The Rainaldi Quartet

by Paul Adam

  ‘Spohr was on tour in Germany with the cellist Beneke,’ he said. ‘His violin was packed inside his trunk and fastened with ropes to the back of the carriage in which they were travelling. The carriage had no rear window so Spohr was continually leaning out to check that the trunk was still there. When they reached Göttingen and were stopped at the town gate, Spohr asked the sergeant of the guard if the trunk was secure, to which the sergeant replied, “What trunk?” Spohr leaped out and saw that the ropes had been cut. He drew a hunting knife and raced off back down the track to look for the thieves. But they had melted into the night. The next day the trunk and empty violin case were found in a field near the town, but there was no sign of the Guarneri. It was never recovered in Spohr’s lifetime.’

  ‘But you found it?’ Guastafeste said.

  ‘Not personally. I acquired it seven years ago from a dealer. It came with letters and other papers which gave conclusive proof of its provenance. It cost me two million dollars.’

  I started. ‘Two million?’

  ‘You seem surprised,’ Forlani said. ‘I know, it was a lot of money. But I’m prepared to pay whatever it takes to get what I want. How much would you say this collection is worth today?’

  His eyes were gleaming with avarice, the tip of his tongue touching his lips, wetting them in anticipation of my reply. This was the point of his collection. They weren’t living instruments to him, nor even simply objects of beauty, they were investments. Their value was all that mattered to him. I could see him in here, sitting for hour after hour in his chair, gazing around at his violins, as sad and futile an occupation as Midas counting his gold.

  I gave him the answer I give everyone who asks me what a violin is worth.

  ‘Whatever someone is prepared to pay.’

  Forlani’s disappointment, and his displeasure, were manifest.

  ‘Is that the best you can do?’ he said in disgust. ‘What kind of reply is that?’

  ‘An honest one. A violin, like any other object, is only worth what a buyer is willing to pay. And that price will vary according to the market conditions, what else is on offer, what other buyers are competing to acquire it.’

  ‘But millions, you would say?’ Forlani pressed his point.

  ‘Of course. Many millions, but I wouldn’t like to be more specific than that.’

  ‘Dottor Forlani,’ Guastafeste said gently. ‘If we could return to Tomaso Rainaldi.’

  ‘What? Oh, yes. Rainaldi. The dead man.’ Forlani’s gaze drifted away from us. ‘What a waste.’

  For a moment I thought he was talking about the waste of a life. Then the real train of his thoughts became apparent.

  ‘Five thousand euros, I gave him. All for nothing. Where’s my violin now?’

  ‘You said he told you he believed there was another Messiah somewhere,’ Guastafeste said. ‘You surely didn’t just take his word for that. He must have given you some evidence to support his claim.’

  Forlani squinted at us with his pale, moist eyes. He was scruffy and unwashed but that didn’t make him a fool. I suddenly caught a glimpse of the wily, calculating nature that lay at the core of his character.

  ‘Why should I tell you that?’ he said. ‘So someone else can go and find it? My violin.’

  ‘Withholding evidence in a murder inquiry is a serious offence, dottore,’ Guastafeste said. ‘I have powers to compel you to cooperate, but I’m sure neither of us wants to go down that route. Look at it like this, you’re an elderly man, you’re obviously not in the best of health. You’re not going to find the violin by yourself, are you? But if it’s discovered in the course of our investigations, it may well come on the open market and you’ll have an opportunity to acquire it.’

  It was an astute approach, appealing to Forlani’s avarice, his self-interest. The old man moved away from us and stood looking at the Spohr Guarneri for a time.

  ‘He showed me some documents,’ he said eventually. ‘Some papers – photocopies of some papers – he’d found in England.’

  ‘You have the photocopies?’ Guastafeste asked.

  ‘No, he took them away with him.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘I can’t remember in any detail. They were old letters, very old letters. Correspondence between a firm of cloth merchants in Italy and one of their suppliers in England.’

  ‘Cloth merchants?’ Guastafeste said, frowning. ‘What has that got to do with violins?’

  ‘The firm was in Casale Monferrato.’

  Guastafeste stared at him blankly. ‘So?’

  Forlani had his eyes on me. ‘Your colleague understands.’

  ‘Anselmi di Briata?’ I asked.

