“THIS JAMBALAYA COMES FROM one of my grandmother’s recipes. It has okra in it. I hope it’s not too spicy for you, Bruce.”

Clay Lemaitre, our host for the evening, was being Southern and gracious. I made some obligatory sounds. The concoction I was forking struck me as suitable for someone on half rations in a Turkish prison.

“Oh, it’s delicious, Clay,” David, sitting across from me, put in. His remark was possibly sincere and he wanted everyone to be happy.

“More wine, Bruce?” Clay lifted the bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé. One glass was my limit these days but I held up my glass anyway. I didn’t get this stuff every night, bottled sunlight.

We were at a table by the window, Central Park spread below us like a giant postage stamp. I had to admit that, aside from the jambalaya of antique provenance, the evening had been pleasant. Clay was a good host and his apartment was made for entertaining. Deep chintz-covered chairs, richly textured rugs, handsome brass lamps, cut crystal that glinted in blues and reds. And of course, books everywhere – lavish, expensive books, overflowing the waist-high bookcases, the tables, the side chairs. Clay was head of a medium-size publishing house, Lightning Books. He and David had met in a Village bar about ten months ago. I still wasn’t sure where – or how far – their relationship was going. But it was obviously serving some good purpose. Now, more than two weeks after Miles’s murder, David was back at the piano, talking about his Canada tour again. I liked to think that my few, well-selected words had eased him over the rough places, but tonight, in this lush apartment on Central Park West, I realized I had probably contributed less than Clay.

I examined Clay again, noting the shaggy graying hair, the strong nose and jaw, the massive shoulders and sensual mouth. He had told us an amusing story tonight over drinks. Once, when he was a kid in New Orleans, he had been sitting in church when he heard the tinkle of an ice-cream cart outside. He had whispered to his father that he wanted a cone now. Together they had slipped out of the service. “Whatever I wanted, my Daddy gave me,” he informed us, “I never had to ask him twice.” It was undoubtedly the key to his personality, I thought somewhat sourly, but Clay seemed highly pleased. I figured he had gone through life without having to ask for many things twice, including David.

“Clay tells me your tour went well, David.” Rita Osterkamp, the fourth member of our party, hadn’t spoken much. She worked with Clay at Lightning Books, his second-in-command. She was tall, slender, with dark hair and olive-tinted skin, heading into the shoals of middle age with a pleasant, self-effacing manner. I had liked her right off.

“Pretty well.” David frowned. “I don’t know about those Latino audiences. They make an awful lot of noise, worse than the Italians.”

“I went to a Marta Argerich concert in Caracas a few years ago,” Rita went on, glancing at Clay. “I was down there seeing Jorge Jiménez, we were trying to get the translation rights. I thought the audience was quite well-behaved.”

“They pay attention to her,” David replied. “She’s one of them.”

As the small talk went on, my sense of well-being increased. The events of the past few weeks, worries about my health, seemed remote here. I was safe in this penthouse, this cloud-capped circle of friendship and good will.

Half an hour later we were back in the living area, coffee cups in hand.

The conversation came around to Miles. By mutual consent we had avoided it during the meal.

David started. “The police asked me not to leave the country, did I tell you that, Bruce?”

I shook my head. “I thought they were finished with you.”

“For now. But they want me around just in case.”

Clay cut in. “Jim Slade has given us an opinion on that. David can go to Canada if he wants. He will have to furnish an itinerary to the authorities and stick to it, that’s all.”

Jim Slade, I knew, was the high-powered attorney Clay had brought in, to take the place of my own nomination.

“Also, be prepared to cancel a concert at short notice if they want me back here,” David put in. He shook his head. “I’m still not absolutely sure I want to go.”

“There’s no reason you can’t tour,” Clay spoke authoritatively. We all watched David. His fingers were splayed on his thighs, tapping out unheard melodies.

“I don’t see why they can’t let him off the hook,” I said. “They’re just playing games with him.”

“Of course they are,” Clay rumbled. “That’s what they do. It’s a form of psychological warfare.”

I started to protest that David was innocent but checked myself. Everybody knew that.

“I hadn’t come across Miles Halloran in some years,” Rita remarked in her mild way. “Was he working on anything at … the time?”

“Miles never stopped dreaming up stories,” I said, “it was as natural as breathing.”

