by Gerald Elias
He didn’t move when Roy Miller’s truck drove up, arriving with Sigurd Benson.
‘Martha’s made coffee for everyone back at the house,’ Miller told them.
Benson reported that Jimmy Ubriaco’s Barrington Savings safe deposit box had been flush with cash.
‘His mountebank account,’ Jacobus muttered.
‘He came totally clean to me,’ Benson said, whose swagger made it apparent he thought Ubriaco’s flood of confession had been uncorked by his crack interrogation methods.
‘His box had the ten thousand dollars that Borlotti had given him for safekeeping the violins and a heck of a lot more from their years of collaboration.’
‘That’s a surprise,’ Jacobus said without surprise.
‘It also contained Amadeo Borlotti’s will, which appointed his friend, Jimmy Ubriaco, as his executor. Ubriaco swore the will was not a forgery.’
‘You believe it?’
‘Yes, I do. Because there was very little in it for him. Almost everything Borlotti owned, including the two-hundred-thirty- thousand dollars in his home safe, the insurance reimbursement from his destroyed home and business, and the money in the safety deposit box was left for Dahlia Maggette. But I do have some serious concerns as to whom the rightful owners of all those assets were.’
Jacobus silently vowed to make sure she got all of it. What she decided to do with the money was up to her.
‘The violins, of course, will be returned to their rightful owners,’ Benson continued, but Jacobus wasn’t listening anymore.
‘That’ll be a relief to the insurance companies,’ Nathaniel said. ‘Some of those owners, though, are going to be pretty ambivalent when they learn that instead of possessing valuable old violins they’re proud owners of a new Borlotti.’
‘And how are things working out for your new house?’ Benson asked Jacobus.
‘Eh?’
‘Tell him, Jake!’ Nathaniel said. ‘If you won’t, I will. The insurance company didn’t share our high opinion of his house’s value no matter how much I argued with them. But after I inventoried all the contents, including his violin and hundreds of one-of-a-kind musical scores, recordings, memorabilia—’
‘That we euphemistically used to call “his stuff,”’ Yumi inserted.
‘The overall payoff will be enough to build and furnish a better house than Jake ever had.’
‘You kept documentation for all that?’ Benson asked Jacobus.
‘Ask Nathaniel,’ Jacobus said.
‘Between you and me,’ Nathaniel continued, ‘I took a page out of Jimmy Ubriaco’s book and made a catalogue ex post facto. Dates and everything. The insurance company still needed some arm-twisting so I told them that if they didn’t honor Jake’s policy, it wouldn’t look too good for them in the news that they threw an old blind man out on the street who had just put Vince Primo behind bars.’
‘Isn’t that sweet?’ Jacobus asked. As much as he appreciated what Nathaniel had done, a new house would never restore his peace of mind. In a way, being out on the street would have afforded him more comfort. He almost longed for it. Starting over again was almost more of a burden than he could hope to endure. He could just stand on this spot until he was covered by snow and he wouldn’t have minded.
‘Don’t forget to come to the house,’ Miller said. He and Benson got into the truck.
‘Come on, Jake,’ Yumi said, with more enthusiasm than seemed warranted. ‘A little hot coffee will do you good.’
She, Nathaniel, and Jacobus got into her Camaro and followed the truck to the Millers’. Martha had hot coffee and pastries waiting for them.
‘What do you say we play some music for everyone?’ Yumi said to Nathaniel when everyone was settled. ‘I think we should celebrate Jake’s new house with a little concert!’
Nathaniel heartily agreed, but Jacobus, who would never recover from the loss of his violin and could not bear being a mere listener, said, ‘You go ahead. I think I’ll just go to my room.’
There was a knock at Miller’s door.
‘Lieutenant Brooks!’ Miller said. ‘What a surprise! Come on in!’
‘I can’t stay long. I just wanted to drop a little something off for Mr Jacobus.’
Jacobus was in no mood for festivities. The last thing he wanted was a slice of Bundt cake or a new clock radio to celebrate his brand new house. He got up to leave, but Yumi almost tackled him to prevent him. He heard a box opening.
‘I thought you might be able to use this,’ Brooks said.
Jacobus felt Brooks place something in his hand. It fit with the familiarity of a painting returned to its impression on the wall where it had hung for fifty years. It was the neck of a violin.
‘What the hell?’ he asked.
‘Mr Jacobus, congratulations! You’re the proud owner of a new Stradivarius! And I do mean new. We don’t need it as evidence anymore and I figured it should have a good home.’
Jacobus played a few tentative notes on the violin made by Amadeo Borlotti. A sweet sound. Not like his old friend, his Gagliano. But sweet. And it would get better. Over time.
