Death at La Fenice

Brunetti thought it all a bit too theatrical, but he ignored this and asked the question she had clearly meant to prepare by her remark. ‘Am I to take it that you didn’t like the Maestro, Miss Lynch?’

‘No,’ she answered, looking at him directly. ‘I didn’t like him, and he didn’t like me.’

‘Was there any particular reason?’

She moved a hand dismissively. ‘We disagreed about many things.’ That, he supposed, was meant to be sufficient reason.

He turned to Petrelli. ‘Was your rapport with the Maestro different from your friend’s?’

She closed the score and set it carefully at her feet before she answered. ‘Yes, it was. Helmut and I always worked well together. We had a great deal of professional respect for one another.’

‘And personal?’

‘That too, of course,’ she answered quickly. ‘But our relationship was primarily professional.’

‘What, if I might ask, were your personal feelings toward him?’ If she was prepared for the question, she nevertheless seemed not to like it. She shifted in her seat, and he was struck by how obvious she was making her discomfort at the question. He had read about her for years and knew her to be a better actress than this. If she had something to hide in her relationship with Wellauer, she knew how to hide it; she would not sit there like a schoolgirl squirming around when asked about her first boyfriend.

He allowed the silence to grow, intentionally not repeating his question.

Finally, she said, with some reluctance, ‘I didn’t like him.’

When she added nothing to this, Brunetti said, ‘If I might repeat my question to Miss Lynch, was there a particular reason for that?’ How polite we’re being, he thought. The old man is lying, cold and eviscerated, across the laguna, and we sit here engaged in grammatical niceties—a subjunctive here, a conditional there: Would you be so kind as to tell me? Could you please tell me? For a moment, he wished himself back in Naples, where he’d spent those awful years dealing with people who ignored the subtlety of words and responded to kicks and blows.

Signora Petrelli cut in on his reverie by saying, ‘There was no real reason. He was simply antipatico.’ Ah, thought Brunetti, hearing that word again, how much better than any exercise in grammar. Just haul out this explanation of any human discord, that someone was antipatico, that some nameless transport of cordiality hadn’t been struck between people, and everything was supposed to be miraculously clear. It was vague, and it was insufficient, but it appeared to be all that he was going to get.

‘Was it mutual?’ he asked, unperturbed. ‘Did the Maestro find something in you to dislike?’

She glanced across at Brett Lynch, who was again sipping at her coffee. If something passed between them, Brunetti didn’t see it.

Finally, as though displeased with the character she was playing, Petrelli raised one hand in an open-fingered gesture, one he recognized from the publicity still of her as Norma that had appeared in the papers that morning. Dramatically, she thrust the hand away from her and said, ‘Basta. Enough of all of this.’ Brunetti was fascinated by the change in her, for the gesture had carried away years with it. She got abruptly to her feet, and the rigidity disappeared from her features.

She turned to face him. ‘You’re bound to hear all of this sooner or later, so it’s better that I tell you.’ He heard the slight tap of porcelain as the other woman set her saucer down on the table, but he kept his eyes on the singer. ‘He accused me of being a lesbian, and he accused Brett of being my lover.’ She paused, waiting to see what his response would be. When he made none, she continued. ‘It started the third day of rehearsal. Nothing direct or clear; just the way he spoke to me, the way he referred to Brett.’ Again she paused, waiting for his response, and again there was none. ‘By the end of the first week, I said something to him, and that developed into an argument, and at the end of that he said he wanted to write to my husband.’ She paused to correct herself. ‘My ex-husband.’ She waited for the impact of that to register on Brunetti.

Curious, he asked, ‘Why would he do that?’

‘My husband is Spanish. But my divorce is Italian. So is the decree that gives me custody of our children. If my husband were to bring an accusation like that against me in this country . . .’ She allowed her voice to trail off, making it clear what she thought the chances would be of her keeping her children.

‘And the children?’ he asked.

She shook her head in confusion, not understanding the question.

‘The children. Where are they?’

‘In school, where they should be. We live in Milan, and they go to school there. I don’t think it’s right to drag them along to wherever I happen to be singing.’ She came closer to him, then sat at the end of the sofa. When he glanced at her friend, he saw that she sat with her face turned away, looking off at the bell tower, almost as if this conversation in no way involved her.

For a long time, no one said anything. Brunetti considered what he had just been told and wondered whether it was the cause of his instinctive backing away from the American. He and Paola had enough friends of variegated sexuality for him to believe that, even if the accusation was true, this would not be the reason.

‘Well?’ the singer finally said.

‘Well what?’ he asked.

Aren’t you going to ask if it’s true?’

He dismissed the question with a shake of his head. ‘Whether it’s true or not is irrelevant. All that’s important is whether he would have gone through with his threat to tell your husband.’ Brett Lynch had turned back to face him with speculative eyes.

When she spoke, her voice was level. ‘He would have done it. Anyone who knew him well would have known that. And Flavia’s husband would move mountains to get custody of the children.’ When she said her friend’s name, she glanced over at her, and their eyes locked for a moment. She moved down in her seat, shoved her hands into her pockets, and stretched her feet out in front of her.

Brunetti studied her. Was it those gleaming boots, the careless display of wealth in this apartment, that caused him to feel such resentment toward her? He tried to clear his mind, to see her for the first time, a woman in her early thirties who had offered him her hospitality and, now, appeared to be offering him her trust. Unlike her employer—if that’s what Petrelli was—she didn’t bother with dramatic gestures or try in any way to highlight the sharp Anglo-Saxon beauty of her face.

He noticed that the strands of her beautifully cut hair were damp at the neck, as though she had not long ago stepped from either a bath or a shower. Turning his attention to Flavia Petrelli, he thought that she had about her, too, the fresh smell of a woman who had just finished bathing. He suddenly found himself embroiled in an erotic fantasy of the two women entwined, naked, in the shower, breasts pushed up against breasts, and he was amazed at the power of the fantasy to stir him. Oh, God, how much easier it had been in Naples, with a kick and a shove.

The American released him from his reverie by asking, ‘Does this mean you think Flavia could have done it? Or that I could have?’

‘It’s far too early to speak like that,’ he said, though this was hardly true. ‘It’s far too early to speak of suspects.’

‘But it’s not too early to speak of motive,’ the singer said.

‘No, it’s not,’ he agreed. He hardly needed to point out that she now appeared to have one.

‘I suppose that means I’ve got one as well,’ added her friend, as strange a declaration of love as Brunetti had ever heard. Or friendship? Or loyalty to an employer? And people said Italians were complicated.

He decided to temporize. ‘As I said, it’s too early to talk of suspects.’ He decided to change the topic. ‘How long will you be in the city, Signora?’

‘Until the end of the performances,’ she said. ‘That’s another two weeks. Until the end of the month. Though I’d like to go back to Milan for the weekends.’ It was phrased as a statement, but it was clear that she was asking for permission. He nodded, the gesture conveying both understanding and police permission to leave the city.

She continued. After that, I don’t know. I haven’t any other engagements until—’ she paused, looking across at her friend, who supplied immediately, ‘Covent Garden, on the fifth of January.’

‘And you’ll be in Italy until then?’ he asked.

‘Certainly. Either here or in Milan.’

‘And you, Miss Lynch?’ he asked, turning to her.

Her glance was cool, as cool as her answer. ‘I’ll be in Milan, as well.’ Though it was hardly necessary, she added, ‘With Flavia.’

He took his notebook from his pocket then and asked if he could have the address in Milan where they would be. Flavia Petrelli gave it to him and, unasked, supplied the phone number. He wrote down both, put the notebook back in his pocket, and stood.

‘Thank you both for your time,’ he said formally.

‘Will you want to speak to me again?’ the singer asked.

‘That depends on what I’m told by other people,’ Brunetti said, regretting the menace in it but not the honesty. Understanding only the first, she picked up the score and opened it, posing it on her lap. He no longer interested her.

He took a step toward the door and, as he did, stepped into one of the beams of light that washed across the floor. Looking up toward its source, he turned to the American and asked, finally, ‘How did you manage to get those skylights?’

She crossed in front of him and went into the hallway, stopped before the door, and asked him, ‘Do you mean how did I get the skylights themselves or the permits to build them?’

‘The permits.’

Smiling, she answered, ‘I bribed the city planner.’

‘How much?’ he asked automatically, calculating the total area of the windows. Six of them, each about a meter square.

She had obviously lived in Venice long enough not to be offended by the indelicacy of the question. She smiled more broadly and answered, ‘Twelve million lire,’ as though she were giving the outside temperature.

That made it, Brunetti calculated, about half a month’s salary a window.

‘But that was two years ago,’ she added by way of explanation. ‘I’m told prices have risen since then.’

He nodded. In Venice, even graft was subject to inflation.

They shook hands at the door, and he was surprised at the warmth of the smile she gave him, as though their talk of bribery had somehow made them fellow conspirators. She thanked him for having come, though there was no need for that. He responded with equal politeness and found real warmth in his voice. Had it taken so little to win him over? Had her display of corruptibility rendered her more human? He said goodbye and mused on this last question as he walked down the stairs, glad again to feel their sea-like unevenness under his feet.

