Where the Heart Resides

The June 12th headline of the Denver Post read: Famed Violinist Found Dead. Nearly all those who picked up the first edition of the paper that morning knew the identity of the headline capturing violinist before reading the article. There was after all only one classical musician in the modern age of synthesized rock and gangster rap with enough wall to wall talent to capture the interest of a general public whose collective attention span had devolved decade by decade into a primordial stupor that could only be engaged with excessive theatrics and overindulgent pyrotechnics. The violinist was Frank Balducci and before the twentieth century had wound down he would leave an indelible mark on popular culture, a mark that stood out like a purple knife scar on a pirate's cheek.

Balducci’s decomposing body was found on Trail Ridge Road in the Rocky Mountains by two retreating nudists, who had been foraging for Saskatoon berries from which to make a potent homemade infusion which they fermented in their root cellar and which they claimed was imbibed for strictly medicinal purposes. At the time of the discovery, neither nudist noticed that Balducci's prized Stradivarius violin was missing, for neither nudist knew that the badly decomposed body was that of the renowned violinist or that he carried the Stradivarius wherever he went.

Balducci’s corpse would not be identified for nearly a week after its discovery at which time his mother, Esther Balducci, would report recognizing the red rose tattoo initialed with the letters H.S. on his left pectoral muscle when his corpse was broadcast on popular national news program featuring unidentified bodies and the mysterious circumstances surrounding them.
There were many tears shed in the weeks to come by family, friends, and admirers, many honors bestowed upon the now deceased violinist, and many hypothesis formed on who exactly might have done Frank Balducci in.

The nudists subsequently denied involvement in Balducci's death, were questioned, dressed in garbage bags, and released. The Stradivarius violin and heart were not found.

"What the Sam Hill is a plucker?" Doctor Vessel, the esteemed forensic pathologist, chosen to perform the autopsy on Balducci, asked as he looked over the body. He scratched at his smooth scalp. At fifty-five, he was mostly bald, except for fine white hairs around the sides of his head which fanned out like dove's wings when the wind blew through it.

"Haven't you ever heard of Frank Balducci?" Dr. Vessel's new assistant, Peter Connelly, asked.

"That Italian designer, the one that wears black all the time?" Doctor Vessel asked.

"No, no, Frank Balducci, he's only the greatest violinist to ever live…”

“Oh, yes, right, right, the violinist.”

“A plucker must be his violin," Peter Connelly said, picking a piece of lint from Balducci's thick patch of chest hair with a pair of tweezers.

"Maybe a plucker's a heart. He doesn't have a heart, which would explain what's missing," Doctor Vessel said, taking the piece of lint from Connelly and placing it in a plastic bag. Doctor Vessel's specialty was a cardiology and he was particularly interested in matters of the heart. Medically speaking he was quite adept in understanding the physical functions and diseases of this purposed love muscle but was rather inept in his understanding of its purported romantic operations. For Doctor Vessel had no love in his life, only dead bodies. If he would have taken the time to listen to his heart through a stethoscope he would have found it sounded hollow, like a leaky roof emptying into a coffee can.

"Someone stole his heart? I don't think so Doc, he's been lying outside so long. I'd guess an animal probably ate it," Peter said.

“An animal? I don’t think so.”

The motivation for murder would not be so easy to pinpoint for there were several medical abnormalities discovered during the autopsy which seemed to defy conventional psychopathic archetypes. The most significant of these aberrations was a hole in the chest cavity where the heart usually resides; there was also the matter of a rock speckled with bluish crystals lodged in the throat, and the most mysterious of the forensic clues, four words carved in his stomach with what would later be determined as a dull tuning fork: My Plucker's Gone Missing.

“The rock found in the throat was placed there post mortem,” Doctor Vessel said into his pocket tape recorder when alone in his office. He bit into a raspberry filled donut and wiped the excess from the corner of his mouth on the back of his hand…“is the rock some sort of calling card? Is the killer a professional? Was he giving us a clue? Reminder to send rock to Bailey for analysis.” He popped the rest of the donut in his mouth and hurriedly chewed it, washing it down with a Styrofoam cup of tap water. He felt inexplicably alert, almost uncomfortably so, as if his nerve endings were on fire. Something about this case was bothering him and it wasn't the words etched on Balducci’s stomach, or the hole in his chest had been made with surgical precision, and it wasn't because he suspected someone had lodged the rock in his throat post mortem. What bothered Doctor Vessel was the absence of a heart.

