Fiddle Game (21 page)

“A lot of people have had that prejudice, over the years. But I’m not as easy to get rid of as they generally suppose.”

“Are you again on the run?”

“I don’t think so. It’s hard to tell for sure, but the cop who wanted me is dead now, and I think that’s the end of it.”
But then, you already know that.

“The coffee is ready, I think.”

I held out my cup and he poured steaming black liquid in it, leaving room for the obligatory spike. As he did so, I watched his hands and again saw the steady power and control. No wonder I hadn’t noticed his age. I could see it now, easily enough. The shoulders were stooped a bit, even when he wasn’t bent over his work, and the slicked back hair was obviously dyed. And he had strong facial bone lines, but like my Uncle Fred, he flashed intelligence and energy from eyes that were nevertheless trapped in a matrix of wrinkles. He poured coffee for himself after serving me, then put the pot down and added booze to both cups, taking a swig directly from the bottle first.

“This is excellent brandy,” he said.

“Technically, it’s five-star cognac, but I have to admit the distinction is somewhat lost on me. Brandy is brandy. The only difference is who you drink it with.”

“I think I like that.” He clinked his cup to mine. “To present company.”

“To old friends,” I said.

“You think so?” He smiled and took a large drink. “I like to think we might have been, in another world. But our history did not go that way, yes? It is a terrible burden, history.”

“It can be,” I said, meaning it more deeply than he would ever know. I took a gulp of the steaming brew and savored the familiar hot rush. “But are you talking about you and me, or about the history of a place called the Ardennes Forest?”

“You know this story, then? I am impressed.”

“I know a version of it, anyway. Shall I tell you?”

He nodded and took a bite of roll, settling down on a corner of a workbench. I retold Stefan Yonkos’ story for him, including where and how I came to hear it. As I did so, he alternately shook and nodded his head, smiling sadly the whole time. At one point, he may have blinked back a tear. He waited until I was done before he said anything.

“Well, that’s the way he would tell it, wouldn’t he? And he’s had a long time to polish it up. But he left out the most important part.”

“Which was?”

“When he killed the real Gerald Cox.”

Chapter Twenty

End Game

He may have never trembled again, but he had tears running down his cheeks as he finished the story. He turned his back to me and busied himself with making a fresh pot of coffee.

“Good lord,” I said. “You were right about Yonkos leaving out the most important part. What happened after that? Did you also vow to kill the Gypsy?”

“No. That did not happen until much, much later. The rest of my war story is not so interesting, I’m afraid. I went back to the place where Cox had been shot. The Gypsy had left his own clothes there, and I took them. I threw my own uniform away and I became what he had said he was going to pretend to be, a partisan living off the land. I also threw away the American gun, which I didn’t know how to use, and found another Mauser. It was a hard life for a while, but I didn’t care any more. I found my way to an American army camp, a staging area, and they kept me around, like a mascot. That was when I took the name of Feinstein. I thought they would be more likely to believe I wasn’t a Nazi if I had a Jewish-sounding name. And I added the G. B. so I would always remember the name of the dead American.”

I poured myself some more coffee and thought of Rosie and her many aliases.
Doesn’t anybody or anything in this damn world go by its real name anymore?
Then I remembered my own past and bit my tongue. Feinstein, for that was now his only name, continued.

“I worked on their trucks and did menial jobs, and they taught me bits of English. You wouldn’t believe how long it was before I learned that ‘fuckin’ A’ was not the correct way to say ‘I agree.’ And when the unit was sent back to the United States, I stowed away on the transport ship.”

“Along with the Mauser?”

“Yes. And the Luger. There were many, many souvenir guns being taken back. A few more didn’t matter. I never got a visa or any citizenship papers, and I never will. Your wonderful government gave me a Social Security card anyway. After you have that, you can get anything.”

“Under your assumed name.”

“Of course. I got a job cleaning up and doing general labor in a guitar factory, and I decided to teach myself luthiery. It seemed like a way of coming to terms with my great downfall, you see. A calling, if you will. The rest is pretty much what you would expect.”

“How old were you, back when you met the Gypsy in the forest?”

“I was born in 1931.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. You really were just a kid.”

“Not after that, I was not. After that, I was never young again.”

“No. You wouldn’t be, would you?” I stopped for a moment, took a deep breath, and braced myself. Sooner or later, somebody had to say the obvious, and I decided it might as well be then.

“So you killed Stefan Yonkos, finally…” I began.

“And his daughter and son, don’t forget.”

“No. I definitely didn’t forget. You killed them all for revenge? Revenge for your lost youth and innocence?”

“Revenge? Oh no,
Herr Herman
. I never thought of it in that way for a moment. It was setting things right, you see, making up for my own past failure. War is all about guilt. People talk these days about post-stress something…”

“Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome,” I said.

“Ya ya, that is it. Thank you. But it’s always about the guilt of killing. They think that’s all there is, the doctors. Backwards, for me, all wrong. All those years, all the places I went, I carried the guilt of who I did
not
kill. I should have killed the Gypsy.”

Where had I heard that before?

“You could have been killed yourself, trying to,” I said.

“Very true. But then, also, I would have been free of the guilt. And the poor man named Gerald Cox might also have lived.”

