Dear Friends:
I am a 57-year-old musician with Asperger's Syndrome. I just found out about Asperger's in 1998, and, when I did, a lot of stuff fell into place about why my life has been so screwed up. I just finished an autobiography that details all the consequences of this mental disability, its penalties and its rewards, such as they are.
The book covers my early formative years, my small successes as a composer in California, by bout with demon possession, my struggles in graduate school, and my final reconciliation with myself in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.
I have found that aspies are a breed unto themselves, and appreciate hearing stories about the trials and successes of other aspies.
The book, Black Swan: The Story of an Aspie Musician, is available in an electronic Kindle edition at Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=richard+freeman-toole&x=11&y=17
I'm asking $1.60 (I have to charge SOMETHING), but as you can see, I am not in it for the money, so if anybody wants to just e-mail me (richardfreemantoole@yahoo) I'll just send them the book for free.
Yours,
Dr. Richard Freeman-Toole
richardfreemantoole@yahoo.com
PO box 245, Glennallen, AK, 99588
Monday, June 15, 2009
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Hitman Melodies Section 13
XIII.
Mrs. Gilbert Sullivan took possession of the house in Apollo, New Jersey, and wrote a lengthy expose of organized crime for the Metro Star. Knopf offered her a book contract, and soon, Songs of Death, was a major best-seller. The names were changed, (for the most part), and most of the characters were dead anyway, so no reprisal efforts were directed at her. Anyway, she was pretty invisible while she stayed in New Jersey, and, later, she moved to Europe where she maintained secret apartments in London, Paris, and Munich. Her book made a lot of money, but the initial financing for her new lifestyle came from a lovely charm bracelet given to her by Sebastian Chronic. The charms were disguised with pearls, but on closer investigation, they were discovered to be safe deposit box keys--about ten of them. When Maddy had made the complete rounds, she had amassed about two and a quarter million dollars in cash, which she deposited in Swiss bank accounts herself.
Hollywood offered her tens of thousands of dollars for the scores to Sebastian Chronic's musical compositions, but she couldn't bring herself to broker the deal. When she realized that Private Eyes were closing in on her, the house in Jersey suddenly burned to the ground, taking all of Sebastian's papers with it; a Puerto Rican lawn man had accidentally spilled some gasoline on a corner of the front porch, and it was gone in a flash. Rinaldo bought the property for practically nothing, and rebuilt.
Maddy never parted with the recording of Sebastian's final song, and the cassette of My Own; she would listen to this music in private when she got blue, when she doubted that life was worth living, when she wanted to remember. Reviewing these pieces brought to mind the greatest man she had ever heard of, the greatest love she ever would know, and the person who thought enough of Maddy High to trade his life for hers. She wondered if Jesus would have been a good hit man.
The Milano-Chen connection didn't last long; too much inner turmoil over too little led to the gradual disintegration of what had been an efficiently-run drug business; it broke down into a medley of little private operations that the cops picked on when there was a break in their schedule. The Milano crime family declined into nothing, and the Chinese Mafia drifted back to Taiwan. Anyway, Dong Yang Chen was an asshole.
Glennallen, AK, July 08
Mrs. Gilbert Sullivan took possession of the house in Apollo, New Jersey, and wrote a lengthy expose of organized crime for the Metro Star. Knopf offered her a book contract, and soon, Songs of Death, was a major best-seller. The names were changed, (for the most part), and most of the characters were dead anyway, so no reprisal efforts were directed at her. Anyway, she was pretty invisible while she stayed in New Jersey, and, later, she moved to Europe where she maintained secret apartments in London, Paris, and Munich. Her book made a lot of money, but the initial financing for her new lifestyle came from a lovely charm bracelet given to her by Sebastian Chronic. The charms were disguised with pearls, but on closer investigation, they were discovered to be safe deposit box keys--about ten of them. When Maddy had made the complete rounds, she had amassed about two and a quarter million dollars in cash, which she deposited in Swiss bank accounts herself.
Hollywood offered her tens of thousands of dollars for the scores to Sebastian Chronic's musical compositions, but she couldn't bring herself to broker the deal. When she realized that Private Eyes were closing in on her, the house in Jersey suddenly burned to the ground, taking all of Sebastian's papers with it; a Puerto Rican lawn man had accidentally spilled some gasoline on a corner of the front porch, and it was gone in a flash. Rinaldo bought the property for practically nothing, and rebuilt.
Maddy never parted with the recording of Sebastian's final song, and the cassette of My Own; she would listen to this music in private when she got blue, when she doubted that life was worth living, when she wanted to remember. Reviewing these pieces brought to mind the greatest man she had ever heard of, the greatest love she ever would know, and the person who thought enough of Maddy High to trade his life for hers. She wondered if Jesus would have been a good hit man.
The Milano-Chen connection didn't last long; too much inner turmoil over too little led to the gradual disintegration of what had been an efficiently-run drug business; it broke down into a medley of little private operations that the cops picked on when there was a break in their schedule. The Milano crime family declined into nothing, and the Chinese Mafia drifted back to Taiwan. Anyway, Dong Yang Chen was an asshole.
Glennallen, AK, July 08
Hitman Melodies Section 12
XII.
They took the long way back to town to delay their arrival. He wanted to get there at 5:00--as the autumn sun was fading in the sky, but before the place opened. Is he growing faint? Jackie and the crew would be waiting. He wanted them to wait--he wanted them to think they were ready for him. Chico would be pissed. He wanted them pissed; he wanted them asking questions. He parked in the alley. He jockeyed the car around, nose outward, so it wouldn't have to be turned around for a clean getaway. He left the key in the ignition. She raised her eyebrows. "Nobody steals Jaguars parked in the alley behind Tony's." Her mouth was a grim line. She didn't ask. She knew asking would skew his timing. They went to the kitchen door. "They'll be waiting on the other side," he said. "There'll be two of them--the others are covering the front. Stand behind me." He winced again, paler than before. What's wrong with him?
He turned the handle and pushed the door wide open. There was Jonesy smiling a serpent smile, with his .45 leveled. "Hey, Sebastian. How ya doon?" Chico was standing behind to the right, his throat was bandaged. He managed to whisp, "Mutherfucker."
"Lookin' good Chico," mused Sebastian, confidently advancing. "Sorry about taking such hasty leave of you last night. Spur of the moment deal, you know."
Quicker than thought, Jonesy was spun around, his own gun at his ear, a look of stupid surprise lit his otherwise dark-dumb features.
"You retarded piece of shit," Chico hissed. "I told you, keep your distance."
Sebastian interjected, "Chico, I didn't kill you once, but don't expect to be so lucky a second time. Now, drop the piece and turn around. We're doing a little chorus line thing here."
Hands in the air, mouth twisted back over his shoulder, gun in his ear, "Sebastian, whut the fuck ya doon?" Jonesy was a poet.
"Dumbshit," fumed Chico, tossing his .38 to the floor.
"Ankle," said Sebastian. The .22 clattered into the dishtrays.
He kicked both guns to the side as they processed through the kitchen, through the backstage area, over the risers, past the drumset. Sebastian pushed Jonesy into Chico and they both tumbled off the stage into the first row. Giorgio was coming round the back to flank him. Sebastian sent a warning shot into the hall shattering the silence and a light fixture.
"Let's all relax and have a seat," he said. There were Jack, Jackie Junior, and Bruno sitting in the center, Giorgio sat down in back, Freddy and Flippy brought up the rear, attracted by the gunfire, but not prepared to deal with it. Chico and Jonesy were ringside, Maddy cowered by the drums. She wilted onto a sax chair. Sebastian eased himself onto the piano bench. All one big happy family. "Fred, Flip, sit. Hands on the table. Everybody, hands on the tables. We're all friends here, until we're not." Sebastian placed Jonesy's .45 on top of the piano, brought out his own Beretta, and laid it beside the .45. They glistened in the green dusk like twin gargoyles tempting the bold to test their biting potency.
Jack Milano was a stone wall of power and authority. He had no fear, even of that faggotty asshole Sebastian Chronic. That guy was destined to fall off the deep end sooner or later--shoulda x'ed him couple years ago. "Sebastian."
"Jack."
"What's up with the broad? What's with giving us the slip? What's with puttin' Chico in the soprano section?"
"Good questions all, Jack. All will be answered presently. I want you to know I'm still your man, and you're still my boss. But there's a snake in this room and it's not this girl. So if everybody stays calm and still, the tale will be told and all will be well--except for one." Everybody leaned forward at this, even Jackie Junior. "Maddy, stand up, take a bow."
Maddy's jaw dropped. She hesitated just a moment, and then obeyed. At that moment she remembered and pressed her hand to her bosom as she leaned forward. Tape is running.
Flippy's hand reached under the table. What an easy target. Jack would be pleased. Sebastian's hand was lightning exploding over the top of the Steinway. Flippy was suspended in time with a bright red spot in his forehead, the Beretta smoking casually, like an office worker lounging over the coffee machine. Flippy fell with a crash, Freddy watching the floor aghast.
Sebastian replaced the piece in its cozy niche next to the .45. "That's the kind of behavior we DON'T want. Maybe we all better move up closer together." Sebastian picked up the .45. "Jack maybe you better tell Al to come on out here, before I blow YOUR fucking head off."
Al had been secretly threading his way round the back and was just about to get the drop on Sebastian, but he had jostled the curtain.
"Al. Get out here," Jack commanded.
Al stumbled over the stage past Maddy, and parked it next to Chico.
"Hands--on--the--table," said Sebastian, ever so patiently pinpointing the .45 at Al's nose.
Throughout this exchange Maddy had stood frozen in front of a row of gangsters, wondering which one would rape her first.
"Everybody, this is Maddy High. (Siddown, sweetie.) You may know her by another name, what was it?"
"Jeanie, Jeanie Priss."
"Jeanie Priss. (Cute. Right out of the bottle.) But her real name is Maddy High, and she is a reporter with the Metro Star. She was doing undercover work hoping to expose any gangland highjinx and shenanigans she could, and make life more difficult for all of us lowlife, scum-of-the-earth criminals." There was a reaction from the crowd. Sebastian scanned all the nervous fingers, tapping the table cloths like restless horses. They relaxed back into their stalls under his gaze. Flippy was still bleeding out.
"Well gentlemen, she failed in her project, and uncovered nothing that would be of the slightest interest to the legal authorities, unless you consider Jackie Junior's impetuous dick of interest."
The mention of his name visibly lurched Jackie Junior in his seat. The others couldn't repress their knowing grins, and glanced slantways toward Jack Senior to see if it was okay. It was. First the laugh, then the sneer. Jesu Christe, ahi, such a son you give me.
"But she did uncover something that is of supreme importance to everybody here."
Jackie Junior-in-the-box jumped up two feet. "I dint tell that goddamn whore shit!" he protested.
Like a quickest electric switch in the arcade, Sebastian's finger was on the trigger again. "SIT . . . DOWN."
Jack Milano's eyes narrowed with interest. The crew caught the boss's body language and relaxed their communal grip on the tables. Jackie Junior squirmed under the heavy weight of his father's hand crushing him back into his seat. Bruno responded to a silent cue and edged over closer to Jackie Junior, pinioning the kid between himself and Jack Senior. A tight fit for a tight spot. Jackie Junior's attempt to disguise his look of panic with an arrogant smirk, went down into the hall of fame for Worst Acting Job of the Century. Sebastian continued.
"Yes, Jack, without Maddy High you would be a dead duck, and the traitor, you guessed it, is sitting right next to you right now."
"Liar!" shouted Jackie Junior.
"Whaddayamean?" shouted Jackie Senior, rising, impervious to Sebastian's prescribed protocol.
"I thought you would want to know. So I made up this little song to tell you all about it." With that Sebastian attacked the piano and, with a flourish, tossed off a magical, twisted, triadic arpeggio.
A SONG! They all thought. He's going to kill someone!
This is the part it's hard to tell, because the music can't possibly be heard through this narrator's puny powers of description. We may all have to wait until the movie comes out. Reproducing the lyrics, here, gives the sense of the song, but not the majesty of it. The music, as simple as a breath, as complex as a mathematical proof, pervaded the dark of the nightclub with a tangible cloak of intent; the empty corners became livid with vibrating spectres, chorusing their shriek into the ears, the eyes, the entrails of the remaining eight mobsters, and into the very soul of Maddy High. There are no words for what happened next. Nevertheless, as inadequate as they are, words are all we have, so, in Sebastian's words, the song begins:
"Slow September breezes bring
'A melody of death to sing;
'A song to fix in darkest hate,
'A traitor's final twist of fate.
