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Vishinsky? I remember him. I used to hear him playing when I went to sleep at night. The music came right down through the whole courtyard. I was sorry when he died.”
    I didn’t know anything about classical music except that a lot of it really got to me, and that was partly due to that ghostly music drifting down the air shaft from Mr. Vishinsky’s open window.
    â€œHe didn’t just die,” Joel said. “He killed himself.”
    â€œOh,” I said.
    â€œAnyway, that’s what I heard,” he went on, staring past me into the lobby. “Because it wasn’t ever going to come back.”
    â€œWhat wasn’t?”
    â€œThe control in his left hand. Why do you think he quit concertizing? He got that creeping nerve disease pianists get sometimes. You lose the strength, the control you need.”
    â€œGod, how awful. I always thought his music sounded wonderful.” Joel gave me this sour look that said as plain as words, shows how much you know. “Well, I don’t know a lot about good music. I only hear what my mom plays on the stereo.”
    â€œIf you’d heard Vishinsky live, when he was still okay, you’d know the difference,” he said, “probably.”
    â€œHow did you know him? Did you take piano lessons with him?” Mr. Vishinsky had had lots of students.
    â€œMy father knew him.” Joel shifted his weight again, looking up the block. I thought, he doesn’t like me, he wants to be someplace else. He said, “So is he going to be there again tomorrow?”
    â€œWho?” I said.
    â€œYour pal, the fiddler?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I lied. I decided on the spot that I would rather fall dead where I stood than have Joel Wechsler show up in the park tomorrow when Paavo and I took on the kraken. “No,” I added, “come to think of it, no, he isn’t. He told me it wasn’t working out as well as he thought, so he was going to try someplace else.”
    Joel looked hard at me. “Did he say where?”
    â€œSomeplace downtown, one of the other parks.”
    â€œThe other parks are mainly full of junkies,” he said.
    â€œSo?” I said. “Maybe he buys from the dealers, how would I know? Aren’t musicians all dopers anyway?”
    Joel made a contemptuous grunt and walked away, his hands still in his pockets.
    â€œThanks for the soda,” I yelled after him. “Creep.” But that, of course, I kept under my breath.
    I went upstairs and stood at my window for a long time, wondering if Joel or Paavo or the Princes or even the kraken would show up down there on the sidewalk. Eventually I wrote a little in my diary about Joel and a lot more about Paavo, and then I actually got some homework done.
    This turned out to be a good thing, because that evening was not very productive for work. At eight o’clock the landlord came barging into the apartment to accuse my mother of vandalizing his building for deep, dark reasons of her own. All the mail chutes had disappeared, leaving long, pale strips down the walls of the hallways across from the elevators. We were also to blame for the stuff missing from our apartment. The landlord called my mom an “urban communist cadre.”
    My mother called her lawyer.
    I took my homework into the bathroom and thought about various ways to tell my mother and the lawyer and the landlord that the disappearances were really about something I had that I didn’t know I had that a kraken wanted.
    That was also the night, according to the next day’s news, on which the famed Sabatini string quartet played their final concert of a series in Carnegie Hall, but due to what the papers called an “accoustical freak,” nobody could hear a sound. The musicians said they heard their own music just fine. Everybody else sat there thinking they themselves had gone crazy or deaf.
    This news report scared me. Maybe the kraken had taken