Death at La Fenice

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Death at La Fenice

[Commissario Brunetti 01]

By Donna Leon

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Ah, signor, son rea di morte

E la morte io sol vi chiedo;

Il mio fallo tardi vedo;

Con quel ferro un sen ferite

Che non merita pietà.

Ah, sir, I’m guilty to death

And all I ask is death;

Too late I see my sin.

With your sword pierce this breast,

Which merits no pity.

—Cosi Fan Tutte

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CHAPTER ONE

The third gong, announcing that the opera was about to continue, sounded discreetly through the lobbies and bars of Teatro La Fenice. In response, the audience stabbed out cigarettes, finished drinks and conversations, and started to filter back into the theater. The hall, brightly lit between acts, hummed with the talk of those returning to their seats. Here a jewel flashed, there a mink cape was adjusted over a naked shoulder or an infinitesimal speck of dust was flicked from a satin lapel. The upper galleries filled up first, followed by the orchestra seats and then the three rows of boxes.

The lights dimmed, the hall grew dark, and the tension created by an ongoing performance mounted as the audience waited for the conductor to reappear on the podium. Slowly the hum of voices faded, the members of the orchestra stopped fidgeting in their seats, and the universal silence announced everyone’s readiness for the third and final act.

The silence lengthened, grew heavy. From the first gallery, there came a burst of coughing; someone dropped a book, perhaps a purse; but the door to the corridor behind the orchestra pit remained closed.

The first to talk were the players in the orchestra. A second violinist leaned over to the woman next to him and asked if she had made her vacation plans. In the second row, a bassoonist told an oboist that the Benetton sales were starting next day. The people in the first tiers of boxes, who could best see the musicians, soon imitated their soft chatter. The galleries joined in, and then those in the orchestra seats, as though the wealthy would be the last to give in to this sort of behavior.

The hum grew to a murmur. Minutes passed. Suddenly the folds of the dense green velvet curtain were pulled back and Aamdeo Fasini, the theater’s artistic director, stepped awkwardly through the narrow opening. The technician in the light box above the second gallery, with no idea of what was going on, decided to center a hot white spot on the man at center stage. Blinded, Fasini shot up his arm to shield his eyes. Still holding his arm raised in front of him, as if to protect himself from a blow, he began to speak: ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ and then he stopped, gesturing wildly with his left hand to the technician, who, realizing his error, switched off the light. Released from his temporary blindness, the man on the stage started again. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that Maestro Wellauer is unable to continue the performance.’ Whispers, questions, rose from the audience, silk rustled as heads turned, but he continued to speak above the noise. ‘His place will be taken by Maestro Longhi.’ Before the hum could rise to drown him out, he asked, voice insistently calm, ‘Is there a doctor in the audience?’

His question met a long pause, then people began to look around them: who would be the one to present himself? Almost a full minute passed. Finally, a hand rose slowly in one of the first rows of the orchestra, and a woman got out of her seat. Fasini waved a hand to one of the uniformed ushers at the back of the house, and the young man hurried to the end of the row where the woman now stood. ‘If you would, Dottoressa,’ Fasini said, sounding as if he were in pain and needed the doctor for himself. ‘Please go backstage with the usher.’

He glanced up into the horseshoe of the still-darkened hall, tried to smile, failed, and abandoned the attempt. ‘Excuse, ladies and gentlemen, the difficulty. The opera will now continue.’

Turning, the artistic director fumbled at the curtain, unable for a moment to find the opening through which he had come. Disembodied hands parted the curtain from behind, and he slipped through, finding himself in the bare garret where Violetta was soon to die. From out in front, he heard the tentative applause that greeted the substitute conductor as he took his place on the podium.

Singers, chorus members, stagehands appeared from all around him, as curious as the audience had been but far more vocal. Though the power of his position usually protected him from contact with members of the company as low in standing as these, the director could not now avoid them, their questions, their whispers. ‘It’s nothing, nothing,’ he said to no one in particular, then he waved at them all, trying to clear them, with that gesture, from the stage upon which they flocked. The music of the prelude was drawing to a close; soon the curtain would open on the evening’s Violetta, who now sat nervously on the edge of the cot at the center of the stage. Fasini redoubled the intensity of his gestures, and singers and stagehands began to move off to the wings, where they continued to whisper among themselves. He snarled a furious ‘Silenzio’ and waited for it to take effect. When he saw the curtains inching apart to reveal the stage, he hurried to join the stage manager, who stood off to stage right, beside the doctor. A short, dark woman, she stood directly under a No Smoking sign, with an unlighted cigarette in her hand.

‘Good evening, Doctor,’ Fasini said, forcing himself to smile. She dropped the cigarette into the pocket of her jacket and shook his hand. ‘What is it?’ she finally asked as, from behind them, Violetta began to read the letter from Germont père.

Fasini rubbed his hands together briskly, as if the gesture would help him decide what to say. ‘Maestro Wellauer has been . . .’ he began, but he found no satisfactory way to finish the sentence.

‘Is he sick?’ asked the doctor impatiently.

‘No, no, he’s not sick,’ Fasini said, and then words left him. He returned to rubbing his hands together.

‘Perhaps I had better see him,’ she said, making it a question. ‘Is he here in the theater?’

When Fasini continued incapable of speech, she asked, ‘Has he been taken somewhere else?’

This prodded the director. ‘No, no. He’s in the dressing room.’

‘Then hadn’t we better go there?’

‘Yes, of course, Doctor,’ he agreed, glad of the suggestion. He led her off to the right, past a grand piano and a harp draped with a dull green dust cover, down a narrow corridor. He stopped at the end, before a closed door. A tall man stood in front of it.

‘Matteo,’ Fasini began, turning back toward the doctor. ‘This is Doctor—’

‘Zorzi,’ she supplied curtly. This hardly seemed a time for formal introductions.

At the arrival of his superior and someone he was told was a doctor, Matteo, the assistant stage manager, was all too eager to step away from the door. Fasini moved past him, pulled the door half open, looked back over his shoulder, then allowed the doctor to precede him into the small room.

Death had distorted the features of the man who was slumped across the easy chair at the center of the room. His eyes stared out at nothingness; his lips were pulled back in a fierce grimace. His body canted heavily to one side, head thrust against the chair back. A trail of dark liquid stained the starched and gleaming front of his shirt. For a moment, the doctor thought it was blood. She took a step closer and smelled, rather than saw, that it was coffee. The scent that mingled with the coffee was equally distinctive, the cutting, sour almond smell she had only read about.

She had seen so much of death that it was unnecessary for her to try to find his pulse, but she did place the fingers of her right hand under his upraised chin. Nothing, but she noticed that the skin was still warm. She stepped back from the body and looked around. On the floor in front of him were a small saucer and the cup that had held the coffee that trailed down the front of his shirt. She knelt and placed the back of her fingers against the side of the cup, but it was cold to the touch.

Rising, she spoke to the two men who stood near the door, content to leave her to the business of death. ‘Have you called the police?’ she asked.

‘Yes, yes,’ Fasini muttered, not really hearing her question.

‘Signore,’ she said, speaking clearly and raising her voice so that there could be no question of his hearing her. ‘There’s nothing I can do here. This is a matter for the police. Have you called them?’

‘Yes,’ he repeated, but he still gave no sign that he had heard or understood what she said. He stood staring down at the dead man, trying to grasp the horror, and the scandal, of what he saw.

Abruptly the doctor pushed her way past him and out into the corridor. The assistant stage manager followed her. ‘Call the police,’ she commanded him. When he nodded and moved off to do as she had ordered, she reached into her pocket for the cigarette she had dropped there, fingered it back into shape, and lit it. She pulled in a deep breath of smoke and glanced down at her watch. Mickey’s left hand stood between the ten and the eleven, and his right was just on seven. She leaned back against the wall and waited for the police to arrive.

* * * *

CHAPTER TWO

Because this was Venice, the police came by boat, blue light flashing on the forward cabin. They pulled up at the side of the small canal behind the theater, and four men got out, three in blue uniform and one in civilian clothes. Quickly they walked up the calle, or narrow street, alongside the theater and continued through the stage entrance, where the portiere, who had been warned of their arrival, pushed the button that released the turnstile and allowed them to walk freely into the backstage area. He pointed silently to a staircase.

At the top of the first flight of steps, they were met by the still-stunned director. He started to extend his hand to the civilian, who seemed to be in charge, but forgot about the gesture and wheeled around, saying over his shoulder, ‘This way.’ Advancing down a short corridor, he stopped at the door to the conductor’s dressing room. There he stopped and, reduced to gestures, pointed inside.

Guido Brunetti, a commissario of police for the city, was the first through the door. When he saw the body in the chair, he held up his hand and signaled the uniformed officers not to come any farther into the room. The man was clearly dead, body twisted backward, face horribly distorted, so there was no need to search for a sign of life; there would be none.

The dead man was as familiar to Brunetti as he was to most people in the Western world, if not because they had actually seen him on the podium, then because they had, for more than four decades, seen his face, with its chiseled Germanic jaw, its too-long hair that had remained raven black well into his sixties, on the covers of magazines and the front pages of newspapers. Brunetti had seen him conduct twice, years before, and he had, during the performance, found himself watching the conductor, not the orchestra. As if in the grip of a demon, or a deity, Wellauer’s body had swept back and forth above the podium, left hand clutched half open, as if he wanted to rip the sound from the violins. In his right hand, the baton was a weapon, flashing now here, now there, a thunderbolt that summoned up waves of sound. But now, in death, all sign of the deity had fled, and there remained only the leering demon’s mask.

Brunetti turned his eyes away and glanced around the room. He saw the cup lying on the floor, the saucer not far from it. That explained the dark stains on the shirt and, Brunetti was sure, the horribly twisted features.

Still only a short distance into the room, Brunetti remained still and let his eyes roam, taking note of what he saw, uncertain about what any of it might come to mean, curious. He was a surprisingly neat man: tie carefully knotted, hair shorter than was the fashion; even his ears lay close to his head, as if reluctant to call attention to themselves. His clothing marked him as Italian. The cadence of his speech announced that he was Venetian. His eyes were all policeman.

He reached forward and touched the back of the dead man’s wrist, but the body was cold, the skin dry to the touch. He took one last look around and turned to one of the men who stood behind him. He told him to call the medical examiner and the photographer. He told the second officer to go downstairs and speak to the portiere. Who was backstage that night? Have the portiere make a list. To the third, he said he wanted the names of anyone who had spoken to the Maestro that evening, either before the performance or during the intermissions.

He stepped to the left and opened the door to a small bathroom. The single window was closed, as the one in the dressing room had been. In the closet hung a dark overcoat and three starched white shirts.

He went back into the dressing room and across to the body. With the back of his fingers, he pushed aside the lapels of the dead man’s jacket and pulled open the inner pocket. He found a handkerchief, and holding it by a corner, he pulled it out slowly. There was nothing else in the pocket. He repeated the same process with the side pockets, finding the usual things: a few thousand lire in small bills; a key with a plastic tag attached to it, probably the key to this room; a comb; another handkerchief. He didn’t want to disturb the body until it had been photographed, so he left the pockets of the trousers until later.

The three policemen, satisfied that there was a certifiable victim, had gone off to follow Brunetti’s orders. The director of the theater had disappeared. Brunetti stepped out into the corridor, hoping to find him and get some idea of how long ago the body had been discovered. Instead he found a small, dark woman, leaning against the wall, smoking. From behind them came deep waves of music.

‘What’s that?’ Brunetti asked.

‘La Traviata,’ the woman replied simply.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Does that mean they went on with the performance?’

‘ “Even if the whole world falls,”‘ she said, giving it that heavy weight and emphasis usually reserved for quotations.

‘Is that something from Traviata?’ he asked.

‘No; Turandot.’ she responded, voice calm.

‘Yes, but still,’ he protested. ‘Out of respect for the man.’

She shrugged, tossed her cigarette to the cement floor, ground it out with her foot.

‘And you are?’ he finally asked.

