by Paul Adam
‘You know how many pages there are? Cozio was an obsessive. He measured every tiny bit of his violins – the height of the archings, the width of the purfling, the dimensions of the scrolls. It took him years of meticulous work. The Carteggio runs to thousands of pages. Cozio kept everything. Not just his own notes, but copies of letters he wrote to musicians, to violin-makers, to other collectors. He was constantly dealing, trying to enlarge his collection, selling off instruments he didn’t want, buying others.’
‘You think Tomaso found some mention of Thomas Colquhoun in the Carteggio?’ Guastafeste said.
‘It’s quite possible. But to find it will take us as long as it took Tomaso – weeks, months. Are you sure there was nothing in Tomaso’s workshop? No notes of his research?’
‘Not a single sheet. I’ve checked. There were bills, invoices, all that sort of thing, but no notes, nothing at all from the public archives, at least none that…’ Guastafeste broke off. ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute.’ He put his thumb to his mouth, chewing pensively on the nail. ‘Stay here, I’ll be right back.’
I sat down at the table and waited. A good half hour elapsed before Guastafeste returned. He was holding a clear plastic bag stamped with the words ‘Cremona Police Department’. There was a white label on the bag bearing a serial number and a description of the contents. Guastafeste placed the bag on the table. Through the transparent plastic I could see a rectangular piece of paper about ten centimetres by eight. It was bright orange with the printed heading ‘Comune di Cremona Sistema Museale’, and beneath that the words ‘Biglietto Cumulativo’ and four black ink drawings of a boy with a dog, a plough, a violin-maker and a violin.
‘You know what this is?’ Guastafeste said.
‘A ticket for the Museo Stradivariano,’ I said.
‘It was in the waste bin in Tomaso’s workshop. No one has got round to checking it out yet. You have friends over there, don’t you?’
I followed Guastafeste out of the library and across the landing to the Stradivari Museum. The museum used to be around the corner on the Via Palestro – a scruffy little place with a few violins hanging up and a collection of grubby glass cases containing the Master’s tools and forms. But in the last couple of years the city council – under pressure from various citizens, myself included – had refurbished the Sala Manfredini in the Palazzo Affaitati to provide a setting worthy of Stradivari’s place in the history of the city.
‘What is it you want to do here?’ I asked Guastafeste.
He pointed at the bottom left-hand corner of the ticket in the plastic bag. ‘There’s a serial number here – 4578. I want to know on what date it was issued.’
I gave the young girl on the ticket counter my name and asked her to call the director of the museum. A few minutes later, Vittorio Sicardo came out through a door behind the counter and shook hands.
‘Gianni, how nice to see you.’
‘I want to ask a favour,’ I said.
We went back a long way, Vittorio and I. I’d sold him one of my violins – at a big discount – thirty years ago when he was still a fine-arts student at the University of Milan and we’d maintained our friendship ever since, through his early days in museum posts in Brescia, Turin and Parma until his return to Cremona as assistant director and then director of the civic museums. He was an art and sculpture man by training – specialist subject, Italian painters of the fifteenth century – but he was a keen amateur violinist and champion of Cremonese cultural history. I’d been a member of the committee that had pressed for this new, improved museum in honour of Stradivari, but we would never have succeeded without Vittorio’s tenacity, commitment and political cunning.
‘That shouldn’t be a problem,’ Vittorio said when I’d explained who Guastafeste was and what he wanted. ‘Just let me check through the counterfoils.’
Vittorio unlocked a drawer in the desk behind the ticket counter and examined a thick black ledger.
‘It was issued on June the sixteenth,’ he said, looking up. ‘A couple of weeks ago.’
I glanced at Guastafeste. He was keeping his expression resolutely neutral.
‘Thank you,’ he said politely. ‘I’m grateful for your help.’
‘Is that all?’ Vittorio said.
‘Would you mind if we looked around the museum?’
‘Not at all. Feel free.’
I thanked Vittorio and exchanged a few words of small talk with him, though I could sense Guastafeste was impatient to move on. Then we shook hands again and Vittorio returned to his office.
