Fiddle Game

by Richard A. Thompson

  “Thank you,” I said. “For the brandy and the compliments. Are we out of coffee?”

  “I thought perhaps it was time to get down to essentials.”

  “Maybe it is, at that.”

  We both took another shot, clinking our cups again.

  “But you must have assumed I’d look under the label sooner or later,” I said. “And when I saw the burned-in brand of Roger Baldwin, written backwards, it would point me straight to you.”

  “I assumed later, rather than sooner,” he said. “Or possibly not at all. Maybe someday another appraiser would do it, say. In the meantime, it was possible to do one last, um…”

  “Con.”

  “Yes, thank you. A last con in a world of cons. If I destroyed the instrument that you thought was the Amati and made good on your cash losses, then that would be the end of it. The curse, the killing, and even the past. I wanted you to be free of it, you see.”

  “I picked up on that, yes. Thank you so much. Why?”

  He shrugged. “I told you when we first met that I liked you. That buffoon, Evans, died just because he got in the way. I didn’t want that to happen to you.”

  “Are you saying you didn’t tip him off that I was in Skokie?”

  “Tip him off? Oh, no. I was never in league with him or any of them. As far as they knew, I was just a disinterested appraiser, used once and forgotten.”

  “You know, that’s really rather wonderfully ironic.” I had another sip from the tin cup, and it seemed even more so.

  “It is, isn’t it? The violin that led me to become a fine luthier also led the Gypsy family back to me for a final accounting, and they didn’t even know it.”

  “I believe I led you to Skokie, though.”

  “On the contrary, I followed Evans to Skokie, not you. He was what the Gypsies call the cop-in-the-pocket, you see. The woman, Amy, was the bait in a sweet fish hook, I think? No, that’s not quite right.”

  “A honey trap.”

  “Ya, ya, that’s it. Thank you again. She was supposed to compromise him, seduce him and make him pliable. But I think she succeeded beyond her own hopes. He not only became her lover, he became insanely protective and jealous of her. And he really did think you had killed her. So when you were looking for the Gypsy connection, he was looking for you, to kill you, I’m sure. I was merely looking for her father, looking to be sure that Yonkos was her father. And Evans was so very easy to follow. The man couldn’t go for an hour without calling somebody or other on the radio or phone. Not like you, Herr Herman. You were really very clever.”

  “Not so clever that you didn’t almost trap me and kill me when I went back to the officia.”

  “That was you?”

  “Me and a friend.”

  “Ah, yes, the pretty woman. Perhaps I spent too much time looking at her. Anyway, that was a mistake. I wasn’t sure you hadn’t given your violin to Yonkos, and I thought it might be more of the Gypsy gang, come back to retrieve it. And to be honest, the killing had almost become a habit by then. It wanted to have a life of its own. An evil life, just like the violin that started it all. The hunter of evil becomes evil himself.”

  “So you really weren’t part of the original con game at all?”

  “Never. Not that one, nor any of the others the brother and sister ran over the years. And there were many.”

  “So how did you know about them?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know about the ones before I did the appraisal, would I? After that, I followed their career from a distance, you might say. An insurance adjustor or a policeman would come to me to verify the certificate, and so I would get a new set of bogus names, a new bit of a trail. I never knew exactly how the fraud worked or how they kept getting the Amati back. And I didn’t care. I waited and waited for them to lead me back to the father. Finally, when they started using the name Cox for their scams, the name they had stolen, it was just too much. I decided if I couldn’t kill the father, I would kill the children instead. After all, they were my mistake, too. He shouldn’t have lived to sire them in the first place.”

  “So you stalked Amy Cox?”

  “An ugly word, but yes, I suppose I did. I followed her to your office, and when she finally left with a violin under her arm, I seized my chance. But as you know, that killing was a beginning, not an end.”

  “It was an end for her.”

  “True enough.”

  “Did you really break her neck, or was Evans just telling me that to rattle me?”

  “Oh, I broke her neck, all right. I wanted her dead, but I didn’t want her to suffer, after all. It was always Yonkos I was after. And when I finally found him, he didn’t even remember who I was. Can you believe that?”

  “Well, he was under rather a lot of stress at the time. And he was also blind, remember.”

  “Hmm. Or he pretended to be. I tell you one thing, though: After I finally killed him, I slept without dreams for the first time in fifty years.”

  “And the real Amati?”

  “Can’t you guess?” He grinned slyly and chuckled. “A clever fellow like yourself?”