‘Barbara Zorzi,’ she answered, then amended it, though he hadn’t asked. ‘Dr. Barbara Zorzi. I was in the audience when they asked for a doctor, so I came back here and found him, at exactly ten thirty-five. His body was still warm, so I’d estimate he had been dead for less than half an hour. The coffee cup on the floor was cold.’

‘You touched it?’

‘Only with the back of my fingers. I thought it might be important to know if it was still warm. It wasn’t.’ She took another cigarette from her bag, offered him one, didn’t seem surprised when he refused, and lit it for herself.

‘Anything else, Doctor?’

‘It smells like cyanide,’ she answered. ‘I’ve read about it, and we worked with it once, in pharmacology. The professor wouldn’t let us smell it; he said even the fumes were dangerous.’

‘Is it really that toxic?’ he asked.

‘Yes. I forget how little is necessary to kill a person; far less than a gram. And it’s instantaneous. Everything simply stops—heart, lungs. He would have been dead, or at least unconscious, before the cup hit the floor.’

‘Did you know him?’ Brunetti asked.

She shook her head. ‘No more than anyone who likes opera knew him. Or anyone who reads Gente,’ she added, naming a gossip magazine he found it difficult to believe she would read.

She looked up at him and asked, ‘Is that all?’

‘Yes, Doctor, I think so. Would you leave your name with one of my men so that we can contact you if we have to?’

‘Zorzi, Barbara,’ she said, not at all impressed by his official voice and manner. ‘I’m the only one in the phone book.’

She dropped the cigarette and stepped on it, then extended her hand to him. ‘Goodbye, then. I hope this doesn’t become too ugly.’ He didn’t know if she meant for the Maestro, the theater, the city, or for him, so he merely nodded his thanks and shook her hand. As she left, it struck Brunetti how strangely similar his work was to that of a doctor. They met over the dead, both asking ‘Why?’ But after they found the answer to that question, their paths parted, the doctor going backward in time to find the physical cause, and he going forward to find the person responsible.

Fifteen minutes later, the medical examiner arrived, bringing with him a photographer and two white-jacketed attendants whose job it would be to take the body to the Civil Hospital. Brunetti greeted Dr. Rizzardi warmly and explained as much as he had learned about the probable time of death. Together, they went back to the dressing room. Rizzardi, a fastidiously dressed man, pulled on latex gloves, checked his watch automatically, and knelt beside the body. Brunetti watched him as he examined the victim, oddly touched to see that he treated the corpse with the same respect he would give to a living patient, touching it softly and, when necessary, turning it gently, helping the awkward movement of stiffening flesh with practiced hands.

‘Could you take the things from his pockets, Doctor?’ Brunetti asked, since he didn’t have gloves and didn’t want to add his prints to anything that might be found. The doctor complied, but all he found was a slim wallet, alligator perhaps, which he pulled out by one corner and placed on the table beside him.

He got to his feet and stripped off his gloves. ‘Poison. Obviously. I’d say it was cyanide; in fact, I’m sure it was, though I can’t tell you that officially until after the autopsy. But from the way his body’s bent backward, it can’t be anything else.’ Brunetti noticed that the doctor had closed the dead man’s eyes and attempted to ease the corners of his distorted mouth. ‘It’s Wellauer, isn’t it?’ the doctor asked, though the question was hardly necessary.

When Brunetti nodded, the doctor exclaimed, ‘Maria Vergine, the mayor’s not going to like this at all.’

‘Then let the mayor find out who did it,’ Brunetti shot back.

‘Yes, stupid of me. Sorry, Guido. We should be thinking of the family.’

As if on cue, one of the three uniformed policemen came to the door and signaled Brunetti. When he emerged from the room, he saw Fasini standing next to a woman he assumed was the Maestro’s daughter. She was tall, taller than the director, taller even than Brunetti, and to that she had added a crown of blond hair. Like the Maestro, she had a Slavic tilt to her cheekbones and eyes of a blue so clear as to be almost glacial.

When she saw Brunetti emerge from the dressing room, she took two quick steps away from the director. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked in heavily accented Italian. ‘What’s happened?’

‘I’m sorry, Signorina,’ Brunetti began.

Not hearing him, she cut him short and demanded, ‘What’s happened to my husband?’

Though surprised, Brunetti had the presence of mind to move to his right, effectively blocking her entrance to the room. ‘Signora, I’m sorry, but it would be better if you didn’t go in there.’ Why was it that they always knew what it was you had to tell them? Was it the tone, or did some sort of animal instinct cause us to hear death in the voice that bore the news?

The woman slumped to one side, as though she had been struck. Her hip slammed against the keyboard of the piano, filling the corridor with discordant sound. She braced her body with a stiff outthrust hand, palm smashing more discord from the keys. She said something in a language Brunetti didn’t understand, then put her hand to her mouth in a gesture so melodramatic it had to be natural.

It seemed, in this moment, that he had spent his entire life doing this to people, telling them that someone they loved was dead or, worse, had been killed. His brother, Sergio, was an x-ray technician and had to wear a small metallic card pinned to his lapel that would turn a strange color if it was exposed to dangerous amounts of radiation. Had he worn a similar device, sensitive to grief or pain or death, it would have changed color permanently long ago.

She opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘I want to see him.’

‘I think it would be better if you didn’t,’ he answered, knowing that this was true.

‘What happened?’ She strove for calm, and she achieved it.

‘I think it was poison,’ he said, though in fact he knew.

‘Someone killed him?’ she asked with astonishment that appeared to be real. Or practiced.

‘I’m sorry, Signora. There are no answers I can give you now. Is there someone here who can take you home?’ From behind them, he could hear the sudden crash of applause, then wave upon wave of it. She gave no sign that she had heard it or his question, simply stared at him and moved her mouth silently.

‘Is there anyone in the theater who can take you home, Signora?’

She nodded, at last understanding him. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, then added in a softer voice, ‘I need to sit.’ He was prepared for this, the sudden blow of reality that sets in after the first shock. It was this that knocked people down.

He put his arm under hers and led her out into the backstage area. Though tall, she was so slender that her weight was easy to support. The only space he could see was a small cubicle on the left, crowded with light panels and equipment he didn’t recognize. He lowered her into the chair in front of the panel and signaled to one of the uniformed officers, who had appeared from the wing, which swarmed now with people in costume, taking bows and crowding into groups as soon as the curtain was closed.

‘Go down to the bar and get a glass of brandy and a glass of water,’ he ordered the policeman.

Signora Wellauer sat in the straight-backed wooden chair, hands grasping the seat on either side of her, and stared at the floor. She shook her head from side to side in negation or in response to some inner conversation.

‘Signora, Signora, are your friends in the theater?’

She ignored him and continued with her silent dialogue.

‘Signora,’ he repeated, this time placing his hand on her shoulder. ‘Your friends, are they here?’

‘Welti,’ she said, not looking up. ‘I told them to meet me back here.’

The officer returned, carrying two glasses. Brunetti took the smaller one and handed it to her. ‘Drink this, Signora,’ he said. She took it and drank it down absently, then did the same with the water when he handed that to her, as though there were no difference between them.

He took the empty glasses and set them aside.

‘When did you see him, Signora?’

‘What?’

‘When did you see him?’

‘Helmut?’

‘Yes, Signora. When did you see him?’

‘We came in together. Tonight. Then I came back after ...’ Her voice trailed off.

‘After what, Signora?’ he asked.

She studied his face for a moment before she answered. ‘After the second act. But we didn’t speak. I was too late. He just said—no, he didn’t say anything.’ He couldn’t tell if her confusion was caused by shock or by difficulty with the language, but he was certain she was past the point where she could be asked questions.

Behind them, another wave of applause crashed out at them, rising and falling as the singers continued to take their curtain calls. Her eyes left him, and she lowered her head, though she seemed to have finished with her inner dialogue.

He told the officer to stay with her, adding that some friends would come to find her. When they did, she was free to go with them.

Leaving her, he went back to the dressing room, where the medical examiner and the photographer, who had arrived while Brunetti was speaking to Signora Wellauer, were preparing to leave.

‘Is there anything else?’ Dr. Rizzardi asked Brunetti when he came in.

‘No. The autopsy?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Will you do it?’

Rizzardi thought for a moment before he answered. ‘I’m not scheduled, but since I examined the body, the questore will probably ask me to do it.’

‘What time?’

‘About eleven. I should be finished by early afternoon.’

‘I’ll come out,’ Brunetti said.

‘It’s not necessary, Guido. You don’t have to come to San Michele. You can call, or I’ll call your office.’

‘Thanks, Ettore, but I’d like to come out. It’s been too long since I was there. I’d like to visit my father’s grave.’

‘As you like.’ They shook hands, and Rizzardi started for the door. He paused a moment, then added, ‘He was the last of the giants, Guido. He shouldn’t have died like this. I’m sorry this happened.’

‘So am I, Ettore, so am I.’ The doctor left, and the photographer followed after him. As soon as they were gone, one of the two ambulance attendants who had been standing by the window, smoking and looking at the people who passed through the small campo below, turned and moved toward the body, which now lay on a stretcher on the floor.

‘Can we take him out now?’ he asked in a disinterested voice.

‘No,’ Brunetti said. ‘Wait until everyone’s left the theater.’

The attendant who had remained near the window flipped his cigarette outside and came to stand at the opposite end of the stretcher. ‘That’ll be a long time, won’t it?’ he asked, making no attempt to disguise his annoyance. Short and squat, he spoke with a noticeable Neapolitan accent.

‘I don’t know how long it’ll be, but wait until the theater’s empty.’

The Neapolitan pushed back the sleeve of his white jacket and made a business of checking his watch. ‘Well, we’re scheduled to go off shift at midnight, and if we wait much longer, we won’t get back to the hospital until after that.’

The first one chimed in now. ‘Our union rules say we aren’t supposed to be kept working after our shift unless we’ve been given twenty-four hours’ notice. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do about something like this.’ He indicated the stretcher with the point of his shoe, as though it were something they’d found on the street.

For a moment, Brunetti was tempted to reason with them. That passed quickly. ‘You two stay here, and you don’t open the door to this room until I tell you to.’ When they didn’t respond, he asked, ‘Do you understand? Both of you?’ Still no answer. ‘Do you understand?’ he repeated.

‘But the union rules—’

‘Damn your union, and damn its rules,’ Brunetti exploded. ‘You take him out of here before I tell you to, and you’ll be in jail the first time you spit on the sidewalk or swear in public. I don’t want a circus when you remove him. So you wait until I tell you you can leave.’ Without waiting to ask if they now understood him, Brunetti turned and slammed out of the room.

In the open area at the end of the corridor he found chaos. People in and out of costume milled about; he could tell by their eager glances toward the closed door of the dressing room that the news of death had spread. He watched as the news spread even further, watched as two heads came together and then one turned sharply to stare down the length of the corridor at that door, behind which was hidden what they could only guess at. Did they want a sight of the body? Or only something to talk about in the bars tomorrow?

When he got back to Signora Wellauer, a man and a woman, both considerably older than she, were with her, the woman kneeling by her side. She had her arms around the widow, who was now openly sobbing. The uniformed policeman approached Brunetti. ‘I told you they can go,’ Brunetti told him.

‘Do you want me to go with them, sir?’

‘Yes. Did they tell you where she lives?’

‘By San Molisè, sir.’

‘Good; that’s close enough,’ Brunetti said, then added, ‘Don’t let them talk to anyone,’ thinking of reporters, who were sure to have heard by now. ‘Don’t take her out the stage entrance. See if there’s some way to go through the theater.’

‘Yes, sir,’ the officer answered, snapping out a salute so crisp Brunetti wished the ambulance attendants could have seen it.

‘Sir?’ he heard from behind him, and turned to see Corporal Miotti, the youngest of the three officers he had brought with him.

‘What is it, Miotti?’

‘I’ve got a list of the people who were here tonight: chorus, orchestra, stage crew, singers.’

‘How many?’

