When the theaters let out, Toby took up his lute, set down the green velvet–lined case, and began to play. He shut his eyes. His mouth was half open. He played the darkest most intricate music by Bach that he knew, and he saw every now and then, through a slit of vision, the bills piling in the lute case, and heard even here and there applause from those who stopped to hear him.
Now he had even more money.
He went back to his room and decided he liked it. He didn’t care that it looked on rooftops and a shiny wet alley below. He liked the real bedstead and the little table, and the large television that was an infinite improvement on the one he’d watched all those years in the apartment. There were clean white towels in the bathroom.
The next night, on the recommendation of a cabbie, he went to Little Italy. He played on the street between two busy restaurants there. And this time he played all the melodies he knew from the opera. Poignantly he played the songs of Madame Butterfly and Puccini’s other heroines. He went through stirring riffs and wove together the songs of Verdi.
A waiter came out of one restaurant and told him to move on. But someone interrupted the waiter. It was a big heavyset man in a white apron.
“You play that again,” said the man. He had thick black hair and only a little white at the sides over his ears. He rocked back and forth as Toby played the music from La Bohème, and attempted again the most heart-wrenching arias.
Then he moved on into the gay and festive songs of Carmen. The old man clapped for him and wiped his hands on his apron and clapped some more.
Toby played every tender song that he knew.
The crowd shifted, paid, and filled out again. The pudgy old man stood listening to all of it.
Over and over the pudgy man reminded him to collect the bills out of his case and hide them. The money kept coming.
When Toby was too tired to play anymore, he started to pack up but the pudgy old man said, “Wait a minute, son.” And he asked him to play Neapolitan songs that Toby had never played, but he knew them by ear and it was easy.
“What are you doing here, son?” asked the man.
“Looking for a job,” said Toby, “any kind of job, dishwasher, waiter, anything, I don’t care, just work, good work.”
He looked at the man. The man was wearing decent trousers and a white dress shirt open at the neck with the sleeves rolled just below the elbows. The man had a soft fleshy face, graven with kindliness.
“I’ll give you a job,” said the man. “Come inside. I’ll fix you something to eat. You’ve been out here all night playing.”
By the end of his first week he had a little second-floor hotel apartment downtown, and a fake set of identification papers saying that he was twenty-one (old enough to serve wine) and he had the name Vincenzo Valenti because the name had been suggested to him by the gentle old Italian who had hired him. A real birth certificate had come with the suggestion.
The man’s name was Alonso. The restaurant was beautiful. It had huge glass windows facing the street, and very bright lights, and in between their waiting tables, the waiters and waitresses, students all, sang opera. Toby was the lutist beside the piano.
It was good, good for Toby who didn’t want to remember that he had ever been Toby.
Never had he heard such fine voices.
On many a night, when the restaurant was crowded with convivial parties, and the opera was sweet, and he could play his lute in a ripping fashion, he felt almost good and didn’t want for the doors to close, or the wet pavements to be waiting for him.
Alonso was good-hearted, smiling, and took a special liking to Toby, who was his Vincenzo.
“What I wouldn’t give,” he said to Toby, “just to see one of my grandchildren.”
Alonso gave Toby a little pearl-handled gun and told him how to shoot it. It had a soft trigger. It was just for protection. Alonzo showed him the guns he kept in the kitchen. Toby found himself fascinated with these guns, and when Alonso took him into the alley behind the restaurant and let him shoot with these guns, he liked the feel of them, and the deafening sound that echoed up the high blind walls on both sides of them.
Alonso got work for Toby at weddings and at engagement parties, paid him well, bought him fine Italian suits for the job, and sometimes sent him to serve private dinners in a house only a few blocks from the restaurant. People unfailingly found the lute to be elegant.
This house where he played was a handsome place, but it made Toby uneasy. Though most of the women living there were old, and kind, there were a few young women, and men came to see them. The woman who ran the place was named Violet and she had a deep whiskey voice, and wore heavy makeup, and treated all the other women as her young sisters or children. Alonso loved to sit for hours and talk to Violet. They spoke Italian mostly but sometimes English and they seemed involved in times gone by, and there were hints they had once been lovers.
There were card games there, and sometimes little birthday gatherings, mostly of elderly men and women, but the young women smiled at Toby lovingly and teasingly.
One time, behind a painted dressing screen, he played the lute for a man who made love to a woman, and the man hurt her. She hit the man and the man slapped her.
Alonso waved it away. “She does that all the time,” he explained as if the conduct of the man had not been involved in it. Alonso called the girl Elsbeth.
“What kind of name is that?” Toby asked.
Alonso shrugged. “Russian? Bosnian? How do I know?” He smiled. “They have blond hair. The men love them. And she’s run away from some Russian, that I can tell you. I’ll be lucky if the bastard doesn’t come looking for her.”
Toby grew to like Elsbeth. She did have an accent that might have been Russian, and once she told him that she had made up her name, and as Toby was now calling himself Vincenzo, he felt a certain sympathy with that. Elsbeth was very young. Toby wasn’t sure she was past sixteen. The makeup she wore made her look older and less fresh. With a bit of lipstick only on Sunday morning, she was beautiful. She smoked black cigarettes on the fire escape as they talked together.