‘June the sixteenth,’ Guastafeste said to me, knowing I was only too aware of the significance of that date. ‘The day he was killed, Tomaso came here. Why?’
We walked through into the museum complex, passing first through the city art gallery and its hundreds of worthy but dull examples of the Fleshy Women and Naked Cherubs school of painting. Then we reached the Museo Stradivariano.
The first room we entered was half taken up by a display showing the various stages of making a violin, and half by a group of chairs lined up in rows before a television screen where you could watch a video about violin-making. I looked around blankly.
‘Why would Tomaso have come here?’ I said. ‘A museum. He was hardly likely to find an undiscovered violin.’
‘He must have had a reason,’ Guastafeste said. ‘Just keep your eyes open. See if anything strikes you.’
In the next room were violins in glass cases by various nineteenth-century luthiers whose names are unknown outside violin-making circles – and some within it too. But what was interesting was the painting hanging on the wall, the original portrait of Count Cozio di Salabue by Bernardo Morera from which the photographic reproduction we’d seen at the Castello di Salabue had been taken.
I paused in front of the painting and studied it for a time. It wasn’t a great work of art, but it was competently executed like most portraits of obscure noblemen of the time. It had more life than the copy at Salabue. You could see the texture of the oils, the colours were more intense, the expression in Cozio’s eyes more striking.
‘What do you think?’ Guastafeste said, coming up to my shoulder.
‘I don’t know.’
‘That blank piece of paper in his hand still looks peculiar to me. I’m not convinced by Giovanni Davico’s theory about it.’
‘The French Revolution, you mean?’
‘Look at the date. It was painted in 1831. That was almost half a century after the Revolution. Why would anyone worry about being identified as an aristocrat?’
I mused on that as we moved on through the other rooms of the museum, ending at the most impressive of them all, the Sala Manfredini which contains the collection of Stradivari’s tools, moulds and forms which Paolo Stradivari sold to Cozio di Salabue in 1776. The room has a high ceiling with a crystal chandelier in the centre and walls painted with fake pillars and classical scenes of ancient ruined buildings. There is a background hum of air-conditioning and humidifying equipment and the softer, more attractive sound of violin music being piped in through speakers.
By the first of the illuminated glass cases I bumped into two of my students – a German and a Swede – from the International School of Violin Making; there, presumably, seeking inspiration from Stradivari’s legacy. I am an occasional visiting professor at the school which is housed in the shabby splendour of the Palazzo Raimondi – an apposite preparation for the impoverished gentility the students will face in their subsequent careers as luthiers. Young men and women come from all over the globe to study here in Cremona. All are talented and enthusiastic but I fear for their futures. There are too many violin-makers in the world, too many old violins around. The new artisans will struggle to compete in such a crowded marketplace.
I had a brief conversation with the students, then continued my slow perambulation around the room.
‘I’ve never been in here before. Now I can see why. This is the most boring museum I’ve ever been in,’ Gu
astafeste said witheringly from across one of the cabinets.
‘You’re such a philistine sometimes,’ I replied.
‘But there’s nothing here except a few old planes and chisels and lots of meaningless bits of paper.’
‘These are historical treasures.’
‘Treasures? To whom? They’ve got all these security cameras in here but, really, what thief in his right mind is going to want to steal any of this junk?’
‘There are the violins in the other rooms,’ I said.
‘But none of them are Stradivaris. This is a Stradivari Museum that doesn’t contain a single violin he made.’
I had to concede that that was true. The city’s small collection of great violins – by Stradivari, Guarneri and Amati – is in the Town Hall, in a locked room which is opened only when someone wants to view them, and then only under the watchful eyes of two security guards.
‘This is a valuable part of our heritage,’ I began defensively. Then I saw the expression on Guastafeste’s face. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Cameras,’ he said.
* * *
‘Take as long as you like,’ said Vittorio Sicardo. ‘I think the tapes are all there. Let me know if you need anything else.’
