She was everything Vera wasn’t: understated, comfortable, and droll, and she brought a slyness to everything she sang. She sang jazz without making a big deal about it, and the audience liked her a lot. I wouldn’t have wanted to be Vera if and when she deigned to return. Jack had more than a bluff card with Norma; I could tell he was just dying to play this ace from up his sleeve. I thought I’d enjoy arranging for Norma’s unique voice and manner. But first I had a chart to write that might mean a great deal to me, to Gail, maybe even to the general population. And the grimly hilarious part was, it didn’t matter what it sounded like.

I left the bandstand so fast after the last number that I had to weave my way around the applauding couples to get out of the place.

I couldn’t let Gail do what she’d done. The trouble was, she’d already done it. My only hope was to create, overnight, a substitute Swing—a placebo version of all the music held by Fumio Dakuzaku— and then to somehow switch it with the original.

Had I ever created and copied an entirely new arrangement in one night? Not on your life. But in the taxi on the way to RC Copying, I realized certain things that could make it possible for me to do the seemingly undoable.

First, I didn’t have to rewrite the drum part, because none of its notes were in Gail’s original score. I’d invented the part from scratch, so it played no part in the code. I could also leave a couple of parts as is, because making gibberish of two thirds of the music would make gibberish of it all. Finally, blissfully, what would speed me along was that, for the first time in my career, I knew it didn’t fucking matter what notes I wrote! Oh, how I’d labored and agonized over my musical choices when I’d voiced the piece for Gail. But now I was going to lay out each part in a similar range and rhythm to my original, with no regard to the pitches of the notes except that they be different.

But I decided not to change anything until after the words top secret decision. Everything prior to that was harmless enough, and this way if anyone tried decoding the music to see if they had the genuine article, the code would pass muster, at first—the equivalent of wrapping a real twenty-dollar bill around a roll of play money.

It would be the most ridiculous arranging job I’d ever done and would have made for a fabulous story to tell the guys, if telling it might not have gotten my possible daughter possibly executed.

Chapter 48

48

The Concert Master