Paganini's Ghost

by Paul Adam

  “He was pretty patronising, really. Talked down at me most of the time.”

  “That’s his style,” Margherita said. “Have you ever seen him on the Culture Show, that trashy piece of froth RAI puts out on a Friday night? The way he talks to some of the guests. If I were on it, I’d give him a good slap.”

  “That would help the ratings,” I said.

  “The whole programme infuriates me.”

  “Why do you watch it, then?”

  “It’s good for my blood pressure. Every time I see Castellani’s blow-dried hair and those skintight jeans, I want to hurl something at the television. I’m all in favour of popular culture, but why on earth does it have to be so vulgar, so crass? And don’t even get me started on those stupid blondes who escort the guests into the studio. Can people really take culture only if it’s served up by a reptilian narcissist like Castellani, with a few scantily clad bimbettes to keep him company?”

  “Steady on,” I said. “This is supposed to be a relaxing evening out.”

  “Am I moaning? Sorry. My daughter says that’s all I do. Is it an age thing, or is there really a lot to be disgruntled about?”

  “It’s not an age thing,” I said.

  “I interrupted you. Go on. What did he say?”

  “Not much more than is in his biography of Paganini. He didn’t know anything about any gifts Elisa Baciocchi might have given Paganini, and he’d never heard of the Serenata Appassionata. I can find no mention of it in any of the other books, either.”

  “But you think it exists?”

  “Elisa mentions it by name in her letter. It definitely exists—or it did then. Whether it’s still round now, that’s a different question.”

  “So what might have become of it?”

  “That’s what I need to find out.” I looked at her. “I have a confession to make. I’ve done something rather disgraceful, particularly for a respectable man of my mature years.”

  “My God, now you’ve got me interested,” Margherita said. “Come on, don’t keep me in suspense.”

  I reached across to my raincoat, which was draped over the back of a spare chair, and pulled the book from the pocket.

  “I took this from Castellani’s office.”

  “You stole it?” Margherita said.

  “Borrowed it. I have every intention of returning it.”

  “What is it?”

  I showed her the title.

  “Napoléon’s Sisters: Caroline, Pauline, and Elisa. There may be something useful in it,” I said.

  “Won’t Castellani miss it?”

  “It was gathering dust in a cardboard box on the floor. I couldn’t believe it when I looked down and saw it. He obviously doesn’t need it for anything. I’ll keep it for a few days, then hand it back to Marco. He won’t give me away.”

  I leafed quickly through the book. I saw passages underlined, notes scrawled in the margins, but I didn’t look closer. Now wasn’t the time.

  “And what about the violin you think may once have been in the gold box?” Margherita said.

  “I’ve got no further with that.”

  “You think François Villeneuve opened the box and removed it?”

  “That’s one possibility.”

  “If he did, what happened to it?”

  “It wasn’t in his hotel room. Either he disposed of it before he was murdered or his killer took it.”

  Margherita shuddered.

  “Someone would kill for a violin?” She paused. “Stupid of me. Of course they would,” she said, and I knew she was remembering her uncle. “Didn’t you say it must be a very small violin?”

  “The smallest I can imagine, yes. But if it were a Stradivari, it could be worth a lot of money.”

  “And the other possibilities?”

  “Villeneuve opened the box and found it empty. Or he never opened it at all.”

  “Empty? You mean the violin had already been taken from it? When? By whom?”

  “I couldn’t say. There are an awful lot of unanswered questions.”

  I put the book back in my coat pocket and topped up our wineglasses as the waiter brought us our first course—wild mushroom risotto for Margherita, spinach and ricotta cannelloni for me. For the rest of the meal, we kept away from Paganini and Elisa and François Villeneuve and talked of other things—about Margherita’s work, about my work, about our families. We had so much in common, so many shared interests, that conversation was never difficult.

  Afterwards, I walked Margherita back to her apartment. She invited me in for coffee, but I declined. It was getting late and I had my train to Cremona to catch. Margherita kissed me lightly on the lips and stepped back.

