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███████████████████████████████
█ THE MOZART CODE, An Excerpt █
███████████████████████████████
Author: Dick Alder
Title: THE MOZART CODE
Category: Detective Novel
Interface: Writers Dream
Publisher: Da Ponte and Co.
Price: $6.95
Available from: Da Ponte and Co.
402 Broadway
Venice CA 90291
Excerpt:
THE MOZART CODE
By Dick Alder
Copyright 1992 By Dick Alder
INTRODUCTION
"I very much liked the character and musical detail.
I really was very tempted..." said Suzanne Kirk of
Scribner's. "Welcome humor and vivid local color,"
said Joe Blades of Ballantine. "I loved THE MOZART CODE.
If we weren't on a buying hiatus at the moment, I'd
champion this here. Dick Adler has a strong, engaging
voice," said Sara Ann Freed of the Mysterious Press.
"I particularly enjoyed Ivan's irreverent manner," said
Tara Harnett of Houghton Mifflin. "Ivan Davis is a
wonderful, funny character, who I think readers would
enjoy following from book to book," said Melinda Metz
of Berkeley.
Those were some of the notices I got when my
agent sent my first mystery novel to 23 different
publishers. Everybody loved it; nobody bought it. So
I'm trying to reach an audience by another route -
disktop publishing. I'm sending the first three
chapters up into BBS Land as a free appetizer.
And the delicious main course - another 200 pages -
can be yours very cheaply: $6.95, with tax and
postage tossed in free. Type "ORDER" at the DOS
prompt to print out an order form. Or if your printer
went south, send a check for $6.95 to DICK ADLER,
402 Broadway, Venice CA 90291. Even if you don't order,
a comment would be appreciated - either by surface mail
or at CompuServe #76346,546. Thanks for taking the time
to read this.
DICK ADLER is the co-author, with former California
Governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, of PUBLIC JUSTICE,
PRIVATE MERCY: A Governor's Education on Death Row,
published in 1989 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. He also
co-authored a book about the Richard Miller FBI
espionage case, SLEEPING WITH MOSCOW, published in
1987. A former magazine editor in New York, London
and Los Angeles, Adler has written more than 500
articles for major magazines in America and England.
He regularly reviews mysteries for the Chicago Tribune.
THE MOZART CODE has been prepared using a licensed copy
of WRITER'S DREAM, which is the copyrighted property of
ANOTHER COMPANY. All other files copyright (c) 1992
by Dick Adler.
CHAPTER ONE
The bogus UPS man was now holding a gun. Like the
purple and green running shoes, I was sure it wasn't a regular
part of the uniform.
"Back off, fat man. And put your hands up -- high!"
It was the running shoes that had first caught my
attention. Wearing a Santa Claus suit that didn't need much
extra padding and a fake beard pasted over my real one, I was
standing outside of Praeger's Jewelry Store on the third floor
of the Westside Pavilion, ringing my bell and trying to get a
line on how large quantities of merchandise were slipping out
of the shop almost every day without being paid for. I had
noticed UPS men and women coming and going several times a
day, which seemed perfectly normal for the holiday season. But
the rest all wore those standard issue shiny brown brogans.
This guy, who came in once a day at about the same time,
didn't fit the pattern. So I watched through the window as he
went over to a woman behind the counter, and noticed that she
looked around nervously before dropping half a dozen small
packages into his sack. It wouldn't be the first time that
someone inside a store had figured out a new way to steal.
"Mind if I look at those?" I said as quietly as I
could to the UPS man as he came out of Praeger's. "Security,"
I added, flashing the badge I'd been given when I took the
job.
That's when he pulled out his gun and started
shouting. I wasn't carrying anything more lethal than a small
Swiss Army knife, buried deep under my Santa suit. If I could
get it out, I might stab him with my ivory toothpick. On the
other hand, his noise had already attracted the attention of
several other Santas who were real cops and carried real guns.
There were too many possible hostages around; I had to
do something before he thought of grabbing one. I started to
raise my hands, and as naturally as I could I also began to
swing my sack of toys toward his gun hand. The idea was to
knock his hand away long enough for one of the armed Santas to
get his own gun out. But I must have swung harder than I
thought; the sack caught his arm and then his jaw and lifted
him backwards, off balance. He hit the guardrail and kept on
going, up and over and down three floors to the gallery below.
I heard the screams from down there and hoped he hadn't taken
any shoppers with him. He hadn't. The screams came from people
upset by the sight of a body in a brown suit suddenly dumped
into the Pavilion's decorative fountain...
