Paganini's Ghost

by Paul Adam

  “To where?”

  “The Via Bucco.”

  I frowned.

  “The Via Bucco?”

  “I had to think about it myself, to tell you the truth, and I’ve lived in Cremona all my life. It was too small to be on the map.”

  “Have you told the police this?” I asked.

  “Yes, a few days ago. They were questioning everyone round the hotel. Me, the shops and businesses. You know the Via Bucco?”

  “Yes, I know it,” I said.

  It was near the railway station, a seedy little dead end backing onto the tracks. As far as I could recall, there was only one thing of any interest there. I drove down to refresh my memory, then headed back into the town centre, parked, and walked to the questura.

  Guastafeste had returned from Milan. He came down to the front desk and suggested we go for a coffee at a bar round the corner. Something in his manner told me that his trip to see Vincenzo Serafin had not been a success.

  I waited until we were seated at a table, a double espresso each and a pastry for Guastafeste on the table between us, before I said, “How was Milan?”

  Guastafeste pulled a face.

  “Frustrating.”

  “Did you bring Serafin in?”

  Guastafeste gave a sardonic chuckle.

  “If only.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He was indignant, got himself all worked up into a pompous rage. You know the kind of thing—a law-abiding citizen accused of some outrageous crime by an incompetent police officer.”

  “And the gold box?”

  “He said he’d never seen any gold box at the villa. The old lady’s nephew, Ruggiero Monteveglio, showed him the violin he wanted appraised, but that was all. They stayed in the one room the whole time, never went anywhere else in the villa.”

  “Doesn’t sound like Serafin to me,” I said. “He’d have been snooping about all over the place, seeing what the old lady had. How big is the villa? Do you know?”

  “I got the burglary report from the Stresa police. It’s big. Seven bedrooms, three bathrooms, a view over the lake. Nicoletta Ferrara must have been loaded.”

  “What else was stolen?”

  “Jewellery, silverware, some paintings, including a racecourse scene by Degas—mostly small stuff that was easily transportable. She had some valuable antique furniture, according to the investigating officer I spoke to, but that would have needed a van to remove. Whoever did it knew what they were looking for, and knew how to dispose of it. They were selective. Didn’t touch the TV or the DVD player, the stuff the amateurs go for. They picked off a few prize items and got out quickly.”

  “There wasn’t an alarm?”

  “It was disabled—expertly disabled by someone who knew what they were doing. It was a very professional job from start to finish.”

  “What do the Stresa police say?”

  “Enquiries are ongoing. Which basically means they haven’t a clue. This was a slick operation. The house was cased; the burglars went in at night, stole a few specific items to order, and were gone in minutes. There’s no forensic evidence worth a damn. No fingerprints, no tyre marks. The houses on either side were both empty—one’s a holiday home belonging to a property developer in Milan; the other’s occupied by a banker who was away in Switzerland for a week. No one even knows exactly when it happened. The nephew was keeping an eye on the place, but he didn’t go there every day.”

  “Do the Stresa police know about Serafin?” I asked.

  “They interviewed him. The nephew told them he’d been to the house. Serafin gave them the same story he gave me. He was invited there to look at a violin; he’s a respected international violin dealer, friends with lots of powerful people, et cetera, et cetera. The evidence is all circumstantial. There’s nothing to prove that Serafin had anything to do with the burglary.”

  Guastafeste picked up his pastry and bit into it fiercely, his teeth snapping together with an audible impact.

  “Nothing except common sense, that is,” he said a touch bitterly. “But common sense isn’t proof. You know, he had the nerve to say that I was hounding him, trying to intimidate him. He said he’d be talking to his lawyer about it. God, I would love to pin something on him.”

  Guastafeste let out a long sigh and gave me a rueful smile.

  “Sorry, he got under my skin.”

  “He does that.”

  “You left a message while I was out.”

  “Yes. Can I have another look at the gold box? I’ve had a thought.”

  “What kind of thought?”

