The Lost Ballet

By Richard Dorrance

Another in the series of caper novels staring Gwenny and Roger June, who live in America's most beautiful town, Charleston, SC. In a secret compartment of an antique desk they find a musical score by Igor Stravinsky, and decide to produce the world premier of this lost ballet. Also staring Pete Townshend of THE WHO, Catherine Deneuve, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. And of course Stirg, their enemy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Dorrance
• Release date: Sep 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301682843

Richard Dorrance

Richard Dorrance lives next door to Gwenny and Roger June in America's most beautiful town, Charleston, South Carolina. Four days after moving into his house on Church St., Richard heard gunfire on the other side of the 200 year old brick wall that separates his historic property from the June's. Being of stout heart, he stood on a chair and looked over the wall, where he saw Gwenny sitting on a wooden milk crate, holding a gun and looking at the wall along the back line of her property, where Richard could see small craters in the wall and brick chips on the ground underneath. The appearance of his head above the wall caught Gwen's eye, and she looked at him with a dazzling smile.She said, "Hey. Sorry about the noise, but I just had to sight this new baby in. Looks like it pulls a hair to the left." She got up, went over to the wall, and offered him a handshake.Richard never had had the inclination to kiss a woman's hand, old-fashioned style, but he did now. He would discover that Gwen made a lot of men feel and think things they never had before. He controlled himself, shook her hand regular style, and asked, "Don't the police mind you firing a gun in the back yard?"She said, "They do, or used to, but after they come to check it out they seem to leave satisfied. I don't do it very often. We like a quiet neighborhood."That was a few years ago, and since then Richard and the Junes have become good friends. So good, in fact, that Richard started writing books about them and the capers they get involved in. You can read excerpts from these books on Richard's website.Before meeting the Junes and being stimulated to record their multifarious lives in a series of comedy cum caper novels, Richard worked for many years as an historical preservationist for the National Park Service. He now finds living vicariously through his neighbors exploits to be much more interesting. He also really likes the June's dog, who communicates with him telepathically. Occasionally, as Richard works on a book, the Junes try to hide something from him about one of their capers, but the dog always squeals and tells the whole story.email: [e-mail]

Book preview

Chapter 1 – The Secret Compartment

Helstof called Gwen June and said, If you want to come over for coffee, we have something interesting to show you. You brought something back from Russia you didn’t know about.

I’m on my way. Should I invite Roger, or is this girl stuff?

Bring him. And bring the four ballet geeks, if you can. We haven’t seen them in a while, and this is about ballet. Oh, I shouldn’t have given that away. It’s half the surprise. See you.

Gwen called down to the rehearsal hall, and got Peter. When he answered she said, Who’s down there today? Are Selgey and Bart there? Can you get away for an hour or two?

They’re here. So is Pater. What’s up?

Helstof wants us to come over to her house; says she has a surprise about ballet. Says we brought something back from the heist we didn’t know about. Can you come now?

Peter yelled something away from the phone, then said, Yeah. See you.

Roger showed up first, and gave his wife an American kiss, then gave Helstof a European double kiss. He liked the direct, American style of smackaroo right on the lips, better than the prissy European thing. But the double kiss was different, which made it interesting. He shook hands with Henric, Helstof’s husband, and said, Where’s the baby horse?

Henric said, Outside, running the beach.

How much you paid in fines so far, letting her off leash every day?

Henric looked at Helstof, who held up five fingers.

$500?

With her hands, Helstof pantomimed stretching.

$5,000? Roger said.

Henric beamed with pride. Helstof rolled her eyes.

Gwen said, Jesus.

Henric’s baby horse was a borzoi dog that weighed 140 pounds, and was dumb as an ox. It was only ten months old and not fully grown. The huge dog was lucky its master was wealthy and owned a 10,000 square foot house for it to run around in. It would follow Henric around all day, from the garage on the ground floor to the bedrooms on the fourth floor. This blockheaded but sweet-natured dog would run up the stairs and down the stairs; around the garage and around the wine cellar; around the kitchen and around the sunrooms. It loved Henric, and Henric loved it. But god, was it dumb.