That night Doctor Vessel slept restlessly, dreaming of a Hell in which the fires were heated with burning Stradivarius and Hellhounds howled like off key string quartets over speakers choked with static, torturing one’s eardrums to the point of near explosion.

At around three AM Doctor vessel awoke and unwilling to chance dreaming of violin Hell once again, he decided to start his day several hours early and rose from bed. Although he was rising well before his normal time, he didn't wake his wife or a lover because he didn't have a wife or a lover. The doctor had never been particularly lucky in love and the left side of his king size bed was kept warm only by his Chihuahua, Ernie.

In the kitchen he brewed a cup of coffee and sat down at his computer. He searched the Internet for information on Frank Balducci, for his interest had been piqued that previous day. He found that the violinist was raised in a middle class neighborhood by middle class parents in the middle of Central Pennsylvania. Reading further, he found that he was an average student of average intelligence who attended average schools. Now, with all this middle and average in his life one might have assumed that Frank Balducci would have most likely never have made it past middle management in any job, might have married an average girl that he met in middle school, and moved into a middle class neighborhood in the middle of nowhere, but one thing in Frank Balducci's life saved him from a life destined for mediocrity.

Dr. Vessel found that at a very early age, two and one half years according to an unauthorized Frank Balducci website, his mother had started him on violin lessons with the elderly gentleman who lived in the apartment above theirs. Esther Balducci was a part time social climber and full time alcoholic who saw to it, by means of sexual favors and payouts from various insurance scams, that her only son was dressed in the finest of shark skin suits, attended symphonies and other socially enriching events, had his hair colored and cut by the same stylist that had once been Lauren Bacall’s hair stylist, and had a constant supply of his favorite candies, Junior Mints, on hand which she doled out to him like pet parrot whenever he did things that pleased her.

The man that would bring the gift of Frank Balducci’s violin playing to the world was man that went by the name of Phineas Bolke. He was a slight man, who wore a monocle, mumbled swear words in German under his breath whenever he became frustrated, and from time to time could be heard playing his violin on the fire escape of his Harrisburg apartment building. For the cash sum of five dollars per hour he gave music lessons to children of the neighborhood and the first time the youthful Frank sat in his parlor and scratched at his second hand violin he knew he had himself a child prodigy.

No one knew at the time that Phineas Bolke was in actuality Heinrich Schmeltz, the infamous Nazi musician/commander who purportedly used the hair of Jewish concentration victims to string his violin and tortured them by playing his instrument off key late into the night. He’d disappeared after WWII to the chagrin of Nazi hunters who’d lost his trail on Lake Poopó in Bolivia where he hopped a ferry in his rented Puegot and mysteriously vanished from sight.

Like Beethoven, but more like a later day Liberace, Balducci toured the world at a very early age, starting on late night cable access television and graduating to variety shows, minor parts in sitcoms, cable specials and then a much heralded halftime Super Bowl performance. The pudgy prodigy with the coconut milk complexion and frizzy black hair had three best selling albums by the time he was nine, which was unheard of in the music industry especially for a classical musician.

Under the tutelage of Schmeltz, Frank Balducci studied violin until the age of twenty-two, at which time his mother noticed an unsettling closeness had develop between the two. She always been slightly suspicious that her son’s extensive Hummel collection, passion for bubble baths, and undying adoration for daytime soap operas were somewhat feminine interests for a man and soon her suspicions would be confirmed when she would catch her son and Schmeltz mugging down back stage during the post show hoopla after his only performance on the MTV Music Awards.

