“How ya doing?” he said. “I regret to inform you, she’s five flights up.”
“Of course she is.”
They started their climb. By the time they reached the fourth floor, James felt like his lungs might collapse. When they got to the door, there were three pieces of pink construction paper taped to it—one said SARA, one said JENNIFER, the other ADHIRA.
The cop knocked.
“Come in,” she said.
The girl was Indian or something like that. She was sitting on a sofa in a cramped common room that smelled like incense. A red tapestry hung on the wall, and books were piled high on every surface. She was dressed in sweatpants and a t-shirt. Her black hair hung wet over her shoulders. She looked about twelve years old.
“I think I’m fine now,” she said. She spoke with an English accent. “I shouldn’t have called 911.”
“What happened?” James asked.
“I was in the shower and I suddenly felt dizzy, like I was going to faint.”
“Did you?”
“No. I got out and sat here on the couch and put my head between my legs, and I felt better.”
“Good,” James said. “Has this ever happened before?”
“No, sir.”
Sir? Jesus, how old did he look?
“Have you eaten anything today?” he asked.
“No.”
“Was the shower very hot?”
“Yes!” she said, like he was MacGyver over here. “As hot as it would get.”
James tapped his foot on the hardwood floor. He looked around him at the warm, plumped-up sofa and the leather chair in the corner. This dorm room was nicer than his house.
“Do you think you need to go to the hospital?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I’m fine now.”
They gave her a waiver to sign. James told her to lie down, relax, have a glass of water and some food.
“When will your roommates be back?” he asked.
“They’re gone for the holidays,” she said.
He wondered why neither of them had invited her, when she was clearly so far from home. It was irrational, but for an instant he thought of inviting her over to his house. And though it was really none of his business, he asked, “Do you have plans for Christmas?”
She nodded. “I’ll be with friends tomorrow.”
Maurice, James, and the cop made their way back outside. A light snow had started to fall. It was already sticking to the grass and the windshield.
“So basically she took a hundred-degree shower when she had low blood sugar and was surprised when she felt dizzy,” the cop said. “These Harvard kids kill me.”
James thought that maybe she had just felt lonely. They met enough people like that on the job, though most of them were either elderly or nuts.
“Last Friday a girl in this same dorm had to be intubated because she drank so much her airways stopped working,” the cop said.
Maurice nodded. “Otherwise known as your average Friday night.”
“Man, I hate those kids,” the guy went on. “Do you know what they chant at basketball games against UMass? ‘Safety school.’ That’s their idea of an insult. Faggots.” He shook his head. “Anyway. Have a good one.”
Back in the truck, James leaned over and opened the glove compartment. He took out the bottle of Advil and shook three pills into his hand, making a mental note: that made six so far today. He swallowed them down, and then turned toward Elsie’s.
A minute later, they heard the familiar sound of Nona calling: “P-four.”
“Shit,” Maurice said.
James reached for the radio. Before he picked it up, he said, “By the time you get that cheeseburger, it may actually be a time of day when it’s no longer totally fucking disgusting to eat a cheeseburger.”
Maurice’s expression was deadly serious. “God, I hope you’re wrong.”
2003
Delphine stood in the middle of the living room, surveying her work. She had turned the coffee table on its side, just because, and scratched its surface with the sharp points of the scissors in a wild pattern.
She smashed a gorgeous lamp that she had found in an antiques shop in Brooklyn. She and P.J. had fought about that lamp. He said it wasn’t him, as if he had ever had any sense of style or beauty. They were fighting about everything by that point.
In the course of six years of marriage, Delphine and her husband had disagreed on only two things. First, soon after the wedding, Henri decided that he wanted a child. He dreamed of a daughter named Josephine. It was the name of his older sister, who drowned when she was just three. It seemed strange to think of an older sibling who had never made it to her fourth birthday. Delphine doubted that Henri’s parents would want to be reminded of the girl’s name this long after her death, even if she were willing to have a baby, which she wasn’t. She was forty, too old for all that. And though she never said so, she believed her husband was far too old to be a father. At fifty-five, he had no business asking her for a baby.
The other thing they fought over was the Stradivarius.
That violin was her husband’s greatest pride. Whenever they had anyone over for dinner, he brought it to the table even before she served the cheese course. It lit him up in a way that nothing else could. Given a new audience, Henri could talk about Stradivari all night. He would tell their guests that there were many theories for what made a Strad sound so perfect, but in his opinion the most convincing had to do with a strange weather pattern known as the Maunder Minimum, a period lasting from around 1645 to 1715, during Europe’s Little Ice Age. A lack of sunlight during that time made for low temperatures, which slowed tree growth, leading to the existence of abnormally dense wood. If you looked at the growth rings in the wood of any Stradivarius, you’d see it.
“The thickness is perfect at every spot,” Henri would say, holding the violin up, turning it this way and that. “If Stradivari had shaved off even one extra millimeter of wood, the sound would be out of balance.”
