by Paul Adam
I thought about all these things in passing. But mostly I was wondering why the Englishman should have been visiting Enrico Forlani at half past eleven at night.
5
‘You know something?’ Guastafeste said over breakfast the next morning. ‘I think Forlani is holding out on us.’
I spread some apricot jam on a bread roll and looked up. ‘How do you mean?’
‘He must know more than he’s letting on. The letters Tomaso showed him – Forlani said he couldn’t remember what they contained. I don’t believe that. A man like Forlani; he’s peculiar, but he’s not senile. I want to talk to him again before we leave Venice.’
‘Go back to his house? With that stench?’ I said.
‘It won’t take long,’ Guastafeste replied.
We paid our bill and left our bags at the pensione while we walked back over the Grand Canal to Forlani’s palazzo. The front door of his house was ajar when we got there. Guastafeste looked at it, frowning, then he pushed the door open with his foot.
‘Dottor Forlani?’ he called.
There was no reply. Guastafeste examined the door without touching it. The locks were still intact. There was no sign of a forced entry.
‘Maybe he’s gone out to the shops,’ I said. ‘He has to buy food some time.’
‘And leave his door unlocked? I don’t think so, not Forlani. Did you see his alarm system yesterday? He’d close up the place like a fortress.’
We stepped inside and went upstairs. On the first-floor landing we paused to look into the room with the long table. There was no one there. We continued on up the stairs. The smell was just as bad as before, the air just as stale and hot.
Guastafeste came to an abrupt halt. At the far end of the second-floor corridor the door was open. Beyond it the heavy steel door guarding the violin room was also open. We walked quickly down the corridor and stopped on the threshold. The lights were on inside the chamber, all the glass cases illuminated as they had been yesterday. But one thing was different. On the floor of the room, lying in a puddle of congealed blood, was Enrico Forlani.
He was sprawled on his front, his head twisted sideways, his eyes wide open, unseeing. He was still wearing his dressing gown and plastic flip-flops. On the floor all around him, mixed in with the blood, were fragments of glass from the shattered display case which the old man appeared to have fallen against and broken.
Guastafeste went in. I hung back near the door, averting my gaze. The air-conditioning was on in the room, but even so I could detect a faint putrid odour which I guessed was the smell of flesh starting to decompose. I put my handkerchief over my mouth, wondering if I was going to be sick.
I glanced at Forlani. Guastafeste was bending over his body, examining it more closely. He had a policeman’s stomach, the ability to tolerate sights and smells that would make most people nauseous.
Guastafeste straightened up and walked across to me, his hand delving into the pocket of his jacket, pulling out his mobile phone. Another image came to me: Guastafeste outside Rainaldi’s workshop, doing the same thing. He’d spared me then, shielded me from the shocking realities of violent death, but this time I’d had no such protection. I’d seen Forlani’s body. The sight was etched immutably in my mind: horrific, bloody, a vision of nightmares to come.
Guastafeste took me by the arm. ‘Let’s wait outside.’
He punched in a number on his phone as we went back along the corridor and down the stairs. I was in a daze, aware only distantly of him talking to the emergency operator, asking for the Venice police, then we were outside in the alley by the front door and I was leaning back on the brick wall, taking deep gulps of fresh air.
‘You okay, Gianni?’ Guastafeste asked.
‘I think so. It’s just the shock. Two dead bodies in less than a week.’ I tried to shut out the images, but they wouldn’t go. No matter how hard I tried to direct my mind elsewhere it stayed resolutely on Forlani. ‘What happened?’ I said. ‘Was he murdered?’
‘That’s hard to tell.’
‘What else could it be? All that blood everywhere.’
‘It looks to me as if he fell – or was pushed – against the display case. Severed an artery on the broken glass. Maybe it was an accident. He was an old man. He could have had a heart attack and fallen into the case. Only an autopsy will give us a clearer picture of what really happened.’
We walked along the alley. It was an unprepossessing passageway, little more than a metre wide, hemmed in by Forlani’s palazzo on one side and another high wall on the other. Yet when we got to the end, the Grand Canal was suddenly there before us in all its shabby splendour, the buildings along the banks bathed in sunlight, some pink, some orange, some sugar white. A vaporetto cruised past, sending a wash of cloudy green water to lap against the steps by our feet.
‘There’s something you should know,’ I said.
I told him what had happened after we’d split up the previous evening.
‘He went to Forlani’s house?’ Guastafeste said, a note of urgency in his voice. ‘You’re sure it was the same man you saw at Serafin’s?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know his name?’
‘No.’
Guastafeste handed me his mobile phone. ‘Call Serafin. Find out who he is. It could be very important.’
I rang Serafin’s office in Milan. His secretary said he hadn’t come in yet, she didn’t know where he was. I tried his mobile number, but there was no reply so I left a message on his voice-mail asking him to call Guastafeste’s number as soon as possible.