  Forlani nodded, appraising me quietly. ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Who?’ Guastafeste said.

  ‘Your colleague will explain later,’ Forlani replied impatiently.

  ‘And these letters were enough to make you believe Rainaldi?’ Guastafeste said.

  ‘Enough to make me take a chance, yes. For five thousand euros what did I have to lose?’

  ‘That’s all, just some papers?’

  ‘Yes. That’s all I can tell you.’

  Forlani walked to the heavy steel door of the room and waited for us to leave. It was an incongruous sight, this dirty old man in flip-flops surrounded by his priceless collection of violins. He activated the electric motor that swung the massive door shut behind us. It clicked smoothly into place and the locks engaged. We followed him back downstairs to the front door.

  ‘You’ve been privileged,’ Forlani said smugly, unfastening the chains and bolts to pull open the door, ‘to see a collection like mine. There isn’t a finer one anywhere in the world.’

  I stepped over the threshold into the narrow alley outside the door. Guastafeste made a move to follow me, but Forlani clutched at his sleeve, holding him back.

  ‘If the violin is found, it is to be mine. No one else’s. You understand?’ the old man said in a hoarse whisper. ‘Mine.’

  ‘I promise you nothing,’ Guastafeste said, breaking free of Forlani’s possessive grasp.

  ‘I am a rich man. I will make it worth your while.’

  Guastafeste gave him a look of withering contempt.

  ‘Policemen are not violins, dottore. Not all of them have a price.’

  * * *

  We went to St Mark’s Square for a drink before dinner. It’s what all the tourists do, but somehow in Venice it’s the only place to go for an aperitif. The city is so cramped, its open spaces so small and few in number that the Piazza alone gives any relief from the suffocating claustrophobia. Only in St Mark’s can you really see the sky, only there can you savour the exquisite atmosphere of the Venetian dusk, the sunlight touching the pinnacles of the basilica, the shadows stretching out across the footworn stones, the water by the Piazzetta iridescent as a sheet of polished mother-of-pearl.

  That is the romantic view, of course, a guidebook description of St Mark’s. In fact, when you get to the square you find it brimming over with braying foreigners, unscrupulous street sellers and overfed pigeons which spatter droppings on your head as you fight your way through the throng.

  In days gone by, the Venetians had a reputation for savage cruelty. The two men who made the fantastic zodiacal clock in the Piazza were supposedly officially blinded to prevent them making another for somebody else. Traitors were sometimes found buried alive head first, their legs sticking up through the slabs of the Piazzetta, and the Bridge of Sighs and the terrible tortures of the state dungeons sent shivers throughout the civilised world. The citizens have mellowed over the centuries, but the tradition of inhuman punishment still continues in a modified form in St Mark’s: not the garrotte or the rack of yore, but something infinitely more subtle and pitiless – the cafe orchestra.

  There are three of these excrescences in the square and two more in the Piazzetta, all competing to be the most nauseatingly sugary and trite. It’s impossible to escape them. Their noise blends together in a s
ickly mélange and reverberates around the surrounding buildings, assaulting your ears from every direction. Short of throwing yourself off the top of the campanile, the only sensible course of action is to take a table at one of the cafes and thereby ration your senses to just a single orchestra. The drinks are outrageously expensive and the proprietors have the gall to charge you a supplement for the ‘music’, but it is possible to survive a half hour or so of the torture without serious long-term consequences for your health.

  We ordered a couple of drinks and settled back in our chairs, watching the people milling about the square. The Venetians have always been renowned for their style and fondness for clothes. Back in the days when the city was a republic, the women used to vie so much with one another in the richness and splendour of their dress that the authorities introduced a sumptuary law to restrict ostentation, but it never worked. Well, it wouldn’t, would it?

  There wasn’t much ostentation on show this evening. Most of the people huddled together around the square were scruffy backpackers and foreign tour groups. I watched a young man pause to take a photograph of the campanile. It’s an impressive bell tower in its way, but not a patch on the one in Cremona which – as everyone should know – is the tallest brick structure in Europe. The basilica too seems to me to be inferior to the duomo in Cremona. St Mark’s is an architectural wonder, but with all those Byzantine domes and pinnacles it looks gaudy and vulgar, like a Mafia capo’s wedding cake.

