by Paul Adam
‘But we still don’t know how it happened. Whether it was an accident, whether it was murder. The pathologist found no evidence that Forlani had had a heart attack or a sudden stroke or anything that might have made him black out and fall into the case.’
‘What about the missing Maggini? The open front door. Doesn’t that indicate that someone else was there at the time?’
‘Not necessarily. The Maggini might have been taken earlier. That’s one of the things we’re going to ask Christopher Scott when we talk to him.’
Something in his tone, his phrasing, made me look at him sharply.
‘When? He’s been located?’
‘Picked up two hours ago as he tried to board a flight from Linate to London. Spadina’s laid on a car. We’re driving to Milan now, the two of us.’
7
I had breakfast alone on the small, enclosed terrace at the rear of the pensione. I’d hoped that Margherita might have been there to keep me company, but she didn’t appear until I’d finished my coffee and roll and was preparing to return to my room.
She came out into the courtyard and smiled when she saw me. ‘Would you mind if I joined you?’ she asked.
‘Of course I wouldn’t. Here.’ I moved my plate and cup to clear a space for her on the opposite side of the table.
‘Just a coffee, please,’ she said to the proprietor, who had emerged from the door to the kitchen. She sat down and glanced around. We were the only guests on the terrace. Our table was in the shade, but above us the sunlight was creeping slowly down the whitewashed walls. The sky was a cloudless cobalt. I studied her. Her face was showing signs of her age – lines around her eyes and mouth – but she still had the bone structure that in her youth would have made her a strikingly attractive woman. Perhaps not beautiful in the conventional sense, but I’ve never been much of a one for convention.
‘It’s going to be hot again,’ she said. ‘Venice is insufferable in the heat. And smelly. Are you staying on?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m catching the train back to Cremona this morning.’
‘What a shame. I enjoyed our dinner last night.’
‘When do you go back to Milan?’
Margherita shrugged. ‘Who knows? The police want me to go over to the Questura this morning. Apparently there are forms I have to sign. Then I have to see my uncle’s lawyer, start dealing with his affairs.’ She gave a shudder. ‘The whole business fills me with dread. I hate lawyers and legal matters. I never understand what any of it’s about. I’ll probably be here for days.’
She looked up as her coffee arrived, nodding her thanks at the proprietor. Then she saw me glance at my watch.
‘Please, don’t let me keep you.’
I smiled apologetically. ‘My train leaves at half past nine. I’m afraid I’ll have to go.’ I pushed back my chair and stood up. ‘It was nice meeting you. I hope you manage to get everything sorted.’
‘Sorted?’ she said dryly. ‘This is Italy. Since when has anything here ever been sorted?’
I held out my hand. Her fingers touched mine.
‘Goodbye.’
‘Safe journey, Gianni.’
I thought about her in the vaporetto on the way to the station, heading up the Grand Canal in the morning sunshine. Thought about her perhaps more than I should have done. I wondered why. I considered whether I should have given her my phone number, or asked for hers. But what would have been the point? I was no longer a young man. I’d reached an age when such things weren’t really acceptable, perhaps weren’t even respectable. We’d met, had dinner, then parted. That was all it amounted to. There was nothing else to be said.
I made myself a cup of coffee and a sandwich when I arrived home, then went out to my workshop. It was hot and stuffy after being closed up for the previous two days. I threw open the windows to let in some air before unlocking my safe and taking out the damaged Stradivari that Serafin had entrusted to me.
What was it that made Stradivari so great? What was his secret? Hardly a year goes by without some scientist or so-called ‘expert’ coming up with a new theory: about the wood Stradivari used, how it was seasoned, how it was treated, above all how it was varnished. There have been countless treatises on the magical ingredients of his varnish. Experts have tested the vibrations of his plates, the movements of air inside the body of his violins. They have examined his tools, his drawings, scoured the Alps for the source of the timber he used. To what end?
