Nine Fingers

by Thom August

  “My work here is done,” I said to no one in particular, and headed toward the edge.

  I was stopped by Paul’s voice, saying, “Well, not entirely.” He was standing holding a microphone in his right hand, keeping it at arm’s length in obvious distaste.

  Of course, I thought, how could you play on a rotating circular stage without amplification? A big guy with a curly blond beard and a ponytail waddled up onto the stand, and walked over to where I was crouching.

  “I’m Egon,” he said. “I’m the manager here.” We shook hands.

  “Help me out, Egon,” I said. “Where is the sound system?”

  In the middle of the stage, by a large pole, was a tarpaulin that looked like someone had just dumped it on the floor. Egon lifted the tarp and a cloud of dust wafted up. Below it was an ancient soundboard. He pointed to the side, where the power switch was. I leaned down and blew on the board, and another cloud floated up. Next to it was a small block of wood, obviously handmade, bolted to the pole. There were two rusty toggle-switches on it, and a popsicle stick was taped to the bottom of the right one, limiting how far you could throw the switch. I looked up at Egon.

  “What’s the popsicle stick for?” I asked.

  “That there’s the switch that controls the stage’s rotation. There’s your regular speed, like now, and your OFF, which is up, and your high speed, which is down. We rigged it so that stick blocks you from high speed. Trust me—you don’t want to go there,” he repeated. “The one on the left is for all the player pianos and shit,” and turned his back and hopped off the stage.

  I looked at Paul. He made a point of looking at his watch. I looked at my own; we had maybe five minutes before we were scheduled to start. “I know you’ll do what you can,” he said. “Maybe we can make some adjustments between sets.”

  I did what I could to get the levels right, to bring the piano up and the trumpet down, to clear some of the mud out of the bass, and to round off the tinny treble. Paul usually carried a small mike that clipped onto the bell of his horn. I rooted around in his case and found it, praying that it would connect up. I held out the connector of the little mic, and brought it closer and closer to the cord coming from the board, my arms out straight and pointing inward, like Dr. Frankenstein preparing to summon the lightning into his laboratory.

  “Please,” Paul said, “I can’t stand the suspense.”

  With a flourish, I brought the two together. I made myself shake for a few seconds, then dropped the connection to the floor and headed to the bar.

  There’s no way I was going to sit there listening to them play without me while I was stone-cold sober.

  The bar wrapped all the way around the north third of the hexagon, between the entrance and the kitchen door, and it was magnificent—an old mahogany-and-brass classic that had felt the weight of a million elbows perched on its edge. A heavyset barkeep came up to me, I said “Jack on the rocks and an Old Style draft,” as I settled into a rickety red vinyl barstool.

  Akiko was busy with her drums. Paul was blowing into his horn to warm it up. Sidney was playing trills, of all things, on the tuba. Landreau was touching the piano tentatively, the way a man might reach out to touch a leper. Ridlin’s reed was in his mouth, getting moist, but he was turning his head, sweeping the room.

  I decided to take a peek myself, and it was a motley crowd indeed. It looked as if everyone already had a half a dozen drinks in them. Most of them were males, most of them were obscenely fat, most of them were wearing greasy ball caps with a sharp break in the bill, and all of them were loud, laughing, slapping each other on the back. There were maybe a dozen women in the room, and they all seemed to be smoking as if this would be their last one for a month, taking long slow concentrated drags, barely letting any out, then taking the next ones, as if they felt they had to inhale smoke with every breath of air they took.

  I lit one myself, and self-consciously coughed. I found an ashtray on the bar, already full, nudged some dead butts out of the way, and set my own carefully down. As I started to turn away, the barkeep set down my shot-and-a-beer and swept the ashtray off the bar, freshly lit cigarette and all, dumped it somewhere behind the bar, and banged it down empty front of me.

  I thumbed another one from the pack, lit it, and held onto it.

