Pulling All the Stops

• Chapter 1 The Final Cadence
• Chapter 2 Echoes in St. Jude’s
• Chapter 3 Keys and Cobwebs
• Chapter 4 Discord in the Loft
• Chapter 5 The Broken Bellows
• Chapter 6 Half-Steps and Hostility
• Chapter 7 Heat Waves and Lead Pipes
• Chapter 8 A Measure of Dust
• Chapter 9 Tuning the Great Diapason
• Chapter 10 Swell and Crescendo
• Chapter 11 Solos in the Shadows
• Chapter 12 Striking a Nerve
• Chapter 13 The Midnight Fugue
• Chapter 14 Crossing Voices
• Chapter 15 Secrets Behind the Façade
• Chapter 16 Pedal Point
• Chapter 17 In Dulcet Tones
• Chapter 18 Bleeding Air
• Chapter 19 Syncopated Breath
• Chapter 20 Rain on the Stained Glass
• Chapter 21 The Lost Tracker
• Chapter 22 Consonance Found
• Chapter 23 The Weight of the Windchest
• Chapter 24 Dress Rehearsal for Two
• Chapter 25 Pulling All the Stops
• Chapter 26 Resonating Forever

The air conditioning inside Avery Fisher Hall had evidently given up forty-five minutes before the jury retired, leaving three hundred patrons, two dozen music critics, and the surviving finalists of the Van Dam International Piano Competition to stew in their own formalwear. It was late May in Manhattan, but the thermometer hovering near the stage door read ninety-four degrees, and the air possessed the heavy, wet density of boiled cabbage.

Leo Sterling did not wipe his forehead. To wipe one’s forehead in front of an adjudicating panel was to admit that one had a body, and bodies made mistakes. Instead, he stood backstage by the hydraulic lift, shoulders squared inside a bespoke wool jacket that had cost more than his first three uprights combined, staring fixedly at the scuff marks on the stage-left floorboards. His fingers, long and habitually dry, drummed an inaudible sixteenth-note pattern against the seams of his trousers. Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, measure thirty-two, repeating endlessly like an unscratchable itch.

Beside him, slouched against a flight case labeled NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC – PERCUSSION, sat Julian Morales.

Julian had not bothered with a tuxedo. He wore a rumpled linen shirt with the collar undone, black trousers that had seen better decades, and leather boots that squeaked insolently whenever he shifted his weight. His dark curls were glued to his temples with sweat, and he was currently occupied with peeling the foil wrapper off an aggressively melted peanut butter cup.

"You're going to give yourself an aneurysm, Sterling," Julian said without looking up, licking a streak of chocolate off his thumb. "Or a stroke. Which would be tragic, really. Think of all those crisp, mechanical scales dying unexpressed."

Leo did not turn his head. "Some of us respect the venue, Morales. And some of us understand that stage presence doesn't begin when the footlights hit your teeth."

"Stage presence is for magicians and people who play Liszt because they don't know how to voice a chord," Julian replied cheerfully. He crumpled the foil into a tight sphere and flicked it toward a distant recycling bin. It missed by three feet and bounced across the linoleum. "You played the Brahms like you were filing an audit. Very thorough. Very neat. Nobody's going to jail, but nobody’s having a drink afterward, either."

Leo’s jaw tightened until the muscles ached. "I played the score as Brahms wrote it. Not as an excuse for an interpretive tantrum. If you’d bothered to observe the poco sostenuto in the second movement instead of dragging the tempo into an alcoholic stupor, the third movement wouldn’t have sounded like an amateur recital."

Julian snorted, leaning his head back against the plywood case. "The audience was crying, Leo."

"The audience was humid."

They had hated each other with scientific precision since the age of eleven, when they had shared a dressing room at the junior division of the Chopin Competition in Miami. Julian had spilled orange juice across the keyboard of the practice upright; Leo had retaliated by quietly transposing Julian’s sheet music for the sight-reading round into B-flat minor while Julian was in the lavatory. Over the following decade, through Juilliard masterclasses, European tours, and an exhausting string of regional contests, they had become the twin pillars of a very specific, insufferable ecosystem. Leo was the architect: flawless technique, terrifying intellectual rigor, and the emotional temperature of an iceberg. Julian was the firebrand: erratic, brilliant, prone to memory slips that he covered with shameless improvisations that left the critics divided between calling him a charlatan and hailing him as the second coming of Anton Rubinstein.