CHAPTER TWO
"Remind me after rehearsal. I want to ask you a
favor."
A favor. As I watched her enchanting bottom walk away,
I wondered what kind of favor Esther had in mind. Sexual,
perhaps? She was 28, a light soprano who one day could be as
foxy as Janacek's "Cunning Little Vixen" and the next as soft
and innocent as Sophie in "Rosenkavalier." She projected a
combination of strength and vulnerability which most of the
men in the chorus would have left home for. On the surface,
she didn't seem to require the sexual services of a heavyset
(to put it kindly) amateur bass 20 years her senior. But
stranger things had happened, so I let the idea dance through
my head while we tried to clean up the mess of the Fair Scene
chorus from the first act of "Faust."
"It's about my father," Esther began as we drank a
velvety Italian red wine from Barry Salzman's cellar in a
booth away from the other singers. Aha! I thought. Maybe it
was sex after all. The last two freelance outings I'd enjoyed
had both called me Daddy at a certain point in the
proceedings. "He's missing. Somebody told me that you look for
missing people."
Five years before, when an Australian press lord
bought the magazine I was editing and paid me two years'
salary not to work for him, I spent six months of it getting
my private investigator's license. I thought the work would be
a continuation of what I'd been doing for 20 years as a writer
and an editor -- getting people to help me find out things for
money, love or other perverse reasons. For the next 18 months
I sat in my office in the Writers and Artists Building on
Little Santa Monica and waited for cases to walk up the two
flights. It was a long 18 months. Then an orchestrated piece
in the View section of the Los Angeles Times, another former
employer, brought in a few clients. A couple were short-term
and got me even more attention; some others were less
interesting but became regulars. Now I actually lived on what
I made as a p.i. -- although the $1,000 a month sent by my ex-
wife, who I had once put through law school, helped pay the
rent from time to time.
"It's one of the things I do," I told Esther, watching
her teeth dip into the wine. "What's the story on your father,
and how long has he been missing?"
"I'm not sure. I usually talk to him about once every
two weeks, but he's on sabbatical and he's been travelling a
lot this year, so I didn't think much about not hearing from
him until Thanksgiving came and went. We always spend
Thanksgiving together, because I go to my mother's for
Christmas. They were divorced when I was in college," she
explained, as though I'd asked a question.
"He lives by himself?"
"Yes. He has an apartment in Northridge, not far from
the campus. Did I tell you he's a professor in the English
Department? Anyway, I called and called and got no answer, not
even his machine, so I drove up there on Friday. His car
wasn't in his spot. I used the key he gave me to go in. I got
the feeling that he hadn't been there for a long time -- but
also that he hadn't planned to stay away so long. You know
what I mean? And the answering machine was turned on, but the
tape was full so it couldn't take any more messages."
I had been singing under Esther Lundberg's direction
in the chorus at The Opera Cafe for six months, but this was
the first time I'd ever had her to myself for more than 30
seconds. I wanted to know a lot of things, chiefly did she
ever fool around with older men, but I decided the best idea
at this point was to stick to business. "You say he was on
sabbatical, travelling a lot -- maybe he just got delayed
someplace."
"I'm sure he would have called me if he did that," she
said. "We're not the closest family in the world, but we both
worked at it. No, I'm afraid he's sick or in some kind of
trouble. I tried to file a missing person report with the
Northridge police -- they told me to wait another week or two.
'Sixty-year-old men get some funny ideas sometimes,' the
detective said to me. Is there anything you can do to help?"
"I could probably do a little looking around, if you'd
like," I told her. "I'm not overburdened with work at the
moment." In fact, the Santa gig at the Westside Pavilion was
all I had going, and this afternoon's little drama had
probably ended that.
"The only trouble is," she said, turning the full
force of her Nordic blue eyes on my face, "I haven't got much
money. I thought maybe... we could work out some sort of an
arrangement..."
Be still my heart. "An arrangement?" I echoed dumbly.
"Didn't you once say you wanted to take some private
singing lessons but couldn't afford it? I usually get thirty
dollars an hour -- I don't know how much you charge..."
I swallowed my dashed hopes manfully. In the long run,
music lasted longer than sex anyway. "Something like that, but
on a daily rate. Sure, that would be fine. Anyway, I'm not
even sure I can help you. But I'll be glad to give it a try."
