by Gerald Elias
“Maybe you have a point.”
“How sweet of you to say so. Now play it again, and play it like the classical composer Beethoven was in 1802—with proportion and tone quality—and not like a prequel to Phantom of the Opera.”
“You should be happy I’ve learned not to take your criticism personally,” Yumi said.
“Who said it wasn’t personal?”
Yumi laughed, then played through the movement again, this time with control and attention to detail. The energy was still there and the music seemed to flow more naturally.
When she finished, Jacobus said, “That time I heard a little bit of Beethoven. And a little Beethoven will go a long way. Thank you.”
That was as much of a compliment as Yumi had ever received from Jacobus.
“Jake,” she said, “since this tour with the Magini Quartet coming up is my first, I was wondering if you and Nathaniel might want to come to one of our performances.”
“Where are you playing, honey?” asked Nathaniel, who had been listening from the living room. He folded up an old Times Book Review and entered the studio.
“It’s a festivals tour,” Yumi said. “We start in Durango, Colorado. Then the Antelope Island Festival in Utah, Teton Festival in Wyoming, Sunriver in Oregon, and we finish at Ojai in California. Two weeks. And we’re doing the Brahms Quintet with Virgil Lavender on some of the programs.”
“Out west with the hicks?” asked Jacobus. “It’ll be a cold day in hell when I fly out west for a concert.”
“Well,” said Nathaniel, “with this heat I wouldn’t mind a little cold. And, Jake, your house here, it ain’t exactly paradise.”
FIVE
DAY 2: FRIDAY
Rosenthal followed as Jacobus was ushered into the interview room at the maximum-security Sing Sing Correctional Facility by two burly guards for his 7 A.M. meeting with BTower. Four strong hands guided Jacobus to a cheap uncomfortable plastic chair at a counter that divided the unadorned room in half. Along the entire length of the counter was a Plexiglas shield that separated the visitors from the inmates. Opposite Jacobus sat BTower, flanked by a pair of even burlier guards: Bailey Haskell, a muscular African American with short-cropped graying hair, neatly trimmed mustache, and a palm big enough to hide a football; and Gruber Gundacker, a much younger white man, former offensive tackle on the Syracuse University football team, shorter than Haskell but still well over six feet, with a buzz cut and a baby face.
Jacobus felt for the desk phone in front of him and picked up the receiver. “Yeah,” he said.
“I just want you to know, man,” said BTower from the other side of the Plexiglas, “that this was all Rosenthal’s idea. See?”
“Oh, was it?” said Jacobus. “Well, in that case I wouldn’t want to waste your time, which I imagine is becoming increasingly precious,” and he slammed down the phone and got up to leave, upending the flimsy chair.
“What?” yelled Rosenthal.
“What am I doing here with this punk?” said Jacobus. “I’m out of here.”
“You can’t!” said Rosenthal and grabbed Jacobus’s sleeve.
“Get off of me.” Jacobus made a wild and ineffectual swing for where he thought Rosenthal’s face would be. Rosenthal, shorter than Jacobus by almost a head, wrapped his arms around Jacobus and tried to wrestle him to the ground. As the two geriatric combatants struggled, BTower shouted out from his side of the Plexiglas, “Jacobus, you son of a bitch! You can rot in hell!”
“Guards!” yelled Rosenthal. “Guards!”
The two muscular guards, laughing, had little trouble separating blind old Jacobus from the diminutive Rosenthal. “Whoa, big fella,” one of them said.
“What the hell’s your problem, Jacobus?” said Rosenthal, panting. “What did you expect, that he would be waiting for you with open arms? You’re the one who helped put him here. Now listen to me. You think this is tough for you? I represent labor unions. They call me a lot worse than you’ve ever heard and I’m on their side! Then, guess what, I have to go out there and get them a good deal or my ass is grass. Now here I’ve got the one-in-a-million client who just so happens to be innocent and you get offended because he doesn’t make nice to you.
