The Night and The Music

by Lawrence Block

  “You don’t mean Italians.”

  “A guinea was a gold coin,” he said, “back when they had such an article, and it was the nearest thing to a pound sterling, but with twenty–one shillings instead of twenty. So a price in guineas is five percent higher than the same in pounds. I suspect the notion died out when decimal currency came in, but there was a time when your carriage trade liked prices in guineas. Rosenstein told me he didn’t really expect this to work, but that it wouldn’t be outrageous enough to kill the deal altogether, and we could always back off and take the twenty. But they paid us in guineas after all.”

  “And that small lagniappe paid off your tenants.”

  “It did.” He put his glass down. “You’d have thought they’d won the Powerball, and in a sense they had. Of course there was one wee fucker, fourth floor rear on the left, who thought there might be a toy or two left in Santa’s sack. ‘Oh, I don’t know, Mr. Ballou, and where am I gonna move to, and how’ll I find something decent that I can afford, and all the expenses of relocation.’”

  I could see the shadow of a smile on Kristin’s face.

  “I looked at him,” Mick said, “and did I settle a hand on his shoulder? No, I don’t believe I did. I just held him with my eyes, and I lowered my voice, and I said I knew he’d be able to move, and move quickly, as it would be unsafe for him and his loved ones to be in the presence of men whose job it was to knock things down and blow them up. And in the end his was the first apartment vacated. Can you imagine?”

  Kristin clasped her hands, looking like Lois Lane. “My hero,” she said.

  It’s not impossible to take me by surprise, but I can’t think of anything that did so more utterly than Mick’s announcement of his upcoming marriage to Kristin. It was at Grogan’s that I learned of it, after some preliminary speculation on what happens after you die. I’d been bracing myself for bad news when he asked me to be his best man.

  Elaine swears she saw it coming, and can’t imagine how I didn’t.

  Kristin came into our lives when her parents left theirs, the victims of a particularly horrible home invasion. The madman who orchestrated it wasn’t finished; he wanted her and the house and the money, and it didn’t stop him when I spiked his first try. He came back a few years later, and didn’t miss by much.

  I got Mick to babysit her, confident that no one would get past him. They sat in the kitchen of her brownstone. They drank coffee and played cribbage. I suppose they talked, though I couldn’t guess what they talked about.

  That’s the same house in which she discovered her parents’ bodies. She went on living there, because she is far tougher at the core than you’d think, and she lives there now as my friend’s wife, and if they’re as unlikely a couple as Beauty and the Beast, you lose sight of the disparity after a few minutes in their company. He’s a big man, hard and forbidding as an Easter Island monolith, and she looks to be a frail and slender slip of a girl. He’s forty years her senior. She’s a child of privilege, while he’s a Hell’s Kitchen hoodlum who’s killed grown men with his hands.

  And she settles her hand on his arm, and beams while he tells his stories.

  There was a silence, with an unasked question hovering. Elaine broke the one and asked the other. Did he regret the sale?

  “No,” he said, and shook his head. “Why should I? I could run it a thousand years and not take twenty million dollars out of it. And if it’s a neighborhood institution, and enough people felt they had to say so last night, well, it’s one the neighborhood’s well off without.”

  “There’s history here,” I said.

  “There is, and most of it misfortunate. Crimes planned, oaths sworn and broken. You were here on the worst night of all.”

  “I was remembering it just now.”

  “How could you not? Two men in the doorway, spraying bullets as if they were watering the flowers. One tosses a bomb, and I can see the arc of it now, and the flash before the sound of it, like lightning before thunder.”

  The room went still again, until Mick got to his feet. “We need music,” he announced. “They were supposed to come this afternoon for the Wurlitzer, the truck from St. Vincent de Paul. The creature’s not old enough to be valuable or new enough to be truly useful, but they said they’d find a home for it. If they get here tomorrow or Monday they’re welcome to it, assuming I’m here to let them in. On Tuesday the building changes hands, and what’s in it belongs to the new owner, and most likely goes into a landfill along with the bricks and floorboards. You haven’t any use for it, have you? Or a two–ton Mosler safe? I didn’t think so. What would you like to hear?”

