Two weeks later:
Sorry sugar nothing new to report. They say they don’t have anything. When you coming back to Philly? There’s a new restaurant that opened near me and I want to take you.
He called Kim Wach. Told her how he’d reached out to his cousins, and they knew nothing about Leon Marks and the violin. Told her how his aunt Rochelle had asked his family to see if they’d seen the envelope, and how they told her they hadn’t. “The thing is,” he said, “I don’t know how hard they looked. I seriously doubt my uncle Larry or my mom would even bother looking, even if they did have it. There’s nothing in it for them, so they won’t bother lifting a finger.”
And then Ray told her his plan: a stroke of genius that killed two birds with one blow. His plan would resolve his family’s issues and get him that missing envelope.
Kim Wach did not think it was a stroke of genius. “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” she told him. “You are seriously not going to do this.”
He ignored her.
* * *
—
A week later, in a Sheraton outside the Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, Ray seated himself at the head of a conference table, his back to the brown vertical blinds, a sheet of paper with his notes in front of him. He’d arranged with the hotel staff for two video screens, and he booted up both: on the first was Kim Wach, his lawyer; on the second was Colin Handzo, who collectively represented his family—except for Aunt Rochelle—in the lawsuit against him.
En masse, his mother and her siblings poured into the room. No significant others or kids. Aunt Rochelle, who didn’t have to be there but wanted to back him up, hugged him. Uncle Larry shook Ray’s hand, told him he looked good. The others nodded and smiled insincerely. His mother glared at him from the far end of the table.
“Thank you for coming,” Ray said. “I hope you all had good flights or drives in. I know how bad the traffic can be. I tried to find a place that was central for all of you.”
“Woulda just been better to pick someone’s house and we all could go there,” said his mother. “I got to pay for a hotel room tonight.” She’d dressed up for the occasion in a tight salmon-colored dress, with fake nails and lipstick to match.
He ignored her. “Anyway, I have a proposal for you, and I wanted to talk to you about it in person.”
“Ray,” Kim Wach cut in from the video monitor, “can I just say for the record that I think this is a terrible idea?”
He ignored her, too. “I’d like to settle the issue of PopPop’s fiddle. Kim here”—he nodded at the screen—“says that if you end up actually going to court, and not just writing me threatening letters, that the case will get thrown out as frivolous and that you’ll have to pay her attorney fees. She thinks you’re doing all this because you want me to settle and you want to make some money, even if you don’t have a good claim to my violin.”
He took a breath, waiting for a contradiction. But no one spoke. “Let me start by saying that there is no way that I’m getting rid of PopPop’s fiddle. Grandma gave it to me. It was important to her and to this family, and it’s going to stay with me. If I have kids someday, I’ll pass it down to them.
“But I do want to settle this, and I want us to be a family again. I also got accepted to compete in the Tchaikovsky Competition, which is pretty much the biggest competition in the world. I need to be able to practice without all these distractions.
“So here’s my proposal. When I’m done talking, I’ll leave the room and let all of you talk to your lawyer and figure out if you want to do it. Just know that this is the only settlement offer I’ll be making. If you go to court and lose, you won’t be getting anything, and you’ll be stuck with Kim’s attorney fees, too—which are pretty steep, let me tell you.
“Here’s what I’m offering.” He looked down at his notes, looked back up. “Starting next year, I will pay each of you a hundred thousand dollars over the next ten years. That’s five hundred thousand dollars total. I know you think that’s nothing to me, but let me tell you: for a working musician, it’s a lot of money.
“I’ll also list the five of you as the primary beneficiaries of the violin’s insurance policy in case something happens to the violin. But let me be super clear here: if the violin gets damaged or stolen, or if I get injured in any way, and if there’s the slightest evidence that any of you or any of your friends or relatives are involved, you’ll get absolutely nothing. And to make sure this happens, the insurance company will be instructed to hold the money in escrow for five years, so you won’t see an immediate payday if something happens to the violin. So it’d be better for you if you kept me alive.” He smiled. Nobody else did.