by Paul Adam
The light was starting to fade. The yard, a dingy little enclosure at the best of times, was filling with dusky shadows. It was getting colder. I pulled my jacket tight across my chest and plunged my hands into the pockets. Guastafeste sensed the movement and turned to look at me.
“I’m sorry, Gianni; I should have thought. You must be freezing out here. I’ll have a word with someone.”
He strode across to the cordon and spoke briefly to the uniformed officer guarding the entrance to the building. Another officer was called over and given instructions. Half a minute later I was being led to one of the unmarked cars and installed comfortably in the rear seats, the doors closed and the heater on, pumping warm air round my chilled body. Guastafeste joined me shortly afterwards.
“It shouldn’t be long now,” he said. “Someone’s going to drive us over to the quai des Orfèvres.”
In fact, it was nearly forty minutes before a plainclothes detective pulled open the driver’s door and slid in behind the wheel. He glanced over his shoulder at us but didn’t say anything, just started the engine and manoeuvred the car out of the yard, past all the parked vehicles. The journey to the ile de la Cité took only a few minutes. We were escorted inside police headquarters and gave our statements to a female officer seated at a computer terminal. Neither Guastafeste nor I spoke fluent French, but we had enough between us to provide a reasonably coherent account of what we’d seen. Our fingerprints were taken; then we waited in an anteroom for a further hour before an older, weary-looking plainclothes detective arrived. I recognised him from the crime scene.
“I’m Inspector Forbin,” he said. “I’m sorry to keep you. These things take time.”
“We understand,” Guastafeste replied. “Was it Alain Robillet?”
Forbin shrugged.
“We think so. He had credit cards in his wallet that would seem to confirm it, but we can’t be absolutely sure until the body has been formally identified. We haven’t found anyone to do that yet.”
“Was he married?”
“We don’t know. We’re trying to trace the next of kin.”
“And the time of death?”
“This morning, between nine A.M. and noon, the doctor reckons.”
“The shop looked closed when we got there,” Guastafeste said. “Are there no staff?”
“We spoke to a woman across the street. She said the place had been shut up since the weekend.”
“Since François Villeneuve was killed?”
“That’s right.” Forbin looked at his watch. “Where are you staying?”
We gave him the name and address of our hotel.
“And you’re going back to Italy when?”
“Tomorrow morning. Is that all right?”
“I’ll call you first thing if I need to ask you anything else. I’ll get someone to drive you to your hotel.”
We were both in sombre moods that evening. We had dinner in a small restaurant near our hotel, but neither of us was much inclined to talk. I was still shaken by the afternoon’s events, and even Guastafeste, who is no stranger to homicide enquiries, seemed troubled by what he’d witnessed. Any death is disturbing, a violent death particularly so. Guastafeste had seen bodies before. He’d had to deal with the emotional consequences of that. But this was different. On this occasion, he was closer to the distressing events. He wasn’t a police officer being called in afterwards—he had actually found the body. And what made things worse for him, I suspected, was the fact that in Paris he was an outsider—in effect, a civilian. He couldn’t distract himself with the practical demands of an investigation. He had to stand by impotent on the sidelines while others took charge.
I slept badly, troubled by the harrowing images of Alain Robillet on his office floor, and got up early next morning. When I went down to the hotel dining room, Guastafeste was already there, drinking black coffee and chewing pensively on a croissant.
“How did you sleep?” he asked.
“Not well. You?”
“The same.”
“I kept seeing the body,” I said.
Guastafeste nodded sympathetically.
“I told you to keep back.”
“I know, but I was curious. I never expected to see . . . well, something as bad as that.”
Guastafeste finished his croissant and drank some coffee. The waiter came to the table and I ordered a café crème.
“Do you mind flying back on your own?” Guastafeste said. “I want to stay on for a few hours. I’m going to see Forbin, talk to him about the case, see if there’s anything here that can help us with our investigations in Cremona.”
“No, I don’t mind,” I said. “Our tickets are open, aren’t they? We can take any flight?”
“Yes. I’ll probably go back this evening.”
