The Chopin Manuscript: A Serial Thriller

Chapter Eight John Gilstrap

Felicia Kaminski had always loved the idea of airports. As a child in a family that never went anywhere, she used to envy the friends who would take their holidays in places that were far enough away to be flown to. Trains were a thrill in their own right, but only at airports did you find people who are going far enough away to actually change their lives. Having dreamed of the moment for so long, she was finally about to climb on her very first airplane — to fly to the United States. In first class, no less.

Fiumicino International Airport teemed with people as travelers mingled in their common mission to check in and navigate their way to their departure gates. Felicia Kaminski — no, Joanna Phelps; she might have to remember that — found herself distracted by one family in particular as a mother and father did their best to herd six children toward the security lines. It looked a lot like pushing water up hill. She found herself smiling.

Then she forced herself to concentrate. After this morning’s events, she needed to be vigilant. Clearly, she was a target, and if another attacker wanted to hurt her, she would most certainly be hurt. It helped that every 10th person in the airport was a carabinieri with a machine gun slung over his shoulder. It seemed to her like a very bad place to attempt murder.

The afternoon’s events were unfolding exactly as Faust had predicted. Freshly cleaned and redressed, he’d led her downstairs through the lobby of the hotel, where two Mercedes sedans stood waiting with their engines running. He ushered her to the first vehicle while he climbed into the back seat of the other. They’d pulled away from the curb together, but then split into different directions, her car going right while his went left, and she hadn’t seen any sign of him since.

“I understand that you haven’t traveled much,” her driver said in passable Polish. She couldn’t quite place the accent. “Do you know how the check-in process works?”

Kaminski hated the patronizing tone, but had to confess her ignorance. The driver — Peter, if he’d told her the truth — took her through the process step by step, from check-in at the ticket counter, to the passage through security, and on the boarding process itself. The only real surprise came from the requirement to take her shoes off to go through the metal detectors. She was well aware of the detectors themselves, of course, but it just hadn’t occurred to her that she would have to strip off articles of clothing.

“Are you going to walk through the process with me?” she’d asked when Peter had finished.

“No, Miss Phelps, I’m afraid that will not be possible. Security at the airport is very tight these days. I must stay with the car and drive away as soon as I drop you off. You will be on your own.”

“Where is Faust?”

Peter’s eyes found hers in the rearview mirror. For a long moment, he said nothing. “He will be where he needs to be at the correct time. What is most important is that you remember to show no sign of recognition if you see him again. Let him make that move.”

“I remember,” she said. I’m in no hurry to know him anyway.

Having arrived at the airport with nearly three hours to spare, Felicia moved quickly to get through the check-in process at the ticket counter, but then took her time heading for security. Befitting her first-class status, Faust had given her 300 U.S. dollars to fill her wallet, and she decided to put some of the windfall to good use at an airport coffee shop. She found a table at the edge of the concourse, one that offered a broad view of the security lines. It was a sea of people, shoulder to shoulder in a human corral.

On the far side of the crowd, she could see the first-class security area, where the crowds were much thinner and better organized, and that was where she concentrated her attention. It was there that she predicted that things were about to get exciting.

It took long enough that she had to order a second espresso — surrendering herself to the inevitability of being wide-eyed all night — but after 45 minutes, she saw what she’d been waiting for. Faust finally entered the line. In his business attire, he looked completely at home among the other wealthy travelers.

From 15 meters away, she watched as the man who’d saved her life shrugged out of his suit jacket and stepped out of his shoes. He placed his briefcase on the belt for the x-ray machine, then stepped through the narrow archway of the metal detector.

Kaminski’s heart hammered against her ribs as she began to wonder if something had gone wrong. There should be a reaction by now. There should—

Suddenly, an alarm erupted and a red light strobed urgently over the security checkpoint. It was the kind of noise and light that guaranteed attention and made people instinctively want to run away. All except for the carabinieri, that is, who swarmed from all over the concourse to respond to the threat.

Biting the inside of her cheek to stifle any sign of the satisfied smile that might draw attention to her, Kaminski pushed away from the table and started walking toward the taxi stands at the front of the airport. Before that, she needed to find a cambio, where she could convert her windfall of U.S. dollars into more readily spent euros. She knew she had time — Faust would be busy with the carabinieri for at least a couple of hours, she imagined — and she hoped that even a short delay would provide enough time for her to do what she needed to do and then disappear.

Meanwhile, the officials at the airport would be turning Faust’s luggage inside out as they looked for the pistol that showed up so clearly in the x-ray. Ultimately, probably in fairly short order, they’d find the source of their alarm.

She wondered if any of them would even smile when they realized that they’d mobilized dozens of policia because a businessman had covered a water pistol with a foil wrapper and stuffed it in one of the file pockets of his brief case.

