The Chopin Manuscript: A Serial Thriller

Chapter Seven David Corbett

The car’s interior reeked of almost archeological skank, old greasy food wrappers gumming the floor, malt liquor cans cluttering the wheel wells, ashtrays brimming with stale butts. The air-conditioner stuttered and coughed, exhaling a mildewy coolness, while the three bodies added an additional tang of gamey sweat — not just Middleton but Marcus and Traci, his would-be muggers. He’d learned their names from the nonstop badgering back and forth, relentless recriminations salted with snapshot details from their shattered biographies — their fumbling needs, their aching wants, their pitiless crank habits, promises to amend, curses in reply, testaments fired back and forth in a fierce vulgar slang that Middleton could barely decipher. Meanwhile, the car bumped and rattled north toward Baltimore, a lone headlight pointing the way along I-495’s rain-wet asphalt. A brief summer storm had come and gone, turning the night air cottony thick and hot, against which the dying air-conditioner merely chattered. Middleton’s sport jacket clung to his shoulders and arms like a second skin, and he wiped his face with his free hand, the other damply gripping the Beretta.

Finally, if only to ward off his nausea, he broke into the front-seat argument with, “Turn on the radio,” nudging Marcus’s shoulder with the pistol.

The youth turned just slightly. His cheek was mottled with small white sores. “Hey, me and Traci got things to discuss here.”

Middleton lodged the tip of the pistol’s barrel into Marcus’s neck. “I said turn on the radio. I can’t think.”

“Don’t jump the rail there, Mr. Gray.” This was Traci, at the wheel, eyeing him over her shoulder. “You kidnap us, threaten us, we doin’ all you ask. Be cool now. Don’t play. Not with that gun.”

They’d been calling him that since he’d climbed in the car: Mr. Gray. At first he’d thought it referred to his rumpled appearance, which was only worsening with the strain, the need for sleep. But he’d caught an edge of racial mockery in it too. Wasn’t it Cab Calloway, in his Hepcat’s Dictionary, who’d referred to white people as grays? But that was so very long ago, before these two were born. Christ, before even Middleton himself was born…

“I’m not playing,” he said.

“All I mean—”

“Turn on the damn radio!”

Marcus’s hand shot toward the dash and punched the On button. Middleton recoiled at the instant blast of menace, a lilting growl of bragging bullshit warring with a jackhammer bass track and droning synthesized mush, all inflicted at ear-splitting volume.

“Change the station.”

“Whoa, mack, you got a serious pushy streak.”

“Change the station. Now!”

Marcus huffed but obliged, fiddling through crackling sheets of white noise, punctuated by sudden twangy cries, garbled Bible-drunk voices…

Traci said, “You need to put a chill on, Mr. Gray. Break it back, let the little shit slide.”

Suddenly, the reedy cry of woodwinds broke through. A soprano lilting through a familiar bar of haunting Sprechstimme. Middleton shot forward. “There! Stop!”

Marcus looked like he’d been told to swallow a toad. “This?”

“Tune it in. Get rid of the static.”

“No, no. Taking us prisoner, that’s wack enough. You can’t torture us too.”

“Tune it in!”

The piece was Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg, 21 songs scored for five musicians on eight instruments, plus voice, with the lyrics half-sung, half-spoken, the first twelve-tone masterpiece of the 20th century. Incomprehensible noise to most people, but not to Middleton, not to anyone who understood, who could hear in it the last throes of Romanticism, with echoes of not just Mahler and Strauss, but Bach.

“Maybe you’re the one who should chill,” Middleton said, easing back in his seat a little. “You think your generation invented rap or hip-hop? Spoken word with musical background goes back over four hundred years. It’s called recitatif. Here, though, Schoenberg’s notes are scored, but in speech we never stay on a single pitch, our voices glide on and off a tone. That’s what the soprano’s doing. It’s left entirely up to her how she does it. Meanwhile, the instruments are conjuring up the landscape: there’s moonlight, insanity, blood…”

Traci was leaning ever so slightly toward the speaker, intrigued now.

Eyeing the Beretta with a newfound skepticism, Marcus said, “You a professor?”