“You think BTower’s been kind to me? You think he appreciates our efforts to clear him? Well, think again. He’d gotten used to associating with the caviar of society, and here I was, pickled herring. The arrogance never wore off, and the longer the legal process went on, the greater the antagonism grew.”
“So why bother, Rosenthal? Why not go on to cases you can win, with clients who deserve it?”
“Because the guy’s innocent! Mr. Jacobus, let’s start over again, please. Let’s you and I sit down a minute and catch our breath. Maybe I should’ve given you a little better preparation. My apologies.
“When BTower was convicted,” Rosenthal told Jacobus after the guards had reset the overturned chairs, “we had assumed that an appeal would be successful, that he’d be walking in a few weeks. Certainly not more than a few months. After all, as I said, where was the evidence? So he became arrogant. Cocky. He alienated the prison guards and, worse, the other inmates. When the appeals, one after another, were rejected, everyone got his payback. He was subject to the worst abuse from both ends of the legal spectrum. The worst abuse, Jacobus. Need I say more? His will collapsed. Playing the violin, and the fame that accompanied it, became a distant memory. They segregated him from the rest of the prison population. He went from combative to morose, and was placed on a twenty-four-hour suicide watch. If there’s a fate worse than the death penalty, that’s it, so don’t expect him to be all peaches and cream. Now, with that in mind, would you please go back and talk to him?”
Jacobus grunted and let himself be escorted back to the chair, which had been put back into place.
“That was quite a show,” BTower said. “Just what are you doing here, man?”
“I have no idea. Your ambassador put me up to it.”
“Rosenthal. That incompetent asshole. If lawyers got convicted along with their clients, you can be sure a lot more would get acquitted. So now he’s trying to cover his damn ass?”
“Maybe you wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t killed Allard,” said Jacobus.
“Whatever.”
“Rosenthal seems to think you didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“Didn’t kill Allard.”
“Whatever.”
“Hey, you schmuck!” yelled Jacobus. “I don’t like you and I don’t like the way you played the violin, and I don’t like the fact that the greatest violinist of the twentieth century was murdered. But if you didn’t kill him, someone else did. Someone who’s been walking around somewhere for the last two years. So you can rot in hell for all I care, but I want the one that did it locked up. Capisce?”
“Played the violin?” asked BTower.
“Well, I haven’t heard you playing with the Philharmonic lately, pretty boy,” said Jacobus.
Jacobus heard a sudden clamor, a hard thud against the Plexiglas, quick footsteps, then the sound of a scuffle. A bunch of grunts, ughs, and nnngs, as Haskell and Gundacker subdued BTower, shoving him back into his chair, which clattered brittlely against the concrete floor. Jacobus smiled. He had found the soft spot. He was getting somewhere.
“What was that?” Jacobus asked with mock innocence. “Someone fall down and go boom?”
“Just my two pals here,” said BTower. “Music lovers.”
“So tell me,” asked Jacobus, “they don’t let you play the violin here? You’d think a little music would spruce up this place.”
“That’s a laugh,” said BTower. “I actually tried that, see, during the first appeal. My agent hadn’t canceled my engagements yet.”
“And?”
“And they beat the shit out of me. Didn’t like the ‘faggot’ music.”
Jacobus kept his mouth shut. He wanted BTower to do the talking.
“Then, when they put me
on suicide watch,” BTower continued, “the powers that be considered violin strings to be a potential lethal weapon, so the violin got nixed. You should be familiar with that one.”
Jacobus considered for a moment the murder a few years earlier of the violin pedagogue Victoria Jablonski, who had been strangled with a G-string that the cops thought, mistakenly, had come from his own violin. That he had finally been cleared of the murder did not, in the eyes of the authorities, negate the lethal potential of violin strings.
“But it wasn’t any violin string that killed Allard. Tell me what did happen the night he was murdered, and not the BS Rosenthal spouted in court. How did you end up standing over his body with his blood on your hands?”
“First let me tell you that René Allard was not the kind old grandfather that everyone thought.”
“That statement makes you a minority of one,” said Jacobus.
“Yeah, well, then don’t believe me. But after he finished his Carnegie recital, I went backstage to congratulate him.”
