The Chopin Manuscript: A Serial Thriller

Chapter One Jeffery Deaver

The piano tuner ran through ascending chords, enjoying the resistance of the heavy ivory keys. His balding head was bent forward, his eyes closed as he listened. The notes rose to the darkened ceiling of the recital hall near Warsaw’s Old Market Square, then dissipated like smoke.

Satisfied with his work, the tuner replaced the temperament strips and his well-worn extension-tuning lever in their velvet case and indulged himself by playing a few minutes of Mozart, A Little Night Music, an ebullient piece that was one of his favorites.

Just as he concluded, the crisp sound of clapping palms echoed behind him and he spun around. Twenty feet away stood a man nodding and smiling. Stocky, with a flop of brown hair, broad of face. Southern Slavic, the tuner thought. He’d traveled in Yugoslavia many years ago.

“Lovely. Ah, my. So beautiful. Do you speak English?” the man asked with a thick accent.

“I do.”

“Are you a performer here? You must be. You are so talented.”

“Me? No, I simply tune pianos. But a tuner must know his way about the keyboard too…Can I help you, sir? The recital hall is closed.”

“Still, such a passion for music. I could hear it. Have you never desired to perform?”

The piano tuner didn’t particularly care to talk about himself, but he could discuss music all night long. He was, in addition to being perhaps the best piano tuner in Warsaw if not all of central Poland, an avid collector of recordings and original music manuscripts. If he’d had the means, he would collect instruments too. He had once played a Chopin polonaise at the very keyboard the composer had used; he considered it one of the highpoints of his life.

“I used to. But only in my youth.” He told the man of his sweep through Eastern Europe with the Warsaw Youth Orchestra, with which he’d been second-chair cello.

He stared at the man, who in turn was examining the piano. “As I say, the hall is closed. But perhaps you’re looking for someone?”

“I am, yes.” The Slav walked closer and looked down. “Ah, a Bosendorfer. One of Germany’s great contributions to culture.”

“Oh, yes,” the slight man said, caressing the black lacquer and gothic type of the company’s name. “It’s perfection. It truly is. Would you like to try it? Do you play?”

“Not like you. I wouldn’t presume to even touch a single key after hearing your performance.”

“You’re too kind. You say you’re looking for someone. You mean Anna? The French horn student? She was here earlier but I believe she’s left. There’s no one else, except the cleaning woman. But I can get a message to anyone in the orchestra or the administration, if you like.”

The visitor stepped closer yet and gently brushed a key — true ivory, the piano having been made before the ban. “You, sir,” he said, “are the one I came to see.”

“Me? Do I know you?”

“I saw you earlier today.”

“You did? Where? I don’t recall.”

“You were having lunch at a café overlooking that huge building. The fancy one, the biggest one in Warsaw. What is it?”

The piano tuner gave a laugh. “The biggest one in the country. The Palace of Culture and Science. A gift from the Soviets, which, the joke goes, they gave us in place of our freedom. Yes, I did have lunch there. But…Do I know you?”

The stranger stopped smiling. He looked from the piano into the narrow man’s eyes.

Like the assault of the sudden vehement chord in Haydn’s Surprise Symphony, fear struck the piano tuner. He picked up his tool kit and rose quickly. Then stopped. “Oh,” he gasped. Behind the stranger he could see two bodies lying on the tile near the front door: Anna, the horn player; and beyond her, the cleaning woman. Two shadows on the floor surrounded their limp figures, one from the entranceway light, one from their blood.

The Slav, not much taller than the piano tuner but far stronger, took him by the shoulders. “Sit,” he whispered gently, pushing the man down on the bench then turning him to face the piano.

“What do you want?” A quaking voice, tears in his eyes.

“Shhh.”

Shaking with fear, the piano tuner thought madly, What a fool I am! I should have fled the moment the man commented on the Bosendorfer’s German ancestry. Anyone with a true understanding of the keyboard knew the instruments are made in Austria.