The double doors leading to the green room swung open, cutting through the hum of the dead cooling vents.

Dr. Arthur Vance emerged. The chairman of the Van Dam jury was eighty-one years old, possessed ears like dried apricots, and walked with a silver-tipped cane that he used primarily for nudging errant conservatoire students out of his path. Behind him trailed Madame Chen and the rest of the weary, linen-suited committee.

Leo straightened by half an inch. Julian remained slumped against the road case, though he stopped swinging his boots.

"Gentlemen," Dr. Vance said, stopping three paces away. He looked between them with an expression of profound, historic disappointment, the look of an archivist who had opened an ancient sarcophagus only to find it filled with packing peanuts. "The deliberations have concluded."

Leo drew a clean, measured breath through his nose. He had prepared for this moment for eighteen months. The Van Dam carried a sixty-thousand-dollar cash prize, a debut recital at Carnegie Hall, and a guaranteed contract with Deutsche Grammophon. It was the linchpin. The launchpad. His father had already booked a table for twelve at Le Bernardin to celebrate.

"We have an issue," Vance continued, resting both hands on the crook of his cane.

Julian raised an eyebrow. "Leo’s metronome broke?"

"Shut up, Julian," Leo muttered.

"The jury," Vance said, his voice dry as parchment, "was divided. Perfectly, stubbornly, and utterly divided. Seven votes for Mr. Sterling’s Brahms, which was described by Madame Chen as a masterclass in structural architecture, and by Professor Hauer as an embalming." Vance glanced at Chen, who offered an impassive blink. "And seven votes for Mr. Morales’s Rachmaninoff, described by Professor Hauer as an electric revelation, and by Madame Chen as an assault on basic pulse."

Leo felt a cold drop of sweat trace the path of his spine. "A tie?"

"A deadlock," Vance corrected. "A tie implies two winners. The Van Dam charter, penned in 1924 by Silas Van Dam himself, explicitly forbids the division of the first prize. Silas was a Calvinist and a steel magnate; he believed in singular victors and catastrophic defeats. Under subsection twelve of the trust, when a consensus of at least eight votes cannot be reached after three rounds of secret balloting, the primary award is withheld."

The silence in the backstage corridor was absolute, save for the dull thrum of the emergency generator somewhere in the basement.

"Withheld?" Julian’s voice had lost its breezy lilt. He pushed himself off the flight case, his boots planting flat on the floor. "You can't withhold it. We just spent three weeks playing through the entire romantic canon in an oven."

"We can, and we have," Vance said smoothly. "The cash purse rolls over to the next triennial cycle. There will be no Carnegie debut under the auspices of the foundation this autumn."

Leo felt the blood drain from his ears. "Dr. Vance, with respect, this is absurd. A sudden-death round. Give us forty-eight hours. The Hammerklavier. A concerto with second piano. Anything."

"The charter does not permit additional auditions once the jury has adjourned," Vance said. "However."

The old man paused, his pale eyes flickering between them with something faintly resembling malice. Or perhaps it was merely amusement; at eighty-one, the two emotions tended to blur together.

"Silas Van Dam was an eccentric," Vance continued. "In addition to his trust for the piano competition, he left behind several real estate and preservation covenants in the state of New York. Among them is an endowment dedicated to the historical restoration of mechanical instruments, specifically church instruments of the late nineteenth century. One such instrument has recently fallen into the trust’s custody via probate."

"We are pianists," Leo said, his voice clipped. "Not carpenters."

"You are currently unemployed prodigies," Vance replied mildly. "With a significant stain of indecision on your vitas. The press is already out there, gentlemen. They know the jury couldn't agree. By tomorrow morning, the narrative will not be that you are both extraordinary; it will be that neither of you was good enough to convince a simple majority."

