“We tried to assist him. How we tried! Clive knows a great deal about CPR methods, and we labored, both together, pressing his chest, applying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
“But he was dead from the moment he fell. My friend Václav was dead.
“And in that moment I panicked. I had slapped him in senseless anger, and he had toppled like a felled tree. What we did then — Clive unwillingly but out of friendship — was the result of my panic, and I am solely at fault. But once done — once we sent Václav’s little car down the slope and into the water — there was no going back because — do you understand? — because no matter how much we wanted to, we could never bring him again among the living.
“And so — we waited instead for this inevitable day. I see him sometimes. Did I tell you that? Out of the corner of my eye, I see him, but then when I turn to look he isn’t there.” Davis drew a deep breath and made an effort to compose himself. “You will find, sheriff that Václav died of a seizure of some kind, I’m sure — a heart attack or a stroke. I am completely ashamed of my behavior — but I did not kill him.”
I had remained by the window, looking out from time to time at both the grim activities along the shore of the lake and also at the continued darkening of the troubled sky. But as Byron Davis came gradually to this emphatic conclusion to his revelations, I returned to the sofa and sat beside my husband. We exchanged a brief glance; then I ventured to speak.
“Mr. Davis,” I said, beginning tentatively. “Before R. J. or Sheriff Bonner responds to what you’ve said, I — that is, could I broach a rather different subject?” Without waiting for a reply I continued, “As a good friend of Václav Hucek, you were aware, I’m sure, of the sense of communion he felt for the music and personality of Niccolò Paganini. My question, simply put, is this: did he ever break his reticence on that subject with you? Regarding its source?”
“Is... this a... relevant question?” Davis spoke slowly but in a rising, querulous tone. “Sheriff why are you being so silent?”
Sheriff Bonner was a lean, reticent man with a mild voice. He said, “Why — I’m interested in hearing your answer, Mr. Davis.”
“Then—” Davis looked across at the table with, momentarily, a doomed expression in his eyes. “Then I don’t know a thing about it. Paganini was tall and slim; Václav was short and fat. Paganini was a notorious libertine; Václav was a paragon of conventional respectability. It was a preposterous pose on Václav’s part that no one took seriously but himself. I—”
He came to a sudden halt, doubtless because R. J. had risen to his feet and turned to peer down at the violin in the glass case. “That is a beautiful instrument, Mr. Davis,” he said. “My wife’s rather a fancier of violins. Would you mind if she took a look at it?”
The air within the room seemed to become completely still, although above the sound of the rushing wind outside I thought I could hear the rumble of distant thunder.
“Sheriff,” Davis said after a moment. “I... I don’t understand what Mr. and Mrs. Carr are about. Not at all. Can’t we simply come to the point between us, you and I? Caution me, condemn me, arrest me if you must, but—”
“I don’t have any plans to arrest you, Mr. Davis,” said the sheriff quietly. “Not so far. But I like Mr. Carr’s suggestion — and I do have a search warrant here that I’d rather not use.”
Davis stood then and moved with reluctant steps across to the glass case. “This is a purported Amati from 1693 which I have owned since 1987,” he said in a forced, even voice as he unlocked the case. “Please — handle it with care.” He brought the instrument to me and lowered it into my hands with an air of hostile caution. I, who had never so much as held a violin until the previous week, took it from him and pretended to an expertise I did not have. I examined the rich sheen of the ancient wood, both front and back, tucked it briefly under my chin and plucked a string or two, sighted along the top surface, tested the gloss of the finish with my finger.
“Surely this is no Amati, Mr. Davis,” I said. And in the interval that followed I did hear thunder.
I held the instrument up to my eyes to peer in through the sound-holes, then lowered it and gave a deliberate sigh. “But of course the maker’s label is missing, as they often are, and so—”
R. J., meanwhile, had remained by the open glass case, looking at and then turning pages in the Bible on display. “Here’s a label, Ginny,” he said innocently. “ ‘Giuseppe Guarneri, IHS.’ With a cross.”
Davis wrenched his gaze from me to my husband in a gesture of helpless fury, and in that moment, as if all the powers at hand were conspiring against him, there came a much louder rumbling of thunder followed closely by a sharp rapping at one of the casements. The thunder boomed again even as I turned with the others to look out at the dark and lowering sky and the equally dark and ominous figure framed there in the window, the figure of an old man dressed in black, peering into the room with a fiery anger in his eyes. He was a foreign-looking man, short and burly of build, with disheveled, damp hair and dirt smeared across his forehead. The severe black suit he wore clung to him in an extreme wetness, and in one hand he held up a violin — or what had once been a violin before five months submerged in freezing depths had destroyed its finish and warped it until it had split apart.
“Václav?” said Davis suddenly, in a horrified tone. “No!”
“Hvere-iss-da-Guar-ne-ri-us?” shouted the man through the casement.
And as a heavy peal of thunder shook the house, Byron L. Davis collapsed on the carpet at my feet.
“...because, you see, Peter,” I was saying to my uncle that evening, “perhaps the most famous violin in all musical history isn’t a Stradivarius but the Guarneri played by Niccolò Paganini and made by the famed ‘Giuseppe del Jesu,’ who labeled his instruments with his name followed by IHS and a cross, the IHS being the first three letters in Greek for the name Jesus.
“It does seem strange, at least to me, that a violin dedicated in such a way to holiness could have been the favored instrument of a man like Paganini, who traded on his reputation for demonic musical powers, but—” I made a gesture of incomprehension.
“And so what is it you’re saying, Ginny Girl? That old Hucek’s mysterious thing about Paganini was just that he’d swiped a fiddle made by this fella Guarneri?”
“No — because it’s far more complex than that. You have to understand, first of all, that he’d had the use of the violin for much of his career prior to his defection, and he sincerely believed that his playing had at least earned him the right to it for his remaining lifetime. I suspect also that he felt, as Paganini had, that he drew supernatural power from Giuseppe Guarneri’s craftsmanship, but he attributed that power to a holy rather than a diabolical source.
“And as far as mere physical ownership is concerned, who really owns the violin now, Peter? Václav’s brother Karl? The Czech people — no longer under a socialist government? The previous owner from whom the violin was confiscated?”
“I guess I know who doesn’t own it,” Peter remarked.
“Byron Davis?” said R. J. from beside me. “He owns a water-soaked, dubious Amati and more luck than he probably realizes. I don’t think there’s a chance in the world he’ll be prosecuted for theft, provided the autopsy confirms that Hucek’s death was natural, and I think it will I think up to the very last point Davis was telling us the truth about what happened that night — not necessarily about the hugs and consolation part, but that’s his own business and it doesn’t really matter. The big thing is this: after we brought him around and he offered to make amends by paying restitution to cover the cost of all the man-hours and equipment-hours spent searching for Hucek, I could see the sheriff backing off from any interest he might have had in criminal charges and considering a consent decree instead.”