‘And I just happened to bring the Corelli trios!’ Yumi said.
‘What do you say, Jake?’ Nathaniel asked.
‘You still know how to play the cello?’ he responded.
From time to time Jacobus’s memory betrayed him, and with the new violin he didn’t play as well in tune, but they performed for the Millers, Benson, and Brooks for almost an hour, until Jacobus became too fatigued. With the evening nearing its end, Yumi announced she was returning to Italy ‘to try out some new violins that Marcello wants me to play.’ She would drive Nathaniel back to New York with her the next morning. Though Jacobus felt the emptiness of their imminent absence from his life, the promise of his new violin helped fill the void. He shook Brooks’s hand and thanked him for it.
‘No. It’s me who should be thanking you,’ Brooks said. ‘Without your help I don’t think we’d ever have cornered Primo. But, you know, one thing I’ll always wonder about is how Primo figured out Falcone was hiding in his yacht. We thought the wife would lead us to him, but she was a decoy the whole time.’
‘Yeah. Pirates of the Caribbean.’ Jacobus faked a laugh. ‘Wild goose chase.’ He’d had enough of the conversation and wanted to get away.
‘Someone must have tipped Primo off,’ Brooks said.
‘Really? Didn’t you say Falcone asked him for help?’
‘Yes, but he never told Primo where he was. And we had Primo’s phone tapped. It’s not foolproof, and I suppose someone could have given Primo a message in person. Maybe a letter, but who writes letters these days, right?’
‘Telegram.’
Brooks laughed off that notion. Jacobus laughed along with him.
‘We’ll never know,’ Brooks said.
‘No, I guess you never will.’
AUTHOR’S NOTE
For the concertgoer, the world of classical music is a swirl of white tie and tails, elegant flourish, and ineffable beauty. What goes on backstage, though, can be, and often is, a cultural Dorian Gray. Just as Mozart’s Don Giovanni shows us the ugly underbelly lurking behind the gay frivolity of eighteenth-century mores, the Daniel Jacobus mystery series holds a mirror to the glittery façade of the concert world, taking the reader deep into its murky recesses, where greed, ambition, and power supersede notions of collegial creation and artistic perfection.
Playing With Fire, the fifth book of the series, delves into the multi-million-dollar sleight-of-hand of violin dealing: forged instruments, counterfeit documents, manipulated valuations, and insurance fraud. In real life, countless unsuspecting and trusting musicians have been burned by devious dealers. In Playing With Fire, that figure of speech becomes more than a metaphor.
Not everyone in the violin and insurance fields is a scoundrel. Quite the contrary. Without an abundance of honest brokers, acquiring and maintaining valuable violins would be chaos for professional musicians. As with fin
e art, every violin is different. Unlike fine art, those differences among violins, even over almost five centuries of the instrument’s existence, can be extraordinarily subtle. Any layperson can tell the difference between a Rembrandt and a Picasso. They might have a harder time between an Amati and a Vuillaume. And when attribution is not convincingly documented, and when experts learn more and more about certain makers and change their opinions, even honest brokers are bound to be second-guessed. For example, I’ve been the proud owner of a fine nineteenth-century Parisian violin bow since the late 1960s. Over the years, some of the most reputable bow experts in the world have identified its maker as Pierre Simon, Dominique Peccatte, and most recently Dominique’s brother, Francois Peccatte, all of whom worked together in the same shop. Who knows what the verdict will be ten or twenty years from now? Of course, I have a certain rooting interest who the maker is, as it changes the market value by tens of thousands of dollars. For a violin bow! Thus enters the temptation for shady dealing.
Here’s a true story from the dark side, which provided some of the background for Playing With Fire. It’s compiled from 2012 news articles in The Washington Post, Business Insider, Der Spiegel, and Huffpost Arts & Culture:
On Friday, November 9, 2012, Dietmar Machold, described alternately as the violin-dealing world’s Bernie Madoff and Jay Gatsby, was sentenced by Vienna’s Criminal Court to six years in prison. It was four years less than the maximum he could have received, but the judge took Machold’s partial confession and acceptance of responsibility for losses estimated at two hundred million dollars into consideration.