'Junior's name doth spring to mind,
'As least of kin and less than kind,
'To merit cruelest punishment,
'To Jack Milano's detriment.
'But singer, nay, he least of all,
'The vengeful angel trumpet's call
'Should give that song it's twisted lie,
'Lest with the last refrain he die.
'A son but no more like a son
'Than serpent, this in stealth hath done:
'He struck a deal with Lyang Chen
'To merge the northside ops and then
'To whack his daddy dear--the dread
'Jack Milano--make him dead;
'And taking charge with treacherous power,
'On Daddy's grave a single flower.
In the interlude, the piano painted a violent picture of betrayal in black shadow. The dissonance advanced upon Jackie Junior, cowering between Jack and Bruno. Jack's anger was lifting him out of his chair, but at the peak of the phrase, Sebastian lifted his right hand elegantly from the piano, took his Beretta and put one into the table six inches from Jack's knotted knuckles. Jack sat. The explosion brought a deafening silence to the hall that resounded for three seconds, before Sebastian plowed into the chorus:
'But singer, nay, he least of all,
'The vengeful angel trumpet's call
'Should give that song it's twisted lie,
'Lest with the last refrain he die.
'And so the plot has been revealed,
'And all the falsities congealed
'In this, regretful, tragic scene,
'Where Daddy's blood there might have been,
'If not for Maddy High, the whore,
'Spilled upon the ground, and more--
'The traitor's lust, the traitor's scorn
'Giv'n voice in strains bereft, forlorn;
'But singer, nay, he least of all,
'The vengeful angel trumpet's call
'Should give that song it's twisted lie,
'Lest with the last refrain he die.
Sebastian was visibly weakening, as if in rhythm with the dramaturgy of the song. The music dropped down a 5th, preparing, getting ready for some final effort that nobody could predict. They hung on his lips. Was that blood in the corner of his mouth?
'Thus, Sebastian breathes his plaintive cry
'A song composed for Maddy High;
'Let heaven's chorus offer up in trade
'A deal that at death's door is made:
'Traitors three there were in this,
'Jackie, Chico, and Sebastian; his
'The lesser, still to Jack the same,
'Let fair revenge take mercy's name.
Here the interlude took on an allegro barbaro feel: pounding bass staccati worked their way up the keyboard to the .45, which Sebastian grabbed and used to blow out Chico's windpipe. Sebastian had it figured that Jackie Junior must have had help, probably even inspiration--he would never have thought this up on his own. Chico was Jackie Junior's bodyguard, and had likely been on the take from Chen for weeks, poisoning Jackie Junior's weak mind with traitorous thoughts, and jockeying for a position of power in the new regime. Jackie Junior was a weak pawn in the scenario, and Chico would love putting him down, once things were settled. Chico was an asshole, and his blood was a pleasant sight on the floor of Tony's nightclub. But there was one more chorus, the last and best, and Sebastian did not pause to exult in Chico's demise--he had other fish to fry.
'Let singer, yea, he most of all,
'The vengeful angel trumpet call--
'So give the girl her life, and I
'With the last refrain shall die."
And as the final chord, a silver trembling question mark hanging in the brooding air, faded into the corners of the night to rest on the haunches of a great St. Bernard of silence, Sebastian Chronic took his Beretta and blew his own brains out. The spots of blood on the keys were like little 16th notes spilled randomly over the midrange. He fell, as in all things, with grace, backwards, avoiding any stray notes on the piano to mar his conclusion. The Goodfellas were on him before he hit the stage, their guns poised above him, ready for any false moves. He was dead. Jack Milano strode over to his body and looked down. Jonesy opened Sebastian's coat and shuddered.
"Boss, this guy's got a hole in his chest the size of the Holland Tunnel!"
"That's why he was weak," thought Maddy, gradually taking it all in.
In his blood-stained breast pocket were two envelopes, one marked "Jack Milano" the other marked "Maddy High." The one to Jack told a simple tale:
"Dear Jack:
Maddy High gave me the insight necessary to figure out that Jackie Junior, Chico, and Lyang Chen were planning a restructuring of your business organization. She didn't tell anybody but me. The dumb broad didn't even know she was onto anything. This morning I paid a visit to Chen and confronted him with the evidence. His man, Wong, put one in me (that's why I am dead) before I sent him and Chen both to that big Chinatown in the sky. I think your Chen troubles are over--Chen's son, Dong Yang, is on the loose and will want revenge, but I doubt he'll have time to deal with things by the time you read this. Jackie Junior is a brat, but I figure it was Chico all along.
Please let Maddy go--she saved your life, and gave me mine. I ask this favor, since I have also saved your life.
How did you like my new song?
Yours,
Sebastian Chronic"
Jack Milano's gangster mind, and his higher Catholic soul strove within him. Faggotty asshole. And still, he had not missed the upshot of the song--Sebastian was offering himself, Chico and Jackie Junior in exchange for Maddy High. And Sebastian's faith in the mafioso's old world sense of fair play had assured him that Milano would go along, even without a pre-set agreement. He had bet everything on the persuasive power of his song, which he had composed in his head on the road that morning; and, as usual, his confidence in himself, one last time, was not misplaced.
Sidebar: remember the reason Jack Milano had wanted to interrogate Maddy before eliminating her--it was because he feared that Jackie Junior had somehow got wind of a secret that almost nobody in the organization knew: Milano was planning a move on Chen. He hadn't even told Sebastian about it yet, but he wanted Chen out, so the North Side would be cleared for take-over. It was a bitter irony that, instead, Maddy had uncovered a plot of Chen's to hit HIM--via his OWN SON! Jesu Christe!
Milano opened the envelope to Maddy. It contained a short note and a lovely little pearl-studded charm bracelet.
"Dear Maddy:
Sorry to leave you so soon, but I am damaged goods, and you wouldn't want to go the distance with me (although, if you're reading this, I guess you did). Enjoy the trinket I am leaving you--it's not much but it's pretty, and each pearl is a note in a love song to you I will never write. You are the love of my life, the life of my death, the death of my pain. Thanks.
SC
p.s. take the car"
Milano thought about it. He could not think about it. "Let her go," he said, handing over the letter and the bracelet.
Maddy was out of there, driving the Jag over the George Washington Bridge before Jack Milano walked out the front door of Tony's into a hail of Chinese machine gun fire. Jackie Junior and Jonesy stepped over the bodies and gave a grinning high five to Dong Yang, new leader of the Chinese Mafia. Sebastian had been wrong about two things: that the Chinese would not have time today to organize a retaliatory strike (had he been wrong, or had he known that, too?), and he was definitely wrong about Chico--that is to say it was not just Chico who had been working with the Chinese, it was Chico AND Jonesy. Jonesy had not figured into Sebastian's theorizing because he underestimated Jonesy's astuteness; he had always assumed that Chico was the brains of that pair, everybody had. Jackie Junior did too, so imagine his surprise when, grinning like a pig, Jonesy reached down with a glooved hand, scooped up Bruno's .38, lying blood-soaked on the sidewalk, and put one in Jackie Junior's temple. Jonesy wasn't so dumb after all.
They took the long way back to town to delay their arrival. He wanted to get there at 5:00--as the autumn sun was fading in the sky, but before the place opened. Is he growing faint? Jackie and the crew would be waiting. He wanted them to wait--he wanted them to think they were ready for him. Chico would be pissed. He wanted them pissed; he wanted them asking questions. He parked in the alley. He jockeyed the car around, nose outward, so it wouldn't have to be turned around for a clean getaway. He left the key in the ignition. She raised her eyebrows. "Nobody steals Jaguars parked in the alley behind Tony's." Her mouth was a grim line. She didn't ask. She knew asking would skew his timing. They went to the kitchen door. "They'll be waiting on the other side," he said. "There'll be two of them--the others are covering the front. Stand behind me." He winced again, paler than before. What's wrong with him?
He turned the handle and pushed the door wide open. There was Jonesy smiling a serpent smile, with his .45 leveled. "Hey, Sebastian. How ya doon?" Chico was standing behind to the right, his throat was bandaged. He managed to whisp, "Mutherfucker."
"Lookin' good Chico," mused Sebastian, confidently advancing. "Sorry about taking such hasty leave of you last night. Spur of the moment deal, you know."
Quicker than thought, Jonesy was spun around, his own gun at his ear, a look of stupid surprise lit his otherwise dark-dumb features.
"You retarded piece of shit," Chico hissed. "I told you, keep your distance."
Sebastian interjected, "Chico, I didn't kill you once, but don't expect to be so lucky a second time. Now, drop the piece and turn around. We're doing a little chorus line thing here."
Hands in the air, mouth twisted back over his shoulder, gun in his ear, "Sebastian, whut the fuck ya doon?" Jonesy was a poet.
"Dumbshit," fumed Chico, tossing his .38 to the floor.
"Ankle," said Sebastian. The .22 clattered into the dishtrays.
He kicked both guns to the side as they processed through the kitchen, through the backstage area, over the risers, past the drumset. Sebastian pushed Jonesy into Chico and they both tumbled off the stage into the first row. Giorgio was coming round the back to flank him. Sebastian sent a warning shot into the hall shattering the silence and a light fixture.
"Let's all relax and have a seat," he said. There were Jack, Jackie Junior, and Bruno sitting in the center, Giorgio sat down in back, Freddy and Flippy brought up the rear, attracted by the gunfire, but not prepared to deal with it. Chico and Jonesy were ringside, Maddy cowered by the drums. She wilted onto a sax chair. Sebastian eased himself onto the piano bench. All one big happy family. "Fred, Flip, sit. Hands on the table. Everybody, hands on the tables. We're all friends here, until we're not." Sebastian placed Jonesy's .45 on top of the piano, brought out his own Beretta, and laid it beside the .45. They glistened in the green dusk like twin gargoyles tempting the bold to test their biting potency.
Jack Milano was a stone wall of power and authority. He had no fear, even of that faggotty asshole Sebastian Chronic. That guy was destined to fall off the deep end sooner or later--shoulda x'ed him couple years ago. "Sebastian."
"Jack."
"What's up with the broad? What's with giving us the slip? What's with puttin' Chico in the soprano section?"
"Good questions all, Jack. All will be answered presently. I want you to know I'm still your man, and you're still my boss. But there's a snake in this room and it's not this girl. So if everybody stays calm and still, the tale will be told and all will be well--except for one." Everybody leaned forward at this, even Jackie Junior. "Maddy, stand up, take a bow."
Maddy's jaw dropped. She hesitated just a moment, and then obeyed. At that moment she remembered and pressed her hand to her bosom as she leaned forward. Tape is running.
Flippy's hand reached under the table. What an easy target. Jack would be pleased. Sebastian's hand was lightning exploding over the top of the Steinway. Flippy was suspended in time with a bright red spot in his forehead, the Beretta smoking casually, like an office worker lounging over the coffee machine. Flippy fell with a crash, Freddy watching the floor aghast.
Sebastian replaced the piece in its cozy niche next to the .45. "That's the kind of behavior we DON'T want. Maybe we all better move up closer together." Sebastian picked up the .45. "Jack maybe you better tell Al to come on out here, before I blow YOUR fucking head off."
Al had been secretly threading his way round the back and was just about to get the drop on Sebastian, but he had jostled the curtain.
"Al. Get out here," Jack commanded.
Al stumbled over the stage past Maddy, and parked it next to Chico.
"Hands--on--the--table," said Sebastian, ever so patiently pinpointing the .45 at Al's nose.
Throughout this exchange Maddy had stood frozen in front of a row of gangsters, wondering which one would rape her first.
"Everybody, this is Maddy High. (Siddown, sweetie.) You may know her by another name, what was it?"
"Jeanie, Jeanie Priss."
"Jeanie Priss. (Cute. Right out of the bottle.) But her real name is Maddy High, and she is a reporter with the Metro Star. She was doing undercover work hoping to expose any gangland highjinx and shenanigans she could, and make life more difficult for all of us lowlife, scum-of-the-earth criminals." There was a reaction from the crowd. Sebastian scanned all the nervous fingers, tapping the table cloths like restless horses. They relaxed back into their stalls under his gaze. Flippy was still bleeding out.
