Stradivarius. Donald P. Ladew

      PRELUDE

      THE NORTHERN ITALIAN TOWN OF CREMONA - FALL 1685

      The Maestro slid back from his bench and stretched. He pushed his cloak away from his face and ran callused fingers through thick coal-black hair. The afternoon sun washed the medieval town of Cremona with crimson and orange. It poured through the two arched windows on the west side of an ancient tower built by invading armies from the north. In the distance the river Po turned gold. The autumn sun brought little warmth to the Maestro’s hands.

      The tower wasn’t really a tower, but in Cremona where buildings were stacked so close one could have leapt from one to the other, it stood apart. In the vaulted room the slowly shifting beams of light changed from rose to amber: lucent, liquid, filled with fine particles of wood that swirled in the afternoon air.

      This was a supreme moment. There had been other such moments, each unique.

      The Maestro picked up the violin and smiled. The wood, so intimately his, was true. He had endowed it with his art, his skill, his love. Now the result, many times magnified, flowed back to his callused hands.

      He tucked it between shoulder and chin, took it away, repeated the movement, pleased with it.

      Around the shop master carvers, artisans, apprentices, stopped their efforts and held their breath. Antonius Stradivarius, the Maestro of Cremona, picked up a bow, touched the horsehair with amber-colored resin, put it back down.

      The drama of the moment reached every corner of the room. With birth there is always anticipation, hope and magic. No Italian with an ounce of passion could allow such a moment to pass unmarked.

      He plucked each string in turn. The four liquid notes hung in the air, reverberating as though cast from the most perfect bell. They sang with extraordinary power.

      He picked up the bow again and held it over the strings. He paused, let his eyes scan the shop. Here his friends, his men of genius, transformed wood into instruments whose voices were alike unto the voices of saints.

      He closed his eyes and brought the bow close to the strings. The Maestro chose a simple, country song: lush, romantic, melodic. As he played, he smiled, his worn face beautiful to behold.

      The power of the instrument reached beyond anything he’d ever created. The violin’s voice filled the space effortlessly. When the song ended every man and boy let out a sigh, then stood as one and cheered.

      The Maestro bowed. A look of surprise covered his face. He could not believe he had created such a wondrous thing.

      “My friends, I shall name this one...Hercules.”

      Chapter 1

      SOUTH KOREA, FEBRUARY 1951

      A relentless, gray-brown world. Aching cold, a cruel wind driving clouds of debris across the landscape. War in winter: a hard-rock, vicious war; paranoid, xenophobic, wasteful, mean.

      There was no relief from one broken horizon to the other. Not one leaf, not one full standing tree.

      Amid a barrage of artillery and mortar fire, Master Sergeant Martin Luther Cole stumbled out of the trench that zigzagged down the south ridge of hill 406. It was one o’clock in the afternoon.

      Luther had slept four hours in the last thirty six. During the hours he was awake waves of Chinese and North Korean soldiers battered the narrow ridge. By one o’clock in the afternoon he commanded the remnants of two companies. Every officer and senior NCO had been killed or wounded.

      Of the twenty seven men he trained and brought to Korea, the last, private Rodriguez, had been killed in hand-to-hand combat an hour before.

      He searched the length of the trench for one, just one of his men that he could help. A dozen times he carried men to safety, only to have them killed in the next assault.

      That was what he was supposed to do. He had failed.

      The explosion was so close, he couldn’t hear it. It blew him to his hands and knees amidst a hailstorm of earth and stones. He tried to think. He tried to remember his name and could not. He sensed force, felt pain. Not minor pain, not bruises or scratches, not even the bayonet wounds on his arms.

      A hole went in the front of his shoulder and out through the large bone in the back. It burned with a terrible heat.

      Luther trembled like an animal beaten beyond understanding. His eyes locked onto his right wrist. He tried to comprehend what he saw. A three-inch wound filled with congealing blood in the shape of a half circle on both sides of his wrist.

      Teeth marks! He remembered. A Chinese soldier clung to him, clawing and biting until Luther, howling like a rabid dog, strangled the man with a length of barbed wire.

      He should do something; act, move, but he couldn’t force his body to respond. Awareness had been compressed, pounded, beaten inward. The spirit that was Martin Luther Cole was blind, hidden behind a wall of reality as dense as the center of a star.

      An enormous explosion, preceded by a giant, metal-tearing screech, ripped into the hill top, and Luther, still kneeling, was thrown backward off the hill, down the steep rear-facing slope.

      He rolled and tumbled away, a helpless mote on the surface of an insignificant planet, itself a fleck of dust in the eye of God. At the bottom of the hill he staggered to his feet.

      The explosion and fall down the hillside added no more than bruises to a litany of harsher wounds. And as if his flight down the hill were a step on an incomplete journey to oblivion, he rose and stumbled away to the

Скачать книгу