Music for Love or War Read online

  Music for Love or War

  Martyn Burke

  F+W Media

  Copyright © 2015 by Martyn Burke.

  Originally published in Canada.

  First U.S. printing, 2017, Tyrus Books.

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

  Published by

  TYRUS BOOKS

  an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.

  10151 Carver Road, Suite 200

  Blue Ash, OH 45242. U.S.A.

  www.tyrusbooks.com

  Hardcover ISBN 10: 1-5072-0091-9

  Hardcover ISBN 13: 978-1-5072-0091-9

  Paperback ISBN 10: 1-5072-0090-0

  Paperback ISBN 13: 978-1-5072-0090-2

  eISBN 10: 1-5072-0092-7

  eISBN 13: 978-1-5072-0092-6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Burke, Martyn, author.

  Music for love or war / Martyn Burke.

  Blue Ash, OH: Tyrus Books, 2017.

  LCCN 2016030930 | ISBN 9781507200919 (hc) | ISBN 1507200919 (hc) | ISBN 9781507200902 (pb) | ISBN 1507200900 (pb) | ISBN 9781507200926 (ebook) | ISBN 1507200927 (ebook)

  BISAC: FICTION / War & Military. | FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Love stories. | War stories.

  LCC PS3552.U7233 M87 2016 | DDC 813/.54--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030930

  Martyn Burke gratefully acknowledges permission from Faber & Faber to use lines from “Journey of the Magi” from The Ariel Poems by T.S. Eliot. Copyright © 1927 by T.S. Eliot and copyright © 1965 by the estate of T.S. Eliot.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and F+W Media, Inc. was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed with initial capital letters.

  Cover design by Sylvia McArdle.

  Cover and interior images © Getty Images/Stocktrek Images; mishabokovan; sidmay; july7th; aleksandarvelasevic.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Hollywood in Times of War 1

  The Mountains 2

  3

  4

  5

  Toronto and the Mountains 6

  7

  8

  9

  Toronto 10

  The Mountains 11

  12

  Toronto 13

  14

  The Mountains 15

  16

  Hollywood 17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  Toronto 26

  27

  The Mountains 28

  29

  Home 30

  31

  For Laura

  Who has given me both the music and the lyrics

  Hollywood in Times of War

  1

  According to what we’ve been told, the source of all knowledge is located somewhere just south of Sunset Boulevard. The problem is that Danny has lost the address.

  This home of all knowledge is what’s scrawled on some piece of paper Danny is frantically trying to find. It’s where the psychic lives.

  Danny doesn’t want to get sidetracked by nuance and details. He just wants to get us to the ten P.M. appointment he’s had ever since he got online in Afghanistan and e-mailed this woman, Constance, telling her that we’d be here on leave. She was supposed to have been booked up for months in advance with Hollywood types, trailing their mutually exclusive cynicism and neediness in one tight little bundle behind them. So Danny called in markers with her and got the appointment on three weeks’ notice. Maybe this Constance is feeling guilty over the guys we lost after she’d e-mailed I see a rough patch ahead . . . a rough patch. In other words, death for Davis, Onuko, and Alvarez, who were caught out in the open in a Taliban ambush near Khost. The roughest patch.

  Danny can’t find the piece of paper and I’m getting edgy as the sheriff’s deputies show up, parking their cruiser right in the middle of Sunset Boulevard between the two spastic ribbons of taillights. The deputies saunter through the traffic and the Mexican parking valets outside Screem, the latest hot club. They have that way of walking down to a fine art, the walk of the Men in Charge, stepping onto the sidewalk past all the airbursts of rope-line lust and anxiety wafting in on waves of studied indifference. They greet the bouncers like old friends. A tradition of service and all that serve and protect stuff cops always plaster on their cruisers to bring on the warm and fuzzies while they’re busting you. The bouncers are standing there like cliffs to be scaled. As usual, there’s one massive black bouncer just to make all the white people extra polite. A lot of the rope-line herd are decked out in their mandatory black, with a duster coat or two among them to accessorize that outlaw gunfighter attitude that usually backfires, making the rope line seem even more servile in their desperation to be chosen to get inside the club. The deputies are a study in form-fitting beige and starch that seeps all the way into their smiles as they stroll past the parking valets and go inside Screem so they can enforce the local by-laws and oh by the way, check out which movie stars are there so they can brag to their wives and families baking and garrisoned up in the boonies of Simi Valley or Santa Clarita, letting them know that they were in this cool Hollywood club hanging out with the A list.

  Well, not really the A list. Tonight it’s strictly C minus. Mostly television actors whose shows got canceled, actors who know you don’t know their names and hate you for it. That kind of stuff. But still, most of the deputies live at least two area codes away, so even some guy on Jeopardy! can be a big deal.

  Danny has taken all the pieces of paper from his pockets and he’s laying them out on the sidewalk like he’s going to do some incantation over them, hoping this psychic’s address will miraculously rise from the lost and found of scrap paper. A lowrider Honda goes by with Mexicans pumping bass out of it like a rocket launcher. Danny doesn’t even hear it.

