After THE TRAVELER was published, I gave away most of my possessions and moved to New York City. I was attempting to follow the Rule of One: owning only one bed, one spoon, one blanket. This meant that my apartment was bare and uncomfortable, and I began to look for public places to write.
At the time, the Metropolitan Museum of Art had a private members’ lounge with couches on the second floor. If I arrived at 10 a.m., I was the only member there, along with two male servers preparing for the lunch shift. The only annoying aspect of the room was that hidden speakers endlessly played the ultimate musical cliché: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. I began to hate this composition and the cheerful regularity of its melodies.
Eventually, I asked Raul, the head server, if there was any musical alternative.
“What kind of music do you want, sir?”
“Something lively. What about Tito Puente?”
Raul grinned. “Bueno.” And from then on, if I was the only member in the lounge, we listened to salsa music.
The music was an antidote to what was occurring in the second book of the trilogy, THE DARK RIVER. Victory From Sin Fraser — Vicki — is alone on an island off the west coast of Ireland when the Tabula discover her location.
I began to write the chapter and suddenly realized that Vicki had to die. Writing longhand on a pad of yellow legal paper, I killed her in a painful way.
Vicki was a kind and giving person: the most moral and sympathetic character I had ever created. I felt a bastard when I killed her, then dropped my pen and began to weep.
When I looked up, Raul and his friend Hector were staring at me. “Are you okay, sir?”
“I’m not okay. Someone…died.”
“Your mother? Father?”
“A member of my family.”
Both men said they were sorry for my loss and returned to the prep room. A few minutes later, they canceled Tito Puente and began to play Bach