Paganini's Ghost Read online

  “So your dressing room was unguarded? It wasn’t locked?”

  “No, it was not locked.”

  “And at the end of the concert, what happened?”

  “I finish my encores and return to dressing room. The insurance company men are with me. I put the Cannon back in its case and they take it away from me immediately. Put it on van and take back to Genoa.”

  “And your music?”

  “I leave in dressing room while we go to reception. Then I go back after and take music with me to hotel.”

  “Thank you, Signor Ivanov,” Guastafeste said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “Do we get that back?” Ludmilla asked, pointing at the fragment of music in the evidence bag.

  “I’m sorry,” Guastafeste said. “But I have to keep it for the time being. The rest of the ‘Moses Fantasy,’ too. There may be fingerprints on it.”

  “Does not matter,” Yevgeny said. “I do not need it.”

  “What do you think?” Guastafeste said, checking his mirror and pulling away from the kerb outside the Hotel Emanuele. “When did Villeneuve tear off the corner?”

  “Not during the concert,” I said.

  “You think not?”

  “He was in the audience. The cathedral was packed with people. The nave is very open. If he’d slipped away while Yevgeny was playing, someone would have noticed. It had to have been after the concert.”

  “That would be my guess, too. When the audience was on its feet, everybody milling round. He sneaked back into the vestry area, waited for Yevgeny to leave his dressing room, then nipped in. A few seconds would have been all he needed. Or perhaps he went back later, when Yevgeny was at the reception.”

  “But why only the corner of the music? Why not the whole thing?”

  “Maybe he wanted only the corner. Maybe he was interrupted. You know, someone startled him and he accidentally ripped off the corner.”

  “It’s a very odd thing to do,” I said. “Why did he want any of the music in the first place?”

  “I have an idea about that,” Guastafeste replied. “Have you time for a detour? I want to show you something.”

  He headed west along the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, then turned right after the Teatro Ponchielli and doubled back along the Via Tribunali. Blue-and-white police patrol cars were parked along both sides of the road outside the questura. Guastafeste found a space and pulled in.

  “You want me to wait here?” I said.

  “No, come inside.”

  We went through the arched entrance of the questura. Guastafeste signed me in at the front desk, I was issued a visitor’s pass, and we went upstairs into a large open-plan office crammed with desks and computers and intense-looking men in shirtsleeves. Guastafeste introduced me to his colleagues and pulled out a chair for me.

  “I won’t be a minute.”

  He crossed the room and disappeared through a door. I looked round. The other detectives were all on the phone or tapping away at keyboards. On the wall at the far side of the office was a large whiteboard covered in writing—words and phrases in black boxes, with arrows connecting them all together. I saw Villeneuve’s name at the top, then other names and bits of information sprouting out below, like a family tree.

  When Guastafeste returned a few minutes later, he was carrying another transparent plastic evidence bag. He put the bag down on the desk, unsealed it, and took out a rectangular gold box about thirty centimetres long, fifteen wide, and perhaps five or six deep. It looked to me like a woman’s jewellery box or perhaps a man’s cigar box. It was a beautifully made item and obviously an expensive one. I know very little about metalworking, particularly gold-and silversmithing, but I have an eye for quality, and this was undoubtedly the work of a master craftsman.

  “You can touch it,” Guastafeste said. “It’s been dusted for fingerprints.”

  I picked up the box and examined it. The edges were finely tooled, and engraved round the sides was a geometrical pattern of lines and squares. On the lid, as Guastafeste had mentioned, was an engraving of Moses on Mount Sinai. That, too, was a superlative piece of work. The figure of Moses, with his long, flowing hair and beard, was particularly well done. His wrinkled face seemed alive, his eyes burning with fervour. The gold was slightly dirty, in need of a polish. There were specks of white dust in some of the grooves, which I guessed had been left behind by the police forensics people.

  “It’s a nice piece,” I said.

