Oh, my darling one, my greatest pain is that I must leave you alone in a world full of dangers and temptations. Always strive for justice, never accept the second-rate in yourself, my darling, even though you must accept it from the world around you. I grieve that I shall not live to see you grown, in your own life, but remember: Il mio amore per te è l’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle.

My love for you is the love that moves the sun and all the other stars. She used to croon that to me as a child. It was only in college I learned that Dante said it first.

I could see her cloudy with pain, obsessed with her commitment to save Salvini’s music, scoring open the velvet of the box and sealing it in the belief I would find it. Only the pain and the drugs could have led her to something so improbable. For I would never have searched unless Vico had come looking for it. No matter how many times I recalled the pain of those last words, “nella cassa.” I wouldn’t have made the connection to this box. This lining. This letter.

I smoothed the letter and put it in a flat side compartment of my case. With the sense that my mother was with me in the room some of my anger calmed. I was able to begin the search for Francesca Salvini’s treasure with a degree of rationality.

Fortunately Ranier relied for security on the building’s limited access: I’d been afraid he might have a safe. Instead he housed his papers in the antique credenza. Inside the original decorative lock he’d installed a small modern one, but it didn’t take long to undo it. My anger at the destruction of Gabriella’s box made me pleased when the picklocks ran a deep scratch across the marquetry front of the cabinet.

I found the score in a file labeled “Sestieri-Verazi.” The paper was old, parchment that had frayed and discolored at the edges, and the writing on it-clearly done by hand-had faded in places to a pale brown. Scored for oboe, two horns, a violin, and a viola, the piece was eight pages long. The notes were drawn with exquisite care. On the second, third, and sixth pages someone had scribbled another set of bar lines above the horn part and written in notes in a fast careless hand, much different from the painstaking care of the rest of the score. In two places he’d scrawled “da capo” in such haste that the letters were barely distinguishable. The same impatient writer had scrawled some notes in the margin, and at the end. I couldn’t read the script, although I thought it might be German. Nowhere could I find a signature on the document to tell me who the author was.

I placed the manuscript on the top of the credenza and continued to inspect the file. A letter from a Signor Arnoldo Piave in Florence introduced Vico to Ranier as someone on the trail of a valuable musical document in Chicago. Signor Ranier’s help in locating the parties involved would be greatly appreciated. Ranier had written in turn to a man in Germany “well-known to be interested in 18th-century musical manuscripts,” to let him know Ranier might soon have something “unusual” to show him.

I had read that far when I heard a key in the outer door. The cleaning crew I could face down, but if Ranier had returned… I swept the score from the credenza and tucked it in the first place that met my eye-behind the Modigliani that hung above it. A second later Ranier and Vico stormed into the room. Ranier was holding a pistol, which he trained on me.

“I knew it!” Vico cried in Italian. “As soon as I saw the state of my hotel room I knew you had come to steal the score.”

“Steal the score? My dear Vico!” I was pleased to hear a tone of light contempt in my voice.

Vico started toward me but backed off at a sharp word from Ranier. The lawyer told me to put my hands on top of my head and sit on the couch. The impersonal chill in his eyes was more frightening than anger. I obeyed.

“Now what?” Vico demanded of Ranier.

“Now we had better take her out to-well, the place name won’t mean anything to you. A forest west of town. One of the sheriff’s deputies will take care of her.”

There are sheriff’s deputies who will do murder for hire in unincorporated parts of Cook County. My body would be found by dogs or children under a heap of rotted leaves in the spring.

“So you have Mob connections,” I said in English. “Do you pay them, or they you?”

“I don’t think it matters.” Ranier was still indifferent. “Let’s get going… Oh, Verazi,” he added in Italian, “before we leave, just check for the score, will you?”

“What is this precious score?” I asked.

“It’s not important for you to know.”

“You steal it from my apartment, but I don’t need to know about it? I think the state will take a different view.”

Before Ranier finished another cold response Vico cried out that the manuscript was missing.

“Then search her bag,” Ranier ordered.

Vico crossed behind him to snatch my case from the couch. He dumped the contents on the floor. A Shawn Colwin tape, a tampon that had come partially free of its container, loose receipts, and a handful of dog biscuits joined my work notebook, miniature camera, and binoculars in an unprofessional heap. Vico opened the case wide and shook it. The letter from my mother remained in the inner compartment.

“Where is it?” Ranier demanded.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell,” I said, using English again.

“Verazi, get behind her and tie her hands. You’ll find some rope in the bottom of my desk.”

Ranier wasn’t going to shoot me in his office: too much to explain to the building management. I fought hard. When Ranier kicked me in the stomach I lost my breath, though, and Vico caught my arms roughly behind me. His marigold was crushed, and he would have a black eye before tomorrow morning. He was panting with fury, and smacked me again across the face when he finished tying me. Blood dripped from my nose onto my shirt. I wanted to blot it and momentarily gave way to rage at my helplessness. I thought of Gabriella, of the love that moves the sun and all the other stars, and tried to avoid the emptiness of Ranier’s eyes.

“Now tell me where the manuscript is,” Ranier said in the same impersonal voice.

I leaned back in the couch and shut my eyes. Vico hit me again.

“Okay, okay,” I muttered. “I’ll tell you where the damned thing is. But I have one question first.”

“You’re in no position to bargain,” Ranier intoned.

I ignored him. “Are you really my cousin?”

Vico bared his teeth in a canine grin. “Oh, yes, cara cugina, be assured, we are relatives. That naughty Frederica whom everyone in the family despised was truly my grandmother. Yes, she slunk off to Milan to have a baby in the slums without a father. And my mother was so impressed by her example that she did the same. Then when those two worthy women died, the one of tuberculosis, the other of excess heroin, the noble Verazis rescued the poor gutter child and brought him up in splendor in Florence. They packed all my grandmother’s letters into a box and swept them up with me and my one toy, a horse that someone else had thrown in the garbage, and that my mother brought home from one of her nights out. My aunt discarded the horse and replaced it with some very hygienic toys, but the papers she stored in her attic.

“Then when my so-worthy uncle, who could never thank himself enough for rescuing this worthless brat, died, I found all my grandmother’s papers. Including letters from your mother, and her plea for help in finding Francesca Salvini so that she could return this most precious musical score. And I thought, what have these Verazis ever done for me, but rubbed my nose in dirt? And you, that same beautiful blood flows in you as in them. And as in me!”

“And Claudia Fortezza, our great-grandmother? Did she write music, or was that all a fiction?”

“Oh, no doubt she dabbled in music as all the ladies in our family like to, even you, looking at that score the other night and asking me about the notation! Oh, yes, like all those stuck-up Verazi cousins, laughing at me because I’d never seen a piano before! I thought you would fall for such a tale, and it amused me to have you hunting for her music when it never existed.”