* * * *

CHAPTER NINE

Back at the Questura, he learned that officers Alvise and Riverre had gone to the Maestro’s apartment and looked through his personal effects, coming away with documents and papers, which were now being translated into Italian. He called down to the lab, but they still had no results on fingerprints, though they had confirmed the self-evident, that the poison was in the coffee. Miotti was nowhere to be found; presumably he was still at the theater. At a loss for what to do, knowing that he would have to speak to her soon, Brunetti called the Maestro’s widow and asked if it would be possible for her to receive him that afternoon. After an initial and entirely understandable reluctance, she asked him to come at four. He rooted around in the top drawer of his desk and found half a package of bussolai, the salty Venetian pretzels he loved so much. He ate them while he looked through the notes he had taken on the German police report.

A half hour before his appointment with Signora Wellauer, he left his office and walked slowly up toward Piazza San Marco. Along the way, he paused to look into shop windows, shocked, as he always was when in the center of the city, by how quickly their composition was changing. It seemed to him that all the shops that served the native population— pharmacies, shoemakers, groceries—were slowly and inexorably disappearing, replaced by slick boutiques and souvenir shops that catered to the tourists, filled with luminescent plastic gondolas from Taiwan and papier-mâché masks from Hong Kong. It was the desires of the transients, not the needs of the residents, that the city’s merchants answered. He wondered how long it would take before the entire city became a sort of living museum, a place fit only for visiting and not for inhabiting.

As if to exacerbate his reflections, a group of off-season tourists wandered by, led by a raised umbrella. Water on his left, he passed through the piazza, amazed by the people who seemed to find the pigeons more interesting than the basilica.

He crossed the bridge after Campo San Moisè, turned right, then right again, and into a narrow calk that ended in a huge wooden door.

He rang and heard a disembodied, mechanical voice ask who he was. He gave his name and, seconds later, heard the snap that released the lock on the door. He stepped into a newly restored hall, its ceiling beams stripped to their original wood and varnished to a high gloss. The floor, he noticed with a Venetian eye, was made of inlaid marble tiles set in a geometric pattern of waves and swirls. From the gentle undulance of it, he guessed that it was original to the building, perhaps early fifteenth century.

He began to climb the broad, space-wasting steps. At each landing there was a single metal door; the singleness spoke of wealth and the metal of the desire to protect it. Engraved nameplates told him to keep ascending. The steps ended, five flights up, at another metal door. He rang the bell and a few moments later was greeted by the woman he had spoken to in the theater the night before, the Maestro’s widow.

He took her extended hand, muttered, ‘Permesso,’ and crossed into the apartment.

If she had slept the night before, there was no sign of it in her face. She wore no makeup, so the intense pallor of her face was accented, as were the dark smudges beneath her eyes. But even under the fatigue, the structure of great beauty was visible. The bones of her cheeks would carry her into great age safely, and the line of her nose would always create a profile that people would turn to see again.

‘I’m Commissario Brunetti. We spoke last night.’

‘Yes, I remember,’ she replied. ‘Please come this way.’ She led him down a corridor to a large study. In one corner, there was a fireplace with a small open fire. Two chairs separated by a table stood in front of the fire. She waved him to one of the chairs and sat in the other. On the table, a burning cigarette rested in a full ashtray. Behind her was a large window, through which he could see the ocher rooftops of the city. On the walls hung what his children insisted on calling ‘real’ paintings.

‘Would you like a drink, Dottor Brunetti? Or perhaps tea?’ She repeated the Italian phrases as though she had learned them by rote from a grammar book, but he found it interesting that she would know his proper title.

‘Please don’t go to any trouble, Signora,’ he said, responding in kind.

‘Two of your policemen were here this morning. They took some things away with them.’ It was evident that her Italian wasn’t adequate to name the things that had been removed.

‘Would it help if we spoke English?’ he asked in that language.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, smiling for the first time and giving him a hint of what her full beauty would be. ‘That would be much easier for me.’ Her face softened, and some of the signs of stress disappeared. Even her body seemed to relax as the language difficulty was removed. ‘I’ve just been here a few times, to Venice, and I’m embarrassed by how badly I speak Italian.’

In other circumstances, the situation would have demanded that he deny this and praise her ability with the language. Instead he said, ‘I realize, Signora, how difficult this is for you, and I want to express my condolences to you and your family.’ Why was it that the words with which we confronted death always sounded so inadequate, so blatantly false? ‘He was a great musician, and the loss to the world of music is enormous. But I’m sure yours must be far worse.’ Stilted and artificial, it was the best he could do.

He noticed a number of telegrams sitting next to the ashtray, some open, some not. She must have been hearing much the same thing all day long, but she gave no indication of that and, instead, said simply, ‘Thank you.’ She reached into the pocket of her sweater and pulled out a package of cigarettes. She took one of them from the pack and raised it to her lips, but then she saw the cigarette still smoking in the ashtray. She tossed fresh cigarette and package on the table and pulled the lighted cigarette from the ashtray. She took a deep breath of smoke, held it for a long time, then expelled with obvious reluctance.

‘Yes, he will be missed by the world of music,’ she said. Before he could reflect on the strangeness of this, she added, ‘And here as well.’ Though there was only a millimeter of ash on the end of it, she flicked her cigarette at the ashtray, then bent forward and scraped the sides, as though it were a pencil she wanted to sharpen.

He reached into his pocket and took out his notebook, opened it to a page on which he kept a scribbled list of new books he wanted to read. He had noticed the night before that she was almost beautiful, would become unquestionably so from certain angles and in certain lights. Under the weariness that veiled her face today, that beauty was still evident. She had wide-spaced blue eyes and naturally blond hair, which today she wore pulled back and knotted simply at her neck.

‘Do you know what killed him?’ she asked.

‘I spoke to the pathologist this morning. It was potassium cyanide. It was in the coffee he drank.’

‘So it was fast. There is at least that.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘It would have been almost instantaneous.’ He jotted something in his notebook, then asked, ‘Are you familiar with the poison?’

She shot him a quick glance before she answered, ‘No more than any other doctor would be.’

He flipped a page. ‘The pathologist suggested that it’s not easily come by, cyanide,’ he lied.

She said nothing, so he asked, ‘How did your husband seem to you last night, Signora? Was there anything strange or in any way peculiar about his behavior?’

Continuing to wipe her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray, she answered, ‘No; I thought he was quite the same as always.’

‘And how was that, if I might ask?’

‘A bit tense, withdrawn. He didn’t like to speak to anyone before a performance, or during intermissions. He didn’t like to be distracted by anything.’

That seemed normal enough to him. ‘Did he appear any more nervous than usual last night?’

She considered this for a moment. ‘No, I can’t say that he was. We walked to the theater at about seven. It’s very close.’ He nodded. ‘I went to my seat, even though it was early. The ushers were used to seeing me at rehearsals, so they let me in. Helmut went backstage to change and take a look at the score.’

‘Excuse me, Signora, but I think I read in one of the papers that your husband was famous for conducting without a score.’

She smiled at this. ‘Oh, he did, he did. But he always kept one in the dressing room, and he’d look over it before the performance and during the intervals.’

‘Is that why he didn’t want to be interrupted during the intervals?’

‘Yes.’

‘You said you went backstage to speak to him last night.’ She said nothing, so he asked, ‘Was that normal?’

‘No; as I told you, he didn’t like anyone to talk to him during a performance. He said it destroyed his concentration. But last night, he asked me to go back after the second act.’

‘Was anyone with you when he asked you?’

Her voice took on a sharp edge. ‘Do you mean, do I have a witness that he asked me?’ Brunetti nodded. ‘No, Dottor Brunetti, I don’t have a witness. But I was surprised.’

‘Why?’

‘Because Helmut seldom did things that were . . . I’m not sure of the words to use . . . out of the ordinary. He seldom did things that were not part of his routine. So it surprised me that he asked me to go and see him during a performance.’

‘But you went?’

‘Yes, I went.’

‘Why did he want to see you?’

‘I don’t know. I met friends in the foyer, and I stopped to talk to them for a few minutes. I’d forgotten that during a performance, you can’t get backstage from the orchestra, that you have to go upstairs to the boxes. So by the time I finally got backstage and to his dressing room, the second bell was already ringing for the end of the interval.’

‘Did you speak to him?’

She hesitated a long time before she answered. ‘Yes, but not more than to say hello and ask him what he wanted to tell me. But then we heard—’ She paused here and stabbed out her cigarette. She took a long time doing this, moving the dead stump around and around in the ashtray. Finally, she dropped it and continued, though something had changed in her voice. ‘We heard the second bell. There was no time to speak. I said I’d see him after the performance, and I went back to my seat. I got there just as the lights were going down. I waited for the curtain to go up, for the performance to continue, but you know . . . you know what happened.’

‘Was that the first time you thought that anything was wrong?’

She reached for the package and pulled another cigarette from it. Brunetti took the lighter from the table and lit it for her. ‘Thank you,’ she said, blowing the smoke away from him.

‘And was that the first time you realized that something was wrong?’ he repeated.

‘Yes.’

‘In the last few weeks, had your husband’s behavior been different in any way?’ When she didn’t answer, he prompted: ‘Nervous, irritable in any way?’

‘I understood the question,’ she said shortly, then looked at him nervously and said, ‘I’m sorry.’

He decided it was better to remain silent than to acknowledge her apology.

She paused for a moment and then answered. ‘No, he seemed much the same as ever. He always loved Traviata, and he loved this city.’

