Death and the Maiden Page 7

  “Well, Señor Yacovis, I must tell you that here in Peru we have many people who we know with certainty are truly missing and it is with great difficulty that we occasionally succeed to find them. Sometimes they are never found, and sometimes they are found but I am sorry to say no longer having the capacity to appreciate our worthwhile efforts.

  “Tell me, señor, what was the date anyone last heard from this Kortovsky?”

  “July twenty-sixth.”

  “So you are telling me that for a month the missing man has not been missed?”

  “Hey, who do you think you are? Gabriel García Márquez? I thought you were a cop.”

  Ochoa Romero chuckled. “Discúlpeme. I will dispense with the metaphysic. Now, please tell me, where was Señor Kortovsky staying in Lima? Perhaps we can find out where he went from there.”

  “Damn,” said Jacobus. “I don’t even know that.”

  “You will find out and call me back. Buenos días, Señor Yacovis.”

  “What about a photo?” stammered Jacobus, grasping at straws. “I could tell his manager to send one down.”

  “A photo? What a considerate idea from a blind person, señor, but that will not be necessary.”

  “What do you mean? How the hell did you know I was blind?” asked Jacobus, primed to be re-ignited.

  Ochoa Romero laughed. “I am no Inca clairvoyant, if that is what you are thinking. It was only that I was fortunate enough to attend the memorable concert of the New Magini String Quartet here in Lima, and in the program notes was the biography of the lovely segunda violinista, that young Asian woman, Miss … One moment, I have it right here.”

  “Shinagawa. Yumi Shinagawa,” Jacobus said, his patience waning.

  “Yes, of course. Miss Shinagawa, which mentioned you as her illustrious teacher. That is how I know about you, and of your special gift.”

  “Gift?”

  “Yes, your blindness. My grandfather, César, was also blessed with that gift, and it was he who taught me how to truly listen to music with only my ears and my heart, and no doubt it is one of the reasons why you have become such a perceptive teacher.”

  Tell the blind beggar he should be grateful for his gift, thought Jacobus.

  “So I gather you’ve got a photo of Kortovsky from the program book,” he said.

  “A splendid one, gracias. A handsome man, Señor Yacovis. A handsome man. Peru is not a country of tall, blond men, señor. The ladies must beware, por cierto. And the quartet, they played like gods. Or shall I say, one god and three goddesses. Never has Lima seen such excitement since Peru vanquished Chile, one to nil, scoring a beautiful goal in the eighty-eighth minute to claim the South American fútbol title nine years ago. I myself was at the estadio with my aged grandfather—”

  “He teach you how to listen to soccer with your heart?”

  “He felt the pulse, Señor Yacovis. La energía. So much so that after the match he collapsed with joy and later expressed dismay that he had been successfully resuscitated, complaining he had lost his opportunity to die a happy man.

  “But this is not why you called. We were talking about your missing Señor Kortovsky and his string quartet. I must say that although their Beethoven took the audience to its standing ovation—it was el famoso opus 59, numero tres, and the closing fugue was miraculously exciting, I was not—how shall we say?—so swept off my feet. Discúlpeme.”

  “And why was that?” asked Jacobus with an edge. He considered Beethoven to be the greatest composer, and what could an opinionated cop know about music?

  “For me, the heroism of Beethoven’s music tells us what humanity should be, which no doubt is wonderful but un poco utopian for me. That is why I prefer Mozart, because he tells us the way humanity really is. As a policeman, that is what I see every day. That is my life. And the utmost clarity with which he presents his musical ideas brings comfort to me, who has always to unravel what is murky and dark. That is why I preferred the Mozart that the quartet played on the first half. Yes, it is my favorite. Until later then, Señor Yacovis.”

  “And which Mozart quartet would be your favorite?” Jacobus asked, but Oro had already hung up.

  EIGHT

  Jacobus, bolstered by the increasingly salubrious weather, walked to his rendezvous with Annika Haagen at the celebrated violin shop of Boris Dedubian at the Bonderman Building in Midtown Manhattan. Before closing the apartment door behind him, he shouted to Trotsky, asleep on Nathaniel’s king-size bed, “Guard the house.”

