Perfidia | Page 2

drum or a gunshot. The band trailed off, and that was where it ended, with more shouts, the sound of furniture crashing and glass breaking, and then silence.
"Turn it off," my father said, though it was already over. I took the CD out and moved the boom box back to windowsill. "It's some kind of fake," he finally said, more to himself than me. "They could take his solo off another recording and put a new background to it."
"It came off a wire recorder. I didn't pay enough for it to justify that kind of trouble. Look, I'm going to track this down."
"You do that. I want to know what kind of psycho would concoct something like this." He waved his left hand vaguely. "I'm tired. You two go home." It was nine at night; I could see the lights of downtown Durham through the window. I'd been so focused on the recording that I'd lost all sense of time.
Ann bent down to kiss him and said, "I'll be right outside if you need me."
"I'll be fine. Go get something to eat. Or go to the motel and sleep, for God's sake." My father had come to North Carolina for the VA hospital at Duke, and Ann had flown in from Connecticut to be with him. I'd offered her my guest room, 25 miles away in Raleigh, but she'd insisted on being walking distance from the hospital.
In the hallway, her rage boiled over. "What was the point of that?" she hissed.
"That's the most involved I've seen him since the stroke. I think it was good for him."
"Well, I don't. And you could at least have consulted me first." Ann's height and big bones had opened her to ridicule in grade school, and for as long as I could remember she'd been contained, slightly hunched, given to whispers instead of shouts.
"Do you really need to control my conversations with him now?"
"Apparently. And don't make this about me. This is about him getting better."
"I want that too."
"But I'm the one who's here with him, day in and day out."
It was easy to see where this was headed, back to our mother again. "I've got to go," I said. She accepted my hug stiffly. "You should take his advice and get some rest."
"I'll think about it," she said, but as the elevator doors closed, I could see her in the lounge two doors down from his room, staring at the floor in front of her.
*
I had email from the seller waiting at home. Her initial response when I'd written her about the recorder had been wary. I'd labored hard over the next message, offering her ten percent of anything I made off the deal, up to a thousand dollars, at the same time lowballing the odds of actually selling it, and all the while working on her guilt--with no provenance, the items were virtually worthless to me.
She'd gone for it, admitting picking everything up together at one stall in the March?? Vernaison, part of the vast warren of flea markets at Saint-Ouen, on the northern edge of Paris. She wasn't sure which one, but she remembered an older man with long, graying hair, a worn carpet on a dirt floor, a lot of Mickey Mouse clocks.
I knew the Vernaison because one of my competitors operated a high-end stall there, a woman who called herself Madame B. The description of the old man's place didn't ring any bells for me, but the mere mention of that district of Paris made my palms sweat.
My business gave me an excuse to read up on music history. I already knew a fair amount about Miller's death, and I'd gone back to my bookshelves the night before. Miller allegedly took off from the Twinwood Farm airfield, north of London, on Friday, December 15, 1944. He was supposed to be en route to Paris to arrange a series of concerts by his Army Air Force Band, but the plane never arrived. Of the half dozen or more legends that dispute the official account, the most persistent has him flying over on the day before, and being fatally injured on the 18th in a brawl in the red light district of Pigalle. Pigalle was a short taxi ride from the Hotel des Olympiades, where the band had been scheduled to stay, and the Hotel des Olympiades was itself only a short walk from the March?? Vernaison.
I walked out to the garage and looked at the wire recorder where it sat on a bench, its case removed, its lovely oversized vacuum tubes visible from the side. I'd recognized it in the eBay photos as an Armour Model 50, manufactured by GE for the US Army and Navy, though I'd never seen one firsthand before. The face was smaller than an LP