Windy City Blues

I

GABRIELLA SESTIERI OF PITIGLIANO.

Anyone with knowledge of her whereabouts should contact the office of Malcolm Ranier.

I WAS READING the Herald-Star at breakfast when the notice jumped out at me from the personal section. I put my coffee down with extreme care, as if I were in a dream and all my actions moved with the slowness of dream time. I shut the paper with the same slow motion, then opened it again. The notice was still there. I spelled out the headline letter by letter, in case my unconscious mind had substituted one name for another, but the text remained the same. There could not be more than one Gabriella Sestieri from Pitigliano. My mother, who died of cancer in 1968 at the age of forty-six.

“Who could want her all these years later?” I said aloud.

Peppy, the golden retriever I share with my downstairs neighbor, raised a sympathetic eyebrow. We had just come back from a run on a dreary November morning and she was waiting hopefully for toast.

“It can’t be her father.” His mind had cracked after six months in a German concentration camp, and he refused to acknowledge Gabriella’s death when my father wrote to inform him of it. I’d had to translate the letter, in which he said he was too old to travel but wished Gabriella well on her concert tour. Anyway, if he was alive still he’d be almost a hundred.

Maybe Gabriella’s brother Italo was searching for her: he had disappeared in the maelstrom of the war, but Gabriella always hoped he survived. Or her first voice teacher, Francesca Salvini, whom Gabriella longed to see again, to explain why she had never fulfilled Salvini’s hopes for her professional career. As Gabriella lay in her final bed in Jackson Park Hospital with tubes ringing her wasted body, her last messages had been for me and for Salvini. This morning it dawned on me for the first time how hurtful my father must have found that. He adored my mother, but for him she had only the quiet fondness of an old friend.

I realized my hands around the newspaper were wet with sweat, that paper and print were clinging to my palms. With an embarrassed laugh I put the paper down and washed off the ink under the kitchen tap. It was ludicrous to spin my mind with conjectures when all I had to do was phone Malcolm Ranier. I went to the living room and pawed through the papers on the piano for the phone book. Ranier seemed to be a lawyer with offices on La Salle Street, at the north end where the pricey new buildings stand.

His was apparently a solo practice. The woman who answered the phone assured me she was Mr. Ranier’s assistant and conversant with all his files. Mr. Ranier couldn’t speak with me himself now, because he was in conference. Or court. Or the John.

“I’m calling about the notice in this morning’s paper, wanting to know the whereabouts of Gabriella Sestieri.”

“What is your name, please, and your relationship with Mrs. Sestieri?” The assistant left out the second syllable so that the name came out as “Sistery.”

“I’ll be glad to tell you that if you tell me why you’re trying to find her.”

“I’m afraid I can’t give out confidential client business over the phone. But if you tell me your name and what you know about Mrs. Sestieri we’ll get back to you when we’ve discussed the matter with our client.”

I thought we could keep this conversation going all day. “The person you’re looking for may not be the same one I know, and I don’t want to violate a family’s privacy. But I’ll be in a meeting on La Salle Street this morning; I can stop by to discuss the matter with Mr. Ranier.”

The woman finally decided that Mr. Ranier had ten minutes free at twelve-thirty. I gave her my name and hung up. Sitting at the piano, I crashed out chords, as if the sound could bury the wildness of my feelings. I never could remember whether I knew how ill my mother was the last six months of her life. Had she told me and I couldn’t-or didn’t wish to-comprehend it? Or had she decided to shelter me from the knowledge? Gabriella usually made me face bad news, but perhaps not the worst of all possible news, our final separation.

Why did I never work on my singing? It was one thing I could have done for her. I didn’t have a Voice, as Gabriella put it, but I had a serviceable contralto, and of course she insisted I acquire some musicianship. I stood up and began working on a few vocal stretches, then suddenly became wild with the desire to find my mother’s music, the old exercise books she had me learn from.

I burrowed through the hall closet for the trunk that held her books. I finally found it in the farthest corner, under a carton holding my old case files, a baseball bat, a box of clothes I no longer wore but couldn’t bring myself to give away… I sat on the closet floor in misery, with a sense of having buried her so deep I couldn’t find her.

Peppy’s whimpering pulled me back to the present. She had followed me into the closet and was pushing her nose into my arm. I fondled her ears.

At length it occurred to me that if someone was trying to find my mother I’d need documents to prove the relationship. I got up from the floor and pulled the trunk into the hall. On top lay her black silk concert gown: I’d forgotten wrapping that in tissue and storing it. In the end I found my parents’ marriage license and Gabriella’s death certificate tucked into the score of Don Giovanni.

When I returned the score to the trunk another old envelope floated out. I picked it up and recognized Mr. Fortieri’s spiky writing. Carlo Fortieri repaired musical instruments and sold, or at least used to sell music. He was the person Gabriella went to for Italian conversation, musical conversation, advice. He still sometimes tuned my own piano out of affection for her.

When Gabriella met him, he’d been a widower for years, also with one child, also a girl. Gabriella thought I ought to play with her while she sang or discussed music with Mr. Fortieri, but Barbara was ten years or so my senior and we’d never had much to say to each other.

I pulled out the yellowed paper. It was written in Italian, and hard for me to decipher, but apparently dated from 1965.

Addressing her as “Cara signora Warshawski,” Mr. Fortieri sent his regrets that she was forced to cancel her May 14 concert. “I shall, of course, respect your wishes and not reveal the nature of your indisposition to anyone else. And, cara signora, you should know by now that I regard any confidence of yours as a sacred trust: you need not fear an indiscretion.” It was signed with his full name.

I wondered now if he’d been my mother’s lover. My stomach tightened, as it does when you think of your parents stepping outside their prescribed roles, and I folded the paper back into the envelope. Fifteen years ago the same notion must have prompted me to put his letter inside Don Giovanni. For want of a better idea I stuck it back in the score and returned everything to the trunk. I needed to rummage through a different carton to find my own birth certificate, and it was getting too late in the morning for me to indulge in nostalgia.

II

Malcolm Ranier’s office overlooked the Chicago River and all the new glass and marble flanking it. It was a spectacular view-if you squinted to shut out the burnt-out waste of Chicago ’s west side that lay beyond. I arrived just at twelve-thirty, dressed in my one good suit, black, with a white crepe-de-chine blouse. I looked feminine, but austere-or at least that was my intention.

Ranier’s assistant-cum-receptionist was buried in Danielle Steel. When I handed her my card, she marked her page without haste and took the card into an inner office. After a ten-minute wait to let me understand his importance, Ranier came out to greet me in person. He was a soft round man of about sixty, with gray eyes that lay like pebbles above an apparently jovial smile.

“Ms. Warshawski. Good of you to stop by. I understand you can help us with our inquiry into Mrs. Sestieri.” He gave my mother’s name a genuine Italian lilt, but his voice was as hard as his eyes.

“Hold my calls, Cindy.” He put a hand on the nape of my neck to steer me into his office.

Before we’d shut the door Cindy was reabsorbed into Danielle. I moved away from the hand-I didn’t want grease on my five-hundred-dollar jacket-and went to admire a bronze nymph on a shelf at the window.

“Beautiful, isn’t it.” Ranier might have been commenting on the weather. “One of my clients brought it from France.”

“It looks as though it should be in a museum.”

A call to the bar association before I left my apartment told me he was an import-export lawyer. Various imports seemed to have attached themselves to him on their way into the country. The room was dominated by a slab of rose marble, presumably a work table, but several antique chairs were also worth a second glance. A marquetry credenza stood against the far wall. The Modigliani above it was probably an original.

“Coffee, Ms.”-he glanced at my card again-“Warshawski?”

“No, thank you. I understand you’re very busy, and so am I. So let’s talk about Gabriella Sestieri.”

“D’accordo.” He motioned me to one of the spindly antiques near the marble slab. “You know where she is?”

The chair didn’t look as though it could support my hundred and forty pounds, but when Ranier perched on a similar one I sat, with a wariness that made me think he had them to keep people deliberately off balance. I leaned back and crossed my legs. The woman at ease.

“I’d like to make sure we’re talking about the same person. And that I know why you want to find her.”

A smile crossed his full lips, again not touching the slate chips of his eyes. “We could fence all day, Ms. Warshawski, but as you say, time is valuable to us both. The Gabriella Sestieri I seek was born in Pitigliano on October thirtieth, 1921. She left Italy sometime early in 1941, no one knows exactly when, but she was last heard of in Siena that February. And there’s some belief she came to Chicago. As to why I want to find her, a relative of hers, now in Florence, but from the Pitigliano family, is interested in locating her. My specialty is import-export law, particularly with Italy: I’m no expert in finding missing persons, but I agreed to assist as a favor to a client. The relative-Mrs. Sestieri’s relative-has a professional connection to my client. And now it is your turn, Ms. Warshawski.”

“Ms. Sestieri died in March 1968.” My blood was racing; I was pleased to hear my voice come out without a tremor. “She married a Chicago police officer in April 1942. They had one child. Me.”

“And your father? Officer Warshawski?”

“Died in 1979. Now may I have the name of my mother’s relative? I’ve known only one member of her family, my grandmother’s sister who lives here in Chicago, and am eager to find others.” Actually, if they bore any resemblance to my embittered Aunt Rosa I’d just as soon not meet the remaining Verazi clan.

