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“Oh,” she exclaimed just before a commercial break, “isn’t that your friend there, in the second row of the audience?”

“Who?”

She pointed to the screen. “The belligerent little fellow who drops in for lunch sometimes.”

By the time I looked up from my pile of papers they were showing a SoyHammy commercial. “You mean Norbert Tuffy?”

“I think that’s his name. He won an Emmy or something years ago. What’s he doing these days?”

“Sort of difficult to explain.”

After the block of commercials we got a grinning closeup of Mack Naydell. “This next guest’s long been one of my favorite people and a damn fine writer. I’m kicking myself it took a near-tragedy to remind me to have him drop in to visit us,” he said. “Let’s welcome a very talented guy, Macho Sweeze.”

They cut to a medium shot to show Macho come striding out to shake hands and sit in an armchair next to the affable host.

“Happy to be here, Mack,” Macho said.

“He’s got a sexy voice,” said my secretary.

“Before we talk about your recent experiences,” said Naydell, leaning in the direction of his guest, “I’d like to talk about the Blind Butcher books.”

Up in the woods above the theater Fritz Momand made the final adjustments to his rifle. He had Macho in the crosshairs now and was waiting for just the right second to fire. He figured he’d have time for two, maybe three shots. As he waited he listened to them talking.

“Up until recently,” Naydell was saying, “no one knew you’d written these great suspense novels, Macho. One of which will soon be a major movie. But now you’ve come out from behind the Dan X. Spear pen name.”

“Yeah, I got tired of hiding my light under a bushel,” said Macho, grinning. “Now I am openly admitting that I am the author of the Blind Butcher series.”

Fritz’s finger tightened on the trigger.

Then up out of the audience leaped Norbert Tuffy. Before anyone could restrain him, he hopped right on the stage and ripped the lapel mike off Macho’s checkered jacket.

“That’s a lie!” Norbert shouted, and turned, arm raised high and facing the audience. “My name is Norbert Tuffy and I’m the true and only author of the Blind Butcher books!”

Fritz hesitated. He wasn’t sure which one, Macho or Norbert, had written the books and had an affair with his wife.

He decided to play it safe.

He shot both of them.

Concerto for Violence and Orchestra

by William Bankier

© 1981 by William Bankier

A new short story by William Bankier

There have been classic cases in which a whole landscape has been stolen, in which a house and all its furnishings have disappeared, in which an entire jury and a complete baseball team have been abducted. Now read about the theft of a five-piece dance band...

People will steal anything. The police could open their files and show you cases of a ship being stolen, or lead from a church roof, or a herd of cattle. Countries even try to steal other countries — we read about it in the papers every day. These thoughts cross my mind as I remember what happened between me and Carlotta Teddington and Leonard Zolf. Perhaps I should begin in the traditional way.

Once upon a time there was a man who tried to steal a dance band.

The band in question is The Bones Cornfield Quintet and I am the leader. The nickname suits me. I weigh 190 pounds but it is spread thin over a six-foot four-inch frame. A sadistic guitar player once told me that when I am asleep it is easy to imagine what I will look like when I’ve been dead a few years.

The quintet is a semi-pro band. We play once a week at a pub in southwest London. The money is minimal but the management is enlightened. He charges no admission, so we always have a full house of beer drinkers who like the forties swing we play.

Some of us have regular jobs. Carlotta, our vocalist, teaches school in Wandsworth. Muir Levy, our piano player, sells cut-price Asian holidays to homesick Pakistanis. That may be the beginning of a lyric. Clay Braithwaite, our reed player, drives a Number 93 bus for London Transport. Pat Manta, the drummer, paints houses occasionally and collects social security regularly. And I play double bass when I’m not pulling pints on the morning shift at the Rose and Crown.

Quintet, you say, counting on your fingers. Quintet?

I’m coming to the fifth member of the band (sorry girls, we don’t count the female vocalist). He is the man I mentioned earlier, Leonard Zolf, trumpeter. Leonard used to be with the National Westminster amateur jazz band till the bank fired him. Now he sells used cars. When we ask why the bank gave him the sack, Zolf inflates like a pigeon, tugs at the points of his red waistcoat, smooths his pale thinning hair with both hands, and changes the subject.

It was shortly after Zolf joined the band that the trouble started. We had finished our Tuesday night rehearsal in the back room at St. Stephen’s Church hall. The vicar lets us use the room free because the band plays for nothing at his annual summer fête. I was inviting Carlotta to join me for coffee when we heard Zolf s voice rising in that locust drone of his.

“Terrible to be playing this out-of-date music when we could be making money.” He was not talking to anybody in particular. Zolf has a way of soliloquizing, scattering words like a fisherman flinging bait on the water, confident that sooner or later something will surface. “We should be playing disco. That’s where the money is.”

“The bank is where the money is,” Braithwaite said. Braithwaite is from the West Indies. When he plays soprano sax, he sounds like Sidney Bechet. “You never told us why you left the bank.”

Zolf ignored the probe. “I know the man who books the Aladdin Disco. We could get in there twice a week on a standard contract.”

Nobody said anything. Muir Levy played a progression of Shearing-esque chords. His eyes were on me. So were those of the other sidemen. Their heads were raised, their movements frozen, like antelopes around the waterhole checking out their leader to see if it was time to run.

I followed rules one and two of my emergency procedure used whenever I am threatened by events. I said nothing and I did nothing. Later, as Carlotta was helping me load my double bass into the back of the minivan, she said, “Zolf is deliberately making waves.”

“I felt them lapping around my ankles.”

“How long are you going to wait? Till your nostrils get wet?”

“It’s only talk.”

“That’s how palace revolutions begin. Talk. He’s trying to steal your band.”

She got behind the wheel and I sat in calmly beside her, a good man, a harmless man, everybody likes me. “Never trust a musician who wears rimless glasses,” Carlotta warned.

Our weekly Thursday night gig at the pub was a great success. We went through our modified arrangements of big-band standards and the crowd ate it up. Carlotta was in good voice. She sings like June Christie used to do with Stan Kenton, in a pure, clear, almost child-like voice. But whereas Christie was a blonde beauty, Carlotta Teddington’s appearance suggests gypsy ancestors. Her long black hair falls over one shoulder in a braid thick enough to moor one end of the QE2. Her broad face maintains a tan even under the random English sun and those pale green eyes announce that no phonies need apply.

When we stopped playing at 10:30 and the crowd dispersed in deference to English drink-licensing laws, the manager, a shaggy man named Shep, shuffled over to the bandstand. “Good news and bad news,” he said. “Which do you want first?”

“No news,” Manta the drummer said.