The Rainaldi Quartet (29 page)

By the first of the illuminated glass cases I bumped into two of my students – a German and a Swede – from the International School of Violin Making; there, presumably, seeking inspiration from Stradivari's legacy. I am an occasional visiting professor at the school which is housed in the shabby splendour of the Palazzo Raimondi – an apposite preparation for the impoverished gentility the students will face in their subsequent careers as luthiers. Young men and women come from all over the globe to study here in Cremona. All are talented and enthusiastic but I fear for their futures. There are too many violin-makers in the world, too many old violins around. The new artisans will struggle to compete in such a crowded marketplace.

I had a brief conversation with the students, then continued my slow perambulation around the room.

‘I've never been in here before. Now I can see why. This is the most boring museum I've ever been in,' Guastafeste said witheringly from across one of the cabinets.

‘You're such a philistine sometimes,' I replied.

‘But there's nothing here except a few old planes and chisels and lots of meaningless bits of paper.'

‘These are historical treasures.'

‘Treasures? To whom? They've got all these security cameras in here but, really, what thief in his right mind is going to want to steal any of this junk?'

‘There are the violins in the other rooms,' I said.

‘But none of them are Stradivaris. This is a Stradivari Museum that doesn't contain a single violin he made.'

I had to concede that that was true. The city's small collection of great violins – by Stradivari, Guarneri and Amati – is in the Town Hall, in a locked room which is opened only when someone wants to view them, and then only under the watchful eyes of two security guards.

‘This is a valuable part of our heritage,' I began defensively. Then I saw the expression on Guastafeste's face. ‘What's the matter?'

‘
Cameras,
' he said.

*   *   *

‘Take as long as you like,' said Vittorio Sicardo. ‘I think the tapes are all there. Let me know if you need anything else.'

We were in one of the museum offices, a small room made even smaller by all the clutter on the floor – boxes of broken pottery, a stack of tatty gilt frames and a disembodied marble head with a chipped nose which had somehow strayed in from the restoration workshops. On the desk in front of us was a television and video cassette recorder. Guastafeste inserted the first of the tapes Vittorio had dug out for us.

‘This is the camera covering the entrance to the Museo Stradivariano,' he said. ‘The first tape of the day for June the sixteenth, immediately after the museum had opened to the public.'

Guastafeste played the recording back. There was nothing on it for the first few minutes, just a deserted vestibule, then a man in the uniform of one of the museum attendants came in from the art gallery. He glanced around briefly before moving out of shot into one of the adjoining rooms. Guastafeste let the tape run for a few more minutes, then pressed the ‘fast forward' button on the remote control. According to the time code in the bottom corner of the screen it was another half an hour before anyone else entered the museum, and then it was another uniformed attendant.

‘Popular place,' Guastafeste said sarcastically. ‘They're really packing them in, aren't they? What's he doing?'

The attendant was pushing a trolley bearing a number of plastic canisters. He stopped by the piece of apparatus in the corner of the room and removed its lid.

‘Changing the reservoirs on the humidifying machinery,' I said.

Guastafeste fast forwarded the tape again, the speeded up image still on the screen so we could see if anything happened. We'd been lucky. The museum stored the tapes from the CCTV cameras for only a fortnight. If we'd been a couple of days later, the tapes would all have been wiped.

‘There,' I said. ‘What's that?'

Guastafeste pressed the ‘play' button. A man had entered the vestibule and was pausing to take his bearings. But it wasn't Tomaso. We kept going. A few more people came into the museum during the course of the morning, but none of them was Tomaso. I started to get restless. I stood up and stretched. I'd have paced around the office only there was no room.

‘There he is,' Guastafeste said quietly.

He froze the picture. Tomaso had just stepped into the vestibule. It brought a lump to my throat to see my dead friend brought back to life.

