The Violin Conspiracy(5)

“I’m very serious. I need you there with me. Especially after this. Will you come? Help a brother out?”

“But I have to play,” she said. He could tell from her voice that she was just going through the motions. Her grip tightened on his. “I can’t just take off three weeks from work—we’re doing that Sibelius retrospective, remember?”

“Nicole. You’re coming. We can do this together. I might not have a violin, but I have you.”

“I think the violin is worth more.”

“True. Maybe I can sell you in Russia and use the money to pay the ransom.”

She slid off the bed and slipped over to him, wrapped her arms around his back. Her face was cool against his cheek. “I’m sure I can probably get time off work.” He could feel her mind working, so close to his. “You’d probably have a lot of money left over, after you sell me.”

“Yeah, I’m planning on it. So you’ll come?”

“I’ve got to figure out flights.” Letting him go and sitting down on the bed, she pulled out her phone, compared various offerings.

With his eyes he traced the nape of her neck, the elegance of her finger as she scrolled across the screen. Her eighth-note tattoo flickered almost as if it were a melody. Even after the longest day in creation, she was still beautiful. How could she love someone as damaged as he was?

“There’s actually a flight from Erie that’s $493, with a three-hour layover in Frankfurt,” she said.

He’d lost his violin and she was still with him. She still believed in him. How was this possible?

Ten minutes later, he lay on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. She kept thumbing her phone, whispering travel options that he only half heard. “This one goes through Rome. Oh, but that one has a twenty-four-hour layover. Want to spend a day in Rome?” One thing about Nicole: she loved to travel, but was stupidly cheap about it. She always looked for the cheapest routes.

Twenty minutes later she tucked the phone away. By 5:00 a.m. her breathing had grown deep and even. He lay there, holding her through the broken remainder of the night, until the ceiling’s silver warmed into dawn.





Chapter 3


    Day 2: Temporary Solution


News of the theft broke sometime around dawn, and by 7:00 a.m.—when Ray next turned on the TV—his face peered out from CNN, FOX, and every other news channel. Underneath talking journalists’ heads, and shots of the Saint Jacques’s gold-and-white awning, the theft slid into the chyron: “$10M Stradivarius Stolen from NYC Hotel.”

Bill Soames had told him the night before not to do media interviews: the FBI would release a statement. They told him that doing an interview could compromise the investigation, and, anyway, Ray had no intention of sitting across from Anderson Cooper to explain how he had managed to lose the violin.

“So let me get this straight. Two days ago you carried your violin in an unlocked case, up and down New York’s Upper West Side? Do I have that right?”

Yes, you have that right.

“Did you take it on the subway?”

No. Only taxicabs, and to a couple bars. That’s it. Swear to god.

By 8:15 a.m., his voice mail was full and he had a hundred and twelve unread texts.

He would have turned off his phone entirely, but Soames had said that there could be further communication from the kidnappers, so he needed it on and charged.

There will be no further communication.

He flipped channels.

“Turn that off,” Nicole said from the bed, eyes still closed. “Please.”

He turned off the TV.

Nicole was groggily checking her phone. “Hey, Janice texted. She’s here. She said you haven’t texted her back.”

Janice Stevens, his violin teacher—mentor, friend, and surrogate mother—had taken the first flight out of Charlotte that morning to be with them. She, more than anyone else in the world, understood what the violin meant to him. He was terrified to see her, afraid that he would read disappointment in her eyes. He’d failed her, too, like he’d failed everyone else. After all the time she’d spent with him, the extra hours she’d wasted, touring over the summer, teaching him how to talk to music directors—

“I didn’t want to talk to her.”

“I’ll tell her to meet us at Mischa’s, okay? It looks like she can be there by nine fifteen.” Nicole groaned. “Let’s have her meet us there at ten. We both need a shower, and I need to get some breakfast. I bet there’s media outside.”

“They’re definitely out front,” Ray said. “We should go out the back.”

“So I’ll tell her ten a.m. at Mischa’s? She can call the shop and tell him we’re coming.”

He felt unable to make decisions, incapable of even nodding assent, so he just shrugged.

The news spread. Texts swirled in from his family.

Aunt Rochelle: Are you ok call me

Uncle Thurston: Why you let somebody steal it

And then his mother: When u think we get paid???

His lawyer, Kim Wach, called and texted—probably to say I told you so. No way was he talking to her.

Meanwhile Nicole ordered breakfast. “You’ve got to eat,” she said, ordering the same food as yesterday—how could it have been only yesterday? “Hope you’re not hungry,” she told him when she hung up. “They said it’ll be an hour. Let’s jump in the shower so we can be ready to go right after we eat.”