  I turned it over and saw the hallmark on the bottom.

  “Do you know who made it, and when?” I asked.

  “Not yet. We’ll have to get an expert in for that. Have you seen the lock?”

  “Yes, it’s interesting, isn’t it? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a combination lock that uses letters rather than numbers.”

  The lock was along the front edge of the box. It was a sturdy-looking mechanism with four circular dials set into the metal so that only a fraction of their circumferences protruded. Engraved into the dials, the grooves filled with some kind of black mastic to make them more legible, were a series of letters. I turned each of the dials in turn with my thumb. They rotated smoothly, as if they’d been recently oiled.

  “You noticed the letters?” Guastafeste said.

  “Yes. A to G on each dial. Only seven letters.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “They could spell out someone’s name.”

  “I thought of that, but I didn’t get very far. I couldn’t think of a single four-letter Christian name that used only the letters A to G. Surnames weren’t much easier.”

  “Someone’s initials, then?”

  “That’s possible. But I’ve been wondering: What was it that prompted Villeneuve to steal a fragment of the ‘Moses Fantasy’? The music is in print and available, so he could easily have got hold of his own copy. Yet he had to tear off a bit of Yevgeny Ivanov’s copy. Why?”

  “He needed it there and then,” I said. “He was in a hurry and couldn’t wait.”

  “Exactly. He heard the ‘Moses Fantasy’ being played and something suddenly occurred to him. There was an engraving of Moses on the gold box—that’s an obvious link with the music. But there was another link, too. The combination lock on the box uses the letters A to G. And A to G . . .”

  “Are the letters of the musical scale,” I said.

  Guastafeste grinned.

  “You see where I’m heading? The Hotel San Michele’s night manager told me that on Saturday evening, about eleven-thirty, Villeneuve took the gold box from the hotel safe. He went up to his room with it, then returned the box to the safe half an hour later.”

  “You think he opened the box? That he’d discovered the combination?” I said.

  “Seems a plausible guess.”

  “Why would anyone use the opening notes of Paganini’s ‘Moses Fantasy’ as the combination for a lock? It’s pretty far-fetched, you have to admit.”

  “Let’s give it a try.”

  Guastafeste produced the torn-off corner of music and put it down on the desk next to the box.

  “Do you want the honours?” I said.

  “No, you do it. I’ll read out the notes.”

  Guastafeste peered at the music.

  “G.”

  I turned the top dial of the combination lock to G.

  “C, D, E flat.”

  I turned the other three dials. Then I tried the lid. It didn’t budge.

  “Try them from the bottom up,” Guastafeste said.

  I reversed the order of letters and tugged on the lid again. It was still firmly locked.

  “Let me see,” Guastafeste said.

  He took the box from me and rotated the dials himself, trying out several combinations of those four letters. None of them worked.

  “Merda!” he said.

  “I told you it was far-fetched,” I said.

  Guastafeste gave a low growl of annoyance.

  “I was hoping to avoid it, but it looks now as if I’ll
have to break it open.”

  “Surely not,” I said, aghast. “It’s such a splendid box. You would ruin it.”

  “What choice do I have? I’ll need permission, of course. It’s a valuable item. Technically, it belongs to Villeneuve’s estate, to his wife or heirs. I’ll have to apply for a warrant from the investigating magistrate.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “The bureaucracy round here, at least twenty-four hours.”

  I picked up the box and looked at the engraving on the lid again: Moses clutching a stone tablet in each arm, a range of mountains in the background, and a break in the clouds above, through which a heavenly ray of light was shining—presumably to signify the divine revelation of ancient Jewish law, the Decalogue, whose sixth commandment, in François Villeneuve’s tragic case, had recently been broken.

  “It doesn’t feel very heavy,” I said. “It would be a shame to force it open and then discover it was empty.”

  “I don’t believe it is empty,” Guastafeste said with quiet conviction. “There’s something inside it; I’m sure of it. And whatever it is, it’s important.”