“You were cautious, Ms. Warshawski, so you will forgive my caution: do you have proof of your identity?”

“You make it sound as though treasure awaits the missing heir, Mr. Ranier.” I pulled out the copies of my legal documents and handed them over. “Who or what is looking for my mother?”

Ranier ignored my question. He studied the documents briefly, then put them on the marble slab while condoling me on losing my parents. His voice had the same soft flat cadence as when he’d discussed the nymph.

“You’ve no doubt remained close to your grandmother’s sister? If she’s the person who brought your mother to Chicago it might be helpful for me to have her name and address.”

“My aunt is a difficult woman to be close to, but I can check with her, to see if she doesn’t mind my giving you her name and address.”

“And the rest of your mother’s family?”

I held out my hands, empty. “I don’t know any of them. I don’t even know how many there are. Who is my mystery relative? What does he-she-want?”

He paused, looking at the file in his hands. “I actually don’t know. I ran the ad merely as a favor to my client. But I’ll pass your name and address along, Ms. Warshawski, and when he’s been in touch with the person I’m sure you’ll hear.”

This runaround was starting to irritate me. “You’re a heck of a poker player, Mr. Ranier. But you know as well as I that you’re lying like a rug.”

I spoke lightly, smiling as I got to my feet and crossed to the door, snatching my documents from the marble slab as I passed. For once his feelings reached his eyes, turning the slate to molten rock. As I waited for the elevator I wondered if answering that ad meant I was going to be sucker-punched.

Over dinner that night with Dr. Lotty Herschel I went through my conversation with Ranier, trying to sort out my confused feelings. Trying, too, to figure out who in Gabriella’s family might want to find her, if the inquiry was genuine.

“They surely know she’s dead,” Lotty said.

“That’s what I thought at first, but it’s not that simple. See, my grandmother converted to Judaism when she married Nonno Mattia-sorry, that’s Gabriella’s father-Grandpa Matthias-Gabriella usually spoke Italian to me. Anyway, my grandmother died in Auschwitz when the Italian Jews were rounded up in 1944. Then, my grandfather didn’t go back to Pitigliano, the little town they were from, after he was liberated-the Jewish community there had been decimated and he didn’t have any family left. So he was sent to a Jewish-run sanatorium in Turin, but Gabriella only found that out after years of writing letters to relief agencies.”

I stared into my wineglass, as though the claret could reveal the secrets of my family. “There was one cousin she was really close to, from the Christian side of her family, named Frederica. Frederica had a baby out of wedlock the year before Gabriella came to Chicago, and got sent away in disgrace. After the war Gabriella kept trying to find her, but Frederica’s family wouldn’t forward the letters-they really didn’t want to be in touch with her. Gabriella might have saved enough money to go back to Italy to look for herself, but then she started to be ill. She had a miscarriage the summer of sixty-five and bled and bled. Tony and I thought she was dying then.”

My voice trailed away as I thought of that hot unhappy summer, the summer the city burst into riot-spawned flames and my mother lay in the stifling front bedroom oozing blood. She and Tony had one of their infrequent fights. I’d been on my paper route and they didn’t hear me come in. He wanted her to sell something which she said wasn’t hers to dispose of.

“And your life,” my father shouted. “You can give that away as a gift? Even if she was still alive-” He broke off then, seeing me, and neither of them talked about the matter again, at least when I was around to hear.

Lotty squeezed my hand. “What about your aunt, great-aunt in Melrose Park? She might have told her siblings, don’t you think? Was she close to any of them?”

I grimaced. “I can’t imagine Rosa being close to anyone. See, she was the last child, and Gabriella’s grandmother died giving birth to her. So some cousins adopted her, and when they emigrated in the twenties Rosa came to Chicago with them. She didn’t really feel like she was part of the Verazi family. I know it seems strange, but with all the uprootings the war caused, and all the disconnections, it’s possible that the main part of Gabriella’s mother’s family didn’t know what became of her.”

Lotty nodded, her face twisted in sympathy; much of her family had been destroyed in those death camps also. “There wasn’t a schism when your grandmother converted?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s frustrating to think how little I know about those people. Gabriella says-said-the Verazis weren’t crazy about it, and they didn’t get together much except for weddings or funerals-except for the one cousin. But Pitigliano was a Jewish cultural center before the war and Nonno was considered a real catch. I guess he was rich until the Fascists confiscated his property.” Fantasies of reparations danced through my head.

“Not too likely,” Lotty said. “You’re imagining someone overcome with guilt sixty years after the fact coming to make you a present of some land?”

I blushed. “Factory, actually: the Sestieris were harness makers who switched to automobile interiors in the twenties. I suppose if the place is even still standing, it’s part of Fiat or Mercedes. You know, all day long I’ve been swinging between wild fantasies-about Nonno’s factory, or Gabriella’s brother surfacing-and then I start getting terrified, wondering if it’s all some kind of terrible trap. Although who’d want to trap me, or why, is beyond me. I know this Malcolm Ranier knows. It would be so easy-”

“No! Not to set your mind at rest, not to prove you can bypass the security of a modern high rise-for no reason whatsoever are you to break into that man’s office.”

“Oh, very well.” I tried not to sound like a sulky child denied a treat.

“You promise, Victoria?” Lotty sounded ferocious.

I held up my right hand. “On my honor, I promise not to break into his office.”

III

It was six days later that the phone call came to my office. A young man, with an Italian accent so thick that his English was almost incomprehensible, called up and gaily asked if I was his “Cousin Vittoria.”

“Parliamo italiano,” I suggested, and the gaiety in his voice increased as he switched thankfully to his own language.

He was my cousin Ludovico, the great-great-grandson of our mutual Verazi ancestors, he had arrived in Chicago from Milan only last night, terribly excited at finding someone from his mother’s family, thrilled that I knew Italian, my accent was quite good, really, only a tinge of America in it, could we get together, any place, he would find me-just name the time as long as it was soon.

I couldn’t help laughing as the words tumbled out, although I had to ask him to slow down and repeat. It had been a long time since I’d spoken Italian, and it took time for my mind to adjust. Ludovico was staying at the Garibaldi, a small hotel on the fringe of the Gold Coast, and would be thrilled if I met him there for a drink at six. Oh, yes, his last name-that was Verazi, the same as our great-grandfather.

I bustled through my business with greater efficiency than usual so that I had time to run the dogs and change before meeting him. I laughed at myself for dressing with care, in a pantsuit of crushed lavender velvet which could take me dancing if the evening ended that way, but no self-mockery could suppress my excitement. I’d been an only child with one cousin from each of my parents’ families as my only relations. My cousin Boom-Boom, whom I adored, had been dead these ten years and more, while Rosa ’s son Albert was such a mass of twisted fears that I preferred not to be around him. Now I was meeting a whole new family.

I tap-danced around the dog in my excitement. Peppy gave me a long-suffering look and demanded that I return her to my downstairs neighbor: Mitch, her son, had stopped there on our way home from running.

“You look slick, doll,” Mr. Contreras told me, torn between approval and jealousy. “New date?”

“New cousin.” I continued to tap-dance in the hall outside his door. “Yep. The mystery relative finally surfaced. Ludovico Verazi.”

“You be careful, doll,” the old man said severely. “Plenty of con artists out there to pretend they’re your cousins, you know, and next thing-phht.”

“What’ll he con me out of? My dirty laundry?” I planted a kiss on his nose and danced down the sidewalk to my car.

Three men were waiting in the Garibaldi’s small lobby, but I knew my cousin at once. His hair was amber, instead of black, but his face was my mother’s, from the high rounded forehead to his wide sensuous mouth. He leapt up at my approach, seized my hands, and kissed me in the European style-sort of touching the air beside each ear.

“Bellissima!” Still holding my hands he stepped back to scrutinize me. My astonishment must have been written large on my face, because he laughed a little guiltily.

“I know it, I know it, I should have told you of the resemblance, but I didn’t realize it was so strong: the only picture I’ve seen of Cousin Gabriella is a stage photo from 1940 when she starred in Jommelli’s Iphigenia.”

“Jommelli!” I interrupted. “I thought it was Gluck!”

“No, no, cugina, Jommelli. Surely Gabriella knew what she sang?” Laughing happily he moved to the armchair where he’d been sitting and took up a brown leather case. He pulled out a handful of papers and thumbed through them, then extracted a yellowing photograph for me to examine.

It was my mother, dressed as Iphigenia for her one stage role, the one that gave me my middle name. She was made up, her dark hair in an elaborate coil, but she looked absurdly young, like a little girl playing dress-up. At the bottom of the picture was the name of the studio, in Siena where she had sung, and on the back someone had lettered, “Gabriella Sestieri fa la parte d’Iphigenia nella produzione d’Iphigenia da Jommelli.” The resemblance to Ludovico was clear, despite the blurring of time and cosmetics to the lines of her face. I felt a stab of jealousy: I inherited her olive skin, but my face is my father’s.

“You know this photograph?” Ludovico asked.

I shook my head. “She left Italy in such a hurry: all she brought with her were some Venetian wineglasses that had been a wedding present to Nonna Laura. I never saw her onstage.”

“I’ve made you sad, cousin Vittoria, by no means my intention. Perhaps you would like to keep this photograph?”

