THE HUNGARIAN LIGHTBULB 

 

 When the symphony orchestra collapsed in ruin after years spent floating, half-dead near bankruptcy, all the musicians were thrown out of work. At that time nearly everyone was out of work anyway—many of them discovered soup-kitchens and soon found employment at menial tasks. A few—the lucky or the talented, but mostly those with both luck and talent—found other musical work well below stevedore's wages. 

 Jurgen had tremendous talent but no luck, yet he could not imagine any other life than being a violist. He would not look for non-musical work—everything was unsuitable, and certainly unattractive. He took the little savings he had and went West thinking to find a place less crowded with hungry musicians. Rather than spend his money on transportation he settled on a romantic adventure:  he made friends around the freight yards and rode the rails west until he arrived on the outskirts of a comfortably large city with a clean look—and there he decided to make his home. The city was familiar to him, as a professional musician:  it boasted a fine orchestra whose conductor, one Laurence Lamonte, frequently found shockingly intimate details of his flamboyant life splashed across the pages of the tabloids. 

 In River Street, on the wrong side of the tracks, after hours spent walking from the fashionable districts gradually down the economic ladder into a grimy, dilapidated neighborhood, Jurgen found the Charleston Residence Hotel. Brownstone, four stories tall, it had two windows boarded up on the third floor and unmistakable blackened marks from a conflagration that had never been cleaned away. There was a sign in the window advertising a weekly fee he thought he could manage—if the sign was not out of date. It was yellow, curling at the edges, and could hardly be read behind a smudged window laced with years of accumulated cobwebs. It did not seem like a wholesome place—but the price was right so he walked into the tiny lobby. 

 "Have you any rooms?" he asked. He had his viola case tucked under one arm and his cracked leather valise dangling from the other hand. 

 A short, bearded and balding man in a brown, pinstriped suit that might once have been new, stood at the front desk. The stub of a stale cigar not two inches long was stuffed between his lips. He cupped a hairy hand to his ear. 

 "I asked," Jurgen stated in a much louder voice, "whether you have a room to let." 

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