  “It might be nothing. I just want to look at it again, if that’s okay. But there’s something else, too. Something I’ve found out since I called you.”

  I told him about my conversation with the newspaper seller. Guastafeste listened with mounting concern, his eyes fixed on my face.

  “Well, that’s the first I’ve heard of that,” he said when I’d finished.

  “He claims he told the police.”

  “He probably did. We have a pile of statements this high in the office. We’re working our way through them, but there’s a long way to go. The Via Bucco?”

  “You know what’s there, of course?”

  “Pietro Lodrino’s place, you mean?”

  I nodded.

  “I checked it out. It’s a very short street. Lodrino’s warehouse is the only thing there.”

  Guastafeste gazed at me pensively, pastry crumbs on his lips.

  “You said something a couple of days ago. Why was Villeneuve in Cremona? Why not Milan, where Serafin lives? What was he doing here? I’ve been stupid. I should have followed it up then.”

  He bolted the rest of his pastry, gulped down his coffee, and stood up.

  “Thank you, Gianni. I wish to God I had you on my team at the questura.”

  “You have,” I said.

  I phoned Ludmilla Ivanova when I got home, to stop her phoning me. I told her that I was still making enquiries about Yevgeny and would continue doing so until I had some news for her. Then I grilled some sausages for my dinner and ate them with a few potatoes and a glass of red wine. After dinner, my daughter, Francesca, phoned from Mantua, as she does at least once a week. We talked for half an hour or more, Francesca telling me about my grandchildren and how they were doing at school and all the things they did in the evenings and at weekends, then asking me questions, probing, checking up on me to make sure I was looking after myself properly—not turning into some unshaven old man who washes once a month and eats food straight out of a can.

  When she’d rung off, I gazed up at the photographs on the mantelpiece, my three grandchildren beaming at me, looking different, less familiar in every picture. I saw them a few times a year, heard about them every week, but increasingly—as they got older—I was feeling less and less a part of their lives. I didn’t feel part of Francesca’s life, either. Or my two sons’ lives, Domenico living in Rome now, Alessandro in Brussels, working for a petro-chemical company and coming home once a year, if that. Home? I still thought of my house as their home, but of course it wasn’t. It hadn’t been for a long time.

  My gaze moved along the mantelpiece to the photograph of my wife, a smiling, radiant Caterina sitting by a waterfall in the Dolomites, where we’d gone for a walking holiday. That was how I wanted to remember her—the beautiful, happy woman she had been, rather than the shrivelled husk she became by the end. I wanted to blot out those final months from my memory because that was not Caterina who endured them. Not my Caterina, the woman I’d fallen in love with thirty-five years earlier. It was some pale, unrecognisable shadow of her—a shadow racked with pain and the terrible knowledge of her own death.

  My vision began to mist over. Sometimes I feel that my purpose in life has been completed. Why are you gone, Caterina, while I am still here?

  I was getting morose. That wasn’t good. I needed to snap myself out of it, and there was only one infallible way of doing that. I went into my
back room and took out my violin and played a Bach unaccompanied partita, the one in B minor that Yevgeny Ivanov had performed at his recital in the cathedral. I didn’t play it very well. There was a time when that would have made me furious with myself, made me rage against my inadequate technique. But my expectations have declined with age. Now I’m just glad even to get through a partita. Bach played badly is better than no Bach at all.

  “Don’t ring us; we’ll ring you,” said a dry voice from the doorway.

  I turned and saw Guastafeste leaning on the frame, half-smiling at me.

  “Sorry, did I startle you?” he said.

  “How long have you been there?”

  “Not long. I knocked, but you didn’t hear. Don’t let me stop you. What is that piece, by the way, Schoenberg’s Variations on a Theme by Bach?”

  I gave him a narrow look.

  “Don’t push me,” I growled. “I know where you live.”

  I put my violin back in its case and we went into the kitchen.

  “Have you eaten?” I asked.

  “You’re not cooking me any more meals, Gianni,” Guastafeste said.

