by Paul Adam
‘Antonio.’
I held out the revolver. Guastafeste took it from me and let it dangle down by his side.
‘He slipped,’ he said.
Only then did I realise where he was looking. By his feet was the freshly dug grave. I moved forward, directing the torch beam into the hole. Sprawled in the mud at the bottom, still clutching the violin case, was Christopher Scott. From the unnatural angle of his neck, the empty glaze over his eyes, there was no doubt that he was dead.
19
‘What are we going to do?’ I said.
Guastafeste didn’t reply. He walked over to a waist-high rectangular marble tomb and sat down wearily on the edge of it. He took out his handkerchief and held it to the gash in his head.
‘You need a doctor,’ I said.
‘Later.’
‘Let me see it.’
‘It looks worse than it is.’
I examined his head in the torch light. ‘It will need stitches. We’d better get you to a hospital.’
‘I’ll be okay. There are other, more pressing matters.’
I nodded and waited for him to continue. He looked at me. ‘This is more complicated than we expected. How far are you prepared to go?’
‘You don’t think the truth will do?’
‘We’ve broken into a tomb illegally. Robbed a grave, I suppose. Someone has died. I can keep you out of it, Gianni, say I came here alone. But it will be the end of my police career, perhaps any career.’
‘That’s too high a price to pay,’ I said. ‘Scott was a killer. His death was accidental. We should have nothing on our consciences.’
‘Or I can make something up,’ Guastafeste said. ‘Wipe our fingerprints from the vault. Say I followed Scott here, caught him breaking into it. There’ll be a storm ahead, but I think I can weather it.’
‘And the violin?’
‘Who’s to say Scott found anything in the vault?’
‘You mean we keep it?’
‘It has no legitimate owner. Cozio di Salabue gave it away to pay a debt. Paolo Anselmi stole it. Thomas Colquhoun was paid the money he was owed. Who does the violin really belong to? Technically you might say it ought to go to the State. But do you want a bunch of politicians in Rome to have it?’
I shivered. It was getting cold in the graveyard. I didn’t want to remain there much longer.
‘I know what we have to do with it,’ I said.
* * *
It was almost dawn when Guastafeste returned to our hotel room from the Questura in Casale. I was waiting up for him, still fully dressed. There hadn’t seemed much point in going to bed. Guastafeste had a dressing over the gash on the side of his head.
‘How does it feel?’ I said.
‘Sore, but not too bad.’
I opened the door of the mini bar and took out a miniature bottle of cognac. I poured the brandy into a glass and handed it to Guastafeste. He took a sip.
‘Thanks.’
‘How was it?’ I said.
‘Tricky.’
‘Did they believe you?’
‘For the time being. I’m one of theirs. They want to believe me. The hard bit will come later when the investigating magistrate gets involved. By then I hope there’ll be other developments.’
He drank some more cognac. ‘I’ve asked for a sample of Scott’s DNA to be sent to Cremona. There was a spot of blood on the workbench in Tomaso’s workshop which wasn’t his. If it turns out to be Scott’s, neither the Casale police nor my colleagues in Cremona will give a damn about the Anselmi vault or any violin.’
Guastafeste looked around the room and saw the violin case on my bed. ‘You haven’t opened it?’
‘I was waiting for you.’
I went across to the bed and stared down at the case, unable to bring myself to touch it. This was the moment we’d been waiting for – for how long? Was it really only a couple of weeks? It is a cliché, I know, but I felt as if I had been waiting a lifetime. And perhaps I had. My mouth was dry. There was a sickness in my stomach: the nausea of anticipation, and maybe of fear, for I did not know what this moment would bring.
‘Come on, Gianni,’ Guastafeste said. ‘This is your honour.’
It was an old-style violin case, of the type they used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the instrument was inserted lengthwise into the end of the case rather than – as today – being placed under a hinged lid. My fingers found the fastening, fumbled with it, unable to open it. Guastafeste leaned past me and undid the simple metal catch. I murmured my thanks and took hold of the flap covering the opening. I glanced up. Guastafeste was utterly still, his gaze fixed intently on the case. I was almost paralysed by nerves. It might be empty, it might contain nothing but sawdust. I had to find out.
