Playing with Fire

by Gerald Elias

  ‘Now I have two fat lips, Mr Jacobus,’ she said.

  ‘Must make it difficult to smoke a pipe.’

  ‘I hope they’ll give me credit for taking my lumps.’

  ‘There’s a story,’ Jacobus said, ‘that after a recital by the great violinist Jascha Heifetz, an admirer went to congratulate him backstage. “Oh, Mr Heifetz,” she said, “Your violin” – which happened to be a Stradivarius – “sounded so wonderful.” Heifetz held the violin to his ear and responded by saying, “That’s funny. I don’t hear anything.”’

  ‘I don’t understand what that has to do with anything.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. The moral of the story, honey, is that if people like you realized that it’s the music that’s important, not the violin it’s played on, our dear Mr Borlotti might still be alive today.’

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  It wasn’t the Last Supper. Jesus and the apostles had gone the way of Vivaldi and Corelli when Jacobus’s house burned down. This puzzle was of the nearby bucolic Tanglewood Music Festival grounds in summer. Like its predecessor it was also five hundred pieces, so Jacobus, intent on fitting the last pieces of the Last Supper into place, pretended that it was.

  Yumi baked a victory chocolate cake for dinner. As she sliced it – small portions for her and Jacobus, a quarter of the cake for Nathaniel – she said, ‘In a way, I feel sorry for those people – Primo, Falcone, Forsythe, even Borlotti. They never heard the music in the violins. They only saw money.’

  Maybe it’s better to be blind, Jacobus thought.

  ‘The crooks got their just desserts,’ Nathaniel said, adding a third scoop of Rocky Road to his plate. ‘Francis Falcone’s dead. Vince Primo’s going to be put away for a long time. Minerva Forsythe will be working on a plea deal for the foreseeable future.’

  ‘Wasn’t Minerva the Roman goddess of wisdom?’ Yumi asked.

  ‘The cunning Miss Calculation didn’t learn much from her namesake, did she?’ Jacobus said.

  ‘And didn’t Smetana compose an opera called The Cunning Little Vixen?’ Nathaniel asked.

  ‘Yeah, and Forsythe was both. Do you have any more dumb questions or are you going to let me finish this puzzle?’

  ‘I don’t know if this comes under that category,’ Yumi said, ‘but if Minerva Forsythe was so petrified of Primo, why did she go to you? Why didn’t she go to the police in the first place?’

  ‘She hoped the cops would catch Falcone or Primo and never even get wind of her. That way she could keep her two million dollars. But even her larceny was small potatoes compared to Primo’s very large potatoes. Since he was responsible for hiring Falcone to commit arson and to murder Borlotti—’

  ‘And probably a lot of other people—’

  ‘It would then have been his word against hers,’ Nathaniel said. ‘And she’s a real pro at putting on the innocence act. They wouldn’t have believed that a seasoned thug like Primo could have been set up by sweet Minerva Forsythe.’

  ‘She probably had her fingers crossed they’d kill him before he could talk,’ Jacobus said. ‘Ah! Problem solved.’ Jacobus was referring not to the Forsythe saga, but to finding that there was only one more puzzle piece.

  ‘That was so nice of Boris to help us!’ Yumi said. ‘He was risking his life!’

  ‘He said he was happy to do his part to help keep predators out of the violin business,’ Nathaniel responded.

  ‘Other than himself,’ Jacobus chuckled.

  ‘What really scared me for a minute,’ Yumi said, ‘was that Boris was almost fooled about the violin!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Jacobus asked.

  ‘When he was telling Primo about how to spot a fake, he said’ – and here Yumi imitated Dedubian’s carefully cultivated European accent – ‘“It is easy enough to make the outside of a violin look old, but one of the telltale signs for a fake is the absence of dust on the inside.” But when he looked inside Primo’s instrument his face turned white.

  ‘Later, Boris told me that it was very old dust. Borlotti must have brushed the dust and loose glue from a different violin, then applied it to all the wood of the fake Strad. He even blew it on to all the blocks and bass bar before he glued them so every part of it looked old. I can’t imagine what would have happened if Boris had said the violin was a Strad!’

  Yumi began to laugh.

  ‘He seemed so scared to be in the same room with Primo,’ she said. ‘I was dying to hold his hand to reassure him, but I couldn’t. That wouldn’t have been an appropriate thing for “Hitomi Sato” to do.’