We are a strange species. We have an immense ability to hope. We want Stradivari to have had a secret because we want to hope that, if only we could discover that secret, we could equal him as a luthier. But there is no secret. Violin-making is not alchemy, the transmutation of base metals into gold. It is woodwork.
When I was a schoolboy I was a reasonably bright pupil – not the best in the class but a good all-rounder. I could no doubt have stayed on at school, perhaps gone to university, but academic study didn’t interest me. I always had a preference, a particular aptitude, for art and craft so I was put with all the numbskulls and delinquents in the class who because they couldn’t add up or read were assumed to be ‘good with their hands’. Well, they were. They were good at thieving and fighting. But woodwork? They could no more craft an object in wood than they could explain Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The ability to work with your hands is not some leftover that is given to those who are not intellectual. It is a gift, just as surely and just as precious as an aptitude for maths or languages. You are given the gift, but then you have to work at it to realise your true potential. That is something we do not want to acknowledge today. We do not want anything to be hard work.
Stradivari did not emerge from nowhere, a genius arriving fully formed from a vacuum. He was born in a city of luthiers where violin-making had been a widespread and profitable calling for a century and a half before him. There was a rich established tradition, a wealth of experience and knowledge on which he could call. He was fourteen when he was apprenticed to Nicolò Amati and he continued making violins until he was ninety-three. That is almost eighty years of practice. Who today can boast that in any calling? He learned his trade and he worked at it day in and day out. He didn’t have four or five weeks’ holiday to go off skiing in the Dolomites or to sun himself on a Tuscan beach. He worked six days a week, ate a piece of bread and cheese at his bench for his lunch and worked on into the evening. Violin-making wasn’t just his life’s work, it was his life.
By contrast, young luthiers today do a course at some college lasting three or four years at the most. They come out with a diploma, a piece of paper with a seal on it, and think they know how to make violins. What’s more, they think people will buy them. They are living in a dream-world. After fifty years in the business I don’t need any experts to tell me Stradivari’s secret. I know what it was. He was simply a better craftsman than any violin-maker – Guarneri ‘del Gesù’ excepted – before or since.
I gazed at the instrument on the workbench in front of me, then I found my eyes lifting and being drawn towards another violin that hung on the wall in a corner of my workshop – a violin that I had not made and would never sell. I stood up, walked across to the violin and brought it back to my bench. I placed it next to the Stradivari and compared the two instruments. The similarities were marked. The varnish, the arching of the tables, the cut of the f-holes, the carving of the scroll, they all bore the distinctive marks of the same maker, so much so that I would have sworn they were both the work of the Master. Yet I knew that the instrument on my left was a genuine Stradivari whilst the one on my right was a fake manufactured by my old apprentice master Bartolomeo Ruffino – an unsold fake that he had bequeathed to me on his death, along with his tools and stock of wood.
I had to admire his skill. He’d been an exceptionally gifted forger, practising in a long, if dishonourable, tradition. Violins have been forged since the days of Andrea Amati and Gasparo da Salò, the fathers of the instrument. It is human nature. When a
n object is in demand and highly prized, there will always be someone looking to cash in on the market and meet that demand from more dubious sources. So many violins were forged in the nineteenth century that it was a veritable industry, employing hundreds of luthiers. I’d guess that probably half the total number of instruments made at that time are falsely labelled. Add in the copies made by honest luthiers making instruments in the style of the masters but not labelling them as such and it’s no wonder that it is difficult to be sure a particular violin is genuine. With this kind of history, dealers and buyers are naturally going to be suspicious of any instrument that purports to be either old, or Italian, and particularly both. A forger must be very careful which makers’ violins he chooses to fake.