‘More than a hundred, sir,’ he said with a sigh, as if to apologize for the hundreds of hours of work the list represented.

‘Well,’ Brunetti said, then shrugged it away. ‘Go to the portiere and find out how you get through those turnstiles down there. What sort of identification do you have to have?’ The corporal scribbled away in a notebook as Brunetti continued to speak. ‘How else can you get in? Is it possible to get back here from the theater itself? Who did he come in with this evening? What time? Did anyone go into his dressing room during the performance? And the coffee, did it come up from the bar, or was it brought in from outside?’ He paused for a moment, thinking. ‘And see what you can find out about messages, letters, phone calls.’

‘Is that all, sir?’ Miotti asked.

‘Call the Questura and get someone to call the German police.’ Before Miotti could object, he said, ‘Tell them to call that German translator—what’s her name?’

‘Boldacci, sir.’

‘Yes. Tell them to call her and have her call the German police. I don’t care how late it is. Tell her to request a complete dossier on Wellauer. Tomorrow morning, if possible.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Brunetti nodded. The officer saluted and, notebook in hand, went back toward the flight of steps that would take him to the stage entrance.

‘And, Corporal,’ Brunetti said to his retreating back.

‘Yes, sir?’ he asked, pausing at the top of the steps.

‘Be polite.’

Miotti nodded, wheeled around, and was gone. The fact that he could say this to an officer without offending him made Brunetti newly grateful that he had been transferred back to Venice after five years in Naples.

Though the final curtain calls had been taken more than twenty minutes before, the people backstage gave no sign of leaving. A few who seemed to have more sense of purpose went among the rest, taking things from them: pieces of costume, belts, walking sticks, wigs. One man walked directly in front of Brunetti, carrying what looked like a dead animal. Brunetti looked again and saw that the man’s hands were filled with women’s wigs. From across the area behind the curtain, Brunetti saw Follin appear, the officer he had sent to call the medical examiner.

He came up to Brunetti and said, ‘I thought you might want to talk to the singers, sir, so I asked them to wait upstairs. And the director too. They didn’t seem to like it, but I explained what happened, so they agreed. But they still didn’t like it.’

Opera singers, Brunetti found himself thinking, then, repeating the thought, opera singers. ‘Good work. Where are they?’

‘At the top of the stairs, sir,’ he said, pointing toward a short flight that continued to the top floors of the theater. He handed Brunetti a copy of that night’s program.

Brunetti glanced down the list of names, recognizing one or two, then started up the stairs. ‘Who was the most impatient, Follin?’ Brunetti asked when they reached the top.

‘The soprano, Signora Petrelli,’ the officer answered, pointing toward a door that stood at the end of the corridor to the right.

‘Good,’ said Brunetti, turning left. ‘Then we’ll leave Signora Petrelli for the last.’ Follin’s smile made Brunetti wonder what the encounter between the eager policeman and the reluctant prima donna had been like.

‘Francesco Dardi—Giorgio Germont,’ read the typed cardboard rectangle that was tacked to the door of the first dressing room on his left. He knocked twice and heard an immediate cry of ‘Avanti!’

Seated at the small dressing table and busy wiping off his makeup was a baritone whose name Brunetti had recognized. Francesco Dardi was a short man, whose broad stomach pressed hard against the front of the dressing table as he leaned forward to see what he was doing. ‘Excuse me, gentlemen, if I don’t stand to greet you,’ he said, carefully toweling black makeup from around his left eye.

Brunetti nodded in response but said nothing.

After a moment, Dardi looked away from the mirror and up at the two men. ‘Well?’ he asked, then returned to his makeup.

‘Have you heard about this evening?’ Brunetti asked.

‘You mean about Wellauer?’

‘Yes.’

When his question got him no more than this monosyllabic reply, Dardi set down the towel and turned to look at the two policemen. ‘May I be of help, gentlemen?’ he asked, directing the question at Brunetti.

Since this was more to his liking, Brunetti smiled and answered pleasantly. ‘Yes, perhaps you can.’ He glanced down at the piece of paper in his hand, as if he needed to be reminded of the man’s name. ‘Signor Dardi, as you’ve heard by now, Maestro Wellauer died this evening.’

The singer acknowledged this news with a slight bow of his head, nothing more.

Brunetti continued. ‘I’d like to know as much as you can tell me about tonight, about what went on during the first two acts of the performance.’ He paused for a moment, and Dardi nodded again but said nothing.

‘Did you speak to the Maestro this evening?’

‘I saw him briefly,’ Dardi said, swinging around in his chair and going back to the business of removing his makeup. ‘When I came in, he was talking to one of the lighting technicians, something about the first act. I said “Buona sera” to him, then came up here to begin with my makeup. As you can see,’ he said, gesturing at his image in the mirror, ‘it takes a long time.’

‘What time was it you saw him?’ asked Brunetti.

‘At about seven, I’d say. Perhaps a bit later, maybe quarter after, but certainly no later than that.’

‘And did you see him at any time after that?’

‘Do you mean up here or backstage?’

‘Either.’

‘The only time I saw him after that was from the stage, when he was on the podium.’

‘Was the Maestro with anyone when you saw him this evening?’

‘I told you he was with one of the lighting crew.’

‘Yes, I remember that. Was he with anyone else?’

‘With Franco Santore. In the bar. They had a few words, but just as I was leaving.’

Although he recognized the name, Brunetti asked, ‘And this Signor Santore, who is he?’

Dardi didn’t seem at all surprised by Brunetti’s display of ignorance. After all, why should a policeman recognize the name of one of the most famous theatrical directors in Italy?

‘He’s the director,’ Dardi explained. He finished with the towel and tossed it on the table in front of him. ‘This is his production.’ The singer took a silk tie from where it lay on the far right side of the table, slipped it under the collar of his shirt, and carefully knotted it. ‘Is there anything else you’d like?’ he asked, voice neutral.

‘No, I think that will be all. Thank you for your help. If we want to speak to you again, Signor Dardi, where will We find you?’

‘The Gritti.’ The singer gave Brunetti a quick, puzzled glance, as if he wanted to know if other hotels actually existed in Venice but was somehow afraid to ask.

Brunetti thanked him and went out into the hallway with Follin. ‘We’ll try the tenor next, shall we?’ he asked as he glanced down at the program in his hand.

Nodding, Follin led him along the corridor to a door on the opposite side.

Brunetti knocked, paused a moment, heard nothing. He knocked again and heard a noise from inside, which he chose to interpret as an invitation to enter. When he did, he found a short, thin man, sitting fully dressed, coat over the arm of his chair, poised in an attitude learned in drama class, one that was meant to denote ‘annoyed impatience.’

‘Ah, Signor Echeveste,’ Brunetti gushed, walking quickly to him and extending his hand so that the other didn’t have to rise. ‘It is a tremendous honor to meet you.’ Had Brunetti been enrolled in the same class, he would have been working on the assignment ‘awe in the presence of staggering talent.’

Like a frozen stream in early March, Echeveste’s anger melted under the warmth of Brunetti’s flattery. With some difficulty, the young tenor pushed himself up from the chair and made a small, formal bow to Brunetti.

‘And whom have I the honor to meet?’ he asked in slightly accented Italian.

‘Commissario Brunetti, sir. I represent the police in this most unfortunate event.’

‘Ah, yes,’ replied the other, as though he’d once heard of the police, long ago, but had quite forgotten what they did. ‘You’re here, then, for all of this,’ he said, and paused, gesturing limply with his hand, waiting for someone to supply him with the proper word. Bidden, it came: ‘. . . this unfortunate affair with the Maestro.’

‘Yes, I am. Most unfortunate, most regrettable,’ Brunetti babbled, all the time keeping his eyes on the tenor’s. ‘Would it be too much trouble for you to answer a few questions?’

‘No, of course not,’ answered Echeveste, and he sank gracefully back into his chair, but not before carefully hiking up his trousers at the knee so as to preserve their knife-edged crease. ‘I’d like to be of help. His death is a great loss to the world of music.’

In the face of so stunning a platitude, Brunetti could do no more than bow his head reverently for a moment, then raise it to ask, ‘At what time did you reach the theater?’

Echeveste thought for a moment before he answered. ‘I’d say it was about seven-thirty. I was late. Delayed. You understand?’ and somehow, in the question, managed to convey the image of slipping reluctantly away from crumpled sheets and female allure.

‘And why were you late?’ Brunetti asked, knowing he was not supposed to and waiting to see how the question affected the fantasy.

‘I was having my hair cut,’ the tenor replied.

‘And the name of your barber?’ Brunetti asked politely.

The tenor named a shop only a few streets from the theater. Brunetti glanced at Follin, who made a note. He would check tomorrow.

‘And when you arrived at the theater, did you see the Maestro?’

‘No, no. I saw no one.’

‘And it was about seven-thirty when you arrived?’

‘Yes. As nearly as I can remember.’

‘Did you see or speak to anyone when you came in?’

‘No, I didn’t. No one at all’

Even before Brunetti could comment on the strangeness of that, Echeveste explained. ‘I didn’t come in, you see, through the stage entrance. I came in through the orchestra.’

‘I didn’t realize that was possible,’ Brunetti said, interested that there was access to the backstage area that way.

‘Well,’ Echeveste said, looking down at his hands. ‘It usually isn’t, but I have a friend who is an usher, and he let me in, so I didn’t have to use the stage entrance.’

‘Could you tell me why you did this, Signor Echeveste?’

The tenor raised a dismissive hand and allowed it to float languidly in front of them for a moment, as if hoping it would erase or answer the question. It did neither. He put the hand on top of the other and said, simply, ‘I was afraid.’

‘Afraid?’

‘Of the Maestro. I’d been late for two rehearsals, and he’d been very angry about it, shouting. He could be very unpleasant when he was angry. And I didn’t want to have to go through it again.’ Brunetti suspected that it was only respect for the dead that kept any word stronger than ‘unpleasant’ from being used.

‘So you came in that way to avoid seeing him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you see or speak to him at any time? Other than from the stage?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

Brunetti got to his feet and repeated his very theatrical smile. ‘Thank you very much for your time, Signor Echeveste.’

‘My pleasure,’ the other replied, rising from his seat. He looked at Follin, then back to Brunetti, and asked, ‘Am I free to go now?’

‘Of course. If you’d just tell me where you’re staying?’

‘The Gritti,’ he answered, with the same puzzled glance Dardi had given. It was enough to make a man wonder if there were other hotels in the city.

* * * *

CHAPTER THREE

When Brunetti emerged from the dressing room, he found Miotti waiting for him. The young officer explained that Franco Santore, the director, had refused to wait, saying that anyone who wanted to speak to him could find him at the Hotel Fenice, along the side of the theater. Brunetti nodded, almost pleased to be assured of the presence of other hotels in the city.

That leaves us the soprano,’ said Brunetti, heading down the corridor. The usual cardboard tag was stuck to the door. ‘Flavia Petrelli—Violetta Valéry.’ Below this, there was a line of what appeared to be Chinese characters sketched with a fine black pen.

He knocked at the door and signaled with a nod that the other two could remain outside.

‘Avanti!’ he heard, and opened the door.

Two women were waiting for him in the room, and it surprised him that he couldn’t tell which of them was the soprano. Like everyone in Italy, he knew of ‘La Petrelli.’ Brunetti had seen her sing only once, some years ago, and had a vague memory of seeing pictures of her in the newspapers.

The darker of the two women stood with her back to the dressing table, while the other sat in a straight wooden chair against the far wall. Neither of them spoke when he came in, and Brunetti used the silence to study them.

He guessed the woman who was standing to be in her late twenties or early thirties. She wore a purple sweater and a long black skirt that brushed against a pair of black leather boots. The boots were low-heeled and of glove-quality leather, and Brunetti vaguely recalled walking past the window of Fratelli Rossetti with his wife and hearing her exclaim at the madness of spending half a million lire for a pair of boots. These boots, he felt sure. She had shoulder-length black hair with a natural curl that would allow it to be cut with a spoon and still look perfect. Her eyes were out of place with her olive coloring, a clear green that made him think of glass but then, remembering those boots, of emeralds.

