Of course, the individual instrumental parts to Swing were safe enough under the protection of Fumio Dakuzaku. But trying to evaluate a composition by looking only at each individual part would be like trying to judge the artwork on a jigsaw puzzle by examining one piece at a time.

At least I still had a copy of my arrangement. Gail didn’t know that. But there was no Photostat of her original piano score. That had stayed with her when I’d taken my orchestral score to the copyist. Gail’s original composition for piano, from which everything had sprung, was gone now . . . except, ironically, for the dedication page she’d handed Fumio moments before Swing was first played. So her words still existed, but none of her notes, except, of course, those on the flip side of the page: Gail’s abandoned beginning of her Opus 38, the whimsically named “A Bach Ache.” I wondered what the gravely serious Mr. Fumio Dakuzaku would make of that.

Jurgen Haffner hadn’t been able to make anything of it, and he knew his way around the themes of J. S. Bach as well as anyone on the planet. Had I remembered the theme incorrectly? It had been a simple enough tenor sax part—. “Oh, idiot!” I laughed out loud.

“Excuse me?” asked the hackie.

“Sorry, I was talking to myself. About myself,” I added.

Gail had transposed the notes for tenor sax, which is a B-flat instrument. Being a tenor sax player, I hadn’t thought beyond that, because that was the right key, from my own instrument’s point of view.

But when I wrote the melody out for Haffner, I should have written it in its concert key, the key in which it would be played on the piano. That was Haffner’s instrument, after all. I’d written out B-C-B-D-C#-B-D-C#-F#, the notes from Gail’s tenor sax part. But it was safe to say that Bach never composed a single note in his entire life for tenor sax, since the instrument wasn’t invented until a hundred years after he died. If Bach had written the notes for voice, piano, harpsichord, organ, or violin, they would have been notated a whole tone lower: A-B♭-A-C-B♮-A-C-B♮-E. That’s what I should have spelled out for Haffner. Maybe he’d have recognized the melody if I’d quoted the notes to him in the correct key.

Of course, Haffner would have wanted me to convey the notes to him in German fashion, substituting an H for the B-naturals and a B for the B-flats. Then it would have been A-B-A-C-H-A-C-H-E-oh God.

A Bach Ache. The melody spelled the title of the piece.

Was that all there was to Gail’s inside joke? What else had she notated on that page?