Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

I walked between the mountains of scrap metal, sure I was getting closer, then, down a narrow side path, I saw the glow of a brazier and heard the music more clearly than I had before. If anything, it had even more magic than when I heard it from a distance. More than that, it had the potential to make my fortune. Heart pounding, I headed towards the light.

What I found there was a wizened old black man sitting at a beat-up honky-tonk piano. When he saw me, he stopped playing and looked over at me. The glow of the brazier reflected in his eyes, which seemed to flicker and dance with flames.

‘That’s a beautiful piece of music,’ I said. ‘Did you write it yourself?’

‘I don’t write nothing,’ he said. ‘The music just comes out of me.’

‘And this just came out of you?’

‘Yessir,’ he said. ‘Just this very moment.’

I might lack the creativity, the essential spark of genius, but when it comes to technical matters I’m hard to beat. I’m a classically trained musician who happened to choose to play jazz, and already this miraculous piece of music was fixed in my memory. If I closed my eyes, I could even see it written and printed on a sheet. And if I let my imagination run free, I could see the sheets flying off the shelves of the music shops and records whizzing out of the racks. This was the stuff that standards were made of.

‘So you’re the only one who’s heard it, apart from me?’

‘I guess so,’ he said, the reflected flames dancing in his eyes.

I looked around. The piles of scrap rose on all sides, obscuring the rest of the world, and once he had stopped playing I could hear nothing but the hissing of the steam from the factories across the river. We were quite alone, me and this poor, shrunken black man. I complimented him again on his genius and went on my way. When I got behind him, he started playing again. I listened to the tune one more time, burning it into my memory so there could be no mistake. Then I picked up an iron bar from the pile of scrap and hit him hard on the back of his head.

I heard the skull crack like a nut and saw the blood splash on the ivory keys of the old piano. I made sure he was dead, then dragged his body off the path, piled rusty metal over it, and left him there.

I had to get back to the hotel now and write down the music before I lost it. As luck would have it, at the other side of the junkyard, past another set of crossroads, was a wide boulevard lined with a few run-down shops and bars. There wasn’t much traffic, but after about ten minutes I saw a cab with his light on coming up the road and waved him down. He stopped, and twenty minutes later I was back in my hotel room, the red neon of the strip club across the street flashing through the flimsy, moth-eaten curtains, as I furiously scribbled the notes and chords etched in my memory on to the lined music paper.

I was right about the music, and what’s more, nobody even questioned that I wrote it, despite the fact that I had never composed anything in my life. I suppose I was well enough known as a competent jazz pianist in certain circles so people just assumed I had suddenly been smitten by the muse one day.

I called the tune ‘The Magic of Your Touch’, and it became a staple of the jazz repertoire, from big bands to small combos. Arrangements proliferated, and one of the band members, who fancied himself a poet, added lyrics to the melody. That was when we really struck the big time. Billie Holiday recorded it, then Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, Mel Torme, Ella Fitzgerald. Suddenly it seemed that no one could get enough of ‘The Magic of Your Touch’, and the big bucks rolled in.

I hardly need say that the sudden wealth and success brought about an immense change in my lifestyle. Instead of fleabag hotels and two-bit whores, it was penthouse suites and society girls all the way. I continued to play with the sextet, of course, but we hired a vocalist and instead of sleazy bars we played halls and big name clubs: the Blue Note, the Village Vanguard, Birdland, and the rest. We even got a recording contract, and people bought our records by the thousands.

‘The Magic of Your Touch’ brought us all this, and more. Hollywood beckoned, a jazz film set in Paris, and off we went. Ah, those foxy little mademoiselles. Then came the world tour: Europe, Asia, Australia, South Africa, Brazil. They all wanted to hear the band named after the man who wrote ‘The Magic of Your Touch’.

I can’t say that I never gave another thought to the wizened old black man playing his honky-tonk piano beside the brazier. Many times, I even dreamed about that night and what I did there, on instinct, without thinking, and woke up in a cold sweat, my heart pounding. Many’s the time I thought I saw the old man’s flame-reflecting eyes in a crowd, or down an alley. But nobody ever found his body, or if they did, it never made the news. The years passed, and I believed that I was home and dry. Until, that is, little by little, things started to go wrong.

I have always been of a fairly nervous disposition – highly strung, my parents used to say, blaming it on my musical talent, or vice versa. Whiskey helped, and sometimes I also turned to pills, mostly tranquillisers and barbiturates, to take the edge off things. So imagine my horror when we were halfway through a concert at Massey Hall, in my home town of Toronto, playing ‘Solitude’, and I found my left hand falling into the familiar chord patterns of ‘The Magic of Your Touch’, my right hand picking out the melody.

Of course, the audience cheered wildly at first, thinking it some form of playful acknowledgement, a cheeky little musical quotation. But I couldn’t stop. It was as if I was a mere puppet and some other force was directing my movements. No matter what tune we started after that, all my hands would play was ‘The Magic of Your Touch’. In the end I felt a panic attack coming on – I’d had them before – and, pale and shaking, I had to leave the stage. The audience clapped and the other band members looked concerned.

Afterward, in the dressing room, Ed, our stand-up bass player, approached me. I had just downed a handful of Valium and was waiting for the soothing effect of the pills to kick in.

‘What is it, man?’ he asked. ‘What the hell happened out there?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know,’ I told him. ‘I couldn’t help myself.’

‘Couldn’t help yourself? What do you mean by that?’

‘The song, Ed. It’s like the song took me over. It was weird, scary. I’ve never experienced anything like that before.’

Ed looked at me as if I were crazy, the first of many such looks I got before I stopped even bothering trying to tell people what was happening to me. Because that incident at Massey Hall was, I soon discovered, only the beginning.

Playing in the band was out of the question from that night on. Whenever my hands got near a piano, they started to play ‘The Magic of Your Touch’. The boys took it with good grace and soon found a replacement who was, in all honesty, easily as good a pianist as I was, if not better, and they carried on touring under the same name. I don’t really think anyone missed me very much. My retirement from performing for ‘health reasons’ was announced, and I imagine people assumed that life on the road just got too much for someone of my highly strung temperament. The press reported that I had had a ‘minor nervous breakdown’, and life went on as normal. Almost.

After the Toronto concert, I developed an annoying ringing in my ears – tinnitus, I believe it’s called – and it drove me up the wall with its sheer relentlessness. But worse than that, one night when I went to bed I heard as clear as a bell, louder than the ringing, the opening chords of ‘The Magic of Your Touch’, as if someone were playing a piano right inside my head. It went on until the entire song was finished, then started again at the beginning. It was only after swallowing twice my regular nightly dose of Nembutal that I managed to drift into a comalike stupor and, more important, into blessed silence. But when I awoke, the ringing and the music was still there, louder than ever.