The Mozart Conspiracy

by Phil Swann

  "I'm a music historian. People don't die because of me."

  David ran a hand through his hair and tried to decide where to fish next. "I think Henry was working on a book, or something to do with Mozart."

  "Okay."

  "That means nothing to you?"

  Dani shook her head, feeling only sympathy again for David. "I'm sorry."

  He didn't have the faintest idea where to go next.

  "Why do you think he was working on something to do with Mozart?” Dani asked.

  "Because I talked to him the night he was killed. He was frantic about borrowing something he had given me a long time ago. A sketch by Mozart."

  "Wow. Original?" The elevator arrived, but Dani ignored it.

  "Yeah."

  "That must be worth a fortune. What's it from?"

  "I don't know. It's only a partial sketch and doesn't fit any known work. But the autograph and watermark have been authenticated."

  "Really, what year?"

  "Ninety, ninety-one, or thereabouts. It's from the Vienna paper stock."

  "That must be one of the last sketches Mozart ever did. Of course, you checked it against the D minor Requiem?"

  "First place, not even close."

  "Do you think Henry had learned what it was from?"

  "I don't know. But I thought that's why he had your number."

  "That doesn't make sense, David. If he wanted assistance from the Institution, there are other curators here who know more about Mozart than me. Especially when it comes to analyzing a sketch. Paul, for one."

  David said nothing.

  "Did you bring the sketch to DC?"

  "Yeah, it's in here,” David said, nodding to his briefcase.

  "You're carrying it around? An authentic sketch by Mozart, and you're carrying it around Washington, DC?"

  "Yeah, I thought you might want to see it," David replied. He opened his briefcase and withdrew the plastic laminate. He gently took the parchment from the cover and handed it to Dani.

  She didn't see it immediately. She was too busy studying the paper stock and the scribbles. But when she finally looked at the notes on the staff, it only took seconds. There it was—right down to the accidental A flat in measure four.

  "Oh my God," Dani whispered.

  "What's wrong?"

  Dani looked up in shock. "You need to come with me. Now.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Fowler had moved his car to the Madison Avenue side of the Mall and was sitting on the north side of the street a hundred yards east of the museum when the call came in.

  “Agent Fowler, it’s Sanders, we got him. Petrovic.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “He’s wearing tan shorts, a tie-dyed shirt, and a Yankee's cap. He’s in a gift shop on the main floor.”

  “I'm on my way,” Fowler said, jumping from his car.

  »»•««

  "It’s the same melody. Where did you get this?" David asked, staring at the parchment given to Dani by Sugarberry.

  "From a woman named Gertrude Sugarberry. She claims it's a Cook."

  "A what?"

  "Not a what, a who. Dr. James Cook was a medical doctor and free slave in the mid-eighteen hundreds. He also played the violin. She thinks he wrote it."

  "Well, he didn't," David replied. "Mozart did."

  "If your sketch is authentic, it—”

  “It is,” David cut in. “It’s been authenticated more than once.”

  “I believe you, David, but—”

  "How did a—”

  "Right," Dani interrupted, finishing David’s thought. "How was a free-slave from the eighteen hundreds able to transcribe a Mozart work no one's ever heard before? I don't know."

  "Have you had this—"

  "No," Dani interrupted again, "I haven't done anything yet except play it with Paul. I've only had it since yesterday."

  "Yesterday?" David responded.

  "Yeah, quite a coincidence, huh?"

  A chill went down David's back. "Someone told me recently there are no such things as coincidences."

  Dani took the Sugarberry music from David and laid it on her desk beside David's Mozart sketch. The two musicians went to work.

  David spoke first. “The melodies are the same, but the transcriptions are different.”

  Dani added, “Sugarberry's is a single melody line and yours is a complete sketch, and four bars longer.”

  “Mine has Mozart’s autograph, yours has no claim of authorship.”

