The Vanishing Violin (30 page)
Read The Vanishing Violin Online
Authors: Michael D. Beil
“What did he do?”
“He was so surprised he didn’t do anything. And then I ran inside, so even if he wanted to do something, like … like—”
“Kiss you back—”
“It was too late. And … and … and this is all your fault!”
“What did I do?”
“You told me I need to take more chances. Try new things. The whole time we were walking home last night, that’s all I could think about. I mean, I’m almost thirteen! And then—I just went and did it. And I didn’t even wait around to get kissed back.” She sighs, quite dramatically. “My life is ruined. He’ll tell everybody, and I’ll be the nitwit girl who kissed and ran.”
“Not gonna happen. He likes you. Look how cool he was at Perkatory, telling Livvy off like that. I think he might even be—just barely—good enough for my best friend.”
“You really think so?”
“I know so. I’m willing to bet you’re going to know what it feels like to be kissed very soon.”
“But how can I possibly face him today?”
“Easy. Just be yourself.”
“Well, I am never doing that again.”
“Listening to my advice?”
“Well, that, too. But I meant kissing a boy.”
“Margaret, Margaret,” I say, shaking my head. “Of course you will!”
After my guitar lesson, I get down to the serious business of solving the logic problem. Since printing out the clues and the chart, I haven’t even looked at the thing, but I’m determined to do it myself.
And I do. Not quite “easy as brioche,” as my dad would say, but nothing I can’t handle once I put my mind to it. Once I’m positive I have the solution, I call Margaret.
I wasn’t home when she and Andrew saw each other for the first time since the Kiss. Dad took me out to a local pub so he could watch a French soccer game and I could chow down on a colossal cheeseburger. Right now, it is details I am hungry for.
“So, how did it go today?”
“Um, great. I think. Andrew was totally cool. He didn’t say anything about, you know, what happened, but we talked after the lesson. He asked me to this concert at Lincoln Center next weekend.”
“Yay! That’s excellent! A date!”
“And get this: my parents said I can go! Of course, it starts at two in the afternoon.”
“Hey, it’s something,” I say.
“Are you ready for tomorrow?” she asks.
“I know where the violin player lives.”
“That’s good. Okay then, I’ll meet you there tomorrow, a few minutes before noon.”
“We’re not going together?”
“Nope. Becca and Leigh Ann will meet us there, too. This way, we’re all equal. We’re a team, but we can do it ourselves if we need to.”
“But what if some of us are wrong?”
“That’s a great question, Sophie. See you tomorrow!” …
• • •
Sunday morning, I leave the apartment at eleven, thinking that I will lurk outside Margaret’s building and follow her. The doorman, outside hosing down the sidewalk, smiles and waves when I approach.
“You just missed her,” he informs me. “She went thataway about five minutes ago. She said you’d be by.”
Oh, she just thinks she is so clever. Grrrr.
I take the subway down to Fifty-ninth and then hike up to Sixty-third to transfer to the F train, which I take to Delancey Street.
I’m non-ultrafamiliar with this part of town, so it takes me a minute to get my bearings. As I’m looking up the street, I spot Leigh Ann trying to read a map. I sneak up behind her and boom, “CAN I HELP YOU, MISS?”
“Jeez, Sophie! Don’t do that. I swear, my heart stopped.” She puts her hand on her chest to slow her heart down, closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath. Very actressy.
I take out the paper with my solution and show it to her. “Is this where you’re going?”
She looks incredibly relieved. “Hey, guess I really did it! And if we’re both wrong, at least I’ll have someone to be lost with. Where’s Margaret?”
“Somewhere ahead of me. I’ve been trying to catch up to her, but I keep missing trains by, like, two seconds.” I point across the street. “We need to go that way.”
As we wait for the light to change, Leigh Ann slips
her arm through mine. “Hey, thanks for Friday—you know, for introducing Alex to Malcolm and Caroline. He said he had such a nice time with them that Columbia is definitely moving up on his list.”
“So there’s a chance. That’s good, right? How ’bout your dad?”
She shakes her head. “Nothing new. He’s moving right after Thanksgiving. I’m starting to be okay with it.”
“Really?”
“I mean, I don’t want him to go, but when we went to dinner, he explained that it is a fantastic opportunity for him, and he says it’s only for two years. I felt bad, because when I told him how I felt about everything changing so fast, he looked like he was going to cry. But we had a good talk, and I decided that I’m going to be mature about it.” She stands up straight, her chin high in the air. “After all, I am almost thirteen.”
