The Violin Conspiracy(81)

Ray couldn’t remember ever being parted from the violin case the entire time they were at the restaurant. He did indeed take it with him when he went to the bathroom (twice). The police and CCTV further confirmed the route they took after dinner to an Irish pub on the corner of Eighty-Third and Columbus, where Ray tucked himself into a booth, the violin in the corner, and where they continued to drink until almost midnight, when Ray and Nicole caught a cab south to the hotel.

No, he didn’t open the case when he was out at the restaurant or the bar or in the cabs. At least he didn’t think so.

Had he opened it back in the hotel? There was that one bit of fingering that Leonid kept drilling him on: Had he practiced briefly before putting the violin back?

He’d had too much to drink. He didn’t think he’d opened the case. He wasn’t sure. He never locked it when it was with him. It was always with him. The keys to the lock were on his keychain. He had his keychain. The case had not been locked when he opened it in Charlotte.

The next morning they woke after 7:00 a.m. Both their flights were around eleven o’clock, so they ordered room service, and a woman named Pilar Jiménez set out their breakfast on the small dining-room table, inches from his unopened violin case.

She left, they ate, they packed, they took cabs to the airports—Nicole flying out of Newark to Erie and Ray heading to Charlotte via LaGuardia.

That afternoon, back in Charlotte, he’d opened the violin case for the first time in twenty-four hours and, instead of his violin, found only a white Chuck Taylor tennis shoe and a ransom note.

How do you remember to keep breathing when the most important piece of your life—a violin-shaped marvel that defines who you are, that organizes your day, that completes you as a human being—is stolen? How do you keep the blood moving in your veins? How do you make sure your eyes blink, your throat swallows?

You just do. You lie on your bed for hours, you pull out the Lehman that you have to practice on. You try to recapture the magic of music, the emotion of the moment, the days and weeks of practicing. You try because, after all these years of practicing, you’re hardwired to try.

The world swims in unreality, and for a moment you believe that your violin is in its case—you only have to open it. The next moment, reality crushes you: the case is empty, miles away, in some police warehouse somewhere.

This happens all day, forty or fifty or two hundred times: opening a door or pouring a bowl of cereal or flushing the toilet. A knock on the door is someone returning the violin: no, it’s the mailman with a Bath & Body Works coupon. You open your closet and expect to see a violin hanging from a hook or propped on a shelf. You turn on your TV and anticipate that the newscaster will talk not about the latest stock market updates but about a violin miraculously restored to its owner.

You convince yourself that you’re going to get it back, but the voice that tells you you’re going to get it back is also the voice that tells you, a half breath later, that you’ll never see it again. No matter what anyone says. No matter how often your girlfriend hugs you and holds you. No matter how many bouquets of flowers—or teddy bears—fans send you, or casseroles that your beloved mentor, friend, and teacher drops off, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t help. The teddy bears pile up in a corner and you throw a sheet over them so you don’t have to encounter their accusatory glares, them telling you that it’s gone. It can’t be gone, it was just here. It’s gone.

Because here is the heart of it: it wasn’t about the money, or the prestige of playing a Stradivarius, or the looks people gave him—envious and impressed—when they learned who he was and what the violin had been. His loss had nothing to do with any of these things, and the wealth and fame were distractions that he shrugged off.

Here is what he realized in the gray shadows of his 3:00 a.m. vigils: He was alone now. He was desperately, terribly, alone. Until then, he’d been a solitary, lonely kid—and then a solitary, lonely man—who had had one special person in his life, dressed in a pink housecoat and smelling of lavender and bluing solution in her hair. She had gone, but she had given him music, and music had filled his world, had allowed him to connect with people in a way that he sometimes could not believe could ever be real. But now she was gone, and the violin had gone, and the music had gone, and he felt so lonely and guilty now that he often thought the misery would paralyze him and he would simply, suddenly, stop breathing under the weight of it.

He obsessed over who could have taken it. After the initial flurry of police activity, the FBI did not call that often, Alicia’s texts pinged his phone less frequently, the updates only trickled in. So he pushed them all—Bill Soames and Alicia Childress and the NYPD—to investigate every lead.

Nicole was convinced it was his family who wanted their half of the insurance money—and figured it would be better to wait the agreed-upon five years for it rather than have Ray dole out their money in tinier increments.

Ray, however, was convinced that it was the Marks family. They were crazy. They were also unscrupulous and obsessed with the violin. They seemed less interested in money and more interested in owning the violin itself, or in punishing Ray for his existence. The only thing that made him doubt his own theory was the ransom: the Marks family would have no intention of returning the violin for whatever price. But perhaps that, too, was part of their plan—to take the violin and an extra $5 million. He wouldn’t put it past them.