  Six

  I spent the rest of the day in my workshop, quietly getting on with my violins. I have made violas and cellos in the past—and would do so again if asked—but luthiers tend to specialise, and my output now is predominantly violins. People sometimes ask me how many instruments I have made. I keep a record of each one, so the exact figure is available in the dog-eared logbook in my safe, but off the top of my head it is probably somewhere in the low three hundreds. That is a respectable number, but modest compared to some of the great makers of the past. Stradivari produced twelve hundred, Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume an astonishing three thousand.

  Making the violins is not the problem, though producing a good one is difficult. It is selling them that is the tricky part. When I was a young man, I struggled to find buyers for my instruments. Why would anyone want a new violin by the unknown Giovanni Battista Castiglione when they could get a serviceable secondhand instrument for half the price? But making violins was my calling, so I persisted, determined to succeed, although most of my income in those early years came from repairs and overhauls and bow rehairing.

  As I grew more experienced and began to acquire a reputation as a good craftsman, I started to sell more instruments. Word of mouth from satisfied customers, particularly among the professional musicians who formed my main clientele, led to more sales, until I no longer had to make violins on spec, but was working to commission only. At my peak, I was probably producing ten or more instruments a year, and that was entirely on my own. Stradivari and the others, it must be remembered, had apprentices doing a lot of the less skilled work, but I have never employed anyone else. I have thought about it occasionally, but I like working on my own, like doing all the tasks myself. It adds variety to the day, but it also means that every part of the violin-making process is completed to my own exacting standards. I am a perfectionist, and not ashamed to be one. I would find it very difficult to entrust anything but the most menial tasks to an apprentice, and that would make little sense for either of us.

  I have never felt lonely in my workshop. I have always worked either at home or close to home. When my wife was alive, we had lunch together every day, friends or other luthiers would pop in for a chat, and the children would always come in to see me when they came home from school. Now that my wife has gone and my children have grown up and left, I have my music for company. I never work in silence. I always have a CD or an old LP on my player, an orchestral or vocal piece, or something from my extensive collection of violin music.

  I do not make so many instruments now—probably no more than five a year, and all to order. I could make many more than that—I have a waiting list of commissions that is several years long—but I like to take my time, and I still like to do some repair work, though only at the upper end of the market, Stradivaris and Guarneris and the like.

  My job is necessarily repetitive, but very rarely do I get bored. There are many different stages in the making of an instrument, and as I always have more than one in progress at any given time, if I get tired of one task on one violin, I can simply move on to another task on a second instrument, or a third. In an average day, I might be sawing a piece of maple, or gluing ribs, or carving a back, or fitting a neck, or one of a hundred other jobs. I am a mini–production line, but I can move round it as much as I choose.

  There is something deeply satisfying about working with your hands, particularly with wood. I think it meets a basic, almost atavistic need in all of us—a throwback to more primitive times, when building a shelter or fashioning a hunting tool was essential to one’s survival. I find it soothing and therapeutic and would recommend it to anyone who is suffering from stress. The world would be a more peaceful place if we were all craftsmen. At those international conferences, when our belligerent leaders get together to squabble and plot but never manage to resolve their differences, I would take them all into a room, give them each a knife and a block of wood to carve, and by the end of the day they would be calmer and more willing to compromise. Problems would not be solved overnight, but the odds on agreement would certainly be improved. I am being naïve, perhaps. More likely, given the nature of our leaders, they would ignore the block of wood and just apply their knives to one another’s backs.

  At half-past six, I stopped work and went into the kitchen to make dinner—a cheese omelette and some of the French beans I’d picked the previous day, with a glass of red wine to go with them. I’d finished eating and was drinking my coffee when the phone rang. To my surprise, it was Ludmilla Ivanova.

  She wasted no time on social courtesies, but said bluntly, “Is Yevgeny there?”