‘And the rehearsals went well? Peacefully?’

‘I’m not sure I understand that question.’

‘Did your husband have any difficulty with the other people engaged in the production?’

‘No, not that I know of,’ she answered after a short pause.

Brunetti decided it was time to bring his questions to a more personal level. He flipped a few pages in his notebook, glanced down at it, and asked, ‘Who is it that lives here, Signora?’

If she was surprised by the sudden change of subject, she gave no sign of it. ‘My husband and I and a maid who sleeps in.’

‘How long has she worked for you, this maid?’

‘She has worked for Helmut for about twenty years, I think. I met her only when we came to Venice for the first time.’

‘And when was that?’

‘Two years ago.’

‘Yes?’ he prodded.

‘She lives here in the apartment year round, while we’re away.’ Immediately she corrected herself: ‘While we were away.’

‘Her name?’

‘Hilda Breddes.’

‘She’s not Italian?’

‘No; Belgian.’

He made a note of this. ‘How long were you and the Maestro married?’

‘Two years. We met in Berlin, where I was working.’

‘Under what circumstances?’

‘He was conducting Tristan. I went backstage with friends of mine who were also friends of his. We all went to dinner after the performance.’

‘How long did you know each other before you were married?’

‘About six months.’ She busied herself with sharpening her cigarette.

‘You said that you were working in Berlin, yet you are Hungarian.’ When she didn’t comment, he asked, ‘Isn’t this true?’

‘Yes; by birth I am. But I am now a German citizen. My first husband, as I’m sure you’ve been informed, was German, and I took his nationality when we moved to Germany after our marriage.’

She stubbed out her cigarette and looked at Brunetti, as if declaring that she would now devote all her attention to his questions. He wondered that it was these factual issues on which she had decided to focus, for all of them were matters of public record. All her answers about her marriages had been true; he knew because Paola, hopelessly addicted to the gutter press, had filled him in on the details that morning.

‘Isn’t that unusual?’ he asked.

‘Isn’t what unusual?’

‘Your being permitted to move to Germany and take German citizenship.’

She smiled at that, but not, he thought, in amusement. ‘Not so unusual as you here in the West seem to think.’ Was it scorn? ‘I was a married woman, married to a German. His work in Hungary was finished, and he went back to his own country. I applied for permission to go with my husband, and it was granted. Even under the old government, we were not savages. The family is very important to Hungarians.’ From the way she said it, Brunetti suspected she believed it to be of only minimal importance to Italians.

‘Is he the father of your child?’

The question clearly startled her. ‘Who?’

‘Your first husband.’

‘Yes, he is.’ She reached for another cigarette.

‘Does he still live in Germany?’ Brunetti asked as he lit her cigarette, though he knew that the man taught at the University of Heidelberg.

‘Yes, he does.’

‘Is it true that, before marrying the Maestro, you were a doctor?’

‘Commissario,’ she began, voice tight with an anger she did little to contain or disguise, ‘I am still a doctor, and I shall always be a doctor. At the moment, I don’t have a practice, but believe me, I am still a doctor.’

‘I apologize, Doctor,’ he said, meaning it and regretting his stupidity. He quickly changed the subject. ‘Your daughter, does she live here with you?’

He saw the impulsive motion toward the cigarette package, watched as she glided her hand toward the burning cigarette and picked that up instead. ‘No, she lives with her grandparents in Munich. It would be too difficult for her to go to a foreign-language school while we were here, so we decided it would be best for her to go to study in Munich.’

‘With your former husband’s parents?’

‘Yes.’

‘How old is she, your daughter?’

‘Thirteen.’

His own daughter, Chiara, was the same age, and he realized how unkind it would be to force her to attend school in a foreign country. ‘Will you resume your medical practice now?’

She thought awhile before she answered this. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps. I would like to heal people. But it’s too early to think about that.’ Brunetti bowed his head in silent agreement.

‘If you will permit me, Signora, and perhaps forgive me in advance for the question, could you tell me if you have any idea of the sort of financial arrangements your husband made?’

‘You mean what happens to the money?’ Remarkably direct.

‘Yes.’

She answered quickly. ‘I know only what Helmut told me. We didn’t have a formal agreement, nothing written, the way people do today when they marry.’ Her tone dismissed such thinking. ‘It is my understanding that five people will inherit his estate.’

‘And they are?’

‘His children by his previous marriages. He had one by the first and three by the second. And myself.’

‘And your daughter?’

‘No,’ she said immediately. ‘Only his natural children.’

It seemed normal enough to Brunetti that a man would want to leave his money to children of his own blood. ‘Have you any idea of the amount involved?’ Widows usually did and just as usually said they did not.

‘I think it is a great deal of money. But his agent or his lawyer would be able to tell you more about that than I can.’ Strangely enough, it sounded to him as if she really didn’t know. Stranger still, it sounded as if she didn’t care.

The signs of fatigue he had seen in her when he entered had grown more pronounced during their conversation. The line of her shoulders was less straight; twin lines ran down from her nose to the corners of her mouth. ‘I have only a few more questions,’ he said.

‘Would you like something to drink?’ It was clear that she was being no more than formally polite.

‘Thank you, but no. I’ll ask these questions and then leave you.’ She nodded tiredly, almost as if she knew that these were the questions he had come to ask.

‘Signora, I would like to know something about your relationship with your husband.’ He watched her grow visibly more distant and self-protective. He prodded. ‘The difference in age between you was considerable.’

‘Yes, it was.’

He remained silent, waiting. She finally said, stating, not admitting, and he liked her for that, ‘Helmut was thirty-seven years older than I.’ That would make her a few years older than he had judged her to be, just Paola’s age. Wellauer was just eight years younger than Brunetti’s grandfather. As strange as he found that thought, Brunetti tried to give no sign of it. What was it like for this woman, with a husband almost two generations older than she? He saw that she was shifting uncomfortably under the intensity of his gaze, and he glanced away for a moment, as if thinking about how to phrase his next question.

‘Did the difference to your ages create any difficulties in your marriage?’ How transparent was the cloud of euphemism that always surrounded such a union. Though polite, the question was still a voyeur’s leer, and he was embarrassed by it.

Her silence stretched out for so long that he didn’t know if it spoke of her disgust with his curiosity or her annoyance at the artificiality with which he expressed it. Suddenly sounding very tired, she said, ‘Because of the difference in our ages, in our generations, we saw the world differently, but I married him because I was in love with him.’ Brunetti’s instinct told him that he had just heard the truth, but the same instinct also told him that he had heard only the singular. His humanity prevented him from asking about the omission.

As a sign that he was finished, he closed the notebook and slipped it back into his pocket. ‘Thank you, Signora. It was very kind of you to see me at this time.’ He trailed off, unwilling to lapse again into euphemism or platitude. ‘Have you made arrangements for the funeral?’

‘Tomorrow. At ten. At San Moisè. Helmut loved the city and always hoped that he would have the privilege of being buried here.’

The little that Brunetti had heard and read about the conductor made him doubt that the dead man would have viewed privilege as anything other than what he could bestow, but perhaps Venice had sufficient grandeur to be an exception. ‘I hope you have no objection if I attend.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘I have one more question, also a painful one. Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to harm your husband? Is there anyone with whom he recently argued, anyone he might have had reason to fear?’

Her smile was small, but it was a smile. ‘Does that mean,’ she asked, ‘can I think of anyone who might have wanted to kill him?’

Brunetti nodded.

‘His career was very long, and I’m sure he offended many people during it. Some people disliked him, surely. But I can’t think of anyone who would do this.’ Absently, she ran her finger along the arm of her chair. ‘And no one who loved music could do this.’

He rose to his feet and extended his hand. ‘Thank you, Signora, for your time and your patience.’ She stood and took his hand. ‘Please don’t bother,’ he said, meaning that he would see himself out of the apartment. She dismissed his suggestion with a shake of her head and led him down the hall. At the door, they shook hands again, neither speaking. He left the apartment troubled by the interview, not quite sure if the reason was only the platitudes and excessive courtesies on his part or something he had been too dull to catch.

* * * *

CHAPTER TEN

While he was inside, it had grown dark, the suddenly descending early-winter obscurity that added to the desolation that brooded over the city until the release of spring. He decided not to go back to his office, not willing to risk his anger if there was still no report from the lab and not interested in reading the German report again. As he walked, he reflected on how very little he had learned about the dead man. No, he had a great deal of information, but it was all strangely out of focus, too formal and impersonal. A genius, a homophobe, adored by the world of music, a man whom a woman half his age would love, but still a man whose substance was elusive. Brunetti knew some of the facts, but he had no idea of the reality.

He walked on and considered the means by which he had acquired his information. He had the resources of Interpol at his command, he had the full cooperation of the German police, and he had sufficient rank to call upon the entire police system of Italy. Obviously, then, the most reliable way to get accurate information about the man was to address himself to the unfailing source of all information—gossip.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Brunetti disliked Paola’s parents, the Count and Countess Falier, but it would be an equal exaggeration to say that he liked them. They puzzled him in much the same way that a pair of whooping cranes would puzzle someone accustomed to tossing peanuts to the pigeons in the park. They belonged to a rare and elegant species, and Brunetti, after knowing them for almost two decades, had to admit that he had mixed feelings about the inevitability of their extinction.

