Finale

Albert was the last person anyone would turn to in a crisis. He was only a composer: a pianist. Why, then, did Judge Penchant, Supreme Court nominee, seek him out to help him with his problem; someone was blackmailing his wife?

For nearly seven years Albert had been running from death - from Massachusetts to North Carolina, England, New Zealand - but the dead always found him. He'd come to suspect the reason he couldn't escape them was that they were the restless inhabitants of that tiny yellow island in his brain the doctors had found when he collapsed after a concert in London. Was it they, those ghosts, who guided him to the resolution of problems like the Judge's? And why was he so comfortable in the presence of specters? Was it that he, too, occupied a place apart from those around him: a place with which reality had only an uneasy acquaintance.

Albert was not a normal person - his association with a world in which people knew about things like matching socks, Social Security Numbers, and the inevitable demise of light bulbs was tenuous; no one was more keenly aware of that than he. But might the fragility of that relationship account for his ability to see what others could not in a way that, to him, made perfect sense? In Allegro, Albert's peculiar kaleidoscope of skills embroil him in international intrigue in ways he would never understand, but that didn't mean they were beyond solution.