Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 77, No. 7. Whole No. 454, June 17, 1981

Concerto for Violence and Orchestra by William Bankier

© 1981 by William Bankier

There have been classic cases in which a whole landscape has been stolen, in which a house and all its furnishings have disappeared, in which an entire jury and a complete baseball team have been abducted. Now read about the theft of a five-piece dance band...

People will steal anything. The police could open their files and show you cases of a ship being stolen, or lead from a church roof, or a herd of cattle. Countries even try to steal other countries — we read about it in the papers every day. These thoughts cross my mind as I remember what happened between me and Carlotta Teddington and Leonard Zolf. Perhaps I should begin in the traditional way.

Once upon a time there was a man who tried to steal a dance band.

The band in question is The Bones Cornfield Quintet and I am the leader. The nickname suits me. I weigh 190 pounds but it is spread thin over a six-foot four-inch frame. A sadistic guitar player once told me that when I am asleep it is easy to imagine what I will look like when I’ve been dead a few years.

The quintet is a semi-pro band. We play once a week at a pub in southwest London. The money is minimal but the management is enlightened. He charges no admission, so we always have a full house of beer drinkers who like the forties swing we play.

Some of us have regular jobs. Carlotta, our vocalist, teaches school in Wandsworth. Muir Levy, our piano player, sells cut-price Asian holidays to homesick Pakistanis. That may be the beginning of a lyric. Clay Braithwaite, our reed player, drives a Number 93 bus for London Transport. Pat Manta, the drummer, paints houses occasionally and collects social security regularly. And I play double bass when I’m not pulling pints on the morning shift at the Rose and Crown.

Quintet, you say, counting on your fingers. Quintet?

I’m coming to the fifth member of the band (sorry girls, we don’t count the female vocalist). He is the man I mentioned earlier, Leonard Zolf, trumpeter. Leonard used to be with the National Westminster amateur jazz band till the bank fired him. Now he sells used cars. When we ask why the bank gave him the sack, Zolf inflates like a pigeon, tugs at the points of his red waistcoat, smooths his pale thinning hair with both hands, and changes the subject.

It was shortly after Zolf joined the band that the trouble started. We had finished our Tuesday night rehearsal in the back room at St. Stephen’s Church hall. The vicar lets us use the room free because the band plays for nothing at his annual summer fête. I was inviting Carlotta to join me for coffee when we heard Zolf s voice rising in that locust drone of his.

“Terrible to be playing this out-of-date music when we could be making money.” He was not talking to anybody in particular. Zolf has a way of soliloquizing, scattering words like a fisherman flinging bait on the water, confident that sooner or later something will surface. “We should be playing disco. That’s where the money is.”

“The bank is where the money is,” Braithwaite said. Braithwaite is from the West Indies. When he plays soprano sax, he sounds like Sidney Bechet. “You never told us why you left the bank.”

Zolf ignored the probe. “I know the man who books the Aladdin Disco. We could get in there twice a week on a standard contract.”

Nobody said anything. Muir Levy played a progression of Shearing-esque chords. His eyes were on me. So were those of the other sidemen. Their heads were raised, their movements frozen, like antelopes around the waterhole checking out their leader to see if it was time to run.

I followed rules one and two of my emergency procedure used whenever I am threatened by events. I said nothing and I did nothing. Later, as Carlotta was helping me load my double bass into the back of the minivan, she said, “Zolf is deliberately making waves.”

“I felt them lapping around my ankles.”

“How long are you going to wait? Till your nostrils get wet?”

“It’s only talk.”

“That’s how palace revolutions begin. Talk. He’s trying to steal your band.”

She got behind the wheel and I sat in calmly beside her, a good man, a harmless man, everybody likes me. “Never trust a musician who wears rimless glasses,” Carlotta warned.

Our weekly Thursday night gig at the pub was a great success. We went through our modified arrangements of big-band standards and the crowd ate it up. Carlotta was in good voice. She sings like June Christie used to do with Stan Kenton, in a pure, clear, almost child-like voice. But whereas Christie was a blonde beauty, Carlotta Teddington’s appearance suggests gypsy ancestors. Her long black hair falls over one shoulder in a braid thick enough to moor one end of the QE2. Her broad face maintains a tan even under the random English sun and those pale green eyes announce that no phonies need apply.