  Walking along Ninety-sixth toward Fifth Avenue, he steeled himself for another encounter with the blind beggar and felt vaguely deflated when, passing the spot of their earlier confrontation, the rattling of a tin cup was replaced by the groan of a bus leaving the curb. To make absolutely certain that he wasn’t about to be ambushed, he reconnoitered with his cane, probing the area where the beggar had been. Nothing. Not even trash. Jacobus began to wonder whether the confrontation had been in his mind only, and whether he was losing his sanity in his old age, but his chafed palms provided evidence he wasn’t totally mad. Yet.

  From a missing beggar, his thoughts turned to a missing violinist. What had he learned, if anything, from his conversation with Ochoa Romero, that pampas ass? Not much. There was as much chance Kortovsky was assaulting a liverwurst sandwich right now at the Carnegie Deli in New York as assaulting the peak of Mount Fujimori in the Andes.

  Such musings occupied Jacobus’s mind as he meandered down Fifth Avenue along Central Park, until a squeal of car brakes and a blaring horn as he took a step into the intersection at Seventy-ninth Street provided a reminder that it was time to turn his daydreaming from Kortovsky to Haagen. Yes, he had met her a few times after the quartet’s concerts, but this was the first time he and she would actually engage in anything other than the usual loathsome postconcert chitchat. He had always admired Haagen’s playing, her determination not to be overwhelmed by the more prominent voices of the quartet—the first violin and cello—and her ability to bring out the musically tantalizing but often obscured inner voice of the viola part. Her tone, lush and sensuous, was matched, according to those who described her to him, by her Scandinavian beauty and her riveting stage presence. Jacobus suddenly barked out a raucous laugh—as he did so, he could hear the pace of the pedestrians near him pick up—hell with them—recalling a line by veteran New York Times music critic Martin Lilburn, who had provided the most apt and succinct description both of the typical viola part and of Haagen’s overall artistic personality in one of his rare displays of levity: “Annika Haagen can even make ‘oom-pah’ sexy.”

  Jacobus tried to imagine her looks based on her sound, but visual images of any sort had almost ceased to exist for him. At this late point in his life, people were how they sounded and how they smelled, and occasionally what they felt like. Taste had not been a viable option for some time. Nevertheless, he entered the Bonderman Building entertaining himself trying to visualize a woman with a beautiful viola sound, and who, as Aaron Kortovsky’s wife, might know something of his whereabouts. And more to the point, how it could be she did not know.

  He pressed the button of the recently installed stainless-steel, automated elevator for the top floor, the sole longtime occupant of which was Dedubian et Fils Violins. As it ascended, with speed and silence, he recalled the old days: the vintage Otis elevator, manually operated by his onetime friend Sigmund Gottfried. He could almost smell the polished woodwork, the soothing sound of the well-oiled wrought-iron door as it caressingly slid open. Ah, Ziggy, if only—

  “So, Mr. Jacobus,” came the Danish-inflected voice. “Here you are.”

  “Huh? Oh, Haagen. Ready to go?” asked Jacobus, holding the elevator door open.

  “I am sorry, but no. I arrived here a little late. Traffic on 684 was just ridiculous. And parking! Pffff! And now Dedubian keeps me waiting and waiting. He has been on the phone since I got here. Shall we leave now? I don’t want to keep you.”

  “What do you need to do?” />
  “Just an update on my insurance appraisal for my Gasparo. It should only take a minute. He knows the instrument well. After all, I bought it from him way back when I was still a student.”

  “Nah. We can wait.”

  “Thank you.”

  Haagen took his arm and escorted him from the elevator, across well-trod antique Oriental rugs and around the massive French Renaissance central table on which lay an assortment of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century violins, to a pair of frilly, overstuffed Victorian chairs in a corner of the ostentatious, spacious showroom. Jacobus caught the scent of her floral perfumed soap and heard the muted, intimate sounds of prospective buyers trying out six-figure fiddles in side rooms, and of other customers negotiating the sale, repair, or appraisal of their instruments in quiet confidentiality. He wondered why, after all these years selling tens of millions of dollars’ worth of these pretty-sounding wooden boxes, Dedubian still hadn’t retired to his beloved condo in Montreux. Business must be in his blood, Jacobus considered, just as blood was also in his business.

