The Rainaldi Quartet (6 page)

‘I can have it ready for then,' I said.

I put the violin back in its case and sensed a movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned my head. Serafin's mistress, Maddalena, was coming through the door from the small flat behind the office. Serafin has a wife but she seldom comes to Milan. She lives on their country estate near Lake Maggiore, a sad neglected creature destined to share her husband's affections with a steady stream of more sophisticated metropolitan harpies. Maddalena was idle, glamorous, undeniably beautiful yet curiously unsexy. Actually, I don't know why I say ‘curiously' for there is nothing curious about it. If there is one thing that I have learnt about women it is that the most stunning of them are rarely the most sexy. Maddalena was so poised and disdainful it was impossible to imagine her ever abandoning herself to the torrid confusion of passion. But then I suspected she was more of an ornament for Serafin's arm than his bed.

‘I'm going out now,' she said, barely acknowledging my presence. I'm too old and too poor to interest her. I'm simply a servant hovering in the background.

‘All right, darling,' Serafin replied. ‘Shall I meet you for lunch?'

‘Not today. I'm seeing Teresa. You know, girl talk.'

Maddalena leaned down to allow Serafin to kiss her – her cheek only, to avoid any damage to her make-up.

‘I'll see you later, darling,' Serafin said and watched her waggling her bony hips as she left the office.

I sat down and we haggled about my fee for the work. Serafin enjoys haggling. He has cultivated a veneer of culture, a suave, slightly unctuous gloss of refinement that appeals to his wealthy clientele, but underneath it all he's just a market trader, buying low and selling high. In the narrow world of violin dealing he has a reputation as a man who would not just sell his own mother, he would put her out to tender.

‘I see you've been having some excitement in Cremona,' he said when we'd sorted out the money.

I gave him a puzzled look.

‘The murder,' Serafin explained. ‘What was his name again, Tomaso Rainaldi? You know anything about it?'

His tone was casual, almost indifferent. I was instantly on my guard.

‘Why would I know anything about it?' I asked warily.

‘Oh, I don't know. You're on the spot. He was a luthier. I wasn't familiar with him myself, but you probably knew him.'

‘Yes, I knew him.' I didn't expand. I had no intention of sharing my knowledge of the case with Serafin. Ours was strictly a business relationship. ‘Why are you interested?'

Serafin shrugged. ‘I'm not really. It's just unusual, isn't it? A murder in Cremona.'

He looked away and we chatted about other things for a short while.

‘Keep me informed about the Stradivari, Gianni,' he said as we parted. ‘If there's a problem, let me know at once.'

‘There won't be a problem,' I said.

*   *   *

It was early evening by the time I got back to my house. I had something to eat, then took the Stradivari through into my workshop. My workshop is in the garden at the back of the house, but I also have a varnishing room with skylights in the attic, and this is where I finish my instruments and hang them to dry. Stradivari had the same in his house in the Piazza San Domenico and I attribute some of the lustre of his varnish to the Italian sun which seems to have been absorbed by the wood. They make violins elsewhere, some of them very good, but it is no coincidence that the finest instruments have all come from the warm, but not too warm, pastures of northern Italy.

I laid the violin down on its back on my workbench and composed myself. I've repaired Stradivaris before, and Guarneris, Amatis and most of the other great makers too, but I've never lost the feeling of being privileged to hold them, privileged to be allowed to take the masters' creations and work on them with my own humble hands.

I studied the instrument for a time, examining every part of it carefully to make sure there was no other damage that had been overlooked. Then I concentrated on the crack. The first thing to do was to remove the belly, gently so as not to open the crack even further. I took a syringe and injected a tiny amount of alcohol into the join between the belly and ribs, taking care not to spill any on the varnish which was soluble in alcohol. The alcohol would make the glue dehydrate and lose its grip. Then I inserted a thin knife blade under the belly and put pressure on it with another smaller wedge-shaped blade which I gradually slid in over the ribs. Working my way around the instrument I eased off the front.