Felicia Kaminski left the airport with none of her new clothes — none but what she wore, that is. Her fancy new suitcase was somewhere in the bowels of the airport, already checked and on its way to the aircraft that would dead-head it to New York. She kept the money too, but beyond that, she carried only those items that were rightfully hers — her backpack and her violin.

She had the taxi drop her at the foot of Via dei Polacchi, and she added a generous tip to the fare. What was the point of a windfall if it couldn’t be shared with others? The driver thanked her effusively and offered three times to wait for her while she ran whatever errand she was on, but after she’d steadfastly refused, he finally understood that her insistent “no” meant just that, and he drove on.

She waited until the taxi was out of sight around the corner before she started walking up the hill. She’d never actually visited the shop she was looking for — La Musica — but she’d sipped coffee with Abe Nowakowski, the proprietor, several times since she’d arrived in Rome. Signor Abe and her uncle had shared a childhood, it turned out, living only a few houses away from each other in the old country. Uncle Henryk had asked his friend to look in on her from time to time. During their last meeting, at a cafe near the Pantheon, only a few dozen meters from the spot where she had first encountered the man who called himself Faust, Abe’s demeanor had been different than it had been before. His easy humor seemed clouded by something dark.

During one of her visits, she asked, “Are you feeling all right?”

He’d smiled, but it wasn’t convincing. “I am just getting old, that is all,” he said. He paused a moment before adding, “I am concerned for you, Felicia.”

So that was it. “I enjoy my life, Signor Abe. I understand that you worry about me, but as I’ve told you before—”

He cut her off with a dismissive flick of his hand. “I know what you have to say, so let’s pretend that you have already said it and move on. I want you to promise me something.”

She cocked her head, waiting. When dealing with her uncle’s generation, it never paid to make a promise before all terms had been revealed.

“If anything happens to you, if ever you are in any trouble, I want you to come to me.”

Looking back on the conversation now, she wondered if Signor Abe hadn’t known something. Even at the time, she’d felt her pulse quicken with his sense of urgent mystery.

He’d read her expression exactly, and hurried to soothe her. “I don’t mean to frighten you,” he’d said. “As I get older I sometimes worry about things that perhaps I shouldn’t. But if there ever comes a time when you feel as if you are in danger — or even if there comes a time when you merely feel lonely or hungry for some of my fettuccini — I want you to promise that you will come by the shop. I worry that I am not showing you the hospitality that I should. I don’t want to disappoint my dear friend Henryk.”

That conversation had taken place only two weeks ago. Now, as she walked purposefully up the hill, she forced her mind to think of music. If she could bridge the synapses of her brain with triplettes and chromatic scales, maybe there would be no room left for her fear. No room left for the looming grief that awaited her when she finally confronted the fact of her uncle’s death.

She walked faster. The increased tempo brought to her imagination the sound of American bluegrass music — fiddle music instead of the violin — a music form that she’d never taken seriously until she’d listened to a CD that featured Yo Yo Ma bringing sounds out of his cello that she had never heard before. She heard alternating strains of joy and melancholy. She’d tried to recreate the sounds in her own violin, but could never quite discover them. It was if those particular strands of musical DNA could not be found in an instrument played by a Polish girl whose childhood was steeped in classical training.

Kaminski saw the sign for La Musica from a block away, and instantly wished that the walk could have been longer. With a few more steps, perhaps she could have found the emotional strength she craved, the strength she needed before breaking terrible news to such a nice man. But it was not to be. She had arrived, and she could think of no reason not to enter the shop.

Passing across the threshold was like stepping backward a hundred years. Narrow, dark and deep, the shop reminded her of a cave; where there would be bats, dozens of violins and violas and cellos hung instead from the ceiling, each of them glimmering as if they’d been freshly dusted. Double basses lined the left hand wall, and along the right, countless pages of sheet music peeked out from above their wooden racks. At the very back of the store…

Actually, she couldn’t see the back of the store through the shadows that cloaked it.

“Felicia?”

The voice came from behind her — from the cash register she had not seen, hidden away as it was around the corner at the very front of the store. She instantly recognized the heavily accented voice as that of Signor Abe, but she jumped anyway as she whirled to look at him.

“Felicia, what’s wrong?” Even as he spoke, he was on his way around to the front of the tiny counter, moving as quickly as his arthritic hips would allow him. “What has happened?”

The flood of emotion hit out of nowhere, all at once. “Uncle Henryk is dead,” she managed to say, but her next words were lost in her sobs.

Abe Nowakowski locked the door to his shop at mid-day, something he’d never done before, and helped his beautiful young friend up the back steps to his flat on the second floor. There he fixed her some tea and listened to her story.

Kaminski hated herself for losing control of her emotions this way, but there were times in the next hour when she feared that her tears would never stop. They did, of course, eventually, but she sensed that Signor Abe would have sat with her for as long as he needed to.

