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
Sunday, November 23, 2008
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."
Hitman Melodies Section 7
VII.
Maddy looked out the window at the lengthening distance that separated her from the wrath of Jack Milano. With her right hand she lightly stroked the fingernails of her left and turned to Sebastian Chronic, chief enforcer for the Milano crime family.
"Can you--do you want to tell me where we are going?"
"Got a place. Gotta think."
Silence. It had become the primary modus apparandi of their relationship.
"I'm not giving you to them. I know you don't know anything. I know it."
"Thanks." Silence. "You're right, you know, I missed it--I don't know shit."
"Don't suck up to me--I'm still going to kill you."
"Ah."
Black water flowed beneath them as they crossed the George Washington Bridge; the liquid movement was almost imperceptible, but, like unconscious thoughts, an occasional white ripple betrayed the river's secret progress toward the ocean of its non-being. The inward curve of the suspension arches, and the diffracted glare of yellow lights, (spewed out of the bus terminal on the New York side), gave the scene a suffocating, sickly-surreal cast; but as her glance bent back on the magnificence of the city the never sleeps, the breadth of scope almost tempted Maddy's soul to flights of freedom. Almost.
The George Washington Bridge was a portal into the mental mediocrity of New Jersey. Sebastian hated New Jersey. That's why he'd kept a secret hideaway there for years, against the advent of a clean escape from whomever. He knew someday he would need a place. He had bought it, cash on the barrelhead, almost ten years ago, paid an automatic monthly fee to a maintenance company from an account twice removed from his legal name, and had not set eyes on it since. He almost didn't remember how to get there, but the address, Orpheus Street in Apollo New Jersey, was a pnemonic he had chosen apurpose when he bought the place, (the deciding factor really), and he knew it was located at the plumb end of a cul-de-sac, which (the cul-de-sac part) he figured would be a memorable, albeit vulgar, symbolic reduction of whatever future emergency sent him reeling there.
They rolled up the driveway, headlights off, at about 5:00 A.M., and sat for a moment before trudging up the wooden steps. The house had the look of a lakeside resort; it was surrounded on three sides by an enclosed porch, its shutters were that ugly Lincoln/RobinHood green color that people paint their Sherwood-foresty houses with; and, if you looked at it straight on, ignoring the other five or six houses on the short street, its pervasive brown, melting into the color of the trees among which it was comfortably nestled, gave it a feeling of privacy and protection more appropriate to a mountain cabin than a house in a New Jersey suburb. Sebastian had enough money saved to retire there and never show his face to the forces of evil ever again, and the thought had crossed his mind more than once. In the rising dawn, the dark criss-cross of the screens became livid with tiny squares of gold, and the sunrise lifted Maddy's heart with hope she did not think ought to be there. Perhaps the hope had risen from the silence between them.
She followed Sebastian up the steps, docile, almost trusting. They were together in this, and thoughts of escape had never entered her mind. She knew that any attempt to flee would be an insult to his intelligence, and an invitation to corrective surgery. Her only chance of overwhelming him had been at the opera house, and (he was right) there had never been more than a 30% chance of success there. The rest of her eggs resided in a completely other basket. For now, waiting, in the web of his fascination, was the signature of the moment and of any immediate future lurking in the shortening shadows of breaking day.
Indeed, "fascination" was a key descriptor of Maddy's general mood. Of course, she was terrified of dying, but fear of death had unexpectedly taken a back seat to another feeling--a feeling of hypnotic distraction. Considering the circumstances, most people would consider getting caught up in feelings of fascination with one's executioner to be fucking bonkers, and Maddy's higher self, witnessing the scene from above, knew this to be true. However, here below, she found it more and more difficult to look upon him as a coarse murderer. The music of the dance hummed its refrain in his every movement, in the refinement of his expression, spoken and unspoken, in the smoothness of his physical gestures, the way he swerved the Jaguar through New York City traffic, the masterful way he had swooped her through the doors of the Met, the way he drove Chico to the floor with one balletic arc of his arm; his every completed act was a phrase in a chain of melody that seemed to stretch to infinity, and she was swept into it, brought along by the force of it, as a mere note of orchestration in the grand design of a cosmic symphony, a glorious vision that an insensitive world would not see, but which he heard with every breath, with every sigh.
The key was not under the mat--it was underneath a little white plastic 8th note screwed to the door, the single hint as to the house's true owner. Sebastian slid the 8th note sideways, caught the key as it dropped out of its niche, slid the key into the lock, twisted and threw the door back, all in one fluid motion. His arm swung wide with the door, and he surveyed his domain for the first time in ten years with the familiar air of one who has never left it. It might have been the drawing room of a Victorian aristocrat, replete with hearth and hound, except there was no hound and the hearth was cold and dark. Maddy followed him in. She almost tripped over a package on the floor, a long, thick envelope that had been dropped through the mail slot and knocked to the side by Sebastian's sweeping entrance.
Stooping to pick up the package, he said, "This is not only my getaway, this is my library. I send stuff here every few weeks (addressed to Gilbert Sullivan) and the cleaning lady has instructions to place the envelopes on this shelf over here." He stepped over to an enormous bookcase which took up the entire far wall. On it could be seen rows and rows of yellow 9"x12" envelopes, like the one he had just picked up, neatly stacked in vertical piles. "This is my life's work sitting on these shelves," he mused, almost to himself. He checked the date, gave a nod of satisfaction, and placed the envelope on the shortest stack. "Have a seat."
Before she knew what was happening, Maddy had been maneuvered over to a plush Victorian divan; the left arm of the sofa had a metal bar, about two feet long, growing out of the top of it, affixed by a two-footed steel frame. She looked down and was surprised to see her wrists inhibited by restraints. It would not be fair to call them handcuffs, because they were padded with soft rubber, quite as comfortable as they were confining; there were three feet of play in a thin chain linking the hands, and in the middle of this chain was connected another chain that Sebastian was padlocking to the metal bar on the arm of the couch. She could see the feet of the couch nailed to the floor.
Maddy was taken aback by the suddenness of the action, and because, all night, Sebastian had barely laid a finger on her--it was understood that she was his prisoner, and she should not try any funny business. Eventually, their dual complicity had made the idea of funny business contrary to their shared project--getting away from Jack Milano. Now, she was almost insulted to see their colloquial confidence so betrayed, but she immediately saw the wisdom of it.
"Let's be clear," Sebastian said. "I just broke faith with one of the most vicious, unforgiving monsters on the face of the planet. I crossed Jack Milano for you, which makes us partners in complicity, and makes me the target of a relentless, remorseless, murdering crime family. The fact that I couldn't stand the idea of them torturing you for no reason, doesn't mean I'm still not going to kill you. I admit that I haven't yet decided what I'm going to do with you, but, for the time being, you are in my power and are going to stay that way, and I am NOT going to underestimate you, or give you any more free pokes at me. You almost got me with that poison letter, you know--twice."
Maddy attempted to quell a blush of professional pride, but her bosom would not obey her inner command. Her breasts swelled with the smile she would not allow to break upon her face. Sebastian reached down and swiped the emerald broach off that pleasantly pneumatic convexity, and checked it for microphones one more time, before throwing it onto a lampstand on the other side of the room. This was the third savage gesture he had visited on Maddy's person--the first was at the Met, the second was at Tony's when he told her to keep her fucking hands off the cymbals, and now this, the most violent, taking away her emerald broach--it was like shaving Samson's hair. She could not have been more humiliated if he had stripped her naked. She hated him then, and with the hate came the clarity: he had already checked that device at the opera house, he didn't need to check it again--he just wanted to touch her. Once again, a disdainful act had protested a secret, involuntary attraction. It was a false move, and they both knew it.
This would have been the time for talk, but it turned into a time for sleep. Sebastian threw her a quilt from a corner closet, installed himself in a great overstuffed chair, neatly out of range of her restraints, and, before either of them knew it, their dreams were intertwined like kite strings, each tugging in different directions, each flying up the same.
Maddy looked out the window at the lengthening distance that separated her from the wrath of Jack Milano. With her right hand she lightly stroked the fingernails of her left and turned to Sebastian Chronic, chief enforcer for the Milano crime family.
"Can you--do you want to tell me where we are going?"
"Got a place. Gotta think."
Silence. It had become the primary modus apparandi of their relationship.
"I'm not giving you to them. I know you don't know anything. I know it."
"Thanks." Silence. "You're right, you know, I missed it--I don't know shit."
"Don't suck up to me--I'm still going to kill you."
"Ah."
Black water flowed beneath them as they crossed the George Washington Bridge; the liquid movement was almost imperceptible, but, like unconscious thoughts, an occasional white ripple betrayed the river's secret progress toward the ocean of its non-being. The inward curve of the suspension arches, and the diffracted glare of yellow lights, (spewed out of the bus terminal on the New York side), gave the scene a suffocating, sickly-surreal cast; but as her glance bent back on the magnificence of the city the never sleeps, the breadth of scope almost tempted Maddy's soul to flights of freedom. Almost.
The George Washington Bridge was a portal into the mental mediocrity of New Jersey. Sebastian hated New Jersey. That's why he'd kept a secret hideaway there for years, against the advent of a clean escape from whomever. He knew someday he would need a place. He had bought it, cash on the barrelhead, almost ten years ago, paid an automatic monthly fee to a maintenance company from an account twice removed from his legal name, and had not set eyes on it since. He almost didn't remember how to get there, but the address, Orpheus Street in Apollo New Jersey, was a pnemonic he had chosen apurpose when he bought the place, (the deciding factor really), and he knew it was located at the plumb end of a cul-de-sac, which (the cul-de-sac part) he figured would be a memorable, albeit vulgar, symbolic reduction of whatever future emergency sent him reeling there.
They rolled up the driveway, headlights off, at about 5:00 A.M., and sat for a moment before trudging up the wooden steps. The house had the look of a lakeside resort; it was surrounded on three sides by an enclosed porch, its shutters were that ugly Lincoln/RobinHood green color that people paint their Sherwood-foresty houses with; and, if you looked at it straight on, ignoring the other five or six houses on the short street, its pervasive brown, melting into the color of the trees among which it was comfortably nestled, gave it a feeling of privacy and protection more appropriate to a mountain cabin than a house in a New Jersey suburb. Sebastian had enough money saved to retire there and never show his face to the forces of evil ever again, and the thought had crossed his mind more than once. In the rising dawn, the dark criss-cross of the screens became livid with tiny squares of gold, and the sunrise lifted Maddy's heart with hope she did not think ought to be there. Perhaps the hope had risen from the silence between them.
