed his banker to prepare for the transfer of a very large sum of money indeed.
The Schönwald was one of the finest Polyphons ever made, a music box with a sound so pure it was said to be like listening to the angels play their harps. In over a hundred years, only a handful of people had heard it, and now Verner was about to become one of them.
There was nothing in the catalogue about the curse, but Verner knew the story. It had been all over the papers again that morning.
The Polyphon had been built on commission for Franz Schönwald, a merchant from Cologne, as a wedding present for his wife Maria. She had adored The Blue Danube – composed by Johann Strauss a few years earlier – so this was the only tune the Polyphon played.
According to the story, Maria listened to the music box only once, as shortly afterwards a chandelier in the Schönwald mansion dropped from the ceiling and killed her on the spot. Distraught, Franz Schönwald forbade anyone from playing the Polyphon again.
When he died, the music box passed to his nephew, whose young daughter Katharina found it in the attic and played it before anyone could stop her. Shortly afterwards, she died in a house fire.
Since then the Polyphon had passed through five owners, four of whom had supposedly died in accidents after playing it. The sixth, Oscar Persson, had kept it in a locked cabinet and never touched it, or so he had claimed.
No doubt the story was good publicity for the auction house, Verner thought to himself. But whatever anyone said, the Polyphon had not wrenched the chandelier free from the ceiling, nor struck a match and set fire to the house. It was not bad luck that killed people, but lack of care.
When, finally, the Polyphon was wheeled in front of the auctioneer, Verner had to concentrate hard not to leap up and shout with both hands in the air. In the hush that had fallen over the room, his heart was a booming drum.
As tall as a man, the top of the Polyphon was crafted in the style of a fairy-tale castle with columns and turrets and tiny windows and doors. In the centre, behind glass, sat a perforated steel disc, and on the bottom panel an exquisite painting showed a stretch of the Danube with a wooded bank, a white castle and snow-capped mountains just visible in the distance.
There were other bidders, but in the end they must have sensed that Verner would have kept raising his hand until everyone had left and the lights had been switched off, for one by one they folded, shaking their heads.
Finally the auctioneer pointed at Verner and dropped his gavel hard, and there was a gasp around the room.
As he put on his fur hat and left, Verner noticed two people get up and follow him. In the vestibule, he turned around to be blinded by a flash.
‘Are you concerned by the curse, Mr Borg? Will you be playing the music box?’
Verner didn’t normally speak to reporters, but on this occasion he was happy to make an exception.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I shall play it and I shall enjoy it, and you shall see there is no such thing as a curse, only silly stories.’
It wasn’t until he had left the building and sat in his car outside that he permitted himself the tiniest of smiles.
It was a whole twenty-four hours before the Polyphon could be delivered, and the waiting was sheer agony.
Sleepless, he got out of bed and walked through his apartment and stood by the window to look out at the city. Far below him, Sortedamsøen lay like a black mirror, ringed by street lights. Somewhere out there, the Polyphon would be standing in a dark warehouse, with a label with his name on it, and the thought of it made his heart flutter.
Twice he had telephoned the auction house to make sure they had received the money. And three times he had called the delivery people to make sure they had the correct address. So much could go wrong and Verner never left anything to chance.
To calm himself, he inspected his collection room to make sure everything was in place.
He had had a special display case built in solid oak, taking up one entire wall. Each of the more than one hundred compartments held an antique music box, from the tiniest French pocket watch to a large carousel, which had once stood in a child’s bedroom in Geneva.
Verner had spent the whole day climbing up and down a ladder to dust the shelves and polish the music boxes, taking each one down and playing it before putting it back and locking it behind its glass door. Now, standing on the floor, bathed in light from an unusually bright moon, he reached for the first piece he had been given as a boy, a ballerina in a gold enamel case no bigger than a matchbox, twirling in front of a mirror. The mechanism still worked when he turned the key.
As the tiny scroll wound its way through its halting rendition of the theme from Swan Lake, he held the box up in front of his face, imagining that he was a giant looking in through the window, his huge eye framed in the mirror behind the dancing girl.
There was only one space left in the display, a large compartment on a raised podium at the centre. All these years it had stood empty, waiting for him to buy the Polyphon and complete his collection.