The seated woman appeared to be a few years older and wore her hair, in which there were a few specks of gray, cropped close to her head, like one of the Roman emperors of the centuries of decline. The severity of the cut emphasized the fineness of bone and nose.

He took a few steps toward the seated woman and made a motion that could have been taken for a bow. ‘Signora Petrelli?’ he asked. She nodded but said nothing. ‘I’m honored to meet you and regret only that it has to be in these unfortunate circumstances.’ Since she was one of the leading opera singers of the day, he found irresistible the temptation to speak to her in the excessive language of opera, as if he were playing a part.

She nodded again, doing nothing to remove the burden of speech from him.

‘I’d like to speak to you about the death of Maestro Wellauer.’ He glanced across the room to the other woman and added, ‘And speak to you too,’ leaving it to one of them to supply the second woman’s name.

‘Brett Lynch,’ the singer supplied. ‘My friend and secretary.’

‘Is that an American name?’ he asked the woman whose name it was.

‘Yes, it is,’ Signora Petrelli answered for her.

‘Then would it be better if we were to speak in English?’ he asked, not a little bit proud of the ease with which he could switch from one language to the other.

‘It would be easier if we spoke in Italian,’ the American said, speaking for the first time and using an Italian that displayed not the least accent. His reaction was entirely involuntary and was noticed by both women. ‘Unless you’d like to speak in Veneziano,’ she added, slipping casually into the local dialect, which she spoke perfectly. ‘But then Flavia might have trouble following what we say.’ It was entirely deadpan, but Brunetti realized it would be a long time before he’d flaunt his English again.

‘Italian, then,’ he said, turning back to Signora Petrelli. ‘Will you answer a few questions?’

‘Certainly,’ she answered. ‘Would you like a chair, Signor ...’

‘Brunetti,’ he supplied. ‘Commissario of police.’

The title appeared not to impress her in the least. ‘Would you like a chair, Dottor Brunetti?’

‘No, thank you.’ He pulled his notebook from his pocket, took the pen that was stuck between the pages, and prepared to give the appearance of taking notes, something he seldom did, preferring to let his eyes and mind roam freely during the first questioning.

Signora Petrelli waited until he had uncapped his pen, then asked, ‘What is it you would like to know?’

‘Did you see or speak to the Maestro tonight?’ Then, before she could offer it, he continued, ‘Aside from while you were on the stage, of course.’

‘No more than to say “Buona sera” when I came in and to wish one another “In boca al lupo.” Nothing more than that.’

‘And that was the only time you spoke to the Maestro?’

Before she answered, she glanced across toward the other woman. He kept his eyes on the soprano, so he had no idea of the other’s expression. The pause lengthened, but before he could repeat the question, the soprano finally answered. “No, I didn’t see him again. I saw him from the stage; of course, as you pointed out, but we didn’t speak again.’

‘Not at all?’

‘No, not at all,’ came her instant reply.

‘And during the intervals? Where were you?’

‘Here. With Signorina Lynch.’

‘And you, Signorina Lynch?’ he asked, pronouncing her name with complete lack of accent, though he had to concentrate to do it. ‘Where were you during the performance?’

‘Here in the dressing room for most of the first act. I went downstairs for “Sempre libera,” but then I came back up here. And I was here for the rest of the performance,’ she replied calmly.

He looked around the bare room, searching for something that could possibly have occupied her for that length of time. She caught his glance and pulled a slim volume from the pocket of her skirt. On it he saw Chinese characters such as those on the name card on the door.

‘I was reading,’ she explained, holding the book toward him. She gave him an entirely friendly smile, as though she were now ready to talk about the book, if he so desired.

‘And did you speak to Maestro Wellauer during the evening?’

As Signora Petrelli told you, we spoke to him when we came in, but after that I didn’t see him again.’ Brunetti, quelling the impulse to say that, no, Signora Petrelli had not mentioned that they had come in together, let her continue. ‘I couldn’t see him from where I was standing backstage, and I was here in the dressing room during both of the intervals.’

‘Here with Signora Petrelli?’

This time it was the American who glanced toward the other woman before she answered. ‘Yes, with Signora Petrelli, just as she told you.’

Brunetti closed his notebook, in which he had done no more than scribble the American’s last name, as if to capture the full horror of a word composed of five consonants. ‘In case there should be other questions, could you tell me where I might find you, Signora Petrelli?’

‘Cannaregio 6134,’ she said, surprising him by naming an entirely residential part of the city.

‘Is that your apartment, Signora?’

‘No, it’s mine,’ interrupted the other woman. ‘I’ll be there, too.’

He reopened his notebook and wrote down the address. Without missing a beat, he asked, ‘And the phone number?’

She gave him that as well, telling him that it was not listed, then added that the address was near the basilica of SS. Giovanni e Paolo.

Putting on his formal self, he bowed slightly and said, ‘Thank you both, Signore, and I’m sorry for your difficulty at this time.’

If either one of them found the words strange, neither gave any sign of it. After more polite exchanges, he left the dressing room and led the two officers who had been waiting for him outside down the narrow flight of stairs that led to the backstage area.

The third officer waited at the bottom of the steps.

‘Well?’ Brunetti asked him.

He smiled, pleased to have something to report ‘Both Santore, the director, and La Petrelli spoke to him in his dressing room. Santore went in before the performance, and she went in after the first act.’

‘Who told you?’

‘One of the stagehands. He said that Santore seemed to be angry when he left, but this was just an impression the man had. He didn’t hear any shouting or anything.’

‘And Signora Petrelli?’

‘Well, the man said he wasn’t sure it was La Petrelli but that she was wearing a blue costume.’

Miotti interrupted here. ‘She wears a blue dress in the first act.’

Brunetti gave him a quizzical look.

Was it possible that Miotti lowered his head before he spoke? ‘I saw a rehearsal last week, sir. And she wears a blue dress in the first act.’

‘Thank you, Miotti,’ Brunetti said, voice level.

‘It’s my girlfriend, sir. Her cousin’s in the chorus and he gets us tickets.’

Brunetti nodded, smiling, but he realized he would have liked it more if he hadn’t said that.

The officer who had been making his report shot back his cuff and looked at his watch. ‘Go on,’ Brunetti told him.

‘He said he saw her come out toward the end of the interval, and he said she was angry, very angry.’

‘At the end of the first interval?’

‘Yes, sir. He was sure of that.’

Taking a cue from the policeman, Brunetti said, ‘It’s late, and I’m not sure we can do much more here tonight.’ The others glanced around at the now empty theater. ‘Tomorrow, see if you can find anyone else who might have seen her. Or seen anyone else go in.’ Their mood seemed to lighten when he spoke of tomorrow. ‘That will be all for tonight. You can go.’ When they started to move away, he called, ‘Miotti, have they taken his body to the hospital yet?’

‘I don’t know, sir,’ he said, almost guiltily, as I hough afraid this would cancel out the approval he had received a moment before.

‘Wait here while I find out,’ Brunetti told him.

He walked back to the dressing room and opened the door without bothering to knock. The two attendants sat in easy chairs, feet on (he table that stood between them. On the floor beside them, covered by a sheet, entirely ignored, lay one of the greatest musicians of the century.

They looked up when Brunetti came in but gave no acknowledgment. ‘You can take him to the hospital now,’ he said, then turned and left the room, careful to close the door behind him.

Miotti was where he had left him, glancing through a notebook that was very similar to the one Brunetti carried. ‘Let’s go and have a drink,’ Brunetti said. ‘The hotel is probably the only place open at this hour.’ He sighed, tired now. ‘And I could use a drink.’ He started off to his left, but he found himself walking back toward the stage. The staircase seemed to have disappeared. He had been inside the theater for so long, up and down stairs, along corridors and back down them, that he was completely disoriented and had no idea how to get out.

Miotti touched him lightly on the arm and said, ‘This way, sir,’ leading him to the left and down the flight of steps they had first come up more than two hours before.

At the bottom, the portiere, seeing Miotti’s uniform, reached under the counter at which he sat and pushed the button that released the turnstile blocking the exit of the theater. He gestured that all they had to do was push. Knowing that Miotti would already have questioned the man about who had come in and out of the theater that night, Brunetti didn’t bother to ask him any questions but passed directly out of the theater and into the empty campo beyond the door.

Before they started up the narrow street that led to the hotel, Miotti asked, ‘Are you going to need me for this, sir?’

‘You don’t have to worry about having a drink while you’re still in uniform,’ Brunetti assured him.

‘No, its not that, sir.’ Perhaps the boy was simply tired.

‘What is it, then?’

‘Well, sir, the portiere is a friend of my lather’s, so I thought that if I went back now, and maybe I asked him to come and have a drink, maybe he’d tell me something more than he did before.’ When Brunetti didn’t respond, he said quickly, ‘It was just an idea, sir. I don’t mean to…’

‘No, it’s a good idea. Very good. Go back and talk to him. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. No need to get there before nine, I think.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Miotti said with an eager smile. He snapped out a salute that Brunetti answered with a cursory wave of his hand, and the young man turned back toward the theater and the business of being a policeman.

* * * *

CHAPTER FOUR

Brunetti walked up toward the hotel, still lighted, even at this hour when the rest of the city was darkened and sleeping. Once the capital of the dissipations of a continent, Venice had become a sleepy provincial town that virtually ceased to exist after nine or ten at night. During the summer months, she could remember her courtesan past and sparkle, as long as the tourists paid and the good weather held, but in the winter, she became a tired old crone, eager to crawl early to bed, leaving her deserted streets to cats and memories of the past.

But these were the hours when, for Brunetti, the city became most beautiful, just as they were the same hours when he, Venetian to the bone, could sense some of her past glory. The darkness of the night hid the moss that crept up the steps of the palazzi lining the Grand Canal, obscured the cracks in the walls of churches, and covered the patches of plaster missing from the facades of public buildings. Like many women of a certain age, the city needed the help of deceptive light to recapture her vanished beauty. A boat that, during the day, was making a delivery of soap powder or cabbages, at night became a numinous form, floating toward some mysterious destination. The fogs that were common in these winter days could transform people and objects, even turn long-haired teenagers, hanging around a street corner and sharing a cigarette, into mysterious phantoms from the past.

He glanced up at the stars, seen clearly above the darkness of the unlighted street, and noticed their beauty. Holding their image in mind, he continued toward the hotel.

The lobby was empty and had the abandoned look common to public places at night. Behind the reception desk, the night potter sat, chair tilted back against the wall, that day’s pink sporting newspaper open before him. An old man in a green-and-black-striped apron was busy spreading sawdust on the marble floor of the lobby and sweeping it clean. When Brunetti saw that he had trailed his way through the fine wooden chips and couldn’t traverse the lobby without tracking a path across the already swept floor, he looked at the old man and said, ‘Scusi.’

‘It’s nothing,’ the old man said, and trailed after him with his broom. The man behind the newspaper didn’t even bother to look up.

Brunetti continued on into the lobby of the hotel. Six or seven clusters of large stuffed chairs were pulled up around low tables. Brunetti threaded his way through them and went to join the only person in the room. If the press was to be believed, the man sitting there was the best stage director currently working in Italy. Two years before, Brunetti had seen his production of a Pirandello play at the Goldoni Theater and had been impressed with it, far more with the direction than with the acting, which had been mediocre. Santore was known to be homosexual, but in the theatrical world where a mixed marriage was one between a man and a woman, his personal life had never served as an impediment to his success. And now he was said to have been seen angrily leaving the dressing room of a man who had died violently not too long afterward.

Santore rose to his feet as Brunetti approached. They shook hands and exchanged names. Santore was a man of average height and build, but he had the face of a boxer at the end of an unlucky career. His nose was squat, its skin large-pored. His mouth was broad, his lips thick and moist. He asked Brunetti if he would like a drink, and from that mouth came words spoken in the purest of Florentine accents, pronounced with the clarity and grace of an actor. Brunetti thought Dante must have sounded like this.