“Sshhh.” It was Traci. The gaunt young coffee-skinned woman with glowing eyes and mussed Afro was rapt. “Act like you got some sense.”

Sulking, Marcus flopped back against the door, moodily scratching his scabbed arm.

Finally, they were quiet; Middleton had his chance to think. But the eerie music, with its tale of the moon-obsessed clown and his Freudian nightmares, only enhanced his dread. Where was Charley, was she safe? Who tried to kill him at Dulles, what was the man after? And what was waiting for him at 122 Fremont Avenue, in the city of Baltimore?

The possible danger to Charley only amplified the need to decipher the threat. His mind spun around and around like that, addled by the fatigue, his fear, thoughts careening against each other senselessly. Meanwhile:

Nodding toward the radio, Marcus said, “Sounds like the same old screechy shit, over and over.”

“Not if you understand German.” Middleton rubbed his burning eyes. “And you’re not listening to the accompaniment.”

“It’s edgy,” Traci offered, striving for a compliment, though she’d clearly lost interest already.

Marcus sniffed. “Sounds like some kind of secret code, you ask me.”

“Funny you should say that.” Middleton stared out the grimy window at the blurring trees. “There were rumors during World War II that the Nazis were using twelve-tone music to send messages to sympathizers in the American cultural elite. There’s no standard melody, people can’t pick out a wrong note—”

“Sounds like nothing but wrong notes.”

“Exactly. All the easier to hide a message in it. Who’s going to know when the music is off?”

He flashed on the Chopin manuscript in his briefcase, the one he’d thought the Polish authorities had wanted when they’d stopped him at the Krakow airport. His conviction it wasn’t genuine lay exactly in several passages of oddly discordant cadences, unlike the meticulously melodic Chopin. What if it’s a code, he wondered. What if it’s not the manuscript or the other music they’re after, but something far more valuable, something only to be found by decrypting the counterfeit folios?

Inspired suddenly, he reached down for his briefcase to check the manuscript — only to realize the briefcase wasn’t there.

No please, he thought. Dear God. He mentally backtracked to the St. Regis, remembered placing his cell phone in his pocket at the restroom sink, then shambling out to the bar, checking his ravaged, hopelessly memorable reflection in the mirror before dropping the cell phone into his briefcase, snapping it shut. Had he then just wandered off without it? How dementedly absent-minded. It was one more sign of how addled, scattered — moonstruck, like mad Pierrot — he’d become.

“Turn the car around.”

Traci glowered over her shoulder. “Come again?”

“Turn the car around! We’re going back to the hotel.”

The two hapless thieves glanced back and forth. Marcus said, “Check out your eyes, mack.”

Traci chimed in, “You beginning to scare me, Mr. Gray.”

Middleton lifted the Beretta, placed the tip of the barrel against the back passenger-side window, and pulled the trigger. The thundering report in the small car, topped by the piercing hiss of shattered glass, deafened him again. Traci opened her mouth in a silent scream, hunching forward in terror as she fumbled to maintain hold of the steering wheel. Marcus clutched his head, staring at the gun with wide-eyed dread. The burnt sulfur smell of cordite, fanned by the sudden gust of black wet summer heat, finally masked the stench of the car’s moldering interior.

Middleton reached forward, clutched Marcus’s collar with his free hand while jabbing the pistol forward. As before at the airport, every sound came swathed in invisible muck, and yet from somewhere deep within his thrumming skull he heard the underwater roar of his own words, shouted at Traci: “I said turn the car around or I swear to God I’ll kill him — I’ll kill him, understand? Right here. I’ll kill you too.”

Struggling weakly in Middleton’s grip, Marcus started to tremble uncontrollably. Reaching across the car, Traci tried to soothe him, the lilt of her gentling words finally beginning to register as, with a hateful glance over her shoulder, she merged right to make the coming exit.

Gradually, even the crackling radio, the abstract insistence of Pierrot Lunaire, returned. Middleton wondered: Who have I become?

Conrad the bartender held the manuscript, paging through it gingerly. It seemed very old — the paper faded and brittle, the notations handwritten, not printed like the ones he’d bought Jennifer before. She’d love this, he thought, feeling a surge of inner heat. Chopin. She’ll throw her arms around his neck, press her cheek to his.

