The Bach Manuscript

Chapter 45

Madison Cahill fell silent and looked away, her face flushing as though she thought she’d said too much.

Ben stared. ‘What did you just say?’

She waved a hand, flustered. ‘Forget it. It doesn’t concern you. I don’t think you’d be interested, anyway.’

Ben said, ‘Try this on for size. Four pages, bound together with wax. Handwritten music stave, the ink slightly faded after more than two and a half centuries of changing hands from one place to another, and maybe not always as well cared for as it should have been. The signature of Johann Sebastian Bach at the top of the front page. On the bottom corner of the front page, a funny-shaped stain that some people seem to think is coffee. Personally, I have my doubts, and I’m not the only one who feels that way. Some people seem to think the manuscript is a fake, although I have my doubts about that as well, and I’m definitely not the only one who feels that way about that either. It was discovered in an old music shop in Prague last year. Bought cheap and taken to England as a novelty, from where it was recently stolen to order by a bunch of killers who reneged on their arrangement with the guy who hired them, and brought it here to Serbia.’ Watching the change in her expression, he smiled. ‘Does that sound like the kind of thing you’re looking for?’

The colour had drained from Madison’s face and now she was staring back at him with eyes so intense that they could have nailed him to the back wall. She opened and closed her mouth a couple of times and shook her head in disbelief. ‘I… I don’t—’

‘I thought it might,’ Ben said.

‘Your friend—?’

‘His name was Nick. He’s the guy who found it in Prague and didn’t think it was real. But someone else knew better.’

‘Dragan Vuković—?’

‘The guy who stole it. Who now works for Zarko Kožul, who now has the manuscript. Which you already knew, because someone called Ulysses tipped you off. Which is how you came to be here, and now I’m waiting to hear more. It seems you and I have a lot more in common than either of us realised.’

Madison’s mouth was still hanging open in amazement and she had to struggle to regain her composure. ‘Ulysses isn’t his real name.’

‘That’s a big surprise.’

‘He’s a specialist in lost and stolen artifacts. A dealer, fence, call it what you like. He used to work with my father sometimes.’

‘Your father, Rigby Cahill?’

Madison nodded. ‘You haven’t heard of him. But if you were in the antiquities world, you would have. My father was, is, one of the most legendary treasure hunters of the last fifty years.’

‘Tell me about him.’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘I don’t have anything else to do tonight.’

They ordered more coffee. Ben lit a Gauloise. ‘I don’t think you can light up in here,’ Madison said, pointing at the sign that said ZABRANJENO PUŠENJE.

Ben glanced over at the hunched shapes scattered about the rows of empty tables. ‘I don’t think anyone really cares what I do in here.’

‘In that case, screw it. I’ll join you.’

He offered her the pack of Gauloises and lit up for her with his Zippo. She took a couple of drags, then plucked the cigarette from her lips and stared at it. ‘Jesus, these French smokes sure pack a wallop. What’s in them, nitroglycerine?’

‘If a thing’s worth doing,’ he said, ‘it’s worth overdoing.’

Madison smoked, and began to tell the rest of her story. Talking about her father made her face soften. She would pause now and again, and gaze sadly into space for a quiet moment before continuing. Ben listened, kept the Gauloises coming, and nobody came over to complain.

Rigby Ignatius Boddington Cahill had founded his company in New York in 1970, at the age of 40, following a successful but not sufficiently rewarding career as a scholar, dealer and valuer of all things antiquarian. Thanks in part to his vast knowledge of his subject, his new agency quickly gained a strong international reputation searching for — and in most cases locating — lost or stolen art treasures. He named the firm Cahill Associates even though from the get-go it had essentially been a one-man outfit.

‘Dad was as famous for his energy as he was for his talent,’ Madison said. ‘He’d only have burned out anyone who tried to work alongside him, or driven them nuts.’ She explained that then, like now, the police avoided getting too involved in stolen art and antiquities recovery cases, lacking the expertise and connections to pursue them effectively and preferring to leave such work to specialists, who functioned like private detectives and could make a lot of money by charging commission on the value of recovered goods.

And make money Cahill Associates did, in spades. Rigby’s searches all over the world for lost art treasures seemed to draw him like a magnet, time and again and with uncanny precision, to the exact spot that others in his profession had consistently missed. He raked in generous commission for locating paintings stolen from museums and private collections. He tracked the often tortuous path of war plunder, a great deal of which had been looted by the Nazis before and during the Second World War and stashed away in all kinds of ingenious locations to keep it safe from Allied hands as the Third Reich crumbled in the latter years of the conflict. The sheer volume of what the Nazis had stolen during their twelve-year heyday between Hitler’s rise in 1933 and his downfall in 1945 was mind-boggling. Rigby soon became known as a specialist Nazi-plunder hunter. Even accounting for the vast quantity recovered by the Allied forces’ Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Program after the peace, stashes of plundered gold bars, silver coins and ornaments, paintings, jewels, furniture, rare books, ceramics and sculptures, tapestries, and religious treasures taken by the Nazis were still turning up all over Europe.

Rigby didn’t find all of it. One of his misses was the legendary Amber Room, the eighteenth-century wonder dismantled and removed from the Catherine Palace near St Petersburg during Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. He smarted over that one, but not for long. In September 1974 he succeeded in locating one of several Nazi treasure trains reputed to exist, this particular one hidden underground in a collapsed tunnel deep in the heart of Poland and all eight of its carriages loaded to the roof with bullion, artwork and 1940s paper currency. The cargo’s value was in excess of $50 million, of which Rigby walked away with an eye-watering thirty per cent.

‘He could have retired young and lived like a king,’ Madison said. ‘Instead, he just ploughed the money straight back into expanding his operation into bigger and more ambitious ventures. He lost a packet trying to resurrect a sixteenth-century Portuguese treasure ship from the ocean bed off the coast of Sumatra, and squandered more millions hunting for Paititi, the Incan City of Gold. He never cared about wealth. Forget fast cars and palatial homes. Half the time he’d be going about with odd socks, holes in his clothes and just a few cents in his pockets, because he didn’t give a damn about anything much except his work.’

She gave a wistful smile. ‘I guess that explains why I came along so late. When I got older, my mom told me she hardly ever saw him during those years. He was like a force of nature, totally fixated on whatever was his goal at that time. Even after my mom died in 1991, when I was eleven, he just kept on working through his grief. I don’t even know if he realised how sick she was, until it was too late.’

‘A little one-track minded, perhaps,’ Ben said.

‘Raging obsessive would be more like it,’ Madison said. ‘Even to the point of total self-absorption. He could drive you crazy at times.’

‘But you still love him.’

‘Yes, I do. I bleed for him. When I see him now, I just want to cry. I’m ready to cry now, just talking about it.’ As if to prove her point, a tear rolled from the corner of her left eye. She brushed it quickly away.

‘What happened to him?’ Ben asked.

‘The Silbermann manuscript happened,’ Madison said.