When Brunetti accepted his suggestion that they have brandy, Santore went off for some. Left alone, Brunetti looked down at the book the other man had left open on the table in front of him, then pulled it toward him.

Santore came back, carrying two snifters, each generously filled with brandy.

‘Thanks,’ Brunetti said, accepting the glass and taking a large swallow. He pointed at the book and decided to begin with that, rather than with the usual obvious questions about where he had been, what he had done. ‘Aeschylus?’

Santore smiled at the question, hiding any surprise he might have felt that a policeman could read the title in Greek.

‘Are you reading it for pleasure, or for work?’

‘I suppose you could call it work,’ Santore answered, and sipped at his brandy. ‘I’m supposed to begin work on a new production of the Agamemnon in Rome in three weeks.’

‘In Greek?’ Brunetti asked, but it was clear that he didn’t mean it.

‘No, in translation.’ Santore was silent for a moment, but then he allowed his curiosity to get the better of him. ‘How is it that a policeman reads Greek?’

Brunetti swirled the liquid around in his glass. ‘Four years of it. But a long time ago. I’ve forgotten almost all I knew.’

‘But you can still recognize Aeschylus?’

‘I can read the letters. I’m afraid that’s all that’s left.’ He took another swallow of his drink and added, ‘I’ve always liked it about the Greeks that they kept the violence off the stage.’

‘Unlike us?’ Santore asked, then asked again, ‘Unlike this?’

‘Yes, unlike this,’ Brunetti admitted, not even bothering to wonder how Santore would have learned that the death had been violent. The theater was small, so he had probably learned that even before the police did, probably even before they had been called.

‘Did you speak to him this evening?’ There was no need to use a name.

‘Yes. We had an argument before the first curtain. We met in the bar and went back to his dressing room. That’s where it started.’ Santore spoke without hesitation. ‘I don’t remember if we were shouting at each other, but our voices were raised.’

‘What were you arguing about?’ Brunetti asked, as calmly as if he’d been talking to an old friend and equally certain that he would get the truth in response.

‘We had come to a verbal agreement about this production. I kept my part of it. Helmut refused to keep his.’

Instead of asking Santore to clarify the remark, Brunetti finished his brandy and set the glass on the table between them, waiting for him to continue.

Santore cupped his hands around the bottom of his glass and rolled it slowly from side to side. ‘I agreed to direct this production because he promised to help a friend of mine to get a job this summer, at the Halle Festival. It isn’t a big festival, and the part wasn’t an important one, but Helmut agreed to speak to the directors and ask that my friend be given the part. Helmut was going to be conducting just the one opera there.’ Santore brought the glass to his lips and took a sip. ‘That’s what the argument was about.’

‘What did you say during the argument?’

‘I’m not sure I remember everything I said, or what he said, but I do remember saying that I thought what he’d done, since I’d already done my part, was dishonest and immoral.’ He sighed. ‘You always ended up talking like him, when you talked to Helmut.’

‘What did he say to that?’

‘He laughed.’

‘Why?’

Before he answered, Santore asked, ‘Would you like another drink? I’m going to have one.’

Brunetti nodded, grateful. This time, while Santore was gone, he laid his head against the back of the chair and closed his eyes.

He opened them when he heard Santore’s steps approach. He took the glass that the other man handed him and asked, as if there had been no break in the conversation, ‘Why did he laugh?’

Santore lowered himself into his chair, this time holding the glass with one hand cupped under it. ‘Part of it, I suppose, is that Helmut thought himself above common morality. Or perhaps he thought he’d managed to create his own, different from ours, better.’ Brunetti said nothing, so he continued: ‘It’s almost as if he alone had the right to define what morality meant, almost as if he thought no one else had the right to use the term. He certainly thought I had no right to use it.’ He shrugged, sipped.

‘Why would he think that?’

‘Because of my homosexuality,’ the other answered simply, suggesting that he considered the issue equal in importance to, say, a choice of newspaper.

‘Is that the reason he refused to help your friend?’

‘In the end, yes,’ Santore said. ‘At first, he said it was because Saverio wasn’t good enough, didn’t have enough stage experience. But the real reason came later, when he accused me of wanting a favor for my lover.’ He leaned forward and put his glass down on the table. ‘Helmut has always seen himself as a sort of guardian of public morals,’ he said, then corrected his grammar. ‘Saw himself.’

‘And is he?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Is who what?’ Santore asked, all grammar forgotten in his confusion.

‘Is he your lover, this singer?’

‘Oh, no. He’s not. More’s the pity.’

‘Is he homosexual?’

‘No, not that, either.’

‘Then why did Wellauer refuse?’

Santore looked at him directly and asked, ‘How much do you know about him?’

‘Very little, and that only about his life as a musician, and only what’s been in the newspapers and magazines all these years. But about him as a man I know nothing.’ And that, Brunetti realized, was beginning to interest him a great deal, for the answer to his death must lie there, as it always did.

Santore said nothing, so Brunetti prompted him. ‘Never speak ill of the dead, vero? Is that it?’

‘And never speak ill of someone you might have to work with again,’ Santore added.

Brunetti surprised himself by saying, ‘That hardly seems to be the case here. What ill is to be spoken?’

Santore glanced across at the policeman and studied his face, giving it the sort of speculative look that he might give to an actor or a singer he was deciding how to use in a performance. ‘It’s mostly rumor,’ he finally said.

‘What sort of rumor?’

‘That he was a Nazi. No one knows for sure, or if they ever knew, no one is saying, or whatever they might have said in the past has been forgotten, dropped into that place where memory does not follow. He conducted for them while they were in power. It’s even said he conducted for the Führer. But he said he had to do it to save some of the people in his orchestra, who were Jews. And they did survive the war, those who were Jews, and managed to play in the orchestra all through the war years. And so did he, play and survive. And somehow his reputation never suffered because of all those years or because of those intimate concerts for the Führer. After the war,’ Santore continued, voice strangely calm, ‘he said he had been “morally opposed” and had conducted against his will.’ He took a small sip of his drink. ‘I’ve no idea what’s true, whether he was a member of the party or not, what his involvement was. And I suppose I don’t care.’

‘Then why do you mention it?’ Brunetti asked.

Santore laughed out loud, his voice filling the empty room. ‘I suppose because I believe it’s true.’

Brunetti smiled. ‘That could be the case.’

‘And probably because I do care?’

‘That as well,’ Brunetti agreed.

They allowed the silence to expand between them until Brunetti asked, ‘How much do you know?’

‘I know that he gave those concerts all during the war. And I know that, in one case, the daughter of one of his musicians went to him in private and begged him to help her father. And I know that the musician survived the war.’

‘And the daughter?’

‘She survived the war.’

‘Well, then?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Then nothing, I suppose.’ Santore shrugged. ‘Besides, it’s always been easy to forget the man’s past and think only of his genius. There was no one like him, and I’m afraid there’s no conductor like him left.’

‘Is that why you agreed to direct this production for him—because it was convenient to forget his past?’ It was a question, not an insult, and Santore clearly took it as such.

‘Yes,’ he answered softly. ‘I chose to direct it so that my friend would get the chance to sing with him. So it was convenient for me to forget all that I knew or suspected, or at least to ignore it. I’m not sure it matters all that much, not anymore.’

Brunetti watched an idea appear in Santore’s face. ‘But now he won’t get to sing with Helmut, ever,’ and he added, to let Brunetti know that the purpose of the conversation had never been far beneath its surface, ‘which would seem to argue that I had no reason to kill him.’

‘Yes, that would seem to follow,’ Brunetti agreed, with no apparent interest, then asked, ‘Did you ever work with him before?’

‘Yes. Six years ago. In Berlin.’

‘Your homosexuality didn’t present difficulties then?’

‘No. It never presented real difficulties, once I was famous enough for him to want to work with me. Helmut’s stand, as a sort of guardian angel of Western morality or biblical standards, was pretty well known, but you can’t survive very long in this world if you refuse to work with homosexuals. Helmut just made his own sort of moral truce with us.’

‘And you did the same with him?’

‘Certainly. As a musician, he was as close to perfection as a man could come. It was worth putting up with the man to be able to work with the musician.’

‘Was there anything else about the man you found objectionable?’

Santore thought a long time before he answered this. ‘No, there’s nothing else I knew about him that would make me dislike him. I don’t find the Germans sympathetic, and he was very Germanic. But its not dislike or liking that I’m talking about. It was this sense of moral superiority he seemed to carry about with him, as if it was—he was—a lantern in dark times.’ Santore grimaced at the last phrase. ‘No, that’s not right. It must be the hour or the brandy. Besides, he was an old man, and now he’s dead.’

Going back to an earlier question, Brunetti asked, ‘What did you say to him during the argument?’

‘The usual things one says in an argument,’ Santore said wearily. ‘I called him a liar, and he called me a faggot. Then I said some unpleasant things about the production, about the music and his conducting, and he said the same things about the stage direction. The usual things.’ He stopped speaking and slumped in his chair.

‘Did you threaten him?’

Santore’s eyes shot to Brunetti’s face. He couldn’t disguise his shock at the question. ‘He was an old man.’

‘Are you sorry he’s dead?’

This was another question the director wasn’t prepared to hear. He thought for a time before he answered it. ‘No, not for the death of the man. For his wife, yes. This will be . . .’ he began, but then didn’t finish the sentence. ‘For the death of the musician, yes, I’m very sorry about that. He was old, and he was at the end of his career. I think he knew that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The conducting, it didn’t have its old glory somehow, didn’t have that old fire. I’m not a musician, so I can’t be clear about just what it was. But something was missing.’ He paused and shook his head. ‘No, maybe it’s just my anger.’

‘Did you talk to anyone about this?’

‘No; one doesn’t complain about God.’ He paused for a moment, then said, ‘Yes, I did. I mentioned it to Flavia.’

‘La Signora Petrelli?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what did she say?’

‘She’d worked with him before; often, I think. She was bothered by the difference in him, spoke to me about it once.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Nothing specific; just that it was like working with one of the younger conductors, someone with little experience.’

‘Did anyone else mention it?’

‘No, no one; at least not to me.’

‘Was your friend Saverio in the theater tonight?’

‘Saverio’s in Naples,’ Santore responded coldly.

‘I see.’ It had been the wrong question. The mood of easy intimacy was gone. ‘How much longer will you be in Venice, Signor Santore?’

‘I usually leave after the prima has been successfully performed. But Helmut’s death will change things. I’ll probably be here for another few days, until the new conductor is fully at home with the production.’ When Brunetti made no response to this, he asked, ‘Will I be allowed to go back to Florence?’

‘When?’

‘Three days. Four. I have to stay for at least one performance with the new conductor. But then I’d like to go home.’

‘There’s no reason you can’t go,’ Brunetti said, and stood. ‘All we’ll need is an address where we can reach you, but you can certainly give that to one of my men at the theater tomorrow.’ He extended his hand. Santore got to his feet and took it. ‘Thank you for the brandy. And good luck with the Agamemnon.’ Santore smiled his thanks, and saying nothing else, Brunetti left.

* * * *

CHAPTER FIVE

Brunetti decided to walk home, to take advantage of the star-studded sky and the deserted streets. He paused in front of the hotel, measuring distances. The map of the city that lay imprinted in the minds of all Venetians showed him that the shortest way was across the Rialto Bridge. He cut across Campo San Fantin and into the labyrinth of narrow streets that wound back toward the bridge. No one passed him as he walked, and he had the strange sensation of having the sleeping city entirely to himself. At San Luca, he passed the pharmacy, one of the few places that were open all night, except for the train station, where slept the homeless and the mad.

And then he was at the water’s edge, the bridge to his right. How typically Venetian it was, looking, from a distance, lofty and ethereal but revealing itself, upon closer reflection, to be firmly grounded in the mud of the city.