Closing my eyes, I lifted aside the flap and slid my hand inside the case. Just a short distance in I encountered something soft and yielding. It felt like a bag. I pulled it out and opened my eyes. It was indeed a cloth bag. I undid the drawstring and peered inside. It contained grains of rice, now swollen with moisture – protection from the damp and humidity that can destroy an instrument.
I closed my eyes again and slipped my hand back into the case. I felt more cloth, then something harder beneath the cloth. My fingers closed around it and pulled. The object came slowly out. I used my other hand to guide it. I could feel its shape, the curve of the bouts, then the waist, then more curves and finally the neck and scroll. I opened my eyes. All I could see was a length of yellow silk, a parcel with something inside it. I placed the parcel carefully on the bed next to me and unwrapped the silk sheath. As the folds fell apart, I heard a gasp of astonishment, of awe, and realised it had come from my own lips. For one brief moment my whole body seemed to shut down. I stopped breathing, my heart ceased beating. Beneath the silk was a violin. A violin unlike any other violin I’d ever seen. Unlike any violin anyone alive had ever seen.
It was perfect. Absolutely perfect – in near mint condition despite its century and a half in a vault. Only the gut strings were damaged, all four of them snapped in two. I picked the violin up and gazed at it. The back was made of two pieces of maple, cut on the quarter, with a fine, well-marked curl in the wood. The belly was an even, open-grained spruce, the waist quite long, the f-holes rather pointed – all classic signs of its maker. And the varnish … even in the unflattering light of our hotel room the varnish glowed like molten rubies.
‘My God,’ Guastafeste breathed. ‘That is beautiful.’
I tilted the belly so the light shone through the bass f-hole, revealing the label inside the instrument. ‘Joseph Guarnerius fecit Cremonae anno 1743’, followed by the mark of the cross and the cipher IHS.
‘Look at the fingerboard, the tailpiece, the bridge, the neck,’ I said. ‘They’re all original, exactly the way Guarneri made them. Nothing has been changed.’
‘That’s special?’ Guastafeste said.
‘Very. Even the Messiah is not as Stradivari made it.’
‘So it’s not a sister to the Messiah?’
‘In one way it is,’ I replied. ‘The Messiah is a perfect, unplayed Stradivari. This is an even more perfect Guarneri “del Gesù”. They don’t share a maker, but they are sisters all the same.’
‘And its value?’ Guastafeste said, practical as ever.
‘It is beyond valuation,’ I said. ‘How can you put a price on something like this? It’s like putting a price on a newborn child, or a sunset over the mountains. Some things are too precious to think of in terms of money.’
‘You’re such a romantic, Gianni,’ Guastafeste said. ‘It’s only a violin.’
‘Only!’ I exclaimed. ‘Only a violin! Are you blind? Can you not see perfection when it’s before your eyes?’
I stood up, the violin still in my hands.
‘If only I could play it for you. If only you could hear the sound, then you would realise what I mean. This is not just an old violin. Not just an old violin by a maker who – in terms of to
nal beauty – is the greatest who ever lived. This is a living, breathing thing. This can sing, make your heart soar, move you to the depths of your soul.’
I looked at him. His face was blurred by my tears. Guastafeste held out his arms and embraced me.
‘We’ve found it,’ he said. ‘We’ve found it.’
20
I put the violin case down on my workbench and carefully removed the instrument. It seemed more beautiful than ever. In the warm evening sunshine its varnish burnt with the scorching intensity of red-hot lava.
Guastafeste pulled out a stool and watched while I strung the ‘del Gesù’. The pegs were stiff and swollen after their years in the vault. I let the sun warm them for a bit, then removed the remains of the old broken gut strings and lubricated the pegs with a bit of dry soap to make them turn smoothly. Before I put on the new strings I checked the bridge and soundpost which, amazingly, was still in place.