When he was stopped at Krakow’s John Paul II airport, he was certain his offense had to do with what he carried in his briefcase.

The hour was early and he’d wakened much earlier at the Pod Roza, “Under the Rose,” which was his favorite hotel in Poland, owing both to its quirky mix of scrolly ancient and starkly modern, and to the fact that Franz Liszt had stayed there. Still half asleep, without his morning coffee or tea, he was startled from his stupor by the two uniformed men who appeared over him.

“Mr. Harold Middleton?”

He looked up. “Yes, that’s me.” And suddenly realized what had happened. When airport security had looked through his attaché case, they’d seen it and grown concerned. But out of prudence the young guards there had chosen not to say anything. They let him pass, then called for reinforcements: these two large, unsmiling men.

Of the twenty or so passengers in the lounge awaiting the bus to take them to the Lufthansa flight to Paris, some people looked his way — the younger ones. The older, tempered by the Soviet regime, dared not. The man closest to Middleton, two chairs away, glanced up involuntarily with a flash of ambiguous concern on his face, as if he might be mistaken as his companion. Then, realizing he wasn’t going to be questioned, he turned back to his newspaper, obviously relieved.

“You will please to come with us. This way. Yes. Please.” Infinitely polite, the massive guard nodded back toward the security line.

“Look, I know what this is about. It’s simply a misunderstanding.” He larded his voice with patience, respect and good nature. It was the tone you had to take with local police, the tone you used talking your way through border crossings. Middleton nodded at the briefcase. “I can show you some documentation that—”

The second, silent guard picked up the case.

The other: “Please. You will come.” Polite but inflexible. This young, square-jawed man who seemed incapable of smiling held his eye firmly and there was no debate. The Poles, Middleton knew, had been the most willful resisters of the Nazis.

Together they walked back through the tiny, largely deserted airport, the taller guards flanking the shorter, nondescript American. At 56, Harold Middleton carried a few more pounds than he had last year, which itself had seen a weight gain of few pounds over the prior. But curiously his weight — conspiring with his thick black hair — made him appear younger than he was. Only five years ago, at his daughter’s college graduation, the girl had introduced him to several of her classmates as her brother. Everyone in the group had bought the deception. Father and daughter had laughed about that many times since.

He thought of her now and hoped fervently he wouldn’t miss his flight and the connection to Washington, D.C. He was going to have dinner with Charlotte and her husband that night at Tyson’s Corner. It was the first time he’d see her since she announced her pregnancy.

But as he looked past security at the awaiting cluster of men — also unsmiling — he had a despairing feeling that dinner might be postponed. He wondered for how long.

They walked through the exit line and joined the group: two more uniformed officers and a middle-aged man in a rumpled brown suit under a rumpled brown raincoat.

“Mr. Middleton, I am Deputy Inspector Stanieski, with the Polish National Police, Krakow region.” No ID was forthcoming.

The guards hemmed him in, as if the 5-foot, 10-inch American was going to karate kick his way to freedom.

“I will see your passport please.”

He handed over the battered, swollen blue booklet. Stanieski looked it over and glanced at the picture, then at the man in front of him twice. People often had trouble seeing Harold Middleton, couldn’t remember what he looked like. A friend of his daughter said he would make a good spy; the best ones, the young man explained, are invisible. Middleton knew this was true; he wondered how Charlotte’s friend did.

“I don’t have much time until that flight.”

“You will not make the flight, Mr. Middleton. No. We will be returning to Warsaw.”

Warsaw? Two hours away.

“That’s crazy. Why?”

No answer.

He tried once more. “This is about the manuscript, isn’t it?” He nodded to the attaché case. “I can explain. The name Chopin is on it, yes, but I’m convinced it’s a forgery. It’s not valuable. It’s not a national treasure. I’ve been asked to take it to the United States to finish my analysis. You can call Doctor—”

The inspector shook his head. “Manuscript? No, Mr. Middleton. This is not about a manuscript. It’s about a murder.”

“Murder?”