The possibility of a relationship between her son and Schmeltz bothered Esther on two levels. First she feared that if it was discovered that her son was gay that he would lose his countless endorsements and hordes of female admirers, and therefore his fame and riches and secondly and more importantly she held the irrational fear that if her son did love someone else, namely Heinrich Schmeltz, that he wouldn’t have enough love left for her. So, Esther Balducci forbade Frank to ever see his violin teacher again and being the ever loyal and brow beaten son Frank was he obliged his mother’s wishes and severed ties with his teacher. He then threw himself so fully into his music that his life outside the studio and stage ceased to exist.

Some weeks after Balducci and Schmeltz parted ways a national news story broke revealing the details of Heinrich Schmeltz's Nazi past and hinted at a romance between him and his former star pupil. "Perhaps, sometimes, a little good can come from a lot of bad," Balducci had said to a reporter when asked about his involvement with Schmeltz.

Soon thereafter, he announced that he would be giving twenty percent of his earnings to help surviving Holocaust victims.

Schmeltz, supposedly distraught over his past being exposed and Balducci having recently ended their long love affair, was said to have fled to South America, where he lived some years with the Panará Indians in the Brazilian rain forest.

Doctor Vessel felt better about Balducci after reading about his charitable contributions and in the days to come he found himself becoming more and more involved in Balducci’s case, extending his work beyond his normal forensic role, curiously propelled to find solving the mystery of the slain violinist. He began to dream of the violinist with the hole in his chest at night and thought of him constantly throughout the day and the roots of a strange obsession began to take hold. The resulting odd behavior the doctor began to exhibit did not go unnoticed to those closest to him and when confronted he simply claimed that his overt interest in the deceased violinist was merely an extension of his research but it was evident to everyone that he’d crossed that imaginary line, the imaginary line that lies between medium and well done, stirred and shaken, here and there, a little and a lot.

He began buying up all Balducci's CD's and took to wearing his portable CD player around the office, often humming the violinist's popular Violin Sonata 12. On the walls of his home, he pinned up posters of Balducci and bought his cuff links at a charity auction, which he took to wearing every day. The doctor purchased a violin of his own and fully erect, ran his penis over the strings at night until he climaxed, all the while listening to the violinist's 1998 Concert at the Met. It wouldn't be inaccurate to say that Doctor Vessel fell in love with Balducci's music, and the hole that was his own heart slowly began to fill. Where love might have been found, musical notes swam like goldfish.

Those who knew the doctor had to admit that he was a different person after he found Balducci's music but not all of his behavior was obsessive or odd. Once stingy and not quick to laugh, the doctor became a joke cracker and a giggler. While once he never even attended office parties, he now hosted them. He was lighter on his feet, more graceful in his gesticulations. He became a flirt and tease, dating an endless string of nurses. Co-workers joked that once he'd been one of the dead; now he was such a joy to be around that he nearly raised them. There was even talk that the he might fulfill his life's dream, give up working with the corpses, and start a children’s cardiology practice with his brother. Things were just dandy in the Doctor's life, until one day when he received a special delivery. The doctor was drinking coffee and eating a chocolate éclair in the morgue when a package arrived via UPS. He studied the return address on the box and found it had been sent by his old friend and former college roommate Raymond Bailey.

Bailey worked for the NYPD and was considered a top shelf detective but a gruff son-of-a-bitch, sometimes down right disgusting in his behaviors but unparalleled in his insights into the criminal mind. Although doctor Vessel sometimes hated himself for liking Bailey, a man he considered one generation removed from a mudskipper, he was comforted by the knowledge that he’d been instrumental in taking many criminals off the streets and was therefore able to bear their unconventional friendship.

There was a manila envelope taped to the outside of the box. Doctor Vessel opened it and found a letter written on Holiday Inn stationary.

The letter read: Hey there chubby. Found what we think is Balducci's Stradivarius in a dumpster at LaGuardia. How'd it get from the Rocky Mountains to here? I enclosed it for you to examine. Oh, and I also got the report back on that rock you found in Balducci's throat, seems that bluish green crystal is Yvonite and it's only found in one place in the world in the Salsigne mine in Aude, the South of France. So, whoever killed this guy went to a hell of a lot of trouble to get a rock from France to stuff in this guy's throat. Could've just looked around him and picked a rock up off the ground. He was in the Rocky Mountains for Christ's sake! Well, I gotta run, say hello to Ernie for me. Bailey.