I was handing the phone back to Guastafeste when I saw the police launch surging towards us. The helmsman brought the vessel in fast then, at the last moment when it seemed a collision with the bank was inevitable, thrust the throttle into reverse to allow the side of the boat to brush gently up against the steps. An officer leaped ashore with a rope and secured the launch to one of the red and white mooring posts along the edge of the canal, then five or six more officers – two in plain clothes – clambered out and headed down the alley with Guastafeste.
I stayed where I was, watching the boats on the canal, trying not to think of the body in the building behind me, until Guastafeste returned.
‘Can you face coming back upstairs?’ he asked. ‘The police want to talk to you about last night. And there’s something else you can help with. Something I overlooked. The broken glass case. The violin that was inside it is missing. We need to know which one it was.’
I followed him back into the palazzo and upstairs to the second floor. The Venetian police officers were grouped around Forlani’s body, two of them crouching down by the corpse so that – to my relief – I could barely see it. One of the plain-clothes detectives came across to meet us, introducing himself as Gian Luigi Spadina. I repeated everything I’d told Guastafeste earlier.
‘We’re waiting for a call giving us the name,’ Guastafeste added when I’d finished.
‘And the missing violin?’ Spadina said.
I looked around at the illuminated glass cases, recalling the order in which I’d examined them the previous day. I knew immediately which violin had been in the broken case.
‘The Maggini,’ I said.
‘You’re sure?’ Guastafeste said.
‘Positive. It was quite a well-known instrument. The Snake’s Head Maggini, it was called.’
‘Valuable?’ Spadina asked.
‘Fairly. Though nothing like as valuable as some of the other violins here.’
Spadina gazed around the room. ‘Why just that one?’ he said contemplatively. ‘Why didn’t the killer take more?’
‘Killer?’ I said, glancing at Guastafeste.
‘I’m afraid it’s looking more and more like a homicide,’ Guastafeste replied.
‘Thank you for your help, Signor Castiglione,’ Spadina said. ‘We’ll need a full statement from you later. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’ He went back across to Forlani’s body.
Guastaf
este looked at the display case in the centre of the room. ‘Why didn’t he take that one, the Guarneri that belonged to Louis Spohr? It must surely be the most valuable in the collection.’
‘That’s a fake,’ I said, not really thinking about what I was saying.
Guastafeste turned and squinted at me. ‘Pardon?’
I hesitated. ‘It’s a fake.’
‘How can you tell?’
I took my time replying, wondering why I’d told him, whether it was too late to withdraw the remark. But I wanted him to know. I kept my voice low, so the other police officers wouldn’t hear.
‘Because I made it.’
* * *
When you look back at your life from my age it’s difficult to be sure at exactly what point key events happened. Our memories are unreliable, the ebb and flow of our existence so blended together that it’s impossible to distinguish the tide which led on to greater – or lesser – things. For most of us the greater things rarely come. Our lives are a continual process of coming to terms with failure. We all want to make our mark somewhere, to leave some trace of our passing. But how do we make that mark?
I was seven years old when I started to learn the violin. By the age of twelve I could play Bach and Haydn concerti. At fourteen I could play the Mendelssohn. I used to dream of being the next Paganini, of making a career as a concert virtuoso. At what point did I realise that dream would never be fulfilled? There was no single, identifiable point. We cling on to our ambitions until they are wrenched away from us. I am sixty-three years old with greying hair and creaking joints, but I still daydream about scoring the winning goal for Italy in the World Cup final the way I did when I was ten. I still dream about playing the Brahms concerto at Carnegie Hall. Why shouldn’t I? Our lives would be unbearable without illusions.
But in reality? I knew in my teens that I would never be a concert soloist. I might have made a rank-and-file orchestral player, but that is a life of frustration and dissatisfaction, as my friend Rainaldi discovered. It comes as a shock, the realisation of your own limitations. But if you’re sensible, you put the disappointment behind you and turn to other things, something you can excel at. That’s when I turned to violin-making.
At fifteen I was apprenticed to a local Cremona luthier named Bartolomeo Ruffino. I made his coffee, sharpened his tools, swept the wood shavings from the floor for several months, then he let me have a go at making an instrument myself. At sixteen I finished my first violin. It was not very good, but I persevered. The next one was better. I discovered I had a gift.
It was at that moment too that I understood there was more to Ruffino than met the eye. He was a well respected luthier whose instruments were highly regarded in both violin-making circles and in the marketplace. But working alongside him each day, it gradually dawned on me that my apprentice master was not simply a maker of new violins: he was also a faker of old violins. He made no attempt to conceal from me what he was up to. Indeed, he made it clear that he expected me to help him in his nefarious activities, thus becoming complicit in his dishonesty. Because if I was involved, I too was tainted and therefore less likely to betray him.
‘What choice did I have?’ I said to Guastafeste. ‘I was just a boy, an apprentice. Ruffino paid my wages. I wanted desperately to learn how to make violins – not fakes, but instruments of my own. In retrospect, I know I should have left, refused to have anything to do with his schemes, but I was young, pliable. Apprenticeships were not easy to come by and I didn’t want to jeopardise my career.’
Guastafeste studied me intently. He was finding it hard to absorb what I was telling him. We were in a cafe in one of the squares near Forlani’s house, sitting out on the terrace with a couple of glasses of mineral water on the table between us.