  Dani said, “Yours is written on traditional eighteenth century scoring paper, brownish-white, longer horizontally than vertically. Sugarberry's is lighter in color and longer vertically than horizontally. And look at this, at bar twelve, Sugarberry's ends with the tied B-flat quarter note, yours continues to a dotted-C half note followed by a quarter rest. I was right. Sugarberry's does end in the middle of a phrase.” Then Dani noticed bar four, the A-flat quarter note. “Well, I’ll be.”

  “What?” David responded.

  “When Paul and I played this last night, we speculated this might be an E-flat suspended chord.”

  “Well done,” David said. “I see both pieces are in the same key and time signature.”

  Dani nodded. “Yes, but where mine only has the abbreviation adg, yours has the complete word adagio handwritten in the upper left corner. Yours also has expression marks. Pianissimo in the first five bars, with a crescendo notation to mezzo piano in bar eight, then a diminuendo decrescendo to bar twelve, returning to pianissimo for the remaining four bars. Sugarberry's has no such markings. What are these?”

  “Just doodles,” David answered. “It appears Mozart never meant for this to go to a copyist.”

  "Are you sure that’s all they are? They look familiar."

  "What's that?" David asked, pointing to the lower left edge of Sugarberry's music.

  "Just ink drippings, I think."

  "No, here, on the corner."

  "Hang on." Dani opened a drawer and pulled out a magnifying glass. "Where?”

  "Here, where my finger is."

  Dani lowered the glass to the manuscript. "It looks like…letters or something."

  "Let me see."

  Dani handed David the glass.

  "Yeah, they are. It's a C and a K and a F."

  "Here, let me see?"

  David handed Dani back the eyeglass.

  “You’re right, C-K-F.”

  "Okay, now look here at mine—right here," David instructed.

  Dani focused the glass to the lower right edge of David's sheet. "C—K—F." Dani looked up. "What’s C-K-F mean? I've never heard of it before."

  "Neither have I."

  “The title?”

  “Strange place to put it if it is,” David responded.

  Neither spoke for several seconds.

  "Well, at least I know why Henry had your number," David finally said.

  Dani’s head snapped toward David. "Really? I don't."

  David answered Dani’s statement with a stare.

  "David, didn't you tell me Henry was killed only a few nights ago?"

  "Yeah, Thursday night…actually I guess it was Friday morning."

  "I didn't get the Sugarberry assignment until Friday morning. Before then, I didn't even know Gertrude Sugarberry existed, much less this music. Besides, she didn't even show this to me. I stumbled onto it by accident."

  David offered no rebuttal. Instead, he walked around her desk and sat down in her chair and crossed his arms.

  Dani looked at David, his face was relaxed, and his eyes were calm. The calmest they’d looked since she’d met him. “Are you okay?” Dani asked.

  “I’m fine,” David answered, almost serenely.

  “David, did you hear what I said? I didn’t get this music until yesterday, and the assignment the day before yesterday.”

  “I heard you.”

  “And that makes sense to you?”

  “No, it makes no sense at all.”

  �
�So why are you suddenly so—”

  “Because now I know there’s something going on—that there’s a tangible reason behind all of the insanity. Until now, I wasn’t sure if Henry’s death and J.P.’s disappearance weren’t just random acts. I mean, I thought they were connected—everyone said they were—but I still wasn’t sure. But now, I know. Henry was working on something, something that started all of this.”

  “And this piece of music is the key?” Dani asked.

  “Yes, it is,” David answered.

  “But I—”

  “I know, Dani, it’s…” David searched for the words, “Don’t try and make sense out of the picture. Just paint the picture.”

  “What?”

  “What were you planning to do with this?”

  Dani sighed and sat on the corner of her desk. “I’m meeting Paul in the morning." Dani chuckled, interrupting herself. "Boy, is this going to freak him out. We’re dropping it off at the lab to have the paper analyzed and dated. We also have a ProTools studio where we were going to run some possible accompaniment—guess that won’t be necessary now.”

  “No,” David broke in, “I think you should still do it.”

  Dani thought for a second and then nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. If nothing else, the computer can do a sparse orchestral arrangement based on the notes Mozart made himself.”