She followed Sebastian up the steps, docile, almost trusting. They were together in this, and thoughts of escape had never entered her mind. She knew that any attempt to flee would be an insult to his intelligence, and an invitation to corrective surgery. Her only chance of overwhelming him had been at the opera house, and (he was right) there had never been more than a 30% chance of success there. The rest of her eggs resided in a completely other basket. For now, waiting, in the web of his fascination, was the signature of the moment and of any immediate future lurking in the shortening shadows of breaking day.
Indeed, "fascination" was a key descriptor of Maddy's general mood. Of course, she was terrified of dying, but fear of death had unexpectedly taken a back seat to another feeling--a feeling of hypnotic distraction. Considering the circumstances, most people would consider getting caught up in feelings of fascination with one's executioner to be fucking bonkers, and Maddy's higher self, witnessing the scene from above, knew this to be true. However, here below, she found it more and more difficult to look upon him as a coarse murderer. The music of the dance hummed its refrain in his every movement, in the refinement of his expression, spoken and unspoken, in the smoothness of his physical gestures, the way he swerved the Jaguar through New York City traffic, the masterful way he had swooped her through the doors of the Met, the way he drove Chico to the floor with one balletic arc of his arm; his every completed act was a phrase in a chain of melody that seemed to stretch to infinity, and she was swept into it, brought along by the force of it, as a mere note of orchestration in the grand design of a cosmic symphony, a glorious vision that an insensitive world would not see, but which he heard with every breath, with every sigh.
The key was not under the mat--it was underneath a little white plastic 8th note screwed to the door, the single hint as to the house's true owner. Sebastian slid the 8th note sideways, caught the key as it dropped out of its niche, slid the key into the lock, twisted and threw the door back, all in one fluid motion. His arm swung wide with the door, and he surveyed his domain for the first time in ten years with the familiar air of one who has never left it. It might have been the drawing room of a Victorian aristocrat, replete with hearth and hound, except there was no hound and the hearth was cold and dark. Maddy followed him in. She almost tripped over a package on the floor, a long, thick envelope that had been dropped through the mail slot and knocked to the side by Sebastian's sweeping entrance.
Stooping to pick up the package, he said, "This is not only my getaway, this is my library. I send stuff here every few weeks (addressed to Gilbert Sullivan) and the cleaning lady has instructions to place the envelopes on this shelf over here." He stepped over to an enormous bookcase which took up the entire far wall. On it could be seen rows and rows of yellow 9"x12" envelopes, like the one he had just picked up, neatly stacked in vertical piles. "This is my life's work sitting on these shelves," he mused, almost to himself. He checked the date, gave a nod of satisfaction, and placed the envelope on the shortest stack. "Have a seat."
Before she knew what was happening, Maddy had been maneuvered over to a plush Victorian divan; the left arm of the sofa had a metal bar, about two feet long, growing out of the top of it, affixed by a two-footed steel frame. She looked down and was surprised to see her wrists inhibited by restraints. It would not be fair to call them handcuffs, because they were padded with soft rubber, quite as comfortable as they were confining; there were three feet of play in a thin chain linking the hands, and in the middle of this chain was connected another chain that Sebastian was padlocking to the metal bar on the arm of the couch. She could see the feet of the couch nailed to the floor.
Maddy was taken aback by the suddenness of the action, and because, all night, Sebastian had barely laid a finger on her--it was understood that she was his prisoner, and she should not try any funny business. Eventually, their dual complicity had made the idea of funny business contrary to their shared project--getting away from Jack Milano. Now, she was almost insulted to see their colloquial confidence so betrayed, but she immediately saw the wisdom of it.
"Let's be clear," Sebastian said. "I just broke faith with one of the most vicious, unforgiving monsters on the face of the planet. I crossed Jack Milano for you, which makes us partners in complicity, and makes me the target of a relentless, remorseless, murdering crime family. The fact that I couldn't stand the idea of them torturing you for no reason, doesn't mean I'm still not going to kill you. I admit that I haven't yet decided what I'm going to do with you, but, for the time being, you are in my power and are going to stay that way, and I am NOT going to underestimate you, or give you any more free pokes at me. You almost got me with that poison letter, you know--twice."
Maddy attempted to quell a blush of professional pride, but her bosom would not obey her inner command. Her breasts swelled with the smile she would not allow to break upon her face. Sebastian reached down and swiped the emerald broach off that pleasantly pneumatic convexity, and checked it for microphones one more time, before throwing it onto a lampstand on the other side of the room. This was the third savage gesture he had visited on Maddy's person--the first was at the Met, the second was at Tony's when he told her to keep her fucking hands off the cymbals, and now this, the most violent, taking away her emerald broach--it was like shaving Samson's hair. She could not have been more humiliated if he had stripped her naked. She hated him then, and with the hate came the clarity: he had already checked that device at the opera house, he didn't need to check it again--he just wanted to touch her. Once again, a disdainful act had protested a secret, involuntary attraction. It was a false move, and they both knew it.
This would have been the time for talk, but it turned into a time for sleep. Sebastian threw her a quilt from a corner closet, installed himself in a great overstuffed chair, neatly out of range of her restraints, and, before either of them knew it, their dreams were intertwined like kite strings, each tugging in different directions, each flying up the same.
Hitman Melodies Section 6
VI.
Sebastian and Maddy spent an hour or so after Mimi's demise in a little pizza joint a few blocks from Lincoln Center. They traded Puccini for Dolly Parton on the juke box. It was a good trade--Sebastian thought there was no other voice in the universe like Dolly Parton's. With Dolly and Maddy in the room together, it was a tempting diversion to compare cup sizes, but that was just silly. Draped in the dusk of the Coke machine and the cash register, they spoke very little over pepperoni; they were each considering what had passed between them during the last act: Sebastian was figuring how this would influence the character of the hit (the exquisite roundness of her undulating bosom flooded his mind with voluptuous viola melodies of doom and desire, but he still intended to do his job, preferably without spoiling that Attic shape); Maddy's thoughts were wildly searching for a way out, meanwhile noticing that his gaze wandered haphazardly past the emerald broach in a not uninterested rhythmical pattern. In spite of these twin, hidden hysterias, their eyes met more and more often, and attending those meetings a stoic calm began to penetrate the scene; a kind of peace eventually settled over them, and they ate, and drank, and sat together in a void--a stillness that took them both by surprise, but which they neither one tried to resist.
After pizza, they toured Central Park in a cab; the stillness persisted, followed them into the cab and nestled comfortably between them like a great St. Bernard, as they each lurked leisurely out of separate windows, passing the time--time, a concrete quality, now as heavy and sluggish as the stones guarding the 5th Avenue promenade. They circulated five, six, seven times in absolute silence, again and again past the park benches, the picnic grounds, and the horse trails, gloomy and mysterious now, with the trembling shadows of trees disfiguring the surface of the pavement with shifting shapes cast there, as it were, thrown away, by the city's grainy glow. The Afghani driver's gum-chewing face, faintly lit by the light of the speedometer, was the only sign of active life inside the cab. Sebastian and Maddy were both sitting sort of side-ways, their faces glued to opposite windows, their legs skewed toward the center of the cramped backseat, a kind of adolescent posture. A bump in the road shifted their toes into a position of lightly touching each other. Nobody shifted his/her position, but each was aware of the contact, and each was aware that the other did nothing to change it. Sebastian got this weird impression of Michelangelo's Adam touching the finger of God, but instead of touching fingers they were touching toes. Jeezus!
They were meeting Milano at Tony's. 3:00 A.M., after closing. Sebastian didn't know if the whole crew would be there with him, or just Jackie Junior, or maybe nobody else. They got dropped off at the alley in back, and came in through the kitchen. He was gripping her arm, guiding her with subtle pressures and pulls, and when she strayed a hair's breadth from the direction in which he was leading her, she could fell his powerful, wiry strength. It was known that he was a master of Karate and Tai Chi, and his body, though spare and light was exceedingly strong and tough--a cross between Baryshnikov and Bruce Lee.
Sebastian threw aside the curtain separating the miniscule backstage area from the stage, and stepped up onto the trumpet risers. They threaded their way into the restaurant past the piano, a dark brown smudge in the green glow of the exit lights. They paused for a moment amid music stands and drum set. Maddy whizzed a ride cymbal with her fingernail, sending a ghostly sigh out into the empty dark. Sebastian gave her a peremptory jerk on the arm--a territorial gesture indicating that all musical parameters of their relationship were in HIS domain, and keep your fucking fingers off the drums. He was also saying, you can forget that toe-touching, bitch, you're a dead girl, that's for damn sure. Maddy began to hope he protesteth too much. Sebastian wondered if he protested too much.
They stepped down off the slightly raised stage and sat at one of the front row tables. The table cloth was spread crookedly, at a jaggedly jaunty angle; bread crumbs and spilled wine, luminescing in the green, gave its surface the texture of a lunar landscape, a desert or a junkyard. He thought of that clever cartoon he'd seen years ago: it depicts a desolate wind-swept horizon on which appear an old used tire, a rusty soup can, and other useless garbage; the caption reads, "Life without Mozart." In the pulsating emptiness of that cluttered room, two feet away from Maddy High, Sebastian suddenly felt the impoverished desperation of a life without Mozart. He fought to dispel the feeling, but it grew on him, flooding his mind like the headlight of an approaching locomotive. In order to block the light he spoke:
"So you had something to tell me," he said.
"I was just going to blow smoke," she said. "I was going to try to sell you on the idea that Jackie had let slip something. I had to meet you to realize you wouldn't fall for it. You don't fall for much, do you Mr. Chronic?"
"Mozart," Sebastian muttered, inaudibly. They sat. She let it pass.