  I let my gaze drift pointedly to the Baldwin hanging on his wall, the one he had shown me that first night. Feinstein saw my gaze and nodded in silent confirmation. And it may have been the booze at work, but I felt obliged to chuckle, too.

  “Why is it called the Wolf?” I said.

  “Because it has a wolf note, of course.”

  “Say what?”

  “You do not know this thing? It is every violin maker’s worst nightmare. It is an unplanned harmonic, a note that emerges without being played, a squawk in the middle of an otherwise flawless performance. It is a rogue harmony that the box will produce, again and again.”

  “But the whole art of making violins is harmonics, I thought. How can this happen?”

  “It only happens among the very best ones. It’s rare and unpredictable, and it seldom shows itself when the instrument is new. But once it emerges, there is no remedy for it at all. The instrument becomes worthless for professional play. Some museum might give a few thousand for it, since it is still an Amati, but that’s all.”

  “So after that, it’s only good for con games.”

  “Or hanging on my wall. Fitting, is it not?”

  And that may have also been the booze, but I had to admit that it was. I couldn’t let it stay there, but it was very fitting.

  We drank and talked for a long time then, telling each other trivial or monumental stories, both of us avoiding the obvious question. Feinstein produced another bottle and we slipped into it seamlessly. Finally, it was he who broached the unspeakable.

  “You talked a while ago about me having a true vocation, I think?”

  “I did,” I said, nodding with intoxicated exaggeration. “Many people would envy it.”

  “And I would trade it for a good night’s sleep, as it turned out. Amusing. But the problem, I think, is not my profession, but yours.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You work for the law. You have personal knowledge of four killings. Surely, you have to do something about that?”

  “Do I?” I said.

  “Don’t you?”

  “I work for the law, I suppose.” I sighed. That’s a fact that I’ve never really come to terms with. “But I’m not a lawman. I’m not always sure just what I am, but it’s not that. A referee, maybe. I make sure everybody plays by the rules.”

  “And the rules in this case?”

  “Are simple. The police are entitled to arrest you, and the DA is entitled to try to convict you. But I don’t have to help them. I won’t lie to them, but I won’t do their jobs for them, either. And I won’t call them. If they want you, they have to do their own homework.”

  He looked astonished. Maybe I did, too, since I had just then figured it all out.

  “But this is very generous!” he said.

  “Not as generou
s as you think. I do still have to give the violin back.”

  “Now you joke, I think. The violin you had is dust on the river, and its owner is dead.”

  “But her people are still alive. And the violin she thought she had is still around, too. One way or another, we both need to be clear of it. If you don’t pay off all your debts, they just go back to accumulating interest.”

  “No, Herman, you cannot mean this. You cannot ask me to do this thing.”

  “That’s the deal I made with the familyia in Skokie,” I said. “And it’s also what I owe to Amy Cox. The duty of my office, if you like that better. What you called my vocation.”

  “They will only use it to swindle more people, you know.”

  “They will swindle more people, no matter what. It’s what they do. I’m only responsible for what I do. And I have to do this.”

  “I could still kill you, you know.” His powerful hand reached deep in the pocket of his smock, and I had no doubt of what it found there.

  “You could, yes. Is that the same Luger you had in the forest?” I said. “The one that has kept you from sleeping for fifty years?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t think you want to let it do that to you again.”

  “I… But you can’t…” The hand came back out of the pocket, and the gun was in it, but he wasn’t pointing it at me. He waved it around aimlessly, as if looking for a correct gesture. Then he laid it on a bench and began to weep. Maybe he also trembled, I’m not sure. I turned away and walked toward the door.

  “It’s been a long night, G.B., and a lot of heavy talk. And I have drunk more than I need or can handle. I’m going out to my car, the gray BMW across the street. I’m going to tip the seat back and have a very long sleep. Maybe I’ll have a dream that tells me what to do about you. Good night, and thanks for everything. Especially the coffee.”

  I waited for the gunshot that would end my life or his, but it did not come. Instead, as I was almost out the door, I heard him say very quietly, “It has been my pleasure, Herr Herman.”

  I went down to my car and did exactly what I had said I would. The long sleep part was very easy.

  The next morning, I found a violin case on the seat beside me. So I knew what to do about Feinstein. Back in the building, his shop was deserted, the walls and benches partially stripped, the door unlocked. He wasn’t there.

  I never saw the man again.

  Epilogue

  The police never did come to question me, about Feinstein or Amy Cox, or anything else that had to do with old violins and even older passions. Maybe my uneasy allies, the Rom, had done their jobs, at that. The day after the long night of brandy and soul baring, I met Wilkie in my office and gave him the violin case.

