The Bach Manuscript

by Scott Mariani

  Ben nodded.

  ‘Same for me. From what I hear, this Zarko Kožul character is a crook like any other. He steals things he has no right to possess, and right now he has his hands on something that means a very great deal to me, and to someone I care for more than anyone in the world. At least, that’s what I was told by Ulysses.’

  ‘Who the hell is Ulysses? What are you talking about?’

  Madison leaned forward again, and this time when she replied the coolness was gone from her voice and Ben saw anger flashing like summer lightning in her eyes.

  ‘I’m talking about my father, the once-great Rigby Cahill, a broken-hearted, sad and lonely and wonderful old man who spent the best years of his life hunting for that goddamned music manuscript. How a piece of trash like this Kožul has got his hands on it, I don’t know and I don’t give a damn. What I do know is that I won’t tolerate it. I aim to take it back from that sonofabitch, and I’ll roll right over the top of anyone who tries to stop me.’

  Chapter 45

  Madison Cahill fell silent and looked away, her face flushing as though she thought she’d said too much.

  Ben stared. ‘What did you just say?’

  She waved a hand, flustered. ‘Forget it. It doesn’t concern you. I don’t think you’d be interested, anyway.’

  Ben said, ‘Try this on for size. Four pages, bound together with wax. Handwritten music stave, the ink slightly faded after more than two and a half centuries of changing hands from one place to another, and maybe not always as well cared for as it should have been. The signature of Johann Sebastian Bach at the top of the front page. On the bottom corner of the front page, a funny-shaped stain that some people seem to think is coffee. Personally, I have my doubts, and I’m not the only one who feels that way. Some people seem to think the manuscript is a fake, although I have my doubts about that as well, and I’m definitely not the only one who feels that way about that either. It was discovered in an old music shop in Prague last year. Bought cheap and taken to England as a novelty, from where it was recently stolen to order by a bunch of killers who reneged on their arrangement with the guy who hired them, and brought it here to Serbia.’ Watching the change in her expression, he smiled. ‘Does that sound like the kind of thing you’re looking for?’

  The colour had drained from Madison’s face and now she was staring back at him with eyes so intense that they could have nailed him to the back wall. She opened and closed her mouth a couple of times and shook her head in disbelief. ‘I … I don’t—’

  ‘I thought it might,’ Ben said.

  ‘Your friend—?’

  ‘His name was Nick. He’s the guy who found it in Prague and didn’t think it was real. But someone else knew better.’

  ‘Dragan Vuković—?’

  ‘The guy who stole it. Who now works for Zarko Kožul, who now has the manuscript. Which you already knew, because someone called Ulysses tipped you off. Which is how you came to be here, and now I’m waiting to hear more. It seems you and I have a lot more in common than either of us realised.’

  Madison’s mouth was still hanging open in amazement and she had to struggle to regain her composure. ‘Ulysses isn’t his real name.’

  ‘That’s a big surprise.’

  ‘He’s a specialist in lost and stolen artifacts. A dealer, fence, call it what you like. He used to work with my father sometimes.’

  ‘Your father, Rigby Cahill?’

  Madison nodded. ‘You haven’t heard of him. But if you were in the antiquities world, you would have. My father was, is, one of the most legendary treasure hunters of the last fifty years.’

  ‘Tell me about him.’

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘I don’t have anything else to do tonight.’

  They ordered more coffee. Ben lit a Gauloise. ‘I don’t think you can light up in here,’ Madison said, pointing at the sign that said ZABRANJENO PUŠENJE.

  Ben glanced over at the hunched shapes scattered about the rows of empty tables. ‘I don’t think anyone really cares what I do in here.’

  ‘In that case, screw it. I’ll join you.’

  He offered her the pack of Gauloises and lit up for her with his Zippo. She took a couple of drags, then plucked the cigarette from her lips and stared at it. ‘Jesus, these French smokes sure pack a wallop. What’s in them, nitroglycerine?’

  ‘If a thing’s worth doing,’ he said, ‘it’s worth overdoing.’