“I would, very much. Now-a drink? Or dinner?”

He laughed again. “I have been in America only twenty-four hours, not long enough to be accustomed to dinner in the middle of the afternoon. So-a drink, by all means. Take me to a typical American bar.”

I collected my Trans Am from the doorman and drove down to the Golden Glow, the bar at the south end of the Loop owned by my friend Sal Barthele. My appearance with a good-looking stranger caused a stir among the regulars-as I’d hoped. Murray Ryerson, an investigative reporter whose relationship with me is compounded of friendship, competition, and a disastrous romantic episode, put down his beer with a snap and came over to our table. Sal Barthele emerged from her famous mahogany horseshoe bar. Under cover of Murray ’s greetings and Ludovico’s accented English she muttered, “Girl, you are strutting. You look indecent! Anyway, isn’t this cradle snatching? Boy looks young!”

I was glad the glow from the Tiffany table lamps was too dim for her to see me blushing. In the car coming over I had been calculating degrees of consanguinity and decided that as second cousins we were eugenically safe; I was embarrassed to show it so obviously. Anyway, he was only seven years younger than me.

“My newfound cousin,” I said, too abruptly. “Ludovico Verazi-Sal Barthele, owner of the Glow.”

Ludovico shook her hand. “So, you are an old friend of this cousin of mine. You know her more than I do-give me ideas about her character.”

“Dangerous,” Murray said. “She breaks men in her soup like crackers.”

“Only if they’re crackers to begin with,” I snapped, annoyed to be presented to my cousin in such a light.

“Crackers to begin with?” Ludovico asked.

“Slang-gergo-for ‘pazzo,’” I explained. “Also a cracker is an oaf-a cretino.”

Murray put an arm around me. “Ah, Vic-the sparkle in your eyes lights a fire in my heart.”

“It’s just the third beer, Murray -that’s heartburn,” Sal put in. “Ludovico, what do you drink-whiskey, like your cousin? Or something nice and Italian like Campari?”

“Whiskey before dinner, Cousin Vittoria? No, no, by the time you eat you have no-no tasting sensation. For me, Signora, a glass of wine please.”

Later over dinner at Filigree we became “Vic” and “Vico”-“Please, Veek, no one is calling me ‘Ludovico’ since the time I am a little boy in trouble-” And later still, after two bottles of Barolo, he asked me how much I knew about the Verazi family.

“Niente,” I said. “I don’t even know how many brothers and sisters Gabriella’s mother had. Or where you come into the picture. Or where I do, for that matter.”

His eyebrows shot up in surprise. “So your mother was never in touch with her own family after she moved here?”

I told him what I’d told Lotty, about the war, my grandmother’s estrangement from her family, and Gabriella’s depression on learning of her cousin Frederica’s death.

“But I am the grandson of that naughty Frederica, that girl who would have a baby with no father.” Vico shouted in such excitement that the wait staff rushed over to make sure he wasn’t choking to death. “This is remarkable, Vic, this is amazing, that the one person in our family your mother is close to turns out to be my grandmother.

“Ah, it was sad, very sad, what happened to her. The family is moved to Florence during the war, my grandmother has a baby, maybe the father is a partisan, my grandmother was the one person in the family to be supporting the partisans. My great-grandparents, they are very prudish, they say, this is a disgrace, never mind there is a war on and much bigger disgraces are happening all the time, so-poof!-off goes this naughty Frederica with her baby to Milano. And the baby becomes my mother, but she and my grandmother both die when I am ten, so these most respectable Verazi cousins, finally they decide the war is over, the grandson is after all far enough removed from the taint of original sin, they come fetch me and raise me with all due respectability in Florence.”

He broke off to order a cognac. I took another espresso: somehow after forty I no longer can manage the amount of alcohol I used to. I’d only drunk half of one of the bottles of wine.

“So how did you learn about Gabriella? And why did you want to try to find her?”

“Well, cam cugina, it is wonderful to meet you, but I have a confession I must make: it was in the hopes of finding-something-that I am coming to Chicago looking for my cousin Gabriella.”

“What kind of something?”

“You say you know nothing about our great-grandmother, Claudia Fortezza? So you are not knowing even that she is in a small way a composer?”

I couldn’t believe Gabriella never mentioned such a thing. If she didn’t know about it, the rift with the Verazis must have been more severe than she led me to believe. “But maybe that explains why she was given early musical training,” I added aloud. “You know my mother was a quite gifted singer. Although, alas, she never had the professional career she should have.”

“Yes, yes, she trained with Francesca Salvini. I know all about that! Salvini was an important teacher, even in a little town like Pitigliano people came from Siena and Florence to train with her, and she had a connection to the Siena Opera. But anyway, Vic, I am wanting to collect Claudia Fortezza’s music. The work of women composers is coming into vogue. I can find an ensemble to perform it, maybe to record it, so I am hoping Gabriella, too, has some of this music.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I kept all her music in a trunk, and I don’t think there’s anything from that period.”

“But you don’t know definitely, do you, so maybe we can look together.” He was leaning across the table, his voice vibrating with urgency.

I moved backward, the strength of his feelings making me uneasy. “I suppose so.”

“Then let us pay the bill and go.”

“Now? But, Vico, it’s almost midnight. If it’s been there all this while it will still be there in the morning.”

“Ah: I am being the cracker, I see.” We had been speaking in Italian all evening, but for this mangled idiom Vico switched to English. “Mi scusi, cara cugina: I have been so engaged in my hunt, through the papers of old aunts, through attics in Pitigliano, in used bookstores in Florence, that I forget not everyone shares my enthusiasm. And then last month, I find a diary of my grandmother’s, and she writes of the special love her cousin Gabriella has for music, her special gift, and I think-ah-ha, if this music lies anywhere, it is with this Gabriella.”

He picked up my right hand and started playing with my fingers. “Besides, confess to me, Vic: in your mind’s eye you are at your home feverishly searching through your mother’s music, whether I am present or not.”

I laughed, a little shakily: the intensity in his face made him look so like Gabriella when she was swept up in music that my heart turned over with yearning.

“So I am right? We can pay the bill and leave?”

The wait staff, hoping to close the restaurant, had left the bill on our table some time earlier. I tried to pay it, but Vico snatched it from me. He took a thick stack of bills from his billfold. Counting under his breath he peeled off two hundreds and a fifty and laid them on the check. Like many Europeans he’d assumed the tip was included in the total: I added four tens and went to retrieve the Trans Am.

IV

As we got out of the car I warned Vico not to talk in the stairwell. “We don’t want the dogs to hear me and wake Mr. Contreras.”

“He is a malevolent neighbor? You need me perhaps to guard you?”

“He’s the best-natured neighbor in the world. Unfortunately, he sees his role in my life as Cerberus, with a whiff of Othello thrown in. It’s late enough without spending an hour on why I’m bringing you home with me.”

We managed to tiptoe up the stairs without rousing anyone. Inside my apartment we collapsed with the giggles of teenagers who’ve walked past a cop after curfew. Somehow it seemed natural to fall from laughter into each other’s arms. I was the first to break away. Vico gave me a look I couldn’t interpret-mockery seemed to dominate.

My cheeks stinging, I went to the hall closet and pulled out Gabriella’s trunk once more. I lifted out her evening gown again, fingering the lace panels in the bodice. They were silver, carefully edged in black. Shortly before her final illness Gabriella managed to organize a series of concerts that she hoped would launch her career again, at least in a small way, and it was for these that she had the dress made. Tony and I sat in the front row of Mandel Hall, almost swooning with our passion for her. The gown cost her two years of free lessons for the couturier’s daughter, the last few given when she had gone bald from chemotherapy.

As I stared at the dress, wrapped in melancholy, I realized Vico was pulling books and scores from the trunk and going through them with quick careful fingers. I’d saved dozens of Gabriella’s books of operas and lieder, but nothing like her whole collection. I wasn’t going to tell Vico that, though: he’d probably demand that we break into old Mr. Fortieri’s shop to see if any of the scores were still lying about.

At one point Vico thought he had found something, a handwritten score tucked into the pages of Idomeneo. I came to look. Someone, not my mother, had meticulously copied out a concerto. As I bent to look more closely, Vico pulled a small magnifying glass from his wallet and began to scrutinize the paper.

I eyed him thoughtfully. “Does the music or the notation look anything like our great-grandmother’s?”

He didn’t answer me, but held the score up to the light to inspect the margins. I finally took the pages from him and scanned the clarinet line.

“I’m no musicologist, but this sounds baroque to me.” I flipped to the end, where the initials “CF” were inscribed with a flourish: Carlo Fortieri might have copied this for my mother-a true labor of love: copying music is a slow, painful business.

“Baroque?” Vico grabbed the score back from me and looked at it more intensely. “But this paper is not that old, I think.”

“I think not, also. I have a feeling it’s something one of my mother’s friends copied out for a chamber group they played in: she sometimes took the piano part.”

He put the score to one side and continued burrowing in the trunk. Near the bottom he came on a polished wooden box, big enough to fit snugly against the short side of the trunk. He grunted as he prised it free, then gave a little crow of delight as he saw it was filled with old papers.

“Take it easy, cowboy,” I said as he started tossing them to the floor. “This isn’t the city dump.”

