“Mikhail Lezenkov’s family,” Ray said.
“Quite possibly,” she said. “Whatever you said to him seems to have shaken things loose.”
“I’m coming,” he said. “I’ll be on the next plane.” He was sitting on the edge of his hotel bed with Nicole hovering somewhere in front of him.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “No. Don’t even think of coming here.”
“But if I see it, I’ll know immediately if it’s mine or not.”
“So will I,” she said. “I have enough photos to identify it in the dark.”
“You need backup,” he said.
“What are you going to do, serenade them to death?”
“I’m serious,” he said. He worried that he sounded like he was whining.
“Look,” she said, “I could be here for days. Weeks, even. This kind of thing takes time. I’ll let you know how things go. You just go practice your Tchaikovsky and win a gold medal, will you?”
“Okay,” Ray said, already pulling his suitcase out of his closet. “Keep me posted, will you?”
They hung up, and Ray packed.
Nicole begged to go with him, but he thought it would be better if he went alone. She and Janice could stay at the hotel, tell people that he was holed up in his room with a stomach bug. She could run interference for any competition officials who came to check in on him. Besides, he told her, he needed her and Janice to rearrange his practice session with the Moscow Philharmonic. He needed her in Moscow.
At last she relented. “We Greenwich girls hold it down for our men,” she told Ray, sending him off with a hug and a deep kiss as he went to catch the first flight out to Belgrade.
After a three-hour flight, as soon as he had a cellular connection, Ray texted Alicia: Hi where r u
No immediate response. Was she still asleep? It was almost 9:00 a.m. Was she in the shower? Still, he was illogically disappointed. After he collected his suitcase and waded through customs, he took a cab to Belgrade’s city center, passing a motley collection of ornate nineteenth-century buildings interspersed with blocky Soviet concrete monoliths. Alicia was staying at the Sky Hotel, she’d told him. He arrived and checked into an ultramodern mash-up of open white spaces and slanting plate glass.
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.