Paganini's Ghost (29 page)

“It's not a bad little hole, is it?” Monteveglio said dryly.

“What's going to happen to the house now? Are you going to sell it?”

“I don't know. I'm not sure I can afford to keep it on.”

“You live in Stresa?”

“In Pallanza. You know it, across the other side of the bay. I have a two-bedroom apartment. You could probably fit the whole thing into this one room and still have space left over.”

“Where was the painting by Degas?” Guastafeste asked.

“Just there.”

Monteveglio pointed. Above the mantelpiece was a conspicuous rectangular section of wall that was a lighter colour than the rest.

“It's been recovered, by the way,” Guastafeste said.

Monteveglio stared at him in surprise.

“The Degas? When?”

“Yesterday. We raided an auction house in Cremona.”

“In Cremona? You have the thieves?”

“Only the fence, and he's saying nothing about the burglars.”

“Just the Degas? None of the other stuff that was stolen?”

“Not so far. The gold box you already know about, of course.”

Guastafeste gazed round the room. There were a lot of pictures on the walls—far too many, in fact. They were squashed so close together that the frames were almost touching. Several of the pictures were clearly the work of the same artist. They had a distinctive style—not really paintings, but more mixed-media compositions, part oil paint, part watercolour, part collage. Some were little more than crude daubs, big splashes of colour, with different objects stuck onto the canvas—pieces of cloth or sacking, strange silhouettes cut from black card, even chunks of what looked like varnished driftwood. A couple seemed to have musical themes—large staves with clefs and random notes painted on them, images of musical instruments that had a surreal, distorted look. In one, a violin as thin and flexible as a sheet of paper was slithering down a flight of steps whose treads and risers were the black and white keys of a piano.

“The burglars didn't take any of these, I notice,” Guastafeste said.

“They had taste,” Monteveglio replied.

“Who's the artist?”

“These were all done by my aunt.”

“She was an artist? A professional?”

“Would you pay for something like that? No, she did them purely for her own amusement. They're all over the house.”

“And not one was stolen?”

“No. Shame, isn't it?”

“I quite like them,” I said, feeling strangely defensive of Nicoletta Ferrara. A lot of work and imagination had gone into these creations and I felt they deserved a little more respect.

“Really?” Monteveglio said incredulously.

“They're very individualistic.”

“Yes, I suppose that's one way of putting it.”

“The gold box,” Guastafeste said. “Where was that kept?”

“In the music room.”

“May we see?”

The music room was at the far end of the house. It was almost as big as the sitting room and just as cluttered, with glass-fronted music cabinets against the walls and two grand pianos in the middle—a Steinway and a Bösendorfer. There was more of Nicoletta Ferrara's idiosyncratic artwork on the walls, many again with musical subjects. Some were strange collages, fragments of photocopied music arranged to create landscapes or peculiar animals or people's faces.

“Your aunt was obviously musical,” I said.

Monteveglio nodded.

“Yes, it was her great passion. She was an excellent pianist, and a very good violinist, too.”

“The violin you showed Vincenzo Serafin, the Bergonzi, do you know how your aunt acquired it?”

“I believe she inherited it from her father. It had been in the Bianchi family for several generations, I think.”

“That was your aunt's maiden name, Bianchi?”

“Yes.”

“They must have been well-off.”

Monteveglio gave a ghost of a smile.

“They weren't short of a euro or two. They made their money in banking back in the middle of the nineteenth century.”

“And she was your aunt by marriage?”

“She married my mother's older brother, Luca. The money was all hers. My uncle Luca was an investment broker in Milan. Nicoletta came to him for advice on what to do with her inheritance when her father died. Uncle Luca's solution: Marry him. And she did.”

“And your uncle died when?”

“Oh, ten, twelve years ago.”

I looked at a framed photograph on one of the tables. It showed a
middle-aged man and woman standing by a fountain that I recognised as the Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona in Rome.

“Is this your aunt and uncle?” I asked.

“Yes, that's them.”

