Improvisato

by David Crossman

  Hawkes, no senior sergeant in his own home, bowed his head. He knew from which direction the storm was coming, and all he could do was batten down his hatches and pray to survive the blow.

  “‘Some piano player!’” continued Emelda, the woman to whom, in a fit of overactive hormones, he had pledged his troth, lo, those many years ago. She poked Albert’s photo about the head and shoulders with an accusatory index finger. “Perhaps the greatest pianist since Rachmaninoff! An international treasure! And you . . . and you . . . !”

  When Emelda ran out of words with which to express disapprobation, she stamped her foot, and when she stamped her foot, it excited the phlebitis in her legs, producing pain for which she compensated by throwing something, her object of preference being something near-at-hand and breakable. The candidate in this instance, was a porcelain pepper shaker in the shape of a cherub.

  Her motions, as Hawkes watched helplessly, were almost slow-motion. Inwardly, he cringed when she seized the poor, defenseless object d’art in her fist, its wings protruding between her clenched fingers. It smiled at him benignly in blissful ignorance of impending personal apocalypse. As she drew back he couldn’t help but compare her form to that of Mark Burgess bowling right arm off-breaks at the peak of his cricket career. The transformation from cherub to projectile was sudden, and the instant the transformation took place, things ceased to move in slow motion.

  Hawkes ducked into rather than out of the way of the beatific missile. Whether Emelda had meant to hit his head and missed, or had intentionally missed and hit him as a result of his own poor reaction will never be known. The result, in either event, was a bleeding gash over his left brow and, almost as quickly, a rising mound of flesh.

  The cherub fell to the floor, unbroken and—it seemed to Hawkes as he watched a little cloud of dust settle about it—smiling even more broadly.

  Emelda fell upon her husband in agonies of remorse—guilt being another ingredient in the leit motif of regret that generally followed her fury and one he was often able to convert to conjugal repentance.

  Not a bad arrangement, overall.

  “I wasn’t to know, was I?” he said when, at last, fury and remorse had abated.

  Emelda spit on the corner of a dish towel and, with it, wiped the blood from her husband’s forehead. With each stroke of the cloth, she gushed apology. But Hawkes had discovered long ago that his wife had a way of making an apology sound like an accusation. The more she apologized, the more convinced he became that he should feel sorry for having driven her to madness. And the more convinced he became—being man and, therefore, perverse—the more determined he was to stop feeling sorry.

  “Enough!” he said, standing abruptly. He snatched the cloth from her hand and tossed it into the sink. “So now I know. Fair go. I shall be suitably obsequious in the unlikely event our paths should cross again.”

  Then the phone rang. As it was near at hand, Hawkes answered it before their maid could do so.

  “Senior Sergeant?”

  “Jeffreys. That you?”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry to trouble you at home.”

  “What is it, man? Why are you calling at this hour?”

  Chapter Six

  “I didn’t see him,” said Mrs. Gibson for the third time since she’d answered the phone. Huffy’s physiognomy did not permit simultaneous input and output, and for about five minutes he’d been so busy outputting his frustration that her input was nothing more than an annoying static on the line.

  “He’s booked in Dallas, Fort Worth, St. Louis, and Chicago!” Huffy snapped, when he inhaled long enough to hear what the housekeeper was saying. “Starting Friday!”

  Mrs. Gibson took the phone in both hands, held it out and throttled it within an inch of its life. Repenting, she lifted it to her lips. “Well, I hope you find him in time. All I know is Miss Angela collected their passports, and . . .”

  “Passports!” Huffy erupted. “Passports!? They’ve left the country? Where did they go?”

  She’d already told him she didn’t know where they were. Several times.

  “I need them here! I need him here! In Dallas! Friday!”

  Huffy, Mrs. Gibson knew, often spoke in exclamations. It was his favorite punctuation, but overuse had blunted its teeth. “Well, I don’t have them. Now if I was you, Mr. Huffy, I’d take a moment to say a prayer and set your little universe back on its stand. The poor man’s mama just died. You can reschedule those concerts. Folks’ll understand, if they got any Christian in ’em.”

