by Paul Adam
“A gold violin?” I said.
Rupert Rhys-Jones nodded.
“Solid gold and studded with diamonds, rubies, and emeralds.”
He turned over two or three of the thick, glossy pages of the book to reveal a full-colour drawing of the violin. Rudy heaved himself up from his armchair and came to look, too.
“My God, that is exquisite!” he exclaimed.
“Isn’t it just?” Rhys-Jones said.
I looked at the drawing. The violin it depicted was about twenty centimetres long and not much thicker than a finger. The vertical sides—the ribs of a normal violin—were studded with diamonds, and round the top edge, where the purfling would usually be, was a continuous row of bloodred rubies. Four more rubies were inlaid into the head of the violin to represent the pegs, and down the centre of the instrument, instead of strings, were four lines of emeralds. Even in the two-dimensional drawing, the jewels seemed to sparkle with light.
“Catherine the Great gave this to Viotti?” I asked.
“That’s right,” Rhys-Jones said.
“And what happened to it?”
“No one knows. Viotti took it away from Russia with him; then it disappeared. No one has seen it for the last two hundred years.”
“It’s stunning,” Rudy said. “Where did the drawing come from?”
“From Posier’s workshop. He kept a record of it. There are forty diamonds and forty rubies round the edges, each weighing more than a carat, and eighty small Siberian emeralds down the middle. Those four red stones at the head aren’t rubies; they’re red diamonds, an incredibly rare gem.”
“What would it be worth today?” Rudy asked.
“That craftsmanship, with that provenance,” Rhys-Jones replied. “I wouldn’t dare name a price. The last time a red diamond was auctioned, in America—one weighing less than a carat—it went for nearly a million dollars. Those four red diamonds alone are probably worth five million dollars. And then you’ve got the other diamonds and the rubies and emeralds, not to mention Posier’s cachet. Put it in an auction, I couldn’t see it going for less than twenty million dollars, maybe fifteen million pounds, depending on the exchange rate.”
I gazed at the drawing, taking in the delicate golden scroll, the curving lines of brilliant jewels. I knew now what we were looking for. And I knew why François Villeneuve and Alain Robillet had been killed.
Thirteen
I spent the night at Rudy’s home in the Buckinghamshire countryside, thirty miles northwest of London. Rudy’s wife, Ruth, no doubt aware of her husband’s lunchtime proclivities, gave us a light dinner of poached salmon and salad; then Rudy and I spent a happy couple of hours playing violin duets, with Ruth accompanying us on the piano.
Both the Weigerts were accomplished musicians. They’d met as students at the Royal Academy. Rudy had realised shortly after graduation that he wasn’t cut out for the drudgery of life as a rank-and-file orchestral violinist and had found himself a job with a London violin-dealing firm. Ruth, the more talented of the two, had stuck with music, building a solid career for herself as an accompanist and chamber musician before the arrival of their children—twins, a boy and a girl—had disrupted the settled pattern of their lives.
Ruth’s career, by choice, was the one that was sacrificed to the demands of a family. She scaled down her playing commitments for a period, then, finding the trick of juggling children and work too demanding, gave up altogether—not without a sense of relief. She’d suffered badly from concert nerves and had always found performing stressful. With Rudy earning a decent salary, she was content to stay at home with the twins, keeping her hand in by doing some keyboard teaching on the side.
She was still a formidable pianist, putting Rudy and me to shame with her dexterity, her phenomenal gift for sight-reading any piece that was placed before her, no matter how difficult. We played the Bach double-violin concerto, then duets by Vivaldi, Shostakovich, and Moszkowski, Rudy lending me his Gagliano, while he contented himself with one of the lesser instruments from his collection.
It was eleven o’clock when Ruth excused herself to go to bed.
“I’ll see you in the morning, Gianni,” she said. She kissed Rudy. “Don’t stay up too long.”
“We’re just going to have a little chat. Business, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” Ruth said dryly. “Just don’t have too many glasses of it.”
