Paganini's Ghost

by Paul Adam

  The journey took us less than two hours. First the A1 to Milan, then the A8—one of the many motorways that radiate out from Milan with the sole purpose of getting its citizens out of town as swiftly as possible. Milan is a wonderful place—or so the Milanese are always telling us—it’s just that no one actually wants to live there, particularly at weekends. On a Friday evening, the A8 is choked with fleeing families heading north to the lakes and mountains, like refugees from a war zone.

  This morning, however, the roads were relatively quiet. There were the usual convoys of lorries, of course, but Guastafeste soon left them far behind in his 150-kilometres-an-hour slipstream. At the Sesto intersection, we turned off the autostrada, crossed over the River Ticino, and took the road along the western shore of Lake Maggiore, the carriageway hugging the edge of the shimmering water, twisting and turning past inlets where yachts and rowing boats were moored in the shallows. In the distance, beyond the northern tip of the lake, I could see the mountains stretching away into Switzerland, the highest peaks glazed with snow.

  Stresa was once the favourite summer retreat of the rich and fashionable, of royalty and artists and idle playboys. Dickens and Flaubert passed through the town and Hemingway set part of A Farewell to Arms there. It is long past its heyday, but it is still a stylish, attractive resort, the public gardens along the lakeside luxuriant and well maintained, the hotels elegant and smart, their trade no longer sustained by dukes and counts, but by coach parties of Swiss and Austrian tourists.

  It was awhile since I had been there. I first went with my parents when I was a child, just after the Second World War, and later I returned with my own children, visiting the zoo in the grounds of the Villa Pallavicino and taking day trips out to the Borromean Islands to see the grottoes and white peacocks of the Isola Bella and the tropical gardens of the Isola Madre. We went swimming in the lake, the kids screaming at the cold water, and hiked up Mottarone, the mountain behind Stresa, from whose summit you can ostensibly see both Switzerland and the Duomo in Milan, though on the day we went, there was a low mist and you were lucky to see beyond the end of your nose.

  I remembered it as a bustling, vibrant place, the waterfront crowded with visitors and boat skippers touting for trade, the balconies of every hotel garlanded with red geraniums. In summer, it is no doubt still like that, but now, as winter approached, it was quiet, with that sad, closed-up feel of a holiday resort out of season.

  The Villa Nettuno was on the outskirts of Stresa, on the hillside overlooking the lake. We turned off the main road through an open pair of steel gates and went up a steep drive to a small parking area at the side of the house. The villa was a stately nineteenth-century gentleman’s residence, rendered with a white stucco that had faded to a dirty grey. It had two storeys, the ground-floor windows arched, the ones on the first floor rectangular, with wrought-iron balconies outside them and green wooden shutters. The shutters, like the render, were faded and rather shabby. Some of the wooden slats were missing; others were broken and hanging loose.

  Ruggiero Monteveglio was waiting for us by the side door. He was a slender man in his late thirties. He had a squat nose with very open nostrils, which gave him a porcine appearance, and hair shaved close to the scalp to disguise his premature baldness. He was wearing a creased pair of cotton trousers, a frayed jacket, and scuffed suede shoes. In some countries—England, for example—it is fashionable for the very rich to dress down, to disguise their wealth under the trappings of the common man. But this is not the case in Italy. In Italy, that kind of dissimulation would be regarded as ludicrous, possibly even evidence of insanity. If you had it, why on earth would you not flaunt it? Ruggiero Monteveglio didn’t look like a man whose aunt owned a villa that, at a conservative guess, was worth two or three million euros.

  We introduced ourselves and shook hands; then Monteveglio unlocked the door and turned off the alarm at a keypad on the wall of the hall.

  “You’ve had the alarm fixed?” Guastafeste said.

  “Yes, of course. The insurance company insisted on it.”

  “You’ve made a claim for what was stolen?”

  “For what I know was stolen,” Monteveglio said. “There may have been other things that were taken that I don’t know about. My aunt had a lot of stuff, some of it valuable, some of it junk, and she wasn’t good at keeping records. I can’t be sure exactly what was taken.”