Alonso sometimes took Toby home for a plate of spaghetti with him and his mother. This was in Brooklyn. Alonso served Northern Italian food at the restaurant, since that was what the world wanted now, but as for the old man, he liked his meatballs and red gravy. His own sons lived in California. His daughter was dead from drugs when she was fourteen. He pointed to her picture once and that was the last of it.
He would sneer and wave his hand at the mere mention of his sons.
Alonso’s mother didn’t speak English, and would never sit at the table. She poured the wine, cleaned up the dishes, and stood against the stove, with her arms folded, staring at the men as they ate. She made Toby think of his grandmothers. They had been women like that, who stood while the men ate. Such a dim memory.
Alonso and Toby went to the Metropolitan Opera several times, and Toby concealed what a revelation this was, to be hearing one of the greatest companies in the world, to be sitting in good seats with a man who knew the story and the music perfectly. Toby knew something in those hours that was the perfect imitation of happiness.
Toby had been to operas in New Orleans, with his teacher from the Conservatory. And he had heard the students at Loyola sing opera too, and been moved by these dramatic spectacles. But the Metropolitan Opera was infinitely more impressive.
They went to Carnegie Hall and also to the symphony.
It was a thin emotion, this happiness, drawn like a gossamer sheet over the things he remembered. He wanted to be joyful as he looked around these great auditoriums and listened to the dazzling music, but he didn’t dare to trust in anything.
One time he told Alonso he needed a beautiful necklace to send to a woman.
Alonso laughed and shook his head.
“No, my music teacher,” said Toby. “She taught me for free. I have two thousand dollars saved up.”
Alonso said, “You leave it to
me.”
The necklace was stunning, “an estate piece.” Alonso paid for it. He wouldn’t take a dime from Toby.
Toby shipped it to the woman at the Conservatory because that was the only address he had for her. He put no return address on the package.
One afternoon, he went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral and sat for an hour staring at the main altar. He believed nothing. He felt nothing. The words of the psalms he had so loved did not come back to him.
As he was leaving, as he was lingering in the foyer of the church, looking back at it as if it were a world he would never behold again, a rough policeman forced a young tourist couple to leave because they had been embracing. Toby stared at the policeman, who gestured for him to get out. But Toby just took his rosary out of his pocket and the policeman nodded and moved away from him.
In his own mind, he was a failure. This world of his in New York wasn’t real. He had failed his little brother, his sister, his mother, and he had disappointed his father. Pretty Face.
At times, an anger began to blaze in Toby but it wasn’t directed at anyone.
This is an anger angels have trouble understanding because what Toby had long ago underlined in the book of Pascal Parente was true.
We angels do in some respects lack cardiognosis. But I knew intelligently what Toby felt; I knew from his face and from his hands, and even from the way that he now played his lute, more darkly and with a forced gaiety. His lute, with its deep roughened tones, took on a melancholy sound. Both sorrow and joy were subjected to it. He couldn’t put his own private pain in it.
One night his employer, Alonso, came to Toby’s little hotel apartment. He carried a big leather knapsack over his shoulder.
This was a place Alonso had sublet to Toby on the very edge of Little Italy. It was a fine place as far as Toby was concerned, though the windows looked out on walls, and the furniture was fine and even a little fancy.
But Toby was surprised to open the door and see Alonso. Alonso had never come there. Alonso might put him in a cab to go home after the opera, but he’d never come home with him.
Alonso sat down and asked for wine.
Toby had to go out to get it. He never kept liquor in his apartment.
Alonso started to drink. He took out from his coat a large gun and laid it on the kitchen table.
Alonso told Toby he was up against a force that had never threatened him before: Russian mobsters wanted his restaurant and his catering business, and they had taken his “house” away from him.
“They’d want this hotel,” he said, “but they don’t know I own it.”
A small band of them had gone right into the house where Toby had played for the card gamers and the ladies. They had shot the men there, and four of the women and girls, and run off everybody else, and put in their own girls in place of them.
“I’ve never seen this kind of evil,” said Alonso. “My friends won’t stand by me. What friends do I have? I think my friends are in this with them. I think my friends have sold me out. Why else would they let this happen to me? I don’t know what to do about this. My friends blame me for this.”
Toby stared at the gun. Alonso took the clip out of it, then shoved it back in. “Know what this is? This will shoot more rounds than you can imagine.”
“Did they kill Elsbeth?” Toby asked.
“Shot her in the head,” said Alonso. “Shot her in the head!” Alonso began to shout. Elsbeth was the reason these men had come, and Alonso’s friends had told him how foolish it was for him and Violet to have given her shelter.
“Did they shoot Violet?” Toby asked.
Alonso began to sob. “Yes, they shot Violet.” He wept uncontrollably. “They shot Violet first, an old girl like that. Why would they do that?”
Toby sat thinking. He wasn’t thinking about all the crime dramas he had once watched on television, or the true-crime novels he had read. He was thinking his own thoughts, about those who prevail in this world and those who don’t, those who are strong and resourceful, and those who are weak.