The sting hit Leo precisely where Vance intended. A split decision was a failure of dominance. A non-verdict was worse; it was a joke.

"The board," Vance said, reaching into his inner pocket and withdrawing a pair of heavy brass keys on identical, oxidized rings, "has proposed an extraordinary resolution. An addendum, if you will, to break the deadlock of public opinion and determine who truly possesses the dedication required for the foundation’s full management backing."

He held out the keys. They were long, intricate things, their barrels notched with antiquated wards, looking more like museum pieces than modern hardware.

"Upstate," Vance said. "St. Jude the Apostle. A decommissioned parish near the river, roughly four miles outside of Hudson. The diocese abandoned the structure six years ago, but the building was acquired by the Van Dam trust under the historic preservation act. Inside the west gallery stands an 1888 E. & G.G. Hook & Hastings pipe organ. Three manuals, forty-six ranks, mechanical tracker action. It has not been sounded in thirty years."

Julian let out a short, incredulous bark of laughter. "You want us to play church music?"

"I want you to restore it," Vance corrected. "The console is seized, the leather in the reservoirs is desiccated, and the pipework is choked with three decades of swallow nests and coal soot. The foundation has set aside twenty-five thousand dollars for materials and specialist oversight. We are offering you the summer. June through August. You will live on the premises, clear the chests, re-leather the bellows, adjust the linkages, and bring the instrument back to pitch."

"And the prize?" Leo demanded, his gaze locked on the brass key swinging from Vance’s liver-spotted fingers.

"A joint recital on the restored Hook & Hastings on the first of September, attended by the foundation board, the press, and the jury," Vance said. "Followed by a private solo audition on the instrument for the definitive award of the Van Dam fellowship, the deferred cash prize, and a solo tour arranged by Columbia Artists. If you refuse, the competition simply ends. No prize. No Carnegie. You may both return to teaching seven-year-olds their Clementi sonatinas."

Leo looked at the key. His mind raced through the coming calendar: three months of subletting his cramped Morningside Heights studio, practicing on a muted Yamaha upright while his competitors swept through the European festival circuit, pretending that missing the Van Dam prize was a deliberate career choice. It was intolerable.

Then he looked at Julian.

Julian was staring at the key with an expression that was harder to read. The sneer had vanished, replaced by an intense, dark calculation. Julian had no family money; Leo knew that much from the conservatoire grapevine. He lived in an uninsulated loft in Bushwick and played accompaniment for modern dance troupes to pay for his rehearsal space.

"Mechanical tracker action," Julian said slowly. "No electric blowers?"

"Hand-pumped levers, originally," Vance said. "Though an auxiliary rotary fan was installed in 1912. It may or may not function. You will find out."

"Together?" Leo’s voice cracked slightly, a rare betrayer of his composure. "You expect us to work together?"

"The restoration of a three-manual instrument cannot be accomplished by a single pair of hands, Sterling. Someone must hold the pallet while the tracker is adjusted; someone must pump the wind while the pipes are voiced. You will either learn to cooperate, or the organ will remain mute, and your reputations along with it."

Vance stepped forward and dropped one heavy key into Leo’s palm. The brass was cold, smelling faintly of machine oil and old tin. He dropped the second key into Julian’s open hand.

"The train to Hudson leaves from Penn Station twice daily," Vance said, turning back toward the green room doors. "The foundation truck with your basic supplies and the technical manuals will arrive at the cathedral on Monday morning. Try not to break any bones, gentlemen. Ivory is easier to replace than metacarpals."

The doors swung shut, their pneumatic latches clicking with the finality of a guillotine.

Leo stood in the stifling heat of the hallway, the key biting into his palm. He looked at Julian, who was turning his own key over and over between his long, nicotine-stained fingers.

"I’m taking the console," Leo said coldly. "You can have the manual labor."

Julian smiled, though his dark eyes remained entirely flat. "We haven't even seen the place yet, Maestro. But don't worry. I wouldn't trust you near a toolbox anyway. You might scuff your cuff links."

Julian turned on his heel, his boots squeaking rhythmically as he headed down the corridor toward the alley exit, leaving Leo alone with the humming transformers and the bitter, metallic taste of a draw.

