"I don't have any theories."
"You will, before the day is up." He tossed a two-euro coin on the counter, and they went out. "Our first stop is the Palazzo Comunale, a fine example of medieval civic architecture, containing a notable marble chimneypiece by Pedoni."
"Heck, I've always wanted to see that chimneypiece."
Pendergast smiled.
A ten-minute walk brought them to the heart of the city and a crooked piazza. On one side stood an enormous cathedral with a soaring tower. Pendergast gestured at it as they passed. "That is said to be the tallest medieval tower in Italy. Built in the thirteenth century, the height of a thirty-three-story skyscraper."
"Amazing."
"And here is the Palazzo Comunale." They entered a massive, unadorned medieval palace built of brick. A guard nodded at them as they passed the entrance, and D'Agosta wondered if it was Pendergast's air of utter self-confidence, or something else, that allowed them such easy entry. He followed Pendergast up a flight of stairs and down several stone corridors to a small, barren room. A glass case stood in its center, and an enormous Venetian glass chandelier hung from above, bristling with lightbulbs and giving the room the brilliance of a movie set. An armed guard stood nearby.
In the glass case were six violins.
"Ah!" said Pendergast. "Here we are: the Saletta dei Violini."
"Violins?"
"Not just any violins. What we are looking at is the history of the violin, in one case. Which is, in microcosm, a history of music."
"I see," said D'Agosta, letting a note of sarcasm creep into his voice. Pendergast would, eventually, get to the point.
"The first one, there, was made by Andrea Amati in 1566. You'll recall the violin Constance plays is also an Amati, though very much inferior to these. Those two beside it are by his sons; that one by his grandson. That next was built by Giuseppe Guarneri in 1689." Pendergast paused. "And that last one was made by Antonio Stradivari in 1715."
"As in Stradivarius?"
"The world's most celebrated violinmaker. He invented the modern violin and during his lifetime made eleven hundred, of which about six hundred survive. Although all his instruments remain among the greatest ever made, there was a period when he made a string of violins that had a most gloriously perfect tone-perhaps twenty or thirty. We call that his golden period."
"Okay."
"Stradivari was a man of many secrets. To this day, no one has ever solved the mystery of how he made such perfect violins. He kept his methods and formulas in his head, never wrote them down. He passed these priceless trade secrets on to his two sons, who took over his workshop, but when they died, all Stradivari's secrets died with them. Ever since, people have been trying to duplicate his violins. A number of scientists have tried to re-create his secret formulas. But to this day, Stradivari's secret has never been cracked."
"They must be worth a lot of dough."
"Not so long ago you could buy a good Strad for fifty or a hundred thousand dollars. But the market for violins has been ruined by the super-rich. Now a top Strad can fetch ten million or more."
"No shit."
"The best are priceless, especially those made during his golden period. In those instruments, he got the formula just right. Nobody really knows why. It's quite humbling, Vincent, to realize we can land a spaceship on Mars, we can build a machine to perform a trillion calculations a second, we can split the nucleus of the atom-but we still cannot make a better violin than could a man puttering around in a simple workshop three centuries ago."
"Well, he was Italian."
Pendergast laughed quietly. "One of the beautiful things about a Strad is that it has to be played in order to maintain its tone. It's alive. If you leave it in a case, it loses its tone and dies."
"What about these?"
"They are taken out and played at least once a week. Cremona is still the center of violinmaking, and there are many eager volunteers."
He clasped his hands behind his back, turned. "And now, for the real reason we came to Cremona. Stick close behind me, please, and don't get lost."
Pendergast led the way through a maze of back passages and narrow staircases to a side alley behind the palazzo. There they paused at least a minute while Pendergast made a careful inspection of the alley and surrounding buildings. Then, moving very quickly, he led D'Agosta through a winding series of ever more tortuous medieval streets, the ancient brick and stone buildings crowding in above. Some of the streets were so narrow they were dark despite the midday sun. Now and then, Pendergast would duck into a doorway or side alley and make another visual scan.
