An interesting thing happened at our evaluation day in Dallas last weekend. My colleague Tucker Densley and I were half-way through the morning’s appointments when a woman walked in with a cello case. Inside was a very nice Camillo Mandelli cello (we’ll call it that for privacy purposes…).
There was something strange about the situation from the begining–the woman didn’t seem to know anything about the cello and was cagey with the circumstances by which she acquired the cello–”inherited from a friend,” she told us. We gave her an auction estimate for the cello and she said she needed to think about it. We left her with some auction literature and told her we’d be happy to help with the cello when the time comes.
Then, about four hours later a man walks in with a cello bow to consign. In the course of conversation it comes out that he is selling his bow to replace his beloved Camillo Mandelli cello which was stolen from inside a cafe just two months before. This seems like too rare a coincidence that two Mandelli cellos would live in Dallas so we ask him to describe it. Sure enough he describes the varnish, wood, label and case with perfect accuracy. You should have seen his face when we told him we had just seen his cello that morning. I think we made his day…
He had filed a police-report at the time of loss and within 10 minutes we had the detective on the phone. The detective called the woman and asked her to bring the cello to the police station which she did. It turns out she bought it at a pawn-shop–or so the story goes–and was very cooperative. The owner is delighted to have his cello back…