I gazed down at the inside of the violin, seeing the two-piece maple back, the ribs, linings and blocks as Stradivari had left them. I could even see the marks of his clamps on the surface of the blocks. I wasn't the first person to open up the instrument. Like all violins of that period the neck, fingerboard and bass bar had been changed – probably at the beginning of the nineteenth century – the neck lengthened and angled backwards to take the additional string tension caused by the increased pitch of the diapason since Stradivari's day. But probably only two other men had seen what I was seeing now, and one of them was Stradivari himself.

I lingered a while, studying the results of the Master's unmatched craftsmanship. Apart from the changes to the neck and bass bar and the switch from gut strings to gut wound with metal, the violin today is exactly the same as it was when Stradivari was alive. Aesthetically, and musically, it cannot be improved, though many people have tried. It is perfect the way it is.

I pulled my eyes away from the body of the instrument and turned my attention to the belly. I took another careful look at the crack with my loupe, this time from the inside of the belly. Not only was the wood fractured, but the plate had been crushed slightly so the two sides of the break were not in alignment. I would have to fix the crack, and also restore the curve of the belly – a time-consuming task that required my making a plaster cast of the plate, then pressing the wood back into shape with a hot sandbag. This was delicate work that needed more concentration than I felt I could summon at this late hour, so I locked the Stradivari away in my fireproof safe and went to bed early. I needed a good night's sleep. My grandchildren were coming to stay the next day.

*   *   *

There are three of them: Paolo, aged eleven, Carla, nine, and the baby of the family, Pietro, six. They live only a couple of hours' drive away, to the east of Mantua, so I see quite a lot of them on day visits. But once a year I have them overnight. My daughter, Francesca, and her husband drop the children off with me on a Saturday morning, then go off somewhere together until Sunday afternoon – maybe to one of the lakes, maybe shopping in Milan followed by an evening at the theatre, a good hotel and some time to themselves.

They arrived early, unloading what appeared to be enough baggage for a month. Francesca, as usual, began fussing over them, torn between her desire to be off and a mother's natural anxiety at leaving her children even for just one night.

‘Now be good for Grandpa,' she said. ‘Don't make too much noise, eat your food properly and don't wake up too early in the morning.'

The children rolled their eyes and shuffled their feet. ‘Yes, yes, Mama. We'll see you tomorrow.'

Francesca's husband was waiting by the car, inscrutable in his expensive sunglasses. He had the driver's door open and was impatient to be on their way. But Francesca had one last duty to perform. She gave me a piece of paper.

‘It's the list of dos and don'ts,' she said. ‘What they can eat, what time they each have to be in bed. You know.'

I nodded. She gives me a list of instructions every time. After she's gone, the first thing I do is throw it in the bin. Children always forget that you brought them up and know a little about it. Or maybe they don't forget, they just want to do it differently with their own.

Francesca kissed me and the children and we waved them off. Then the kids rushed round into the garden, temporarily free of their shackles, and I didn't see them again for an hour until they came into the house, hot and sweaty, demanding drinks and biscuits.

Towards midday the phone rang. It was Guastafeste.

‘What are you doing today?' he asked.

‘I've got the grandchildren,' I explained. ‘I'm taking them for a swim and a picnic. Why?'

‘I wanted to talk to you. About Tomaso.'

‘Come with us. Join us for the picnic,' I said.

‘I don't have time for picnics.'

‘It's Saturday, Antonio. You're allowed a lunch break, aren't you? You've got to look after yourself better, you know. Get more sleep, eat regularly. You won't solve this case more quickly by making yourself ill.'

He gave a dry little laugh. ‘Don't fuss, Gianni.'

‘I mean it,' I said. ‘You know where we'll be. The pool by the woods. Midday onwards. I'll expect you.'

‘I'll see,' Guastafeste said.

*   *   *

The pool we were going to was on the river a few kilometres from Cremona. Not the Po, which is hardly one of the world's most attractive rivers – if Johann Strauss had been Italian, I doubt he'd have written ‘On the Beautiful Blue Po' – but on one of the smaller tributaries where the stream was still largely water, as opposed to industrial effluent.

