Paganini's Ghost (20 page)

Delacourt spoke to the Arabic-looking man in French, his manner deferential to the point of servility, then stepped aside to let the group pass. We waited a moment, the blonde's cloying perfume lingering in the air, then went through one of the other doors and up a flight of stairs to an office on the first floor.

The office was large and spacious, furnished with expensive antiques—a huge leather-topped desk, mahogany chairs, an elaborate walnut chest of drawers with a marquetry front. The floor was covered in the same rich burgundy carpet as the showroom downstairs, and there were gilt-framed paintings on the walls, one a Cézanne, which I knew would be an original. Molyneux et Charbon was not the kind of firm that would have any truck with reproductions.

Monsieur Auguste Jahinny, the general manager, was a small man in his fifties. He had greying hair, a silver moustache, and close-trimmed beard, and he was wearing the dark three-piece suit and watch chain that seemed to be the standard company uniform. Perched on the end of his nose was a pair of half-moon reading glasses.

We went through the usual introductions and courtesies; then Monsieur Jahinny offered us coffee, speaking all the time in Italian.

“We don't want to put you to any trouble,” Guastafeste said.

“It is no trouble,” Monsieur Jahinny replied.

He spoke into an intercom on his desk, and a few minutes later a middle-aged woman entered with a tray of porcelain cups and a silver pot of coffee. She, too, was wearing the requisite dark suit—in her case, a jacket and skirt—but she had been spared the need for a waistcoat and watch chain. She put the tray down on the desk and left the room. Monsieur Jahinny consulted his fob watch, glancing at us anxiously, as if he feared he was being rude.

“I am timing the coffee,” he explained. “A good-quality arabica needs at least three and a half minutes to brew, or the flavour is impaired.”

“Of course,” Guastafeste said, nodding politely in agreement.

“I am most particular about my coffee. I'm sure you are, too, being Italian. Now, while we wait, shall we get down to business? I was very sorry to hear of François Villeneuve's death. And in such horrifying circumstances, too.”

“You knew him?” Guastafeste asked.

“A little. We had occasional business dealings, but no more than that.”

Jahinny sniffed, and I thought I could detect a hint of distaste in his expression. That was understandable. Given Villeneuve's suspect reputation, no jeweller with Jahinny's sort of clientele would want to be associated with him.

“ ‘Business dealings'?” Guastafeste said.

“He would sometimes consult us on antique jewellery that came his way. He was most knowledgeable about paintings and furniture, but jewellery was not his strong point. I saw him only last week, as a matter of fact.”

Monsieur Jahinny looked at us over his half-moon glasses.

“Interestingly enough, he also wanted to look at the records of Henri le Bley Lavelle.”

Guastafeste caught my eye, then turned back to Jahinny.

“Is that right? Did he say why?”

“He said he'd been offered an item that appeared to have been made by Le Bley Lavelle and he wanted to check its authenticity.”

“Did he tell you what the item was?” Guastafeste asked.

“No. And, of course, I didn't ask. That would not have been discreet.”

Vincenzo Serafin had said something very similar in his office, but I was more inclined to believe Monsieur Jahinny.

“And
was
the item authentic?” Guastafeste said.

“I don't know that, either. François went down into the basement—where you will shortly be going—and examined the ledgers for a time, but that is all I can tell you, I'm afraid. I hope this item, whatever it is, has no relevance to his murder.”

Guastafeste didn't answer the question. He took a colour photograph from his jacket pocket and passed it across the desk to Jahinny.

“François Villeneuve placed this gold box in his hotel safe in Cremona two days before he died. We've established from the hallmarks that Le Bley Lavelle made it in 1819. I believe this may have been the item that Monsieur Villeneuve wanted to look up in your records. When was he here?”

“Last week, as I said. I think it was the Tuesday.”

“Tuesday? That was two days before Villeneuve arrived in Cremona,” Guastafeste said. “Do you recognise the box?”

Jahinny studied the photograph.

