"I would like you to do a search of all deaths in Italy over the past year in which the body was found burned or partially burned."
Esposito smiled. "Another favor…" He let his voice trail off into a cloud of smoke. "Here in Italy, we believe in the principle of reciprocation. I would like you to tell me, Mr. Pendergast, what you will be doing for me."
Pendergast leaned forward. "Colonnello, all I can say is, one way or another I will return the favor."
Esposito gazed at him for a moment, stubbed out his cigarette. "Well then. You're looking for a burned corpse in Italy " He laughed. "That would involve half the homicides in the South. The Mafia, Camorra, Cosa Nostra, the Sardinians—burning their victims after killing them is a time-honored tradition."
"We can safely eliminate homicides related to organized crime, family or business feuds, or any for which you've already caught the killer. We're looking for one that is isolated, perhaps an older person, probably rural."
D'Agosta stared at Pendergast. What was he driving at? There was an eager glint in his eyes. He was clearly hot on some trail and, as usual, wasn't sharing it with anyone.
"That will narrow things down tremendously," said Esposito. "I'll get someone on it right away. It might take a day or two—we are not nearly as computerized as your FBI."
"I am most grateful." Pendergast rose and shook Esposito's hand.
The policeman leaned forward and said, "Quann' 'o diavulo't'accarezza, vo'll'ànema."
As they exited into the sun, Pendergast turned to D'Agosta. "I find that I need to call on you again for a translation."
D'Agosta grinned. "It's an old Neapolitan proverb. You need a strong heart to resist the devil's caresses."
"Appropriate." Pendergast inhaled. "What a fine day. Shall we go sightseeing?"
"What'd you have in mind?"
"I hear Cremona is lovely this time of year."
{ 61 }
D'Agosta stepped out of the Cremona train station into the warm sunlight of late morning. A wind had sprung up and was shaking the leaves of the plane trees in the broad piazza that lay before them. Beyond was the old part of the city, a cheerful medieval jumble of red-brick buildings rising from a maze of narrow streets. Pendergast chose one of these—the Corso Garibaldi—and began striding down it quickly, his black suit coat flapping behind him in the stiff wind.
With a sigh of resignation, D'Agosta hastened to keep up. He noticed the agent hadn't bothered to consult a map. Pendergast had spent most of the train ride talking about the history of the nearby marble quarries at Carrara, and the extraordinary coincidence that the source of the purest white marble in the world was located only a few dozen miles downriver from the birthplace of the Renaissance, giving the Florentine sculptors options other than black or green marble. He had deftly deflected D'Agosta's inquiries as to the reason why sightseeing had taken them here.
"Now what?" D'Agosta asked, sounding a little more irritated than he intended.
"Coffee." Pendergast swerved into a café and approached the zinc bar. D'Agosta felt his irritation swell.
"Due caffè, per favore," Pendergast said.
"Since when did coffee become your favorite drink? I thought you were a green-tea man."
"Usually, yes. But when in Rome—or Cremona, as the case may be…"
The coffees arrived, in the usual tiny espresso cups. Pendergast stirred his, tossed it down in the Italian manner. D'Agosta drank his more slowly, catching Pendergast's eye. There it was again: that look of eagerness.
"My dear Vincent, please don't think I'm being intentionally mysterious. In certain kinds of police work, there can be great danger in propounding theories. They take on a life of their own. They are like wearing colored spectacles, becoming the truth we see even when it is wrong. So I hesitate to bandy theories—especially with someone whose judgment I respect as much as yours—until I have proof in hand. That is why I have not asked for your theories, either."
"I don't have any theories."
"You will, before the day is up." He tossed a two-euro coin on the counter, and they went out. "Our first stop is the Palazzo Comunale, a fine example of medieval civic architecture, containing a notable marble chimneypiece by Pedoni."
"Heck, I've always wanted to see that chimneypiece."
Pendergast smiled.