I studied the photograph more closely. Nicoletta Ferrara had a striking face, but she wasn't a beautiful woman. Her features were too uneven, her nose on the large side, her jawline slightly masculine. There was a strength, perhaps even stubbornness, in her eyes and the set of her mouth. I'd never met her, but something about her face seemed familiar.

“When Vincenzo Serafin came here, which room did you go in?” Guastafeste asked Monteveglio.

“I showed him the violin in here,” Monteveglio replied.

“But to get here, you would have to pass through the sitting room?”

“Yes, I suppose we did.”

Guastafeste shot me a meaningful glance.

“Apart from the Degas, which of the stolen items were in the sitting room?”

“Well, the silverware was. My aunt kept it in the big glass cabinet in the corner—unlocked, of course.”

“And the gold box?”

“That was on top of that cabinet over there. You're not suggesting that Signor Serafin had anything to do with this, are you?”

“No, no,” Guastafeste said. “A reputable violin dealer like him. What made you go to him, by the way?”

“He has a house up the road from here, near Baveno. I don't know him personally, but a friend of a friend told me about him. Said he was one of the leading dealers in the country.”

“Do you know where your aunt got the gold box?” I asked.

“I think she inherited that from her parents, too. It was another family heirloom, like the furniture and the violin. I remember it from my childhood. We'd come here for lunch and the box was always there on the cabinet. It fascinated me—the box you couldn't open. You know it had a funny combination lock on it? I used to spend hours trying
to crack the code. No one knew what it was, even my aunt. I was sure there was a treasure map inside it. I wanted to break it open and see, but my aunt wouldn't hear of it. She said it was like that English legend of King Arthur and Excalibur. When the right person came along, the box would open. Until then, it had to be allowed to keep its secrets. She claimed it once belonged to a princess, but we didn't believe her, of course. Aunt Nicoletta was like that—fanciful, liked to tell stories, to embroider the truth a bit.”

“Did this princess have a name?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Elisa?”

“No, I don't think so. Why?”

“It was made for Elisa Baciocchi, the princess of Piombino and Lucca. She was Napoléon's sister.”

“Aunt Nicoletta never said anything about that.”

“There's nothing about its origins in the insurance paperwork—a bill of sale or certificate of authenticity? She must have had it valued at some point.”

“It wasn't insured,” Monteveglio said. “The Degas, the silverware, the jewellery—they were specifically listed on the insurance policy, but not the gold box.”

“It wasn't covered?”

“A lot of things aren't covered. My aunt didn't worry about things like insurance. She didn't really seem to care. If something was stolen or broken, so what? They're only objects, after all. Why worry about them? That was her attitude. You can be indifferent like that when you had as much as she did.”

“Do you inherit all her estate?” Guastafeste asked.

“Most, yes. She left money to various charities, but this house, the stuff in it, it's all mine now. There's too much of it for my liking. I'll probably get rid of the furniture, all the junk she collected over the years.”

“Has Serafin made you an offer for the Bergonzi violin?” I said.

“No, he hasn't given me a valuation yet.”

“If I were you, I'd get a second opinion from another dealer.”

“You would? Signor Serafin seemed a very straightforward, honest kind of man.”

“Appearances can be deceptive,” I said.

In the car driving home, Guastafeste was silent until we were a couple of kilometres from the Villa Nettuno. Then he said, “That was a bit of a waste of time, wasn't it? All we found out was that that lying rogue Serafin cased the joint, then tipped off Villeneuve and his pal Lodrino, who organised the burglary—and we knew that already.”

“Mmm,” I murmured noncommittally.

I wasn't so sure we'd wasted our trip. Something about that photograph of Nicoletta Ferrara was bothering me. Her maiden name, too, had struck a chord. Bianchi. Why did I know the name Bianchi?

I dwelt on it as we headed south along the lakeshore road and onto the autostrada. We were nearing Milan, the traffic starting to thicken, when something happened that took my mind off Nicoletta Ferrara.