  “Thank you for a wonderful evening, Gianni.”

  “It was my pleasure. I’ll call you soon.”

  “I’d like that. Good night.”

  I watched her go in through the door of the apartment block, then found a taxi to take me to the station. I never drive my car into Milan if I can help it, especially at night. The traffic is insufferable and the parking even worse.

  An hour and a half later, I was home. The red light on my answering machine was flashing. I had two messages. The first was from Vincenzo Serafin, though he didn’t bother to identify himself, just left a peremptory command on the tape.

  “That violin I mentioned on Saturday. I need you to look at it. I’ll expect you in my office tomorrow morning, eleven o’clock. Okay?”

  I was used to Serafin’s lordly arrogance, but even so, the message annoyed me. How dare he address me in such a discourteous fashion. I wasn’t one of his employees, a minion at his beck and call. I was an independent artisan with an international reputation in my field. I was damned if I was going to let him push me about. I’d ring his office in the morning and say I couldn’t come.

  The second message was from Guastafeste, simply asking me to give him a call. It was half-past eleven. I wouldn’t normally phone anyone at such a late hour, but I knew that Guastafeste would still be up. He rarely goes to bed before midnight, and often much later, particularly when he’s working on a major investigation.

  “Thanks for calling, Gianni,” he said when he heard my voice on the line.

  “Sorry, I was out,” I said. “I’ve been in Milan, asking Vittorio Castellani about Paganini and Elisa Baciocchi.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing of any interest, I’m afraid. But I’ll keep looking. You?”

  “I had the forensics people go over the inside of the gold box and the letter from Elisa. They found no trace of Villeneuve’s fingerprints. It doesn’t look to me as if he managed to open the box.”

  “Unless he wore gloves,” I said.

  “Why would he do that? He was a fine-arts dealer, not a safecracker. His prints were all over the outside of the box. If he’d opened it, his prints would have been inside, too.”

  “He didn’t work out the scordatura?”

  “I think not. He wasn’t a violin specialist like you. It would never have occurred to him that the actual notes of the ‘Moses Fantasy’ weren’t what was written on the page.”

  “So the violin had already been removed. Villeneuve didn’t touch it.”

  “It looks that way to me.”

  “Have you found out where he acquired the box?”

  “Not yet. A jeweller is coming in tomorrow to inspect it. But I have a suspicion your friend Vincenzo Serafin knows more than he’s letting on.”

  “Serafin? Don’t talk to me about Serafin. I got a message from him on my answering machine this evening, practically ordering me to go to his office tomorrow morning. The man is an obnoxious bully.”

  Guastafeste was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Are you going to go?”

  “I wasn’t intending to. I thought I’d assert my independence. Why?”

  “What does he want to see you about?”

  “Just a violin.”

  Guastafeste was silent again.

  “Antonio?” I said. “Wh
at is this?”

  “Go and see him, Gianni,” Guastafeste said. “I’ll come with you. I’d like a word with him, and face-to-face will be better than on the phone.”

  “A word with him about Villeneuve?”

  “I spoke to him yesterday morning, if you remember. He said he knew nothing about why Villeneuve was in Cremona, said he wasn’t doing business with him.”

  “And he was?”

  “I don’t know for sure. But we’ve got the phone records from the Hotel San Michele now. François Villeneuve phoned Serafin on Thursday evening, and again on Friday morning. I’d like to know what they talked about. Oh, and while we’re on the subject, we checked the phone records at the Hotel Emanuele. A call was put through to Yevgeny Ivanov’s suite yesterday afternoon, at three-forty-six, when Ludmilla was out shopping.”

  “You know who the call was from?” I asked.

  “It came from the Hotel San Michele,” Guastafeste replied. “From Vladimir Kousnetzoff.”