She left the music room and headed upstairs. Rudy and I went along the hall to his study and Rudy got out a bottle of malt whisky and poured us each a generous measure. The curtains were open, the light from the room spilling out over the patio and the lawn beyond. On the skyline, I could see the undulating silhouette of the Chiltern Hills.
We talked about violins and I recounted my experience with the Cannon and Yevgeny Ivanov.
“You played it?” Rudy said. “You played Paganini’s violin? You crafty old devil, Gianni. What was it like?”
“Incredible. But slightly odd.”
“Odd? In what way?”
“I felt like an impostor, a trespasser. You know, like an uninvited guest at a party. There’s an English word for that, isn’t there?”
“A gate-crasher.”
“That’s right. That’s how I felt. Like a gate-crasher. I knew I shouldn’t have been doing it, but I couldn’t resist.”
“What utter nonsense. When you repair a violin, don’t you always try it out afterwards, to make sure the repair is good? So what’s the difference?”
“I know, it doesn’t make sense. But Paganini is the difference. Just to touch his instrument, never mind play it, sent shivers down my back. I was unworthy of such a distinguished violin. I got this feeling that Paganini was looking over my shoulder all the time I was playing it, screaming, ‘Stop! Stop. I can’t take any more of this appalling din.’ ”
Rudy laughed.
“He wasn’t a god, Gianni. He was a man—and a pretty disreputable man at that.”
“But he played the violin like a god.”
“For his time, yes. But he’d be nothing special today.”
“You think not? I’m not so sure.”
“Things have moved on. The standard of playing is higher than it’s ever been. In Paganini’s day, only Paganini could play Paganini. Now, every student at Juilliard, or the Royal Academy, or the Moscow Conservatoire can play it. I’ll wager that Yevgeny Ivanov plays Paganini better than Paganini did.”
“He was certainly pretty impressive. He’s disappeared, you know.”
Rudy frowned at me.
“Ivanov? What do you mean?”
I told him what had happened, described my encounters with Yevgeny and his mother, his disappearance from the hotel, and his bizarre phone call to me.
“Sounds as if he’s cracked up,” Rudy said. “Had some kind of a nervous breakdown. Either that or there’s a woman somewhere.”
“A woman?”
“My guiding principle of human nature—sex. A man does something strange, acts out of character, there’s always a woman involved. And vice versa, of course. Or a man, I suppose. He’s not gay, is he?”
“I know nothing about his sexuality,” I said.
“It wouldn’t surprise me. I know it’s crude amateur psychology, but men with overbearing mothers like that, well, they’re often gay, aren’t they? Poor boy. It’s child abuse, really, isn’t it, what he’s had to go through.”
“That’s a bit extreme, don’t you think?”
“Well, look at it. He starts the violin at—what?—four, five years old. That’s when most of them start. You think it was his idea, no parental pressure? Then his mama stands over him for three or four hours a day, making him practise. You think he wouldn’t rather have been out playing football, or watching television? I’ve seen these kids. They come to the workshops to try out instruments, and they’ve always got mummy or daddy in tow. They’re like those tennis prodigies, the teenagers with some big loudmouth bully of a dad hovering over them every minu
te of the day. They’ve had their childhoods taken away from them. I’d say that was abuse, wouldn’t you?”
“Some kids like it,” I said. “You can’t generalise.”
“Then they get to their twenties and they’ve had enough. They rebel, reject the parents who’ve put them through all that misery. I bet Ivanov’s run off with some girlfriend his mama doesn’t know about.”
“I didn’t get the impression he knows any girls.”
“Well, he should, a young fellow his age. He should have girls coming out of his ears. He could be with a prostitute, I suppose.”
“Antonio thought that, but I can’t see it. He has no money, for a start. Ludmilla keeps a very tight grip on the purse strings.”
“He’d have salted something away, ready for the day when he made his bid for freedom.”