The taxi driver from the Hudson Amtrak station refused to turn up the gravel driveway. He deposited Leo, two oversized leather suitcases, and a garment bag that had already begun to wilt in the river humidity onto a strip of crabgrass bordering State Route 9G.

"Private property," the driver muttered through the cracked window, eyeing the rusted wrought-iron archway that leaned at a drunken fifteen-degree angle over the entrance. The iron letters, corroded to the color of dried liver, spelled out ST. JUDE APOSTLE - ENTER IN PEACE, though someone had long ago shot out the letter P with a deer rifle. "Road’s washed out past the culvert anyway. You got a mile walk, kid. Watch for timber rattlers."

Before Leo could protest or offer an extra twenty to brave the gravel, the yellow sedan kicked up a storm of grey dust and accelerated back toward the river.

Leo stood in the simmering silence of noon. The heat here was different from the subway tunnels of Manhattan. It was green, thick with the scent of wild mustard, stagnant ditch water, and rotting hemlock needles. It coated the throat like warm lard. He adjusted the strap of his weekender bag, picked up his two cases by their reinforced handles, and began the march up the hill.

His Italian loafers, completely devoid of traction, slipped on the crushed limestone. Within ten minutes, the chalky dust had coated his ankles and powdered the black fabric of his trousers. The driveway wound through a forgotten orchard of crabapple trees whose branches knit together overhead, choking out the breeze and filtering the sunlight into an oily yellow glare.

Then the trees broke, and St. Jude the Apostle rose against the flat blue sky.

It was not a cathedral in the European sense—no flying buttresses or soaring rose windows of royal blue—but for the Hudson Valley in the late nineteenth century, it was an act of imperial Catholic hubris. Built from dark, quarry-faced limestone that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it, the structure boasted a square campanile that lacked its bell, a steeply pitched slate roof that had shed dozens of tiles into the rhododendron bushes below, and a cavernous clerestory flanked by boarded-up lancet windows. It looked less like a house of prayer and more like a fortress erected to repel an advancing army of heretics.

Sitting on the bottom step of the limestone portico, his bare back propped against the flank of a weather-beaten stone cherub, was Julian.

He had arrived on the earlier train. His luggage, consisting of a single canvas duffel with a broken zipper and a battered wooden crate labeled ORANGE CRUSH, sat haphazardly on the landing. Julian had shed his linen shirt, draping it over the headless cherub, and was currently paring an apple with a remarkably sharp pocketknife.

"You're late," Julian called out, slicing off a translucent curl of apple skin and flicking it into the weeds. "I was beginning to hope you'd been hit by a milk truck on the Taconic. I had the whole victory statement drafted in my head. Gracious, somber, deeply touched by your tragic passing."

Leo dropped his suitcases onto the flagstones with a dull, echoing thud. The palms of his hands were blistered red from the leather handles. He straightened his back with rigid care, refusing to wipe the sweat that was currently stinging his left eye.

"Some of us had business to conclude with our landlords," Leo said, his voice flat. "And unlike you, I don't travel like an itinerant fruit picker."

Julian cast a critical eye over Leo’s bespoke luggage. "Right. Because when one undertakes three months of heavy industrial salvage in an abandoned parish, one must never forget one's cedar shoe trees and matching French cuffs. Did you bring your velvet tailcoat, too? In case the bats demand an impromptu encore of the Waldstein?"

"Where is the foundation representative?" Leo asked, ignoring him and mounting the broad stone steps.

"Left an hour ago," Julian said, chewing. "Middle-aged guy named Miller. Smelled like pipe tobacco and cheap ham. He unlocked the north transept door, showed me where the circuit breaker is, told me the local volunteer fire department wouldn't come out here even if the place caught fire because of the cistern being dry, and handed me this."

Julian reached behind his wooden crate and held up a thick, grease-stained binder bound in cracked black buckram. Stenciled across the cover in fading gilt were the words: E. & G.G. HOOK & HASTINGS, OPUS 1388, BOSTON, MASS. – SPECIFICATIONS AND TRACKER SCHEMATIC.

