Kolankiewicz met Troy at Rosen’s apartment.
“Show me,” Troy said.
“My guys did everything in this room. Everything that anyone might touch in the course of a crime. Anything that would bear the weight of a hand. The place is clean of prints. Yet, the person who found the body was the cleaner. Jack talked to her. She cleans twice a week. Yesterday was her day. The room should have been covered in prints. Even if Rosen had received no vistors in the three days before his death, think how many objects he would have touched, how many leant upon. See the bookshelf at hip height? By now it would have a fine sheen of dust on it. When my guys dusted it down it was spotless. It had been wiped that day, ahead of the cleaner.”
“It’s too thorough, isn’t it?”
The room—the rehearsal room—still had that odd feel to Troy. He’d been here dozens of times, perhaps close to a hundred over the last two years—and it was still as though he was seeing things for the first time.
“Let us suppose for a moment that Viktor was killed. We have no motive in robbery. The first thing I’d take would be the Picasso—under my jacket and away. If I’d planned well, the Van Gogh fits in a suitcase. And then we have the problem of how to make it look like a convincing suicide. And it is convincing isn’t it?”
“It is. The prints on the gun are quite consistent with Herr Rosen having loaded it himself, and with the grip he would have on it to point it at his own heart. Not as easy as pointing it at your head.”
“Did you dust beyond this room?”
“No. We had no reason to.”
Troy led him backstage, into the foreign country. Kolankiewicz showed less surprise at the “cell” than he or Jack had. A Polish shrug seemed to say, “So what?”
Down the corridor three of the four other bedrooms smelled of non-use. The last, the biggest, did not. Jack’s nose had deceived him. This room was in use. Troy could swear there was a trace of scent in the air but could not say what. It was a lavish room, quite the biggest bed Troy had ever seen; hand-printed, hand-trimmed wallpaper in a large Monet-inspired pattern; a large, French cherrywood wardrobe; a bergère sofa along the foot the bed; and over the bed an unframed Chagall that stretched from bed head to ceiling, and almost wall to wall—a dark painting, executed lightly, cobalt blue; navy blue; a deep, entrancing green; a bouquet of crimson . . . a girl: part girl, part what? Mermaid? Bird? Floating in midair . . . or was she borne aloft by the fiery, feathery thing above her?
Kolankiewicz sniffed the air.
“A woman,” he said. “Not a man’s room. It’s not a bedroom, it’s a boudoir.”
He opened the wardrobe door, he opened the drawers in the tallboy but both were empty.
“I still say woman.”
“With not a knickknack in place, no mirror, no dressing table, no dresses, no knickers?”
“Can you not smell it? Say it is an absence of smell if you like. But it is in the air.”
“Yes,” said Troy. “I can smell it. I’ll be in the other room if you need me.”
Troy sat at the piano. Looked at the open score. Viktor had played the Mozart twenty-third at Carnegie Hall last year. Perhaps it was the sheer quality of his performance, perhaps it was the memory of the war years and how much Viktor had raised in U.S. war bonds, but the audience, to a man, to a woman, had stood and cheered at the end. Troy held his hands over the keys poised for the opening notes of the piano, hearing in the mind’s ear, rushing through, the long, two-minute string introduction. His fingers never touched the keys. He went back to Kolankiewicz.
“Do you have a spare print kit?”
Kolankiewicz pointed at his Gladstone bag on the floor and said, “In there. Somewhere.”
Troy dusted outward from middle C an octave either way. And then octave by octave until he had reached the extremities of bass and treble. Keys he’d never touched on his own piano.
Kolankiewicz returned.
“The cell, as you put it, has prints in all the obvious places. On the door knob, on the tin mug, and smudged all over the reading glasses. They look like Rosen’s but I will need to check that to be sure. The other room, the boudoir, is spotless.”
“So’s this,” said Troy. “Now tell me, what murderer, what assassin, would be so foolish as to play the piano before committing his crime and then have to wipe down every key?”