The door to the kitchen opened, and in came Peter, Pater, Selgey, and Bart - the four ballet geeks. Now there was a lot more European kissing, because Peter and Pater were Russian, and even though Selgey was American and Bart was English, they had lived in Europe for a while, and liked that gesture. So between the eight people, there were like, forty-four kisses dished out. If the dog had been in the room, rather than running around loose on the beach, breaking the law, there would have been lots more.

Roger said, What’s the surprise?

Henric pointed to a desk across the living room, which was eighty feet away. The Gromstov’s have a really big living room. The group walked over and stood looking at a large hole in the side.

Dog, Henric said. Running around the house, slipped on the polished floor, did a header into the desk. He looked at the hole. Didn’t hurt her a bit. Really thick skull.

Helstof said, That’s not the surprise, though that caused the surprise. She looked at Henric, who nodded. She pointed at the hole, said, Secret compartment. Had stuff in it. Stuff about ballet. The desk was one of several hundred small objects the Gromstovs, the Junes, and the Ps (Peter and Pater) had stolen from warehouses of the Hermitage Museum, in Saint Petersburg, Russia, about a year earlier. All the items had been smuggled back to Charleston in huge shipping containers, and some of them now were in the Gromstov’s house on Kiawah Island.

The Junes had masterminded the Hermitage heist. They are real Charlestonians, meaning both their families had lived there since before the Civil War. If your family came to town after the Civil War, say 1870 or so, you are not a real Charlestonian.

Peter and Pater, the Ps, no last name, had been security guards at the Hermitage, and had been bribed to let the heist team slip out of the museum compound in the dead of night. The bribe had consisted of an offer they couldn’t refuse. After the heist, their employment status at the Hermitage changed from satisfactory to hunt them down like the rats they are, and exterminate them. So they had vacated the premises along with the stolen goods, and been transported to Charleston on the container ship, in one of the containers. Before becoming trusted members of the Hermitage security force, both of them had been dancers in the Mariinsky ballet corps. When Peter tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee, Pater also ended his career. Partners, for better or for worse.

Selgey and Bart, also dancers, had fallen in love during a performance of Swan Lake. According to Selgey, it happened just after Bart threw her upwards toward the ceiling of the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden, and just before he caught her. She said she had been thrown around a lot of stages by a lot of guys during her illustrious career as principle dancer with the American Ballet Theater, but no one other than Bart had thrown her upwards with just one arm, and then caught her with just the one other arm. No one. During that weightless interlude, similar to what astronauts in outer space experience, between the throw and the catch, that was when she decided she was in love with Bart.

Bart, on the other hand, said he fell in love with Selgey when, accidentally, he saw her standing naked in front of the mirror in her dressing room. Selgey was the romantic of the two; Bart the pragmatist. They decided to leave the life of world class ballet performance at the same time, get married, and retire out of the limelight to the quaint cultural charms of Charleston. The four dancers, and Henric, were toying with the idea of starting a ballet academy, and had rented a rehearsal space in an old theater on John Street, traditionally called The Hall.

Now the four Russians, three Americans, and the one Englishman stood together in the really big living room, looking at the busted antique desk, waiting for Helstof to tell them about the surprise.

Pater said, The dog did that, with her head, and she’s ok?

Henric said, Russian dogs, very tough.

Henric sat on the floor in front of the center of the desk and demonstrated how the secret compartment worked. He stuck his head into the space where a person’s legs were when they sat at the desk. The desk was small, but beautifully crafted, with ornate detailing and finishes, and had one drawer on each side. Henric looked carefully at the inner wall of the side, and at the top, just under the bottom of the drawer, was a small wooden latch, made from the same wood as the side, and very unobtrusive. He turned the latch, and the entire inner wall panel popped away from the outer side, towards him. This panel was connected to the desk by a hinge at the bottom, completely invisible unless the desk was laid on its back or top, which hardly was thinkable, given the quality and beauty of the desk.

Carefully he held the top edge of the panel, and lowered it downwards. There was a squeak from the invisible hinges, but the mechanism worked perfectly. The entire inner wall panel folded down until its top edge touched the floor. He pointed to the narrow compartment between the inner and outer walls, and said, Papers.

