“For a good cigar you need something peaty.”

“All for you,” Avram said. “Laphroaig is too peaty for me.”

“The peatiest,” Jordan said, making some final adjustments to his beautiful 1892 Edison Cylinder Player with a fine polished mahogany box as a base. On top was the rotor on which the cylinder would be placed and the brass horn and a needle that was set on the turning cylinder to play it, a bit like the later arm of a record player.

Heinrich grabbed the Laphroaig and poured himself a healthy measure. “Too peaty? You’re a pussy, Avram. Scotch can never be too peaty.”

The bureaucrat only laughed as he lit a cigar. “Who’s the pussy? You’re only pouring yourself a double!”

“Nothing makes jetlag worse than a hangover.”

“Yeah, guess you got a long flight tomorrow,” Avram said, pouring himself a triple of Scapa, a fine single malt from Orkney that had been making waves in recent years after a long time out of the business.

“Sure do, and a hell of a case at the other end of it,” Heinrich said, taking a slug of whiskey to ease away a sudden spike of tension. That secret meeting had really taken it out of him. “I don’t want to talk about work tonight.”

“Well I hope you get some time off to search for tunes,” Thornton said. “Warsaw has probably been picked clean, but I bet there’s some gold hidden in those smaller towns. When we played in the Czech Republic a few years ago, I extended my stay to go collecting. Prague was a washout, but I found wonderful recordings in Brno. Take a look.”

The Old Farts had an unspoken rule that whenever a member was travelling, they kept an eye out for records and cylinders the other members might like. Trading records was a big part of the fun.

“I’ll make time,” Heinrich promised. “Who here’s got an adaptable gramophone?”

Thornton and Jordan both said they did.

“What do you mean?” Avram asked.

Jordan turned to the new guy. “American records run at 78.26 rpm. Everywhere else they run at 77.92 rpm. It’s because the cycle frequency for the electric current was a little different, and that affected the recording equipment.”

“Oh,” Avram said, hiding his embarrassment behind his glass of whiskey. It was a newbie question for sure, but Heinrich didn’t mind newbies who could hold their whiskey and had a killer collection of early Vocalion and OKeh blues sides. Avram wasn’t slumming like that hipster he buried. He was real people.

Heinrich’s 78 finished its last track, and he walked through a cloud of cigar smoke and Scotch fumes to turn off the gramophone. Jordan got up and pulled a cylinder out of its box. Everyone oohed and aahed. It was bright pink, meaning it dated before 1903, a real rarity. Why the Edison company produced the earliest commercial cylinders in such a garish color was a bit of a mystery.

“Gentlemen, this is Sherman Houston Dudley’s “Oh! Oh! Miss Phoebe”, first written sometime in the 1890s, although I’m sad to say this recording dates to 1901. I’d love to get some more nineteenth century recordings for my collection. Heinrich, if you find any while sleeping with those Polish chicks, I’d definitely be interested. Now you’ve all heard of Dudley, but you probably didn’t know that he used to play up and down the Mississippi River with my very own great-grandfather, “Blind” Cash Carter. Wish my ancestor had recorded some cylinders or disks but as far as I know he didn’t. This is the next best thing.”

He slipped the cylinder onto the player, flipped the switch to start it turning, and set the needle and horn on top of the cylinder.

The player crackled to life, and from beneath the hisses and pops came the sound of a lively band and an old-style voice singing of his true love.

Heinrich closed his eyes, took a sip of whiskey, took a puff from his Cuban cigar, and savored the moment. He knew this was the last bit of peace he would have until the murders were solved.

CHAPTER SIX

 

Heinrich spent the flight to Warsaw with his Polish vocabulary tutorial, pissing off some suit sitting next to him who wanted to sleep.