It isn’t necessary to trust your friends. Conversely, it is equally unnecessary to be friendly with—or in this case, to even know—the people you trust. So Thierry calmly went up the steps of Symphony Hall. The night was pumped up with city lights, punctured by urban noises, and moved with the rhythm of the crowd stalking a complicated string of sounds. Concertgoers surrounded him. Somewhere in this live river streaming through the narrow heavy doors, moving with inexorable grace and precision to ushers tearing tickets—somewhere in this was the man Thierry trusted.
His ticket for the evening had arrived in the morning mail. His girlfriend would ordinarily have gone to the lobby, flipped through the envelopes for hers, shaken his for clues, held all of them up to the light in the elevator on the way back, and stood next to him asking, “Did you get tickets?” because he was always waiting for tickets to arrive. Music came from his mailbox. The shadows formed by the lobby ferns flowed across the walls in patterns that mimicked those of music stands. He knew the configuration of every audience space in Boston and Cambridge. He knew that the double-T row in Symphony Hall showed the horn section of any piece to its worst advantage, that the wood in Sanders Theater was an acoustical anomaly that made plainsong and other medieval chant symmetric and angelic, that early music at the Museum of Fine Arts was a disaster after the first row center. Placement. It could make or break a concert, though in any endeavor placement was important. That morning, Thierry had gone for the mail himself.
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