Chapter 2 – The Composer and The Impresario

Helstof showed them the papers they had found in the secret compartment. She made everyone sit down, explained about the two letters and the two newspaper articles from 1914, and passed them around. She said to the four former dancers, I guess you know who Stravinsky and Diaghilev were? They did. She looked at Roger and Gwen, who nodded, yes. Helstof picked up a letter and unfolded the single sheet of paper. She looked at the Russian script, and read aloud:

Dear Sergei:

The days are warmer here in Petersburg than when I left Switzerland two months ago. It is pleasant, but I don’t fancy spending another winter here…..ever. I long to get back to Lausanne to see the little boy and the baby.

I spend my days here in the main city library, and at the Hermitage. I have found some interesting material that will help me with Les Noces, but I think I will have to make up much of that story as I go along. I am used to doing that after the last six months, working on the ballet. I could not warm myself to the story you proposed for the ballet, as I am sick of thinking about old Russian gods running around the forests, making life miserable for everyone. So I wrote the score based on some paintings I saw recently in Lausanne by some Frenchmen. They are wild, and that matches my mood over the last six months.

When I am bored reading in the libraries, I take out the ballet score and sing it in my head. I am not sure the music is any good, and that may be because I don’t understand the paintings. But they consume me.

I must get back to Lausanne soon. Katerina is poorly.

Yours most fondly, IS

Petersburg, July 1914

Henric opened the flap of one envelope and extracted two articles, cut from a newspaper. He said, They’re from a French newspaper, and handed them to his wife, whose mother was French. The two articles were from Le Monde, one dated August 1913 and one dated September 1913. Helstof said, They are reviews of a performance by the Ballets Russes, in Paris in August 1913. It was The Rite of Spring, by Stravinsky. One is about the music, and one is about the choreography. The person who wrote the article about the music hated it. The person who wrote about the choreography and the dancing loved it.

She set the articles on the table and translated the second letter.

1914, January the 13th, My Dear Friend Igor,

In another post I have sent two more reviews of Rite. The one man is a fool, who wouldn’t know great music if God himself stuck a celestial trumpet in the man’s ear and blew a choir written by angels. The other man also is a fool for praising Bakst for the movements. When it comes time to do Les Noces, I will get someone else who understands the direction you are heading in your musical phantasies, and will not choreograph so as to make all the dancers seem to be in straightjackets and from the lunatic asylum.

I have paid off almost all the debts from the Rite production, and soon shall send you funds. We did well on this, and will do better on the next.

If you cannot come to Paris to discuss the next dance, I will come to Lausanne. We must speak. We must continue this work. No one can write dance songs the way you will, and I have people who will give us the money to make the productions. You will have as great and large of an orchestra as you want and need. I promise you this, my great friend, and any dancer you want. They all want to fly to your music.

Do you still mean to go back to Petersburg? Are things there not very unsettled, dangerous even? The damned Bolsheviks are trouble-makers, and they are serious. Can you not come to Paris and do the research?

Please write to me soon and tell me about the new music. It will be wonderful. I await your next work.

Diaghilev

Helstof picked up printouts from Wikipedia articles on Diaghilev and Stravinsky. At the end of both articles were lists of works, which showed that Stravinsky and Diaghilev had collaborated on the following ballets:

The Firebird, 1910

Petrushka, 1911

The Rite of Spring, 1913

Pulcinella, 1920

Les Noces, 1923

Helstof looked at the others and said, Nothing from the time period of Stravinsky’s letter that we have here, 1914. Nothing between 1913 and 1920. But in the letter it says he has written another ballet, and he’s not sure he likes it. But he says he takes it out when he’s bored, and sings it in his head. She paused. Why is it not on the encyclopedia list of articles? Where is it? What’s it called?

Chapter 3 – The Second Secret Compartment

It was clear Stravinsky had received the letter and articles Diaghilev had sent him in January 1914. It also was clear he never sent the letter he had written to Diaghilev in July 1914. Helstof said, So the mystery is, why didn’t Stravinsky send the letter he wrote to Diaghilev, and why did he put these papers in the secret compartment of the desk in Saint Petersburg?