“I’m glad I still have a little time as a tween,” I say. “This ‘growing up’ stuff sounds like it could be hard.”
“Tell me about it. Oh, and somebody sent him all this information about Cleveland. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“Moi?”
“I knew it was you! Anyway, thanks! He already found a school nearby with a great summer dance program—so I’ll probably spend most of my summer vacation with him.”
“See, that’ll be nice,” I say, throwing my arm around her shoulders.
A few minutes later, we catch up to Margaret, standing on the sidewalk in front of a run-down-looking apartment building.
“Ah, here comes that famous bass player,” I say, spotting Becca.
When we’re all together, we all show our solutions on the count of three, like poker players revealing their hands.
“See?” Margaret says. “A cinch!”
I look up at the building. “You really think this is the place? It almost looks abandoned.”
“This is the right address. And I left a message on that Fred guy’s watch telling him when we’d be here.”
As she starts for the door, I see it. Peeking out of Margaret’s bag is the latest issue of
Seventeen
. But that is a conversation for another day.
“Umm, I know this is kind of late to be asking this,” Leigh Ann says, “but how do we know this is safe? It looks a little sketchy to me.”
“She has a point,” I agree. “What if we open the door and there’s a guy standing there with a million pins sticking out of his head or something?”
“Or there’s, like, a basket full of bloody body parts in the middle of the floor?” Becca adds.
“You watch too much television. I gave my parents the address, they know where we are. And look, there’s four of us. If anything about it doesn’t look right, we won’t go in.”
A trio of grunts and nods—grods.
“So,” Margaret announces,
“allons-y!”
We march single file to the door. Margaret takes the key from around her neck and inserts it in the outside door. I hold my breath as she turns it, and the door swings open. We take one last look at each other and step inside.
The staircase is really dark and creaks loudly with every step. There’s no sneaking up and down the stairs in this building. We stop in front of the door to the apartment where the mystery violin allegedly resides.
I have 9-1-1 punched into my phone, with my thumb on the
SEND
button, as Margaret knocks on the door.
“Come right in,” says a strangely familiar voice.
“Hey, that sounds like …,” Leigh Ann starts.
Margaret turns the knob and pushes the door open.
Not in ninety-three years would I have guessed what awaits us.
“What the—”
Despite the seedy appearance of the building’s exterior, the apartment is surprisingly pretty and bright … and packed wall to wall with people I know.
For starters, all of our moms—all wearing some version of a red blazer—are sharing the couch. Behind them are the dads and Alex, who is talking to Caroline. Becca’s little brother and sister are sitting on Malcolm’s and Elizabeth’s laps in matching wing chairs. Mr. and Mrs. Chernofsky have claimed dining-room chairs, as have Ben, Mr. Eliot, and Sisters Bernadette and Eugenia. And finally, in the shadow behind the door stands
Raf, the first boy I ever kissed—the boy who now thinks it is acceptable to keep secrets from me!
“What is going on here?” I demand. “Mom. Dad. How did you …” I fix on Raf. “And you. I saw you Friday, I talked to you yesterday!”
Raf flashes one of his famous smiles at me and—wait, remind me why I was supposed to be mad at him?
We are still standing one step inside the door, too freaked out to move, despite the many beaming smiles.
“Ladies, please come in,” Malcolm says. “We’ve been expecting you. Make yourselves comfortable. May I get you something to drink?”
“Oooookaaaayyyy,” Margaret says. “But—”
Malcolm cuts her off. “I promise an explanation—after libations.” He hands each of us a plastic champagne glass full of ginger ale and then holds up his own glass—which I suspect contains something a bit stronger—to make a toast. “To the Red Blazer Girls on the successful completion of another case.”
“Cheers!” shouts the crowd.
Still confused and a little embarrassed, we seat ourselves while Malcolm takes some papers out of an oversize envelope.
“All right,” he says. “I think we’ve challenged these young ladies enough for one day. I have a little story to tell and a letter to read to you. My good friend Harvey Woldowski, who was also my college roommate and is now an attorney, had a client for many, many years named Janos Bartoszek. This Bartoszek fellow was a
Polish immigrant who first came to Harvey because, at the time, he was the only lawyer with a Polish name he could find. Janos worked at Carnegie Hall and lived in this apartment for nearly fifty years. A few weeks ago, he died at the age of eighty-three. And then, as you will see, things got interesting.”