Across the bridge, he walked through the now abandoned market. It was usually a cross lo bear, shoving and pushing through the crowded street, through herds of tourists jammed together between vegetable stalls on one side and shops filled with the worst sort of tourist junk on the other, but tonight he had it to himself and could stride freely. Ahead of him, in the middle of the street, a pair of lovers stood, glued hip to hip, blind to the beauty about them but perhaps, after all, somehow inspired by it.

At the clock, he turned left, glad to be almost home. Five minutes brought him to his favorite shop, Biancat, the florist, whose windows offered the city a daily explosion of beauty. Tonight, through the clinging humidity of the glass, tubs of yellow roses preened themselves, while behind them lurked a cloud of pale jasmine. He walked quickly past the second window, crowded with lurid orchids, which always looked faintly cannibalistic to him.

He let himself into the palazzo in which he lived, bracing himself, as he always had to do when he was tired, for the task of climbing the ninety-four steps to their fourth-floor apartment. The previous owner had built the apartment illegally more than thirty years before, simply added another floor to the existing building without bothering with official permission of any sort. This situation had somehow been obscured when Brunetti bought the apartment ten years ago, and ever since, he had lived in recurrent fear of being confronted with a summons to legalize the obvious. He trembled at the prospect of the Herculean task of getting the permits that would authenticate both that the apartment existed and that he had a right to live there. The mere fact that the walls were there and he lived within them would hardly be thought relevant. The bribes would be ruinous.

He opened the door, glad of the warmth and smell he associated with the apartment: lavender, wax, the scent of something cooking in the kitchen at the back; it was a mixture that represented to him, in a way he couldn’t explain, the existence of sanity in the daily madness that was his work.

‘Is that you, Guido?’ Paola called from the living room. He wondered who else she might be expecting at two in the morning, but he didn’t ask.

‘Yes,’ he called back, kicking off his shoes and removing his coat, just now beginning to accept how tired he was.

‘Would you like some tea?’ She came into the hall and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

He nodded, making no attempt to hide his exhaustion from her. Trailing her down the hall toward the kitchen, he took a chair while she filled the kettle and put it on the stove to boil. She pulled down a bag of dried leaves from a cupboard above her head, opened it, sniffed, and asked, ‘Verbena?’

‘Fine, fine,’ he answered, too tired to care.

She tossed a handful of dried leaves into the terra-cotta teapot that had been his grandmother’s and came over to stand behind him. She kissed the back of his head, right on the spot where his hair was beginning to thin. ‘What is it?’

‘At La Fenice. Someone poisoned the conductor.’

‘Wellauer?’

‘Yes.’

She placed her hands on his shoulders and gave them a gentle squeeze that he found encouraging. No comment was necessary; it was obvious to both of them that the press would make a sensation of the death and become screamingly insistent that the culprit be found as quickly as possible. Either he or Paola could have written the editorials that would appear in the morning, were probably being written even now.

The kettle shot out a burst of steam, and Paola went to pour the water into the chipped pot. As always, he found her mere physical presence comforting, found solace in observing the easy efficiency with which she moved and did things. Like many Venetian women, Paola was fair-skinned and had the red-gold hair so often seen in portraits of the women of the seventeenth century. Not beautiful by any ordinary canon, she had a nose that was a bit too long and a chin that was more than a bit too determined. He liked both.

‘Any ideas?’ she asked, bringing the pot and two mugs to the table. She sat opposite him, poured out the aromatic tea, then went back to the cupboard and returned with an immense jar of honey.

‘Its too early,’ he said, spooning honey into his mug. He swirled it around, clicking his spoon against the side of the mug, then spoke in rhythm with the clicking of the spoon. ‘There’s a young wife, a soprano who lied about not seeing him before he died, and a gay director who had an argument with him before he was killed.’

‘Maybe you ought to try to sell the story. It sounds like something we’d see on TV

‘And a dead genius,’ he added.

‘Yes, that would help.’ Paola sipped at her tea, then blew on it to cool it. ‘How much younger is the wife?’

‘Easily young enough to be his daughter. Thirty years, I’d say.’

‘OK,’ she said, using one of the Americanisms toward which her vocabulary was prone. ‘I say it was the wife.’

Though he had repeatedly asked her not to do this, she insisted on choosing a suspect at the beginning of any investigation he worked on, and she was generally wrong, for she always opted for the most obvious choice. Once, exasperated beyond bearing, he’d asked her why she insisted on doing it, and she’d explained that since she had written her dissertation on Henry James, she considered herself entitled to the release of finding the obvious in real life, since she’d never found it in his novels. Nothing Brunetti had ever done could stop her from making her choice, and nothing could ever induce her to inject any subtlety into her selection.

‘Which means,’ he said, still swirling his spoon, ‘that it will turn out to be someone in the chorus.’

‘Or the butler.’

‘Hmm,’ he agreed, and drank his tea. They sat in companionable silence until the tea was gone. He took both mugs and placed them in the sink, and set the teapot on the counter beside it, safe from harm.

* * * *

CHAPTER SIX

The morning after the conductor’s body was found, Brunetti arrived at his office a bit before nine, to discover that an event almost as marvelous as that of the night before had transpired: his immediate superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, was already in his office and had been calling for Brunetti for almost half an hour. This fact was revealed to him first by the porter who stood just inside the entrance to the building, then by an officer he met on the stairs, then by the secretary who worked for him and the two other commissarios of the city. Making no attempt to hurry, Brunetti checked his mail, phoned the switchboard to see if there had been any calls, and at last went down the flight of stairs that led to his superior’s office.

Cavaliere Giuseppe Patta had been sent to Venice three years before in an attempt to introduce new blood into the criminal justice system. In this case, the blood had been Sicilian and had proved to be incompatible with that of Venice. Patta used an onyx cigarette holder and had been known, upon occasion, to carry a silver-headed walking stick. Though the first had made Brunetti stare and the second laugh, he tried to reserve judgment until he had worked long enough with the man to decide if he had a right to these affectations. It had taken Brunetti less than a month to decide that though the affectations did suit the man, he had little right to them. The vice-questore’s work schedule included a long coffee each summer morning on the terrace of the Gritti, and, in the winter, at Florian’s. Lunch was usually taken at the Cipriani pool or Harry’s Bar, and he usually decided at about four to ‘call it a day.’ Few others would so name it. Brunetti had quickly learned, as well, that Patta was to be addressed, at all times, as ‘Vice-Questore’ or the even grander ‘Cavaliere,’ the provenance of which title remained obscure. Not only did he insist that his title be used, but he had to be addressed formally as lei, leaving it to the rabble to call one another by the familiar, tu.

Patta preferred not to be disturbed by any of the more distressing details of crime or other such messiness. One of the few things that could drive him to run his fingers through the graceful curls at his temples was a suggestion in the press that the police were in any way lax in their duties. It did not matter what the press chose to comment on: that a child had managed to slip through a police cordon to give a flower to a visiting dignitary or that notice had been taken of the open sale of drugs by African street vendors. Any suggestion that so little as hinted at anything less than a police stranglehold on the inhabitants of the city sent Patta into paroxysms of accusation, most of which fell upon his three commissarios. His ire was usually expressed in long memos to them, in which the crimes of omission by the police were made to sound infinitely more heinous than those of commission by the criminal population.

Patta had been known, as the result of a suggestion in the press, to declare various ‘crime alerts,’ in which he singled out a particular crime, much in the way he would select an especially rich dessert from the cloth-draped sweet table in a restaurant, and announced in the press that, this week, the crime in question would be wiped out or, at least, minimized. Brunetti could not, when he read of the most recent ‘crime alert’—for this was information that was generally revealed to him only by the press—help but think of the scene in Casablanca in which the order was given to ‘round up the usual suspects.’ That was done, a few teenagers were sentenced to jail for a month or so, and things went back to normal until the press’s attentions once again provoked an ‘alert.’

Brunetti often mused that the crime rate in Venice was low—one of the lowest in Europe and certainly the lowest in Italy—because the criminals, and they were almost always thieves, simply didn’t know how to get away. Only a resident could navigate the spiderweb of narrow calles, could know in advance that this one was a dead end or that one ended in a canal. And the Venetians, the native population, tended to be law-abiding, if only because their tradition and history had given them an excessive respect for the rights of private property and the imperative need to see to its safekeeping. So there was very little crime, and when there was an act of violence or, much more rarely, a murder, the criminal was quickly and easily found: the husband, the neighbor, the business partner. Usually all they had to do was round up the usual suspects.

But Wellauer’s death, Brunetti knew, was different. He was a famous man, no doubt the most famous conductor of the age, and he had been killed in Venice’s little jewel of an opera house. Because it was Brunetti’s case, the vice-questore would find him directly responsible for any bad publicity that might attach to the police.

He knocked on the door and waited to be told to enter. When the shout came, Brunetti pushed open the door and saw Patta where he knew he would be seated, poised as he knew he would find him, sitting behind his enormous desk, bent over a paper that was made important by the scrutiny he gave it. Even in a country of handsome men, Patta was shockingly handsome, with a chiseled Roman profile, wide-spaced and piercing eyes, and the body of an athlete, though he was well into his fifties. He preferred, when photographed for the papers, to be taken in left profile.

‘So you’ve finally come,’ Patta said, suggesting that Brunetti was hours late rather than on time. ‘I thought I’d have to wait all morning for you,’ he added, which Brunetti thought was overplaying the role. When Brunetti made no response to either remark, Patta demanded, ‘What have you got?’

Brunetti pulled that morning’s Gazzettino from his pocket and answered, ‘The paper, sir, Its right here on page one.’ Then, before Patta could stop him, he read out, ‘“Famous Maestro Found Dead. Murder Suspected.”‘ He offered the paper to his superior.

Patta kept his voice level but dismissed the paper with a wave. ‘I’ve already read that. I meant what have you found out?’

Brunetti reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out his notebook. There was nothing written in it except for the name, address, and phone number of the American woman, but so long as he was kept standing in front of the seated Patta, there was no way the other man could see that the pages were virtually empty. Pointedly, he wet the finger of one hand and leafed slowly through the pages. ‘The room was unlocked, and there was no key in the door. That means that anyone could have gone in or out at any time during the performance.’

‘Where was the poison?’

‘In the coffee, I think. But I won’t know until after the autopsy and the lab report.’

‘When’s the autopsy?’

‘This morning, I think. At eleven.’

‘Good. What else?’

Brunetti turned a page, exposing fresh emptiness. ‘I spoke to the singers at the theater. The baritone saw him, but only to say hello. The tenor says he didn’t see him, and the soprano says she saw him only when she came into the theater.’ He glanced down at Patta, who waited. ‘The tenor’s telling the truth. The soprano’s lying.’

‘Why do you say that?’ Patta snapped.

‘Because I think it’s true, sir.’

With exaggerated patience, as if he were speaking to an especially slow child, Patta asked, ‘And why, Commissario, do you think it’s true?’

‘Because she was seen going into his dressing room after the first act.’ Brunetti didn’t bother to clarify that this was only a suggestion from a witness, not yet confirmed. His interview had suggested she wasn’t telling the truth, perhaps about that, perhaps about something else.

‘I also spoke to the director,’ Brunetti continued. ‘He had an argument with the conductor before the performance began. But he didn’t see him again during the performance. I think he’s telling the truth.’ Patta didn’t bother to ask him why he thought this.

‘Anything else?’

‘I sent a message to the police in Berlin last night.’ He made a business of leafing through his notebook. ‘The message went out at—’

‘Never mind.’ Patta cut him off. ‘What did they say?’

‘They’ll fax down a full report today, any information they have on Wellauer or his wife.’

‘What about the wife? Did you speak to her?’

‘Not more than a few words. She was very upset. I don’t think anyone could have talked to her.’

‘Where was she?’

‘When I spoke to her?’

‘No, during the performance.’

‘She was sitting in the audience, in the orchestra. She said she went back to see him after the second act but got there too late to speak to him, that they never spoke.’

‘You mean she was backstage when he died?’ Patta asked with an eagerness so strong Brunetti almost believed the man would need little more to arrest her for the crime.

‘Yes, but I don’t know whether she saw him, whether she went into the dressing room.’

