The Bronze King

  Paavo stood braced back in their grip. He looked awful—yellow in the face and blank like someone who’d been yanked out of a deep sleep.

  “Not making out so good, eh?” Pins sneered. He looked at the violin. “What about this? Maybe it’s a priceless Stradivarius or something?”

  “Hell no,” Tattoo crowed. “It’s a piece of junk, man! All he can get out of it is those weird noises we heard.”

  “Oh, well, if it’s just a piece of junk,” Pins said, and he turned and swung it hard against the edge of the pink marble plinth where Jagiello used to stand. The instrument exploded into fragments. Shards of wood hung from the scroll by the strings.

  “Oops,” said Pins, right over a raw, deep gasp from Paavo. “Look what happened. But the way it sounded, I figured we just did you a favor, you know?”

  Joel flung himself on Pins. With a lot of grunting and scrabbling the two of them went down. Tattoo let go of Paavo and danced around them, looking for a chance to clobber Joel with that huge radio of his.

  Paavo, with the Chewer holding one of his arms twisted behind him, threw back his head and let out this terrible cry that made me go all lurchy inside.

  But then I heard something else—a siren, a police siren! One of the police cars that patrol the park must be coming! Someone had reported something. We were going to be saved!

  Tattoo hugged his blaster to his chest and took off, hollering back over his shoulder, “Come on, let’s go!” Pins-and-Grins whomped Joel in the stomach and scrambled up. The Chewer gave Paavo a shove that sent him staggering. Then he and Pins-and-Grins careened out of the park after Tattoo, laughing and whooping as if it had all been a great game.

  The sirens got louder and nearer and seemed to pass by us, following the Princes, and then they died away. Where were the police cars?

  I climbed to my feet, all gulpy with shock.

  The mommies were still sitting on the grass, and the kids were playing at the edge of the water. Nobody else had been flattened and battered but us three, nobody else had heard sirens.

  Paavo had done it.

  He stood sort of holding himself up on one of the lacy antique lampposts on the terrace. I felt terrible, and I was angry. At him. What kind of a wizard lets himself get roughed up like that by a bunch of creeps, anyway? I couldn’t stand looking at Paavo and being sorry for him.

  He spat out a word: “Perkele!”

  “What?” I said.

  “It means ‘damn,’ ” he said harshly.

  “In Korean?” I was really half out of it, that’s all I can say in my defense.

  “In Finn.”

  “Oh.”

  “Ugh,” he said. He let go of the lamppost and worked his shoulders as if they ached. “Everybody okay?”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I said. “But you said they wouldn’t come. What happened?”

  He looked bitterly disgusted. “I got careless. Damn it. I thought I had them all fixed, I gave them plenty to do. I been going around the city today, playing some strength back into some of the markers and guardians they been fooling with. The kraken’s had them neutralizing all kinds of things. I thought if I put most of it right, they’d be sent out again with the spray can, hammers, and pliers—some of your markers are pretty easy to wreck. It doesn’t take much, it doesn’t take long, not as long as to fix it again. But long enough, I thought. I was wrong. The kraken has a stronghold here already.”

  He coughed.

  “Are you all right?” I said. Maybe they’d really hurt him. I felt scared and furious.

  “Tired,” he said. “They didn’t do me any real damage personally. But it’s always bad to get interrupted like that in the middle of things. Also I think I did too much this morning. I’m not used to conditions here. My conditions.” He looked down at his hands and flexed his fingers. “I should have waited.”

  He bent over like an old man, I mean a really old man, picked up the bow he’d been using, and sat down on the wall, shaking his head.

  “Too impatient, too quick, always the same thing. Damn. If I wasn’t already tired out from this morning’s work, I’d have felt them coming, I wouldn’t have let them catch me like that. I’d have been faster when they moved in, I might have stopped them. Shaa.” He shoved one hand through his hair and looked at us. “You sure you’re both all right?”

  Joel nodded. His lips looked white. He got up carefully. He still didn’t ask anything. I would have admired him for that, except that I was so upset. So I did what you do when you’re upset, I guess. I turned on him.

