The Night and The Music

by Lawrence Block

  Then Elaine said, “I don’t want to go home.”

  “All right.”

  “I want to hear music. Can we do that?”

  “We just did that.”

  “Different music. Not another opera.”

  “Good,” I said, “because one a night is my limit.”

  “You old bear. One a night is one over your limit.”

  I shrugged. “I’m learning to like it.”

  “Well, one a night’s my limit. You know something? I’m in a mood.”

  “Somehow I sensed as much.”

  “She always dies,” she said.

  “Mimi.”

  “Uh-huh. How many times do you suppose I’ve seen La Bohème? Six, seven times?”

  “If you say so.”

  “At least. You know what? I could see it a hundred times and it’s not going to change. She’ll die every fucking time. ”

  “Odds are.”

  “So I want to hear something different,” she said, “before we call it a night.”

  “Something happy,” I suggested.

  “No, sad is fine. I don’t mind sad. As a matter of fact I prefer it.”

  “But you want them all alive at the end.”

  “That’s it,” she said. “Sad as can be, so long as nobody dies.”

  We caught a cab to a new place I’d heard about on the ground floor of a high-rise on Amsterdam in the Nineties. The crowd was salt and pepper, white college kids and black strivers, blonde fashion models and black players. The group was mixed, too; the tenor man and the bass player were white, the pianist and the drummer black. The maître d’ thought he recognized me and put us at a table near the bandstand. They were a few bars into “Satin Doll” when we sat down and they followed it with a tune I recognized but couldn’t name. I think it was a Thelonious Monk composition, but that’s just a guess. I can hardly ever name the tune unless there’s a lyric to it that sticks in my mind.

  Aside from ordering drinks, we didn’t say a word until the set ended. We sipped our cranberry juice and soda and listened to the music. She watched the musicians and I watched her watch them. When they took a break she reached for my hand. “Thanks,” she said.

  “You okay?”

  “I was always okay. I do feel better now, though. You know what I was thinking?”

  “The night we met.”

  Her eyes widened. “How’d you know that?”

  “Well, it was in a room that looked and felt a lot like this one. You were at Danny Boy’s table, and this is his kind of place.”

  “God, I was young. We were both so goddamned young.”

  “Youth is one of those things time cures.”

  “You were a cop and I was a hooker. But you’d been on the force longer than I’d been on the game.”

  “I already had a gold shield.”

  “And I was new enough to think the life was glamorous. Well, it was glamorous. Look at the places I went and the people I got to meet.”

  “Married cops.”

  “That’s right, you were married then.”

  “I’m married now.”

  “To me. Jesus, the way things turn out, huh?”

  “A club like this,” I said, “and the same kind of music playing.”

  “Sad enough to break your heart, but nobody dies.”

  “You were the most beautiful woman in the room that night,” I said. “And you still are.”

  “Ah, Pinocchio,” she said, and squeezed my hand. “Lie to me.”

  We closed the place. Outside on the street she said, “God, I’m impossible. I don’t want the night to end.”

  “It doesn’t have to.”

  “In the old days,” she said, “you knew all the after-hours joints. Remember when Condon’s would stay open late for musicians, and they’d jam until dawn?”

  “I remember Eddie Condon’s hangover cure,” I said. “‘Take the juice of two quarts of whiskey …’ I forget what came after that.”

  “Oblivion?”

  “You’d think so. Say, I know where we can go.”

  I flagged a cab and we rode down to Sheridan Square, where there’s a basement joint with the same name as a long-gone Harlem jazz club. They start around midnight and stay open past dawn, and it’s legal because they don’t serve alcohol. I used to go to late joints for the booze, and I learned to like the music because I heard so much of it there, and because you could just about taste the alcohol in every flatted fifth. Nowadays I go for the music, and what I hear in the blue notes is not so much the booze as all the feelings the drink used to mask.

  That night there were a lot of different musicians sitting in with what I guess was the house rhythm section. There was a tenor player who sounded a little like Johnny Griffin and a piano player who reminded me of Lennie Tristano. And as always there was a lot of music I barely heard, background music for my own unfocused thoughts.

