A bus went by and wisely refused to stop. Some boys and girls ran after it flinging bottles which smashed in the street. “Is this what we’re doing two nights a week from now on?” I said to nobody in particular.
Zolf picked it up. “Nothing to do with us.” He had a fistful of money. “Come on inside,” he announced. “It’s payday.”
That was the Tuesday fiasco. We had another scheduled for Friday. On Thursday, Carlotta came to my place and I put on the album of Charlie Parker with Strings. Eventually we would wander down the road for fish and chips. For now we were talking and sipping rose and getting hungry.
“I don’t think I can face the Aladdin any more,” I said.
“Nobody really likes it except Leonard.”
“Then why are we doing it?”
“Because it’s been sold to us.”
“Same reason the kids go, I suppose. They’ve been told this is the thing to do.”
“And a lot of hustlers in the record business are making a fortune merchandising schlock.”
“Well, I’m not buying any more. Let Zolf get his friend to play bass.”
Carlotta punished me with half a minute of disapproving silence. Then she said, “Do you know all that is needed for the triumph of evil?”
I completed the axiom. “That good men do nothing.”
“Right. This is your band, Bones. We’re going through a bad patch, you can’t desert us now. Stay and fight.”
The thought of confronting Zolf, of taking him on for control of the band, was very upsetting. Zolf loved contention, the threat of violence fueled his engine. I wanted peace at any price, almost. Even now I felt the tension, a frightening anger boiling up inside me.
Then the stylus slid into the next track on the record and Charlie Parker began to blow April in Paris. As the string section laid down a fabric of lush chords, Bird’s alto poured out notes like hard, bright diamonds tumbling from a velvet sack. I felt my tension evaporating.
“Carlotta,” I said, “I think I have an idea.” I told her what I had in mind.
“That’s more like it,” she said, and she gave me an approving kiss.
“That’s more like it,” I said.
The Friday disco was a photocopy of the one before. I suspected they would all be the same until the kids died of boredom at seventeen. During one of our breaks, while the DJ was plugging the top ten and Zolf was in the manager’s office counting the take, I had a word with the other members of the group. They needed no long explanation — they were with me immediately.
The only problem would be getting rid of Zolf at the crucial time. Carlotta said she would take care of it.
As we began our final set, she went to Zolf and said, “I was just out in the parking lot having a breath of air. Your car is gone.”
Zolf put down his trumpet and left on the run. “Is his car really gone?” I asked.
“Sure is,” Carlotta said. “I sneaked the keys from his coat and moved it during intermission. It’s on the next street. He’ll be a good half hour talking to the police.”
The band played two more identical numbers and then I stopped the sausage machine. I went to the mike and said, “Okay, kids, a change in mood. We’re going to close with something different. We call this a time to get to know your partner.”
I counted a slow four and the band began to play one of our romantic medleys. We started with Sentimental Journey, segued into Harlem Nocturn, then ended with Dream. Carlotta sang the final number in that clear voice of hers, no pretense, just an intelligent concentration on the meaning of the words.
“...Things never are as bad as they seem...”
The crowd applauded when the set ended, the first human response I have ever heard from a disco floor. As they drifted out of the hall, Zolf appeared with a livid face. “All right,” he said, “which one of you cretins moved my car?”
“Guilty, and proud of it,” Carlotta said.
“Acting on my instructions,” I put in. “We needed you gone so we could change the program.”
“Yes, I heard that Mickey Mouse music from the outside. What’s going on?”
“Follow me and I’ll show you.”
I led the group to the front door and we stepped outside into a calm summer evening. The kids were drifting away, some of them queueing for a bus. There was a certain amount of exuberant teenaged shouting, but not a clenched fist anywhere.
“What we did was soothe a lot of savage breasts and ennoble a few hearts,” I said. “We charmed these kids with our music.”
“That isn’t the idea,” Zolf fumed. “Disco music turns people on, it strings them out. Man, we are paid to establish a ‘high’ and sustain it. No way are you going to change this lucrative gig into your square old failure of a band concert. That was the first and last time you alter my program.”
Zolf turned and headed inside. I glanced at Carlotta; she was watching me. So were the other members of the quintet. Carlotta nodded but said nothing. Words were unnecessary. I knew this was a perfect example of the bad guy winning unless the good guy is willing to take action. “Hey, Zolf,” I called, stopping him at the door.
“Yeah?”
“I take exception to everything you just said.”
“So?”
I approached him, took the rimless glasses off his nose, and handed them to Carlotta. “So this,” I said and planted one on his jaw. He sat down on the pavement and looked up at me. “The band now goes back to being The Bones Cornfield Quintet,” I said. “We’ll keep the disco job. But we’ll play a balanced program, the frenetic stuff interspersed with standards that don’t all sound the same. All right?”
I’m not sure whether Zolf replied because the response from the boys was immediate and loud. “Yeah! That’s right, boss. That’s what we’re going to do.”
Driving home with Carlotta, I said, “That felt good. It really did. One punch on the chops gave me more satisfaction than saying all the right things in a ten-minute argument.”
“That’s why they invented violence,” she said. “It’s like making love. It feels good.” The car rolled to a stop in front of her house. “And you were terrific,” she added, putting her arms around me. “I like the way you took charge.” She kissed me so hard my teeth hurt.
“Which was that?” I asked. “Love or violence?”
“Take your choice,” she said. “It’s a fine line.”
And I think that’s a fine line to end on.
M as in Mayhem
by Lawrence Treat
© 1981 by Lawrence Treat
A brisk, breezy procedural about one of our favorite cop characters, Mitch Taylor of Homicide, assigned to protect a frightened concert pianist... “A lot of times you don’t really figure things out, you just go ahead and do something, and then later on it adds up and you find out why you did if”...
The way Mitch Taylor, Homicide, got it, it seemed that this Vladimir Borsky was supposed to give a concert tomorrow night and he’d asked for police protection on account his wife had threatened to chop off his hands or something. When the lieutenant handed out the assignment to Mitch, he figured about all he had to do was go out to the new Hubert Humphrey airport, pick the guy up, and then deliver him to his hotel and again to the concert hall the next day. After that somebody else could worry.
With a name like Borsky the guy ought to be easy to spot, even if he didn’t carry his piano around with him. Only he wasn’t, because when he showed up at the information counter after he got paged, he looked like he was ready to get down and hide under a piano instead of sitting in front of it. He was kind of a tall skinny guy with a nose that kept sniffing around, like he was going to sneeze only he couldn’t get started, and he looked pooped.