They waited. The St. Bernard rose up, scratched its ears, and moseyed out past the drum set, sighing the cymbal again with its tail. As the stillness rescinded itself, replaced by a nervous vibration filling the space between them, not once did their eyes meet; and yet their non-meeting was a tangible thing, a riotous, maniacal conflagration of feelings and conflict. The shadows of their spirits striving together on the back wall awakened the dense air to activity and turmoil, and the sound of breathing became a thunderous symphony. Sebastian was imagining piercing her heart with a cello endpin, but each time he summoned up the vision, he found his own breast transposed into the scenario. Maddy, for her part, was a veil of tears, yet, tantric-like, not a single drop moistened her cheek. Her cheek, the soft part right under the eye, was a couch where Sebastian's imaginary lips reclined in blissful repose. He turned toward her. Still the eyes did not meet, but he observed that cheek with the same desire that a man dying of thirst in the desert sees a pool of water, the same attention with which a man on the gibbet, face upturned, studies the guillotine's haughty blade. They were two tough cookies caught in a meat-grinder of emotion. Each was waiting, not for the other, but for him/herself to crumble.
Suddenly fragile, Jesus in the garden, she whispered, "What do you suppose they'll do to me?" The subtle tremble in her voice betrayed her fears. What would they do to her, to make sure she didn't know what they were afraid she knew? If only she knew what she knew they were afraid she knew, but didn't know, damn it! I don't want to die--but even less do I want to learn what a blow torch feels like. Abba, let this cup pass from me.
"I don't know," said Sebastian. "But I hope you don't have any vain attachment to your fingernails." He was sorry the moment he said it. He was sorry he was sorry. and he was sorry he was sorry he was sorry.
It took some moments for the fingernail moment to disperse into shards. Maddy braced herself. "Mr. Chronic, answer me one question."
"No," he explained.
And before he knew what was happening, and before she knew what was happening, and before the shadows in the room could adjust to the unaccustomed flight of wings, he had grabbed her hand and was dragging her past the piano, through the kitchen, and out the back. They met Jonesy and Chico both coming in as they opened the door.
Chico's face brightened in recognition. "Sebastian! You got the bitch! Great work. Hey, Jack is right behin--." Sebastian delivered a lightning-quick karate chop to the throat sending Chico to his knees. A powerful right cross left Jonesy piled on top of Chico, clattered to the floor with a tray full of dirty dishes and silverware. The broken wine glasses glittered like sand on a lunar landscape. One more lurch forward and they were in Sebastian's Jag, parked right out on the street, and they were gone. Sebastian had tried to control his punches. He had tried not to kill Chico. "Chico is probably not dead," he thought.
Sebastian and Maddy spent an hour or so after Mimi's demise in a little pizza joint a few blocks from Lincoln Center. They traded Puccini for Dolly Parton on the juke box. It was a good trade--Sebastian thought there was no other voice in the universe like Dolly Parton's. With Dolly and Maddy in the room together, it was a tempting diversion to compare cup sizes, but that was just silly. Draped in the dusk of the Coke machine and the cash register, they spoke very little over pepperoni; they were each considering what had passed between them during the last act: Sebastian was figuring how this would influence the character of the hit (the exquisite roundness of her undulating bosom flooded his mind with voluptuous viola melodies of doom and desire, but he still intended to do his job, preferably without spoiling that Attic shape); Maddy's thoughts were wildly searching for a way out, meanwhile noticing that his gaze wandered haphazardly past the emerald broach in a not uninterested rhythmical pattern. In spite of these twin, hidden hysterias, their eyes met more and more often, and attending those meetings a stoic calm began to penetrate the scene; a kind of peace eventually settled over them, and they ate, and drank, and sat together in a void--a stillness that took them both by surprise, but which they neither one tried to resist.
After pizza, they toured Central Park in a cab; the stillness persisted, followed them into the cab and nestled comfortably between them like a great St. Bernard, as they each lurked leisurely out of separate windows, passing the time--time, a concrete quality, now as heavy and sluggish as the stones guarding the 5th Avenue promenade. They circulated five, six, seven times in absolute silence, again and again past the park benches, the picnic grounds, and the horse trails, gloomy and mysterious now, with the trembling shadows of trees disfiguring the surface of the pavement with shifting shapes cast there, as it were, thrown away, by the city's grainy glow. The Afghani driver's gum-chewing face, faintly lit by the light of the speedometer, was the only sign of active life inside the cab. Sebastian and Maddy were both sitting sort of side-ways, their faces glued to opposite windows, their legs skewed toward the center of the cramped backseat, a kind of adolescent posture. A bump in the road shifted their toes into a position of lightly touching each other. Nobody shifted his/her position, but each was aware of the contact, and each was aware that the other did nothing to change it. Sebastian got this weird impression of Michelangelo's Adam touching the finger of God, but instead of touching fingers they were touching toes. Jeezus!
They were meeting Milano at Tony's. 3:00 A.M., after closing. Sebastian didn't know if the whole crew would be there with him, or just Jackie Junior, or maybe nobody else. They got dropped off at the alley in back, and came in through the kitchen. He was gripping her arm, guiding her with subtle pressures and pulls, and when she strayed a hair's breadth from the direction in which he was leading her, she could fell his powerful, wiry strength. It was known that he was a master of Karate and Tai Chi, and his body, though spare and light was exceedingly strong and tough--a cross between Baryshnikov and Bruce Lee.
Sebastian threw aside the curtain separating the miniscule backstage area from the stage, and stepped up onto the trumpet risers. They threaded their way into the restaurant past the piano, a dark brown smudge in the green glow of the exit lights. They paused for a moment amid music stands and drum set. Maddy whizzed a ride cymbal with her fingernail, sending a ghostly sigh out into the empty dark. Sebastian gave her a peremptory jerk on the arm--a territorial gesture indicating that all musical parameters of their relationship were in HIS domain, and keep your fucking fingers off the drums. He was also saying, you can forget that toe-touching, bitch, you're a dead girl, that's for damn sure. Maddy began to hope he protesteth too much. Sebastian wondered if he protested too much.
They stepped down off the slightly raised stage and sat at one of the front row tables. The table cloth was spread crookedly, at a jaggedly jaunty angle; bread crumbs and spilled wine, luminescing in the green, gave its surface the texture of a lunar landscape, a desert or a junkyard. He thought of that clever cartoon he'd seen years ago: it depicts a desolate wind-swept horizon on which appear an old used tire, a rusty soup can, and other useless garbage; the caption reads, "Life without Mozart." In the pulsating emptiness of that cluttered room, two feet away from Maddy High, Sebastian suddenly felt the impoverished desperation of a life without Mozart. He fought to dispel the feeling, but it grew on him, flooding his mind like the headlight of an approaching locomotive. In order to block the light he spoke:
"So you had something to tell me," he said.
"I was just going to blow smoke," she said. "I was going to try to sell you on the idea that Jackie had let slip something. I had to meet you to realize you wouldn't fall for it. You don't fall for much, do you Mr. Chronic?"
"Mozart," Sebastian muttered, inaudibly. They sat. She let it pass.
They waited. The St. Bernard rose up, scratched its ears, and moseyed out past the drum set, sighing the cymbal again with its tail. As the stillness rescinded itself, replaced by a nervous vibration filling the space between them, not once did their eyes meet; and yet their non-meeting was a tangible thing, a riotous, maniacal conflagration of feelings and conflict. The shadows of their spirits striving together on the back wall awakened the dense air to activity and turmoil, and the sound of breathing became a thunderous symphony. Sebastian was imagining piercing her heart with a cello endpin, but each time he summoned up the vision, he found his own breast transposed into the scenario. Maddy, for her part, was a veil of tears, yet, tantric-like, not a single drop moistened her cheek. Her cheek, the soft part right under the eye, was a couch where Sebastian's imaginary lips reclined in blissful repose. He turned toward her. Still the eyes did not meet, but he observed that cheek with the same desire that a man dying of thirst in the desert sees a pool of water, the same attention with which a man on the gibbet, face upturned, studies the guillotine's haughty blade. They were two tough cookies caught in a meat-grinder of emotion. Each was waiting, not for the other, but for him/herself to crumble.
Suddenly fragile, Jesus in the garden, she whispered, "What do you suppose they'll do to me?" The subtle tremble in her voice betrayed her fears. What would they do to her, to make sure she didn't know what they were afraid she knew? If only she knew what she knew they were afraid she knew, but didn't know, damn it! I don't want to die--but even less do I want to learn what a blow torch feels like. Abba, let this cup pass from me.
"I don't know," said Sebastian. "But I hope you don't have any vain attachment to your fingernails." He was sorry the moment he said it. He was sorry he was sorry. and he was sorry he was sorry he was sorry.
It took some moments for the fingernail moment to disperse into shards. Maddy braced herself. "Mr. Chronic, answer me one question."
"No," he explained.
And before he knew what was happening, and before she knew what was happening, and before the shadows in the room could adjust to the unaccustomed flight of wings, he had grabbed her hand and was dragging her past the piano, through the kitchen, and out the back. They met Jonesy and Chico both coming in as they opened the door.
Chico's face brightened in recognition. "Sebastian! You got the bitch! Great work. Hey, Jack is right behin--." Sebastian delivered a lightning-quick karate chop to the throat sending Chico to his knees. A powerful right cross left Jonesy piled on top of Chico, clattered to the floor with a tray full of dirty dishes and silverware. The broken wine glasses glittered like sand on a lunar landscape. One more lurch forward and they were in Sebastian's Jag, parked right out on the street, and they were gone. Sebastian had tried to control his punches. He had tried not to kill Chico. "Chico is probably not dead," he thought.
Hitman Melodies Section 5
V.
At intermission, there was no break for them out in the hall. They sat in the brilliant glare of the chandelier eyeing each other. She had turned to the side, legs crossed, her feet in their short private aisle. She shuffled the furs off her shoulders and gave Sebastian that first sweet glimpse of her famous tits. A push-up bra would have been redundant; her breasts were like loaves of fresh bread (home-made, warm, sweet cinnamon bread) pulsing out of her dress, the tender tender skin so touchable at every curve; and from this elevated angle Sebastian's eye could follow every delicious undulation all the way to the nipple, nestled like a fawn just below the lace.
"Let's see the broach."
She leaned up toward him, exposing her cleavage with an ever-so-slightly seductive tremble.
"I mean take it off."
She pouted a little, turned away scorned, like a man zipping up his fly, and unclasped the emerald. "Here." insensitive asshole motherfucker philistine faggot.
