Little God Blues Read online

  I’d been putting off visiting Jack Ross. I was sure to get the junior Lenny. I’d already had abbreviated versions in our few phone calls.

  JR Enterprises (“where Ross is Boss”) was off Wardour Street in Soho, London’s tame, and increasingly upmarket, red-light district. His office took up one floor of a former warehouse wedged between a retro punk fashion place and a gay video and accessories shop. It had one of those ground-floor entrances where you ring the intercom, then try to hear the disembodied voice above the street noise.

  Ross was a short, balding man with a puffy, pockmarked face. His longish black hair swept rearward from the top and sides of his shiny pate. He liked to massage his face or clean his glasses with his silk handkerchief. He spoke only after a few seconds’ thought, as if editing any comments for publication. But once going, he blurted out his sentences as if trying to catch up.

  His entire office had ego walls full of signed concert stills and promo shots. Others of Ross standing poised and self-important next to a pantheon of rock gods. There was one of him with Mick Jagger, the donnish MJ in corduroy jacket, leaning away in feigned distaste, a conspiratorial expression on his lean face.

  We sat in his office in an alcove with a worn sofa in yellow silk and two club chairs in black leather. What a contrast to the expensive leather furniture in Lenny’s tenth-floor office in Century City. We talked about music. Jack took me on a tour of his successes, selling me. Yet he gave the impression of genuine interest in artistic freedom, career paths, and musical honesty. It was not all about money; or that’s the way he played it. He did a good job, balancing “take your time” with glimpses of a musical future here in London. He knew a large range of players. “When you’re ready to sit in, let me know,” was how he summed it up.

  I wasn’t ready. I needed to come to terms with Jim Shalabon, the free agent solo musician, as distinct from one-quarter of the Eyebeams. Might as well take the crankshaft out of an engine and find another use for it. Eventually, after Ross had fulfilled his role as agent, we got around to other topics.

  Ross had met Kirk once for a drink at The Drummond, the hotel where Kirk was staying. Distracted and impatient was how he described him. Their conversation had been inconsequential. Kirk promised, sipping his mineral water, to keep in touch about music without much apparent interest, not making an effort to hide that. Kirk was usually subtler than that.

  I asked about my flat.

  “Your flat?” Ross said, rubbing his forehead. “‘Nothing fancy,’ isn’t that what you told Frank?”

  “The flat’s fine. I was just curious.”

  “I took your comment to mean somewhere…‌anonymous. A quiet neighborhood. You’d expect to see a Jim Shalabon in Chelsea or Holland Park. You see?”

  “My landlord, Sir Clive, I guess he’s off somewhere with some sun in the picture?” I asked disingenuously, testing Natalie’s story.

  “Not exactly. He’s in prison, if you must know. A minor indiscretion. Tame white-collar stuff.”

  “Do you know Claudia Steyning—lives below Sir Clive?”

  “I’ve met her a few times, yes.”

  “So you know she’s disappeared?”

  Ross nodded vaguely. “You must think of me as your agent…‌here. In London. This means I should help you. This is what I will do; help you. Perhaps I am not being presumptuous when I assume that you, in turn, will return the favor?”

  “Help you?”

  Ross gave me a look that assumed we had closed our deal, nodded curtly. “There is a club you should know about. Your landlord is…‌involved, as is Claudia. Through this club…‌the police have interviewed several of its members. They may be suspects in her disappearance. My information is sketchy.”

  “What is this club?”

  Ross held up his hand; this would have to develop at his pace and in his direction. “Now, before I tell you more, to my request. There is an American musician who lives in our city…” He wanted me to go out and visit him. He was strung out, under the control of his people and the drugs they allowed him. Sometimes new visitors, American ones, could get the chains off and the deadbolts unslotted. Once. My mission was to claim his guitar, a custom-made Nashville flattop, on Jack Ross’ behalf. It was a legendary guitar, a valuable one. Debts were mounting. Soon the guitar would be cashed in or traded for debts. Ross would keep it just in case his client cleaned up his act.

