Lucifer's Shadow

11 From the past

Rizzo sat in the small, bare apartment behind a locked door and closed curtains. He lived in a basic public-housing block in Cannaregio, not far from the old Jewish ghetto. His neighbours were, in the main, elderly, and wisely kept their noses out of his business. It was an ideal location from which to pursue his chosen trade.

The violin was safe inside its case in the luggage locker in Mestre. Even if it was discovered there, nothing linked him to the stolen instrument. All the risk came from any attempt to realise its value. He had to find a buyer, one who understood its worth and was willing to pay the price. And he had to achieve all this without making his disloyalty known to Massiter. In the gossipy world of stolen artefacts, this was no easy task. Rizzo had on occasion dealt in contraband tobacco, cocaine, and marijuana in addition to the run-of-the-mill objects he lifted from tourist pockets. These were all saleable items which could be moved through any number of third parties familiar to him. An ancient violin was a different matter. In order to establish the kind of price it might fetch, he needed the right advice and, to back up what that told him, some research of his own.

There was one possible solution. Three years before, he had, by a roundabout route, come into possession of a small, decorative antique carriage-clock, an item of little interest to the customary outlets he used for moving stolen goods. After some phone calls, he had established three individuals who might offer him a price for it: two dealers— one in Mestre, one in Treviso — and a third figure, a city man he knew as Arturo, who seemed ready to buy and sell on an occasional basis, though only through a third party so that the two of them never met. The Treviso dealer had taken the clock in the end, for a miserly price, but Rizzo had carefully filed away the dealers’ numbers for future reference. The day after he acquired the violin, he had phoned all three anonymously, described the instrument as accurately as he could, with its markings and the curious inscription on the label. The first two dealers had laughed at him. The violin must be a fake, they said. Even if it were not, no one could possibly buy it. Any instrument of that calibre would be bought by an active, performing musician who would never take the risk of using a stolen violin in public.

Arturo had made the same point, yet there was, Rizzo felt, a note of measurable interest in his voice. He had asked detailed questions about the instrument: its colour, its size, and whether it had two parallel lines of stain on its belly — a sign, Rizzo judged, of a particular maker. When he confirmed the last point, Arturo fell silent for a moment, then asked, unwisely, what price Rizzo had in mind. The figure came straight out of Rizzo’s head: $100,000. Arturo had whistled and said the game was too rich for him. No one would pay such a sum for an instrument that could never be played in a concert hall. But he asked for Rizzo’s name and number and, when they were refused, suggested they speak again later, when his caller was willing to accept a more realistic price.

The conversation ended with both parties knowing it would one day, at Rizzo’s choosing, resume. Yet it was hardly an ideal position. Rizzo preferred to have several potential buyers, each bidding against the others. With just three calls he had, in some way he failed to understand, managed to alert Massiter to the existence of the violin. To widen the net would be to invite Massiter’s discovery of his theft, the consequences of which Rizzo cared not to contemplate. There were only two options: to take the thing out of its locker and throw it into the marshland out by the airport, where it could rot in the filthy salt waters of the lagoon, hidden forever. Or to squeeze the best price he could out of Arturo and get the thing off his hands as quickly as possible. To achieve the latter demanded information about the goods he had for sale. There seemed no better way to acquire that than to look into the background of its last owner.

Rizzo spent two hours in the city library, going through back issues of Il Gazzettino, and came away with ten photocopied pages of cuttings. Susanna Gianni’s death had caused quite a stir in the city at the time, prompting a string of stories, each accompanied by the same photograph that he had seen on her headstone. It was perhaps this buried memory that had made her long-dead face so mesmeric when he had encountered it on San Michele. There had been a time when it was present on the front pages of the newspapers almost every day.