  Nine

  We drove into Milan in an unmarked police car. Guastafeste has none of my qualms about big-city traffic and, as far as parking is concerned, he has the policeman’s careless disregard for what he sees as minor inconveniences. He leaves his car wherever he pleases, in Cremona and elsewhere—and not just his police vehicle but his private car, too. He gets parking tickets, of course, but never pays them—and never gets fined for not paying them. His colleagues are all the same. Somewhere in the questura, I imagine, there is a room that is knee-deep in paper, all the various tickets and summonses that officers have accumulated over the years and ignored.

  We headed across the River Po to the A21, then joined the A1 outside Piacenza and went northwest towards Milan at a steady 140 kilometres an hour—greater than the speed limit to satisfy Guastafeste’s professional pride, but moderately restrained in deference to the nervous, elderly passenger by his side.

  “Any news of Yevgeny Ivanov?” I asked.

  Guastafeste banged on the horn and flashed his headlights at the van in front of us, then sped past as the van pulled over into the inside lane.

  “Not a thing. We’ve circulated an alert to every police force in the country, telling them to watch out for him. Airports, seaports, and border posts have been notified, too.”

  “And Kousnetzoff?”

  “No sign of him, either.”

  “You think Yevgeny’s with him?”

  “That phone call on Monday makes it more likely. Kousnetzoff phones the Emanuele. Ludmilla is out. He speaks to Yevgeny; maybe they arrange to meet. But if Yevgeny is with him, he’s there of his own free will. All that stuff about abductions, that’s just Ludmilla getting overexcited. An agent wouldn’t kidnap a potential client; that would be ludicrous.”

  “And if he’s not with Kousnetzoff?”

  “That’s trickier. We have to decide whether we go public, notify the media, get Yevgeny’s photo in the press, on television. Fortunately, that’s not my decision. The questore will have to make that call.”

  Guastafeste eased on the brakes as we came up behind a small Fiat Panda. He hammered on the horn again, but the Panda stayed where it was, crawling past the lorries in the inside lanes before finally pulling over to let us pass.

  “I’ve been thinking overnight,” I said. “About the gold box, the violin it must once have contained, Elisa’s letter to Paganini. What happened to the violin? Villeneuve didn’t manage to open the box, but someone must have taken the violin. Who?”

  “The box could have been empty for years,” Guastafeste said. “Maybe Paganini himself disposed of the violin.”

  “There’s another mystery, too,” I said. “The piece of music Elisa refers to in her letter, the piece of music that Paganini wrote for her in Lucca. His ‘ghost,’ she called it.”

  “I remember.”

  “A Serenata Appassionata. I can’t find any mention of it in any books on Paganini. Castellani didn’t know anything about it, either. It appears to have gone missing, too.”

  “Is that significant?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s intriguing. What if someone were looking for this ‘ghost’?”

  Guastafeste looked across at me sharply.

  “You think Villeneuve’s killer may have been after a piece of music?”

  I shrugged.

  “It’s possible.”

  “A missing composition by Paganini. Would that be valuable?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How valuable? Thousands? Tens of thousands?”

  “Certainly thousands,” I said.

  “But not more?”

  “Paganini wasn’t a great composer. A long-lost composition by Mozart or Beethoven, now that might fetch a fortune at auction. But a Paganini? I’m not sure. His name alone is worth something. He seems to fascinate people. There may well be collectors of Paganiniana—and there are quite a few of those—who would pay a lot of money to own one of his compositions.”

  “But would they kill for it?”

  I didn’t reply. We were on the outskirts of Milan now. The road into the city centre was solid with slow-moving or stationary traffic, but Guastafeste had no intention of waiting patiently in line. He rolled down his window, took a portable flashing light from a clip under the dashboard, and hooked it out through the window, attaching it to the car roof by its magnetic base. He flipped the switch to turn the light on and another to activate the siren, pulled over on to the wrong side of the carriageway, and accelerated. I hung on to the door handle, watching the scenery flash past outside.

  Guastafeste turned his head and grinned at me.

