“Driving that little car, too. I think they should be outlawed.”
Davis and I said goodbye with Clive Macmillan looking on in the background, and I couldn’t help wondering, as I descended to the Chevy, what kind of conversation they might be having in my immediate absence.
I took the obvious alternate route south to Lake Geneva, watching without conviction for sites where Hucek might have strayed from the road and stopping to investigate four of them with the same negative results I had had on the trip north. The truth, though, was that if Hucek really had left the highway for some accidental or voluntary reason and gotten himself even further lost, then after four months’ time and two official searches — the second following the spring melt-off — only luck or unforeseen happenstance was going to lead me to him. I didn’t have faith in either of these alternatives mainly because the situation was developing a different kind of feel to me.
The drive from Lake Geneva home to the Chicago suburbs gave me some time to mull the problem over, with the result that the next day when I had an hour free I put in a long distance call to the editor of the Walworth County Beacon, a biweekly paper out of Lake Geneva that had given the disappearance a front page headline a few days after it had happened.
“Yeah. This is Paul Zimmer,” said a sharp voice.
“My name is Carr,” I said. “I’ve been hired by Václav Hucek’s brother to—”
“Yeah, I heard about that. And brother — believe you me — I wish you luck.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why? You’re not God, are you? Or Superman? No X-ray vision? What I’ve said right along is, find the car and you’ll find the man. But the car — wow. Uh-uh.”
“Well, yeah. And that’s why I’d like to try a different starting point,” I said.
“A bright idea, only it won’t work.”
“Why not?”
The line went silent briefly, then he replied, “Don’t mind me, Mr. Carr. I was just being cute. But if there’s a different starting point, you’re the party that’s going to have to supply it.”
“Fine. Tell me about Václav Hucek.”
“Why? No — never mind. I see the inference. I don’t buy it, but I see it. And Hucek was a strange bird, all right — notice the use of the past tense — but I’ll tell you this, Mr. Carr, he wasn’t the kind of strange bird that flies away.
“He was what you’d probably call an eccentric, and my feeling is that some of it was phony but most of it wasn’t. If you saw him, you’d remember him, believe me, because he always wore a formal black suit with a tailcoat and a high collar — like he was on his way to a performance, you know — and in person he acted like the grand maestro. I interviewed him once just after he retired and got the full treatment: thick accent, big gestures, air of superiority. And mysterious, my God, did the guy like to act mysterious.”
“How?” I asked.
“The Paganini thing. He and Paganini were soulmates. You’ve heard of Paganini? I had to look him up. Nineteenth century virtuoso violinist, supposedly had the ladies swooning in the aisles. Hucek and Paganini ‘shared a sacred musical and spiritual bond’ — I’m quoting — only don’t ask how or why or you’ll get the icy stare of the maestro. Actually, Hucek was well known on this score, but I was the hick reporter. The tailcoat — that was Paganini. Also the flamboyant gestures. Also Hucek’s style of playing the violin.
“In my own defense, though, by the time Hucek retired, he wasn’t such a big noise. In the fifties and sixties behind the Iron Curtain he was a pretty hot number as a soloist, but he never came on that strong in the U.S. Defected in 1968 with his wife. Had open heart surgery in ’76 and took the... what’s it called? The Stenstrom Chair for Violin Studies, I think, over at Madison. That was 77. Mandated retirement in ’84. Came here because his wife liked Lake Geneva and picked up two hundred bucks per half hour giving lessons to hotshot kids and dilettantes of indeterminate gender like that Davis character he was on his way to see when the storm hit.
“Oh. His wife died about three years ago, and that reminds me of the guy’s last eccentricity. Supposedly, from the time she was laid out, he never went anyplace without a violin case under his arm — grocery shopping, walking on the beach.”
“Any theories on that?” I asked.
“Well, wherever he’s gone, that’s where the violin case has gone, too. It’s got a violin in it; don’t get me wrong. It’s not filled with money or one of his wife’s nightgowns because people have seen him take it out and play it while he was standing by the lake.
“And... what else? This is the last free tidbit because I’ve got a paper to run, but there’s a story that I don’t vouch for saying that when Hucek defected he brought with him some pretty rare and valuable instruments — one, three, or five, depending on the source — that were technically the property of the Czech government. His practice room, which I was in the one time, had, I’d like to say, at least four violins in display cases and one of those big ones — a cello — and some things like guitars only they weren’t. The official word, though, was that nothing was taken, so... I don’t see much in this particular angle, frankly.”
I thanked him and we said goodbye. But that evening on the vaguest kind of hunch I spent an hour and a half in our local library digging around at the real and rumored biography of a man who had been dead for one hundred fifty years named Niccolò Paganini.
At around ten thirty the following Saturday morning a man who looked suspiciously like myself was strolling along the edge of a county highway in south central Wisconsin near a sign inviting persons of easy means and limitless credulity to consider a future at Mansion Lakes. This man wore a hunter’s cap, a well-worn tan windbreaker, and a pair of field binoculars on a strap around his neck. On occasion he would peer earnestly through the binoculars into the woods on the opposite side of the road in the apparent hope of spotting a creature perched on a twig with a brain at least the size of his own. Or such seemed to be the man’s innermost desire.
At ten thirty-eight a metallic gray Ford station wagon slowed as it passed him on the pavement and came to a halt on the shoulder a hundred feet ahead. He trotted up to the car and climbed in on the passenger’s side before glancing across at the driver, a black-haired woman dressed in tweeds whose mature beauty was capable of stopping traffic on that particular or any other stretch of highway in the universe. Except for the tweeds she looked remarkably like the man’s wife, Ginny.
“You were right — as usual,” she said in a low, clear tone.
“I was afraid of that,” I replied. I looked out at the mild, cloudless sky. “Well. If we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it.”
“Yes. Breaking and entering in broad daylight — how to bring new excitement into your humdrum married life. Do Wisconsin jails allow conjugal visits?”
She drove the Ford ahead, reversed our course in the next lane, and braked to a halt five minutes later in front of the Byron Davis house. “I knocked seven times even though I felt silly doing it,” she said, “Perhaps you should, too.”
“Nope,” I said. “I feel silly enough as is. Just blow that whistle if you see them coming.”
We kissed for no special reason except that we always do; then I got out and looked around before climbing the steps. Golfers blocked from view by the hillock; no construction crews in sight; no farmers in the distant fields — only the occasional hum of a passing vehicle on the road beyond the artificial berm at the opposite end of the lake. And no one in the house. I hoped.