by Gerald Elias
“Coming from an expert source such as yourself I am particularly interested to hear about my own personal blindness. I shall be mum as well.”
Smug son of a bitch.
“Good, because that makes three,” said Jacobus.
“I don’t understand.”
“Blind, mum, and you’re also deaf. Deaf to the fact that regardless of Kortovsky’s egotism, regardless of his insults, regardless of him stealing and then marrying Annika, your Nordic fantasy, regardless of his market study, and most significant, regardless of his insistence on a certain somewhat eccentric style of playing, the New Magini String Quartet is arguably the greatest quartet in the world. You were just too busy getting pissed off at his attitude to hear it.”
“Perhaps, Mr. Jacobus, you have a fondness for the superficial. Ivan Lensky, a pale reflection of his musical parentage, is, for all his brutishness, the only nonphony of the lot. His brother, Peter, is a true musician and will have nothing to do with the current incarnation of what was once a gem. Is it possible you do not recall the original Magini Quartet, the passion with which they played, their utter devotion to their—”
“Spare me. I don’t need Music Appreciation 101 from you. Next you’ll be telling me about their extraordinary journey through Beethoven’s quartets, ‘the Mount Everest of the musical literature.’ I’ve heard the spiel. Yes, they were great, and to tell you the truth I did favor their style compared to the new group’s. But you know what? The Russians didn’t play quite as well in tune and they didn’t play quite as well together as you guys, and even though that didn’t bother me—in fact, I prefer the rough edges to these sterile CDs they’re cranking out these days—playing in tune and playing together count for something, and no one does it better than the New Magini. Plus, they play with good taste and the best sound around—maybe because they always play on the string.
“I think you had a good thing going, Short. You just didn’t know it, and you blew it. But you felt you had to take it out on someone. Maybe you’ll win your suit, maybe you won’t. Maybe it’s a coincidence you threatened Annika Haagen an hour before a severed finger was found in her case. Maybe the finger belongs to—”
“Mr. Jacobus, look at me. Do I look like someone who could kill anyone?” said Short. “I ask that rhetorically, of course.”
TWENTY-ONE
Again they waited for Kortovsky, this time for the Carnegie Hall dress rehearsal and—despite Sheila Rathman’s desperate phone calls and e-mails—again they were disappointed, except this time “they” wasn’t just the remainder of the New Magini String Quartet. “They” included Power Ramsey and his entourage, The Movement dancers, the video technicians, the sound crew, the dressing-room attendants, the stagehands. Not a good policy to keep so many unionized New York City workers waiting. It makes them unhappy, and Rathman was bearing the brunt of it. Seeking refuge, she called Ivan Lensky out of desperation and reached him on his cell phone at the Circle of Fifths. “Yes, I come,” he said, somewhat blearily, “but I am already at A major.” Rathman had no idea what that meant but told him to hurry.
Lieutenant Malachi was also waiting, but he was in no hurry as he questioned Yumi.
“Why should I not think you gave Annika Haagen the finger?” asked Malachi.
“Ha! Another Henny Youngman!” Jacobus said, barging in. “Why would she do that? You’ve checked out that Yumi was telling the truth that Stevenson did in fact rehair her bow, so she had good reason to borrow Haagen’s rosin.”
“Here’s another one-liner, Jacobus. Miss Shinagawa was having an affair with her husband. And you’re both very well aware of that.”
“But why? Why would I do something like that?” asked Yumi. “How could I? It’s too grotesque.”
“I take it you’re referring to the finger and not your sordid affair,” said Malachi. “Were you not the last identifiable person to have been with Kortovsky before he disappeared? Were you not the first person found with a finger we now presume to be Kortovsky’s, in Haagen’s case?”
“Malachi,” said Jacobus, knowing he didn’t believe what he was telling Malachi, “you’re one syllable short of a haiku. Did Rathman not receive an e-mail from Kortovsky saying he would be here tonight?”
“Well, I don’t see him,” said Malachi. “Do you?”