He gave me a look of startling rage at my reproof, then covered it so quickly with a laugh that I couldn’t be sure I’d seen it. “This old wood is beautiful. You should keep this out where you can look at it.”

“It was Gabriella’s, from Pitigliano.” In it, carefully wrapped in her winter underwear, she’d laid the eight Venetian glasses that were her sole legacy of home. Fleeing in haste in the night, she had chosen to transport a fragile load, as if that gained her control of her own fragile destiny.

Vico ran his long fingers over the velvet lining the case. The green had turned yellow and black along the creases. I took the box away from him, and began replacing my school essays and report cards-my mother used to put my best school reports in the case.

At two Vico had to admit defeat. “You have no idea where it is? You didn’t sell it, perhaps to meet some emergency bill or pay for that beautiful sports car?”

“Vico! What on earth are you talking about? Putting aside the insult, what do you think a score by an unknown nineteenth-century woman is worth?”

“Ah, mi scusi, Vic-I forget that everyone doesn’t value these Verazi pieces as I do.”

“Yes, my dear cousin, and I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck, either.” I switched to English in my annoyance. “Not even the most enthusiastic grandson would fly around the world with this much mystery. What’s the story-are the Verazis making you their heir if you produce her music? Or are you looking for something else altogether?”

“Turnip truck? What is this turnip truck?”

“Forget the linguistic excursion and come clean, Vico. Meaning, confession is good for the soul, so speak up. What are you really looking for?”

He studied his fingers, grimy from paging through the music, then looked up at me with a quick frank smile. “The truth is, Fortunato Magi may have seen some of her music. He was Puccini’s uncle, you know, and very influential among the Italian composers of the end of the century. My great-grandmother used to talk about Magi reading Claudia Fortezza’s music. She was only a daughter-in-law, and anyway, Claudia Fortezza was dead years before she married into the family, so I never paid any attention to it. But then when I found my grandmother’s diaries, it seemed possible that there was some truth to it. It’s even possible that Puccini used some of Claudia Fortezza’s music, so if we can find it, it might be valuable.”

I thought the whole idea was ludicrous-it wasn’t even as though the Puccini estate were collecting royalties that one might try to sue for. And even if they were-you could believe almost any highly melodic vocal music sounded like Puccini. I didn’t want to get into a fight with Vico about it, though: I had to be at work early in the morning.

“There wasn’t any time you can remember Gabriella talking about something very valuable in the house?” he persisted.

I was about to shut him off completely when I suddenly remembered my parents’ argument that I’d interrupted. Reluctantly, because he saw I’d thought of something, I told Vico about it.

“She was saying it wasn’t hers to dispose of. I suppose that might include her grandmother’s music. But there wasn’t anything like that in the house when my father died. And believe me, I went through all the papers.” Hoping for some kind of living memento of my mother, something more than her Venetian wineglasses.

Vico seized my arms in his excitement. “You see! She did have it, she must have sold it anyway. Or your father did, after she died. Who would they have gone to?”

I refused to give him Mr. Fortieri as a gift. If Gabriella had been worried about the ethics of disposing of someone else’s belongings she probably would have consulted him. Maybe even asked him to sell it, if she came to that in the end, but Vico didn’t need to know that.

“You know someone, I can tell,” he cried.

“No. I was a child. She didn’t confide in me. If my father sold it he would have been embarrassed to let me know. It’s going on three in the morning, Vico, and I have to work in a few hours. I’m going to call you a cab and get you back to the Garibaldi.”

“You work? Your long lost cousin Vico comes to Chicago for the first time and you cannot kiss off your boss?” He blew across his fingers expressively.

“I work for myself.” I could hear the brusqueness creep into my voice-his exigency was taking away some of his charm. “And I have one job that won’t wait past tomorrow morning.”

“What kind of work is it you do that cannot be deferred?”

“Detective. Private investigator. And I have to be on a-a-”-I couldn’t think of the Italian, so I used English-“shipping dock in four hours.”

“Ah, a detective.” He pursed his lips. “I see now why this Murray was warning me about you. You and he are lovers? Or is that a shocking question to ask an American woman?”

“ Murray ’s a reporter. His path crosses mine from time to time.” I went to the phone and summoned a cab.

“And, Cousin, I may take this handwritten score with me? To study more leisurely?”

“If you return it.”

“I will be here with it tomorrow afternoon-when you return from your detecting.”

I went to the kitchen for some newspaper to wrap it in, wondering about Vico. He didn’t seem to have much musical knowledge. Perhaps he was ashamed to tell me he couldn’t read music and was going to take it to some third party who could give him a stylistic comparison between this score and something of our grandmother’s.

The cab honked under the window a few minutes later. I sent him off on his own with a chaste cousinly kiss. He took my retreat from passion with the same mockery that had made me squirm earlier.

V

All during the next day, as I huddled behind a truck taking pictures of a handoff between the vice president of an electronics firm and a driver, as I tailed the driver south to Kankakee and photographed another handoff to a man in a sports car, traced the car to its owner in Libertyville and reported back to the electronics firm in Naperville, I wondered about Vico and the score. What was he really looking for?

Last night I hadn’t questioned his story too closely-the late night and pleasure in my new cousin had both muted my suspicions. Today the bleak air chilled my euphoria. A quest for a great-grandmother’s music might bring one pleasure, but surely not inspire such avidity as Vico displayed. He’d grown up in poverty in Milan without knowing who his father, or even his grandfather were. Maybe it was a quest for roots that was driving my cousin so passionately.

I wondered, too, what item of value my mother had refused to sell thirty summers ago. What wasn’t hers to sell, that she would stubbornly sacrifice better medical care for it? I realized I felt hurt: I thought I was so dear to her she told me everything. The idea that she’d kept a secret from me made it hard for me to think clearly.

When my dad died, I’d gone through everything in the little house on Houston before selling it. I’d never found anything that seemed worth that much agony, so either she did sell it in the end-or my dad had done so-or she had given it to someone else. Of course, she might have buried it deep in the house. The only place I could imagine her hiding something was in her piano, and if that was the case I was out of luck: the piano had been lost in the fire that destroyed my apartment ten years ago.

But if it-whatever it was-was the same thing Vico was looking for, some old piece of music-Gabriella would have consulted Mr. Fortieri. If she hadn’t gone to him, he might know who else she would have turned to. While I waited in a Naperville mall for my prints to be developed I tried phoning him. He was eighty now, but still actively working, so I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t answer the phone.

I snoozed in the president’s antechamber until he could finally snatch ten minutes for my report. When I finished, a little after five, I stopped in his secretary’s office to try Mr. Fortieri again. Still no answer.

With only three hours sleep, my skin was twitching as though I’d put it on inside out. Since seven this morning I’d logged a hundred and ninety miles. I wanted nothing now more than my bed. Instead I rode the packed expressway all the way northwest to the O’Hare cutoff.

Mr. Fortieri lived in the Italian enclave along north Harlem Avenue. It used to be a day’s excursion to go there with Gabriella: we would ride the Number Six bus to the Loop, transfer to the Douglas line of the el, and at its end take yet another bus west to Harlem. After lunch in one of the storefront restaurants, my mother stopped at Mr. Fortieri’s to sing or talk while I was given an old clarinet to take apart to keep me amused. On our way back to the bus we bought polenta and olive oil in Frescobaldi’s Deli. Old Mrs. Frescobaldi would let me run my hands through the bags of cardamom, the voluptuous scent making me stomp around the store in an exaggerated imitation of the drunks along Commercial Avenue. Gabriella would hiss embarrassed invectives at me, and threaten to withhold my gelato if I didn’t behave.

The street today has lost much of its charm. Some of the old stores remain, but the chains have set out tendrils here as elsewhere. Mrs. Frescobaldi couldn’t stand up to Jewel, and Vespucci’s, where Gabriella bought all her shoes, was swallowed by the nearby mall.

Mr. Fortieri’s shop, on the ground floor of his dark-shuttered house, looked forlorn now, as though it missed the lively commerce of the street. I rang the bell without much hope: no lights shone from either story.

“I don’t think he’s home,” a woman called from the neighboring walk.

She was just setting out with a laundry-laden shopping cart. I asked her if she’d seen Mr. Fortieri at all today. She’d noticed his bedroom light when she was getting ready for work-he was an early riser, just like her, and this time of year she always noticed his bedroom light. In fact, she’d just been thinking it was strange she didn’t see his kitchen light on-he was usually preparing his supper about now, but maybe he’d gone off to see his married daughter in Wilmette.

I remembered Barbara Fortieri’s wedding. Gabriella had been too sick to attend, and had sent me by myself. The music had been sensational, but I had been angry and uncomfortable and hadn’t paid much attention to anything-including the groom. I asked the woman if she knew Barbara’s married name-I might try to call her father there.

“Oh, you know her?”

“My mother was a friend of Mr. Fortieri’s-Gabriella Sestieri-Warshawski, I mean.” Talking to my cousin had sunk me too deep in my mother’s past.

“Sorry, honey, never met her. She married a boy she met at college, I can’t think of his name, just about the time my husband and I moved in here, and they went off to those lakefront suburbs together.”

