When he didn't receive an answer, he raised his glass in another toast. "From the very first time I met you, I knew that I would have to kill you. And here we are."
He took a sip, set down the glass. "I had hoped that idiot Bullard would pull it off. But, of course, he failed."
"You put him up to that, naturally."
"Let us just say that, in his frightened condition, he was susceptible to suggestion. And so now it is left to me. But first, don't you think you should congratulate me on a beautifully executed plan? I extracted the violin from Bullard. And as you know well, Mr. Pendergast, there are no witnesses or physical evidence to connect me to the murders."
"You have the violin. Bullard once had it. That can be established beyond the shadow of a doubt."
"It belongs to the Fosco family by legal right. I still have the bill of sale, signed by Antonio Stradivari himself, and the chain of ownership is beyond question. A suitable period will pass following Bullard's death; then the violin will surface in Rome. I've planned it down to the last detail. I will make my claim, pay a small reward to the lucky shopkeeper, and it will come to me free and clear. Bullard told no one why he needed to remove the violin from his laboratory, not even the people at his company. How could he?" Fosco issued a dry chuckle. "So you see, there is nothing, Mr. Pendergast, no evidence at all against me. But then, I have always been a most fortunate man in such matters." He bit off a piece of bread. "For example, there is an extraordinary coincidence at the very heart of this affair. Do you know what it is?"
"I can guess."
"On October 31, 1974, in the early afternoon, while on my way out of the Biblioteca Nazionale, I ran into a group of callow American students. You know the type-they throng Florence all year long. It was the afternoon of All Hallows' Eve-Halloween to them, of course-and they'd been drinking to excess. I was young and callow myself, and I found them so astonishingly vulgar that they amused me. We fell in for the moment. At some point, one of the students-Jeremy Grove to be precise-went on a tear about religion, about God being rubbish for the weak mind, that sort of thing. The sheer arrogance of it annoyed me. I said that I couldn't speak on the existence of God, but I did know one thing: that the devil existed."
Fosco laughed silently, his capacious front shaking.
"They all roundly denied the existence of the devil. I said I had friends who dabbled in the occult, who had collected old manuscripts and that sort of thing, and that, in fact, I had an old parchment which contained formulas on how to raise Lucifer himself. We could settle the question that very night. The night was perfect, in fact, being Halloween. Would they like to try it? Oh, yes, they said. What a marvelous idea!"
Another internal disturbance shook Fosco's person.
"So you put on a show for them."
"Exactly. I invited them to a midnight séance in my castle, and then rushed back myself to set it all up. It was a great deal of fun. Pinketts helped-and, by the way, he isn't English at all, but a manservant named Pinchetti who happens to be both a clever linguist and a lover of intrigue. We had only six hours, but we did it up rather well. I've always been a tinkerer, a builder of machines and gadgets, and incidentally a designer off uochi d'artificio -fireworks. There are all sorts of secret passageways, trapdoors, and hidden panels in the cellars here, and we took full advantage of them. That was a night to remember! You should have seen their faces as we recited the incantations, asked the Prince of Darkness to bring them great wealth, offered their souls in return, pricked their fingers and signed contracts in blood-especially when Pinketts activated the theatrics." He leaned back, pealing with laughter.
"You terrified them. You scared Beckmann so much it ruined his life."
"It was all in good fun. If it shook up their pathetic little certainties, so much the better. They went their way and I went mine. And here comes the coincidence so marvelous I feel it must be predestination: thirty years later, I discovered to my horror that one of these philistines had acquired the Stormcloud."
"How did you learn?" Pendergast asked.
"I had been on the track of the Stormcloud almost my entire adult life, Mr. Pendergast. I made it my life's goal to return that violin to my family. You've been to see Lady Maskelene, so you know its history. I knew perfectly well Toscanelli had not thrown it into the Falls of the Sciliar. How could he? As crazy as he was, he knew better than anyone what that violin represented. But if he didn't destroy it, then what had happened? The answer is not so mysterious. He froze to death in a shepherd's hut up on the Sciliar, and then it snowed. There were no footprints in the snow. Obviously, someone had found him dead with the violin before it snowed and had stolen the violin. And who was this someone? Just as obviously, the man who owned the hut."
Pinketts whisked away his plate, then returned bearing another of tortelloni with butter and salvia. Fosco tucked into it with relish.
"Remember how I told you I loved detective work? I have a rare talent for it. I traced the Stormcloud from the shepherd, to his nephew, to a band of Gypsies, to a shop in Spain, to an orphanage in Malta-this way and that it traveled. I shudder to think of the times it was left in the sun; packed in a case with a few threads of straw and thrown into the back of a truck; left unattended in some school auditorium. Mio Dio! Yet it survived. It ended up in France, where it was sold in a lot of junk instruments to a lycée. Some clumsy oaf in the orchestra dropped it, chipped one of the scrolls, and it was taken to a violin shop in Angoulême for repair. The man who owned the shop recognized it, substituted it, and sent back another instrument in its place." Fosco clucked disapprovingly. "What a moment that must have been for him! He knew he could never acquire legal title to it, so he smuggled it to America and quietly put it up for sale. It took a long time to find a buyer. Who wanted a Stradivarius if you couldn't play it as a Strad? If you could never establish title to it? If it might be taken from you at any moment? But he finally did find a buyer-in Locke Bullard. Two million dollars-that was all! I found out three months after the deal had closed."
A dark furor passed over Fosco's face, rapidly clearing as Pinketts carried in the next course, a bistecca fiorentina , sizzling from the fire. Fosco carved off a piece of almost raw meat, placed it in his mouth, chewed.
"I was perfectly willing to buy it from Bullard, even paying a handsome price, despite the fact it was mine to begin with. But I never got to the point of making an offer. You see, Bullard was going to destroy the violin."
"To crack Stradivari's secret formulas once and for all."
"Exactly. And do you know why?"
"I know Bullard was not in the business of making violins, nor did he have any interest in music."
"True. But do you know the business his company, BAI, was into? With the Chinese?"
Pendergast did not reply.
"Missiles, my dear Pendergast. He was working on ballistic missiles . That's why he needed the violin!"
"Bullshit!" D'Agosta interjected. "There can't possibly be a connection between a three-hundred-year-old violin and a ballistic missile."
Fosco ignored this. He was still looking at Pendergast. "I sense you know rather more than you let on, my good sir. In any case, I penetrated their laboratory with a mole in my employ. Poor fellow ended up with his head crushed. But before that happened, he did tell me just what Bullard planned to do with the violin."
He leaned forward, eyes flashing with indignation. "The Chinese, you see, had developed a ballistic missile that could theoretically penetrate the United States' planned antimissile shield. But they had a problem with their missiles breaking up on re-entry. To make the missile invisible to radar, you know, one can't have any curved or shiny surfaces. Look at the strange angular shapes of your stealth fighters and bombers. But this wasn't a bomber flying at six hundred miles an hour: this was a ballistic missile re-entering the atmosphere at ten times that speed. Their test missiles broke up under uncontrollable resonance vibrations during atmospheric re-entry."