Symphony of Secrets, page 32
“What about?”
Place the violet between the lavender. “It’s a private matter. Tell him Josephine Reed is here. I used to work with him at Ditmars and Ross.”
Silence. Then the door buzzed, and she was in.
Up a narrow rickety flight of stairs and into a small reception area, where a young woman presided. Josephine again explained who she was. The receptionist disappeared. Josephine would have sat in one of the two small wooden armchairs but she wasn’t sure if colored people were allowed to sit, so she stood, sweating, her fingers digging into her purse.
Miles’s voice, before she saw him: “Can I help you—Josephine? It is you!”
Miles Turpin appeared in the doorway. Tall and in need of a haircut, wearing a threadbare dark suit. He was skinnier than she remembered, his chest more concave and shoulders more hunched. He’d grown a potbelly. “What are you doing here? Come into my office.”
She followed him. He sat behind a desk that was half the size of the dinette table in her room and perhaps a quarter the size of Freddy’s desk. Again, she wasn’t sure if she should sit, so she stood until he gestured for her to take the chair opposite him.
“How have you been? What a surprise to see you,” Miles was saying. “You were one of the few good things about Ditmars and Ross. I knew exactly where to find things. You did a nice job organizing the place. Are you still working there?”
“No.”
“Oh, well. That’s too bad. Their loss, right? So what brings you here? Are you looking for work? I’m afraid that I don’t really have any job openings, but as soon as I do—”
She told herself that if she could just speak the words, she could make it happen. “I have music,” she said. “I want to sell it.”
Miles sat back in his chair. “You have music? To sell?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s nice, but I don’t think your kind of music would sell very well.”
“My music is good. People like it. From everywhere. My melodies have all the colors in them. Not just a few.”
Miles looked at her blankly. “Yes, well, be that as it may, I don’t think your kind of music would sell too well. Maybe if you come back in a few months I may be able to hire you as a helper for Rita. How does that sound?”
Josephine moved to the piano against the back wall, sat at the bench. Miles was getting up, coming toward her with a fake smile stretched across his lips, and she began to play: the first few bars opened like a dance-hall tune but then morphed almost immediately into an upbeat rag; and, then, somehow, impossibly melded jazz into its own unique, unforgettable melodic style.
When she finished, she told him, “That was ‘When It Was Evergreen.’ I wrote it four days ago.”
Sometime during the song, Miles had carefully closed the door. Now he leaned over to look at the foolscap.
She’d printed When It Was Evergreen in careful block lettering and had transcribed the music into passable notation. She could, of course, read and write music. She’d been able to do that from her earliest days, from the locked piano in Oxford, before she’d developed her own system. But Fred had never asked her to write in regular notation, and she’d never offered to do it for him. Before, it had been an excuse to see him every night; and then, later, she thought he would be angry that she hadn’t told him.
“Did you write this?” Miles asked, as if he hadn’t heard her.
“Yes, four days ago.”
“Uh-huh. I see. What inspired you to write the music?”
“Is there something wrong with it?”
“No, nothing at all. As a matter of fact, it’s quite good. It sounds familiar. Almost like something I’ve— You say you wrote this?”
“Yes, I did.”
“How much do you want for it?”
“Twelve dollars.”
“Twelve dollars, huh? Well, I may be able to work something out. I’ll need a copy so I can play through it, see if it can be arranged. Do you have another copy?”
“No,” Josephine said. She hadn’t thought of that.
“I can buy the original, then,” he said.
“I want my name on it. I want it to say, Music by Josephine Reed.”
“You do, do you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Twelve dollars, and I want my name on it. If you don’t want it because I’m colored, I’ll take it somewhere else.” She knew from Fred that people didn’t like music written by colored people.
“Because you’re colored,” he echoed. “You don’t have to worry about that with this song. It’s a good song. It’s not just a coon song that only colored people would like. I don’t think people will care who wrote it if they can sing it and dance to it.”
She was so surprised, she looked right at him, could feel a gong go off in her chest, a full-on F chord, and tried to catch her breath. After everything Fred had said. All the promises he’d made. No one would care if she was colored?
She tried to gather her thoughts. Tried again. “Do you want it? You have to tell me now.”
She could go to Ditmars next. All she knew was that it had to be today. She was leaving tonight. Last night, while Fred was out, the Compendium had been loaded into two taxis, and she paid the porter in Penn Station to haul all five steamer trunks into the left-luggage office—the same room where she’d stashed her single trunk of the Compendium all those years ago. The train to North Carolina would leave at 10:15 tonight, and she and the Compendium would be on it.
“Really?” Miles said. “What’s the hurry?”
She looked down at her hands on the keyboard. How many pianos had she touched over the years? Most of them uprights: beat-up, damaged things, few of them really in tune, none of them the kinds of instruments that she’d heard in concert halls. She’d imagined, when she first came to New York, that everyone would play on baby grands.
“I want the twelve dollars now,” she said. “And a letter that says I wrote the music and that I’m selling it to you.”