Leo reached for it instinctively, but Julian snatched it back against his ribs with the speed of an alley cat protecting a fish spine.

"Ah-ah," Julian chided, waving the pocketknife in a lazy circle. "Cooperation, remember? Dr. Vance’s sacred covenant of mutual suffering. We share the manual. You can look at the stops when I’m done reading the wind pressures."

"You don't even know how wind pressure is measured," Leo snapped. "You think a manometer is an Italian dessert."

"Water column displacement in inches, Sterling. Read a pamphlet on the train." Julian stood up, folding the knife and slipping it into his pocket. He picked up his shirt, gave it a perfunctory shake, and slung it over one shoulder without bothering to put it on. "Come on. You really need to see this. The photographs in the archives didn't do the horror justice."

The side entrance to the north transept was an arched oak door studded with iron clavos. The key Dr. Vance had given Leo fit the heavy, hand-forged lock with an agonizing shriek of ungreased tumblers, but the bolt finally yielded. Leo pushed. The oak groaned against the stone sill, releasing a puff of cold, ancient air that smelled of damp plaster, dry rot, mouse droppings, and the unmistakable, lingering sweetness of centuries-old beeswax.

They stepped inside.

The interior of St. Jude’s was vast and drowned in a perpetual, dusky gloom. The nave stretched out before them for sixty yards, lined with two rows of octagonal pine pillars that soared into an open-timber hammerbeam roof. Sunlight fought its way through the grime of the clerestory, casting long, diagonal beams of butter-yellow light across rows of empty, high-backed pews. The red carpeting along the center aisle was mottled with white bird lime and littered with fragments of fallen ceiling plaster that crunched beneath their soles like eggshells.

Every sound they made—the shuffle of leather, the click of the latch, the intake of their breath—was caught by the limestone walls and amplified into a low, whispering reverberation that hung in the upper vaults for four, maybe five full seconds. It was an acoustic designed not for precision, but for awe; a terrifying space for anyone trained on the immediate, crisp decay of modern concert halls.

"Listen to that decay time," Julian murmured. For once, his voice was entirely stripped of mockery. He snapped his fingers sharply.

The sharp crack travelled up the center aisle, bounced off the sanctuary steps, climbed the high reredos behind the altar, and rolled back down the timber rafters, folding over itself three times before dying into the corners.

"Five and a half seconds," Leo calculated quietly. "The bass will turn to mud if the touch isn't bone-dry. You won't be able to pedal your way out of sloppy finger work in here, Morales. Every smear will hang in the air like a wet sheet."

"Then don't play sloppy," Julian replied, though his gaze remained fixed upward.

He pointed toward the rear of the cathedral, above the main entrance. "Look at the gallery."

Leo turned.

The west gallery hung thirty feet above the narthex, supported by four heavy fluted cast-iron columns painted an oxidized bronze. And dominating the entire width of that loft, rising nearly to the peak of the timber roof, stood the Hook & Hastings.

Even in decay, it possessed a terrible, aristocratic dignity. The case was carved from dark black walnut, featuring three soaring towers of zinc diapason pipes interspersed with flat flats of smaller gilded speaking pipes. The tallest pipes in the outer towers were sixteen feet of seamless metal, painted in deep Victorian crimson and stenciled with gold fleurs-de-lis, though decades of moisture had caused the pigment to peel away in scabby ribbons.

Above the central tower, an intricately carved wooden angel held a gilded trumpet toward the rafters. The trumpet was crooked, drooping downward at an angle that gave the angel a faintly exhausted, drunken appearance. Below the pipes, nestled in the shadow of the overhang, sat the console—a massive walnut desk crowned with three stepped keyboards, flanked by vertical jambs drilled with dozens of round wooden stop knobs, and backed by a flat wooden music desk that was covered in a thick blanket of pale gray dust.

"Opus 1388," Leo read softly from memory. "Three manuals. Great, Swell, and Choir. Forty-six ranks. Two thousand six hundred and twelve pipes."

"And about four million dead hornets," Julian added, pointing up at the central pipe flat. A papier-mâché nest the size of a beer keg was wedged between two tenor C pipes, suspended like a gray tumor over the console.