“I’m going to go back later, too.”
“Gianni, you don’t have to wait for me.”
“No, it’s not that. I want to find out more about Jeremiah Posier.”
“How are you going to do that? Go to a library?”
“I thought I’d go to London.”
“To London?”
“You remember my old friend Rudy Weigert?”
“The auctioneer? But he’s a violin expert. What does he know about jewellery?”
“Very little, probably. But he works for one of the world’s biggest auction houses. He’ll have a colleague who’s a jewellery expert.”
“Well, if you want to . . . How are you going to get there? Fly?”
“I’ll take the train. There’s a high-speed rail link now. I can be there for lunch.”
In retrospect, it was perhaps a mistake. I’d forgotten just what the word lunch meant to Rudy Weigert. To me, it was a light meal to be consumed quickly and without fuss—in the kitchen of my house or, quite frequently, at my workbench. To Rudy, it was an excuse for an orgy of gluttony on a scale rarely seen since the end of the Roman Empire.
I exaggerate, of course, but only a little. Rudy was an epicure, and he had the figure to prove it. On a tall man, his stomach would have been an impressive sight. On Rudy, who was only five five, it was a miracle of anatomical engineering. Quite how he carried such a heavy load round was a mystery, perhaps explained by the fact that he generally didn’t carry it, at least not very far. From his office on the third floor of a modern block off Piccadilly, we took the lift to the foyer, then a taxi to the restaurant he’d booked, which turned out to be less than a hundred metres away—though, given the traffic, it took us close to five minutes to get there. By the time we were seated at our table, we had probably walked no farther than twenty metres in total and burned off, at a guess, half a calorie—if that.
“We should have walked,” I said.
“Walked?” Rudy said in a horrified voice, raising one of his caterpillar eyebrows. “Are you serious?”
“It would have done us good.”
“What, inhaling all those exhaust fumes? No, the only way to stay healthy in London is to avoid exercise altogether, unless it involves the intensive lifting of a knife and fork. Why don’t we have a cocktail, to celebrate your arrival?”
Rudy called the waiter over and ordered two martinis.
“Stirred, not shaken, you understand?” he emphasised, turning to me when the waiter had gone and saying, “You’ve got to watch these wretched barmen, waving cocktail shakers about as if they were maracas. James Bond has a lot to answer for, if you ask me. Alcohol is a very delicate liquid. Any fool knows that shaking it violently destroys the subtlety of the taste. A gentle stir is all that’s required.”
Rudy settled himself back in his chair and looked at me.
“How are you, Gianni? You’re looking well.”
“I’m feeling well. And you?”
“I can’t complain.”
“How’s business?”
“Thriving.”
“Sales are holding up?”
“There’s a lot of competition, but we’re doing fine, particularly at the to
p end of the market. There are bucketloads of money pouring in from Russia—mostly Mafia loot, but if we turned away customers because they were crooks, we’d be bankrupt by now. And all those new Chinese millionaires are starting to take an interest, too. Property’s taking a bit of a hit at the moment, but you can’t beat fine art as an investment. An old master, a Strad, they’ll always keep their value. I’ll take you into the workshops later. We’ve just had this beautiful Goffriller violin in—two-piece back with a rich red-brown varnish. Dated 1708, but in remarkably good condition. I expect great things of it at the next sale.”
Auctioneers have a reputation for avarice, but the money per se was genuinely unimportant to Rudy. He saw high prices as a vindication of his love for violins, a confirmation of their true worth. If jewellery or antiques or old paintings could fetch a fortune in the saleroom, then it was only right that violins—which were, after all, vastly superior in every possible way to those other types of object—should do the same.
Our drinks arrived, accompanied by little dishes of olives, nuts, and crisps. The waiter handed us both menus, but Rudy didn’t even open his.
“I already know what I’m having. The Stilton and walnut tart, followed by a steak. The steaks here are excellent, by the way. A good sixteen ounces or more. That’s what in metric? Five hundred grams?”
“Five hundred grams?” I said. “Half a kilo of meat?”
“Tempting, isn’t it?”
