Night flight, Minneapolis to New York, February 1973. High above Lake Huron on a cold and moonless night, Johannes Immergluck looks out at the cloud cover below. The brilliant winter sky casts enough light to illuminate its roiling white surface, as a gloom recently banished from his mind returns full force. The gloom of a job he cannot shake. Somewhere below a tide washes away the last sandy traces of one of the most deservedly neglected composers who ever lived, and Immergluck feels as if he has been hired to go out and find the Lost Chord.

How do you steal a composer? he thinks. More to the point: Why would anyone want to?”

Xylophone Fragments is a fast-paced literary mystery that inhabits the world of classical music. A nameless detective who specializes in musical matters chases around the world, investigating why all traces of a deservedly neglected Baroque composer are disappearing right under the noses of musicians and musicologists. The intrigue enmeshes a beautiful concert pianist, a washed up Vermont composer, an aging artists’ agent and his jaded associate, an owlish musicologist, and a host of other memorable characters. This uncommonly thoughtful work touches on the realities of concert life, the quandaries facing those who would compose and perform concert music, and some of the ineffable mysteries that attend the creation of great music. Told with great wit and a sometimes cynical humor, Xylophone Fragments will appeal both to those who like to sink their teeth into a puzzle that doesn’t necessarily revolve around a dead body, those who like their mysteries to deal with more than “who?” and “why?” – and those who know and love classical music and the people who compose and perform it.

At half past one, the detective had turned gingerly into van Kleck’s driveway. The small two-story house huddled close to its neighbors, on either side and behind, as if for protection against the cold. The built-in garage stood closed, but the front door was open. A recent light dusting of snow on the existing dry, wind-packed drifts cushioned the crunch of the detective’s feet. He knocked on the old wooden storm door, peered through the fogged panes and let himself into the front hall.

“Hello?” No answer. Gone out for cigarettes. The detective didn’t remember any store nearby, but it was an unfamiliar neighborhood after all. He took off his coat and made himself at home. Van Kleck had led a disorderly existence in New York, kept true to form in Minnesota. Unkempt kitchen and dining room, table piled high with books, manuscripts, and papers, lay on one side of the stairs, piano-dominated living room on the other. Accumulated aunt-like bric-a-brac had been pushed around, but not yet packed away, giving the house the peculiar air of either a maiden piano teacher (Did Nadia Boulanger’s flat in Paris look like this?), or an old fag. Van Kleck’s sexuality had never been a topic of discussion, was suspected by the detective of being at least ambivalent—but whatever, he had seemed comfortable with it. Music was clearly the driving force in his life, and just as apparently, cleanliness he did not judge next to godliness.

The piano took up the front half of the living room. Behind it were a pseudo-Queen Anne love seat and wing chair, a highboy with foldout desk, and a walnut credenza against the wall. Van Kleck touches included a bust of Vivaldi wearing ski cap and scarf, and, over the desk, an index card with the legend “I am what has been, is, and shall be. No mortal has ever lifted my veil.” Beneath it a postcard with a black-and-white film still depicted a veiled Greta Garbo.

Scores and papers covered the piano. A piano/vocal score of “Peter Grimes” stood open on the music stand. The detective plunked out the opera’s perky little first act motto with his index finger on the keyboard. He noted compositions in progress, some photocopied articles from Musical Quarterly, an unread copy of Time, and absolutely nothing that had anything to do with Finarini. Half a dozen volumes of the Grove Dictionary were stacked on the credenza. The topmost contained the letter F. The detective thumbed through to the page with the miniscule entry on Finarini. It was missing—ripped out. The detective scowled, looked again at the chapeauxed Vivaldi, looked at the couch where he noted van Kleck’s characteristic dark wool overcoat slung casually over the back. Next to the front door in a plastic boot tray sat van Kleck’s black wingtips and a pair of galoshes, both dry.

“Hello?” The detective called again and went upstairs. Two small bedrooms and a bath, all empty. Back down, circling around the first floor, he stuck his head through the side door into the garage, recognized a blue Volkswagen beetle with the vanity plate “COMPSR.” In the living room, the soft music in the background registered. Not likely to be a classical radio station up here, he thought, unless he can pull in the CBC. The detective went over to the stereo console. The needle was heading into the final groves—a Janá?ek song cycle, Tagebuch eines Verschollenen. Not gone more than twenty minutes from the timings on the record jacket. He finally opened the front door and what he hadn’t noticed on the way in startled him: shallow footprints leading across the narrow front yard toward the street.

Barefoot.

He may be nutty but he’s not crazy, thought the detective. It couldn’t have been more than ten degrees outside and variable gusts of wind made it effectively colder. The trail angled to the right, past the lip of the driveway and into the street where the snow was too hard packed for prints to register. It was one house down from the corner, and the intersecting cross street went straight downhill to the lakefront. Already the prints closest to the street were filling in with blowing snow. The detective buttoned his down vest and went back out the walk to the driveway. A single, partial footprint—booted, indecipherably male or female—cut the corner from the walk to the driveway, outbound. Other prints in the driveway had either blown away or been obscured by the detective’s tire tracks. Nothing visible in the street. The detective had stood at the corner, looking down the long hill for minutes as a dark squall line pushed through overhead and snow began to fall thickly. No people in sight. A few cars crossed an intersection two streets down.

He reentered the house and took a closer look around while he waited. Van Kleck’s music-related clutter was consistent with its author in all respects except one: there was no trace of any material relating to Antonio Luigi Finarini. Not on the piano, not on the desk or dining room table. Not upstairs, under the mattress, in the washing machine, or buried under the garbage. In the lettuce crisper of the refrigerator the detective found another copy of Time, folded over to an article about the eccentricities of purported billionaire Foster Cronenberg. The detective made a sandwich and scanned the page. The investment banker-turned venture capitalist had just completed his personal Xanadu—a Ludwig-like fairy tale castle in the Bahamas, where he retired to play the recorder and, likely as not, bathe like Scrooge McDuck in his money. Interesting, but relevant? The detective waited for another hour—he wasn’t sure for what or whom—and then drove back through the snow to Minneapolis and a flight home, lost in the shadow of his own dreams.

Before he left, he pulled a copy of Schmieder’s Bach Werke Verseischnis from van Kleck’s bookshelf and left it open on the piano, turned to the back page where the author briefly noted, then dismissed, the Alberghetti Manuscript.