The Icy Fire of Deception. Mike Trial
father, who would pay the debt immediately. He put the letter back in his jacket pocket. “I will not live with that shame,” he said.
“What did you say?” Copilot Henry Cho asked.
Aaron smiled, “I’ll take it for a while. Go stretch your legs.”
After Copilot Cho left, Captain Li locked the cockpit door.
* * *
On September 14, 1997, Silk Air flight 298, carrying seventy-two vacationers and a flight crew of four to Penang, Indonesia, from Bangkok, Thailand, crashed. There was no threatening weather, no apparent mechanical failure, no indication of terrorism. Twenty minutes into the flight, the Boeing 737 inexplicably pitched down and flew straight into the ground, impacting at nearly 600 miles per hour, disintegrating the aircraft and everything it carried.
No cause for the crash was ever determined.
Stolen Melody
Steve always wanted to be a rich and famous musician, but never had the talent to make it happen. Until he discovers a few sheets of music that he knows will make him great. The only catch is that no one must ever know he didn’t write it. And Steve has a plan to make sure that never happens.
Steve hurried up the sunny Milan street, ignoring the people, the shops, all the happy chatter of Italy. He was fed up with Italy, fed up with this tour of Italy Nancy had talked him into, and fed up with Nancy. Fed up with everything his life had become.
He turned a corner at random, then another, moving uphill, into the older part of the cosmopolitan city. The streets narrowed, a few old people passed, the city quickly reverted to its fifteenth century roots. He walked more slowly now, as his anger subsided. The winding cobbled street was too narrow for cars. The second-floor windows of houses were ground-level with the next house up the hill.
When he stopped to catch his breath, he felt the silence of the old city. Ancient stone with weathered tile roofs surrounded him. Some of the dark windows were devoid of glass. On impulse, he ducked his head inside one of them. He saw an empty room, long abandoned. Cracked, discolored plaster covered its irregular walls and ceiling. The tour guide had mentioned that even in Milan, one of Italy’s most modern cities, some of the ancient houses had sat abandoned for decades. The cost of fitting them with running water and electricity was prohibitive.
Steve lifted himself to the sill, then swung both legs inside. A deep layer of dust covered the floor. Smoke stains covered the walls around a tiny fireplace. An open doorframe led into an empty corridor. He stood in the silence, glad, so glad, to be away from Nancy’s endless chatter. The years go by while I work temp jobs to pay for the house Nancy insisted on buying, her Lexus, this vacation. I could have been, should have been, writing music.
He picked at the cracked plaster as though seeking an answer hidden in the wall. When he and Nancy had gotten married, he’d told her, “All I want to do is write and play music.” But the years passed, he wrote less and less, and now he wrote none at all. “And I’ve fallen out of love with Nancy,” he said to the empty room. But saying it didn’t make his frustration any less.
He tried to stuff a plaster chip he’d picked off the wall back into its crack, failed, flung it across the room. There was some yellowed paper deep in the crack. He pulled out four sheets of thick paper, folded twice. Italians! Trying to fix plaster cracks by stuffing paper into them. So stupid!
It was quarto paper, very old. Music paper. He unfolded them on the dusty floor. The inked score lines had been drawn with a pen and ruler. The notes were quick hand-drawn ovals, only the occasional staff—scribbled glissando here, there adagio, and more than once the notation tenerezza—tenderly, sadly.
“This must be at least a hundred years old,” Steve muttered. He fingered the paper, old paper, a previous century’s paper. “Might be worth a few dollars to some collector.”
He thumbed through the sheets looking for a composer’s name or the title of the piece, but found nothing. He had not read a score since his university days, but his eyes followed the lines, haltingly at first, then faster as the music came to life in his mind.
How long he crouched there hearing the soundless music, he didn’t know. But when he rose and folded the sheets, the melody, full of sorrow and a magical ethereal beauty, stayed in his mind.
He tucked the music under his arm and made his way back out into the alley through the glassless window. The alley was empty. His watch told him the tour bus would depart in only five minutes. He had to get moving. He quickly went down the street the way he’d come. Near the bottom of the steep incline was a sign on the side of an ancient building: Via Achato. He turned a corner, then another, and was back in modern Milan. At a newsstand he grabbed two newspapers, tossed down a euro, then folded the music into the papers.
“See anything interesting?” Nancy said as they took their seats on the bus with the other pastel-clad tourists.
“Nah, nothing, just stretching my legs.” He took his travel bag off the overhead rack and stuffed his bundle inside.
“Lot of newspapers,” Nancy said.
He sat down and closed his eyes, “Thought I’d try to decipher some Italian while we’re here.” The bus started up, the video screens came to life, describing their route and next point of interest, but Steve closed his eyes, oblivious to the TVs. The score he’d read continued to play in his head. Music he’d never heard before, music his heart was hungry for. As powerful as it was sorrowful, rich, and moving. He ached to play it, to make it his own, to rearrange it into something more attuned to contemporary audiences, but still retaining it’s heartfelt sadness and beauty. He pretended to doze so that Nancy wouldn’t point out every sight to him.
* * *
On their second full day back home, Nancy went back to work as usual. Steve sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and checking his email messages. The temp agency had an assignment for him today. He should have been there an hour ago. Steve deleted the message and sat down at his electric piano. He propped up the old sheets of music and began picking out the melody. It took him all morning to reconfigure a single motif of the music into the form and texture of a pop song. But when he was done, it was beautiful. He copied the electronic file into ProTunes and emailed it to Del, his agent.
He ate lunch out of a can, standing at the kitchen sink. His email now had two increasingly angry messages from the temp agency. And a message on his voicemail: “We are going to stop offering you positions if you do not respond to our calls.” Steve deleted the messages and phoned Del.
“Steve, I’m glad you called,” Del said sarcastically. “The temp agency has terminated your contract. And by the way, while you were gone, the Erawan restaurant said they didn’t want you playing there any more.”
“Just because I took a week off to go on vacation with my wife?” Steve snapped, feeling unexpectedly wounded.
“Frankly, they haven’t been happy with you for a long time,” Del said. “Coming in late, leaving early. They told me to tell you that the Erawan is a Thai-Indian restaurant. They asked you repeatedly not to play ‘Volaré.’ But you did so anyway.”
Del was silent for a moment, then, “Sorry, Steve. I don’t have anything else for you. Maybe you should check with LA City College, they’re always looking for adjunct faculty to teach music. You’d make a good teacher, and there are lots of bright young kids . . .”
“I don’t want to teach a bunch of kids,” Steve told Del. “And I don’t want to play crap at a restaurant for people who aren’t listening anyway. Check your email, Del. I sent you a file a few minutes ago. It’s a new tune of mine. Call me back and let me know what you think.” He hung up before Del could object.
Steve set his phone on the kitchen counter and poured himself a generous shot of Ballantine’s from the bottle he kept under the sink. It wasn’t long until his phone buzzed. “It’s fabulous, Steve!” Del shouted. “Your trip to Italy must have really inspired you. This is the best