“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.
THE PIETRO ANDROMACHE
I
“YOU ONLY AGREED to hire him because of his art collection. Of that I’m sure.” Lotty Herschel bent down to adjust her stockings. “And don’t waggle your eyebrows like that-it makes you look like an adolescent Groucho Marx.”
Max Loewenthal obediently smoothed his eyebrows, but said, “It’s your legs, Lotty; they remind me of my youth. You know, going into the Underground to wait out the air raids, looking at the ladies as they came down the escalators. The updraft always made their skirts billow.”
“You’re making this up, Max. I was in those Underground stations, too, and as I remember the ladies were always bundled in coats and children.”
Max moved from the doorway to put an arm around Lotty. “That’s what keeps us together, Lottchen: I am a romantic and you are severely logical. And you know we didn’t hire Caudwell because of his collection. Although I admit I am eager to see it. The board wants Beth Israel to develop a transplant program. It’s the only way we’re going to become competitive-”
“Don’t deliver your publicity lecture to me,” Lotty snapped. Her thick brows contracted to a solid black line across her forehead. “As far as I am concerned he is a cretin with the hands of a Caliban and the personality of Attila.”
Lotty’s intense commitment to medicine left no room for the mundane consideration of money. But as the hospital’s executive director, Max was on the spot with the trustees to see that Beth Israel ran at a profit. Or at least at a smaller loss than they’d achieved in recent years. They’d brought Caudwell in in part to attract more paying patients-and to help screen out some of the indigent who made up 12 percent of Beth Israel’s patient load. Max wondered how long the hospital could afford to support personalities as divergent as Lotty and Caudwell with their radically differing approaches to medicine.
He dropped his arm and smiled quizzically at her. “Why do you hate him so much, Lotty?”
“I am the person who has to justify the patients I admit to this-this troglodyte. Do you realize he tried to keep Mrs. Mendes from the operating room when he learned she had AIDS? He wasn’t even being asked to sully his hands with her blood and he didn’t want me performing surgery on her.”
Lotty drew back from Max and pointed an accusing finger at him. “You may tell the board that if he keeps questioning my judgment they will find themselves looking for a new perinatologist. I am serious about this. You li
sten this afternoon, Max, you hear whether or not he calls me ‘our little baby doctor.’ I am fifty-eight years old, I am a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons besides having enough credentials in this country to support a whole hospital, and to him I am a ‘little baby doctor.’”
Max sat on the daybed and pulled Lotty down next to him. “No, no, Lottchen: don’t fight. Listen to me. Why haven’t you told me any of this before?”
“Don’t be an idiot, Max: you are the director of the hospital. I cannot use our special relationship to deal with problems I have with the staff. I said my piece when Caudwell came for his final interview. A number of the other physicians were not happy with his attitude. If you remember, we asked the board to bring him in as a cardiac surgeon first and promote him to chief of staff after a year if everyone was satisfied with his performance.”
“We talked about doing it that way,” Max admitted. “But he wouldn’t take the appointment except as chief of staff. That was the only way we could offer him the kind of money he could get at one of the university hospitals or Humana. And, Lotty, even if you don’t like his personality you must agree that he is a first-class surgeon.”
“I agree to nothing.” Red lights danced in her black eyes. “If he patronizes me, a fellow physician, how do you imagine he treats his patients? You cannot practice medicine if-”
“Now it’s my turn to ask to be spared a lecture,” Max interrupted gently. “But if you feel so strongly about him, maybe you shouldn’t go to his party this afternoon.”
“And admit that he can beat me? Never.”
“Very well then.” Max got up and placed a heavily brocaded wool shawl over Lotty’s shoulders. “But you must promise me to behave. This is a social function we are going to, remember, not a gladiator contest. Caudwell is trying to repay some hospitality this afternoon, not to belittle you.”
Windy City Blues Page 6