She arranged to meet me outside her father's apartment
building the next morning, then slid out of the booth to grab
some cake and catch the accompanist before he left for the
night. I was watching her walk away again when Barry Salzman
interrupted my thoughts.
"Keep your mind on the music, Ivan. That bass solo in
the 'Faust' still sounds thin and ragged."
"It will improve dramatically after the first
performance," I told him. "There's nothing like a little
public embarrassment to motivate people into learning their
parts."
The owner of The Opera Cafe was an entertainment
lawyer who, like me, had chosen the straight world over music
early in his life and was now regretting that choice. He
plowed most of the money he made defending the lifestyles of
the rich and famous back into his restaurant, which soaked it
up the way a soprano soaks up love. There were 14 young
professional singers like Esther on Barry's payroll, not to
mention an authentic Italian chef from Parma and a gang of
waiters straight out of the road company of "Hello, Dolly."
Barry slipped easily into the seat just vacated by
Esther, and I cursed again his ability to eat at his own
restaurant every night of the week and still look as gaunt as
a marathon runner. Maybe he was a secret bulemic, sneaking
into the onyx-walled john to unload all that angel hair pasta
primavera and anisette-soaked cheesecake. "I've got some work
for you, if you're available," he said.
"Absolutely," I replied. "Which one of your superstars
is in trouble?"
"Fish Taylor. Remember him?"
"Sure. I used to buy all his records in the Sixties.
'Street Girl,' 'Sun Dreams,' 'The Last Time I Saw Samantha' --
great stuff. Didn't he change his name and become some sort of
religious fanatic?"
"Brother Serenity," Barry said. "He lives at a place
called Earth Works, near Santa Fe. Lots of rich people trying
to find redemption by working the soil."
"And just what seems to be Brother Serenity's problem?
Somebody dipping into his supply of nose candy? From what I
recall, he snorted up a sizeable slice of Colombia in his
time."
"He swears he's been clean for five years," Barry
said. "That was my first thought when he told me about the
death threats -- that they were drug-related. I tend to
believe him. I know that the people who started Earth Works
make a big thing about renouncing all artificial stimulants. I
can't even get a cup of coffee when I go out there." As if to
compensate, Barry drained his inky espresso and signalled for
a refill.
"What form did these death threats take?" I asked.
"A few postcards and then two phone calls. It was the
calls that made Fish turn to me for help. He was sure after
the second one that he recognized the voice -- and that it was
someone he and I both know. That's when I thought about using
your services. For a singer, you know how to keep your mouth
shut when necessary."
I thanked him for the compliment. "And now you're
going to tell me who he thinks the mystery voice belongs to?"
"Not yet. Drop by the office tomorrow and we'll kick
it around some more. I just wanted to be sure you were
interested," Barry said as he rose to leave.
"Interested? I'm fascinated. I'll see you after lunch,
if that's acceptable. About 2:30?"
Barry said that was fine, and moved off to talk shop
with some of the women in the chorus. The Opera Cafe was
becoming an increasingly expensive hobby until his wife Rose
had the brilliant idea six months ago of starting a chorus of
dedicated amateurs who enjoyed singing opera enough to pay a
hundred dollars for eight rehearsals and three performances.
Esther liked the idea because working as choral director added
to her meager income. The Salzmans liked it because each of
the 40-odd members of the chorus filled the restaurant on
performance nights with their friends and families. I liked it
because it combined three of my four major interests -- music,
food and (in the form of fantasies about Esther and a whiskey-
voiced alto named Jeanine who I had my eye on) sex. As for my
fourth major interest, crime -- things seemed to be looking up
in that direction as well.
Esther's father lived in an apartment complex that
looked like a Swiss chalet on the outside. Inside, it had the
same cottage cheese ceilings and metal-framed sliding windows
and midget pool as my place in Santa Monica -- which looked
like a Morroccan cathouse from the front. She had kissed me on
the cheek as I got out of my car. "Did you check his mailbox?"
I asked to cover my confusion about this change in our
relationship.
"I don't have a key, but it looks empty." Which meant
either lying in wait for the mailman or a visit to the post
office to see if he'd left a temporary hold order.
As we entered her father's apartment, I knew what
Esther meant about nobody having been there for awhile. The
air was stale and dusty, with the faint odor of dead plants.
The only sign of life was the flashing red light on the
answering machine on the desk in the living room. It was the
kind you can call from any touchtone phone to get your
messages and clear the tape. I rewound it now; the tape was
full, and most of the messages seemed routine. "Call me when
you get back and we'll have dinner," said a woman named Norma.
