The Rainaldi Quartet (14 page)

‘Uncle Enrico wasn't the easiest man to get on with. He was stubborn, obsessive, suspicious. He never married, lived all alone in that vast house after my grandfather died. He nursed all kinds of grievances, some maybe real, most, I suspect, imagined. And he got worse as he got older.' She spiked a piece of tomato on her fork and slipped it into her mouth.

‘He certainly seemed a little eccentric when I met him yesterday,' I said.

‘I think it was the violins that did it in the end. Money, I suppose. Uncle Enrico – being the eldest – inherited the bulk of my grandfather's estate. My father always resented that. It infuriated him that Enrico spent so much money on violins. Squandered so much money was how he saw it. My father thought it was wasteful and self-indulgent. Families are messy, aren't they? Blood's thicker than water, but it turns bad more easily.'

‘You had no contact with your uncle at all?'

‘I used to send him Christmas cards, but he never replied. Perhaps I should have made more of an effort. Come and seen him, even though I know he'd probably have closed the door in my face. When I saw his house this afternoon – the state of it, the dirt, the smell – I felt guilty. Guilty for neglecting him.'

‘The way he lived wasn't your fault. It was his violins that made him happy. Everything else was an irrelevance.'

‘Perhaps so. If that dealer – Serafin, was it? – only knew our family history, he'd realise how unlikely it is that I'll inherit my uncle's collection. He's probably left it to a museum somewhere.'

I ate my
antipasto,
thinking about my visit to Forlani's vault, that room full of glass cases. At the time it had felt like a mausoleum for dead violins. Now Forlani was gone it seemed even more like a tomb. I hoped that perhaps the instruments might be resurrected from their air-conditioned grave, given a new life in the outside world where their music might be heard again. Yet I couldn't help having misgivings. The Spohr Guarneri ‘del Gesù' would inevitably come out into the open. It would be examined by experts, by dealers, auctioneers, subjected to the kind of intense scrutiny it had so far avoided. Did I really want that?

‘But let's not dwell on my uncle,' Margherita said, forcing a weak smile. ‘Tell me about
your
violins. My grandson's interested in learning the violin, you know.'

‘You have grandchildren?'

‘Three. Stefano is six. Is that too young to start?'

‘Not at all.'

‘He'll need a small instrument, of course. He's not a very big boy. Are they hard to find?'

‘He'll probably need a quarter size,' I said. ‘No, they aren't difficult to obtain. Is he in Milan too?'

‘Yes. All my grandchildren are nearby.'

‘You're lucky. Mine are further away than I would like. And your husband? He couldn't come with you?'

‘My
ex
-husband,' Margherita said. ‘We divorced four years ago.'

‘Ah.' I refrained from saying more. With divorce it's always difficult to know whether to offer your congratulations or your condolences.

‘And your wife?' she asked.

‘She died six years ago.'

A shadow passed across her face.

‘Oh, I'm sorry.'

I picked up the bottle of Soave to cover the uncomfortable silence that followed.

‘Have some more wine. How is your
antipasto
?' I said.

I didn't want to talk about Caterina. At that particular moment, having dinner with another woman, it didn't seem right.

*   *   *

I'd been back in my room for only ten minutes when there was a knock on the door and I heard Guastafeste's voice outside.

‘Gianni, are you awake?'

I pulled open the door to let him in.

‘You weren't in bed?' he said.

‘No, I haven't been back long. How was the autopsy?'

Guastafeste sat down in the chair near the window, his legs splayed, his arms dangling down limply. He rubbed his eyes. He looked very tired.

‘Inconclusive,' he said, yawning. ‘We've established the cause of death. It was what I thought. Forlani severed the artery in his left wrist when he crashed through the glass display case. He basically bled to death.'

‘That sounds pretty conclusive,' I said.

‘But we still don't know how it happened. Whether it was an accident, whether it was murder. The pathologist found no evidence that Forlani had had a heart attack or a sudden stroke or anything that might have made him black out and fall into the case.'

‘What about the missing Maggini? The open front door. Doesn't that indicate that someone else was there at the time?'