"What's up?" D'Agosta asked at one point.
"Just caution, Vincent; habitual caution."
They finally arrived at a street so narrow it could hardly admit a bicycle. It twisted into a dead end at what appeared to be a deserted shop front, a plate-glass window rudely affixed to a medieval stone arch. The plate glass was cracked and taped and opaque with dirt. A metal grate had been fitted and locked over the front, where it seemed to have rusted in place.
Pendergast slid his hand through the grate and pulled a string. There was a small tinkle in the shop beyond.
"Would it compromise your investigation completely if you told me who we're visiting now?"
"This is the laboratory and workshop of il dottor Luigi Spezi, one of the world's foremost experts on Stradivari violins. He is a bit of a Renaissance man himself, being a scientist and engineer as well as a fine musician. His re-creations of the Stradivari violins are among the best in the world. But I warn you: he is known to be a little cranky."
Pendergast pulled again, and a voice rumbled from the back. "Non lo voglio. Va' via!"
Pendergast rang again, insistently.
A gray shape materialized behind the glass: an enormous, stooped man in a leather apron with long gray hair and a gray mustache. He waved both hands at Pendergast in a shooing motion. "Che cazz'! Via, ho detto!"
Pendergast took out a business card, wrote a single word on the back, and slipped it through the mail slot in the door. It fluttered to the floor. The man picked it up, read the back, and went very still for a moment. He looked up at Pendergast, looked down at the card-and then began the laborious process of unlocking the door and raising the grate. Within a minute, they had stooped beneath the arch and were standing in his shop.
D'Agosta looked around curiously. The walls of the shop were almost completely covered with the hanging bellies, backplates, and purflings of violins in various stages of carving. It had a pleasant smell of wood, sawdust, varnish, oil, and glue.
The man stared at Pendergast as if he were staring at a ghost. He was wearing a dirty leather apron, and he removed a pair of sawdust-covered glasses in order to peer at the agent more closely.
"So, Aloysius Pendergast, Ph.D.," he said in almost flawless English. "You have gotten my attention. What is it you want?"
"Is there a place where we can talk?"
They followed him through the confines of the narrow shop-perhaps eight feet wide-to a much larger space in the back. Spezi indicated for them to sit on a long bench. He himself perched against the corner of a worktable, folded his hands, and stared.
In the rear wall, D'Agosta could see a stainless-steel door, grossly out of place, with a single small window. On the far side of the window was a gleaming white laboratory, racks of computer equipment and CRTs bathed in unpleasant fluorescent light.
"Thank you for agreeing to see me, Dottor Spezi," Pendergast said. "I know you are a very busy man, and I can assure you we will not waste your time."
The man bowed his head, mollified slightly.
"This is my associate, Sergeant Vincent D'Agosta of the Southampton Police Department, New York."
"Very pleased." The man leaned forward and shook his hand. He had a surprisingly strong grip. Then he sat back again and waited.
"I propose an exchange of information," Pendergast said.
"As you wish."
"You tell me what you know of Stradivari's secret formulas. I will tell you what I know of the existence of the violin mentioned on my card. Naturally, I will keep your information secret. I will write nothing down and speak to no one about it, except to my associate, who is a man of complete discretion."
D'Agosta watched the man's deep pale eyes stare back at them. He appeared to be thinking about, perhaps even struggling with, the proposal. Finally he nodded curtly.
"Very well, then," said Pendergast. "I wonder if you could answer some questions about your work."
"Yes, but first: the violin. How in the world-?"
"First things first. Tell me, Dottore-since I am a man who knows nothing about violins-tell me what makes the sound of a Stradivarius so perfect?"
The man seemed to relax, evidently realizing he was not dealing with a spy or competitor. "This is no secret. I would characterize it as very lively. It is an interesting sound. On top of that, it has a combination of darkness and brilliance, a balance between high and low frequencies-a tone that is rich but as pure and sweet as honey. Of course, each Strad sounds different-some have a fatter tone, others are lean, even harsh; some are thin and quite disappointing. Some have been repaired and rebuilt so many times they can hardly be called original. Only six Strads, for example, retain their original necks. When you drop a violin, it's always the neck that breaks. But there are about ten or twenty that sound almost perfect."
