Paganini's Ghost

by Paul Adam

  “I’m sorry,” she said when she broke away, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. She looked at the smear of mascara on her knuckles. “Excuse me.”

  She hurried into the bathroom and shut the door behind her. Guastafeste and I waited in silence. It was five minutes before Ludmilla came back out, the damage to her makeup repaired.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I’m just very upset.”

  “We understand,” I said. I gave her a brief reassuring smile. “But I think you’re worrying about nothing. Yevgeny isn’t going to walk away. He doesn’t strike me as that kind of man.”

  “You don’t know him. You don’t know how easily he can be influenced. He’s just a boy.”

  “He’s twenty-three,” I said gently. “Have more faith in him. I’m sure he’s tougher than you seem to think.”

  Guastafeste took his notebook and pen from his pocket.

  “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?” he said, relieved to get back to professional matters. “When did you last see your son?”

  Ludmilla sat down on the lyre-backed chair beside the desk and crossed her legs, composed now, though her eyes were still bloodshot.

  “After lunch,” she said. “Yevgeny was practising. I left him to go shopping—not much, just some shoes, a few clothes.”

  “And you came back to the hotel at what time?”

  “About six o’clock. Yevgeny wasn’t here. I checked downstairs, in the hotel lounge and dining room, but he wasn’t there, either. That’s when I phoned Dottor Castiglione. I thought Yevgeny might have gone to see him.”

  “He left no note?”

  “No. He’s with Kousnetzoff; I’m sure of it. Where else could he be?”

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Guastafeste said. “There are many places he could be.”

  “Oh, yes? Such as?”

  “He could be in a bar having a drink.”

  “Yevgeny doesn’t drink.”

  “Not at all?”

  “No.”

  “He could have gone to a restaurant.”

  “By himself? I don’t think so.”

  “Or just be wandering round the city.”

  “Yevgeny never goes anywhere without me,” Ludmilla said.

  “Never? He must go out with friends, surely?”

  “He doesn’t have any friends. He is too dedicated to his music. He doesn’t have time for friends.”

  “But there is nothing to indicate that he has been abducted against his will.”

  “I’m not suggesting Kousnetzoff threw a bag over his head and bundled him into the back of a car. He’s far too clever for that. He’ll have taken Yevgeny somewhere quiet, where they won’t be disturbed. He’ll be using his charm on him, trying to ensnare him. I know how these agents work.”

  “Even if you’re correct,” Guastafeste said, “what do you expect me to do? There is nothing unlawful about what you describe.”

  “Kousnetzoff is a crook,” Ludmilla said fiercely. “A devious, cunning crook who is interested in Yevgeny only for the money my son can bring him. Nothing else, just the money.”

  “That’s how all business works, signora.”

  “Yevgeny is not a businessman. He is an innocent, inexperienced boy. Kousnetzoff will take advantage of him. He will—what’s the word?—con him. He will persuade Yevgeny to sign a contract, to become one of his clients. He may have done so already. He has to be stopped. Don’t you see that? Yevgeny is my son. He needs me to look after him.”

  Guastafeste ran a hand along his jawline, rubbing the rough strip of stubble. He caught my eye, then sighed wearily.

  “Do you know where Kousnetzoff is staying?” he asked Ludmilla.

  “No. If I did, I would have gone round there.”

  “I’ll track him down and see if he knows anything about Yevgeny’s whereabouts. Okay?”

  “Yes. Thank you. That would be good.”

  “Good night, signora.”

  Guastafeste took out his phone as we walked away along the corridor and called the questura. He asked someone to check the hotels, find out if Kousnetzoff was registered anywhere.

  “A complete waste of time,” he said, putting the phone back in his pocket. “What a life that kid has, eh? A different city every couple of days, no friends, only his suffocating mother for company. He’s probably gone down to the station and picked up a prostitute.”

  “He’s not the type,” I said.

  “People change. A highly strung, nervous boy like him—anything could happen.”

  We were at the car when the questura phoned back. Guastafeste listened for a moment, asked a couple of questions, then rang off.

  “Vladimir Kousnetzoff was staying at the Hotel San Michele,” he said.

  “Was?” I said.

  “He checked out earlier this evening. No forwarding address.”

  “The San Michele? The same hotel as François Villeneuve.”

  “There aren’t many to choose from in Cremona. But I’ll look into it anyway.”

  Guastafeste slid in behind the wheel of the car. I got in beside him.

  “We’ll go to the questura and I’ll get someone to run you home, Gianni. Thanks for your help.”

  “Anytime.”

  Guastafeste turned the key in the ignition and looked across at me.

  “Will you do me a favour? This is your area of expertise—violins and violinists. Check all those books you’ve got. See if you can find out exactly what gift Princess Elisa gave Paganini in Lucca. That’s what our killer was after.”