Guastafeste started the tape again. After only a few seconds Tomaso moved out of shot into the adjoining room. Guastafeste made a note of the time code, then stopped the tape and searched through the pile of tapes on the desk for the one covering the next room. It was a relatively simple task to fast forward to the point at which Tomaso came through from the entrance vestibule. He stopped, glancing perfunctorily around the cabinets of violins, before turning his attention to the portrait of Cozio on the wall. It seemed to interest him. He gazed at the painting for a long time, changing his position to gain different angles on the image of the count. Then he moved closer, leaning forward to examine a portion of the painting in more detail. He lifted a finger and – so quickly it was easy to miss – ran the tip over the blank sheet of paper in Cozio's right hand.

‘He's noticed something,' Guastafeste said.

‘That's more than I did,' I said, peering intently at the screen.

We followed Tomaso through the next few rooms, but he didn't linger in any of them. Then Guastafeste inserted the tape from the Sala Manfredini and played it back from the moment Tomaso entered. He didn't seem in a hurry. He glanced at his wristwatch, looked slowly around the room, then moved to the first of the waist-high glass cabinets and studied the exhibits inside it – his gaze distracted as if he had time on his hands to kill.

His attention passed to the next cabinet, but it soon started to wander. He began looking around casually. He seemed bored. At one point he even yawned. There was still no real purpose to his movements. It was as if he'd come to the museum in the hope of finding something, but wasn't sure exactly what.

‘He doesn't know what he's doing there,' Guastafeste said.

‘Fishing, perhaps,' I said.

‘Fishing for what?'

‘Inspiration. Like my students. He'd told Forlani that he could find him a second Messiah. He had some old letters to indicate that the violin might once have existed but had gone missing. But that's all. I suspect he had no idea where to go next. He needed a new lead to get him on the right track. So he came here to the museum hoping that something – anything – might strike him and provide that lead.'

‘It doesn't look as if he found it,' Guastafeste said.

‘Hang on a moment, what's this?'

Another figure had come into shot – a taller, younger man with thin wispy hair swept back from his freckled face. He was wearing an open-necked shirt and a fashionable light-coloured linen jacket. Tomaso seemed to know him. The two men exchanged a few words, their lips moving soundlessly on the screen. Then Tomaso gave a nod, as if agreeing to something, and followed Christopher Scott out of the room.

*   *   *

I stepped closer to the painting, aware that the camera high up in the corner of the room was recording my every move. I could see nothing particularly interesting in the portrait, nothing I hadn't seen when I'd examined it before. I took a pace to my right. The angle of the light changed, casting a sheen over the canvas and obscuring Cozio's face and the front of his frock-coat. I moved back to my original position, then kept going left. The light changed again. This time the count's face was brought into sharper relief. I could see the artist's brush strokes, the way he'd painted the fine detail of Cozio's shirt, the wrinkles on the skin of his fingers and hands. And I saw something I hadn't noticed before – a subtle change in the texture of the oils along the edges of the blank sheet of paper. I touched the join, expecting to feel a minute ridge, but of course I felt nothing except the smooth layer of varnish over the paint.

‘Anything?' Guastafeste asked.

‘I don't know. But there's a way of finding out.'

*   *   *

‘This is really very irregular, Gianni,' Vittorio Sicardo said. ‘If the curator of pictures gets to hear of it, he'll blow a fuse.'

‘Who's going to tell him?' I said. ‘It'll only take a couple of minutes. It's important.'

Vittorio sighed. ‘You go back upstairs. I'll bring the equipment up.'

Guastafeste was still standing in front of the portrait of Cozio di Salabue.

‘It's all fixed,' I said.

A few minutes later, Vittorio arrived with the ultra-violet lamp, an extension lead and three pairs of tinted goggles. He called in one of the museum attendants and told him to keep visitors out of the room, then plugged the extension lead into a socket in the wall and handed out the goggles.

‘Which area are you interested in?'

‘The blank piece of paper,' I said.

Vittorio switched on the lamp and shone the ultra-violet beam on to the painting. Through my tinted goggles I could see the image of Cozio glowing with a strange bluish luminescence. The blank piece of paper in the count's hand was darker than the rest of the canvas, almost black in fact.

