Curtis stood behind the desk in his small, dark, cramped office space. He looked nervously at the clock on the wall. Then, he looked at the desk before him. He started, for at least the tenth time to go over a mental list of the objects: photocopier, paper cutter tray, scissors, tape, extra bolts of paper…He stopped when he heard the outer door to the office screech its metallic sound announcing the arrival of a visitor. The inner wooden door creaked open and Darcy walked in carrying a black, worn leather satchel.
“Have you got the goods?” Curtis asked furtively.
Of course I have it, you fool. Did you think I would forget it?”
“Well…”
“None of that. Let’s get busy with this stuff.”
They immediately started to work.
• • •
The problem Curtis and Darcy found themselves with was a logistics headache. They had been offered the chance to play bass and guitar, respectively, with a local choir chamber group. This group specialized in Gregorian chants but this upcoming performance would be medleys of Broadway-style musical tunes. The conductor thought it would be a ‘fun change of pace’. When Darcy got the score book from the conductor he quickly realized a seriously flawed predicament. He phoned Curtis and they planned to meet in Curtis’ office to see what could be done.
The score book was clearly formatted by vocalists for vocal performance. So much vocal information covered every page that each contained at most six measures. This resulted in upwards of fifty pages that a musician would have to turn through one by one every few seconds. It was clearly an unacceptable situation.
In their phone conversation Darcy had said, “This will not do. It must be fixed.”
Curtis agreed, “Yeah, yeah…I can fix it…for money…as long as we can get money…”
“I’ll bring the score and we will straighten this out. For we have Machines. And Tape. And the Will to Succeed.”
“For money…”
“We will not be vanquished.”
“Or not paid.”
“It is clearly our destiny. We will conquer.”
“And get paid.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow in your office.”
• • •
They started by making multiple photo copies of every page of the score. Then, using the paper cutter they sliced the musical lines and the vocal parts into long thin strips which they could reorganize and tape onto another sheet of paper. At that point they recopied and resized the document to fit more of the music onto fewer sheets of paper. The end result would hopefully be a working score which wouldn’t have fifty odd pages to be turned every few seconds. They would have one long reduced score to play from and not ever have to turn a page. It was strictly an old school cut and paste job all the way. They were convinced it was an ingenious idea. But it would require a great deal of organization and concentration…
Darcy had twenty little scraps of paper semi-organized on the desk in front of him. He had six more in one hand and small sections of tape stuck to various fingers of his other hand. He was trying to decide which fragment was next in the process to be taped onto the large rescoring sheet. Curtis was photo copying and slicing paper like mad, then stacking the resultant musical fragments in pile on Darcy’s side of the desk.
Darcy growled disgustedly, “Arrgg…this is very complicated.”
Curtis replied without looking up, “Just make sure you get it right.”
“Oh, I’ll get it right…”
“If you don’t we might not get paid.”
“I’m putting more time into toying with this paper than I was planning on practicing the actual music.”
This got Curtis’ attention, “You’re not gonna practice?!”
“Calm down, little money. I didn’t say that. I’ll practice a bit…not that I have to practice, you know…”
“All this paper and machinery costs money to buy, use and keep running, man.”
Darcy was lost in thought again with the score fragments. He had so many in his hands now it looked like he was playing bridge, trying to organize his hand and decide how many tricks he would bid. The bits of tape were not making it easier to filter and place the fragments properly.
Curtis carried on, “I’m mean if we screw this up they might not pay us…”
“Ah ha! That’s where this one goes!” Darcy slammed a fragment in place on the desk. It scattered most of the other fragments out of order.
“And I really need to get paid.”
Darcy said, “Wow this is really confusing…What? They wouldn’t dare not pay us!”
“But if…”
“Ah, ah, ah! No, ‘but’s’! Lemme think about it.”
They continued to work without talking for some time. The reorganized score was beginning to take shape. Suddenly Darcy slammed his hand down on the desk causing Curtis to flinch and more score fragments to scatter and float off the desk.
“Wait a minute! I’ve got it! We can start our own private detective agency! Yeah…and that’s how we’ll get paid if there’s any…trouble,” he started chuckling under his breath. “Yeah…they would dare give us any trouble if we were tough guy private eyes…”
Curtis looked at him, confused, “Wait a minute…did they TELL you we are getting paid for this thing? I mean money, of course. We will get some, isn’t that right?”