Their guests would usually be interested, but her dear husband never knew when to stop. “This is the original varnish. Imagine that. And it’s not just for beauty. No, it impacts the sound. There is the slightest water damage on the lower bout, but it adds character. The 1721 Lady Blunt is probably the best-preserved Strad. It still has gut strings and no bridge. But of course that’s because it’s only ever been in the hands of collectors, hardly even played, which is a crime.”
Delphine was always impressed by the extent of his knowledge on the subject, if slightly amused. Henri knew the whereabouts of nearly every one of the five hundred and forty Strads on earth, and he loved sharing this useless information with others: there were four at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, eight at the Royal Academy of Music, over a dozen with the Nippon Music Foundation, three at the Smithsonian Institution, two owned by Itzhak Perlman, and so on.
Fearing that everyone might fall asleep before he was done, Delphine encouraged him to tell only the more colorful stories, the ones that involved some scandal or tragedy. In the mid-nineties, the 1727 Davidoff Stradivarius was stolen from the apartment of the virtuoso Erica Morini just days before her death at the age of ninety-one. She was in the hospital at the time, and her family never let on that the violin had vanished, wanting to protect her from such pain.
In 1936, during a fifteen-minute break from his weekly gig at the Russian Bear Restaurant in New York, a small-time violinist named Julian Altman snuck across the street to Carnegie Hall, where the Polish soloist Bronislaw Huberman was performing. Huberman traveled with a double violin case, containing two of the world’s finest instruments: a Guarneri, and the Gibson Stradivarius. Having read as much in the newspaper, Altman’s mother had suggested that he might steal whichever one Huberman wasn’t using that night.
And so, Altman bribed a guard at the stage door with a fine cigar and snuck into Huberman’s dressing room. He snatched the Stradivarius and hid it under his coat as Huberman
stood onstage unaware, playing a flawless Franck sonata.
Altman concealed the violin’s identity by covering it in shoe polish. He played it at weddings and pubs for nearly fifty years, only telling the truth on his deathbed. Huberman was awarded thirty thousand dollars for the loss in the thirties. When Altman’s widow brought the violin to Lloyd’s of London in 1987, it was valued at over a million.
Henri’s Strad was called the Salisbury. Occasionally, he would lend it out to be played for six months or a year, but he always asked for it back after a period of time. He could barely stand to be apart from it, and when it returned he’d put it straight into its glass case and stare.
Plenty of collectors and musicians had tried to buy it from him over the years. He turned them all down. Delphine had seen him entertain the idea only once, at a dinner party when an old curator friend of his from Moscow, Peter Yefimov, said, “You know the Rogue is interested.”
Just briefly, her husband’s eyes glowed, like a child beholding the candles on his birthday cake. The Rogue was one of Henri’s favorite performers. A young virtuoso from New York. In general, her husband didn’t care for American soloists, the showy types who recorded albums with Sting and mixed Simon and Garfunkel in with Bach. But though he was young and stylish, the Rogue was essentially a traditionalist, like Henri. They had once seen him perform Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic, and afterward Henri had pronounced him a genius.
“He’s most unusual,” Yefimov said that night at dinner. “A white, corn-fed midwestern American boy with skills like that!”
“What does the white or the midwestern matter?” asked another guest at the table, a young American woman who was in town on a buying trip for Paramount Pictures. Delphine held her breath. Americans were so touchy about any talk whatsoever of race, and she needed this account.
“These abilities run in certain groups and not in others,” Yefimov said. “In the first half of the twentieth century, the greatest soloists in the world were Jews from Russia and eastern Europe. Jascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, Efrem Zimbalist, Mischa Elman. The talent is the main thing, but what is it that makes a talented child into a prodigy? Practice. That’s all. And what child would choose that path for himself? It comes from some need in the parents. When Jews didn’t even have the right to live in capital cities in some cases, the parents saw these children as their ticket to the West.”
The girl from Paramount seemed satisfied with this answer, since Yefimov himself was a Russian Jew, and Americans believed that you could say anything you liked about your own people.
But then he continued, “You will notice that today, a majority of the gifted young violinists come from Asia. Again, the parents crave this Western acceptance. We all know Asians are the hardest workers alive, and so, from a purely technical standpoint, they excel. But I feel that the musicality is missing. I think it’s because the violin is not ingrained in their bodies and blood the way it is in ours. You listen to a Chinese man play his primitive folk instrument, and there you hear such real beauty, such meaningful sound. But on the violin? Heartless.”
And now the American looked appalled. Delphine decided to bring in the mille-feuille a bit earlier than she had planned.
A week after the dinner, a formal letter arrived, from the Rogue himself. He wanted to make his interest known officially. He was willing to pay two million American dollars. Delphine did the math in her head—it was more than they had paid for the entire shop five years earlier, more than their home was worth. But she knew her husband would never sell.
“You could loan him the Strad,” she said. “It might please you just to hear him play it.”
“Yes,” Henri said, but he didn’t mention it again for more than a year. He had only just gotten it back from a young French soloist and he wasn’t ready to be separated from it yet.
On a Thursday in the spring of 2001, Delphine was helping the only customer in the store, a collector in from London. He was there to see an eighteenth-century Tononi cello. Delphine had looked him up on the Internet; he was vice president of a major advertising agency and earned a million pounds a year. In his spare time, as a hobby, he collected instruments.
