by Gerald Elias
“I did call sooner. You just never answered the phone. So what two and two have you put together?”
“Why do I always have to spell things out for everyone? For you, though, I will try to be patient.”
“Okay, big shot, let’s hear.”
“First of all, you’d have to be deaf and blind to miss the stories in the papers and TV. Then, the same day the Strad was stolen from Carnegie, there were two murders in New York and one of those sicko Central Park beatings, all in the same precinct. Since Hizzoner the Mayor is making violent crime his number-one reelection campaign issue, do you really think the police will put the theft of a violin at the top of its ever-growing crime docket? And a violin—valuable as it may be—is generally considered a plaything for sissy rich kids. Where do you think your average man on the street wants his hard-earned tax money going?”
“Well? So?”
“So, if the police aren’t going to bother pursuing a case that doesn’t seem to have any leads anyway, who’s most interested in seeing an eight-million-dollar violin found? Of course, the insurance company. Which one is it this time?”
“Intercontinental Insurance Associates,” offered Nathaniel.
Nathaniel sounded deflated. Not a small accomplishment for someone of his girth, Jacobus thought.
“Okay, so Intercontinental whatever whatever doesn’t want to pay out eight million to the Holbrooke Grimsley Family Trust, which owns the fiddle and sponsors the damned competition. When they realize that New York’s Finest, who don’t know about and don’t care about art theft anyway, aren’t going to do a damn thing to find it, they naturally get nervous.”
“And?”
“And, so they, Intercontinental, decide to hire someone to try to recover the violin. And why not hire the person who for some reason is considered the best such agent of that kind and also claims to be highly conversant in the language of the music world? Someone who also is enough of a professional that his ego isn’t too big to ask an old friend for, let’s say, special consultation?”
“So, Jake, are you going to help me or what?” asked Nathaniel. “I’m hardly assuaged by the flattery.”
“Sorry, Nathaniel. Not a chance.”
“But Jake, why not?”
“Are you sitting down, Nathaniel?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Because I stole it.” Jacobus let out a hideous cackle.
“You stole it!? Come on, Jake. Get serious.”
“Who’s not serious? I stole it, chopped it in eentsy-weentsy pieces, and burned it in the fireplace.”
“In this heat? In July? Right.”
“Look,” said Jacobus, “I detest that competition. I detest the people surrounding it. The Piccolino Strad symbolizes everything I detest about the music business. Detest. Detest. Detest. So, do I pass de-test?”
“Very funny. You going to help me or not?”
Even as Jacobus joked, an idea began to occur to him. Maybe he could be persuaded. Maybe it would be worth his while. Maybe there was a bigger prize than the recovery of the Piccolino Strad. Maybe.
“Or not. Look, I’ve got better things to do. First, I have a shitload of highly deserving overachieving students.” This was a lie. Nathaniel knew it and Jacobus knew he knew it. The number of Jacobus’s students had dwindled in inverse proportion to the growth of ivy on his house. “In fact,” he continued, “there’s one standing in front of me as we speak.
“Second, a wild-goose chase is not in my best interests, and anyway, most stolen violins never again see the light of day. Third, as stunning as that Piccolino Strad seems to be to everyone, it’s ruined anyone who’s ever put his hands on it. Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned. Eight million is a small price to pay. And, as I mentioned, I stole it.”
“Jake, I’m going to make you an offer.”
“Go ahead, but there’s nothing you could offer that would change my mind,” Jacobus said, but in fact his mind had already changed. It was one of those impulsive split-second decisions that Jacobus was prone to make that altered the course of his life.
He reasoned that the Piccolino Strad was tied to the Grimsley Competition, which was joined at the hip to the Musical Arts Project. He hated all three. Everything they stood for was repugnant to him. His discussion of it with Yumi had opened up old wounds. Maybe this would be his chance to heal them. He had already failed to destroy the Piccolino Strad, but that had been a stupid idea concocted in the depths of his depression. Perhaps that failure was a reprieve. Would he ever have another opportunity to bring the walls down? What would he be willing to sacrifice to do it? How would he do it?