  The inhabitants of the world in which Huffy lived and breathed and had his being operated on percentages of gate receipts and did not, in their business dealings, exemplify Christian behavior to any recognizable degree. He knew better than to bring this to Mrs. Gibson’s attention as she’d made no secret of her opinion that “show folk”—a broad category taking in everyone from street mimes to Leonard Bernstein—were all spoiled children who needed nothing more than a good stiff spanking to “knock ’em inside out and make ’em useful.”

  Albert didn’t fall under this broad category. Their lives had, by some strange alchemy, grafted to one another in the four years since they’d met in the hospital, and she cherished him. Had she, under oath in a court of law, been asked her position in his household, she’d have said, “I take care of ’em,” meaning Albert, Jeremy Ash, and Angela. Pressed, though, she’d have added that she was nurse, cook, adviser, spiritual counselor, protector, defender, surrogate mother, grand-mother, caretaker, plumber, electrician and, truth be told, the one who gave them all a much-needed anchor.

  To Huffy, however, she was simply Albert’s housekeeper and, as such, ought to know where he was. “What am I s’pose to tell ’em?”

  “They also serve who stand and wait,” Mrs. Gibson quoted. “Think about that and all will be well with your soul.” She hung up.

  Huffy, however much good it might have done his soul, didn’t follow the prescription. He immediately dialed his fallback.

  “Mr. Huffy,” said Mrs. Bridges, once Albert’s banker, now manager of the financial kingdom of which her employer lived in blissful ignorance. “Haven’t heard from you in a while. What can I do for you?”

  “Where’s the Maestro?” said Huffy without preamble. “Gibson says he left the country—the kid, the girl, all of ’em! and . . .”

  “He’s in New Zealand, Mr. Huffy,” Mrs. Bridges said calmly.

  “New Zealand!” Huffy echoed. “He’s not booked in New Zealand! He’s booked in Dallas! What’s he doing in New bloody Zealand?!”

  “I expect he’s recovering from his loss,” said Mrs. Bridges patiently.

  “Loss? What’d he lose?”

  “His mother just died, Glen.”

  “Oh, that. Yeah,” Huffy huffed. “Well, I might be able to reschedule Dallas.”

  “You’re all heart.”

  Huffy took that as a compliment. “Well, you gotta do what you gotta do. When are they comin’ back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know!” he said, resorting to his favorite punctuation. “What do you mean you don’t know? If you don’t know, who does?”

  “I don’t know that, either,” said Mrs. Bridges calmly.

  “Where in New Zealand?”

  Huffy listened anxiously as Mrs. Bridges shuffled some papers on her end of the phone. “A private hotel in Auckland, according to the bank transfer Angela requested,” she said. She gave him the telephone number and address.

  “Okay. Good. That’s good. I gotta call him. Bye!”

  Mrs. Bridges placed the phone in the receiver, sighed, and sipped her tea. Unlike many in Albert’s tiny circle of pilot fish—among whom she counted herself—she didn’t dislike Huffy; not that she coveted his company, but she did appreciate how difficult his job was. In her brief tenure in the Maestro’s employ, two battle-hardened managers had—upon realizing that they might as well try to corral a kindle of mentally feeble kittens—tossed in their towels.


  Huffy had hung in there. He’d done everything a manager is supposed to do, efficiently and in keeping with the spirit of what would have been his master’s wishes, had his master ever made them known. Was he pushy and tactless? Yes. Was he common and vulgar? Yes. Were these bad traits in a manager? Apparently not. If anyone knew Albert’s bottom line better than she and the IRS, it was Huffy, and it was a bottom line that had quintupled under their joint administration. She wasn’t being modest or gracious in attributing much of that success to him; she was just being honest.

  Of course, he’d made himself rich, as well, but at what cost? For her part, she loved her job—one of its greatest benefits being that she didn’t have to deal with either the public or Albert on a daily basis. Love him however she might, he’d have driven her mad.

  For Huffy, it was too late.

  “Telephone, Mr. Albert,” said Bindy.

  Albert was reading a book, something he couldn’t remember having done since scouring The Hardy Boys and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in the public library back in Ashburn, Massachusetts several years ago in the hope of learning something about detecting so he could get Tewksbury out of jail.