"Well gentlemen, she failed in her project, and uncovered nothing that would be of the slightest interest to the legal authorities, unless you consider Jackie Junior's impetuous dick of interest."
The mention of his name visibly lurched Jackie Junior in his seat. The others couldn't repress their knowing grins, and glanced slantways toward Jack Senior to see if it was okay. It was. First the laugh, then the sneer. Jesu Christe, ahi, such a son you give me.
"But she did uncover something that is of supreme importance to everybody here."
Jackie Junior-in-the-box jumped up two feet. "I dint tell that goddamn whore shit!" he protested.
Like a quickest electric switch in the arcade, Sebastian's finger was on the trigger again. "SIT . . . DOWN."
Jack Milano's eyes narrowed with interest. The crew caught the boss's body language and relaxed their communal grip on the tables. Jackie Junior squirmed under the heavy weight of his father's hand crushing him back into his seat. Bruno responded to a silent cue and edged over closer to Jackie Junior, pinioning the kid between himself and Jack Senior. A tight fit for a tight spot. Jackie Junior's attempt to disguise his look of panic with an arrogant smirk, went down into the hall of fame for Worst Acting Job of the Century. Sebastian continued.
"Yes, Jack, without Maddy High you would be a dead duck, and the traitor, you guessed it, is sitting right next to you right now."
"Liar!" shouted Jackie Junior.
"Whaddayamean?" shouted Jackie Senior, rising, impervious to Sebastian's prescribed protocol.
"I thought you would want to know. So I made up this little song to tell you all about it." With that Sebastian attacked the piano and, with a flourish, tossed off a magical, twisted, triadic arpeggio.
A SONG! They all thought. He's going to kill someone!
This is the part it's hard to tell, because the music can't possibly be heard through this narrator's puny powers of description. We may all have to wait until the movie comes out. Reproducing the lyrics, here, gives the sense of the song, but not the majesty of it. The music, as simple as a breath, as complex as a mathematical proof, pervaded the dark of the nightclub with a tangible cloak of intent; the empty corners became livid with vibrating spectres, chorusing their shriek into the ears, the eyes, the entrails of the remaining eight mobsters, and into the very soul of Maddy High. There are no words for what happened next. Nevertheless, as inadequate as they are, words are all we have, so, in Sebastian's words, the song begins:
"Slow September breezes bring
'A melody of death to sing;
'A song to fix in darkest hate,
'A traitor's final twist of fate.
'Junior's name doth spring to mind,
'As least of kin and less than kind,
'To merit cruelest punishment,
'To Jack Milano's detriment.
'But singer, nay, he least of all,
'The vengeful angel trumpet's call
'Should give that song it's twisted lie,
'Lest with the last refrain he die.
'A son but no more like a son
'Than serpent, this in stealth hath done:
'He struck a deal with Lyang Chen
'To merge the northside ops and then
'To whack his daddy dear--the dread
'Jack Milano--make him dead;
'And taking charge with treacherous power,
'On Daddy's grave a single flower.
In the interlude, the piano painted a violent picture of betrayal in black shadow. The dissonance advanced upon Jackie Junior, cowering between Jack and Bruno. Jack's anger was lifting him out of his chair, but at the peak of the phrase, Sebastian lifted his right hand elegantly from the piano, took his Beretta and put one into the table six inches from Jack's knotted knuckles. Jack sat. The explosion brought a deafening silence to the hall that resounded for three seconds, before Sebastian plowed into the chorus:
'But singer, nay, he least of all,
'The vengeful angel trumpet's call
'Should give that song it's twisted lie,
'Lest with the last refrain he die.
'And so the plot has been revealed,
'And all the falsities congealed
'In this, regretful, tragic scene,
'Where Daddy's blood there might have been,
'If not for Maddy High, the whore,
'Spilled upon the ground, and more--
'The traitor's lust, the traitor's scorn
'Giv'n voice in strains bereft, forlorn;
'But singer, nay, he least of all,
'The vengeful angel trumpet's call
'Should give that song it's twisted lie,
'Lest with the last refrain he die.
Sebastian was visibly weakening, as if in rhythm with the dramaturgy of the song. The music dropped down a 5th, preparing, getting ready for some final effort that nobody could predict. They hung on his lips. Was that blood in the corner of his mouth?
'Thus, Sebastian breathes his plaintive cry
'A song composed for Maddy High;
'Let heaven's chorus offer up in trade
'A deal that at death's door is made:
'Traitors three there were in this,
'Jackie, Chico, and Sebastian; his
'The lesser, still to Jack the same,
'Let fair revenge take mercy's name.
Here the interlude took on an allegro barbaro feel: pounding bass staccati worked their way up the keyboard to the .45, which Sebastian grabbed and used to blow out Chico's windpipe. Sebastian had it figured that Jackie Junior must have had help, probably even inspiration--he would never have thought this up on his own. Chico was Jackie Junior's bodyguard, and had likely been on the take from Chen for weeks, poisoning Jackie Junior's weak mind with traitorous thoughts, and jockeying for a position of power in the new regime. Jackie Junior was a weak pawn in the scenario, and Chico would love putting him down, once things were settled. Chico was an asshole, and his blood was a pleasant sight on the floor of Tony's nightclub. But there was one more chorus, the last and best, and Sebastian did not pause to exult in Chico's demise--he had other fish to fry.
'Let singer, yea, he most of all,
'The vengeful angel trumpet call--
'So give the girl her life, and I
'With the last refrain shall die."
And as the final chord, a silver trembling question mark hanging in the brooding air, faded into the corners of the night to rest on the haunches of a great St. Bernard of silence, Sebastian Chronic took his Beretta and blew his own brains out. The spots of blood on the keys were like little 16th notes spilled randomly over the midrange. He fell, as in all things, with grace, backwards, avoiding any stray notes on the piano to mar his conclusion. The Goodfellas were on him before he hit the stage, their guns poised above him, ready for any false moves. He was dead. Jack Milano strode over to his body and looked down. Jonesy opened Sebastian's coat and shuddered.
"Boss, this guy's got a hole in his chest the size of the Holland Tunnel!"
"That's why he was weak," thought Maddy, gradually taking it all in.
In his blood-stained breast pocket were two envelopes, one marked "Jack Milano" the other marked "Maddy High." The one to Jack told a simple tale:
"Dear Jack:
Maddy High gave me the insight necessary to figure out that Jackie Junior, Chico, and Lyang Chen were planning a restructuring of your business organization. She didn't tell anybody but me. The dumb broad didn't even know she was onto anything. This morning I paid a visit to Chen and confronted him with the evidence. His man, Wong, put one in me (that's why I am dead) before I sent him and Chen both to that big Chinatown in the sky. I think your Chen troubles are over--Chen's son, Dong Yang, is on the loose and will want revenge, but I doubt he'll have time to deal with things by the time you read this. Jackie Junior is a brat, but I figure it was Chico all along.
Please let Maddy go--she saved your life, and gave me mine. I ask this favor, since I have also saved your life.
How did you like my new song?
Yours,
Sebastian Chronic"
Jack Milano's gangster mind, and his higher Catholic soul strove within him. Faggotty asshole. And still, he had not missed the upshot of the song--Sebastian was offering himself, Chico and Jackie Junior in exchange for Maddy High. And Sebastian's faith in the mafioso's old world sense of fair play had assured him that Milano would go along, even without a pre-set agreement. He had bet everything on the persuasive power of his song, which he had composed in his head on the road that morning; and, as usual, his confidence in himself, one last time, was not misplaced.
Sidebar: remember the reason Jack Milano had wanted to interrogate Maddy before eliminating her--it was because he feared that Jackie Junior had somehow got wind of a secret that almost nobody in the organization knew: Milano was planning a move on Chen. He hadn't even told Sebastian about it yet, but he wanted Chen out, so the North Side would be cleared for take-over. It was a bitter irony that, instead, Maddy had uncovered a plot of Chen's to hit HIM--via his OWN SON! Jesu Christe!
Milano opened the envelope to Maddy. It contained a short note and a lovely little pearl-studded charm bracelet.
"Dear Maddy:
Sorry to leave you so soon, but I am damaged goods, and you wouldn't want to go the distance with me (although, if you're reading this, I guess you did). Enjoy the trinket I am leaving you--it's not much but it's pretty, and each pearl is a note in a love song to you I will never write. You are the love of my life, the life of my death, the death of my pain. Thanks.
SC
p.s. take the car"
Milano thought about it. He could not think about it. "Let her go," he said, handing over the letter and the bracelet.
Maddy was out of there, driving the Jag over the George Washington Bridge before Jack Milano walked out the front door of Tony's into a hail of Chinese machine gun fire. Jackie Junior and Jonesy stepped over the bodies and gave a grinning high five to Dong Yang, new leader of the Chinese Mafia. Sebastian had been wrong about two things: that the Chinese would not have time today to organize a retaliatory strike (had he been wrong, or had he known that, too?), and he was definitely wrong about Chico--that is to say it was not just Chico who had been working with the Chinese, it was Chico AND Jonesy. Jonesy had not figured into Sebastian's theorizing because he underestimated Jonesy's astuteness; he had always assumed that Chico was the brains of that pair, everybody had. Jackie Junior did too, so imagine his surprise when, grinning like a pig, Jonesy reached down with a glooved hand, scooped up Bruno's .38, lying blood-soaked on the sidewalk, and put one in Jackie Junior's temple. Jonesy wasn't so dumb after all.
Hitman Melodies Section 11
XI.
Sleep was a curtain brought down to thunderous angel applause. The Peace of Christ blanketed the lovers--for lovers they were, now, and they cherished the knowledge as any feather blown by the wind of fate cherishes a moment of calm in the eye of the hurricane. Maddy was occasionally aroused from her perfect slumber by the feeling of French horn fingerings subtly teasing her left breast, but even this became a pleasing lullaby that coaxed her back to dreamland with an even more contented sigh.
Sleep was long and deep, and most of her somnolent fantasies cloaked her troubled thoughts in drifting pale blue and white velvet clouds of comfort and repose; but not all: at one point she found herself aboard an underground train, traveling at lightning speed toward a bright glare at the end of a tunnel. Ellington's A-train was playing, Dizzy Gillespie, she thought. The train was rattling in time to the hi-hat, louder and louder, but the light was not growing any nearer. Suddenly the light jumped, and they (she and some other faceless New York easy riders, a bag lady, a negro, a drunk) were catapulted into the open mouth of the tunnel. But Sebastian Chronic was standing there right in the locomotive's path, larger than life, a close-up in the dream's view-finder, and the train stopped instantly, without a trace of a lurch. "No, no, no," wagged Sebastian's uplifted finger of truth, and his John-the-Baptist smile was wide and filled with Mozart, giggling. "No, no, no, not you." And blood dripped from his finger, then his mouth, then--
"Ahgghh!" she screamed.
Sebastian was gone. Panic thrilled through her waking muscles like a harp glissando, as she cast her eyes wildly around the empty room. Then she saw the note. On the door, stuck there with a tack. "Stay here. Look around, as if I could stop you. Mi casa su casa. Get dressed be ready to leave. No cops. I'll be back." And below, in hasty pencil-drawn music notation, was the cursed-love theme from Tristan und Isolde. She took a slow cleansing breath and stilled her heart. A parade of question marks flustered her brain for several minutes, until she had another realization: she trusted him. He was an insane lowlife murderer who had kidnapped her, abused her, threatened her, imprisoned her, and made love to her, and she trusted the truth of him more than any Bible Heaven could bestow on her. "Stay here . . . I'll be back," was a new catechism, a new promise written on her new testament of fidelities. She would wait. And the vocal silence that had passed between them spoke again, remembering, and she was calm. It was 10:00 A.M. "It's going to be a long day," she thought.
She finished the half-carton of eggs, wiped down the kitchen, had a quick shower, and stuffed her boobs back into the opera dress. It was 11:00. She began to browse the apartment, seeking verbal justifications for new-found affections. "Look around, as if I could stop you," repeated Sebastian Chronic's new biographer to herself. On the surface there was not much telling material in the front room. There were the sofa, the chair, the rug, and the fireplace, all thoroughly visited already, but not much else. There was a Victorian lamp on a lampstand sitting beside the chair. (She reclaimed the broach, and re-installed the mic and an empty tape from her bag--just in case.) There were framed pictures--family portraits of Madison Avenue models, Lassie, and somebody's nephewandyhardy at the pony rides. There was a telephone (no dial-tone) and a Chicago phone book from 1972 (Sebastian would have his little jokes). There was a massive oak wardrobe at the opposite end of the room demarcating a kind of equator between the 19th century salon and the 1960's suburban kitchen replete with melmac countertops and little foam rubber daisies magnetted to the door of the fridge.