Williams then made Jacobus an offer of half the twenty percent commission he would receive for the safe recovery of the violin. At an insured value of eight million dollars, Jacobus would pocket eight hundred thousand.
Jacobus responded to Williams’s offer, saying he was insulted that someone who he thought was his friend would try to bribe him. Williams, flabbergasted, asked him what it would take.
Jacobus said, “Nathaniel, if you expect me to leave the peace and quiet of my house in the country to go traipsing around New York City and who knows where else to try to find something that I want to stay lost, just to avoid incriminating myself, I expect you to provide me with a pastrami and corned beef combo at the Carnegie Deli. Extra lean.”
“What?” asked Williams, bewildered.
“And with one Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Tonic.”
There was a momentary silence on the line.
“I’m not really authorized to spend this much, Jake, but I’ll swing it . . . somehow.”
“Nathaniel, you’ve twisted my arm,” Jacobus said. “If you’re willing to go out on a limb like that just to get me to pretend to track down a heinous thief when I’ve already told you that I did the dastardly deed, who am I to stand in the way of justice? Why don’t I take the five eighteen bus into the city? I’d be there by nine.”
“Um, Jake?”
“What now?”
“Well, I’m not calling from the city. I had this weird feeling you might decide to help me out, so at the moment I’m at the Main Street Doughnut Shoppe, you know, the place you warned me never to go in because ‘Shop’ is spelled with pe at the end. You were right. Now the sign even says, ‘Purveyors of Fine Fried Pastries.’ If this coffee I’m drinking doesn’t burn a hole in my stomach first, I can be at your place in fifteen minutes.”
Jacobus was amused and, as always, had to remind himself that Nathaniel had more of a head on his shoulders than he usually gave people credit for.
“Nathaniel, I suppose you know me almost as well as I know you.”
“I suppose so, Jake.”
“See you in fifteen minutes or when you finish your first dozen doughnuts, whichever is sooner.”
Jacobus hung up. He called out, “Yumi, you like pastrami?”
EIGHT
Though it was indeed true that Jacobus had not seen his good friend Nathaniel for several years, it didn’t take long for his initial exhilaration to turn to irritation. Jacobus’s behind was getting sore sitting next to Yumi as they waited on the stone stoop outside his front door. With each passing car his annoyance increased.
He was, as usual, disheveled. Sweating in the heat, he ineffectually slapped at mosquitoes feeding on his neck. The stoop was narrow so Jacobus felt Yumi’s body against his. With the intense heat the contact was merely an additionally chafing and clammy irritant.
As the minutes passed, Jacobus mulled. Yumi had been far from enthusiastic about going to New York with him. Maybe she was uncomfortable going to the big city with strangers, he thought. He suggested she might have a chance to play on the stage at Carnegie Hall. Her reaction was at first negative, but a moment later she precipitously changed her tune. She said it would be a thrill for her, but to Jacobus’s ear, there was no thrill in her voice when she said it.
It crossed Jacobus’s mind that he didn’t know what Yumi looked like. After so many years
of blindness, the concept of a visual world threatened to become more and more of a vague memory. It would have been easy for his world to become an endless series of voices—a series of invisible talking heads. He could learn a lot about a person from a voice, but to know who someone really was, he wanted to know more.
Jacobus had taught himself to learn not only from the way people sounded but also from the way they felt, smelled, even tasted. There had not been much tasting lately.
Jacobus heard the distant but distinct sound of tires on gravel. Nathaniel, finally, and an opportunity to find out more about Yumi.
“Here’s the car now,” Jacobus said. He suddenly turned toward the sound, brushing heavily against Yumi in so doing—the clumsy blind man act. He hated it, but it always worked.
“I hear nothing,” said Yumi.
“Coming down the driveway. Listen. Trees block the sound a little. Same old ’74 red Rabbit, if I’m not mistaken.”
He had felt the coarse fabric of jeans—seemed to him fashionably tight. Billowy blouse, silk maybe, loose-fitting for the heat. No perfume—didn’t really need it; she smelled clean, even in this weather! Likely no makeup either, if she’s consistent. She had earlier asked for a rubber band for her hair so he was guessing ponytail.