A ten-minute walk brought them to the heart of the city and a crooked piazza. On one side stood an enormous cathedral with a soaring tower. Pendergast gestured at it as they passed. "That is said to be the tallest medieval tower in Italy. Built in the thirteenth century, the height of a thirty-three-story skyscraper."
"Amazing."
"And here is the Palazzo Comunale." They entered a massive, unadorned medieval palace built of brick. A guard nodded at them as they passed the entrance, and D'Agosta wondered if it was Pendergast's air of utter self-confidence, or something else, that allowed them such easy entry. He followed Pendergast up a flight of stairs and down several stone corridors to a small, barren room. A glass case stood in its center, and an enormous Venetian glass chandelier hung from above, bristling with lightbulbs and giving the room the brilliance of a movie set. An armed guard stood nearby.
In the glass case were six violins.
"Ah!" said Pendergast. "Here we are: the Saletta dei Violini."
"Violins?"
"Not just any violins. What we are looking at is the history of the violin, in one case. Which is, in microcosm, a history of music."
"I see," said D'Agosta, letting a note of sarcasm creep into his voice. Pendergast would, eventually, get to the point.
"The first one, there, was made by Andrea Amati in 1566. You'll recall the violin Constance plays is also an Amati, though very much inferior to these. Those two beside it are by his sons; that one by his grandson. That next was built by Giuseppe Guarneri in 1689." Pendergast paused. "And that last one was made by Antonio Stradivari in 1715."
"As in Stradivarius?"
"The world's most celebrated violinmaker. He invented the modern violin and during his lifetime made eleven hundred, of which about six hundred survive. Although all his instruments remain among the greatest ever made, there was a period when he made a string of violins that had a most gloriously perfect tone—perhaps twenty or thirty. We call that his golden period."
"Okay."
"Stradivari was a man of many secrets. To this day, no one has ever solved the mystery of how he made such perfect violins. He kept his methods and formulas in his head, never wrote them down. He passed these priceless trade secrets on to his two sons, who took over his workshop, but when they died, all Stradivari's secrets died with them. Ever since, people have been trying to duplicate his violins. A number of scientists have tried to re-create his secret formulas. But to this day, Stradivari's secret has never been cracked."
"They must be worth a lot of dough."
"Not so long ago you could buy a good Strad for fifty or a hundred thousand dollars. But the market for violins has been ruined by the super-rich. Now a top Strad can fetch ten million or more."
"No shit."
"The best are priceless, especially those made during his golden period. In those instruments, he got the formula just right. Nobody really knows why. It's quite humbling, Vincent, to realize we can land a spaceship on Mars, we can build a machine to perform a trillion calculations a second, we can split the nucleus of the atom—but we still cannot make a better violin than could a man puttering around in a simple workshop three centuries ago."
"Well, he was Italian."
Pendergast laughed quietly. "One of the beautiful things about a Strad is that it has to be played in order to maintain its tone. It's alive. If you leave it in a case, it loses its tone and dies."
"What about these?"
"They are taken out and played at least once a week. Cremona is still the center of violinmaking, and there are many eager volunteers."
He clasped his hands behind his back, turned. "And now, for the real reason we came to
Cremona. Stick close behind me, please, and don't get lost."
Pendergast led the way through a maze of back passages and narrow staircases to a side alley behind the palazzo. There they paused at least a minute while Pendergast made a careful inspection of the alley and surrounding buildings. Then, moving very quickly, he led D'Agosta through a winding series of ever more tortuous medieval streets, the ancient brick and stone buildings crowding in above. Some of the streets were so narrow they were dark despite the midday sun. Now and then, Pendergast would duck into a doorway or side alley and make another visual scan.
"What's up?" D'Agosta asked at one point.
"Just caution, Vincent; habitual caution."
They finally arrived at a street so narrow it could hardly admit a bicycle. It twisted into a dead end at what appeared to be a deserted shop front, a plate-glass window rudely affixed to a medieval stone arch. The plate glass was cracked and taped and opaque with dirt. A metal grate had been fitted and locked over the front, where it seemed to have rusted in place.
