The Rainaldi Quartet (5 page)

‘And where is it now?' Guastafeste asked.

‘In the Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford.'

‘Oxford? In England, you mean?'

‘Yes. It was acquired by the English dealers, Hills, who donated it to the museum.'

‘Has it ever been played?'

‘Just twice, and never in public. Delphin Alard played it at a private gathering of friends and family in 1855. Vuillaume said he heard the angels singing. And Joseph Joachim played it briefly in 1891.'

‘Never since?'

‘No,' I said. ‘Hills stipulated that it should never be played.'

Guastafeste leaned back in his chair, his coffee still untouched on the table.

Then with a studied casualness, he said: ‘If there were another violin – a sister to this “Messiah”, what would it be worth?'

I kept my voice equally off-hand. ‘Another perfect, untouched Stradivari coming on the open market. That would be an opportunity that comes once in a lifetime, maybe once in several lifetimes, if ever. A lot of people would be interested.'

‘How interested?'

‘Well,
Le Messie
has been valued at ten million US dollars.'

Guastafeste's eyes opened wide and I nodded in agreement.

‘I know. It's amazing what some people will pay for a few pieces of wood and varnish.'

Guastafeste rubbed his jawline pensively, running his fingertips over the dark stubble. Then he voiced the question I'd been expecting him to ask.

‘Would they kill for it?'

I looked away across the pavement, watching the traffic go by, a delivery van pulling in outside a shop, a mother pushing a pram down the street. It seemed odd that life elsewhere was functioning normally when my own felt so disrupted. Guastafeste was waiting for my reply.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Human nature being what it is, I think they would.'

3

When I was a boy, I had a violin teacher named Dr Martinelli who was a great believer in the purifying properties of Bach. He said it cleansed the mind, stimulated the production of beneficial hormones, enhancing the body's sense of well-being and lifting the spirits. He was a teacher of the old school, a reserved, very proper man who always taught in frock-coat, waistcoat and dark tie no matter how hot the weather. He could be sharp and critical, but for the most part he was a benevolent tutor who regarded our lessons not simply as instruction in music but as the foundations of a philosophy for life.

To him, music was not something that you tacked on to your life, a secondary consideration or a frivolous distraction. It was an integral part of your very existence, as vital as breathing or eating. To live a day without music was an unthinkable omission, to live a day without Bach a transgression that bordered on blasphemy. ‘Giovanni,' he would say to me in his soft, mellifluous voice, ‘whatever you are doing, no matter how busy you are, you must always find time in your day for Bach.' And he would exhort me to play an unaccompanied partita every morning before breakfast, much as people today go jogging or to the gym to set themselves up for the day.

I never did, of course. I found it difficult enough getting out of bed in time to go to school, never mind practise my violin. But now I am older, the master of my own timetable, I have finally taken Dr Martinelli's advice. I do not do it before breakfast, nor every day, but as often as I can I go through into the back room after my coffee and roll and I play my violin.

On this particular morning I rose a little after eight, as usual, and had my breakfast in the kitchen. I'd slept badly, my mind preoccupied with Rainaldi's death, with his grieving family and – of less immediate concern but there all the same – the mysterious violin for which my friend had been searching.

After breakfast I went through to my violin and tackled the piece which seemed most in keeping with my melancholy mood – the Chaconne from the D Minor Partita which Bach wrote as an elegy for his beloved wife Maria Barbara whom, on returning home after a long absence, the composer found not only dead but buried as well. His distress must have been excruciating and the Chaconne is shot through with the anguish of his grief.

As I played, I found my conscious thoughts dissolving into the music so that my mind became almost a blank. It calmed me at first, brought a tranquillity which seeped through my body like a drug, then slowly began to energise me, sharpening my senses and filling me with renewed vigour.

When the last chord had died away and I was alone once again in the silence, I thought inevitably of my own wife. She was a fine pianist. We used to make music together almost every day. One of the Brahms sonatas, or perhaps Beethoven or Mozart. Then to end, just for the hell of it, I would take out some bravura piece by one of the great virtuosi composers: Paganini or Wieniawski or Sarasate. I am a violinist whose ambition, alas, has always surpassed his technique. And Caterina would play along with me, her shoulders shaking with laughter as I caterwauled up and down the register, missing harmonics, butchering double stops, searching for notes that never came in tune or never came at all. I thought of her at the piano, her slim fingers dancing over the keyboard, her eyes shining with pleasure, and I wondered again why it is that happy memories are so much more painful than unhappy ones.