The man hesitated. “I use the word to impress on you the gravity of the situation. Now it is best that I say nothing more, and I would strongly suggest you do the same, isn’t it?”

“My luggage—”

“Your luggage is already in the car. Now.” A nod of his head toward the front door. “We will go.”

“Please, come in, Mr. Middleton. Sit. Yes there is good…I am Jozef Padlo, first deputy inspector with the Polish National Police.” This time an ID was exhibited, but Middleton got the impression the gaunt man, about his own age and much taller, was flashing the card only because Middleton expected it and that the formality was alien in Polish law enforcement.

“What’s this all about, Inspector? Your man says murder and tells me nothing more.”

“Oh, he mentioned that?” Padlo grimaced. “Krakow. They don’t listen to us there. Slightly better than Posnan, but not much.”

They were in an off-white office, beside a window that looked out on the gray spring sky. There were many books, computer printouts, a few maps and no decorations other than official citations, an incongruous ceramic cactus wearing a cowboy hat and pictures of the man’s wife and children and grandchildren. Many pictures. They seemed like a happy family. Middleton thought again of his daughter.

“Am I being charged with anything?”

“Not at this point.” His English was excellent and Middleton wasn’t surprised to notice that there was a certificate on the wall testifying to Padlo’s completion of a course in Quantico and one at the Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas.

Oh, and the cactus.

“Then I can leave.”

“You know, we have anti-smoking laws here. I think that’s your doing, your country’s. You give us Burger King and take away our cigarettes.” The inspector shrugged and lit a Sobieski. “No, you can’t leave. Now, please, you had lunch yesterday with a Henryk Jedynak, a piano tuner.”

“Yes. Henry…Oh no. Was he the one murdered?”

Padlo watched Middleton carefully. “I’m afraid he was, yes. Last night. In the recital hall near Old Market Square.”

“No, no…” Middleton didn’t know the man well — they’d met only on this trip — but they’d hit it off immediately and had enjoyed each other’s company. He was shocked by the news of Jedynak’s death.

“And two other people were killed, as well. A musician and a cleaning woman. Stabbed to death. For no reason, apparently, other than they had the misfortune to be there at the same time as the killer.”

“This is terrible. But why?”

“Have you known Mr. Jedynak long?”

“No. We met in person for the first time yesterday. We’d e-mailed several times. He was a collector of manuscripts.”

“Manuscripts? Books?”

“No. Musical manuscripts — the handwritten scores. And he was involved with the Chopin Museum.”

“At Ostrogski Castle.” The inspector said this as if he’d heard of the place but never been there.

“Yes. I had a meeting yesterday afternoon with the director of the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow, and I asked Henry to brief me about him and their collection. It was about a questionable Chopin score.”

Padlo showed no interest in this. “Tell me, please, about your meeting. In Warsaw.”

“Well, I met Henry for coffee in the late morning at the museum, he showed me the new acquisitions in the collection. Then we returned downtown and had lunch at a café. I can’t remember where.”

“The Frederick Restaurant.”

That’s how Padlo found him, he supposed — an entry in Jedynak’s PDA or diary. “Yes, that was it. And then we went our separate ways. I took the train to Krakow.”

“Did you see anyone following you or watching you at lunch?”

“Why would someone follow us?”

Padlo inhaled long on his cigarette. When he wasn’t puffing he lowered his hand below his desk. “Did you see anyone?” he repeated.

“No.”

He nodded. “Mr. Middleton, I must tell you…I regret I have to but it is important. Your friend was tortured before he died. I won’t go into the details, but the killer used some piano string in very unpleasant ways. He was gagged so the screams could not be heard but his right hand was uninjured, presumably so that he could write whatever this killer demanded of him. He wanted information.”

“My God…” Middleton closed his eyes briefly, recalling Henry’s showing pictures of his wife and two sons.