  “Damn,” says Danny before he heads back inside Screem, sifting past the dead-eyed bouncers like they were invisible. It’s one of the advantages to wearing a military uniform. Right now it’s a free pass. In this war, at least. Choose any old vets and they’ll tell you how soldiers got spit on coming back from Vietnam. Baby killers and all that. But in this war, we’re strictly Teflon. Danny is still wearing the same camouflage tunic he wore back when I met him eight months ago, the one that a lot of people mistake for an American combat outfit until they see the little maple leaf flag on the left shoulder.

  Me, I have no interest in wearing my uniform, but my jarhead haircut hasn’t grown in enough yet so I might as well have a sign saying GRUNT hanging around my neck. The bouncers figured this out when we walked up to the rope line the first time, and after studying their clipboards like they were deciphering some code, they let us in ahead of the hordes of high-cool-factor types jostling behind the rope who erupted in silent confusion at the sight of us being waved through. Danny and I are so uncool we’re cool. Totally. In fact, we are reverse cool here in Hollywood. Which is like four cherries on the karmic slot machine of cool here.

  But, like everything else here, cool mel
ts fast when it gets inside the heat of this celebrity beast whose entrails we’re plummeting through. I’d give us another two, maybe three weeks till half of Hollywood starts showing up in combat gear. That’ll be the end of our reverse cool, the moment when the sphincter comes into sight and we splat out into the rope-line sewer.

  But for now we’re a definite standout inside Screem, this big cavern of a club where everyone is pretending to talk while looking over each other’s shoulders to see who they should really be talking to. Actually they’re all yelling at each other from close range, trying to be heard over the amplified percussion. We had artillery barrages that were quieter. The thing about these places is that everyone seems like they’re working hard to look like they’re having fun. Seriously. It’s hard to see if anyone is really having fun here. Everyone’s looking for something or someone that will give them whatever it is they can’t figure out that they’re missing in their lives. And then the minute they find it, if they ever do, they never want to come back to all this enforced enjoyment. We even had a place like that in Kabul the ones the foreign-aid workers set up after the Taliban were driven out.

  Although Screem won’t really get going till about eleven o’clock, the whole place is the usual aerial assault of music from speakers pumping out a bass beat that’s like a massive fist pounding on you. You can almost feel your inner ear being liquefied. I’m lip-reading Danny while also looking over his shoulder—when in Rome, etc.—at a few amazing-looking women wearing skirts the size of ammo clips, clustered around the bar pretending to be interested in each other. This combat uniform of Danny’s is definitely causing some quivering on the mating ritual compass needle. He doesn’t even notice though. “Where did I write her address?” he keeps saying.

  Then it’s the light bulb going off. He pulls out his wallet, checks all his money, and suddenly bolts through the club. I follow him past all the female bartenders in their skimpy little T-shirts, past yet another roped-off sushi bar area reserved for the guys who want to let the rest of the world know they’re being overcharged and don’t have to care.

  I’m groping past the dance floor, flailed by blasts of light whipping around like fire hoses that have seized control of themselves. I see Danny vanishing into the unisex bathroom, which is a cultural experience all its own. Even those earnestly liberated college dorms wouldn’t prepare you for it. Sounds of male intestinal warfare thunder from beyond the cubicle doors, while attempts to casually apply lipstick are being valiantly waged in front of the mirrors. Instantly, I think of those bone-chilling old warlords we’re supposedly civilizing over in Afghanistan. They’d take one look at all this equal opportunity unisex pissing, farting, shitting, and ogling going on in here and bayonet every damn one of us before we could explain the Western democratic values they’re missing out on.

  But Danny doesn’t notice any of it. He’s locked onto the little bathroom attendant, a wizened Mexican gnome who paws her tip jar with a desiccated claw of a hand as Danny gets her to pull out all the money in it. He’s peering into the bills she takes from the jar until he stops, holding a ten-dollar bill aloft, and beaming.

  “I wrote her address on a ten,” he says.

  At first I don’t understand what he’s saying. But then I remember he’s used to all that weird Canadian colored money where all the denominations look different. “I thought it was a one.” He holds it up, triumphantly showing me Constance the psychic and an address scrawled right under the In God We Trust part.

  “Imagine. Coming all this way and then nada, zip. All because of a bathroom in a Hollywood club.” I stare at him. “Hey,” he says defensively, “is it my fault you guys have boring money that all looks the same?” I keep staring. “Besides, it’s fate. It was meant to be. Constance will have all the answers.” You can tell when Danny isn’t convinced of what he’s telling you. He always says, “Trust me” at some point.

  “Trust me,” he says.

  Reading the address on the ten-dollar bill, we find the psychic’s place. It’s off Fairfax in an area of L.A. that used to be Jewish until everyone else took it over. It’s one of those fake Spanish duplexes with a wall around it and a wrought iron gate illuminated by a streetlight, balancing on its cone of light over the stillness of the parked cars.

