The Icy Fire of Deception. Mike Trial

      On the road, Nancy and the dingy little house in Reseda were forgotten. Steve loved the adulation he was getting at the clubs where he played. And afterward at the hotel bar, women would approach him and he seldom turned them down. Good looking women, too.

      But, soon the tour ended, the limo dropped him at the same old house in Reseda, and the same old Nancy came home after work. They ate the same food, and watched the same TV shows. Late at night Steve would sometimes stand in the darkened kitchen leaning against the kitchen sink, sipping Johnny Walker Black, while Nancy slept. Thinking about other tunes. Great tunes. He began to spend his nights secluded in the converted bedroom he used as a study.

      He released another tune, then went on the road again and when he got back, Del showed him the numbers. He was netting over fifteen thousand dollars a week. But the money was gone as soon as it arrived. Nancy had remodeled the old house, bought clothes. Steve had no interest in anything she’d bought. He just wanted to be rid of this house and this wife. But he suppressed his anger and began working on a new tune. Three weeks later Del had him booked on another tour, this time for two weeks in Vegas.

      Steve returned from Vegas flushed with success, expensive whiskey, and beautiful women. He dropped his suitcase in the recarpeted, repainted living room, and went straight to the kitchen, poured out the Johnny Walker, then opened the bottle of Laphroaig whiskey he’d bought on his way to the house. The expensive single malt was smooth on his tongue.

      Only then did he notice Nancy’s note on the kitchen counter, next to the microwave where she stacked the unpaid bills. It read, I don’t know who you are any more. You’re never home and when you are, you’re not with me. I can’t live like this any longer.

      Steve left it on the kitchen counter while he prowled the house, whiskey in hand, “Screw her!” he said, but when he thought about it, he felt no anger, only a great and glorious sense of relief. I’m glad she’s gone. He made a mental note to have Del get him an attorney who could get him a divorce quickly and cleanly. Nancy could keep this house. In the meantime he’d let his royalties accumulate in his account at Del’s agency where she couldn’t touch the money.

      * * *

      A year later, in his glossy new Marina Del Rey condo, Steve decided to find out something about the four pages of mysterious music that were making him rich. All he remembered was that they came from an abandoned building on a tiny street not far from Via Achato in Milan, Italy. He hired a historical research agency to determine if a famous musician had ever lived in that area. He told them nothing about the music. Two weeks later their report arrived in his email. Guiseppe Verdi had lived in a garret in that part of Milan for a part of 1840. The researchers provided a lengthy biography of Verdi along with a list of the operas he’d written. At the bottom of the list was a note mentioning Rocester, “an opera whose score has never been found.” In that same year, when he was just beginning to establish himself in the world of opera, his son died, then Marguerite, his wife died. Verdi was devastated.

      * * *

      Steve envisioned a snowy night in Milan, Verdi sitting alone, crying over his wife’s death, and writing music, because that was the only way he knew to express the nearly overwhelming grief he felt. As the snow fell outside his window, he wrote and rewrote, putting all the sorrow and longing into the notes. He thought to make it an opera called Rocester. When Spring came, he folded the pages and stuffed them into a crack in the wall of the old garret he was leaving behind. He knew he could never work on that music again without feeling the crushing loss he had suffered through. And with the coming of spring, new music was forming in his head, music that would become Nabucco, the opera that would make him world famous.

      * * *

      Steve had never attended an opera in his life, but decided he would go once, just to see what a Verdi opera was like. Happily, the Los Angeles Opera was doing Aida.

      Steve bought a ticket and drove to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles. As he wandered around the lobby, waiting for the opera to begin, he noticed a glass case displaying a page of Verdi’s original Aida score. He smiled. The notes were in the same hand as those on the parchment in his desk. Wonder what an undiscovered Verdi score would be worth?

      The opera bored him out of his mind. He managed to stay in his seat until the first intermission, then left. Downstairs, at Kendall’s Brasserie, he ordered a double Laphroaig and sat at the bar telling everyone how great the music was, but that opera was an outmoded art form, the music needed to be modernized.

      Back home, he sat down in his big white chair and looked out over the lights of Marina Del Rey, ten floors below. He slipped an Estevez Ermil cigar out of its tube, clipped the end, and lit it. It was a non-smoking building, but Steve had paid the Mexican kid who cleaned the windows to disable the smoke detectors a week after he’d bought his condo.

      The smoke was mellow. He put his feet up, sipped the smoky fire of his Laphroaig.

      “Thanks, Giuseppe,” he toasted his reflection in the glass wall overlooking the marina lights. “You wrote it, I arranged it, we made a fortune. Glad you’re not here to help me enjoy the money.” It had been a great two years. After his first song had gone platinum, he’d hired a PR agency to screen him from the deluge of producers wanting to handle what MusicMaker was calling “the greatest talent of his generation.” He released one new song every six months for three years. And they all went platinum.

      Steve poured another shot of Laphroaig and toasted the dozen framed certificates on the wall over the fireplace. He picked up his phone and checked his account balance: twenty million dollars.

      Nancy was gone, but he didn’t miss her. Just like he didn’t miss his joyless gigs at Erawan restaurant, or the old house in Reseda, or his ratty old car.

      I have everything I want.

      He took out the four quarto sheets of Verdi’s music and touched the end of his cigar to the pages, one at a time, and watched the flame devour the hand-inked notes. I could have sold this for a million dollars. But if I did that, I would no longer be the “greatest talent of my generation,” but just another hack composer stealing melodies from the classics. I can spend the rest of my life on tour, playing my greatest hits. I don’t need to write another song in my life and I’ll still be famous, and I’ll still be rich.

      The door chimed and the girl from the escort service came in, looking gorgeous in a Bottega dress of deep purple trimmed in dark green leather. Steve poured her a double shot of the whiskey and set the decanter down on the glass coffee table beside the ashtray full of ashes.

      “Burning the map to hidden treasure?” she asked, raising her glass with a smile.

      Steve laughed, “You’re so right, baby.”