incantations, asked the Prince of Darkness to bring them great wealth, offered their souls in return, pricked their fingers and signed contracts in blood-especially when Pinketts activated the theatrics.' He leaned back, pealing with laughter.
'You terrified them. You scared Beckmann so much it ruined his life.'
'It was all in good fun. If it shook up their pathetic little certainties, so much the better. They went their way and I went mine. And here comes the coincidence so marvelous I feel it must be predestination: thirty years later, I discovered to my horror that one of these philistines had acquired the Stormcloud.'
'How did you learn?' Pendergast asked.
'I had been on the track of the Stormcloud almost my entire adult life, Mr. Pendergast. I made it my life's goal to return that violin to my family. You've been to see Lady Maskelene, so you know its history. I knew perfectly well Toscanelli had not thrown it into the Falls of the Sciliar. How could he? As crazy as he was, he knew better than anyone what that violin represented. But if he didn't destroy it, then what had happened? The answer is not so mysterious. He froze to death in a shepherd's hut up on the Sciliar, and then it snowed. There were no footprints in the snow. Obviously, someone had found him dead with the violin before it snowed and had stolen the violin. And who was this someone? Just as obviously, the man who owned the hut.'
Pinketts whisked away his plate, then returned bearing another of tortelloni with butter and salvia. Fosco tucked into it with relish.
'Remember how I told you I loved detective work? I have a rare talent for it. I traced the Stormcloud from the shepherd, to his nephew, to a band of Gypsies, to a shop in Spain, to an orphanage in Malta-this way and that it traveled. I shudder to think of the times it was left in the sun; packed in a case with a few threads of straw and thrown into the back of a truck; left unattended in some school auditorium. Mio Dio! Yet it survived. It ended up in France, where it was sold in a lot of junk instruments to a lycee. Some clumsy oaf in the orchestra dropped it, chipped one of the scrolls, and it was taken to a violin shop in Angouleme for repair. The man who owned the shop recognized it, substituted it, and sent back another instrument in its place.' Fosco clucked disapprovingly. 'What a moment that must have been for him! He knew he could never acquire legal title to it, so he smuggled it to America and quietly put it up for sale. It took a long time to find a buyer. Who wanted a Stradivarius if you couldn't play it as a Strad? If you could never establish title to it? If it might be taken from you at any moment? But he finally did find a buyer-in Locke Bullard. Two million dollars-that was all! I found out three months after the deal had closed.'
A dark furor passed over Fosco's face, rapidly clearing as Pinketts carried in the next course, a bistecca fiorentina , sizzling from the fire. Fosco carved off a piece of almost raw meat, placed it in his mouth, chewed.
'I was perfectly willing to buy it from Bullard, even paying a handsome price, despite the fact it was mine to begin with. But I never got to the point of making an offer. You see, Bullard was going to destroy the violin.'
'To crack Stradivari's secret formulas once and for all.'
'Exactly. And do you know why?'
'I know Bullard was not in the business of making violins, nor did he have any interest in music.'
'True. But do you know the business his company, BAI, was into? With the Chinese?'
Pendergast did not reply.
'Missiles, my dear Pendergast. He was working on ballistic missiles . That's why he needed the violin!'
'Bullshit!' D'Agosta interjected. 'There can't possibly be a connection between a three-hundred-year-old violin and a ballistic missile.'
Fosco ignored this. He was still looking at Pendergast. 'I sense you know rather more than you let on, my good sir. In any case, I penetrated their laboratory with a mole in my employ. Poor fellow ended up with his head crushed. But before that happened, he did tell me just what Bullard planned to do with the violin.'
He leaned forward, eyes flashing with indignation. 'The Chinese, you see, had developed a ballistic missile that could theoretically penetrate the United States' planned antimissile shield. But they had a problem with their missiles breaking up on re-entry. To make the missile invisible to radar, you know, one can't have any curved or shiny surfaces. Look at the strange angular shapes of your stealth fighters and bombers. But this wasn't a bomber flying at six hundred miles an hour: this was a ballistic missile re-entering the atmosphere at ten times that speed. Their test missiles broke up under uncontrollable resonance vibrations during atmospheric re-entry.'
Pendergast nodded almost imperceptibly.
'Bullard's scientists realized the solution to this problem lay in the Stradivari formula for the varnish. Can you imagine? You see, the key to the Stradivari varnish is that, after a few years of playing, it develops billions of microscopic cracks and flaws, too small to be seen. These are phenomenally effective in dampening and warming the sound of a Stradivari. This is also why the violin must be played regularly-otherwise, the cracks and flaws start knitting back up. Bullard was designing a high-performance coating for those Chinese missiles that would do the same thing-a coating that would have billions of microscopic flaws to dampen the vibrational resonance of re-entry. But he had to figure out precisely what the physics was, why those cracks and flaws did what they did. He had to know how they were distributed three-dimensionally in the varnish; how they made contact with the wood; how wide, long, and deep they were; how they connected to each other.'
Fosco stopped talking long enough to eat some more steak and sip his wine.
'To do that, Bullard needed to cut up a golden period Strad. Any would do, but none were for sale-especially to him. And then along came the black-market Stormcloud. Ecco fatto! '
D'Agosta stared in mingled repulsion and disbelief as the count wiped his red and greasy lips on an oversize napkin. It seemed outrageous, impossible.
'Now you see, Pendergast, why I needed to go to such lengths. It was worth a billion to Bullard on the Chinese deal alone. With more money to come as he resold the technology to a host of other eager buyers. I had to get the violin quickly, before he destroyed it. He had already brought it to his Italian laboratory, where it was guarded under truly impenetrable security. And that's when it came to me. I'd use the only leverage I had: our first and only encounter, thirty years ago. I’d frighten Bullard into giving up the violin!'
'Through murdering the others who had been at the staged devil raising.'
'Yes. I would kill Grove, Beckmann, and Cutforth, making it look in each case like the devil had finally come for their souls. Beckmann seemed to have disappeared, so that left only Grove and Cutforth. Only two. Whatever I did, it had to be utterly convincing. Bullard was an ignorant, blustering man with few religious impulses. I needed a way to kill them that was so unique and dreadful that the police would be baffled, that would generate all kinds of talk
