Paganini's Ghost

by Paul Adam

  “Just once. He went to visit her in the convent. No one knows what passed between them. Perhaps he entreated her to leave, to come away with him and be his wife. Perhaps she wanted to but couldn’t. Perhaps she had already decided to devote herself to a life of religious contemplation. Whatever the truth, the fact is that Viotti went away without her. He returned to Turin, then left Italy for Paris.”

  “And the gold violin?”

  “He gave it to Teresa.”

  “This is guesswork?”

  “Yes. But it fits what happened years later—about 1806, 1807, when Elisa was princess of Piombino and Lucca. It’s documented in a book I’ve got about Elisa. Napoléon was running short of cash to keep his war machine going. He ordered Elisa to dissolve all the religious institutions in her principality and confiscate their lands and assets—which would have been quite considerable. Montecatini is near Lucca. Teresa’s convent is one of the institutions that would have been closed.”

  “So the gold violin—if it was there—would have been confiscated by Elisa’s soldiers,” Guastafeste said. “But not sent to fill her brother’s war chest.”

  “That’s consistent with Elisa’s character. She went through all the assets that were seized from the convents and monasteries and kept some of the loot for herself. The gold violin must have been hard to resist. A beautiful piece of jewellery like that. And she was in the middle of a passionate love affair with Paganini. Who better to give the violin to than him?”

  Guastafeste scooped up a forkful of pasta and chewed pensively.

  “It’s only a theory,” I said. “But it fits the facts. How else did Elisa get the violin?”

  Guastafeste nodded.

  “It has the ring of truth about it,” he said. “Catherine the Great gives it as a love token to Viotti, he gives it as a love token to Teresa, and then Elisa gives it as a love token to Paganini. And yet not one of those loves endured. That says something about human nature, doesn’t it?”

  Was he right? I wondered. Certainly about Catherine and Elisa and Paganini. All moved on to other lovers without much difficulty. But Viotti and Teresa? That was a different matter. No one knows what became of Teresa. Her life was lived away from the public gaze. But Viotti was one of the greatest musicians of his day, his achievements recorded for posterity.

  He was a complex man. His first appearance in Paris, playing one of his own concertos—only months after that final meeting with Teresa—caused a sensation. His audience clamoured for more and every concert he gave thereafter was a sellout. But eighteen months after that glorious debut, he walked away from the concert platform and devoted his time to teaching—without remuneration—and composition, his violin concertos being performed, but not by him.

  A brief spell running one of the Paris opera houses with the help of Marie Antoinette’s coiffeur put him in jeopardy after the French Revolution and he fled to London, where he resumed his career as a soloist. But that revival was cut short when he was accused of revolutionary sympathies and expelled by the English. Three years of exile in Germany followed, during which time he composed but did not perform, and when the expulsion order was revoked and he was permitted to return to London, he rejected any notion of playing in public again and became a wine merchant. Business was clearly not his forte, however, for in 1818 he went bankrupt. He went back to Paris to run the Royal Opera House, but that was not a success, either. When he died, in 1824, he had large debts, which even the sale of his Stradivari violin could not cover.

  He was an enigmatic man—kind, generous, and modest, but difficult to fathom. He was renowned in his time as both a composer and performer, but he had the misfortune to be living in an era of great change. With the rise of Romanticism, his concertos, hugely popular before 1800, were soon regarded as old-fashioned, and his classical style of playing was superseded by the flashy virtuosity of which Paganini was the foremost exponent. Viotti’s real legacy was not his music, but the pupils he taught—Rode, Baillot, and Kreutzer, who went on to dominate the nineteenth-century French school of violin playing, their influence continuing on into the twentieth century through Massart, Wieniawski, and Kreisler.