A book editor from New York had called three times; the second
time he sounded impatient and the third time he was definitely
angry. I wrote down all the names and numbers as possible
leads. Then I checked the outgoing message, which Esther
wouldn't have heard. A smooth, unruffled man's voice gave no
indication of being away for an hour or a year.
"Can you tell if any of his clothes are missing?" I
asked Esther as we moved into the small bedroom. "What kind of
luggage did he use?"
"I gave him a matched set last Christmas -- a garment
bag and a small suitcase in tan canvas with brown leather
trim," she said, going through his closet. "I don't see them
here. And his good blue blazer isn't here, either. He wore
that for dressy occasions. Shoes I can't be sure about, but I
don't see his desert boots. He lived in those." She checked
off a few more obviously missing items -- a favorite tweed
jacket, a shirt she had given him for his birthday. Adding
them to the absence of basic toilet articles in the bathroom
convinced me that Carl Lundberg had gone on a trip somewhere.
But looking around the apartment also made me agree
with Esther that he probably hadn't meant to stay away longer
than a couple of weeks. The plants in the living room each had
those self-watering gadgets that would keep them moist for up
to two weeks, but the things had all run out of water and the
plants were dry and in some cases long dead. And there were
three books neatly stacked on the hall table, waiting to be
returned to the UCLA Music Library. I recognized the signs of
a fellow library compulsive and checked the due days; the
books were 10 days overdue. My guess was that Lundberg had
planned to stay away for two weeks, but hadn't been back here
for a month. I'd be able to pin down the dates better when I
checked with the post office and called some of the messages
on the answering machine. What bothered me most was why he
hadn't called in to get his messages. Esther may have thought
about the same thing, but I wasn't going to mention it in case
she hadn't.
"Is there anybody else he might have told where he was
going?" I asked her. "A friend at college, maybe? Or a woman -
- the Norma on the tape?"
"He never mentioned women to me," Esther said. "I
tried to ask him about it a couple of times, to encourage him,
but he always changed the subject. Daddy was very reserved
about things like that -- very Norwegian, if you know what I
mean. And the only friend I ever met was Briscoe McBride, the
director of the opera program at Northridge."
McBride's name and number were in the Rolodex on
Lundberg's desk, which I asked to borrow. The desk itself
looked curiously neat and bare. "Did he do most of his work
here?" I asked.
"No, he used the computer in his office. He joked
about becoming very dependent on it in his old age."
I looked through the rest of the apartment and asked
Esther if there was someplace nearby where we could get some
coffee. I followed her in my car and we joined the early lunch
crowd at a Denny's down the road.
"You said your father was on sabbatical. Did he have
some definite project in mind?"
"Oh yes, he was working on a book about Lorenzo Da
Ponte in America. He was very excited about it; he found some
research material at the University of Texas that hadn't been
looked at for 50 years."
I knew enough about Da Ponte from reading various
Mozart biographies to understand why Lundberg would want to
write about him. Born a Jew near Venice, he became a Catholic
priest and poet, got mixed up with Casanova and was kicked out
of the Church for adultery, then wound up writing the libretti
for Mozart's three best Italian operas in Vienna. After that,
Da Ponte had moved on to London and ended up in New York,
where he worked with Clement Clark Moore at Columbia College
and helped bring Italian opera to America. A hell of a life; I
envied Lundberg for having the chance to dig into it.
"Could that be where he is now -- in Texas?" I asked
Esther.
"Maybe. But I think he had already finished the work
he had to do there. He was in Austin for about three weeks in
September, looking through the material. He couldn't stop
talking about it after he got back." The memory of her
father's happiness brought tears to her eyes.
"What else can you tell me about him?" I asked gently,
to get her over the hump. "How was his health? Did he have a
problem with drinking?" I hadn't seen any signs of that in
Lundberg's apartment, but he might have been the type who
never boozes at home.
"I don't think Daddy has ever been drunk in his life,"
she said. "The most I've seen him take is a second glass of
wine. And as far as I know, his health is good." She paused,
then looked me full in the face with those dazzling eyes.
"Tell me the truth, Ivan. Do you think something has happened
to him?"
"It's too early for theories. He could be in Bermuda
with some hot-blooded companion and has just been too busy to
call home." She smiled gamely, either at the thought or my
attempt to ease her mind, then handed me the picture I'd asked
for. It showed a 20-year-old Esther, her blonde hair a lot
longer than it was now, laughing and resting her head on the
shoulder of a handsome, silver-haired man in his 50s. They
were standing outside of what appeared to be a Western saloon
or restaurant.
