22

Music ceased when he grabbed the knob and pushed his way inside.

Sash stood there, a slate jacket draped over his suitcase. He looked beautiful with the Pilar in one hand and its bow in the other. His snow-white dress shirt flared about his arms, its hem tucked into those gray trousers somewhere behind that matching vest.

Andrew slammed the door. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

Sash sat on the bed with the instrument across his lap.

“This is my piece,” he said of the Pilar, then, with the bow, tapped the pistol with a charred condom on its barrel. “This is also my piece.”

Andrew refused to look at it. “How did you get in here?”

Sash set aside the violin with its bow and pulled a cigar from his vest pocket. “You locked your room with my locks.” He tapped his temple. “I have the combinations up here,”

Andrew thrust out his jaw. “Why’d you order Samil killed?”

“I gave no such order.” Sash moved to the window above the AC unit and forced it open. “You didn’t bother looking across from you when you hid under that table. I was in the elevator when the firing started, Andrej,”

Noisy traffic filtered in but couldn’t drown out Andrew’s beating heart.

“Tadeusz wanted Radek to kill Sam, but Radek couldn’t.” Sash cracked his neck with an oddly strange elegance. “That man has a deadly temper.”

A stiff breeze ruffled the quilt hanging above the bed.

“Samil told federal officers about the job in Hudson Valley,” he added. “He showed up to drive wearing a wire. They arrested Niko and Radek,”

“Well,” Andrew said. “Radek got out,”

“Cyril sent some girl to bail them out, and when Radek got out, he and Cyril found Tadeusz at Samil’s.” Sash ran a hand over his bald head. “Cyril tried to keep Tadeusz calm,”

“No one calms Tadeusz,” Andrew snapped. “I’ve only known you people a few months, and I could see that much,”

“You people,” Sash chuckled softly. “You are something different from us?”

Andrew crept around him as if getting too close might burn.

“I didn’t know the Pilar was yours,” he said, grabbing it from the bed.

Sash set that eye upon him. “You’re not going to ask to keep it?”

Andrew desperately wanted to keep it. It felt so good in his hands. Instead, he placed the instrument and its bow into the wooden box and slid the box onto the condom-covered gun.

“I must know why.” Sash sat on the bed again, carefully moving the box and exposing the gun. “You’ve always been so forthright, yet you held back this one thing,”

“I want you to leave,” he said.

“You told Radeki you were twenty,” Sash said, eyeing the floor. “Niko and Samil said the same,”

Andrew sat on the other end of the bed and took the violin box in his arms.

“I’m asking you to leave,” he said through his teeth.

Sash’s bright blue eye imprisoned him. “I just want to know, Andrej,”

“Seventeen,” he yelled. “Now get the fuck out!”

“You were bound for White Plains.” Sash spoke calmly. “Why didn’t you get there?”

Andrew narrowed his eyes. “Why are you asking me this shit like you’re owed some kind of explanation?”

“You left home and never went back,” said Sash. “Why?”

“What do you care?” he cried.

“Because your matka deserves better,” Sash scolded, silencing him. He unbuttoned his vest and stood, removing it slowly. He draped it over the gun. “Good mothers are rare in this world, Andrej. She deserves better than this from you.”

His words punched Andrew in the gut.

“She didn’t raise you to be around pigs like us,” Sash spoke softly, undoing his wrist buttons. “Your time with us, is this punishment for something you did?”

Andrew set the box down and started for the door. “If you don’t go, I will.”

Sash’s grasp felt like a vice, and he moved with it, rolling onto the mattress and flipping upright in fear-fueled courage.

“Don’t you fucking touch me!” he yelled, hurling his black violin case.

Sash ducked it, letting it hit the wall and fall to the floor while Andrew stood on his knees on the mattress.

“Do you know what kind of day I’ve had?” he screamed. “Get the fuck out!”

“When I was eight, my mother insisted I learn. I did this to make her happy.” Sash pulled his unbuttoned dress shirt over his shoulders, his shapely chest visible beneath his undershirt. “My father left before I could walk, so making her happy was the most important thing in my world.”

Accented words continued as lean, muscular arms lifted the undershirt, exposing the black patches of hair beneath them.

“When I turned twelve, my mother started hearing voices. Sometimes, she’d be fine. Other times, not so fine.” Sash retook his position at the foot of the bed and opened the wooden box. “When I played for her, she was fine.”

Dull blue tattoos decorated his corded abdomen, and dark round nipples dotted his chest.

“When I was fourteen, I wanted to be with my friends for the Passover holiday. I told her I’d be home to play for her after school, but I went out with my friends instead.” Sash’s voice became distant, his blue eye drowning in a pool that wouldn’t overflow. “I found our neighbors crowded around the stoop when I came home. She had covered the windows with towels. Killed our cat and nailed it to the front door.”

Andrew brought his knees to his chest, hugging them.

 “The constable at the door told me to get in there and calm her down.” Sash picked up the violin. “This was on the table. She asked why I would not play for her. It wasn’t her, you see. It was one of those voices that became her.”

Sash lifted his bow stick. “She grabbed this and beat me terribly.”

Andrew’s nose began to burn.

“She caught my eye with the end here.” Sash dragged a finger over the frog and its stained hairs. “It gouged me so deep that my eye came out with it.”

A tear fell down Andrew’s cheek.