  I went back to looking around the room, checking out all the player instruments, when I saw her. She was sitting in one of the hexagon’s corners, in a dark space, out of the light, a glass of red wine sitting in front of her. She was wearing a long black dress, closed all the way to her neck, with a string of dark gray pearls in the front. She looked fabulous: rich, slim, elegant, sexy, sophisticated, demure. In a place like this, she stuck out.

  No, not Laura; her mother, Amelia Della Chiesa. She was almost as tall as Laura, but less voluptuous, with a little less flesh in the bust and the hips, as if time had carved the excess off her. Her cheekbones were sharper, her hair more severely styled. Her skin was that same flawless olive tone, and polished smooth. She was holding a cigarette, cocked at an angle. Every now and then she would reach out and flick it over the ashtray, but I didn’t see her actually inhale it. She was sitting very still, her right leg crossed over her left, not moving a muscle. And she was staring, but wasn’t making any attempt to hide it. It was a bold, frank stare, unwavering, unblinking.

  She was staring at Jack.

  No one else caught her interest; her eyes didn’t flinch. She was taking in every gesture as his fingers roamed across the middle half of the keyboard I had managed to salvage. Her eyes were cool, her back straight. I couldn’t see lust; I couldn’t see disdain; I couldn’t see anything. Whatever was going on inside was way down deep, for herself alone.

  As I stared I heard the band start its final tune-up, and they quickly jumped into the same song we had heard on the sound system on the way in from the kitchen, “The Heebie Jeebies.” This hadn’t been on the playlist; it must have been one of Paul’s last-minute improvisations.

  It was hard to tell that we hadn’t practiced this tune in years. Sidney remembered it from our early Dixieland days and played it on his tuba, and Akiko knew the old Baby Dodds drum routine well enough, and Jack and Ken jumped right in and made it work.

  The crowd applauded madly.

  Paul took a minute to introduce the band, even pointing to me over at the bar, and they went right into “West End Blues,” another Louis number, starting with the famous sixteen-bar obbligato way up in the stratosphere on the trumpet. After that was “Skid-Dat-De-Dat.” And then right into the ballad “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” a beautiful tune, all minor-key regret and major-key resolution, and they did a fabulous job on it. I looked over at Amelia and the expression on her face was rapt and yet surprised.

  They played the final chorus on “Sleepytime” and before I knew it my shot was gone and my beer glass was empty and they were done, an all-Armstrong set, and a nice one.

  The crowd gave them a big ovation—some of them even stood up and hooted—and all of a sudden all the lights came on and all of the player instruments came on all at once, playing “When the Saints Come Marching In,” and we all held our hands over our ears until it was over.

  CHAPTER 51

  Ken Ridlin

  At the Nickelodeon

  Friday, January 24

  Halfway through the first set I see her, sitting at a table in the corner in the darkest spot in the room. At first I think it is Laura, with her hair pulled back, watching Jones play the drums. But the stage rotates a notch and I see it is her mother, Amelia. She’s not watching Akiko play the drums, she’s watching Landreau play the piano.

  We’re in the middle of “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” all minor keys with lots of sharps, and I don’t like lots of sharps and I haven’t played this tune in years, and Powell hands the solo off to me as we get to the bridge and I have to concentrate just to stumble my way through it and I lose sight of her as I focus on the music.

  We come down
to the close and the set ends and the crowd applauds and I look for her again. The stage is still turning. I am feeling dizzy and nauseous and weak. I lean back in the chair to feel the forty-five tucked into the small of my back, and it comforts me. I rub my right foot against my left ankle to feel the thirty-two tucked in the holster there, and it strengthens me.

  For a second, I see her again, just a glimpse. Then the crowd stands and we are borne off the stage and I lose her again. In seconds I find myself in front of Amatucci at the bar, and a beer is placed in my hands and I look at it, the light shining through it all golden and warm. In a second a ginger ale replaces it. I take a sip and look around and we are all there.

  Except for Landreau. I find Amelia’s corner and she is gone as well.

  CHAPTER 52

  Vinnie Amatucci

  At the Nickelodeon

  Friday, January 24

  By one in the morning the place had finally emptied out and Akiko had finished packing up her kit. Ridlin herded us over to a booth. He took one of the police drawings and held it up.