  There was a flurry among the cooing carpet of pigeons in the centre of the Piazza. Someone was tossing out birdseed. A woman posed for a photograph, the mangy, bedraggled creatures perched all over her head and outstretched arms. I wondered if she realised what ghastly avian disease she risked catching for the sake of a holiday snap.

  ‘So what did you make of Forlani?’ Guastafeste said, sipping his beer. ‘Do you think he’s quite right in the head? Living in a dump like that, the place falling apart around his ears. He stank to high heaven, did you notice?’

  ‘It was impossible not to,’ I said. ‘He’s a rich man. They live by different rules to the rest of us.’

  ‘So what was he on about? All that stuff he said you’d explain to me. You know, about the letters, the cloth merchants.’

  ‘Casale Monferrato. I mentioned it to you the other night.’

  ‘You did? All I know about Casale Monferrato is that it’s a town in Piedmont. What’s it got to do with violins?’

  ‘Casale Monferrato was the home of Cozio di Salabue.’

  ‘Salabue?’ It came back to him. ‘Ah, you mean the guy who bought the Messiah from Stradivari’s son? The violin collector.’

  I nodded. ‘Count Cozio bought the Messiah from Paolo Stradivari. But he didn’t buy it directly. He used an intermediary called Giovanni Michele Anselmi di Briata who – like Paolo Stradivari – was a cloth merchant. Anselmi acted as agent for the count in several transactions, including a later deal whereby Cozio bought all of Stradivari’s remaining tools from Paolo.’

  ‘His tools?’

  ‘Yes. Cozio wasn’t just interested in Stradivari’s violins. He wanted anything the Master had used to make them – tools, patterns, moulds.’

  ‘Why?’

  I shrugged. ‘He was a fanatical collector. He was like Forlani. He hoarded violins, though unlike Forlani he wanted to do more than merely gloat over them. He studied how they were put together, measured them in painstaking detail. He was planning to write a book on violins and violin-making but he never got round to it.’

  ‘So this agent, this cloth merchant, what was he called again?’

  ‘Giovanni Michele Anselmi di Briata.’

  ‘He was mentioned in the papers Tomaso showed to Forlani?’

  ‘So it would seem.’

  ‘And that’s all we’ve got to go on. We don’t know what these letters said, what they were about.’

  ‘Just that they were sufficient to persuade Enrico Forlani to risk a gamble on them.’

  ‘They must have been pretty convincing. Forlani didn’t strike me as a man who throws his money around much.’

  ‘Except on violins. He lives in squalor, but I think he would blow his whole fortune to own another Messiah.’

  I watched the leader of the five-piece orchestra, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Chico Marx – though without the hat. He wasn’t a bad player. Too much vibrato, too many showy glissandi, but his technique was solid. They were finishing a medley of Neapolitan tunes – Torna a Surriento and the cod dialect Funiculì, Funiculà which the English always think is a song about a mountain railway.

  An elderly woman came out on to the steps next to the bandstand as the music ended. She clapped her hands and blew kisses to the musicians who bowed to her graciously in acknowledgement. I recognised her as a well-known Italian actress, more famous for her longevity and flamboyant clothes than her talent. She was caked in orange make-up and around her shoulders – despite the warm evening – she was wearing what appeared to be the last surviving North American buffalo.

  ‘Why did Tomaso go to Forlani?’ Guastafeste said. ‘Why not find the violin first, then put it in an auction and sell it to the highest bidder?’

  ‘Money,’ I replied. ‘You know how Tomaso lived. Always on the edge, always exceeding his income. He’d already been to England. That must have cost. He needed someone to pay the bills. Particularly as his search might well have proved unsuccessful. Forlani could afford the risk, Tomaso couldn’t.’

  ‘We need to find those letters – if the killer hasn’t found them already.’

  ‘You think that was why Tomaso’s workshop was searched?’

  ‘It’s a good bet. The violin’s the key, I know that.’

  Guastafeste finished his beer. ‘We pick up the scent of the violin and we’ll pick up the scent of Tomaso’s killer.’

  * * *

  We left our table and strolled across the Piazzetta to the Molo. The gondolas were bobbing up and down at their mooring posts, the water slapping against their hulls, making a sound like wellington boots squelching through mud. The church of Santa Maria Della Salute, at the end of the Grand Canal, looked as timeless and ravishing in the sunset as she had when Canaletto captured her in oils.

