Free The Rainaldi Quartet by Paul Adam Page A

vault.
    Forlani unlocked the cabinet and, shielding his fingers with his body, punched in a combination on a keypad. The steel door clicked open and swung out towards us, its electric motor purring softly.
    Beyond the door was another room, a vast chamber that must have taken up half the total area of the second floor. It had no windows – the light was all artificial, beaming down from recessed lamps in the ceiling – and from the breath of cool air that gusted out I could tell it was air-conditioned and humidity-controlled. I knew Forlani’s reputation, had seen fine collections many times before, but nothing could have prepared me for what I saw when I entered that room. Around all the walls and in the centre of the chamber, immaculately presented in individually lit glass cases, were violins.
    I paused on the threshold, suddenly breathless. It wasn’t the quantity of instruments that struck me – though there must have been a hundred or more – it was the quality. I could tell at a glance that this was a truly exceptional collection, maybe the finest ever put together since Cozio di Salabue had amassed – and then lost – his own.
    Forlani was watching me, gauging my reaction.
    â€˜What do you think?’ he asked.
    â€˜It’s incredible.’
    I stared around at the glass cases, at the violins bathed in light, their varnish glowing orange and red and russet like a sunlit autumn forest.
    â€˜You see now?’ Forlani said. ‘For forty years I have been building this collection. Forty years, that’s a long time. I have instruments by all the giants of violin-making: by Stradivari, the Guarneris, by every one of the great luthiers. I have spent a fortune on it.’
    He wandered deeper into the chamber, holding out his arms as if to embrace his precious possessions.
    â€˜This is why I gave Rainaldi money. Maybe he was wrong about the violin, maybe he was even lying to me, trying to cheat me. But think of the prize: a perfect, undiscovered Stradivari, as fresh and untouched as the day the Master finished it. If there was just a one per cent – no, a fraction of one per cent – possibility that Rainaldi was right and could find it, then that was good enough for me. He was offering me a chance to have it. What collector could turn down an opportunity like that?’
    Forlani’s eyes had the glint of the fanatic in them, a hard coruscating light which was just this side of insanity. I believed him. I’d met collectors before. I’d seen how the desire, the greed to own a violin could consume and corrupt a man.
    Forlani was rich and shrewd, the scion of a shipowning family which dated back to the Middle Ages when the Venetians had made a killing transporting the Crusaders to the Holy Land, their support for their passengers’ Christian cause always tempered by good sense and the clear-headed philosophy that has almost become the unofficial Venetian motto: ‘On what terms?’ Forlani was tough and ruthless, but he also had that other dominant Venetian characteristic: a willingness to gamble.
    I walked in a daze around that perfect room, that shrine in a cathedral of squalor, my head swimming with an intoxicating cocktail of emotions: awe, astonishment, envy, admiration. But also anger. A deep, powerful resentment directed against Forlani. I despised him for hiding away treasures that the whole world should have been able to share. I have no quarrel with people who collect art. Its only purpose is to be looked at; whether in a public gallery or on a collector’s wall is irrelevant except for the number of people who can enjoy it. But a violin is different. A violin is meant to be played and heard, not put in a vault or a glass case. Forlani could have lent out his instruments to gifted but impoverished players, to young musicians who would use them as their makers intended, but he had chosen instead to hoard them away where only he could look