Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 44, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1999

I took the obvious alternate route south to Lake Geneva, watching without conviction for sites where Hucek might have strayed from the road and stopping to investigate four of them with the same negative results I had had on the trip north. The truth, though, was that if Hucek really had left the highway for some accidental or voluntary reason and gotten himself even further lost, then after four months’ time and two official searches — the second following the spring melt-off — only luck or unforeseen happenstance was going to lead me to him. I didn’t have faith in either of these alternatives mainly because the situation was developing a different kind of feel to me.

The drive from Lake Geneva home to the Chicago suburbs gave me some time to mull the problem over, with the result that the next day when I had an hour free I put in a long distance call to the editor of the Walworth County Beacon, a biweekly paper out of Lake Geneva that had given the disappearance a front page headline a few days after it had happened.

“Yeah. This is Paul Zimmer,” said a sharp voice.

“My name is Carr,” I said. “I’ve been hired by Václav Hucek’s brother to—”

“Yeah, I heard about that. And brother — believe you me — I wish you luck.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why? You’re not God, are you? Or Superman? No X-ray vision? What I’ve said right along is, find the car and you’ll find the man. But the car — wow. Uh-uh.”

“Well, yeah. And that’s why I’d like to try a different starting point,” I said.

“A bright idea, only it won’t work.”

“Why not?”

The line went silent briefly, then he replied, “Don’t mind me, Mr. Carr. I was just being cute. But if there’s a different starting point, you’re the party that’s going to have to supply it.”

“Fine. Tell me about Václav Hucek.”

“Why? No — never mind. I see the inference. I don’t buy it, but I see it. And Hucek was a strange bird, all right — notice the use of the past tense — but I’ll tell you this, Mr. Carr, he wasn’t the kind of strange bird that flies away.

“He was what you’d probably call an eccentric, and my feeling is that some of it was phony but most of it wasn’t. If you saw him, you’d remember him, believe me, because he always wore a formal black suit with a tailcoat and a high collar — like he was on his way to a performance, you know — and in person he acted like the grand maestro. I interviewed him once just after he retired and got the full treatment: thick accent, big gestures, air of superiority. And mysterious, my God, did the guy like to act mysterious.”

“How?” I asked.

“The Paganini thing. He and Paganini were soulmates. You’ve heard of Paganini? I had to look him up. Nineteenth century virtuoso violinist, supposedly had the ladies swooning in the aisles. Hucek and Paganini ‘shared a sacred musical and spiritual bond’ — I’m quoting — only don’t ask how or why or you’ll get the icy stare of the maestro. Actually, Hucek was well known on this score, but I was the hick reporter. The tailcoat — that was Paganini. Also the flamboyant gestures. Also Hucek’s style of playing the violin.

“In my own defense, though, by the time Hucek retired, he wasn’t such a big noise. In the fifties and sixties behind the Iron Curtain he was a pretty hot number as a soloist, but he never came on that strong in the U.S. Defected in 1968 with his wife. Had open heart surgery in ’76 and took the... what’s it called? The Stenstrom Chair for Violin Studies, I think, over at Madison. That was 77. Mandated retirement in ’84. Came here because his wife liked Lake Geneva and picked up two hundred bucks per half hour giving lessons to hotshot kids and dilettantes of indeterminate gender like that Davis character he was on his way to see when the storm hit.

“Oh. His wife died about three years ago, and that reminds me of the guy’s last eccentricity. Supposedly, from the time she was laid out, he never went anyplace without a violin case under his arm — grocery shopping, walking on the beach.”

“Any theories on that?” I asked.

“Well, wherever he’s gone, that’s where the violin case has gone, too. It’s got a violin in it; don’t get me wrong. It’s not filled with money or one of his wife’s nightgowns because people have seen him take it out and play it while he was standing by the lake.

“And... what else? This is the last free tidbit because I’ve got a paper to run, but there’s a story that I don’t vouch for saying that when Hucek defected he brought with him some pretty rare and valuable instruments — one, three, or five, depending on the source — that were technically the property of the Czech government. His practice room, which I was in the one time, had, I’d like to say, at least four violins in display cases and one of those big ones — a cello — and some things like guitars only they weren’t. The official word, though, was that nothing was taken, so... I don’t see much in this particular angle, frankly.”