“And he didn’t even start till he was in his fifties,” David added. “He told me he was walking around Granada one afternoon, the gardens of the Generalife, I think, when a story about the Moors and the ghost of Washington Irving popped into his head.” He laughed. “The funniest part was that he’d never read a word of Washington Irving.”

“That must have been The Gardens of Paradise, Rita said. “That was the first Halloran title we published.”

I looked at her. “That’s an odd coincidence. I didn’t know Lightning Books published Miles.”

“We did for a short while,” Clay interrupted. “Then we parted ways.”

“Oh?” I floated the syllable like a question mark, but Clay’s lips were closed.

“It just didn’t work out,” Rita said, with a glance at Clay.

“He never really learned to write saleable fiction,” Clay said briskly, closing the subject. He got up. “I’ve got something to show you.”

He went into the bedroom and a moment later appeared with a video cassette. “It’s the Bolshoi doing L’Age d’Or,” he said.

Without waiting for approval he wheeled the TV forward and slipped the cassette into the VCR. We settled back. The ballet was highly athletic and took place on a murkily-lit stage. However, the Russian male in the lead role was magnificent. Nothing effetely western about him. He might have left a Siberian coal mine for a few minutes. We watched without speaking.

When the tape finished, Rita spoke. “Well,” she said, in a tone that might have been interpreted in a dozen ways. Whether she was thrilled intellectually or physically I couldn’t tell.

“That’s Miles’s tape,” David put in. “I borrowed it from him a few months ago.” He seemed to sag. “I guess we can keep it now.” He turned toward Rita. “That reminds me, I brought that mask for you. The one from Miles’s shipment.”

“We keep coming back to Miles,” I said, trying not to sound accusatory. My euphoria of the dinner table was evaporating. Fatigue was hovering over me. “What mask is that?”

David said that Miles had been bringing plaster masks and other tourist stuff from Puerto Rico to New York. “He was doing it as a favor to a friend on the island. He passed them on to some wholesaler in the Bronx, also to some tourist shops around town. I guess he made a little money out of it.”

“I hoped you picked out a nice one for me,” Rita said.

“They’re all the same. They’re used in one of the religious fiestas down there, sort of a blend of African animism and Catholicism. Sometimes Miles painted the masks, gave the eyes shadows and made the cheeks pink and did curlicue mustaches, stuff like that. Remember how small his apartment was? Well, he got a double shipment a few weeks ago and asked me to store some boxes for him. I still have them.”

He went to the vestibule and came back with a bag. From it he extracted a white plaster mask. It was quite uninteresting – smooth features, large eyeholes, mouth like a gash. “They must have an assembly line down there,” he said, “though they’re carelessly packed. Lots of them seem to be broken.”

“Well, I’ll decorate it myself,” Rita said. She took the mask and bag from David. “This working person has to get home,” she said. “Do you want to share a cab, Bruce?”

I did. I would drop her in Chelsea, then proceed on to 12th Street.

We were collected at the door, Rita and I ready to leave, when Clay said, “I thought Miles looked poorly after he came back from Greece.”

I tried to recollect how he’d looked when he visited me in the hospital, but the details were blurry. I was seeing him through a haze of drugs. “Maybe he did, Clay. Maybe he had something serious on his mind. But we’ll never know.”

Our goodnights were a little strained. There was something about David’s staying behind that triggered an old, useless proprietorship in me. And the talk of Miles had made us all uncomfortable.

I was glad of Rita’s company going downtown. She filled me in on Clay’s background. His people were prominent politically in Louisiana – judges, a state senator, a newspaper owner. He had two married sisters there. Even though he had exiled himself from all that, a residue remained. I agreed – he transmitted power and status without trying. Rita had worked for him for almost ten years, since he started Lightning Books.

Before getting out at 18th Street, she pressed her business card into my hand, also some money for the fare. “Just in case you need something, Bruce, please call. We’re practically neighbors.” She brushed her cheek against mine, leaving me touched and surprised.

I tried not to think of David and Clay as I got ready for bed. It was truly none of my business – an empty claim. David had had many affairs over the years, as necessary to his music as scales and arpeggios, but this one bothered me. What was the attraction? Even though Clay was a cultivated man, there was something coarse underneath. Was that the lure – opposites? But David, I knew, despite his delicacy, his magical connection to his music, had something hard and immovable at his core. He was no weak reed looking for someone to give him shape.

I gave up at last. Whatever the dynamic between them, the transfer of power or need, it couldn’t be reduced to some simple syntax. I chuckled to myself. Maybe it was good sex and nothing more.