“What happened to your diet?”
The last time I’d seen Rudy, he’d claimed to be on a diet, though not one recognisable to a nutritionist.
“Oh, I’m still on it,” Rudy said blithely. “It’s absolute hell. That’s why I’m glad you’re here. I can have a decent lunch for once without feeling guilty.”
“When was the last time you had a decent lunch?”
“The day before yesterday, I believe. Two days is a long time when you’re starving. We’ll have a couple of bottles of the Puligny-Montrachet, shall we?”
“Two? Rudy, I can’t possibly drink that much wine, especially at lunchtime.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll help you.”
“When do you have to be back in the office?”
“Oh, sometime this afternoon. You know, the English work the longest hours in Europe, and take the shortest lunch breaks.”
“Well, there’s no fear of that with you.”
Rudy laughed.
“We live in an age of fast food and indigestion. In my own way, I’m a one-man resistance movement—though I use the word movement with caution.”
He gave a signal to the sommelier and ordered the wine. Then he spiked a black olive with a cocktail stick and chewed it. He smiled at me warmly.
“It’s good to see you, Gianni. Really good. I’ve arranged for us to meet Rupert Rhys-Jones later this afternoon. He’s our jewellery expert. Very nice chap. Knows his stuff. Welsh, but we don’t hold that against him. So what’s this all about? Why are you suddenly interested in jewellery?”
I’d been discreet in my phone call to Rudy from Paris, but now I told him everything that had happened since François Villeneuve had been found dead in his hotel room.
“My goodness!” Rudy exclaimed. “You have been having an exciting few days. And this second man, the partner, you actually found his body?”
“I don’t want to think about that bit,” I said. “A body, another murder investigation, I didn’t expect anything like that. Antonio brought me along only because he’s convinced that a violin is somewhere at the bottom of all this.”
“You sound sceptical. You don’t agree with him?”
“I don’t know what to make of it. You know the business better than anyone, Rudy. Have you ever seen or heard of a violin small enough to fit in a gold box about this size?” I held out my hands to show him the dimensions.
“Just once,” Rudy said. “A variety performer I saw many years ago. A very good violinist. He had a tiny violin like that as part of his act—the world’s smallest violin. He could play it, too, though it didn’t make much of a sound.”
“Paganini was a showman. He wouldn’t have had a little violin like that, would he? To amuse his audiences.”
I knew that Paganini often broke up his concerts with interludes in which he would make animal sounds on his violin—a cock crowing, a dog howling, a cat screeching, that kind of thing. On one occasion, in Ferrara, after someone in the audience whistled at the soprano who was sharing the platform, Paganini retaliated by imitating a braying ass—a particularly offensive insult to the locals, who had historically been known as donkeys—and had to be given a police escort from the city to protect him from the mob. I could see that a tiny violin might have appealed to the virtuoso as a publicity gimmick.
“If he’d had anything like that, we’d know about it,” Rudy said. “There are plenty of eyewitness accounts of his concerts. His playing on a full-size instrument was spectacular enough. He didn’t need anything more to captivate the public.”
“That’s what I think, too. I’ve a feeling we’re on the wrong track. I’m hoping your colleague might be able to help us get back on course.”
We had our starters; then Rudy had his slice of cow and I a grilled Dover sole before we moved on to dessert and cheese and coffee. It was half-past three when we left the restaurant and returned to Rudy’s office. I was so stuffed, I was glad of the taxi this time. Rudy offered me a cognac from his well-stocked drinks cabinet, but I declined.
“You go ahead,” I said. “But I’d like to be sober when I meet Rupert Rhys-Jones.”
“Oh, Rupert deals a lot with the landed gentry. He’s used to drunks,” Rudy replied.
He filled a tumbler with Rémy Martin and brought it with him as we walked along the corridor to Rupert Rhys-Jones’s office.
Rhys-Jones was younger than I’d expected—in his mid-to late thirties, a rather delicate-looking man with long, slender fingers and steel-rimmed spectacles over his pale blue watery eyes. He shook hands limply and retreated behind his desk, which, like the rest of his office, was spotlessly tidy.