Ruffino had been cautious. He hadn’t produced many fakes a year and had concentrated mainly on the lesser-known luthiers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their violins are much easier to slip out into circulation without arousing suspicion and their prices can be remarkably rewarding. The great makers’ instruments are riskier. They are subject to closer scrutiny and because they were ostensibly produced so long ago it is harder to explain plausibly where they have been in the intervening two or three hundred years. But Ruffino had faked them nevertheless. The temptation, the money, the challenge had been too much to resist. In my time with him as an apprentice he’d faked instruments by Giovanni Grancino, Nicolò Gagliano, Giovanni Battista Guadagnini and Carlo Bergonzi – actually three Bergonzis: he took a genuine Bergonzi, dismantled it piece by piece and then built three new instruments using some of the original parts and adding others. This is a wily way of fooling an expert – confronted with an undoubtedly genuine Bergonzi belly, say, he is much more likely to believe the whole instrument to be genuine.
This fake Stradivari before me had come much later, long after Ruffino and I had parted company, but I remembered him making it all the same. It had taken him years to finish. Occasionally it would be out on his bench when I paid a social call on him in his workshop and he would show me with glee exactly how he was faking it – finishing the back and belly with scrapers which, like Stradivari’s, were made from the blades of sabres, completing the final smoothing of the wood with dried dogfish skin and horsetail, a coarse, abrasive grass which still grows along the banks of the Po as it did in the Master’s day. He was disarmingly honest with me, much as he had been when I had been apprenticed to him. He knew I would never turn him in to the police. I had too much affection for him as a person and, besides, I had spent my apprentice years helping him. To expose Ruffino would have been to destroy my own hard-won reputation as a luthier and Ruffino knew I would never do that.
His painstaking work on the Stradivari had paid off. Even my expert eye could not detect any flaws in its construction. Ruffino had imitated every facet of Stradivari’s style with consummate mastery, and in addition he had ‘aged’ the violin convincingly. He had darkened and dirtied the varnish, simulated wear and tear on the upper treble bout where a player’s hand would have rested in third position, and rubbed away some of the varnish on the middle of the back and the chamfers of the scroll. Even the label inside had been discoloured to make it appear three hundred years old. It was the most perfect fake I’d ever seen, yet Ruffino had never tried to dispose of it. I wondered sometimes if he’d hung on to it because he knew it was the apotheosis of his forger’s craft, something never again to be equalled. There again, Stradivari was a dangerous subject for a deception. He produced a large number of instruments – probably close on 1,100, of which only around 650 survive – so there would appear superficially to be scope for finding a few hitherto undiscovered examples. In fact, those 650 are so well documented, and so many people over the years have tried unsuccessfully to track down the remaining 450, that the arrival in the marketplace of an unknown Strad would arouse the most profound suspicion and a prima facie assumption that it was a fake. Maybe Ruffino had kept his ‘Stradivari’ because he feared he might be caught if he tried to sell it.
I picked up the instrument and hung it back on its hook. It had been there for almost a quarter of a century. Sometimes I had thought about destroying it – in case on my own death it was brought out into the light and believed to be genuine – but I’d always resisted the impulse. I liked having it there on the wall. It was a memento of my old teacher, a reminder of the skills he had taught me, and perhaps also a warning to me about how those skills should be used.
For the next two hours I worked on the genuine Stradivari, making the plaster of Paris mould I needed to repair the damaged belly of the violin. I was so engrossed in my task that I didn’t notice Guastafeste coming into my workshop until he closed the door behind him with a loud click. I looked up sharply.
‘Sorry,’ Guastafeste said. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’
‘Come in,’ I said. ‘What time is it?’
‘Seven-thirty. Am I interrupting?’
‘It’s time I stopped. I’m tired.’ I stretched my shoulders and slid down off my stool. ‘How about a drink?’
We sat out at the table on the terrace with a glass of Valpolicella each and a large bowl of olives between us. Guastafeste looked unkempt, a dark stubble on his face. He was wearing the same shirt and tie he’d had on in Venice almost twenty-four hours earlier.
‘What happened with Christopher Scott?’ I said. ‘Or is that confidential?’
‘You’re inside the loop, Gianni,’ Guastafeste replied. ‘What I know, you can know.’
‘Did he kill Forlani?’
Guastafeste chewed on an olive, spitting the stone out into the palm of his hand.