She opened the wardrobe. It's massive doors swung open to reveal a $5000 stereo system. The amplifier, turntable, tape deck, and speakers were all studio quality, state of the art equipment (state of the art ten years ago, that is--there wasn't even a CD player). In a cabinet below the playback stuff there was a drawer of audio cassettes. Bach, Handel, Mozart, Brahms, (no Beethoven, hmm), Mendelssohn, Schubert, and Hugo Wolf, the staples; and then there was the lunatic fringe, Schonberg, Bartok, Varese, Ives, Reich, and the lunatic ancients, Machaut, Morales, Gesualdo, Isaac, Josquin, and the lonely only chick, Hildegard. There were some vinyl disks in a side compartment, but this library was of a different genre entirely: we saw in the consecrated rock section, the White Album, Zappa's Lumpy Gravy and The Yellow Shark, along with collections of Joni Mitchell, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix; the jazz section included the Nat King Cole Trio (before he went soft-pop), Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, George Shearing, Billy Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan, along with a few maverick LPs of Petula Clark and the Grateful Dead. She spent some time going through this music collection, as each article in the library provided fresh insight into the mind with which she had become so fascinated and embroiled. Finally, only for entertainment's sake, Maddy was tempted to put on Miles of Aisles when her eye accidentally strayed over at the wall with the 9"x12" envelopes.
She took a faltering step toward the bookcase, then found herself propelled by an unseen force to the very brink of that paper cemetery. Every envelope on that wall stood for a dead man. She counted 123 envelopes. 123 over a fifteen year period. That's around ten hits a year, nine, maybe, about one every month and a half, with some multiple hits mixed in there (the trio sonata was going to go in one envelope). Her reporter's brain couldn't help doing the math: at, say, an average of $20,000 per hit, that was $2,460,000; that's $164,000/yr. Not quite a presidential salary, but good money. Of course that didn't include his base salary, paid out to him regularly for services rendered, like hanging out at Tony's, bodyguarding Jack, flashing a piece at weddings and funerals, you, know, patrol salary; so Sebastian was making a lot of money. Of course, they probably weren't all $20,000 hits, especially 15 years ago, (she was sure that contract killing was subject to the same ravages of economic inflation as anything else), but there must have been some that paid more. The guy was totally rich no matter how you cut it. "Who have I become involved with?" she murmered, almost coming to her senses.
She wracked her brain. Joey Spinelli--that was about two, no, three years ago. She thumbed down the stack. Trio for Lute, Recorder, and Tenor Viol. She slipped it out and skewed the spot, "God help me if I get this stuff out of order," she whispered. She didn't know why she said that--it was either because she didn't know if Sebastian would mind her looking through his private stuff, or simply out of respect for the anal retentive nature that keeps its gangland hits filed in precise chronological order. Anyway, the envelope aspirated its contents onto the couch, as if it had been impatiently holding back. There was a score and parts, neatly printed on computer paper, all velo bound at Kinko's. "Is that blood, there on the corner? My God." Then she saw what she had hoped she would find: two cassette tapes. One was marked "MIDI version" the other marked, "Live." She couldn't believe she was doing it, but she carried the "Live" version over to the stereo cabinet.
At first she followed along with the score, but very soon her eyes were swimming and she couldn't see. The piece began with sparse chords in a kind of slow sarabande rhythm, as if the lute were laying out a repeating harmonic framework (ciaccona) that would be decorated with flute lines later. But that expectation was thwarted when the recorder and viol began trading phrases out of Webern, while the lute insisted on its dusty sarabande. The dissonances piled up for awhile, then gradually began to clear out, as simplicity of diatonic melodic line replaced atonal angularity. Maddy thought of a spider web whose strands were, one by one, falling out of the web. The lute part climbed up into the altissimo range, plinking like a mandolin, while the recorder and viol broadened in tempo in a lower range. The effect was of a conclusion of consonant confidence being reached with nervous anticipation. It was at this moment that Maddy noticed the first sound on the tape being made by something other than the trio: it was a shudder of fear and tension, exhaled at some distance from the microphone recording the performance. (Performance, my God!) She suddenly realized she had been hearing an extra-musical sound all along--a subtle foot fall, in time to the sarabande. Joey's cautious step from grass to stone on his torturous blindfolded way to the back of the yard. Finally, the lute plinked its last, the recorder and lute finally affirmed the opening sarabande, and the piece was over. "I made it! I made it!" she heard a voice shout in exultation, right before the roar of an explosion distorted the mic and clipped the tape off.
She sat stunned before the $600 speakers. It was the most horrible thing she had ever experienced--and the most wonderful. The music was like an intense little musical haiku or sonnet; the constraints on the material teasing the mind, drawing forth and retreating, creating an effect incredibly hypnotic and compelling. The gestures were dynamically compressed with energy that seemed to be constantly bursting with non-bursting--but there was none of that aphoristic self-conscious declusion that mars Webern, reducing so much repressed expectation to gross expectoration. With Webern, a composer dedicated to the proposition that less is more, we all too often discover that less is less. With Sebastian Chronic, less was really more--a lot more. And when Joey self-destructs, the art comes alive in the face of death as no art has ever come alive since the coliseum. The reality of it was overwhelming, shattering--and transforming. Maddy was spell-bound, repelled, transfixed, and enraged. And yet the attraction was like the force of nature that draws a river to the sea, irrepressible, irresistible, irrevocable. She had to listen to it again. Then again. She sat, she knew not how long in amazement. She did not even notice when Sebastian entered the room. It was 3:00 P.M.
"I knew you would listen," he said. A slight cough jittered his words. He was pale. "I wanted you to."
She shrank before him. She had not noticed that she was sitting down--on the floor. He towered over her, smiling. Where had she seen that smile before? Was it in a dream? But everything here was a dream. She wondered if she would ever awaken. She wondered if she wanted to. "It's--it's--awful."
"Awful?"
"Full of awe--wonder--power. I don't love it. I don't hate it. I accept it. I pity it. I praise it. I shrink before it. I rise up to meet it."
"I have never heard any of these tapes," he said. "I never wanted to hear any of it again. But now you're here. Can I live it again? Can I see myself reflected in your eyes and--"
"Love yourself?" she asked, as if she didn't already know the answer.
And he leaped to the bookcase and flung envelope after envelope to the floor, grabbing this one, tossing that one. "Ha ha! Giuseppe de Salvo! Mickey the Rat! Moxy Goldspan! Ha ha!" He raced to the tape deck with recording after recording, and for an eternal hour he played her his songs of death, sometimes only a phrase, sometimes the whole thing twice, each ending with a scream, or a gunshot, or a roar of final decision. He was a mad whirlwind of enthusiasm. His eyes were crazy with light, weird light, and his madness enflamed them both as the desperate sounds of unbridled reality rampaged through the Victorian room like a bull, like a tyrannosaur, ripping the seams of Maddy's well-ordered moral constructions, and searing Sebastian's schizoid dogmas. The wildest Roman orgy could not compare with the psychic bacchanal that raged like a storm through that place. The music hushed and reeled and rose and rushed and halted and laughed and wept and screamed and sighed. And each composition was like a new pinnacle of intensity that engorged them with astral energy, then drained and cast them away, like the indifferent beak of Zeus dropping, from a great height, the spent body of raped and ravished Leda.
It was Eddy the Weasel's My Own that ended it. "Enough!" he cried, breathless. She slipped the cassette out herself. And all their days to the end of time were encapsulated in that moment, and Eddy the Weasel's falsetto note would reverberate forever, captured in the black hole of their shared destiny, their ultimate loneliness, their beautiful, perfect, star-crossed love. As he calmed his racing heart and looked at her bright eyes, still alive with it, he wept a single tear, then rose and took command. "Let's go."
"Where we going?" He was man-handling her again. What happened?
"You'll see."
"Sebastian. Wait. Seb--"
"Come on." He dragged her to the door, but his strength was not what it was. Pain was coming from somewhere she could not identify, he would not reveal. Weakly apologetic, once more smiling, he turned and embraced her, once more fondling that precious left breast, "You got tape?" he winced.
"Yes. Sebastian, what--?"
"Good. Turn it on when we get to Tony's. Let's go."
"Tony's?" not a bang, a whimper.
"Let's go."
Sleep was a curtain brought down to thunderous angel applause. The Peace of Christ blanketed the lovers--for lovers they were, now, and they cherished the knowledge as any feather blown by the wind of fate cherishes a moment of calm in the eye of the hurricane. Maddy was occasionally aroused from her perfect slumber by the feeling of French horn fingerings subtly teasing her left breast, but even this became a pleasing lullaby that coaxed her back to dreamland with an even more contented sigh.
Sleep was long and deep, and most of her somnolent fantasies cloaked her troubled thoughts in drifting pale blue and white velvet clouds of comfort and repose; but not all: at one point she found herself aboard an underground train, traveling at lightning speed toward a bright glare at the end of a tunnel. Ellington's A-train was playing, Dizzy Gillespie, she thought. The train was rattling in time to the hi-hat, louder and louder, but the light was not growing any nearer. Suddenly the light jumped, and they (she and some other faceless New York easy riders, a bag lady, a negro, a drunk) were catapulted into the open mouth of the tunnel. But Sebastian Chronic was standing there right in the locomotive's path, larger than life, a close-up in the dream's view-finder, and the train stopped instantly, without a trace of a lurch. "No, no, no," wagged Sebastian's uplifted finger of truth, and his John-the-Baptist smile was wide and filled with Mozart, giggling. "No, no, no, not you." And blood dripped from his finger, then his mouth, then--
"Ahgghh!" she screamed.
Sebastian was gone. Panic thrilled through her waking muscles like a harp glissando, as she cast her eyes wildly around the empty room. Then she saw the note. On the door, stuck there with a tack. "Stay here. Look around, as if I could stop you. Mi casa su casa. Get dressed be ready to leave. No cops. I'll be back." And below, in hasty pencil-drawn music notation, was the cursed-love theme from Tristan und Isolde. She took a slow cleansing breath and stilled her heart. A parade of question marks flustered her brain for several minutes, until she had another realization: she trusted him. He was an insane lowlife murderer who had kidnapped her, abused her, threatened her, imprisoned her, and made love to her, and she trusted the truth of him more than any Bible Heaven could bestow on her. "Stay here . . . I'll be back," was a new catechism, a new promise written on her new testament of fidelities. She would wait. And the vocal silence that had passed between them spoke again, remembering, and she was calm. It was 10:00 A.M. "It's going to be a long day," she thought.
She finished the half-carton of eggs, wiped down the kitchen, had a quick shower, and stuffed her boobs back into the opera dress. It was 11:00. She began to browse the apartment, seeking verbal justifications for new-found affections. "Look around, as if I could stop you," repeated Sebastian Chronic's new biographer to herself. On the surface there was not much telling material in the front room. There were the sofa, the chair, the rug, and the fireplace, all thoroughly visited already, but not much else. There was a Victorian lamp on a lampstand sitting beside the chair. (She reclaimed the broach, and re-installed the mic and an empty tape from her bag--just in case.) There were framed pictures--family portraits of Madison Avenue models, Lassie, and somebody's nephewandyhardy at the pony rides. There was a telephone (no dial-tone) and a Chicago phone book from 1972 (Sebastian would have his little jokes). There was a massive oak wardrobe at the opposite end of the room demarcating a kind of equator between the 19th century salon and the 1960's suburban kitchen replete with melmac countertops and little foam rubber daisies magnetted to the door of the fridge.