‘Well, make it your business to find out.’ Even Patta realized that his tone had been too harsh. He added, ‘Sit down, Brunetti.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ he said, closing his notebook and slipping it into his pocket before taking a seat opposite his superior. Patta’s chair, he knew, was a few centimeters higher than this one, something the vice-questore undoubtedly regarded as a delicate psychological advantage.

‘How long was she back there?’

‘I don’t know, sir. She was very upset when I spoke to her, so her story wasn’t very clear.’

‘Could she have gone into the dressing room?’ Patta asked.

‘She might have. I don’t know.’

‘It sounds like you’re making excuses for her,’ said Patta, then added, ‘Is she pretty?’ Brunetti realized Patta must have found out about the difference in age between the dead man and his widow.

‘If you like tall blonds,’ Brunetti said.

‘Don’t you?’

‘My wife doesn’t permit me to, sir.’

Patta thrust around for a way to pull the conversation back together. ‘Did anyone else go into the dressing room during the performance? Where did the coffee come from?’

‘There’s a bar on the ground floor of the theater. Probably from there.’

‘Find out.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Now pay attention, Brunetti.’ Brunetti nodded. ‘I want the name of anyone who was in the dressing room, or near it, last night. And I want to find out more about the wife. How long they’ve been married, where she comes from, that sort of thing.’ Brunetti nodded.

‘Brunetti?’ Patta suddenly asked.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Why aren’t you taking notes?’

Brunetti permitted himself the smallest of smiles. ‘Oh, I never forget anything you say, sir.’

Patta chose, for reasons of his own, to give this a literal reading. ‘I don’t believe what she told you about not seeing him. People don’t start to do things and then change their minds. I’m sure there’s something here. It probably has something to do with the difference in their ages.’ It was rumored that Patta had spent two years studying psychology at the University of Palermo before changing to the law. But it was unblemished fact that, after an undistinguished career as a student, he had taken his degree and, soon thereafter, as a direct result of his father’s very distinguished career in the Christian Democratic party, had been appointed a vice-commissario of police. And now, after more than twenty years, he was vice-questore of the police of Venice.

Patta having apparently finished with his orders, Brunetti prepared himself for what was coming, the speech about the honor of the city. As night the day, the thought gave birth to Patta’s words. ‘You might not understand this, Commissario, but this is one of the most famous artists of our era. And he was killed here in our city, Venice’—which name never failed to sound faintly ridiculous coming from Patta, with his Sicilian accent. ‘We have to do everything in our power to see that this crime is solved; we cannot allow this crime to blot the reputation, the very honor, of our city.’ There were times when Brunetti was tempted to take notes of what the man said.

As Patta continued in this vein, Brunetti decided that if something was said about the glorious musical history of the city, he’d take Paola flowers that afternoon. ‘This is the city of Vivaldi. Mozart was here. We have a debt to pay to the world of music.’ Irises, he thought; she liked them best of all. And she’d put them in the tall blue Murano vase.

‘I want you to stop whatever you’re working on and devote yourself entirely to this. I’ve looked at the duty rosters,’ Patta continued, surprising Brunetti that he even knew they existed, ‘and I’ve assigned you two men to help you with this.’ Please let it not be Alvise and Riverre, and I’ll take her two dozen. ‘Alvise and Riverre. They’re good, solid men.’ Roughly translated, that meant they were loyal to Patta.

‘And I want to see progress in this. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Brunetti replied blandly.

‘Right, then. That’s all. I’ve got work to do, and I’m sure you’ve got a lot to get busy with.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Brunetti repeated, rising and going toward the door. He wondered what the parting shot would be. Hadn’t Patta taken his last vacation in London?

‘And good hunting, Brunetti.’

Yes, London. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said quietly, and let himself out of the office.

* * * *

CHAPTER SEVEN

For the next hour, Brunetti busied himself reading through the reports of the crime in the four major papers. Il Gazzettino, as was to be expected, put it all over the front page and saw it as a crime that somehow compromised the city and put it at risk. It editorialized that the police must quickly find the person responsible, not so much to bring that person to justice as to remove the blot from the honor of Venice. Reading it, Brunetti reflected on Patta’s having read this article instead of waiting for his usual L’Osservatore Romano, which wasn’t on the newsstands until ten.

La Repubblica viewed the event in light of recent political developments, suggesting a relationship so subtle that only the journalist, or a psychiatrist, could grasp it. Corriere della Sera behaved as though the man had died in his bed and devoted a full page to an objective analysis of his contribution to the world of music, drawing special attention to his having championed the cause of certain modern composers.

He saved L’Unità for last. Predictably, it screamed the first thing that came into its head—in this case, vengeance, which, predictably, it had got confused with justice. An editorial hinted broadly at the same old secrets in high places and dragged out, not surprisingly, poor old Sindona, dead in his jail cell, and asked the patently rhetorical question of whether there wasn’t some dark connection between these two ‘frighteningly similar’ deaths. Aside from the fact that they were both old men who died of cyanide poisoning, there was little similarity, frightening or not, that Brunetti could see.

Not for the first time in his career, Brunetti reflected upon the possible advantage of censorship of the press. In the past, the German people had got along very well with a government that demanded it, and the American government seemed to fare similarly well with a population that wanted it.

He turned back to the long story in the Corriere, and tossed the three other papers into the wastebasket. He read through the article a second time, occasionally taking notes. If not the most famous conductor in the world, Wellauer was certainly ranked high among them. He had first conducted before the last war, the prodigy of the Berlin Conservatory. Not much was written about the war years, save that he had continued to conduct in his native Germany. It was in the fifties that his career had taken off and he had joined the international glitter set, flying from one continent to another to conduct a single concert, then going off to a third to conduct an opera.

In the midst of the tinsel and the fame, he had remained the consummate musician, exacting both precision and delicacy from any orchestra he directed, insisting upon absolute fidelity to the score as written. Even the reputation he had acquired of being imperious or difficult paled before the universal praise that greeted his absolute devotion to his art.

The article paid little attention to his personal life, save to mention that his current wife was his third and that the second had taken her life, twenty years before. His residences were given as Berlin, Gstaad, New York, and Venice.

The picture that appeared on the front page was not a recent one. In it, Wellauer appeared in profile, talking with Maria Callas, who was in costume and was obviously the prime subject of the photograph. It seemed strange to him that the paper would print a photo that was at least thirty years old.

He reached down into the wastebasket and grabbed back the Gazzettino. It, as usual, had a photo of the place where the death had occurred, the dull, balanced facade of Teatro La Fenice. Next to it was a smaller photo of the stage entrance, out of which something was being carried by two uniformed men. The picture below was a recent full-face publicity still of the Maestro: white tie, shock of silver hair swept back from his angular face. There was the faint Slavic tilt to the eyes, which appeared curiously light under the dark brows that overshadowed them. The nose was entirely too long for the face, but the effect of those eyes was so strong that the slight defect hardly seemed worth notice. The mouth was broad, the lips full and fleshy, a strangely sensual contrast with the austerity of the eyes. Brunetti tried to remember the face as he had seen it the night before, tightened and distorted by death, but the power of this photo was enough to supplant that image. He stared at those pale eyes and tried to imagine a hatred so strong that it would lead someone to destroy this man.

His speculations were interrupted by the arrival of one of the secretaries, with the report that had come down from the police in Berlin, already translated into Italian.

Before he began to read it, Brunetti reminded himself that Wellauer was a sort of living monument and the Germans were always on the lookout for heroes, so what he read was very likely to reflect both of those things. This meant that some truths would be there only by suggestion, others by omission. Hadn’t many musicians and artists belonged to the Nazi Party? But who remembered that now, after all these years?

He opened the report and began to read the Italian text, the German useless to him. Wellauer had no criminal record whatsoever, not even a driving violation. His apartment in Gstaad had been robbed twice; both times, nothing had been recovered, no one apprehended, and the insurance had made good, though the totals had been enormous.

Brunetti waded through two more paragraphs of Germanic exactitude until he came to the suicide of the second wife. She had hanged herself in the basement of their Munich apartment on 30 April 1968, after what the report referred to as ‘a long period of depression.’ No suicide note had been found. She had left three children, twin boys and a girl, then aged seven and twelve. Wellauer had himself discovered the body and, after the funeral, had gone into a period of complete seclusion that lasted six months.

The police had paid no attention to him until his marriage, two years ago, to Elizabeth Balintffy, a Hungarian by birth, a doctor by training and profession, and a German by her first marriage, which had ended in divorce three years before her marriage to Wellauer. She had no criminal record, either in Germany or in Hungary. She had one child by the first marriage, a daughter, Alexandra, aged thirteen.

Brunetti looked, and looked in vain, for some reference to what Wellauer had done during the war years. There was mention of his first marriage, in 1936, to the daughter of a German industrialist, and his divorce after the war. Between those dates, the man seemed not to have existed, which, to Brunetti, spoke very eloquently of what he had been doing or, at any rate, supporting. This, however, was a suspicion about which he was likely to get very little confirmation, especially not in an official report from the German police.

Wellauer was, in short, as clean as a man could possibly wish to be. But still, someone had put cyanide in his coffee. Experience had taught Brunetti that people killed one another primarily for two reasons: money and sex. The order wasn’t important, and the second was very often called love, but he had, in fifteen years spent among the murderous, encountered few exceptions to that rule.

Well before eleven, he had finished with the German police report. He called down to the laboratory, only to learn that nothing had been done, no fingerprints taken from the cup or from the other surfaces in the dressing room, which remained sealed, a fact that, he was told, had already prompted three phone calls from the theater. He yelled a bit at that, but he knew it was useless. He spoke briefly with Miotti, who said he’d learned nothing further from the portiere the night before, save that the conductor was a ‘cold one,’ the wife very pleasant and friendly, and La Petrelli not at all to his liking. The portiere gave no reason for this, falling back, instead, on the explanation that she was antipatica. For him, that was enough.

There was no sense in sending either Alvise or Riverre to take prints, not until the lab could determine if prints other than those of the conductor were on the cup. No need for haste here.

Disgruntled that he would miss lunch, Brunetti left his office a little after noon and walked to the bar on the corner, where he had a sandwich and a glass of wine, not at all pleased with either. Though everyone in the bar knew who he was, no one asked him about the death, though one old man did rustle his newspaper suggestively. Brunetti walked down to the San Zaccaria stop and caught the number 5 boat, which would take him to the cemetery island of San Michele, cutting through the Arsenate and along the back side of the island. He seldom visited the cemetery, somehow not having acquired the cult of the dead so common among Italians.

He had come here in the past; in fact, one of his first memories was of being taken here as a child to help tend the grave of his grandmother, killed in Treviso during the Allied bombing of that city during the war. He remembered how colorful the graves were, blanketed with flowers, and how neat, each precise rectangle separated from the others by razor-edged patches of green. And, in the midst of this, how grim the people, almost all women, who came carrying those armloads of flowers. How drab and shabby they were, as if all their love for color and neatness was exhausted by the need to care for those spirits in the ground, leaving none left over for themselves.

And now, some thirty-five years later, the graves were just as neat, the flowers still explosive with color, but the people who passed among the graves looked as if they belonged to the world of the living, were no longer those wraiths of the postwar years. His father’s grave was easily found, not too far from Stravinsky. The Russian was safe; he would remain there, untouched, for as long as the cemetery remained or people remembered his music. His father’s tenancy was far more precarious, for the time was arriving when his grave would be opened and his bones taken to be put in an ossuary in one of the long, crowded walls of the cemetery.

The plot, however, was neatly tended; his brother was more conscientious than he. The carnations that stood in the glass vase set in the earth of the grave were new; the frost of three nights earlier would have killed any that had been placed here before. He bent down and brushed aside a few leaves that the wind had blown up against the vase. He straightened up, then stooped to pick up a cigarette butt that lay beside the headstone. He stood again and looked at the picture displayed upon the front of the stone. He saw his own eyes, his own jaw, and the too-big ears that had skipped over him and his brother and gone, instead, to their sons.