  Elaine and I shrugged. Kristin said, “Something sad.”

  “Something sad, is it?”

  “Something mournful and Irish.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Sure, that’s easily arranged.”

  I remembered an evening some years earlier. Elaine and I on our way out of the Met at Lincoln Center, the last strains of La Bohème still resounding. Elaine in a mood, restless. “She always fucking dies. I don’t want to go home. Can we hear more music? Something sad, it’s fine if it’s sad. It can break my fucking heart if it wants. Just so nobody dies.”

  We hit a couple of clubs, wound up downtown at Small’s, and by the time we got out of there the sun was up. And her mood had lifted.

  Irish songs on the ground floor of a Hell’s Kitchen tenement may be a far cry from jazz in a Village basement, but it served the same purpose, drawing us down into the mood as a means of easing us through it. I don’t remember exactly what Mick selected, but there were Clancy Boys and Dubliners cuts, and some ballads of the 1798 Rising, including a rendition of Boolavogue with a clear tenor voice backed by a piper’s keening.

  That was the last record to play, and it would have been a hard one to follow. I was put in mind of the Chesterton poem, and trying to remember just how it went when Elaine read my mind and quoted it:

  For the great Gaels of Ireland

  Are the men that God made mad,

  For all their wars are merry,

  And all their songs are sad.

  “I wonder,” Mick said. “Is it just the Irish? Or are we all of us like that, deep in our hearts?” He got to his feet, picked up his bottle and glass. “That’s enough whiskey. Is it iced tea you’re all drinking? I’ll fetch us another pitcher.” And to Kristin: “No, don’t get up. ’Tis my establishment still. I’ll provide the service.”

  He said, “Will I miss it? The short answer is it’s a bar like any other, and I’ve lost my taste for them, even my own.”

  “And the long answer?”

  He gave it some thought. “I expect I will,” he said. “The years pile up, you know. The sheer weight of them has an effect. I wasn’t always on the premises, but the place was always here for me.” He filled his glass with iced tea, sipped it as if it were whiskey. “The room is full of ghosts tonight. Can you feel it?”

  We all nodded.

  “And not just the shades of those who died that one bad night. Others as well, whose deaths were somewhere else altogether. Just now I looked over at the bar and saw a little old man in a cloth cap, perched on a stool and nursing a beer. I pointed him out to you once, but you wouldn’t remember.”

  But I did. “Ex–IRA,” I said. “If it’s the fellow I’m thinking of.”

  “It is. One of Tom Barry’s lads in West Cork he was, and that lot shed enough blood to redden Bantry Bay. When his regular local closed he brought his custom here, and drank a beer or two seven nights a week. And then one night he wasn’t here, and then the word came that he was gone. No man lives forever, not even a wee cutthroat from Kenmare.”

  He pronounced it Ken–mahr. There’s a Kenmare Street a few blocks long in NoLita, which is the tag realtors have fastened on a few square blocks north of Little Italy. A Tammany hack called Big Tim Sullivan managed to name it for his mother’s home town in County Kerry, but he couldn’t make people pronounce it in the Irish fashion. Ken–mair�
��s what they say, if indeed they say the name at all; the residents nowadays are mostly Chinese.

  “Andy Buckley,” he said. “You remember Andy.”

  That didn’t require an answer. I could hardly have forgotten Andy Buckley.

  “He was here on that bad night. Got us into the car and away, the two of us.”

  “I remember.”

  “As good behind the wheel of a car as any man I’ve ever known. And as good with darts. He’d scarcely seem to be paying attention, and with a flick of his wrist he’d put the little feathered creature just where he wanted it.”

  “He made it look effortless.”

  “He did. You know, when I had them put this place back together again, I bought a new dartboard and had it installed in the usual place on the back wall. And I found I didn’t like seeing it there, and I took it down.” He took a deep breath, held it, let it out. “I had no choice,” he said.