  “Now to NE1. That is the name of Claudia’s club. Yes, and Sir Clive’s. Let’s start by considering it as dinner theater. Two members, unknown to each other, they are set up to meet at a restaurant.” He stopped abruptly to tell me he wasn’t a member. “So…‌the pair is given an envelope with instructions that they open at the restaurant. They are like improv actors given a premise that they must act out over dinner. I’ve only heard a few.”

  His eyebrows tightened here as he gave me an assessing look. How much was I following? My look must have been positive, for he continued. “Sometimes the two are given occupations, other times, interests. Sometimes a storyline. ‘You are two old flames who run into each other ten years later.’ ‘Boss and hesitant secretary.’ That sort of thing. I gather it’s rather fun if you are good at it.” He was not afraid of telegraphing his failure. “But you must think on your feet. You must be accomplished at ad-libbing, lying, keeping your real emotions in check while showing others. Yes, I tried it. It was too much of a game, one I could not take seriously enough.”

  “Sounds to me like a reasonable reaction. How do you keep from bursting out laughing?”

  This brought out an impatient swat. “In Japan everyone wants to be a singer, so they have karaoke. In your country, it’s stand-up comedy, so you have open mics. So here…?” He left the rest implied.

  “Now to Claudia. She was one of a few super-members. It was patently unfair to put me up against her my first time. I rather suspect your landlord was behind that, just for a chuckle, mind. Sir Clive is not a malicious man. At any rate, you can see how this club puts various members in front of Claudia. There is a school of thought that one of them, his ego in tatters, exacted his revenge. The police have, of course, been all over this ground.”

  I was stuck trying to connect karaoke to this tableau. Two islands packed with reserved people. That’s as far as I could get.

  “Why am I telling you all this?” Ross met my eyes now. “I feel it only fair you know…‌there’s a school of thought that says Claudia might have met with foul play in the flat below yours. Also, Claudia quite possibly met Kirk. She offered to show him your flat. On my behalf, that is. I called her the week before she disappeared to find out whether that had happened; she never got back to me.”

  “Why are you renting it out?”

  “Claudia suggested it. She thought a flat should not stay dormant for too long. Sir Clive has sizable legal bills, so I acted on her suggestion. Mind you, only if something came along. I didn’t advertize it or talk to estate agents or anything like that. As you know, we did nothing to make it renter-friendly, so that meant someone known to us, someone who could be trusted to respect his personal things.”

  We had reached a break in our conversation. Ross stood; I matched him. “A break up is like a car crash. I’ve seen dozens. It is important to get back behind the wheel before the doubts start to take over. Just a word to the wise. Call me if you need anything.”

  Ross walked me to the stairs. I asked, “Claudia disappeared a week after Kirk…‌died?”

  Ross nodded, pulling at his face in thought or agitation.

  “Connected?”

  “I don’t see how. Don’t get me wrong, it’s occurred to me, of course it has. But I don’t see it. One of those coincidences.”

  I walked out into the bright, gray glare of Soho, my head lightly spinning. I had visited Ross out of a sense of duty, steeling myself for more pushy advice about my career. Instead, it felt as if I had just read every other chapter in the first third of a crime novel. Back on th
e shelf with that. Ten minutes away was the absolute center of London, where the big bookstores and guitar shops were located. If I was staying here a while, I’d need to do some serious shopping.

  CHAPTER 4

  Kirk’s funeral in San Francisco had been held only six weeks after those four planes slammed into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside. Now, this more personal jolt, no less powerful. A world-gone-to-hell vibe pervaded that cathedral, as if we were all seeking sanctuary from the terrorists outside.

  I was giving the eulogy. I remember getting up from the front pew, so quiet I could hear my shoes clacking on the stones. I stopped for a second before the coffin, and nodded. The lid was closed, but I could picture that half-knowing Kirk smile—I’d seen it two days before at the viewing. That this was one of Kirk’s pranks was about as believable as the finality of this service. I paused and scanned the congregation; a face jumped out at me the way a word can from a jumble of print: Kirk’s father, Henry Howell. His sour, embittered look embodied the subtext of this eulogy: we have before us this party animal, our local expert on drugs, who’s now going to talk about the tragedy of a drug death. A quick scan bumped on familiar faces like visual braille.