The eight friends sat in the living room and pondered on the question. Roger closed his eyes, which Gwen knew was a sign he had kicked his brain into high gear. He repeated Helstof’s question, and focused on the secret compartment phrase. Why did the desk have a secret compartment? Why have desks throughout history and around the world had secret compartments? Simple. To hide stuff. Roger opened his eyes and looked across the eighty feet of living room space at the desk. Like most desks, it was symmetrical: one drawer in the center, and one on each side. Symmetry. Symmetry. One drawer on each side. One secret compartment on the left side. So….

He got up, went over to the desk, and stared at it. Gwen knew something was up. Roger had a special skill, a special intuitive characteristic called the Divvy Sense. A Divvy is a person who can sense the presence of a work of art, even when they are not looking at it. If an antique or painting or piece of silver is near them, they feel it. And, Divvys can sense fake works of art; even very good fakes. Roger had employed this special skill when the team was stealing stuff from the Hermitage Museum warehouses. He turned it on now, looking at the desk with the secret compartment on the left side. He stared at the right side. Bong, bong, the Divvy Sense spoke.

Roger said, Henric, did you look at the other side of the desk?

Henric stood up and said, No. He walked across the room, picked up a flashlight, and sat on the floor in front of the desk. He shined the light at the right side wall panel, and saw a latch at the top, just like the latch on the left side. He turned first to Roger, and then to the others. Another compartment. He turned the latch and lowered the panel to the floor. Inside the compartment was a very large paper document, not at all like a letter or newspaper article. It measured about twenty inches from left to right, fifteen inches from top to bottom, and more than an inch thick. A faint musty smell drifted first to Henric’s nose, and then to Roger’s. Henric took it out of the compartment and handed it to Roger. He raised the panel, turned the latch again, and stood up. Together they walked back to where the others sat and watched. Gwen moved the letters and articles, and Roger set the large document on the coffee table. Everyone looked at it, wondering, smelling the old paper. There was no writing, no markings of any kind, on the outside.

Roger looked at Helstof and said, Go ahead, it’s yours.

Helstof opened the document by turning the first page, and saw something she never had seen before. A musical score. Bars and clefs and notes and measures. Musical notation. She had seen this before on television, and in movies, but never the real thing, in front of her like this. Across the top, written in pencil by hand, in Russian, was, four dances for Ballets Russes, 1914, IS. Below that began the staffs of standard printed musical notation. And on the printed staffs were notes and other symbols, written in pencil. Surrounding the staffs on all sides were handwritten notes, jammed wherever there was a little blank space on the page. Quickly Helstof read all the notes on the first two pages. Then she sat back in her chair and looked at the others.

"It’s a story. The beginning of a story. The notes say a girl is lying in bed at night, dreaming about a family of crows she had seen in a field that day, the birds flying around, shrieking at each other, playing. There are to be two male dancers and two female dancers, dressed in black, that represent the crows. It says courante; I don’t know what that means. And expressivo. That’s what’s on these pages."

Selgey and Bart looked at each other, then at the Ps. The four dancers knew what courante and expressivo mean, and they knew about the Ballets Russes. And because of the other items Henric had found in the first compartment, they knew what this document was. It was the score Stravinsky had mentioned in the letter to Diaghilev. It was a lost ballet.

Chapter 4 – The Lost Ballet

Gwen looked at her husband, silently asking him if the score was genuine. His Divvy Sense was bonging ever so sweetly and profoundly, so he answered her silently, yes. Gwen said, It’s real. It’s Stravinsky.

Selgey said, I know something about music. If Pater can read the Russian notes, I can try to understand the score. Roger picked up the document and took it to the dining room table, where Selgey and Pater sat down together and began to turn pages. The others went into the kitchen, where Helstof made coffee. Everyone sensed they would be together for many hours.