‘It looks remarkably good for a violin that’s been in a tomb for a hundred and fifty years,’ Guastafeste said.
‘Whoever put it there knew what they were doing. The marble plinth, the lead casket, would have protected it from extreme fluctuations in temperature. There were air holes to keep it well ventilated, to stop the wood rotting, and grains of rice to soak up the excess moisture.’
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t have preferred it to be a Stradivari?’
I shook my head. ‘A “del Gesù” is much rarer, much more interesting. There is something restrained, almost clinical about Stradivari’s perfection, his consistency. Guarneri was a wilder character, more erratic in his life and craftsmanship. But that passion is in his violins, and what a passion it was. And what a sound!’
I tightened the strings one at a time and fine-tuned them. Then I went back into the house and returned with one of my bows. I slid the violin under my chin.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Guastafeste asked.
‘I don’t know whether I can do this.’ My throat felt constricted, my stomach fluttering with nerves as if I were about to perform before an audience of thousands. ‘I don’t know whether I can cope with my expectations. With the disappointment if it fails to live up to them.’
‘Just go for it, Gianni.’
I touched the bow to the strings, running it lightly over each one in turn. The sound sent a shiver up my arm and all the way down my spine.
‘Properly,’ Guastafeste said.
I played a G major broken chord, letting the bow dig into the strings.
‘Wow, that is some sound,’ Guastafeste said in amazement.
‘Imagine what it would be like in the hands of a real player.’
‘Play some more.’
I played Bach from memory, the slow Sarabande from the D Minor Partita. A shudder went through me. I had never heard a sound like it, never heard myself play like this. For a hundred and fifty years the violin had been shut away in the darkness, entombed among corpses who would never hear again. Now it was back in the light and it seemed to me as if during all those years of silence the violin had been storing up its voice for this one moment when it would be allowed to sing again. The power was overwhelming, the resonance rich and dark, one moment full of passion, the next sobbing out in anguish, then crying out in joy, every element of human emotion encompassed in that wondrous, uplifting sound.
I couldn’t get enough of it. Not just the music, but the violin too. I wanted it for my own. The music alone was not sufficient, I had to possess the source of that music. I began to see in myself the greed, the lust for ownership I’d observed, and so despised, in wealthy collectors – men who cared nothing for the voices of their possessions, but looked on them as objects, as trophies to be gloated over in secret. I felt the violin bewitching me, whispering in my ear, ‘I could be yours’, like the Devil making a bid for my soul. I wrenched the instrument away from my chin and put it down with a gasp.
‘What is it?’ Guastafeste asked, suddenly concerned.
I shook my head, unable to speak. I was fighting off a curse, struggling with the base forces within me. The violin had been shut away for too long already. It was not for a collector, nor for a poor, ungifted player like me. It was made for greater things.
* * *
I began work on the violin next morning. For a long while I did nothing, simply sat at my workbench and stared at the ‘del Gesù’. What I was about to do filled me with disquiet. It seemed tantamount to vandalism. Certainly a musical historian would have regarded it as such. Yet I knew it was necessary. Whatever my sentiments, it was the right thing to do.
I looked up for a moment, my gaze coming to rest on the violin hanging on the wall in the corner of the workshop – Ruffino’s final gift to me. ‘Guide me, Bartolomeo. Steady my hand,’ I murmured softly before I turned my attention back to the ‘del Gesù’ in front of me.
Very carefully, I prised off the fingerboard, then the belly of the instrument. The soundbox was dirty and full of dust. I cleaned it out and examined the label. It was one of the last instruments Guarneri had ever made. I turned the belly over and studied the bass bar. It was far too short and weak for a modern concert instrument. The soundpost too was thin and old. Both pieces of wood would have to be replaced. The fingerboard would also have to go. This one was wedge-shaped, made of willow, lined at the sides with maple and faced with an ebony veneer. I would substitute it for a solid ebony fingerboard, but first I had to undertake the most fundamental alteration to the instrument – the lengthening of the neck.