  “Don’t you like them?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “You haven’t, have you?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “What, a pastry and a cup of coffee? That’s not a meal, Antonio.”

  “Do you want to look at this, or not?”

  He put the gold box on the table, still in its transparent plastic evidence bag, and slumped down onto a chair. His face was pale and lined, the stress of the murder investigation taking its toll. Since the split with his wife, Guastafeste has become absorbed in his work to an unhealthy degree. He is a handsome, attractive man, but he shows no signs of becoming attached to another woman. And what he really needs is someone—other than me—to look after him.

  I poured us both a glass of wine and brought cheese and crackers and grapes to the table, helping myself to a few grapes before pushing the plate towards Guastafeste. He didn’t say anything, just cut a thick slice of cheese and ate it hungrily.

  “You’ve been to Lodrino’s warehouse, haven’t you?” I said.

  “Took every available officer and went through his entire warehouse. He’d been careless. One of the items taken from the villa in Stresa was still there—the painting of the racecourse by Degas. We brought him into the questura and he admitted buying the painting and a few other things, including the gold box, from someone—a Signor Rossi—who came into his shop the week before last. Just wandered in off the street. Lodrino swears blind, of course, that he didn’t know the goods were stolen. He said Signor Rossi had incontrovertible proof of ownership, proof that Lodrino has con ve niently managed to mislay.”

  Guastafeste cut another slice of cheese and put in on a cracker.

  “I should have thought of Lodrino earlier. You know his reputation, don’t you?”

  I nodded, recalling my one and only encounter with the auctioneer and antiques dealer. He’d come to me with a good copy of a Maggini violin, which he’d picked up in a house clearance, and suggested that I might authenticate it as a genuine Maggini and we would split the profits, an offer I had politely declined. He hadn’t approached me since.

  “A job like the one in Stresa,” Guastafeste said. “It was well organised, professional. And the stuff that was stolen was valuable, probably easily identifiable. There are only a limited number of people who could dispose of it safely. In this part of Lombardy, that had to be Lodrino.”

  “Did you ask him about Serafin?”

  “He said he’d never heard of him. But here’s the interesting bit. Lodrino said he sold the gold box to two men for five thousand euros in cash.”

  “Two men?” I said.

  “One was François Villeneuve. Lodrino had done business with him before, in Paris—shady business, no doubt.”

  “And the other?”

  “Lodrino didn’t know him, or his name. But he gave us a description of him. Medium height, stocky, bald. Spoke Italian with a strong foreign accent—Eastern European or Russian.”

  “Vladimir Kousnetzoff?” I said.

  “No question about it.”

  “Kousnetzoff and Villeneuve were partners?”

  “Puts a new slant on Villeneuve’s murder, doesn’t it?”

  “You haven’t tracked down Kousnetzoff yet?”

  “We’re doing our best. Sooner or later, he’s got to turn up.”

  Guastafeste picked up a grape, tossed it into the air, and caught it in his mouth.

  “So tell me why you want to look at the gold box again?” he said.

  “Just something that occurred to me when I was repairing a violin case earlier. You remember when we were in Paris, down in the Molyneux et Charbon archives, we found the original drawings for the box, including the specifications for the lined insert, the wooden frame that held the jewelled violin in place?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was a hollow insert.”

  “You think there might be something underneath it?”

  “I don’t know. Did your jewellery expert remove the insert?”

  Guastafeste shook his head.

  “He just examined the outside of the box, particularly the hallmarks. That’s all we needed—to know who made it and when.”

  I took the gold box out of the plastic evidence bag. The dials on the combination lock had spun round so that the lock was engaged. I turned them back—B, E, F, G—and heard a click. I pulled open the lid. The interior of the box was just the way I remembered it: gleaming gold sides and a recessed insert lined with blue velvet. I tried to pull the insert out, but there was nothing to grip—my fingers kept sliding off the velvet—so I took a table knife from a drawer and slid the thin blade down between the insert and the side of the box. I applied a little pressure, but nothing happened.