  The sky was light by the time we dragged ourselves out of there. “Look at that,” Elaine said. “It’s bright as day.”

  “And well it might be. It’s morning.”

  “What a New York night, huh? You know, I loved our trip to Europe, and other places we’ve gone together, but when you come right down to it — ”

  “You’re a New York kind of gal.”

  “You bet your ass. And what we heard tonight was New York music. I know all about the music coming up the river from New Orleans, all that crap, and I don’t care. That was New York music.”

  “You’re right.”

  “And nobody died,” she said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Nobody died.”

  Elaine said, “You never stop working, do you?”

  I looked at her. We were in Florence, sitting at a little tile-topped table in the Piazza di San Marco, sipping cappuccino every bit as good as the stuff they served at the Peacock on Greenwich Avenue. It was a bright day but the air was cool and crisp, the city bathed in October light. Elaine was wearing khakis and a tailored safari jacket, and looked like a glamorous foreign correspondent, or perhaps a spy. I was wearing khakis, too, and a polo shirt, and the blue blazer she called my Old Reliable.

  We’d had five days in Venice. This was the second of five days in Florence, and then we’d have six days in Rome before Alitalia took us back home again.

  I said, “Nice work if you can get it.”

  “Uh-uh,” she said. “I caught you. You were scanning the area the way you always do.”

  “I was a cop for a lot of years.”

  “I know, and I guess it’s a habit a person doesn’t outgrow. And not a bad one, either. I have some New York street smarts myself, but I can’t send my eyes around a room and pick up what you can. And you don’t even think about it. You do it automatically.”

  “I guess. But I wouldn’t call it working.”

  “When we’re supposed to be basking in the beauties of Florence,” she said, “and exclaiming over the classic beauty of the sculpture in the piazza, and instead you’re staring at an old queen in a white linen jacket five tables over, trying to guess if he’s got a yellow sheet and just what’s written on it — wouldn’t you call that working?”

  “There’s no guesswork required,” I said. “I know what it says on his yellow sheet.”

  “You do?”

  “His name is Horton Pollard,” I said. “If it’s the same man, and if I’ve been sending a lot of looks his way it’s to make sure he’s the man I think he is. It’s well over twenty years since I’ve seen him. Probably more like twenty-five.” I glanced over and watched the white-haired gentleman saying something to the waiter. He raised an eyebrow in a manner that was at once arrogant and apologetic. It was as good as a fingerprint. “It’s him,” I said. “Horton Pollard. I’m positive.”

  “Why don’t you go over and say hello?”

  “He might not want that.”

  “Twenty-five years ago you were still on the job. What did you do, arrest him?”

  “Uh-huh.”

&n
bsp; “Honestly? What did he do? Art fraud? That’s what comes to mind, sitting at an outdoor table in Florence, but he was probably just a stock swindler.”

  “Something white-collar, in other words.”

  “Something flowing-collar, from the looks of him. I give up. What did he do?”

  I’d been looking his way, and our glances caught. I saw recognition come into his eyes, and his eyebrows went up again in that manner that was unmistakably his. He pushed his chair back, got to his feet.

  “Here he comes,” I said. “You can ask him yourself.”

  “Mr. Scudder,” he said. “I want to say Martin, but I know that’s not right. Help me out.”

  “Matthew, Mr. Pollard. And this is my wife, Elaine.”

  “How fortunate for you,” he told me, and took the hand she extended. “I looked over here and thought, What a beautiful woman! Then I looked again and thought, I know that fellow. But then it took me a minute to place you. The name came first, or the surname, at any rate. His name’s Scudder, but how do I know him? And then of course the rest of it came to me, all but your first name. I knew it wasn’t Martin, but I couldn’t sweep that name out of my mind and let Matthew come in.” He sighed. “It’s a curious muscle, the memory. Or aren’t you old enough yet to have found it so?”