“That doesn’t really fit with your theory about a breakdown,” I said.
“No, maybe not. I’m making it up as I go along. It’s probably all rubbish. You want a top-up?”
We lingered until the small hours, Rudy telling scurrilous tales about his work colleagues and clients; then we went to bed. I slept heavily, anaesthetised by the whisky.
In the morning, we had a late, leisurely breakfast before Rudy drove us into London and dropped me off at St. Pancras station. I caught the Eurostar to Paris, took the shuttle bus straight to Charles de Gaulle, and was back in Cremona by the early evening. I called the questura, but Guastafeste wasn’t there. He’d stayed on in Paris, one of his colleagues told me. I made myself something to eat—a pork escalope with fried potatoes—and retired to the sitting room with one of the books from my shelves—a biography of Giovanni Battista Viotti.
Viotti is not a name with which most nonmusicians are familiar. Even musicians would be hard-pressed to tell you much about his life. His works are rarely heard on the radio, and hardly ever in the concert hall. Yet he wrote twenty-nine violin concertos and is known as the father of modern violin playing.
He was born in northern Italy in 1755, twenty-seven years before Paganini, and, like Paganini, showed a precocious talent for the violin. He went to Turin at the age of eleven and became a pupil of Gaetano Pugnani, another legendary violinist, whose fame today rests almost entirely on a musical hoax perpetrated by Fritz Kreisler, who wrote several pieces for the violin in the early twentieth century, claiming that they were the work of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century composers such as Vivaldi and Tartini. One of the pieces was a “Praeludium and Allegro”—familiar to every student of the violin—which was attributed to Pugnani. Years later, Kreisler came clean and admitted that all these “long-lost” compositions were, in fact, his own work.
Pugnani is little more than an obscure footnote in history now, but in his day he was a musical giant, celebrated for his eight operas, seven symphonies, and innumerable other pieces. He was also much in demand as a soloist, and in 1780 he went on a tour of Switzerland, Germany, Poland, and Russia. He took with him his star pupil, Viotti, who was then an unknown twenty-four-year old with limited concert experience.
In Saint Petersburg, both men performed for Catherine the Great, and—as Rupert Rhys-Jones had said—the empress was so captivated by Viotti that she kept him on in the capital and he became her lover. The affair lasted a year before petering out, allowing Viotti to return to Italy. It must have been an amicable end to the relationship, for Catherine’s parting gift of the jewel-encrusted gold violin was fabulously generous, even by her standards.
Exactly what happened to the violin after that was a mystery. The biography I was reading mentioned the gift in passing but made no further reference to it. It was a book about Viotti the musician and its focus was on his career as a violinist and composer. A piece of jewellery, no matter how distinguished its provenance, was of little interest to the author.
But as I read the pages that dealt with Viotti’s return from Russia and his brief stay in Italy before he went to Paris for the triumphant debut that was to make him a celebrity overnight, I began to construct a theory about the gold violin—a theory based on the flimsiest of evidence but which, as I refined it, seemed to have an appealing plausibility.
I was still thinking about it when the phone rang. It was Guastafeste. He was back from Paris, catching up with his colleagues at the questura.
“I need to talk to you,” I said. “I’d prefer not to do it on the phone.”
“Give me an hour and I’ll be there,” Guastafeste said.
“Have you eaten?”
“No, but . . .”
“When did you last eat?”
“Gianni . . .”
“When?”
“Breakfast.”
“I’ll make you something.”
“You don’t need—”
“Don’t argue, Antonio. I’ll see you in an hour.”
I went into the kitchen and made a simple pasta sauce with olive oil, onions, garlic, and tomatoes. By the time Guastafeste arrived, there were ham and black olives and a bottle of red wine on the kitchen table and a pan of boiling water on the hob. I added a few handfuls of conchiglie to the water as Guastafeste walked in, then poured us both a large glass of wine.
“Help yourself to the ham and olives.”
