Pizzicato: The Abduction of the Magic Violin Read online

  Okay, thinks Darius, this is where we start.

  He goes to the bench and sits down. The old woman doesn’t look at him. She’s busy. She takes a slice of bread from a package, and then she pours something out of a thermos into a cup. White steam rises up into the cold, sunny morning air. Darius looks sideways at the woman’s leg. There are some rags tied around her calf. The foot poking out underneath is covered with scratches.

  “That’s right, sonny,” says the woman, who has noticed him looking. “That’s what ’appens when ya live on the streets like me. It’s always the same.”

  She seems nice. She bites into her bread and chews it noisily.

  “Does it hurt?” asks Darius. “Course it ’urts,” says the woman and stretches out her leg as if that would help Darius understand exactly how much it hurts. “But what you wanna know that for?” She slurps her drink from her cup. “Not your problem.”

  Darius carefully lifts Pizzicato out of his duffel bag and lays it on his lap. He’s concentrating so hard on what he’s about to do that he sees nothing except the violin and the woman chewing her bread. If he were to look up and straight ahead, he would see Mrs. Needham come out of a shop with an armful of white coats, stop with a jerk, and then squint her eyes and fix them firmly on him.

  “What’cha gonna do with that?” asks the woman in surprise. “Gonna collect some money fer me an’ my poor leg?”

  Darius doesn’t answer. As if at random, he begins to pluck the strings. Some chickadees in the lime tree over the bench start twittering. Darius goes on plucking. At first the sounds are uncoordinated, but gradually his left and right forefingers get into more and more of a rhythm. A pair of white butterflies goes fluttering past.

  The woman has stopped eating. She sits there listening with her eyes closed. Darius looks at her and goes on plucking the strings. He already has a good idea of what is about to happen. And then, the woman suddenly pulls a face as if someone has slapped her. Startled, she grabs hold of her bandaged calf. Darius plays on, although he feels sorry for the woman. He knows that this is precisely how it has to be.

  All at once the woman lets go of her leg, and Darius stops plucking the strings. The last notes fade away. The woman says nothing. Then she looks at her foot. Bewildered, she twists and turns it. There is not a scratch to be seen. With an expression almost of fear, she looks at Darius. Slowly she unwraps the gray rags around her calf. The leg beneath is completely healed.

  “What’cha gone an’ done to me, sonny?” she whispers. She reaches for Darius’s hand and grasps it tightly. “How didja do it?”

  Darius puts the violin back in his duffel bag. He presses the woman’s hand and slowly gets up. He is happy that the woman’s cuts and scratches have disappeared.

  It really looks as if everything he had suspected is true: with Pizzicato he can heal people. But he wants to be quite certain before he tells Mey-Mey and gets her hopes up.

  “All the best,” he says softly. “I have to go now.”

  Even now, Darius does not notice Mrs. Needham, who in the meantime has hidden behind a tree and is watching intently.

  When he disappears down the next side street, she scurries after him, like a lizard hunting a tasty grasshopper.

  “Excuse me, Doctor, but your mother insists on seeing you!” stammers Angelica, the receptionist, as she stands red-faced in the doorway of Ulrich Needham’s consultation room.

  “Will you let me through, for heaven’s sake!” screeches Mrs. Needham indignantly and pushes the girl aside. “Bunny, I must speak with you, now!”

  She carelessly tosses the white coats onto a chair, flounces across to the desk, and sits down. She clasps her purse tightly on her lap. Her hair is sticking up from her head in a somewhat unusual confusion.

  “Mother, I’ve told you a hundred times not to disturb me during my office hours!” hisses Ulrich, waving the receptionist away. He once heard a doctor say this on a TV show, and he had been extremely impressed. In actual fact, though, he doesn’t mind at all if he’s kept away from his tedious duties.

  “Is that how you speak to your mother?” she shrieks. Ulrich jerks his head back and then watches his mother take a mirror and comb out of her purse and straighten her hair. When she’s satisfied, she continues in a whisper, “I’ve seen him again!” Her voice quakes, and she squints nervously at her son.