At its peak, Machold’s empire had offices in Vienna, Berlin, Bremen, Zurich, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, and Seoul, where he bought and sold eighteenth-century string instruments valued at millions of dollars made by the likes of Stradivari and Guarneri. With the profits of his wheeling and dealing he maintained a lifestyle for which the word lavish would be an understatement. Ultimately, though, when he was finally caught it was determined the empire could more accurately have been described as a house of cards. Major banks had loaned him millions of dollars of credit, astoundingly, for violins they never even saw. Some of those instruments Machold did not actually own, or had appraised himself, or had allegedly forged certificates of provenance for, or had promised a single instrument to multiple banks for multiple loans, or were fakes, or never even existed. But because Machold, who lived in a fourteenth-century castle and drove a yellow Rolls Royce, was a charming and persuasive gentleman who lived the high life and clicked champagne glasses with the upper crust, he was taken at his word by those who should have known better.
Jet-setting Dietmar Machold, who escaped detection for so long by flying above the radar, ultimately paid the price for his crimes with prison time and public scorn. ‘You played high and lost big,’ Judge Claudia Moravec-Loidolt said to Machold when she handed down her sentence.
Amadeo Borlotti, in Playing With Fire, took the opposite tack, remaining under the radar, away from the limelight. A seemingly humble practitioner of his craft, Borlotti preferred the quiet life in the country. He even found love at an advanced age. But his larceny, which began as a typographical error in a bill for a violin repair, grew like a malignant tumor. In the end he became a helpless captive of his past indiscretions and was consumed by it.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Among the many good guys are several who were extremely generous with their time in helping me prepare the material for this book. Terry Borman, who made a wonderful violin for me in 1992, provided me with explosive insider information about flammable fluids in a violin shop and also offered some creative possibilities of what might lead a violinmaker into temptation. Timothy Stephenson, who lives up the block from me in Salt Lake City and who made me a fabulous copy of my Peccatte bow, gave me a detailed tour of his shop, including his store of aging, valuable wood, and gave me a seminar about his tools and supplies. Michael Selman, a fellow violin student at Yale and now an internationally renowned violin expert, provided an insider’s look on high-level commerce in the violin world. Peter Prier, founder of the internationally famed Violin Making School of America in Salt Lake City, let me pick his brain while he did an amazing restoration of my 1785 Joseph Gagliano in 2014. Sadly, it was to be his last project, as he passed away in June of 2015. I think he would have been tickled to know that my character, Boris Dedubian, is partly based upon him.
For decades I have insured all of my instruments with Anderson Musical Instrument Insurance Solutions, LLC. I’ve known Peter Anderson, the company’s Managing Member, from the early days of his practice. Peter was gracious enough to provide me with the ins and outs of that complex field. (Not that I understand all of it even now.) What happens financially when the status of a precious instrument is in limbo? At what point do we decide a violin has gone from lost to stolen? How is its value determined after it has been damaged and repaired? Which experts do we believe? What kind of corroboration is necessary? There is a very large gray area where the insurance and violin fields overlap, and it is only rarely black and white.
These days, traveling with instruments, especially on international flights, can be an unintentional and dispiriting adventure. Airlines have become fussy, and at times capricious, in deciding what they’ll allow to be carried on. Instruments that are checked are sometimes damaged, usually inadvertently. Customs agents around the world have been known to confiscate million-dollar violins based upon arcane regulations, but which in reality seems little more than a whim. And most recently, the totally justifiable ban on commerce involving elephant ivory has made traveling with string instrument bows – many of which older ones have a fraction of an ounce of ivory at the tip – an absolute bureaucratic nightmare. John Demick, stage manager of the Boston Symphony and the guy in charge of shipping the musicians’ instruments when the orchestra goes on tour, gave me the lowdown on the ever-changing sea of red tape and managed to keep a smile on his face the whole time. Well, almost the whole time. Paul Liddiard, who manages Mail Express in Salt Lake City and is the world’s fastest package taper, took time out of his busy day to give me a tutorial on the art of shipping parcels from the U.S. abroad.
For all things Italian in Playing With Fire, a hearty grazie mille to my dear friend and colleague, Sergio Pallottelli, a fine musician with equally excellent culinary skills, with whom I’ve collaborated on many an enjoyable concerto and cena. Speaking of concertos, thanks to David Cowley, principal oboist of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, for permission to share our translation of Vivaldi’s sonnets for The Four Seasons. Over the course of the Jacobus series, the character Roy Miller has played a role. So thank you to my pals Joe Roy and his wife, Anne, for being such significant role models in Playing With Fire. Finally, because I was totally ignorant of how fires are fought in rural areas I turned to my friend, Jim Hallock. Jim, who plows my driveway in winter, cuts down my trees in summer, and is a former member of the vaunted West Stockbridge Fire Department in Massachusetts, was kind enough to explain in patient detail how the firemen extinguish a fire where there are no hydrants. Hopefully, I’ll never have to call upon his firefighting skills.