We were in one of the museum offices, a small room made even smaller by all the clutter on the floor – boxes of broken pottery, a stack of tatty gilt frames and a disembodied marble head with a chipped nose which had somehow strayed in from the restoration workshops. On the desk in front of us was a television and video cassette recorder. Guastafeste inserted the first of the tapes Vittorio had dug out for us.
‘This is the camera covering the entrance to the Museo Stradivariano,’ he said. ‘The first tape of the day for June the sixteenth, immediately after the museum had opened to the public.’
Guastafeste played the recording back. There was nothing on it for the first few minutes, just a deserted vestibule, then a man in the uniform of one of the museum attendants came in from the art gallery. He glanced around briefly before moving out of shot into one of the adjoining rooms. Guastafeste let the tape run for a few more minutes, then pressed the ‘fast forward’ button on the remote control. According to the time code in the bottom corner of the screen it was another half an hour before anyone else entered the museum, and then it was another uniformed attendant.
‘Popular place,’ Guastafeste said sarcastically. ‘They’re really packing them in, aren’t they? What’s he doing?’
The attendant was pushing a trolley bearing a number of plastic canisters. He stopped by the piece of apparatus in the corner of the room and removed its lid.
‘Changing the reservoirs on the humidifying machinery,’ I said.
Guastafeste fast forwarded the tape again, the speeded up image still on the screen so we could see if anything happened. We’d been lucky. The museum stored the tapes from the CCTV cameras for only a fortnight. If we’d been a couple of days later, the tapes would all have been wiped.
‘There,’ I said. ‘What’s that?’
Guastafeste pressed the ‘play’ button. A man had entered the vestibule and was pausing to take his bearings. But it wasn’t Tomaso. We kept going. A few more people came into the museum during the course of the morning, but none of them was Tomaso. I started to get restless. I stood up and stretched. I’d have paced around the office only there was no room.
‘There he is,’ Guastafeste said quietly.
He froze the picture. Tomaso had just stepped into the vestibule. It brought a lump to my throat to see my dead friend brought back to life.
Guastafeste started the tape again. After only a few seconds Tomaso moved out of shot into the adjoining room. Guastafeste made a note of the time code, then stopped the tape and searched through the pile of tapes on the desk for the one covering the next room. It was a relatively simple task to fast forward to the point at which Tomaso came through from the entrance vestibule. He stopped, glancing perfunctorily around the cabinets of violins, before turning his attention to the portrait of Cozio on the wall. It seemed to interest him. He gazed at the painting for a long time, changing his position to gain different angles on the image of the count. Then he moved closer, leaning forward to examine a portion of the painting in more detail. He lifted a finger and – so quickly it was easy to miss – ran the tip over the blank sheet of paper in Cozio’s right hand.
‘He’s noticed something,’ Guastafeste said.
‘That’s more than I did,’ I said, peering intently at the screen.
We followed Tomaso through the next few rooms, but he didn’t linger in any of them. Then Guastafeste inserted the tape from the Sala Manfredini and played it back from the moment Tomaso entered. He didn’t seem in a hurry. He glanced at his wristwatch, looked slowly around the room, then moved to the first of the waist-high glass cabinets and studied the exhibits inside it – his gaze distracted as if he had time on his hands to kill.
His attention passed to the next cabinet, but it soon started to wander. He began looking around casually. He seemed bored. At one point he even yawned. There was still no real purpose to his movements. It was as if he’d come to the museum in the hope of finding something, but wasn’t sure exactly what.
‘He doesn’t know what he’s doing there,’ Guastafeste said.
‘Fishing, perhaps,’ I said.
‘Fishing for what?’
‘Inspiration. Like my students. He’d told Forlani that he could find him a second Messiah. He had some old letters to indicate that the violin might once have existed but had gone missing. But that’s all. I suspect he had no idea where to go next. He needed a new lead to get him on the right track. So he came here to the museum hoping that something – anything – might strike him and provide that lead.’