Not a bad picture for starters.
As the car rounded the final bend, careening, it clanged into a pothole.
“You heard that, I imagine,” said Jacobus.
“Yes.”
“Probably was brushing the remains of his French cruller off his ample girth. At least he missed the tree.”
The car shuddered to a halt in front of Jacobus’s house, which in the hot, hazy dusk looked disembodied. Jacobus heard the car door open and close, and rose immediately to greet Nathaniel, noticing that Yumi’s footsteps on the gravel behind him were initially tentative but then more rapid. He noted to himself that she was probably at first surprised and taken aback that he had an extralarge, bearded African-American friend, no doubt wearing one of his favorite bright-patterned dashikis. He also noted how quickly she regained her self-control.
“Well, if it ain’t Beauty and the Beast!” said Nathaniel. Jacobus was engulfed by a smothering bear hug.
“Jake, you and the house haven’t changed a bit. Unkempt as ever! When are you going to get a little TLC?”
Jake extricated himself from Nathaniel’s suffocating embrace and readjusted his glasses.
“Great to see you too,” he said. “Let’s go.” He hurriedly introduced Yumi and Nathaniel. They packed their violins and bags in the back of the car.
They were soon on the winding Taconic Parkway, heading south. As the heavy sky darkened, the haze transformed into patches of dense fog. Nathaniel had to drive slowly.
Yumi asked how Nathaniel and Jacobus had met.
Nathaniel said to Jacobus, “So you haven’t even explained our infamous relationship yet?”
Jacobus grunted, indicating he wanted Nathaniel to do the talking. Nathaniel explained that the two of them had gone to Oberlin College together, when Nathaniel had still been a cellist, and that after graduating they formed a trio with a pianist who later went successfully into what was then the computer industry in its infancy. After the trio broke up, Nathaniel followed in the footsteps of his idol, the iconoclastic early twentieth-century American composer Charles Ives, who went into the insurance business where he could make a lot more money and be freer to pursue whatever direction he wanted in music.
“Except,” Nathaniel said, “insurance was b-o-r-i-n-g. Everyone sittin’ around in a gray suit acting truly concerned for their clients’ well-being. The only part I liked was the dirt—fraudulent claims, stolen property, contested wills. The real low-down, and the lower down the better, honey.”
The car was suddenly engulfed by fog on the unlit parkway. Jacobus felt Nathaniel overcorrect his steering. The car swerved. Nathaniel corrected again. Jacobus bounced uncomfortably off the door as Nathaniel finally brought the car under control.
“Hey, asshole, you wanna get me killed? Keep your eyes on the road.”
“You wanna drive, Jake?”
“It might be safer.”
“Real sweetheart,” muttered Nathaniel.
“Sorry, Miss Shinagawa,” he continued. “You’re probably trying to figure out how you got to be in this situation with such strange and unpleasant people. Don’t worry. We’re not so bad.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Jacobus. “And slow down.”
Nathaniel returned to his subject. After working for a single insurance company for a few years, he decided to freelance, where he wouldn’t have a boss or have to wear a fancy suit or work nine to five. Since Nathaniel’s real genius in music was his encyclopedic knowledge of the field—composers, repertoire, recordings, performers—he was in great demand any time an instrument of value was stolen. Insurance companies would hire Williams to recover the instruments, greatly preferring to pay him a commission of twenty percent of its insured value than to reimburse one hundred percent of the owner’s claim.
“So,” said Yumi after a moment, “if the Piccolino Strad is insured for eight million dollars, and you find it, that means you will receive . . . one and one half million dollars!”
“One point six, honey!” said Nathaniel. “Whoa, mama! You don’t think I’d want to be with ol’ Jake here for a walk in the park? Even when Jake starts gettin’ ornery we make a great team.”
“Yes, that must be very exciting,” said Yumi.
“I have two questions,” said Jacobus.
“Mercy Circe, Jake, why you always talkin’ in pairs? ‘I got two questions.’ ‘Just two points.’ ‘First and second.’ ”
Jacobus folded his hands and said quietly, “Sometimes, Nathaniel my friend, things cannot be explained as simply as one would like. My first question is, since you’re so intent on becoming a millionaire, I suppose you’d like me to question people? Maybe those MAP bastards who were at the reception?”
