Symphony of Secrets, page 18
He returned to the couch, handed her a glass, set his down on the coffee table. The ice in his glass chimed faintly.
She drank hers down in two gulps. “What we can’t do is say anything to anyone. Look. I know you get a hard-on for Delaney but now we pretty much know that everything about him is suspect. Now, as much as that means to you, imagine if you had more to lose than just credibility. More than prestige. It’s their bankroll, remember? That’s what we are potentially dealing with: how the Delaney Foundation makes its fortune. Do you really think these stuck-up white people are going to let somebody like us destroy all that?”
“I know what you’re thinking, but it’s the Delaney Foundation. Mallory—”
“Don’t be naive. You can’t trust her. She sure doesn’t trust you.”
Bern stood up again, paced to the window, which looked onto another building, most of the shades drawn against prying eyes. “Okay, but this is bigger than her. Bigger than the Foundation. This is what I’ve dedicated my life to. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of us have. Think of all the DF Kids. Think what a charge it will be for little Brown and Black kids to know that someone who looks like them maybe contributed to some of Delaney’s music. I can’t just let all that go.”
“Good idea. We run to Mallory and say, ‘We discovered that you actually have a half-Black cousin and now you gotta share your money with them.’ I can see that going over real well.”
“I think you’re wrong. The Delaney Foundation has done so much for the world—”
“Which is exactly why we can’t tell them. Rich people stay rich by hanging on to their money. I know how much Delaney means to you. You’ve got to use your head and not follow your heart on this one. Please trust me on this.” She typed a few more keys, double-checked something on the screen, and said, “Check it out.”
She shifted her monitor around so he could get a better view. It was a spreadsheet. In the left column she listed what seemed like random place names, with an address. The next column clarified it: these were all places mentioned in Earlene’s trunk. Out of twenty-three rows, four were highlighted in yellow. Two were green.
“What’s this a list of? All the physical locations from the Doodles?” he asked.
“It’s more than that,” Eboni said. “It’s anywhere that we know Josephine has been. So I included references to all the photos, as well.”
“The Alibi Club,” he said. “What are the highlighted rows?”
“The yellow means that the building seems to still be there. It wasn’t torn down or turned into a skyscraper. The coffee shop where they had the roast beef is a Citibank now. The ones highlighted in green are private apartments and will be harder to get into. So I thought we could start with the yellow ones. Except the Delaney town house—we should be able to talk our way into that. You can just flash your badge.”
“Got it.” He studied the chart for a few minutes. “So what’s the point of this? You think she carved her name on a table or in a bathroom stall?”
She stared at him, unblinking. “Don’t be a dumdum,” she said. “I’m wondering if one of these places might be a way into her code. Maybe some architectural detail or the layout of a room or something inspired her, and we can use that to decode some of the symbols. If I can get a place to start, I bet I can figure it out. We need an end of a thread. We tug the thread and boom, everything unravels.”
“A lot of the Doodles do look like art deco,” Bern said thoughtfully. “That’s the angle that the Foundation was pursuing, too, talking to people at the Met.”
“Well, the people at the Met don’t have any of our Earlene pages,” she said. “So we have a lot more options than they do. Come on, get your coat. Let’s check them out.”
“Now? I’m—”
“Yeah, now,” she said, standing and heading around to the door. “You coming? It’s cold out, so be sure you have your gloves.” Her boots were black leather with heels. She pulled on her faux leopard-skin coat, which hung almost to her ankles, with a faux leopard-skin hat and gloves to match.
Bern was wearing an ironed double-creased white oxford shirt and crisp khakis. He guessed he could put on a blazer under his woolen coat. “Why don’t we go tonight? I’m really trying to get through act two here.”
“We need to go when they’re open,” she said patiently. “They might not be open at night. I googled them all—see the column on the end?—and got their hours. Let’s go. You can work on act two tonight.”
Five minutes later they were hailing a cab.
Of the four yellow highlighted options, they decided to start off near the Empire State Building, at the B. Altman & Company building. A department store back in Delaney’s day, the white limestone structure loomed over an entire city block, and now housed the CUNY Graduate Center and several other businesses. Eboni had already printed out copies of the Doodle pages that had appeared on the Altman’s stationery, with blowups of the Doodles. Once they got inside, they wandered the halls that they could access—Eboni somehow managing to talk her way past the university’s security guards—holding up the sheet and on the lookout for architectural details that somehow would seem relevant.
They could find nothing. The building had been totally gutted and remodeled. Any telling design or symbol was now concealed behind drywall, dropped ceilings, and recessed lighting. A few stairwells seemed of the period, but Bern and Eboni couldn’t see any connection to the Doodles.
They took the subway up to the second site: 244 West Sixty-Third Street, the original address of Delaney Music Publishing, Inc. The Delaney Foundation still owned the building, so it seemed highly probable that the Foundation had already examined every square inch, but the Foundation didn’t have all the Doodles that they had, so they rode the subway with excitement and anticipation. Eboni kept leaning into Bern, playfully punched his shoulder a couple of times. If he didn’t know better, he would’ve thought she might be flirting with him, just a little.
