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echoed. Then he stood up without a word, went to his car, and drove to his girlfriend. It was almost 3:00 a.m. when he returned.
    Later that same night, Tackler sat alone in the library. A silent home movie was running on the screen he’d had built into the bookshelves. It had been transferred to video from a Super-8 camera. The footage was overexposed.
    His first wife is holding the two children by the hand; Theresa is probably three years old and Leonhard two. His wife says something; her mouth moves soundlessly. She lets go of Theresa’s hand and points into the distance. The camera follows her arm; there is the ruin of a castle in the blurry background. Pan back to Leonhard, who hides himself behind his mother’s leg and cries. Stones and grass blur in the foreground; the camera is passed to someone else while it’s still running. It pans upward again, showing Tackler in jeans and an open shirt, his chest hair exposed. He roars with soundless laughter, he holds Theresa up to the sun, he kisses her, he waves to the camera. The image flares and the film breaks off.
    That night, Tackler decided to arrange a farewell concert for Theresa. His contacts should suffice; he would “put her right on top.” Tackler didn’t want to be a bad person. He wrote each of his children a check for 250,000 euros and put them on the breakfast table. He felt that was enough.
    The day after the concert, there was an article in the regional newspaper that bordered on the euphoric. The great music critic certified that Theresa had a “brilliant future” as a musician.
    She didn’t register at the conservatory. Theresa believed her gift to be so great that she could still take her time. For now, it was something else that mattered. The two of them spent most of the next three years traveling through Europe and the United States. She gave a few private concerts and otherwise played only for her brother. Tackler’s money made them independent, at least for a while. They remained inseparable. They took none of their love affairs seriously, and there was scarcely a day in those years that either of them spent away from the other. They seemed to be free.
    Almost two years to the day after her concert in Bad Homburg, I encountered the two of them again at a party near Florence, in the Castello di Tornano, a ruined castle from the eleventh century, surrounded by olive trees and cypresses amid the vineyards. The host described them both as “gilded youth” when they arrived in a 1960s open sports car. Theresa kissed him and Leonhard doffed his idiotic Borsalino straw hat with studied elegance.
    When I told Theresa later that I had never heard the cello suites performed with more intensity than in her father’s house, she said, “It’s the prelude to the first suite. Not the sixth, which everyone thinks is the most important and is the most difficult. No, it’s the first.” She took a mouthful of wine, leaned forward, and whispered in my ear, “D’you understand, the prelude to the first. It’s all of life packed into three minutes.” Then she laughed.
    At the end of the following summer, the two of them were in Sicily. They spent a few days with a commodities trader who had rented a house there for the summer and was somewhat infatuated with Theresa.
    Leonhard woke up with a light fever. He thought it was due to the alcohol of the previous night. He didn’t want to be ill, not on a glorious day like this, not when they were having the time of their lives. The E. coli bacteria colonized his body at great speed. They had been in the water he’d drunk at a gas station two days before.
    They found an old Vespa in the garage and were headed toward the sea. The apple was lying in the middle of the asphalt; it had fallen off one of the harvest trucks. It was almost round and glinted in the noonday light. Theresa said something, and Leonhard turned his head to hear her properly. The front wheel went over the apple and slid sideways. Leonhard