As Jacobus considered taking what he knew would be an ill-advised swipe in the direction of Malachi’s jaw, the sound of Ivan Lensky’s arrival and the attendant upturn in the noise level of resumed activity intervened, so he refrained from getting himself into any more trouble.
“I have to go rehearse now,” Yumi said. “Will you excuse me, please?”
“Go ahead,” said Malachi. “But be warned. At the moment, you’re a person of interest. Don’t push it.”
There were many more people in the hall for this, the dress rehearsal. In addition to all those involved in the actual production, there were a lot of friends, family, and Carnegie Hall financial supporters who were invited to be a test audience. The last group was scattered around the hall. They would be the guinea pigs, chosen by the dancers for the climactic dance of death in the last movement of the quartet. This rehearsal would be two nonstop run-throughs, with an intermission in between.
For the professionals involved, even in a unique project of this sort, it was just another day at work. They all had their assigned tasks, and if the format was a little different from what they were used to, it was part of the job, so let’s get on with it. For the invited guests, though, who felt they were an indispensable part of some epic history-making artistic enterprise—and with famous people, no less!—this was a once-in-a-lifetime event, something they would tell their grandchildren about. Many times.
As a result, there was a great deal of unnecessary and unwanted commotion in the hall. Too much talking. Too much carousing. Too much distraction. Despite repeated pleas from Mehmet, perhaps excessively polite in deference to the fickle largesse of wealthy donors, committed and potential, the invitees were simply too excited to stay quiet. This made it difficult for the professionals to concentrate, creating even more tension than usual among these normally intense personalities.
So mistakes were made. Lighting was out of synch. Stage monitors weren’t properly calibrated. The movie screen would not uncouple properly. The dancers, when they weren’t out on Fifty-sixth Street smoking, were confused as to their instructions.
Jacobus heard Power Ramsey bark increasingly harsh commands to whoever was in or out of earshot. It surprised Jacobus, and pleased him, that the only thing going smoothly was the quartet, seemingly unfazed by the disturbances and by the absence of Kortovsky. Having had one rehearsal under their belt with Lensky, they already were melding as a group, the tensions of yesterday’s brouhaha at Rose Grimes notwithstanding. Yumi, Haagen, and Lenskaya were playing with a bit more verve and incision than before, and Lensky sounded as if he were making an effort to blend, to tone things down a notch. Maybe that was his way of expressing reconciliation, if not remorse. Lenskaya, in particular, seemed to have rediscovered some of her former swagger. Such is the nature of good musicians, thought Jacobus, whether they love or hate each other. Not a word needed to be said. Just listening to each other, and a deadline.
“Well, wasn’t that a disaster?” Yumi said laughingly to Jacobus at intermission. “You couldn’t tell, but Imogene Livenstock slipped off the edge of the stage at the end when the dancers did their collapse thing. Annika started laughing and I had to kick her. You’d think after her fall down the stairs she’d be a little more sympathetic, but I’m glad she seems happy.”
“Who’s Imogene Livenstock?”
“She’s the major sponsor of the whole production and had won a raffle to do the death dance with the troupe. I think the only worse thing that could have gone wrong would have been for the whole stage to collapse.”
“Ramsey would love that,” said Jacobus. “‘A metaphor for the cataclysm of genocide.’ But at least you got the most important part r
ight, and that’s the music. It’s sounding better than I expected.”
“Thank you. Here are two tickets for the show tonight. For you and Nathaniel.”
“Thanks. Just try to stay out of trouble till then.”
“What do you mean?”
Jacobus hadn’t meant anything. He really hadn’t, and should have kept his mouth shut. But couldn’t.
“Well, y’know, Kortovsky. Who the hell knows where he is now, with Malachi sniffing around? And, y’know, your fling with him?”
“What about it? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Nothing.” He knew he should stop there. “Except he and Haagen, being married. And you and Haagen…”
“Jake, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, except there’s nothing for me to be ashamed of, and it’s none of your business, or Malachi’s, or anyone else’s!”
