Muttering that she ought to give up on the lazy shit, Alice stalked back to her desk. Matthew drank some more coffee and read the piece on Rachel Stein’s death. She could easily have slipped. He remembered how tiny she was, how wrinkled and old-looking, even if the article said she was only sixty-five. She wasn’t used to snow and ice. So maybe she slipped and maybe she didn’t-did it make any difference? He went back to the beginning and reread the piece.
And there it was. Rachel Stein had emigrated from Amsterdam in 1945, having spent the last months of the war in a Nazi concentration camp. She was a Dutch Jew.
A Dutch Jew.
And the man Ryder was supposed to have met, Hendrik de Geer, was also Dutch.
Stark looked up at the LZ poster, not seeing it. Something else was stirring around in his head, but he couldn’t pin it down. He pulled out the program he’d saved from the concert, just in case Feldie wanted proof he’d attended, just in case he felt like cutting out the picture of Juliana Fall and sticking it on his partition.
He flipped to Ms. Pianist’s bio. There was the usual garbage. First and only student of Eric Shuji Shizumi, who didn’t want her to go to Vermont. Attended Juilliard, which stood to reason. Career launched after winning various prestigious piano competitions, including the Levenritt at Carnegie Hall, which Stark was glad he hadn’t had to sit through. The bio neglected to mention she was beautiful. He remembered the way her dress had clung to her. Hell, yes, she was beautiful. He skipped the stuff about her technique and conception of the Beethoven concerto and dropped down to the last personal items. She lived in New York, where she’d been born and raised, the daughter of Wall Street banker Adrian Fall and Catharina Peperkamp Fall, owner of Catharina’s Bake Shop on upper Madison Avenue-and a Dutch immigrant.
And what a handy coincidence that was. Feldie was right: he was a journalist. As such, he didn’t believe in coincidences.
A year ago, before J.J. Pepper, Juliana had bought an aquarium and put it up behind her concert grand piano, near the French doors that separated her dining room and huge living room overlooking Central Park. She’d filled the aquarium with water and added goldfish, six of them. Their names were Figaro, Cosima (after Wagner’s wife), Puccini, Carmen, Bartók, and the Duke (after Duke Ellington; to Shuji he was Ludwig). They didn’t talk, and they weren’t much to look at, weren’t, in fact, any company at all, but they were something alive to have around during her long hours of isolation. She could turn around in her chair at the piano-she practiced far too many hours for her back to tolerate a bench-and have a nice chat with them, as she was doing now. They fit her itinerant lifestyle more easily than would a dog or cat. It was easy to get people to feed fish while she was away, but she had a feeling if they ever forgot, they’d just flush the bodies down the toilet and buy new ones for her. Would she ever know?
Shuji had won. She’d decided to postpone Vermont. Saturday night at the Club Aquarian had gone too well, been too much fun. She needed to work. She had to get J.J. Pepper out of her system. There was no time for decent practice on the road, and she needed to get back into it. If she did at least eight hours a day at the piano for the next two weeks, she’d be back in shape-like a runner. The real work of being a pianist, Shuji had said. He had a point, although she was still so irritated with him for ruining Vermont for her that she wasn’t about to tell him so. Once she’d established her schedule, she could spare a few days in Vermont without compromising her progress. Without guilt.
But she couldn’t just leap back into her old routines. Yesterday, after a meager three hours of practice, she’d ended up trotting off to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the Christmas tree.
Today she’d done a little better. She’d climbed out of bed at eight, just an hour later than she’d meant to, and had done ten minutes of stretching, although twenty would have been better. She should have gone jogging in the park if it was warm enough or jumped on her stationary bike. She’d jumped into the tub. Her “healthy breakfast” was two of her mother’s famous butter cookies and a pot of tea. A proper schedule would put her at her Steinway by nine, there to stay for eight to ten hours, with occasional breaks and time out for lunch and dinner. Today’s schedule had put her at her piano at eleven with lots of breaks.
It was just three o’clock, and so far she’d had four fish-talk breaks. But she refused to be hard on herself. All she needed were a couple of days. She’d be back to her old self, as demanding and absorbed in her work as ever.
“What do you say, Duke, back to the Chopin?”
Duke wiggled and darted away. Chopin had little effect on him. She was working on the Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, a bitch of a piece, which she happened to love. It wasn’t the music that had her talking to fish. It was something else-the isolation, she supposed.
The doorman called up, startling her, and informed her that a Matthew Stark was downstairs in the lobby and wanted to see her, was that all right?
“Damn,” she said, surprising both herself and the doorman. She remembered Matthew Stark vividly-the sardonic laugh, the dark, changeable eyes. She couldn’t imagine what he wanted with her. She didn’t even know why he’d been in her dressing room Saturday night. Just to say hello to Sam Ryder? To her? She doubted he’d been even momentarily tempted to ask her to dinner. He’d called her toots. What was he doing downstairs? She didn’t need the distraction right now, but what the hell. “Send him up.”
For no reason that made any sense to her, she considered her appearance: black sweatpants, oversized sweatshirt with the bust of Beethoven silk-screened on the front, scrunchy black socks, sneakers. She wasn’t wearing makeup, and her hair was up in a ponytail.
At least it isn’t pink, she thought as the doorbell rang.
She went into the large foyer and opened the door only as wide as her chain-lock would permit because she was a New Yorker and didn’t trust anyone. But the man she peeked out at was definitely the one who’d made her feel like such a ding-a-ling the other night. He had on a black leather jacket, a black sweater, jeans, and heavy leather boots. No hat, no gloves. Somehow she wouldn’t expect any. Snow had melted into his dark hair, but his scarred face didn’t even look cold. She hadn’t realized it was snowing. Maybe the Chopin was going better than she’d thought it was.
Stark gave her a lazy, unselfconscious grin. “A ponytail? How un-world-famous of you.”
No one had ever been that irreverent to her. Absolutely no one. “Don’t you think you should wait until I let you in before you turn on the sarcasm?”
“It never occurred to me.”
She believed him. “What do you want?”
“Five minutes. I’d like to ask you a couple questions.”
“About what?”
“A few things. I’m a reporter.”
“I only have your word on that.”
“The way I’ve been going lately, that might be the best you’ll get. But here.” He fished out his wallet and handed a press card through the opening. “Check me out.”
Juliana managed to take the card without touching his fingers. As she glanced at it, she could feel his dark eyes on her. “You’re with the Washington Gazette?”
“Uh-huh.”
He sounded amused, and she recalled she was supposed to have heard of him. Well, bullshit. “No wonder I didn’t recognize your name.” She gave him a haughty look and one of her cool, distant smiles, both of which she figured he deserved. “I don’t read the Gazette.”
“Nice try, sweetheart, but nobody knows me from the Gazette.”
She felt her cheeks redden with anger and embarrassment-and, she thought desperately, awareness. He was still standing out in the damn hall, and already she was noticing little things. The lopsided grin, the muscular thighs, the thick, jagged scar on his right hand. It probably wasn’t from anything as simple as slicing cucumbers.