Stradivarius by Jonny Eberle

Milan is burning, a smudge of black smoke on the horizon. Cannon fire thunders over the
hills, the apprentices have fled, and yet the master remains in his workshop. Chisel and awl lie
forgotten beside heaps of sawdust on a long table. He releases the clamps from the hollow body
of what will one day be a violin. Steady hands riddled with spots and blue veins turn the
instrument, inspecting every angle. He closes his eyes as he runs a fingertip over the grain of the
wood, tracing the ribs and soundboard. In the master’s hands, the wood seems to sing.

The master lays the body down gently, as he would a sleeping child, and turns his
attention to the scroll and neck, lovingly and meticulously carved. He does not know that the
buyer of this violin—the governor of Milan—is at this moment being driven out of the city,
retreating, bloodied and beaten, and will soon return to France. It is of no importance, so long as
the instrument is appreciated and played. That is the purpose of a violin, after all. He should
know—he’s made almost 900 of them.

A stray musket ball sails over the low stone wall, shatters a window in the house. A voice
cries out “Antonio!” This is the only voice that can cut through his focus, the only person he
loves more than his work. He sets down the neck of the violin. It is time to leave.

• • •

Dylan comes back to reality, pulled from a memory that isn’t hers like a snapped rubber
band, and it takes her a moment to remember where she is. Awareness comes back slowly. It is
night. It is raining. Her feet are not touching the ground. All at once she remembers and grips the
rope tightly. This isn’t the tallest building she’s scaled, but it’s close. A shock runs through her.
How long was she in the memory?

“Hey, are you good?” Martine asks. She is hanging beside Dylan, decked out in harness
and climbing gear. “Vertigo?”

Dylan shakes her head. Whatever happened, it must have only lasted for a few seconds.
She checks her harness and the large bag slung over her back.

“I’m good,” she says. “Let’s get what we came for.”

They descend the face of the building, cold rain flecking their faces as they push off plate
glass windows. After a few excruciating minutes, they alight softly on a balcony. Martine
immediately gets to work, reverently unrolling an old set of lock picks. Dylan is momentarily
queasy as she feels a flash of deep, complicated emotion coming from Martine’s tools. The lock
picks are an heirloom, passed down from her mother. They didn’t get along. Dylan grips the
railing, touches her necklace, and takes deep breaths to regain her composure. Normally, she has
to touch an object to feel its history, but tonight, something is magnifying her abilities.

The front door of the apartment is secured with a high-tech biometric lock, virtually
impenetrable, but the sliding glass door on the balcony employs a simple deadbolt. Martine
jimmies the lock and the door slides open.

“Don’t go inside yet,” Martine says. She feels around the frame of the door for a sensor,
and when she finds it, she selects a small plastic device from her bag, peels off the adhesive
backing, and sticks it on top. “That should block any signal to the alarm system. After you.”

• • •

Dylan is back with the violin. No—she is the violin. She is in Vienna, in the palace of
Prince Eugene of Savoy. The prince is no musician, but he likes to be surrounded by beautiful
things, and he heard that the luthier of Carmona made the most beautiful instruments. Following
the Milan campaign, he purchased the violin from the old man and brought it home as a prize of
war. For 30 long years, it hangs on a wall in his palace among paintings and sculptures and other
fineries bought and looted from across the continent. But it is never played."

That is all about to change, however. The prince is dead and he has left his enormous
collection of art and books to his longtime mistress, a Hungarian countess named Eleonore
Batthyány-Strattmann. It is the countess who noticed the violin hanging on the wall of the library
and asked the valet to bring it down so she could look at it. She took lessons as a child, but these
days her fingers are so wracked with arthritis she can barely hold a wine glass. Determined to
hear the instrument her beloved was so proud of, she sends the valet out in search of a violinist.

He returns with a boy no more than 15 years old. Like the countess, he is Hungarian.
Unlike the countess, he is a Jew. But, he can play. An hour ago, he was playing for loose change
on a street corner while his toes went numb and now he is here, in this warm, opulent palace, in
front of a rich and powerful noblewoman. He is dumbfounded—until he is handed the violin. At the first touch of the bow to the strings,
he feels like he’s known this instrument all his life. The notes are crisp and bright, leaping forth almost on their own,
as if the music was merely trapped inside. The countess is delighted and so the young man stays for three years, performing nightly
concerts for her.

As she lies on her deathbed, she gifts the violin to the young man and he leaves with it to
seek a fame and fortune that never comes.

• • •

Dylan shakes herself from the memory and tries to act as if nothing is out of the ordinary
as she steps into the apartment. She knows no one is home, that Mr. Kwan is in Hong Kong on
business and won’t be back for a week. But still, she feels a presence, almost alive, calling her. It
drowns out her other senses, and she nearly trips over the clawed foot of an armchair.

The living room is practically a museum, every wall and table and display case brimming
with antiquities. A Roman wine jug, an Egyptian burial mask, a Mayan codex. Martine pauses to
admire a crossbow mounted on the wall above the fireplace.

“Thirteenth-century Chinese, Song Dynasty,” Dylan says. Her parents collected items
like this, when they were alive. Even without touching it, she knows that this weapon has seen
battle. She can hear the screams, see blood running like rivers in the snow. She backs away from
it.

“Must be worth a lot,” Martine says. Dylan is sure that she’s already done the math. She
doesn't know her partner well—this is by design. They are hired to do a job, and in this line of
work, Dylan finds it best not to confide in her partners about her unusual abilities. Trust is a
liability. Martine came highly recommended and that is all Dylan needs to know about her. What
roubles her now are the dollar signs in Martine’s eyes as she passes fragments of history
scattered around the room. That kind of greed can blind you to important details.

“This way,” Dylan says. She senses the item they’re after, calling to her from the next
room. She pushes open the door and a cat darts into the hall.

