Читать книгу The Icy Fire of Deception - Mike Trial - Страница 6

Steve always wanted to be a rich and famous musician, but never had the talent to make it happen. Until he discovers a few sheets of music that he knows will make him great. The only catch is that no one must ever know he didn’t write it. And Steve has a plan to make sure that never happens.

Steve hurried up the sunny Milan street, ignoring the people, the shops, all the happy chatter of Italy. He was fed up with Italy, fed up with this tour of Italy Nancy had talked him into, and fed up with Nancy. Fed up with everything his life had become.

He turned a corner at random, then another, moving uphill, into the older part of the cosmopolitan city. The streets narrowed, a few old people passed, the city quickly reverted to its fifteenth century roots. He walked more slowly now, as his anger subsided. The winding cobbled street was too narrow for cars. The second-floor windows of houses were ground-level with the next house up the hill.

When he stopped to catch his breath, he felt the silence of the old city. Ancient stone with weathered tile roofs surrounded him. Some of the dark windows were devoid of glass. On impulse, he ducked his head inside one of them. He saw an empty room, long abandoned. Cracked, discolored plaster covered its irregular walls and ceiling. The tour guide had mentioned that even in Milan, one of Italy’s most modern cities, some of the ancient houses had sat abandoned for decades. The cost of fitting them with running water and electricity was prohibitive.

Steve lifted himself to the sill, then swung both legs inside. A deep layer of dust covered the floor. Smoke stains covered the walls around a tiny fireplace. An open doorframe led into an empty corridor. He stood in the silence, glad, so glad, to be away from Nancy’s endless chatter. The years go by while I work temp jobs to pay for the house Nancy insisted on buying, her Lexus, this vacation. I could have been, should have been, writing music.

He picked at the cracked plaster as though seeking an answer hidden in the wall. When he and Nancy had gotten married, he’d told her, “All I want to do is write and play music.” But the years passed, he wrote less and less, and now he wrote none at all. “And I’ve fallen out of love with Nancy,” he said to the empty room. But saying it didn’t make his frustration any less.

He tried to stuff a plaster chip he’d picked off the wall back into its crack, failed, flung it across the room. There was some yellowed paper deep in the crack. He pulled out four sheets of thick paper, folded twice. Italians! Trying to fix plaster cracks by stuffing paper into them. So stupid!

It was quarto paper, very old. Music paper. He unfolded them on the dusty floor. The inked score lines had been drawn with a pen and ruler. The notes were quick hand-drawn ovals, only the occasional staff—scribbled glissando here, there adagio, and more than once the notation tenerezza—tenderly, sadly.

“This must be at least a hundred years old,” Steve muttered. He fingered the paper, old paper, a previous century’s paper. “Might be worth a few dollars to some collector.”

He thumbed through the sheets looking for a composer’s name or the title of the piece, but found nothing. He had not read a score since his university days, but his eyes followed the lines, haltingly at first, then faster as the music came to life in his mind.

How long he crouched there hearing the soundless music, he didn’t know. But when he rose and folded the sheets, the melody, full of sorrow and a magical ethereal beauty, stayed in his mind.

He tucked the music under his arm and made his way back out into the alley through the glassless window. The alley was empty. His watch told him the tour bus would depart in only five minutes. He had to get moving. He quickly went down the street the way he’d come. Near the bottom of the steep incline was a sign on the side of an ancient building: Via Achato. He turned a corner, then another, and was back in modern Milan. At a newsstand he grabbed two newspapers, tossed down a euro, then folded the music into the papers.

“See anything interesting?” Nancy said as they took their seats on the bus with the other pastel-clad tourists.

“Nah, nothing, just stretching my legs.” He took his travel bag off the overhead rack and stuffed his bundle inside.

“Lot of newspapers,” Nancy said.

He sat down and closed his eyes, “Thought I’d try to decipher some Italian while we’re here.” The bus started up, the video screens came to life, describing their route and next point of interest, but Steve closed his eyes, oblivious to the TVs. The score he’d read continued to play in his head. Music he’d never heard before, music his heart was hungry for. As powerful as it was sorrowful, rich, and moving. He ached to play it, to make it his own, to rearrange it into something more attuned to contemporary audiences, but still retaining it’s heartfelt sadness and beauty. He pretended to doze so that Nancy wouldn’t point out every sight to him.