‘Not necessarily. The Maggini might have been taken earlier. That's one of the things we're going to ask Christopher Scott when we talk to him.'

Something in his tone, his phrasing, made me look at him sharply.

‘
When?
He's been located?'

‘Picked up two hours ago as he tried to board a flight from Linate to London. Spadina's laid on a car. We're driving to Milan now, the two of us.'

7

I had breakfast alone on the small, enclosed terrace at the rear of the
pensione.
I'd hoped that Margherita might have been there to keep me company, but she didn't appear until I'd finished my coffee and roll and was preparing to return to my room.

She came out into the courtyard and smiled when she saw me. ‘Would you mind if I joined you?' she asked.

‘Of course I wouldn't. Here.' I moved my plate and cup to clear a space for her on the opposite side of the table.

‘Just a coffee, please,' she said to the proprietor, who had emerged from the door to the kitchen. She sat down and glanced around. We were the only guests on the terrace. Our table was in the shade, but above us the sunlight was creeping slowly down the whitewashed walls. The sky was a cloudless cobalt. I studied her. Her face was showing signs of her age – lines around her eyes and mouth – but she still had the bone structure that in her youth would have made her a strikingly attractive woman. Perhaps not beautiful in the conventional sense, but I've never been much of a one for convention.

‘It's going to be hot again,' she said. ‘Venice is insufferable in the heat. And smelly. Are you staying on?'

I shook my head. ‘I'm catching the train back to Cremona this morning.'

‘What a shame. I enjoyed our dinner last night.'

‘When do you go back to Milan?'

Margherita shrugged. ‘Who knows? The police want me to go over to the
Questura
this morning. Apparently there are forms I have to sign. Then I have to see my uncle's lawyer, start dealing with his affairs.' She gave a shudder. ‘The whole business fills me with dread. I hate lawyers and legal matters. I never understand what any of it's about. I'll probably be here for days.'

She looked up as her coffee arrived, nodding her thanks at the proprietor. Then she saw me glance at my watch.

‘Please, don't let me keep you.'

I smiled apologetically. ‘My train leaves at half past nine. I'm afraid I'll have to go.' I pushed back my chair and stood up. ‘It was nice meeting you. I hope you manage to get everything sorted.'

‘Sorted?' she said dryly. ‘This is Italy. Since when has anything here ever been sorted?'

I held out my hand. Her fingers touched mine.

‘Goodbye.'

‘Safe journey, Gianni.'

I thought about her in the
vaporetto
on the way to the station, heading up the Grand Canal in the morning sunshine. Thought about her perhaps more than I should have done. I wondered why. I considered whether I should have given her my phone number, or asked for hers. But what would have been the point? I was no longer a young man. I'd reached an age when such things weren't really acceptable, perhaps weren't even respectable. We'd met, had dinner, then parted. That was all it amounted to. There was nothing else to be said.

I made myself a cup of coffee and a sandwich when I arrived home, then went out to my workshop. It was hot and stuffy after being closed up for the previous two days. I threw open the windows to let in some air before unlocking my safe and taking out the damaged Stradivari that Serafin had entrusted to me.

What was it that made Stradivari so great? What was his secret? Hardly a year goes by without some scientist or so-called ‘expert' coming up with a new theory: about the wood Stradivari used, how it was seasoned, how it was treated, above all how it was varnished. There have been countless treatises on the magical ingredients of his varnish. Experts have tested the vibrations of his plates, the movements of air inside the body of his violins. They have examined his tools, his drawings, scoured the Alps for the source of the timber he used. To what end?

We are a strange species. We have an immense ability to hope. We want Stradivari to have had a secret because we want to hope that, if only we could discover that secret, we could equal him as a luthier. But there is no secret. Violin-making is not alchemy, the transmutation of base metals into gold. It is woodwork.