Gwen said, Let’s recap what we know. Stravinsky and Diaghilev did three ballets together in Paris, for the Ballets Russes, between 1910 and 1913: Firebird, Petrushka, and Rite of Spring. The Wikipedia articles don’t show any ballet works for either of them until Pulcinella in 1920, but they do say Stravinsky went from Switzerland to Saint Petersburg in mid-1914, where he researched another piece, Les Noces, which was produced in 1923. What we know from the letter we have, that no one else has seen, is that for the previous six months in 1914, he worked on a ballet based on some French paintings he had seen in Lausanne, Switzerland. He wasn’t sure he liked the music, but he had the score with him, because he would look at it when he was bored with the research. Gwen looked around at the others for confirmation. She said, What else? What else do we know about Stravinsky from that time period?

Bart got up and went back into the living room, where he got the Wikipedia articles from the table. He read the following. While the Stravinskys lived in Switzerland, their second son, Soulima, was born in 1910, and their second daughter, Maria Milena, was born in 1913. During this last pregnancy, Katerina was found to have tuberculosis, and was placed in a Swiss sanatorium for her confinement.

Gwen said, So Katerina is his wife, right?

Bart nodded and went on reading. After a return to Russia in 1914 to collect research materials for Les Noces, Stravinsky left his homeland and returned to Switzerland, just before the outbreak of World War I brought about the closure of the borders. He was not to return to Russia for nearly fifty years. He looked around the kitchen table at the faces of his friends. Gwen closed her eyes and parsed the data. In ten seconds she made the connections. She said, So he’s in Saint Petersburg in mid-1914, with a score he wasn’t sure he liked. At home in Switzerland he had a wife, a four-year old, and a new baby. And the wife was sick with tuberculosis. Europe was tense, and a world war was about to break out. What if, and she paused, what if he found out something about his wife’s health, which made him go back to Lausanne unexpectedly. But he thought he would be going back to Saint Petersburg right away. So he hides his letters in the desk he was using, and hides the score there too, that he’s not sure he likes. He thinks he’ll be back for them. But the war breaks out, and the borders are closed. He can’t go back to Russia, and doesn’t go back for fifty years. And he forgets about the score, or doesn’t care. And it sits in the desk. Until today.

Roger said, It’s possible. It could have happened that way. The others thought about the information they had, and no one could offer an objection to Gwen’s analysis. It appeared they had an original ballet score by Stravinsky, sitting on the table in front of them.

Selgey and Pater came into the kitchen. She said, It’s a complete score, in four acts. He called them dances. I don’t know enough to tell you what style it is, but I can tell you it’s not like Rite of Spring, which was written for a very large orchestra. This score is for a small orchestra, and it’s unbelievable. Every page is full of scribbles and notes about the story. The music and the story correlate perfectly through the entire score. Tell them, looking at Pater.

He said, Each act, each dance, is based on a different painting. He didn’t write down the titles of the paintings, but he did note the painters. Guess who? The others waited. Van Gogh, Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso. He saw all the paintings in 1913 at a show in Switzerland, and they had a major impact on him. He began to write the music immediately. The story of each act is different, but the music is in the same style throughout the entire score, and his notes say the dancers and the dancing should be the same throughout the piece. So there’s a difference in content between the acts, but the music and dance tie them together.

Henric got up and went into the dining room, where he spent a half hour paging through the score. He’d never seen anything like it before. The world of art was new to him and it rang a bell. Over the last year, since buying a house in Charleston where he and Helstof now lived part time, retired, he had found a new love. Sailing. They owned a very nice boat, and had made a trip in it over to St. Barths. It was a great time, and unlike anything he ever had done before. It had expanded his horizons, far out into the ocean. Now he was looking at a book, filled with unknown symbols. He felt himself wondering about music and dance. Was this another new challenge for him?

Chapter 5 – Seeds of the Production

The four retired dancers sat on the edge of the stage at The Hall, eating scones and drinking tea. They felt depressed, and weren’t doing much talking. On one of the long folding tables behind them was a musical score for a ballet; not the Stravinsky score. But like the Stravinsky score, this one had never been produced on stage. Unlike the Stravinsky, it was young, only six months old, a baby waiting to take its first steps. This score had been written by two friends of theirs, a young Russian woman and an older American man. Selgey and Bart had played around with creating choreography for the music, and had produced some good stuff, and some not so good stuff. They were enthusiastic, but in learning mode. The composers had finished a first draft of the music, and had done some revisions, when the Russian woman was offered an opportunity to be in a movie in France. The couple had left Charleston a month earlier, and since then, progress on the choreography had slowed.

