The Chopin Manuscript: A Serial Thriller

Chapter Fifteen Lee Child

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 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.”

Middleton said, “Mozart didn’t write cadenzas.”

Kaminski nodded. “Exactly. He didn’t write twenty-eight piano concertos, either. The cadenza is part of the message. Same board, same game.”

Faust asked, “Which first?”

“Mozart. He was before Chopin.”

“Then how many notes?”

“The two things together, a couple hundred in total, maybe.”

“Still not enough. And you can’t spell stuff out using only A through G. Especially not in German.”

“There are sharps and flats. The Mozart is in D-minor.”

“You can’t sharpen and flatten letters of the alphabet.”

“Numbers,” Middleton said. “It’s not letters of the alphabet. It’s numbers.”

“One for A, two for B? That’s still not enough. This thing is complex.”

“Not one for A,” Middleton said. “Concert pitch. The A above middle C is 440 cycles per second. Each note has a specific frequency. Sharps and flats, equally. A couple hundred notes would yield eighty-thousand digits. Like a bar code. Eighty-thousand digits would yield all the information you want.”

Faust asked, “How do we work it out?”

“With a calculator,” Middleton said. “On the treble stave the second space up is the A above middle C. That’s 440 cycles. An octave higher is the first overtone, or the second harmonic, 880 cycles. An octave lower is 220 cycles. We can work out the intervals in between. We’ll probably get a bunch of decimal places, which is even better. The more digits, the more information.”

Faust nodded. Nothing in his face. He retrieved the Mozart manuscript from the credenza and butted it together with the smeared page in the glassine envelope. Clamped the stack under his arm and nodded to Nacho. Then he looked at Kaminski and Middleton and suddenly leapt forward, ripping the silenced Glock from her hand.

He said, “I wasn’t entirely honest before. I didn’t hire Vukasin. We were both hired by someone else. For the same purpose. Which isn’t entirely benevolent, I’m afraid. We have ricin, and everything else we need. But we couldn’t stabilize the mixture. Now we can, thanks to your keen insights. For which we thank you. We’ll express our thanks practically — with mercy. Exactly ten minutes from now, when I’m safely away, Nacho will shoot you both in the head. Fast and painless, I promise.”

The gun in Nacho’s hand came up and rested level, steady as a rock. He was back in his chair, solidly between Middleton and the door. Kaminski gasped and caught Middleton’s arm. Faust smiled once, and his blue eyes twinkled, and he let himself out.

Ten minutes. A long time, or a short time, depending on the circumstances. Ten minutes in a line at the post office seems like an eternity. The last 10 minutes of your life seems like a blink of an eye. Nacho didn’t move a muscle. He was like a statue, except that the muzzle of his gun moved to track every millimetric move that Middleton or Kaminski made, and except that about once every 90 seconds he glanced at his watch.

He took his final look at the time and raised his gun a little higher. Head height, not gut height. His finger whitened on the trigger.

Then the door opened.

Jack Perez stepped into the room.

Nacho turned toward him. Said, “What—”

Perez raised his gun and shot Nacho in the face. No silencer. The noise was catastrophic. They left by the fire stairs, in a big hurry.

Ten minutes later they were in an Inner Harbor diner and Perez was saying, “So basically you told him everything?”

Kaminski nodded her head very ruefully and said, “Yes.”

Middleton shook his head very definitively and said, “No.”

“So which is it?” Perez said. “Yes or no?”

“No,” Middleton said. “But only inadvertently. I made a couple of mistakes. I guess I wasn’t thinking too straight.”

“What mistakes?”

“Concert pitch is a fairly recent convention. Like international time zones. The idea that the A above middle C should be tuned to 440 cycles started way after both Mozart and Chopin were around. Back in the day the tunings across Europe varied a lot, and not just from country to country or time to time. Pitch could vary even within the same city. The pitch used for an English cathedral organ in the 1600s could be as much as five semitones lower than the harpsichord in the bishop’s house next door. The variations could be huge. There’s a pitch pipe from 1720 that plays the A above middle C at 380 cycles, and Bach’s organs in Germany played A at 480 cycles. The A on the pitch pipe would have been an F on the organs. We’ve got a couple of Handel’s tuning forks, too. One plays A at 422 cycles and the other at 409.”

Perez said, “So?”

“So Faust’s calculations will most likely come out meaningless.”

“Unless?”

“Unless he figures out a valid base number for A.”

“Which would be what?”

“428 would be my guess. Plausible for the period, and the clue is right there in the Mozart. The 28th piano concerto, which he never got to. The message was hidden in the cadenza. If the 28 wasn’t supposed to mean something in itself, they could have written a bogus cadenza into any of the first twenty-seven real concertos.”

“Faust will figure that out. When all else fails. He’s got the Mozart manuscript.”

“Even so,” Middleton said. He turned to Kaminski. “Your uncle would have been ashamed of me. I didn’t account for the tempering. He would have. He was a great piano tuner.”

Perez asked, “What the hell is tempering?”

Middleton said, “Music isn’t math. If you start with A at 440 cycles and move upward at intervals that the math tells you are correct, you’ll be out of tune within an octave. You have to nudge and fudge along the way. By ear. You have to do what your ear tells you is right, even if the numbers say you’re wrong. Bach understood. That’s what The Well-Tempered Klavier is all about. He had his own scheme. His original title page had a handwritten drawing on it. It was assumed for centuries that it was just decoration, a doodle really, but now people think it was a diagram about how to temper a keyboard so it sounds perfect.”

Perez took out a pen and did a rapid calculation on a napkin. “So what are you saying? If A is 440, B isn’t 495?”

“Not exactly, no.”

“So what is it?”

“493, maybe.”

“Who would know? A piano tuner?”

“A piano tuner would feel it. He wouldn’t know it.”

“So how did these Nazi chemists encode it?”

“With a well-tuned piano, and a microphone, and an oscilloscope.”

“Is that the only way?”

“Not now. Now it’s much easier. You could head down to Radio Shack and buy a digital keyboard and a MIDI interface. You could tune the keyboard down to A equals 428, and play scales, and read the numbers right off the LED window.”

Perez nodded.

And sat back.

And smiled.