Free Fiddle Game by Richard A. Thompson

they just paid half a million dollars for sounds like a cigar-box fiddle. And it can happen. So the serious buyer settles for pedigrees and proofs of age. Nobody argues with age.”
    “They just don’t make them like they used to,” I said.
    “Utter rubbish,” he said, spilling coffee with a dismissive gesture. “We make them as well or better than they ever did. And there’s no secret varnish, either. No secrets of any kind, just the finest workmanship you can get out.” He calmed down, refilled his mug from the new pot, and took another sip. “But a new instrument is a new instrument, and there’s no arguing with that. It won’t find its true voice for at least twenty years, sometimes twice that long. And its soul? Well, if it’s going to have one at all, it won’t acquire that for at least a hundred.”
    “Or four?”
    “Four hundred years is better, sometimes.”
    “Why only sometimes?”
    “Sometimes it destroys itself before then. You know anything about engines, Mr. Jackson?”
    “Engines? You mean like in cars?”
    “Exactly like that.”
    “I turn the key, and mine goes. If it doesn’t go, I call a garage.”
    “How nice for you. When I was a young man in the Army, before I had a vocation, I worked on engines. I learned that diesel engines, specifically, have a peculiar trait. They are the easiest to start, smoothest, and most powerful when they are at the end of their natural life span, ready for a complete overhaul or a trip to the junkyard. The same thing is true of violins.
    “It is said that the sweetest sound ever heard from a set of strings was once when Jascha Heifetz played the Tchaikovsky concerto—there is only one, you know—on his Stradivarius, at Carnegie Hall. People who don’t even like Tchaikovsky wept and cheered and gave him a fifteen-minute standing ovation.” He took a bite of Danish and a gulp of coffee and got a far-away look in his eyes, picturing the scene. “After the concert, he put the instrument in its case, the same as always, and it immediately fractured into a thousand splinters, impossible to repair. The timing of its life, you see, was exquisite.”
    “This is true?”
    “True? Probably not. I have heard the story many times. Sometimes it is Heifetz and the Tchaikovsky and sometimes it is Isaac Stern playing a Bach partita or Itzhak Perlman and a Paganini caprice. It is most likely a professional myth. But the heart of it is true enough. The instrument, any stringed instrument, is at its sweetest just before it dies.”
    “And they all die?”
    “Just like you and me, my friend.” He leaned over to clink his mug against mine in a toast to the essential sadness of the universe. It seemed like the right thing to do.
    “But not just yet,” I said.
    He nodded solemnly, then smiled. “But not just yet.”
    “Of course,” he added, “some come to an earlier end than others. Getting put in a museum or a private collector’s case is a kind of early death, rather like being embalmed while you’re still walking around. Then there are accidents and weather and just general lack of care. And of course, there are always the Gypsies.”
    “Gypsies kill violins?” I tried to picture some swarthy, mustachioed type, like Omar Sharif, with a bandana on his head and a billowing peasant shirt, plunging his dagger into the f-hole of an old fiddle, but it just didn’t work.
    “They don’t kill them, exactly. Not right away, at least. A Gypsy could take that Baldwin, scrape down the inside to sweeten the tap tone, loosen the purfling, and make it sound like an Amati, for a while. But it wouldn’t last long after that.”
    “A mere hundred years or so?”
    “If it did, then it would be truly a fine violin, a real collector’s item, but that is most unlikely. Who knows? I, myself, do not know the exact life of the violins I build. But I know that a Gypsy would take one, make it sound like an instant masterpiece, and shorten its life dramatically. You never