  “My memory’s still pretty good.”

  “Oh, mine’s good,” he said. “It’s just capricious. Willful, I sometimes think.”

  At my invitation, he pulled up a chair from a nearby table and sat down. “But only for a moment,” he said, and asked what brought us to Italy, and how long we’d be in Florence. He lived here, he told us. He’d lived here for quite a few years now. He knew our hotel, on the east bank of the Arno, and pronounced it charming and a good value. He mentioned a café just down the street from the hotel that we really ought to try.

  “Although you certainly don’t need to follow my recommendations,” he said, “or Michelin’s, either. You can’t get a bad meal in Florence. Well, that’s not entirely true. If you insist on going to high-priced restaurants, you’ll encounter the occasional disappointment. But if you simply blunder into whatever humble trattoria is closest, you’ll dine well every time.”

  “I think we’ve been dining a little too well,” Elaine said.

  “It’s a danger,” he acknowledged, “although the Florentines manage to stay quite slim themselves. I started to bulk up a bit when I first came here. How could one help it? Everything tasted so good. But I took off the pounds I gained and I’ve kept them off. Though I sometimes wonder why I bother. For God’s sake, I’m seventy-six years old.”

  “You don’t look it,” she told him.

  “I wouldn’t care to look it. But why is that, do you suppose? No one else on God’s earth gives a damn what I look like. Why should it matter to me?”

  She said it was self-respect, and he mused on the difficulty of telling where self-respect left off and vanity began. Then he said he was staying too long at the fair, wasn’t he, and got to his feet. “But you must visit me,” he said. “My villa is not terribly grand, but it’s quite nice and I’m proud enough of it to want to show it off. Please tell me you’ll come for lunch tomorrow.”

  “Well …”

  “It’s settled, then,” he said, and gave me his card. “Any cabdriver will know how to find it. Set the price in advance, though. Some of them will cheat you, although most are surprisingly honest. Shall we say one o’clock?” He leaned forward, placed his palms on the table. “I’ve thought of you often over the years, Matthew. Especially here, sipping caffé nero a few yards from Michelangelo’s David. It’s not the original, you know. That’s in a museum, though even the museums are less than safe these days. You know the Uffizzi was bombed a few years ago?”

  “I read about that.”

  “The Mafia. Back home they just kill each other. Here they blow up masterpieces. Still, it’s a wonderfully civilized country, by and large. And I suppose I had to wind up here, near the David.” He’d lost me, and I guess he knew it, because he frowned, annoyed at himself. “I just ramble,” he said. “I suppose the one thing I’m short of here is people to talk to. And I always thought I could talk to you, Matthew. Circumstances prevented my so doing, of course, but over the years I regretted the lost opportunity.” He straightened up. “Tomorrow, one o’clock. I look forward to it.”

  “Well, of course I’m dying to go,” Elaine said. “I’d love to see what his place looks like. ‘It’s not terribly grand but it’s quite nice.’ I’ll bet it’s nice. I’ll bet it’s gorgeous.”

  “You’ll find out tomorrow.”

  “I don’t know. He wants to talk to you, and three might be a crowd for the kind of conversation he wants to have. It wasn’t art theft you arrested him for, was it?”

  “No.”

  “Did he kill someone?”

  “His lover.”

  “Well, that’s what each man does, isn’t it? Kills the thing he loves, according to what’shisname.”

  “Oscar Wilde.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Memory. Actually, I knew that. Sometimes when a person says what’shisname or whatchamacallit it’s not because she can’t remember. It’s just a conversational device.”

  “I see.”

  She gave me a searching look. “There was something about it,” she said. “What?”

  “It was brutal.” My mind filled with a picture of the murder scene, and I blinked it away. “You see a lot on the job, and most of it’s ugly, but this was pretty bad.”

  “He seems so gentle. I’d expect any murder he committed to be virtually nonviolent.”

  “There aren’t many non-violent murders.”

  “Well, bloodless, anyway.”

  “This was anything but.”