Who could have analyzed my life with Hector, when I was in my late twenties, David’s age now? From the outside we must have looked like a total mismatch. Hector from Santo Domingo, his father a professional breeder of fighting cocks, his mother barely literate. Setting up house together was absurd on the face of it – a mesalliance that couldn’t last a month. But the outsider wouldn’t have known about our nights holding each other, or the confusion we were able to share, or the hostility of the world we were able to fend off together. None of that information was available to the casual inspector. And the same must be true of David and Clay. It was impertinent of me even to speculate. Certainly David’s playing, at least until the last few weeks, had reflected the fact that something new was happening in his life.

Time to drop the subject. I slipped the Callas tape into my bedside cassette and listened to it again. When she started on the Regnava nel silenzio, my attention wandered and I thought about weight. Why had she gone on that diet? She never sang like this after 1955, which meant she’d had only a half-dozen great years. And she had died in Paris, immured in her apartment, refusing to see her friends, her identity shattered. Take her voice away and she was nothing – or so she thought.

And then, quite clearly, I heard Clay’s rumbly voice in my ear and a jolt went through me. “I thought Miles looked poorly after he came back from Greece.” The words echoed. There was something wrong. Miles had been killed just twenty-four hours after his return. I could almost reconstruct his last day.

He had arrived late at night, Sunday, September 14, to find a note from David under his door, notifying him that I would be in St. Vincent’s the following day. The next afternoon, Monday, a little after four, he had paid me a visit. That night David had come for dinner, bringing the Callas tape and departing around eleven. Miles had been murdered later that same evening. I had read about it the next day, Tuesday, in the Post, after my discharge from the hospital. When could Clay have seen him?

I went over the schedule again, looking for cracks and seams. Was it possible they had met for lunch? Miles had complained about the subway trip downtown from his apartment. And Clay’s days were undoubtedly busy. A lunch date seemed unlikely. Had they met after Miles left the hospital – in the late afternoon? But Miles had said he’d find the end of his story on the subway trip home, and offered to phone me with the details. And David had been due for dinner, so there must have been some kitchen chores to be done. I turned everything over in my mind some more. Was it possible that Clay had paid Miles a visit after David left?

I twisted and turned for a while, sleep impossible despite my fatigue. I switched on the lamp and dialed David’s number. His machine – of course. He was spending the night at Clay’s. I left a message and hung up, more fretful than ever. A few minutes later the phone rang. I reached for it quickly.

“Hello, is this Bruce Pittman?”

The voice was echoey, as if coming from inside a rain barrel. I didn’t recognize it.

“This is Sonny Barowski. In Puerto Rico.”

“Sonny! We have a rotten connection. I can hardly hear you.”

He let out a snarl of laughter. “All the connections in Puerto Rico are rotten. We have to yell.”

I thought of all those phone lines undersea being nibbled by fish. “Okay,” I yelled, “how are you?”

“I was disturbed to hear about Miles. Lito Echeverria told me an hour ago. Did they find out who did it?”

“They’re still looking.”

“I think they should look down here.”

“Why?”

“Miles had some funny friends on the island. He was investigated by the Nick.”

“By the who?”

“Negociado de Investigaciones Criminales. N-I-C. We call it the Nick.”

“What for?”

“He was on the premises of a certain club when they made a raid. The club is known for being mixed up in drugs and prostitution.”

“What was Miles doing there?”

“He claimed he was selling them one of his paintings, and they let him go. But everybody smelled a rat.”

I thought about the two detectives on the Halloran case. They might enjoy a trip to Puerto Rico but they’d never get authorization for it. “I don’t know what I can do up here, Sonny,” I replied, “the police like to do it their own way.”

“Well,” Sonny’s voice was growing fainter, “if they want some leads, tell them to get in touch with me. It’s something I’d like to do for Miles.”

We chatted a bit more then signed off. I doused the light. The news that Miles had some sleazy friends on the island didn’t really surprise me. I had met a few of them in his various apartments there – one-legged lottery vendors, drug dealers from the British Virgins, a “professor” who furnished under-age prostitutes to tourists, the flotsam and jetsam that washed up at the edge of two cultures. Not that Miles used, or abused, these services. They simply reflected his taste for the macabre, the same taste that led him to concoct gothic romances. They stimulated his imagination. And of course, he was always protected by his Britishness, that impregnable armor of respectability. He could go anywhere, do anything, and remain one of Queen Victoria’s own.

