The Best British Mysteries III

The Magic of Your Touch by Peter Robinson

‘Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth, I heard many things in hell.’

– Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’

One night, many years ago, I found myself wandering in an unfamiliar part of the city. The river looked like an oil slick twisting languidly in the cold moonlight, and on the opposite bank the towering metal skeletons of factories gleamed silver. Steam hissed from tubes, formed abstract shapes in the air, and faded into the night. Every now and then a gush of orange flame leapt into the sky from a funnel-shaped chimney.

I was lost, I know now. The bar where I had played my last gig was miles behind me, and the path I had taken was crooked and dark. The river lay at my right, and to the left, across the narrow, cobbled street, tall empty warehouses loomed over me, all crumbling, soot-covered bricks and caved-in roofs. Through the broken windows small fires burned, and I fancied I could see ragged figures bent over the flames for warmth. Ahead of me, just beyond the cross-roads, the path continued into a monstrous junkyard, where the rusted hulks of cars and piles of scrap metal towered over me.

Out of nowhere, it seemed, I began to hear snatches of melody: a light, romantic, jazzy air underpinned by wondrous, heartrending chords, some of which I could swear I had never heard before. I stopped in my tracks and tried to discern where the music was coming from. It was a piano, no doubt about that, and though it was slightly out of tune, that didn’t diminish the power of the melody or the skill of the player. I wanted desperately to find him, to get closer to the music.

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.

I couldn’t get the song out of my head. Every minute of the day and night it played, over and over again in a continuous loop tape. The pills helped up to a point, but I found my night’s sleep shrinking from four hours to three to two, then one, if I was lucky. Only with great difficulty could I concentrate on anything. No amount of external noise could overcome the music in my head. I couldn’t hold intelligent conversations. People shunned me, crossed the street when they saw me coming. I started muttering to myself, putting my hands over my ears, but that only served to trap the sound inside, make it louder.

One day in my wanderings, I found myself back in the city where it all began and retraced my steps as best I could remember them. I don’t know what I had in mind, only that this was where the whole thing had started, so perhaps it would end here, too. I don’t know what I expected to find.

Soon the landscape became a familiar one of decaying warehouses, oily river, and factories venting steam and belching fire. I saw the junkyard looming ahead beyond the crossroads and followed the path through the towers of scrap metal, rusty cars, engine blocks, tires, axles, and fenders. Then I heard it again. Uncertain as first, hardly willing to believe my ears, I paused. But sure enough, there it was: ‘The Magic of Your Touch’ played on an out-of-tune honky-tonk piano, the music outside perfectly matching the loop tape in my head.

I could see the brazier now, a patch of light at the end of the narrow path between the columns, and when I approached, the wizened old black man looked up from his keyboard with fire dancing in his eyes. Then I saw what I should have seen in the first place. The flames weren’t reflections of the brazier’s glow. They were inside his head, the way the music was inside mine.

He didn’t stop playing, didn’t miss a note.

‘I thought I’d killed you,’ I said. ‘Lots of people make that mistake,’ he replied.

‘Who are you?’

‘Who do you think I am?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You took my song,’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me.’

‘No matter. Now it’s taken you.’

‘I can’t get it out of my head. It’s driving me insane. What can I do?’

‘Only one thing you can do, and you know what that is. Then your soul will come home to me, where it belongs.’

I shook my head and backed away. ‘No!’ I cried. ‘I’m dreaming. I must be dreaming. This can’t be real.’

But I heard his laughter echoing among the towers of scrap as I ran, hands over my ears, the insufferable melody I had come to detest now going around and around for the millionth time in my head, gaining in volume, just a little bit each time, and I knew he was right.

When I got back to my hotel room, I took out paper and pen. You have no idea what a struggle it was to write just this brief account with the music, relentless, precise, and eternal inside my head, what an effort it cost me. But I must leave some kind of record. I can’t bear the thought of everyone believing I was mad. I’m not mad. It happened exactly the way I told it.

Now, like a man who can’t get rid of hiccups might contemplate slitting his throat, I have only one thought in mind. The pills are on the table, and I’m drinking whiskey, waiting for the end. He said my soul would go home to him, where it belongs, and that scares the hell out of me, but it can’t be worse than this eternal repetition driving out all human thought and feeling. It can’t be. I’ll have another slug of whiskey and another handful of pills, then I’m sure, soon, the blessed silence will come. Amen.