My practice complete, I drove to the railway station and caught the train to Milan. There was a time when I would have driven all the way, but not now. Milan is so choked with cars it's difficult to breathe there let alone drive. On the station news-stand there were prominent bills announcing, ‘Violin-maker Murdered – Police Hunt Killer'. I could see the stacks of papers with Rainaldi's death on the front page. I was curious to see what had been reported, but I didn't buy one. I knew it would be too distressing to read.

On arrival in Milan, I took a taxi to Serafin's shop, though his premises are really too grand for so common a noun. Serafin would be outraged at the term, deeming it a slur not only on his business but on himself for by extension labelling him a shopkeeper. And no one regards himself as less like a shopkeeper than Vincenzo Serafin.

The salon, Serafin's preferred description for his place of work – if work is really the word for what he does there – was in the heart of Milan's fashionable central district, a rhinestone's throw from the cathedral, the Galleria Umberto II and La Scala. It was sandwiched between an art gallery in which nothing was priced below 5,000 euros and an exclusive
haute couture
clothes shop with one dress in the window and, apparently, nothing else in the entire store. Serafin's establishment was even more minimalist. From its polished mahogany frontage no one would have known that violins were sold inside. Indeed, there was no indication that anything at all was sold there. The front window was completely empty and the room beyond, partially shielded from the street by vertical blinds, contained nothing except a desk and a chair in which a supercilious blonde receptionist had little to do except varnish her immaculate nails. Only a small brass plaque beside the door gave any information about the occupants of the building and that was too discreet to provide anything other than Serafin's name. Clients – never customers – came there by invitation and appointment only. If you didn't already know what went on there, then you were in the wrong place.

I went in. The blonde receptionist, becoming animated for a moment, looked up in what – for her – was a frenzy of excitement. Then she saw who it was and relapsed into her lethargic reverie. What she thought about all day – if she thought about anything at all – was a mystery to me.

‘He's upstairs,' she said, raising her plucked eyebrows a couple of millimetres to indicate where ‘upstairs' was.

She pressed a button under the desk and the door behind her clicked open. I walked through into a small carpeted hall where a thick-set man in a dark suit sat upright on an antique wooden chair. He didn't make a show of it, but I knew he was armed. Behind the door to the man's left was Serafin's inner sanctum, the sound-proofed music room where his clients tried out instruments. At any one time there were probably several million euros' worth of violins in that room, each one individually displayed in an illuminated glass case. The room had a marble floor, intricately carved oak-panelled walls which looked as if they'd come from the choir of an English church, and was acoustically perfect. Violins were tried one at a time, brought forth from their glass cases by an attendant wearing white gloves like a duke's footman – a wonderful touch which somehow encapsulated Serafin's shrewd nature. Bare hands would have made no difference to the instruments, but it reassured customers that what they were trying, even if it was some rubbishy old fiddle – and Serafin sells a few of those, though never priced accordingly – was delicate and priceless. In the violin-dealing world – far more than outsiders realise – appearances are everything.

I went up the stairs. As I neared the top, I heard voices raised inside Serafin's office. I paused on the landing, listening. I recognised one of the voices as Serafin's, but the other was unfamiliar. It was difficult to make out exactly what was being said, for Serafin's office had a thick, reinforced door, but the tone of both voices was undoubtedly heated, and they were speaking not in Italian but in English. I knocked on the door. There was a sudden silence inside the office, then Serafin called out, ‘Yes?'

I went in. Serafin was seated behind his huge mahogany desk. On the other side of the office – as far away from Serafin as it was possible to be – a man was standing. He was tall and gangly with cold blue eyes and sandy hair, receding at the front but long enough at the back to curl over the collar of his white linen jacket. He looked to be somewhere in his thirties. His underlying complexion was pale, spotted with ginger freckles, but right now his skin was flushed with anger. I'd never seen him before, but from his clothes, his appearance, the snatches of conversation I'd overheard, I knew he was English.