  “Seen who again?”

  She gives a scornful snort. “The boy, for heaven’s sake! The snail of a lad who the violin-maker has had in tow for the last couple of days. But you’ll never believe what I’ve just seen, Bunny! He’s an absolute gold mine!”

  “Gold mine? How come?” asks Ulrich in disbelief. “For heaven’s sake, Bunny, close your practice now! I’ll explain later! We’re as good as made!”

  Ulrich jerks his head forward. He swiftly presses a button on his telephone, fixing his watery eyes on his mother.

  “Under no circumstances am I to be disturbed for the next hour,” he says curtly into the speaker. “Oh, what the hell, close the practice for the rest of the day and send all the patients home.”

  He and his mother now have their tête-à-tête, and what Ulrich hears leaves him with his mouth wide open. The more his mother tells him about the miracles she saw as she followed the boy through the town, the darker glows the expression of greed in his eyes.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Cremona

  On Friday afternoon, Alice Ponticello is sitting with her mother and Uncle Adriano in Ebbli’s Coffee House, right in the center of the old part of Cremona. It’s very warm, as it has been for days all over Italy. There’s a giant fan slowly revolving on the ceiling. Baroque music is playing quietly through the speakers, and people are talking and laughing.

  “Three double espressos, three pan Cremoneses, and three torrones!” orders Uncle Adriano.

  “But Uncle Adriano, it’s only a week ago that Mama had a heart attack!” whispers Alice. “And then the tiring journey here. She shouldn’t be having so many rich cakes and coffee.”

  “Nonsense!” thunders her uncle merrily and lays his big, hairy hand on the shoulder of Alice’s mother, who gives it a cheerful pat. “Your mama had a heart attack simply because she was missing me—that’s all!” He roars with laughter, and Alice’s mother giggles. “In any case, it’s marvelous that the two of you have come to see me after all this time, eh? You were four years old and wearing pigtails last time I saw you, Alice. I don’t suppose you’ll even remember the city. Ah, Cremona, the city of violins—always worth a visit!” he says enthusiastically.

  With a clatter, the waiter puts the plates and cups down in front of them.

  “Cremona’s the city of violins?” asks Alice. “I didn’t know that! My best friend is a violin-maker,” she says, digging into her torrone.

  “Ah, then this is where he’d certainly find his true friends,” comments Uncle Adriano with his mouth full. “Because we’ve got the biggest violin-making school in the whole world! Young people come here from as far as Japan and America just to learn this famous craft from us.” It sounds almost as if Uncle Adriano had set up the violin-making school with his own hands, he’s that proud of it.

  When the three of them are so full of sweets that they can scarcely utter another word, Uncle Adriano puts his napkin to one side and says, “If you feel like it, I’ll show you the violin museum in the Palazzo Comunale—our city hall. There you’ll hear a very mysterious tale about a violin which the music world is still puzzling over.”

  He puts some money on the table, stands up, and offers his arm to Alice’s mother. She hooks her arm in and cuddles up close to him.

  “So what sort of mystery is this?” asks Alice with sudden curiosity, and she hooks herself onto her uncle’s other arm.

  He winks at her. “Just come with me.”

  The three of them leave the via Cavalotti Felice and soon find themselves in the via Robolotti.

  “This is the street where many of the violin-makers have their workshops,
as you can even see from the outside,” says Uncle Adriano, pointing to the houses, which all look medieval.

  It’s true. Out of one house after another, Alice can now hear the sawing, hammering, and planing. The sounds of violins playing also waft through the air. Suddenly Alice feels homesick. Oh, Archie, she thinks, I miss you. If only you knew how much!

  At last they come to the city hall. The great colonnaded arcades at the front and the little crenellations on the roof make it look like a rather flat castle.

  “Let’s go in,” says Uncle Adriano, opening the front door. “I’ll take you to the saletta dei violini, if Signor Mosconi gives us permission.” He looks around. “He’s the museum curator and happens to be a friend of mine. And believe it or not, every day he plays all the Stradivariuses himself, just so they don’t lose their magic tone! Ah, there he is!”

