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 second-guesser. 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.”
Middleton said, “Your uncle?”
Faust said, “This is Felicia Kaminski. Temporarily going as Joanna Phelps, but she’s Henryk Jedynak’s niece. Or, she was.” Then he pointed at Middleton and addressed the girl and said, “And this is Colonel Harold Middleton. He saw your uncle in Warsaw. Your uncle was a brave man. He stole a page. He knew what was at stake. But he didn’t get away with it.”
“Who did this to him?”
“We’ll get to that. First we need to know if he put the truth on paper.” Faust took out the rest of the first-movement manuscript and handed it to the girl. She spread it out in sequence. She followed the melody with her finger, humming silently. She raised the piano’s lid again and picked out phrases on the keys, haltingly. She jumped to the bloodstained page and continued. Middleton nodded to himself. He heard continuity, logic, sense.
Until the last measure.
The last measure was where the movement should have come home to rest, with a whole note that settled back to the root of the native key, with calm and implacable inevitability. But it didn’t. Instead it hung suspended in midair with an absurd discordant trill, sixteenth notes battling it out through the whole of the bar, a dense black mess on the page, a harsh beating pulse in the room.
The girl said, “The last bar can’t be right.”
Faust said, “Apparently.”
The girl played the trill again, faster. Said, “OK, now I see.”
“See what?”
“The two notes are discordant. Play them fast enough, and the intermodulation between them implies a third note that isn’t actually there. But you can kind of hear it. And it’s the right note. It would be very obvious on a violin.”
Middleton said, “Chopin didn’t write like that.”
The girl said, “I know.”
Faust asked, “What’s the implied note?”
The girl played the trill for half a bar and then stabbed a key in between and a pure tone rang out, sweet and correct and reassuring. She said, “Two notes.”
Faust said, “Sounds like one to me.”
“The last note of this movement and the first of the next. That’s Chopin. Who did this to my uncle?”
Faust didn’t answer, because right then the door opened and Vukasin walked in. He had a silenced Glock held down by his thigh and from six feet away Middleton could smell that it had been used, and recently. Faust said, “We’re all here.” He made the formal introductions, one to the other, Vukasin, Middleton, Nacho, Kaminski. He let his gaze rest on Kaminski and said, “Colonel Middleton killed your uncle. He tortured that page out of him and then cut his throat. In Warsaw, after their lunch.”
“Not true,” Middleton said.
“True,” Vukasin said. “I saw him leave. I went in and found the body. Three bodies. Two bystanders got in the way, apparently.”
Faust stepped aside as Nacho took Middleton’s arms and pinned him. Vukasin raised the silenced Glock and pointed it at Middleton’s face. Then Vukasin lowered the gun again and reversed it in his hand and offered it butt-first to the girl. Said, “Your uncle. Your job, if you want it.”
The girl got up off the piano stool and stepped around the end of the keyboard and came forward. Took the gun from Vukasin, who said, “It’s ready to go. No safety on a Glock. Just point and shoot, like a cheap camera. There won’t be much noise.”
Then he stood off to her left. She raised the gun and aimed it where he had aimed it, at the bridge of Middleton’s nose. The muzzle wavered a little, in small jerky circles. With the sound suppressor it was a long and heavy weapon.
Middleton said, “They’re lying.”
The girl nodded.
“I know,” she said.
She turned to her left, twisting from the waist, and shot Vukasin in the face. He had been right. There wasn’t much noise. Just a bang like a heavy book being slammed on a table, and a wet crunch as the bullet hit home, and the soft tumble of a body falling on thick carpet. Then nothing, just the stink of gunpowder and pooling blood.
The girl twisted back, and lined up on Faust.
“Middleton understands music,” she said. “I can see that from here. He wouldn’t need to torture that melody out of anyone. It was predictable. Like night follows day.”
Faust said, “I didn’t know.”
“The two discordant notes,” the girl said. “Making a phantom third. My uncle always called it a wolf tone. And Vukasin means wolf, in Polish. It was a coded message. He was naming his killer.”
“I didn’t know,” Faust said again. “I swear.”
“Talk.”
“I hired Vukasin. Someone else must have gotten to him. Hired him out from under me. He was double crossing me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. I swear. And we can’t waste time on this. The music holds more code than who killed your uncle.”
“He’s right, Felicia,” Middleton said. “First things first. It’s about nerve gas. It could make 9/11 look like a day at the beach.”
“And it’s coming soon,” Faust said.
Kaminski nodded.
“Days away,” she said.
She lowered the gun.
“Forty notes,” Faust said. “Forty letters between A and G. It’s not enough.”
“Add in the Mozart cadenza,” Kaminski said. “That’s bullshit too.”