‘It doesn’t look as if he found it,’ Guastafeste said.
‘Hang on a moment, what’s this?’
Another figure had come into shot – a taller, younger man with thin wispy hair swept back from his freckled face. He was wearing an open-necked shirt and a fashionable light-coloured linen jacket. Tomaso seemed to know him. The two men exchanged a few words, their lips moving soundlessly on the screen. Then Tomaso gave a nod, as if agreeing to something, and followed Christopher Scott out of the room.
* * *
I stepped closer to the painting, aware that the camera high up in the corner of the room was recording my every move. I could see nothing particularly interesting in the portrait, nothing I hadn’t seen when I’d examined it before. I took a pace to my right. The angle of the light changed, casting a sheen over the canvas and obscuring Cozio’s face and the front of his frock-coat. I moved back to my original position, then kept going left. The light changed again. This time the count’s face was brought into sharper relief. I could see the artist’s brush strokes, the way he’d painted the fine detail of Cozio’s shirt, the wrinkles on the skin of his fingers and hands. And I saw something I hadn’t noticed before – a subtle change in the texture of the oils along the edges of the blank sheet of paper. I touched the join, expecting to feel a minute ridge, but of course I felt nothing except the smooth layer of varnish over the paint.
‘Anything?’ Guastafeste asked.
‘I don’t know. But there’s a way of finding out.’
* * *
‘This is really very irregular, Gianni,’ Vittorio Sicardo said. ‘If the curator of pictures gets to hear of it, he’ll blow a fuse.’
‘Who’s going to tell him?’ I said. ‘It’ll only take a couple of minutes. It’s important.’
Vittorio sighed. ‘You go back upstairs. I’ll bring the equipment up.’
Guastafeste was still standing in front of the portrait of Cozio di Salabue.
‘It’s all fixed,’ I said.
A few minutes later, Vittorio arrived with the ultra-violet lamp, an extension lead and three pairs of tinted goggles. He called in one of the museum attendants and told him to keep visitors out of the room, then plugged the extension l
ead into a socket in the wall and handed out the goggles.
‘Which area are you interested in?’
‘The blank piece of paper,’ I said.
Vittorio switched on the lamp and shone the ultra-violet beam on to the painting. Through my tinted goggles I could see the image of Cozio glowing with a strange bluish luminescence. The blank piece of paper in the count’s hand was darker than the rest of the canvas, almost black in fact.
‘See that?’ Vittorio said. ‘Areas of overpainting always fluoresce black. It seems you were right, the picture has been altered.’
He switched off the UV lamp and we removed our goggles.
‘Is there any way of seeing what was overpainted?’ I said.
‘What do you think might have been there?’
‘I don’t know. Words, perhaps. Something written on the piece of paper. Can’t you see images beneath the paint with infra-red light?’
‘You can use infra-red photography to detect images on the ground layer, yes. The chalk or graphite lines the artist used to sketch out the portrait would be visible. But if there were words on the piece of paper, Morera, the artist, would never have put them in at the ground stage. Details like that would always be in the paint layer, and infra-red photography can’t distinguish between different layers of paint.’
‘So there’s no way of finding out if there was anything written on the paper?’
‘Not without stripping away the varnish and then the overpaint,’ Vittorio said. He saw what was coming. ‘And no, Gianni, I am not going to allow that. This is a precious painting.’
I gave a weary nod. ‘Thanks, Vittorio. It was worth a try.’
Vittorio unplugged the extension lead and wound it into a coil around his arm. ‘You could always look at Morera’s sketches, if you like,’ he said.
‘You have his sketches? For this portrait?’
‘I’m not absolutely sure about that, but we have a collection of his drawings in the basement. You want me to have them brought up?’
* * *
The drawings were in three A1-sized portfolios, fastened shut with faded black ribbons which looked as if they hadn’t been untied for decades. Vittorio had to use a letter opener to prise apart the knotted ends of the ribbons, then he spread open the first portfolio on his desk. He was wearing white cotton gloves to prevent any soiling of the drawings.