  David nodded.

  “Then Paul and I planned to go over to Georgetown and meet an historian to see if he knows anything about this Cook guy. Who knows, now that we know it’s a Mozart, maybe we can figure out how Cook got it.”

  “What about the woman who owns it, Sugar…”

  “Sugarberry. Yeah, I need to go by there too. I still have to pick up her collection of sheet music. Maybe I should call her now…” Dani said, reaching for the phone. “No. I’ll wait ’til we talk to the historian in Georgetown.”

  “Can I come?” David blurted, ignoring any subtlety.

  Dani looked at David and thought for a moment. Then she smiled. “On two conditions. One, you let our lab analyze your sketch. It’s not that I don’t believe you, it’s just if we’re going to be working together on this, I want us both to be using the same information. Besides, we have the latest technology when it comes to carbon dating and watermark ID’ing. We also have the latest Kochel catalog in ProTools, so we can download your sketch and see if it matches any known Mozart work—you are familiar with Kochel, aren’t you?”

  “Viennese botanist, mineralogist, and educator who was the first to catalog Mozart’s work in eighteen sixty-two,” David said.

  Dani raised an eyebrow. “Okay, I’m impressed.”

  David continued, “But it might be helpful to look at earlier Kochel catalogs to check it against work that was omitted over the six revised editions.”

  Dani smiled. “Smart, but not too smart—seven.”

  “What?”

  “Seven editions. A couple of years ago, Breitkof & Hartel revised another one. It’s called The New Kochel.”

  “Oh,” David said with an apathetic shrug, “whatta you know? Guess I’ve been out of the serious music world for a while.” He pretended not to care, but there was a time when he would have known that fact like his own name.

  “At any rate, it’s no problem. Our computer has all seven revisions as well as the original Kochel catalog downloaded.”

  David nodded. “What’s the second condition?”

  Dani picked up David’s parchment. “That you let me keep this in the safe here in my office. You shouldn’t be walking around the streets of DC with it.”

  “You got it.”

  “Okay, then. Where are you staying?” she asked, picking up both pieces of music and walking to her safe.

  David stood. “A hotel on Tenth.”

  “I’ll drop you off. Paul and I will pick you up in the morning, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Dani heard a sadness in David’s reply. “What’s wrong?”

  David shook his head as he picked up his briefcase. “No, nothing…it’s just, I wish there was more I could do tonight. I sure doubt I’m going to sleep much.”

  Dani grinned as she opened the door to the safe. “You sound like me.”

  “Do you have dinner plans?”

  Dani closed the door to the safe and looked back mildly surprised. “Wow, you don’t waste any time, do you?” she said, spinning the tumbler.

  “What?” David blanched, realizing the way his innocent question sounded. “No, I don’t mean like—”

  “Are you asking me out on a date?” Dani asked, fully knowing that he wasn’t, but enjoying David’s awkwardness too much to let him off the hook.

  “No…uh…I…wasn’t…”

  “Must be an L.A. thing.”

  “No, of course not…I mean, I assume you and Paul are—”

  “Me and Paul?” Dani laughed and decided David had had enough. “Paul and I are just colleagues and friends. I’m sorry, I know what you meant.”

  “I’m asking if you want to eat with me tonight. I owe you at least a decent dinner…you know, after the way I acted.”

  Dani picked up her bag and walked toward the door. She turned and looked back at David with an accusatory expression. “You know, I’m still not sure I trust you or not, or even like you for that matter. I haven’t forgotten what a jerk you were downstairs in the restaurant, or how you freaked out in the Mall.”

  David said nothing in his defense.

  “Do you like to shop?”

  “What?” David responded, taken completely off guard.

  “Shop. Do you like to shop?”

  “No, I hate it.”

  “Figures,” Dani said, rolling her eyes. “Well, look, I was going to do some shopping tonight. There’s a new outdoor promenade on the east side of town. If you’d like, you can join me, and maybe I’ll let you buy me dinner after—”

  “What time?” David’s face gave no reaction, but inside was a different story. He was both happy and relieved. Happy as any man would be to spend an evening with a beautiful woman, and relieved he wouldn’t have to face the night alone with his thoughts.