They found the spiral staircase tucked into the base of the south tower. The steps were narrow wedges of yellow pine that wound around a central post, squeaking with an oily pitch as they climbed.

The air grew progressively hotter as they rose. By the time they reached the gallery floor, the temperature had climbed another ten degrees, trapped beneath the uninsulated slate of the roof. The loft was strewn with remnants of the church’s final years: moldering hymnals stacked in cardboard boxes, a broken wire music stand, several zinc oil cans with long spouts, and a disemboweled vacuum cleaner from the 1960s.

Leo walked straight to the console.

His hands, despite the sticky humidity, felt cold. He touched the edge of the keydesk. The walnut was dry and split along the grain, but the craftsmanship was undeniable. The drawknobs were solid rosewood with engraved ivory faces, arranged in tiered vertical columns on either side of the manuals.

He read the names, his classical training automatically parsing the mechanical orchestra waiting behind the casework: Open Diapason 8', Viol di Gamba 8', Rohr Flöte 4', Twelfth 2 2/3', Fifteenth 2', Mixture IV, Trumpet 8', Bourdon 16', Ophicleide 16'.

He extended an index finger and depressed middle C on the Great manual.

The key dropped with a heavy, leaden clatter. There was no resistance, no spring, no rebound. It simply fell into the keybed and stayed there, dead as a stone. Somewhere deep within the dark belly of the case behind the facade, a thin wooden rod rattled against a timber frame, followed by a faint, wheezing hiss of air escaping a dry leather pouch.

"The trackers have dropped," Leo said, leaning down to examine the key lip. "The pulldown wires are probably rusted through at the rollerboard."

"Or the cypher springs are snapped," Julian said. He had dropped his duffel on the gallery floor and was already circling the instrument like an animal inspecting a trap. He peered through a missing access panel on the side of the case. "The whole windchest is sagging on the treble side. Look at those support stays. They're pine, and dry rot has chewed through the joints."

Leo reached out and took hold of the Open Diapason 8' drawknob. He pulled. It slid out with a screech of unlubricated wood, moving nearly four inches before locking in place with a solid thud. He pulled the Principal 4'. It moved an inch, jammed, and refused to budge further.

"Don't force it," Julian snapped from behind the casework. "You'll snap the trundle arms. The linkages are white oak. If you sheer a tenon off an eighteen-eighty-eight square, you'll be hand-carving a replacement with a chisel for three days."

Leo let go of the knob, wiping his thumb on his trousers. "I know how a square-and-roller action works, Morales."

"Knowing how it works in a diagrams book at Juilliard isn't the same as having sixty pounds of lead pipe drop on your face because you pulled the wrong retaining wedge," Julian’s voice echoed from deep inside the case. "There’s an electric motor back here. Looks like a 1920 Westinghouse induction engine. Big as an iron pig. The belt is cracked into about fifty pieces."

Leo walked around the side of the console to the access door. He had to bend almost double to peer into the dark interior.

The smell of the organ's interior was overwhelming: animal hide glue, tin, lead, decaying sheepskin, and the peculiar, sharp scent of bat guano. Above them, stretching up into the gloom like the ribs of a wrecked galleon, were hundreds of wooden trackers—slender laths of white pine no thicker than matchsticks, running thirty feet through the air in dense, parallel grids to connect the keys at the console to the pallets inside the windchests high above.

It was a vast, silent machine of absolute mechanical logic. Every key, every pedal, every stop had a physical, material connection to a valve that allowed air to enter a pipe. No wires. No solenoids. No electricity. Just wood, leather, iron wire, and gravity.

"It’s completely desiccated," Leo murmured, squinting into the gloom. "The primary bellows... look at the gussets."

Julian was shining a small brass penlight across the lower reservoir. The massive leather bellows, six feet wide and ten feet long, sat at the bottom of the case like a crushed accordion. The sheepskin gussets that sealed the folding wooden ribs had dried until they were the color and consistency of burnt toast. Huge fissures ran along the creases, exposing the raw linen reinforcement underneath.