  “Spooky,” says Danny—this from the guy who crawls through the nighttime darkness of some Taliban-infested valley, waiting for when the makeshift door of some cave opens for jihad business at dawn.

  There’s two buttons next to the gate and beside the bottom one is written Constance Amonte—by appointment only. And next to that is one of those handwritten Post-its that says, Please refrain from pressing the door buzzer until the exact time of your appointment. Thank You. We sit on the fender of the Rent-A-Wreck Ford and wait.

  “Watching silence is a real art form,” says Danny, looking around like he was expecting some Pashtun fighter to leap out from behind the bushes. “Do you think she’ll remember us?”

  “Probably. Unless she has other guys visiting after they were fighting the Taliban.”

  “You think that’s possible?”

  With Danny, you never know what’s serious. “Do you know what you want to ask her?”

  “For weeks I’ve known. Do you?”

  “I want to believe in all that stuff she was telling us . . .” I leave the rest unsaid.

  The wrought iron gate suddenly swings open and a small man with gray hair hurries out. He’s wearing one of those leather jackets that makes sure you know it’s casual and expensive all at once. He’s fixed on his cell phone until he sees us. “She’s amazing,” he says, as if we’re all part of the same tribe, and then reacts to his cell phone, telling whoever he’s talking to about something he’s going to kill—axe—axe is the word he uses. And then we figure out it’s a TV show he’s talking about. Its ratings will go into the tank next season, he says.

  “Whaddaya mean ‘How do I know?’ I just know, okay?” he repeats while getting into a big Mercedes. “I have this intuition.”

  We’re both looking at our watches as Danny presses the button beside the gate and a slightly Brooklyn-type accent comes through the little speakers. “Are you the soldiers?” it wants to know.

  We cross a tiny courtyard with a big stone fountain filled with dry leaves. At the big door, Constance is waiting. She doesn’t look anything like our Afghan images of her. She’s a lot younger than we thought—maybe thirty with a kind of Goldilocks tangle of blonde hair suspended over this high, round forehead like a frozen wave. Her face looks like it was pieced together from a bunch of different people. She’s got big green eyes that, from the side, look like they bulge out a little too much, and her mouth is like something that’s been cinched up too tight over this tiny little chin. She’s wearing a big, bulky sweater that has a hole in one of the elbows and comes halfway down her legs. In an offbeat way, she’s sort of attractive. Especially those green eyes. They have a way of looking at you and they almost draw you into someplace warm and mysterious.

  “I’m tired,” is all she says.

  Inside, her place is all candles and heavy, dark velvets with a big oak table in the middle of the room with one chair on either side of it. Except for a leather couch, that’s all the furniture she seems to have. Shiva-type Indian images are covering the walls and there’s cats, just like we thought, but only one of them is black. The other’s pure white. She introduces them as Alpha and Omega and right away Alpha is curling around my ankles. A good sign, apparently. “You can call him Alfie,” she says, suddenly becoming more friendly. “And that’s Meg.” So we all talk about the cats for a while because everything’s so awkward and both Danny and I have both lost our brains somewhere. Finally, she asks which of us wants the reading. When I tell her both of us, she makes a loud, exhaling noise and sits in one of the chairs. “Look, I don’t usually do readings after nine o’clock. And I definitely don’t do back-to-backs at this hour. It’s too exhausting.”

  “Do you remember me?”
Danny asks. “I phoned about a dozen times.”

  “I have so many clients,” she says, looking as if she’s heard the question before.

  “We’re from Afghanistan.”

  She goes blank for a moment. “Oh, that’s nice,” she says, as if it’s somewhere around San Diego. “Now then, I’m not sure if I’ll last much longer. I’m so tired.”

  Danny and I look at each other, wondering which of us will be the honorable gentleman and bow out. We’re both looking for the women we lost. I want to find Annie Boo as much as he wants to find Ariana. But I’m on the verge of being sporting and all that because I can practically hear the jangling going on inside him. It turns out we don’t have to make a decision, though. “Stop,” she says sharply. “I’m picking up some kind of weird energy . . . very dark. Everything is going opaque.” She looks from Danny to me and back again. “You go first,” she says to him.

  Danny beams and turns to me. “I was going to let you have it,” he says.

  • • •

  It was one of those nights that keeps reinventing itself in your memory. What I remember the clearest is that thick orange candle Constance lit right after Danny sat in the chair facing her across that oak table. It flickered wildly even though there was no breeze in the room. But maybe it was me looking for signs. Then she looked confused, almost startled. She sprayed something from a little bottle and the whole room smelled like a breath mint gone bad. “Wintergreen, juniper, and tea tree. It clears the energy around me,” she said, as if I should understand. “Witches hung juniper beside their doors to protect themselves. Centuries ago. Not like now.”

  Then she took out some cards from a little velvet bag and put them on the table and went through a series of questions about place and date of birth without ever looking at Danny. It was as if she were looking out the window to that streetlight. “I’m hearing so many voices,” she said.