  Now, as I reflected on Viotti’s life, one particular fact stood out: He never married. Was he still carrying a torch for Teresa Valdena? I don’t generally subscribe to the concept of a broken heart. An aching heart, yes. We have all suffered from that. But a heart so shattered by lost love that it never fully recovers from the blow? That is much rarer. We are a resilient species. If we were not, how would we survive the vicissitudes that life throws in our paths? The pain, the grief, the misery—they would all overwhelm us and we would just curl up and die. But we cope. We endure. We lose one love, we mourn for a period, and then we move on. In the flash of a star that comprises our life span, it will only be an instant before we, too, are gone.

  Did Viotti never recover from the loss of Teresa? Did he carry her memory with him for the rest of his life, a memory so intense that no other woman could erase it? I pictured that final encounter at the convent at Montecatini, Teresa in her nun’s habit, Viotti sitting beside her. What did they say to each other? Did they touch hands? Was there a last kiss before they parted? I saw Viotti reasoning with her, perhaps pleading with her to come with him, Teresa shaking her head. Then I saw him giving her the jewelled violin he had brought home with him from Russia. A gift from one woman who had loved him, which he was now giving to another woman who had loved him, but who would never be his. There was something poignant about that.

  “So the question now,” Guastafeste said, scraping up the last few conchiglie from his bowl, “is what did Paganini do with the violin? Did he keep it for the rest of his life? Did he give it away, perhaps to another woman?”

  “Coffee?” I said.

  “Please.”

  I spooned coffee into the steel espresso pot and put it on the hob.

  “It would help if we knew where François Villeneuve got the gold box,” I said. “Elisa had it specially made for the violin, after all, and Paganini must surely have used it. If we knew where the box came from, it might give us a clue as to what became of the violin.”

  “There’s been progress on that,” Guastafeste said. “While I was in Paris, my colleagues checked through the stolen-goods register, particularly the fine-arts squad’s records from Milan. A gold box exactly matching the one Villeneuve had—combination lock, engraving of Moses on the lid—was stolen from a villa in Stresa ten days ago. The villa belonged to an old lady who’d just died, so it was unoccupied at the time.”

  I was opening a cupboard to take out two coffee cups, but I stopped and turned to stare at Guastafeste.

  “An old lady? Stresa?” I said. “Her name wasn’t Nicoletta Ferrara, was it?”

  Now it was Guastafeste’s turn to stare at me.

  “How did you know?”

  I told him about the Bergonzi violin that Vincenzo Serafin had asked me to authenticate. Guastafeste took a moment to absorb the details; then he said, “Serafin went to the villa?”

  “He has a country house up there himself. Nicoletta Ferrara’s nephew invited him over to look at the violin.”

  “When was this?”

  “Recently. The last couple of weeks, I think.”

  “So let me get this straight. Serafin visits the villa; then shortly afterwards the house is burgled and a valuable gold box is stolen, a gold box that later turns up in the possession of Serafin’s friend François Villeneuve.” Guastafeste paused. “I think I’m going to have to make another trip to Milan.”

  Fourteen

  The excursion to Paris, and the unplanned detour to London, had taken more time than I’d anticipated, and next morning I was disconcerted to find that I had got behind in my work. An instrument belonging to one of the first violins in the pit orchestra at La Scala was due for collection that very day, yet I’d barely looked at it, never mind begun the fitting of the new sound post and bridge that its owner was expecting.

 
I cut short my breakfast and skipped my customary mid-morning break for coffee and applied myself intensively to the job. By lunchtime the violin—a rather handsome mid-nineteenth-century Giuseppe Rocca—was finished. I tried it out for a short while; then, satisfied with the sound, prepared to put the instrument back in its case.

  A violin case—like a bedroom—reveals a lot about the personality of its owner. Some are pristine, the linings as clean as the day they were made; others are battered and dirty, littered with the detritus of a musician’s life—discarded strings, chips of rosin, chocolate-bar wrappers. Renato Lampi’s case was one of the latter.

  Renato was a big, ungainly man with long, greasy hair and an unkempt beard that always seemed to contain traces of the last meal he’d eaten, sometimes the last week’s meals. His clothes were generally crumpled, his shirts frequently stained with splashes of toothpaste or pasta sauce. His violin case was a similar mess. The felt linings, originally a rich dark green colour, were now faded and matted with grime. In places, the material had come unstuck, exposing the bare plywood underneath. The bottom of the shaped recess where the violin nestled was caked with dust and one end had broken away entirely.