“I wonder what that might be,” Padlo said. “This piano tuner was well known and well liked. He was also a very transparent man. Musician, tradesman, husband and father. There seemed to be nothing dark about his life…” A careful examination of Middleton’s face. “But perhaps the killer thought that was not the case. Perhaps the killer thought he had a second life involving more than music…” With a nod, he added, “Somewhat like you.”

“What’re you getting at?”

“Tell me about your other career, please.”

“I don’t have another career. I teach music and authenticate music manuscripts.”

“But you had another career recently.”

“Yes, I did. But what’s that got to do with anything?”

Padlo considered this for a moment, and said, “Because certain facts have come into alignment.”

A cold laugh. “And what exactly does that mean?” This was the most emotional Harold Middleton usually got. He believed that you gave up your advantage when you lost control. That’s what he told himself, though he doubted that he was even capable of losing control.

“Tell me about that career, Colonel. Do some people still call you that, ‘Colonel’?”

“Not anymore. But why are you asking me questions you already seem to know the answers to?”

“I know a few things. I’m curious to know more. For instance, I only know that you were connected with the ICTY and the ICCt, but not many details.”

The UN-sanctioned International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia investigated and tried individuals for war crimes committed during the complicated and tragic fighting among the Serbs, Bosnians, Croatians and Albanian ethnic groups in the 1990s. The ICCt was the International Criminal Court, established in 2002 to try war criminals for crimes in any area of the world. Both were located in The Hague in Holland, and had been created because nations tended to quickly forget about the atrocities committed within their borders and were reluctant to find and try those who’d committed them.

“How did you end up working for them? It seems a curious leap from your country’s army to an international tribunal.”

“I was planning to retire anyway. I’d been in the service for more than two decades.”

“But still. Please.”

Middleton decided that cooperation was the only way that would let him leave anytime soon. With the time difference he still had a chance to get into D.C. in time for a late supper at the Ritz Carlton with his daughter and son-in-law.

He explained to the inspector briefly that he had been a military intelligence officer with the 7,000 U.S. troops sent to Kosovo in the summer of 1999 as part of the peacekeeping force when the country was engaged in the last of the Yugoslavian wars. Middleton was based at Camp Broadsteel in the southeast of the country, the sector America oversaw. The largely rural area, dominated by Mount Duke which rose like Fuji over the rugged hills, was an ethnically Albanian area, as was most of Kosovo, and had been the site of many incursions by Serbs — both from other parts of Kosovo and from Milosevic’s Serbia, which Kosovo had been part of. The fighting was largely over — the tens of thousands of ironically dubbed “humanitarian” bombing strikes had had their desired effect — but the peacekeepers on the ground were still on high alert to stop clashes between the infamous Serb guerillas and the equally ruthless Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army forces.

Padlo took this information in, nodding as he lit another cigarette.

“Not long after I was deployed there, the base commander got a call from a general in the British sector, near Pristina, the capital. He’d found something interesting and had been calling all the international peacekeepers to see if anyone had a background in art collecting.”

“And why was that?” Padlo stared at the Sobieski hidden below eye-level.

The smell was not as terrible as Middleton had expected but the office was filling with smoke. His eyes stung. “Let me give you some background. It goes back to World War Two.”

“Please, tell me.”

“Well, many Albanians from Kosovo fought with an SS unit — the Twenty-First Waffen Mountain Division. Their main goal was eliminating partisan guerillas, but it also gave them the chance to ethnically cleanse the Serbs, who had been their enemies for years.”

A grimace appeared on the inspector’s heavily lined face. “Ah, it’s always the same story wherever you look. Poles versus the Russians. Arabs versus the Jews. Americans versus”—a smile “—everyone.”

Middleton ignored him. “The Twenty-First supposedly had another job too. With the fall of Italy and an Allied invasion a sure thing, Himmler and Goering and other Nazis who’d been looting art from Eastern Europe wanted secure places to hide it — so that even if Germany fell, the Allies couldn’t find it. The Twenty-First reportedly brought truckloads to Kosovo. Made sense. A small, little populated, out-of-the-mainstream country. Who’d think to look there for a missing Cezanne or Manet?