"The mic fits right in here?"
"Yes. It's got a pick-up range of only about three feet, and the wire gets awful sweaty in there, but it works pretty good. I've got hours of tape. Every bad, dumb mafia joke ever told by a bunch of disgusting drunks is on tape. I could put out a comedy album."
Contact. Now what? He gave it back. She put it on, a splash of green in that same rolling valley.
"We going to get a chance to talk, or are you just going to do me?"
"Sebastian Chronic doesn't do anybody, but, yeah, you get to talk to Milano himself. He'll probably slap you around a little, but he'll leave the rest to me. I'll find a way to ease your pain."
"Mr. Chronic I've got something to say that you may find int--"
"Shut up. Third act is starting. We can leave after that. I want to hear the quartet."
"Let's stay to the end. I want to see Mimi die. You know."
"Okay, we'll watch Mimi die."
A strange thing happens then. The third act piddles along at its pseudo-Wagnerian pace, and Musetta gets to break some crockery; but when the fourth act comes and the pathetic, tubercular Mimi starts coughing up her last good-byes, Maddy begins to cry. Sebastian moves down next to her, and envelopes her small heaving shoulders into his cape. And then he is crying too, and they are both sitting there crying in a box at the Met for poor baby Mimi, too young to die, alas. They have shared their first peak moment together, they have given birth to a shared aesthetic response.
"How hard it will be to kill her now."
"He will have trouble killing me now."
At intermission, there was no break for them out in the hall. They sat in the brilliant glare of the chandelier eyeing each other. She had turned to the side, legs crossed, her feet in their short private aisle. She shuffled the furs off her shoulders and gave Sebastian that first sweet glimpse of her famous tits. A push-up bra would have been redundant; her breasts were like loaves of fresh bread (home-made, warm, sweet cinnamon bread) pulsing out of her dress, the tender tender skin so touchable at every curve; and from this elevated angle Sebastian's eye could follow every delicious undulation all the way to the nipple, nestled like a fawn just below the lace.
"Let's see the broach."
She leaned up toward him, exposing her cleavage with an ever-so-slightly seductive tremble.
"I mean take it off."
She pouted a little, turned away scorned, like a man zipping up his fly, and unclasped the emerald. "Here." insensitive asshole motherfucker philistine faggot.
"The mic fits right in here?"
"Yes. It's got a pick-up range of only about three feet, and the wire gets awful sweaty in there, but it works pretty good. I've got hours of tape. Every bad, dumb mafia joke ever told by a bunch of disgusting drunks is on tape. I could put out a comedy album."
Contact. Now what? He gave it back. She put it on, a splash of green in that same rolling valley.
"We going to get a chance to talk, or are you just going to do me?"
"Sebastian Chronic doesn't do anybody, but, yeah, you get to talk to Milano himself. He'll probably slap you around a little, but he'll leave the rest to me. I'll find a way to ease your pain."
"Mr. Chronic I've got something to say that you may find int--"
"Shut up. Third act is starting. We can leave after that. I want to hear the quartet."
"Let's stay to the end. I want to see Mimi die. You know."
"Okay, we'll watch Mimi die."
A strange thing happens then. The third act piddles along at its pseudo-Wagnerian pace, and Musetta gets to break some crockery; but when the fourth act comes and the pathetic, tubercular Mimi starts coughing up her last good-byes, Maddy begins to cry. Sebastian moves down next to her, and envelopes her small heaving shoulders into his cape. And then he is crying too, and they are both sitting there crying in a box at the Met for poor baby Mimi, too young to die, alas. They have shared their first peak moment together, they have given birth to a shared aesthetic response.
"How hard it will be to kill her now."
"He will have trouble killing me now."
Hitman Melodies Section 4
IV.
Maddy went straight to the men's john and started picking off plastic pimples. She figured she had five minutes. She knew when he pulled out the glove, he was on to her, and wondered why he hadn't taken her right then. "I guess my disguise was pretty good," she giggled, taking out padding and peeling rubber off her nose. Her evening gown was stashed in the last stall, and within seconds she was admiring her pneumatic bosom in the mirror, getting the emerald broach just right. She wouldn't insult him by trying to run a wire, but she couldn't meet him face to face without a self-conscious display of her signature logo. When they met (and they would meet) she would need every ounce of personality she could gain to entice his interest in her, and buy time.
She didn't figure he would fall for the poison birthday card (damn those gloves! maybe latex on her hands would have worked?), but she had to make an opening gambit with potential disaster written on it to show him she was serious. Her second move was going to be much more dangerous. She knew he would be down momentarily (he might be outside the door right now), but she had to let him catch her just at the front doors. She had to lead him out that way because she had a cop stashed on the steps.
Just ten minutes ago, she had reported a mugging and asked for a patrol car to come down at once. She had maneuvered a passing beat cop (lucky break, that) over to the front of the Met, hysterically describing a thin, hollow-cheeked man in an opera cape who had assaulted her, ("Look at my eye, ow,") and took her purse. "He just ran around the corner there. No, over there. I have to go in here for a minute, I want to see what he did to my eye." (Put dark make-up on it?) "I'll be right back. Wait for me." She ran into the lobby of the Met (she had her ticket in hand, seat up in the gallery) before the cop could react, and in about 90 seconds she was in the men's bathroom. (The 1st act was well under way, there were no men in there.) Quickly off with the dress (and furs, yes, and jewelry, and the black eye), on with the pimples, and in two minutes she was gingerly skipping upstairs in thick glasses and a pillbox hat, sporting a birthday card, held at a distance, in a gloved hand.
The whole operation had taken less than seven minutes. She was extremely lucky with the timing--she might have been off by two or three minutes, if that extra cop hadn't entered the picture. Now she had potentially three cops waiting outside, not knowing that in a few minutes she was going to yell, "Rape! Help, he's got a pistol!", and they were going to obligingly gun down Sebastian Chronic for her. It could work. Timing was everything.
In the bellboy outfit she had practically hopped up the stairs; now, in her slinky, low-cut gown, that glittering emerald fringed with fake mink, she glided out of the men's room; but not a leasurely glide--a firm, skateboard-like sweep that covered the distance without appearing rushed. She didn't see him. She's slackened her pace. She sees the cop through the glass wall. He is pacing and pissed. Good. "Still no Chronic. Is that the police car? Great. I'm almost there--ten feet from the door. Here's Chronic coming out of the elevator, his cape draped over his arm. Perfect. Here I go."
She was being carried to the door just ahead of him on the current of her self-created flow, and would have timed it perfectly except--Sebastian is a master of timing, too. With a flourish, he twirls his cape off his arm and over his shoulder. CRASH. Sebastian's cape just knocked over a huge rack of Metropolitan Opera pamphlets. They're everywhere. Maddy involuntarily turns and looks back at the ushers' fluttering outcry. That turn cost her the game, because in that two second interval, Sebastian used the diversion to cover the distance between the counter and the revolving glass door.
"Hello, Mr. Chronic. I was just waiting for you. I'd like to--"
He spun her deftly toward the door, and stuck his hand into her mink. "You know what I'm digging into your back right now?"
"It feels like a ball point pen."
"Strike two, Miss College Bowl birthday card," he hissed. "You're talking to Sebastian Chronic, infamous underworld figure, who does not bargain, and who does not bluff. I'm holding a syringe of plaxenated-poly-hypo-cystic plasma. At the moment the needle is retracted, but one deft motion of my thumb sends enough of this stuff into your spinal cord to arrest your heartbeat for two hours, about one hour and fifty-eight minutes longer than the rest of your life. Now feel this," (he jabs her viciously, she snarls and pouts), "and ask yourself if you really thought Sebastian Chronic was going to come out on the job armed with nothing but a ball point pen."
"Mr. Chronic, I think we have a misunder--."
"Miss High--that's right, into the spinning door--we have about 15 seconds before interfacing with New York's Finest. Would you rather waste it on bad acting, or listen to the man who holds your life in his hands? Now hush." She hushed--grimaced and hushed. "I can see your plan, and although it never had more than a 30% chance of success, it still shows strength of purpose, character. I admire that. But right now, we are going outside, and you are getting rid of that flatfoot. Then, you and I are going back into the opera house and listening to La Boheme. Or, we could dance through the Pearly Gates together."
They were outside.
"Ma'am, what's the big idea leaving--? Hey, your eye looks a lot better."
Oops.
"Is this the guy in the cape?"
"No officer, this is--."
Sebastian swung her around in a dramatic tango sweep. "She's my ball and chain, officer Krupke," he sang. He pranced a circular two-step around the blur-faced blue. "We just came to the opera from a Fred Astaire movie, if you can believe that! I wanted to be on time, she wanted to dry her nails, so what happens? I leave her alone in a cab for 15 minutes and she loses her wallet. What a great town. You like opera, Sergeant Krupke? You think--."
"McElvoy--."
"McElvoy--you think Fred Astaire and Puccini make a pair, in their underwear, don't stare, yes, I'm very civilizedly, opera house drunk. You ever had opera house champagne, Officer Krup-McElvoy? No champagne, no gain! Our swains commend it. Hey Offishr Krp--."
"Ma'am, you wanta--here's my back-up now, hi Lou, we got a phantom of the opera house purse snatcher somewhere around here, and--."
"Officer McElvoy, I'm calmed down now," she panted, "and I think I'll come over to the station later and fill out the report forms. Right now, we're going in--we don't want to miss any more of the opera--."
"You and your fucking nails," asided Sebastian. "I ask you what kind of a dumb bimbo polishes her nails in a fucking taxi cab on the way to La Boheme? It's so--bourgeois!"
"and my hubby here has been looking forward to this for a good 45 minutes, which is longer than he looks forward to most things," (yank, yank) she was flowing into the part, "Thank you, good night."
"Hey, wait a minute--." Mr. New York's Finest never gets to finish a sentence.
They turn.
"Ma'am--"
"Keep walking," a sober-hissing Chronic jabs and jerks, weaves for the cops. Back through the revolving glass door. Krupke's protests are muffled now. The Keystone Cops try to catch up with them, but they get tangled in the revolving door. Ten steps to the elevator's warm ding, and they are away, cops slipping and sliding on opera house brochures. In two minutes they are sitting in his box, she on the rail, he directly behind. Just in time for the septet.