  Andy Buckley had betrayed Mick, his employer and friend. Sold him out, set him up. And I’d been there on a lonely road upstate when Mick took Andy’s head in his own big hands and broke his neck.

  You remember Andy, he’d said.

  “No fucking choice,” he said, “and yet it never sat easy with me. Or why would I have had them replace the dartboard? And why would I have taken it down?”

  “If they hadn’t come round with their offer,” he said, “I’d never have closed Grogan’s. It never would have occurred to me. But the time’s right, you know.”

  Kristin nodded, and I sensed they’d discussed this point before. Elaine asked what was so right about the timing.

  “My life’s changed,” he said. “In many ways, beyond the miracle that an angel came down from heaven to be my bride.”

  “How he does go on,” Kristin said.

  “My business interests,” he said, “are all legitimate. The few wide boys I had working for me have moved on, and if they’re still doing criminal deeds they’re doing them at someone else’s behest. I’m a silent partner in several enterprises, and I may have come by my interest by canceling a debt or doing someone an illegal favor, but the businesses themselves are lawful and so is my participation.”

  “And Grogan’s is an anomaly?” Elaine frowned. “I don’t see how, exactly. It’s evolved like the rest of your life, and it’s more a yuppie watering hole than a hangout for hoodlums.”

  He shook his head. “No, that’s not the point. In the bar business there’s no end of men looking to cheat you. Suppliers billing you for undelivered goods, bartenders making themselves your silent partners, hard men practicing extortion and calling it advertising or charity. But I always had a pass, you know, because they knew to be afraid of me. Who’d try to get over on a man with my reputation? Who’d dare to steal from me, or cheat me, or put pressure on me?”

  “Whoever did would be taking his life in his hands.”

  “Once,” he said. “Once that was true. Now the lion’s old and toothless and wants only to lie by the fire. And sooner or later some lad would make his move, and I’d have to do something about it, something I’d not care to do, something I’m past doing. No, I’m well out of the game.” He sighed. “Will I miss it? There’s parts of the old life I miss, and it’s no shame to admit it. I wouldn’t care to have it back, but there’s times when I miss it.” His eyes found mine. “And you? Is it not the same for you?”

  “I wouldn’t want it back.”

  “Not for anything. But do you miss it? The drink, and all that went with it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “There are times I do.”

  It was late when we left. Mick turned off the one light, locked up, proclaiming the latter a waste of time. “If anyone wants to come in and take something, what does it matter? None of it’s mine anymore.”

  He had his car, the big silver Cadillac, and dropped us off. Nobody had much to say beyond a few pleasantries as we got out of the car, and the silence held while Elaine and I crossed the Parc Vendome’s lobby and ascended in the elevator. She had her key out and let us in, and we checked Voice Mail and email, and she found a coffee cup I’d left beside the computer and returned it to the kitchen.

  We tried the Conor Pass engraving in a few spots—in a hallway, in the front room—and decided to defer the decision of where to hang it. Elaine felt it wanted to be seen at close range, so we left it for now, propped against the base of a lamp on the drum–top table.

  The little tasks one does, all of them performed in a companionable silence.

  And then she said “It wasn’t so bad.”

  “No. It was a good evening, actually.”

  “I love the two of them so much. Individually and together.”

  “I know.”

  “And he’s much better off without the place. He’ll be fine, don’t you think?”

  “I think so.”

  “But it really is, isn’t it? The end of an era.”

  “Like Seinfeld?”

  She shook her head. “Not quite,” she said. “There won’t be any reruns.”

  I began writing about Matthew Scudder in the early 1970s. My first marriage was in dissolution, and I was living alone in an apartment a block from Columbus Circle. I wrote out a series proposal, my agent made a deal with Dell, and the three books flowed from my typewriter one after another: The Sins of the Fathers, Time to Murder and Create, and In the Midst of Death.

  Paperback distribution in general was problematic during those years, and Dell’s troubles were greater than most; they returned much of their manuscript inventory, paid for but unpublished, to authors and agents, and but for the personal enthusiasm of editor Bill Grose, Scudder might never have seen print.

