He shook his head, bewildered. “I don’t understand. Who’s Mikhail? Why would I talk to him? Is he American?”
She laughed, and her friends laughed, too. “Mikhail Lezenkov,” said the short dark-haired girl next to Svetlana, like it was obvious. “Mikhail Lezenkov from Serbia,” she repeated, like maybe he was teasing her.
Ray stared at her blankly. “Sorry, miss, I’m not following you. Is he a judge?”
“He is—how do you say?” They talked among themselves for a moment. “He is your rival,” Svetlana said. She fumbled with her phone, pulled up a page, handed it to him.
It was in Cyrillic. He handed it back. “I can’t read this. And I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The third girl was pulling up a translation: “Who will win the Tchaikovsky Competition, America or Serbia?” He scanned the blog post. Apparently cyberspace was taking bets about the outcome of the competition, and there were two crowd favorites: the Serbian Mikhail Lezenkov and the American Rayquan McMillian. He wasn’t sure if he should be flattered, embarrassed, or surprised.
“I didn’t even know about this,” he said. “I haven’t really been focusing on social media.” Ray had spent the last month online dealing with crowdfunding. He’d studiously avoided looking at the other potential competitors; for him, this was all about the music, about playing the best he could, and he knew that if he spent a lot of time studying other people who potentially would be competing against him, it would only undermine his confidence and psych him out. Besides, up until a few weeks ago he’d had one advantage that none of the rest of them possessed: a magical violin that made every note sound perfect.
“Mikhail is right there,” the dark-haired girl said, pointing with her chin. “He keeps looking at you, you did not see?”
Ray hadn’t noticed, but now he turned, like a moron, and locked eyes with a handsome blue-eyed blond guy about his age standing in another line a few feet away.
“Stop!” Svetlana said, grabbing Ray’s shoulder. “Now he knows we are talking about him!”
The damage was done. All Ray could do was give a cool What’s up? nod and turn back to the group. “I guess this hasn’t really hit the States yet,” he told them.
“Are you going to talk to him?”
“Probably later,” he said.
He wished them luck—only Svetlana was competing, the others were there for moral support—said goodbye, and his turn came at the registration desk to pick up his badge and registration materials.
Afterward he’d planned on introducing himself to the medici.tv people, but a thought had struck him and now he couldn’t shake it loose. He wandered outside, thinking about Mikhail Lezenkov from Serbia. He tried out the name a few times. How awesome that he had a rival, that a bunch of strangers would create his own personal duel. Typical media hype.
His brain felt like a Ferris wheel, spinning—catching a glimpse of a farther shore, and then whirling on and down. He decided to walk back to the hotel, since it wasn’t far. He checked out a few shop windows as he passed, enjoying the exotic alienness of an early Moscow evening. Maybe he’d pick up the gorgeous silver filigree necklace, set with blue-painted porcelain beads for Nicole. That amber bracelet, in the next shop window, would look really good on Aunt Rochelle. Mikhail Lezenkov from Serbia. He didn’t have a lot of money left—especially with the Markses’ lawsuit—but he thought a little splurging wouldn’t hurt anybody. To celebrate his arrival in Moscow, he bought a sweet braided-dough kolach from a tiny bakery, ate it as he walked.
Mikhail Lezenkov. He couldn’t shake the name. It resonated, echoing.
Now a wild, irrational thought kept bouncing around his head: Could Mikhail Lezenkov have had anything to do with his Strad’s theft? Of course not: Ray was seeing suspects everywhere. It was only natural.
But he couldn’t shake the possibility, and the more he mulled it over, the less irrational it seemed.
He pulled out his phone and googled Mikhail Lezenkov, but it was too hard to walk, eat, and read. Besides, the hotel was only a couple blocks away now.
The blinds had been drawn in the hotel room. Nicole breathed, rhythmic and faint. He showered—she’d unpacked and left his toiletry bag in the bathroom, what a goddess!—slipped into bed, pulled up the website he’d been looking at on the street.
The alleged rivalry between Lezenkov and McMillian was all over the internet, on all social-media channels that covered the Tchaikovsky Competition—which, to be fair, were mostly European. But still, he hadn’t touched social media for the past six months. He also never googled himself—it was too weird. He wondered why nobody had mentioned this rivalry to him before, and he had a vague recollection of Nicole—or was it Janice?—mentioning that one of the other competitors was really great, but honestly he hadn’t been paying much attention, caught up in the loss of the Strad and the pressure of practicing.