Cornel sat down at the keyboard, brushed his hair back from his eyes, and flexed his long fingers. Thrusting the tantalizing aroma of food to the back of his mind, he played.
The murmur of conversation in The Avatar faltered and died as the fervid melody of Beethoven's Sonata Appassionata filled the air. It was unusual music to people accustomed to hearing the more modern compositions of Schonberg, Harris and Westine. The comparison of Cornel's inspired touch to the mechanical renditions of Wan Ti's regular piano player was noticeable even to those who were unfamiliar with music.
When the final movements of the allegro ma non troppo faded, Cornel sat back and looked toward Wan Ti. The proprietor cocked an ear toward the rare applause, smiled and nodded slightly. Exultantly, Cornel swung into Chopin's Fantasie-Impromptu and followed it, not pausing, with Liszt's Waldesrauschen and Schubert's Serenade.
The applause was just as enthusiastic, but by now the hum of voices and the click of eating utensils had begun to rise again. Frowning slightly, Cornel hunched his shoulders and began a composition the most musical of his audience had never heard before.
Like the molten notes of the nightingale, the music floated and throbbed above the diners, almost a physical thing. The people in the restaurant paused with food halfway to their lips. They turned to see the artist, carefully, so that no chair would scrape. The waiters stopped with trays in their hands. Wan Ti stopped a newly arriving couple, his fingers at his lips.
In the midst of the applause that roared through the room when Cornel had finished, a waiter tapped his shoulder.
"Excuse me, sir," he said. "Miss Meta Erosine asks that you join her at her table."
Rising and bowing to his audience, Cornel followed the man to a table at the rear of the room, where a woman sat with her escort.
Meta Erosine's pale, heart-shaped face, with its mop of short black hair and luminous black eyes, was widely known on Earth, but Cornel had never been to Earth before. Her vibrant beauty blazed on a victim unprepared for it.
She was clad in the cretan-can-can style just then becoming popular, with breasts exposed over a tight bodice and a short, ruffled skirt gathered in front to reveal the knees. She smoked a long-stemmed, tiny-bowled pipe, studded with jewels.