This wasn’t a job to undertake lightly. I was dealing with an historic instrument, the work of a master. I would need to be exceptionally careful and meticulous in the way I went about it. One slip of the chisel and I could ruin the instrument. For the rest of the morning I worked on the violin, absorbed in the details of my craft. It seemed to me that my entire career as a luthier had been preparation for this moment. Everything I had done over the last half century seemed to pale in comparison with the task on which I was now engaged. Bringing the Guarneri ‘del Gesù’ back from the dead, quite literally resurrecting it – if that is not too blasphemous an analogy – seemed to me to be a truly momentous undertaking. If I did nothing else hereafter, I would consider my life well spent.
In the middle of the afternoon I took a break for a glass of wine and some bread and cheese. I was anxious to get back to my workshop, but I forced myself to sit down in the kitchen for half an hour. This was not the kind of work that could be rushed.
The day’s post had been delivered while I was at my bench, including my regular copy of The Strad, the magazine for violinists and luthiers which is sent to me every month from England. I opened the magazine on the kitchen table and glanced through it as I ate my lunch. By coincidence, one of the main articles concerned a Guarneri – not Giuseppe ‘del Gesù’, but his wife Katarina about whom I knew very little except that there had been speculation over the years that she had been a violin-maker in her own right – an unusual phenomenon for her time – and had possibly assisted her husband in the manufacture of his own instruments. I read the article with interest. Here was a woman condemned to live her life in the shadow of her husband, left a widow at a comparatively early age before she remarried a Bohemian infantryman named Horak … I paused. Horak?
Dio, I knew that name. Elisabeta Horak, author of one of the letters to Michele Anselmi we’d found in the archives in Casale. She’d mentioned a violin left to her by her mother. Was her mother Katarina Guarneri? If so, the instrument on my workbench was quite possibly the one Elisabeta had sold to Anselmi for Count Cozio’s collection. I liked the symmetry of that hypothesis. It tied up another of the loose ends that had been bothering me. There were others, of course, but … but.
I looked up. No, was that possible? My glass of wine was frozen in mid-air, halfway to my mouth. I put the glass down on the table. My hand was trembling. Surely not. Was it?
I went to the telephone and rang directory enquiries, then made a couple of calls to Mila
n. When I returned to my workshop, I was so agitated I had to sit for ten minutes, controlling my breathing, before my hand was steady enough to pick up my tools. My mind was preoccupied, but no longer with the violin before me.
* * *
Guastafeste came round that evening. I opened a bottle of wine and we sat on the terrace, watching the sun set over the cornfields at the bottom of my garden.
‘The DNA matched,’ he said. ‘Proof that Christopher Scott was in Tomaso’s workshop the night he was murdered. We think he must have nicked his finger with the chisel he used, let a droplet of blood fall on to the worktop. We’ve sent the details to the Questura in Venice. See if they can get a match with anything in Forlani’s house.’
‘You think Scott killed Forlani too?’ I said. ‘What about his alibi?’
‘Spadina’s looking into that again. There must be a hole in it somewhere, something we’ve overlooked. Maybe he borrowed a boat to get off the Giudecca, maybe he bribed the water taxi driver and hotel receptionist. We’ll find it.’
‘And the missing Maggini?’
‘Scott took it.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so. Scott knew about violins. He’d have taken a Stradivari.’
‘But the Maggini was the only one whose glass case was broken. It was there for the taking. Why smash another few cases? Scott had just murdered Forlani. He wouldn’t have wanted to hang around.’
I sipped my wine without replying.
‘You don’t agree?’ Guastafeste said.
‘No.’
‘So who did kill Forlani?’
‘It’s just a hunch,’ I said. ‘But I think I may have an idea.’
21
They were already waiting for us when we arrived at the Conservatorio, sitting at a corner table in the coffee bar, glasses of mineral water in front of them.