She made it sound like as daring a trip as any her ancestors had undertaken braving the Atlantic. Fatigue made it sound funny to me and I found myself doubling over to keep the woman from seeing me shake with wild laughter. The thought of Gabriella telling me “No gelato if you do not behave this minute” only made it seem funnier and I had to bend over, clutching my side.

“You okay there, honey?” The woman hesitated, not wanting to be involved with a stranger.

“Long day,” I gasped. “Sudden-cramp-in my side.”

I waved her on, unable to speak further. Losing my balance, I reeled against the door. It swung open behind me and I fell hard into the open shop, banging my elbow against a chair.

The fall sobered me. I rubbed my elbow, crooning slightly from pain. Bracing against the chair I hoisted myself to my feet. It was only then that it dawned on me that the chair was overturned-alarming in any shop, but especially that of someone as fastidious as Mr. Fortieri.

Without stopping to reason I backed out the door, closing it by wrapping my hand in my jacket before touching the knob. The woman with the laundry cart had gone on down the street. I hunted in my glove compartment for my flashlight, then ran back up the walk and into the shop.

I found the old man in the back, in the middle of his workshop. He lay amid his tools, the stem of an oboe still in his left hand. I fumbled for his pulse. Maybe it was the nervous beating of my own heart, but I thought I felt a faint trace of life. I found the phone on the far side of room, buried under a heap of books that had been taken from the shelves and left where they landed.

VI

“Damn it, Warshawski, what were you doing here anyway?” Sergeant John McGonnigal and I were talking in the back room of Mr. Fortieri’s shop while evidence technicians ravaged the front.

I was as surprised to see him as he was me: I’d worked with him, or around him, anyway, for years downtown at the Central District. No one down there had told me he’d transferred-kind of surprising, because he’d been the right-hand man of my dad’s oldest friend on the force, Bobby Mallory. Bobby was nearing retirement now; I was guessing McGonnigal had moved out to Montclare to establish a power base independent of his protector. Bobby doesn’t like me messing with murder, and McGonnigal sometimes apes his boss, or used to.

Even at his most irritable, when he’s inhaling Bobby’s frustration, McGonnigal realizes he can trust me, if not to tell the whole truth, at least not to lead him astray or blow a police operation. Tonight he was exasperated simply by the coincidence of mine being the voice that summoned him to a crime scene-the nature of their work makes most cops a little superstitious. He wasn’t willing to believe I’d come out to the Montclare neighborhood just to ask about music. As a sop, I threw in my long-lost cousin who was trying to track down a really obscure score.

“And what is that?”

“Sonatas by Claudia Fortezza Verazi.” Okay, maybe I sometimes led him a little bit astray.

“Someone tore this place up pretty good for a while before the old guy showed up. It looks as though he surprised the intruder and thought he could defend himself with-what did you say he was holding? an oboe? You think your cousin did that? Because the old guy didn’t have any Claudia whoever whoever sonatas?”

I tried not to jump at the question. “I don’t think so.” My voice came from far away, in a small thread, but at least it didn’t quaver.

I was worrying about Vico myself. I hadn’t told him about Mr. Fortieri, I was sure of that. But maybe he’d found the letter Fortieri wrote Gabriella, the one I’d tucked into the score of Don Giovanni. And then came out here, looking for-whatever he was really hunting-and found it, so he stabbed Mr. Fortieri to hide his-Had he come to Chicago to make a fool of me in his search for something valuable? And how had McGonnigal leaped on that so neatly? I must be tired beyond measure to have revealed my fears.

“Let’s get this cousin’s name… Damn it, Vic, you can’t sit on that. I move to this district three months ago. The first serious assault I bag who should be here but little Miss Muppet right under my tuffet. You’d have to be on drugs to put a knife into the guy, but you know something or you wouldn’t be here minutes after it happened.”

“Is that the timing? Minutes before my arrival?”

McGonnigal hunched his shoulders impatiently. “The medics didn’t stop to figure out that kind of stuff-his blood pressure was too low. Take it as read that the old man’d be dead if you hadn’t shown so pat-you’ll get your citizen’s citation the next time the mayor’s handing out medals. Maybe Fortieri’d been bleeding half an hour, but no more. So, I want to talk to your cousin. And then I’ll talk to someone else, and someone else and someone after that. You know how a police investigation runs.”

“Yes, I know how they run.” I felt unbearably tired as I gave him Vico’s name, letter by slow letter, to relay to a patrolman. “Did your guys track down Mr. Fortieri’s daughter?”

“She’s with him at the hospital. And what does she know that you’re not sharing with me?”

“She knew my mother. I should go see her. It’s hard to wait in a hospital while people you don’t know cut on your folks.”

He studied me narrowly, then said roughly that he’d seen a lot of that himself, lately, his sister had just lost a kidney to lupus, and I should get some sleep instead of hanging around a hospital waiting room all night.

I longed to follow his advice, but beneath the rolling waves of fatigue that crashed against my brain was a sense of urgency. If Vico had been here, had found what he was looking for, he might be on his way to Italy right now.

The phone rang. McGonnigal stuck an arm around the corner and took it from the patrolman who answered it. After a few grunts he hung up.

“Your cousin hasn’t checked out of the Garibaldi, but he’s not in his room. As far as the hall staff know he hasn’t been there since breakfast this morning, but of course guests don’t sign in and out as they go. You got a picture of him?”

“I met him yesterday for the first time. We didn’t exchange high school yearbooks. He’s in his mid-thirties, maybe an inch or two taller than me, slim, reddish-brown hair that’s a little long on the sides and combed forward in front, and eyes almost the same color.”

I swayed and almost fell as I walked to the door. In the outer room the chaos was greater than when I’d arrived. On top of the tumbled books and instruments lay gray print powder and yellow crime-scene tape. I skirted the mess as best I could, but when I climbed into the Trans Am I left a streak of gray powder on the floor mats.

VII

Although her thick hair now held more gray than black, I knew Barbara Fortieri as soon as I stepped into the surgical waiting room (now Barbara Carmichael, now fifty-two, summoned away from flute lessons to her father’s bedside). She didn’t recognize me at first: I’d been a teenager when she last saw me, and twenty-seven years had passed.

After the usual exclamations of surprise, of worry, she told me her father had briefly opened his eyes at the hospital, just before they began running the anesthetic, and had uttered Gabriella’s name.

“Why was he thinking about your mother? Had you been to see him recently? He talks about you sometimes. And about her.”

I shook my head. “I wanted to see him, to find out if Gabriella had consulted him about selling something valuable the summer she got sick, the summer of 1965.”

Of course Barbara didn’t know a thing about the matter. She’d been in her twenties then, engaged to be married, doing her masters in performance at Northwestern in flute and piano, with no attention to spare for the women who were in and out of her father’s shop.

I recoiled from her tone as much as her words, the sense of Gabriella as one of an adoring harem. I uttered a stiff sentence of regret over her father’s attack and turned to leave.

She put a hand on my arm. “Forgive me, Victoria: I liked your mother. All the same, it used to bug me, all the time he spent with her. I thought he was being disloyal to the memory of my own mother… anyway, my husband is out of town. The thought of staying here alone, waiting on news…”

So I stayed with her. We talked emptily, to fill the time, of her classes, the recitals she and her husband gave together, the fact that I wasn’t married, and, no, I didn’t keep up with my music. Around nine one of the surgeons came in to say that Mr. Fortieri had made it through surgery. The knife had pierced his lung and he had lost a lot of blood. To make sure he didn’t suffer heart damage they were putting him on a ventilator, in a drug-induced coma, for a few days. If we were his daughters we could go see him, but it would be a shock and he wanted us to be prepared.

We both grimaced at the assumption that we were sisters. I left Barbara at the door of the intensive care waiting room and dragged myself to the Trans Am. A fine mist was falling, outlining street lamps with a gauzy halo. I tilted the rearview mirror so that I could see my face in the silver light. Those angular cheekbones were surely Slavic, and my eyes Tony’s clear deep gray. Surely. I was surely Tony Warshawski’s daughter.

The streets were slippery. I drove with extreme care, frightened of my own fatigue. Safe at home the desire for sleep consumed me like a ravening appetite. My fingers trembled on the keys with my longing for my bed.

Mr. Contreras surged into the hall when he heard me open the stairwell door. “Oh, there you are, doll. I found your cousin hanging around the entrance waiting for you, least, I didn’t know he was your cousin, but he explained it all, and I thought you wouldn’t want him standing out there, not knowing how long it was gonna be before you came home.”

“Ah, cara cugina!” Vico appeared behind my neighbor, but before he could launch into his recitative the chorus of dogs drowned him, barking and squeaking as they barreled past him to greet me.

I stared at him, speechless.

“How are you? Your working it was good?”

“My working was difficult. I’m tired.”

“So, maybe I take you to dinner, to the dancing, you are lively.” He was speaking English in deference to Mr. Contreras, whose only word of Italian is “grappa.”

“Dinner and dancing and I’ll feel like a corpse. Why don’t you go back to your hotel and let me get some sleep.”

“Naturally, naturally. You are working hard all the day and I am playing. I have your-your partitura-”

“Score.”

“Buono. Score. I have her. I will take her upstairs and put her away very neat for you and leave you to your resting.”

“I’ll take it with me.” I held out my hand.