Count Falier, who numbered two doges on his mother’s side, could, and did, trace his family back to the tenth century. There were crusaders perched on the limbs of his family tree, a cardinal or two, a composer of secondary importance, and the former Italian ambassador to the court of King Zog of Albania. Paola’s mother was Florentine by birth, though her family had transferred itself to the northern city shortly after that event. They claimed descent from the Medici, and in a kind of genealogical chess that had a strange fascination for people of their circle, she matched her husband’s doges with a pope and a textile millionaire, the cardinal with a cousin of Petrarch, the composer with a famous castrato (from whom, sadly, no issue), and the ambassador with Garibaldi’s banker.

They lived in a palazzo that had belonged to the Falieri for at least three centuries, a vast rambling vault on the Grand Canal that was virtually impossible to heat in the winter and that was kept from imminent collapse only by the constant ministrations of an ever-present horde of masons, builders, plumbers, and electricians, all of whom joined Count Falier willingly in the perpetual Venetian battle against the inexorable forces of time, tide, and industrial pollution.

Brunetti had never counted the rooms in the palazzo and had always been embarrassed to ask how many there were. Its four floors were surrounded on three sides by canals, its back propped up by a deconsecrated church. He entered it only on formal occasions: the vigil of Christmas, when they went to eat fish and exchange gifts; the name day of Count Orazio, when, for some reason, they ate pheasant and again gave gifts; and the Feast of the Redeemer, when they went to eat pasta fagioli and watch the fireworks soaring above Piazza San Marco. His children loved to visit their grandparents on these occasions, and he knew they went, either by themselves or with Paola, to visit during the year. He chose to believe that it was because of the palazzo and the possibilities of exploration it offered, but he had the niggling suspicion that they loved their grandparents and enjoyed their company, twin phenomena that baffled Brunetti utterly.

The count was ‘in finance.’ Throughout the seventeen years Brunetti had been married to Paola, this was the only description he had ever heard of her father’s profession. He was not described as being ‘a financier,’ no doubt because that might have suggested something manual, like counting money or going to the office. No, the count was ‘in finance,’ in much the same way that the de Beers were ‘in mines,’ or von Thyssen ‘in steel.’

The countess, for her part, was ‘in society,’ which meant that she attended the opening nights of Italy’s four major opera houses, arranged benefit concerts for the Italian Red Cross, and gave a masked ball for four hundred people each year during Carnevale.

Brunetti, for his part, earned slightly more than three million lire a month as a commissario of police, a sum he calculated to be only a bit more than what his father-in-law paid each month for the right to dock his boat in front of the palazzo. A decade ago, the count had attempted to persuade Brunetti to leave the police and join him in a career in banking. He continually pointed out that Brunetti ought not to spend his life .in the company of tax evaders, wife beaters, pimps, thieves, and perverts. The offers had come to a sudden halt one Christmas when, goaded beyond patience, Brunetti had pointed out that although he and the count seemed to work among the same people, he at least had the consolation of being able to arrest them, whereas the count was constrained to invite them to dinner.

So it was with some trepidation that night that Brunetti asked Paola if it would be possible for them to attend the party her parents were giving the following evening to celebrate the opening of a new exhibition of French impressionist paintings at the Doge’s Palace.

‘But how did you know about the party?’ Paola asked, astonished.

‘I read about it in the paper.’

‘My parents, and you read about it in the paper?’ This seemed to offend Paola’s atavistic concept of the family.

‘Yes; but will you ask them?’

‘Guido, I usually have to threaten you just to get you to go and have Christmas dinner with them, and now you suddenly want to go to one of their parties. Why?’

‘Because I want to talk to the sort of people who go to that sort of thing.’

Paola, who had been reading and grading student papers when he came in, carefully set her pen down and graced him with the look she usually reserved for brutal infelicities of language. Though they were not infrequent in the papers that rested under her pen, she was not accustomed to hearing them from her husband. She looked at him a long time, formulating one of the replies he often relished as much as he dreaded. ‘I doubt that they could refuse, given the elegance of your request,’ she said, then picked up the pen and bent back over the papers.

It was late, and he knew that she was tired, so he busied himself at the counter, making coffee. ‘You know you won’t sleep if you drink coffee this late,’ she said, recognizing what he was doing from the sounds he made.

He passed her on the way to the stove, ruffled her hair, and said, ‘I’ll think of something to occupy myself.’

She grunted, struck a line through a phrase, and asked, ‘Why do you want to meet them?’

‘To find out as much as I can about Wellauer. I’ve been reading about what a genius he was, about his career, about his wives, but I don’t have any real idea of what sort of man he was.’

‘And you think the sort of people,’ she said with heavy emphasis, ‘who go to my parents’ parties would know about him?’

‘I want to know about his private life, and those are the people who would know the sort of thing I want to know.’

‘That’s the sort of thing you can read about in STOP.’ It never failed to amaze him that a person who taught English literature at the university could be so intimate with the gutter press.

‘Paola,’ he said. ‘I want to find out things that are true about him. STOP’s the sort of place where you read about Mother Teresa’s abortion.’

She grunted and turned a page, leaving a trail of angry blue marks behind her.

He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a liter of milk, splashed some into a pan, and set it on the flame to heat. From long experience, he knew that she would refuse to drink a cup of coffee, no matter how much milk he added to it, insisting that it would keep her awake. But once he had his own, she would sip at it, end up drinking most of it, then sleep like a rock. From the cabinet he pulled down a bag of sweet biscuits they bought for the children and peered into it to see how many were left.

When the coffee was finished boiling up into the top of the double pot, he poured it into a mug, added the steaming milk, spooned in less sugar than he liked, and went to sit across from Paola. Absently, still intent on the paper in front of her, she reached out and took a sip of coffee even before he had a chance to do so. When she put it back on the table, he wrapped his fingers around it but didn’t pick it up. She turned a page, reached out for the mug, and looked up at him when he refused to release it.

‘Eh?’ she asked.

‘Not until you agree to call your mother.’

She tried to push his hand away. When he refused to move it, she wrote a rude word on it with her pen. ‘You’ll have to wear a suit.’

‘I always wear a suit when I go to see your parents.’

‘Well, you never look like you’re happy to be wearing a suit.’

All right,’ he said, smiling. ‘I promise to wear a suit and to look happy that I’m wearing it. So will you call your mother?’

‘All right,’ she conceded. ‘But I meant it about the suit.’

‘Yes, my treasure,’ he fawned. He let go of the cup and pushed it toward her. When she had taken another sip, he extracted a biscuit from the bag and dipped it into the coffee.

‘You are disgusting,’ she said, then smiled.

‘Simple peasant,’ he agreed, shoving the biscuit into his mouth.

Paola never talked much about what it had been like to be raised in the palazzo, with an English nanny and a flock of servants, but if he knew anything about all those years, he knew that she had never been permitted to dunk. He saw it as a great lapse in her upbringing and insisted that their children be allowed to do it. She had agreed, but with great reluctance. Neither child, he never failed to point out to her, showed grave signs of moral or physical decline as a result.

From the way she scribbled a hasty comment across the bottom of a page, he knew she was about to come to the end of her patience for that night.

‘I’m so tired of their blunt minds, Guido,’ she said, capping the pen and tossing it down on the table. ‘I’d almost rather deal with murderers. At least they can be punished.’

The coffee was finished, or he would have pushed it toward her. Instead he got up and took a bottle of grappa from the cabinet. It was the only comfort he could think of at the moment.

‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘First coffee, and now grappa. We’ll never get to sleep.’

‘Shall we try keeping each other awake?’ he asked. She glowed.

* * * *

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The following morning, he arrived at the Questura at eight, carrying with him the day’s newspapers, which he read through quickly. There was little new information: most of it had been said the day before. The summaries of Wellauer’s career were longer, the cries that the killer be brought to justice more strident, but there was nothing that Brunetti didn’t already know.

The lab report was on his desk. The only fingerprints on the cup, in which traces of potassium cyanide were found, were Wellauer’s. In the dressing room, there were scores of other prints, far too many to be checked. He decided against having prints taken. Since the only ones on the cup were Wellauer’s, there seemed little sense in identifying all those found in the room.

Along with the fingerprint report was a list of articles found in the dressing room. He remembered having seen most of them: the score of Traviata, each page crowded with notations in the angular Gothic script of the conductor; a comb, a wallet, change; the clothes he had been wearing and those in the closet; a handkerchief and a package of mints. There had also been a Rolex Oyster, a pen, and a small address book.

The officers who had gone to take a look at the conductor’s home—one could hardly call it a search—had written a report, but since they had no idea of what they were supposed to be looking for, Brunetti had little hope that their report would reveal anything of interest or importance. Nevertheless, he picked it up and read through it carefully.

The Maestro had had a remarkably complete wardrobe for a man who spent only a few weeks in the city each year. He marveled at the precision of the notes made about the clothing: ‘Black double-vent cashmere jacket (Duca D’Aosta); cobalt and muted-umber sweater, size 52 (Missoni).’ For a moment, he wondered if he had lost his bearings and found himself in the Valentino boutique rather than in police headquarters. He flipped to the end and found, as he had feared, the signatures of AIvise and Riverre, the two officers who had written, a year ago, about a body that had been pulled out of the sea at the Lido: ‘Appears to have died of suffocation.’