"Mr. Chronic," she whispers over her shoulder.
He leans over her ear. "I know at least fifty ways to break your neck and throw you in the official Metropolitan Opera Dumpster, so turn around and shut up."
"What were you sticking in my back?"
"A ball point pen."
"I thought so."
"But I've got plenty of real fire-power aimed at your head, now, so don't test me."
"Of course."
Silence. Down on the stage, Musetta flirts and fumes. Rodolfo rises and beckons to Mimi.
Sebastian leans forward again. "Out of idle curiosity--what was written on the card?" he whispers.
"The Dies Irae."
"Ah." Pause. "Gregorian or Byzantine version?"
"New Catholic, American translation."
"Ah. Here comes the high note."
Marcello the painter sings the only really good high note in the act, although everybody gets a piece of it at the climax of the septet. Here comes the parade. Mimi follows her friends off stage, her thin cotton dress translucent in the dimming lights, a vision of spring, swaying against the martial music.
Maddy went straight to the men's john and started picking off plastic pimples. She figured she had five minutes. She knew when he pulled out the glove, he was on to her, and wondered why he hadn't taken her right then. "I guess my disguise was pretty good," she giggled, taking out padding and peeling rubber off her nose. Her evening gown was stashed in the last stall, and within seconds she was admiring her pneumatic bosom in the mirror, getting the emerald broach just right. She wouldn't insult him by trying to run a wire, but she couldn't meet him face to face without a self-conscious display of her signature logo. When they met (and they would meet) she would need every ounce of personality she could gain to entice his interest in her, and buy time.
She didn't figure he would fall for the poison birthday card (damn those gloves! maybe latex on her hands would have worked?), but she had to make an opening gambit with potential disaster written on it to show him she was serious. Her second move was going to be much more dangerous. She knew he would be down momentarily (he might be outside the door right now), but she had to let him catch her just at the front doors. She had to lead him out that way because she had a cop stashed on the steps.
Just ten minutes ago, she had reported a mugging and asked for a patrol car to come down at once. She had maneuvered a passing beat cop (lucky break, that) over to the front of the Met, hysterically describing a thin, hollow-cheeked man in an opera cape who had assaulted her, ("Look at my eye, ow,") and took her purse. "He just ran around the corner there. No, over there. I have to go in here for a minute, I want to see what he did to my eye." (Put dark make-up on it?) "I'll be right back. Wait for me." She ran into the lobby of the Met (she had her ticket in hand, seat up in the gallery) before the cop could react, and in about 90 seconds she was in the men's bathroom. (The 1st act was well under way, there were no men in there.) Quickly off with the dress (and furs, yes, and jewelry, and the black eye), on with the pimples, and in two minutes she was gingerly skipping upstairs in thick glasses and a pillbox hat, sporting a birthday card, held at a distance, in a gloved hand.
The whole operation had taken less than seven minutes. She was extremely lucky with the timing--she might have been off by two or three minutes, if that extra cop hadn't entered the picture. Now she had potentially three cops waiting outside, not knowing that in a few minutes she was going to yell, "Rape! Help, he's got a pistol!", and they were going to obligingly gun down Sebastian Chronic for her. It could work. Timing was everything.
In the bellboy outfit she had practically hopped up the stairs; now, in her slinky, low-cut gown, that glittering emerald fringed with fake mink, she glided out of the men's room; but not a leasurely glide--a firm, skateboard-like sweep that covered the distance without appearing rushed. She didn't see him. She's slackened her pace. She sees the cop through the glass wall. He is pacing and pissed. Good. "Still no Chronic. Is that the police car? Great. I'm almost there--ten feet from the door. Here's Chronic coming out of the elevator, his cape draped over his arm. Perfect. Here I go."
She was being carried to the door just ahead of him on the current of her self-created flow, and would have timed it perfectly except--Sebastian is a master of timing, too. With a flourish, he twirls his cape off his arm and over his shoulder. CRASH. Sebastian's cape just knocked over a huge rack of Metropolitan Opera pamphlets. They're everywhere. Maddy involuntarily turns and looks back at the ushers' fluttering outcry. That turn cost her the game, because in that two second interval, Sebastian used the diversion to cover the distance between the counter and the revolving glass door.
"Hello, Mr. Chronic. I was just waiting for you. I'd like to--"
He spun her deftly toward the door, and stuck his hand into her mink. "You know what I'm digging into your back right now?"
"It feels like a ball point pen."
"Strike two, Miss College Bowl birthday card," he hissed. "You're talking to Sebastian Chronic, infamous underworld figure, who does not bargain, and who does not bluff. I'm holding a syringe of plaxenated-poly-hypo-cystic plasma. At the moment the needle is retracted, but one deft motion of my thumb sends enough of this stuff into your spinal cord to arrest your heartbeat for two hours, about one hour and fifty-eight minutes longer than the rest of your life. Now feel this," (he jabs her viciously, she snarls and pouts), "and ask yourself if you really thought Sebastian Chronic was going to come out on the job armed with nothing but a ball point pen."
"Mr. Chronic, I think we have a misunder--."
"Miss High--that's right, into the spinning door--we have about 15 seconds before interfacing with New York's Finest. Would you rather waste it on bad acting, or listen to the man who holds your life in his hands? Now hush." She hushed--grimaced and hushed. "I can see your plan, and although it never had more than a 30% chance of success, it still shows strength of purpose, character. I admire that. But right now, we are going outside, and you are getting rid of that flatfoot. Then, you and I are going back into the opera house and listening to La Boheme. Or, we could dance through the Pearly Gates together."
They were outside.
"Ma'am, what's the big idea leaving--? Hey, your eye looks a lot better."
Oops.
"Is this the guy in the cape?"
"No officer, this is--."
Sebastian swung her around in a dramatic tango sweep. "She's my ball and chain, officer Krupke," he sang. He pranced a circular two-step around the blur-faced blue. "We just came to the opera from a Fred Astaire movie, if you can believe that! I wanted to be on time, she wanted to dry her nails, so what happens? I leave her alone in a cab for 15 minutes and she loses her wallet. What a great town. You like opera, Sergeant Krupke? You think--."
"McElvoy--."
"McElvoy--you think Fred Astaire and Puccini make a pair, in their underwear, don't stare, yes, I'm very civilizedly, opera house drunk. You ever had opera house champagne, Officer Krup-McElvoy? No champagne, no gain! Our swains commend it. Hey Offishr Krp--."
"Ma'am, you wanta--here's my back-up now, hi Lou, we got a phantom of the opera house purse snatcher somewhere around here, and--."
"Officer McElvoy, I'm calmed down now," she panted, "and I think I'll come over to the station later and fill out the report forms. Right now, we're going in--we don't want to miss any more of the opera--."
"You and your fucking nails," asided Sebastian. "I ask you what kind of a dumb bimbo polishes her nails in a fucking taxi cab on the way to La Boheme? It's so--bourgeois!"
"and my hubby here has been looking forward to this for a good 45 minutes, which is longer than he looks forward to most things," (yank, yank) she was flowing into the part, "Thank you, good night."
"Hey, wait a minute--." Mr. New York's Finest never gets to finish a sentence.
They turn.
"Ma'am--"
"Keep walking," a sober-hissing Chronic jabs and jerks, weaves for the cops. Back through the revolving glass door. Krupke's protests are muffled now. The Keystone Cops try to catch up with them, but they get tangled in the revolving door. Ten steps to the elevator's warm ding, and they are away, cops slipping and sliding on opera house brochures. In two minutes they are sitting in his box, she on the rail, he directly behind. Just in time for the septet.
"Mr. Chronic," she whispers over her shoulder.
He leans over her ear. "I know at least fifty ways to break your neck and throw you in the official Metropolitan Opera Dumpster, so turn around and shut up."
"What were you sticking in my back?"
"A ball point pen."
"I thought so."
"But I've got plenty of real fire-power aimed at your head, now, so don't test me."
"Of course."
Silence. Down on the stage, Musetta flirts and fumes. Rodolfo rises and beckons to Mimi.
Sebastian leans forward again. "Out of idle curiosity--what was written on the card?" he whispers.
"The Dies Irae."
"Ah." Pause. "Gregorian or Byzantine version?"
"New Catholic, American translation."
"Ah. Here comes the high note."
Marcello the painter sings the only really good high note in the act, although everybody gets a piece of it at the climax of the septet. Here comes the parade. Mimi follows her friends off stage, her thin cotton dress translucent in the dimming lights, a vision of spring, swaying against the martial music.
Hitman Melodies Section 3
III.
It was La Boheme again. Sebastian had to admit that he still loved the 2nd Act Septet, Quando men vo, but he resented how all the sopranos excerpted the first half of it, just so they could sing the high note. (It was the difference between a visceral response versus a formal, (you might say relational), response--listening with your gut instead of your mind. "My God, any dodo bird, listening with his little pea brain, could see that piece isn't finished saying what it has to say at that halfway point! Damn the high note. But never mind.") Yes, he still liked that piece, especially the fact that it doesn't end, but flows right into the next scene--no place for applause. Bravo Giacomo Caro! But Sebastian was beginning to lose interest in the rest of Puccini's bag of tricks; it was the obviousness of the Mickey Mouse dramatic materials, the calculated pathos, the clumsy melodic juxtapositions between the voice and the orchestra, the multitudinous interminable high notes, etc. Anything Sebastian could see through, he didn't like; he preferred music that went straight for the kill. "God, Mozart would have been a fabulous hit man."
Another good thing about La Boheme is that it doesn't have an overture, it just plows right into the action from the first staccato cello notes. This means that, as soon as the house lights go down, there is a faint wash emanating from the stage, illuminating the faces of the audience with a ghostly translucent glow; if there had been an overture, the audience would have been in relative darkness for a good five or six minutes--plenty of time for a sniper to set up a cymbal crash shot. Chronic knew she knew this was their first parry, that she was in no danger, but that he was. He knew she knew that he was offering her the first blow. He was in a private box, there would be lots of chances. Which one would she take?