  “I try to imagine what Kirk would think if he were looking down on us right now. There’s no certain answer, not even to how much attention he’d be paying. It might be like our days on stage: he’s there, he’s part of the show, but another part of him is off somewhere else, some private world we can never know. Now that world has claimed him completely.”

  A slight jolt of pain to my left temple caused me to pause. This had to be a dream—all I needed to do was wake up, the first step of which was to stop talking. I sought out a face, away from Mr. Howell, to steady myself. Most had that TV-watching blankness to them. Kirk’s mother, Ava Howell, gave me a weary yet supportive smile. I hardly knew her.

  “When I first heard the news about Kirk I was angry. I still am angry. Too much business left unfinished. As his friend I was always handing things off to Kirk; ideas, theories, speculation. Music too, of course. Kirk would take that hand-over and work it in intelligent, unpredictable ways. The result was always interesting. Kirk is…‌was…‌such a large part of my life, of all our lives. It is unutterably sad that all we will get from him now is silence.

  “I struggle to think of virtues of the man that didn’t come back to haunt him. He was always generous, but in lending his shirt to a fan he started a riot in Portland. There was his honesty, but in that TV interview about the Seattle suicides that honesty turned him into an antichrist. The man was seriously excoriated for that. There was his lack of ego, but he was a celebrity despite that. There was his…

  My God, my mind went blank. All those nights on all those stages, song after song, chord after chord, note after note, improvised solos, off the cuff intros, ad lib patches when Kirk chose not to come in on time. Now this big, fat silence. I knew the next part, about Kirk’s lack of anger, malice, competitiveness. I knew exactly how I was going to structure those thoughts; but that was all on the other side of this bridgeless ravine. I had no idea how to get across. I stood there before all those expectant faces. All I could deliver was fumbling silence. It was my worst fear from our stage improvisations: Kirk would hand over only for me to stumble, fall even. And just now we were at the Big Hand-over.

  No doubt it looked like some drug echo, a cluster of chemicals unclogged like a log finally unjamming and marauding downriver to do some damage. I recovered, limped on, finished. I know what I was scripted to say; I can only assume I did that.

  I had a chance to compose myself while the reverend talked about Kirk. (It was never clear who in his family decided on a church service: Kirk wasn’t religious.) I had learned all about grief four years earlier when a drunk sloshed around a corner and hit my sister Molly head-on. I was intimate with those two types of waves: either an engulfing tsunami of enormity or a single, sharp, crashing curler that pounded you into the sand, a diamond-hard scene or realization. It was the latter that had tripped me up, Kirk’s poker face, as if still aware of the hand he was playing, laid out against white satin. An internal shriek now, as if my whole body was shouting no!

  CHAPTER 5

  Kirk Howell had died holding a book of poems. I only found that out later when his father, Henry Howell, sent it to me. It had arrived just before I left for London, and I had been trying to get to Howell on the phone ever since.

  Impossibly, the book was a Soviet-era publication of my father’s poems, False Memory. There was an inscription, also in Russian, that read: to Voronitchka in London, from Nikolai from Nowhere. It was dated Russian-style, 12 IX 1968. My father was a Nikolai, but so too were maybe five percent of Russian men. Anyway, Dad had left Russia in 1967.

  It was not even 4:00 p.m., dark already. I had just finished a fifty-minute trudge back from Jack Ross in Soho in the chill drizzle, up the shiny commercial sameness of the electronic goods emporia on Tottenham Court Road, eventually the endless High Street up through Camden, then Kentish Town. The same shops repeated over and over again, the DNA sequencing to this nation of shopkeepers. The Christmas decorations were up. The metal profiles of holly and bells hanging from the light standards were being beaten this way and that by the wind. Finally, the start of a leafier residential area once under the second railway bridge. Home.

