"For what?" demanded the colonel, accepting handcuffs of his own.
"Just while we straighten things out with your government," the "I" assured us. "We have to explain to them what they're going to do, and you're prisoners until they agree. That's your best option, see? If you don't like it, you do have one other choice. You can offer resistance. Then you won't be prisoners any more, just dead."
A combo driver, hunched high in the cab of his big John Deere, drove slowly down the rows of early beans, thinking of nothing more serious than a cold beer and the Sox game he was missing on TV, when he heard from behind him the zap-zap-zap of high-speed cars passing and the rrrrawr-rrrrawr of sixteen-wheel semis. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a huge diesel beanng down on him. Frantically he wrenched the wheel of the combo. He spoiled a dozen rows, but when he looked back there was nothing there.
23 August 1983
9:10 P.M. Mrs. Nyla Christophe Bowquist
It was really disappointing to be in Dom's hometown without Dom there, but I kept busy, There's always plenty to do getting ready for a concert. There are press interviews. There are cocktails before the performance, mixing with the heavy donors to the National Symphony. Most of all, there are rehearsals. Ten minutes of rehearsal with the orchestra uses up an hour of my time—worrying about it beforehand, trying to remember all the cuts and tempi and intonations we'd agreed on afterward. One would think that rehearsing with Mstislav Rostropovich ought to be easier than most, because Slavi started out as a cellist himself. Not a bit of it. He is an endless fusser. He can drive you crazy fidgeting over the dynamics for one oboe, or the exact number of microseconds a note should be syncopated. I don't mean that I don't like working with him. He has a wonderful sense of humor, for instance. In fact, I love the man.
I'll give you an idea of the kind of gentle joke I get from Slavi Rostropovich. When I'd signed and returned the contract for this performance, his concertmaster called up and said, "Slavi says you can have a choice, Nyla. The Sibelius or the Mendelssohn, which?" I couldn't help giggling.
It was the kind of joke that you have to have been around for a while to laugh at. It had a history. The previous time I played the National Symphony a newspaper feature writer caught me off guard. I guess I was tired. Anyway, I told him what violinists don't often talk about, but what every fiddle player since Paganini has known. There are concerti that are crowd-pleasers because they sound a lot harder to play than they are—like the Mendelssohn—and concerti that are tests of skill because they are a lot harder than they sound—like the Sibelius. So I told this woman that when I wanted to win cheap bravos from an unsophisticated audience I'd play the Mendelssohn, and if I wanted to show off for my colleagues, I'd do the Sibelius.
"Tell Slavi I'd rather do the Mendelssohn," I said to the concertmaster, grinning into the phone. Because, after all, I knew that it wouldn't be either. Sure enough, two days later I got a bunch of flowers with a note in Elena Rostropovich's handwriting that said:
"Not only talented—not only beautiful—but also very sensible! Slavi sends his admiring compliments and asks that what you really play is the Gershwin, since the President will be there."
I wired back that I would be delighted. I was. The Gershwin is one of the greats, as well as being the only violin concerto composed by an American fit to call pigs with. Anyway, I knew that President Reagan wasn't going to want to hear some foreigner's stuff.
Elena Rostropovich was a sweet lady, although I didn't always know what she was thinking. I didn't really know, for instance, if she knew about Dom and me. We were very careful to avoid gossip. Still, she never said a word to me, not even a wink. But when I got an invitation to a late dinner after a concert, I knew that an identical one went to Dominic's home in Virginia. Mine was always for Mr. and Mrs. Bowquist. Dom's was always for Senator and Mrs. DeSota. It didn't matter if our mates were back in Chicago, as Ferdie was almost always and Marilyn DeSota more often than not. So Dom would spend the night before in my hotel suite. We'd both put in a full day's work on the day of the concert, and at eleven o'clock that night we would "discover" each other, with expressions of cordial surprise, at Elena's party. Then she would suggest that, since we were both unattached for the evening, Dom take me home.
Which he unfailingly did.
Those evenings were the best kind of time Dom and I had. We were actually able to appear in public together. Then, later on, when we were in private, there was very little chance of either one of us being caught out by our mates. Anything we did like that in Chicago was pretty risky. There was always the chance of somebody one of us knew accidentally turning up at the wrong time-in a hotel lobby, or an elevator, or the restaurant where we met. Other cities, not much better. Sometimes by good fortune Dom could invent a reason to fly up to Boston or New York or wherever I was on the road, but we were always squeezed for time. No. Washington was the best . anyway, the best that I could see any way of our ever having.
Even that wasn't perfect. We knew people in Washington too.' Sooner or later, either Ferdie or Marilyn was going to hear a hint, or feel a suspicion. From that moment on it would be only a matter of time. Private detectives? Maybe. Why not? Betrayed spouses don't necessarily play fair.
And then the whole thing would come crashing down on our heads, and what would happen after that would be really nasty. .
But, please, God, not yet awhile. "Not ever," said Dom firmly, pulling on his socks at two o'clock one morning, when I had just said that to him.
"It has to happen sooner or later, darling," I said reasonably.
"It does not. We don't have to get caught." He paused in putting on his pants to bend to kiss my navel. "We can go on like this forever. Even if we did get caught—"
I headed off what he was going to say next. Or tried to. "President Reagan is going to be at, the concert," I told him.
"Yes? What about it? Oh," he said, nodding wisely as he zipped his fly. "I see the connection. You mean you wouldn't want to shock the President, right? But if we don't get caught, she won't be shocked, will she? And even if we do, there's always the alternative of—"
"No, there isn't," I said, before he could finish the sentence with "getting married." Because that was the one subject I refused to discuss, ever, with Senator Dominic DeSota. I could stand being unfaithful to a man who loved me. I couldn't stand the idea of throwing him out of my life, in public humiliation.
So I wasn't altogether sorry when Dom had to go off to New Mexico, because he'd been getting more and more insistent about that, and I was running out of easy ways to fend the idea off. And on the night of the concert, as I opened the concerto in that fast, syncopated "allegro hot" first movement, his seat in the third row center was empty.
What happened next was totally unexpected, and to explain what was going on I have to explain about the concerto.
Gershwin died young. He'd only begun composing violin music of any kind a couple of years before the taxi caught him crossing Fifty-second Street. Then, out of almost no experience, he produced this wonder. It was all his own too. In the early days Gershwin had had to hire Ferde Grofe to do his orchestrations for him, but by the time of the violin concerto he had mastered the art. The woodwinds and percussion were as much idiosyncratically his very own as those heart-melting violin themes.