“No, no. We are leaving one big mess last night, I know that, and I am greedy last night, making you stay up when today you work. So I come with you, clean-il disordine-disorderliness?, then you rest without worry. You smell flowers while I work.”

Before I could protest further he ducked back into Mr. Contreras’s living room and popped out with a large portmanteau. With a flourish he extracted a bouquet of spring flowers, and the score, wrapped this time in a cream envelope, and put his arm around me to shepherd me up the stairs. The dogs and the old man followed him, all four making so much racket that the medical resident who’d moved in across the hall from Mr. Contreras came out.

“Please! I just got off a thirty-six-hour shift and I’m trying to sleep. If you can’t control those damned dogs I’m going to issue a complaint to the city.”

Vico butted in just as Mr. Contreras, drawing a deep breath, prepared to unleash a major aria in defense of his beloved animals. “Mi scusa, Signora, mi scusa. It is all my doing. I am here from Italy to meet my cousin for the first time. I am so excited I am not thinking, I am making noise, I am disturbing the rest your beautiful eyes require…”

I stomped up the stairs without waiting for the rest of the flow. Vico caught up with me as I was closing the door. “This building attracts hardworking ladies who need to sleep. Your poor neighbor. She is at a hospital where they work her night and day. What is it about America, that ladies must work so hard? I gave her some of your flowers; I knew you wouldn’t mind, and they made her so happy, she will give you no more complaints about the ferocious beasts.”

He had switched to Italian, much easier to understand on his lips than English. Flinging himself on the couch he launched happily into a discussion of his day with the “partitura.” He had found, through our mutual acquaintance Mr. Ranier, someone who could interpret the music for him. I was right: it was from the Baroque, and not only that, most likely by Pergolesi.

“So not at all possibly by our great-grandmother. Why would your mother have a handwritten score by a composer she could find in any music store?”

I was too tired for finesse. “Vico, where were you at five this afternoon?”

He flung up his hands. “Why are you like a policeman all of a sudden, eh, cugina?”

“It’s a question the police may ask you. I’d like to know, myself.”

A wary look came into his eyes-not anger, which would have been natural, or even bewilderment-although he used the language of a puzzled man: I couldn’t be jealous of him, although it was a compliment when we had only just met, so what on earth was I talking about? And why the police? But if I really wanted to know, he was downstairs, with my neighbor.

“And for that matter, Vic, where were you at five o’clock?”

“On the Kennedy Expressway. Heading toward north Harlem Avenue.”

He paused a second too long before opening his hands wide again. “I don’t know your city, cousin, so that tells me nothing.”

“Bene. Thank you for going to so much trouble over the score. Now you must let me rest.”

I put a hand out for it, but he ignored me and rushed over to the mound of papers we’d left in the hall last night with a cry that I was to rest, he was to work now.

He took the Pergolesi from its envelope. “The music is signed at the end, with the initials ‘CF.’ Who would that be?”

“Probably whoever copied it for her. I don’t know.”

He laid it on the bottom of the trunk and placed a stack of operas on top of it. My lips tight with anger I lifted the libretti out in order to get at the Pergolesi. Vico rushed to assist me but only succeeded in dropping everything, so that music and old papers both fluttered to the floor. I was too tired to feel anything except a tightening of the screws in my forehead. Without speaking I took the score from him and retreated to the couch.

Was this the same concerto Vico had taken with him the night before? I’d been naive to let him walk off with a document without some kind of proper safeguard. I held it up to the light, but saw nothing remarkable in the six pages, no signs that a secret code had been erased, or brought to light, nothing beyond a few carefully corrected notes in measure 168. I turned to the end where the initials “CF” were written in the same careful black ink as the notes.

Vico must have found Fortieri’s letter to my mother stuffed inside Don Giovanni and tracked him down. No, he’d been here at five. So the lawyer, Ranier, was involved. Vico had spent the day with him: together they’d traced Mr. Fortieri. Vico came here for an alibi while the lawyer searched the shop. I remembered Ranier’s eyes, granite chips in his soft face. He could stab an old man without a second’s compunction.

Vico, a satisfied smile on his face, came to the couch for Gabriella’s evening gown. “This goes on top, right, this beautiful concert dress. And now, cugina, all is tidy. I will leave you to your dreams. May they be happy ones.”

He scooped up his portmanteau and danced into the night, blowing me a kiss as he went.

VIII

I fell heavily into sleep, and then into dreams about my mother. At first I was watching her with Mr. Fortieri as they laughed over their coffee in the little room behind the shop where McGonnigal and I had spoken. Impatient with my mother for her absorption in someone else’s company I started smearing strawberry gelato over the oboe Mr. Fortieri was repairing. Bobby Mallory and John McGonnigal appeared, wearing their uniforms, and carried me away. I was screaming with rage or fear as Bobby told me my naughtiness was killing my mother.

And then suddenly I was with her in the hospital as she was dying, her dark eyes huge behind a network of tubes and bottles. She was whispering my name through her parched lips, mine and Francesca Salvini’s. “Maestra Salvini… nella cassa… Vittora, mia carissima, dale…” she croaked. My father, holding her hands, demanded of me what she was saying.

I woke as I always did at this point in the dream, my hair matted with sweat. “Maestra Salvini is in the box,” I had told Tony helplessly at the time. “She wants me to give her something.”

I always thought my mother was struggling with the idea that her voice teacher might be dead, that that was why her letters were returned unopened. Francesca Salvini on the Voice had filled my ears from my earliest childhood. As Gabriella staged her aborted comeback, she longed to hear some affirmation from her teacher. She wrote her at her old address in Pitigliano, and in care of the Siena Opera, as well as through her cousin Frederica-not knowing that Frederica herself had died two years earlier.

“Cassa”-“box”-isn’t the usual Italian word for coffin, but it could be used as a crude figure just as it is in English. It had always jarred on me to hear it from my mother-her speech was precise, refined, and she tolerated no obscenities. And as part of her last words-she lapsed into a coma later that afternoon from which she never awoke-it always made me shudder to think that was on her mind, Salvini in a box, buried, as Gabriella was about to be.

But my mother’s urgency was for the pulse of life. As though she had given me explicit instructions in my sleep I rose from the bed, walked to the hall without stopping to dress, and pulled open the trunk once more. I took out everything and sifted through it over and over, but nowhere could I see the olivewood box that had held Gabriella’s glasses on the voyage to America. I hunted all through the living room, and then, in desperation, went through every surface in the apartment.

I remembered the smug smile Vico had given me on his way out the door last night. He’d stuffed the box into his portmanteau and disappeared with it.

IX

Vico hadn’t left Chicago, or at least he hadn’t settled his hotel bill. I got into his room at the Garibaldi by calling room service from the hall phone and ordering champagne. When the service trolley appeared from the bar I followed the waiter into the elevator, saw which room he knocked on as I sauntered past him down the hall, then let myself in with my picklocks when he’d taken off again in frustration. I knew my cousin wasn’t in, or at least wasn’t answering his phone-I’d already called from across the street.

I didn’t try to be subtle in my search. I tossed everything from the drawers onto the floor, pulled the mattress from the bed, and pried the furniture away from the wall. Fury was making me wanton: by the time I’d made sure the box wasn’t in the room the place looked like the remains of a shipwreck.

If Vico didn’t have the box he must have handed it off to Ranier. The import-export lawyer, who specialized in remarkable objets, doubtless knew the value of an old musical score and how to dispose of it.

The bedside clock was buried somewhere under the linens. I looked at my watch-it was past four now. I let myself out of the room, trying to decide whether Ranier would store the box at his office or his home. There wasn’t any way of telling, but it would be easier to break into his office, especially at this time of day.

I took a cab to the west Loop rather than trying to drive and park in the rush-hour maelstrom. The November daylight was almost gone. Last night’s mist had turned into a biting sleet. People fled for their home-bound transportation, heads bent into the wind. I paid off the cab and ran out of the ice into the Caleb Building ’s coffee shop to use the phone. When Ranier answered I gave myself a high nasal voice and asked for Cindy.

“She’s left for the day. Who is this?”

“Amanda Parton. I’m in her book group and I wanted to know if she remembered-”

“You’ll have to call her at home. I don’t want this kind of personal drivel discussed in my office.” He hung up.

Good, good. No personal drivel on company time. Only theft. I mixed with the swarm of people in the Caleb’s lobby and rode up to the thirty-seventh floor. A metal door without any letters or numbers on it might lead to a supply closet. Working quickly, while the hall was briefly empty, I unpicked the lock. Behind lay a mass of wires, the phone and signal lines for the floor, and a space just wide enough for me to stand in. I pulled the door almost shut and stared through the crack.

A laughing group of men floated past on their way to a Blackhawks game. A solitary woman, hunched over a briefcase, scowled at me. I thought for a nervous moment that she was going to test the door, but she was apparently lost in unpleasant thoughts all her own. Finally, around six, Ranier emerged, talking in Italian with Vico. My cousin looked as debonair as ever, with a marigold tucked in his lapel. Where he’d found one in mid-November I don’t know but it looked quite jaunty against his brown worsted. The fragment of conversation I caught seemed to be about a favorite restaurant in Florence, not about my mother and music.