“The constable tackled her to the floor. She screamed as they hauled her away. All the voices in her head screaming all at once, some of them damning me as I sat there bleeding.” Sash cleared his throat. “My uncle collected me from hospital. I lived with him for many months until he put me on a train one day and told me to visit my mother.”

Sash returned the bow and closed the box. “He put this box in my hand and said, go play for her at the sanitarium.”

Andrew reached for the box, his eyes Sash’s pain.

“I didn’t get off at hospital,” he said softly. “I rode the train to Gdansk and lived on the streets. I fed myself once a day on what I stole from people’s pockets.”

After several moments of silence, Sash pulled at the clasp on his pants before sliding them down his legs. “I learned to steal and kill, but I never learned to forget.”

Andrew opened the violin box as Sash tossed his folded trousers on the floor.

“That’s how I got here, Andrej,” he said. “How did you get here?”

“I met Oleg about three months before I graduated high school.” Andrew cradled the Pilar in his arms. “He would show up at parties with these boys,”

Sash reached over and wrapped his hand around the Pilar’s long fingerboard.

“They always had drugs, so I avoided them,” Andrew said, letting him take the violin. “He chatted me up one night, so I blew him. He was bad news, but I didn’t care because only women get stuck with bad men, right?”

Sash rose and started playing the first four bars of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. Like a fantasy in his black underwear, he stood there, powerful arms working the bow stick with the Pilar tucked under his chin.

“It was just once, or so I thought.” Andrew closed his eyes when the melody turned dark. “I was on the Parkway when he came running out of the woods. He said his car broke down.”

The bow cut across the strings, tempo gaining momentum.

“At the rest stop, I bought us some food, and he asked me to pull into the woods so he could piss and get rid of the trash. I drove around the parking area and into the trees where my car would fit.”

Sash’s ashen chest glistened as his arm pulled and pushed.

“Oleg yanked my keys from the ignition and started hitting me.” Tears cut down Andrew’s cheeks as those moments replayed in his mind. “I’ve never been hit like that before in my life. It hurt so much.”

Strings thundered as the composition intensified.

“He got into the back and pulled me over the seat.” Andrew wiped the tears from his eyes. “I just needed him to stop hitting me.” The serene opening bars in A-Major began, and his voice dropped to a whisper. “I knew it wasn’t him inside me. It burned so bad. I was bleeding. But then, just like that, it stopped hurting.”

Sash held the bow and violin at his side, bringing silence.

“It stopped hurting, and I,” he studied the man’s taut shoulders and trim waist. “I don’t know what happens to me when I fuck. You know that movie with Paul Newman, where he says he keeps drinking until he hears that click?”

Sash put the Pilar back in its box.

“Anal sex is the opposite for me.” Shame flooded Andrew’s gut. “Something clicks, and I can’t stop.”

Sash walked to the black violin case and, taking out the instrument, skillfully adjusted the pegs while gently dragging the bow over the strings.

“I bucked back and started fucking it.” Andrew took up the Pilar and held it tightly to his chest. “Afterward, Oleg said he would make a fortune pimping me out. I spat at him and hit him.”

Sash began the Kreutzer composition again with an angelic calm as the wind outside swept through Andrew’s hair.

“He crawled over the seat and started the car.” His lips twisted into a smile. “That’s when it dropped on the floor.”

Like a choppy film, he saw himself grab the gun, condom still on its barrel, and fire it at the back of Oleg’s platinum head.

None of that mattered, not in the face of his shame.

“What kind of man,” he sobbed. “Gets off from being raped with a gun?”

Sash stopped playing.

“Your body isn’t your soul, Andrej.” The man’s profile regarded him without judgment. “I have been raped three times in my life. One of those times, my body enjoyed it enough to come. My soul did not like it, and my body is not my soul,”

Sash again tucked the wood under his jaw.

“The newspaper on the bed, it’s yours.”

Andrew unfolded the weekly print as Sash played something new.

‘Police Call Off Search for Missing Collegiate.’

It spoke of his going missing in May and then told of how his mother called the police last month when she received his voice message.

An addendum mentioned finding career criminal Oleg Paraskevich dead in the local man’s car just south of Exit 172. A bullet wound to the head. Police sought the young man for questioning, with assurances that the missing local acted in self-defense and authorities did not consider him a murder suspect.

“What is that you’re playing?” Andrew let the paper fall to the floor. “It’s beautiful.”

Sash stopped and returned to the end of the bed.

“I wrote it to play for my mother at hospital.” A disgraced eye met him as he spoke softly. “But, like you, I got lost along the way.”

Andrew crawled over the bed, closing the distance between them. Sash’s head warmed his hands, and that glass orb felt smooth against his tongue.

“Andrej,” Sash’s lips parted, offering a taste of tobacco.

He dragged his lips down Sash’s chest and relished the man’s fingers in his hair. Pushing the seated man to the wall, he straddled his legs and quickly pulled his shirt over his head. Sash tugged at the snap on his jeans, freeing him, and Andrew pulled their cocks together and retook Sash’s mouth.

Neither was able to stop. Stop the wanting, the feeling, the tasting. Andrew tugged their arousals in his hand, two captured snakes weeping at the tips. He couldn’t say how many moments passed until Sash’s pleasured groan made a mess on his smooth chest. The very sight of it spitting led Andrew to make it worse.

Marked with sweat and dried tears, Andrew dragged a finger through their mingled seed and brought it to the man’s bottom lip, spreading it like balm. Sash rubbed his lips together before Andrew stole a taste of their sticky tang.