Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery (17 page)

It wasn’t the age difference. That didn’t faze me in the slightest; she was no child and her supple mind had already absorbed enough information and pain for a lifetime. When a woman is that beautiful, she learns to make a great many choices early on; the world comes at her like snowflakes in a storm, exhilarating and relentless. Barbara was not yet twenty-two, but she might as well have been forty-two.

But she didn’t look forty-two when she stepped out of the bathroom fifteen minutes later. I was lying beneath the top sheet of the bed, having pulled the blankets down and opened a window to the tropical night air. The bathroom door swung open and the light behind her went out. Barbara was wearing a bath towel and I could see drops of water glinting in her hair as she crossed a narrow shaft of moonlight in the middle of the room. And as she crossed that band of light, at that very theatrical moment, she allowed her towel to drop to the floor.

“Hello,” she whispered.

It was all I could do to keep from just crying out. It was not simply the harmonious beauty of the parts; it was the ease of her revealed body, her delighted acceptance of its perfection, her total lack of self-consciousness. She was just a happy naked girl.

“This is an awfully big bed, isn’t it?” she said, then took one step backward and jumped, landing next to me, face-to-face.

“Good evening,” I said, “and welcome to the Hotel Nacional.” She put her hand over my mouth and giggled. When she removed her hand, she kissed me on the lips very lightly. I kissed her nose, her eyes, inhaled the clean, dense fragrance of her hair.

“You taste good,” she whispered, and then she began to kiss my neck and work her way south and when she got halfway down my body she stopped to survey my throbbing parts with the enthralled gravity of a botanist in a garden. She began to kiss and lick and nibble in earnest. I heard a moan and it was me and then I heard another moan and it was her; when I looked down, she had me in her mouth and was touching herself and her eyes were closed and her head was moving ever so slowly and then my eyes were closed and I was lost in an overrun tropical garden of damp sensations.

I remained that way until the door to the room went flying off its hinges. I looked up but I never saw a thing, just two dark shapes and then the back of my head exploded. And then I remember nothing.

NINE

I thought I heard music
, then I didn’t, and it was dark again, and I spiraled away. Time passed, I’ll never know how much, and then I heard it again, that music, except it was sort of woozy and distorted, like someone humming off-key. Though my lids were still shut, I entered a new state of consciousness and I thought I made out shapes somewhere around me; my head was pounding and I felt a rocking motion beneath my body. The humming got more insistent; it sounded almost like groaning, but it had rhythm and force. I tried opening my eyes, but the light flooding my retina made my insides turn like a frightened animal, so I shut my eyes once again. The rocking continued, and so did the humming. Two possibilities presented themselves: I had either been tied to a rocking horse, or I was on a boat. The humming I couldn’t figure.

More time crept by. I endeavored to sit up and was successful on the second try; I pulled myself upright, moving ever so slowly, my eyes still shut. Every bone in my manly body ached and cracked. Once again I tried to open my eyes and this time I managed to keep them open, at least for a couple of seconds. Yes, I was on a boat, in a small cabin on a top deck, lying on some sort of daybed; through a window I could see the ocean and a cloudy day at sea. Thank God for the clouds; full sunshine would have blown my circuits entirely. I turned and found the source of the insistent humming. Across the cabin from me, perched on a sofa and singing along to a musical score, was Arturo Toscanini.

The score Toscanini gripped in his small, smooth hands had
WAGNER
written across the top and
DIE MEISTERSINGER
below in Gothic lettering. The Maestro held the score very close to his face, like a mirror, studying the notes with eyes set so deep they were almost like a blind man’s eyes. And as he examined the score, he hummed in a hoarse, nearly tuneless voice—“Dah, dah, dah-dah, dah-dah-dah-dahhhhh.” The notes ascended and descended, music of genius croaked in the accents of a fish peddler. I leaned forward, my head beginning to clear, and the bed creaked loudly. The Maestro stopped his singing and gazed curiously across the room, putting the score down on the sofa beside him.

“Awake?” he said, looking at me with some curiosity.
“Alla fine.
”

“Yes.”

“Was a noisy sleep.”

“I snored, did I?”

“Ma!
For too long! I took a walk, for the air, and to escape your noise,
signore.
”

“I apologize, Maestro.”

He nodded, an amused smile on his lips. He really was a beauty, this Toscanini, with a baby’s alabaster complexion and the white hair of a biblical prophet. His eyebrows were dark and his nose was slightly bent, but these slight irregularities only made his appearance all the more arresting. The Maestro didn’t appear to be much taller than five-foot-three, but he radiated the power and authority of a head of state. When he looked at you he made eye contact, yet he seemed to be also looking through you, to some other place, and you got the feeling that you didn’t really matter all that much, that he had much bigger fish to fry, that his real intimates and soulmates were Beethoven and Brahms and Verdi.

I tried to stand up, but got instantaneously light-headed and sat right back down. I was somewhat surprised that I hadn’t been restrained, but then again, we were at sea, and whoever had smashed the back of my skull had probably calculated the odds of my jumping from the boat and swimming to Havana to be long indeed.

“Maestro, may I ask how long I have been here?”

Toscanini took a pocket watch from his black jacket. He was wearing a white shirt with a blue silk necktie, formal gray-striped pants, and a pair of black slippers that looked to have cost as much as my car. He looked spic and span, ready to mount a podium and start the music. I didn’t know what he had been through over the past couple of months, but it obviously had not involved any rough treatment. The old man appeared serene and unscathed.

