“And he expected a price sufficient to cover his costs of buying his freedom,” Harris said.
“When I interrogated Jedynak, he admitted to his crime, but I could not persuade him to tell me where the original manuscripts were.”
Harris smiled wryly. Vukasin knew only violence, and not the more subtle and sophisticated methods that were needed when interrogating true believers.
“He did tell me that Middleton was in possession of something he doesn’t know he has, but would discover it soon enough.”
“You squandered a valuable resource.”
“I hardly need you to tell me what I have or haven’t done.”
But it was so. Jedynak had taken knowledge to the grave, and now his niece was gone too-stolen from under the noses of his men in Rome. What she knows remained a mystery.
Vukasin said, “I believe the key is somehow in a Chopin manuscript Jedynak gave to Middleton.”
“Real or fake?” Harris asked.
Vukasin looked at her and raised an eyebrow. There was no reason to believe Jedynak could’ve known the real manuscript needed to be moved now. Vukasin had waited three years to seek its return.
Harris saw Vukasin bristle. “It was you who got to Rugova and his wife, wasn’t it?” she asked, her voice rich with flattery.
Vukasin nodded. He was glad to tell her about how he’d accomplished the seemingly impossible.
“Colonel Rugova was desperate,” he said. “Guards were bribed ahead of my visit, and I went in disguised as a lawyer from the Tribunal needing Rugova’s signature on some documents. My fountain pen leaked, and the poisoned ink on the colonel’s fingers did its job in seven or eight hours.”
Vukasin smiled. “You know, the colonel was glad to see me. He was amused by my disguise, and very pleased when I told him we had a plan to get him to safety. He was unaware, of course, his wife had surrendered his journals-we had everything he was going to use for leverage. He even named the men who paid him for the treasures-his benefactors. In the end, the great Colonel Rugova was a simple coward without loyalty or honor.”
“I wish I could have been there.”
Vukasin lit a small cigar and watched as a car pulled up. His two men exited and entered the hotel side by side.
“Now we’ll see if Middleton is inside,” he said.
“And if he’s not…?”
“His daughter,” he replied. “Charlotte. Pregnant, by the way.”
“Once I have Charlotte in the same room with him… ” She smiled at the thought and rubbed her long delicate hands together vigorously. “Does he love anybody else?”
“A woman he worked with named Tesla. Leonora Tesla.”
“If we had the Tesla woman, that might almost be as effective-if he still cares about her. But a pregnant daughter is preferable.”
7
The car’s interior reeked of almost archeological skank, old greasy food wrappers gumming the floor, malt liquor cans cluttering the wheel wells, ashtrays brimming with stale butts. The air- conditioner stuttered and coughed, exhaling a mildewy coolness, while the three bodies added an additional tang of gamey sweat-not just Middleton but Marcus and Traci, his would-be muggers. He’d learned their names from the nonstop badgering back and forth, relentless recriminations salted with snapshot details from their shattered biographies-their fumbling needs, their aching wants, their pitiless crank habits, promises to amend, curses in reply, testaments fired back and forth in a fierce vulgar slang that Middleton could barely decipher. Meanwhile, the car bumped and rattled north toward Baltimore, a lone headlight pointing the way along I-495’s rain-wet asphalt. A brief summer storm had come and gone, turning the night air cottony thick and hot, against which the dying air- conditioner merely chattered. Middleton’s sport jacket clung to his shoulders and arms like a second skin, and he wiped his face with his free hand, the other damply gripping the Beretta.
Finally, if only to ward off his nausea, he broke into the front-seat argument with, “Turn on the radio,” nudging Marcus’s shoulder with the pistol.
The youth turned just slightly. His cheek was mottled with small white sores. “Hey, me and Traci got things to discuss here.”
Middleton lodged the tip of the pistol’s barrel into Marcus’s neck. “I said turn on the radio. I can’t think.”
“Don’t jump the rail there, Mr. Gray.” This was Traci, at the wheel, eyeing him over her shoulder. “You kidnap us, threaten us, we doin’ all you ask. Be cool now. Don’t play. Not with that gun.”
They’d been calling him that since he’d climbed in the car: Mr. Gray. At first he’d thought it referred to his rumpled appearance, which was only worsening with the strain, the need for sleep. But he’d caught an edge of racial mockery in it too. Wasn’t it Cab Calloway, in his Hepcat’s Dictionary, who’d referred to white people as grays? But that was so very long ago, before these two were born. Christ, before even Middleton himself was born…
“I’m not playing,” he said.
“All I mean-”
“Turn on the damn radio!”
Marcus’s hand shot toward the dash and punched the On button. Middleton recoiled at the instant blast of menace, a lilting growl of bragging bullshit warring with a jackhammer bass track and droning synthesized mush, all inflicted at ear-splitting volume.
“Change the station.”
“Whoa, mack, you got a serious pushy streak.”
“Change the station. Now!”
Marcus huffed but obliged, fiddling through crackling sheets of white noise, punctuated by sudden twangy cries, garbled Bible-drunk voices…
Traci said, “You need to put a chill on, Mr. Gray. Break it back, let the little shit slide.”
Suddenly, the reedy cry of woodwinds broke through. A soprano lilting through a familiar bar of haunting Sprechstimme. Middleton shot forward.
“There! Stop!”
Marcus looked like he’d been told to swallow a toad. “This?”
“Tune it in. Get rid of the static.”
“No, no. Taking us prisoner, that’s wack enough. You can’t torture us too.”
“Tune it in!”
The piece was Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg, 21 songs scored for five musicians on eight instruments, plus voice, with the lyrics half-sung, half-spoken, the first twelve-tone masterpiece of the 20th century. Incomprehensible noise to most people, but not to Middleton, not to anyone who understood, who could hear in it the last throes of Romanticism, with echoes of not just Mahler and Strauss, but Bach.
“Maybe you’re the one who should chill,” Middleton said, easing back in his seat a little. “You think your generation invented rap or hip-hop? Spoken word with musical background goes back over four hundred years. It’s called recitatif. Here, though, Schoenberg’s notes are scored, but in speech we never stay on a single pitch, our voices glide on and off a tone. That’s what the soprano’s doing. It’s left entirely up to her how she does it. Meanwhile, the instruments are conjuring up the landscape: there’s moonlight, insanity, blood… ”
Traci was leaning ever so slightly toward the speaker, intrigued now.
Eyeing the Beretta with a newfound skepticism, Marcus said, “You a professor?”
“Sshhh.” It was Traci. The gaunt young coffee-skinned woman with glowing eyes and mussed Afro was rapt. “Act like you got some sense.”