  “It’s a real racket these dealers have with the insurance companies, isn’t it?” Jacobus said to Haagen.

  “You mean with the appraisals?” Haagen asked.

  “Yeah, they get you coming and going. The insurance companies want you to get an appraisal every two or three years or else they won’t acknowledge appreciation for the instrument during the time between valuations.”

  “Yes, somehow they are unwilling to connect the dots,” Haagen said, continuing his thought. “And at the same time, the dealers are only too happy to write the reappraisals for you, since they already have the information they need about the instruments, but they don’t mind charging you a hundred dollars for the new piece of paper with their signature.”

  “Exactly,” said Jacobus. “They don’t make you get your house reappraised every time you—”

  “Excuse me,” Haagen said, their conversation interrupted by an unexpected sound, jarringly inconsistent with their surroundings—an electronic version of the idée fixe from Harold in Italy, the unique symphony/concerto for viola that Berlioz composed for Paganini.

  “My cell phone,” said Haagen. “Please excuse me a moment.”

  While she conversed on the phone, Jacobus wondered what Berlioz would have thought to hear his genius reduced to a sissified, mechanical jingle. Where will music be in a hundred years? he mused. Will humanity reminisce nostalgically of the oldies but goodies of elevator music? “Hey, you remember that ‘Guantanamera’ recording when we strolled down the frozen foods aisle at Price Saver?”

  “… so it’s good news, Mr. Jacobus,” said Haagen, interrupting his ongoing internal diatribe, “and bad news.”

  “What’s good news?”

  “Sheila managed to get Ivan to fill in for Aaron today and to do an outreach with us tomorrow. Smetana quartet.”

  “Ivan Lensky? Pravda Lenskaya’s son?” asked Jacobus.

  “Yes. He’s a terrific violinist, and of course knows our quartet very well…” She left the sentence dangling.

  “But? What’s the bad news?” coaxed Jacobus.

  “There’s a reason they call him Ivan the Terrible.”

  A terrific violinist, yes, thought Jacobus. But he was well aware there was some major baggage there. It was Ivan Lensky who had finished second to Yumi when the quartet was auditioning candidates for Crispin Short’s vacated position. Only months before the audition, Lensky had been a finalist at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, not winning a prize but playing well enough to secure a recording of the Dvořák Violin Concerto with the Prague Philharmonia. Doubtless, winning neither a top competition prize nor the position with the quartet had been a major blow to his ego, and to his mother. Surely, as Lenskaya got older, she’d want to resurrect the musical style established by the original quartet members, the style that had first brought the quartet to world prominence. Yumi, as she had related to Jacobus, believed it had been her ascendance over Ivan Lensky in winning the position that initially caused Lenskaya’s icy standoffishness. Jacobus wondered why Ivan, after being rejected in favor of Yumi, would now consent to participate in their rehearsals. And how would Yumi respond to having someone she had defeated playing first fiddle to her second?

  “I know what you are thinking,” said Haagen. “But don’t worry. Sheila told Ivan it was just temporary until Aaron gets back. Ivan is a strong violinist, but he’s got that traditional Russian take-no-prisoners way of playing and would never be a good fit for the quartet. But for today and tomorrow, it seems a good compromise.”

  “What’s the outreach?”

  “We do little demo-performances at schools. We wanted to cancel this one because of Aaron’s situation and with the concert on Thursday, but Sheila said we had to do this because we get a grant from the city and if we cancel we’ll lose the grant, and these days we really need the money. So it’s good Ivan’s available.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Rose Grimes School. Up in Harlem.”

  “Yeah, I know it. BTower’s school. Yumi teaches there.”

  Haagen didn’t reply—it wasn’t a very interesting conversation, anyway—so they continued their wait in silence, hoping that Nature would qualify their absence of verbiage as an example of a vacuum to be abhorred and would draw Dedubian into their presence. Several minutes later, Haagen gave up the experiment.

  “Sometimes I think maybe I am paranoid, but ever since Crispin sued us it seems we’ve been treated like this. Like dirt. I’m afraid if he wins this thing, our careers might be over.”

  “Aren’t you being a little melodramatic?”

  “Maybe. But maybe not. You know, when these dominoes start to tumble in this business, who knows when they stop?”