  “I’ve got one last job for you, Wide.”

  “I’m not going in any more jungles.”

  “That was a City park, sort of,” I said.

  “That’s its problem.”

  “This jungle has naked ladies in it.”

  “Yeah? I’m listening.”

  “Go find a strip joint in Chicago called the New Lost City, and give this to the night bartender, named Joe Paterno. Tell him it’s the Wolf, and it will make him clean if anything can.” Joe wasn’t really Amy Cox’s heir, of course. But then, the Gypsies hadn’t really said what they were going to do for me, and in return, I hadn’t exactly said who in the familyia I was going to give the fiddle back to. Fair is fair.

  “Everybody talks in riddles today,” he said. But he took the case. “Your girlfriend, Rosie, is talking in riddles, too.”

  “You saw her today?”

  “Just for a bit, this morning at the coffee shop. She says to tell you she’s all square with your uncle Fred now. I told her you don’t have an uncle, Fred or anything else, but she just laughs, says her markers are all paid off now and she’s heading out. What the hell’s she talking about?”

  “Beats me,” I said. “She’s crazy.” And she had told me as much, more than once. But not as crazy as she seemed at times. Nor was she merely a restless soul running away from a dinky town diner. She was a pro of some kind, one of Uncle Fred’s people, and he had sent her to look after me, no less. I always did say he was a good judge of talent.

  “When did she leave?” I said. I looked at my watch and suddenly the meaning of the shopping trip in Chicago soaked in. The fancy watch that I would never have bought for myself was Rosie’s goodbye gift, given in advance to tell me later that I had not been just an assignment or a debt. Now, when it was almost certainly too late to say so, I was touched.

  “About fifteen minutes ago,” said Wilkie. “But you aren’t going to catch her.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s driving your BMW.”

  I laughed, in spite of myself. I wouldn’t say it to Wilkie, but I felt that she had earned it, wherever she wanted to go with the thing. “Well,” I said, “she definitely knows how to do that.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Whatever,” said Wilkie. He left with his signature coattails billowing out behind him. He disappeared into the morning fog, and I watched him do so from the same spot where I had been when Amy Cox had first appeared out of the rain. And I thought about appearances and disappearances and names and labels and illusions and scams and how very muddled they all get at times. I thought about the violin case under Wilkie’s huge arm and wondered what was really inside it. Evil? Salvation? Or just an old fiddle? I hadn’t looked inside the case, and I didn’t intend to.

  Finally, I thought about the story Uncle Fred had reminded me of, as I was leaving the visitors room at Redrock, the one he had said to use as my guide. It was an old story, one he had told me many times over the years. I remembered it well.

  It happens in the marketplace in ancient Constantinople, a crossroads of commerce and deceit. A young boy, always eager to learn about the ways of the world, is watching the people coming and going when he sees a Turkish merchant, whom he knows, meet a Gypsy who is leading a fine-looking horse. There is lively discussion, money changes hands, and the merchant walks away with the horse. The boy runs after the Gypsy, who is now leaving at a brisk pace.

  “Ho, there, Gypsy! Tell me, for my education: did you sell that horse to the Turk?”

  “I did,” says the Gypsy. “I charged him 54 sisterces for it.”

  “Is that a good price?” says the boy.

  “Boy, that is a huge price. That fool of a Turk doesn’t know it, but that horse is lame.”

  The boy then runs the other way and catches up with the merchant, who is leading the horse to a stable.

  “Ho, there, Turk! You are the fool of fools. The Gypsy has sold you a lame horse.”

  “No, no, boy,” says the merchant. “It is the Gypsy who is the fool. This horse only walks like he’s lame because he has a stone in his shoe. At 54 sisterces, I stole this horse.”

  So the boy runs back to the Gypsy, who is now almost out of town.

  “Ho, there, Gypsy! You are the fool of fools. That horse only walks like he’s lame because he has a stone in his shoe. The Turk has robbed you.”

  “Listen to me, boy, for your education. I put that stone in the horse’s shoe so the Turk would think that’s why he walks that way. That horse really is lame.”

  Again, the boy runs back to the merchant.

  “Ho, Turk! The Gypsy has cheated you, after all. He put the stone in the horse’s shoe to deceive you, and you believed what you saw and became a fool.”

  “This is true?” says the Turk.

  “He told me himself, sir.”

  “Well. A curse on him for a thief, then. Good thing I paid him with counterfeit coins.”

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