  “God, Joel, why didn’t you jump in sooner? If only you’d done something right away—”

  Ignoring me, he walked over, limping a little, and looked down at the smashed violin. Then he stood in front of Paavo, who was fumbling around with his cigarettes.

  “Look,” Joel said in this low, trembly voice, “I’m sorry. If I’d realized—”

  Paavo inhaled and blew smoke through his nostrils. “Realized what?” he said. “You still don’t really believe even what you saw, do you? Don’t apologize, you did fine. I’m the only one who knows all about what goes on here, so I’m the only one to blame, okay? And I don’t like blame, so I better do something to fix it, yah? First thing, let’s see what we got before the Princes came.”

  We looked for Joel’s history text. He’d been taking Jagiello’s dictation on the inside back cover. The book was gone. The Princes must have gotten it.

  “Shakespeare,” I said. “It was Shakespeare and it was all about darkness and roaring and stuff.”

  “Yes, but that’s not exact enough,” Paavo said. “If we could just try a little more—” You could see him stiffening against the impulse to turn toward the ruined violin.

  “Listen,” Joel said. “Maybe I can do something, um, I mean there’s a possibility—I don’t know exactly what you were—what we were doing, what you were playing just now. But could you take up where we left off if you had another fiddle?”

  Paavo looked at his bow. “Well,” he said, “maybe we could do something, I don’t know how much. There’s no time to do the job right.” Now he did glance over at the smashed violin and quickly away again. I knew without being told that he’d worked with it for years, filling it with magic one thin layer at a time.

  “Still, with a decent instrument, maybe we could do something tomorrow. Today is shot anyhow. But a good fiddle is expensive, isn’t it? I don’t have a bank account. I didn’t know to fix that up. You got something in mind?”

  Joel said, “Let’s go to my house. I think I have something there you could use.”

  Paavo nodded and got up. He took the smashed remains of the old violin, laid them gently in the battered black case, and went to the edge of the water. I didn’t watch what he did—it had made me feel terrible to see how lovingly he’d handled the broken bits—but I think he sank the case and the wreckage in the lake.

  He rejoined us with just his bow in his hand. We trudged out of the park to the East Side and got a cab. Joel said he had money. We headed uptown.

  Paavo sat in the middle of the back seat. He didn’t smoke, maybe because the cab had a sign in it, “This is my home. I don’t come fill your living room with smoke and butts and ashes.” Something like that.

  Joel was rubbing his left hand, stretching the fingers out and pulling on them gingerly.

  “Let’s see your hand,” Paavo said.

  He took Joel’s hand and felt it all over and even reached up under Joel’s sleeve a little. “What did you do, punch him?”

  Joel nodded, looking miserable and mad.

  “Next time bite. Kick, use your knees, your skull. They’re harder and stronger than hands. Anyhow, you just bruised yourself a little, you’ll be okay.”

  “For the guitar, maybe,” Joel said. “What about playing the violin?”

  “I thought you didn’t play,” Paavo said.

  “I don’t, not anymore,” Joel muttered, looking at the floor of the cab. “I mean I used to, but
I quit. I’m thinking of going back to it again.”

  “No real problem with the hand,” Paavo said. “How long since you played?”

  “A few years.”

  Paavo thought. He said, “Depends what you want to do. A concert career, solo performance—you’ve lost some time.”

  “I know that,” Joel snapped. “I didn’t say I was going back. I said I was thinking about it. Right on this corner is fine,” he told the driver, and we piled out in front of a superluxury apartment building on Park Avenue.

  “Mmm,” said Paavo. “Nice.”

  We went in. The man at the desk in the lobby gave us this look.

  “It’s okay, Barney,” Joel said. “This is Tina, from my school, and this is a friend, a violinist.”

  “Somebody been bothering you or something?” Barney said to him, squinting suspiciously at Paavo. “You want me to try and reach your mother?”