“Now you want a letter?” Miles sounded amused. “Before it was just twelve dollars. Now it’s your name and a letter.”
She was silent, still marveling over his words, how being a Negro didn’t matter to the music.
“Okay,” Miles said at last. “I’ll do it, Miss Josephine Reed.”
He went over to a file cabinet, thumbed through some files, pulled out a form. “This form says that I’m buying all rights, title, and interest to your music from you. In exchange I’ll give you twelve dollars and give you a credit line for the music. See?” He handed her a single sheet of legal-size paper with tiny lettering and several blanks to be filled in. “Will this do?”
She pretended to look it over, but the words swam. “Yes,” she said at last. “I have four other songs, too.”
“You do? Four more? Like that one?”
“Yes,” she said. “Can you pay me sixty dollars for all five?”
“If they’re as good as that one, I can,” Miles said.
She played the other four for him.
“I have other songs, too,” she said. “If these work out, I’ll bring you others.”
“You will?” Miles rubbed the side of his face. “I’m happy to pay for music like this. They’re swell. Just swell. I’ll buy them, but can you come back tomorrow? There’re forms and signatures I’ll need to have prepared. And I don’t have that much cash on me.”
Josephine stared at her fingers on the keyboard. She said at last, “But then my name will be on them? The papers will show my name?”
“Absolutely. That’s what this set of forms is for. I always write my own songs, so I don’t buy music directly from other people. That’s why I need a lawyer to approve it first. Standard procedure.”
“Can you get it today?” Her train left tonight at ten fifteen.
“I’m afraid not,” Miles said. “Could you be here tomorrow morning at ten o’clock sharp?”
She sat, thinking. She supposed that she could have one more night in the apartment on Sixty-Third Street, come back here tomorrow and then head immediately to Penn Station. She could take her already-packed suitcases to Penn Station today, leave them with the Compendium.
The trick would be tonight: when he stopped by for the music. She’d have to pretend everything was as it had been. That the Compendium still hunkered in Freddy’s old rooms. She’d have a few tunes ready for him. He would knock his D-major knocks, open the door, take the music, and leave, and not stay long enough to notice any difference.
It was a risk, but now Miles Turpin promised that she’d have her own name on her own songs, and an income stream for the future.
Yes, she told Miles, she could be there tomorrow. Ten sharp. She gathered her handbag, nodded her thanks.
Tomorrow morning it would finally be done. These were her songs, after all. She could do with them what she liked. The world would know that Josephine Reed wrote this music.
Moments later she found herself outside in the May sunshine, breathing in the smell of Tin Pan Alley and New York in the spring: heat, flowers, metal, and the distant smell of sewage.
42
Dear Members of the Board
Bern
Dear Members of the Board and Executive Director of the Delaney Foundation,
The past several days have shown me exactly who you are and what you stand for. You have lied, cheated, manipulated, threatened, and humiliated me for the last time.
I dedicated my life to making the world a better place, partially by following the lead of Frederic Delaney and the Delaney Foundation. Now it’s become apparent that your organization, like its founder, is riddled with disease and disinformation.
If you hoped to intimidate me with your clumsy and brutal police tactics, please know your plan has backfired spectacularly. In your attempts to destroy me, you’ve left me no choice except to destroy you. And I absolutely intend to do so.
Please be advised that I hereby terminate all affiliation with you and my employment by you. Rest assured, however, that you, and the rest of the world, will be hearing from me and my attorney in the very near future with a full account of the activities of your founder and of yourselves.
Sincerely,
K. Bernard Hendricks, PhD
“What do you think?” Bern asked Eboni.
She was sitting across from him, balancing a laptop on her lap. They were holed up in a shady fourth-floor walkup deep inside the Bronx: one of Eboni’s friends had a friend who had a friend who was out of town for the month. It had a great view of a fire escape and laundry draped over a matching fire escape on the other side of a narrow exterior shaft.
“I think it’s way too nice,” she told him. “You need to go for the jugular. Show ’em how we do it in the hood.”
He tried to smile, but he was too tired. He had no doubt that the Foundation would poison every institution against him. He wouldn’t work in academia again. He wouldn’t work with music again. What options did he have? He imagined a career delivering pizza. Driving a cab in Manhattan: he’d heard of plenty of PhDs who did exactly that. Could people even earn a living driving cabs these days?
He’d lost everything—and for what? For a half-baked, half-formed, half-believable story about a now-long-dead woman no one had ever heard of?
He’d left everything behind in the tiny Upper West Side apartment, except his driver’s license. Now—using a burner phone, paying with cash, wearing faded clothes from a local thrift store—he wasn’t even sure he was himself. Eboni, on the other hand, seemed right at home. Somehow her cornrows had been re-braided, her nails were done, her clothing trim and tailored.
“I don’t think we should give away the game plan to them,” he said.
“No effing way we will,” she told him. “But this’ll be a lot more fun if they’re running scared. If they’re worried about what we’ll do. Because we’re gonna go big.”