The first act proceeded routinely. Mimi the Bohemian seamstress was appropriately fetching, Rodolfo the poet was appropriately heroic. Sebastian had never known an heroic poet, just a lot of faggoty assholes who thought that since they could put it into words, they had it all figured out. He never really liked Rodolfo, and wondered why Mimi didn't dump him sooner. The pianissimo high C at the end of the scene brought down the house in tears and sighs; all the old society matrons were once again affirmed in their sensitivity and culture. Their diamonds sparkled, their sables gleamed. The great Metropolitan Opera House chandelier was like a lighthouse of truth and beauty in a dull, dark place.
There is a pause while they change the set for the 2nd Act, but they are not taking a full intermission. He has just spent the 1st Act eyeballing every person in the entire audience using a modified night-vision telescope-turned-opera-glass. She was not in the audience. Disguised as opera house staff? He watched a girl usher for awhile, standing just off the orchestra aisle down in front; she was a lovely thing, down there in the half-light, mouthing the words to Mimi's aria with her, lost in the magic of it, very sensitive. The kid was obviously a music major at Julliard, just across the square, and could probably out sing Miss Too-Fragile-for-Words up there. Maddy was not in the hall. She was laying for him somewhere outside. Now would be a good time.
There is a soft knock at his door. Right on cue--she wouldn't want to piss him off by interrupting the music--now was okay. He answers the knock sideways and low. (He doesn't expect anything obvious, but he remembers to not underestimate her.) He looks down at a formally be-capped usher--a teen-age kid with thick glasses and pimples--on the short side, kind of fat. (The Flash Gordon shoulders and the West Point buttons remind Sebastian of the Drake Hotel in the 30's. He stole a Bible from there once--used it to kill a pedophiliac priest. There's no place like Chicago.)
"Mr. Chronic?" (His voice is a polite, crackly whisper.)
"Yes."
"Message sir."
"Message?"
"Message. From downstairs."
"Downstairs."
"Yes, sir. Somebody came by the box office and left a note for you. Asked me to deliver it. We had to look up your reservation, because she didn't--"
"She?"
"Yes, sir. Some woman. Dressed up in furs. Asked me to please deliver this note to Mr. Sebastian Chronic's private box. She didn't know the box number--we had to look it up."
The boy held out a square envelope with a ribbon around it. It looked like a birthday card. Sebastian reached for it, but just before taking it, he noticed that the boy was wearing white gloves. Sebastian quickly went into his pocket for a tip and came out with a black-gloved hand. He took the envelope. It was scented: blush of rose. (Flores para los muertos?) He dropped a twenty on the kid, because he deserved it, and swung the door closed in his face.
"Thank you, s--."
"Hmmm. A birthday card. Wants me to know it's from her. Happy Deathday to me. She wants me to know she's playing by the rules, she kept her appointment." He mused absently while his creative geist kicked into gear. He almost touched the envelope to his temple and then he remembered. Why was the usher wearing the glove? Would she have entrusted a package that might contain some kind of lethal poison to a dumb shit music major? Who knew what was in that envelope? Or on it? (The scent was a nice touch--covered any telltale odor.) It could be anything--could be some of that contact poison--the kind that, if you merely touch it, your body goes into silent convulsions and you are dead in two minutes. Came out of the aerospace industry, if you can dig that. No, the clue was in the outer action of giving him the birthday card--anything inside was anti-climax (for Sebastian, of course).
"That gloved hand keeps coming back to me. What if--? What if it was Maddy High herself, just now, who delivered that card?" She knew he would be concentrating on the envelope and not be too attentive of the bearer, right? Even that maroon pill-box hat, with the cute strap that stretched down under the chin, was distracting in a good way for her--more of her face was obscured. (Was that singer-usher on the first floor wearing a hat? No, just the boys, I guess.) And the pimples--nobody wants to look too closely at a face with pimples, and yet--did they look kind of waxy, kind of Hollywood FX glossy finish? He looks down at a formally be-capped usher--a teen-age kid with thick glasses and pimples--on the short side, kind of fat. Kind of fat? Ha! she was disguising her boobs! She was really a classy-looking girl with a face as smooth as wedding cake, so it was necessary, (and easy enough), to disguise that with pimples, but no polyester wrap known to man was ever going to bind those magnificent breasts down to a flat- chested Cherubino--she had to be fat! Damn, he could have taken her right then! Not only had he missed his first chance, but she had upstaged him by offering her opponent the first blow. "Shit, this kid is good." Sebastian was in love. He threw the envelope (and the glove) into a trash bin on his way out, off to drive a knife into his love's heart. He was going to have to miss the famous 2nd Act Septet.
The next day a janitor at the Metropolitan Opera House died mysteriously on the job--he was cleaning the 3rd floor boxes, and had some kind of seizure.
It was La Boheme again. Sebastian had to admit that he still loved the 2nd Act Septet, Quando men vo, but he resented how all the sopranos excerpted the first half of it, just so they could sing the high note. (It was the difference between a visceral response versus a formal, (you might say relational), response--listening with your gut instead of your mind. "My God, any dodo bird, listening with his little pea brain, could see that piece isn't finished saying what it has to say at that halfway point! Damn the high note. But never mind.") Yes, he still liked that piece, especially the fact that it doesn't end, but flows right into the next scene--no place for applause. Bravo Giacomo Caro! But Sebastian was beginning to lose interest in the rest of Puccini's bag of tricks; it was the obviousness of the Mickey Mouse dramatic materials, the calculated pathos, the clumsy melodic juxtapositions between the voice and the orchestra, the multitudinous interminable high notes, etc. Anything Sebastian could see through, he didn't like; he preferred music that went straight for the kill. "God, Mozart would have been a fabulous hit man."
Another good thing about La Boheme is that it doesn't have an overture, it just plows right into the action from the first staccato cello notes. This means that, as soon as the house lights go down, there is a faint wash emanating from the stage, illuminating the faces of the audience with a ghostly translucent glow; if there had been an overture, the audience would have been in relative darkness for a good five or six minutes--plenty of time for a sniper to set up a cymbal crash shot. Chronic knew she knew this was their first parry, that she was in no danger, but that he was. He knew she knew that he was offering her the first blow. He was in a private box, there would be lots of chances. Which one would she take?
The first act proceeded routinely. Mimi the Bohemian seamstress was appropriately fetching, Rodolfo the poet was appropriately heroic. Sebastian had never known an heroic poet, just a lot of faggoty assholes who thought that since they could put it into words, they had it all figured out. He never really liked Rodolfo, and wondered why Mimi didn't dump him sooner. The pianissimo high C at the end of the scene brought down the house in tears and sighs; all the old society matrons were once again affirmed in their sensitivity and culture. Their diamonds sparkled, their sables gleamed. The great Metropolitan Opera House chandelier was like a lighthouse of truth and beauty in a dull, dark place.
There is a pause while they change the set for the 2nd Act, but they are not taking a full intermission. He has just spent the 1st Act eyeballing every person in the entire audience using a modified night-vision telescope-turned-opera-glass. She was not in the audience. Disguised as opera house staff? He watched a girl usher for awhile, standing just off the orchestra aisle down in front; she was a lovely thing, down there in the half-light, mouthing the words to Mimi's aria with her, lost in the magic of it, very sensitive. The kid was obviously a music major at Julliard, just across the square, and could probably out sing Miss Too-Fragile-for-Words up there. Maddy was not in the hall. She was laying for him somewhere outside. Now would be a good time.
There is a soft knock at his door. Right on cue--she wouldn't want to piss him off by interrupting the music--now was okay. He answers the knock sideways and low. (He doesn't expect anything obvious, but he remembers to not underestimate her.) He looks down at a formally be-capped usher--a teen-age kid with thick glasses and pimples--on the short side, kind of fat. (The Flash Gordon shoulders and the West Point buttons remind Sebastian of the Drake Hotel in the 30's. He stole a Bible from there once--used it to kill a pedophiliac priest. There's no place like Chicago.)
"Mr. Chronic?" (His voice is a polite, crackly whisper.)
"Yes."
"Message sir."
"Message?"
"Message. From downstairs."
"Downstairs."
"Yes, sir. Somebody came by the box office and left a note for you. Asked me to deliver it. We had to look up your reservation, because she didn't--"
"She?"
"Yes, sir. Some woman. Dressed up in furs. Asked me to please deliver this note to Mr. Sebastian Chronic's private box. She didn't know the box number--we had to look it up."
The boy held out a square envelope with a ribbon around it. It looked like a birthday card. Sebastian reached for it, but just before taking it, he noticed that the boy was wearing white gloves. Sebastian quickly went into his pocket for a tip and came out with a black-gloved hand. He took the envelope. It was scented: blush of rose. (Flores para los muertos?) He dropped a twenty on the kid, because he deserved it, and swung the door closed in his face.
"Thank you, s--."
"Hmmm. A birthday card. Wants me to know it's from her. Happy Deathday to me. She wants me to know she's playing by the rules, she kept her appointment." He mused absently while his creative geist kicked into gear. He almost touched the envelope to his temple and then he remembered. Why was the usher wearing the glove? Would she have entrusted a package that might contain some kind of lethal poison to a dumb shit music major? Who knew what was in that envelope? Or on it? (The scent was a nice touch--covered any telltale odor.) It could be anything--could be some of that contact poison--the kind that, if you merely touch it, your body goes into silent convulsions and you are dead in two minutes. Came out of the aerospace industry, if you can dig that. No, the clue was in the outer action of giving him the birthday card--anything inside was anti-climax (for Sebastian, of course).
"That gloved hand keeps coming back to me. What if--? What if it was Maddy High herself, just now, who delivered that card?" She knew he would be concentrating on the envelope and not be too attentive of the bearer, right? Even that maroon pill-box hat, with the cute strap that stretched down under the chin, was distracting in a good way for her--more of her face was obscured. (Was that singer-usher on the first floor wearing a hat? No, just the boys, I guess.) And the pimples--nobody wants to look too closely at a face with pimples, and yet--did they look kind of waxy, kind of Hollywood FX glossy finish? He looks down at a formally be-capped usher--a teen-age kid with thick glasses and pimples--on the short side, kind of fat. Kind of fat? Ha! she was disguising her boobs! She was really a classy-looking girl with a face as smooth as wedding cake, so it was necessary, (and easy enough), to disguise that with pimples, but no polyester wrap known to man was ever going to bind those magnificent breasts down to a flat- chested Cherubino--she had to be fat! Damn, he could have taken her right then! Not only had he missed his first chance, but she had upstaged him by offering her opponent the first blow. "Shit, this kid is good." Sebastian was in love. He threw the envelope (and the glove) into a trash bin on his way out, off to drive a knife into his love's heart. He was going to have to miss the famous 2nd Act Septet.