She opened the wardrobe. It's massive doors swung open to reveal a $5000 stereo system. The amplifier, turntable, tape deck, and speakers were all studio quality, state of the art equipment (state of the art ten years ago, that is--there wasn't even a CD player). In a cabinet below the playback stuff there was a drawer of audio cassettes. Bach, Handel, Mozart, Brahms, (no Beethoven, hmm), Mendelssohn, Schubert, and Hugo Wolf, the staples; and then there was the lunatic fringe, Schonberg, Bartok, Varese, Ives, Reich, and the lunatic ancients, Machaut, Morales, Gesualdo, Isaac, Josquin, and the lonely only chick, Hildegard. There were some vinyl disks in a side compartment, but this library was of a different genre entirely: we saw in the consecrated rock section, the White Album, Zappa's Lumpy Gravy and The Yellow Shark, along with collections of Joni Mitchell, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix; the jazz section included the Nat King Cole Trio (before he went soft-pop), Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, George Shearing, Billy Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan, along with a few maverick LPs of Petula Clark and the Grateful Dead. She spent some time going through this music collection, as each article in the library provided fresh insight into the mind with which she had become so fascinated and embroiled. Finally, only for entertainment's sake, Maddy was tempted to put on Miles of Aisles when her eye accidentally strayed over at the wall with the 9"x12" envelopes.
She took a faltering step toward the bookcase, then found herself propelled by an unseen force to the very brink of that paper cemetery. Every envelope on that wall stood for a dead man. She counted 123 envelopes. 123 over a fifteen year period. That's around ten hits a year, nine, maybe, about one every month and a half, with some multiple hits mixed in there (the trio sonata was going to go in one envelope). Her reporter's brain couldn't help doing the math: at, say, an average of $20,000 per hit, that was $2,460,000; that's $164,000/yr. Not quite a presidential salary, but good money. Of course that didn't include his base salary, paid out to him regularly for services rendered, like hanging out at Tony's, bodyguarding Jack, flashing a piece at weddings and funerals, you, know, patrol salary; so Sebastian was making a lot of money. Of course, they probably weren't all $20,000 hits, especially 15 years ago, (she was sure that contract killing was subject to the same ravages of economic inflation as anything else), but there must have been some that paid more. The guy was totally rich no matter how you cut it. "Who have I become involved with?" she murmered, almost coming to her senses.
She wracked her brain. Joey Spinelli--that was about two, no, three years ago. She thumbed down the stack. Trio for Lute, Recorder, and Tenor Viol. She slipped it out and skewed the spot, "God help me if I get this stuff out of order," she whispered. She didn't know why she said that--it was either because she didn't know if Sebastian would mind her looking through his private stuff, or simply out of respect for the anal retentive nature that keeps its gangland hits filed in precise chronological order. Anyway, the envelope aspirated its contents onto the couch, as if it had been impatiently holding back. There was a score and parts, neatly printed on computer paper, all velo bound at Kinko's. "Is that blood, there on the corner? My God." Then she saw what she had hoped she would find: two cassette tapes. One was marked "MIDI version" the other marked, "Live." She couldn't believe she was doing it, but she carried the "Live" version over to the stereo cabinet.
At first she followed along with the score, but very soon her eyes were swimming and she couldn't see. The piece began with sparse chords in a kind of slow sarabande rhythm, as if the lute were laying out a repeating harmonic framework (ciaccona) that would be decorated with flute lines later. But that expectation was thwarted when the recorder and viol began trading phrases out of Webern, while the lute insisted on its dusty sarabande. The dissonances piled up for awhile, then gradually began to clear out, as simplicity of diatonic melodic line replaced atonal angularity. Maddy thought of a spider web whose strands were, one by one, falling out of the web. The lute part climbed up into the altissimo range, plinking like a mandolin, while the recorder and viol broadened in tempo in a lower range. The effect was of a conclusion of consonant confidence being reached with nervous anticipation. It was at this moment that Maddy noticed the first sound on the tape being made by something other than the trio: it was a shudder of fear and tension, exhaled at some distance from the microphone recording the performance. (Performance, my God!) She suddenly realized she had been hearing an extra-musical sound all along--a subtle foot fall, in time to the sarabande. Joey's cautious step from grass to stone on his torturous blindfolded way to the back of the yard. Finally, the lute plinked its last, the recorder and lute finally affirmed the opening sarabande, and the piece was over. "I made it! I made it!" she heard a voice shout in exultation, right before the roar of an explosion distorted the mic and clipped the tape off.
She sat stunned before the $600 speakers. It was the most horrible thing she had ever experienced--and the most wonderful. The music was like an intense little musical haiku or sonnet; the constraints on the material teasing the mind, drawing forth and retreating, creating an effect incredibly hypnotic and compelling. The gestures were dynamically compressed with energy that seemed to be constantly bursting with non-bursting--but there was none of that aphoristic self-conscious declusion that mars Webern, reducing so much repressed expectation to gross expectoration. With Webern, a composer dedicated to the proposition that less is more, we all too often discover that less is less. With Sebastian Chronic, less was really more--a lot more. And when Joey self-destructs, the art comes alive in the face of death as no art has ever come alive since the coliseum. The reality of it was overwhelming, shattering--and transforming. Maddy was spell-bound, repelled, transfixed, and enraged. And yet the attraction was like the force of nature that draws a river to the sea, irrepressible, irresistible, irrevocable. She had to listen to it again. Then again. She sat, she knew not how long in amazement. She did not even notice when Sebastian entered the room. It was 3:00 P.M.
"I knew you would listen," he said. A slight cough jittered his words. He was pale. "I wanted you to."
She shrank before him. She had not noticed that she was sitting down--on the floor. He towered over her, smiling. Where had she seen that smile before? Was it in a dream? But everything here was a dream. She wondered if she would ever awaken. She wondered if she wanted to. "It's--it's--awful."
"Awful?"
"Full of awe--wonder--power. I don't love it. I don't hate it. I accept it. I pity it. I praise it. I shrink before it. I rise up to meet it."
"I have never heard any of these tapes," he said. "I never wanted to hear any of it again. But now you're here. Can I live it again? Can I see myself reflected in your eyes and--"
"Love yourself?" she asked, as if she didn't already know the answer.
And he leaped to the bookcase and flung envelope after envelope to the floor, grabbing this one, tossing that one. "Ha ha! Giuseppe de Salvo! Mickey the Rat! Moxy Goldspan! Ha ha!" He raced to the tape deck with recording after recording, and for an eternal hour he played her his songs of death, sometimes only a phrase, sometimes the whole thing twice, each ending with a scream, or a gunshot, or a roar of final decision. He was a mad whirlwind of enthusiasm. His eyes were crazy with light, weird light, and his madness enflamed them both as the desperate sounds of unbridled reality rampaged through the Victorian room like a bull, like a tyrannosaur, ripping the seams of Maddy's well-ordered moral constructions, and searing Sebastian's schizoid dogmas. The wildest Roman orgy could not compare with the psychic bacchanal that raged like a storm through that place. The music hushed and reeled and rose and rushed and halted and laughed and wept and screamed and sighed. And each composition was like a new pinnacle of intensity that engorged them with astral energy, then drained and cast them away, like the indifferent beak of Zeus dropping, from a great height, the spent body of raped and ravished Leda.
It was Eddy the Weasel's My Own that ended it. "Enough!" he cried, breathless. She slipped the cassette out herself. And all their days to the end of time were encapsulated in that moment, and Eddy the Weasel's falsetto note would reverberate forever, captured in the black hole of their shared destiny, their ultimate loneliness, their beautiful, perfect, star-crossed love. As he calmed his racing heart and looked at her bright eyes, still alive with it, he wept a single tear, then rose and took command. "Let's go."
"Where we going?" He was man-handling her again. What happened?
"You'll see."
"Sebastian. Wait. Seb--"
"Come on." He dragged her to the door, but his strength was not what it was. Pain was coming from somewhere she could not identify, he would not reveal. Weakly apologetic, once more smiling, he turned and embraced her, once more fondling that precious left breast, "You got tape?" he winced.
"Yes. Sebastian, what--?"
"Good. Turn it on when we get to Tony's. Let's go."
"Tony's?" not a bang, a whimper.
"Let's go."
Hitman Melodies Section 10
X.
The love scene between Sebastian Chronic and Maddy High cannot be written; the music of it, if such could ever be heard, would reduce the striving words to gibberish. To describe the sex part of it would undoubtedly excite the prurient interest of any low mind, and might, from that level of observation be indistinguishable from any other episode in which two beautiful bodies might be seen fucking their brains out. But if the complex relationship of mental and spiritual energies in play, at that apocalyptic meeting, were even partially perceived, the witness could not fail to recognize a cavalcade of archetypal scenes passing before his eyes--a medley of mythological moments ranging in character from Eros and Psyche on their magic bed, to Baby Jesus sucking the perfect breast of Mother Mary. Every configuration of human meeting and giving was explored on that hearthrug; and when their mutual climaxes had come and gone, the weeping began again, and after that the stillness, now familiar, now almost habitual. They hallowed the hearthrug with their tears, and receded slightly back into themselves covering their nakedness with the quilt, still slightly warmed by the sinking fire.
Sebastian might have lain there in silence until dawn, in that sacred place; but Maddy invoked that denouement that women always feel is necessary after sex--talking. Sebastian went with it.
"What got you into--" she hesitated.
"Contract killing?" he finished for her.
"Yes." Mother Mary's breast snuggled against him, Jughead's Veronica.
"Long story."
"Tell me."
Oh well, sure, why not. "Okay, it's not such a long story. It was personal, the first one. I must be a murderer by nature, you know; just because I'm a cool dude doesn't mean I'm not also a scumbag."
"We'll see."
"Don't argue. I'm still going to kill you."
"I know." It was a joke now. She kissed his collar bone.
"The first one was revenge. I was 16."
"My God."
"You'll never guess what my first instrument was."
"Piano. No, the violin."
"Nice try. The French Horn."
"My God."
"Yeah, I was just another waspy jr. high public school music student, and there was a spare horn. Teacher gave the last saxophone to Freddy Neidermeyer. Imagine if Freddy Neidermeyer had been sick that day, or my real name wasn't Nelson--"
"No shit."
"Nein scheise. The world as we know it would have been different." The musing was irresistible. "Freddy Neidermeyer. What a pig. Sally Osterman got the tuba. Wrap your mind around that one for awhile."
"About the hit."
"The hit. Hit is a professional term for a paid-for assassination. This was murder most foul, a 16-year-old passion turned awry." He sank into the memory, and somehow he didn't hate it, damn him. "We were doing the 1812 Overture for the 4th of July Celebration in Podunk, New Jersey--"
"Where?"
"You writing my biography or what? Don't make me tell you where."
"Sorry," she pouted, just a little bit. "Journalistic curiosity, you know."
"Okay, okay. It was somewhere around here."
"Cool."
"May I continue?"
"Sorry." She kissed his left shoulder. He kissed her right nipple. There is a lot of kissing. Then let this meeting come to order.
"So we're doing the 1812 Overture replete with canon--"
"No shit."
"I was not an underprivileged child. There's tons of money in New Jersey. The Civic Society of Podunk New Jersey is funded by Rockefeller, or some minor Rockefeller relative. Anyway, we have rehearsal after rehearsal, OUTSIDE in the park, WITH the CANON. And the canon never comes in right."
"Never comes in right?"
"The canon part in the 1812 Overture is not improvised. It is not noise. It is written into the percussion section of the score and is supposed to fire precisely at certain times. That guy, Mort Snyder was in the fucking musician's union, for Chrissake! It's supposed to be music."
"Philistine."
"Damn straight. So I talk to him several times, I talk to the conductor, nothing happens. The asshole just likes to fire off the canon when he feels like it--looks at the fireworks or something, wrong length fuse, whatever. You know what his answer to me was? You know what he said when I told him he was firing the canon at the wrong time?"
"I'm spellbound."
"'What the fuck.' He said, 'What the fuck.'!"
"Asshole."
"Damn straight. So I stuffed the canon with ten pounds of cotton balls that morning, and at the performance the Goddamn canon blew up in his face."
"Wow."
"I don't even know that I intended to kill him, I just wanted to blow up the fucking canon. It wasn't obvious I had killed him. The canons are always way backstage and nobody noticed anything except that there was only one canon explosion instead of several. The performance went on to its conclusion; his body was found afterwards, a gash of shrapnel through his brain." And here came the crux of the matter, intimate and spooky. "But right after that first explosion I sensed something and, as I was playing the 2nd horn fanfare notes, I saw transposed in front me the face of Mort Snyder. MORT Snyder? Jesus. He smiled at me, and then he wafted up into the smoke of the fireworks. I can't describe how I felt. And when I heard that he was dead, I can't describe that either. There was never even any suspicion of foul play, it was just assumed that he was a stupid jerk and had loaded up the canon wrong."
"That's a sad story."
"At Tony's it would be a crack-up."
"Don't remind me."
"What fickle memories we all have."