  “I know it’s childish, but I always get a kick out of this.”

  “Try to keep your eyes on the road, Antonio,” I said a little hoarsely.

  “This the first time you’ve done this?”

  “Yes, but it’s never too late to get killed in a multiple-car crash.”

  “Relax, I know what I’m doing.”

  “You may be right. But does everyone else know what you’re doing?”

  Guastafeste braked hard and veered back to the right side of the road as a huge articulated lorry loomed up in front of us.

  “Are you allowed to do this in Milan?” I asked. “Being a policeman from Cremona.”

  “Strictly speaking, no, it’s outside my jurisdiction.”

  “What if the Milanese police catch you?”

  Guastafeste winked at me.

  “Be serious. The Milanese police catch me?”

  He lurched back out across the carriageway and overtook a few more crawling cars before swerving back in time to skip a red light through the Porta Romana. He slowed down then and removed the flashing light from the car roof. We negotiated the inner ring road at a sedate twenty kilometres an hour and turned down the Via Manzoni towards Vincenzo Serafin’s office.

  The narrow side street near La Scala on which the office is situated is technically a no-parking zone, but Guastafeste interpreted the regulations as not so much a prohibition as a tentative suggestion. He pulled to the side of the road, then, to compound his transgression, drove up over the kerb and stopped the car with the two nearside wheels on the pavement, blocking the path of pedestrians.

  “Here’s how I want to play it, Gianni,” he said. “You go in by yourself. How long do you reckon you need to complete your business with Serafin?”

  “Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. It depends on how much he talks.”

  “Okay, I’ll give you twenty minutes, then come in. He’ll be more at ease with you there. I might catch him off guard.”

  I opened my door and climbed out. Serafin’s violin-dealing business has a shop frontage at street level, but there is nothing in the shop except a desk and chair occupied by his haughty blonde receptionist, Annalisa. She glanced at me without interest as I walked in, then turned her attention back to the glossy fashion magazine she was idly flicking through. She has worked for Serafin—and I use the term work loosely—for several years, but I have yet to figure
out exactly what she does. She has no computer. She does not appear to write letters or file invoices. She seems to be a sort of “trophy” receptionist, a status symbol that affirms Serafin’s position as a successful businessman. She is certainly a decorative addition to his establishment, but then, so would be a vase of flowers—and the vase would probably be more productive.

  “I’m expected,” I said.

  Annalisa looked up again, as if she were surprised that I was still there.

  “Your name?”

  I choked back the curt retort that was rising in my throat. I’d been there dozens of times. She knew perfectly well who I was, but this was her way of bolstering her self-esteem, of reassuring herself that others could be as insignificant as she was.

  “Gianni Castiglione,” I said with icy politeness.

  “Ah, yes, you may go up.”

  “Thank you.”

  She reached under the desk and pressed the hidden button with one of her varnished talons. A door at the back of the room clicked open and I walked through into the small hall, where a security man in a suit sat on guard outside Serafin’s inner sanctum—the soundproofed music room where he keeps his stock of violins. I nodded at the man and went upstairs to Serafin’s office.

  Serafin wasn’t alone. His mistress, Maddalena, was with him, perched on the corner of his desk, her bright pink lips pulled together in an angry pucker.

  “But you always let me, Vincenzo,” she was whining. “Why not today?”

  “I can give you a number of reasons. Two thousand six hundred reasons, to be precise,” Serafin replied.

  “It wasn’t that much.”

  “I have the bill in a drawer. I can show you it, if you like.”

  Serafin waved me into the room, then continued his conversation with Maddalena.

  “And the one before that wasn’t much less. Fifteen hundred euros, if I remember correctly.”

  “It was less than that,” Maddalena protested.

  “I have that bill, too.”

  Maddalena leant back over the desk, showing off her willowy figure. Her voice took on a more conciliatory tone.

  “All right, maybe it was that much. But you can afford it, darling. What’s the problem? You like me to look nice, don’t you?”