“What the British general had found was an old Eastern Orthodox church. It was abandoned years ago and being used as a dormitory for displaced Serbs by a U.N. relief organization. In the basement his soldiers unearthed 50 or 60 boxes of rare books, paintings and music folios.”

“My, that many?”

“Oh, yes. A lot was damaged, some beyond repair, but other items were virtually untouched. I didn’t know much about the paintings or the books, but I’d studied music history in college and I’ve collected recordings and manuscripts for years. I got the okay to fly up and take a look.”

“And what did you find?”

“Oh, it was astonishing. Original pieces by Bach and his sons, Mozart, Handel, sketches by Wagner — some of them had never been seen before. I was speechless.”

“Valuable?”

“Well, you can’t really put a dollar value on a find like that. It’s the cultural benefit, not the financial.”

“But still, worth millions?”

“I suppose.”

“What happened then?”

“I reported what I’d found to the British and to my general, and he cleared it with Washington for me to stay there for a few days and catalog what I could. Good press, you know.”

“True in police work too.” The cigarette got crushed out forcefully under a yellow thumb, as if Padlo were quitting forever.

Middleton explained that that night he took all the manuscripts and folios that he could carry back to British quarters in Pristina and worked for hours cataloging and examining what he’d found.

“The next morning I was very excited, wondering what else I’d find. I got up early to return…”

The American stared at a limp yellow file folder on the inspector’s desktop, the one with three faded checkmarks on it. He looked up and heard Padlo say, “The church was St. Sophia.”

“You know about it?” Middleton was surprised. The incident had made the news but by then — with the world focusing on the millennium and the Y2K crisis, the Balkans had become simply a footnote to fading history.

“Yes, I do. I didn’t realize you were involved.”

Middleton remembered walking to the church and thinking, I must’ve gotten up pretty damn early if none of the refugees were awake yet, especially with all the youngsters living there. Then he paused, wondering where the British guards were. Two had been stationed outside the church the day before. Just at that moment he saw a window open on the second floor and a teenage girl look out, her long hair obscuring half her face. She was calling, “Green shirt, green shirt…Please…Green shirt.”

He hadn’t understood. But then it came to him. She was referring to his fatigues and was calling for his help.

“What was it like?” Padlo asked softly.

Middleton merely shook his head.

The inspector didn’t press him for details. He asked, “And Rugova was the man responsible?”

He was even more surprised that the inspector knew about the former Kosovo Liberation Army commander Agim Rugova. That fact was not learned until later, long after Rugova and his men had fled from Pristina, and the story of St. Sophia had grown stone cold.

“Your change in career is making sense now, Mr. Middleton. After the war you became an investigator to track him down.”

“That’s it in a nutshell.” He smiled as if that could flick away the cached memories, clear as computer jpegs, of that morning.

Middleton had returned to Camp Broadsteel and served out his rotation, spending most of his free time running intelligence reports on Rugova and the many other war criminals the torn region had spawned. Back at the Pentagon, he’d done the same. But it wasn’t the U.S. military’s job to catch them and bring them to trial, and he made no headway.

So when he retired, he set up an operation in a small Northern Virginia office park. He called it “War Criminal Watch” and spent his days on the phone and computer, tracking Rugova and others. He made contacts at the ICTY and worked with them regularly but they and the UN’s tactical operation were busy with bigger fish — like Ratko Mladic, Naser Oric and others involved in the Srebrenica massacre, the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II, and Milosevic himself. Middleton would come up with a lead and it would founder. Still he couldn’t get St. Sophia out of his mind.

Green shirt, green shirt…Please…

He decided that he couldn’t be effective working from America nor working alone. So after some months of searching he found people who’d help: two American soldiers who’d been in Kosovo and helped him in the investigation at St. Sophia and a woman humanitarian worker from Belgrade he’d met in Pristina.

The overworked ICTY was glad to accept them as independent contractors, working with the Prosecutor’s Office. They became known in the ICTY as “The Volunteers.”

