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."