  Which he did.

  Then someone killed him.

  This book wasn’t about detecting. It was about plants and animals and things native to New Zealand. There were lots of colored pictures and he found these helpful. He looked up at the specimen of native fauna who was holding out a phone. He looked at it. She was right, it was a phone. “Yes.”

  Bindy giggled. “No, I mean, it’s for you.”

  Albert didn’t want a telephone, but he didn’t want to hurt the girl’s feelings, so he took it from her. “Thank you.” He placed it in the magazine rack beside his chair and returned to his study of the book, the Pekapeka bat, in particular, which, according to the text, Maori folklore associates with the mythical, night-flying bird, Hokioi, the appearance of which foretells death or disaster.

  “It’s a Mr. Huffy,” said Bindy.

  The transition from Hokioi and its promise of death and disaster to Huffy was not a jarring one.

  Bindy was pointing at the phone in the magazine rack, to which Albert directed his gaze. He looked at her. “Huffy’s on the phone?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  This meant Huffy wanted to talk to him. He studied the phone for a moment, much the way he’d studied the color photo of the Short-tailed Pekapeka, but with less interest. Portions of Bindy vibrated in anticipation. “He’s calling from America,” she said.

  That meant he was a Very Long Way Away. That was good.

  “Very dear, that,” said Bindy.

  “?”

  “Expensive,” said Jeremy Ash, without looking up from the cribbage board as he moved his peg fourteen holes ahead of Angela’s. “He’s not gonna hang up, A. You might as well get it over with.”

  Albert had a better idea. “You talk to him.”

  Unlike Mrs. Bridges, Jeremy Ash did not like, respect, or admire Huffy. They were tinder and spark, mortar and pestle, iodine and skinned knee, and their intercourse often ended, well, not happily.

  Angela got up from the table, brushed cracker crumbs from her dress front into her hand and, tossing them into Jeremy’s hair in passing, went to the phone and picked it up. “Hello, Glen.”

  “Lost Angela!” He laughed the same quick, abrasive laugh that always accompanied the joke. “What in hell are you doing on Atlas’s backside?”

  “Jeremy wanted to come.”

  “Well, the Maestro should’ve sent him,” said Huffy, with rising emotion. “I’d’ve paid the fare out of my own pocket. One way with no parole. But why did you and him have to tag along?”

  “Seemed the best thing to do,” Angela replied much more casually than she felt. “He needed to get away, and it’s lovely here.”

  “It may be. But it ain’t Dallas.”

  “Pardon?”

  “That’s where Fingers is s’posed to be this Friday.”

  “Oh, dear. Is that still on?”

  “As of this moment? Yes. Where else would it be?”

  “Well, I’d assumed that, since he just buried his mother. . .”

  “I danced down that alley with Bridges,” Huffy said curtly. “I feel for him just as much as the next guy. I got a mother, too, you know.” Which was true. He had a mother. Somewhere. Last known whereabouts—in 1964—a squatter’s flat in Limehouse. Still, that was beside the point. “But we’ve got contracts, my twist an’ twirl. My name’s on ’em. His name’s on ’em. An’ they don’t say nothin’ about time off for buryin’ relatives.

  “Sonsabitches, contracts,” he summarized. “But like the captain of the Titanic said when he seen the iceberg, “There’s no gettin ‘round it’.

  “Lemme speak to ’im.”

  Angela studied Albert, bending intently over the picture of the Pekapeka blissfully oblivious of the world and its troubles, foremost of which, in his estimation, was Huffy. She decided not to inflict him upon her benefactor. “He can’t come to the phone right now, Glen. Can I give him a message?”

  “Yes, you can give him a message, ducky,” said Huffy, riding a rising tide of ire. “You can tell him if he ain’t in Dallas by Friday, I’ll . . .”

  Albert had risen from his study and crossed the room without Angela noticing. Her attention had drifted to Jeremy Ash and his obvious battle with the impulse to cheat while his opponent was otherwise occupied. His attitude was exactly that of the golden retriever that had been told to sit still and not attempt to eat the bacon that its cruel master had balanced upon its nose.