“Oh sure, sure…We’ll be paid like Kings and live like Vikings. Not that it will matter much once we get our detective agency rolling. You know, that’s the only thing that will save us if those scoundrels try to short us. That’s why I’m the Boss. I’m very clever and I have such brilliant ideas.”
“We might not get paid?” Curtis asked with genuine anguish roiling up from his throat. He slowed his paper cutting pace noticeably.
Darcy stopped pasting score fragments. He stood by the desk with his arms akimbo and feet planted wide apart and looking dramatically off into the distance (or at the wall across the room) he said, “Yeah, just like Sam Spade…or Bogart in one of those old black and white movies…looking for important statues of birds…”
Curtis had nearly stopped working altogether, “Look, man…I don’t wanna do all this…you know…this work…without getting paid some money.”
“Or even Fred McMurray! Oh, yeah, he could play it cool…”
Curtis dropped the scissors on the stack of shredded score fragments scattered on the paper cutter tray, “Darcy, man, are you sure they promised we were getting paid some form of American currency?”
“Now, of course, that was long before he wound up disgracing himself as the droopy daddy on ‘My Three Sons’.” He chuckled, “What a waste of talent that was!”
“Look man…My wife is gonna kill me if I leave the house to play music and don’t come back with some money.”
Darcy stopped his reverie and looked down at the floor shaking his head back and forth very slowly, very sadly. Looking up he quickly reached over the desk and smacked Curtis on the side of the head, “Will you stop your incessant whining about money?! I told you…we are supposed to get paid! BUT, if we don’t! IF we don’t…we’ll have our detective agency to get to the bottom of the sordid tale! To find out WHY we didn’t get paid and WHO the responsible party is.”
“Oh…” Curtis replied rubbing the side of his head.
“And even if we don’t eventually get our money, we will get our man…Oh yes, we will get…justice,” Darcy shook his fist in the air with this last word, threw his head back and started laughing maniacally.
“But…”
“No! No ‘but’s’”, he said quickly cutting off Curtis. “Now let’s get back to work on these…these…CLUES…”
They recommenced work on the score fragments that were now hopelessly scattered in a thousand different little piles on the desk and floor.
• • •
The final dress rehearsal was scheduled for an hour before the actual performance. The choir was on the stage singing. The conductor was in front of them conducting. Darcy and Curtis were off to one side of the stage playing their instruments. The other side of the stage housed the resident pianist on a slightly out of tune ancient upright Kimball. The whole ensemble went through a few more measures of a medley of Gershwin, Porter and Berlin tunes. The conductor stopped everyone again abruptly…for the thirteenth time in a row.
She was a tall, thin, nervous looking woman in her forties. Her manner was one of a long suffering patron of the arts that gives and gives and expects maybe to get just a little bit back. But never has in all these years. Her temperament swung back and forth between apologetic hostility and amiable depression. She quickly ran over to the side of the stage where Darcy and Curtis stood with their instruments. Waving her arms wildly and vaguely in the air suggesting a foul odor she said, “I keep hearing wrong notes from over here!”
Darcy shot his cuffs and folded his arms across the top of guitar, “Well, that’s how you know it’s jazz, honey.”
Curtis looked worriedly back and forth between Darcy and the conductor, “Will we be fined for wrong notes?”
The conductor glowered at them for a few brief seconds before turning back to her podium, “Let’s try it again from measure seventy-eight.”
The whole ensemble started up again following her count in. Eventually, she had to stop the trial run again. Finally after several more aborted attempts it was time to stop practicing. Attendees were beginning to file into the auditorium and the vocalists needed to rest their voices before the performance. They had not gotten through the entire piece and this left the conductor visibly shaken.
As the performers filed off the stage she herded Darcy and Curtis to the offstage wings.
“Look, now, boys…” she began almost sobbing, “We really need to discuss this problem. We really, really need to figure out what’s going wrong and where it’s going wrong.”
Darcy still had his guitar strapped on and strummed a few bitonal chords thick with pungent altered tension, “Hey, now. Ain’t nothing a few chord substitutions won’t fix. Not to worry, I’ve everything under CONTROL.”