Between bits of scone and sips of tea, the dancers now thought about the discovery of the Stravinsky score. This had the effect of dulling the light that had been shining on their own efforts to do the choreography for a new work. After all, Stravinsky is world renown. What was going to come out of the discovery of a lost ballet?

Selgey hopped down off the stage and looked at the other three. She said, God, what an unbelievable thing, finding the music in the desk. What are we going to do with it? Selgey had not been part of the Hermitage heist team that stole the desk from a warehouse in Saint Petersburg, but over the last year or so, she and Bart had become close friends with those who had, and she now thought of herself as one of the team. Bart felt that way too. Which is why Selgey was cutting herself into the decision-making apparatus which would determine what to do with the Stravinsky score.

A half mile away, Gwen and Roger played with their dog in the back yard, and asked themselves the same question. The Junes know a lot about art and antiques, and they know a lot about fine wine, and Roger knows something about private investigating, which he does when some interesting case comes his way. The Junes don’t know much about ballet, other than that they like going to performances, which they have done many times, at theaters in Europe and New York. They threw the ball around for the dog, and thought about the document that now sat on the Gromstov’s dining room table, smelling musty.

The Gromstovs were in the Kiawah Island town offices, making another contribution to the new fire engine replacement fund. Their dog, the big, lovable, but dumb borzoi puppy, was lucky in that his master would let it out of the house regularly, where it ran for miles and miles on the Kiawah Island beach. Town regulations prohibit dogs off leash on the beach, and town police enforce the regulation. When the cops first encountered the puppy, it only weighed sixty pounds. They got it on a rope, figured out which house it came from, knocked on the beachfront patio door, and informed the wealthy residents with the thick Russian accents that the dog couldn’t run loose on the beach. When the beach patrol found the dog running loose the next day, they presented its owners with a $40 ticket. Henric did the math. If he got three tickets a week for the next ten years at $40 per, that would come to $67,200. He could afford that without even blinking. His dog was bred to run down wolves in Siberia. It had to run, right? Let it run.

The Town of Kiawah Island also did the math. If they tripled the cost of the tickets, at the end of a ten year term, they would have collected $201,600 from this resident, which just happens to be the cost of a new fire engine. The Town is used to dealing with rich residents, and is very skillful at coming to mutually beneficial financial arrangements. In this case, the dog pretended to chase wolves down the Kiawah Island beach on a regular basis, and the fire engine replacement fund grew on an exactly equivalent basis. Now that’s cooperation. Helstof wrote out a check for $400, which covered the last ten tickets the police had issued.

When they got home, they let the dog out the front sliding glass doors, and it took off down the beach, looking either for some wolves to chase, or some kids to play with. They sat down at the dining room table and looked at the pages of the book that was covered in squiggles and quarter notes and arpeggios and clefs. They had found the document in the desk they had gotten as part of the Hermitage caper, and so technically it was theirs. But the Gromstovs knew that possession of the desk and the document was the result of a team effort, so they felt they were looking at group property. What to do with it had to be a group decision.

Helstof watched her husband as he sat staring at the score. Something was going on with him, and she didn’t know what it was. He never really had been into art in any significant way. With his high level position in the Russian bureaucracy, they had been to more than their share of cultural events, but these, for Henric, had been more of a duty than a pleasure. Something had captured his attention, and Helstof waited to find out exactly what it was.

He looked up at her and said, Remember the dinner at McCrady’s, when Gale ran around the private dining room in her underwear for half an hour? She nodded. And the maître d' kept trying to get in, but the sommelier kept the door locked, because Gwen told him if he let anyone in to see what was going on, she would shoot him? Helstof nodded again, remembering the dinner well. Gale was a friend of the Junes, a fashionista of the highest and wildest order. Get a few glasses of champagne into her, and you were guaranteed an interesting evening. Henric said, Remember what else happened that night? Selgey and Bart? Helstof couldn’t forget that either. Gale wasn’t the only one who shed clothes there in the back room of the restaurant. Selgey, the retired American Ballet Theater prima ballerina, had gotten into the spirit of the event by springing onto the