  Four p.m. was my default time to call Mom—eight a.m. in California. She was the only one I knew back home who was up that early. Sometimes I got her; others not. She worked as a fill-in nurse on the day shift at Marin General Hospital. Her new husband, C. Bradley Sweltzer, did not like the idea of Mom working, wanted her home in the evenings to cook for him. Mom, I suspect, was not ready to completely abandon her career. I tried not to think too much about her marriage and all it meant. Today we had a brief chat: I told her about my flat, that I didn’t know what I was doing, swept along by unseen currents. She had always been a distant spectator to my life. Of the hundreds of towns I’d called her from on the road, London was just another one.

  I was isolated, lonely, but sharpening and shaping up. So far I had been true to my resolution to be Mr. Natural. No drugs, not even a few pills. Now, my mind clear and rested, the days were so damn long. Not even 5:00 p.m., dark, yet eight hours to go. I would read, work on songs, fight to postpone my trip to the Indian restaurant, or the Ethiopian one, then probably the pub. After that, more reading. It was as if I had created my own detox clinic, thousands of miles from the temptations of home. One day soon, though, I’d have to do something about my isolation.

  I was three hours away from dinner when my cell phone rang. It was Kirk’s father, Henry Howell, finally returning my call.

  I had met Henry Howell once, and that was at his son’s funeral. It was a fraught time. During the eulogy I wanted to refute the possibility of Kirk taking drugs. But a eulogy is for fond remembrance, shared memories, affectionate anecdotes. Besides, it would have been too late. By the time of the funeral, delayed by waiting for the repatriation of Kirk’s body, the conventional wisdom had hardened into accepted fact: Kirk died of a drug overdose.

  Howell had been stiff and distant at the funeral, so disconnected that it was as if he had wandered into it by mistake. I took that as a reaction to me, the ambassador from the chemically-liberal world that had killed his son. But others had a similar view.

  Now, on the phone, Howell sounded more upbeat than I expected. I described the Last Stand. He asked if I had taken pictures. No, but there was a project to take a bite out of a day. I asked him about False Memory, the book he’d sent me. Did he know it was a book of my father’s poems? That it had a Russian inscription, possibly from my father?

  “Yes,” he said, “that’s why I sent it to you. Evgeny in our department was excited. Your father is quite famous, in Russia at least.” I could now hear an American laziness in his British accent, less articulated, a few corners cut, gonna instead of going to.

  Did he k
now where Kirk got it? Did Kirk say anything about it to him?

  “All I know is that Kirk was holding it when he died. Wait a minute, let me be accurate here. It was found with Kirk; I don’t know whether he was holding it.”

  “Russian? My father? How?”

  “You are in a better position to find that out.”

  That brought a long silence.

  Kirk must have picked it up here. I’d seen him the day before he left for London; he would have mentioned it. Howell suggested I talk to his brother, Richard Howell, a physics professor at London’s Imperial College. Kirk had visited him.

  That book made no sense from whichever angle I looked at it. Kirk, prying into my life, losing his? Kirk no longer around to ask. My father, too, long gone. He died of cancer in 1984, fourteen months after his return to the rodina, the soil of his motherland.

  I had never become fluent in Russian but knew enough to talk, and to translate. I’d stayed away from my father’s dark, complicated and witty poems. Before he abandoned us, I was too young; after that, too angry. Maybe in London I’d have enough distance, physical and emotional, to make a start translating them. It was a project that would eat up some of my ample spare time. I placed False Memory on the margins, back left, of the dining room table. In publishing you would call it a drop cap, that overlarge, embellished single letter that starts a chapter. It lay there day after day like some dark era of my family history, best avoided except for the puzzle of its provenance, there to remind me that this was one mystery I needed to keep my eye on.

  ***

  Imperial College is a hodgepodge of buildings lost between London’s major museums in Kensington, and the flat, green expanse of Hyde Park. I was lucky enough to find Kirk’s uncle, Professor Richard Howell, in his office at the Physics Department. He sat at a tidy metal desk in a small room, a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf behind him with horizontally stacked papers, as well as shelves of books. His desk was opposite a small whiteboard that had been fully erased, but rows of equations ghosted through. He wore a three-piece suit that sharply outlined his bony frame.