  We walked along the Riva degli Schiavoni, stopping for a while to look at the Bridge of Sighs. Below, in the small canal that runs behind the Doge’s Palace, a long line of gondolas was gliding towards us. In the first boat, an accordion player and a balding tenor with a shrill voice were serenading their passengers. The gondolier had one hand on his oar, the other pressing a mobile phone to his ear. In the gondola at the rear of the line sat a single Japanese tourist with only his camcorder for company. I felt a twinge of pity for him. Venice is not a place in which to be alone.

  Beyond the Hotel Danieli we turned left down an alley and found a trattoria near Campo San Zaccaria, an inferior, overpriced tourist establishment like most of the restaurants in Venice. We had spaghetti with clams, veal cutlets and a carafe of the house red wine, then wandered back to St Mark’s. It was late, but there were still plenty of people about, drifting aimlessly around the piazza, seated at the tables outside the cafes where the orchestras were still churning out their saccharine medleys.

  I paused, soaking up the atmosphere, in no particular hurry to get back to our pensione.

  ‘I need to catch up on some sleep,’ Guastafeste said. ‘You stay here, if you like. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  I sauntered slowly across the square. The lights were on in the open galleries around the edge. The shop frontages shone as brightly as the glass and silverware in their windows. It was cooling down. I could feel a breeze gusting in from the lagoon, stirring the debris, the litter that was scattered over the paving stones. The people were starting to move, getting up from their cafe tables, slipping on jackets or pullovers, heading back to their hotels. Even the pigeons were thinning out, returning to their roosts for the night.

  In the gallery at the western end of the piazza
I turned to look back at the floodlit basilica and my attention was caught by a figure crossing the square. He was fifty metres away, walking purposefully towards the exit from the square. Tall, gaunt, wearing a white linen jacket, I recognised him as the Englishman I’d encountered in Serafin’s office in Milan. He was staring straight ahead, taking no notice of his surroundings, as if his mind were focused on more important matters. I watched him pass by, then made an impulse decision, curious to know who he was, what he was doing in Venice.

  I set off after him, following him through the Campo San Moise and along the well-trodden path to the Accademia Bridge. The streets were quieter here, the pavements washed with a sickly greenish light from the wall lamps. Not once did the Englishman look back. We were across the bridge and into the dark alleys on the western side of the Grand Canal when I felt a strange, disconcerting tingle in the nape of my neck. I had a curious feeling that I too was being followed. I paused and looked round, listening. But I heard no footsteps, saw no figures, no shadows behind me. I turned to look ahead again. The Englishman had vanished. I hurried on along the street, unnerved now – by the night, by the sinister atmosphere, by the continuing suspicion that I was not alone.

  There was no sign of the Englishman. I turned down an alley and emerged into a tiny unlit courtyard. I paused again. This time I heard footsteps – in front of me, not behind. I walked quickly under an arch and out into another alley. Ahead of me I saw a flash of the Englishman’s white jacket and went after him. Moments later he turned off into a narrow passageway. I crept to the mouth of the passage and watched him stop outside a door and ring the bell. The door opened a fraction. I caught a glimpse of a pale face before the Englishman stepped inside and disappeared from sight. I was close enough to hear a lock snap shut as the door closed.

  I retraced my steps and stood on the Accademia Bridge looking out over the Grand Canal. A barge loaded with crates of beer passed by beneath me, then a water taxi cruising for hire. I shivered as a gust of cool air swirled up from the canal. There is something fundamentally untrustworthy about Venice. She is like a moody, enigmatic mistress whose loyalties cannot be relied on, a mistress whom you continually fear will leave you for someone richer, more powerful. No man can hold on to her indefinitely, though many have tried. I thought of the great historical figures who had been here before me: Goethe, Stendhal, Mendelssohn, Dickens, Hemingway, the list was endless. Robert Browning died in the Ca’ Rezzonico, I could see it clearly a few hundred metres away up the Grand Canal. Richard Wagner died surrounded by silk in the Palazzo Vendramin further north beyond the Rialto Bridge. Byron swam in the waters just below my feet and miraculously survived.