  Eight

  After breakfast the following morning, I didn’t go across to my workshop as usual, but went into my back room and browsed through my collection of music books. I have a small library of biographies and reference books, built up over many years. I say “small” because by comparison with a municipal or university library, it is very small, but by most domestic standards, it is quite extensive—there are several hundred books downstairs and many more upstairs. My wife, Caterina, when she was alive, used to complain good-naturedly about the way in which my books were slowly colonising the entire house. From a few shelves in the back room, they had gradually spread to the sitting room and then, as the children grew up and left home, to all of the bedrooms. It was like a disease, she said, or mould on a damp wall. It started small; then, before you knew it, every surface was covered with a virulent fungus that had no known cure.

  I have a number of books on Paganini. As I dipped into them, searching for information about the violinist’s relationship with Elisa Baciocchi, I was reminded of a famous quote—from Stravinsky, I believe, though I may be wrong. “Good composers borrow; great composers steal.” The same could be said of biographers. When you read a few books about the same subject one after the other, you come to realise that biography is essentially plagiarism disguised as originality. The same information, the same phrases, the same quotes, even the same mistakes keep cropping up, and it’s hard to avoid the suspicion—no, the certainty—that the writers have simply copied a previous biographer’s work. With popular biographies you expect this—the ropy “celebrity” profiles that have been cobbled together by a hack from newspaper cuttings and a couple of interviews—but it is disappointing to find the same shoddy secondhand writing in supposedly academic tomes.

  I checked through five books and discovered that the sections about Paganini and Elisa were virtually identical in each case. There could, of course, have been a legitimate explanation for that. Maybe the authors had all consulted exactly the same source material, visited the same archives, studied the same documents. But I was inclined to be sceptical. It was just too much of a coincidence that all five books—making due allowance for differences in style and emphasis—could easily have been written by the same person. Vittorio Castellani’s version, its title as unoriginal as its contents, was called Paganini: The Man and the Myth. It was the most recent of the biographies, having been written only ten years earlier, and the most readabl
e of the five, though given the turgid prose of the earlier books, that wasn’t saying much.

  I reread his chapter on Elisa, then checked the index for any reference to gifts Paganini had received, or instruments he had owned. There was nothing to indicate that Elisa had ever given him a violin small enough to fit in the gold box. I thought about what Guastafeste had said. Why commission someone to make an expensive gold violin case if the violin you were going to put in it was a run-of-the-mill instrument? It had to be something special, something valuable. Was Guastafeste right? Had one of the great luthiers, Stradivari or perhaps Guarneri del Gesù, made a tiny violin at some point, a violin that Elisa later acquired and gave to Paganini? I had never heard of such an instrument, but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. Much of Stradivari’s and Guarneri’s lives is still a mystery, and neither of them left behind records of the instruments they made.

  I took a short break to make myself a cup of coffee, then went back to Castellani’s biography of Paganini. Something else about Elisa’s letter to the violinist was bothering me. I tried to recall exactly what she’d written. Something about another piece of music Paganini had composed for her. “I think of it as your ghost, a spirit that is constantly with me . . .” Had I remembered that correctly? Paganini’s ghost. A “Serenata Appassionata,” she’d called it. I didn’t know the piece, and that troubled me. I had piles of sheet music of Paganini’s works and dozens of recordings—by Salvatore Accardo, Ruggiero Ricci, Arthur Grumiaux, Itzhak Perlman, Zino Francescatti, and others. I had all the concertos, three or four different versions of the caprices, and several LPs and CDs of his lesser-known works for violin. But I didn’t recall a Serenata Appassionata.

  I studied the list of compositions in one of the appendices in Castellani’s book. There was no mention of a Serenata Appassionata. That was strange. I took out my sheet music and recordings and started to go through them one by one. Maybe there was some obscure track on a CD I’d forgotten about.

  I was still checking when the phone rang. It was Guastafeste.

  “Ludmilla Ivanova has been in to see me,” he said. “Yevgeny didn’t come back to the hotel last night. Or this morning. She’s worried sick. She didn’t burst into tears again, thank God, but she wouldn’t leave the questura until I’d promised to find him.”

  “You think he really has been kidnapped?”

  “We’re ruling nothing out.”

  “Kousnetzoff?”

  “We don’t know where he is. He was on his own when he left the San Michele yesterday evening, according to the receptionist on duty. We have the number of his office in Saint Petersburg. We’ve tried it, but there’s no reply.”

  “So where do you go from here?”

  “Kousnetzoff had a hire car. He picked it up from Malpensa when he flew in last week. We’ve got the registration number.”

  “He could be anywhere by now. He could even have left the country. Did Yevgeny have his passport with him?”

  “No, he left everything behind. Passport, clothes, his Stradivari.”

  “It doesn’t sound good to me.”

  “Nor me. If he didn’t leave with Kousnetzoff, then either he must still be in Cremona or he left another way. We’re checking the railway station, the bus and taxi companies.”

  “He might have hired a car, I suppose.”

  “He doesn’t have a credit card.”

  “What about cash?”

