“They wouldn’t let you, remember? The FBI didn’t want you on TV.”
“Well, they ain’t got shit done,” he said. “Pilar Jiménez is probably partying every night, playing merengue on the violin to her family.”
“You have time,” she repeated. “It hasn’t even been a week. You’ve raised almost thirty thousand dollars a day. That’s incredible!”
“It’s been almost a week. At this rate it’ll take me five months to raise five mil. I have less than five weeks. And the comments are fucking me up.”
“Call Benson again,” she said. She was convinced that the insurance company was to blame: all it had to do was pay the ransom, or pay out the insurance policy before the ransom date, and Ray would have his violin back. Simple. The insurance agent had tried to explain to both of them that the company had a strict policy not to pay ransoms and that there was also a waiting period before any payment would be issued—let alone the delay required by his family’s settlement—but Nicole told them that their “strict policy” about ransoms wasn’t written anywhere in any of the paperwork. She’d checked. So now she hounded Ray to make them pay.
“It doesn’t do any good to call them,” he said. “They’re not paying more than the twenty-five-thousand reward.”
Benson was no help—neither were the investors. Trying to convince wealthy investors to cough up some of their hard-earned cash to invest in a small percentage of a stolen Stradivarius violin wasn’t quite as easy as it might sound—especially when Ray had no proof that the violin still existed. And of course these investors were savvy enough to understand the implications of the Markses’ lawsuit: Even if Ray did get the violin back, he might not actually own it. He might have to give it to the Marks family.
When the violin had been stolen, it had seemed that there were a half dozen very possible leads—Pilar, Ray’s family, the Marks family.
Pilar had turned out to be a dead end. Alicia had talked to her, then the FBI had flown down. She’d refused to say anything, and they could find nothing in her movements or actions to tie her to the lost violin.
Ray’s family continued to be scrutinized, Bill Soames reported, but their bank accounts remained consistent （Consistently low, Ray thought）， and none of them had acted suspiciously. Until someone made a move or slipped up, nothing could be done against them.
The Marks family, by their very existence, was the most frustrating. If they hadn’t stolen the violin, they should have—and in any case they should take the blame. That said, the Markses had been very quiet since the theft: their lawyer had never coughed up additional evidence of the Markses’ legal claim. “Why should they,” Ray told Alicia, “since they already have the violin? Their niece is probably practicing on it right now.” Maybe the niece and Pilar Jiménez would start a chamber group.
So Ray had lost faith in the FBI and in Benson’s crack art detective, Alicia. If he was going to get the violin back, he was going to have to do it himself.
He’d tried to find investors to pay the ransom, but the money hadn’t materialized. So he’d tried to raise the money himself, spending an hour a day on his crowdfunding site, answering questions or reaching out to music lovers, violin aficionados, fan groups. By the first week of June, he’d raised $1.2 million.
So he hit the talk shows. Going to New York seemed intrusive and would derail his daily practicing, so he reached out to the TV and radio producers he’d met over the past year and invited them to film him in Charlotte. Several syndicated radio shows aired interviews across America. The New York Times unveiled an enormous photo of him on the first page of the Style section. By June 15, the day before he was leaving for Moscow, he’d raised $2,330,285: $1,349,775 from wealthy donors, $683,510 from crowdfunding, $52,000 from the bank. Janice had taken out a second mortgage on her house and given him $245,000. His family had been disinclined to assist. Why would they? They’d get $5 million shortly.
The Tchaikovsky Competition loomed. Ray couldn’t forget those millions of online viewers who would be watching the contest. All rabid classical music fans. Many wealthy. If half of them donated one dollar, he’d have the ransom money.
Win or lose, gold medal or none, the Tchaikovsky Competition—which he’d spent the last eight months practicing for—took on a whole new meaning: it would be his road to recovering the violin. The longer he survived in the tournament, the more people would see him and, hopefully, want to contribute to the crowdfunding campaign.