Джеймс Эллрой - Brown's Requiem

Shortly after returning to Los Angeles, I got a letter, postmarked New York from Jane Baker:

Dear Fritz:

It has taken me a long time getting around to writing this letter, because it has taken me a long time to resolve my feelings about you. I apologize for my actions on the day of August 2. It was absurd to call you a killer. At the time I blamed you for Sol’s heart attack, which was ridiculous, but understandable. To me you were the catalyst of all those terrible events that awful summer. Later I learned that they had been set in motion many years before, and all you did was stumble into them and try to help the victims as best you could. Thank you for that. Sol has told me that you acted courageously and were responsible for lifting a terrible yoke off his back.

Sol is doing very well, by the way, and so am I. I am attending Milliard and getting good! Some day I will be a good cellist, worthy of the Strad I play with and the love Sol has given me. Sol is here in New York, too, and is enjoying his retirement and nurturing a new fondness for modem art.

I feel strange about you, Fritz, and somehow guilty that I couldn’t love you. I know you had put great hopes on our being together. I sensed in you a desperate loneliness and a great thwarted love of beauty that contradicted the violence that seemed to define your character. Try to pursue that love of beauty, Fritz, try.

Maybe if you listened to less violent music, it would help. Beethoven and the romantics sometimes tend to create violent emotions in people already prone to violence. Listen to some baroque, enjoy the delicacy of it. Listen to the impressionists, they have a great statement to make, one I know you could appreciate.

I have to go now. Thank you for all the help you gave Sol and me. Sol won’t tell me the whole story, but I know you acted bravely, and with great concern for us. Try to love. I will always remember you fondly.

Sincerely,

I do try to love. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes I’m drunk, sometimes I’m sober. Sometimes I think of Fat Dog and his “plan” for me and wake up shaking. Sometimes I forget completely about his malevolent genius. Why me? Since that summer I have interviewed at least a hundred people who knew Fat Dog, and I still have no inkling.

Walter died last year of cirrhosis of the liver. He was thirty-four. His mother had him buried with a Christian Science service. I got drunk and disrupted it. The fuzz came and busted me, but all it cost me was a hundred dollar fine. I miss him terribly. Some night I’m going to steal his coffin and transport it to the beach, where a big raft will be waiting. I’ll put Walter on the raft, ignite it, and send it out to sea. I’ll have speakers hooked up all along the beach to blast out Wagner as my beloved comrade floats to a fiery Valhalla.

I get restless sometimes at night and go for long walks on golf courses. While walking the fairways I feel very much in touch with some kind of transient spirit world, a world in constant ellipsis.

When I think of what happened that summer I think not of myself, but of the other people involved. Nothing that went before or will happen after can touch that summer when I was part of the insane, tragic music of so many people’s lives. That summer was my concerto for orchestra — each instrument in the orchestra having a voice equal, yet distinct from all the others.

So I go on, heeding Jane’s advice. I have not performed violence on a human being since hurting the two boys in Bayreuth. I try to appreciate beauty. Most of the time I’m equal to the task, but sometimes my mind turns to wild flights of fantasy, envisioning other electric calms and moral stands that might bring me permanent salvation. When I think of these things, my reason and love of beauty desert me and I hang suspended like a bizarre hovercraft in a holding pattern over Los Angeles. But I hold.

I listen to a lot of music.