  He opened an internal door and we walked through into a large sitting room at the front of the house. The shutters were closed, but there was enough light filtering in through the slats to show that the room was crammed from wall to wall with furniture.

  “I see what you mean,” Guastafeste said.

  There were dark wooden antique sideboards and cabinets round the perimeter of the room, and the centre was taken up with armchairs, sofas, and low tables. Every surface was cluttered with objects—framed photographs, vases, ornaments, all manner of bric-a-brac and knickknacks.

  Ruggiero Monteveglio picked his way round the furniture and pulled open the windows to throw back the wooden shutters. Light flooded into the room.

  “You don’t have metal shutters?” Guastafeste asked.

  “Unfortunately, no,” Monteveglio replied. “I kept trying to persuade my aunt to instal them, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said they were ugly and would ruin the look of the house. I suppose she had a point, but . . .” He shrugged. “It would have made the place more secure.”

  “I’ve seen the Stresa police report,” Guastafeste said. “The burglars broke in through the kitchen window, didn’t they?”

  “That’s right. After they’d cut the power to the alarm.”

  “And the items stolen, they were in which rooms?”

  “This one, the music room, and my aunt’s bedroom upstairs. The bedroom is where they found the jewellery. My aunt, as you may gather, was careless about security. She had the alarm—the insurance company wouldn’t insure the house without one—but I don’t think she ever switched it on. She was the same with her jewellery. She used to leave it lying around on her dressing table or in a box in a drawer. Nothing was locked away.”

  I walked over to the windows and looked out. There was a terrace flanked by a stone balustrade running the width of the house. From either end of the terrace, diagonal flights of stone steps descended through the garden, which was a lush jungle of temperate and semitropical vegetation—banana plants, eucalyptus, camellias, azaleas, hydrangeas. Palm trees poked their heads up from the dense undergrowth, some of them short and stubby, some tall and thin, with umbrellas of fronds, like propellers, at the top that looked as if they might take off into the air in a high wind. Out across the water, I could see the ornate terraces of the Isola Bella. One of the steamers that crisscross the lake was heading towards the island, sunlight glinting off its white hull and the rippling waves it was leaving in its wake.

  “This is a magnificent setting,” I said. “Your aunt was very lucky.”

  “It’s not a bad little hole, is it?” Monteveglio said dryly.

  “What’s going to happen to the house now? Are you going to sell it?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure I can afford to keep it on.”

  “You live in Stresa?”

  “In Pallanza. You know it, across the other side of the bay. I have a two-bedroom apartment. You could probably fit the whole thing into this one room and still have space left over.”

  “Where was the painting by Degas?” Guastafeste asked.

  “Just there.”

  Monteveglio pointed. Above the mantelpiece was a conspicuous rectangular section of wall that was a lighter colour than the rest.

  “It’s been recovered, by the way,” Guastafeste said.

  Monteveglio stared at him in surprise.

  “The Degas? When?”

  “Yesterday. We raided an auction house in Cremona.”

  “In Cremona? You have the thieves?”

  “Only the fence, and he’s saying nothing ab
out the burglars.”

  “Just the Degas? None of the other stuff that was stolen?”

  “Not so far. The gold box you already know about, of course.”

  Guastafeste gazed round the room. There were a lot of pictures on the walls—far too many, in fact. They were squashed so close together that the frames were almost touching. Several of the pictures were clearly the work of the same artist. They had a distinctive style—not really paintings, but more mixed-media compositions, part oil paint, part watercolour, part collage. Some were little more than crude daubs, big splashes of colour, with different objects stuck onto the canvas—pieces of cloth or sacking, strange silhouettes cut from black card, even chunks of what looked like varnished driftwood. A couple seemed to have musical themes—large staves with clefs and random notes painted on them, images of musical instruments that had a surreal, distorted look. In one, a violin as thin and flexible as a sheet of paper was slithering down a flight of steps whose treads and risers were the black and white keys of a piano.