He turned back to the report. The signora, it appeared, did not share her late husband’s interest in clothing. Nor, from what he read, did it seem that Alvise and Riverre thought highly of her taste. ‘Varese boots, only one pair. Black woolen coat, no label.’ They had, however, apparently been impressed by the library, which they described as ‘extensive, in three languages and what appears to be Hungarian.’

He turned another page. There were two guest rooms in the apartment, each with a separate bath. Fresh towels, empty closets, Christian Dior soap.

There was no evidence of Signora Wellauer’s daughter; nothing in the report suggested the presence in the house of the third member of the family. Neither of the two extra rooms held a teenager’s clothes or books or possessions of any kind. Knowing how he was forever finding proof of his own daughter’s existence under foot, Brunetti found this strange. Her mother had explained that she was going to school in Munich. But it was a remarkable child who managed to take all of her clutter along with her.

There was a description of the Belgian maid’s room, which the two officers appeared to have found too simply furnished, and of the maid, whom they had found subdued but helpful. The last room described was the Maestro’s office, where they had found ‘documents.’ Some, it seems, had been brought back and looked over by the German translator, who explained, in a page added to the report, that the bulk of them pertained to business and contracts. A datebook had been inspected and judged unimportant.

Brunetti decided to seek out the two authors of this document and thus spare himself the irritation of having to wait for them to respond to his request that they come up to his office. Since it was almost nine, he knew that he would find them down the street at the bar on the other side of the Ponte dei Greci. It was not the precise hour but the fact that it was before noon that made this conclusion inescapable.

Though Brunetti dreaded the assignment of the two men to any case he was working on, he couldn’t help liking them. Alvise was a squat man in his late forties, almost a caricature of the dark-skinned Sicilian, save that he came from Tarvisio, on the border with Austria. He was accepted as the resident expert on popular music, this because he had once, fifteen years ago, actually had a program autographed by Mina, the mythic queen of Italian popular singing. Over the years, this event had swelled and expanded—as had Mina—by repeated retelling, until Alvise now suggested, eyes bright with the glitter of satisfied desire, that far more had gone on between them. The retelling seemed not at all affected by the fact that the singer was a head taller than Alvise and was now almost twice his girth.

Riverre, his partner, was a red-haired Palermitano, whose only interests in life appeared to be soccer and women, in that order. The high point in his life to date was having survived the riot in the Brussels soccer stadium. He augmented his account of what he had done there, before the Belgian police arrived, with tales of his triumphs with women, usually foreigners, who, he claimed, fell like wheat before the sickle of his charms.

Brunetti found them, as he had expected, standing at the counter in the bar. Riverre was reading the sports newspaper, and Alvise was talking with Arianna, the woman who owned the bar. Neither noticed Brunetti’s arrival until he came up to the bar and ordered a coffee. At that, Alvise smiled in greeting and Riverre pulled his attention away from the paper long enough to greet his superior.

‘Two more coffees, Arianna,’ Alvise said, ‘all three on my bill.’

Brunetti recognized the maneuver, aimed at putting him in the other’s debt. By the time the three coffees arrived, Riverre stood with them, and the newspaper had somehow been transformed into a blue-covered case file, which now lay open on the counter.

Brunetti spooned in two sugars and swirled his spoon around. ‘Is it you two who went to the Maestro’s house?’

‘Yes, sir,’ brightly, from Alvise.

‘And what a house it is!’ chimed in Riverre.

‘I’ve just been looking at your report.’

‘Arianna, bring us some brioches.’

‘I read it with great interest.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Particularly your comments about his wardrobe. I take it you didn’t like those English suits.’

‘No, sir,’ replied Riverre, as usual not getting it. ‘I think they’re cut too loose in the leg.’

Alvise, reaching along the counter to open the file, accidentally nudged his partner in the arm, perhaps a bit harder than was necessary. ‘Anything else, sir?’ he asked.

‘Yes. While you were there, did you notice any sign of the signora’s daughter?’

‘Is there a daughter, sir?’ This, predictably, from Riverre.

‘That’s why I’m asking you. Was there any sign of a child? Books? Clothes?’

Both showed signs of deep thought. Riverre stared off into space, which he seemed to find closer than most people did, and Alvise looked down at the floor, hands thrust into his uniform pockets. The requisite minute passed before they both answered, ‘No, sir,’ at the same time, almost as if they had practiced it.

‘Nothing at all?’

Again their separate displays, then the simultaneous response: ‘No, sir.’

‘Did you speak to the maid, the Belgian?’

Riverre rolled his eyes at the memory of the maid, suggesting that any time spent with such a stick of a woman was time wasted, even if she was a foreigner. Alvise contented himself with ‘Yes, sir.’

‘And did she tell you anything that might be important?’

Riverre drew in a breath, preparing himself to answer, but before he could begin, his partner said, ‘Nothing she actually said, sir. But I got the impression she didn’t like the signora.’

Riverre couldn’t let this pass and asked, with a lurid smile, ‘What’s not to like there?’ putting heavy emphasis on the last word.

Brunetti gave him a cool glance and asked his partner, ‘Why?’

‘It was nothing I could put my finger on,’ he began. Riverre snorted. So much for the effectiveness of his cool glance.

‘As I was saying, sir, it was nothing definite, but she seemed much more formal when the signora was there. Be hard for her to be more formal than she was with us, but it just seemed that way. She seemed to, I don’t know, get cooler when the signora was there, especially when she had to speak to her.’

‘And when was that?’

‘When we first went in. We asked her if it would be all right if we had a look around the apartment, at his things. From the way she answered us, I mean the signora, sir, it looked like she didn’t like the idea very much. But she told us to go ahead, and then she called the maid and told her to show us where his things were. It was then, when they were talking to each other, that the maid seemed, well, cold. Later, when she was talking to us, she seemed better. Didn’t warm up or anything—after all, she is Belgian—but she was better with us, more friendly, than she was with the other one.’

‘Did you speak to the signora again?’

‘Just before we were leaving, sir. We had the papers with us. She didn’t like it that we were taking them with us. It was just a look, but it’s the way she made us feel. We asked her if we could take the papers. We had to; it’s the regulation.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Brunetti answered. ‘Anything else?’

‘Yes,’ chirped in Riverre.

‘What?’

‘She didn’t mind it when we looked through his clothing and closets. She sent the maid with us, didn’t even bother to come herself. But when we went into the other room, where the papers were, then she came along and told the maid to wait outside. She didn’t like us looking at that stuff, sir, papers and things.’

‘And what were they?’

‘They looked official, sir. It was all in German, and we brought it back here to be translated.’

‘Yes, I’ve seen the report. What happened to the papers, after they were translated?’

‘I don’t know, sir,’ answered Alvise. ‘Either they’re still down with the translator or they were sent back to her.’

‘Riverre, could you go and find out for me?’

‘Now, sir?’

‘Yes, now.’

‘Yes, sir.’ He sketched out something that resembled a salute and moved away from the bar with deliberate slowness.

‘And, Riverre,’ he called out after him. Riverre turned, hoping to be called back and spared the walk to the Questura and the two flights of stairs. ‘If the papers are there, have them sent up to my office.’

Brunetti picked up one of the brioches that lay on a plate in front of them and took a bite. He signaled to Arianna to make him another coffee. ‘While you were there,’ he asked Alvise, ‘did you notice anything else?’

‘What kind of things, sir?’ As though they were meant to see only those things they were sent to look for.

‘Anything. You mentioned the tension between the two women. Did either of them seem to act strangely?’

Alvise thought for a moment, took a bite from one of the brioches, and answered, ‘No, sir.’ Seeing that Brunetti was disappointed with this answer, he added, ‘Only when we took the papers.’

‘Do you have any idea why that might be?’

‘No, sir. Only she was so different from how she was when we looked at his personal things, as if that didn’t matter at all. I’d sort of think that people wouldn’t like that, poking around in someone’s clothing. But papers are just papers.’ Seeing that this last remark had clearly garnered Brunetti’s interest, he grew more expansive. ‘But maybe it’s because he was a genius. Of course, I wouldn’t know about that sort of music’ Brunetti braced himself for the inevitable. ‘The only singer I know personally is Mina, and she never sang with him. But as I was saying, if he was famous, then maybe the papers might be important. There might be things in them about, you know, music’

At that moment, Riverre came back. ‘Sorry, sir, but the papers have been sent back.’

‘How? Mailed?’

‘No, sir; the translator took them himself. He said that the widow would probably need some of them.’

Brunetti stepped back from the bar and reached for his wallet. He put ten thousand lire on the counter before either of the two uniformed men could object.

‘Thank you, sir,’ they both said.

‘It’s nothing.’

When he turned to leave, neither of them made a move to accompany him, though both did salute.

The porter at the Questura’s door told him that Vice-Questore Patta wanted to see him immediately in his office.

‘Gesù Bambino,’ Brunetti exclaimed under his breath, an expression he had learned from his mother, who, like him, used it only when pressed beyond the limits of human patience.

At the door to his commander’s office, he knocked and was careful to wait for the shouted ‘Avanti!’ before entering. As he had expected, he found Patta posed behind his desk, a stack of files fanned out in front of him. He ignored Brunetti for a moment, continuing to read the paper he had in his hand. Brunetti contented himself with examining the faint traces of a fresco that had once been painted on the ceiling.