“But then you rubbed him the wrong way. What Lavender testified.”
“I wore my jeans and T-shirt to his recital.”
“Big deal, that’s what you always wear. Am I supposed to congratulate you on your nonconformity with the civilized world?”
“Hey, man, if Allard had said that to me, see, I wouldn’t have minded a bit. What he said was, in his dapper Maurice Chevalier accent, ‘So, you have worn your Halloween costume tonight.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s what I’m comfortable in.’ And he just shrugged and said, ‘Once an Africain, always an Africain,’ and walked away.”
“Allard said that?” said Jacobus. “I find that hard to believe.”
“Why do you give more credibility to the way someone phrases music than what he actually says? You know all that crap Brown was spouting about how Allard made me one of the family? The truth is he made me his errand boy. His gofer. He was actually saving money by giving me free lessons so he wouldn’t have to hire someone.”
“But if all that’s true about Allard, why didn’t Rosenthal harp on it at the trial?”
“Are you that dumb, man? That would have handed the jury even more motives for me to have killed him! The truth is I did follow Allard back to the Bonderman and tried one more time to settle things with him. I’m telling you, I tried. You know, ‘go the extra mile’? When I get to the elevator he won’t even look at me, see? Won’t say shit. That’s what pisses me off. That he won’t even acknowledge my existence, man. When I run up the stairs after him, it wasn’t to apologize anymore. I wanted to tell him off. But I wasn’t going to kill him.”
“Prove it.”
“I’m not the one supposed to prove what I didn’t do! You know, Jacobus, you may think I’m some kind of gangsta rapper, but I don’t go around wasting the competition.”
“That argument certainly made one helluva defense,” said Jacobus. “So, hotshot, what kind of stupidity was it to have that review from the Times tacked up on your wall?”
“It’s a free country. Right? But hey, if I thought hanging something on my wall was going to get me convicted of murder, I might have had second thoughts.”
“I’m not talking about that, and I don’t need your sarcasm. I’m talking about music. What the hell does a crummy review have to do with music?”
“Let’s say it gave me incentive, okay?”
“Incentive to what?”
BTower looked down at his limply hanging hands. “Jacobus, if you could see my hands. They feel thick and old as those stinking canned Vienna sausages my roommate, Wally Walinsky, used to eat when we were students.”
BTower smiled. “Walinsky. What a weirdo, who everyone thought was a big-time talent. ‘Isn’t Wally wonderful? He’s sooo smart.’ Ended up doing the orchestra grind—playing with the same hundred dudes three hundred days a year with the same asshole conductors. Sell your soul for a pension and health insurance. Thank God I’m better than that.
“Because of my hands I was as well known around the world as Muhammad Ali, man. I could go anywhere. ‘Hello, BTower. Yes, BTower. We’ll send it up right away, Mr. BTower. Can I have your autograph, BTower? Can I take you out for a drink, BTower? Would you like to come to my room after the concert, BTower?’
“And you know damn well it’s not easy, Jacobus. I paid my dues, man. I taught myself when I was a kid. One hour of practice every day. Then three hours a day. Five hours. Seven. And hey, it paid off, didn’t it? Just ask my former agent, Sheila Rathman of InHouseArtists, Inc. She got her ten percent from me for six—no, seven—years. From the Chicago Symphony, the Berlin Philharmonic, the NHK Symphony, the Sydney Symphony. You name it. Maybe she can get me a gig at the fucking Sing Sing Symphony.
“Then, wouldn’t you know it, the minute the trial’s over, my best buddy Sheila sends me a letter. ‘IHA regrets to inform you . . .’ Wouldn’t want to tarnish their image now, would we? Tarnished image, all right—I’d give that princess her virginity back if it was a medical possibility.”
BTower pressed his fingers into his thighs. Jacobus let the silence linger. BTower’s bitterness echoed his. Jacobus had suppressed his all these years, but it was killing him. Had BTower not been able to hold it in? Had he finally lashed out? One way or the other, their rage would probably kill each of them, sooner or later.