When we stopped playing at 10:30 and the crowd dispersed in deference to English drink-licensing laws, the manager, a shaggy man named Shep, shuffled over to the bandstand. “Good news and bad news,” he said. “Which do you want first?”

“No news,” Manta the drummer said.

“Means good news,” Shep concluded. “Okay, the good news is I can’t afford to pay you any more.”

“Thank goodness the money is so bad we won’t miss it,” Braith-waite said.

“I can always paint a house,” Manta said.

I joined in the mood of levity. “I can always move back to Nottingham and resume my job dragging the rain covers on and off the cricket field. At least it’s steady work.”

Muir Levy played a heavy fanfare on the piano. “And now for the bad news.”

“The bad news,” Shep said, “is that I want you to keep on playing for me. You’re sounding better all the time. the A Train was really super tonight.”

“I think we’ve just been told we’re loved,” I said.

“Is that what you call it?” Zolf muttered. “I call it rape.”

Before we left, I reassured the pub owner that we would continue showing up on Thursday nights. The following week, on Monday at half-past seven, I took a bus to Carlotta’s school. She gives a bunch of the older girls a class in voice production after which I collect her and we go for a tandoori chicken dinner at the Bombay Paradise Take-Away Café. Yes, that could become another lyric.

I was early but the girls were leaving and there was no sign of Carlotta. “She had to go,” one of them told me. “Something about a special band meeting at the church hall.”

I sprang for a taxi, spending my now-redundant tandoori money. At the church hall there was no music being played. It was more like a conference at the bank. Carlotta interpreted the expression on my face. It told her there had been activity from the Zolf department of treachery, Doublecross Division. “I thought you knew about this,” she whispered. “I expected you to be here.”

“And here I am,” I said, giving Zolf one of my nice-guy smiles. Everybody likes me, that’s why I’m the leader.

“This is about the disco gig,” Zolf said in my direction. “I thought you weren’t interested.”

“Rimless glasses,” Carlotta murmured.

“I’m interested in whatever affects The Bone’s Cornfield Quintet,” I said. “Carry on.”

It seemed Zolf had been negotiating with the manager of the Aladdin Disco. When Shep announced he could no longer pay us, the former bank employee rubbed the magic lamp. The result was an offer for us to play not one but two nights a week at the Aladdin for a fee which, if not exactly handsome, was certainly not as homely as the amount we had been getting from Shep.

At the end of Zolf’s explanation the band members turned and looked at me. “What do you say, boss?” Braithwaite asked.

“I don’t like discos,” I said. “I hate disco music. In my opinion it is to popular music what sausages are to food. I would hate to see The Bones Cornfield Quintet playing in a disco.”

“That’s another thing,” Zolf said. “I don’t think that’s a persuasive name for a disco band. We should call ourselves something like Zodiac or Starsounds.”

This opened the door to a fifteen-minute creative session as everybody suggested names for a disco band. It proved my point about the sterile disco scene: say any word that comes into your head and it can be the name of one of their pseudo-bands. Paperclip. Blinding Headache. Desk Lamp. It’s the same with race horses. You can call a race horse anything and you can call a disco band anything.

I began to realize the other four were ready to try this enterprise. The money appealed to them. So did two nights a week. The Bones Cornfield Quintet was not as holy an institution to them as it was to me, Bones Cornfield.

“There’s something else,” I argued. “The Aladdin has a bad reputation. The kids pour out into the street when the dance is over and they have gang fights. Punks against mods. They vandalize the bus shelters, intimidate people walking their dogs. It’s a bad scene.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with the band,” Zolf said, dismissing me as if I was a teenager asking for a loan. “How many of you want to give it a try?”

Diabolical sonofagun, how could anybody object to giving something a try? Up went the hands of Manta, Levy, and Braithwaite. Carlotta and I felt the ship going down beneath us.

“As for your old-style double bass,” Zolf said to me, “I’d rather have an electric bass for this gig. I know a guy. And no hard feelings, Carlotta,” he said, filling the room with feelings as hard as anthracite, “but we don’t need a vocalist for the music we’ll be playing.”