“That is hard to tell from a photo. I have certainly seen boxes like this before. Le Bley Lavelle made a lot of gold boxes. How big is it?”

Guastafeste demonstrated with his hands.

“It has an interesting lock on it,” he said. “A four-dial combination lock using letters rather than numbers.”

“Letters?”

“Is that unusual?”

“The lock, no. Le Bley Lavelle put combination locks on many of his boxes. They were invariably used for storing jewellery or other valuable items. A good lock would have been essential. Number combinations are the most common, but I
have
seen letter combinations before.”

“But not this particular box?”

“No. The ones I've seen were smaller than the one you describe.”

“You say they were used for storing jewellery?”

“Generally, yes. They were often made with a partitioned interior for separating the contents—rings, necklaces, brooches, and so on.”

“What about violins?”

“
Violins?”
Jahinny stared at Guastafeste.

“Did he ever make boxes for violins?”

“A violin would be far too big for a box like this.”

“A small violin.”

“I've never heard of such a thing.”

“You've looked at Le Bley Lavelle's records yourself?”

“Not in detail, no. I've consulted them occasionally, but not for several years. François Villeneuve was the first person to check the archives in a very long time.”

Jahinny glanced at his watch again. The aroma of coffee was getting stronger, tantalising my senses. I had eaten and drunk nothing since breakfast, except for a plastic beaker of a liquid on the aeroplane—which, whatever the airline chose to call it, was certainly not coffee. I was longing for a cup of the real stuff now, but Jahinny was in no hurry to serve it. At least three and a half minutes, he'd said, and he struck me as a man who would not risk going a second too soon.

“Perhaps you could tell us a little about Henri le Bley Lavelle?” Guastafeste said.

“Yes, of course,” Jahinny replied. “He was one of the finest French goldsmiths of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—which is to say, he was one of the finest in the world. Paris then was the centre of the international jewellery business, the home of the greatest, most renowned jewellers.” He paused to allow himself a modest smile. “
Plus ça change
. . . He had a workshop not far from here, in the rue Saint-Honoré, and worked to commission for most of Europe's aristocracy, including a number of crowned heads.”

“We believe this box was made for Napoléon's sister Elisa Baciocchi,” Guastafeste said.

“That wouldn't surprise me. He made jewellery for all the Bonaparte
family—Princess Caroline, Princess Pauline, the Empress Josephine. He was a master craftsman whose work was highly prized—and highly priced, too. You say this box is hallmarked 1819? He would have been at his peak about then. Those two decades, from about 1810 to 1830, produced his best work. After 1830, he went into decline. When he died, in 1838, his business was taken over by two other goldsmiths, Molyneux and Charbon, whose names still adorn the firm to this day.”

Jahinny made a final check on the gold watch in his fob pocket and leaned forward towards the silver coffeepot.

“Let us drink our coffee now,” he said. “Then I will ask Monsieur Delacourt to show you the archives.”

 

The basement of the Molyneux et Charbon premises was a complete contrast to the rest of the building. There was no carpet on the floor, just bare stone flags, and the lighting was supplied by a couple of unshaded sixty-watt bulbs dangling from cables that were wreathed in cobwebs. Instead of the heady scent of Chanel and money, there was an unpleasant smell of damp mixed with a sharper, more noxious odour that seemed to be seeping up from the sewers.

“I'm afraid this isn't a very salubrious place,” Olivier Delacourt said apologetically. “We rarely come down here, as you can see.”

“How do we find the records for 1819?” Guastafeste asked.

“I'll show you.”

Delacourt moved off into the stacks of shelves that ran the full length of the basement, each shelf laden with leather-bound ledgers and dusty cardboard boxes.

“There's no real filing system,” Delacourt said. “No one has ever cata logued every item that's down here; it would be a simply enormous task. The records are arranged in a rough chronological order, but I couldn't guarantee that what you're looking for is here.”

“Monsieur Jahinny said that François Villeneuve came in last week. Do you know what he looked at?”