“How can I help you?” he said.
I told him about the gold box and my visit to Molyneux et Charbon in Paris. Jones nodded, making a steeple of his fingers and resting his chin on it.
“Yes, I’m familiar with Henri le Bley Lavelle,” he said. “An excellent craftsman. His work comes up for auction quite frequently. The prices are respectable, but nothing special. He’s a bit out of fashion at the moment. Modern buyers find him a little—well, vulgar isn’t too strong a word. His designs are very ornate, almost gaudy. People these days want something simpler.”
“This gold box is quite plain,” I said. “Though it has a fairly elaborate engraving on the lid. It’s what’s inside that puzzles me. There’s a velvet-lined wooden insert with a cutout in the middle in the shape of a violin.”
“But no violin?” Rhys-Jones said.
“No, but the box was obviously made for one. It was a gift from Elisa Baciocchi, Napoléon’s sister, to Paganini, so the violin link makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is the size of the box. It’s far too small for any violin I have ever seen.”
“And Rudy?”
Rhys-Jones turned his head to look at Rudy, who was slumped back in an armchair, sipping his tumbler of cognac.
“It’s a mystery to me, too,” he said.
“Elisa gave Paganini another gift, many years earlier,” I said. “We don’t know what it was, but in Le Bley Lavelle’s records there was a mention of a Jeremiah Posier, who seems to have been another jeweller.”
Rupert Rhys-Jones went very still. He stared at me, his eyes unblinking behind the thick lenses of his glasses.
“Jeremiah Posier?” he said slowly.
“Yes.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Yes. Why? Who was he?”
Rhys-Jones licked his lips.
“Jeremiah Posier? A violin?” he said. “Dear God, it can’t be. Surely not
.” His voice had gone suddenly hoarse.
“Can’t be what?” I said.
Rhys-Jones didn’t appear to hear me. He gazed at me as if he were in a trance for a few seconds, then rose to his feet and went to the bookshelves on the wall. He took down a massive tome about sixty centimetres tall and a good ten centimetres thick. I’d seen books like it in Rudy’s office—I had one or two of them myself. They weren’t intended for sale to the general public; they were limited-edition reference books for fine-arts specialists and cost several hundred, sometimes several thousand, euros each.
Rhys-Jones put the tome down on his desk and I saw the title: Goldsmiths and Jewellers of the Eighteenth Century. He ran his finger down the list of contents, stopping at a name near the bottom, then turned to a chapter at the end of the book.
“Jeremiah Posier,” he said. “Court jeweller to Catherine the Great of Russia, and probably the finest goldsmith of his era. He made the great imperial crown for Catherine’s coronation in 1762. That’s it there.”
He showed me a photograph of the crown.
“It’s a Byzantine design—two half spheres, to represent the two continents spanned by Catherine’s empire, studded with four thousand nine hundred and thirty-six diamonds, though we generally round that figure up to five thousand. There are pearls along the edges, and a beautiful red gem on the top that’s usually referred to as a ruby but is, in fact, a red spinel, a semiprecious stone that you don’t find very often in Western European jewellery but which was highly prized in the East. This particular specimen weighs nearly four hundred carats and was brought to Saint Petersburg by Nicholas Spafary, the Russian envoy to China in the late seventeenth century.”
Rhys-Jones lifted his head and gazed at me again. I could sense his excitement.
“The imperial crown is undoubtedly the most spectacular piece of jewellery Posier produced for Catherine, but it wasn’t the only item he made her. You have heard of Giovanni Battista Viotti, of course? The great Italian virtuoso violinist. In 1780, he went on a concert tour that took him to Saint Petersburg, where he played for the Empress Catherine. Catherine was not a great lover of music, but she was a great lover of young men. And Viotti was young. In his twenties, handsome and prodigiously gifted. He became the empress’s lover and stayed in Russia for a year. When he finally left the country, Catherine—who was famously generous to her paramours—gave him a gift of a jewel-encrusted gold violin that had been specially made by Posier.”