Lespasse and Brocco, the soldiers, younger, driven by their passion for the hunt;

Leonora Tesla, by her passion to rid the world of sorrow, a passion that made the otherwise-common woman beautiful;

And the elder, Harold Middleton, a stranger to passion and driven by…well, even he couldn’t say what. The intelligence officer who never seemed to be able to process the HUMINT on himself.

Unarmed — at least as far as the ICTY and local law enforcement knew — they managed to track down several of Rugova’s henchmen and, through them, finally the man himself, who was living in a shockingly opulent townhouse in Nice, France, under a false identity. The arrangement was that, for ethical reasons, the Volunteers’ job was solely to provide the tribunal with intelligence and contacts; the SFOR, the UN’s Stabilization Force — the military operation in charge of apprehending former Yugoslav war criminals — and local police, to the extent they were cooperative, would be the arresting agents.

In 2002, working on pristine data provided by Middleton and his crew, UN and French troops raided the townhouse and arrested Rugova.

Tribunal trials are interminable, but three years later he was convicted for crimes that occurred at St. Sophia. He was appealing his conviction while living in what was, in Middleton’s opinion, a far-too-pleasant detention center in The Hague.

Middleton could still picture the swarthy man at trial, ruggedly handsome, confident and indignant, swearing that he’d never committed genocide or ethnic cleansing. He admitted he was a soldier but said that what happened at St. Sophia was merely an “isolated incident” in an unfortunate war. Middleton told this to the inspector.

“Isolated incident,” Padlo whispered.

“It makes the horror far worse, don’t you think? Phrasing it so antiseptically.”

“I do, yes.” Another draw on the cigarette.

Middleton wished that he had a candy bar, his secret passion.

Padlo then asked, “I’m curious about one thing — was Rugova acting on anyone else’s orders, do you think? Was there someone he reported to?”

Middleton’s attention coalesced instantly at this question. “Why do you ask that?” he asked sharply.

“Was he?”

The American debated and decided to continue to cooperate. For the moment. “When we were hunting for him we heard rumors that he was backed by someone. It made sense. His KLA outfit had the best weapons of any unit in the country, even better than some of the regular Serbian troops. They were the best trained, and they could hire pilots for helicopter extractions. That was unheard of in Kosovo. There were rumors of large amounts of cash. And he didn’t seem to take orders from any of the known KLA senior commanders. But we had only one clue that there was somebody behind him. A message had been left for him about a bank deposit. It was hidden in a copy of Goethe’s Faust we found in an apartment in Eze.”

“Any leads?”

“We thought possibly British or American. Maybe Canadian. Some of the phrasing in the note suggested it.”

“No idea of his name?”

“No. We gave him a nickname, after the book — Faust.”

“A deal with the devil. Are you still searching for this man?”

“Me? No. My group disbanded. The Tribunal’s still in force and the prosecutors and EUFOR might be looking for him but I doubt it. Rugova’s in jail, some of his associates too. There are bigger fish to fry. You know that expression?”

“No, but I understand.” Padlo crushed out another cigarette. “You’re young. Why did you quit this job? The work seems important.”

“Young?” Middleton smiled. Then it faded. He said only, “Events intervened.”

“Another dispassionate phrase, that one. ‘Events intervened.’”

Middleton looked down.

“An unnecessary comment on my part. Forgive me. I owe you answers and you’ll now understand why I asked what I did.” He hit a button on his phone and spoke in Polish. Middleton knew enough to understand he was asking for some photographs.

Padlo disconnected and said, “In investigating the murder of the piano tuner I learned that you were probably the last person — well, second last — to see him alive. Your name and hotel phone number were in his address book for that day. I ran your name through Interpol and our other databases and found about your involvement with the tribunals. There was a brief reference to Agim Rugova, but a cross-reference in Interpol as well, which had been added only late yesterday.”

“Yesterday?”

“Yes. Rugova died yesterday. The apparent cause of death was poisoning.”