  “No, it’s okay. I had a little trouble in the park, but it’s not as bad as it looks. I’ll tell my parents myself later. I wouldn’t want to scare anybody.”

  In the elevator the uniformed guy who punched the button for us said, “Mrs. Rouse isn’t there right now, Joel.”

  “It’s okay, I’ve got my keys,” Joel said.

  We went down the hall with the elevator man’s eyes drilling us through the back. “Who’s Mrs. Rouse?” I whispered.

  “Housekeeper,” Joel said. He unlocked the door.

  Well, I could see why they needed a housekeeper; there was a lot of house to keep. We walked into this enormous, bright apartment, lit by a huge window on an outside terrace. There was a lot of pale, polished wood everywhere, a lot of wall space, and a few hangings and prints full of exotic colors and designs. A jungle of potted plants crowded around the big window and spilled out onto the terrace beyond.

  The living room had to be big. There was a grand piano in it. A bunch of music stands, like a little crowd of silver stick figures, stood nearby with a few chairs among them.

  “Holy cow,” I said.

  Joel said, “I’ll go and see if there’s anything to nosh on in the kitchen.”

  He went.

  Paavo walked over to the big window and sank down into a sofa facing it, looking out. I had a feeling he needed not to have anybody close by for a little while, so I sort of drifted around the room looking at things: books, shelves of music scores for chamber groups, some photos on the wall.

  One of them was of a kid I thought was Joel, but younger. He was standing on a stage with his arms lifted, and a bunch of musicians were poised in front of him to play.

  Now I knew: Richard Wechsler, of course, the prodigy. He was conducting whole orchestras even though he was only about twelve. A genius, they said.

  “Hey, Joel,” I said, sticking my head in the kitchen. “Is Richard Wechsler your brother?”

  He was putting cookies on a plate. “That’s right,” he said. “And Abraham Wechsler is my father. He plays the cello. My mom’s a singer, but you might not know her name, not unless you’re an opera freak. Are you?”

  “No,” I said. I was getting the picture, all right.

  He said, “You want to take these out there? If he wants tea or coffee, there’s instant in the cupboard, and I’ve got water heating in that pot.”

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  “To get him a violin.”

  6

  Tea and Cookies

  PAAVO ATE UP ALL THE COOKIES and drank some tea full of sugar. Then he turned to the violin that lay gleaming in an open case on the sofa where Joel had put it.

  Paavo touched his bow to the strings, tightened up two pegs, and played a few notes. I don’t know what that music was, but in one instant I felt as if I was hovering in space someplace, on the verge of dissolving in some huge wave of feeling that would pass and leave me never the same.

  Then the music turned all thoughtful and slow and beyond me. I mean I could hear how beautiful it was, but I couldn’t follow it exactly. Nothing stayed in my head in the way of a tune or anything with a shape.

  Collapsed next to me in a big old chair, Joel groaned. “Well,” he said when the music stopped, “I guess there’s nothing left but suicide.”

  Paavo said, “Shaa. Coming from a family with all that talent, you’ll do fine.”

  “I don’t care about ‘fine,’ ” Joel said angrily. “Anybody can do ‘fine.’ ”

  “Yah?” Paavo said, sounding interested. “Anybody? Val, here, if she wanted?”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Joel said.

  “No,” Paavo said.

  “I meant—” Joel stared at the floor. “You can’t just lope along in the concert world, you know? It’s all or nothing. Either you’ve got it, or you end up fifth chair in some lousy community orchestra in Podunk. Or on the street, fiddling for pennies.”

  I gasped. I mean, that was an incredibly crass thing to say, considering Paavo’s circumstances. Joel pushed on, sounding fierce. “That can happen even to good players. I know. Anything can happen. You don’t even want to start unless you’ve got all the cards already stacked in your hand.”

  Suddenly he leaned forward and said, “Teach me. I don’t know what’s going on, who you are, anything, but I’ll help, I’ll do whatever you want and not ask a single question—only teach me to play like that!”