  Madison smoked, and began to tell the rest of her story. Talking about her father made her face soften. She would pause now and again, and gaze sadly into space for a quiet moment before continuing. Ben listened, kept the Gauloises coming, and nobody came over to complain.

  Rigby Ignatius Boddington Cahill had founded his company in New York in 1970, at the age of 40, following a successful but not sufficiently rewarding career as a scholar, dealer and valuer of all things antiquarian. Thanks in part to his vast knowledge of his subject, his new agency quickly gained a strong international reputation searching for – and in most cases locating – lost or stolen art treasures. He named the firm Cahill Associates even though from the get-go it had essentially been a one-man outfit.

  ‘Dad was as famous for his energy as he was for his talent,’ Madison said. ‘He’d only have burned out anyone who tried to work alongside him, or driven them nuts.’ She explained that then, like now, the police avoided getting too involved in stolen art and antiquities recovery cases, lacking the expertise and connections to pursue them effectively and preferring to leave such work to specialists, who functioned like private detectives and could make a lot of money by charging commission on the value of recovered goods.

  And make money Cahill Associates did, in spades. Rigby’s searches all over the world for lost art treasures seemed to draw him like a magnet, time and again and with uncanny precision, to the exact spot that others in his profession had consistently missed. He raked in generous commission for locating paintings stolen from museums and private collections. He tracked the often tortuous path of war plunder, a great deal of which had been looted by the Nazis before and during the Second World War and stashed away in all kinds of ingenious locations to keep it safe from Allied hands as the Third Reich crumbled in the latter years of the conflict. The sheer volume of what the Nazis had stolen during their twelve-year heyday between Hitler’s rise in 1933 and his downfall in 1945 was mind-boggling. Rigby soon became known as a specialist Nazi-plunder hunter. Even accounting for the vast quantity recovered by the Allied forces’ Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Program after the peace, stashes of plundered gold bars, silver coins and ornaments, paintings, jewels, furniture, rare books, ceramics and sculptures, tapestries, and religious treasures taken by the Nazis were still turning up all over Europe.

  Rigby didn’t find all of it. One of his misses was the legendary Amber Room, the eighteenth-century wonder dismantled and removed from the Catherine Palace near St Petersburg during Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. He smarted over that one, but not for long. In September 1974 he succeeded in locating one of several Nazi treasure trains reputed to exist, this particular one hidden underground in a collapsed tunnel deep in the heart of Poland and all eight of its carriages loaded to the roof with bullion, artwork and 1940s paper currency. The cargo’s value was in excess of $50 million, of which Rigby walked away with an eye-watering thirty per cent.

  ‘He could have retired young and lived like a king,’ Madison said. ‘Instead, he just ploughed the money straight back into expanding his operation into bigger and more ambitious ventures. He lost a packet trying to resurrect a sixteenth-century Portuguese treasure ship from the ocean bed off the coast of Sumatra, and squandered more millions hunting for Paititi, the Incan City of Gold. He never cared about wealth. Forget fast cars and palatial homes. Half the time he’d be going about with odd socks, holes in his clothes and just a few cents in his pockets, because he didn’t give a damn about anything much except his work.’

  She
gave a wistful smile. ‘I guess that explains why I came along so late. When I got older, my mom told me she hardly ever saw him during those years. He was like a force of nature, totally fixated on whatever was his goal at that time. Even after my mom died in 1991, when I was eleven, he just kept on working through his grief. I don’t even know if he realised how sick she was, until it was too late.’

  ‘A little one-track minded, perhaps,’ Ben said.

  ‘Raging obsessive would be more like it,’ Madison said. ‘Even to the point of total self-absorption. He could drive you crazy at times.’

  ‘But you still love him.’

  ‘Yes, I do. I bleed for him. When I see him now, I just want to cry. I’m ready to cry now, just talking about it.’ As if to prove her point, a tear rolled from the corner of her left eye. She brushed it quickly away.

  ‘What happened to him?’ Ben asked.

  ‘The Silbermann manuscript happened,’ Madison said.