  “Maybe it’s glued in?” Guastafeste suggested.

  “I don’t think so. It’s just a tight fit.”

  I brought a second table knife and inserted that at the other end. With Guastafeste holding the box firmly down, I pulled on the two knives, levering them backwards. Slowly, the insert rose up out of the box.

  There was nothing underneath it except the dull unpolished gold base and a scattering of dust.

  “What did you expect?” Guastafeste said.

  I didn’t reply. I was disappointed. What had I expected? I wasn’t sure. I’d probably expected exactly what I’d found: nothing. But I’d hoped for more. And hope is the most irrational of emotions.

  I examined the underside of the insert, still reluctant to accept defeat. I saw only bare pine and the glued ends of the velvet lining.

  “I thought . . .” I began, and stopped. “I don’t know what I thought.”

  I put the insert back into the box and pressed it down to the bottom.

  “The violin’s gone, Gianni,” Guastafeste said gently. “It disappeared two centuries ago. No one knows how or where.”

  “No one knows, maybe,” I said. “But someone has an inkling. Someone has a suspicion about what became of it. Why else would Villeneuve and Robillet have been killed? Someone knows more than we do; that’s clear. But who are they, and what exactly do they know?”

  I put my hand on the lid of the gold box to close it. And then I noticed something that had never really registered with me before. The inside of the lid was also lined with blue velvet. I ran my fingertips over it. The material was still soft, the colour hardly faded after all these years. Lack of exposure to light and air—that had to be the reason why it was so well preserved. Had the box been locked since Paganini died? Had the combination been forgotten until Guastafeste and I managed to work it out?

  There was something beneath the lining—a piece of board to give it some rigidity. My fingers encountered a tiny protrusion along the front edge—like a sliver of velvet that had come unstuck. I peered closer and saw that it was indeed a sliver of velvet, but it hadn’t come unstuck. It was at
tached to the lining—a very small hand-stitched tag.

  I tugged on the tag. The lining came away from the lid along three sides. On the fourth—the back edge—it remained fastened, a strip of velvet acting like a hinge. Between the lining and the underside of the lid was a rectangle of card about the size of a business card. And it was a business card. It had Henri le Bley Lavelle’s name and address printed on it beneath an elaborate coat of arms incorporating his initials.

  The business card wasn’t the only thing inside the lining. There was a piece of paper. A piece of paper folded in two, about ten centimetres square. I lifted it out—it felt old and brittle in my fingers—and carefully unfolded it.

  There was writing on the paper—faded but legible—writing in two different hands. The first hand—at the top of the page—was bold and clear, the letters large and ornamented with swirls. I read what was written aloud to Guastafeste.

  “ ‘San Carlo, March 20, 1819. I undertake within twelve months of this date to pay the sum of six thousand eight hundred francs to Signor Domenico Barbaia.’ It’s signed Nicolò Paganini.”

  “Paganini?” Guastafeste said. “What is that?”

  “It’s an IOU,” I said. “For a gambling debt, I would guess.”

  “Who’s Domenico Barbaia?”

  “He was the impresario who ran the San Carlo opera house, in Naples. And controlled the gaming tables at the opera house. Paganini must have owed him money—a lot of money. Six thousand eight hundred francs would have been a fortune back then.”

  Guastafeste frowned.

  “If it’s an IOU to Barbaia, shouldn’t he have had it? What’s it doing in a gold box that belonged to Paganini?”

  “Because the debt was paid off,” I said. “Look at this, lower down the page.”

  The second hand was harder to read. It was an untidy scrawl, the letters cramped together, but I could just make out the words.

  “ ‘The debt is now considered cleared. Isabella will love this. Domenico Barbaia, May 16, 1819.’ ”

  I turned the paper round so Guastafeste could read it for himself.

  “Paganini paid what he owed and the IOU was returned to him,” I said. “That’s why he put it in the gold case. What better place to keep it, considering how he’d cleared the debt.”