The Chopin Manuscript: A Serial Thriller

Chapter Ten Jim Fusilli

Leonora Tesla stepped out of the yellow taxi on the busy northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and 35^th Street, and hustled into Macy’s. She emerged with her hair trimmed short and punked, wearing a black button-down blouse with the collar curled high, black slacks and black flats — in many ways, the opposite of what she wore 24 hours earlier when she killed Günter Schmidt. A new black-leather shoulder bag, tucked tight under her arm, held a change of underwear and what remained from the moment she steered Schmidt’s body toward the ravaging hyenas down in the wadi: her sunglasses, cash, credit cards and passport, her portfolio and her most valued possession, her fully loaded iPod, a gift from Harold Middleton.

She called the Human Rights Observer from a payphone in Herald Square. An intern answered and told her Val Brocco hadn’t come in. A flu, she reported; his message said he intended to spend a second day in bed. Tesla decided against giving her name and demanding his latest cell number, consoling herself with the thought that Brocco’s bordering-on-obsessive sense of precaution might serve him well. It’d better: To find Middleton, they’d tried to kill her, sending an agent to Namibia for the task. No doubt then already had at least one agent in metro D.C., where Middleton and Brocco were based.

Next, from the lobby of Madison Square Garden, she tried Jean-Marc Lespasse in Parkwood, North Carolina. Mr. Lespasse, she was told, was no longer with TDD — Technologie de Demain, the company he founded. And, no, the receptionist added tersely, there’s no forwarding information. Sure enough, the last cell number Tesla had for Lespasse was no longer active.

Downstairs into Penn Station, Tesla paid cash for a one-way ticket on the Acela Express to Washington’s Union Station, though she planned to get off in Delaware. Checking the overhead Departure board, she saw she had enough time to run to the newsstand for a pre-paid cell phone and an array of domestic and international newspapers for the two-hour train ride to Wilmington.

As she gathered her change, she looked up. There, on a TV above a rack of batteries and disposable cameras, was a grainy video of a gun battle at Dulles Airport. “Two Cops Killed,” the zipper reported.

“Harold,” she said, the word escaping before she realized it had.

She stared at the soundless newscast. The zipper under the video now told her the gunman hadn’t yet been found.

For some reason, she took it as verification that he was still alive.

She wondered if the same could be said of Lespasse and, maybe, Brocco.

Twelve hours earlier, Harold Middleton left the St. Regis Hotel with the sadist Eleana Soberski on his arm and a Zastava P25 in his ribs. As he and Soberski walked west along K Street, they seemed like the kind of couple not unknown in the neighborhood: a disheveled middle-aged man in a business suit, briefcase swinging at the end of his fist, and an upscale hooker exuding cold impenetrability. Except they were moving away from a four-star hotel rather than toward one for a $500 an hour “date.”

Middleton listened for police cruisers’ sirens — no doubt the cowering bartender had called the D.C. police who, in turn, would notify the FBI. Lurching along, he wondered if he’d be saved by the people he’d been trying to avoid.

He said, “Where—”

The gun nozzle raked his ribs.

“Farragut Square,” Soberski replied, “the statue. Charlotte is there.”

Middleton stumbled, but Soberski kept him upright.

“The briefcase,” he said.

“Yes, the briefcase,” Soberski replied. “Of course, the briefcase. But the briefcase is not enough.”

Middleton glanced around. K Street was empty, the sidewalks rolled up now that the dinner hour was through. In New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Krakow, Warsaw, there’d be dozens of people enjoying the night air, on their way to a new hot spot, their chatter and laughter a giddy prelude to what’s next. In Washington, you could hear the joyless scrape of the guards’ shoes outside Lafayette Park and the White House two blocks away.

“What do you mean ‘not enough’?” Middleton asked as they turned north on 16^th Street.

“To me, a piece of paper.”

“My daughter—”

“Of course you would trade your Chopin for your daughter. But what else?”

They stood at the corner of Connecticut Avenue, pausing as a few taxis headed east. As Middleton caught his breath, he finally heard the wail of sirens, further off than he’d hoped, but drawing nearer.

“There’s nothing else,” he said. Fatigue clouded his thoughts. The men he’d shot in the bar were after the Chopin manuscript, weren’t they?

“Colonel Middleton,” she replied with a wry laugh. “Let’s not be silly.”

“But I don’t know what you want.”

She jabbed the gun deeper into his ribcage. “Then we will leave it that I know what you want — Charlotte and your grandchild.”

Up ahead, the traffic light changed, and Soberski led Middleton off the curb and into the street.

“Anything,” he said, as they reached the yellow line.

“Where is Faust?”

A Mercedes sedan eased to the end of the short queue of waiting cars, blocking their path.

“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 café 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.”

She stared at him. In a blue-striped business suit, white shirt and a blue tie that matched the sky over the Atlantic, he was utterly composed as he stroked back his long black hair.

“You are very lucky you were not killed last night,” he told her.

“It wasn’t luck.” Her senses had begun to return.

“Well, you were hiding from me, I suppose, which is as good as hiding from them.”

“Tell me what’s going on.”

Faust looked around the rear of the jet. Stewardesses were in the back cabin, preparing the beverage service.

“Think, Joanna,” he said. “Your Signor Abe is alive, and so are you. I have the Mozart your uncle wanted to protect. Knowing that, tell me how you can believe I am the enemy.”

“You say nothing,” she said as she sat up, crossing her legs under her. “Niente. Nic. Nothing.”

“With the Mozart in my hand, I will go with you to meet Harold Middleton,” he replied. “The last man to see your uncle alive — except for the killer, that is.”