  “The burglars didn’t take any of these, I notice,” Guastafeste said.

  “They had taste,” Monteveglio replied.

  “Who’s the artist?”

  “These were all done by my aunt.”

  “She was an artist? A professional?”

  “Would you pay for something like that? No, she did them purely for her own amusement. They’re all over the house.”

  “And not one was stolen?”

  “No. Shame, isn’t it?”

  “I quite like them,” I said, feeling strangely defensive of Nicoletta Ferrara. A lot of work and imagination had gone into these creations and I felt they deserved a little more respect.

  “Really?” Monteveglio said incredulously.

  “They’re very individualistic.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s one way of putting it.”

  “The gold box,” Guastafeste said. “Where was that kept?”

  “In the music room.”

  “May we see?”

  The music room was at the far end of the house. It was almost as big as the sitting room and just as cluttered, with glass-fronted music cabinets against the walls and two grand pianos in the middle—a Steinway and a Bösendorfer. There was more of Nicoletta Ferrara’s idiosyncratic artwork on the walls, many again with musical subjects. Some were strange collages, fragments of photocopied music arranged to create landscapes or peculiar animals or people’s faces.

  “Your aunt was obviously musical,” I said.

  Monteveglio nodded.

  “Yes, it was her great passion. She was an excellent pianist, and a very good violinist, too.”

  “The violin you showed Vincenzo Serafin, the Bergonzi, do you know how your aunt acquired it?”

  “I believe she inherited it from her father. It had been in the Bianchi family for several generations, I think.”

  “That was your aunt’s maiden name, Bianchi?”

  “Yes.”

  “They must have been well-off.”

  Monteveglio gave a ghost of a smile.

  “They weren’t short of a euro or two. They made their money in banking back in the middle of the nineteenth century.”

  “And she was your aunt by marriage?”

  “She married my mother’s older brother, Luca. The money was all hers. My uncle Luca was an investment broker in Milan. Nicoletta came to him for advice on what to do with her inheritance when her father died. Uncle Luca’s solution: Marry him. And she did.”

  “And your uncle died when?”

  “Oh, ten, twelve years ago.”

  I looked at a framed photograph on one of the tables. It showed a middle-aged man and woman standing by a fountain that I recognised as the Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona in Rome.

  “Is this your aunt and uncle?” I asked.

  “Yes, that’s them.”

  I studied the photograph more closely. Nicoletta Ferrara had a striking face, but she wasn’t a beautiful woman. Her features were too uneven, her nose on the large side, her jawline slightly masculine. There was a strength, perhaps even stubbornness, in her eyes and the set of her mouth. I’d never met her, but something about her face seemed familiar.

  “When Vincenzo Serafin came here, which room did you go in?” Guastafeste asked Monteveglio.

  “I showed him the violin in here,” Monteveglio replied.

  “But to get here, you would have to pass through the sitting room?”

  “Yes, I suppose we did.”

  Guastafeste shot me a meaningful glance.

  “Apart from the Degas, which of the stolen items were in the sitting room?”

  “Well, the silverware was. My aunt kept it in the big glass cabinet in the corner—unlocked, of course.”

  “And the gold box?”

  “That was on top of that cabinet over there. You’re not suggesting that Signor Serafin had anything to do with this, are you?”

  “No, no,” Guastafeste said. “A reputable violin dealer like him. What made you go to him, by the way?”

  “He has a house up the road from here, near Baveno. I don’t know him personally, but a friend of a friend told me about him. Said he was one of the leading dealers in the country.”

  “Do you know where your aunt got the gold box?” I asked.

  “I think she inherited that from her parents, too. It was another family heirloom, like the furniture and the violin. I remember it from my childhood. We’d come here for lunch and the box was always there on the cabinet. It fascinated me—the box you couldn’t open. You know it had a funny combination lock on it? I used to spend hours trying to crack the code. No one knew what it was, even my aunt. I was sure there was a treasure map inside it. I wanted to break it open and see, but my aunt wouldn’t hear of it. She said it was like that English legend of King Arthur and Excalibur. When the right person came along, the box would open. Until then, it had to be allowed to keep its secrets. She claimed it once belonged to a princess, but we didn’t believe her, of course. Aunt Nicoletta was like that—fanciful, liked to tell stories, to embroider the truth a bit.”