‘Gianni!' Serafin appeared flustered, not something I was used to seeing.

‘We had an appointment,' I said.

‘Ah, yes, of course. Our appointment.'

Serafin glanced at the sandy-haired man, who moved towards the door in such a forceful manner that I stepped quickly out of his way for fear he would knock me over.

‘I'll be in touch,' he said curtly in English to Serafin, his tone more of a threat than a promise, then he turned and walked out of the room.

I pushed the door to behind him. By the time I looked back at Serafin he'd recovered his composure. He was taking a sip of coffee from the porcelain cup on his desk.

‘I'm sorry, did I interrupt?' I said.

‘No, no, it's all right. We'd finished.'

Serafin dabbed at his mouth with a napkin and smoothed his neatly trimmed beard with his fingers. There was something very feminine about him – his long, tapering, manicured fingers, his gestures, his soft, fleshy, pampered jowls.

‘The violin is over there,' he said, inclining his head.

I went to the side table and opened the case, taking out the instrument inside and holding it up to the light. I knew what it was, of course – I'd carried out work on it in the past – but I still felt a tremor of anticipation as I ran my eyes over the curves, the belly, the waist, as a philanderer might appraise his next conquest. What was it about a violin that, even now, a half century after I'd first begun making them, could still arouse such a powerful sense of – I tried to identify what it was I felt. Was it desire, to possess it, to stamp my ownership on it? Was it admiration? Was it envy because someone greater, more skilful than I had made it? Or was it a nobler sentiment? Did it thrill me because in that beautifully crafted piece of wood there was something more than the sum of its parts? It wasn't just pine and maple and glue, it had been given life by its maker, a soul all of its own.

I couldn't resist looking at the label inside.
Antonius Stradivarius Cremonensis Faciebat Anno 1704.
She was three hundred years old and showing her age a bit, but she was still a magnificent old lady. I tilted her towards the window so the light caught the rich orange-red varnish, making it glow like a liquid sunset. I could see every grain of the pine, imagine Stradivari's hands smoothing over the contours. But on the left side of the belly, just above the f-hole, was a crack which Stradivari certainly would not have recognised.

‘What happened?' I asked.

Serafin pushed aside his coffee cup. He dabbed at the corners of his mouth again, then folded the napkin and placed it neatly beside the cup.

‘An accident,' he said. He mentioned the name of a distinguished violinist, the leader of one of Italy's foremost string quartets. ‘He put it down in his case which was on the floor next to his chair.'

‘And?'

‘He forgot it was there and trod on it.'

Trod on it!
I could barely contain my contempt. This man had a Stradivari violin, worth probably two million euros, a violin that had survived intact for three centuries. And he trod on it.

‘Unfortunate,' I murmured, though a more robust exclamation was exploding inside my head.

‘Quite,' Serafin said mildly. ‘He is greatly distressed and anxious to have it fixed as soon as possible.'

‘I'm sure he is.'

I examined the crack more closely through the jeweller's loupe I carry in my pocket. The break looked fairly clean, the wood on either side not too badly shredded.

‘How quickly can you do it?' Serafin said. ‘He has another instrument – a Bergonzi – but they have an important concert in New York at the end of next month and he'd really like the Stradivari back by then.'

Serafin's clients move in exalted circles. He deals with concert violinists, chamber musicians, orchestral leaders and rich collectors for whom he attends auctions all over the world. If you want a half-size Chinese import for little Luigi to begin on, then Serafin is most definitely not your man. He knows a lot about violins, but not how to play one nor how to make or repair them – I take care of all that for him. I do the labouring, he takes the money, is how I see it. But it's a mutually advantageous arrangement that we have maintained successfully for many, many years. Like all luthiers I deal a bit on the side. I could have a salon like Serafin's, with all the trimmings, but that would bore me. I'd have to wear a suit, acquire a
chaise longue,
some art for the walls, and I can't be bothered with all that. I just want to be left alone in my workshop. I'm an artisan not a businessman.