There was a woman behind the frantic, worried figure moving forcefully into the front room of the little terraced cottage on London’s Lamb’s Conduit Street. She was tall and elegant, with long dark hair and something that looked like a machine pistol—Kaminski wished weapons were not so familiar—extended in her right hand.

The young Polish musician placed her Bela Szepessy fiddle and bow on the antique walnut table by the window and said, “Harold. Leonora. So nice to see you again. How is the music business these days? Slow or fast? Looking at you at this moment it is difficult for me to judge. Are you here for my debut at the Wigmore Hall? If so . . . ” She placed a slender finger, the nail trimmed down to the quick, on her cheek. “I have some sartorial issues, I must say.”

“Oh crap.” Middleton put away the weapon and Leonora Tesla followed suit, if a little more slowly. He slapped his forehead theatrically. “I’m sorry, Felicia. We saw there was someone inside. I forgot you had the keys.”

“They shoot burglars in London, Harold? Such a beautiful little house. You don’t remember who you lend it to?”

Middleton glanced at the woman with him. “I said Felicia was welcome to use the place. For her . . . ” He stumbled over the details.

“ . . . for my debut at the Wigmore Hall,” Felicia repeated, picking up the fiddle and showing it to them. “I thought you wanted to see me play this. It cost you a lot of money.”

Harold Middleton—she refused to shorten his first name since she wasn’t, Felicia wished to say, a colleague—had proved a good friend of sorts. He saved her life on more than one occasion when she was enmeshed in the deadly game of terror and crime that should have ended in a massacre at the James Madison Recital Hall in Washington, D.C., while she performed as the principal soloist for a newly unearthed work by Chopin.

There had been many more favors in the intervening two years. Over that time she ceased to be an impoverished young Polish émigré, without friends at first, without parents, and had began slowly to adjust to the life of a professional musician, taking the first steps on the international orchestral ladder, occasionally and only when absolutely necessary, using Harold Middleton’s many connections. She was grateful. She was also intensely aware that a part of his generosity stemmed from some private, inward guilt for introducing her to the dark and violent world to which he had now returned, one a million miles away from the music which he truly loved.

“I will see you play,” Middleton insisted.

“We both will, Felicia,” Leonora Tesla added.

Middleton winced when he failed to remember the date of the recital.

“Tonight,” she interrupted with a scowl. “Seven o’clock. I texted you. I emailed . . . ”