The girl stopped playing. Middleton’s mind filled in what would come next, automatically, to the end of the phrase. Faust stepped in behind Middleton and closed the door. The room went quiet. Faust ignored the man in the chair. He walked straight to the piano and gathered the manuscript pages and butted them together and left them in a tidy pile on a credenza. Then he stepped back and closed the lid on the piano’s keyboard, gently, giving the girl time to remove her fingers. He said, “Time for business. We have a Chopin manuscript.”

“Forged and faked,” Middleton said.

“Indeed,” Faust said. “And missing a page, I think. Would you agree?”

Middleton nodded. “The end of the first movement. Possibly not a whole page. Maybe just sixteen bars or less.”

“How many notes?”

“That’s an impossible question. It’s a concerto. A dozen instruments, sixteen bars, there could be hundreds of notes.”

“The solo instrument,” Faust said. “The theme. Ignore the rest. How many notes?”

Middleton shrugged. “Forty, maybe? A statement, a restatement, a resolution. But it’s still an impossible question. It isn’t Chopin. It’s somebody pretending to be Chopin.”

Faust said, “I think that helps us. We have to second-guess a secondguesser. It’s about what’s plausible.”

“We can’t compose the end of something that didn’t exist in the first place.”

Faust opened his jacket and took a folded glassine envelope from the inside pocket. Unfolded it and smoothed it. Behind the milky acetate was a single sheet of paper. It had been torn out of a reporter’s note pad. It was speckled with dried brown bloodstains. Small droplets. Not arterial spray. Just the kind of spatter that comes from small knife wounds, or heavy blows to a face. Under the stains the paper had been ruled by hand into music staves. Five lines, four spaces, repeated four times. A treble clef. E-G-B-D-F. Every Good Boy Deserves Favor. A 4/4 time signature. Sixteen measures. A melody, sketched in with deft untidy strokes of a pen.

Faust laid the page in front of the girl, on the piano’s lid, where the Mozart had been. He said, “Suppose someone who had seen the missing page was asked to reproduce what had been there.”

The girl looked at the spatters of blood and said, “Asked?”

Faust said, “Required, then.”

The girl said, “My uncle wrote this.”

“You can tell?”

“It’s handwritten. Handwriting is handwriting, whether it’s words or musical notes.”

Middleton said, “Your uncle?”

Faust said, “This is Felicia Kaminski. Temporarily going as Joanna Phelps, but she’s Henryk Jedynak’s niece. Or, she was.” Then he pointed at Middleton and addressed the girl and said, “And this is Colonel Harold Middleton. He saw your uncle in Warsaw. Your uncle was a brave man. He stole a page. He knew what was at stake. But he didn’t get away with it.”

“Who did this to him?”