Playing With Fire by Tess Gerritsen Page A

Gerda. “I’ve called the antiques store three times and left messages. No one answers the phone.”
    “Maybe he’s on vacation. Maybe he hasn’t had a chance to talk to the family.” She rises to her feet. “Come on, let’s take another look at that waltz.”
    We go into her cluttered practice room, where a baby grand piano leaves barely enough space for a bookcase, two chairs, and a coffee table. Stacks of sheet music are piled high on the floor like stalagmites in a cave. On her music stand is the copy of
Incendio
that I scanned and emailed to her three weeks ago, when she recorded the piece for Lily’s neurological test. It’s merely two sheets of paper dotted with notes, but I feel its power. As if, at any instant, it could glow red or levitate.
    “This is a gorgeous waltz, but it’s definitely challenging,” says Gerda, settling down in front of the music stand. “It took me a few hours of practice to get the arpeggios under my fingers and to hit these high notes just right.”
    “I never did manage it,” I admit, feeling as if I’ve just confirmed every bad joke ever told about second violin players.
Question: How many second violinists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Answer: They can’t go that high.
    Gerda takes her violin out of the case. “The trick to this passage here is to make the shift to fifth position a measure earlier.” She demonstrates, and her notes scamper up the E string at a blistering speed.
    “You don’t need to play it now,” I cut in.
    “It really does make this next section easier to manage. Listen.”
    “Please
stop.
” Even I am shocked by how shrill my voice sounds. I take a deep breath and say quietly: “Just tell me what you’ve found out about the waltz.”
    Frowning, Gerda sets down her violin. “What’s the matter?”
    “I’m sorry. It gives me a headache listening to it. Can we just talk about the music?”
    “All right. But first, can I look at the original?”
    I open my shoulder bag, take out the book of printed Gypsy music, and flip it open to where I’ve tucked in the loose sheet with
Incendio.
I’m reluctant to even touch the sheet, so I simply hand Gerda the whole book.
    She pulls out the waltz and examines the yellowed page, both front and back. “Written in pencil. Standard manuscript paper, looks pretty brittle. I don’t see any watermark, and there’s nothing to identify its origin except the title and the composer’s name, L. Todesco.” She glances up at me. “I looked up that name online and I can’t find any published music by this composer.” She squints more closely at the page. “Okay, this is interesting. On the other side, there are a number of partly erased notes, which were then written over. It looks like these four measures were revised.”
    “So he wasn’t just copying the music straight from another source.”
    “No, these changes are too extensive to be a simple transcription error. This must be the actual page he composed it on. And then he made these changes.” She glances at me over her glasses. “You know, this could be the only copy of the piece in existence. Since it’s never been recorded.”
    “How do you know there’s no recording?”
    “Because I sent a copy over to Paul Frohlich at the conservatory. He ran it through all his music recognition programs, comparing it to every known recorded piece. There are no matches anywhere. As far as he can tell, this waltz was never recorded, and he can’t find any published music under the name L. Todesco. So we’re completely in the dark about where the waltz comes from.”
    “What about the book of Gypsy tunes? I found
Incendio
tucked inside it, so maybe they came from the same owner. Maybe the book belonged to this L. Todesco.”
    She opens the fragile collection of melodies. The cover is crisscrossed with brittle Scotch tape, which seems to be the only thing holding it together. Gently she turns to the copyright page. “It’s an Italian publisher.