Middleton felt his heart pound. Why hadn’t anyone called? Then he realized that he was no longer connected with the ICTY and that it had been years since St. Sophia was on anyone’s radar screen.

An isolated incident…

“This morning I called the prison and learned that Rugova had approached a guard several weeks ago about bribing his way out of prison. He offered a huge amount of money. ‘Where would he, an impoverished war criminal, get such funds?’ the guard asked. He said his wife could get the amount he named — one hundred thousand euros. The guard reported the matter and there it rested. But then, four days ago, Rugova had a visitor — a man with a fake name and fake ID, as it turned out. After he leaves Rugova falls ill and yesterday dies of poison. The police go the wife’s house to inform her and find she’s been dead for several days. She was stabbed.”

Dead…Middleton felt a fierce urge to call Leonora and tell her.

“When I learned of your connection with the piano tuner and the death on the same day of the war criminal you’d had arrested, I had sent to me a prison security camera picture of the probable murderer. I showed the picture to a witness we located who saw the likely suspect leaving the Old Market Square recital hall last night.”

“It’s the same man?”

“She said with certainty that it was.” Padlo indulged again and lit a Sobieski. “You seem to be the hub of this strange wheel, Mr. Middleton. A man kills Rugova and his wife and then tortures and kills a man you’ve just met with. So, now, you and I are entwined in this matter.”

It was then that a young uniformed officer arrived carrying an envelope. He placed it on the inspector’s desk.

“Dzenkuje,” Padlo said.

The aide nodded and, after glancing at the American, vanished.

The inspector handed the photos to Middleton, who looked down at them. “Oh, my God.” He sucked cigarette-smoke-tainted air deep into his lungs.

“What?” Padlo asked, seeing his reaction. “Was he someone you know from your investigation of Rugova?”

The American looked up. “This man…He was sitting next to me at Krakow airport. He was taking my flight to Paris.” The man in the ugly checked jacket.

“No! Are you certain?”

“Yes. He must’ve killed Henryk to find out where I was going.”

And in a shocking instant it was clear. Someone — this man or Faust, or perhaps he was Faust — was after Middleton and the other Volunteers.

Why? For revenge? Did he fear something? Was there some other reason? And why would he kill Rugova?

The American jabbed his finger at the phone. “Did he get on the flight to Paris? Has it landed? Find out now.”

Padlo’s tongue touched the corner of his mouth. He lifted the receiver and spoke in such rapid Polish that Middleton couldn’t follow the conversation.

Finally the inspector hung up. “Yes, it’s landed and everyone has disembarked. Other than you everyone with a boarding pass was on the flight. But after that? They don’t know. They’ll check the flight manifest against passport control at De Gaulle — if he left the airport. And outgoing flight manifests in case he continued in transit.”

Middleton shook his head. “He’s changed identity by now. He saw me detained and he’s using a new passport.”

The inspector said, “He could be on his way to anywhere in the world.”

But he wasn’t, Middleton knew. The only question was this: Was he en route to Africa to find Tesla at her relief agency? Or to the States, where Lespasse ran a very successful computer company and Brocco edited the Human Rights Observer newsletter?

Or was he on a different flight headed to D.C., where Middleton himself lived?

Then his legs went weak.

As he recalled that, showing off proud pictures, he’d told the piano tuner that his daughter lived in the D.C. area.

What a lovely young woman, and her husband, so handsome…. They seem so happy.

Middleton leapt to his feet. “I have to get home. And if you try to stop me, I’ll call the embassy.” He strode toward the door.

“Wait,” Padlo said sharply.

Middleton spun around. “I’m warning you. Do not try to stop me. If you do—”

“No, no, I only mean…. Here.” He stepped forward and handed the American his passport. Then he touched Middleton’s arm. “Please. I want this man too. He killed three of my citizens. I want him badly. Remember that.”

He believed the inspector said something else but by then Middleton was jogging hard down the endless hall, as gray as the offices, as gray as the sky, digging into his pocket for his cell phone.