Hotel. A white BMW sat under a flickering streetlamp, parked where it could easily be seen. About 100 feet to the south, tucked into the shade of an old oak, was a charcoal sedan, its hood glittering with raindrops, its side windows fogged: Connolly’s.
Vukasin was hidden in the generous gray shadows of a nearby building, watching her. He would not move until she did.
Nine minutes later, he was rewarded for his patience. An almost undetectable shift of the undercarriage told him she had readjusted to a more comfortable position. He was certain she had been in the sedan’s quiet and security for too long.
Though he rather it had been Middleton or Faust behind the wheel, or even Kaminski, it mattered little who was in the car. It could be an innocent soul waiting for a lover, or a fool sleeping off the last taste of cheap whiskey. A minor distraction, at best. But one that had to be dealt with. He could not afford to be seen.
Vukasin slipped from his invisibility and made his way toward the sedan. He added a stagger to his walk and a slump to his shoulders to simulate the last journey of a drunk’s long night.
The sedan jostled again as Vukasin neared it, the occupant coming to life. He could not see inside as he passed, but he heard the faint creak of wet glass moving as the occupant cracked the window a sliver to see who was passing.
He decided to play.
He ambled back to the sedan, arms spread. “Good evening, kind sir, could you spare a few dollars and direct me to the nearest bus line?”
“Go away,” Connolly said, her thoughts on Middleton and the manuscript.
Vukasin moved closer. “I am harmless, I assure you,” he said.
“Get the fuck out of here. Go.”
The window slipped lower, exposing a pale feminine face, her hair brassy and close-cropped. “I’m a cop,” she said. “Now get moving.”
“So maybe you’d like a drink?” he asked, as he reached into his pocket. “I have a bottle of Russkaya-”
He saw something begin to crystallize in her eyes as he started to withdraw the automatic.
She knows, he thought, with a smile. She knows I’m not American and not a drunk just passing by.
Her eyes widened in complete understanding.
She knew who he was.
And when she saw the metallic glint of the Glock leveled at her head, she knew she was about to die.
He fired, the silenced shot sounding like no more than a small but powerful puff of hot air on the empty street.
15
They used the Harbor Court’s main street door. Faust led the way to it and pulled it and let Middleton walk through first. Good manners, etiquette, and a clear semaphore signal to the hotel’s front-of-house staff: I’m a guest and this guy is with me. A literal embrace, one hand holding the door and the other shepherding Middleton inside. A commonplace dynamic, repeated at the hotel’s entrance a thousand times a day. The staff looked up, understood, glanced away.
Vukasin didn’t glance away. From 40 yards his gaze followed both men to the elevator bank.
The elevator was smooth but slow, tuned for a low-rise building. Faust got out first, because Middleton wouldn’t know which way to turn. Faust held his arms at a right angle, like a traffic cop, blocking right, pointing left. Middleton walked ahead. Thick carpet, quiet air. The muffled sound of a piano. A bright tone and a fast, light action. A Yamaha or a Kawai, Middleton thought. A grand, but not a European heavyweight. A Japanese baby, cross-strung. Light in the bass, tinkly in the treble. A D-minor obbligato was being played confidently with the left hand, and a hesitant melody was being played with the right, in the style of Mozart. But not Mozart, Middleton thought. Certainly no Mozart he had ever heard before. Sight-read, which might explain the hesitancy. Perhaps a pastiche. Or an academic illustration, to demonstrate the standard musicological theory that Mozart bridged the gap between the classical composers and the romantics. The melody seemed to be saying: See? We start with Bach, and 200 years later we get to Beethoven.
The sound got louder but no clearer as they walked. Faust eased ahead and repeated his traffic-cop routine outside a door, blocking the corridor, corralling Middleton to a stop. Faust took a key card from his pocket. It bottomed in the slot, a red light turned green, and the mechanism clicked.
Faust said, “After you.”
Middleton turned the handle before the light clicked red again. Bright piano sound washed out at him. The melody again, started over from the top, played this time with confidence, its architecture now fully diagrammed, its structure understood.
But still not Mozart.
Middleton stepped inside and saw a suite, luxurious but not traditional. A lean, bearded man in a chair by the door, with a gun in his hand. His nickname, it turned out, was Nacho. A Yamaha baby grand, with a girl at the keyboard. Manuscript pages laid out left-to-right in front of her on the piano’s lid. The girl was thin. She had dark hair and a pinched Eastern European face full of a thousand sorrows. The manuscript looked to be a handwritten original. Old foxed paper, untidy notations, faded ink.
The girl stopped playing. Middleton’s mind filled in what would come next, automatically, to the end of the phrase. Faust stepped in behind Middleton and closed the door. The room went quiet. Faust ignored the man in the chair. He walked straight to the piano and gathered the manuscript pages and butted them together and left them in a tidy pile on a credenza. Then he stepped back and closed the lid on the piano’s keyboard, gently, giving the girl time to remove her fingers. He said, “Time for business. We have a Chopin manuscript.”
“Forged and faked,” Middleton said.
“Indeed,” Faust said. “And missing a page, I think. Would you agree?”
Middleton nodded. “The end of the first movement. Possibly not a whole page. Maybe just sixteen bars or less.”
“How many notes?”
“That’s an impossible question. It’s a concerto. A dozen instruments, sixteen bars, there could be hundreds of notes.”
“The solo instrument,” Faust said. “The theme. Ignore the rest. How many notes?”
Middleton shrugged. “Forty, maybe? A statement, a restatement, a resolution. But it’s still an impossible question. It isn’t Chopin. It’s somebody pretending to be Chopin.”
Faust said, “I think that helps us. We have to second-guess a secondguesser. It’s about what’s plausible.”
“We can’t compose the end of something that didn’t exist in the first place.”
Faust opened his jacket and took a folded glassine envelope from the inside pocket. Unfolded it and smoothed it. Behind the milky acetate was a single sheet of paper. It had been torn out of a reporter’s note pad. It was speckled with dried brown bloodstains. Small droplets. Not arterial spray. Just the kind of spatter that comes from small knife wounds, or heavy blows to a face. Under the stains the paper had been ruled by hand into music staves. Five lines, four spaces, repeated four times. A treble clef. E-G-B-D-F. Every Good Boy Deserves Favor. A 4/4 time signature. Sixteen measures. A melody, sketched in with deft untidy strokes of a pen.
Faust laid the page in front of the girl, on the piano’s lid, where the Mozart had been. He said, “Suppose someone who had seen the missing page was asked to reproduce what had been there.”
The girl looked at the spatters of blood and said, “Asked?”
Faust said, “Required, then.”
The girl said, “My uncle wrote this.”
“You can tell?”
“It’s handwritten. Handwriting is handwriting, whether it’s words or musical notes.”