“And you’ll want to consider a bow we’ve just gotten in,” she was saying in English when a woman in a dark suit stepped into the shop.
Delphine pulled the bow from its case and placed it in his hands. “Tourte père,” she said, breathing in deeply as if it were covered in fine perfume. “Whoever played it last cracked the tip just slightly. You can barely see it, but of course it hurts the value some. Still, though, a beautiful piece.”
The woman lingered in the doorway. She stared at Delphine.
“Un moment, s’il vous plaît,” she said to the customer. She felt excited. If they sold both pieces, it would be their best week in months. Henri would be so pleased.
Delphine approached the woman and asked, “May I help you?”
“I’m Helena Kaufman,” she said, as if the name should mean something. “From the International Jewish Congress.”
Perhaps she could tell that Delphine did not understand her meaning, because she continued, “I’d like to speak to the owner, please.”
“I’m the owner,” she said.
Helena Kaufman looked puzzled. “Is Henri Petit no longer the owner?”
“He is my husband. He’s in Berlin appraising pieces at the moment. What is this about?”
The woman sighed. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. It’s just that I’ve come all the way from Brussels on the Eurostar to speak with him.”
“Was he expecting you?”
“No. But he never answered my letters, so I had to take matters into my own hands,” she said. “You will have gotten my letters, I presume.”
Delphine didn’t know what she was talking about. “Not me,” she said finally. “But perhaps Henri did.”
“Could we talk for a bit?” the woman asked in a hushed tone, glancing toward the English buyer. “I know this might be uncomfortable.”
“What is this regarding?” Delphine asked.
“We’re speaking to as many owners as we can,” the woman said.
“Owners of?”
“Oh, then you really didn’t see the letters. Owners of violins,” she said. “In particular, certain Stradivari, Guarneri, and Amati violins. All the best. You may not know this, Madame Petit, but thousands of the world’s finest instruments once belonged to Jews who perished or fled during the war. The Nazis targeted these instruments for use in a planned university in Hitler’s hometown. We believe they killed many people just to get exactly the type of violin you have here.”
Delphine had never heard anything about this. She wondered why Henri hadn’t mentioned the letters.
She led the woman to a pair of plush chairs by the door. She gestured to her to sit where she herself had sat years earlier, listening to François Dubray’s children interview the man who would become her husband.
“Please wait,” she said. “I’ll just be a few minutes.”
She returned now to the Englishman, who said, “You have a Stradivarius here in the store?”
He sounded disappointed, as if, had he known, he would have walked out with it half an hour ago.
“No,” she said. “It’s part of my husband’s collection.”
She felt uneasy. She wanted him to leave, didn’t care what he took.
He bought the cello and said he would think about the bow. As soon as he was gone, Delphine went to the woman by the door, and sat down in the chair facing hers.
“You said the Nazis stole Strads,” she said. “What does this have to do with my husband?”
“At the time they were stolen,” the woman started, “the instruments weren’t worth much, other than sentimental value. Most had been in families for generations. Those who made it out of concentration camps had lost so much. They weren’t thinking about something as small as a violin. But these pieces are now worth millions.
We are making efforts to get them back to the families of their rightful owners.”
With that, Delphine understood why Henri had ignored the letters—he wouldn’t have any interest in giving the Stradivarius back.
“I understand the predicament,” Delphine said. “But my husband inherited that violin from his father. It’s precious to him.”
“And when did his father first own it?” the woman asked.
“It would have been the 1950s.”
Helena Kaufman nodded knowingly, and sent her a look that said she ought to be ashamed.
“The Salisbury is among the violins that we suspect may have been stolen,” she said. “You might be aware that its documentation prior to the purchase your father-in-law made has never been verified.”
Delphine’s own father had once taken her to the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, a monument to the 200,000 French victims of Nazi concentration camps. Of the 78,000 Jews deported from France—11,000 of them children—only 2,500 came back alive. She was haunted by the dark hallway lighted with a crystal for each victim, a carving on the plaque in the floor: They went to the end of the earth and did not return.
Afterward, she had nightmares for months. She cried to her father late one night, asking why he had brought her there. He told her for the first time what it had been like to live in Paris under the Nazis. He would never forget the start of the occupation, he said, the sight of people and animals streaming out of the city, boarding trains with no destination in mind. Then came the daily march of German soldiers up the Champs-Élysées. The swastika flag flying outside the Hôtel Le Meurice. There were gas rations that kept all but a few hundred cars off the road. Most everyone rode bicycles. There wasn’t enough heat or food. They all went hungry, bones pushing through skin wherever you turned. Delphine’s grandparents and their neighbors took to keeping chickens in their apartments. If they got news that a butcher had meat, people would line up at four a.m. even though it was illegal.
An older cousin of her father’s was arrested and shot dead for being out past the nine p.m. curfew. Normally, such a minor offense wouldn’t end so tragically, but the Resistance had killed one German soldier that day, and whenever that happened it was the German policy to kill twenty Frenchmen in retaliation, no matter what their crimes.
The Engagements Page 25