Pasta looked up suddenly, feigned surprise at seeing Brunetti, and asked, ‘Where are you?’

Brunetti mirrored Patta’s apparent confusion, as though he found the question peculiar but didn’t want to call attention to it. ‘In your office, sir.’

‘No, no, where are you on the case?’ Waving Brunetti to one of the low ormolu chairs in front of his desk, he picked up his pen and began to tap it on the desk top.

‘I’ve interviewed the widow and two of the people who were in the dressing room. I’ve spoken to the doctor, and I know the cause of death.’

‘I know all that,’ Patta said, increasing the rhythm of the pen and making no attempt to hide his irritation. ‘In other words, you’ve learned nothing important?’

‘Yes, sir, I suppose you could put it that way.’

‘You know, Brunetti, I’ve given a lot of thought to this investigation, and I think it might be wise to take you off the case.’ Patta’s voice was heavy with menace, as though he’d spent the previous night paging through his copy of Machiavelli.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I could, I suppose, give it to someone else to investigate. Perhaps then we’d have some real progress.’

‘I don’t think Mariani’s working on anything at the moment.’

It was only with the exercise of great self-restraint that Patta kept himself from wincing at the mention of the name of the younger of the two other commissarios of police, a man of unimpeachable character and impenetrable stupidity who was known to have gotten his job as part of his wife’s dowry, she being the niece of the former mayor. His other colleague, Brunetti knew, was currently involved in the investigation of the drug traffic at the port of Marghera. ‘Or perhaps you could take it over yourself,’ he suggested, and then added with tantalizing lateness, ‘sir.’

‘Yes, that’s always a possibility,’ Patta said, either not registering the rudeness or deciding to ignore it. He took a package of dark-papered Russian cigarettes from his desk and fitted one into his onyx holder. Very nice, Brunetti thought; color coordinated. ‘I’ve called you in because I’ve had some phone calls from the press and from People in High Places,’ he said, carefully emphasizing all the capitals. ‘And they’re very concerned that you’ve done nothing.’ This time, the enunciation fell very heavily upon the singular. He puffed delicately at the cigarette and stared across at Brunetti. ‘Did you hear me? They’re not pleased.’

‘I can see how that would be, sir. I’ve got a dead genius and no one to blame for it.’

Was he wrong, or did he see Patta mouth that last one silently to himself, perhaps preparing to toss it off himself at lunch today? ‘Yes, exactly,’ Patta said. His lips moved again. ‘And no one to blame for it.’ Patta deepened his voice. ‘I want that to change. I want someone to blame for it.’ Brunetti had never before heard the man so clearly express his idea of justice. Perhaps Brunetti would toss that off at lunch today.

‘From now on, Brunetti, I want a written report on my desk each morning by’—he paused, trying to remember when the office opened—’by eight,’ he said, getting it right.

‘Yes, sir. Will that be all?’ It made little difference to Brunetti whether the report had to be spoken or written; he would still have nothing to report until he had a clearer idea of the man who had been killed. Genius or not, the answer always lay there.

‘No, that’s not all. What do you plan to do with yourself today?’

I’m going to go to the funeral. That’s in about twenty minutes. And I want to have a look through his papers myself.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Patta snorted. ‘No wonder we’re getting nowhere.’

That seemed to signal the end of the interview, so Brunetti got to his feet and went toward the door, wondering how close he would get before Patta would remind him of the written report. He estimated he was still three steps from the door when he heard: ‘Remember, eight o’clock.’

His meeting with Patta kept Brunetti from getting to the church of San Moisè until just a few minutes before ten. The black boat carrying the flower-covered casket was already moored to the side of the canal, and three blue-suited men were busy placing the wooden casket on the wheeled metal platform they would use to take it to the door of the church. In the host of people who crowded around the front of the church, Brunetti recognized a few familiar Venetian faces, the usual reporters and photographers from the papers, but he didn’t see the widow; she must already have entered the church.

As the three men reached the doors, a fourth man joined them, and they lifted the coffin, placed it with practiced ease on their shoulders, and ascended the two low steps of the church. Brunetti was among the people who followed them inside. He watched the men carry the casket up the center aisle and place it on a low stand before the main altar.

Brunetti took a seat at the end of a pew at the rear of the crowded church. With difficulty, he could see between the heads of the people in front of him to the first row, where the widow, in black, sat between a man and a woman, both gray-haired, probably the people he had seen with her in the theater. Behind her, alone in a pew, sat another woman in black, whom Brunetti assumed to be the maid. Though he’d had no expectations regarding the mass, Brunetti was surprised by the starkness of the ceremony. The most remarkable thing about it was the complete absence of music, even an organ. The familiar words floated over the heads of the crowd, the ageless sprinklings and blessings were performed. Because of its simplicity, the mass was quickly over.

Brunetti waited at the end of the pew as the casket was carried past, waited until the chief mourners left the church. Outside, cameras flashed and reporters surrounded the widow, who cringed back against the elderly man who accompanied her.

Without thinking, Brunetti pushed his way through the crowd and took her other arm. He recognized a few of the photographers, saw that they knew who he was, and ordered them to move away. The men who had surrounded the widow backed off, leaving a path open toward the boats that stood at the side of the campo. Supporting her, he led the widow toward the boat, helped her as she stepped down onto the deck, and then followed her into the passenger cabin.

The couple who had been with her in the theater joined her there; the gray-haired woman put her arm around the shoulder of the younger woman, and the man contented himself with sitting beside her and taking her hand. Brunetti placed himself at the cabin door and watched as the boat carrying the casket cast off and began moving slowly up the narrow canal. When they were safely away from the church and the crowds, he ducked his head and went back into the cabin.

‘Thank you,’ Signora Wellauer said, making no attempt to hide her tears.

There was nothing he could say.

The boat moved out into the Grand Canal and turned left, toward San Marco, which they would have to pass in order to get to the cemetery. Brunetti went back to the cabin door and looked forward, taking his intrusive gaze away from the grief within. The campanile flowed by them, then the checkered rectangularity of the Ducal Palace, and then those happy, carefree domes. When they were approaching the Arsenale canal, Brunetti went up on deck and asked the boatman if he could stop at the embarcadero of the Palasport. He went back into the cabin and heard the three people there conversing in low voices.

‘Dottor Brunetti,’ the widow said.

He turned from the cabin door and looked back at her.

‘Thank you. That would have been too much, back there.’

He nodded in agreement. The boat began the broad left turn that would take them into the canal of the Arsenale. ‘I’d like to speak to you again,’ he said, ‘whenever it would be convenient for you.’

‘Is it necessary?’

‘Yes, I believe it is.’

The motor hummed a deeper note as the boat pulled toward the landing platform that stood on the right side of the canal.

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow?’

If she was surprised or the others were offended, they gave no sign. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘In the afternoon.’

‘Thank you,’ he said as the boat hovered at the wooden landing. No one answered him, so he left the cabin, jumped from the boat onto the platform, and stood there as the boat pulled back into line, following the casket out into the deeper waters of the laguna.

* * * *

CHAPTER TWELVE

Like most of the palazzi on the Grand Canal, Palazzo Falier was originally meant to be approached by boat, and guests were meant to enter by means of the four shallow steps leading down to the landing on the canal. But this entrance had long since been closed off by a heavy metal grating that was opened only when large objects were delivered by boat. In these fallen times, guests arrived by foot, walking from Cà Rezzonico, the nearest vaporetto stop, or from other parts of the city.

Brunetti and Paola approached the palazzo by foot, passing in front of the university, then through Campo San Barnaba, after which they turned left and along a narrow canal that led them to the side entrance of the palazzo.

They rang the bell and then were ushered into the courtyard by a young man Paola had never seen before. Probably hired for the night.

‘At least he’s not wearing knee breeches and a wig,’ Brunetti remarked as they climbed the exterior staircase. The young man had not bothered to ask who they were or whether they had been invited. Either he had a guest list committed to memory and could recognize everyone who arrived or more likely, he simply did not care whom he let into the palazzo.

At the top of the stairs, they heard music coming from the left, where the three enormous reception rooms were located. Following the sound, they went down a mirror-lined hallway, accompanied by their own dim reflections. The huge oaken doors to the first room stood open. Light, music, and the scent of expensive perfume and flowers spilled from beyond them.

The light that filled the room came from two immense Murano glass chandeliers, covered with playful angels and Cupids, which hung from the frescoed ceiling, and from candle-filled stanchions that lined the walls. The music came from a discreet trio in the corner, who played Vivaldi in one of his more repetitive moods. And the scent emanated from the flock of brightly colored and even more brightly chattering women who decorated the room.

A few minutes after he saw them enter, the count approached, bowed to kiss Paola’s cheek, and extended his hand to his son-in-law. He was a tall man in his late sixties who, making no attempt to disguise the fact that his hair was thinning, wore it cut short around a tonsure and looked like a particularly studious monk. Paola had his brown eyes and broad mouth but had been spared the large prow of aristocratic nose that was the central feature of his face. His dinner jacket was so well tailored that even had it been pink, the only thing anyone seeing it would have noticed was the cut.

‘Your mother is delighted that you both could come.’ The subtle emphasis alluded to the fact that this was the first time Brunetti had attended one of their parties. ‘I hope you will enjoy yourselves.’

