“And this one? She play also?” Signor Caperelli asks Birgit, after yawning over Sophie’s haphazard performance for half an hour.
“She is just the sewing woman’s child, brought in to amuse Fr?ulein Sophie,” Birgit sniffs.
“But at home I play on my auntie’s flute,” Martina says. She is made bold by the foreign man’s obvious disappointment with Sophie and sees a chance to pay the other girl back for her snubs.
Signor Caperelli produces a child-sized flute from the carpetbag that holds his music. Martina blows on it to warm it, as her auntie has taught her. She shuts her eyes and sees the rainbow spilling onto the nursery floor. Each color has a note and she plays the rainbow, or tries to. She wants to cry, because she hasn’t made the sounds come out to match the colors. She hands the flute back, scarlet with shame.
Signor Caperelli laughs. “Your auntie, she love the noise of Herr Schoenberg? To my ear, he is not making music!”
When Martina doesn’t answer, still staring at the floor, Caperelli rummages in his bag again and extracts a sheet of simple music. “You can read the notes, yes? Give this to your auntie. At your little age, already you are in love with sound, but now you learn to make a song, not the howling of cats on the Prater like Herr Schoenberg make, sì?”
In later years, Martina remembers none of that, although the flute will always calm her. She remembers only the rainbow on the floor, and the discovery that the cut glass in the nursery windows created it.
1
HELL’S KITCHEN
THE SUN SCORCHED my back through my thin shirt. It was September, but out on the prairie, the heat still held a midsummer ferocity.
I tried the gate in the cyclone fence, but it was heavily padlocked; when I pushed hard to see if it would open enough for me to slide through, the metal burned my fingers. A camera and a microphone were mounted on top of the gatepost, but both had been shot out.
I backed away and looked around the empty landscape. Mine had been the only car on the gravel county road as I bumped my way from the turnoff in Palfry. Except for the crows circling and diving into the brown cornstalks across the road, I was completely alone. I felt tiny and vulnerable under the blue bowl of the sky. It closed over the earth in all directions, seeming to shut out air, to let in nothing but light and heat.
Despite dark glasses and a visored cap, my eyes throbbed from the glare. As I walked around the house, looking for a break in the fence, purple smoke rings danced in front of me.
The house was old and falling down. Glass had broken out, or been shot out, of most of the windows. Someone had nailed slabs of plywood over them, but hadn’t put much effort into the job: in several places the wood swung free, secured by only a couple of nails. Behind the plywood, someone had stuffed pieces of cardboard or tatty cloth around the broken panes.
The steel fence had revolving spikes on top to discourage trespassers like me. Signs warned of guard dogs, but I didn’t hear any barking or snuffling as I walked the perimeter.
In front, the house was close to the fence and to the road, but in the back the fence enclosed a large stretch of land. An old shed had collapsed in one corner. A giant pit, filled with refuse and stinking of chemicals, had been dug near the shed. Jugs, spray cans of solvent, and all the other fixings of a meth operation fought with coffee grounds and chicken bones for top stench.
It was behind the shed that I found the opening I needed. Someone had been there before me with heavy steel cutters, taking out a piece of fence wide enough for a car to drive through. The cuts were recent, the steel along the pointed ends shiny, unlike the dull gray of the rest of the metal. As I passed between the cuts, the skin on my neck prickled with something more than heat. I wished I’d brought my gun with me, but I hadn’t known I was coming to a drug house when I left Chicago.
Whoever cut the fence had dealt with the back door in a similarly economic way, kicking it in so that it hung on one hinge. The smell that rolled out the open door—metallic, like iron, mixed with rotting meat—was all too easy to recognize. I pulled my shirt up over my nose and looked cautiously inside. A dog lay just beyond the doorway, his chest blown open. Some large-caliber something had taken him down as he tried to protect the losers he lived with.
“Poor old Rottweiler, your mama never meant you to guard a drug house, did she?” I whispered. “Not your fault, boy, wrong place, wrong time, wrong people.”