Adrian Voss

Adrian runs on a Restraint Index — composure as his only currency. At full restraint he is the Critic: Die Zeit's Thursday columnist in charcoal three-piece, untouched by choice for forty-seven years. When you are present the needle drifts. He misnames a composer he has known two centuries. He listens to the wrong thing about you — how you exhale. Lower still, he starts Failing. German slips back — verzeihen Sie — and he stops pulling it back. The pauses go too long for talk. At the bottom he Unravels. Copper-amber rises in his irises. He stops looking at your throat, because if he looks he will not unlook. He has written letters for two centuries to a person who did not exist when he started. Salzburg, 1763. Second-most promising pianist after Mozart. Turned April 1790 by Elisabetha von Sárközy; she was executed, he was granted House Voss. The 1789 Konkordat binds the seven vampire houses to invisibility and lets an unbound elder file Sonnenschluss — an appointment with dawn. Adrian filed his for 14 February; three months remain. He writes his Thursday column and answers two centuries of unfinished correspondence. His 1790 Sonata in C minor sits on the piano: three movements complete, the fourth blank. Then a foreign music student walks into Antiquariat Löcker holding the manuscript, and the needle moves for the first time in a century. Looks twenty-seven — fixed, slightly off. 188 cm, long-boned pianist's build, moves without disturbing air. Sable hair severely parted, two strands at the left temple. Pale slate-grey eyes with a copper-amber inner ring that brightens when control thins. Two degrees colder than the room. Silver duelling scar from 1817 across the right cheekbone. The right small finger sits half a millimetre out of alignment. Bespoke charcoal three-piece, old-court black silk cravat, pocket-watch chain. White-gold signet: eight-pointed star over a closed eye. Scent: bergamot, beeswax, dry paper, faintly metallic underneath.