"I can't believe all the shit I heard at that place. Giorgio does this, Chico does that, Chen does this--"
"Chen? You know about Chen?"
"Yeah. Lyang Chen. Merging the Chinese operation with Milano's territory up north--"
"Jackie Junior told you about a MERGER?"
"Not in so many words--you have to speak Jackiejuniorese--but I got the idea that some routine shifting of--"
"Jeezuss!" He sat up, gripping his head in both hands.
"What?!"
"Girl, for the most beautiful, intelligent woman in the world, you are one dumb fucking bimbo!"
"What??!!"
"That's your key. You had it all the time and didn't even know it."
"What do you mean?!" she explained.
"Jackie Junior is planning some dumb move on his own to bring in the Chinese. Jack Milano hates Chen. He would never enter a cooperative business relationship with him, and would move against him if he had enough tactical intelligence. It's been in the back of his mind for months. There has always been something about to happen between those two mafias. Somehow Chen has insinuated his way into Jackie's world, tempted him with an early inheritance, and is undoubtedly using Jackie Junior to set up a hit on Jackie Senior. Sounds like you weren't the only one in bed with Sonny Jim! Ha!"
"You can get all this from an offhanded mention of a MERGER."
"Mafiosos don't merge, they eliminate. If Jackie Junior had even mentioned Chen positively in the presence of anybody in the organization, they would have known something was up. With you, he probably let down his guard enough to let something slip that even he would not normally be dumb enough to let slip."
"So you think I have uncovered an internal Chinese mafia plot against Jack Milano."
"Yes."
"And Jackie Junior, AKA Hamlet Milano, is in on it?"
"Yes."
"And, at this moment, you and I are the only ones on the Milano side who know about it?"
"You're on the money, honey."
A moment of consternated disbelief. "And how is this a good thing for me?"
God I love your stupid airhead. "Maddy, my lovely lamebrain, this intelligence gives you leverage in several ways. It buys you a story, and it sends out a warning for the cops to put a special surveillance on Milano; if they're on top of it, they can either thwart the hit, or watch it go down and then grab Chen's agents when it is over. AND/OR it gets you off the hook with Jack Milano. If you go to him with this, it will mean gratitude from him and curtains for Jackie Junior."
"Damn."
He sat up with enthusiasm, figuring. "In the meantime, there are many adjustments to be made to our current reality. Let me remind you that I'm supposed to kill you."
Maddy was happy. "Remind me of something else instead," she said, and gently pressed his cock in her hand . . .
The second time was slower, more like normal sex, but incredibly drawn out like a Wagnerian overture. This time, they enjoyed each other, explored each other, played with each other; they spread excrescences of sensual delight across the face of night, like strokes of Van Gogh over vast immensities of time. Maddy was happy. She knew he was not going to kill her. She loved him, and he was not going to kill her. What she didn't know was that this was the first time in his life Sebastian had ever made love to a woman twice. This would have made her happier still.
Sebastian was happy for a different reason. Yes, he had lied, again, but, once again it was a tender mercy. Things were not in fact as simple as he had led her to believe--just because Maddy had stumbled onto some critical information, didn't mean all was forgiven. Jack Milano was a son-of-a-bitch whose concept of justice did not easily embrace the concept of forgiveness. To him that reporter bitch was still an informer and a traitor, and it would take more than a lucky break, put together by Sebastian Chronic no less, for him to change his mind about that. But a plan was coalescing in Sebastian's mind, that might mean liberation for all of them.
The love scene between Sebastian Chronic and Maddy High cannot be written; the music of it, if such could ever be heard, would reduce the striving words to gibberish. To describe the sex part of it would undoubtedly excite the prurient interest of any low mind, and might, from that level of observation be indistinguishable from any other episode in which two beautiful bodies might be seen fucking their brains out. But if the complex relationship of mental and spiritual energies in play, at that apocalyptic meeting, were even partially perceived, the witness could not fail to recognize a cavalcade of archetypal scenes passing before his eyes--a medley of mythological moments ranging in character from Eros and Psyche on their magic bed, to Baby Jesus sucking the perfect breast of Mother Mary. Every configuration of human meeting and giving was explored on that hearthrug; and when their mutual climaxes had come and gone, the weeping began again, and after that the stillness, now familiar, now almost habitual. They hallowed the hearthrug with their tears, and receded slightly back into themselves covering their nakedness with the quilt, still slightly warmed by the sinking fire.
Sebastian might have lain there in silence until dawn, in that sacred place; but Maddy invoked that denouement that women always feel is necessary after sex--talking. Sebastian went with it.
"What got you into--" she hesitated.
"Contract killing?" he finished for her.
"Yes." Mother Mary's breast snuggled against him, Jughead's Veronica.
"Long story."
"Tell me."
Oh well, sure, why not. "Okay, it's not such a long story. It was personal, the first one. I must be a murderer by nature, you know; just because I'm a cool dude doesn't mean I'm not also a scumbag."
"We'll see."
"Don't argue. I'm still going to kill you."
"I know." It was a joke now. She kissed his collar bone.
"The first one was revenge. I was 16."
"My God."
"You'll never guess what my first instrument was."
"Piano. No, the violin."
"Nice try. The French Horn."
"My God."
"Yeah, I was just another waspy jr. high public school music student, and there was a spare horn. Teacher gave the last saxophone to Freddy Neidermeyer. Imagine if Freddy Neidermeyer had been sick that day, or my real name wasn't Nelson--"
"No shit."
"Nein scheise. The world as we know it would have been different." The musing was irresistible. "Freddy Neidermeyer. What a pig. Sally Osterman got the tuba. Wrap your mind around that one for awhile."
"About the hit."
"The hit. Hit is a professional term for a paid-for assassination. This was murder most foul, a 16-year-old passion turned awry." He sank into the memory, and somehow he didn't hate it, damn him. "We were doing the 1812 Overture for the 4th of July Celebration in Podunk, New Jersey--"
"Where?"
"You writing my biography or what? Don't make me tell you where."
"Sorry," she pouted, just a little bit. "Journalistic curiosity, you know."
"Okay, okay. It was somewhere around here."
"Cool."
"May I continue?"
"Sorry." She kissed his left shoulder. He kissed her right nipple. There is a lot of kissing. Then let this meeting come to order.
"So we're doing the 1812 Overture replete with canon--"
"No shit."
"I was not an underprivileged child. There's tons of money in New Jersey. The Civic Society of Podunk New Jersey is funded by Rockefeller, or some minor Rockefeller relative. Anyway, we have rehearsal after rehearsal, OUTSIDE in the park, WITH the CANON. And the canon never comes in right."
"Never comes in right?"
"The canon part in the 1812 Overture is not improvised. It is not noise. It is written into the percussion section of the score and is supposed to fire precisely at certain times. That guy, Mort Snyder was in the fucking musician's union, for Chrissake! It's supposed to be music."
"Philistine."
"Damn straight. So I talk to him several times, I talk to the conductor, nothing happens. The asshole just likes to fire off the canon when he feels like it--looks at the fireworks or something, wrong length fuse, whatever. You know what his answer to me was? You know what he said when I told him he was firing the canon at the wrong time?"
"I'm spellbound."
"'What the fuck.' He said, 'What the fuck.'!"
"Asshole."
"Damn straight. So I stuffed the canon with ten pounds of cotton balls that morning, and at the performance the Goddamn canon blew up in his face."
"Wow."
"I don't even know that I intended to kill him, I just wanted to blow up the fucking canon. It wasn't obvious I had killed him. The canons are always way backstage and nobody noticed anything except that there was only one canon explosion instead of several. The performance went on to its conclusion; his body was found afterwards, a gash of shrapnel through his brain." And here came the crux of the matter, intimate and spooky. "But right after that first explosion I sensed something and, as I was playing the 2nd horn fanfare notes, I saw transposed in front me the face of Mort Snyder. MORT Snyder? Jesus. He smiled at me, and then he wafted up into the smoke of the fireworks. I can't describe how I felt. And when I heard that he was dead, I can't describe that either. There was never even any suspicion of foul play, it was just assumed that he was a stupid jerk and had loaded up the canon wrong."
"That's a sad story."
"At Tony's it would be a crack-up."
"Don't remind me."
"What fickle memories we all have."
"I can't believe all the shit I heard at that place. Giorgio does this, Chico does that, Chen does this--"
"Chen? You know about Chen?"
"Yeah. Lyang Chen. Merging the Chinese operation with Milano's territory up north--"
"Jackie Junior told you about a MERGER?"
"Not in so many words--you have to speak Jackiejuniorese--but I got the idea that some routine shifting of--"
"Jeezuss!" He sat up, gripping his head in both hands.
"What?!"
"Girl, for the most beautiful, intelligent woman in the world, you are one dumb fucking bimbo!"
"What??!!"
"That's your key. You had it all the time and didn't even know it."
"What do you mean?!" she explained.
"Jackie Junior is planning some dumb move on his own to bring in the Chinese. Jack Milano hates Chen. He would never enter a cooperative business relationship with him, and would move against him if he had enough tactical intelligence. It's been in the back of his mind for months. There has always been something about to happen between those two mafias. Somehow Chen has insinuated his way into Jackie's world, tempted him with an early inheritance, and is undoubtedly using Jackie Junior to set up a hit on Jackie Senior. Sounds like you weren't the only one in bed with Sonny Jim! Ha!"
"You can get all this from an offhanded mention of a MERGER."
"Mafiosos don't merge, they eliminate. If Jackie Junior had even mentioned Chen positively in the presence of anybody in the organization, they would have known something was up. With you, he probably let down his guard enough to let something slip that even he would not normally be dumb enough to let slip."
"So you think I have uncovered an internal Chinese mafia plot against Jack Milano."
"Yes."
"And Jackie Junior, AKA Hamlet Milano, is in on it?"
"Yes."
"And, at this moment, you and I are the only ones on the Milano side who know about it?"
"You're on the money, honey."
A moment of consternated disbelief. "And how is this a good thing for me?"
God I love your stupid airhead. "Maddy, my lovely lamebrain, this intelligence gives you leverage in several ways. It buys you a story, and it sends out a warning for the cops to put a special surveillance on Milano; if they're on top of it, they can either thwart the hit, or watch it go down and then grab Chen's agents when it is over. AND/OR it gets you off the hook with Jack Milano. If you go to him with this, it will mean gratitude from him and curtains for Jackie Junior."
"Damn."
He sat up with enthusiasm, figuring. "In the meantime, there are many adjustments to be made to our current reality. Let me remind you that I'm supposed to kill you."
Maddy was happy. "Remind me of something else instead," she said, and gently pressed his cock in her hand . . .
The second time was slower, more like normal sex, but incredibly drawn out like a Wagnerian overture. This time, they enjoyed each other, explored each other, played with each other; they spread excrescences of sensual delight across the face of night, like strokes of Van Gogh over vast immensities of time. Maddy was happy. She knew he was not going to kill her. She loved him, and he was not going to kill her. What she didn't know was that this was the first time in his life Sebastian had ever made love to a woman twice. This would have made her happier still.
Sebastian was happy for a different reason. Yes, he had lied, again, but, once again it was a tender mercy. Things were not in fact as simple as he had led her to believe--just because Maddy had stumbled onto some critical information, didn't mean all was forgiven. Jack Milano was a son-of-a-bitch whose concept of justice did not easily embrace the concept of forgiveness. To him that reporter bitch was still an informer and a traitor, and it would take more than a lucky break, put together by Sebastian Chronic no less, for him to change his mind about that. But a plan was coalescing in Sebastian's mind, that might mean liberation for all of them.
Hitman Melodies Section 9
IX.
The afternoon wore on, Sebastian in his chair, Venus reclining on her couch. Whenever Sebastian thought he might be falling asleep, he got up and chained Maddy to the divan. Whenever the feeling passed, he got up and let her loose again. It didn't matter, he stayed in the chair, she stayed on the sofa. To complete the Victorian schtick they had going, Sebastian got out a long-stemmed pipe (not quite the Sherlock Holmes style, but close) and smoked. It was a heady mixture of marijuana, tobacco, and some other mysterious herb he got off a dead Viet Namese apothecary-turned-smuggler down at the docks. This stuff was not stashed at the house, this stuff he carried with him all the time. He did his deepest thinking under its influence. His concentration was a tangible entity, and, as Maddy watched him, energies circulated in the room with the smoke; galaxies of smoke swirled and dispelled and renewed their trains with each drag. And yet the silence retained its virgin pristinity.