"Why?"
At this, the man smiled. "That, of course, is the question." He rose, went to the steel door, unlocked it, and swung it open, revealing two hard-disk recording workstations and racks of digital samplers, compressors, and limiters. The walls and ceiling were covered with acoustic foam paneling.
They followed him in, and he shut and locked the door behind them. Then he switched on an amplifier, pulled up the faders on a nearby mixing console. A low hum began to sound from the reference speakers set high in the walls.
"The first really scientific test done on a Stradivarius was performed about fifty years ago. They hooked a sound generator to the bridge of a violin and had it vibrate the instrument. Then they measured how the violin vibrated in return. An absurd test, really, because it has nothing to do with the way a violin is played. But even such a crude test showed the Strad gave back an extraordinary response in the two-thousand-to-four-thousand-hertz range-which, not at all coincidentally, happens to be the range of sound that the human ear is most sensitive to. Later, high-speed computers allowed real-time processing of a Strad being played. Let me give you an example."
He turned to one of the digital samplers, used an attached keyboard to select an audio sample, sent the output to the mixer. The sweet sound of a violin filled the room.
"This is Jascha Heifetz playing the cadenza of Beethoven's violin concerto on the Messiah Stradivarius."
A complex series of dancing lines appeared on a monitor sitting behind the mixer. Spezi pointed at them.
"That is a frequency analysis from thirty to thirty thousand hertz. Look at the richness of the low-frequency sounds! They give the violin its darkness, its sonority. And in the two thousand to four thousand range I mentioned, see how lively and robust it is. This is what fills the concert hall with sound."
D'Agosta wondered what any of this had to do with Bullard or the murders. He also wondered what Pendergast had written on the business card the man was still clutching in one fist. Whatever it was, it had clearly made this man remarkably cooperative.
"And these are the high frequencies. Look how they leap and flicker, like the flame of a candle. It's these transients that give the Strad that breathing, trembling tone, so delicate and fleeting."
Pendergast inclined his head. "So, Dottore-what's the secret?"
Spezi reached for the sampler and the music stopped. "There is no one secret. It was a whole catalog of secrets, some of which we've cracked, others we haven't. For example, we know exactly what kind of architecture Stradivari used. With computerized tomography, we can map a Strad perfectly in three dimensions. We know all there is to know about Stradivari's designs for the belly, backplate, purfling, f-holes-everything. We also know just what types of wood he used. We can make a perfect copy."
He turned to one of the computers, typed again, and the image of a beautiful violin appeared on its screen. "There it is. An absolutely perfect copy of the Harrison Strad, down to the very nicks and scratches. It took me almost half a year, back in the early eighties, to complete." He glanced over at them with a mirthless smile. "It sounds dreadful . The real secret, you see, was in the chemistry . Specifically, the recipe for the solution Stradivari soaked his wood in, and the recipe for his varnish. This has been the thrust of my research ever since."
"And?"
The man hesitated. "I don't know why I am inclined to trust you, but I do. The wood Stradivari used was cut in the foothills of the Apennines and dumped green into the Po or Adige Rivers, floated downstream, and stored in brackish lagoons near Venice. This was purely for convenience, but it did something critical to the wood-it opened up its pores. Stradivari purchased the wood wet. He did not season it. Instead, he soaked it further in a solution of his own making-as far as I can deduce, a combination of borax, sea salt, fruit gum, quartz and other minerals, and ground, colored Venetian glass. He soaked it for months, perhaps years, while it absorbed these chemicals. What did they do to the wood? Amazing, complex, miraculous things! First, they preserved it. The borax made the wood tighter, harder, stiffer. The ground quartz and glass prevented the violin from being eaten by woodworms-but it also filled in the air spaces and gave it a brilliance and clarity of tone. The fruit gum caused subtle changes and acted as a fungicide. Of course, the real secret lies in the proportions-and those, Signor Pendergast, I will not tell you."