  “Well, don’t keep me in suspense. What did he do?”

  “He used a knife,” I said.

  “And stabbed him?”

  “Carved him,” I said. “His lover was younger than Pollard, and I guess he was a good-looking man, but you couldn’t prove it by me. What I saw looked like what’s left of the turkey the day after Thanksgiving.”

  “Well, that’s vivid enough,” she said. “I have to say I get the picture.”

  “I was first on the scene except for the two uniforms who caught the squeal, and they were young enough to strike a cynical pose.”

  “While you were old enough not to. Did you throw up?”

  “No, after a few years you just don’t. But it was as bad as anything I’d ever seen.”

  Horton Pollard’s villa was north of the city, and if it wasn’t grand it was nevertheless beautiful, a white stuccoed gem set on a hillside with a commanding view of the valley. He showed us through the rooms, answered Elaine’s questions about the paintings and furnishings, and accepted her explanation of why she couldn’t stay for lunch. Or appeared to — as she rode off in the taxi that had brought us, something in his expression suggested for an instant that he felt slighted by her departure

  “We’ll dine on the terrace,” he said. “But what’s the matter with me? I haven’t offered you a drink. What will you have, Matthew? The bar’s well stocked, although I don’t know that Paolo has a very extensive repertoire of cocktails.”

  I said that any kind of sparkling water would be fine. He said something in Italian to his house boy, then gave me an appraising glance and asked me if I would want wine with our lunch.

  I said I wouldn’t. “I’m glad I thought to ask,” he said. “I was going to open a bottle and let it breathe, but now it can just go on holding its breath. You used to drink, if I remember correctly.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “The night it all happened,” he said. “It seems to me you told me I looked as though I needed a drink. And I got out a bottle, and you poured drinks for both of us. I remember being surprised you were allowed to drink on duty.”

  “I wasn’t,” I said, “but I didn’t always let that stop me.”

  “And now you don’t drink at all?�
�

  “I don’t, but that’s no reason why you shouldn’t have wine with lunch.”

  “But I never do,” he said. “I couldn’t while I was locked up, and when I was released I found I didn’t care for it, the taste or the physical sensation. I drank the odd glass of wine anyway, for a while, because I thought one couldn’t be entirely civilized without it. Then I realized I didn’t care. That’s quite the nicest thing about age, perhaps the only good thing to be said for it. Increasingly, one ceases to care about more and more things, particularly the opinions of others. Different for you, though, wasn’t it? You stopped because you had to.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “Now and then.”

  “I don’t, but then I was never that fond of it. There was a time when I could distinguish different châteaux in a blind tasting, but the truth of the matter was that I never cared for any of them all that much, and after-dinner cognac gave me heartburn. And now I drink mineral water with my meals, and coffee after them. Acqua minerale. There’s a favorite trattoria of mine where the owner calls it acqua miserabile. But he’d as soon sell me it as anything else. He doesn’t care, and I shouldn’t care if he did.”

  Lunch was simple but elegant — a green salad, ravioli with butter and sage, and a nice piece of fish. Our conversation was mostly about Italy, and I was sorry Elaine hadn’t stayed to hear it. He had a lot to say — about the way art permeated everyday Florentine life, about the longstanding enthusiasm of the British upper classes for the city — and I found it absorbing enough, but it would have held more interest for her than for me.

  Afterward Paolo cleared our dishes and served espresso. We fell silent, and I sipped my coffee and looked out at the view of the valley and wondered how long it would take for the eye to tire of it.

  “I thought I would grow accustomed to it,” he said, reading my mind. “But I haven’t yet, and I don’t think I ever will.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Almost fifteen years. I came on a visit as soon as I could after my release.”

  “And you’ve never been back?”

  He shook his head. “I came intending to stay, and once here I managed to arrange the necessary resident visa. It’s not difficult if there’s money, and I was fortunate. There’s still plenty of money, and there always will be. I live well, but not terribly high. Even if I live longer than anyone should, there will be money sufficient to see me out.”