When I was a schoolboy I was a reasonably bright pupil – not the best in the class but a good all-rounder. I could no doubt have stayed on at school, perhaps gone to university, but academic study didn't interest me. I always had a preference, a particular aptitude, for art and craft so I was put with all the numbskulls and delinquents in the class who because they couldn't add up or read were assumed to be ‘good with their hands'. Well, they were. They were good at thieving and fighting. But woodwork? They could no more craft an object in wood than they could explain Einstein's Theory of Relativity. The ability to work with your hands is not some leftover that is given to those who are not intellectual. It is a gift, just as surely and just as precious as an aptitude for maths or languages. You are given the gift, but then you have to work at it to realise your true potential. That is something we do not want to acknowledge today. We do not want anything to be hard work.

Stradivari did not emerge from nowhere, a genius arriving fully formed from a vacuum. He was born in a city of luthiers where violin-making had been a widespread and profitable calling for a century and a half before him. There was a rich established tradition, a wealth of experience and knowledge on which he could call. He was fourteen when he was apprenticed to Nicolò Amati and he continued making violins until he was ninety-three. That is almost eighty years of practice. Who today can boast that in any calling? He learned his trade and he worked at it day in and day out. He didn't have four or five weeks' holiday to go off skiing in the Dolomites or to sun himself on a Tuscan beach. He worked six days a week, ate a piece of bread and cheese at his bench for his lunch and worked on into the evening. Violin-making wasn't just his life's work, it was his life.

By contrast, young luthiers today do a course at some college lasting three or four years at the most. They come out with a diploma, a piece of paper with a seal on it, and think they know how to make violins. What's more, they think people will buy them. They are living in a dream-world. After fifty years in the business I don't need any experts to tell me Stradivari's secret. I know what it was. He was simply a better craftsman than any violin-maker – Guarneri ‘del Gesù' excepted – before or since.

I gazed at the instrument on the workbench in front of me, then I found my eyes lifting and being drawn towards another violin that hung on the wall in a corner of my workshop – a violin that I had not made and would never sell. I stood up, walked across to the violin and brought it back to my bench. I placed it next to the Stradivari and compared the two instruments. The similarities were marked. The varnish, the arching of the tables, the cut of the f-holes, the carving of the scroll, they all bore the distinctive marks of the same maker, so much so that I would have sworn they were both the work of the Master. Yet I knew that the instrument on my left was a genuine Stradivari whilst the one on my right was a fake manufactured by my old apprentice master Bartolomeo Ruffino – an unsold fake that he had bequeathed to me on his death, along with his tools and stock of wood.

I had to admire his skill. He'd been an exceptionally gifted forger, practising in a long, if dishonourable, tradition. Violins have been forged since the days of Andrea Amati and Gasparo da Salò, the fathers of the instrument. It is human nature. When an object is in demand and highly prized, there will always be someone looking to cash in on the market and meet that demand from more dubious sources. So many violins were forged in the nineteenth century that it was a veritable industry, employing hundreds of luthiers. I'd guess that probably half the total number of instruments made at that time are falsely labelled. Add in the copies made by honest luthiers making instruments in the style of the masters but not labelling them as such and it's no wonder that it is difficult to be sure a particular violin is genuine. With this kind of history, dealers and buyers are naturally going to be suspicious of any instrument that purports to be either old, or Italian, and particularly both. A forger must be very careful which makers' violins he chooses to fake.

Ruffino had been cautious. He hadn't produced many fakes a year and had concentrated mainly on the lesser-known luthiers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their violins are much easier to slip out into circulation without arousing suspicion and their prices can be remarkably rewarding. The great makers' instruments are riskier. They are subject to closer scrutiny and because they were ostensibly produced so long ago it is harder to explain plausibly where they have been in the intervening two or three hundred years. But Ruffino had faked them nevertheless. The temptation, the money, the challenge had been too much to resist. In my time with him as an apprentice he'd faked instruments by Giovanni Grancino, Nicolò Gagliano, Giovanni Battista Guadagnini and Carlo Bergonzi – actually three Bergonzis: he took a genuine Bergonzi, dismantled it piece by piece and then built three new instruments using some of the original parts and adding others. This is a wily way of fooling an expert – confronted with an undoubtedly genuine Bergonzi belly, say, he is much more likely to believe the whole instrument to be genuine.