"It won't hold a teaspoon of air," Julian said. "You could run that Westinghouse motor until the coils melted, and not a single pipe would speak. The wind would blow straight out the sides."

"We need to rebuild the reservoir before we can even test the action," Leo said. He reached out and touched a hanging tracker. The wood was so dry it felt brittle, like dried spaghetti. "If we adjust the tracker tension without wind pressure on the pallets, we’ll throw the entire touch out of alignment the second the chests fill."

Julian looked at him through the grid of tracker rods, his eyes reflecting the yellow beam of the penlight.

"Look at you," Julian said with a low, dry chuckle. "The grand virtuoso of the Upper West Side knows his wind pressures. Madame Chen would weep. She thinks you spend your summers being hand-fed grapes while a mechanical apparatus massages your wrists."

"I spent two years studying historical performance practice at Basel, Julian. Unlike you, I don't assume that genius excuses technical ignorance."

"Genius doesn't," Julian said, his voice dropping an octave as he clicked off the penlight, plunging the interior of the organ back into shadow. "Hunger does. When you don't have eighty thousand dollars a year from a family foundation in Connecticut to buy practice time on a Hamburg Steinway, you learn how to fix the broken dampers on a five-hundred-dollar Baldwin upright yourself, or you don't practice."

Leo didn't answer. The silence between them hung in the gallery, competing only with the distant hum of traffic from the highway and the frantic scratching of starlings nesting somewhere in the roof above.

Julian stepped out from the casework, dusting his palms against his thighs. "The foundation truck brought groceries along with the tools. Canned beans, pasta, coffee, some powdered milk that probably expired during the Carter administration. Miller said there's a stove in the rectory kitchen that works on propane. No hot water, but the well pump runs off the main line."

"Where are we sleeping?" Leo asked, looking around the cavernous nave below.

Julian smiled, that old familiar, irritating smirk returning to his mouth. "The rectory has two bedrooms on the second floor. One has a mattress that looks like it was the site of an historical murder. The other has an army cot with a broken spring. I already claimed the cot. You can have the crime scene, Maestro."

"Generous of you."

"I thought so." Julian turned toward the spiral stairs. "I’m going to see if the kitchen tap produces anything that won't give us cholera. Then we unpack the crates. Miller left four gallons of hide glue and three hides of vegetable-tanned sheepskin on the loading dock. If we don't start scraping the old leather off that reservoir tonight, it'll take two weeks just to prep the wood."

"Tonight?" Leo glanced at his watch. It was past three in the afternoon, and the air was only getting heavier. "We've been traveling all day."

Julian paused on the top step of the spiral stairs, looking back over his shoulder.

"Every day we waste," Julian said quietly, "is a day Vance and his jury spend convinced they were right about us. That we're just two pampered, neurotic boys who can only play when the room temperature is seventy-two degrees and the piano technician has spent four hours voicing the hammers to our delicate specifications. You want Carnegie Hall, Sterling? You want the solo contract?"

Julian tapped the walnut frame of the Hook & Hastings with a dirty fingernail.

"Then start sweating."

He disappeared down the winding stairs, his heavy boots clattering against the pine risers until the sound was swallowed by the yawning acoustic of the empty nave.

Leo stood alone on the gallery floor.

He looked down at the console. The dust lay thick over the three manuals, obscuring the split ivory of the naturals and the worn ebony of the accidentals. He pulled a white linen handkerchief from his breast pocket—the one he had carried onto the stage at Avery Fisher Hall three days ago—and carefully, methodically, wiped a clean square on the music desk.

Then, with his thumb, he wiped the dust from middle C of the Swell manual. The bone beneath was yellowed, cool to the touch, and carved with a faint grain that had outlasted the fingers of three generations of organists.

He pressed the key down.

The clatter was dull. A wire twitched inside the case. No sound came out.

"Patience," Leo whispered to the dark wood.

He folded the grimy handkerchief, put it back into his pocket, took off his bespoke wool jacket, and hung it carefully on the arm of the exhausted angel above the pipes. Then he rolled up his sleeves, turned his back on the empty cathedral, and followed Julian down into the cellar.