Malcolm takes a sip of his drink before continuing. “Many years earlier, Mr. Bartoszek had given a letter to Harvey, to be opened upon his death. This very letter.” He puts on his reading glasses and begins:
To my dear and loyal friend
Harvey Woldowski
,
If you are reading this, it means that my time on earth has come to an end. But do not weep for me. My life, like so many millions before, was filled with happiness and sorrow, and joy and pain, and much, much more. If you must shed a tear, shed it for my family—my mother and father, and my sister, Anna—whose lives were stolen in the insanity of World War II. I have never told their story to anyone, and perhaps it is time
.
Before the war, my father was a professor at a small conservatory of music in Warsaw, and through him, my sister and I grew to love music. Anna played violin like an angel. I played piano, but not nearly as well
.
After the Germans marched into Poland in 1939, the officers often came to the conservatory recitals in the evenings. Anna was a favorite performer there. One young German officer, a promising violinist himself, befriended Anna, asking her for pointers and bringing her chocolates and other scarce items in return. Father was afraid for her but dared not speak out, for we had all heard rumors about the camps where those who spoke against the Germans were sent. This went on for several months. Then we learned that the officer had received a promotion and suddenly had much more power and
influence than before. One evening, after dinner and too much wine, he accused Father of being a Communist. Now, Father had friends who were Communists, but he was indifferent to their politics and never attended any of their meetings. He tried his best to convince the German that he was a music teacher and nothing more. This ambitious young officer, however, had other ideas in his terrible, corrupt mind. He had fallen in love with Anna, but when she refused his attentions, he decided that he would have his revenge by taking something precious to her—her beloved violin
.
When Father was a boy, the violin was given to him by a wealthy patron, and he passed it on to Anna on her twelfth birthday. I had seen the officer looking at it, and when she let him play it, the desire to
have what did not belong to him began to eat away at what was left of his decency. The next weeks were a nightmare that I have relived over and over. Based on the false accusations of the young officer, Father was arrested and sent to a camp. When Mother refused to give the names of all of Father’s friends, she was arrested and sent away, too. I tried to get Anna to run away with me, to hide in the countryside, but she still had hope that Father and Mother would be released, and she refused to leave. When the Germans came for her, she didn’t scream or cry. She simply handed the violin over to the young officer. “Play it in hell,” she said
.
I never saw Anna again. Nor Father and Mother
.
After the war, I learned that they had all died in the camps. For a long time, I was simply lost
,
wandering from village to village. Eventually, I found my way to America. After almost ten years in New York, doing odd jobs like tuning pianos and driving taxis, I got a job at Carnegie Hall. I started out as a janitor, but when they learned that I knew about musical instruments, I was tuning pianos and assisting visiting musicians. And then fate stepped back into my life
.
It had been twenty years since I last saw him, but I could never forget that face. The young German officer, no longer young and handsome, now fleshy and red-faced and even more arrogant than before, was in New York for a concert. He did not recognize me, even when we found ourselves face to face in his dressing room. When he was a young man, his playing had been far inferior to my sister’s, but there he
was, playing to a large crowd at Carnegie Hall. Playing my Anna’s violin. All I could think was that Anna should be alive and on that stage, bowing and humbly accepting the crowd’s cheers, instead of this arrogant, thieving pig
.
And so, on January 16, 1959, I went into his dressing room and took back what belonged to Anna. It was quite simple, really. The hall was especially crowded and warm, and during the intermission, Wurstmann—that was his name—stepped outside to cool off. I ran to his room, threw his coat over the violin case, and calmly walked out the stage door and across the street to a diner where I often stopped for coffee. In the restroom, there was a small closet, and I put the violin, still wrapped in the coat, on a shelf, out of sight if anyone should happen to look inside. Then I rushed back
across the street, blending in with the crowd and reentering the hall unnoticed. Within moments, Wurstmann realized the violin was gone and began shouting loudly in German, but by that time I was rearranging music stands and chairs on the stage and talking with my coworkers. The police searched the hall and questioned everyone who worked there, me included, but the door had been unlocked, leaving the police to believe that someone had simply walked in from the street, taken the violin, and vanished
.
All this happened more than fifty years ago. Once a year, on Anna’s birthday, I take out the violin and play a little song, a Polish folk song that was our favorite when we were children. The rest of the year, it sits on a shelf where I can see it … and remember
.
And now, the point of this letter
.
You have been a good friend to me for many years, Harvey, and I have one final request. I would like you to find a young girl—a girl like Anna, who plays the violin like an angel—and I want you to tell her my story and entrust her with Anna’s violin. I will trust you to find a girl who will always cherish it, for it must never be sold, but simply passed on to its next caretaker. Thank you, and God bless you
.
Your friend,
Janos Bartoszek