“Jesus!” Martine says. “You didn’t tell me there was a cat.”

“There’s a cat-sitter, too, but he only comes once a day to fill the food dish.”

“Anything else you forgot to mention?”

Dylan doesn’t answer.

The next room is an audiophile’s dream. Kwan has an entire wall of vinyl and above it,
signed gold records in frames. He seems to have a taste for classical music and opera, judging by
the autographs from Pavarotti and Yo-Yo Ma.

“The Bohemian,” Martine says. She nods to the violin. It is in the far corner of the room,
standing upright inside a softly lit display case. Dylan moves closer, and with every step, her
mental defenses are swamped by centuries of memory. Joy. Pain. Grief.

It is not all that remarkable to look at. To the untrained eye, it appears to be a regular
violin. But the Bohemian is far more. It was made by the master himself, Antonio Stradivari,
during his Golden Period. Its legendary status is only enhanced by the 200-year gap in its story,
when it disappeared from the historical record before resurfacing in the hands of a suspected
Nazi at a London auction house after World War II.

Dylan runs through everything she’s memorized in preparation for this job in an attempt
to build a wall between the violin and her. In all her years of tracking down artifacts and
heirlooms, this one is by far the most insistent. The Bohemian continues to throw wave after
wave at her, threatening to drag her under.

Once they’ve determined how to disable the alarm, Dylan and Martine take up positions
on either side of the glass case. On three, they lift it off and set it down on the carpet. Dylan
reaches out with gloved hands to pick it up. It’s heavier than she expects and longer than a
typical instrument of the period. She doesn’t play, but if she did, she would struggle to reach the
far end of the ebony fingerboard. She turns it over and furrows her brow.

“What’s wrong?” Martine asks.

“This isn’t it. It’s a replica.”

“What? How can you tell?”

“I just know.” She isn’t getting anything from this violin. It has no history to share. It was
made to fool someone into thinking it was an authentic Stradivarius. But beyond its silence, there
are other clues. The varnish is too perfect. It’s missing the place below the neck where there
should be the carved initials of a young Hungarian musician. And of course, the grain of the
wood is an obvious giveaway. This grain is far too open to be old-growth timber. There is some
dispute over whether the slower rate of growth caused by the Little Ice Age truly changed the
resonant qualities of the wood Stradivari used, or if it was his skill alone that produced his
violins’ signature tone. In truth, it is a little of both. Dylan does not know how she knows this.

“If that’s a fake, then this is a setup. We should go,” Martine says. Dylan is slow to
move. The violin is a fake and yet, there is something here. In this room. Something real.

“I’ll finish in here,” Dylan says. “You check the front door and see if our route is open.”

• • •

The ship steams up the coast of Florida. People hang on the rails, trying to catch a
glimpse of what they hope will be their new home. At one point, they are close enough to see
people dotting the beaches and swimming in the surf. They have come so far, searching for a
safe harbor, but when the radio crackles to life, it delivers only bad news. The Americans have
turned them away. Without permission to dock, the ship is forced to turn back and make its way
slowly across the Atlantic. Some of the passengers will find refuge in Europe, but many will go
back to Germany and take their chances.

A man on the deck pulls the violin out of its case. He has sold everything but this to
finance his family’s escape, but now he is glad he kept it. It has survived centuries of wars and
purges—it will survive this one, as well. Of this, the man is certain. He can feel its story as well
as Dylan can. He plays a few tentative notes, adjusts the tuning pegs, then launches into an old
folk song. A few people nearby turn to listen. An elderly couple begins to dance. As America
sinks beneath the horizon, the notes of the violin are a balm.

• • •

Dylan opens a door to small storage closet. It is filled with cardboard boxes, plastic totes,
and cleaning supplies. An ordinary closet, except for the dusty violin case resting on the top
shelf. Dylan reaches for her backpack.

Martine returns from checking the entrance to see Dylan pushing the case back onto the
shelf.

“Any luck?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s the Bohemian, isn’t it? The real one.”

She pushes her way past Dylan and retrieves the case. There are dollar signs in her eyes
again as she opens it to reveal the violin inside.

“You have an extraordinary gift,” Martine says as she backs away toward the door, violin
case firmly in one hand, a knife in the other. “It’s a shame we couldn’t trust each other.”

Dylan remains motionless until she hears the front door close. That will trip the high-tech
lock, leaving only a minute or two to make her escape. She makes sure her backpack is secure
and then dashes for the balcony. There is enough rope to reach the ground, if she can get her
harness on and block out the memories that continue to come unbidden, one after another.

She is halfway to street level when an alarm begins to sound, and already boarding a bus
by the time building security arrives to investigate. By morning, she is miles away, clutching her
backpack as she knocks on the door of another apartment. This one is much humbler than the last
one she was in. This one is dusty, crammed with old photographs and the smell of mothballs.

The old man can barely see her, but his hearing is sharp. She reaches into the backpack
and pulls out a violin case. As he takes the case from her, she can feel his last memory of it. He
was just a boy when his father played it on the deck of that ship as they embarked on the long
voyage back to Europe. Since then, it has changed hands many times, but now it is home.

“This is it,” he mutters over and over as if he cannot believe it and needs to convince
himself. There are tears in his clouded eyes. Dylan takes the money, but she doesn’t bother to
count it.

“I think I still remember how to play. Would you like to listen?” the old man asks.

“No, thank you,” Dylan says. “I should be going.” By now, Martine will have realized
that the violin she has is not the Bohemian and a businessman in Hong Kong will wake up to the
news that the pride of his collection has been stolen. She will need to disappear again. She
touches her mother’s necklace, peels half the reward money off the stack to leave on the entry
table on her way out, and steps through the door before the old man can touch the bow to the
strings.