“I tried for years to get into this place,” Bern told her as he climbed the steps two at a time from the subway station. “It’s always locked up. I even asked Jacques to get me in. No dice. I sure hope this badge is the ultimate backstage pass.” He fingered the Delaney Foundation employee badge that he’d gotten on his first day working on RED.
“Why’d you want to get in so bad?”
He looked at her like she’d grown three heads. “What do you mean, why’d I want to get in so bad? Because this was where it all started,” he told her. “Frederic Delaney bought the entire building. Rented it first in 1920, purchased it outright in 1927. This was where he composed some of his best-loved pieces—Quicksilver, at least three of the Quintet, and so many other things. I just wanted to get in and see it. Walk where his feet walked. Put my hand on the doorknobs that he’d touched.”
“Pee in the same toilet, huh?” Eboni said.
“Yeah, if I’m lucky,” he said. “Absolutely.”
“You’re such a Delaney dork,” Eboni said, and then they turned the corner. Half a block down, they realized that the Delaney town house, a modest five-story dark brick building, was under renovation. Scaffolding shrouded it. Workmen in neon yellow vests were unloading metal studs and structural supports from a truck that blocked most of the street.
“Don’t tell them you work for the Foundation,” Eboni said suddenly, putting her hand on his coat sleeve to stop him.
“Huh? Why not? That’s how we’re going to get in.”
“Wouldn’t they call over to the Foundation before they let you in? Your friend Mallory might hear about it.”
They stared at each other. Bern said, “At least now it’s open.”
“Maybe we can talk our way inside,” Eboni said.
He grinned wickedly at her. “Maybe we can,” he said and, without hesitating, he sauntered up to a guy who was either supervising or standing there smoking, or both. “Hey man,” Bern said. “Wassup? Check this out.” Bern wished he were wearing threadbare jeans instead of freshly ironed khakis, but the guy was looking at Eboni more than at him, anyway. Bern couldn’t blame him. He went on, “Me and my shorty used to live here back in the day. Fifth floor.”
The man didn’t seem too interested. He sucked deep on his cigarette, stared at the glowing end. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I know it’s weird, and I ain’t trying to get you in trouble or anything, but would it be cool if we went in to look at the place one more time?”
“No can do,” the guy said. “Construction going on. If you get hit by falling debris or step on a nail, it’s my ass. Company policy.”
“C’mon, man,” Eboni said, sliding close. “Just for a minute. We’re about to move to Connecticut. We ain’t gonna be hanging out in the city too much more. We just wanted to see it one more time.”
“How about if I give you fifty bucks and you never saw us go in? Right? Easy money.” Bern retrieved his wallet and pulled out two twenties and a ten.
The workman looked around. “A hundred.”
“Dude, you’re killin’ me,” Bern said.
“Baby, just give it to him. I want to see it one more time,” Eboni chimed in, hanging on Bern’s arm.
“Here you go. We straight?” Bern handed the workman five twenties. He hoped he wouldn’t have to bribe anybody else today—he had only seventeen dollars left in his wallet.
The man pocketed the money. “There are some hard hats right inside. Be sure to put one on. And no more than fifteen minutes, got it?”
Bern and Eboni slipped past him, up the short walkway, and into the building and stuck on the hard hats. To avoid the workmen hauling in the metal studs, they ducked into a room on the left. Even inside, the cold was brutal. Hammering, sawing, and drilling rang out above them.
“This is it,” Bern breathed. “This is where most of the Quintet was created. Maybe all of the Quintet.”
“Settle down, sweetie.” She smirked. “I didn’t bring you an extra pair of underwear. Let’s get to work. Look for any Doodles. Especially ones from the early pages. Like the three triangles.”
“And the overlapping squares with the arrows,” Bern said.
They hadn’t found any specific Doodle page that clearly was written in the town house—his stationery or something else that clearly referenced the place. But because Delaney—and, apparently, Josephine—had been there for years, any or all of the Doodle pages might have come from it.
Eboni and Bern walked carefully around the first room, looking at molding and paneling, many with art deco squares and patterns on them. Some designs remained, but many were thickly painted. Bern couldn’t tell how original the symbols actually were. They examined the other rooms on the main floor, too, picking their way around the construction equipment. Nothing.
Back on the main level, at the end of the hall, a beat-up wooden staircase wrapped around a single tiny elevator. They decided to start at the top floor and work their way down, floor by floor.
Eboni pushed the elevator button and waited. Nothing happened. She tried again.
“It ain’t workin’,” said a skinny Latino guy whose beard was struggling, and failing, to come in. He carried two five-gallon buckets that looked very heavy as he started up the stairs. The wooden treads squeaked and coughed under his weight. “Hasn’t worked for months. You another one of them Foundation people?”
“Us?” Eboni asked. “No. Not us.”
“Oh,” the man said. “Damn. I hoped you were going to get it working again. We sure would like to use it.” He headed up.
“Shit,” Eboni said, looking after him. “Now I gotta walk up them stairs?”