  I baulked at putting the instrument—now rejuvenated by my work—back into such a squalid environment. It deserved better. I emptied the case, then took my vacuum cleaner and sucked out all the dirt. The broken section was more of a problem. It certainly needed repairing, for at the moment the violin wasn’t properly cushioned by the sides of the recess. If the instrument slid round while the case was being carried, it might get damaged.

  I lifted out the broken section, thereby revealing a small cavity behind. The damage was clearly not new, because the cavity was full of fluff and dust and other bits of rubbish. There were two stubby pencils that had somehow strayed in, an ebony mute with a chipped leg, and several pieces of paper, including a receipt for a set of new strings that was five years old. I scraped all the rubbish out and vacuumed the cavity; then I fastened the broken section back into place and reglued the felt lining.

  It was while I was disposing of the mute and scraps of paper that something suddenly occurred to me. I thought back to our visit to the Molyneux et Charbon archives in Paris, to one of the drawings we’d seen in the big leather-bound ledgers. I went to the phone and rang the questura. Guastafeste wasn’t there—he’d gone to Milan—so I left a message asking him to call me when he returned.

  It was early afternoon, and I was absorbed in one of the other jobs I’d neglected to do, when Renato arrived to collect his violin. I didn’t really have time to socialise, but I did. Living and working alone in rural seclusion can be a dispiriting experience. Sometimes I can go for days without seeing another person, so I always try to be hospitable to my customers. Renato isn’t a close friend, but we have known each other for many years, and at our infrequent meetings I always make an effort to catch up on his life.

  We went into the kitchen and spent an amiable half hour drinking wine and gossiping about La Scala, whose orchestra, like most professional orchestras, is a hotbed of feuding and adultery. I am familiar with just about all the members of the pit band—I look after the instruments of many of the string players—and Renato was well informed about who was sleeping with whom and who had fallen out with whom. By the time he left, I was feeling quite relieved that I worked on my own. Just hearing about the antics at the opera house was exhausting.

  I returned to my workshop, but I had been settled at my bench for less than half an hour when I heard footsteps and looked up, to see Ludmilla Ivanova outside on the terrace. She opened the door and strode in, a determined glint in her eyes that made me sigh inwardly. I knew she hadn’t come for a cosy little chat.

  “Where’ve you been?” she demanded.

  Her curt manner took me aback a little. I stared at her.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’ve been ringing you for days.”

  “Ringing me?”

  “About Yevgeny. The police are doing nothing. They just fob me off with excuses. I thought that friend of yours was going to help, but every time I call the questura, they say he’s not there. What’s going on? Where is Yevgeny? Why has he not been found?”

  “He’s safe, signora; we know that.”

  “We know nothing of the kind. That phone call to you was meaningless. If he’s safe, why hasn’t he returned? It’s Kousnetzoff, I’m telling you. He is behind this.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. He said he would be back in a few days.”

  “A few days have passed. Where is he? Why is no one doing anything? Why? I’m sick of this horrible little town. I want Yevgeny back; then we can get away from here. I wish we’d never come.”

  She went on in this vein for several more minutes, getting more and more worked up about the whole business. My attempts to calm her, to reassure her, were rejected out of hand and I could see that she was not going to leave me alone until I took some kind of action.

  “You came by taxi, I assume?” I said when she finally tired of saying the same things over and over again.

  “What’s that got to do with it?” Ludmilla said.

  I took off my work apron and hung it on a hook on the wall.

  “I will drive you back to your hotel now,” I said. “Then I will make enquiries about Yevgeny and Kousnetzoff.”

  “ ‘Enquiries’? What do you mean?”

  I took her firmly by the arm and escorted her out of the workshop.

  “Just leave it to me, signora,” I said.