  He asked us if anyone had seen him tonight, and we all said, no, we hadn’t. I had been looking for him, but I hadn’t seen anyone who even fit the general physical parameters. Ridlin took the drawing, set it down on the table. A breeze lifted it away. He put it back down on the table, smoothing it out with his long fingers, and placed his ginger ale on top of it.

  “The latest thinking over at headquarters is that the focus may have shifted, from Ms. Jones to Mr. Landreau,” he said.

  Passive voice, I thought. Not “I think,” not “We think,” not even the protective coloration of “They think,” but “The latest thinking.” I glanced at Paul. He had caught it, too. Passive voice. What he sometimes calls the “Present Irresponsible” tense.

  “Shifted?” I followed up. “Why?”

  “You were there at the bus stop. The man who was there may be the man we have been looking for. Who identified him? Landreau. We think there might be some history there.”

  Sidney leaned forward. “History?”

  Ridlin waved him off. “Nothing I’m at liberty to say. Jones may still be a target, but Landreau may be a target as well. That’s why we’re keeping him in town. He may know something he’s not saying. But now he’s disappeared.”

  “I mean, like, ‘disappeared’? He didn’t leave alone,” Akiko said.

  “I don’t know if that’s better or worse.”

  “Do you know if Jack has, you know, a history with her, with Laura’s mother?” Akiko asked.

  He said nothing.

  She said nothing. It was a standoff, each one trying to see how much the other knew.

  I was also acutely aware that I didn’t know how much I knew myself. I had seen Landreau freak out and ID the guy in his semi-autistic way at the bus stop. I had heard Akiko’s interpretation of Laura’s wild theories about Jack and her mother. I had seen Amelia, unable to take her eyes off him. But I didn’t know if she was staring at him with hate or lust or disdain.

  When you have no data, it’s easy to speculate. In fact, if you have half a brain, it’s hard not to.

  Ridlin interrupted my reverie.

  “But we don’t even have a clue where she might be hiding out.”

  Akiko spoke up in a quiet voice. “Yes, you do, you just don’t know you do.”

  Ridlin looked over at her. So did the rest of us. She does that a lot, waits and circles and then pounces; it’s like a linguistic version of her martial arts discipline.

  “What do you mean, ‘he knows but he doesn’t know he knows’?” I prompted.

  “You all do,” she said, “except for you, Vince. You weren’t there.”

  We all leaned in. She had the floor.

  “Remember the gig up at Lake Geneva?” she asked. They all nodded their heads.

  “We went outside and looked over the lake, and it was cold and foggy and beautiful? There was a house there, a house on a promontory—”

  “I remember it,” Paul said. “Modern. Plains style, very Frank Lloyd Wright, all horizontal lines. I remember wishing Vince were there so he could tell us if it was a real Wright.”

  “In Lake Geneva?” I repeated. “No. No way.”

  Akiko looked down at the floor, then looked up, but only halfway. There are some stories you can tell and look someone in the eye. This wasn’t going to be one of them.

  “We went up there once,” she said. “Laura and I. She’s like, ‘Field trip!’ so off we went. This was back in, I don’t know, October, November. We drove and drove and got there and it was dark. There’s a road, on the other side of the house from where we were, where you can see it? The road sticks out into the lake a bit and you look over a little cove and there it is. It’s like the same sideways view of the house that we saw, but like, from the other side. So she had me pull up this little road, almost to the water’s edge, and kill the lights. Laura likes to—well, she’s adventurous, OK? She was telling me about this fabulous house with this incredible view, and how the bedroom ceiling was all glass, so you could see the stars, and the walls were all glass, so you could see the water and the woods. She was pulling me out of the car and I’m like, ‘But Laura, we’ll get caught, someone will see us, I am not breaking into somebody’s house, no way, I don’t care how cool the view is,’ and she’s like, ‘No, it’s OK. I have a key.’And she was dragging me out of the car and just then the porch lights came on. She grabbed me and pulled me down behind a bush. A door opened, and a woman came out onto the deck. She was standing there, smoking a cigarette, looking out at the lake. Laura kept shushing me, begging me not to make a sound. Finally, the woman went back inside, and turned out the lights. We waited maybe two, three minutes, freezing our asses off, and then scrambled into the car and she said ‘Drive!’ and I did. She had one of those looks on her face, so I backed out of there and did a U-turn and said, ‘But I thought you had a key,’and she said, ‘I do,’and held it up, in the light of the dashboard. ‘I thought you said you knew her,’ I said. ‘I do,’ she said again. ‘So?’ I asked. ‘Why aren’t we going in?’ She looked back at the house, and said, ‘I didn’t know she was home. I thought she was at her other house, on Saint Barts. We can’t go in there if she’s home.’ And I said, ‘Why? Who is she?’ And she’s like, ‘She’s my mother. She’s my long-lost mysterious mother, and we have to stop talking now.’ And that’s, that’s how I know where she lives. In Lake Geneva. In that house.”