I waited another ten minutes, to make sure they weren’t standing at the elevator, or returning for a forgotten umbrella, then slipped out of the closet and down to Ranier’s import-export law office. Someone leaving an adjacent firm looked at me curiously as I slid the catch back. I flashed a smile, said I hated working nights. He grunted in commiseration and went on to the elevator.

Cindy’s chair was tucked against her desk, a white cardigan draped primly about the arms. I didn’t bother with her area but went to work on the inner door. Here Ranier had been more careful. It took me ten minutes to undo it. I was angry and impatient and my fingers kept slipping on the hafts.

Lights in these modern buildings are set on master timers for quadrants of a story, so that they all turn on or off at the same time. Outside full night had arrived; the high harsh lamps reflected my wavering outline in the black windows. I might have another hour of fluorescence flooding my search before the building masters decided most of the denizens had gone home for the day.

When I reached the inner office my anger mounted to murderous levels: my mother’s olivewood box lay in pieces in the garbage. I pulled it out. They had pried it apart, and torn out the velvet lining. One shred of pale green lay on the floor. I scrabbled through the garbage for the rest of the velvet and saw a crumpled page in my mother’s writing.

Gasping for air I stuck my hand in to get it. The whole wastebasket rose to greet me. I clutched at the edge of the desk but it seemed to whirl past me and the roar of a giant wind deafened me.

I managed to get my head between my knees and hold it there until the dizziness subsided. Weak from my emotional storm, I moved slowly to Ranier’s couch to read Gabriella’s words. The page was dated the 30th of October 1967, her last birthday, and the writing wasn’t in her usual bold, upright script. Pain medication had made all her movements shaky at that point.

The letter began “Carissima,” without any other address, but it was clearly meant for me. My cheeks burned with embarrassment that her farewell note would be to her daughter, not her husband. “At least not to a lover, either,” I muttered, thinking with more embarrassment of Mr. Fortieri, and my explicit dream.

My dearest,

I have tried to put this where you may someday find it. As you travel through life you will discard that which has no meaning for you, but I believe-hope-this box and my glasses will always stay with you on your journey. You must return this valuable score to Francesca Salvini if she is still alive. If she is dead, you must do with it as the circumstances of the time dictate to you. You must under no circumstances sell it for your own gain. If it has the value that Maestra Salvini attached to it it should perhaps be in a museum.

It hung always in a frame next to the piano in Maestra Salvini’s music room, on the ground floor of her house. I went to her in the middle of the night, just before I left Italy, to bid her farewell. She feared she, too, might be arrested-she had been an uncompromising opponent of the Fascists. She gave it to me to safeguard in America, lest it fall into lesser hands, and I cannot agree to sell it only to buy medicine. So I am hiding this from your papa, who would violate my trust to feed more money to the doctors. And there is no need. Already, after all, these drugs they give me make me ill and destroy my voice. Should I use her treasure to add six months to my life, with only the addition of much more pain? You, my beloved child, will understand that that is not living, that mere survival of the organism.

Oh, my darling one, my greatest pain is that I must leave you alone in a world full of dangers and temptations. Always strive for justice, never accept the second-rate in yourself, my darling, even though you must accept it from the world around you. I grieve that I shall not live to see you grown, in your own life, but remember: Il mio amore per te è l’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle.

My love for you is the love that moves the sun and all the other stars. She used to croon that to me as a child. It was only in college I learned that Dante said it first.

I could see her cloudy with pain, obsessed with her commitment to save Salvini’s music, scoring open the velvet of the box and sealing it in the belief I would find it. Only the pain and the drugs could have led her to something so improbable. For I would never have searched unless Vico had come looking for it. No matter how many times I recalled the pain of those last words, “nella cassa.” I wouldn’t have made the connection to this box. This lining. This letter.

I smoothed the letter and put it in a flat side compartment of my case. With the sense that my mother was with me in the room some of my anger calmed. I was able to begin the search for Francesca Salvini’s treasure with a degree of rationality.

Fortunately Ranier relied for security on the building’s limited access: I’d been afraid he might have a safe. Instead he housed his papers in the antique credenza. Inside the original decorative lock he’d installed a small modern one, but it didn’t take long to undo it. My anger at the destruction of Gabriella’s box made me pleased when the picklocks ran a deep scratch across the marquetry front of the cabinet.

I found the score in a file labeled “Sestieri-Verazi.” The paper was old, parchment that had frayed and discolored at the edges, and the writing on it-clearly done by hand-had faded in places to a pale brown. Scored for oboe, two horns, a violin, and a viola, the piece was eight pages long. The notes were drawn with exquisite care. On the second, third, and sixth pages someone had scribbled another set of bar lines above the horn part and written in notes in a fast careless hand, much different from the painstaking care of the rest of the score. In two places he’d scrawled “da capo” in such haste that the letters were barely distinguishable. The same impatient writer had scrawled some notes in the margin, and at the end. I couldn’t read the script, although I thought it might be German. Nowhere could I find a signature on the document to tell me who the author was.

I placed the manuscript on the top of the credenza and continued to inspect the file. A letter from a Signor Arnoldo Piave in Florence introduced Vico to Ranier as someone on the trail of a valuable musical document in Chicago. Signor Ranier’s help in locating the parties involved would be greatly appreciated. Ranier had written in turn to a man in Germany “well-known to be interested in 18th-century musical manuscripts,” to let him know Ranier might soon have something “unusual” to show him.

I had read that far when I heard a key in the outer door. The cleaning crew I could face down, but if Ranier had returned… I swept the score from the credenza and tucked it in the first place that met my eye-behind the Modigliani that hung above it. A second later Ranier and Vico stormed into the room. Ranier was holding a pistol, which he trained on me.

“I knew it!” Vico cried in Italian. “As soon as I saw the state of my hotel room I knew you had come to steal the score.”

“Steal the score? My dear Vico!” I was pleased to hear a tone of light contempt in my voice.

Vico started toward me but backed off at a sharp word from Ranier. The lawyer told me to put my hands on top of my head and sit on the couch. The impersonal chill in his eyes was more frightening than anger. I obeyed.

“Now what?” Vico demanded of Ranier.

“Now we had better take her out to-well, the place name won’t mean anything to you. A forest west of town. One of the sheriff’s deputies will take care of her.”

There are sheriff’s deputies who will do murder for hire in unincorporated parts of Cook County. My body would be found by dogs or children under a heap of rotted leaves in the spring.

“So you have Mob connections,” I said in English. “Do you pay them, or they you?”

“I don’t think it matters.” Ranier was still indifferent. “Let’s get going… Oh, Verazi,” he added in Italian, “before we leave, just check for the score, will you?”

“What is this precious score?” I asked.

“It’s not important for you to know.”

“You steal it from my apartment, but I don’t need to know about it? I think the state will take a different view.”

Before Ranier finished another cold response Vico cried out that the manuscript was missing.

“Then search her bag,” Ranier ordered.

Vico crossed behind him to snatch my case from the couch. He dumped the contents on the floor. A Shawn Colwin tape, a tampon that had come partially free of its container, loose receipts, and a handful of dog biscuits joined my work notebook, miniature camera, and binoculars in an unprofessional heap. Vico opened the case wide and shook it. The letter from my mother remained in the inner compartment.

“Where is it?” Ranier demanded.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell,” I said, using English again.

“Verazi, get behind her and tie her hands. You’ll find some rope in the bottom of my desk.”

Ranier wasn’t going to shoot me in his office: too much to explain to the building management. I fought hard. When Ranier kicked me in the stomach I lost my breath, though, and Vico caught my arms roughly behind me. His marigold was crushed, and he would have a black eye before tomorrow morning. He was panting with fury, and smacked me again across the face when he finished tying me. Blood dripped from my nose onto my shirt. I wanted to blot it and momentarily gave way to rage at my helplessness. I thought of Gabriella, of the love that moves the sun and all the other stars, and tried to avoid the emptiness of Ranier’s eyes.

“Now tell me where the manuscript is,” Ranier said in the same impersonal voice.

I leaned back in the couch and shut my eyes. Vico hit me again.

“Okay, okay,” I muttered. “I’ll tell you where the damned thing is. But I have one question first.”

“You’re in no position to bargain,” Ranier intoned.

I ignored him. “Are you really my cousin?”

Vico bared his teeth in a canine grin. “Oh, yes, cara cugina, be assured, we are relatives. That naughty Frederica whom everyone in the family despised was truly my grandmother. Yes, she slunk off to Milan to have a baby in the slums without a father. And my mother was so impressed by her example that she did the same. Then when those two worthy women died, the one of tuberculosis, the other of excess heroin, the noble Verazis rescued the poor gutter child and brought him up in splendor in Florence. They packed all my grandmother’s letters into a box and swept them up with me and my one toy, a horse that someone else had thrown in the garbage, and that my mother brought home from one of her nights out. My aunt discarded the horse and replaced it with some very hygienic toys, but the papers she stored in her attic.

“Then when my so-worthy uncle, who could never thank himself enough for rescuing this worthless brat, died, I found all my grandmother’s papers. Including letters from your mother, and her plea for help in finding Francesca Salvini so that she could return this most precious musical score. And I thought, what have these Verazis ever done for me, but rubbed my nose in dirt? And you, that same beautiful blood flows in you as in them. And as in me!”

“And Claudia Fortezza, our great-grandmother? Did she write music, or was that all a fiction?”