Upon opening the package, the doctor discovered Balducci's Stradivarius violin and after further careful examination, he found stuffed inside the hole on the left side, a tiny piece of paper, which he extracted with tweezers. It read: The Plucker plays on Balducci's heartstrings at the bottom of the lake. Immediately Doctor Vessel remembered, from his research on the Internet, that Frank Balducci, had a chateau in Aude, in the South of France, on a lake. The same area from which the Yvonite had come from. In the many interviews Balducci had given, he often spoke of how the beauty of this lake was the inspiration for much of his music. Doctor Vessel felt that Balducci's music had changed his life, made it better in every way and felt the very least he could do for such a great gift was to find the musician's heart.
That night Doctor Vessel called his old college roommate William Bailey.

“I think maybe Schmeltz might have done Balducci in and I think he might be in France,” Doctor Vessel said. He dipped his hand in the bowl of salted cocktail peanuts on his desk and popped a few in his mouth. He was a snacker and rarely at more than a half a baloney sandwich and a cup of tomato soup at a meal. The methodology he used to determine cause of death was much like his eating habits, it consisted of taking in bits of information, but never more than one he could figuratively chew. In this way he nourished his hypothesizes and facilitated proper digestion of the facts and was able to determine the cause of death.

“That old Nazi? I thought you said that officials thought he might be cavorting with natives in the rain forest down in South America somewhere. He couldn’t be stupid enough to come back here. They’d have him in handcuffs before he set both feet on the ground.”

“But what if he didn’t come back? What if he only left temporarily? What if he’s been living here all along? What if he only pretended to drop out of sight? What if he’d been sitting under our noses all along?”

“Under our noses? Don’t mention my nose in the same sentence as that honker of yours. Hell that thing’s is big enough to house to circus big tops and an escaped Nazi war criminal but I don’t think he’d have the guts.”

“I don’t buy the rain forest story he’s not the type to live a life that requires you to forage for food everyday. I think maybe he’s been biding his time or maybe he was just watching, watching Balducci’s fame grow, and as it did his own discontent and jealousy grew.”

“Yeah, maybe like you when I dated that sweet thing Mary Ellen in college after you wanted to go out with her so bad-“

“What was that? I can’t hear you you’re breaking up.” Doctor Vessel wrinkled a newspaper in front of the mouth piece imitating static. He often did this when Bailey mentioned a subject that made him uncomfortable. “My cell phone’s breaking up. I can’t hear you. I’ll call you back. Bye.”
The salt from the peanuts had gotten into a paper cut on his thumb and stung. He stuck the finger in his mouth and sucked. He knew then there was only one thing left for him to do if he wanted to solve the mystery of Frank Balducci’s death, he would have to travel to the violinist’s chateau in Aude the South of France.

That night Doctor Vessel packed his scuba gear—he'd been certified the year before while vacationing in Bermuda—dug out his passport, took Ernie to the kennel, and set off for the airport. From the airport in Marseille, he made his way to the chateau in a rented VW Bus and set up a tent in a nearby forest. He hadn’t wanted to camp too close to the lake for there were farm houses scattered about with clear views of its shores and he was afraid his fire would rouse suspicion and possibly encourage unwanted guests.

As the sun sank behind the skyline the doctor lay on his back eating French bread dipped in olive oil and drinking from a bottle of merlot he’d bought at a gas station. He listened to Balducci’s last Christmas collection on his MP3 player and hummed along happily.

It occurred to him for the first time that Balducci had become more than just another case to him, that he might have gotten too close to his subject matter and for a moment this frightened him. He wondered perhaps if he was gay and nearly dropped his loaf of French bread but quickly recovered when he realized that it was the music he’d fallen in love with, not the man. Satisfied, and with his belly full, the doctor drifted off to sleep dreaming of a Violin heaven in which the angles played violins instead of harps and St. Peter sat atop the pearly gates directing with a broke car antenna.