I smiled into the darkness. I recalled a story he had told me last year, on his return from Istanbul. He had stayed in a cheap hotel overlooking the Bosphorus. One afternoon, he had emerged from his room to find men sitting in chairs and benches along the corridor. It seemed that each week a prostitute took a room on this particular floor in order to ply her trade. Miles had stood watching, fascinated. After each man left, the woman appeared in the door of her room and beckoned to the next in line. But as Miles stood there, one of the young men reached over and patted him lightly on the fanny. Then he had nodded in the direction of Miles’s room.

“Of course you took him up on it,” I said laughing.

Miles had batted his eyes fiercely. “Are you mad? Do you think I wanted that whore’s knife between my ribs?”

Yes – a taste for sleaze and an even greater instinct for self-preservation. What miscalculation had led to his death?

David returned my call early next morning, before I left for school. I had a dozen questions on my lips, unwelcome questions about his relationship with Clay, but I suppressed them. There was only one question I had the right to ask. “Clay made a remark last night, David. It’s been on my mind.”

“Oh?”

“He said he thought Miles looked tired – I think he said poorly – after he came back from Greece. I’ve been doing some figuring and I don’t see how Clay had time to see Miles. He was killed just twenty-four hours after he got home.”

I sensed, rather than heard, a shift at the other end. I went on. “I was going to ask Clay, but I decided to ask you first.”

At last he cleared his throat and spoke. “Clay came by Miles’s apartment to pick me up after dinner. He’d been at some publishing shindig. You know, he lives just a few blocks away.”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“I thought it would complicate things.”

“You didn’t tell the police either.”

“I didn’t want to involve Clay.”

My mind was working fast. “So you lied to the police. Or omitted essential information. If they find out, it puts you both in a bad position.”

I heard a sigh at the other end. “We figured Miles’s sexual habits would be plastered all over the tabloids. You know how they are. If Clay was mixed up in that … Well, he’s pretty closeted at work.”

I started to express skepticism about anyone’s closet status in this day and age but David interrupted me. “I think the police know somebody else was there that night. That’s why they keep after me. Why they don’t want me to leave the country.”

“How do they know?”

“There was a Schimmelpenninck butt mixed in with the dirty dinner dishes in the sink. Their forensic people told them Miles was a non-smoker. I would have claimed I’d smoked it but they trapped me. They got me to admit I didn’t smoke before they told me about it.”

I let that sink in. “I don’t understand why you won’t tell the truth, David. A friend comes by for a nightcap, you leave together, what’s the big cover-up?”

“I told you, I don’t like to involve Clay.”

“But he’s already involved. And now you have a perfect alibi, a witness who saw you leave when Miles was still alive.”

A pause at the other end. “I guess you’re right, Bruce, I should tell them.”

“Today.”

“Yeah.”

But there was something still stopping him. I had a sudden flash on the possibility that David might compromise his career to save Clay.

I repeated my exhortations but his response was even weaker. I didn’t have all the facts and, until I did, David would stay with his sacrifice. Clay was probably pressuring him.

After hanging up, I got ready to leave the house. The morning, early October, was blue and gold. As I turned the corner of Hudson, I could see the kids in the playground at Abingdon Square, scuffing a soccer ball. It was a day when, a few months ago, my spirits would have soared. No longer.

And then, as I turned down Charles Street and the school came into view, I had a sudden glimpse of my responsibilities in this. David mustn’t wreck his career out of some misplaced loyalty. If he wouldn’t help himself, then I’d have to help him. It was as simple as that.

I entered the school vestibule, hearing the customary wake-up sounds – students vocalizing, violins tuning, pianos banging, a few latecomers racing for class. This moment had always given me the most intense pleasure – Luddie and I had created all this out of nothing – and for a moment it did again. I saw quite clearly that even though David was not my lover – had never been, would never be – the link that connected us went even deeper than that. It derived from an ancient, unbreakable lineage. It went back to Beethoven’s pupil Czerny and his pupil Liszt. From that circle of students onward to Anton Rubenstein and Paderewski, to Hoffman and Josef Lhévinne and to Rosina Lhévinne, his widow, who had been my teacher. This was my genealogical tree, and David’s was the latest name on it. He was my charge, and as long as I believed in music and in the power of our peculiar art, I would have to make every effort to save him. It was my last obligation.

And then the day, with its delicious complications, began. I didn’t give out until almost three, when a touch of fever sent me home.