  Uncle Adriano greets an elderly, gray-haired man with a hearty slap on the back, and the small, fragile-looking gentleman looks as if he’s going to need at least two days to recover from it. The two of them have a quick conversation, and just a few minutes later, Uncle Adriano and his guests are standing in a lofty room, on whose walls are huge, resplendent mirrors with ornate gold frames. Hanging in countless glass cubes are the violins. They look as if they’re hovering in midair behind the glass.

  “And now have a look at this,” says Uncle Adriano as they go to the far corner of the room.

  They are confronted by a glass cube on a socle that looks no different from all the others.

  Except that it’s empty.

  Alice steps closer and deciphers the writing on a small sign that’s fixed to the floor.

  “So what’s that all about?” asks Alice curiously.

  “Yes, Adriano, tell us about it,” says Alice’s mother with equal interest as she puts her reading glasses back in her purse.

  “Well,” says Uncle Adriano, “it’s the strange tale of the so-called magic violin of Cremona. The story goes that its neck was broken, and it was repaired in 1692 by none other than Stradivarius himself. Since it was repaired by the great maestro—or you might say it was healed—it’s believed to have developed healing powers of its own. They say that anyone who plucked its strings was able to cure illnesses of all kinds on the spot.” Thoughtfully he strokes his chin and gazes at the empty glass cube. “Since then, at irregular intervals, it keeps on turning up out of the blue, but then each time it seems to disappear again! Anyway, it’s been gone for such a long time now that no sensible person can believe in such a fairy tale. So that’s it. Legend has it, though, that the person who finds it will be particularly kindhearted, will have strikingly tranquil hands, and will love music. And so he’ll get the chance to do good with this Pizzicato—in other words, to heal people.”

  Uncle Adriano pauses, as if he has to work out whether he’s finished his little violin lecture or not.

  “Oh yes,” he says, pointing his forefinger up in the air. “If the instrument falls into the hands of someone with evil intent, its effects can be the exact opposite.”

  He suddenly claps his hands, and the sound echoes all around the room. “Personally,” he says, “I think it’s a load of nonsense. Humbug! A tourist attraction, nothing more. All this mystique about violins is just a lot of claptrap. But on the other hand, the tale has made a lot of money for Cremona over the years.” He leans forward and whispers, “There are more people driving Ferraris in this city than anywhere else, if you get my meaning.”

  He winks at Alice and her mother, holds out his elbows, which each of them hooks onto, and the three of them leave the city hall.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Cardboard and Customers

  Darius looks at the clock on St. Matthew’s Church and gets a shock. It’s almost six! Mr. Archinola will be worried, he thinks, and so he speeds up. Today has gone like a sort of time-lapse film. He’s lost count of the number of people he’s been able to heal with Pizzicato, but there were certainly lots of them. He thinks back over the list: There was the boy in the playground with a gash in his head that closed even before his father had realized he’d fallen over. Then the old man in the wheelchair who suddenly stood up and ran off while his wife collapsed with shock in the middle of the sidewalk. There was also the fruit-seller, who would have almost sliced off his fingertip cutting melons if Darius hadn’t been there plucking the strings. And there was the car accident on Tindall Avenue, with three injured people who were all miraculously healed by the time the ambulance arrived with its flashing lights. The paramedics couldn’t believe it when they saw the wrecked cars and realized that the people had no injuries.

  Anyway, one thing is now crystal clear: this violin can heal the worst of injuries and ailments, thinks Darius. But it’s all so crazy that no one will ever believe him. It doesn’t matter. The main thing is that he’ll be able to help Mey-Mey.

  Darius looks up. The sky is now overcast, and the air has become damp and heavy. The birds’ chirping has gone quiet, as if they’re silently hoping for the rain that now weighs on the town like a great expectation. Darius’s duffel bag seems heavier than before. In the distance he can hear a baby crying.

