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

“No — because it’s far more complex than that. You have to understand, first of all, that he’d had the use of the violin for much of his career prior to his defection, and he sincerely believed that his playing had at least earned him the right to it for his remaining lifetime. I suspect also that he felt, as Paganini had, that he drew supernatural power from Giuseppe Guarneri’s craftsmanship, but he attributed that power to a holy rather than a diabolical source.

“And as far as mere physical ownership is concerned, who really owns the violin now, Peter? Václav’s brother Karl? The Czech people — no longer under a socialist government? The previous owner from whom the violin was confiscated?”

“I guess I know who doesn’t own it,” Peter remarked.

“Byron Davis?” said R. J. from beside me. “He owns a water-soaked, dubious Amati and more luck than he probably realizes. I don’t think there’s a chance in the world he’ll be prosecuted for theft, provided the autopsy confirms that Hucek’s death was natural, and I think it will I think up to the very last point Davis was telling us the truth about what happened that night — not necessarily about the hugs and consolation part, but that’s his own business and it doesn’t really matter. The big thing is this: after we brought him around and he offered to make amends by paying restitution to cover the cost of all the man-hours and equipment-hours spent searching for Hucek, I could see the sheriff backing off from any interest he might have had in criminal charges and considering a consent decree instead.”

“But what about the twin brother?”

“When I put the Guarneri into his hands, Peter,” I said, “he was rather like a person in ecstasy. That was all he cared about after the shock of losing Václav: that the violin, at least, had survived. He’d helped his brother smuggle it out of the country, and he was very well aware of its value and importance. What he intends to do with it, of course, isn’t altogether clear at this point, but it will be something far better, I’m sure, than shamefully gloating over its secret possession the way Byron Davis was doing, displaying it in plain view as something else with the maker’s label removed and hidden, half cleverly, in the same case.”

“Uh-huh. Only, you know what? You never did tell me how you and R. J. figured out about the violin and the label in the first place.”

R. J. and I looked at each other. “Well—” I said.

“Well, what?”

R. J. shrugged. “In a way it actually starts off with you, Peter, that’s all — since you’re the one who hooked me up with the Huceks. If I ever get around to writing the Carr Detective Handbook, I’m going to make Axiom Number Three the fact that clients almost always lie to detectives — mostly by leaving out parts of the truth.”

“You mean that that couple of innocents—”

“Well, yeah, Peter — that couple of innocents. It struck me right off the bat, you see, that ten thousand dollars didn’t make a lot of sense as a fee for what they wanted me to do unless there was some additional incentive that they weren’t talking about. So even though the violin was never mentioned, I was looking for something like it from the very beginning. And as it turned out, facts and inferences I picked up along the way pointed very strongly to its existence. Václav’s obsession with Paganini was a big one, of course, and the rumor of his bringing state-owned instruments with him when he defected, and the other obsession he had after his wife died of always carrying his violin around...” R. J. shrugged again. “It just made a lot more sense to think that my clients wanted me to find Václav’s violin as well as his remains even though they didn’t say it.”

“So we hypothesized,” I continued, “that the violin might be a virtually priceless Guarneri and that Byron Davis might have it unlawfully in his possession.”

“Which meant by extension,” R. J. said, “that the reason Václav and his car hadn’t been found might simply be because they were submerged all winter in the deep pool of Mansion Lake under three feet of ice. Ginny was the one who read up on violins and spotted the business about the labels, especially Giuseppe Guarneri’s labels—”

“And so we, or really R. J., went looking for the label removed from the instrument, because it seemed likely that Davis, if he did have the violin, wouldn’t want to advertise the fact.”

“When we found the label, which was pretty valuable in itself, we knew that Hucek had made it to Davis’s place the night of the storm, which meant that the car with Hucek in it almost had to be in the lake along with a replacement violin, probably the Amati that Davis claimed to own. So the only question left, to my mind, was whether Davis’s greed for the much more valuable Guarneri was triggered before or after Hucek died.”

“And you really think it was after?”