Pendergast slid his hand through the grate and pulled a string. There was a small tinkle in the shop beyond.
"Would it compromise your investigation completely if you told me who we're visiting now?"
"This is the laboratory and workshop of il dottor Luigi Spezi, one of the world's foremost experts on Stradivari violins. He is a bit of a Renaissance man himself, being a scientist and engineer as well as a fine musician. His re-creations of the Stradivari violins are among the best in the world. But I warn you: he is known to be a little cranky."
Pendergast pulled again, and a voice rumbled from the back. "Non lo voglio. Va' via!"
Pendergast rang again, insistently.
A gray shape materialized behind the glass: an enormous, stooped man in a leather apron with long gray hair and a gray mustache. He waved both hands at Pendergast in a shooing motion. "Che cazz'! Via, ho detto!"
Pendergast took out a business card, wrote a single word on the back, and slipped it through the mail slot in the door. It fluttered to the floor. The man picked it up, read the back, and went very still for a moment. He looked up at Pendergast, looked down at the card—and then began the laborious process of unlocking the door and raising the grate. Within a minute, they had stooped beneath the arch and were standing in his shop.
D'Agosta looked around curiously. The walls of the shop were almost completely covered with the hanging bellies, backplates, and purflings of violins in various stages of carving. It had a pleasant smell of wood, sawdust, varnish, oil, and glue.
The man stared at Pendergast as if he were staring at a ghost. He was wearing a dirty leather apron, and he removed a pair of sawdust-covered glasses in order to peer at the agent more closely.
"So, Aloysius Pendergast, Ph.D.," he said in almost flawless English. "You have gotten my attention. What is it you want?"
"Is there a place where we can talk?"
They followed him through the confines of the narrow shop—perhaps eight feet wide—to a much larger space in the back. Spezi indicated for them to sit on a long bench. He himself perched against the corner of a worktable, folded his hands, and stared.
In the rear wall, D'Agosta could see a stainless-steel door, grossly out of place, with a single small window. On the far side of the window was a gleaming white laboratory, racks of computer equipment and CRTs bathed in unpleasant fluorescent light.
"Thank you for agreeing to see me, Dottor Spezi," Pendergast said. "I know you are a very busy man, and I can assure you we will not waste your time."
The man bowed his head, mollified slightly.
"This is my associate, Sergeant Vincent D'Agosta of the Southampton Police Department, New York."
"Very pleased." The man leaned forward and shook his hand. He had a surprisingly strong grip. Then he sat back again and waited.
"I propose an exchange of information," Pendergast said.
"As you wish."
"You tell me what you know of Stradivari's secret formulas. I will tell you what I know of the existence of the violin mentioned on my card. Naturally, I will keep your information secret. I will write nothing down and speak to no one about it, except to my associate, who is a man of complete discretion."
D'Agosta watched the man's deep pale eyes stare back at them. He appeared to be thinking about, perhaps even struggling with, the proposal. Finally he nodded curtly.
"Very well, then," said Pendergast. "I wonder if you could answer some questions about your work."
"Yes, but first: the violin. How in the world—?"
"First things first. Tell me, Dottore—since I am a man who knows nothing about violins—tell me what makes the sound of a Stradivarius so perfect?"
The man seemed to relax, evidently realizing he was not dealing with a spy or competitor. "This is no secret. I would characterize it as very lively. It is an interesting sound. On top of that, it has a combination of darkness and brilliance, a balance between high and low frequencies—a tone that is rich but as pure and sweet as honey. Of course, each Strad sounds different—some have a fatter tone, others are lean, even harsh; some are thin and quite disappointing. Some have been repaired and rebuilt so many times they can hardly be called original. Only six Strads, for example, retain their original necks. When you drop a violin, it's always the neck that breaks. But there are about ten or twenty that sound almost perfect."
"Why?"
At this, the man smiled. "That, of course, is the question." He rose, went to the steel door, unlocked it, and swung it open, revealing two hard-disk recording workstations and racks of digital samplers, compressors, and limiters. The walls and ceiling were covered with acoustic foam paneling.