  Chapter 46

  Madison said, ‘You know, I’ve been hearing this goddamn tale all my life. Never thought I’d find myself retelling it to a total stranger in an all-night café in the armpit of Belgrade.’

  ‘We saved each other’s lives tonight,’ Ben said. ‘That’s about as closely connected as two strangers can get.’

  In the spring of 1975, Rigby Cahill’s New York offices received an unexpected call from a prospective new client by the name of Miriam Silbermann. She was fifty years old, currently resident in Zermatt, Switzerland, and a retired classical violinist of international repute, who in her prime had been favourably compared to contemporaries like Michèle Auclair and Patricia Travers. At the peak of her career she had toured with the New York Philharmonic and performed the Brahms Violin Concerto at Carnegie Hall, three times.

  Rigby Cahill had just so happened to be in town on a rare trip home that week. As a lover of Brahms and patron of the NY Phil, he was excited at the prospect of meeting the famous violin virtuoso.

  ‘But he could never have predicted what she was about to tell him,’ Madison said. ‘Even less the effect their meeting would have on his life forever afterwards.’

  Miriam Silbermann travelled to New York City and first met with Rigby Cahill for lunch at the Russian Tea Room on West 57th Street, 23rd April 1975, the same day that President Gerald Ford declared an end to US military involvement in Vietnam. For Cahill, the day was no less momentous. At 50, five years his senior, Miriam Silbermann was still bewitchingly beautiful; many years later he would confess to his daughter that he hadn’t been able to stop staring at her throughout lunch.

  ‘I’ll never forget what he told me,’ Madison said, ‘about the amazing quality she had in her eyes, a light so bright it would blind you to look into them for too long, and a pool of sadness so deep and dark you would be lost forever if you let it swallow you up. But what she had to tell him was even more amazing.’

  Madison related that the Silbermanns had been living in France when, in July 1942, the Germans came knocking on their door to deport them.

  ‘Silbermann is a Jewish name,’ Ben said. ‘The Nazis had been detaining French Jews since 1940, but April ’42 was the start of the major round-ups and deportations. Something like thirteen thousand of them were scooped up within a couple of days and taken to the Drancy internment camp outside Paris.’

  ‘That’s the story she told Dad. She would have been about seventeen at the time, if I remember. Now, the Silbermanns were a musical kind of family, as you might guess from Miriam’s later career. She spent a long time telling Dad all about her little brother Gabriel, who she said was this tremendously gifted pianist. Her father, Abel Silbermann, taught at the Paris Conservatoire for quite a few years, but then being Jewish got in the way of his career, thanks to the Nazi puppets who were running France by then. He was also a collector of all kinds of musical artifacts, I guess mostly a bunch of valuable old instruments. And also—’

  ‘A certain Bach manuscript?’ Ben already knew the answer.

  Madison nodded. ‘You got it. After all those years, she still remembered the name of the German commander of the soldiers who raided their home that day. I’ve heard Dad repeat it so often, it’s branded on my memory too. He was SS Obersturmbannführer Horst Krebs. As it turns out, he was something of a musician himself. When he spotted the manuscript sitting on the Silbermanns’ piano, he snatched it for himself.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Dad said Miriam Silbermann wouldn’t talk much about what happened next. All I know is that the family never saw their home again after that day. They were taken and loaded into a truck with a bunch of other Jewish families, and imprisoned. The house was commandeered by the Wehrmacht for quartering officers, and later on was wrecked by Allied bombing. And that was that.’

  ‘And so, thirty years after the end of the war, Miriam Silbermann came to your father asking him to recover the stolen manuscript. Why wait so long?’

  ‘I think she simply assumed it was lost forever, until she heard about Dad’s reputation for finding plundered Nazi loot and realised that maybe there was hope after all. Or maybe that’s how long it took for her to put the pain of the war behind her. Who really knows?’

  ‘What happened to her and her family after they were taken away?’