He could see Alonso getting drunk. He detested this.
Toby thought for a long time and then he said, “You have to do to them what they are trying to do to you.”
Alonso stared at him and then broke into laughter.
“I’m an old man,” he said. “And these men, they’re going to kill me. I can’t go up against them! I’ve never fired a gun like this one in my life.”
He talked on and on as he drank wine, getting drunker and angrier, explaining that he had always cared about “the basic things,” a good restaurant, a house or two where men could relax, play a little cards, have a little friendly companionship.
“It’s the real estate,” Alonso sighed. “If you want to know. That’s what they want. I should have gotten the Hell out of Manhattan. And now it’s too late. I’m finished.”
Toby listened to everything that he said.
These Russian gangsters had moved right into his house, and brought the deeds for the house to the restaurant. They had deeds for the restaurant as well. Alonso, confronted at the crowded dinner hour, and safe amongst witnesses, had refused to sign anything.
They’d bragged about the lawyers who handled their deeds and the men at the bank who worked for them.
Alonso was supposed to sign his businesses away. They promised if he signed the deeds and cleared out, they’d give him a piece of things, and they wouldn’t hurt him.
“Give me a piece of my own house?” Alonso bawled. “It’s not enough for them, the house. They want the restaurant my grandfather opened. That’s what they really want. And they’ll move on this hotel soon as they find out about it. They said if I didn’t sign the papers, they’d have their lawyer take care of it, and no one would ever find my body. They said they could do to the restaurant the things they’d done in the house. They would make it look to the cops like a robbery. That’s what they said to me. ‘You’re murdering your own people if you don’t sign.’ These Russians are monsters.”
Toby pondered this, what it would mean if these gangsters had moved on the restaurant at night, shut the big blinds to the street, and murdered all the employees. He felt a shiver when he realized that death was coming very close to him.
Without words, he pictured the bodies of Jacob and Emily. Emily with her eyes closed underwater.
Alonso drank another glass of wine. Thank Heaven, Toby thought, that he had bought two fifths of the best Cabernet.
“After I’m dead,” Alonso said, “what if they find my mother?”
A sullen silence came over Alonso.
I could see his guardian angel beside him, seemingly impassive yet striving somehow to comfort him. I could see other angels in the room. I could see those that give off no light.
Alonso brooded and so did Toby.
“As soon as I sign these deeds,” said Alonso, “as soon as they legally own the restaurant, too, they’ll kill me.” He reached into his coat and he took out another large gun. He explained that it was an automatic weapon and could shoot even more rounds of ammunition than the first one. “I swear, I will take them with me.”
Toby didn’t ask, Why not go to the police? He knew the answers to such questions as that and nobody from New Orleans ever trusted the police very much in these sorts of affairs anyway. After all, Toby’s father had been a drunken crooked cop. It wasn’t in Toby’s nature.
“These girls they’re bringing in,” said Alonso. “They’re children, slaves, just children.” He continued, “No one’s going to help me. My mother will be alone. No one can help me.”
Alonso checked the clip of bullets in the second gun. He said he would kill all of them if he could, but he didn’t think he could do it. He was very drunk now. “No, I can’t do this. I have to get out, but there’s no way out. They want the deeds, the legal deeds done. They have their men in the bank, and maybe even in the licensing offices.”
He reached into his knapsack and took out all the deeds and spread t
hem on the table. He spread out the two business cards these men had given him. These were the papers that Alonso had yet to sign. They were his death warrant.
Alonso got up, staggered into the bedroom—the only other room in the place—and passed out. He began to snore.
Toby studied all of these items. He knew the house very well, its back door, its fire escapes. He knew the address of the lawyer whose name was on the card, or rather where he could find the building; he knew the location of the bank, though the names of these people meant nothing, obviously.
A glorious vision seized Toby, or I should say Vincenzo. Or should I say Lucky? He had always had a stunning imagination and a great capacity for visual imagery, and now he saw a plan and a great leap forward from the life he led. But it was a leap into pure darkness.
He went into the bedroom. He shook the old man’s shoulder.
“They killed Elsbeth?”
“Yeah, they killed her,” the old man said with a sigh. “The other girls were hiding under the beds. Two of them got away. They saw those men shoot Elsbeth.” He made his hand into a gun, and made the noise of the gun with his lips. “I’m a dead man.”
“You really think so?”
“I know so. I want you to care for my mother. If my sons come around, don’t talk to them. My mother has all the money I have. Don’t talk to them.”
“I’ll do it,” said Toby. But it was not an answer to Alonso’s entreaty. It was a simple private confirmation.
Toby went into the other room, gathered up the two guns, and went out the back door of his building. The alley was narrow and the walls went up five stories on either side. The windows appeared, as best he could see, to be covered. He studied each gun. He tested the guns. The bullets flew with such speed it jolted and shocked him.
Somebody opened a window and shouted for him to shut up down there.
He went back into the apartment and put the guns into the knapsack.
The old man was cooking breakfast. He set down a plate of eggs for Toby. And then he sat down himself and began dipping his toast in his egg.