“Yes, for starters I’d like you to talk to ‘those MAP bastards,’ and also the Vanders. I’ve made the appointments for you, and I’ll check out the invitation list and do some research on the Carnegie Hall Corporation and the Grimsley Competition itself.” Jacobus had had dealings with most of the MAP people he would be interviewing, and the others he knew enough about. There was not one he particularly cared for, and he was confident the feelings were mutual.
“Quite an entourage for a nine-year-old,” said Jacobus. “Haven’t the police already interviewed everyone?”
“Yeah,” said Nathaniel. “But they hardly know anything about art theft like this. They treated everyone at the reception—at least everyone they could find—like a two-bit breaking-and-entering suspect. You know how flippy these arts folks are, with their fragile egos and all. They all just clammed right up. Probably the only way you could ever get them to shut up.” Nathaniel chuckled. “Anyway, the cops also dusted everywhere for prints—walls, doors, violin case—nothing suspicious. Likely the thief wore gloves.”
“Now, if you don’t mind, here’s my second question.”
“Actually, your third.”
“No, the last one was merely an elaboration of the first. It doesn’t count.”
“My, you always must win, Herr Profesor Jacobus, mustn’t you?” said Nathaniel. “All right, what’s your second question?”
“Just think about this one for now. Why would any of them want to steal the violin? Any more than me, for example. Let’s talk about that when we get to the deli. When do you want me to start with the interviews? First thing tomorrow?” asked Jacobus.
“Actually,” answered Nathaniel, “Martin Lilburn said he needs to see you tonight. He said the next few days are all booked up.”
“Prissy ass,” said Jacobus.
“By the way, Jake,” said Nathaniel, “it’s none of my business, but how come Miss Shinagawa here is coming to New York with us? I mean, she’s certainly welcome, but, you know, sometimes these jobs can
get . . .”
Jacobus had anticipated Nathaniel would ask this question. He was, in fact, intrigued by Miss Shinagawa but, at this point, anyway, did not want to admit as much to Nathaniel and of course not in front of Yumi.
“Two reasons, Nathaniel. First, she’s living on Long Island at the moment. Westbury, isn’t it? So why the hell should she have to take a shitty bus back? Second, I need someone to be my pair of eyes, and how better to get Yumi into the swing of things—”
“Really!” said Nathaniel. “But Jake—”
“Why the hell not?” said Jacobus. “Nathaniel, do you still have that Heifetz tape of the Mendelssohn Concerto that used to be in that jungle you call your glove compartment?”
“Does a bear do his thing in the woods?” Williams replied.
“If there is a thing a bear does in the woods that means ‘of course,’ ” said Yumi, “I would like to add it to my list of American idioms; for example, ‘You ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie.’ ”
“Let’s save the English lesson for later,” Jacobus said as he inserted a tape into the cassette player. Unfortunately, it was the wrong tape. Instead of Heifetz playing Mendelssohn, it was Tom Jones singing “What’s New, Pussycat.” Before trying the next cassette, he confirmed its identity with Williams.
The three drove along silently. The car windows were rolled down to cool them in the muggy summer night, but with the volume turned all the way up, even the combined noise of the road and the Rabbit’s venerable engine failed to intrude upon the magical collaboration between Felix Mendelssohn, a great German composer of the nineteenth century, and Jascha Heifetz, the greatest violinist of the twentieth.
After listening to the few minutes of music that Yumi had played earlier, Jacobus told Nathaniel to stop the tape.
“So, Yumi, what do you think?”
There ensued a long technical discussion of how Heifetz was able to play not only with great accuracy but also with great ease, allowing the music to flow both naturally and with great drama.
Finally Nathaniel said, “It’s fine to dissect how Mr. Heifetz plays, but the plain fact is, the man’s got soul, and either you’ve got soul or you ain’t got soul. If you ain’t got soul, and you want to try to get it, you better spend some time listening to those that do.”