  “Did this princess have a name?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Elisa?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

  “It was made for Elisa Baciocchi, the princess of Piombino and Lucca. She was Napoléon’s sister.”

  “Aunt Nicoletta never said anything about that.”

  “There’s nothing about its origins in the insurance paperwork—a bill of sale or certificate of authenticity? She must have had it valued at some point.”

  “It wasn’t insured,” Monteveglio said. “The Degas, the silverware, the jewellery—they were specifically listed on the insurance policy, but not the gold box.”

  “It wasn’t covered?”

  “A lot of things aren’t covered. My aunt didn’t worry about things like insurance. She didn’t really seem to care. If something was stolen or broken, so what? They’re only objects, after all. Why worry about them? That was her attitude. You can be indifferent like that when you had as much as she did.”

  “Do you inherit all her estate?” Guastafeste asked.

  “Most, yes. She left money to various charities, but this house, the stuff in it, it’s all mine now. There’s too much of it for my liking. I’ll probably get rid of the furniture, all the junk she collected over the years.”

  “Has Serafin made you an offer for the Bergonzi violin?” I said.

  “No, he hasn’t given me a valuation yet.”

  “If I were you, I’d get a second opinion from another dealer.”

  “You would? Signor Serafin seemed a very straightforward, honest kind of man.”

  “Appearances can be deceptive,” I said.

  In the car driving home, Guastafeste was silent until we were a couple of kilometres from the Villa Nettuno. Then he said, “That was a bit of a waste of time, wasn’t it? All we found out was that that lying rogue Serafin cased th
e joint, then tipped off Villeneuve and his pal Lodrino, who organised the burglary—and we knew that already.”

  “Mmm,” I murmured noncommittally.

  I wasn’t so sure we’d wasted our trip. Something about that photograph of Nicoletta Ferrara was bothering me. Her maiden name, too, had struck a chord. Bianchi. Why did I know the name Bianchi?

  I dwelt on it as we headed south along the lakeshore road and onto the autostrada. We were nearing Milan, the traffic starting to thicken, when something happened that took my mind off Nicoletta Ferrara.

  Guastafeste received a message over the radio that was clipped to the dashboard of the car. Vladimir Kousnetzoff had been located, the crackly male voice informed us. Guastafeste reached across to punch a button on the handset.

  “Where?”

  “Bologna. The Hotel Primavera.”

  “He’s been picked up?”

  “Negative. He’d checked out before the Bologna police got there.”

  “Merda!”

  Guastafeste hammered the sides of the steering wheel with the palms of his hands.

  “Isn’t that just like it?” he said through clenched teeth. “We finally track him down and he vanishes.”

  “Bologna?” I said.

  Guastafeste glanced across at me.

  “What about it?”

  “Isabella Colbran’s villa at Castenaso—that’s just outside Bologna.”

  Sixteen

  It is two hundred kilometres from Milan to Bologna, but we did the journey in under ninety minutes, the speedometer occasionally touching 180 kph, the rooflight flashing to clear our path through the traffic. I didn’t take in much of the scenery—I had my eyes tightly shut most of the way.

  Only when I felt the car begin to slow and the g-force that had been pinning me to my seat ease off a little did I dare to open my eyes. I saw a sign reading BOLOGNA—5KM.

  “You have a good sleep?” Guastafeste asked.

  “I wasn’t asleep.”

  “You were breathing very heavily.”

  “I think you’re confusing sleep with a sustained panic attack,” I said.

  We took the ring road north round Bologna, then turned off and followed a smaller rural road to Castenaso. The countryside was flat, bare ploughed fields, which a few months earlier would have contained wheat and maize crops, and scattered farm houses ringed by lime and cypress trees to provide protection from the sun and wind.