“I know that, Yumi. I certainly do. It’s just that now … it just looks a little fishy, that’s all.”
“Fishy! It looks fishy! Jake, my grandmother has loved you since the day you met, when I first became your student, but for all these years you’ve treated her with the warmth of a gravestone! Oh, you acknowledge what a fine teacher she is and how smart she is, but where’s the feeling? It’s no wonder that when I reciprocate someone’s affection you think it’s ‘fishy’! I’ve got to go. Enjoy the rest of the rehearsal.”
As they receded, Jacobus heard Yumi’s high heels tap quickly and emphatically, like nails hammered into a coffin. Simultaneously came the sound of a man’s gait, approaching more cautiously.
“Well, you did a great job convincing her,” Nathaniel said.
“What did I say?” Jacobus asked in exasperation. “I just wanted to give her some good advice.”
“You know what they say, Jake. Good advice is the same as bad advice. You just got to know when someone needs it.”
“Is that good advice or bad advice?” Jacobus asked.
“We’ll find out at the end of the day,” said Nathaniel.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“Running around getting all the information you asked me to get. For some reason it didn’t work when I tried just snapping my fingers and making it appear out of the blue.”
Jacobus heard Nathaniel snapping his fingers.
“Jesus Christ. Why are you doing that?”
“It didn’t work to make anything appear so I’m hoping it’ll make you disappear.”
“You should only be so lucky. What’ve you got?”
“I found out from Sheila that Pravda Lenskaya stayed at the Bolívar Hotel in Lima.”
“That’s what you’ve got? Maybe you should keep snapping your fingers.”
“The Bolívar is only about a half mile from the Maury. An easy walk.”
“So?”
“You remember how hard it was for me to find out if the kid, Prince Rupert, had a plane ticket, and I had to learn which hotel Annika Haagen stayed at? Well, just out of curiosity, I called the Bolívar and asked if Lenskaya might’ve brought someone too.”
“And?”
“And her son.”
“Ivan?”
“Peter. Last minute. Separate room.”
A couple little things began to click for Jacobus. Peter had told Jacobus that Lenskaya treated him like an invalid and didn’t think he could do anything on his own, so it figured she wouldn’t want him to be all by his lonesome in Flushing while she was off on tour. Now, he tried to recall, had Peter Lensky walked with a limp when they had their tête-à-tête? He had heard Lensky approach the door when he arrived. He heard him get up and go to the bathroom to “ablute.” He heard him return with the caviar. He did not recall a limp, though, admittedly, he hadn’t been listening for one and his cold was still clogging his hearing. Nevertheless, he would have noticed something aberrant like that. Wouldn’t he?
“Maybe we’ll have to have another chat with Peter,” he said. “What else?”
“I called up a few of my contacts in the instrument world who might have had dealings with Otkar Vasalin. Private dealers who have no shop, no business card, no public reputation. Only a phone number.”
“And?”
“No one knew much about him. But I did find out that he’s living in his own private little fortress in Quito, Ecuador. It would be harder to get into his estate than for Fidel Castro to get a green card in the U.S.”
Jacobus recalled what Oro had said about security in Peru so was not surprised to hear this.
“The violins,” he said.
“No doubt. They’re worth millions. But there’s more, maybe. I was tracing Vasalin’s history back through the archives, going the violin route. A hard name to confuse. I didn’t get very far with that, but I did find an old clipping about the purchase he made of an old Rogeri violin that referred to him as a former ‘energy czar.’ So I went back to his Eastern Europe days and checked out newpapers, magazines, studies, government documents—”
“Government documents?”
“That’s what I’m getting to. It seems he was a behind-the-scenes mover and shaker for the energy industry in the eighties. Came up out of nowhere. At first he was just a middleman in oil and natural gas pipelines, buying and selling energy contracts to the highest bidders. Did okay with that. But he made the bulk of his billions only after he got into nuclear energy.”
“Nuclear energy?”
“What’s with you, Jake? You getting echolalia in your old age?”
