The Violin Conspiracy(7)

Next was a 1986 Vitacek, gorgeous and showy, with a sharpness that cut through the air, commanded attention. Holding it felt wrong, though—it was beautifully balanced, but not balanced like his violin had been; it didn’t sit quite right under his jaw and looked slightly awkward as he stared down the fingerboard. The 2003 Henner was too tight. No way it would open up enough before the competition. The 1907 Gorman was not bright enough.

Finally, with most of the morning gone, Ray turned to Mischa. “You knew right off the bat which one I’d like,” he said.

The big man smiled, slid the Lehman across the counter. Ray picked it up.

“Great choice,” Nicole said. “You rocked that thing.”

Twenty minutes later, Ray, Janice, and Nicole headed back to the hotel, the Lehman slung securely over Ray’s shoulder in a black Tonareli case. He wasn’t ready to play it—not quite yet—but he felt centered again, having the weight at his back.



* * *



—

Bill Soames and the NYPD were tracking down “dozens” of leads, he told Ray back in the hotel. It sounded promising, but Ray didn’t want to let himself hope.

That afternoon, as they waited for further news, Tommy Reed, the Benson Insurance Company representative, phoned. Benson was offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the Strad’s recovery. In the meantime, they were sending their own investigator. Although it was too early for them to pay out—it would be at least six months, if not longer, before they closed the file and paid the $10 million—they’d already hired a private art detective, Alicia Childress, to investigate the theft. One of the top art recovery experts in the world, she’d cleared her schedule to get started immediately, given the ransom note’s tight deadline.

“That’s great,” Ray said. “She’s coming to New York?”

“Tomorrow. I’m warning you, she can be a little brusque,” Tommy Reed told him. “But she’s a total bulldog and smart as hell.”

The FBI. NYPD. Benson’s reward. Alicia Childress.

Ray was not alone.

All the world was marshaling.





Chapter 4


    Days 3–4: Alicia


Around nine the next morning, Nicole went shopping. “I’ll be back in an hour,” she said. “I’m just going to get stuff to eat so we don’t keep spending this insane money on room service. In the meantime, Mozart’s waiting on you.”

“What?” he said, looking up from the game he was playing on his cell phone. He’d slept a couple hours last night, but as soon as he awoke and the Strad’s loss drenched him, he lay under the covers unable to move, wishing that breathing was not automatic and that he could just stop. An hour later, when Nicole awoke, she immediately bounded into action—opening the curtains, ordering breakfast, forcing him to take a shower.

Now she was dressed, standing near the door, slipping into sneakers. “Time to practice.”

“I don’t really feel like it,” he said, but he knew she was right. The Lehman lay where he’d dropped it last night, propped in the corner of the bedroom. He could feel it pulsating there in the dark, the weight of it unfamiliar and a little uncomfortable, like an extra sack of potatoes in his shopping bag.

She gave him a long hug. After she’d gone, he trudged over to the Lehman and stared at the case, as if he expected it to apologize: Sorry, dude, but I’m all you’ve got.

So here’s what you do if you’re a Black guy trying to make it work in an unfamiliar world: You just put your head down and do the work. You do twice as much work as the white guy sitting next to you, and you do it twice as often, and you get half as far. But you do it. You just sit down and practice, over and over, and eventually someone turns to you and says, “Wow, you’re way better than I expected you’d be.” And all those extra hours of practice, they build themselves into the marrow of your bones, they electrify the nerve endings on the tips of your fingers, until they become habit. Now his bones were pricking and his fingertips were tingling, and even though picking up this unfamiliar instrument was the very last thing he ever wanted to do, he did it. He’d built that into himself—that discipline, that strength.

The Lehman felt light in his hands—too light. It was someone else’s violin. He’d have to relearn the Mozart, the Tchaikovsky, the Ravel, the Bach, and the other pieces, all with someone else’s violin.

But unexpectedly, the Lehman felt familiar to him. Like the violin he’d had back in high school: he’d made that one sound good, too. Playing that violin hadn’t been a betrayal—playing the Lehman wouldn’t be, either. Both were just tools. They were the means of making music.

He started with the Mozart, the Violin Sonata no. 21 in E Minor, trying Nicole’s suggestion of slowing down the second movement. Mozart had written it around the time that his mother had died, and the dark minor key reflected his mourning—and Ray’s, too. The piece felt like an appropriate way for Ray to begin. He tucked the Lehman under his jaw and imagined fat little cherubs tiptoeing across clouds, borne up by the music lingering below, jumping from cumulonimbus to cirrus, sunlight slanting through the blue. Nicole was right: slowing down the tempo meant that the cherubs didn’t have to zip around frenetically—they could glide from cloud to cloud, rolling in an upward current of warm air.