“You were here,
signore,
since dawn. They brought you out.”

“Brought me out.”

“
Sì
. On a little …” He looked for the word.

“A skiff? A little boat.”

“
Sì
. You were lying on a little boat. I was up already, like every day, up when the sun is up. Five o’clock, six o’clock, I am up. I am outside and they are bring you in and you are lying there like a
pesce.
” He chuckled. “Like a fish.”

“I don’t doubt it. I had gotten a nice whack on the head and probably a few pharmaceuticals as well. So you were here already on the boat?”

Toscanini looked at me blankly, which was when the obvious fact penetrated my addled brain.

“You’ve been on the boat for a long while, am I right? For a couple of months.”

“Yes. Was necessary,
sì
? But soon it is over. Today,
a la mossa, sì
? On the move!” He arose. “Time for a walk.”

“The boat usually hasn’t been moving?” I asked.

He made a circular gesture with his right hand.

“Around and around, like
carosello
…”

“Carousel?”

“Sì.
” The old man leaned forward. “You? You are who?”

“Jack LeVine. I’m a private investigator from New York. Excuse me, Maestro, for not introducing myself earlier. I’m a little off my feed.”

“You are detective?”

“Yes.”

“Like Boston Blackie.”

“Something like that.”

He smiled.
“Molto bene.
Now it gets interesting.” Toscanini arose and clapped his hands.
“Molto bene.
Time for a walk. Come, Detective, we take a walk!”

“I’m not sure if I can.”

“Maestro is old man, not walk so fast. You come.”

Toscanini walked to the door. I arose, and had a wobbly moment, put my palm flat against the wall.

“I don’t know….”

The old man clapped his hands again.

“You come. Is good for your head.”

There was no turning this guy down. He had been a virtual dictator for his entire adult life; if you contradicted him, he didn’t even hear it. Toscanini lingered in the doorway for a moment, stroked his mustache, then stepped outside and took a deep breath.

“
Bella! Aria del mare!
”

I made my way outside on legs of sand. It was a hot, gray morning, with a steady breeze coming out of the west at about ten or fifteen miles an hour. Or knots, whatever the hell they were. I couldn’t grasp the concept no matter how often it was explained to me, which, in truth, wasn’t all that often. “We don’t need to know that,” my father used to say, to explain his avoidance of any technical knowledge that didn’t involve the manufacture of hats. Over the years I had come around to his point of view—I didn’t need to know about knots. It was breezy, that was enough.

The vessel on whose top deck Toscanini and I were standing was a substantial and costly pleasure boat, about a hundred and twenty feet in length, freshly painted white with three decks and teak fittings everywhere. A nearby life preserver indicated that the name of the boat was
Four Aces
and that its registry was Key Biscayne.

Toscanini placed both his hands on the railing and looked out over the ocean. In profile, his head looked like it had been carved out of marble.

“Bella,
eh, Detective?”

“Bella,
” I replied.

“Parle Italiano
?” he asked hopefully.

“Just enough to get through a menu,” I told him. “How’s your Yiddish?”

Maestro beamed. “Not bad. Is like
Gennano,
yes? But more messy.” He took a handkerchief from his pocket and delicately mopped his forehead. “Still they are after me, five years after war.”

“Who, the Germans?”

“No.
Fascisti
.”

“The fascists are after you? Is that what you’re saying?”

Toscanini looked at me like I was a bassoonist who had just played a wrong note.

“You are detective? Why you think I am on boat? For sightsee?”

My mind went slightly blank, as if I had fallen asleep for a half second. Whatever drugs they had slipped me had obviously retained a hefty residual kick. I haltingly attempted to process what the old man had just told me.

“I wasn’t sure what you were doing out here, Maestro…. Staying clear of the fascists, is that it? Personal threats were made?”

Toscanini looked at me, then returned his gaze to the ocean.

“I refuse to play fascist anthem in
La Scala
for years; then, 1931, there is
fascisti
riot, screaming, try beat me to pieces, so I leave
Italia,
come to New York, tell the world I will not conduct in homeland until
fascisti
are gone. I stay to my word. Not until war is over and no Mussolini.” He loudly smacked his right fist into the palm of his left hand. I looked around the deck—there was nobody else in sight, and for one lost and druggy moment I thought perhaps the old man and I had been cut adrift.

“So you received an actual threat?”

“Always threat—letter,
cartolina….
Then in spring, big threat,
molto serio.
FBI come.”

“The FBI got involved?” I took a deep breath and hoped to get some oxygen headed in the general direction of my brain.

“During tour. You hear about tour?”

“Yes. On the train across America. A great triumph.”

The old man clapped his hands in great, almost childlike satisfaction. “Toscanini train! All over. Bravo everywhere! Do Beethoven
Eroica,
Schubert
Incompleto
, Brahms, Dvorak, Strauss. In South of America … Richmond is called …?”

“Richmond, Virginia?”

“Sì.
There we play ‘Dixie’ song, people are jumping from seats! Everywhere we go, sold out. People on streets looking for tickets, money in their fists! Everybody happy, even me.” He allowed himself a small smile. “And, Signore Detective, I am not so happy all the time. Music is big suffering for me. I love too much.”