Evening crept into the room and bled its colorless wash onto the floors and furniture like a slow-rising tide. Dusk had briefly illuminated the smoke with gold, but now all was gray, and what light there was hung heavily on the room like damp laundry. In a fit of inspiration, Sebastian lit a fire in the fireplace, (it seemed to take only a moment), and suddenly cheerful flames and eery shadows could be seen doing battle there on the thick hearthrug. His eyes watched the interplay of Ying and Yang swirl to a pitch of desperate contrapuntal crescendo until Maddy crowned the moment by rising from her place and kneeling on the rug.
"I want to ask you about your music," she said.
"No you don't," he explained.
"I'm quite musical you know. In college, I couldn't decide between music and journalism; I took classes in both. Then I won an essay contest that had a scholarship attached to it, and that decided me. But I still play."
"Play?"
"The piano."
"Piano, Schwiano."
"I still love it. I still know that music says something words can never say."
"Platitude me not, thou wench of low estate."
"I know. It's hard to say. But I know music speaks the truth. And I think you are connected. There is a truth about you that feels like a song."
"Don't flatter me--"
"I know, you're still going to kill me."
"And don't truth me either. There is no truth. I mean there is truth, but it exists, like perfection, like everything else, on a scale, on a continuum, in a constant state of flux wrestling with every absolute definition we try to restrain it with. We can only know gradations of truth, level after level all spread out in a sequential line from the force of gravity to the face of God, and even there the absolute eludes the squamous mind. At the end of Il Paradiso, as Dante is carried up into the highest heaven, he looks and discovers the fixed, ultimate, immutable face of God is changing--"
"With every change in me," she intruded.
"Yes," he explained, softening in the sweet sympathy. She knows her Dante. And with this little corner of insight, the breadth of her mind is hinted at, and he begins to understand that she understands, and understanding he understands. It has somehow become important, this conversation; it has become a point of contact. He doesn't know with what. He has no time to consider, but suddenly it has become supremely important that all the old thoughts he has had filed away in the "I've-got-that-all-figured-out File" get aired out, get tried out, get shared out--with this woman. The sound of release is deafening. It is a trumpet fanfare born of repressed loneliness he didn't even know he felt until now. He realizes how completely he has been fooling himself, and how desperately he needs to tell her, for her to know, for her to understand. He looks at the pitiful pile of his life's burnt-out trophies smoldering at his feet, and realizes that if ever he continues anything again, he must continue this. With the rattling brass zinging in his ears, he continues, voice rising urgently, clumsily.
"But even that doesn't mean there is no truth, that we can't have truth, it only means we can't capture it with words. Truth is a power, a living entity that comes down from on high and visits us and blesses us and transforms us and lifts us up. When you want to get the truest expression of soul, you have to go to music. Literature never sings the living truth, it points a finger at it and asks music to take over. We experience truth in the moment. Music is not even the truth itself, it is just the carrier."
"Yes. Yes, I see."
Now, louder: "Music mobilizes the energy of higher worlds which channel directly into the physical dimension via the mind and the muscles of Man. There is nothing made up, momentarily in the mind, about music--it is a reality truer than the most real reality you can name, more real than all these busy, fumbling, puerile occupations we call life, more real than death."
"More real than death. You would have to think that wouldn't you?"
"Why would I have to think that?" he mocked. "Because I meld music and death into an indissoluble unity? Because I use music to ease the passing of condemned men--"
"And women," she interrupted.
"--we'll get to that--because I use music to ease the passing of the condemned from one dimension to another? You think just because I keep music at the right hand of the executioner, I have to justify that with some bullshit moral posture, so I won't feel bad when Joey Spinelli gets his head blown off? Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit! My God, woman, you think I became a hit man BEFORE I became a musician? I've ALWAYS been a musician--I just stumbled into this organized crime bullshit because I found out that there was good money to be made and--"
"And?"
"And--"
"And?"
"I don't think I've ever said this out loud before."
"Tell me."
There came a hush in his voice and that hush crushed the two of them into a smaller space. She had crept closer to his chair. The fire would have raged on with his convictions even if he had not thrown another log onto the grate and knelt down beside her on the rug. It was coming--the intimacy--with a tympano roll and a low anticipatory flutter in the alto flute. This was the part he had held inside for too long. This was the lame duck in the row, the loose canon in his philosophy, the exception to the rule. His voice lowered itself an octave and sibilantly hissed its secret, the warm breath of it almost caressing her ear.
"And the death part of it--the once and only part of it--made the music more precious to me. There, I've said it. I don't play the singer of swan songs for the mark--I do it for me."
"Ah."
"The hypocrisy of it grinds me."
"I see."
"But I can't help it. It's like a drug. The ecstasy of the mark flows into me--"
"Yes?"
"And I die each death with him. For a moment my soul rises up with him, I see the heavenly terrain with him. I NEED IT. I need to kill--because I need to--"
"To love," she explains.
"Yes." And she gets that, too. Jeezus! "It is the only peace I know. I hate my life. I hate my power. I hate my killing. I hate my music. But it is only in these tiny moments, when the music opens up the door for me, that I am free."
Only the supplest body, a child's body, can slump into despair as did the sagging limbs of Sebastian Chronic as he collapsed into the lap of Maddy High and wept, confessing all. Again they were weeping together, and it was not for poor made-up Mimi, but for the vast inconsolable isolation of Adam expelled from Eden, awake to all but the bliss of his lost non-entity. Poor, poor Adam! Mother Mary deliver him from his state of dichotomous knowledge! Give him the courage to fight the angel at the gate!
"Maddy, I want to kill you--because I want to know you!" he cried, and, reaching up, laced the shoulders of her robe with graceful fingers, playing into her flesh like fuguing tunes.
"There is another way," she said, and slipped the robe from her shoulders.
The afternoon wore on, Sebastian in his chair, Venus reclining on her couch. Whenever Sebastian thought he might be falling asleep, he got up and chained Maddy to the divan. Whenever the feeling passed, he got up and let her loose again. It didn't matter, he stayed in the chair, she stayed on the sofa. To complete the Victorian schtick they had going, Sebastian got out a long-stemmed pipe (not quite the Sherlock Holmes style, but close) and smoked. It was a heady mixture of marijuana, tobacco, and some other mysterious herb he got off a dead Viet Namese apothecary-turned-smuggler down at the docks. This stuff was not stashed at the house, this stuff he carried with him all the time. He did his deepest thinking under its influence. His concentration was a tangible entity, and, as Maddy watched him, energies circulated in the room with the smoke; galaxies of smoke swirled and dispelled and renewed their trains with each drag. And yet the silence retained its virgin pristinity.
Evening crept into the room and bled its colorless wash onto the floors and furniture like a slow-rising tide. Dusk had briefly illuminated the smoke with gold, but now all was gray, and what light there was hung heavily on the room like damp laundry. In a fit of inspiration, Sebastian lit a fire in the fireplace, (it seemed to take only a moment), and suddenly cheerful flames and eery shadows could be seen doing battle there on the thick hearthrug. His eyes watched the interplay of Ying and Yang swirl to a pitch of desperate contrapuntal crescendo until Maddy crowned the moment by rising from her place and kneeling on the rug.
"I want to ask you about your music," she said.
"No you don't," he explained.
"I'm quite musical you know. In college, I couldn't decide between music and journalism; I took classes in both. Then I won an essay contest that had a scholarship attached to it, and that decided me. But I still play."
"Play?"
"The piano."
"Piano, Schwiano."
"I still love it. I still know that music says something words can never say."
"Platitude me not, thou wench of low estate."
"I know. It's hard to say. But I know music speaks the truth. And I think you are connected. There is a truth about you that feels like a song."
"Don't flatter me--"
"I know, you're still going to kill me."
"And don't truth me either. There is no truth. I mean there is truth, but it exists, like perfection, like everything else, on a scale, on a continuum, in a constant state of flux wrestling with every absolute definition we try to restrain it with. We can only know gradations of truth, level after level all spread out in a sequential line from the force of gravity to the face of God, and even there the absolute eludes the squamous mind. At the end of Il Paradiso, as Dante is carried up into the highest heaven, he looks and discovers the fixed, ultimate, immutable face of God is changing--"
"With every change in me," she intruded.
"Yes," he explained, softening in the sweet sympathy. She knows her Dante. And with this little corner of insight, the breadth of her mind is hinted at, and he begins to understand that she understands, and understanding he understands. It has somehow become important, this conversation; it has become a point of contact. He doesn't know with what. He has no time to consider, but suddenly it has become supremely important that all the old thoughts he has had filed away in the "I've-got-that-all-figured-out File" get aired out, get tried out, get shared out--with this woman. The sound of release is deafening. It is a trumpet fanfare born of repressed loneliness he didn't even know he felt until now. He realizes how completely he has been fooling himself, and how desperately he needs to tell her, for her to know, for her to understand. He looks at the pitiful pile of his life's burnt-out trophies smoldering at his feet, and realizes that if ever he continues anything again, he must continue this. With the rattling brass zinging in his ears, he continues, voice rising urgently, clumsily.
"But even that doesn't mean there is no truth, that we can't have truth, it only means we can't capture it with words. Truth is a power, a living entity that comes down from on high and visits us and blesses us and transforms us and lifts us up. When you want to get the truest expression of soul, you have to go to music. Literature never sings the living truth, it points a finger at it and asks music to take over. We experience truth in the moment. Music is not even the truth itself, it is just the carrier."
"Yes. Yes, I see."
Now, louder: "Music mobilizes the energy of higher worlds which channel directly into the physical dimension via the mind and the muscles of Man. There is nothing made up, momentarily in the mind, about music--it is a reality truer than the most real reality you can name, more real than all these busy, fumbling, puerile occupations we call life, more real than death."
"More real than death. You would have to think that wouldn't you?"
"Why would I have to think that?" he mocked. "Because I meld music and death into an indissoluble unity? Because I use music to ease the passing of condemned men--"
"And women," she interrupted.
"--we'll get to that--because I use music to ease the passing of the condemned from one dimension to another? You think just because I keep music at the right hand of the executioner, I have to justify that with some bullshit moral posture, so I won't feel bad when Joey Spinelli gets his head blown off? Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit! My God, woman, you think I became a hit man BEFORE I became a musician? I've ALWAYS been a musician--I just stumbled into this organized crime bullshit because I found out that there was good money to be made and--"
"And?"
"And--"
"And?"
"I don't think I've ever said this out loud before."
"Tell me."
There came a hush in his voice and that hush crushed the two of them into a smaller space. She had crept closer to his chair. The fire would have raged on with his convictions even if he had not thrown another log onto the grate and knelt down beside her on the rug. It was coming--the intimacy--with a tympano roll and a low anticipatory flutter in the alto flute. This was the part he had held inside for too long. This was the lame duck in the row, the loose canon in his philosophy, the exception to the rule. His voice lowered itself an octave and sibilantly hissed its secret, the warm breath of it almost caressing her ear.
"And the death part of it--the once and only part of it--made the music more precious to me. There, I've said it. I don't play the singer of swan songs for the mark--I do it for me."
"Ah."
"The hypocrisy of it grinds me."
"I see."
"But I can't help it. It's like a drug. The ecstasy of the mark flows into me--"
"Yes?"
"And I die each death with him. For a moment my soul rises up with him, I see the heavenly terrain with him. I NEED IT. I need to kill--because I need to--"
"To love," she explains.
"Yes." And she gets that, too. Jeezus! "It is the only peace I know. I hate my life. I hate my power. I hate my killing. I hate my music. But it is only in these tiny moments, when the music opens up the door for me, that I am free."
Only the supplest body, a child's body, can slump into despair as did the sagging limbs of Sebastian Chronic as he collapsed into the lap of Maddy High and wept, confessing all. Again they were weeping together, and it was not for poor made-up Mimi, but for the vast inconsolable isolation of Adam expelled from Eden, awake to all but the bliss of his lost non-entity. Poor, poor Adam! Mother Mary deliver him from his state of dichotomous knowledge! Give him the courage to fight the angel at the gate!
"Maddy, I want to kill you--because I want to know you!" he cried, and, reaching up, laced the shoulders of her robe with graceful fingers, playing into her flesh like fuguing tunes.
"There is another way," she said, and slipped the robe from her shoulders.
Hitman Melodies Section 8
VIII.