The next day a janitor at the Metropolitan Opera House died mysteriously on the job--he was cleaning the 3rd floor boxes, and had some kind of seizure.
Hitman Melodies Section 2
II.
He was working on a trio sonata in his studio; it was for a triple hit he was planning in October, next month. Each of the three marks was represented by one of the solo parts in the sonata. Sebastian himself was represented by the figured bass realization. The plan for the piece was this:
the solo parts expose themselves in sequence, each theme proud and confident in a different way;
however, each theme contains one false note, an illogical note, a dissonant note;
as the themes alternate, (each soloist asserting himself with a positive attitude and a winning smile), the false notes begin to multiply, and a cloud of hideous counterpoints obscures from view the individual identities of the soloists;
Sebastian used a sophisticated system of false basses (Neo-Fauxbourdon, he called it) to (subtly at first, then not so subtly) redefine the tonal implications of the bass (Cheech deSalvo);
the harmonic dynamics behind this gradual detuning of the band instigates a mass retreat, each false note clattering into and spinning off of every other false note, until the tonal acceleration drives each solo part, one by one, off a cliff.
The dance would be lovely.
Suddenly (sudden, because unexpected) the phone rang. It was Giorgio. Another job. A broad, a newspaper reporter name of Maddy High, what a byline! She's kind of a Mata Hari, a spy, a snitch. "Yeah, she actually pulled off one of your specialties, Sebastian: she went undercover and got into bed with Jackie Junior." (Jack Milano's punk teen-age kid.) "She's a real looker--got a great rack. He thinks he's some kind of Super-Stud now, ha ha." Yeah, she dove right in, primed and pumped the kid for all kinds of secret mob stuff, you know, location and time of drop, which city cops are on the take, how much Baldassario's percentage is, stuff like that, stuff that a nineteen-year-old punk would feel proud to know, not knowing that it was not worth knowing.
And it was all bullshit; none of the information dropped on her was really legally damaging, or even that annoying, since nothing would come of it. (Jackie Junior was not high enough up in the organization to know anything that wasn't already common knowledge. Also, Jackie Junior was a spoiled brat, as arrogant as he was dumb, and all the eyes of the Milano family were watching, waiting impatiently for him to grow up and stop being such dumb jerkweed.) From a business standpoint, although Maddy's intentions were bad, she had actually done no harm. And there was a funny side to it--Jackie Junior would never forget it, the ultimate sexual extravaganza of his life, snuggling every night into that overflowing bosom of the vast Cosmic Mother. In a way, she really deserved a handsome fee for services rendered. But, Jesus, the fucking broad had duped and humiliated the son of Giovanni Milano! There is no order in a world in which such a woman is permitted to live. I mean, come on, she was eating lasagna dinners at Milano's for a whole month before anybody finally put it together that she was a reporter. God forbid that any of those stupid shits should read a newspaper!
So Sebastian takes the gig, and starts researching this clever, no doubt insanely ambitious (Ambitious? She slept with Jackie Junior, for Chrissake! Need I say more?) girl. He likes her already, which is a bad sign, but it hardly ever affects the work; he likes lots of his marks; sometimes he develops short but meaningful relationships with them; in intense intimacy, he bestows upon them words of towering insight, filled with boundless affection and hope for the future; taken totally into their confidence, he courts, coddles, and befriends them right up to the moment he slices their head off with a harp string. Party on.
Now Sebastian immediately figured that the broad knew how badly she had fucked up. She knew that her primary mission, to get something meaningful on Milano, had failed. She had needed one prize plum of dirt that would both hurt Milano and save her own life, but she missed it--she was simply sleeping with the wrong Milano. Her ruse had been discovered before she could dig any deeper than Jackie Junior, and now, out on the lamb, she was screwed. She had been lucky to get out one step ahead of Jonesy and Chico, the first pair of low-budget blood hounds Milano sent over to her hotel to snatch her then snuff her; but she knew she would have to get a helluva lot luckier to keep ahead of Sebastian Chronic. Damn! Everything had depended on that one piece of evidence, that one exposed skeleton; because without it, she had no leverage to bargain for her life. It had to be there. She knew it was there. But, she has just spent a month eating Milano's lasagna under the sheets with Jackie Junior, without success, and, now that she's exposed, she knows that the only way this thing only ends is with Sebastian Chronic coming after her.
She knew it would be Chronic. Everybody connected with the organization knew about Chronic--he was a living legend. Sebastian Chronic, spare of frame and face, piercing of eye (the one covered by the angled black fedora he always wore, the other glinting like a bright marble out of the cloudy dark); his long flowing cape may have been too much Zorro and not enough Goodfellas, but any sideways sarcasm about it bought the jokester a night in the hospital and any innocent bystanders the rare treat of seeing Sebastian's reflexes put a man down in a hurricane of martial arts moves faster than lightning. If Chronic got your number you were gone. You could look forward to some extravagant entertainment first, but, ultimately you were gone. Although the only people outside the organization who knew him were a bunch of unhappy dead people, nobody in the inner circle was unaware that the terror of Milano was, in large part, due to the the spectre of Sebastian Chronic looming in the shadows ready and waiting to sing you to sleep--if you stepped out of line, if Milano pointed a finger.
Sebastian began to figure. What is this girl going to do? Would she attempt to hide, sweat it out? No way. We're talking Mafia here. They're kind of like Marines: fanatical and stupid. She knows these guys only know two paths to forgiveness: revenge or death--death of the avenger. No, she would not try to get away. She would press forward her cause and keep digging. She was a bright girl, a determined girl--plus, she didn't have any choice: her life depended on her getting something on Milano before Chronic got to her. If Milano were neutralized, Chronic's contract would be null and void, if Chronic got to her first, she would be nil and void.
Sebastian mused on the problem over a dry chardonnay. The pale liquid swirled in the long-stemmed glass like thoughts in Sebastian's transparent mind. Making contact, designing the hit--those ideas would flow naturally out of the context in which he found her, oh sweet joy of the landscape! "No nose, this stuff, but classy, I guess, at $300 a bottle. Classy, this girl. Ha! Jackie Junior's great spring romance. I wish I had the polaroids." Finding her was the immediate problem. Milano had eyes in every dirtbag corner of the city, and all exits were blocked. She could not squirm, leap, or pay her way out of their web. So, it was only a matter of time; but time was, in many ways, the name of the game. Before deleting her, Milano had to get the girl and make sure Jackie Junior hadn't let slip something valuable without knowing it. It was the flow of information they had to control, and there was a very real time factor involved. If she knew what Milano thought she might possibly know, he would have to move quickly, to avert a bad situation; but it would be ten times worse to move quickly not knowing what she knows, or what she's told somebody else she knows. They had to get her, and Milano had the power to get anybody in the world. Sebastian Chronic was not only the weirdest hit man anybody ever heard of, he was the absolute best. No matter what bullshit higher-mental ceremony attended each hit, when the deadline came, the mark was dead. "I don't give a crap about all this music baloney," Milano profoundly observed, "but I like 'em dead, and Chronic makes 'em dead."
A particle of interest rubbed up against Sebastian's enquiring mind like a cat seeking strokes: "I wonder if she'll come after me?" he thought. It was a thought whose attraction grew on him. It made sense. "If she can't hide (and she can't), and she can't run, her only course of action is to take the offensive, because she knows that's what I'm going to do. After all, this is no dumb Italiano meatloaf, this is one smart cookie." Really smart. For a month, she had fooled a bunch of streetwise assholes into thinking that she was just a high-priced hooker from downtown, who was taking a somewhat misguided sabbatical with Baby Super Stud. Never mind how she's always asking questions, how she always wears that charming little broach in the center of her magnificent cleavage, which she loves to push right up into your face (a microphone?); never mind how she was sometimes seen whispering into a pay phone, and slipping a tiny notebook into her handbag next to the rubbers. There was no reason to notice these things. Milano was king, and his crew were all comfortably ensconced in the safety of the arrogant idea that, "Nobody Fucks with Milano." This false sense of security had made them blind.
And she was lucky--for a month. "She must be a great actress," he mused over the wine. "No, now, we can't be thinking like that, because you are a pushover for great actresses." (And they for him; imagine the dramatic fascination a composer/contract killer would have for somebody whose whole life is all theatre anyway. But these relationships never lasted for more than a night, because, after all, who wants to hear the same symphony twice? She left the women with a memory of that one great night, (emphasis on "one") awash in the symphony of Sebastian Chronic's love-making, artful, as in all things. It was a memory whose singularity would be of great comfort when the lonely nights and the hard times came. A good memory is always an object of profound appreciation.) "Think how appreciative she will be when we deliver her unto the portals of Saint Peter."
However things were going to shake down, though, he mustn't underestimate her: she was weak enough to be vulnerable, but smart enough to be dangerous, and only a fool ignores a danger, no matter how slight. It was clearly going to be a duel between him and her--her and whatever resources she had at her disposal: cops? FBI? Probably not: Sebastian got the definite impression "This girl works alone. I mean, is the FBI going to align itself with some self-serving, ego-centric reporter--somebody who's been whoring around with Milano for a whole month, and who fucked up to boot? Maybe the NSA? No, this girl works alone; this is going to be up close and personal. This is a smart girl, and it is going to be a battle of wits all the way. She's going to have to put her mind into my mind, and I'm going to have to put mine into hers. And my mind says: she's going to try to get her man the way a man gets got. Should he play into it, or turn the tables on her and not do the only possible thing?" That part didn't matter anyway, because Milano wanted to see her before Chronic put her down.
So, the course is set. The players are in motion, the clock is ticking toward the time when they will have their first gambit. Now, where? If she were going to come after him, where was a good meeting place for him to find her? A public place, lots of people, but kind of low-life, so shady behavior will not be noticed? If her words were meant to murder, she would probably not want to associate herself with any of the finer things, like Alice Tully Hall, or the Met, but wait--maybe she would--get straight to the truth of the matter. Good girl! Maybe the only place in the world for Sebastian Chronic to meet the architect of his own doom is at the opera house! But when? "No time like the present," he thought, she thought. He got on the phone and reserved his regular box at the Met for that night. He couldn't wait to see that broach.