  I was stunned. There was nothing to say.

  Until Ridlin picked up his ginger-ale glass from on top of the picture of the killer.

  The glass had left a ring on the paper, right about where a mustache would be, and that pulled the image together for me. It was a different mustache from the one with the beard at the bus stop. With the beard it had been straight and bushy, almost British sergeant-major-ish. The wet line on the picture was curved, like the bottom of the glass, and it ran down his chin like a Fu Manchu and I slapped the table and yelped, “Holy shit! Holy fucking shit!”

  Ridlin looked at me and I looked back at him. “Do you remember that I said I thought the picture of this guy looked familiar, like I had seen him somewhere, but I didn’t know where?”

  “Yeah?”

  “And I couldn’t figure out why because at the bus stop all I saw of him was his back, and that was kind of familiar in a kind of a strange way, but how the fuck do you recognize somebody’s face when all you saw of him was his back?”

  He squinted, like he was trying to remember something.

  “Now I know where I saw him. He was wearing a mustache, like a Fu Manchu, like in this picture, in the shape of the water stain.”

  “Who is he, Vince? How do you know him? Where can we find him?”

  I thought through his three questions.

  “I don’t know who he is or what name he goes by, but I have a regular customer with the cab who I think works for the Mob—I think he does collections—and he had this guy show up someplace where he
had a problem collecting. It was on the West Side, out on South Cicero, and I missed the address and went too far, and when my customer saw that I caught a glimpse of this guy he freaked out. I mean he fucking lost it.”

  “I’m not following,” Ridlin said.

  Paul jumped in. “What Vince is trying to say is that he doesn’t know the guy, but he knows a guy who knows the guy.”

  “Is that right, Vince?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know him and wouldn’t know where to find him, but my guy, my regular customer, does. He’s like a leg-breaker, but my guy was surprised as hell when he showed up, like he was the leg-breaker to end all leg-breakers, if that makes any sense.”

  “That’s exactly what he is, the leg-breaker to end all leg-breakers, although using him like that, I don’t know…” Ridlin said.

  Ridlin knitted his brow together, and drummed his fingers on the table.

  “So, what are we going to do?” I asked.

  “ ‘We’? ” he asked. “‘We’ are not going to do anything. You two are going to come with me and make a full report down at HQ, and they are going to take it from there.”

  “No, we’re not,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Akiko said. “No, we’re not. By the way,” she said, turning to me, in a stage whisper, “how come we’re not?”

  “Because it’s gotten personal,” I said. “These guys are personally coming after us, and they’re going to keep coming after us until they get us. Think about it,” I said. “We have a chance to get our hands on both Amelia and the mob’s favorite all-purpose assassin. What kind of fish could we lure in with that kind of bait?”

  “Vince, you’re talking crazy,” Ridlin said. “It’s totally outside of policy. I can’t just—”

  I cut him off.

  “Look, you can tell us all about policy later. I’m sure it’ll be fascinating. But think about it. What do you think we might be able to trade for if we had both of them? They want to make it personal? We make it personal. They take a pawn, and then our rook? We take their queen and threaten their bishop.”