  “Pardon me for saying so, but you should’ve expected push-back when Kortovsky made Short’s firing public. That’s not the way it’s done, even if it was justified. You have to admit, hostile takeovers in this business put all of you in a very bad light.”

  “Maybe so. But we tried everything with Crispin to make the separation easier. But he said, ‘You’ll have to fire me to get rid of me,’ and then when we did he went to the media like that.” She snapped her fingers. Then she laughed.

  “That’s funny?”

  “No. Just that when I snapped my fingers, Boris appeared.”

  Jacobus heard the familiar, cultivated voice approach that could be any accent or no accent, a voice that could charm or belittle, whatever was necessary to make a sale.

  “Ah! Jake,” said Boris Dedubian. “So good to see you again.” He felt his hand clasped by one larger and softer than his, but the handshake, Jacobus noted, demonstrated a lack of enthusiasm inconsistent with his words. Interesting, too, that the appointment was with Haagen, yet Dedubian had greeted him first. Before Jacobus could return the greeting, Dedubian continued.

  “You know, I still have that exquisite Guadagnini that you loved.”

  “That was two years ago. I liked the violin—it’s a great violin—but I have no interest in buying it, and it’s Ms. Haagen who’s here to see you, not me.”

  “Ah, yes. Annika. Sorry to keep you waiting so long. You wanted to see me?”

  “Boris, I just need an update on my Gasparo. I’ve brought it.”

  “Let’s take a look, shall we?”

  Jacobus heard Haagen remove the instrument from its case and hand it to Dedubian for inspection.

  “Ah,” he said after a few moments. “And when was the last time you had it appraised with us?”

  “Five years. I know that’s too long to wait, but—”

  “No, no. No problem.” There ensued a silence that to Jacobus seemed too long for a cursory reappraisal of a familiar instrument. Finally Dedubian continued. “I don’t think its value has changed.”

  “What? I don’t understand,” said Haagen. “How is that possible? Every good instrument has gone up fifty, sixty percent in the past five years. And this is a 1580 Gasparo,
the greatest viola maker ever, and it’s in amazing condition. You’ve told me yourself it’s never been cut down to size, like most of his other instruments. No bass bar crack. No sound post crack. This should be worth three hundred thousand, easy!”

  There was a long, awkward silence.

  “Well, now that I look at it carefully, Annika, I’m not even so sure anymore whether this is a genuine Gasparo. What you say—that such an old instrument has never been cut down—makes me suspicious whether it’s original. You know there were so many later makers who copied his style. And four hundred years ago! Look at these f-holes. Gasparo’s would have been longer than these.”

  “But I bought this from you! It’s got papers from Laszlo Novak!”

  A certificate of authenticity from a guy like Novak was worth its weight in gold, thought Jacobus. But once the guy was dead, it went from twenty-four to fourteen karats.

  “Well, poor Lazlo’s passed away, hasn’t he? I would suggest you keep my previous appraisal, so I don’t have to say in writing what I now think this instrument is, a nicely done nineteenth-century Saxon or Tyrolean copy of a Gasparo. Sixty, seventy thousand, tops. If you want to sell it back to me, I’d be happy to give you your money back, what you paid me for it.”

  “I can’t believe this!” said Haagen. To Jacobus, she sounded on the verge of hyperventilating. “But the sound! It has such an incredible sound!”

  “That all depends upon who is playing it,” said Dedubian. “Doesn’t it, Annika, dear?”

  “Kortovsky’s got an Amati, right?” Jacobus jumped in. Partly he wanted to prevent Haagen, who had just witnessed her nest egg go Humpty Dumpty on her, from attacking Dedubian. Not that he was a peacemaker; in fact, he was enjoying their little tiff. But he wasn’t yet sure whose side he needed to be on, and also he was interested in the timing of this reappraisal. Maybe she and Kortovsky were trying to push the valuations as high as possible in the event that Short’s suit was successful, so that if and when they had to sell their instruments to pay up, the pain would be substantially eased. That might account for her level of distress. Sometimes Dedubian could be sweet-talked by a pretty face into giving a high appraisal; today he seemed to be having no part of it. That was also interesting. “When’s the last time Kortovsky got his violin reappraised?”