“Just wild. Diamond cutters, bakers, piano players, chickenshit politicians.” His voice was low and deep and dark, and he knew he had her scared. She’d have been a damn fool if she weren’t. “You all can have a party when you get my buddy killed.”

Juliana breathed in sharply but said nothing.

“Where’s your uncle live in Antwerp?”

“I won’t tell you.”

“That’s okay. I’m a reporter. I’ll find out.”

“Stop it!” She balled her hands into tight fists, looking as if she were going to hit him. “Damn you, you have no right to-”

“I have every right to help a friend in trouble, and if I have to make you feel bad to do it, tough shit, lady. What do you know about the Minstrel’s Rough?”

“Stop!”

“Hell, no, I’m not going to stop.”

“Oh, yes you are, bub.”

The voice behind Stark was bass-pitched and menacing. Matthew hadn’t forgotten about Len Wetherall. He just didn’t give a damn. He didn’t turn around but looked straight into the wide, terrified, curious, pissed-off eyes of Juliana Fall, gorgeous eyes, and he had to stop his heart from melting and his brain from telling him to lay off her. But then he heard Bloch’s laugh and one of Weasel’s pathetic sniffles, and he felt himself hardening, drawing up his resolve inside himself, accepting the need to do what had to be done.

“If the Weaze ends up on a board because you wouldn’t talk, darling, count on seeing me again.” Without giving her a chance to answer, he turned around and looked up at Len Wetherall. “I wouldn’t fuck with me if I were you.”

He walked out. No one said a word, no one laid a hand on him. No one did a damn thing but let him go.

One piece flowed into the next. Juliana didn’t care; she had to play. Wanted to. Len had said, “Dude’s in a bad mood,” and she’d only nodded, unable to speak. He’d asked her what she was doing messing around with Matt Stark; he’d said himself he wouldn’t want to mess with a guy in a mood like that, with a face like that. When she still didn’t talk, he told her to get a drink and calm down, then play. She couldn’t drink, she couldn’t calm down.

But she could play. Had to.

As she played she thought not about the music but about the old man backstage in the little Delftshaven church seven years ago with his crumpled paper bag holding the Minstrel’s Rough, which she hadn’t known what to do with and so didn’t do anything with it except take it home with her, and her mother’s trembling hands and the quick dark eyes of Rachel Stein and the dreamy baby blue eyes of Samuel Ryder and Matthew Stark who, yes, was a mean-looking sonofabitch. But the hell with that. To hell with him. She wasn’t afraid.

Something touched her shoulder, and she screamed, leaping up, disoriented.

Len caught her around the middle before she could collapse. “It’s okay, babe,” he said tenderly, taking he weight. “I think you’d better head on home.”

“Why-what-” She looked up at him as he lifted her off the bench and stood her up, like a limp doll. “What was I playing?”

“You don’t know?”

She shook her head, still holding on to him. Her heart was beating rapidly; she felt dazed and unsteady.

“You started out with jazz,” Len said, “but then you went into some kind of hairy-assed shit.”

Chopin. She remembered a nocturne. The Nocturne in B Major, Opus 62, No. 1. She’d been playing it for years. But she remembered some Liszt, too, and some Bach and Bartók. Not whole pieces, but phrases here and there.

She remembered hearing them, not playing them.

“Oh, hell,” she said.

“You played that stuff from memory.”

“I know I-” She licked her lips, but her tongue was as dry as her mouth. “I think I’ll go home.”

Len got her raccoon coat and helped her on with it. She was dripping with sweat, and her big eyes were still glazed. He’d seen it happen before, that daze, when musicians were totally absorbed in what they were doing, and it took a while before they came to. He’d experienced that level of concentration himself on the court. He’d be unaware of the crowd, and even afterward, when he watched a tape of a play, he’d know exactly what he’d done, why he’d done it, how, but he wouldn’t be able to remember how it had all come together at that precise moment. He’d just done it. It was organic, a part of him.

Just as what had poured out of J.J.-as he’d stood at the bar in stunned silence and folks around him just held their breath-had to be a part of her.

“Watch out you don’t freeze, babe,” he told her.

“I will. Thank you.”

He put her in a cab himself. Insisted on it. The lady was on the edge, he thought, and in trouble.

It was dark and cold on upper Madison Avenue but crowded, the restaurants filling up. Catharina’s Bake Shop was closed. Even Catharina herself had gone home. Juliana considered heading down to Park Avenue, to her parents’ apartment, and battling it out with her mother. Maybe even her father would get in on it and demand that his wife be more forthcoming, although that had never happened in the past. There was no man in the world more understanding and loving than Adrian Fall. But his sympathy to his wife’s feelings, his acceptance that there were things about her past he would never know, had contributed to a conspiracy of silence-and Juliana’s frustration. How could a father argue with a mother’s desire for their child to be happy?

A couple passed her on the street, dragging a Christmas tree behind them. They were laughing together and singing “Deck the Halls,” and for no reason at all, Juliana thought of Matthew Stark. He was a difficult man, to say the least. Remote, confident, unpredictable. He didn’t exactly tiptoe around her. Myself, I wouldn’t want to mess with him, Len had said. Yes, she could understand that. The changeable nature of his eyes, the scars on his hands and face, and the dark, gravelly voice suggested a certain toughness-but also, in her opinion, an intriguing vulnerability.

Suddenly she imagined herself dragging a Christmas tree along Madison Avenue with him, maybe even singing, and it was strange that the image didn’t seem wrong, impossible, absurd.

You’re in trouble, she thought, and hailed another cab.

Twelve

W ilhelmina watered the spider plants and strawberry geraniums in her kitchen window. She hadn’t slept well, and when the telephone rang, she found herself reluctant to answer it. Who did she want to talk to? No one. But whoever it was would only call back. Resigned, she put down her watering can and picked up the receiver.

In flat-accented Flemish, a man identified himself as Martin Dekker of Antwerp. Wilhelmina sniffed. She had little use for Belgians. “What can I do for you?” she asked, pinching off a dried leaf from her spider plant.

“You have a brother, Johannes Peperkamp?”

“Yes.”

“I’m his landlord.”

He’s dead, Wilhelmina thought, with no particular feeling that she could describe. My brother is dead.

“I don’t want to frighten you unnecessarily,” Dekker went on quickly, “but Mr. Peperkamp hasn’t been to his apartment since the day before yesterday. A man was just here looking for him-a diamond dealer. He says your brother hasn’t been to his shop, either, and he owes him several diamonds. That’s not like Mr. Peperkamp, as I’m sure you know. I was wondering if you might know where he is.”

Wilhelmina crumpled the leaf in one hand. “I haven’t seen Johannes in more than five years,” she said. Actually, not that she thought about it, she realized it was probably longer. She shrugged. “He’s a grown man. Maybe he has a girlfriend.”

“I don’t think that’s likely.”

Neither did Wilhelmina. Far more likely that her brother had been wandering around and fallen off a pier. He’d always loved the ocean. Johannes was getting old, and he’d lived alone since the death of his wife, to whom he’d been devoted, ten years earlier. Poor Ann. She’d been so kind and lovely-everything Wilhelmina wasn’t.