“And?”
The man hesitated. “I don’t know why I am inclined to trust you, but I do. The wood Stradivari used was cut in the foothills of the Apennines and dumped green into the Po or Adige Rivers, floated downstream, and stored in brackish lagoons near Venice. This was purely for convenience, but it did something critical to the wood—it opened up its pores. Stradivari purchased the wood wet. He did not season it. Instead, he soaked it further in a solution of his own making—as far as I can deduce, a combination of borax, sea salt, fruit gum, quartz and other minerals, and ground, colored Venetian glass. He soaked it for months, perhaps years, while it absorbed these chemicals. What did they do to the wood? Amazing, complex, miraculous things! First, they preserved it. The borax made the wood tighter, harder, stiffer. The ground quartz and glass prevented the violin from being eaten by woodworms—but it also filled in the air spaces and gave it a brilliance and clarity of tone. The fruit gum caused subtle changes and acted as a fungicide. Of course, the real secret lies in the proportions—and those, Signor Pendergast, I will not tell you.”
Pendergast nodded.
“Over the years, I’ve made hundreds of violins from wood treated this way, experimenting with the ratios and the length of time in solution. The resulting instruments had a big, brilliant sound. But it was a harsh sound. Something was needed to dampen the vibrations, the overtones.”
He paused. “Here is where the true genius of Stradivari comes in. He found that in his secret varnish.”
He moused up the computer screen, clicked through a few menus. A new image appeared in black and white, a landscape of incredible ruggedness, looking to D’Agosta like some vast mountain range.
“Here is the varnish of a Stradivarius under a scanning electron microscope, 30,000x. As you can see, it is not the smooth, hard layer it seems to the naked eye. Instead, there are billions of microscopic cracks. When the violin is played, these cracks absorb and dampen the harsh vibrations and resonances, allowing only the purest, clearest tone to escape. That’s the true secret to Stradivari’s violins. The problem is, the varnish he used was an incredibly complex chemical solution, involving boiled insects and other organic and inorganic sources. It has defied all analysis—and we have so little of it to test. You can’t strip the varnish off a Strad—removing even a little will ruin a violin. You’d need to destroy an entire instrument to get enough varnish to analyze it properly. Even then, you couldn’t use one of his inferior violins. Those were experimental, and the varnish recipe changed many times. No—you’d have to destroy one from the golden period. Not only that, but you’d need to cut into the wood and analyze the chemistry of the solution he soaked them in as well as the interface between the varnish and the wood. For all these reasons, we have not been able to figure out exactly how he did it.”
He leaned back. “Another problem. Even if you had all his secret recipes, you still might fail. Stradivari, knowing all that we don’t, managed to make some mediocre violins. There were other factors to making a great violin, some apparently even beyond his control—such as the particular qualities of the piece of wood he used.”
Pendergast nodded.
“And that, Mr. Pendergast, is all I can tell you.” The man’s face glittered with feverish intensity. “And now let us speak of this.” He opened his hand and smoothed the crumpled business card. And for the first time, D’Agosta glimpsed what Pendergast had written on it.
It was the word Stormcloud.
{ 62 }
The man held out the card in a trembling hand.
Pendergast nodded in return. “Perhaps the best way to start would be for you to tell Sergeant D’Agosta what you know of its history.”
Spezi turned to D’Agosta, his face filling with regret. “The Stormcloud was Stradivari’s greatest violin. It was played by a string of virtuosi in an almost unbroken line from Monteverdi to Paganini and beyond. It was present at some of the greatest moments in the history of music. It was played by Franz Clement at the premiere of Beethoven’s violin concerto. It was played by Brahms himself at the premiere of his Second Violin Concerto, and by Paganini for the first Italian performance of all twenty-four of his caprices. And then, just before World War I—on the death of the virtuoso Luciano Toscanelli, may God curse him—it disappeared. Toscanelli went insane at the end of his days and, some say, destroyed it. Others say it was lost in the Great War.”
“It wasn’t.”
Spezi straightened abruptly. “You mean it still exists?”