Narabedla Ltd

NARABEDLA LTD.

Frederik Pohl

A Del Rey Book

BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK

A Del Rey Book

Published by Ballantine Books

Copyright © 1988 by Frederik Pohl

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 87-47810

ISBN 0-345-36026-5

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Hardcover Edition: April 1988 First Mass Market Edition: April 1989

Cover Art by Barclay Shaw

W
hen Woody Calderon told me about the offer he couldn’t refuse, but was going to anyway, he blew my mind. He had done that often enough before. I expected a certain amount of weirdness from Woody. It came with the turf, because he was a musician, after all.

I hadn’t expected this particular variety.

Woody was a cellist. I was an accountant—for, among other artists, him. Woody paid me a retainer plus my hourly charges to handle his money, except that he rarely had any, and to keep him out of trouble with the Internal Revenue Service, which I sometimes couldn’t. I wasn’t getting rich on Woody’s account, because his career wasn’t making him rich, either. It had started off, like, wow, with a wonderful first-year string of successes, when he won the Tchaikovsky prize, and debuted at Carnegie Hall, and had the critics comparing him to Casals and Rostropovich. But then he hadn’t had a second year. At first he was a prodigious wunder-kind—the kind that makes thirty-year-old cellists weep. Then, all of a sudden, the critics began to open their reviews with, “While not up to the brilliance of intonation and impeccable musicianship of his debut, Woody Calderon’s new recital is nevertheless …” Nevertheless disappointing, is what they were saying, and Carnegie Hall lost his telephone number.

Nevertheless, and this time I am talking a happier kind of nevertheless, he really was the kind of cellist you could fairly compare with anybody you liked, even if he wasn’t getting either the bookings or the reviews anymore. I kept him on as a client partly because I was certain that sooner or later he would make it again, and partly out of sympathy.

The sympathy was a personal thing. It happened that I, too, had had a brilliant first year. I was a baritone. I sang in all the glorious places: La Scala, Covent Garden, the Met—

I did them all. Oh, I only had little roles, to be sure—somebody’s father or somebody’s jailer—but it was only a matter of time until I’d be doing Papageno or Tonio. Everybody said so. At that time I even said so myself, to the girls I was having so wonderful a time dating. And we all might have been right, too, if it hadn’t been for the damn wardrobe mistress’s damn kid that gave me the damn mumps in Chicago. I didn’t get sick enough to die, just sick enough to wish for it. When I was well enough to sing again I couldn’t.

I do not wish to tell you what it felt like when the doctors began talking about how sometimes, even with the best of care, mumps had consequences—well, not the disease itself, so much, as the side effects of some of the treatments—well, in layman’s terms, Mr. Stennis …

They weren’t very good at layman’s terms. They were better at medical terms like “Guillaume-Barr6 syndrome” and “tracheal stenosis” and “I hope you understand, Mr. Stennis, that there is no possible question here of anything like malpractice.”

Well, there wasn’t. I made sure of that. I checked it out. But the trachea and the larynx had got involved. The warm, strong baritone voice had been turned off.

And, unfortunately, not just the voice.

It was not a good time for me, those days right after I came off the critical list.

I did have a safety net. My mother, bless her prudent, departed soul, had laid down the law while I was still in college. If, against all her sound motherly advice, I were going to go in for something as madly chancy as a singing career, I had to take the precaution of studying something employable as well. So I’d taken a full load of accountancy courses, done well in them, had all the credentials I needed to put them to use.

So, instead of being a star, I began preparing the tax returns of stars … and of a lot of non-stars I didn’t have the heart to turn away, like Woody Calderon.

Woody came in for his appointment with me an hour late, and eight hundred dollars short. I was working out with the weights beside my open window, and he nodded approvingly. “Keeping in shape, huh? Good, good. But listen, you’re going to have to stall them for me again, Nolly,” he said. “I haven’t got the money.”

Since the I.R.S. had been threatening to attach his assets for the money, that didn’t sound like good news to me. “I can’t. They mean it this time. Next step is they file on you.” 

“Yeah,” he said, nodding vaguely. .Woody’s name isn’t Woody, it’s Bruce. But he doesn’t look like a Brace. What he looks like more than anything else is Woody Allen—unsure, unfocused, and all. “I was kind of afraid you might say that. Well, gee. I dunno, Nolly. Maybe I should take the offer from Henry Davidson-Jones.”