“Might have, could have, should have,” I said. “You take all those ‘haves’ and put them with three dollars, and you can buy yourself another package of these cinnamon rolls. Why bother with it, after all these years? I mean”—I swept my hand around, indicating the shop behind us—“you have a vocation here, a real life. A calling, even. Most poor working stiffs never find that. Couldn’t you let the past go its own way?”

“You would think so, wouldn’t you? And believe it or not, I tried. But the past would not let me go. Twenty some years ago, it came to claim me.”

“The certificate of authenticity,” I said.

“Exactly so. It was 1975, as I recall. The blonde—I forget what she was calling herself back then—wanted me to appraise her old violin, certify it as a real Amati. Which it was, of course. And from what she told me of its story, I knew it had to be the violin from the Ardennes.”

“And she was the Gypsy’s daughter.”

“She said as much, and I had no reason to doubt it.”

“Was that when you switched the violins?”

“
Mein Gott
! You figured that out, also?
Wünderbar
! How?”

“I took off the label. Somebody told me once that the real trademark would be burned in the wood, under it.”

“Ah, so he did,
Herr
Herman. That’s what comes of revealing trade secrets,
ya
? Still, it had to take a lot of confidence to remove a fragile piece of history. But you have surprised me many times now. You are, as you say, not so easy to dispose of. Yes, I switched the violins then. I told the woman I had to keep the Amati for a few days, to do some tests. That gave me enough time to make one of the others in my collection into a very good likeness. It was a small enough bit of sabotage, considering what her family had done. And for a time, I thought it would be enough for me. More brandy?”

“Thank you,” I said. “For the brandy and the compliments. Are we out of coffee?”

“I thought perhaps it was time to get down to essentials.”

“Maybe it is, at that.”

We both took another shot, clinking our cups again.

“But you must have assumed I’d look under the label sooner or later,” I said. “And when I saw the burned-in brand of Roger Baldwin, written backwards, it would point me straight to you.”

“I assumed later, rather than sooner,” he said. “Or possibly not at all. Maybe someday another appraiser would do it, say. In the meantime, it was possible to do one last, um…”

“Con.”

“Yes, thank you. A last con in a world of cons. If I destroyed the instrument that you thought was the Amati and made good on your cash losses, then that would be the end of it. The curse, the killing, and even the past. I wanted you to be free of it, you see.”

“I picked up on that, yes. Thank you so much. Why?”

He shrugged. “I told you when we first met that I liked you. That buffoon, Evans, died just because he got in the way. I didn’t want that to happen to you.”

“Are you saying you didn’t tip him off that I was in Skokie?”

“Tip him off? Oh, no. I was never in league with him or any of them. As far as they knew, I was just a disinterested appraiser, used once and forgotten.”

“You know, that’s really rather wonderfully ironic.” I had another sip from the tin cup, and it seemed even more so.

“It is, isn’t it? The violin that led me to become a fine luthier also led the Gypsy family back to me for a final accounting, and they didn’t even know it.”

“I believe I led you to Skokie, though.”

“On the contrary, I followed Evans to Skokie, not you. He was what the Gypsies call the cop-in-the-pocket, you see. The woman, Amy, was the bait in a sweet fish hook, I think? No, that’s not quite right.”

“A honey trap.”

“
Ya, ya
, that’s it. Thank you again. She was supposed to compromise him, seduce him and make him pliable. But I think she succeeded beyond her own hopes. He not only became her lover, he became insanely protective and jealous of her. And he really did think you had killed her. So when you were looking for the Gypsy connection, he was looking for you, to kill you, I’m sure. I was merely looking for her father, looking to be sure that Yonkos
was
her father. And Evans was so very easy to follow. The man couldn’t go for an hour without calling somebody or other on the radio or phone. Not like you,
Herr
Herman. You were really very clever.”

“Not so clever that you didn’t almost trap me and kill me when I went back to the
officia
.”

“That was you?”

“Me and a friend.”

“Ah, yes, the pretty woman. Perhaps I spent too much time looking at her. Anyway, that was a mistake. I wasn’t sure you hadn’t given your violin to Yonkos, and I thought it might be more of the Gypsy gang, come back to retrieve it. And to be honest, the killing had almost become a habit by then. It wanted to have a life of its own. An evil life, just like the violin that started it all. The hunter of evil becomes evil himself.”

“So you really weren’t part of the original con game at all?”

“Never. Not that one, nor any of the others the brother and sister ran over the years. And there were many.”

“So how did you know about them?”

“Well, I wouldn’t know about the ones before I did the appraisal, would I? After that, I followed their career from a distance, you might say. An insurance adjustor or a policeman would come to me to verify the certificate, and so I would get a new set of bogus names, a new bit of a trail. I never knew exactly how the fraud worked or how they kept getting the Amati back. And I didn’t care. I waited and waited for them to lead me back to the father. Finally, when they started using the name Cox for their scams, the name they had stolen, it was just too much. I decided if I couldn’t kill the father, I would kill the children instead. After all, they were my mistake, too. He shouldn’t have lived to sire them in the first place.”

“So you stalked Amy Cox?”

“An ugly word, but yes, I suppose I did. I followed her to your office, and when she finally left with a violin under her arm, I seized my chance. But as you know, that killing was a beginning, not an end.”