“Ummmmm…look, boys…let’s look at the score…please?”
Authoritatively, Darcy ordered, “Curtis! Get the score off the music stand and bring it over here. Now.”
Curtis ran out to stage. He grabbed the score knocking over the music stand in the process. The auditorium was starting to fill with people coming to see the performance. The conductor winced. She watched Curtis fumble around alone on the stage in front of everyone. Once he had the music stand back in place he turned toward the side of the stage and promptly tripped over an instrument cable.
Darcy laughed loudly and yelled, “Careful, little money! You might hurt yourself!” He smiled casually at the conductor who was now openly weeping, “What a clumsy idiot, huh?”
Curtis finally made it to the wings with the score. On a large, long folding table they laid out scores for comparison and analysis.
The conductor pulled a wad of tissues from her pocket and began to wipe tears away as she and Curtis started looking at the scores. Darcy paid no attention and played insanely fast bebop lines on his guitar.
After a few minutes comparing her score with the altered score Darcy and Curtis created she said, “Wait a minute…Where did you get THIS score?”
“You gave it to us, sugar,” Darcy replied.
“This isn’t the score I gave you.”
“Well, the actual one you gave us was unacceptable so we fixed us up a superior version.”
“Yeah we fixed it up all by ourselves. It’s more practical, see?” Curtis said with a proud smile. “It’s all on ONE big piece of paper. Clever, huh?”
She looked again at their version and compared it to hers.
Darcy cocked his head to one side and held his chin with his hand. He squinted and said, “We used a very complicated and advanced technique to straighten out the mess of a score you gave to us. We can show the procedure we used…”
“For a small fee,” inserted Curtis.
“We can even make you a copy of your very own, darling.”
“For just a little bit more…”
The conductor kept looking at the scores, began shaking and finally exploded, “You idiots! You’ve screwed it all up! The music on your score is all out of order! And the vocal lines don’t even make sense! It’s all just gibberish!”
“Look at this,” she jabbed a vicious index finger at the papers on the table. “Your score goes from measure 76 to what should be measure 83. Then from 86 to what should be 52. And then leaves out something…Only to wind up on measure 122! How did you do this?! What were you thinking?!”
She screamed at them and they looked back at her as if she was speaking Swahili.
Finally, after a long tension filled silence, Darcy said, “Look, babe, everything will be fine. You just go out there, wave that baton around and smile at the audience. We have everything under CONTROL.”
When she came out of her glazed-eyes daze, she grabbed her own score book and started running for the backstage door out of the building, yelling back over her shoulder, “I’m going to run off another copy of this thing for you two idiots to use for the performance.”
Darcy and Curtis watched her run out of the building.
Darcy seemed unconcerned and started playing lightning fast augmented arpeggios on his guitar again, “What a funny broad.”
Curtis looked at the score on which they had worked so very hard. He frowned slightly, “I sure hope this doesn’t mean we won’t get paid…”
• • •
In the end the performance went off without a hitch. After all, let’s not forget, Darcy and Curtis are Professionals. Even if they can’t manage to always, completely and successfully cut and paste tiny bits of paper into the proper order…it has no effect on their ability to rise to the challenge of playing jazz tunes for a vocal choir that normally sings Gregorian chants.
They did also wind up getting paid. This set Curtis’ mind greatly at ease, but Darcy was slightly irritated that there was no need for immediate film noir style detective work. “Maybe next time…” he grumbled under his breath as he cashed his check.
The week after the performance Curtis’ photocopier broke down and he had to have a repairman fix it which eventually cost exactly what he made playing bass on the jazz vocal choir gig. Darcy spent the money he made on the gig on a fedora from a second hand clothing store. The salesman convinced him it was once owned by Raymond Chandler.
• • •
A few days later Darcy came into Curtis’ small, dark, cramped office and sat down. He was wearing his fedora tilted at just the right angle. He sat down across the desk from Curtis, looked up at him from under the brim of his fedora and smiled, “Got a line on another assignment, little money. You want in?”
Curtis’ eyes darted back and forth between Darcy and the photocopier on his desk. Finally he asked, “Does it pay?”
Somewhere off in the distance a minor, major seven chord sounded…
The End?