“Old age?”
“Very funny. Yes, nuclear energy. He was involved in the design, construction, and oversight of the Chernobyl reactor. And when it blew, he packed his bags and hightailed it to South America.”
“This is getting interesting. Good work, Nathaniel, if I say so myself. Maybe you could get hold of Vasalin and find out if there’s a Lensky connection. Or at least a quartet connection.” The wheels were turning for Jacobus now. Violins and nuclear reactors, an explosive pairing. “Or,” he said, “if you can’t get through personally, maybe Oro can use his South American back channels to get hold of him.”
“That’s a good plan, except for one thing.”
“What now?”
“Vasalin’s dead.”
“Dead!”
“There you go again. I found it in a little obituary in the International Herald Tribune. Of all things, he slipped in the shower and cracked his skull open. A freak accident.”
“You think so?”
“How else? With all that security? There’s one interesting coincidence, though.”
“Let me guess. He was missing a finger.”
“No. No such luck.”
“What then?”
“The day he died was the day the New Magini String Quartet performed in Quito.”
* * *
Jacobus and Nathaniel listened to the second go-round of the rehearsal with half an ear. There were fewer unpleasant surprises, both logistically and musically. It’s often said that a disastrous dress rehearsal means a great concert, but Jacobus didn’t believe that. He believed a good dress rehearsal enabled the performers to be confident and just relaxed enough to take the edge off the flood of adrenaline that was bound to flow when the curtain went up.
When the rehearsal was finally over, Jacobus was eager to make a quiet but hasty exit so as to avoid another knock-down-drag-out with Yumi. He and Nathaniel had retreated as far as the doors to the lobby when a voice chimed out, “Not so fast, Jacobus.”
“What now, Malachi?”
“Backstage. Now.”
* * *
A large group had congregated, discussing the discovery of three more fingers. One in Ivan Lensky’s case. One in Pravda Lenskaya’s. One in Yumi’s.
“All from the same hand?” Jacobus asked.
“One would hope so,” Malachi said.
Power Ramsey didn’t know what to do.
The union technicians protested that the whole production was jinxed and demanded overtime for havi
ng to stay to answer questions from the police. Mehmet volunteered that the dance troupe was “freaked by the bad karma” and wanted the concert canceled.
“But we’ve spent almost all the money and the tickets have already been paid for,” Ramsey said. “All of this has cost a fortune and how am I going to pay everyone back?”
“What’s wrong, Ramsey?” asked Jacobus. “Getting disenchanted with your enchantments?”
“Mr. Jacobus,” said Ramsey, “you’re getting so, so tiring. If you think I have not understood every one of your juvenile barbs, you are mistaken. You are absolutely incorrigible.”
“Absolutely?”
The recipients of the fingers, the quartet, argued among themselves. They didn’t understand what the appearance of the fingers meant, but it was hard not to believe it was a threat. Even Yumi now conceded that Jacobus might have been right to want the concert stopped. On the other hand, without this concert, what future did the quartet have? But if everyone else decided to cancel it, it would be difficult for them not to go along.
In the end, it was Imogene Livenstock who prevailed, proclaiming she “would not be spooked and intimidated by some childish Halloween stunt.” As the major sponsor not only of the Schubert production but of many of the city’s higher-profile arts projects, she held the political trump card, and with a mixture of cajolery of the dance troupe, not-so-veiled threats to the union workers, and financial reassurances to Power Ramsey, the decision was made that the show would go on.
Malachi seconded the decision. He concurred that the reason for the fingers in the cases was to frighten the musicians into canceling the performance. Since that strategy had not been successful, he suspected that the perpetrator would return to the concert, so for Malachi’s purposes the most effective way to find out who that perpetrator was and then to trap him was to proceed with the concert. A perilous strategy, perhaps, but since there was already a determination to proceed, he was not asking anyone to take risks they hadn’t already agreed to. Malachi permitted the musicians to take their instruments and cases with them to prepare for the concert, the fingers having been collected and bagged by the forensics team.