Guastafeste received a message over the radio that was clipped to the dashboard of the car. Vladimir Kousnetzoff had been located, the crackly male voice informed us. Guastafeste reached across to punch a button on the handset.

“Where?”

“Bologna. The Hotel Primavera.”

“He's been picked up?”

“Negative. He'd checked out before the Bologna police got there.”

“
Merda!
”

Guastafeste hammered the sides of the steering wheel with the palms of his hands.

“Isn't that just like it?” he said through clenched teeth. “We finally track him down and he vanishes.”

“Bologna?” I said.

Guastafeste glanced across at me.

“What about it?”

“Isabella Colbran's villa at Castenaso—that's just outside Bologna.”

I
t is two hundred kilometres from Milan to Bologna, but we did the journey in under ninety minutes, the speedometer occasionally touching 180 kph, the rooflight flashing to clear our path through the traffic. I didn't take in much of the scenery—I had my eyes tightly shut most of the way.

Only when I felt the car begin to slow and the g-force that had been pinning me to my seat ease off a little did I dare to open my eyes. I saw a sign reading
BOLOGNA—5KM
.

“You have a good sleep?” Guastafeste asked.

“I wasn't asleep.”

“You were breathing very heavily.”

“I think you're confusing sleep with a sustained panic attack,” I said.

We took the ring road north round Bologna, then turned off and followed a smaller rural road to Castenaso. The countryside was flat, bare ploughed fields, which a few months earlier would have contained
wheat and maize crops, and scattered farm houses ringed by lime and cypress trees to provide protection from the sun and wind.

As we went over a level crossing, an illuminated electronic speed sign started flashing red at us, telling us we were going sixty-three kilometres an hour. Guastafeste applied the brakes and we dropped to below the legal limit. We were on the outskirts of Castenaso, driving past modern apartment blocks, which soon gave way to a few shops. We crossed a bridge over the River Idice, then kept going through a set of traffic lights and almost immediately found ourselves coming out on the other side of the town.

“Was that it?” Guastafeste said. “Or did we miss something?”

He pulled into the kerb, reversed into a farm track, and drove back the way we'd come.

We hadn't missed anything. That was all there was to Castenaso—a nondescript linear settlement clinging to the main road, with no real centre and no older core that might have been there when Isabella Colbran and Rossini were alive. In their day, it must have been a small, self-sufficient farming community. Now it had become a soulless dormitory town for Bologna, only a few kilometres away.

We parked outside a hardware shop and got out to explore further on foot. A hunched, scruffy-looking fellow was passing by on the pavement. I stopped him and asked if he knew where Isabella Colbran's villa was.

“Who?” he said.

“Isabella Colbran,” I repeated. “She was a singer. Married to Rossini.”

“Rossini? You mean the builder in Marano?”

“The composer. They had a house near Castenaso.”

“Who did?”

Guastafeste took my arm and led me away, muttering darkly about the limited gene pool and mental faculties of the local populace.

The second person we accosted was no help, either. He was obviously a municipal employee, for he was wearing a luminous yellow vest and was going about his work as if he were suffering from a bad case of
somnambulism. He was wandering along the street picking up litter with a long-handled claw and depositing it in a black garbage bag he was carrying. A wirehaired terrier, which might have been his, or a stray with nothing better to do, scampered along beside him, yapping excitedly at the claw. He didn't know who Isabella Colbran was, or Rossini.

“We should've asked the dog,” Guastafeste said sourly as we continued along the street in search of a local who could justify the epithet by actually demonstrating some knowledge of the area.

At the traffic lights, I noticed a small police station and suggested we go inside and ask for help. Guastafeste wasn't keen on the idea. Professional pride, I think. There is a rigid pecking order in the police force, and a city detective like Antonio was reluctant to ask favours from colleagues he no doubt regarded as little more than country bumpkins. We crossed the road instead and approached a group of elderly men who were sitting on benches under the trees by the
comune
. They knew who Rossini was all right, and Isabella, too, but they had some bad news for us about the Villa Colbran.