‘He has an alibi. Corroborated by several witnesses. He would seem to be in the clear.’
‘What kind of an alibi?’
‘He was staying at the Cipriani in Venice. You know it?’
‘No. I’m not very familiar with Venice.’
‘It’s an exclusive, very expensive hotel on the Giudecca. The kind of place film stars like to hide out. It’s private, secure, yet only a five-minute boat ride from St Mark’s. The hotel has its own taxi service across the lagoon – a fleet of swish luxury motorboats to ferry guests to and from the city. The drivers keep a log of who they transport – stops the hoi polloi and paparazzi from sneaking into the hotel compound. Christopher Scott, according to both the taxi driver and the hotel night receptionist, came back to his room at half past twelve on Monday night. He had an early-morning alarm call at seven, then took a water taxi from the hotel to the airport at Jesolo at eight. He caught a nine-thirty Alitalia flight to Milan.’
‘And Forlani died some time between six and eight a.m. on Tuesday morning?’ I said. Guastafeste nodded. ‘What if Scott somehow slipped out of the hotel during the night, went back to Forlani’s house and then returned to the Cipriani in time for his seven a.m. alarm call?’
‘Can’t be done. The only way off the Giudecca is by boat. The Venice police have spent the day checking out Scott’s alibi, talking to every water taxi operator in the city. They’re pretty sure he never left the island until he went to the airport. Not unless he swam across the lagoon which, frankly, is not a credible option.’
‘Did he admit he went to Forlani’s that evening?’
‘Oh, yes, he was very forthcoming.’
‘He say why?’
‘To discuss violins.’
‘Any violin in particular?’
‘A Guarneri that’s coming up for auction in London next week. Scott had the catalogue with him. He showed it to us. He said he was going to be bidding on Forlani’s behalf and they’d met to discuss how high he should go.’
‘At half past eleven at night?’
‘That was the time specified by Forlani, apparently. I can believe it, having met him.’
‘Did you ask Scott about the Messiah’s Sister?’
‘He said he’d never heard of it.’
‘Or Tomaso?’
‘The same.’
‘Do you believe him?’<
br />
Guastafeste helped himself to another olive and toyed with it between his fingers.
‘I’m not sure. We had to conduct the interview through an interpreter. Scott speaks very little Italian and my English – as you know – is atrocious. Spadina’s is even worse. That makes it hard to pick up the nuances. But from his demeanour, his facial expressions, his body language, he didn’t strike me as a particularly trustworthy individual. When you’ve been a policeman as long as I have, you get a feeling for these things.’
‘He’s a dealer,’ I said sardonically.
Guastafeste smiled. ‘That’s not yet a criminal offence in Italy.’
‘Are you holding him?’
‘We had no grounds to. He’s gone back to England.’
‘So what now?’
‘As far as Forlani is concerned, that’s Spadina’s problem.’
‘And Tomaso?’
Guastafeste slid his hand into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a thin sheaf of papers.
‘I’ve been back to his workshop, checked his house. I can’t find any trace of the photocopied letters he showed Forlani. Clara knows nothing about them either. They seem to have disappeared.’
‘Do you know any more about his trip to England?’
‘We’ve obtained his credit card records. He was there for three nights. The first night he stayed in a hotel in London, the third night he stayed in a hotel in Oxford. The second night is unaccounted for. We don’t know where he was, but he didn’t use his credit card.’
Guastafeste unfolded the sheaf of papers in his hand and spread them out on the table.
‘We’ve also got his telephone records – this is a photocopy of them. His two land lines, that is – home and workshop. He didn’t have a mobile phone.’
‘Nor do I,’ I said. ‘It’s a generation thing. Mobile phones are toys for the young.’
‘We’ve identified most of the numbers he called. There were three in England. Two were the hotels in London and Oxford I mentioned – calls to book his rooms, I would guess. The third we’re not sure about. We’ve tried it a few times and got no answer. It’s registered to a Mrs V. Colquhoun. You ever heard the name?’