“I’m worried about contacting the media organizations. The Foundation seems to have everyone in their back pocket.”
She nodded. “Yeah, and as soon as we expose them, there’s a very real possibility that they will come after us extra hard. I mean, really come after us.”
They’d gone around and around about the nondisclosure agreements. Had consulted a lawyer—yeah, Eboni knew a guy—who said that courts sometimes didn’t uphold nondisclosure provisions if they were too broad, and perhaps whistleblower protection programs might shield them, but of course it wasn’t cut-and-dried.
“What about that I didn’t sign the paperwork?” Eboni demanded. That didn’t seem to matter since she knew about it and had assented to its signing. Of course they would make the argument in front of the court that she’d known about the document, and the technicality of a forged signature wouldn’t get her off the hook.
“It has to work,” Bern said now. “Don’t ask me why, but I have a feeling that they think I’m bluffing. They think they broke me.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because they almost did. I almost gave up. I was embarrassed and devastated. When I was in that cell, I wanted to tell them that I’d do whatever they asked. Then I thought about you. And, honestly, about Josephine. It’s time we stood up to them. Time we held them accountable.”
She stood up and gave him a fist bump. He hugged her tight, and she hugged him back.
Somehow he found her lips with his own. The kiss was somehow surprising, but familiar, as if they’d recognized something that they’d forgotten. Her arms were around him, and his were around her, holding her tight, so tight.
Bern closed his eyes and lost himself in her lips, the touch of her tongue on his own. Time stopped. Neither of them spoke. He kissed her again and then they were moving together to the bed and he was unzipping her dress and she was fumbling with his belt buckle.
What seemed like hours later, they lay together on top of the covers. He held her, feeling her breathe against him. Her warmth felt delicious. Neither spoke. He hoped she felt the way he did: regardless of what was happening with Delaney, this moment was untouchable.
He was drifting off into a light doze when Eboni said near his ear, “These people only understand power. You know me. I don’t like to get ugly unless I have to.”
He opened his eyes. The peace was ebbing, sliding like a wave into the corners of the room, disappearing into the crevices. He pulled her closer to him. “What are you thinking?” he said.
She slipped away, and the space where she’d been was cool and felt very empty. A moment later she was back, carrying the two laptops. She tossed one onto his belly, slid back next to him, then leaned her shoulders against the headboard. “We just have to dig deep. Here. Start looking up names.”
She opened the laptop, gave Bern the password to his.
“Let me give you a lesson,” she said. “You should never, ever screw around with someone who does cybersecurity for a living. Number one rule of life. Get it tattooed on your chest.”
“That’s the number one rule, huh?” he said.
“Damn right. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to get a list of the board of directors and all the officers. We’re going to research them and their immediate families, and we’re going to hunt through any recent public business dealings. We’re going to look for any announcements and figure out what lawyers represent them.”
“Seriously?” Bern said, “How are we supposed to find out all that?”
“These are public figures. They’re rich white people. They’re all the same. They like to put their business out there. They like to see themselves in print. They also don’t think anybody will ever touch them. No matter how many times rich people get busted, their neighbor is always convinced that it can’t happen to them. I’m sure at least one of them—or maybe all of them—has some skeletons in their closet. Trust me.”
She pulled up a site, showed him how to maneuver through it.
“Just get started. Remember, only board members and officers. None of those low-level jerks. Leave Mallory to me. One thing I guarantee you: there will be dirt, and we will find it. That’s how we get even. That’s how Josephine and her family get what they’re owed.”
“I’m going after those NYPD officers, too,” Bern said. “The one that tased me. That took me to jail.”
“Damn right you are,” she said.
Over the next eight hours—Bern couldn’t believe the minutiae, the following of one buried lead into another—Bern learned that Suzanne Herz was a majority owner in fourteen corporations—some well-known, many unknown—around the United States, Hungary, and Germany.
“Get a list of them and all their websites, and then I’ll see if we can hit their servers,” she said. She was busy making lists of her own. “And zero in on the ones who don’t have too much information or who look like they aren’t doing too well.”
“What are you digging for?”
“Trust me. Those are areas where we’ll want to focus. He’s probably up to something shady. If it were legit, he would’ve cut ties—he’d have sold it if it’s not making him any money. He’s probably laundering money or doing something rotten. The easiest way is the way that they think no one will suspect.”
Bern wanted to ask how the hell Eboni knew all this but thought better of it. Regardless of how she knew, she was right. After Bern had compiled nine corporations around the United States and three in Hungary that had all reported losses for fourteen straight months, Eboni worked her magic. Bern watched in awe as she hacked into several servers. Thousands of keystrokes later, she discovered that his dealings went through shell corporations in Russia, and then she traced the money for them.
She was single-minded; hours went by. He dug into the backgrounds of more board members, and she pulled out all her resources to research all their companies—from whom they bought land to where they’d bought the blinds in their offices.