No question about it, the band was being stolen from under my nose.

I wanted to yell, “Arrest that man!” Instead I said, “Don’t count me out, Len. I can borrow a Fender bass from a friend of mine. And I’ll know the fingering by the time we play.”

“And I’ll shake a tambourine and look sexy on stage,” Carlotta said. “This is my band, too.”

One rehearsal was all the quintet needed to master the tedious music played to accompany the gymnastics of the disco crowd. After an evening’s work the group was ready with a program to be performed in half-hour chunks alternating with recorded music supervised by a DJ with a professional vocabulary of 35 words.

I brought a few tins of beer to Carlotta’s flat the night before the first gig and we conducted a pre-mortem, sitting in deck chairs on her back roof, watching strips of lighted train windows flowing past on the overhead tracks a mile away, listening to a tape of my old favorites that included the Dinning Sisters singing Me.

“I found out why Zolf was kicked out of the bank,” Carlotta told me.

“How did you do that?”

“A friend of mine works at the Wandsworth branch. She’d never heard of Leonard Zolf but she asked some questions.”

“What were the answers?”

“He took it upon himself. The loans manager was away for a week and during that time Zolf granted loans and overdrafts to several people who should not have had them. He did it because it made him feel important.”

“That’s our Zolf.”

“He takes it upon himself,” Carlotta repeated as she opened two more beers and passed one to me.

“Whatever happened to our nice band?” I asked more or less rhetorically. “And how is it all going to end?”

“Nothing stays the same,” was Carlotta’s defeatist reply.

“I’ll tell you something that stays the same,” I said, listening to the pure voices on the tape blending like silver chimes. “Sweet harmony stays the same. Good sounds.”

Carlotta picked me up and drove me to the Aladdin. As we went inside, I saw the band’s new name on a sign near the door. Zolf the banker had been at work — the group was now called Overdraft.

The experience was as boring and as threatening as I knew it would be. We played our first set all in one chunk, not even bothering to change keys. Zolf repeated a monotonous riff on the trumpet, stepping to the microphone every now and then to cry, “Get down!” and sometimes he blew a blast on a referee’s whistle. What it had to do with music was beyond me.

The kids lurked in groups and might have been in communication except when they danced. Then it was zombie time. I suppose they were all imagining themselves to be John Revolting or Trivia Neutron-Bomb. I remembered the old days when a dance meant arms around each other and heads together, sweet kisses and whispered promises.

When closing time rolled around, the kids were turned out into the street, and we soon heard the sounds of combat. We went to the doorway. There were a dozen lads fighting and a hundred watching, screaming them on. I saw boys on the ground covering up, the boot going in, lots of spit and cursing. One thing struck me — not much physical damage was being done. It was like a ritual; they did it because it was expected of them. We used to have the Home Waltz and today they have a punch-up.

A bus went by and wisely refused to stop. Some boys and girls ran after it flinging bottles which smashed in the street. “Is this what we’re doing two nights a week from now on?” I said to nobody in particular.

Zolf picked it up. “Nothing to do with us.” He had a fistful of money. “Come on inside,” he announced. “It’s payday.”

That was the Tuesday fiasco. We had another scheduled for Friday. On Thursday, Carlotta came to my place and I put on the album of Charlie Parker with Strings. Eventually we would wander down the road for fish and chips. For now we were talking and sipping rose and getting hungry.

“I don’t think I can face the Aladdin any more,” I said.

“Nobody really likes it except Leonard.”

“Then why are we doing it?”

“Because it’s been sold to us.”

“Same reason the kids go, I suppose. They’ve been told this is the thing to do.”

“And a lot of hustlers in the record business are making a fortune merchandising schlock.”

“Well, I’m not buying any more. Let Zolf get his friend to play bass.”

Carlotta punished me with half a minute of disapproving silence. Then she said, “Do you know all that is needed for the triumph of evil?”

I completed the axiom. “That good men do nothing.”

“Right. This is your band, Bones. We’re going through a bad patch, you can’t desert us now. Stay and fight.”