* * *

On their second full day back home, Nancy went back to work as usual. Steve sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and checking his email messages. The temp agency had an assignment for him today. He should have been there an hour ago. Steve deleted the message and sat down at his electric piano. He propped up the old sheets of music and began picking out the melody. It took him all morning to reconfigure a single motif of the music into the form and texture of a pop song. But when he was done, it was beautiful. He copied the electronic file into ProTunes and emailed it to Del, his agent.

He ate lunch out of a can, standing at the kitchen sink. His email now had two increasingly angry messages from the temp agency. And a message on his voicemail: “We are going to stop offering you positions if you do not respond to our calls.” Steve deleted the messages and phoned Del.

“Steve, I’m glad you called,” Del said sarcastically. “The temp agency has terminated your contract. And by the way, while you were gone, the Erawan restaurant said they didn’t want you playing there any more.”

“Just because I took a week off to go on vacation with my wife?” Steve snapped, feeling unexpectedly wounded.

“Frankly, they haven’t been happy with you for a long time,” Del said. “Coming in late, leaving early. They told me to tell you that the Erawan is a Thai-Indian restaurant. They asked you repeatedly not to play ‘Volaré.’ But you did so anyway.”

Del was silent for a moment, then, “Sorry, Steve. I don’t have anything else for you. Maybe you should check with LA City College, they’re always looking for adjunct faculty to teach music. You’d make a good teacher, and there are lots of bright young kids . . .”

“I don’t want to teach a bunch of kids,” Steve told Del. “And I don’t want to play crap at a restaurant for people who aren’t listening anyway. Check your email, Del. I sent you a file a few minutes ago. It’s a new tune of mine. Call me back and let me know what you think.” He hung up before Del could object.

Steve set his phone on the kitchen counter and poured himself a generous shot of Ballantine’s from the bottle he kept under the sink. It wasn’t long until his phone buzzed. “It’s fabulous, Steve!” Del shouted. “Your trip to Italy must have really inspired you. This is the best work you’ve done in years!”

Within a week Steve’s tune had been downloaded two million times. Suddenly Del could get him bookings all over Los Angeles and Orange County. He was interviewed at KTTV and KHJ and at the USC music center. Del booked him a series of play dates in Northern California and Steve went on the road.

On the road, Nancy and the dingy little house in Reseda were forgotten. Steve loved the adulation he was getting at the clubs where he played. And afterward at the hotel bar, women would approach him and he seldom turned them down. Good looking women, too.

But, soon the tour ended, the limo dropped him at the same old house in Reseda, and the same old Nancy came home after work. They ate the same food, and watched the same TV shows. Late at night Steve would sometimes stand in the darkened kitchen leaning against the kitchen sink, sipping Johnny Walker Black, while Nancy slept. Thinking about other tunes. Great tunes. He began to spend his nights secluded in the converted bedroom he used as a study.

He released another tune, then went on the road again and when he got back, Del showed him the numbers. He was netting over fifteen thousand dollars a week. But the money was gone as soon as it arrived. Nancy had remodeled the old house, bought clothes. Steve had no interest in anything she’d bought. He just wanted to be rid of this house and this wife. But he suppressed his anger and began working on a new tune. Three weeks later Del had him booked on another tour, this time for two weeks in Vegas.

Steve returned from Vegas flushed with success, expensive whiskey, and beautiful women. He dropped his suitcase in the recarpeted, repainted living room, and went straight to the kitchen, poured out the Johnny Walker, then opened the bottle of Laphroaig whiskey he’d bought on his way to the house. The expensive single malt was smooth on his tongue.

Only then did he notice Nancy’s note on the kitchen counter, next to the microwave where she stacked the unpaid bills. It read, I don’t know who you are any more. You’re never home and when you are, you’re not with me. I can’t live like this any longer.

Steve left it on the kitchen counter while he prowled the house, whiskey in hand, “Screw her!” he said, but when he thought about it, he felt no anger, only a great and glorious sense of relief. I’m glad she’s gone. He made a mental note to have Del get him an attorney who could get him a divorce quickly and cleanly. Nancy could keep this house. In the meantime he’d let his royalties accumulate in his account at Del’s agency where she couldn’t touch the money.