  He’s relieved to see the name Archibald Archinola—Master Violin-Maker on the metal sign, and he’s just taken hold of the front door handle when he hears something. He turns around. A man is dragging himself in the direction of the church. He’s wearing a strange black cape and a funny hat, even though the weather is so clammy, and his back is all bent.

  Darius listens. Yes! The man is crying! No doubt about it! With great difficulty, he now pulls open the church door. One might almost think that he gives Darius an imploring look before he disappears inside.

  Darius looks at his duffel bag with Pizzicato nestling in it. Maybe it would be better if I tested its miraculous powers one last time. Better safe than sorry.

  Having made up his mind, he lets go of the door handle and hurries across St. Matthew’s Square. A moment later, the door of the church closes behind him with a solemn crash.

  Initially, Darius has to get used to the dim light inside the church. He blinks a few times. Hideously discordant notes resound from the giant organ pipes in the upper story. He clasps the handle of his duffel bag and walks slowly past the columns and arches, which are painted with earthy red and olive green stripes, like candy. Electric lightbulbs hang down from the high ceiling over the nave, and there are flames flickering from thick white candles, as if fighting against the artificial lights.

  Suddenly the organ music stops. Through the loudspeaker comes the sound of someone clearing his throat, and Darius now sees a priest standing at the altar. In a bored and grating tone, he starts to read from a thick black book, and his voice whirrs down the aisle like some tired gray moth. There’s a smell of stale incense.

  In one of the wooden pews at the back, a man is kneeling. Darius can hardly make him out under the black cape and hat. His head is lowered, his hands are folded, and he is murmuring something out loud. Darius slips softly into the pew behind him and sits down close to him. Then he cautiously looks around.

  Fortunately, the church is empty apart from them. This doesn’t seem to bother the priest, who simply drones on. Then he makes a sign of the cross in the air and swiftly strides out of the chancel. The jangling organ music starts up again. The man is still kneeling with lowered head, and from time to time he lets out a sob. Poor fellow!

  Now I can risk it, thinks Darius sympathetically, and he opens the zipper of his duffel bag with a zzzzzz. Softly he takes Pizzicato out, puts it on his lap, and gently rests his hands on its strings.

  Suddenly someone seizes him from behind!

  As he tries to shout for help, something damp is pressed over his mouth and nose. Helplessly he breathes in the sharp smell. For a moment, the lightbulbs, candle flames, striped columns, and organ pipes swirl before his eyes, and then everything goes black.

  “All done?” asks the man in the black cape, and he turns around. On the face beneath the h
at there is not the slightest sign of concern.

  “Yes, help me! Hurry up!” says a woman’s voice.

  Both the man and the woman quickly glance around the interior of the church. When they’re certain that no one is watching them, they grasp Darius by the hands and feet and dump him in a large cardboard box that is standing on the floor next to the confessional.

  “Have you got the violin?” asks the man nervously. The woman nods and holds Pizzicato up in the air. “Then let’s go!” murmurs the man. “Now we can look at the boy’s fingers, to see how he works these miracle cures.” The woman snickers. “What would you do without me, Bunny?” she whispers.

  “One part sandarac, one part mastic, and one part lacquer.” Mr. Archinola is talking aloud to himself, trying to make himself concentrate as he grinds everything together in a mortar. It’s now eight o’clock…School never went on that long in his day!

  The violin-maker pours the finely ground resin into bottles, adds some alcohol, and starts to shake them. Maybe Darius has gone to see his friends in the children’s home. He shakes every bottle as violently as if he could force an answer out of it.

  No, I’ve had enough of this, he thinks. He hurriedly takes the newly prepared varnish to the dark storeroom and then goes to the hall, where he anxiously hunts for the phone number of the Stork’s Nest Children’s Home. But when he’s just about to dial the number, the phone rings. It gives Mr. Archinola a terrible shock.

  “Oh fiddlesticks!” he mumbles. “I’m now a nervous wreck!”

  He picks up the receiver and says, “Nervous Wreck Archinola. Oh, sorry, I mean Violin-Maker Archinola.”