  ‘I was worried when you told Primo that white lie about having a recording of the phone conversation,’ Nathaniel said.

  ‘Well, we did know from Falcone there was a conversation,’ Yumi said, ‘and we did know what it was about. And with everything being bugged and tapped and wired it seemed like something Primo would believe. When he saw the cassette sitting there next to the money in the briefcase his eyes almost bulged out of his head!’

  ‘All’s well that ends well,’ Jacobus said, more intent on finishing his puzzle than hearing the whole post mortem.

  He held the last puzzle piece in his right hand. As he felt with his left for the space in which to insert it the front door of Roy Miller’s house opened. In burst Trotsky, as always irrepressibly delighted with everything. His claws were unable to gain traction on the tile floor. He spun a hundred-eighty degrees and careened into the table on which the puzzle sat, knocking it over and sending every piece flying, except the one that was still held high aloft in Jacobus’s right hand.

  Trotsky, sensing his offense, rolled over on to his back and wagged the stump of his tail in pitiable contrition. Yumi, afraid for the dog’s imminent demise, said, ‘Don’t worry, Jake. I’ll put it all back together.’ Nathaniel said, ‘That dog’s in deeper doo-doo than Primo.’ But while they anticipated Jacobus’s explosion, he continued to hold the piece above his head like a statue, remaining unexpectedly and unaccountably silent.

  ‘The last piece! I’ve been missing the last piece!’ he finally said.

  ‘It’s in your hand, Jake,’ Nathaniel said. ‘Are you feeling all right?’

  ‘Call the high school!’ Jacobus said. ‘Get me the office!’

  ‘It’s Saturday night, Jake,’ Nathaniel said. ‘They won’t be open. What’s the story?’

  ‘Ubriaco! He never exactly said he was fired. He said “laid off” and “redundant.” Maybe he quit before they decided to discontinue the school orchestra. We need to pay Jimmy a visit. And shovel that puzzle back in the box. I have a little gift for our friend.’

  Yumi tested the speed limit on Route 41, keeping her eye out for black ice, and took the back road around Great Barrington, bypassing the traffic on Main Street.

  ‘He’s leaving,’ Yumi shouted, as they pulled up in front of his house. ‘With a U-Haul.’

  ‘Block it,’ Jacobus said.

  He heard Ubriaco sit on his horn to get them to move. Yumi began to get out of the car.

  ‘No!’ Jacobus said. ‘We wait in here until he gets out of his. Otherwise, he might just run your car over.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  Ubriaco finally silenced his horn. Jacobus heard him get out of his car.

  ‘Nathaniel and I are getting out,’ Jacobus said to Yumi. ‘You stay in the car to cut off any escape route.’

  ‘Mr Jacobus, Mr Williams,’ Ubriaco said. ‘To what do I owe the displeasure this time? First you try to run me out of town, and now you won’t let me leave.’

  ‘Going somewhere?’ Jacobus asked.

  ‘You better believe I am! Sunny California, here I come!’

  ‘We’ve got a little bon voyage present for you. You might be going away for a long time.’

  ‘A present?’

  ‘Shall we go inside?’

  ‘Why the hell not? It’s cleared out, but at least we won’t freeze our asses off.’

  Jacobus signaled to Yumi
to join them. Once inside Ubriaco’s house, they stood in the empty space that used to be the living room. Ubriaco turned up the thermostat but then remembered that the utilities had been disconnected. Yumi handed Jacobus the jigsaw puzzle, who in turn presented it to Ubriaco.

  ‘Ah, Tanglewood!’ he said. ‘That’ll be a nice remembrance. Thanks.’

  ‘Have you ever thought of yourself as a pomegranate in Jesus’s face?’ Jacobus asked.

  ‘Can’t say that ever occurred to me. Interesting concept, though. Why?’

  ‘The last piece of the puzzle. Even though it fits, it’s in the wrong place. Something a blind man might screw up … with a jigsaw puzzle.’

  ‘You’re a man of many riddles, Jacobus.’