‘I’m sure we will,’ Brunetti replied for them both. For seventeen years, he had avoided calling his father-in-law anything. He couldn’t use the title, nor could he bring himself to call the man Papà. ‘Orazio,’ his Christian name, was too intimate, a baying at the moon of social equality. So Brunetti struggled on, not calling him anything, not even ‘Signore.’ They did, however, compromise and use the familiar tu form of address with each other, though even that did not fall easily from their lips.

The count saw his wife come across the room and smiled, beckoning her to join them. She maneuvered her way through the crowd with a combination of grace and social skill that Brunetti envied, stopping to kiss a cheek here, lightly touch an arm there. He quite enjoyed the countess, stiff and formal in her chains of pearls and layers of black chiffon. As usual, her feet were encased in dagger-pointed shoes with heels as high as curbstones, which still failed to bring her level with her husband’s shoulder.

‘Paola, Paola,’ she cried, making no attempt to hide her delight at seeing her only child. ‘I’m so glad you could finally bring Guido with you.’ She broke off for a moment to kiss them both. ‘I’m so glad to see you here, not just for Christmas or for those awful fireworks.’ Not one to keep a cat in a bag, the countess.

‘Come,’ said the count. ‘Let me get you a drink, Guido.’

‘Thank you,’ he answered, then, to Paola and her mother, ‘May we bring you something?’

‘No, no. Mamma and I will get something in a little while.’

Count Falier led Brunetti across the room, pausing occasionally to exchange a greeting or a word. At the bar, he asked for champagne for himself and a Scotch for his son-in-law.

As he handed the drink to Brunetti, he asked, ‘I assume you’re here in the line of duty. Is that correct?’

‘Yes, it is,’ Brunetti answered, glad of the other man’s directness.

‘Good. Then my time hasn’t been wasted.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ Brunetti said.

Nodding to an enormous woman who had just enthroned herself in front of the piano, the count said, ‘I know from Paola that you’ve been assigned this Wellauer thing. It’s bad for the city, a crime like this.’ As he spoke, he could not restrain his look of disapproval at the conductor for having gotten himself killed, especially during the social season. ‘In any case, when I heard that Paola called to say you both wanted to come tonight, I made a few phone calls. I assumed that you would want to know about his finances.’

‘Yes, that correct.’ Was there any information this man couldn’t get, just by picking up the phone and dialing the right number? ‘May I ask what you learned?’

‘He wasn’t as wealthy as he was generally thought to be.’ Brunetti waited for this to be translated into numbers he could understand. He and the count, surely, would have different ideas of what ‘wealthy’ meant. ‘His total holdings, in stocks and bonds and real estate, probably didn’t amount to more than ten million deutsche marks. He’s got four million francs in Switzerland, at the Union Bank in Lugano, but I doubt that the German tax people will learn anything about that.’ As Brunetti was calculating that it would take him approximately three hundred and fifty years to earn such money, the count added, ‘His income from performances and recordings must bring in at least three or four million marks a year.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti acknowledged. ‘And the will?’

‘I didn’t succeed in getting a copy of it,’ the count said apologetically. Since the man had been dead only two days, Brunetti believed this was a lapse he could overlook. ‘But it’s divided equally among his children and his wife. There is talk, however, that he tried to get in touch with his lawyers a few weeks before he died; no one knows why, and it need not have been about his will.’

‘What does that mean, “tried to get in touch with”?’

‘He called his lawyers’ office in Berlin, but apparently there was something wrong with the connection, and he never called back.’

‘Did any of the people you spoke to say anything about his personal life?’

The count’s glass stopped just short of his mouth with such a sudden motion that some of the pale liquid splashed onto the lapel of the jacket. He glared at Brunetti in astonishment, as though all the reservations he had harbored for almost two decades had suddenly been proved true. ‘What do you think I am, a spy?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Brunetti said, offering the count his handkerchief to dry his lapel. ‘It’s the job. I forget.’

‘Yes, I can see that,’ the count agreed, though his tone was void of any assent. ‘I’ll go and see if I can find Paola and her mother.’ He left, retaining the handkerchief, which Brunetti feared would be washed, starched, ironed, and sent back by special courier.

Brunetti pushed himself away from the bar and set out into the sea of people to begin his own search for Paola. He knew many of those in the room but, as it were, at second hand. Though he had never been introduced to most of them, he knew their scandals, their histories, their affairs, both legal and romantic. Part of this came from his being a policeman, but most of it came from living in what was really a provincial town where gossip was the real cult and where, had it not been at least a nominally Christian city, the reigning deity would surely have been Rumor.

During the more than five minutes it took him to find Paola, he exchanged greetings with a number of people and turned down repeated offers of a fresh drink. The countess was nowhere in sight; her husband had no doubt warned her of the risk of moral infection that stalked the room.

When Paola came up to him, she grabbed his arm and whispered into his ear. ‘I’ve found just what you want.’

‘A way to leave?’ he said, but only to himself. With her, he practiced some restraint. ‘What?’

‘The voice of gossip, the real thing. We were at university together.’

‘Who? Where?’ he asked, interested in his surroundings for the first time that night.

‘He’s over there, at the door to the balcony.’ She nudged him with her elbow and pointed with her chin to a man who stood across the room, at the central windows that overlooked the canal. The man looked to be about the same age as Paola, though he had clearly had a harder time getting there. From this distance, all Brunetti could distinguish was a short beard, mottled with gray, and a black jacket that seemed to be made of velvet.

‘Come on; I’ll introduce you,’ urged Paola, tugging at his arm and leading him across the room toward the man, who smiled when he recognized Paola coming toward him. His nose was flat, as though it had once been broken, and his eyes were sad, as though his heart had been. He looked like a stevedore who wrote poetry.

‘Ah, the lovely Paola,’ he said as she reached him. He switched his drink into his left hand, took Paola’s with his right, and bent to place a kiss in the air just above it. ‘And this,’ he said, turning to Brunetti, ‘must be the famous Guido, about whom all of us grew so tired of hearing more years ago than it is discreet of me to remember.’ He took Brunetti’s hand and shook it firmly, making no attempt to disguise the interest with which he studied him.

‘Stop it, Dami, and stop staring at Guido as if he were a painting.’

‘Force of habit, my treasure, peering and prying at everything I observe. Next I’ll no doubt peel back his jacket and try to see where he’s signed.’

None of this made any sense to Brunetti, whose confusion must have been obvious to both of the others, for the man hastened to explain. ‘As I can see, Paola will never introduce us, and she apparently has chosen to keep our past together a secret from you.’ Before Brunetti could respond to the suggestion here, he continued: ‘I am Demetriano Padovani, former classmate of your fair wife and currently a critic of things artistic’ He made a small bow.

Brunetti was, like most Italians, familiar with the name. This was the bright new art critic, the terror of both painters and museum directors. Paola and he had read his articles with shared delight, but he’d had no idea that they had gone to university together.

The other man grabbed a fresh drink from a passing waiter. ‘I must apologize to you, Guido—if I may take the liberty of calling you Guido at our first meeting and of giving you the tu, an evidence of growing social and linguistic promiscuity—and confess to having spent years hating you.’ Brunetti’s confusion at this remark obviously delighted him. ‘Back in those dark ages when we were students and all desperately in love with your Paola, we were convulsed by jealousy and, I admit, loathing for this Guido who seemed to have arrived from the stars to carry her heart away from us. First she wanted to know all about him, then it was “Will he take me for a coffee?” which as quickly developed into “Do you think he likes me?” until all of us, much as we loved the daffy girl, were quite ready to throttle her one dark night and toss her into a canal, just to have some freedom from the dark incubus that was Guido and so be left in peace to study for our exams.’ Delighting in Paola’s obvious discomfiture, he continued: ‘And then she married him. You, that is. Much to our delight, as nothing is such an effective remedy for the mad excesses of love,’ and here he paused to sip from his drink, before adding, ‘as is marriage.’ Content with having made Paola blush and Brunetti look around for another drink, he said, ‘It’s really a very good thing you did marry her, Guido, else not a one of us would have managed to pass our exams, so smitten were we with the girl.’

‘It was my only purpose in marrying her,’ Brunetti replied.

Padovani understood. ‘And for that charity, let me offer you a drink. What would you like?’

‘Scotch for us both,’ Paola answered, then added, ‘But come back quickly. I want to talk to you.’

Padovani bowed his head in false submission and headed off in pursuit of a waiter, moving like a very royal yacht of politeness as he made his way through the crowd. In a moment, he was back, holding three glasses in his hands.

‘Are you still writing for L’Unità?’ Paola asked as he handed her the drink.

At the sound of the name of the newspaper, Padovani pulled down his head in mock terror and shot conspiratorial glances around the room. He gave a very theatrical hiss and waved them close to him. In a whisper, he told them, ‘Don’t dare pronounce the name of that newspaper in this room, or your father will have the servants turn me out of the house.’ Though Padovani’s tone made it clear he was joking, Brunetti suspected that he was far closer to the truth than he realized.

