‘For a violinist, believe me, it’s nothing short of a miracle to have such a jewel at one’s disposal’ He sighed. ‘Unfortunately, I have to give it back.’
It’s not yours?’
‘I wish it were! The problem is, I no longer know whom to give it back to. I’d intended to phone the police station today and ask somebody there. But since you’re here …’
‘I’m at your service.’
‘You see, that violin belonged to the late Mrs Licalzi.’
The inspector felt all his nerves tighten up like violin strings. If the Maestro had run his bow across him, a chord would have rung out.
‘About two months ago,’
Maestro Barbera recounted, ‘I was practising with the window open. Mrs Licalzi, who happened to be walking by, heard me. She was very knowledgeable about music, you know. She saw my name on the intercom downstairs and wanted to meet me. She’d been at my very last performance in Milan, after which I retired, though nobody knew that at the time.’ ‘Why did you retire?’
The bluntness of the question caught the Maestro by surprise. He hesitated, though only for a moment, then pulled out the hairpin and slowly unwrapped the scarf. A monster: half his nose was gone; his upper lip had been entirely eaten away, exposing the gums.
‘Is that a good enough reason?’
He wrapped the scarf around himself again, securing it with the pin.
‘It’s a very rare, degenerative form of lupus, totally incurable. How could I continue to appear in public?’
The inspector felt grateful to him for putting the scarf back on at once. He was impossible to look at; one felt horrified, nauseated.
‘Anyway, that beautiful, gentle creature, talking of this and that, told me about a violin she’d inherited from a great-grandfather from Cremona who used to make stringed instruments. She added that, as a child, she’d heard it said within the family that it was worth a fortune, though she’d never paid much attention to this.
These legends of priceless paintings and statuettes worth millions are common talk in families. I’m not sure why, but I became curious. A few days later she phoned me in the evening, then came round to pick me up, and took me to the house she’d recently built. The moment I saw that violin, I tell you, something burst inside me, I felt a kind of overpowering electrical shock. It was in a pretty bad state, but I knew it wouldn’t take much to restore it to perfection.
It was an Andrea Guarneri, Inspector, easily recognizable by the powerful glow of its amber-yellow varnish’
The inspector glanced at the violin, and in all sincerity he didn’t see any glow coming from it. Then again, he was hopeless in matters of music
‘I tried playing it’ said the Maestro, ‘and for ten minutes I was transported to heaven in the company of Paganini, Ole Bull and others…’
‘What’s its market value?’
asked the inspector, who usually flew close to the ground and had never come close to heaven.
‘Market value?!’ the Maestro said in horror. ‘You can’t put a price on an instrument like that!’
‘All right, but if you had to quantify—’ ‘I really don’t know … Two, three billion lire’
Had he heard right? He had.
‘I did make it clear to the lady that she mustn’t risk leaving so valuable an instrument in a practically uninhabited house. We came up with a solution, also because I wanted authoritative confirmation of my assumption - that is, that it was indeed an Andrea Guarneri. She suggested I keep it here at my place. I didn’t want to accept such an immense responsibility, but in the end she talked me into it, and she didn’t even want a receipt. Then she drove me home and I gave her one of my violins to take its place in the old case. If anyone were to steal it, little harm would be done; it wasn’t worth more than a few hundred thousand lire. The next morning I tried to reach a friend of mine in Milan, the foremost expert on violins there is. His secretary told me he was abroad, travelling the world, and wouldn’t be back before the end of this month.’
‘Please excuse me,’ said the inspector. ‘I’ll be back shortly.’
He rushed out and ran all the way to headquarters on foot.
‘Fazio!’
‘At your service, Chief.’
Montalbano wrote something on a piece of paper, signed it and stamped it with the Vigata Police seal to make it official
‘Come with me.’
They took his car and pulled up a short distance from the church.
‘Give this note to Dr Licalzi. I want him to give you the keys to the house in Tre Fontane. I can’t go in there myself. If I’m seen in church talking to the doctor, who’s going to stop the rumours?’
Less than five minutes later they were already on their way to Tre Fontane.
They got out of the car, and Montalbano opened the front door. There was a foul, suffocating smell inside, owing not only to the lack of circulation, but also to the powders and sprays used by forensics.
With Fazio still behind him not asking any questions, he opened the glass display case, grabbed the violin case, went out, and relocked the door.
‘Wait, I want to see something’
He turned the corner of the house and went round to the back, which he’d never done the other times he’d been there. He found the rough draft of what would have one day become a vast garden. On the right, almost attached to the house, stood a giant sorb tree, the kind that produced httle bright-red fruits rather sour in flavour, which Montalbano ate in great abundance when he was a child.
‘I want you to climb up to the top branch’ ‘Who, me?’
‘No, your twin brother’
Fazio started climbing half-heartedly. He was well into middle age and afraid of falling and breaking his neck. ‘Wait for me there.’
‘Yes, sir. After all, I was a Tarzan fan when I was a kid’
Montalbano reopened the front door, went upstairs, turned on the bedroom light — here the smell grabbed him by the throat — and raised the rolling shutter without opening the window.
‘Can you see me?’ he yelled to Fazio.
Yes, perfectly!’
He went out of the house, locked the door, and headed back to the car.
Fazio wasn’t in it. He was still up in the tree, waiting for the inspector to tell him what to do next.
After dropping Fazio off in front of the church to give the keys back to Dr Licalzi (‘Tell him we may need them again’), he drove to Maestro Barbera’s place. There, he climbed the steps two at a time. The Maestro opened the door for him. He was now dressed in a turtleneck sweater and slacks, having doffed the coat and tails. The white silk scarf with gold pin, however, was still in place.
‘Come in,’ said Cataldo Barbera.
‘No need, Maestro. I’ll just be a few seconds. Is this the Guarneri’s case?’
The Maestro took it, studied it closely, and handed it back.
‘It certainly looks like it.’
Montalbano opened the case and, without taking the instrument out, asked, ‘Is this the violin you gave to Michela to keep?’
The Maestro took two steps backward and extended his arm as if to shield himself from an unbearable sight.
‘I wouldn’t touch that thing with my little finger.’ Look at that! It’s mass-produced! It’s an affront to any proper violin!’
Here was confirmation of what the voice of the violin had revealed to Montalbano. From the start he had unconsciously registered the difference between the container and its contents. It was clear even to him, who knew nothing about violins. Or about any other kind of instrument, for that matter.