He lived to dote on his niece, buy her things — toys when she was younger, bits of modest clothing, sheet music now that she’d started piano lessons. A gifted girl, his sister’s oldest, just turned nine. Growing a little awkward now that she was shooting up in height, leaving the baby fat behind, but still with that shimmering black hair, halfway down her back, the vaguely lost blue eyes, the porcelain skin. Black Irish, like her wretch of a father, wherever he might be. Prison. The grave. Back in Carrickfergus. Someone had to look after the girl, she needed a man in her life. And her uncle loved her. He loved her very much.

Her musical turn the past two years had proved a welcome change. He didn’t have to just sit on the sofa and watch her gambol about on the floor in her school jumper and socks. He could sit there beside her now, turning the pages as she played the Schumann he’d bought her. Scenes from a Childhood. Album for the Young. With the vanilla scent of her shampoo thick between them, her hands faltering in painful discords across the keys, he’d gently nudge closer, until their thighs touched, the rustle of her sleeve against his. That was enough, he’d remind himself. No more, not yet. Content yourself with this. But someday. Perhaps. If she wants to.

Such thoughts, such images, so terrible, so welcome, like the devil whispering in his ear: It’s what you’ve always wanted. He lived for that, too.

He let the warmth subside from his face as he rolled up the manuscript and put it in the pocket of his sport jacket, draped on its peg on the storeroom wall. As he returned to the bar, two men entered from the hotel lobby, dressed in blue sport coats and gray slacks, one of them tall with an edgy fluid rhythm in his gait. The other was broad and muscular, with a bull-like neck, small dead eyes. The tall one offered an empty smile and slid a business card across the bar. It bore the seal of the FBI. Behind him, the hefty one remained expressionless.

There was no one else in the bar. It had been deathly slow all night.

The tall one, leaning forward to read the bartender’s nametag, said, “Good evening, Conrad. A middle-aged man came in earlier, probably a little uneasy, rattled. He shot a peace officer out at the Dulles airport, then fled the scene. We have some indication the shooting may be terrorist-related. His cell phone placed him here just a short while back. It’s very important we track his whereabouts. You recall him, yes?”

Conrad knew exactly the man they were talking about, but he couldn’t convince himself just yet that admitting as much was wise. “The description you just gave,” he said, “that could fit just about every guy who’s been in here the past few hours. I mean, I’d like to help, but—”

The tall one wasn’t listening. He’d spotted the briefcase behind the bar.

It belonged to the stranger from earlier, the one who looked like he’d wandered in from a car wreck. A cop killer, they said. Apparently, a musical one. Conrad had found his briefcase while straightening the barstools, and he’d glanced inside, hoping to find some identification, only to discover the Chopin instead.

The tall one refreshed his vacant smile. “Would you mind handing that to me?” He nodded toward the briefcase and held out his hand. “I’d like to take a glance inside.”

Conrad hesitated, yielding to an inchoate fear of being found out.

“Just to be clear, Conrad. National security’s involved. We have broad powers. So.” He wiggled his fingers. “If you would please.”

Conrad collected the briefcase and handed it across the bar, figuring he had little choice. The tall one took it greedily and immediately opened it up, searching the contents brusquely. His partner just stood there, a little ways behind, his huge arms folded across his massive chest.

“It’s not here,” the tall one said finally. He looked over his shoulder at his partner, then back toward Conrad. The empty smile was now pitiless. “Something’s missing. But you know that already — don’t you, Conrad?”

Conrad felt the floor sway beneath him, his viscera coiled. An inner voice said, They’re going to find out your dirty little secret. Before he could think through the consequences, he heard himself say, “I don’t know what you mean,” his voice faltering. He pictured Jennifer sitting sad-eyed and prim on her shiny black piano bench, waiting for her only uncle, smelling of breath mints and aftershave, to settle in beside her.

“The sheet music, Conrad. It’s supposed to be inside. It’s not. Fetch it for us now. Before I lose my temper.”

It was only then that Conrad realized what it was that bothered him about the man’s voice. The accent. Canadian, he thought. Can Canadians join the FBI?