They awoke at noon to the sound of a buzzing lawn mower. Sebastian went out and got rid of the guy--told him to tell his boss to cancel all the maintenance stuff for the rest of the week; this was fine because the cleaning lady had been there just two days ago, and wasn't due back for another week and a half.
The lawn mower guy, Rinaldo, newly arrived from San Juan, was unconcerned with the change of plan, and was especially pleased with the $20 tip stuffed into his pocket as he was packing up; but when he got back to the office and tried to describe Sebastian to Vic the manager, he realized he had got no clear impression of the visitor at the house. It seems every time Rinaldo looked him in the face, Mr. Sullivan was standing directly in the noonday glare, or turning around, or leaning over to admire the keen Sears Clip-o-matic extension, or angling the brim of his fedora over his eyes. "He kind of stoop over, like theess," said Rinaldo, in his new second language, "and he have a high squeaky voice, I theenk. Old man, may-be, seexty years old may-be." Vic's curiosity was as short as his attention span--anybody willing to pay $400/mo to have somebody collect the mail and dust twice a month deserved his private agenda, which was sure to be beyond Vic's ken no matter how you cut it. "No maintenance on Orpheus St. till next week. Account credited."
Sebastian let Maddy out of the cuffs. After checking the bathroom for any unauthorized blades or poisons, he left her alone for a half hour to have a pleasant bath. There were towels, toilet paper, soap, and not much else in the closet; but, rather than change back into her formal eveningwear, she selected a fluffy gray bathrobe to serve as house dress. When she came out, she initially had that slicked-down-pinched-together look women get after they wash their hair, but as she padded quietly through the living room into the kitchen area, meanwhile drying out a bit, she radiated a charismatic warmth and sense of peace. Ever so slightly deified by the situation, she entered a painting in Sebastian's mind, a Botticelli, a symbolic personification of comfort and well-being. She lifted herself up a step onto a barstool at the white counter, revealing a moment of pale, sexy leg before re-covering it demurely with the gray robe.
Sebastian plunked down in front of her a plate of steaming scrambled eggs and toasted English muffins swimming in melted butter. Timing was everything with him. Nay, PERFECT TIMING was everything to him, and he had listened outside the bathroom door for fifteen minutes to be sure that that first perfect glistening drop of butter dripped off the muffin the second he placed it in front of her.
"Oooh," she oohed. "Yummy!" She dug in. "So you keep this place stocked?" "Yes. These people have been throwing out rotten eggs and moldy English muffins for ten years, just so you could have a pleasant brunch, this morning." And a no more pleasant country scene can verily be imagined: a wide picture window flooded the bright kitchen with cheerful sundrops, and from a point of relative elevation, they watched the elegant suburban green of New Jersey curtsey across the proscenium, in bobbing roundness of elm and oak, the iridescent yellow of the fall sumack just beginning to show. Sebastian was drinking Earl Grey and turned to peer through the steam at his forested back yard.
"Deception," he mused.
"Hmmm?" mouth full.
"Facade."
"What in particular inspires this comment?" wiping her mouth with a ten-year old napkin.
"I was just admiring my Sher-wood out here. It looks like it goes deep into Narnia, but I know that 20 paces past where I can see, there is a wall, and over that wall is a four-lane state road curving around into Apollo, where may be conveniently enjoyed: two smallish shopping malls, a McDonald's, a Burger King, and a Hitmen 'r' Us. Ha ha."
"Hitpersons 'r' Us, maybe?" she countered. Death draped from his delicate fingers round the cup, a J.S. Bach Bi-Centennial mug, with a quotation from the Musical Offering on the side. Such delicate fingers, long pianist's fingers, spidery Wanda Landowska fingers.
"Yeah, right. Come to think of it, I may be the only politically correct hit--uh--person hiding out in New Jersey."
"Don't flatter yourself, Roxy the Pox has been living up the road in Hera Ct. ever since he put down Richie Prizzi. He sings in the Apollo Presbyterian Church Choir. He wears a forged halo."
"What is this, newspaper humor?"
"Just trying to flow along with the traffic, boss."
"Don't be cute. I'm still going to kill you."
"So you keep saying." Her mouth was set in an enigmatic pout, but, reaching for another muffin, she stretched over the counter just a enough to let the robe droop open a little. She had to be subtle, but somehow she had to make him want it--had to let him know she wanted it. That was what was strange to her--with all the handcuffs, talk of killing, and the silence, she wanted it. She felt like a moth before a flame, only it was she, not the flame who played the role of temptress. She wondered how she was going to entrap the flame without getting burned. But she forgot to think about this when his eyes were on her. To be burned by Sebastian Chronic became a consummation devoutly to be wished. Strange. And exciting.
"Deception. Facade," he recapitulated. "It's everywhere. We are caught in a field between the twin magnets of what is and what isn't. We drift first toward one magnet then the other, and neither side is true. Which means, both are true, I guess. Which means that any point on the continuum is also true."
"You wanta demystify a bit, Obi-Wan? Where is this going?"
"I don't know that it's going anywhere. I was just looking at my fake woods out there and thinking of a piece I wrote a few years ago called, Secret Garden, for lute, recorder, and tenor viol."
"Renaissance nouveau, eh?"
"Well, duh. I wanted to capture the antique throwback flavor of these little private backyards that cultivate the illusion of being so small and disconnected from the world, and are so totally not."
"I thought all your music was written for gangland hits."
"It is. This was for Joey Spinelli--it was his secret: his secret garden. I hired a trio from Brooklyn to play the piece, and I conducted. Joey had to step to the music, blindfolded, along a faintly-marked path, like a tight-rope walker, avoiding landmines. I told him, if he made it to the back of the yard without breaking time, I'd let him go. He had good rhythm, I have to say."
"My God. Did he hit any of them?"
"There was only one. I timed it so he made it to the little angel by the fountain on the last cadence. The music stopped, he thought he was clear, and ripped off his blindfold in ecstasy. That triggered the bomb."
"You lied."
"Not really. The device was at his feet. If he hadn't anticipated, he would have made it. Of course, Chico was waiting for him out on the street with a shotgun. It was better this way. You should have seen the smile on his face. His head fell into the angel's lap, and the smile stayed pasted on there till the water washed it off."
"The smile?"
"His face."
"Ah."
They awoke at noon to the sound of a buzzing lawn mower. Sebastian went out and got rid of the guy--told him to tell his boss to cancel all the maintenance stuff for the rest of the week; this was fine because the cleaning lady had been there just two days ago, and wasn't due back for another week and a half.
The lawn mower guy, Rinaldo, newly arrived from San Juan, was unconcerned with the change of plan, and was especially pleased with the $20 tip stuffed into his pocket as he was packing up; but when he got back to the office and tried to describe Sebastian to Vic the manager, he realized he had got no clear impression of the visitor at the house. It seems every time Rinaldo looked him in the face, Mr. Sullivan was standing directly in the noonday glare, or turning around, or leaning over to admire the keen Sears Clip-o-matic extension, or angling the brim of his fedora over his eyes. "He kind of stoop over, like theess," said Rinaldo, in his new second language, "and he have a high squeaky voice, I theenk. Old man, may-be, seexty years old may-be." Vic's curiosity was as short as his attention span--anybody willing to pay $400/mo to have somebody collect the mail and dust twice a month deserved his private agenda, which was sure to be beyond Vic's ken no matter how you cut it. "No maintenance on Orpheus St. till next week. Account credited."
Sebastian let Maddy out of the cuffs. After checking the bathroom for any unauthorized blades or poisons, he left her alone for a half hour to have a pleasant bath. There were towels, toilet paper, soap, and not much else in the closet; but, rather than change back into her formal eveningwear, she selected a fluffy gray bathrobe to serve as house dress. When she came out, she initially had that slicked-down-pinched-together look women get after they wash their hair, but as she padded quietly through the living room into the kitchen area, meanwhile drying out a bit, she radiated a charismatic warmth and sense of peace. Ever so slightly deified by the situation, she entered a painting in Sebastian's mind, a Botticelli, a symbolic personification of comfort and well-being. She lifted herself up a step onto a barstool at the white counter, revealing a moment of pale, sexy leg before re-covering it demurely with the gray robe.
Sebastian plunked down in front of her a plate of steaming scrambled eggs and toasted English muffins swimming in melted butter. Timing was everything with him. Nay, PERFECT TIMING was everything to him, and he had listened outside the bathroom door for fifteen minutes to be sure that that first perfect glistening drop of butter dripped off the muffin the second he placed it in front of her.
"Oooh," she oohed. "Yummy!" She dug in. "So you keep this place stocked?" "Yes. These people have been throwing out rotten eggs and moldy English muffins for ten years, just so you could have a pleasant brunch, this morning." And a no more pleasant country scene can verily be imagined: a wide picture window flooded the bright kitchen with cheerful sundrops, and from a point of relative elevation, they watched the elegant suburban green of New Jersey curtsey across the proscenium, in bobbing roundness of elm and oak, the iridescent yellow of the fall sumack just beginning to show. Sebastian was drinking Earl Grey and turned to peer through the steam at his forested back yard.
"Deception," he mused.
"Hmmm?" mouth full.
"Facade."
"What in particular inspires this comment?" wiping her mouth with a ten-year old napkin.
"I was just admiring my Sher-wood out here. It looks like it goes deep into Narnia, but I know that 20 paces past where I can see, there is a wall, and over that wall is a four-lane state road curving around into Apollo, where may be conveniently enjoyed: two smallish shopping malls, a McDonald's, a Burger King, and a Hitmen 'r' Us. Ha ha."
"Hitpersons 'r' Us, maybe?" she countered. Death draped from his delicate fingers round the cup, a J.S. Bach Bi-Centennial mug, with a quotation from the Musical Offering on the side. Such delicate fingers, long pianist's fingers, spidery Wanda Landowska fingers.
"Yeah, right. Come to think of it, I may be the only politically correct hit--uh--person hiding out in New Jersey."
"Don't flatter yourself, Roxy the Pox has been living up the road in Hera Ct. ever since he put down Richie Prizzi. He sings in the Apollo Presbyterian Church Choir. He wears a forged halo."
"What is this, newspaper humor?"
"Just trying to flow along with the traffic, boss."
"Don't be cute. I'm still going to kill you."
"So you keep saying." Her mouth was set in an enigmatic pout, but, reaching for another muffin, she stretched over the counter just a enough to let the robe droop open a little. She had to be subtle, but somehow she had to make him want it--had to let him know she wanted it. That was what was strange to her--with all the handcuffs, talk of killing, and the silence, she wanted it. She felt like a moth before a flame, only it was she, not the flame who played the role of temptress. She wondered how she was going to entrap the flame without getting burned. But she forgot to think about this when his eyes were on her. To be burned by Sebastian Chronic became a consummation devoutly to be wished. Strange. And exciting.
"Deception. Facade," he recapitulated. "It's everywhere. We are caught in a field between the twin magnets of what is and what isn't. We drift first toward one magnet then the other, and neither side is true. Which means, both are true, I guess. Which means that any point on the continuum is also true."
"You wanta demystify a bit, Obi-Wan? Where is this going?"
"I don't know that it's going anywhere. I was just looking at my fake woods out there and thinking of a piece I wrote a few years ago called, Secret Garden, for lute, recorder, and tenor viol."
"Renaissance nouveau, eh?"
"Well, duh. I wanted to capture the antique throwback flavor of these little private backyards that cultivate the illusion of being so small and disconnected from the world, and are so totally not."
"I thought all your music was written for gangland hits."
"It is. This was for Joey Spinelli--it was his secret: his secret garden. I hired a trio from Brooklyn to play the piece, and I conducted. Joey had to step to the music, blindfolded, along a faintly-marked path, like a tight-rope walker, avoiding landmines. I told him, if he made it to the back of the yard without breaking time, I'd let him go. He had good rhythm, I have to say."
"My God. Did he hit any of them?"
"There was only one. I timed it so he made it to the little angel by the fountain on the last cadence. The music stopped, he thought he was clear, and ripped off his blindfold in ecstasy. That triggered the bomb."
"You lied."
"Not really. The device was at his feet. If he hadn't anticipated, he would have made it. Of course, Chico was waiting for him out on the street with a shotgun. It was better this way. You should have seen the smile on his face. His head fell into the angel's lap, and the smile stayed pasted on there till the water washed it off."
"The smile?"
"His face."
"Ah."
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