“These things take time,” he said. He was a little man, a round man, with leathery skin and thick white hair that could never be tamed by a comb. When he spoke softly like this, his normally strong voice grew raspy. “I lost my Maria six years ago now, and while sometimes it feels as though the hole in my heart has healed, there are days when the pain is as raw as the day she died. I’ve come to think of the pain as proof that I loved her as much as I told her I did.”

The tea was awful, overly strong and overly sweet. “Did you know this might happen to my uncle, Signor Abe?” she asked.

The question seemed to startle the old man.

“The other day, when we met for coffee, you asked me to make a promise. I made it, and here I am. But I was wondering…”

She let her voice trail as Signor Abe let his gaze fall to his lap. The body language answered her question; now she hoped that he wouldn’t dishonor her uncle’s memory with a transparent lie to protect her feelings.

“I had an inkling, yes,” he said. “Your uncle called me shortly before you and I met. He seemed…agitated. He spoke hurriedly, as if he were trying to get his message out before he could be interrupted. Or perhaps before he could change his mind.” Nowakowski took a deep breath and let it go slowly. When he resumed speaking, his rasp had deepened. “He told me that he would be sending me a package for safe keeping. He said that it would be too dangerous for him to have the package with him, and that by sending it to me it would truly be safe.”

“Did the package come?”

He ignored the interruption. “I of course agreed, but then he called the very next day. This time, he was clearly frightened. He said that he hadn’t thought things through very clearly before he mailed it, and he was terrified that people might think that he had sent it to you instead. It’s what people would naturally think of anything he sent to Rome. He asked me to check in with you more frequently, and to try and find out if you had been in any danger. He wanted me to do this without alarming you, of course.”

“What kind of danger?”

The old man rose from the table to return to the stove. “Before today, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. I think now we know. More tea, Felicia?”

She recoiled from the thought and tried to cover the reaction with, “I’ve been drinking coffee all day. I don’t need my hands to shake more than they already do.”

Nowakowski gave a knowing smile and limped back to the table. “Yes, I’ve been told that I make it a bit too strong. One of the hazards of not having very many guests, I suppose.”

“About the package,” she pressed. “Did you ever receive it?”

“I did.” He spoke the words as if his explanation was complete.

“What was it?”

Signor Abe’s gaze dropped again. Kaminski realized that this was his habit when he was embarrassed. “Dear Henryk asked me specifically not to open the package when it arrived. He told me that it would arrive double-wrapped, and that if anything ever happened to him, I was to open only the outer wrapping and then contact the name I found on the card taped to the inner wrapping.”

“But you opened it anyway,” she said, connecting the dots.

“Loneliness breeds weakness and curiosity,” he replied sadly. “And I’m afraid that I have been particularly lonely.”

“So what was in it?” She found the old man’s embarrassment charming, but she’d have ripped it open in a second if she’d have been in his place. No reason for shame there.

He thought for a moment, and then rose again from his chair. He disappeared into what must have been the bedroom, and then returned less than a minute later with a thick, mangled envelope. “I tried to re-wrap it,” he confessed, “but I’m afraid I made something of a mess.”

The envelope was a large one, more suitable to construction blueprints than a letter. He handled the package gently, with reverence, almost, as he placed it onto the table between them. When Felicia reached toward it, he shooed her hands away.

“Please,” he said curtly. “Allow me to do this.”

She folded her hands on her lap.

The old man wiped his hands aggressively with a napkin, and then carefully slid the contents into the daylight.

Kaminski leaned closer. She saw a stack of papers. Her first impression was that it was very old — yellow with the kinds of marks that could only be made with an old style ink pen. As more of the contents were revealed, she squinted and leaned even closer. “It’s a musical score,” she said, recognizing the rows of staves.

Nowakowski allowed himself a conspiratorial smile. “Much more than that,” he said. He gently placed it on top of the envelope and turned it so that she could better read his treasure.

My God. Could it be what she thought? There was no mistaking the long runs of sixteenth notes and the other musical notations, but as exotic as they looked written by hand, her eyes were drawn to the written signature at the top. In her circles, there was no more famous a signature.

“Mozart?” she gasped.

“An original,” he beamed. “Or at least I think it is.”

She didn’t know what to say. “It must be worth a fortune.”

“Three fortunes,” he corrected. “Priceless, I would think. It’s clearly a piano concerto, but I’ve searched the Koechel Catalogue, and this isn’t there. I think this is an undiscovered work.”

She recognized the Koechel Catalogue as the internationally recognized indexer of Mozart’s myriad compositions. If Signor Abe was right, then there truly was no way to estimate the value of the manuscript. “This is fabulous,” she said. “But I don’t understand why it frightened Uncle Henryk. This could have answered all of his wildest dreams. Honestly, this is the kind of discovery that he would have given anything to make. Why would he keep it a secret? Why would he send it away?”

“All very good questions,” Nowakowski agreed. “But I have an even bigger one.”

She waited for it while the old man slid the inner envelope out from under the manuscript. She saw a name, but there was no address.

He said, “Who is this Harold Middleton and how are we supposed to find him?”