“You know who killed my uncle?”

Faust stood and held out his hand, beckoning her to leave the narrow row. “Of course,” he said, speaking in Polish. “The traitor Vukasin. The lowest of the lows. It’s a shame your uncle had to die in his presence.”

“Where is he?”

“Vukasin? No doubt he is within a kilometer or so of Colonel Middleton.”

Faust turned at the sound of the beverage cart rattling into the aisle.

“Come, Joanna,” he said, reaching for her. “They serve Champagne in first class. And Bavarian bleu cheese with a pumpkinseed bread — before lunch. I’m sure the effects of the panzanella and cantucci you had last night have long passed.”

Kaminski — no, Phelps — stood and wriggled her feet back into her worn shoes.

The arterial spray from Brocco’s severed throat had already dried on his heartbreakingly meager kitchen table, and rigor had begun to subside. Curiously, only his left hand was tied behind his back; his right hung limply, fingertips just above the blood- and urine-stained floor. Tesla saw the outline of a standard-sized reporter’s notebook on the table. Which meant the killer coerced Brocco to write something before he died. And getting Brocco to write something meant he was tortured before he was killed.

The killer also recorded Brocco’s voice — how else could a dead man call in sick after he died? Clever; a way to buy some time.

But what had he wanted Brocco to write? Tesla had been asked one pertinent question by Schmidt: Where is Harold Middleton? There are four immediate answers Brocco could have given: Middleton’s true location; a false one; a concession that he didn’t know where he was — as Tesla had — or a refusal to say anything. All but the first would lead to escalating pain and, if Brocco hadn’t known where his old boss was, he could have been compelled into speculation.

Tesla looked at her former colleague and, though his head was lolled back and his eyes opened wide and empty, she remembered tenderly his earnestness, his awkwardness around women, his passion for 18^th century classical music, his unassailable belief in the power of a free press.

She peered into his mouth and saw that his tongue had been cut out. Which explained the dried blood on his lips and chin, and also whatever he wrote on the notebook’s page.

Tesla went to the sink to retrieve a ratty dishtowel, and brought it to the old, newsprint-smudged yellow wall phone. She dialed 911, gave them Brocco’s address and then let the handset fall, the towel unraveling and landing on the worn linoleum.

As she turned to leave, she saw Brocco had five deadbolt locks on the door. His tattered khaki saddlebag, which hung from the knob, was empty.

The ultra-cautious Brocco had let the killer in. The killer stole Brocco’s laptop.

Brocco knew the killer, and the e-mail addresses stored in the laptop weren’t enough.

Tesla hustled down three flights of stairs and stepped into the late-afternoon sun. Shaken, her thoughts occupied by Brocco’s brutal murder as well as by speculation on where Harold might be, she momentarily abandoned the vigilance she applied when she stepped off the Acela in Wilmington, only to taxi to BWI, scurry through the airport as if she were late for a flight, and then pop back on Amtrak to Union Station, buying a ticket using a credit card issued to a woman who worked as an extra at Il Teatro Constanzi in Rome. Now as she hurried to catch the Georgia Avenue bus as it wheezed from its stop, she suddenly remembered, with a startling vividness, an unexpectedly satisfying afternoon she’d spent with Harold at a house on Lake Anna. Were she the type to blush, she would’ve.

Lake Anna, she told herself, unaware that she’d failed to see a man in an old sun-baked Citröen sitting directly across from Brocco’s shabby building. He wore a black stocking cap atop his shaved head; the cap covered a black-and-green tattoo of the jack of spades.

When Tesla leaped onto the bus, the man turned the ignition key, folded the switchblade he’d been using to clean his fingernails, and eased the car out of the spot.

He was waiting when, 33 minutes later, the woman in black pulled out of the Budget lot at Union Station in dark blue rental, sunglasses on her nose.

There was nothing else they could do. They had no choice.

The Mercedes had kicked up pebbles as Perez parked it at the side of the house. As Middleton hoisted his weary body from the car, Perez said, “Harry, no lights.”

“She’s sleeping?”

“Harry…”

No, of course not. Charley sent her husband to “Scotland” to rescue her father. If she wasn’t pregnant, she’d have been there herself.

Perez pulled the Python.

Groping through darkness, they’d stepped inside the house, and as Perez climbed the stairs to the bedrooms, Middleton put down his briefcase and headed through the kitchen to the living room.

Through the picture window, he saw his daughter’s silhouette on the porch. She was slumped in a wicker chair.

“Charley,” he’d whispered. Then he said her name again, louder this time.

When she didn’t respond, Middleton called to his son-in-law and raced outside.

Charley had his Browning A-Bolt across her lap.

Beneath the wicker chair was a tiny puddle of blood that had dripping from between her legs.

Middleton recoiled.

“Oh Jesus,” Perez said as he skidded to a halt. “Charley. Charley, wake up.”

At that moment, Middleton understood that his daughter had lost her baby. He felt a muted sense of relief: For a moment, seeing the blood, he thought they had gotten to her as they had Henryk Jedynak, Sylvia and others — and had tried to kill him at Dulles.

Kneeling, Perez said, “She needs—”

“Yeah, she does.”

And now Charlotte Perez was recovering at Martha Jefferson Hospital. A private room, IV drip in place, and her husband at her side, barely awake in a lounge chair with a .357 Magnum in his jacket side pocket.

Honey sunlight streamed through the windows. Treetops swayed in the gentle breeze.

Felt like hiding in plain sight to Harold Middleton.

To Jack Perez too.