  Dani chuckled. “I should probably have my head examined for this. Let’s see, it’s a little after three now, how about seven?”

  “Sounds good, that’ll give me time to make some calls and feed my cat.”

  “Your cat? You brought your cat to DC with you?”

  “Yeah,” David answered.

  Dani shook her head. “You’re a strange man, David Webber.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Fowler spoke as he jogged toward the museum's entrance, “Sanders, where—”

  “He's in a gift shop just as you enter the museum," Sanders interrupted.

  "What's he doing?" Fowler asked, adjusting the volume on his headset.

  "Just meandering. He must have had the same problem I had when Webber and the woman took the employee elevator to the museum's offices. There was no way to follow them without being spotted, so I stationed myself in the foyer beside guest services. We both have a view of the elevator, and he's watching it like a…wait…the elevator’s coming down…it's not stopping, it must be going to the garage. He's moving, sir, he's leaving the gift shop and heading for the doors. He'll be walking past you any second."

  Just as Fowler completed a one-eighty, Petrovic came out the museum’s glass doors and trotted down the steps, passing within feet of the FBI man. Fowler waited until he got a ways down the sidewalk before he followed. If Petrovic was in a hurry, he didn't show it. He casually walked east on Madison, keeping stride with the rest of the tourists. Fowler felt sure he'd turn left onto Twelfth and head toward the east exit of the museum’s underground garage to wait for Webber and Parsons. He did, but instead of stopping, he continued down Twelfth.

  "Sanders, where are you?"

  "I'm in the car now, sir. I’m rounding Fourteenth onto Constitution.”

  “I’m at the corner of Constitution and Twelfth. Get
over here and give me the car. I’m too damn old for a foot pursuit. I want a man at Pennsylvania and Twelfth, Tenth and Fourteenth. If he crosses Penn, have everyone rotate to the next block. Converge at Fourteenth. We do not lose him.”

  The young agent pulled up to the curb and jumped out of the car. Fowler got in on the passenger side, slid over into the driver’s seat, and rolled down the window as the door was shutting. “He’s at Constitution. See him, son?” Fowler said pointing.

  “Yes sir,” Sanders said, watching Petrovic cross the street.

  Fowler talked as he picked up his cell. “I don’t know what this guy’s doing, but he’s not following Webber and the girl. Get moving.”

  With a nod, Sanders was off. Fowler watched as the young agent crossed Constitution in the middle of the street and closed the distance on Petrovic.

  “Bob, it’s Tom. You’ve heard?”

  “Yes, Tom, where is he?”

  “He’s on Twelfth. A perimeter is being established. He’s in a cage.”

  Fowler heard Greenfield sigh in relief. “Good, how about Webber?”

  “We had to drop him when we found Petrovic. He’s probably heading back to his hotel. In fact, that might be where Petrovic’s heading.”

  “Do you think they’re rendezvousing?”

  “No, I don’t. I’m positive Webber isn’t with Petrovic.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Petrovic worked too hard at staying out of sight while staying on Webber’s heels. No, Webber doesn’t have a clue who this guy is.”

  “Then David Webber’s in danger.”

  “Petrovic wants something. I believe he thinks Webber will lead him to it.”

  “The music,” Greenfield stated.

  “That’d be my guess.”

  Fowler heard Sanders’s voice on his radio. “Hang on, Bob. Go ahead, Sanders.”

  “Sir, we may have a problem. He’s entered the subway. Twelfth Street station.”

  “Shit, of course.”

  Fowler went back to the phone. “We got a problem, Bob. He’s taking the Metro. I blew it. I should have anticipated this.”

  “Resign later, Tom. Right now, don’t lose Petrovic.”

  Fowler whipped the car down Twelfth Street. “Talk to me, Sanders.”

  “I’m on him,” Sanders replied. “He’s walking through the station.”