"That was taken in 1978, on our last vacation as a
family, at Bishop's Lodge in Santa Fe," she said. "Daddy
hasn't changed much since then, although lots of other things
have." That meant Mommy was presumably behind the camera. But
Esther hadn't mentioned her directly, and I decided not to
pursue the subject just yet.
Esther had a lesson to give in Pasadena. I asked her
to write a "To Whom It May Concern" note explaining that she
had retained me to look for her father. She brought up the
subject of payment again; we agreed that I'd spend another few
hours of my valuable time trying to come up with a lead and
worry about our barter arrangement later. After she left, I
sat for a moment, finishing my coffee and looking at the
picture she'd given me. Carl Lundberg was a good-looking guy,
in good health, with a job he liked and a daughter who cared
about him. What could make a man like that decide to drop out
of sight? I could think of a lot of things, none of them
pleasant, so I stopped speculating and headed for the main
Northridge post office.
I had noticed a current voter registration card in the
top drawer of Lundberg's desk and slipped it into my pocket
just in case. Rather than go through some long and possibly
useless routine wagging my note and license at the mail pickup
window, I flashed the registration card instead, said I was
back from vacation and asked for my mail. "Stayed away a
little longer than you planned to, eh Mr. Lundberg?" said the
clerk, who looked like a black, female version of the
Pillsbury Dough Boy. "That's all right, no additional charge
for the extra two weeks," she chuckled.
"What did I put down I'd be gone, two weeks or three?"
I asked, trying my best to look like an absent-minded
professor.
"You put down from the sixth through the 20th," she
said, waving a form. "Guess you couldn't tear yourself away,
huh?" Today was the 10th of December, which meant that
Lundberg had been gone for exactly five weeks. There wasn't
much mail to show for it, either -- none of the catalogues
which clog my box with memories of past excesses, only a few
magazines like "Opera News" and "The New Republic," plus a
dozen bills and a couple of personal letters.
One, with Lundberg's name and address hand-printed in
green ink, no return address and a Santa Fe postmark ten days
old, I opened on the spot. Inside there was just a single
sheet of music paper, with no note attached. It wasn't the
kind of printed score I was used to reading. This was written
out by hand, the notes sketched in quickly in pencil, the
words printed in slanting letters below. It seemed to be a
scene from an opera, with a rough orchestra line and two voice
parts -- a baritone and a soprano duet. The words were in
Italian, and I didn't recognize them. But there was something
familiar about the pattern of the music, or what my fading
sight-reading skills could make of it. I thought it was by a
composer I knew, someone whose work I had been looking at
recently. Since that could have covered anyone from Mozart to
Gounod, with Gilbert and Sullivan thrown in, I decided to get
some expert advice.
Briscoe McBride wasn't back from lunch yet, so I used
the time and Esther's note to check out Carl Lundberg's office
in the English Department's motel-like wing on the Cal State
Northridge campus. The secretary who opened his door for me
thought she hadn't seen Lundberg for about a month, but hadn't
worried about it because he hadn't come in more than once or
twice since he'd been on sabbatical anyway. That sounded odd;
Esther said he was doing all his work on his office computer.
"Could he have come in early or late, without you seeing him?"
I asked her.
"I guess so. Now that I think of it, Professor
Lundberg once said he was a night owl. And I leave at 5, so
maybe I just missed him."
Lundberg's computer was a Wang, one of several hooked
up to the department's hard disk. I knew enough about it to
turn it on and try to call up his files. "ENTER PASSWORD"
flashed on the screen, and on a hunch I typed in "ESTHER."
Sure enough, up came a directory listing a dozen separate
files. Ten were labeled "PONTE.l" through "PONTE.10," and
seemed at a fast look to be working drafts of chapters of his
book. One was called "PERSONAL"; feeling even more like a
voyeur than when I went through his apartment or his mail, I
called it up. There wasn't much in it: copies of letters to
people at other colleges, asking for or giving advice on
details about Da Ponte's life; a household inventory for
insurance purposes; a standard short form will, leaving
everything to his daughter. If Lundberg's personal life added
up to just these few electronic bytes on a computer screen, I
felt sorry for him.
There was one more file on his directory, labelled
"LIBRETTO." I tried to call it up and got another "ENTER
PASSWORD" message. "ESTHER" didn't work this time; neither did
"CARL" or "LUNDBERG" or "LORENZO" or any of the other
possiblities I tried. I wondered what was in this particular
file that made Lundberg cover it with extra security. Then I
saw that the computer was hooked up to a telephone modem.