  “Or much cash. Mama takes care of all the money. Pays the hotel and restaurant bills, books the plane tickets. She even buys all Yevgeny’s clothes. He gets a small monthly allowance and that’s all. Pocket money. She really does treat him like a kid.”

  “What’s your gut feeling?”

  “I don’t know. He’s a prominent international concert violinist. It’s possible he’s with Kousnetzoff. It’s also possible someone else has abducted him.”

  “Like who?”

  “Some crank. Maybe organised criminals. We’ve had no ransom demand, but it could be on the way. On the other hand, he might simply have got on a train and gone to Venice, or Florence, or somewhere for a couple of days. If he were a child, we’d have a full-scale national search under way. But with a twenty-three-year-old man, things aren’t quite so cut-and-dried.”

  Guastafeste broke off. I heard him talking to one of his colleagues in the background.

  “Sorry,” he said when he came back on the line. “This is all we need. A high-profile missing person case when we’re right in the middle of a murder enquiry.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Villeneuve? Nowhere. I have to go, Gianni. I’ll keep you posted.”

  I resumed the search through my music collection without success. If there’d ever been a recording made of the Serenata Appassionata, I certainly didn’t have a copy of it. I put my CDs and LPs back on the shelves and sat in an armchair for a while, wondering what to do next. I’d consulted all my books on Paganini and found no useful new information. I could go into Cremona, to the public library, and see what I could find, but I knew from past experience that the music section there was limited. I doubted I’d find anything I didn’t already know. A scholar, of course, would have gone back to original sources—sifted through the archives, examined old letters and records—but I didn’t have either the time or the resources to do that. Besides, Paganini’s personal papers were in Genoa and at the Library of Congress in Washington, and I had no idea where Elisa Baciocchi’s were, if indeed they had survived at all. That left me with one other possibility: finding someone else to ask, someone who knew more about Paganini than I did.

  The dark, brooding young man I knew only as Marco was waiting to greet me in the foyer of the University of Milan’s music department. His face looked drawn and tired, and he had shadows beneath his eyes. We shook hands and he looked at me curiously.

  “Haven’t we met before?” he said. “Ah, yes, of course. The reception in Cremona. You were the one who . . . Mirella told me.” He paused, smiling slightly.

  “Well, yes, that was unfortunate,” I said, filling in the uncomfortable silence.

  “You don’t need to worry about it. He won’t remember you.”

  “He won’t?”

  “Vittorio doesn’t notice anyone or anything round him,” Marco said. “Except when he looks in the mirror,” he added tartly. “Come on, I’ll show you to his office.”

  We went up a broad flight of stone steps to the first floor and along a corridor lined with notice boards covered in concert posters, timetables, and other departmental information. As we reached a door halfway along the corridor, we had to step aside to let a man in dirty overalls pass. He had a lightweight aluminium ladder in one hand, a toolbox in the other. I glanced into the room he’d just left and saw a second man perched on a trestle platform, plastering the ceiling.

  “There’s a toilet on the floor above,” Marco explained. “A pipe burst over the summer, brought the whole ceiling down.”

  “Over the summer?”

  “University maintenance people—they live in a different time zone to the rest of us. With any luck, it might be finished for Christmas.”

  We kept going along the corridor. A group of students came towards us, most of them carrying instrument cases. They broke apart in the middle to let us through. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the faint sound of a piano, someone practising scales and arpeggios.

  “You are Professor Castellani’s assistant?” I said.

  I sensed Marco bristle a little at the suggestion.

  “I’m technically an associate lecturer,” he said stiffly. “I’ve just finished my doctorate, but I’m doing bits of research for Vittorio, as well.”

  He stopped outside a panelled oak door that had Vittorio Castellani’s name stencilled on it in white paint. He knocked once and pushed open the door without waiting for a reply. Castellani was seated behind his desk on the far side of the office. It was a big room, as befitted his status as a professor of music, but a large part
of it was occupied by a Steinway grand piano. There were shelves crammed with books and scores on three of the walls and a high window on the fourth, through which a chestnut tree could be seen, its bare branches silhouetted against the sky. It was late afternoon and it was growing dark. The panes of the window were spotted with raindrops.

  “Signor Castiglione for you,” Marco said.

  I walked towards the desk, but Castellani made no attempt to acknowledge my arrival. He looked straight past me at Marco.

  “Have you typed up that article yet?” he demanded.

  “Almost finished,” Marco replied defensively.

  “It’s taking you a long time. What about the stuff for Friday? The briefing.”

  “The Culture Show? It’s in progress.”

  “I want it tonight.”

  “You said tomorrow.”

  “I want it tonight, okay? Get it done. And call Gilberto’s. Book me a table for two for Saturday night. Nine o’clock. You seen Mirella about?”

  “No.”

  “You do, tell her I want to see her.”

  Castellani waved a hand, dismissing Marco from the room. I waited for the young man to go, then approached the desk.