They used the Harbor Court’s main street door. Faust led the way to it and pulled it and let Middleton walk through first. Good manners, etiquette, and a clear semaphore signal to the hotel’s front-of-house staff: I’m a guest and this guy is with me. A literal embrace, one hand holding the door and the other shepherding Middleton inside. A commonplace dynamic, repeated at the hotel’s entrance a thousand times a day. The staff looked up, understood, glanced away.

Vukasin didn’t glance away. From 40 yards his gaze followed both men to the elevator bank.

The elevator was smooth but slow, tuned for a low-rise building. Faust got out first, because Middleton wouldn’t know which way to turn. Faust held his arms at a right angle, like a traffic cop, blocking right, pointing left. Middleton walked ahead. Thick carpet, quiet air. The muffled sound of a piano. A bright tone and a fast, light action. A Yamaha or a Kawai, Middleton thought. A grand, but not a European heavyweight. A Japanese baby, cross-strung. Light in the bass, tinkly in the treble. A D-minor obbligato was being played confidently with the left hand, and a hesitant melody was being played with the right, in the style of Mozart. But not Mozart, Middleton thought. Certainly no Mozart he had ever heard before. Sight-read, which might explain the hesitancy. Perhaps a pastiche. Or an academic illustration, to demonstrate the standard musicological theory that Mozart bridged the gap between the classical composers and the romantics. The melody seemed to be saying: See? We start with Bach, and 200 years later we get to Beethoven.

The sound got louder but no clearer as they walked. Faust eased ahead and repeated his traffic-cop routine outside a door, blocking the corridor, corralling Middleton to a stop. Faust took a key card from his pocket. It bottomed in the slot, a red light turned green, and the mechanism clicked.

Faust said, “After you.”

Middleton turned the handle before the light clicked red again. Bright piano sound washed out at him. The melody again, started over from the top, played this time with confidence, its architecture now fully diagrammed, its structure understood.

But still not Mozart.

Middleton stepped inside and saw a suite, luxurious but not traditional. A lean, bearded man in a chair by the door, with a gun in his hand. His nickname, it turned out, was Nacho. A Yamaha baby grand, with a girl at the keyboard. Manuscript pages laid out left-to-right in front of her on the piano’s lid. The girl was thin. She had dark hair and a pinched Eastern European face full of a thousand sorrows. The manuscript looked to be a handwritten original. Old foxed paper, untidy notations, faded ink.