The next morning, he was dressed and out of the apartment before eight, stamping his feet on the icy pavement and peering down the road for the van. It was after nine – and he had been back up to the apartment twice to phone the delivery people – by the time it finally arrived.
‘For God’s sake, be careful. That thing is irreplaceable,’ he said to the men as they struggled out of the van with the music box, which was wrapped in padding and plastic and fixed to a pallet.
He saw the men exchange a look as he ran ahead of them and opened the doors, telling them to mind the loose tile in the lobby and keep the music box upright and take care that their fingers didn’t slip on the plastic.
The Polyphon was too big to fit in the lift, so they had to haul it up the stairs on a trolley. Verner felt a churning sensation in his stomach every time they cleared a step, setting off a faint tinkle inside the package. It took the two men almost an hour to reach the fifth floor.
Verner watched as they peeled off the wrapping, anxious for a moment that it should turn out to be a different object altogether, but in the end, there it was, the Schönwald Polyphon, smelling of furniture polish and cigars.
He made the men wear gloves as slowly they lifted the music box into place in its compartment in the display cabinet. It fitted perfectly, Verner was delighted to see, as though it had been there always.
When the men had left, he locked and bolted the front door. In the collection room, he closed the curtains and switched off all the lamps, leaving only the display cabinet brightly lit.
Then he got his best armchair and placed it on the Persian rug in the middle of the room, facing the Polyphon. He put a small side table next to the chair and fetched a decanter of Cognac and a crystal tumbler to place on it.
With a soft cloth, he gently polished the Polyphon, running his hands over the distant mountains and the broad-flowing river, before bending down and looking inside the little windows and doors.
Finally, with trembling hands, he reached into the cabinet and picked up the silver coin, which was still sitting in its little brass box from the last time the Polyphon had been played.
Once, Maria Schönwald had held the same coin in her hand, dropping it into the same slot high up on the side of the Polyphon.
When the coin had fallen with a loud clunk, Verner went and sat in the armchair, too nervous all of a sudden to drink the Cognac he had poured. What if there was something to the story after all?
Too late now. He watched the coin slide slowly down its brass runner, flick the mechanism and begin to turn the perforated steel disc with the words An der schönen blauen Donau written in a tall, looping script.
At the first few notes, Verner felt his heart begin to pound hard. The sound was astonishing. He closed his eyes, imagining the Schönwald’s lounge, tall windows opening on to a lawn sloping down to a lake. The long curtains fluttered in the breeze and sunlight speckled the parquet floor as Maria and Franz swept across it in a waltz, her silk skirts rising and falling like a great pink powder puff.
When the tune had ended, he sat quite still and waited for several minutes. Nothing happened. The apartment was silent. He could hear the traffic in the street, a door slamming in his neighbour’s flat below.
‘Bad luck, my foot,’ he snorted, chuckling a little at how nervous he had been.
It was just a music box after all, just wood and brass. Besides, what harm could he possibly come to, if he were to stay in his apartment from now on and speak to no one and do nothing but listen to it?
He got up, opened the music box and reached in to retrieve the silver coin.
This time he was going to enjoy it more, listen out for the little idiosyncrasies on the disc. He was going to sip his Cognac and listen to the Polyphon and glide down the Danube until it was time to go to bed, and the next day he would do it all again.
He got his fingers on the coin, but it seemed to have got itself wedged fast into a groove. He pulled at it hard, but it wouldn’t come loose. He fetched a can of oil and sprayed it onto the coin to loosen it, but still it wouldn’t budge, and his fingers kept slipping on the grease.
Then he fetched a pair of pliers, fixed them around the coin and pulled till sweat began to trickle down his temples, but the coin stubbornly refused to move.
If only I can get purchase, I will be able to pull it free easily, he thought.
He placed his right foot on the bottom of the cabinet, braced against it while pulling on the pliers with all of his remaining strength.
A couple of hard tugs, and Verner fell back on the Persian rug, clutching the coin in relief.
He was still staring at it, wondering what had got it stuck in the first place, when he heard a loud crack and sensed something move and shift and slide above him with a sudden catastrophic noise.
‘Oh,’ he said, looking up in detached surprise, almost admiration.
I should have asked the carpenter to fix the display cabinet to the wall, was his last thought, before the air above him darkened and a mass of glass, oak and music boxes came down towards him in a great tuneful rush of air.