“Oh, no doubt she dabbled in music as all the ladies in our family like to, even you, looking at that score the other night and asking me about the notation! Oh, yes, like all those stuck-up Verazi cousins, laughing at me because I’d never seen a piano before! I thought you would fall for such a tale, and it amused me to have you hunting for her music when it never existed.”

His eyes glittered amber and flecks of spit covered his mouth by the time he finished. The idea that he looked like Gabriella seemed obscene. Ranier slapped him hard and ordered him to calm down.

“She wants us excited. It’s her only hope for disarming me.” He tapped the handle of the gun lightly on my left kneecap. “Now tell me where the score is, or I’ll smash your kneecap and make you walk on it.”

My hands turned clammy. “I hid it down the hall. There’s a wiring closet… The metal door near the elevators…”

“Go see,” Ranier ordered Verazi.

My cousin returned a few minutes later with the news that the door was locked.

“Are you lying?” Ranier growled at me. “How did you get into it?”

“Same as into here,” I muttered. “Picklocks. In my hip pocket.”

Ranier had Vico take them from me, then seemed disgusted that my cousin didn’t know how to use them. He decided to take me down to unlock the closet myself.

“No one’s working late on this side of the floor tonight, and the cleaning staff don’t arrive until nine. We should be clear.”

They frog-marched me down the hall to the closet before untying my hands. I knelt to work the lock. As it clicked free Vico grabbed the door and yanked it open. I fell forward into the wires. Grabbing a large armful I pulled with all my strength. The hall turned black and an alarm began to blare.

Vico grabbed my left leg. I kicked him in the head with my right. He let go. I turned and grabbed him by the throat and pounded his head against the floor. He got hold of my left arm and pulled it free. Before he could hit me I rolled clear and kicked again at his head. I hit only air. My eyes adjusted to the dark: I could make out his shape as a darker shape against the floor, squirming out of reach.

“Roll clear and call out!” Ranier shouted at him. “On the count of five I’m going to shoot.”

I dove for Ranier’s legs and knocked him flat. The gun went off as he hit the floor. I slammed my fist into the bridge of his nose and he lost consciousness. Vico reached for the gun. Suddenly the hall lights came on. I blinked in the brightness and rolled toward Vico, hoping to kick the gun free before he could focus and fire.

“Enough! Hands behind your heads, all of you.” It was a city cop. Behind him stood one of the Caleb’s security force.

X

It didn’t take me as long to sort out my legal problems as I’d feared. Ranier’s claim, that I’d broken into his office and he was protecting himself, didn’t impress the cops: if Ranier was defending his office why was he shooting at me out in the hall? Besides, the city cops had long had an eye on him: they had a pretty good idea he was connected to the Mob, but no real evidence. I had to do some fancy tap dancing on why I’d been in his office to begin with, but I was helped by Bobby Mallory’s arrival on the scene. Assaults in the Loop went across his desk, and one with his oldest friend’s daughter on the rap sheet brought him into the holding cells on the double.

For once I told him everything I knew. And for once he was not only empathetic, but helpful: he retrieved the score for me-himself-from behind the Modigliani, along with the fragments of the olivewood box. Without talking to the state’s attorney, or even suggesting that it should be impounded to make part of the state’s case. It was when he started blowing his nose as someone translated Gabriella’s letter for him-he didn’t trust me to do it myself-that I figured he’d come through for me.

“But what is it?” he asked, when he’d handed me the score.

I hunched a shoulder. “I don’t know. It’s old music that belonged to my mother’s voice teacher. I figure Max Loewenthal can sort it out.”

Max is the executive director of Beth Israel, the hospital where Lotty Herschel is chief of perinatology, but he collects antiques and knows a lot about music. I told him the story later that day and gave the score to him. Max is usually imperturbably urbane, but when he inspected the music his face flushed and his eyes glittered unnaturally.

“What is it?” I cried.

“If it’s what I think-no, I’d better not say. I have a friend who can tell us. Let me give it to her.”

Vico’s blows to my stomach made it hard for me to move, otherwise I might have started pounding on Max. The glitter in his eye made me demand a receipt for the document before I parted with it.

At that his native humor returned. “You’re right, Victoria: I’m not immune from cupidity. I won’t abscond with this, I promise, but maybe I’d better give you a receipt just the same.”

XI

It was two weeks later that Max’s music expert was ready to give us a verdict. I figured Bobby Mallory and Barbara Carmichael deserved to hear the news firsthand, so I invited them all to dinner, along with Lotty. Of course, that meant I had to include Mr. Contreras and the dogs. My neighbor decided the occasion was important enough to justify digging his one suit out of mothballs.

Bobby arrived early, with his wife Eileen, just as Barbara showed up. She told me her father had recovered sufficiently from his attack to be revived from his drug-induced coma, but he was still too weak to answer questions. Bobby added that they’d found a witness to the forced entry of Fortieri’s house. A boy hiding in the alley had seen two men going in through the back. Since he was smoking a reefer behind a garage he hadn’t come forward earlier, but when John McGonnigal assured him they didn’t care about his dope-this one time-he picked Ranier’s face out of a collection of photos.

“And the big guy promptly donated his muscle to us-a part-time deputy, who’s singing like a bird, on account of he’s p-o’d about being fingered.” He hesitated, then added, “If you won’t press charges they’re going to send Verazi home, you know.”

I smiled unhappily. “I know.”

Eileen patted his arm. “That’s enough shop for now. Victoria, who is it who’s coming tonight?”

Max rang the bell just then, arriving with both Lotty and his music expert. A short skinny brunette, she looked like a street urchin in her jeans and outsize sweater. Max introduced her as Isabel Thompson, an authority on rare music from the Newberry Library.

“I hope we haven’t kept dinner waiting-Lotty was late getting out of surgery,” Max added.

“Let’s eat later,” I said. “Enough suspense. What have I been lugging unknowing around Chicago all this time?”

“She wouldn’t tell us anything until you were here to listen,” Max said. “So we are as impatient as you.”

Ms. Thompson grinned. “Of course, this is only a preliminary opinion, but it looks like a concerto by Marianne Martines.”

“But the insertions, the writing at the end,” Max began, when Bobby demanded to known who Marianne Martines was.

“She was an eighteenth-century Viennese composer. She was known to have written over four hundred compositions, but only about sixty have survived, so it’s exciting to find a new one.” She folded her hands in her lap, a look of mischief in her eyes.

“And the writing, Isabel?” Max demanded.

She grinned. “You were right, Max: it is Mozart’s. A suggestion for changes in the horn line. He started to describe them, then decided just to write them in above her original notation. He added a reminder that the two were going to play together the following Monday-they often played piano duets, sometimes privately, sometimes for an audience.”

“Hah! I knew it! I was sure!” Max was almost dancing in ecstasy. “So I put some Krugs down to chill. Liquid gold to toast the moment I held in my hand a manuscript that Mozart held.”

He pulled a couple of bottles of champagne from his briefcase. I fetched my mother’s Venetian glasses from the dining room. Only five remained whole of the eight she had transported so carefully. One had shattered in the fire that destroyed my old apartment, and another when some thugs broke into it one night. A third had been repaired and could still be used. How could I have been so careless with my little legacy.

“But whose is it now?” Lotty asked, when we’d all drunk and exclaimed enough to calm down.

“That’s a good question,” I said. “I’ve been making some inquiries through the Italian government. Francesca Salvini died in 1943 and she didn’t leave any heirs. She wanted Gabriella to dispose of it in the event of her death. In the absence of a formal will the Italian government might make a claim, but her intention as expressed in Gabriella’s letter might give me the right to it, as long as I didn’t keep it or sell it just for my own gain.”

“We’d be glad to house it,” Ms. Thompson offered.

“Seems to me your ma would have wanted someone in trouble to benefit.” Bobby was speaking gruffly to hide his embarrassment. “What’s something like this worth?”

Ms. Thompson pursed her lips. “A private collector might pay a quarter of a million. We couldn’t match that, but we’d probably go to a hundred or hundred and fifty thousand.”

“So what mattered most to your ma, Vicki, besides you? Music. Music and victims of injustice. You probably can’t do much about the second, but you ought to be able to help some kids learn some music.”

Barbara Carmichael nodded in approval. “A scholarship fund to provide Chicago kids with music lessons. It’s a great idea, Vic.”

We launched the Gabriella-Salvini program some months later with a concert at the Newberry. Mr. Fortieri attended, fully recovered from his wounds. He told me that Gabriella had come to consult him the summer before she died, but she hadn’t brought the score with her. Since she’d never mentioned it to him before he thought her illness and medications had made her delusional.

“I’m sorry, Victoria: it was the last time she was well enough to travel to the northwest side, and I’m sorry that I disappointed her. It’s been troubling me ever since Barbara told me the news.”

I longed to ask him whether he’d been my mother’s lover. But did I want to know? What if he, too, had moved the sun and all the other stars for her-I’d hate to know that. I sent him to a front-row chair and went to sit next to Lotty.

In Gabriella’s honor the Cellini Wind Ensemble had come from London to play the benefit. They played the Martines score first as the composer had written it, and then as Mozart revised it. I have to confess I liked the original better, but as Gabriella often told me, I’m no musician.