That was when I sat up straight. “You didn’t tell me about any offer from Henry Davidson-Jones,” I said.

“Well, it just came up.”

I waited. Henry Davidson-Jones was a name that mattered. For one thing, he was about as big a benefactor of the arts as the world possessed. He was C.E.O. of a huge financial thing called Narabedla Ltd., but where he found time to run the business I could not guess. He was always doing six things at once, and they always turned out to be raising money for chamber-music groups and sponsoring ballet companies and generally doing all the things angels are supposed to do, except that as far as I knew he wasn’t sleeping with any members of the corps de ballet.

Woody was looking tickled and apologetic, both. I waited him out. “Matter of fact,” he said, “I just came from his office. I got a call from his secretary. I thought, I don’t know, I thought maybe he was going to offer me a shot in some quartet or something.” His voice was rising. Woody stands about five feet tall, tops, even with lifts in his shoes, and when he gets excited he chirps like a bird. “Only it wasn’t that. He started out telling me how unfair the critics and the managers were, and how he really thought I deserved a break—well, I sure agreed with him about that. And, I mean, Nolly, he knew,” Woody piped earnestly. “He’s heard me. Probably even bought his own tickets, because I sure never knew he was ever in the audience. He told me how fine I was at those impossible chords and, you know, like in those Paganini runs where you’re lucky if you just get all the notes in, and he said my intonation was flawless—”

“It probably was,” I said, because, as I’ve mentioned before, in my opinion Woody really was some kind of a marvel. Other than intellectually, I mean. “Could you get to the point?”

“He offered me a job!” Woody yelped.

“And you’re thinking twice about whether to take it, for God’s sake? With the I.R.S. breathing down your neck?” He said apologetically, “Yeah, but it’s kind of weird, Nolly. See, he started out by asking me all kinds of personal things—no, I’m a liar, he didn’t ask anything at all. He was telling me all this stuff about myself. Like how Yvonne and I broke up last year and there hasn’t really been anybody else since. Like how my family isn’t really very close. All I have is a couple of cousins, really; and I’ve been chasing around so much trying to get a break that I’ve practically lost touch with all my friends—well, I don’t mean you, Nolly; I mean—”

“I know what you mean, Woody! Get to it! This is beginning to get really bizarre.”

He looked at me worriedly through his Woody Allen glasses. He couldn’t help seeing that I was suddenly very tense. In fact, I could see my hand shaking, and so could he.

“Davidson-Jones said there was a little, well, like a syndicate, sort of, a bunch of people who had kind of a private concert circuit.”

“And he offered you a contract to play for them.” 

“Right, Nolly! Long-term. Years, anyway. And they’d pay me a hundred and a half a year, plus traveling expenses, and because they were all foreigners the whole net would go into a Swiss bank, no taxes, and—”

I held up my hand. It had stopped shaking because I wasn’t in any doubt any longer. I finished for him. “And he said the only drawback was that you’d be completely out of circulation while you traveled, and couldn’t hope to keep in contact with the people you knew.”

Woody gave me a long, worried stare. “You heard about this? He said they were Brazilian millionaires.”

“I heard,” I said. “A long time ago. Before I lost my voice. Henry Davidson-Jones made me the same offer, only then they were Arab oil sheiks.”

We sat and stared at each other for a minute. Then Woody said, “You didn’t take it? Why not?”

“I didn’t get the chance. I had a date at the Chicago Lyric Opera two days later, and then I got the mumps.”

We had another session of staring at each other. Then Woody said, “Listen, Nolly, that’s interesting, but it doesn’t help. What I want to know is, do you think I should do it?”

I couldn’t answer right away, because there were too many answers floating around in my head. They didn’t agree. The first answer that suggested itself to me was that it surely was a way to keep the Feds from attaching his cello. It was no Stradivarius, but it was a good $6,500 contemporary instrument that he would pay hell trying to replace if he lost it to the I.R.S. The second answer that came to mind was that he certainly hadn’t had any better offers lately. The third, however, was positively
no.

But I didn’t have to say any of them, because Woody’s head was moving in the same directions as my own. He straightened up, all five feet of him, and said sorrowfully, “It’s true that that could square me with the Internal Revenue, and it’s a long way the best offer I’ve had. But honest, Nolly, I don’t like the sound of it.”