At 2:00 p.m. he’d drill into the simple, beautiful Valse-Scherzo in C Major by Tchaikovsky—even though he’d be focusing on it during block three, he still wanted to play it every day, since that way even his muscles would follow and anticipate the flow of the competition. Besides, he just liked playing it.
Three p.m. and time for a late lunch. He was always starving. If he and Nicole were in different cities, he’d give her a call and her voice would pour out, warm and honey gold, making a knot loosen in his chest. “How is practice going?”
“Okay. The Scherzo feels better. I think I got a handle on it.”
“I love the way you play that piece. It’s like Tchaikovsky wrote it for you.”
“It felt pretty good at the end.”
“Of course it does. Now get back to it. You have a competition to win.”
After lunch, he drilled into Mozart and Kreisler for the next three hours, playing each piece from beginning to end as if in a concert performance. Before he knew it, 10:00 p.m. had barreled past, and he staggered into the shower, and bed.
In May—only a month before the competition—Leonid Molchalin, one of the world’s foremost Tchaikovsky authorities, had deigned to bestow his insights upon Ray: Molchalin’s teaching schedule at Juilliard meant that he would be available only once school was out, in mid-May. Ray would stay in New York to work with him.
Later, the FBI and Alicia Childress would tell him that his regimented schedule made it easier for the thieves to track him, so he could blame himself for his own stupid predictability; but on May 16, the day of the theft, Ray was still pointlessly unaware, still believed that a strict schedule would help him. He’d practice ten to twelve hours a day, minimum, with lessons in the late morning every other day. He wanted to practice more, but physically he knew he couldn’t: carpal tunnel syndrome could kick in, or tendonitis. It wasn’t worth taking the risk.
May 15—a month before he was slated to fly to Moscow—was Ray and Nicole’s last full day in Manhattan. The morning’s schedule would be identical to the previous five days. Only the late afternoon and evening would be different—a celebration of his last lesson. They were scheduled to leave New York the following day.
So he woke that morning before the 6:00 a.m. alarm, crept out of the room, down to the hotel gym, and worked out for an hour. When he returned at seven, Nicole was awake. He poured the last bowl of cereal, drizzled the little bit of milk that was left in the hotel refrigerator, and then practiced till eight thirty. He slid the violin back into its case, kissed Nicole goodbye, and headed out into the Manhattan morning. Commuters in long tan overcoats swam along the sidewalks, staring at their phones. Garbage trucks roared past. He headed down Fifty-Third, turned up Seventh Avenue toward Lincoln Center and Juilliard.
One of Leonid Molchalin’s earliest teachers actually studied with Adolph Brodsky, who worked with Tchaikovsky himself on the famous Violin Concerto. Russian-born, with decades of experience as a performer and a teacher, Molchalin had been a student of Ivan Galamian and Isaac Stern and a member of the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra. It was pure luck, and a lot of Janice pulling strings, that Leonid agreed to meet with Ray—and they only had a few weeks together. Molchalin was heading to Europe soon to play with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra.
Now above Ray loomed Juilliard’s dramatic steel and glass. Inside, he breathed in its aroma of Pine-Sol and air-conditioning. Most students were gone, and the halls echoed as he ascended to the practice rooms on the second floor. He started warming up. Leonid—a short man in jeans and a shapeless dark green polo shirt—arrived a few minutes later.
On this final morning of Ray’s lessons with Leonid, they practiced the Tchaikovsky Concerto over and over again, Leonid drilling Ray on the interpretation in the third movement. Finally Leonid nodded. “From now on, you must just practice and make it your own. Even more your own. Your sound is very pure, very Russian.”
Very Russian. It didn’t get better than that. Ray packed up the violin, slung it over his shoulder, headed out and down Sixty-Fifth to Central Park, weaving past bicyclists and a waffle stand toward Seventh Avenue, and then back to the hotel. It was 1:30 p.m.
Nicole reappeared around two o’clock—she’d been shopping for her niece whose birthday was next week—and set her packages down just inside the door. She kicked off her shoes and lay back on the bed, listening to him play, or reading her novel, or both.
A little after 3:00 p.m., he set the violin back in its case and spooned with Nicole on the bed for an hour, exhausted, the music of Tchaikovsky and Mozart in his veins. He got up and practiced again until just after 6:00 p.m.