Free Rock and Roll Heaven by T. C. Boyle Page B

saw the girl’s father standing at the elevator, watching the numbers descend. And then the murderer brushing by him as the doors parted. The irony. The father stepped into the elevator and the doors closed on him like the shutter of a lens. At the same moment the murderer hurried through the front door, down the steps and into the street. His gait was awkward, the suitcase tugging at his arm. Up the street, the bus. He hailed it. “Señor.” Kelius looked up. His suitcase was on the table. The inspector motioned for him to open it. It was then that he became aware of the flies, then that the blood rushed to his bowels, then that he tripped the twin latches and pulled back the lid of the suitcase, stamped with flashing K and packed tight with the stiff, wet, hacked and already decomposing flesh of a young girl.

ROCK & ROLL HEAVEN
    for Griff Stevens
    I died and went to rock & roll heaven. It looked like Houston Street. This can’t be rock & roll heaven, I thought.
    A fat black man in a dirty white suit was sitting on a suitcase tootling on a saxophone. Other black men were lying on the sidewalk. They were asleep. I decided to ask the fat black man if this was rock & roll heaven. “This rock & roll heaven?” I said.
    He stopped tootling. The saxophone was like a buttercup in his big black hands. “No, this be-bop heaven,” he said. “You want two blocks down.”
    I passed a knishery on the way. The sign said: Yonah Shimmel, 97 Years in Business. I hadn’t eaten since I’d died. The smell of hot knishes was a siren song to a man who has no qualms about mixing metaphors. I stopped in. It was dark, but non-threatening. After all, this was heaven.
    Two men in open-to-the-navel shirts were sitting on a table, making music. One of them had an acoustic guitar, the other had a mouthharp. What they were playing sounded a lot like rock & roll. “Hey,” I said, “that rock & roll you’re playing?”
    The man with the mouthharp stopped sawing the instrument across his lips. His hair was in ringlets, his eyes were blue. “Where’s your ear, man? This is blue-eyed blues.” He pulled a second mouthharp from a glass of water and shot through a series of high stops, sucking and puffing. Music filled the room.
    I took a table in back and rested my axe against a chair. The waiter was bald. I ordered a kasha knish and homemade yogurt. The waiter held the steaming knish in his hands and sang “Lassù in cielo” from Rigoletto .
    â€œI had the impression this was blue-eyed blues heaven,” I said.
    â€œThis ain’t my neighborhood,” the waiter said. “I live over on the other side of town. In opera heaven.”
    The next block was choked with organ grinders and dancing monkeys. I was confused. I stopped to listen to thick-eared man in a Pinocchio hat. He ground out a rendition of The Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy while his monkey executed a tricky series of glissades and entrechats. When it was over the man handed me a quarter. I put it in the monkey’s cup. “Tank-a-you,” the man said.
    I followed my ears. They took me through reggae heaven, disco heaven, punk heaven and mariachi heaven. In punk heaven people were cutting themselves with razor blades and amplifying air-raid sounds. There was dancing in the streets in mariachi heaven.
    I heard a sound like thunder in the distance. It could have been rock & roll. I hurried toward it. Three blocks down I turned a corner and found myself in St. Celia’s Square. All the buildings round the square had organ pipes, bronze like the sun, instead of chimneys. In the middle of the square, just under the statue, a man in a periwig sat at an organ. His fingers made mountains quake, his feet toppled buildings in distant parts of the city. No one had to tell me. I was in toccata & fugue heaven.
    In showtune heaven I met Frieda. She was wearing a peasant blouse, chamois jumper and