  I could hear an undertone of worry in her voice.

  “No, why should he be here?” I said.

  “You’re the only person he knows in Cremona. I thought he might be visiting you again.”

  “No, signora, he hasn’t been here. Is everything all right?”

  “No, it isn’t all right.”

  The undertone surfaced and there was open anxiety in her voice now.

  “He’s disappeared. I don’t know where he is. Yevgeny has disappeared. Something’s happened to him.”

  “What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?” I said.

  “He’s not here. I went out shopping this afternoon, and when I got back, he was gone.”

  “What time was this?”

  “About half an hour ago.”

  “Signora, relax. He’s probably just gone for a walk.”

  “Yevgeny doesn’t go for walks. And if he did, he’d leave me a note.”

  “Half an hour isn’t long. Have you checked downstairs? Maybe he’s in the hotel restaurant or lounge.”

  “No, he isn’t there; I’ve looked. He’s nowhere in the hotel. Something’s wrong, I can tell. Something’s very wrong.”

  “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about,” I said reassuringly.

  “You think so?”

  “It’s not late. He’s a grown man. My guess is he’s out sightseeing or something like that. Give it more time; he’ll probably be back very soon.”

  “And if he’s not?”

  “Call me again, and we’ll decide what to do then.”

  “Yes, okay. I’ll wait a bit. Thank you. You are very kind.”

  She rang off. I put down the receiver and shook my head. Parents will always worry about their children, which is only natural, but sometimes you can be overprotective. Ludmilla really needed to let Yevgeny go a bit. It would do them both good.

  I washed up my plate and cup, then pondered what to do next. Sometimes in the evenings I return to my workshop and tidy up a bit, or I sharpen my tools or take care of the routine administration relating to my business—invoices, accounts, that kind of thing. Occasionally, I watch television, though there is seldom much on worth watching. This evening, I didn’t feel like any of those activities. I felt lik
e playing my violin.

  I went through into the back room and opened my violin case. I cast a critical eye over the instrument inside. When confronted with excellence in a field of endeavour to which we ourselves aspire, we tend to have two instinctive responses: It inspires us to try even harder to match that excellence, or it dispirits us so much that we throw up our hands in defeat and say, Why bother? Some people are temperamentally more inclined towards one of these responses than the other. I tend towards the first. When I examined il Cannone, I was aware that it was a much finer violin than anything I have produced, or will probably produce in the future. But that realisation didn’t fill me with despair. The reality of life is that we are all second-rate. Mediocrity is the norm in human existence, which is why when an individual transcends that mediocrity, we stand back and gaze on their achievement with awe. We cannot quite believe that they have done it.

  How did Guarneri make such sublime instruments? I don’t know. Probably he himself didn’t know. He learnt his craft and worked at it for years, of course. But I have also worked at my craft for years, yet my violins are crude wooden boxes compared to Guarneri’s. The sad truth is that he had something that I do not, something special, something innate. He was born with the gift, and no matter how hard I work, how hard I dedicate myself to the task of equalling him, I will never succeed. That does not mean I should not try, however. I may not be a Giuseppe Guarneri, but I can certainly be a better Giovanni Battista Castiglione.

  The same applies to playing the violin. I had heard Yevgeny Ivanov, and been overwhelmed by his astonishing virtuosity. But it didn’t make me despondent; it didn’t make me want to give up the instrument myself. It made me want to play better, to strive that little bit harder to improve my own standard. I will never be anything more than a good amateur; I know that. But there is satisfaction and fulfilment to be found in pushing the barriers, in seeing just how far you can take your limited talents.

  I attached the shoulder rest to my violin and tightened my bow. I warmed my fingers up with a few scales and arpeggios, then looked round for some music to play. The “Moses Fantasy” was still out on top of the piano. I would not normally attempt a piece by Paganini—the technical demands are too great for me—but this evening I thought, What the hell. Why not?