^‘Ciao, Papà,’ he said, but then he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He walked down to the end of the row of graves and dropped the cigarette butt into a large metal can set in the earth.

At the office of the cemetery, he announced his name and his rank and was shown into a small waiting room by a man who told him to wait, the doctor would be with him soon. There was nothing to read in the room, so he contented himself with looking out the only window, which gave onto the enclosed cloister about which the buildings of the cemetery had been built.

At the beginning of his career, Brunetti had asked to attend the autopsy of the victim of the first murder he had investigated, a prostitute killed by her pimp. He had watched intently as the body was rolled into the operating theater, stared fascinated as the white sheet was pulled back from her nearly perfect body. And as the doctor raised the scalpel above the flesh, ready to begin the long butterfly incision, Brunetti had pitched forward and fainted amid the medical students with whom he sat. They had calmly carried him out into the hall and left him, groggy, on a chair before hurrying back to watch. Since then, he had seen the victims of many murders, seen the human body rent by knives, guns, even bombs, but he had never learned to look on them calmly, and he could never again bring himself to watch the calculated violation of an autopsy.

The door to the small waiting room opened, and Rizzardi, dressed as impeccably as he had been the night before, entered. He smelled of expensive soap, not of the carbolic that Brunetti couldn’t help associating with his work.

‘Good afternoon, Guido,’ he said, and extended a hand. ‘I’m sorry you bothered to come all the way out here. I could easily have phoned you with what little I learned.’

‘That’s all right, Ettore; I wanted to come out anyway. And there won’t be anything until those fools in the lab give me a report. And it’s certainly too soon to speak to the widow.’

‘Then let me give you what I have,’ the doctor said, closing his eyes and beginning to recite from memory. Brunetti removed the notebook from his pocket and took down what he heard. ‘The man was in excellent health. If I didn’t know his age, seventy-four, I would have guessed him to be at least ten years younger, early sixties, perhaps even late fifties. Muscles in excellent tone, probably through exercise added to a generally healthy body. No sign of disease in the internal organs. He can’t have been a drinker; liver was perfect. Strange to see in a man his age. Didn’t smoke, though I think he might have, years ago, and stopped. I’d say he was good for another ten or twenty years.’ Finished, he opened his eyes and looked at Brunetti.

‘And the cause of death?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Potassium cyanide. In the coffee. I’d estimate he ingested about thirty milligrams, more than enough to kill him.’ He paused for a moment, then added, ‘I’d never actually seen it before. Remarkable effect.’ His voice trailed off, and he lapsed into a reverie that Brunetti found unsettling.

After a moment, Brunetti asked, ‘Is it as quick as I’ve read it is?’

‘Yes, I think it is,’ the doctor answered. ‘As I said, I’ve never seen a case before, not a real one. I’d just read about it.’

‘Instantaneous?’

Rizzardi thought for a moment before he answered. ‘Yes, I suppose it is, or so close as to make it the same thing. He might have had a moment to realize what was happening, but he would have thought it was a stroke or a heart attack. In any case, well before he could have realized what it was, he would have been dead.’

‘What’s the actual cause of death?’

‘Everything stops. Everything simply stops working: heart, lungs, brain.’

‘In seconds?’

‘Yes. Five. Ten at the most.’

‘No wonder they use it,’ Brunetti said.

‘Who?’

‘Spies, in spy novels. With capsules hidden in hollow teeth.’

‘Um,’ Rizzardi muttered. If he found Brunetti’s comparison at all strange, he gave no indication of it. ‘Yes, there’s no question that it’s fast, but there are others that are much more deadly.’ In response to Brunetti’s raised eyebrows, he explained, ‘Botulism. The same amount that killed him could probably kill half of Italy.’

There seemed little to be gained from this subject, regardless of the doctor’s evident enthusiasm for it, so Brunetti asked, ‘Is there anything else?’

‘It looks like he’s been under treatment for the last few weeks. Do you know if he had a cold or flu or something like that.’

‘No,’ Brunetti said, shaking his head. ‘We don’t know anything yet. Why?’

‘There were signs of injections. There was no indication of drug abuse, so I imagine it was antibiotics, perhaps a vitamin, some normal procedure. In fact, the traces were so faint that it might not even have been injections; they could have been simple bruises.’

‘But not drugs?’

‘No, not likely,’ the doctor said. ‘He could easily have given himself an injection in the right hip—he was right-handed—but a right-handed person can’t give himself an injection in the right arm or left buttock, at least not where I found the mark. And as I said, he was in excellent health. I would have seen signs of drug use, if there had been any.’ He paused a moment and then added, ‘Besides, I’m not even sure that’s what they are. In my report, I’ll simply enter them as subcutaneous bleeding.’ Brunetti could tell from his voice that he considered the marks a triviality and already regretted mentioning them.

‘Anything else?’

‘No, nothing. Whoever did this robbed him of at least another ten years of life.’

As was usual with him, Rizzardi displayed, and probably felt, no curiosity whatsoever about who might have committed the crime. In the years he’d known him, Brunetti had never heard the doctor ask about the criminal. At limes, he had become interested in, even fascinated by, a particularly inventive means of death, but he seemed never to care about who had done it or if the person had been found.

‘Thanks, Ettore,’ Brunetti said, and shook the doctor’s hand. ‘I wish they would work this fast in the lab.’

‘I doubt that their curiosity is as compelling as mine,’ Rizzardi said, again confirming Brunetti in the belief that he would never understand the man.

* * * *

CHAPTER EIGHT

On the boat back to the city, he decided to stop in unannounced and see if Flavia Petrelli had perhaps remembered that she had spoken to the Maestro the night before. Buoyed by the sense of having something to do, he got off the boat at Fondamente Nuove and walked toward the hospital, which shared a common wall with the basilica of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. Like all street addresses in Venice, the one the American had given him was virtually meaningless in a city with only six different names for street addresses and a numbering system without plan or reason. The only way to find it was to get to the church and ask someone who lived in the neighborhood. She ought to be easy to find. Foreigners tended to live in more fashionable parts of Venice, not this solidly middle-class area, and very few foreigners managed to sound as if they had grown up here, as Brett Lynch did.

In front of the church, he inquired first for the number, then for the American, but the woman he had approached had no idea of where to find either. She told him to go and ask Maria, saying the name as if she expected him to know exactly which Maria she meant. Maria, it turned out, ran the news-stand in front of the grammar school, and if Maria didn’t know where she lived, then the American didn’t live in the neighborhood.

At the bottom of the bridge in front of the basilica, he found Maria, a white-haired woman of indeterminate age who sat inside her kiosk, dispensing newspapers as though they were fortunes and she the Sibyl. He gave her the number he was looking for, and she replied, ‘Ah, Signorina Lynch,’ saying it with a smile and giving the name the two syllables demanded by Italian. Straight down Calle della Testa, first right, fourth bell, and would he mind taking her newspapers along with him?

Brunetti found the door with no trouble. The name was carved into a brass plate, scratched and tarnished with age, that stood next to the bell. He rang once and, after a moment, a voice through the intercom asked who he was. He resisted the desire to announce that he had come to deliver the papers, and, instead, simply gave his name and title. Whoever it was he had spoken to said nothing, but the door snapped open in front of him, allowing him to enter the building. A single flight of stairs lay off to the right, and he began to climb, noting with pleasure the slight concavity that hundreds of years of use had hollowed out of each step. He liked the way the declivity forced him to walk up the center of the staircase. He went up a double flight, then another. At the fourth turn, the stairway suddenly broadened out, and the original, worn marble steps were replaced by slabs of clean-cut Istrian marble. This part of the building had been extensively restored, and very recently.

The stairs ended at a black metal door. As he approached it, he sensed that he was being examined through the minuscule spyhole that was cut above the top lock. Before he could raise his hand to knock, the door was pulled open by Brett Lynch, who stepped aside and asked him to come in.

He muttered the ritual ‘Permesso’ without which an Italian could never enter another person’s house. She smiled but didn’t offer her hand and turned to lead him down the hallway into the main room of the apartment.

He was surprised to find himself in a vast open space, easily ten meters by fifteen. The wooden floor was made of the thick oak beams used to support the oldest roofs in the city. The walls had been stripped of paint and plaster and taken down to the original brick. The most remarkable thing in the room was the tremendous brightness that glared from the uncovered skylights, six of them, set in triple pairs on either side of the peaked ceiling. Whoever had received permission to alter the external structure of a building this old, Brunetti reflected, either had powerful friends or had blackmailed both the mayor and the city planner. And it had all been done recently; the smell of fresh wood told him that.

He turned his attention from the house to its owner. The previous night, he had failed to notice how tall she was, tall in that angular way Americans seemed to find attractive. But her body, he noticed, had none of the frailty that often came with tallness. She looked healthy, fit, a quality that was heightened by her clear skin and eyes. He found that he was staring at her, struck by the intelligence in her eyes, struck as well by the fact that he was seeking to find cunning in them. He was curious about his own refusal to accept her for what she seemed to be, an attractive, intelligent woman.

Flavia Petrelli sat, rather artistically, he thought, just to the left of one of the long windows that filled the left side of the room and through which, at a distance, he could see the bell tower of San Marco. She made no acknowledgment of his presence other than a faint nod, which he returned before saying to the other, ‘I brought you your papers.’

He was careful to hand them to her with the front page exposed, turned so that she would see the pictures and read the shouting headlines. She glanced down at them, quickly folded them shut, and said, ‘Thank you,’ before turning to toss them on a low table.

‘I compliment you on your home, Miss Lynch.’

‘Thank you,’ was her minimal reply.

‘It’s unusual to see so much light, so many skylights in a building of this age,’ he said, prying.

‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’ she said blandly.

‘Come, Commissario,’ interrupted Flavia Petrelli, ‘certainly you didn’t come here to discuss interior design.’

As if to offset the brusqueness of her friend’s remark, Brett Lynch said, ‘Please have a seat, Dottor Brunetti,’ and motioned him to a low divan that stood in front of a long glass table at the center of the room. ‘Would you like some coffee?’ she asked, the bright hostess, this a purely social call.

Though he had little desire for coffee, he said he’d like some, so as to see how the singer would respond to his declaration that he was there for a while and had no sense of haste. She turned her attention back to a musical score that lay on her lap and ignored him while her friend disappeared to make the coffee.

While she was busy with the coffee and while Petrelli was busy ignoring him, he took a careful look around the apartment. The wall he faced was filled with books from floor to ceiling. He easily recognized the Italian ones by the way their titles ran from bottom to top, the English by their titles running top to bottom. More than half of the books were printed in characters he assumed to be Chinese. All of them looked as if they had been read more than once. Interspersed among the books were pieces of ceramic—bowls and small human figures—that appeared no more than faintly Oriental to him. One shelf was taken up with boxed sets of compact discs, suggesting that they were complete operas. To their left stood very complicated-looking stereo equipment, and in the far corners two large speakers stood on wooden pedestals. The only pictures on the walls were bright modern splashes that didn’t appeal to him.

After a short time, Lynch returned from the kitchen, carrying a silver tray on which stood two small espresso cups, spoons, and a silver sugar bowl. Today, he noticed, she was wearing jeans that had never heard of America and another pair of those boots, this pair a dark reddish brown. A color for each day of the week? What was it in this woman that irritated him so? The fact that she was a foreigner who spoke his language as well as he did and lived in a house he could never hope to afford?

She set the cup down in front of him and he thanked her, waiting for her to take a seat opposite him. He offered to spoon sugar into the second cup, but she shook her head in refusal. He spooned two sugars into his own cup and sat back on the sofa. ‘I’ve just come from San Michele,’ he said by way of introduction. ‘The cause of death was cyanide.’ She raised her cup to her lips, sipped. ‘It was in the coffee.’

She replaced her cup in the saucer and placed both on the table.

Flavia Petrelli glanced up from the score, but it was the other who spoke. ‘Then at least it was quick. How thoughtful of whoever did it.’ She turned to her friend. ‘Did you want coffee, Flavia?’