  The books were published, but distribution was spotty and sales slow, though people who read them seemed to like them well enough. Paperback originals don’t often get reviewed, but the three Scudder novels did receive a fair amount of critical attention, and Time to Murder and Create was shortlisted for an Edgar Allan Poe award.

  But there was certainly no enthusiasm for continuing the series beyond the initial three books, and no reason to believe another publisher would want to take it over. It certainly looked as though I’d be well advised to turn my attention to other books, with other characters.

  Scudder, I found, was not that easily abandoned. And so in 1977 I started writing a short story about him, “Out the Window,” and it ran long enough for us to call it a novelette. Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine ran it in their September issue, and two months later they printed another, “A Candle for the Bag Lady.” (The latter was briefly retitled “Like a Lamb to Slaughter,” so that it might serve as the flagship story of a collection with that title, and that’s a story in itself—but one I’ll save for another time.)

  Those two novelettes helped keep the character alive for me. A couple of years later I took a chance and wrote a fourth full-length Scudder novel on spec, and Don Fine published it at Arbor House. That was A Stab in the Dark, followed in fairly short order by Eight Million Ways to Die.

  That was a pivotal volume, for me and for Matthew Scudder. It was twice as long as the early books, and was as much about the dynamics of alcoholism and the general frailty of human existence as it was about the particular murder investigation which drove the plot. The book got a lot of critical attention; it was shortlisted for an Edgar and won a Shamus award outright. But while it looked like the start of something big, the party appeared to be over.

  Because how could I go on writing about Scudder? In a sense, the five books and two stories amounted to a single mega-novel, and it had all been resolved in Eight Million Ways to Die. By confronting and owning up to his alcoholism, my protagonist had come to terms with the central problem of his existence. He’d had a catharsis, and what human being, fictional or otherwise, gets more than one of those?

  I figured I was done with Scudder. His d’etre, you might say, had lost its raison. I wished it were otherwise, as I enjoyed seeing the world through his eyes and writing in his voic
e, but I wasn’t willing to force a book into existence.

  And that might very well have been the end of it—if not for the third story in this volume, By the Dawn’s Early Light.

  Some years before, Robert J. Randisi told me he was hoping to find a publisher for a collection of original private eye stories. If he managed to do so, would I agree to write a story for the volume? It seemed safe enough to say yes, since the likelihood of my ever hearing further seemed remote at best.

  But Bob, the indefatigable founder of Private Eye Writers of America, came to me not long after the publication of Eight Million Ways to Die to report success. He’d sold his anthology to Otto Penzler’s Mysterious Press, and now he wanted a story from me.

  I explained that I seemed to be done with Scudder. Bob was disappointed but understanding. Otto was also understanding, but this didn’t stop him from whining and coaxing and wheedling. I explained it was out of the question, and then I went home and figured out how to do it. The story could be a flashback, with a sober Scudder recounting an event from his drinking days.

  It worked rather well. Alice Turner snapped it up for Playboy, Bob tucked it into his anthology, and MWA gave it an Edgar for Best Short Story. And then a year later I added a couple of additional plot threads to the story and expanded it from 8500 words to 90,000; the resultant novel, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, is the favorite of a good number of Scudder fans.

  It was to take several years before I found myself able to continue the real-time Scudder saga, with his story continuing in his sober years. I picked him up in 1989, with Out on the Cutting Edge, and the books have continued to follow at reasonably regular intervals. In 2011, I went back to fill in a gap; A Drop of the Hard Stuff, while framed with a late-night conversation between Matt and Mick Ballou, takes place in 1982-3, a year or so after Matt leaves an untouched drink on the bar at the end of Eight Million Ways to Die.

  And over the years I’ve continued to write short fiction starring Matthew Scudder. “Batman’s Helpers” grew out of a friend’s experience in street-level trademark enforcement; Bob Randisi found room for it in Justice For Hire. “The Merciful Angel of Death” was written in response to the AIDS crisis, and appeared in New Mystery, Jerome Charyn’s International Association of Crime Writers anthology.