The Lost Ballet

by Richard Dorrance

  Chapter 20 – Facing the Music (and it ain’t Stravinsky)

  Nev had to go home and face the music. He was getting used to that, this being the third time the Junes had kicked his commando ass. If Gwen June wasn’t so beautiful, and if she didn’t look so hot with her Glock in her hand, he might feel irked. He stopped for lunch at Rue de Jean, the French place four blocks down John Street from The Hall. They had the best pommes frites in town. He was tempted to order a bottle of wine, but figured alcohol on his breath might not play well while he explained his latest failure to achieve mission goals to his boss, the former Nazi hunter. Instead, he ate half a roast chicken along with a second order of fries. Then he headed home.

  “Well?” Stirg said. “You get the music thing? Are we heading to Saint Petes?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Not exactly, what?”

  “I got some of it.” And he handed Stirg the ten sheets of the Stravinsky score that Peter had given him.

  Stirg never had seen a musical score before, either, so it took him a couple of minutes to assimilate the weird symbols he was looking at on the oversize sheets of paper. “Is this the whole ballet? What do you mean you got some of it? If this ain’t all of it, where’s the rest? And how come this ain’t old paper? I thought this thing was a hundred years old. This don’t smell like old Russian paper.”

  Here we go, thought Nev. “That’s not all of it. I don’t know how many pages make up the whole thing. The rest of it is in two places. The old paper is in a bank vault. But it’s also in the computer.”

  “How can old Russian paper be in a computer?”

  “They scanned the original score into a digital file, then put it in the bank vault. The digital thing is in the computer. When they want to work on a part of the music, to make the dance part, they print some pages, then they write the pages on big white boards in magic marker, then change the music thingies to picture thingies, then the ballet geeks make the dance part from the pictures.” Nev tried hard to obfuscate this process in order to deflect Stirg’s attention from the fact that he had failed in his mission. An Israeli commando, failing the mission. Tsk Tsk.

  Stirg was getting old, but he wasn’t stupid. “You didn’t get the music thing, did you?”

  Nev shook his head. “It’s in the bank vault, and in the computer,” like that was a good answer.

  Stirg looked back at the papers, wishing they would morph into the full score, and he wouldn’t have to yell at Nev. He said, “I been reading about ballet. They say most dancers are washed up by the time they’re thirty. Gymnasts are washed up by twenty-six, and dancers by thirty. How old are you Nev? I asked you that a few weeks ago. Are Israeli commandos like gymnasts and dancers, washed up at a young age?”

  Nev was tempted to ask Stirg if all Nazi hunters were washed up at a young age, but he held his tongue.

  “What am I gonna do, Nev? I can’t let the fucks do this ballet thing here. It belongs back in Saint Petes. It’s a Russian thing, not an American thing. It’s gotta have its first performance there. It’s gotta be old style, classical. It’s gotta be done by the Mariinsky, at their theater on Theater Square, in February, when everyone is freezing their asses off. That’s the Russian way. It’s gotta be that way, Nev. Not this fucking American way.” Stirg sat down, looked off into space.

  Nev looked off into space for a while, too. Then he said, “I got an idea. Gimme another chance.”