She was a local girl who grew up on the Lido. Her devoted single mother had, the reporters said, taken on extra cleaning work in the beachfront hotels in order to pay for her music lessons. By the time Susanna was twelve, the word “prodigy” was being used, an idea helped by the rumour, spread about by her mother, that the family was in some way distantly related to the legendary maestro Paganini. Only one mention was made of her instrument. In the year of her death, a preview of the concert which closed the summer school at La Pietà reported that she had been bought a fine and valuable fiddle by an anonymous admirer. No value had been placed upon the violin, which was described as a Giuseppe Guarneri from Cremona. Nor was there a photograph of her with anything which looked like the fiddle Rizzo had taken from her dead arms. Nevertheless, he knew this later instrument had to be the one which was now in his possession. Clearly visible on the label of the fiddle now in Mestre was the name Joseph Guarnerius and a date, 1733. It was also, without doubt, the one in the photograph Massiter had shown him in the apartment.

The newspaper accounts told of her music, not of Susanna Gianni. There was no hint of affairs or a darker side to her character, though knowing Il Gazzettino, he doubted such tittle-tattle would be carried even if it existed. At the start of the last summer of her life, there was every expectation that she would be the star of the summer school paid for by the great benefactor Massiter and, in all probability, move on to the international circuit afterwards. The girl had gone missing after the closing concert, where she had performed triumphantly. Two days later her naked body was found in a rio near Piazzale Roma. She had been badly beaten, but the cause of death was drowning. Susanna Gianni was last seen at the farewell party hosted by Hugo Massiter in the Hotel Danieli. The police had no witnesses who saw her leave or any idea of how or why she had travelled from the waterfront by San Marco across the canal to the dank quarter on the far side of the city where she met her death. Nor was there any mention of the violin, a detail which, it seemed to Rizzo, would surely have been noted had the fiddle been found next to the body, lending the scene a melodramatic touch the papers would surely not have missed. He knew nothing of music. Perhaps the violin had remained at the school and was reunited with its late owner only when she was interred.

Murder is a rarity in Venice. The savage attack on Susanna Gianni and the lack of any progress by the police in finding her killer provided the papers with their best story in years. A week later it was over as sensationally as it had begun. Anatole Singer, the leader of the school, a lean, balding Russian in his late forties, was found hanged in his suite in the Gritti Palace. In a suicide note Singer confessed to attacking the girl when she refused his advances. He had lured her to a remote meeting place near Piazzale Roma after the farewell party on the pretext of meeting an American agent who would find her work in New York. Susanna rebuffed him, and so he raped her in a drunken rage, then threw her, unconscious, into the water.

All this, it seemed to Rizzo, was described in a very pat, logical way for a man who was about to hang himself. As a criminal by trade, Rizzo believed that confession, under any circumstances, was a most unnatural act. Even if one did feel the need to make a clean breast of matters, why do so just before committing suicide? What was the point? Every crime needed a purpose. He had not murdered the cemetery superintendent lightly. The man’s death was required in order to save his own skin, since Massiter would surely kill him if he knew about the fiddle. And where was the gain in Singer’s confession? These doubts did not trouble the heads of the city detectives, however. They had declared the case closed. Within a fortnight, the Gianni story was dead, as dead as its apparent protagonists.

The last cutting in the file was a tribute to Susanna from Hugo Massiter himself. Rizzo stared at the decade-old picture of Massiter. He had only a little more hair and the same dress sense, with a neck scarf folded neatly over his throat. The article described Massiter as the “well-known international art expert and philanthropist.” Rizzo stifled a laugh. It was difficult to decide who was more stupid: the press or the police.

He picked up the phone and dialled the local number. A woman answered, then called Arturo to the phone. The familiar thin, reedy voice came on the line. Rizzo explained his proposition: $80,000, not a penny less.

“Give me time,” the thin voice said.

“Two weeks. There’s some guy in Rome who’s creaming himself for this thing.”

“Two weeks,” the voice repeated glumly. “Ciao. ”

In the small, dark apartment, Rizzo smiled. There was triumph in the air. He even knew Arturo’s full name. The servant had said it when she called to him.

“Ciao, Scacchi,” Rizzo said, then hung up.