  I had no clear idea of what I was going to do, but I knew I had to do something. Guastafeste and his colleagues were obviously too engrossed with their murder enquiry to spare much time for Ludmilla. She was distressed—understandably so—and I couldn’t stand by and do nothing to help her. Her remarks about Cremona had also stung me. I didn’t like to hear my hometown maligned, to be somehow blamed for Yevgeny’s disappearance. That was unjust. I felt it was my civic duty to restore Ludmilla’s faith in Cremona and its citizens by attempting in my own small way to track down her missing son.

  I drove us into the city and saw Ludmilla up to her room in the Hotel Emanuele; then I went back down to the foyer and spoke to the receptionist and the assistant manager, both of whom had been on duty on the Monday afternoon when Yevgeny had vanished. I explained that I was acting on behalf of Ludmilla and asked them a few questions about that afternoon. They had already given statements to the police and could add nothing more to them.

  Yevgeny had received his phone call from Vladimir Kousnetzoff at about a quarter to four; then forty-five minutes later, at half-past four, he had come downstairs from his room, deposited his key at reception, and left the hotel. There had been no one waiting for him in the hotel foyer, or outside on the street—at least as far as the receptionist could see. That was the sum total of their knowledge. Had Yevgeny received any other phone calls that day? I asked. No. Had anyone come to the hotel asking for him? No. What about a stocky, bald Russian man? Had they seen anyone matching that description in the vicinity of the hotel? No, again.

  I thanked them for their time and walked the short distance to the Hotel San Michele, where I spoke to the receptionist on duty, a bubbly, chatty young woman who was only too willing to help me. Yes, she remembered Signor Kousnetzoff. He’d stayed for four nights—arrived on Thursday and checked out early Monday evening. She could tell me that without looking at the register because the police had already asked her the same question. She hadn’t spoken much to Kousnetzoff. No one in the hotel had. He’d asked for his messages when he’d been out, but that was about the limit of his conversation. She hadn’t liked him, really. His manner was unfriendly, almost rude. She hadn’t seen him with anyone else, particularly Yevgeny Ivanov. The police had asked her that, too. She was sorry, but that was about all she knew.

  I was wasting my time; I could see that now. The police had carried out all the obvious checks. There was nothing I could do that had no
t already been done. I took my leave of the receptionist and went back out to the street, crossing over to the other side to return to my car. Almost opposite the hotel entrance was a newspaper kiosk. I skirted round it to avoid the racks of papers and magazines that were half-blocking the pavement, and as I did so, I noticed that one of the racks contained foreign-language newspapers—Le Monde, El Pais, The Times, The Guardian, the International Herald Tribune. I stopped, something occurring to me suddenly. The kiosk proprietor, from his perch on a stool behind the counter, had a clear view of the Hotel San Michele’s entrance—and newspaper sellers, having long periods of inactivity to fill, are not known for their reluctance to take an interest in the affairs of others.

  “You don’t sell Russian newspapers, do you?” I asked him.

  The proprietor sniffed and rubbed his nose with an ink-stained finger.

  “No. There’s not much call for Russian papers round here. Why?”

  “I just wondered,” I said. “There was a Russian man staying in the San Michele last weekend. Short fellow in his fifties, no hair. You didn’t see him, did you? Or a skinny young Russian boy in his early twenties. They might have been together.”

  “No, can’t say I did.”

  “He didn’t come over here and buy a paper?”

  “Not that I remember. The French fellow did, but no Russians.”

  “French fellow?”

  “You know, the dead man. He was found in his room with his head bashed in. It was in the news, the TV, the lot.”

  “François Villeneuve. You spoke to him?”

  “Well, he didn’t say much. He just bought a paper. Friday and Saturday, I think. Le Monde both times. Funny-looking fellow. Buck teeth and a scrappy little beard.”

  “That’s all? He just bought a paper?”

  “That’s what I do, sell papers. Oh, and a map. He bought a map.”

  “A map of where?”

  “Of Cremona. You know, those town plans showing the streets. Well, most of them. He took a look at the index and couldn’t find what he was looking for, so I had to give him directions.”