  ‘It’s just that when your friend, Amadeo, called me on Christmas Eve I haven’t been able to stop wondering, why call me? He hardly even knew who I was. I got to thinking, if you and he were so close why didn’t he call you to tell you what his troubles were?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s been bugging me, too,’ Ubriaco said. ‘To tell you the truth, I felt a little deflated by that. Jealous, really. I suppose he just didn’t want to burden me. Or he didn’t want me to know he hadn’t been on the up-and-up all these years. Geez, can you believe what he was into? I still have a hard time with that,’ Ubriaco sighed. ‘But I guess we’ll never know, will we?’

  ‘But we do know. Don’t we, Jimmy?’

  ‘Is this another riddle?’

  ‘Not any more. The real reason he called me and not you is that there was no need to call you. You knew everything that was going on with Borlotti for the simple reason that you were part of it. A big part. Borlotti called me because he wanted to tell me about what both of you had been up to. That’s the last piece of the puzzle, Jimmy.’

  ‘You’ve got a great imagination, Mr Jacobus. And like I said when we first met, I’ve got a lot of sympathy for the disabled, so I won’t take any of this personally. But now I gotta go, so if the young lady could move her car—’

  ‘E-string tuners and fountain pen nibs and ten thousand dollars,’ Jacobus said. ‘What do those things have in common?’

  ‘Is this one of those Mensa riddles?’ Ubriaco asked. ‘I’m still working on Jesus’s pomegranate face.’

  ‘None of those three things that should have been in Borlotti’s house were there. If the tuners weren’t there, that meant the violins had to have been removed before the fire.’

  ‘That gangster, Falcone, stole them.’

  ‘That’s what I thought at first, too. With the delivery truck, and the tracks in the snow. It fit. But what didn’t fit was that neither Falcone nor Primo knew anything about violins and cared even less. It probably would have given them extra pleasure to see them used as kindling. It had to have been someone else.

  ‘Borlotti knew something terrible was bound to happen, that it was just a matter of time, so he thought about what precautions he could take. Sure, he had a security system, but even those are fallible, especially here in the Berkshires. What would have made more sense for true security than to give the violins to a trusted friend, a paisano, until the smoke cleared? And for doing him such an invaluable service, Borlotti took ten thousand bucks out of his personal till and gave it to you.

  ‘Except the smoke only got a lot thicker when Borlotti’s house got torched and he was murdered. And so you not only pocketed the money, you kept the violins, assuming the owners and insurers would think they had burned in the fire. You showed up at the police station the next morning, rending your vestments and gnashing your teeth. Poor, heartbroken Jimmy! It was a swell smokescreen.

  ‘The missing nibs were a variation on the same theme as the tuners. If Borlotti were the forger, there would have been metal nibs, even if most of the other paraphernalia a forger would need – the paper, the ink, the glue, the pens – would have been incinerated. What threw me off were Borlotti’s love letters and what Yumi told me about his flowing, old-fashioned handwriting. He had all the same earmarks as the forger of the certificates and labels inside the fiddles, so I assumed he was the one. But I was wrong. Though you can’t believe much of what Minerva Forsythe ever said, she denied ever seeing Borlotti himself write a certificate. And I couldn’t understand that when she coerced Borlotti into writing a certificate for her fake Strad he didn’t forge an antique Wurlitzer or Francais one, which would have been convincing, but did it in his own name. It was because he couldn’t forge it. What nailed it for me was that Benson never made any mention of nibs after they sifted through the remains of Borlotti’s house. Unlikely as it seems, the true and simple reason for his flowery penmanship was he thought doing things the old-fashioned way was romantic and proper and would win over the heart of his beloved. Go figure! So it was a joint operation all along, eh, Jimmy? He made the fake fiddles. You made the fake documents.’

  ‘You have no way of proving any of that.’

  ‘Sure we do. Just open the U-Haul.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Because if you don’t, we’ll just have to wait here blocking your driveway until Benson and the rest of the Egremont Falls police department get here. And it’s so damn cold. Don’t you agree?’

  No one spoke. Jacobus had said all he needed to and was disinclined to break the silence. In fact, he quite enjoyed it.

  ‘What a night that was,’ Ubriaco said, ‘the night poor Amadeo died! Christmas Eve, of all nights,’ Ubriaco said. ‘Mi amico. Mi fratello! It seems like a lifetime ago. He called me to his house because he was afraid they were after him. “Come to my house,” I said, and I meant it. But he said, no, they would find him there anyway and then it would be the end of both of us. “Take the violins, though,” he insisted. “Protect them, and if anything happens to me, give them back to the owners.”

