“Faust?”
“We are aware of your relationship with Faust,” Soberski said.
“‘We’? Who’s-”
Before Soberski could react, the driver of the Mercedes jutted his left arm out the open window and squeezed off a shot.
The lone round entered her face at an upward angle, penetrating a nasal bone and exploding the top of her head. Red mist filled the air above Middleton as Soberski collapsed in a heap, the Zastava tumbling from her hand.
“Leave it, Harry.”
As sirens blared, Middleton saw his son-in-law staring up at him from behind the wheel of his ex-wife’s sedan.
“Leave it and get in. Now Harry.”
Seconds later, Jack Perez twisted the wheel and skirted the queue, bursting across the intersection. He raced through a yellow light at George Washington University Hospital, intent on reaching Route 66 before the cops responded to another shooting, this one on Connecticut Avenue.
“Charley?” Middleton asked. The briefcase sat flat on his lap.
“Safe,” Perez said, tires squealing as he turned left.
“Sylvia?”
“No, Harry. They got Sylvia.”
“Where is-”
“The lake house, Harry. Charley’s at the lake house.”
Middleton wiped the side of his face, then stared as his bloody palm.
“Before we get there, Harry, you’d better tell me what’s going on.”
“They’re trying to kill me,” Middleton managed.
“Trying, but you’re not dead,” Perez said. “Sylvia, two guys in the bar, two cops at Dulles-”
“Three people in Warsaw,” Middleton heard himself say.
“And now the hooker.”
“She wasn’t-”
“That’s nine, and none of them is you.”
The ramp up ahead, and what little traffic there was flowed free.
“Jack, listen.”
Perez lifted his right hand from the wheel and silently told his father-in-law to keep still. “I just undid a lifetime’s worth of work reversing my family’s reputation for you, Harry.”
Middleton stayed quiet. He knew the Perez family had been connected in the ’60s to the Genovese crime family through Carlo Marcello, but Army Intel said young Jack had tested clean. He never mentioned the off-the-books background check to Charley.
“In return,” Perez continued, “you tell me what you’re into.”
“There’s a Chopin manuscript in here,” Middleton said, tapping the briefcase’s lid. “It’s believed to be part of a stash the Nazis squirreled away in a church in Kosovo.”
“‘Believed’?”
“It’s a forgery. It’s not in Chopin’s hand. It’s been folded, mistreated-”
“And yet somebody thinks it’s worth nine lives?”
Middleton remembered the bodies strewn inside St. Sophia, and the dying teenage girl’s desperate cry. “Green shirt, green shirt… please.”
“A lot more than nine, Jack.”
They were on the highway now and Perez slid the Mercedes into the fast lane, pushing it up to 70, the sedan riding on a cloud.
“So I’m telling you, Jack, that you and Charley ought to go on thinking I was in Krakow to authenticate-”
“A manuscript that some other expert will know is phony too. Suddenly, you, who’s catalogued scores by Bach, Handel, Wagner-”
“Mozart,” Middleton added.
“-are fooled by an obvious forgery.”
“Jack, what I’m trying to say-”
“And with Charley ready to pop, you go to Poland. That’s not you, Harry.”
Middleton watched the maple and poplars trees rush by at the roadside. “Are you going to toss that Python?”
Perez had been driving with the.357 pressed against the steering wheel. “Hell no. At least not until you’re straight with me.”
Middleton sighed. “Better you don’t know, Jack.”
“Why?” Perez said, peering into the rearview. “You think it’s about to get worse?”
Though toughened by a native cynicism and the hardscrabble life of a street musician, 19-year-old Felicia Kaminski was too young to understand that a sense of justice and a blush of optimism raised by an unexpected success were illusions, no more reliable than a promise or a kiss. Still energized by caffeine and the vision of Faust as he was hauled off by airport security, she’d headed from Signor Abe’s La Musica shop to an internet cafe near the Colosseum-another sign of her cleverness: She fled Via delle Botteghe Oscure and hadn’t gone to the Pantheon or north to the Trevi Fountain, areas Faust had scouted; nor did she return to her home in San Giovanni. She’d begun to feel she was living a clandestine life, a purposeful life, in memory of her uncle Henryk.
Within the first minute at the computer, she’d learned Harold Middleton taught “Masterpieces of Music” at the American University in Washington, D.C.
Which was 40 miles-40.23 miles, to be precise-from the address in Baltimore Faust said was to be her new home.
There was a 6:45 flight from Fiumicino through Frankfurt that would arrive in Washington at 12:45. She could exchange her first-class ticket for a coach seat, and still have enough euros-no, dollars-to take a taxi to the college. Even if Professor Middleton was off campus, she could arrange to bring him back-the words “I am Henryk Jedynak’s niece” would be enough to earn his attention.
She spent the night in a cheap flop on the Lido, resolute but feeling naked without her violin.
Remembering to use the Joanna Phelps passport Faust had given her, she swapped the ticket at the Alitalia courtesy desk in terminal B, sharing a conspiratorial smile with the young woman behind the counter when she explained that she didn’t want to fly with the vecchio sporcaccione-dirty old man-who’d bought it in her name. Incredibly, the woman directed her to retrieve her luggage that had been pulled from yesterday’s flight.
Her excuse played with security in baggage claim too, and she returned upstairs to a Lufthansa desk to turn over nearly 1,400 euros for a new ticket. She converted the remaining euros to dollars, paying an exchange rate worthy of a loan shark.
Three hours later, the ample jet was soaring above the Dolomiti on its way to its stopover in Germany. And miracle of miracles, as it departed Frankfurt, the two seats next to her in row 41 remained empty. She slipped off her shoes, grabbed a blanket from an overhead bin and stretched out, her last thoughts a prayer that Middleton would explain everything and a sense that she was about to discover that her uncle had died in defense of art and culture in the form of an unknown composition by Mozart.
She was in a deep sleep, dreaming of music, of a violin with quicksilver strings, of returning to the States-a glimpse of her father, who hadn’t appeared to her in years, and the broad-shouldered buildings of Chicago’s State Street-when she felt a tug on her toe. She awoke slowly, her mind unable to recall where she was. Opening her eyes, she scrambled to uncoil her body.
“Looking for this?”
Faust held up the oversized envelope that she had seen in Signor Abe’s shop. No doubt it contained the Mozart manuscript.
She rose up on her elbows and, to her surprise, spoke in Italian. “Che cosa avete fatto con l’anziano?”
He nudged into the seat on the aisle, and placed a forefinger on his chin. “Old man Nowakowski is fine,” he replied in English. “He may continue to be fine.”