“I don’t even have life with chance of parole, like Wally has with his orchestra job.”
“You could practice without the violin,” said Jacobus.
“Sure. And you can see without eyes.”
“Can’t I?”
“I’m on death row, Jacobus. I’m going to be executed. My career is finished, see? My life is over. For a murder I didn’t commit. And what are you telling me? That I should be practicing? Hey, smart ass, if I don’t have a violin, how do I practice?”
“We do it all the time,” said Jacobus. “Sitting in a cab stuck in traffic when you’re late getting to the concert hall, what do you do? Close your eyes, see the music. Right? Rest the case on your lap and put your fingers on top of the case like it’s a fingerboard. Sense the feel of the bow in your right hand. Feel its balance, its weight, its responsiveness to your grip. Hear the music in your head. Just think about what you could do with the first chord of the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata. You know the notes. You know where your fingers go to play in tune. No one played the notes better than you, faster than you, more brilliantly than you. Yeah, you could play the notes with the best of them. You just didn’t know how to play the music.”
“Well, and fuck you too, Jacobus. I think our little chitchat is over.”
“Fuck you too, pretty boy,” Jacobus said and got up. As he was escorted out of the room, he said over his shoulder to Rosenthal, “I want all the police files, transcribed to Braille or CD, at no cost to anyone but you.”
SIX
“Ten bucks,” said Gundacker.
“You know I’m not a betting man, Gruber,” said Bailey Haskell, giving careful consideration to each chew of his sandwich.
“Five bucks, then,” said Gundacker.
“Okay,” said Haskell, patiently. “Five bucks. If that’s the way you want it.”
As had become their routine for the twenty minutes that their shifts overlapped, the two big security guards relaxed with their lunch and enjoyed their daily entertainment watching on the audiovideo surveillance monitor as BTower, the only remaining inmate on death row, paced the perimeter of his cell. After finishing their lunches, it would be Gundacker’s turn to do the rounds in the cell blocks, delivering what was euphemistically referred to as lunch to the inmates, and Haskell would remain in the office until they were both replaced by the night shift. It was a timetable that had been going on since Gundacker, still fuzzy cheeked and newly married to his high school sweetheart, Clorinda, had moved up from maintenance on the penal system’s ladder. Haskell had been there many years longer, and in his quiet moments calculated his monthly pension and consulted his astrological chart to ascertain the
most propitious day he and his wife, April, could retire to their mobile home in Sarasota. He was still strong and could handle most of the prisoners without difficulty even without Gundacker, but he felt his batteries gradually slowing down and was just about ready to pack it all up.
As he did every day, BTower first paced counterclockwise, banging the door and each wall three times with his clenched right fist. He then about-faced and repeated the ritual, now pounding with his left hand. Repetitiveness did not cause any reduction in his virulence; the ritual had remained frenetic and brutal from day one, as the bruises on his hands confirmed. Except for his mattress, his stainless steel cell had the antiseptic sterility and cold hardness of an oven interior, the impersonality of which had goaded BTower toward greater and greater rage.
“How’s Clorinda?” asked Haskell.
“She’s okay,” said Gundacker, keeping his eye on the monitor. “I guess.”
“You guess? You don’t know?”
“Well,” Gundacker said, “she’s thinking she wants to have a kid.”
“Somethin’ not okay with that?” asked Haskell.
“You and April never had kids,” said Gundacker.
“Well, Gruber, that doesn’t really prove anything.”
“I’m just not sure it’s the right time. I’ve only had this job for a couple years. Haven’t saved shit yet.”
“Same thing with April and me. There was always something we were savin’ for or waitin’ for so we never did think it was ‘the right time,’ and now it ain’t never gonna be ‘the right time.’ When I look back on it now, maybe it was our thinkin’ that wasn’t right. Maybe we should’ve thought there’s never a ‘wrong time’ to have a child.”
Gundacker took a bite of his peanut butter sandwich, which Haskell referred to as the ‘choke on white,’ that he brought from home every day. It was as predictable to Haskell as his alarm clock going off at 5:45 every morning.