  ‘So I hid them for safe-keeping. Who knew that bastard, Falcone, would burn down his house and everything in it? And then afterwards? Sure, I could have returned the violins, but Amadeo never got around to telling me who the owners were, so how was I supposed to find out? I’m no mind reader. Besides, which of the violins were really what Amadeo said they were? Most of them were secondhand fiddles that he’d doctored up or made himself. I only put the finishing touches on them by printing the fake labels and writing the phony certificates. So if the owners ever made insurance claims they’d end up getting a lot more than what the instruments were worth. Hey, that makes me sort of a Robin Hood, doesn’t it?

  ‘Boy, did I put my time in with those certificates! Not once were they ever questioned!’

  ‘How did you get into forgery?’ Nathaniel asked, out of professional curiosity.

  ‘The Mormons.’

  ‘I could have sworn you were a Catholic boy,’ Jacobus said.

  ‘It was that guy out in Utah, Mark Hoffman.’

  ‘Who forged Mormon nineteenth-century religious documents a few years ago and sold them for a king’s ransom to church officials,’ Nathaniel replied. ‘They actually consulted me, the FBI, and just about every other law enforcement agency about Hoffman. When he realized he was under suspicion, his paranoia took over and he blew up several people. Now he’s doing life, all because the crackle pattern of the ink he used went the wrong way.’

  ‘You blow up anyone lately, Jimmy?’ Jacobus asked.

  ‘So I learned my trade from Hoffman,’ Ubriaco said. ‘But, believe me, I would never kill anyone for any reason whatsoever. I confess, all the materials are in the U-Haul: old paper, old ink, old glue, old pens, you name it.’

  ‘And the fiddles?’

  ‘And the fiddles.’

  ‘Which you were going to peddle in California,’ Jacobus said, ‘where you wouldn’t have to worry about someone saying, “Hey, doesn’t that violin belong to Joe Shmo?” Because all you need to do is replace the current fake label with another of your choosing, and then write out a new certificate to go with it that will look identical to any of the big, old reputable violin houses.’

  ‘Yeah. I’ve got that all down
pat,’ Ubriaco said. ‘But the main thing I learned from Hoffman’s story is that it’s not just the perfect forgery that convinces them. It’s that if a buyer wants to believe something bad enough, he’ll be convinced by anything. If you tell someone who really, really wants a Testore that a piece of crap fiddle is a Testore, you can give them a document written by a six-year-old and he’ll believe it. It’s the greed in people, I guess.

  ‘But you know what the sad part is? Poor old Amadeo’s violins were not crap. They were pretty good. Damn good. Made from that old wood. You can’t forge that, now, can you? I wish I could’ve gotten that old wood from Amadeo’s basement, but hey, you can’t have everything.

  ‘You know, it’s kind of funny. When I started to back out of my driveway, I see your girl’s shiny, red Camaro pulling up. I’m thinking, a prospective homebuyer! With a car like that someone’s got a few bucks to throw around, right? I say to myself, not the best timing in the world, but what the hell? Maybe it’s my lucky day and I can sell my house. What’s another five minutes? Now I’m thinking five years. So, tell me, what do I do now, Jacobus?’

  ‘When Benson gets here,’ Jacobus said, ‘throw yourself upon his mercy and tell him what you just told us. The truth. All of it. But don’t mention we had to squeeze your balls to get it out of you.’

  ‘I think I’ll do just that, Jacobus. Meanwhile, while we wait, you want to help me with this jigsaw?’

  THIRTY-NINE

  Sunday, January 15

  Jacobus, Nathaniel, and Yumi stood huddled at the empty place where his house once stood. It was a cold day, but the sun, rising above leafless trees over the frozen Williams River, warmed Jacobus’s cheeks, and he supposed that felt good. Bare branches rattled against each other like bones. Melting snow seeped up through the soles of his shoes. He ignored Trotsky, whose barking beseeched them to play, and the thud of the dog’s bulk as it landed on its back, rolling in the snow. Whatever conversation Yumi and Nathaniel were having was distant and Jacobus paid no attention. He felt no compunction to move from the spot. He could stay there for another minute or for the rest of his life. It didn’t really matter. He felt neither happiness nor sadness. He felt nothing much at all.