  I felt stabbed in the heart. Joel was trying to grab the only real wizard in the world for himself, and maybe, since they were both musicians, he could. I was just someone who wrote poems sometimes in her journal that she didn’t show to anybody. My only claim on Paavo was that he knew my Granny Gran. Great. He probably wouldn’t even have included me in his magic at all, except for that.

  I couldn’t look at Paavo. Suppose he told Joel yes?

  He touched the strings again with the bow and a thread of song came drifting, like music you might hear from another world, eerie and piercing.

  “There may be things I can teach you,” he said slowly. “There may be time to do it, too. But I can’t make any promises. You understand?”

  Joel said, “Just say yes, say you will. What’s so hard about that? My father will pay anything you like. I know he will, once he’s heard you play. I could catch up in no time, I could play the way I always wanted to, if you’ll just teach me!”

  “Otherwise you won’t lend me this violin?” Paavo said.

  “I’m not lending,” Joel said. “I’m giving. Take it.”

  Paavo held the violin delicately in his thick hands. “It’s a fine instrument,” he said. “Somebody put a lot of love in it when it was made. Is it yours to give?”

  Joel said, “Teach me. Please.”

  “Is that the condition?”

  Slowly Joel sat back, looking down now. “No,” he croaked. “I can only lend it to you, and there is no condition.”

  “Good,” Paavo said. “As long as we know where we are, here. Thanks for the tea and cookies. I’ll meet you both again tomorrow.”

  He put the violin away, hesitated a minute, and then put his own bow in the case with it. Then he shut the case and got up to go. I thought already he looked fresher, stronger than before, as if that little bit of music-making had helped him.

  He handed Joel the case.

  Joel looked at him. “But aren’t you going to take it with you?”

  “How far would I get with this? He didn’t like the look of me, that watchdog downstairs. I came in with only my bow. What will he think if I walk out of here carrying this? No, you keep it for me. Bring it tomorrow. Not to the lake; they may be watching for us there now. In the little park by the planetarium, all right? I’ll be waiting.”

  I went with him to the door, leaving Joel sitting on the couch looking bruised and angry. Paavo said in a low voice to me, “Why don’t you stay a little while? He’s not a happy kid, and he took a big chance today. He might have banged his hand really bad. A little company wouldn’t hurt him.”

  “He’s a selfish, self-centered pig,” I said, not both
ering to keep my voice down.

  Paavo shook his head. “He doesn’t know what you know. Tell him. See if it makes a difference. And Val, be careful going home. Go before dark, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He left.

  So I went back in and sat down across from Joel and I told him.

  When I got finished, he said, “Well, I sure can’t tell any of that to my parents. If I hadn’t been there this afternoon, I wouldn’t believe it myself. So that really was magic he was doing in the park today, talking to this—this missing statue with his violin?”

  “Yes, asking it where it was, see? And it answered through me. That’s why I had to be inside the outline of its shadow, so I could stand for the statue, sort of.”

  He squinted at me. “Does it make sense to you?”

  “Does what make sense?”

  “The whole thing—the kraken, the magic, the missing statue, those bastards, what do you call them, the Princes?”

  “I guess. I haven’t thought about it a lot.”

  “You just believe what he tells you.”

  “Don’t you?”

  He flung himself back in the couch and sighed. “All right, all right. He’s pretty impressive. More impressive than you even know, if you count the music itself. With those big mitts of his, he shouldn’t even be able to play the violin. I’ve never heard a touch like that, a tone. Never. Jesus. My father would flip.”

  “Sure,” I said. “And pay anything. Boy, were you gross there. I was really embarrassed, Joel.”

  He put his hands behind his head. “You don’t know the half of it,” he said. “I’m not just trying to cash in on this incredible thing that you’ve fallen into, you know. It’s not as simple as that.”

  “Tell me how simple it is, then,” I said, “but make it fast. I’m supposed to get home before dark, Paavo said.”

  “Damn straight,” he said. “You’re the one that’s important to him, isn’t that obvious? He didn’t do any magic with me. He just used me like a goddamn tailor’s dummy or something. It’s different for you. You’re in it, you’re special.”