“Look, I’m not trying to be difficult, but I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The tall one glanced past the bartender to the storeroom door; they’d seen him closing it behind him as they’d entered from the lobby. The agent nodded for his muscular partner to have a look.

“You can’t go back there.” Conrad felt a trickle of sweat feathering down his back.

“And why is that?”

“It’s hotel property.”

The tall man grinned. “And?”

The hefty one was behind the bar now. He gave Conrad a snide pat on the cheek, then opened the storeroom door.

His partner said, “It’s in your best interests to offer full cooperation. I’m a little disappointed I have to explain that.”

“You get out first.”

Middleton waved Marcus onto the sidewalk with the Beretta. Opening his own door, he sent one last shower of broken glass tumbling, the spiny fragments toppling down his sleeve. Closing the door behind him, he told Traci through the jagged maw where the window had been, “Wait here. There’s something I left behind. We’ll only be a minute.”

The young woman said nothing, just sat there gripping the wheel, seething.

Middleton plunged the pistol into his sport-coat pocket, taking Marcus’s elbow and gripping it tight. “Come on. We’ll make this quick.”

They were halfway between the street and the hotel’s revolving door when the car peeled out behind them. Both of them turned, watching Traci flee, Middleton feeling his jaw drop. The car reached the corner in one long burst of speed, then a squeal of brakes, a swerving turn. Gone.

Before Middleton could gather his wits, the youth shook off his grip and swept a cracking left across Middleton’s jaw, then darted off, running as fast as his stick-thin legs could carry him. Reeling back on his heels, Middleton gathered his balance but then just stared, rubbing his stubbled chin as the scrawny boy vanished down the wet street.

An hour’s gone by, Middleton thought, since I last stood here, this very spot. Nothing’s changed. Except, perhaps, everything.

He entered the lobby wiping his face with his handkerchief, hoping he didn’t look as raw and untethered as he felt. The desk clerk, recognizing him from earlier, smiled blankly. A well-dressed woman with a slim valise, possibly a call girl, waited at the elevator.

Finding his way to the small dark bar, Middleton crossed the threshold, then stopped. The bartender was wrestling with a man much bigger than he was, while another, taller man looked on. The two strangers were dressed almost identically: blue blazers and gray slacks, Oxford button-downs and forgettable ties, none of which matched their demeanor. The tall one looked on with a cold curiosity; sadism curdled his smile. He held Middleton’s briefcase in his hand while examining a cell phone that Middleton quickly recognized as his. Meanwhile, the other one, who looked much stronger, had the bartender in a headlock, punching him brutally with his free hand. The bartender’s arm was outstretched, the Chopin folio clutched tight in his fist.

As Middleton registered all this, the one with the briefcase turned toward him. You have no time, Middleton realized, as a scowl of recognition crossed the other man’s face. Tugging the Beretta from his pocket, Middleton charged forward as the man dropped the cell phone and plunged his hand inside his sport coat. Middleton aimed and placed two quick shots into the fleshy center of the tall man’s face, trusting the bullets would pierce the cartilage around the nose and lodge deep inside the brain.

The man tottered, his head jerking but his ugly expression strangely unchanged. Then he buckled and dropped.

Stunned by the gunshots, the thick man shoved the bartender aside and crouched, reaching for his own weapon. Middleton swung around, took a quick step forward, aimed and fired two more shots, close range, the soft center of the face again. The man wavered, visage threaded with blood, before dropping to one knee, grabbing at the edge of the bar, then sliding down in fitful spasms.

The bartender recoiled, horrified. Middleton heard steps coming from the lobby, the gasps of unseen onlookers, as he reached out his hand.

“Give that to me.” He gestured for the manuscript. When the bartender merely stared, Middleton turned the gun toward him. “I don’t have time.”

The bartender hesitated, then dropped the mangled folio onto the bar, his face half terror, half desolation. Middleton snatched his briefcase from the floor, stuffed his cell phone then the manuscript inside, then headed toward the scattering crowd in the lobby, the Beretta still in his hand.

The well-dressed woman who’d been near the elevators earlier slipped up behind, tucked her hand inside his arm and clutched his damp sleeve. She guided him across the lobby. “Don’t stop, Harry,” she whispered. “Not if you want to see Charlotte.”