The Violin Conspiracy(93)
He unpacked his Lehman and started practicing, his phone propped on the narrow hotel desk.
She didn’t reply till almost 11:00 a.m.: Sorry still no news
Ray: where r u
Alicia: Belgrade
Ray: where
Alicia: ?? coming back from Dedinje
Ray: coming back to hotel?
Alicia: Yes. Why?
Ray: I’m at Sky Hotel, rm 409
Alicia: WHAT
Ray: Yeah I know you said not to come
Alicia: YOU WILL BLOW MY COVER
Ray: Meet me in my hotel room?
Twenty minutes later, she knocked on his door. “What are you doing here?” She was not pleased.
“I couldn’t sit there waiting,” he said. “I’m sorry. I promise I won’t be seen with you. I’m just a tourist wandering around Belgrade.”
She glared at him. “Shouldn’t you be rehearsing? Don’t you have the finals to get ready for?”
He shrugged. “I have three days. I had to move around one practice session, that was it.”
He didn’t mention that it was the practice session with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, rehearsing in the Zaryadye Concert Hall—arguably the best concert venue in the world—and that he’d heard from Nicole that the Tchaikovsky Competition organizers were furious with Ray’s last-minute change of plans. It didn’t matter. Being physically present when the violin was recovered meant everything to him.
“You might as well tell me,” he said.
She sighed, relenting. The surprising—or, come to think of it, not surprising—thing about $10 million Stradivarius violins is that they’re not that easy to sell. It’s a distinctive instrument, everybody knows what it looks like, and nobody wants to risk being the one caught holding it. Meanwhile the original thief has it. He tries to ransom it, but if the ransom plan doesn’t succeed—as thus far it hadn’t succeeded with Ray’s, since the insurance company refused to pay immediately—the thief could try to trade it on the black market, working with various fences to exchange the instrument for cash or drugs. Then some other lowlife will have it and again swaps it for drugs or guns or a few thousand dollars. Each new owner optimistically takes the chance to resell it, hoping to find an unscrupulous collector who will pay a couple million for it, stuff it in a vault, and never pull it out again. Unless, that is, the thief disappears with the violin. He might simply decide to hold on to it, use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card: if in the future he is picked up for another crime, he could trade the Strad’s whereabouts as a bargaining chip for a lighter jail sentence.
Alicia now believed that Ray’s Strad was somewhere in this chain, being passed around from one crook to another—the ransom was just a red herring, a means of generating additional income. Finding the violin itself was the best way of ensuring its recovery.
“You think the Lezenkov family stole it?” Ray asked. “Hired people to steal it, I mean?”
Alicia was sitting in the armchair near the window, looking out over Belgrade’s blank-fronted buildings, which looked like warehouses. “So their kid would win the Tchaikovsky Competition?” She shook her head, playing with the gold necklace around her neck. She was dressed in some sort of long flowing skirt and turquoise scarf—she looked very European. “Seems like a long shot, honestly, but the father is very competitive. Apparently he really forced the kid to play all the time. Didn’t seem like much of a life, honestly.”
She went on to tell him that a wealthy Serbian dealer had reached out via several intermediaries to let people know that, along with the Lezenkov family, he, too, had a client who was in the market for a very nice violin, no questions asked. This client would pay up to 1.3 million euro—vastly more than the thieves would get just from passing it off as collateral for guns or drugs.
“Who’s the client? Do you know him?” Ray asked.
Alicia fumbled in her purse, handed him her passport. “Me,” she said. “I’m an intermediary interested in purchasing a very nice violin for an anonymous client.”
“You? Seriously?”
She took back the passport, opened it. Marie Hodges of Galveston, Texas, stared back at him from Alicia’s photograph.
“Holy crap. Is this real?”
“Sure. This is my job, remember? I have a whole deep background created for Marie Hodges, which is why having you here is a serious impediment. Anybody can google Marie Hodges and find a lot of information on her. Where she went to college, a LinkedIn page, everything. It’s an alias that will hold up under serious scrutiny.”
“That’s really cool,” he told her. “So now what? We’re just waiting?”
“I told you not to come,” she reminded him.
She was right. He could have stayed in Moscow, practiced his repertoire for the Third Round—but he could practice it just as well in Belgrade. Without his accompanist and without the Moscow Orchestra, true, but closer to his violin.
He was really glad to be gone.
In Belgrade, he spent the next day busking—treating the good folk, residents, and tourists alike, to his Third Round repertoire: the Mozart and the Tchaikovsky, repeating both pieces over and over in different parts of the city. A few people dropped coins in his open violin case.
Between pieces, he wandered around the city streets—some charmingly cobblestoned, others with uniquely disturbing murals, still others that looked like they’d been dropped from a communist labor camp.