They followed him in, and he shut and locked the door behind them. Then he switched on an amplifier, pulled up the faders on a nearby mixing console. A low hum began to sound from the reference speakers set high in the walls.
"The first really scientific test done on a Stradivarius was performed about fifty years ago. They hooked a sound generator to the bridge of a violin and had it vibrate the instrument. Then they measured how the violin vibrated in return. An absurd test, really, because it has nothing to do with the way a violin is played. But even such a crude test showed the Strad gave back an extraordinary response in the two-thousand to four-thousand hertz range—which, not at all coincidentally, happens to be the range of sound that the human ear is most sensitive to. Later, high-speed computers allowed real-time processing of a Strad being played. Let me give you an example."
He turned to one of the digital samplers, used an attached keyboard to select an audio sample, sent the output to the mixer. The sweet sound of a violin filled the room.
"This is Jascha Heifetz playing the cadenza of Beethoven's violin concerto on the Messiah Stradivarius."
A complex series of dancing lines appeared on a monitor sitting behind the mixer. Spezi pointed at them.
"That is a frequency analysis from thirty to thirty thousand hertz. Look at the richness of the low-frequency sounds! They give the violin its darkness, its sonority. And in the two thousand to four thousand range I mentioned, see how lively and robust it is. This is what fills the concert hall with sound."
D'Agosta wondered what any of this had to do with Bullard or the murders. He also wondered what Pendergast had written on the business card the man was still clutching in one fist. Whatever it was, it had clearly made this man remarkably cooperative.
"And these are the high frequencies. Look how they leap and flicker, like the flame of a candle. It's these transients that give the Strad that breathing, trembling tone, so delicate and fleeting."
Pendergast inclined his head. "So, Dottore—what's the secret?"
Spezi reached for the sampler and the music stopped. "There is no one secret. It was a whole catalog of secrets, some of which we've cracked, others we haven't. For example, we know exactly what kind of architecture Stradivari used. With computerized tomography, we can map a Strad perfectly in thre
e dimensions. We know all there is to know about Stradivari's designs for the belly, backplate, purfling, f-holes—everything. We also know just what types of wood he used. We can make a perfect copy."
He turned to one of the computers, typed again, and the image of a beautiful violin appeared on its screen. "There it is. An absolutely perfect copy of the Harrison Strad, down to the very nicks and scratches. It took me almost half a year, back in the early eighties, to complete." He glanced over at them with a mirthless smile. "It sounds dreadful. The real secret, you see, was in the chemistry. Specifically, the recipe for the solution Stradivari soaked his wood in, and the recipe for his varnish. This has been the thrust of my research ever since."
"And?"
The man hesitated. "I don't know why I am inclined to trust you, but I do. The wood Stradivari used was cut in the foothills of the Apennines and dumped green into the Po or Adige Rivers, floated downstream, and stored in brackish lagoons near Venice. This was purely for convenience, but it did something critical to the wood—it opened up its pores. Stradivari purchased the wood wet. He did not season it. Instead, he soaked it further in a solution of his own making—as far as I can deduce, a combination of borax, sea salt, fruit gum, quartz and other minerals, and ground, colored Venetian glass. He soaked it for months, perhaps years, while it absorbed these chemicals. What did they do to the wood? Amazing, complex, miraculous things! First, they preserved it. The borax made the wood tighter, harder, stiffer. The ground quartz and glass prevented the violin from being eaten by woodworms—but it also filled in the air spaces and gave it a brilliance and clarity of tone. The fruit gum caused subtle changes and acted as a fungicide. Of course, the real secret lies in the proportions—and those, Signor Pendergast, I will not tell you."
Pendergast nodded.
"Over the years, I've made hundreds of violins from wood treated this way, experimenting with the ratios and the length of time in solution. The resulting instruments had a big, brilliant sound. But it was a harsh sound. Something was needed to dampen the vibrations, the overtones."
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