* * *

A year later, in his glossy new Marina Del Rey condo, Steve decided to find out something about the four pages of mysterious music that were making him rich. All he remembered was that they came from an abandoned building on a tiny street not far from Via Achato in Milan, Italy. He hired a historical research agency to determine if a famous musician had ever lived in that area. He told them nothing about the music. Two weeks later their report arrived in his email. Guiseppe Verdi had lived in a garret in that part of Milan for a part of 1840. The researchers provided a lengthy biography of Verdi along with a list of the operas he’d written. At the bottom of the list was a note mentioning Rocester, “an opera whose score has never been found.” In that same year, when he was just beginning to establish himself in the world of opera, his son died, then Marguerite, his wife died. Verdi was devastated.

* * *

Steve envisioned a snowy night in Milan, Verdi sitting alone, crying over his wife’s death, and writing music, because that was the only way he knew to express the nearly overwhelming grief he felt. As the snow fell outside his window, he wrote and rewrote, putting all the sorrow and longing into the notes. He thought to make it an opera called Rocester. When Spring came, he folded the pages and stuffed them into a crack in the wall of the old garret he was leaving behind. He knew he could never work on that music again without feeling the crushing loss he had suffered through. And with the coming of spring, new music was forming in his head, music that would become Nabucco, the opera that would make him world famous.

* * *

Steve had never attended an opera in his life, but decided he would go once, just to see what a Verdi opera was like. Happily, the Los Angeles Opera was doing Aida.

Steve bought a ticket and drove to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles. As he wandered around the lobby, waiting for the opera to begin, he noticed a glass case displaying a page of Verdi’s original Aida score. He smiled. The notes were in the same hand as those on the parchment in his desk. Wonder what an undiscovered Verdi score would be worth?

The opera bored him out of his mind. He managed to stay in his seat until the first intermission, then left. Downstairs, at Kendall’s Brasserie, he ordered a double Laphroaig and sat at the bar telling everyone how great the music was, but that opera was an outmoded art form, the music needed to be modernized.

Back home, he sat down in his big white chair and looked out over the lights of Marina Del Rey, ten floors below. He slipped an Estevez Ermil cigar out of its tube, clipped the end, and lit it. It was a non-smoking building, but Steve had paid the Mexican kid who cleaned the windows to disable the smoke detectors a week after he’d bought his condo.

The smoke was mellow. He put his feet up, sipped the smoky fire of his Laphroaig.

“Thanks, Giuseppe,” he toasted his reflection in the glass wall overlooking the marina lights. “You wrote it, I arranged it, we made a fortune. Glad you’re not here to help me enjoy the money.” It had been a great two years. After his first song had gone platinum, he’d hired a PR agency to screen him from the deluge of producers wanting to handle what MusicMaker was calling “the greatest talent of his generation.” He released one new song every six months for three years. And they all went platinum.

Steve poured another shot of Laphroaig and toasted the dozen framed certificates on the wall over the fireplace. He picked up his phone and checked his account balance: twenty million dollars.

Nancy was gone, but he didn’t miss her. Just like he didn’t miss his joyless gigs at Erawan restaurant, or the old house in Reseda, or his ratty old car.

I have everything I want.

He took out the four quarto sheets of Verdi’s music and touched the end of his cigar to the pages, one at a time, and watched the flame devour the hand-inked notes. I could have sold this for a million dollars. But if I did that, I would no longer be the “greatest talent of my generation,” but just another hack composer stealing melodies from the classics. I can spend the rest of my life on tour, playing my greatest hits. I don’t need to write another song in my life and I’ll still be famous, and I’ll still be rich.

The door chimed and the girl from the escort service came in, looking gorgeous in a Bottega dress of deep purple trimmed in dark green leather. Steve poured her a double shot of the whiskey and set the decanter down on the glass coffee table beside the ashtray full of ashes.

“Burning the map to hidden treasure?” she asked, raising her glass with a smile.

Steve laughed, “You’re so right, baby.”