She jumped as her cell phone rang. She stretched her leg and snapped it quickly from her belt. “This is Connolly.”

“Hello, Buttercup.”

She walked toward a corner, away from the kitchen staff ’s prying eyes. “Padlo,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Where are you?”

“Sono a Roma,” he replied, his Italian accented with as much American English as his native Polish. “Someone wants to say hello.”

“Josef, wait—”

“Oh, and by the way, his English is . . . Actually, it’s non-existent.”

Connolly sighed as Faust and Middleton continued in her other ear.

“Buona sera, Signora Connolly,” an old man said nervously. “Il mio nome è Abe Nowakowski. Posso aiutarlo con il vostro commercio.”

“I’m sorry—‘Commercio’? I don’t—”

“Business,” Padlo said, taking the heavy black handset in the old man’s shop. “Which is still finding Middleton, I presume.”

“I’ve got Middleton,” Padlo heard her say. “And Faust.”

When Padlo repeated the names, the old man recoiled.

“They are together?” Padlo asked.

“Together, and negotiating.”

Nowakowski, who had lived in terror since the moment he first saw the Mozart score, said, “Dove è il Felicia?”

Padlo saw that the old man trembled. “A young girl,” the deputy said to Connolly. “Felicia Kaminski. Jedynak’s niece.” Recalling her photo, he began to describe her.

“She’s not here,” Connolly said.

“Harbor Court,” the old man told Padlo.

Padlo repeated the hotel’s name.

Not now, Connolly thought as she shut her cell phone.

Out in the dining room, Faust had made his play.

Faust said, “My father was a relatively old man when he married my mother. They met at a type of tango bar we call milangas in Buenos Aires. A scratchy Carlos Gardel record, seductive glances filled with subverted desire. Invitations to dance made with simple nods. The intense courtship begins with toe-tangling turns and kicks under crystal chandeliers. Before they speak, it seems to my father that they’re making love.”

“What’s your father got to do with this?”

“As a young man, my father was a chemist in Poland. He said my mother reminded him of his first wife, a gypsy, Zumella. She died in Europe during the war.”

“Along with million and millions of others. If we didn’t stop that mad-man we’d all be speaking German.”

“He called my mother Jolanta—violet blossom. He was a sentimental man. He met his first wife selling violet blossoms in Castle Square in Warsaw.”

“I fail to see what this—”

“Colonel Middleton, in all your travels or investigations for the government have you ever heard the name Projekt 93?”

“I don’t believe I have.”

“Are you familiar with the work of Gerhard Schrader?”

Middleton shook his head.

“A German chemist who experimented with chemical agents. He invented Tabun, which was originally used to kill insects, then adapted as a lethal weapon against mankind. The Nazis produced twelve-thousand tons of the stuff at a secret plant in Poland, code named Hockwerk.”