  Madison shrugged. ‘She never talked about that, either. But whatever it was, it wasn’t good. Dad said she would go quiet whenever the subject came up, and the pain in her eyes would become so intense that it was terrible to look at. I think she channelled those emotions into her violin playing, you know?’

  ‘If we don’t know what happened to the family, what about the manuscript?’

  ‘That became Dad’s mission, from that moment on. He was so deeply touched by Miriam Silbermann that he lost interest in any of the other projects on his books, even though they could have been worth millions to the business. Like I told you, money wasn’t what drove him. He went at it full steam, literally not sleeping for weeks at a time. When I was born five years later, he was still at it.’

  ‘Did he ever get close?’

  ‘You’re talking about the journey of a skinny little document, in the middle of a giant war that was ripping the whole world apart. It was almost an impossible quest, but Dad tracked the path of the manuscript to Berlin. He thought Krebs might have taken it there as an offering to Hitler. Old Adolf loved music, apparently, and not just Wagner. In fact the Nazis thought Bach was the most “German” of all the great composers, whatever that means exactly, and they revered his music more than anyone’s. Might have been a real feather in Krebs’s cap to hand a trophy like that to his supreme leader.’

  If the theory was right, Ben was thinking, then it was a pretty rich parallel. The SS commander Krebs taking the manuscript to Berlin to ingratiate himself with his Führer; three-quarters of a century later, Dragan Vuković stealing the very same artifact away to Belgrade as an offering to his prospective employer, Zarko Kožul. History sometimes repeated itself in the most bizarre ways.

  ‘Whatever the case,’ Madison went on, ‘Dad was pretty sure the manuscript was still in Berlin in 1945.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he wasn’t the only one searching for it,’ Madison replied.

  Chapter 47

  Ben’s cigarette was burned down to its stub. He crushed it on his saucer and lit another. ‘Who else was in the hunt?’

  Madison replied, ‘A man called Jürgen Vogelbein, a professor at a Vienna music institute. Vogelbein was much older than Dad. He’d been a soldier in the Battle of Berlin, when the Russians were closing in on the city right at the end of the war. He was part of a special detachment in charge of evacuating art treasures out of Berlin ahead of the Soviet push, and claimed that he actually saw the manuscript being loaded on a truck. He spent years, decades, searching for it after the war, despite being mocked by other academics for believing it even existed. I guess that’s academics for you.’

  Ben suddenly remembered Tom McAllister’s mysterious
reference to Nazis, the KGB and a man called ‘Bird Leg’. ‘Vogel’ was German for bird, ‘Bein’ for leg. No fool, that McAllister. He’d been figuring a lot of things out from his end.

  Ben asked Madison, ‘Did the manuscript by any chance end up in Soviet Russia, in the hands of the KGB?’

  She looked at him. ‘Is that just a wild guess, or do you know more about this than you’re letting on?’

  ‘A little birdie told me. Did it?’

  ‘The convoy that evacuated the treasures out of Berlin went to Silesia,’ Madison said. ‘That’s a region spread between Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic.’

  ‘I know where Silesia is. Go on.’

  ‘Well, the Nazis’ idea was to keep their precious stolen merchandise safely out of enemy hands, but it didn’t quite work out that way for them because pretty soon afterwards the Soviets came swarming in and took over Silesia. Vogelbein believed that the manuscript, along with the rest of the goods, was grabbed by Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD.’

  ‘Which after the war eventually morphed into the Soviet Committee for State Security, the KGB,’ Ben said. So McAllister had been right. It was a rare thing for Ben to take his hat off to a police detective.

  ‘Which was as far as Vogelbein was able to track it before he gave up the chase,’ Madison said. ‘As for Dad, he refused to let it go that easily. He kept on kicking at doors for as long as he could, spent fortunes on bribes and offered all kinds of rewards to anyone who could come up with a lead. He had a whole network of contacts, not all of them legal. The most shadowy of all of them was this specialised art and antiquities fence who was rumoured to be Romanian, but nobody had ever met him or knew his real name; guy called himself “Ulysses”.’

  ‘We’ve heard that name before.’