Definitely a job for Nephew Charles; I smiled to myself as I
wrote down the modem's calling code.
McBride's office in the Music Department was just a
short jog across campus, and he was back from lunch when I got
there. Exploding out of his tan corduroy suit, his round face
framed by wisps of long, unnaturally black hair, he looked
more Russian or Italian than Celtic, and his voice boomed with
European authority. "I called Carl twice last week to invite
him to dinner, but I got no answer," he told me. "I thought
he'd come back from Santa Fe and forgot to turn his answering
machine back on."
"What was he doing in Santa Fe, do you know?"
"It was all very mysterious," McBride said. "Carl
wasn't the most communicative man in the world anyway,
although once he got going on Da Ponte he could talk your ear
off. I gathered there was someone or something in Santa Fe
that was important to his research. I got one card from him
about three weeks ago, and he wrote something very strange on
it -- 'LSD Lives!' I didn't know if he was talking about
drugs, the old British sign for pounds, shillings and pence,
or something else entirely."
I showed McBride the page of music from Lundberg's
mail, and he too thought it looked familiar. "Wait a minute!"
he said as he got up to check a score from a bulging shelf
behind him, then "I thought so!" as he found something of
interest. "Look at this. It's 'La Nozze di Figaro' -- do you
know it?"
"I've tried learning a couple of Figaro's pieces," I
confessed. "As Tito Gobbi said, they're a lot harder than they
look." Now, as McBride held the handwritten page up against
one from the printed score, I saw what he meant. "The patterns
are similar, aren't they?"
"Similar isn't the half of it," McBride said. "Every
composer has a definite signature, a style you can recognize
if you look for it. It's hard to be certain from just one
page, but I'd still be ready to go out on a limb and say this
was either by Mozart or someone doing a damned good
imitation."
"Any idea what it's from?" I asked.
"That's just it -- I haven't a clue! I know all the
Mozart operas fairly well, and this isn't from any of them. I
don't recognize the words, either; they don't seem to tie in
with any of the Italian operas he wrote, so this probably
isn't a scene cut out from one of them. Can I copy this, do
you think? There are some Mozart experts I'd like to consult."
At the time, I didn't see any harm in letting him show
the page around. He ran it through the department's copier,
clucking like a hen who has suddenly found herself sitting on
an unusual egg. I appreciated his enthusiasm, but it didn't
seem to bring me any closer to understanding why Carl Lundberg
was three weeks late in picking up his mail.
CHAPTER THREE
Ellen was looking vulnerable, an aspect so rare in our
25-year-relationship that I was immediately worried. "What's
wrong?" I asked as I sat down opposite her at one of Duke's
patched red vinyl boothes. "Is it one of the kids?"
"They're both fine, as far as I know," she answered
quickly. "It's my mother I'm worried about."
There had been a message from my ex-wife on the
machine when I got home from Northridge: she would be with
clients all afternoon, but could I please meet her at seven at
what had been our favorite cheap dinner joint on Santa Monica
Boulevard. Our son Dean was about two when we started coming
to Duke's, and he used to throw so much food on the floor from
his highchair that I always had to leave an extra buck tip.
"What's Madame La Farge up to now?" I asked. "A
campaign to bring back the guillotine?" Ellen's mother had
moved to Los Angeles from her native Montreal ten years ago,
despite our repeated suggestions that such a permanent change
might bring on drastic culture shock. And so it had: she sat
in her Hollywood apartment, knitting unsuitable garments and
muttering in Quebecoise, or else took long hunched walks in
the neighborhood, harassing the prostitutes and Russian
emigrants.
"She seems to be giving away a lot of her money to
some astonishing queer," Ellen said. Like me, she was of an
age when the expression "gay" hung heavy on our lips --
especially when so many of our homosexual friends were
anything but. "Is there anything you can do to scare him off,
Ivan?"
My relationship with my ex-wife is friendly. She
worries about my weight, sends me money, and as far as I know
doesn't ask the kids about evidence of other women in my life.
(I on the other hand have hinted frequently to Dean and Karen
that any gossip about their mother which they might care to
share would not be scorned. They haven't risen to the
challenge as yet, but I live in hope.) She has even referred
me to clients of hers who needed my services. But this was a
first -- an admission that what I did might be personally
helpful to her.
End of excerpt
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