“Looks like it, princess,” Bern said. “Watch your crown.” They took the stairs up to the second floor, went along each wall, searching for anything that would seem evocative of a Doodle. They ducked into bathrooms and peered into closets. No luck. None of the original wooden paneling—if the building had had wooden paneling—remained; it was all drywall, and looked like the place had been extensively remodeled in the sixties. They repeated the search on the three lower floors, much of which had been utterly gutted with only metal studs separating the rooms. They found nothing. None of the workmen challenged them.
After an examination of the dusty, low-ceilinged basement, they made their way outside.
Bern said, “Well, that was a wasted hundred bucks.”
“Oh, it’s gonna cost you more than a hundred bucks to buy me another coat. Do you know how much this Donna Karan was?” Eboni said, trying to dust herself off.
“No, but I’m sure you’ll tell me to get it from Delaney, right?” Bern rolled his eyes. “Detective work is dirty work.”
“Whatever. Just get me a new one, and I mean from Donna herself, not Marshalls.”
Outside, they passed the hundred-dollar workman. Bern said, “ ’Preciate you, bro,” as they headed out to the street.
“Okay, I admit I’m impressed,” Eboni said as Bern was putting the address into the Uber app for the location of the old Alibi Club, which would be opening shortly.
“Impressed with what?”
“You still got a bit of swag left. I thought Delaney may have sucked it out of you.”
Bern grunted. “The Alibi is called Silvergate now.”
“Good that it’s still a nightclub. Maybe they have some memorabilia of the good old days.” Eboni moved closer to Bern.
His phone pinged. Their Uber was a minute away.
Silvergate seemed very New York, very modern. They were the only patrons in the place: a narrow bar, a small room with a handful of tables, and a tiny stage in the back. Mirrors took up one wall. The reflected black legs of the chairs made a bewildering forest pattern.
A server approached Bern. “Can I help you with something, sir?”
“Oh no. No, thank you,” he said. Eboni had disappeared into the ladies’ room, searching for Doodles. She returned a moment later shaking her head.
As Bern was about to enter the men’s room, she asked, “Why would Josephine go into the men’s room?”
“I don’t think she would. I just have to pee,” Bern said.
When he came out of the bathroom, she met him on the main floor. “Find anything?”
“Just a brand-new unnamed disease,” Bern said. Eboni laughed.
They talked with management and found out the building had been remodeled dozens of times since the ’20s. No memorabilia remained. None of the original fixtures remained. The Alibi Club had no alibis left.
The fourth and final place, formerly Hattie’s Club, was under new management. New management had turned it into a hair salon. One lonely stylist was very disappointed that neither Bern nor Eboni needed a new do. Bern and Eboni were disappointed that, in the ’80s, the entire space had been gut-renovated to the original brick. Not even an old door or a window molding was left.
“Well,” Bern said, back outside, “that was a bust.”
“Yeah, but you got to spend the afternoon with me. You’re welcome,” Eboni told him.
“You’re picking up the tab for the pizza,” he said. “There’s a place I’ve been wanting to try down by the public library. Supposed to be one of the best in Manhattan.”
“If it’s so good how come I haven’t heard about it?”
“Well, I guess I’ve upped the Eboni Michelle Washington on a pizza place. Somebody write this down.”
“It probably won’t be that good,” Eboni said.
But the three-dollar slice was that good.
“Remember when they were a dollar?” Eboni said.
“You’re showing your age.”
“Where’re your manners? You never say that to a lady.”
The crust was crispy and chewy, with bubbled and charred places from the wood-burning stove; the sauce tangy and rich and not too sweet. Just the right amount of fresh mozzarella oozed over it but didn’t detract from the other flavors. They also tried a cheeseless slice—Bern was very dubious—that was absolutely delicious.
“Well, thanks to me this day wasn’t a bust after all,” Bern said.
Eboni rolled her eyes. “Okay, so you got one.”
23
A Thousand or a Dozen Songs I Want to Hear
Freddy
Every night Josephine and Freddy would hit the mixed-race clubs and dance halls. Now, everywhere they went, Josephine would pull out her papers, scribble and listen and draw.
Every day they went to work separately, and although Freddy continued to be nervous about Josephine having another breakdown, nothing of the sort occurred: having her papers nearby seemed to make it possible for her to cope in whatever situation she found herself. He heard Ditmars call her Josie a couple of times, and she and Eunice ate their sandwiches together almost every day.
One night in early October, Freddy was positively giddy after playing his final set at the Alibi Club. He wanted to ask Josephine what she thought, since she was responsible for his new playing style. They walked along companionably, Josephine silent, both of them drinking in the late night. Josephine said nothing about his music: she just said that the band had sounded “grape” and “surging,” whatever that meant.
Down into the subway. Nothing from her. Waiting for the subway train to arrive. The ride downtown. Nothing.
Back in the apartment, Josephine went straight to the piano and, with damper pedal down, started in on some of the combo’s riffs, then segued into other songs she’d heard that day.
He was desperate for her opinion of him as a musician, but he wanted her to bring it up first, compliment him rather than him fishing for praise. The urge to ask gnawed at him.