“I'm sorry, no. I brought him down and left him. I will have to leave you, too, if that's all right. I have clients to see.”

“Yes, thank you for your help.”

We waited until Delacourt had gone, then turned to the shelves. There must have been hundreds of volumes to go through.

“
Dio,”
Guastafeste said. “I'm not sure this was such a good idea now. Where do we begin?”

“Can you see any dates on these ledgers?” I asked.

“No, they all look the same to me.”

I pulled out a volume. It was heavy, too heavy to hold up for long, so I propped one end up on the edge of the shelf and opened the cover. Written on the first page in a large, elegant hand were the words “January 1823– March 1823.”

“They look like quarterly records,” I said. “Four books for each year.”

“How could one man produce so much stuff?” Guastafeste said.

“He wouldn't have done it all alone. He'd have been like the great violin makers or painters. He'd have had apprentices, assistants who did the bulk of the work, but it would all have had Le Bley Lavelle's name on it.”

Guastafeste walked along the stack, counting off the ledgers.

“This should be 1819.”

He pulled out a volume and opened it.

“April 1827. Wrong way,” he said. “Try your end.”

I lifted down a ledger at random and checked inside it.

“October 1820.”

“We're in the wrong stack.”

We moved into the next row of shelves and took down various volumes, finding three that related to 1819.

“The third quarter is missing,” Guastafeste said. “We've got January to March, April to June, and October to December, but nothing for July to September. What was the date on the letter Elisa wrote to Paganini? Can you remember?”

“September 1819,” I said.

“That was when she sent him the gold box, but would Le Bley Lavelle have made it in that same quarter, or earlier in the year?”

“It can't have been much earlier. Paganini didn't write the “Moses Fantasy” until the late spring. But we can check.”

We carried the ledgers to the end of the stacks, where there was a small table and a single chair. Guastafeste insisted I take the chair, while he stood beside me. I opened the volume for the second quarter of 1819 and leafed through it. The pages were yellow and curling at the edges, many of them stuck together due to the damp atmosphere in the basement. Some pages were disfigured by blotches of blue mould and all of them were thickly coated with dust.

Molyneux et Charbon's filing system may have been nonexistent, but there was nothing sloppy about the records Henri le Bley Lavelle had kept almost two hundred years before. There were meticulous entries for each item of jewellery he, or his team of assistants, had made, from small gold chains through to whole silver dinner services. Every piece of metal and every jewel was documented and costed; there were detailed drawings of each item, and every stage of the production process had been approved and signed off by Le Bley Lavelle himself. A simple gold ring might have only a couple of pages of information about it, but a larger item—a necklace or a jewel-encrusted bracelet—could have nine or ten pages devoted to its creation.

I prised apart the pages, taking care not to tear them, and went through the whole ledger. There were records for several gold boxes, but not one that matched the box François Villeneuve had placed in his hotel safe.

“It's not here,” I said.

“
Merda!
” Guastafeste said. “So it must be in the missing volume. Do you think Villeneuve took it away with him?”

“He'd have had a job. It's not exactly something he could shove up his shirt and walk out with.”

“Maybe no one noticed.”

“A place like this? You saw the security upstairs—the locks, alarms, cameras. No, it must still be down here somewhere.”

Guastafeste looked round the basement, appalled at the prospect of having to search all the shelves.

“We could be here for weeks,” he said.

“Let's think it through,” I said. “Work out what Villeneuve would have done. He's found the volume he's searching for, so what does he do? They're heavy books. He wouldn't stand by the shelf looking through it. He'd do what we've done. Bring the book to this table and examine it here.”

“Okay, that makes sense. But then what? Where did the book go after that?”

“He must have put it back.”

“Then why isn't it on the shelf?”

“But not necessarily in the exact place he found it. Let's assume he'd got what he came for and had no plans to come back. He didn't need to find that volume again. You've been in libraries. Have you never dumped a book on a table or the wrong shelf because you couldn't be bothered to return it to its proper place?”