Pendergast nodded.
"Over the years, I've made hundreds of violins from wood treated this way, experimenting with the ratios and the length of time in solution. The resulting instruments had a big, brilliant sound. But it was a harsh sound. Something was needed to dampen the vibrations, the overtones."
He paused. "Here is where the true genius of Stradivari comes in. He found that in his secret varnish."
He moused up the computer screen, clicked through a few menus. A new image appeared in black and white, a landscape of incredible ruggedness, looking to D'Agosta like some vast mountain range.
"Here is the varnish of a Stradivarius under a scanning electron microscope, 30,000x. As you can see, it is not the smooth, hard layer it seems to the naked eye. Instead, there are billions of microscopic cracks. When the violin is played, these cracks absorb and dampen the harsh vibrations and resonances, allowing only the purest, clearest tone to escape. That's the true secret to Stradivari's violins. The problem is, the varnish he used was an incredibly complex chemical solution, involving boiled insects and other organic and inorganic sources. It has defied all analysis-and we have so little of it to test. You can't strip the varnish off a Strad-removing even a little will ruin a violin. You'd need to destroy an entire instrument to get enough varnish to analyze it properly. Even then, you couldn't use one of his inferior violins. Those were experimental, and the varnish recipe changed many times. No-you'd have to destroy one from the golden period. Not only that, but you'd need to cut into the wood and analyze the chemistry of the solution he soaked them in as well as the interface between the varnish and the wood. For all these reasons, we have not been able to figure out exactly how he did it."
He leaned back. "Another problem. Even if you had all his secret recipes, you still might fail. Stradivari, knowing all that we don't, managed to make some mediocre violins. There were other factors to making a great violin, some apparently even beyond his control-such as the particular qualities of the piece of wood he used."
Pendergast nodded.
"And that, Mr. Pendergast, is all I can tell you." The man's face glittered with feverish intensity. "And now let us speak of this ." He opened his hand and smoothed the crumpled b
usiness card. And for the first time, D'Agosta glimpsed what Pendergast had written on it.
It was the word Stormcloud .
{ 62 }
The man held out the card in a trembling hand.
Pendergast nodded in return. "Perhaps the best way to start would be for you to tell Sergeant D'Agosta what you know of its history."
Spezi turned to D'Agosta, his face filling with regret. "The Stormcloud was Stradivari's greatest violin. It was played by a string of virtuosi in an almost unbroken line from Monteverdi to Paganini and beyond. It was present at some of the greatest moments in the history of music. It was played by Franz Clement at the premiere of Beethoven's violin concerto. It was played by Brahms himself at the premiere of his Second Violin Concerto, and by Paganini for the first Italian performance of all twenty-four of his caprices. And then, just before World War I-on the death of the virtuoso Luciano Toscanelli, may God curse him-it disappeared. Toscanelli went insane at the end of his days and, some say, destroyed it. Others say it was lost in the Great War."
"It wasn't."
Spezi straightened abruptly. "You mean it still exists ?"
"A few more questions if I may, Dottore. What do you know of the ownership of the Stormcloud?"
"That was one of its mysteries. It was always owned by the same family, apparently, who it was said purchased the instrument directly from Stradivari himself. It was passed down from father to son only in name, being on continuous loan to a string of virtuosi. That's normal, of course: most of the Strads today are owned by wealthy collectors who turn them over to virtuosi to play on long-term loan. Just so with the Stormcloud. When the virtuoso who was playing it died-or if he had the misfortune to give a bad concert-it was taken away by the family that owned it and given to another. There would have been intense competition for it. No doubt that is the reason the family remained anonymous-they didn't want to be harried and importuned by aspiring violinists. They made secrecy of their identity a strict condition of playing the violin."
Brimstone p-5 Page 35