“You shouldn’t have, Gianni,” Guastafeste said. “It’s not necessary.”
“You look tired and hungry,” I said. “I can’t do anything about the fatigue, but I can certainly feed you. You’re overdoing it; I can tell. You’ve got to take a break occasionally, you know. Look after yourself better.”
“I’m fine,” Guastafeste insisted, but he wolfed down a slice of ham and some olives in quick succession, then took a long gulp of wine.
I gave the pasta a stir and joined him at the table.
“What news from Paris?” I asked. “You stayed on longer than you expected.”
“I was waiting for the pathologist’s report on Alain Robillet. It was Robillet, by the way. His wife formally identified him. He was killed by a heavy blow to the head.”
“Like Villeneuve.”
“There were differences. Villeneuve was hit with the lamp in his hotel room. Robillet was hit with something much nastier—a hammer or a wrench, the pathologist reckoned. And hit with enough force to leave a hole in his skull.”
I grimaced.
“They didn’t find the weapon?”
“It wasn’t at the scene,” Guastafeste said. “They’ve been searching the surrounding area to see if the killer dumped it somewhere, but they’ve found nothing so far.”
“Motive?”
“Nothing obvious. It might have been robbery. There was a shop full of antiques downstairs. It was well secured, but Robillet had the keys to the locks. They were in his jacket pocket. It’s possible that the killer took the keys, went into the shop and stole something, then returned the keys.”
“Was anything missing?”
Guastafeste shrugged.
“You saw the place. There must have been thousands of items. There’s no way you could tell if anything had been taken, not unless you cross-checked everything against an inventory. And Robillet and Villeneuve, according to Inspector Forbin, were not the kind of men who kept inventories. Their business affairs were, let’s say, somewhat less than transparent. Half the stuff in their shop was probably stolen in the first place.”
Guastafeste helped himself to another couple of olives.
“Forbin said they mixed with some pretty unsavoury characters. Violent, ruthless characters who wouldn’t think twice about smashing in someone’s head with a hammer.”
“Forbin knows who these people are?”
“It’s a long list.”
I went to the stove and tested the pasta. The conchiglie were just al dente. I drained off the water and put the pasta into a bowl with the tomato sauce. I placed the bowl on the table in front of Guastafeste, then brought grated Parmesan from the fridge.
“You said you wanted to talk to me,” Guastafeste said.
“Yes. I
think I know what was in the gold box.”
Guastafeste paused, a spoonful of Parmesan half-sprinkled over his pasta.
“Go on,” he said.
I told him about my meeting with Rupert Rhys-Jones. Then I showed him a colour photocopy of the jewelled violin that Rhys-Jones had had done for me before I left his office. Guastafeste studied the photocopy in silence for a long time.
Finally, he said, “How much is it worth?”
“A lot. Twenty million dollars, Rhys-Jones reckoned.”
“And this is what Elisa Baciocchi gave to Paganini?”
“It has to be.”
“Where did she get it?”
“I don’t know for certain, but I have an idea. Viotti, as I said, was given it by Catherine the Great, as a memento of their affair.”
“He must have been one hell of a lover.”
“Perhaps. But Catherine wasn’t the first woman he loved. There was another woman—in Turin, where Viotti lived before he went to Russia. Her name was Teresa Valdena, the daughter of a wealthy cloth merchant. Teresa was seventeen when Viotti met her, Viotti twenty-one. They fell in love and wanted to get married, but Teresa’s father disapproved of the match. Viotti, a penniless music student with few prospects, was not the kind of son-in-law he wanted. Valdena forced his daughter to break off the engagement and forbade her from any further contact with Viotti.
“Viotti went off on his tour of Europe with Pugnani and was away for eighteen months. When he returned to Turin, he found that Teresa’s father had sent her away to a convent after she refused to marry the young nobleman he had chosen to be her husband. The convent she went to was at Montecatini, in Tuscany.”
“So Viotti never saw her again?” Guastafeste said.