Around midnight the camp fire he’d made went out and the doctor became chilled. The doctor awoke and quickly dressed in his scuba gear. He figured it best to enter the lake under the cover of darkness and hurried off his flippers slung over his shoulder.

The lake wasn't very big, only about the size of a small mall parking lot but it was fed by natural springs and very cold on an exposed face and it took several minutes for the doctor to get used to it. To someone in the distance, the wet suit clad doctor would have looked very much like an overweight seal.

When he was accustomed to the water he dove in and swam and swam and swam, several times changing his oxygen tank when it ran low, but found nothing but a discarded refrigerator and several worn out tires. Not until near complete exhaustion, when he was about to give up, did he spot a steamer trunk partially submerged in a bed of seaweed. After dragging the trunk to shore, he pried it open with a crowbar and like a sprung Jack in the box out popped Frank Balducci's violin teacher/gay lover Heinrich Schmeltz. He was dressed in full SS regalia and spread across his cadaverous mug was a grin so wide it looked like a fanning butterfly sitting on a zucchini. Doctor Vessel instantly recognized the former Nazi from photographs he’d collected and was amazed at how well the body was preserved.

As the sun rolled over the rural skyline looking like an orange that had fallen out of a heavenly fruit bowl, the doctor examined Schmeltz on a tarp at his campsite. He quickly determined the cause of death to be suffocation and noticed in his boney right hand a mass of silk hankies which were wrapped with violin strings like a birthday gift. Doctor Vessel cast the hankies aside to reveal a human heart, so shriveled and dry it looked like a hacky sack. Doctor Vessel had found Frank Balducci's heart. Deep in his belly he felt an uncontrollable fit of laughter stir, finding it ironic, and more than a little maddening that the man who possessed Balducci's heart, one Heinrich Schmeltz, had no heart of his own. The doctor fell to the ground and rolled around in the mud laughing. He laughed until his eyes dried of tears and he’d become jittery from burning up all his blood sugar and then he stopped. It occurred to him that something wasn’t right.

Had Schmeltz, very thin and only five feet two inches tall, somehow locked himself into the steamer trunk with Balducci’s heart in his hand and sink it? The doctor thought it very unlikely. Was it possible that third party was involved? Had Esther Balducci killed her own son and then his gay piano/teacher/lover? She had to be in her eighties, hardly possessing the kind of strength that one needed to cut out a heart and yank it out of one’s chest or stuff them in a steamer trunk. Doctor Vessel thought about it for some time, as he sat on the steamer trunk tossing Balducci’s heart in the air and catching it like a tennis ball.

“Bailey will want to know about this,” he thought after some time and removed his cell phone from his wet suit. He was about to call when suddenly he realized that there was no reason to, that he’d found what he was looking for, Balducci’s heart.

“Let Bailey sort out the bodies,” he thought and smiled.

. He put the Balducci’s heart in a Ziploc bag and slid it into his wet suit and took one last look at Schmeltz before closing the steamer trunk and dragging it back into the lake.
A local farmer, out doing some night fishing on the lake, would later report seeing Doctor Vessel dive back into the lake in the bubbling spot where the steamer trunk went in but several hours later he still hadn’t seen him emerge. It would be the least time anyone would report seeing anyone resembling Doctor Vessel on the lake. He simply vanished.

Bailey at the NYPD, Doctor Vessle’s old college roommate, a bullshiter if there ever was one, likes to tell people his old friend lit off for Tijuana where he now resides spending his time drinking aged triple filtered tequila from his own tequila distillery, screwing ten dollar an hour whores on Viagra subscriptions he writes for himself, and sailing around the Gulf on his yacht The Stradivarius. He also claims that the doctor wears Frank Balducci’s heart in an ornate hand carved teak box the size of a woman’s panty hose egg around his neck but then he’s a bullshitter and his story can’t be substantiated. Wherever Doctor Vessel is here or abroad, in heaven or in Hell is strictly a matter of speculation. So what did happen to Doctor Vessel? The answer lies in the heart and can be heard on the strings of a certain Stradivarius violin. For what is music without a heart or someone to share it with?