‘See that?' Vittorio said. ‘Areas of overpainting always fluoresce black. It seems you were right, the picture has been altered.'

He switched off the UV lamp and we removed our goggles.

‘Is there any way of seeing what was overpainted?' I said.

‘What do you think might have been there?'

‘I don't know. Words, perhaps. Something written on the piece of paper. Can't you see images beneath the paint with infra-red light?'

‘You can use infra-red photography to detect images on the ground layer, yes. The chalk or graphite lines the artist used to sketch out the portrait would be visible. But if there were words on the piece of paper, Morera, the artist, would never have put them in at the ground stage. Details like that would always be in the paint layer, and infra-red photography can't distinguish between different layers of paint.'

‘So there's no way of finding out if there
was
anything written on the paper?'

‘Not without stripping away the varnish and then the overpaint,' Vittorio said. He saw what was coming. ‘And no, Gianni, I am not going to allow that. This is a precious painting.'

I gave a weary nod. ‘Thanks, Vittorio. It was worth a try.'

Vittorio unplugged the extension lead and wound it into a coil around his arm. ‘You could always look at Morera's sketches, if you like,' he said.

‘You have his sketches? For this portrait?'

‘I'm not absolutely sure about that, but we have a collection of his drawings in the basement. You want me to have them brought up?'

*   *   *

The drawings were in three A1-sized portfolios, fastened shut with faded black ribbons which looked as if they hadn't been untied for decades. Vittorio had to use a letter opener to prise apart the knotted ends of the ribbons, then he spread open the first portfolio on his desk. He was wearing white cotton gloves to prevent any soiling of the drawings.

He went through them slowly, removing the pieces of paper one at a time and placing them to one side for us to study. There were rough sketches of landscapes, of fields and gardens and grand country houses; there were still-life drawings, charcoal outlines of nudes, both male and female, and numerous studies of faces, the outlines of the portraits which formed the greater part of Morera's artistic output.

‘There,' Vittorio said, pulling out another sketch from the portfolio. ‘That looks like Cozio.'

It did indeed. It was a chalk outline of the count's head, his features drawn in some detail. His torso and arms were missing, but I had no doubt that this was a preliminary sketch for the portrait hanging on the wall in the museum.

Vittorio lifted out another drawing of Cozio's head alone, then a larger, less detailed sketch of the full portrait, with Cozio seated, his left hand resting on his walking stick, his right holding a piece of paper – a piece of paper with a few words scribbled carelessly across it.

Vittorio peered closer. ‘You guessed correctly, Gianni. That looks like a coat of arms at the top, Cozio's family crest.'

‘And below it?' I leaned over the desk, trying to discern the words.

‘They're hard to make out, the chalk is very smudged. I can see a figure here, a number. A seventeen, then more digits. It looks like 1716 – a date.'

I glanced at Guastafeste. 1716, the year the Messiah was made.

‘I'm afraid the rest is very faint,' Vittorio said. He took a magnifying glass from his desk drawer and held it over the drawing. I can see an S followed by an L – no, I think it's a T. The next few letters are illegible. Then maybe a V, then an I. I'm not sure.'

‘Could it be Stradivari?' I said.

Vittorio took his time replying. ‘It might be,' he said eventually without looking up from his magnifying glass. ‘Then there's another couple of words. Federico … Federico something.'

‘Marinetti?' I suggested.

‘Yes, that's possible. There's something that looks like an old-fashioned lire sign, but the figures after it are too blurred to read.' He straightened up. ‘It's intriguing. It doesn't look as if it's a letter the count is holding. From the pattern of the words, the layout, the fact that there are so few words, I'd say it was more like an invoice or a bill of sale; a commercial document of some sort. That date puzzles me though: 1716. The painting was done in 1831. Why would Cozio be holding a document dated 1716?'

‘It's not the date of the document,' I said. ‘It's the date of a violin. A Stradivari of 1716. A Stradivari violin that Cozio sold to Federico Marinetti.'