  “I’ll talk to him,” said Albert, taking her by surprise and the phone from her hand simultaneously. “Huffy?”

  “Al! Thank God it’s you. Do you know where you are? I mean—do you know where you’re s’posed to be this weekend? Friday!”

  “I’m not going to be there.”

  “But . . . We have contracts!”

  “We have contract insurance,” said Albert calmly. He’d remembered Mrs. Bridges saying that once, and this seemed a good time to repeat it.

  Whatever argument Huffy had been expecting, that wasn’t it. “Well, yeah, but . . .”

  It worked! “Tell them I’ll come back and play later.”

  Huffy huffed. “You want me to reschedule?”

  “Yes. Reschedule.”

  Huffy was suddenly in unfamiliar territory. It was almost as if he was talking to a rational human being, which he knew he wasn’t. The effect was unsettling. “They’ll want to know when,” he said.

  “Next year.” Albert let the honey of those words ooze around the cilia in his auditory canal. “Next year,” to Albert, meant “sometime in the remote and unforeseeable future” and would have been interchangeable, had he thought about it, with “when hell freezes over.”

  Huffy frothed on the other end of the line, and Albert, wishing to forestall further comment from that quarter, said what he knew would elicit the desired response. “I’ll double your percentage.”

  “Next year, then,” said Huffy, suddenly puffless. “How many?”

  “How many what?”

  “How many upcoming concerts do you want me to reschedule?” said Huffy. “When do you think you’ll be ready to start playin’ again?”

  Albert considered this. He held his hand over the phone and turned to Angela. “What month is it?”

  “I heard that!” said Huffy in the middle distance.

  Albert put his hand over the other end of the phone.

  “February. It’s the 27th.”

  Albert counted off three months, then took his hand from the receiver. “July.”

  “July! Three months!” Huffy fumed. “You want me to reschedule three months of concerts . . .!”

  “I’ll be in New Zealand for a while.” He handed the phone to Angela, who whispered a few quick words of farewell against the gale of deeply-felt Cockney perturbation having to do with what he was supposed to tell the press, hung up, and re
sumed her seat at the cribbage table.

  “Here it is!”

  The voice was Mr. Sweetman’s. He’d been sifting through a pile of old newspapers that nested in a large bronze bucket beside the fireplace. He’d withdrawn one of these and, crossing to the coffee table at which Albert was seated, dropped it on the picture of the nearly-extinct Long-tail Pekapeka.

  “There!” he tapped at headline. “‘Tragedy Knocks Twice At 14 Parliament Row!’”

  Jeremy Ash looked up from the cribbage board. “That was the maid?”

  Sweetman smoothed out the paper over the rare photo of the nearly-extinct bat. “Cleaning girl,” he corrected. “Tanny. Yes. Came in two or three mornings a week, as I recall.” He extruded his neck in Albert’s direction. “I shouldn’t think Dona’s budget ran to a full-time domestic,” he added confidentially to everyone within earshot.

  Jeremy Ash wheeled to the coffee table for a look at the paper, from which he read aloud. “‘Authorities at the scene report that Miss Tania Ruakari, who had been in Mr. Dona’s employ for less than five weeks, was found at the bottom of the parlor stairs. According to medical examiner, Dr. David Chan, the woman had been dead for four to six hours.’”

  Angela joined the triumvirate and, leaning on Jeremy Ash’s shoulder, took up the narration. “Broken neck. According to Chan, there was no sign of foul play.”

  “Blah, blah, blah, blah,” Jeremy Ash said, skipping the less sensational details until he arrived at something of interest. “‘A neighbor, Colonel McAuley “Mac” Rivens, said Miss Ruakari had visited his wife at their home earlier that day and seemed, in his words “troubled and distracted.” But no more than women are given to being troubled and distracted. Certainly not suicidal.

  “‘This is a close, established neighborhood and we will, of course, rally ’round poor old Dona in this tragedy as in the first.’”

  “Never suspected,” said Mr. Sweetman, “that within weeks he’d be bereaved himself. Poor sod.”