He was working on a trio sonata in his studio; it was for a triple hit he was planning in October, next month. Each of the three marks was represented by one of the solo parts in the sonata. Sebastian himself was represented by the figured bass realization. The plan for the piece was this:
the solo parts expose themselves in sequence, each theme proud and confident in a different way;
however, each theme contains one false note, an illogical note, a dissonant note;
as the themes alternate, (each soloist asserting himself with a positive attitude and a winning smile), the false notes begin to multiply, and a cloud of hideous counterpoints obscures from view the individual identities of the soloists;
Sebastian used a sophisticated system of false basses (Neo-Fauxbourdon, he called it) to (subtly at first, then not so subtly) redefine the tonal implications of the bass (Cheech deSalvo);
the harmonic dynamics behind this gradual detuning of the band instigates a mass retreat, each false note clattering into and spinning off of every other false note, until the tonal acceleration drives each solo part, one by one, off a cliff.
The dance would be lovely.
Suddenly (sudden, because unexpected) the phone rang. It was Giorgio. Another job. A broad, a newspaper reporter name of Maddy High, what a byline! She's kind of a Mata Hari, a spy, a snitch. "Yeah, she actually pulled off one of your specialties, Sebastian: she went undercover and got into bed with Jackie Junior." (Jack Milano's punk teen-age kid.) "She's a real looker--got a great rack. He thinks he's some kind of Super-Stud now, ha ha." Yeah, she dove right in, primed and pumped the kid for all kinds of secret mob stuff, you know, location and time of drop, which city cops are on the take, how much Baldassario's percentage is, stuff like that, stuff that a nineteen-year-old punk would feel proud to know, not knowing that it was not worth knowing.
And it was all bullshit; none of the information dropped on her was really legally damaging, or even that annoying, since nothing would come of it. (Jackie Junior was not high enough up in the organization to know anything that wasn't already common knowledge. Also, Jackie Junior was a spoiled brat, as arrogant as he was dumb, and all the eyes of the Milano family were watching, waiting impatiently for him to grow up and stop being such dumb jerkweed.) From a business standpoint, although Maddy's intentions were bad, she had actually done no harm. And there was a funny side to it--Jackie Junior would never forget it, the ultimate sexual extravaganza of his life, snuggling every night into that overflowing bosom of the vast Cosmic Mother. In a way, she really deserved a handsome fee for services rendered. But, Jesus, the fucking broad had duped and humiliated the son of Giovanni Milano! There is no order in a world in which such a woman is permitted to live. I mean, come on, she was eating lasagna dinners at Milano's for a whole month before anybody finally put it together that she was a reporter. God forbid that any of those stupid shits should read a newspaper!
So Sebastian takes the gig, and starts researching this clever, no doubt insanely ambitious (Ambitious? She slept with Jackie Junior, for Chrissake! Need I say more?) girl. He likes her already, which is a bad sign, but it hardly ever affects the work; he likes lots of his marks; sometimes he develops short but meaningful relationships with them; in intense intimacy, he bestows upon them words of towering insight, filled with boundless affection and hope for the future; taken totally into their confidence, he courts, coddles, and befriends them right up to the moment he slices their head off with a harp string. Party on.
Now Sebastian immediately figured that the broad knew how badly she had fucked up. She knew that her primary mission, to get something meaningful on Milano, had failed. She had needed one prize plum of dirt that would both hurt Milano and save her own life, but she missed it--she was simply sleeping with the wrong Milano. Her ruse had been discovered before she could dig any deeper than Jackie Junior, and now, out on the lamb, she was screwed. She had been lucky to get out one step ahead of Jonesy and Chico, the first pair of low-budget blood hounds Milano sent over to her hotel to snatch her then snuff her; but she knew she would have to get a helluva lot luckier to keep ahead of Sebastian Chronic. Damn! Everything had depended on that one piece of evidence, that one exposed skeleton; because without it, she had no leverage to bargain for her life. It had to be there. She knew it was there. But, she has just spent a month eating Milano's lasagna under the sheets with Jackie Junior, without success, and, now that she's exposed, she knows that the only way this thing only ends is with Sebastian Chronic coming after her.
She knew it would be Chronic. Everybody connected with the organization knew about Chronic--he was a living legend. Sebastian Chronic, spare of frame and face, piercing of eye (the one covered by the angled black fedora he always wore, the other glinting like a bright marble out of the cloudy dark); his long flowing cape may have been too much Zorro and not enough Goodfellas, but any sideways sarcasm about it bought the jokester a night in the hospital and any innocent bystanders the rare treat of seeing Sebastian's reflexes put a man down in a hurricane of martial arts moves faster than lightning. If Chronic got your number you were gone. You could look forward to some extravagant entertainment first, but, ultimately you were gone. Although the only people outside the organization who knew him were a bunch of unhappy dead people, nobody in the inner circle was unaware that the terror of Milano was, in large part, due to the the spectre of Sebastian Chronic looming in the shadows ready and waiting to sing you to sleep--if you stepped out of line, if Milano pointed a finger.
Sebastian began to figure. What is this girl going to do? Would she attempt to hide, sweat it out? No way. We're talking Mafia here. They're kind of like Marines: fanatical and stupid. She knows these guys only know two paths to forgiveness: revenge or death--death of the avenger. No, she would not try to get away. She would press forward her cause and keep digging. She was a bright girl, a determined girl--plus, she didn't have any choice: her life depended on her getting something on Milano before Chronic got to her. If Milano were neutralized, Chronic's contract would be null and void, if Chronic got to her first, she would be nil and void.
Sebastian mused on the problem over a dry chardonnay. The pale liquid swirled in the long-stemmed glass like thoughts in Sebastian's transparent mind. Making contact, designing the hit--those ideas would flow naturally out of the context in which he found her, oh sweet joy of the landscape! "No nose, this stuff, but classy, I guess, at $300 a bottle. Classy, this girl. Ha! Jackie Junior's great spring romance. I wish I had the polaroids." Finding her was the immediate problem. Milano had eyes in every dirtbag corner of the city, and all exits were blocked. She could not squirm, leap, or pay her way out of their web. So, it was only a matter of time; but time was, in many ways, the name of the game. Before deleting her, Milano had to get the girl and make sure Jackie Junior hadn't let slip something valuable without knowing it. It was the flow of information they had to control, and there was a very real time factor involved. If she knew what Milano thought she might possibly know, he would have to move quickly, to avert a bad situation; but it would be ten times worse to move quickly not knowing what she knows, or what she's told somebody else she knows. They had to get her, and Milano had the power to get anybody in the world. Sebastian Chronic was not only the weirdest hit man anybody ever heard of, he was the absolute best. No matter what bullshit higher-mental ceremony attended each hit, when the deadline came, the mark was dead. "I don't give a crap about all this music baloney," Milano profoundly observed, "but I like 'em dead, and Chronic makes 'em dead."
A particle of interest rubbed up against Sebastian's enquiring mind like a cat seeking strokes: "I wonder if she'll come after me?" he thought. It was a thought whose attraction grew on him. It made sense. "If she can't hide (and she can't), and she can't run, her only course of action is to take the offensive, because she knows that's what I'm going to do. After all, this is no dumb Italiano meatloaf, this is one smart cookie." Really smart. For a month, she had fooled a bunch of streetwise assholes into thinking that she was just a high-priced hooker from downtown, who was taking a somewhat misguided sabbatical with Baby Super Stud. Never mind how she's always asking questions, how she always wears that charming little broach in the center of her magnificent cleavage, which she loves to push right up into your face (a microphone?); never mind how she was sometimes seen whispering into a pay phone, and slipping a tiny notebook into her handbag next to the rubbers. There was no reason to notice these things. Milano was king, and his crew were all comfortably ensconced in the safety of the arrogant idea that, "Nobody Fucks with Milano." This false sense of security had made them blind.
And she was lucky--for a month. "She must be a great actress," he mused over the wine. "No, now, we can't be thinking like that, because you are a pushover for great actresses." (And they for him; imagine the dramatic fascination a composer/contract killer would have for somebody whose whole life is all theatre anyway. But these relationships never lasted for more than a night, because, after all, who wants to hear the same symphony twice? She left the women with a memory of that one great night, (emphasis on "one") awash in the symphony of Sebastian Chronic's love-making, artful, as in all things. It was a memory whose singularity would be of great comfort when the lonely nights and the hard times came. A good memory is always an object of profound appreciation.) "Think how appreciative she will be when we deliver her unto the portals of Saint Peter."
However things were going to shake down, though, he mustn't underestimate her: she was weak enough to be vulnerable, but smart enough to be dangerous, and only a fool ignores a danger, no matter how slight. It was clearly going to be a duel between him and her--her and whatever resources she had at her disposal: cops? FBI? Probably not: Sebastian got the definite impression "This girl works alone. I mean, is the FBI going to align itself with some self-serving, ego-centric reporter--somebody who's been whoring around with Milano for a whole month, and who fucked up to boot? Maybe the NSA? No, this girl works alone; this is going to be up close and personal. This is a smart girl, and it is going to be a battle of wits all the way. She's going to have to put her mind into my mind, and I'm going to have to put mine into hers. And my mind says: she's going to try to get her man the way a man gets got. Should he play into it, or turn the tables on her and not do the only possible thing?" That part didn't matter anyway, because Milano wanted to see her before Chronic put her down.
So, the course is set. The players are in motion, the clock is ticking toward the time when they will have their first gambit. Now, where? If she were going to come after him, where was a good meeting place for him to find her? A public place, lots of people, but kind of low-life, so shady behavior will not be noticed? If her words were meant to murder, she would probably not want to associate herself with any of the finer things, like Alice Tully Hall, or the Met, but wait--maybe she would--get straight to the truth of the matter. Good girl! Maybe the only place in the world for Sebastian Chronic to meet the architect of his own doom is at the opera house! But when? "No time like the present," he thought, she thought. He got on the phone and reserved his regular box at the Met for that night. He couldn't wait to see that broach.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)