We laid out our rug on the bank and the kids stripped off and leaped into the pool. Francesca doesn't like me bringing them here, she thinks it's unsafe and unhygienic, but I take no notice of her. When she was growing up she ignored virtually everything I ever said to her, particularly when she was a stroppy teenager. Now it's my turn to ignore her.

The children were out of the water again and on the bank, drying off in the sun and eating bread and cheese and tomatoes from my garden, when Guastafeste emerged from the trees, his jacket slung casually over one shoulder. He sat down next to me on the rug and loosened his tie.

‘You want something to eat?' I said.

‘Is there enough for me?'

‘Of course there is.'

I passed him a chunk of bread and some cheese on a paper plate. He broke off a piece of the bread and chewed it slowly, looking around at the pool.

‘It's years since I was last here,' he said. ‘You remember when you used to bring me here? It's hardly changed at all.'

Guastafeste is the same age as my eldest son, Domenico, still friends with him though Domenico has lived and worked in Rome for the past ten years. Antonio was round at our house to play so often when he was a child, came with us on so many outings that he was almost a part of our family. There was a time, indeed, in his late adolescence when he and Francesca seemed sweet on each other, when I thought he might have become a full member of the family, but it was not to be.

‘Yes, I remember,' I said.

‘Those long summer days. You used to make a wood fire and we cooked sausages on sticks. They always ended up black and charred like lumps of charcoal. I can still remember the taste.'

He smiled at me. He was looking better today, clean shaven, wearing a crisp white shirt and blue tie, but his eyes were still tired.

‘Grandpa, can we go swimming again?' Carla asked.

‘Let your food go down first,' I replied.

‘What about the woods? Can we play in the woods?'

‘Yes, but don't go too far.'

The children got up from the rug.

‘Hey, I brought you something,' Guastafeste said. He felt in his jacket pocket and brought out three packets of sweets. He threw them to the kids.

‘Eat them all at once,' he said.

The children thanked him and ran off into the woods. Guastafeste watched them pushing through the undergrowth, a soft look on his face. He's always been good with children. He and his ex-wife never had any. He doesn't talk about it, but I wonder sometimes whether that is not something he regrets. Perhaps not though. He likes children, but he also likes his own space, time to himself that children do not allow you. He lay back on the rug, his hands behind his head.

‘I should come out here more often,' he said. ‘It's so quiet, so peaceful. So different from the
Questura.
'

‘Things are bad?' I said.

‘The
Questore
wants a result. And he wants it yesterday.'

‘And are you going to be able to give him one?'

‘Not on what we've got so far.'

A fly buzzed towards Guastafeste's nose. He swotted it away lazily. I helped myself to a left-over tomato and bit into it. There's nothing quite like a home-grown tomato.

‘We've almost nothing to go on,' Guastafeste said. ‘We've done a door-to-door enquiry, talked to all the neighbours. No one seemed to hear, or see, anything of significance that night. No shouting, no cars arriving or leaving, no strangers hanging around the street.' He sat up and wrapped his arms around his knees, squinting at the sunlight reflected on the surface of the river. ‘He was a violin-maker; a gentle, harmless violin-maker. All right, he could be difficult, dogmatic, opinionated, but he wasn't the kind of man who made enemies. He wasn't rich, famous, he wasn't mixed up with any criminal activity – as far as we know. What had he done, what did he know that made someone want to kill him?'

I finished my tomato and licked some juice off my fingers. I waited for him to go on, to clear out his thoughts.

‘You know this world better than I do, Gianni. If Tomaso was looking for a violin, this Messiah's Sister, how would he have gone about it?'

‘That's difficult to say. He must have had something to go on, some lead. There are always rumours about long-lost Stradivaris. Every luthier hopes – dreams – that one day he'll come across one somewhere. But we never do.'

‘Never?'

‘It's more than two hundred and fifty years since Stradivari died. The chances of a new, hitherto undiscovered violin of his turning up are almost zero.'