‘I was with Ruffino for nine years,’ I said. ‘When I was twenty-four I left and set up on my own. I didn’t make another fake after that. Except for the Spohr “del Gesù”.’
‘You really made that Guarneri?’ Guastafeste said incredulously. ‘And you got away with it? Didn’t Forlani have it examined, checked over by an expert?’
‘Oh, yes. It was examined by an expert all right. One of Italy’s leading authorities on Cremonese violins.’
‘Who?’
‘Me.’
‘What!’
‘You are a policeman, Antonio,’ I said. ‘But you are an innocent when it comes to the world of violin dealing. The criminals you encounter, the thugs, the thieves, the dregs of society, are paragons of virtue compared to your average violin dealer.’
‘You authenticated your own fake?’
‘Wonderful, isn’t it? Yes, I forged the violin and then I was called in as an expert to verify its provenance.’
‘Called in by whom?’
‘By the dealer who was selling it, Vincenzo Serafin.’
‘Couldn’t Serafin tell it was a fake?’
‘Serafin knew it was a fake. It was Serafin who asked me to make it in the first place.’
Guastafeste gaped at me. This was more than he could handle.
‘Serafin asked you to make it? You mean he’s a crook?’
‘Of course he’s a crook, he’s a dealer,’ I said.
‘Vincenzo Serafin, the respected Milanese businessman who mixes with politicians and opera stars and goodness knows who, who hosts a glittering annual fundraising event for children’s charities and all that kind of bullshit … is no more than a common criminal?’
‘Not common,’ I said. ‘He’d be appalled at the suggestion. Serafin is a very sophisticated criminal.’
‘Who sells fake violins.’
‘Only a few fakes. Most of them are genuine. You have to be careful.’
‘And how long has he been doing this?’
‘Oh, years. His father did it before him. Selling fakes is in his blood.’
‘And he’s got away with it all this time? How come no one has found out?’
‘You have to remember that in this business there is no such thing as an independent expert. The people who sell violins authenticate them. That’s how it works. If Vincenzo Serafin tells you a violin is a Guarneri “del Gesù”, then it is. You could take the instrument somewhere else, to a dealer in London or New York and get a second opinion, but they’re unlikely to want to contradict Serafin’s opinion. They’re all at the same game and it’s a very small pitch. If they undermine Serafin’s reputation, they know it won’t be long before he starts undermining theirs and that’s not good for any of them.’
‘So none of them can be trusted?’ Guastafeste said.
‘You can never trust someone who wants to sell you something.’
Guastafeste took a sip of his mineral water. He had few illusions about human nature. He knew that no one is completely honest, that hypocrisy is the oil that lubricates our relations with other people. But nevertheless I could tell he was shocked; that he was seeing me suddenly in a new light.
‘Why, Gianni? Why did you do it?’
‘Serafin pressured me. After Ruffino died, Serafin lost his master forger. He wanted someone to take his place. He knew I could do it. He kept on at me for years, trying to persuade me to cooperate, but I always resisted. Until seven years ago. When Caterina became ill.’
I thought back to that time. Those long months of watching my wife slowly fade away. Watching her suffer so much that I prayed every night for the end to come so that she might find peace.
‘We needed the money,’ I said. ‘For nursing care, for treatment. I thought moving out of the city might also help her. Caterina had always wanted to live in the country. So I faked a violin for Serafin and used my share of the proceeds to buy our house.’
‘What did Forlani say he paid? Two million dollars, wasn’t it?’
My face clouded for a moment. ‘Yes, that was a revelation to me. Serafin said he only made eight hundred thousand.’
‘So he cheated you too?’
‘Like I said, you can trust no one in this business.’
/> I wondered why I’d told Guastafeste. To clear my conscience, to purge a secret that had been festering inside me perhaps. Certainly I felt cleaner for getting it off my chest.
‘Don’t think ill of me, Antonio. I know it was wrong. I’m ashamed of what I did. You’re a policeman. You must do what you think best.’
Guastafeste stared at me. ‘You think I’d turn you in? What do you think I am? You’re my friend. What do I care that that miserable old man paid two million dollars for a fake violin? But now he’s dead, someone else will examine that Guarneri. I don’t want you to get caught, Gianni.’
‘I won’t get caught.’
‘I thought there were ways of detecting fakes now, scientific ways that can give a true, independent assessment of when a violin was made.’
‘There’s dendrochronology,’ I said. ‘A technique for analysing and dating the tree rings in a piece of wood. But that only gives the age of the wood, not the age of the violin.’
‘You used old wood?’
‘Of course. Ruffino bequeathed me a store of old wood when he died. I don’t know where he got it from. Forlani’s Guarneri “del Gesù” was made from wood cut in the early eighteenth century. A dendrochronological investigation of the instrument would confirm unequivocally that the wood was of the right period for Guarneri to have used it. Every tool I used, every technique was exactly the same as the ones Guarneri used. I doubt there’s an expert on earth who wouldn’t be fooled by it.’