The thought of confronting Zolf, of taking him on for control of the band, was very upsetting. Zolf loved contention, the threat of violence fueled his engine. I wanted peace at any price, almost. Even now I felt the tension, a frightening anger boiling up inside me.

Then the stylus slid into the next track on the record and Charlie Parker began to blow April in Paris. As the string section laid down a fabric of lush chords, Bird’s alto poured out notes like hard, bright diamonds tumbling from a velvet sack. I felt my tension evaporating.

“Carlotta,” I said, “I think I have an idea.” I told her what I had in mind.

“That’s more like it,” she said, and she gave me an approving kiss.

“That’s more like it,” I said.

The Friday disco was a photocopy of the one before. I suspected they would all be the same until the kids died of boredom at seventeen. During one of our breaks, while the DJ was plugging the top ten and Zolf was in the manager’s office counting the take, I had a word with the other members of the group. They needed no long explanation — they were with me immediately.

The only problem would be getting rid of Zolf at the crucial time. Carlotta said she would take care of it.

As we began our final set, she went to Zolf and said, “I was just out in the parking lot having a breath of air. Your car is gone.”

Zolf put down his trumpet and left on the run. “Is his car really gone?” I asked.

“Sure is,” Carlotta said. “I sneaked the keys from his coat and moved it during intermission. It’s on the next street. He’ll be a good half hour talking to the police.”

The band played two more identical numbers and then I stopped the sausage machine. I went to the mike and said, “Okay, kids, a change in mood. We’re going to close with something different. We call this a time to get to know your partner.”

I counted a slow four and the band began to play one of our romantic medleys. We started with Sentimental Journey, segued into Harlem Nocturn, then ended with Dream. Carlotta sang the final number in that clear voice of hers, no pretense, just an intelligent concentration on the meaning of the words.

The crowd applauded when the set ended, the first human response I have ever heard from a disco floor. As they drifted out of the hall, Zolf appeared with a livid face. “All right,” he said, “which one of you cretins moved my car?”

“Guilty, and proud of it,” Carlotta said.

“Acting on my instructions,” I put in. “We needed you gone so we could change the program.”

“Yes, I heard that Mickey Mouse music from the outside. What’s going on?”

“Follow me and I’ll show you.”

I led the group to the front door and we stepped outside into a calm summer evening. The kids were drifting away, some of them queueing for a bus. There was a certain amount of exuberant teenaged shouting, but not a clenched fist anywhere.

“What we did was soothe a lot of savage breasts and ennoble a few hearts,” I said. “We charmed these kids with our music.”

“That isn’t the idea,” Zolf fumed. “Disco music turns people on, it strings them out. Man, we are paid to establish a ‘high’ and sustain it. No way are you going to change this lucrative gig into your square old failure of a band concert. That was the first and last time you alter my program.”

Zolf turned and headed inside. I glanced at Carlotta; she was watching me. So were the other members of the quintet. Carlotta nodded but said nothing. Words were unnecessary. I knew this was a perfect example of the bad guy winning unless the good guy is willing to take action. “Hey, Zolf,” I called, stopping him at the door.

“Yeah?”

“I take exception to everything you just said.”

“So?”

I approached him, took the rimless glasses off his nose, and handed them to Carlotta. “So this,” I said and planted one on his jaw. He sat down on the pavement and looked up at me. “The band now goes back to being The Bones Cornfield Quintet,” I said. “We’ll keep the disco job. But we’ll play a balanced program, the frenetic stuff interspersed with standards that don’t all sound the same. All right?”

I’m not sure whether Zolf replied because the response from the boys was immediate and loud. “Yeah! That’s right, boss. That’s what we’re going to do.”

Driving home with Carlotta, I said, “That felt good. It really did. One punch on the chops gave me more satisfaction than saying all the right things in a ten-minute argument.”

“That’s why they invented violence,” she said. “It’s like making love. It feels good.” The car rolled to a stop in front of her house. “And you were terrific,” she added, putting her arms around me. “I like the way you took charge.” She kissed me so hard my teeth hurt.

“Which was that?” I asked. “Love or violence?”

“Take your choice,” she said. “It’s a fine line.”

And I think that’s a fine line to end on.