The critic stood up to his full height, sipped at his drink, and changed to a voice that was almost declamatory. ‘Paola, my dear, could it be that you have abandoned the ideals of our youth and no longer read the proletarian voice of the Communist Party? Excuse me,’ he corrected himself, ‘the Democratic Party of the Left?’ Heads turned at the sound of the name, but he went on. ‘God above, don’t tell me you’ve accepted your age and begun to read Corriere or, even worse, La Repubblica, the voice of the grubbing middle class, disguised as the voice of the grubbing lower class?’

‘No, we read L’Osservatore Romano,,’ Brunetti said, naming the official organ of the Vatican, which still fulminated against divorce, abortion, and the pernicious myth of female equality.

‘How wise of you,’ Padovani said, voice unctuous with praise. ‘But since you read those glowing pages, you wouldn’t know that I am, however humbly, the voice of artistic judgment for the struggling masses.’ He dropped his voice and continued, aping perfectly the orotund voices of the RAI newscasters announcing the most recent fall of the government. ‘I am the representative of the clear-eyed laborer. In me you see the rude voiced and grubby-fingered critic who seeks the values of true proletarian art in the midst of modern chaos.’ He nodded in silent greeting to a passing figure and continued. ‘It seems a great pity that you are not familiar with my work. Perhaps I can send you copies of my most recent articles. Pity I don’t carry them about with me, but I suppose even genius must display some humility, however spurious.’ They had all begun to enjoy this, so he continued. ‘My most recent favorite was a wonderful piece I wrote last month about an exhibition of contemporary Cuban art—you know, tractors and grinning pineapples.’ He made a moue of feigned distress until the exact words of his review came back to him. ‘I praised its—how did I put it?—”its wonderful symmetry of refined form and purposeful integrity.”‘ He leaned forward and whispered in Paola’s ear, but so loud that Brunetti had no trouble hearing. ‘I lifted that from one I wrote two years ago about Polish woodblocks, where I praised, if memory serves, “refined symmetry of purposeful form.”‘

‘And do you?’ Paola asked, glancing at his velvet jacket, ‘go to the office like that?’

‘How deliciously bitchy you have remained, Paola.’ He laughed, leaning forward to kiss her lightly on the cheek. ‘But to answer your question, my angel, no, I do not think it seemly to take this opulence to the halls of the working class. I don more suitable attire, namely a dreadful pair of trousers my maid’s husband would no longer wear and a jacket my nephew was going to give to the poor. Nor’— he held up a hand to prevent any interruption or question—’do I any longer drive there in the Maserati. I thought that would establish the wrong tone; besides, parking is such a problem in Rome. I solved the problem, for a while, by borrowing my maid’s Fiat to drive to the office. But it would be covered with parking tickets, and then I lost hours taking the commissario of police to lunch to see that they were taken care of. So now I simply take a cab from my house and have myself left off just around the corner from the office, where I deliver my weekly article, speak angrily about social injustice, and then go down the street to a lovely little pasticceria, where I treat myself to a shockingly rich pastry. Then I go home and have a long soak in a hot tub and read Proust.

‘“And so, on each side, is simple truth suppressed,”‘ he said, quoting from a Shakespeare sonnet, one of the texts to which he had devoted the seven years he spent getting a degree in English literature at Oxford. ‘But you must want something, some information, dearest Paola,’ he said with a directness that was out of character or, at least, out of the character he was playing. ‘First your lather calls me personally with an invitation to this party, and then you attach yourself to me like a button, and I doubt that you’d do that unless you wanted something from me. And as the divine Guido is here with you, all you can legitimately want is information. And since I know just what it is Guido does for a living, I can but surmise it has to do with the scandal that has rocked our fair city, struck dumb the music world, and, in the doing, removed from the face of the planet a nasty piece of work.’ The introduction of the British expression had the intended effect of surprising them both to gasps. He covered his mouth and gave a giggle of purest delight.

‘Oh, Dami, you knew all along. Why didn’t you just say so?’

Though Padovani’s voice was steady when he answered, Brunetti could see that his eyes were bright, perhaps with alcohol, perhaps with something else. It mattered little to him what it was, so long as the man would explain his last remark.

‘Come on,’ Paola encouraged. ‘You were the only person I could think of who would be bound to know about him.’

Padovani fixed her with a level glance. ‘And do you expect me to blacken the memory of a man who is not yet cold in his grave?’

From the sound of things, Brunetti thought that might well add to Padovani’s fun.

‘I’m surprised you waited that long,’ said Paola.

Padovani gave her remark the attention it deserved. ‘You’re right, Paola. I will tell you all—that is, if the delicious Guido will go and get us all three enormous drinks. If he doesn’t do it soon, I might begin to rail at the predictable tedium to which your parents have once again subjected me and, I note with wonder, half of what passes for the most famous people in the city.’ Then, turning to Brunetti, ‘Or better yet, Guido, if you could perhaps procure an entire bottle, we could, all three of us, steal away to one of the many ill-decorated rooms with which, alas, your parents’ home is filled.’ But he wasn’t finished and turned back to Paola. ‘And there, you using the blandishment of your beauty and your husband his unspeakable policeman’s methods, you could together pry the nasty, niggling, dirty truth out of me. After which, if you were so minded, you, or perhaps’—he broke off and gave Brunetti a long look—’both of you, could have your way with me.’ So that’s the way things were, Brunetti suddenly realized, surprised that he had so successfully missed all the clues.

Paola shot Brunetti an entirely unnecessary warning glance. He liked the man’s excess. He had no doubt that the invitation, wildly put as it had been, was entirely sincere, but that hardly seemed something to become angry about. He went off, as directed, to see about finding a bottle of Scotch.

It was a comment on either the count’s hospitality or the laxity of the staff that he was given a bottle of Glenfiddich for the mere asking. When he got back to them, he found them arm in arm, whispering like conspirators. Padovani hushed Paola to silence and explained to Brunetti, ‘I was just asking her whether, if I were to commit a really heinous crime, perhaps tell her mother what I think of the drapes, you’d take me down to your office to beat me until I confessed.’

‘How do you think I got this?’ Brunetti asked, and held up the bottle.

Padovani and Paola both laughed. ‘Lead us, Paola,’ the writer commanded, ‘to a place where we can have our way with this, if not’— with a cow-eyed glance at Brunetti—’with one another.’

Ever practical, Paola said flatly, ‘We can use the sewing room,’ and led them out of the main salon and through a set of massive double doors. Then, like Ariadne, she led them unerringly down one corridor, turned to the left, down another, through the library, and into a smaller room, in which a number of delicate brocade-covered chairs stood in a semicircle around an enormous television.

‘Sewing room?’ asked Padovani.

‘Before “Dynasty”,’ explained Paola.

Padovani threw himself down into the most substantial chair in the room, swept his patent-leather shoes up onto the intaglio table, and said, ‘Right, darlings, shoot,’ no doubt lapsing into English by the mere force of the presence of the television. When neither of them asked a question, he prompted them. ‘What is it you want to know about the late and not by anyone I can think of lamented Maestro?’

‘Who would want to see him dead?’ Brunetti asked.

‘You are direct, aren’t you? No wonder Paola capitulated with such alarming speed. But to answer your question, you’d need a phone book to hold the list of names.’ He stopped speaking for a while and held out his glass for some whisky. Brunetti poured him a generous glassful, gave himself some, as well, and poured a smaller amount into Paola’s glass. ‘Do you want me to give it to you chronologically, or perhaps by nationality, or a breakdown according to voice type or sexual preference?’ He rested his glass on the arm of his chair and continued slowly. ‘He goes back in time, Wellauer does, and the reasons people hated him go back along with him. You’ve probably heard the rumors about his having been a Nazi during the war. It was impossible for him to stop them, so like the good German he was, he simply ignored them. And no one seemed to mind at all. Not at all. No one does much anymore, do they? Look at Waldheim.’

‘I’ve heard the rumors,’ Brunetti said.

Padovani sipped at his glass, considering how to phrase it. ‘All right, how about nationality? There are at least three Americans I could name, two Germans, and half a dozen Italians who would have been glad to see him dead.’

‘But that hardly means they’d kill him,’ Paola said.

Padovani nodded, granting this. He kicked off his shoes and pulled his feet up under him in the chair. He might be willing to vilify the countess’s taste, but he would never stain her new brocade. ‘He was a Nazi. Take that as given. His second wife was a suicide, which is something you might look into. The first left him after seven years, and even though her father was one of the richest men in Germany, Wellauer gave her a particularly generous settlement. There was talk at the time of nasty things, nasty sexual things, but that,’ he added, sipping again, ‘was when there still existed the idea that there were sexual things that could be nasty. But before you ask, no, I don’t know what those sexual things were.’

‘Would you tell us if you did?’ Brunetti asked.

Padovani shrugged.

‘Now for things professional. He was a notorious sexual blackmailer. Any list of the sopranos and mezzo-sopranos who sang with him ought to give you an idea of that; bright, young, anonymous things who suddenly sang a Tosca or a Dorabella and then just as suddenly disappeared. He was so very good that he was permitted these lapses. Besides, most people can’t tell the difference between great singing and competent singing anyway, so few people noticed, and no great harm was done. And I have to give him the credit that they were always at least competent singers. A few of them even went on to become great singers, but they probably would have done that without him.’

To Brunetti, this hardly sounded sufficient to provoke murder.

‘Those were the careers he helped, but there are just as many he ruined, especially among men of my particular persuasion and,’ he added, sipping at his drink, ‘women of similar taste. The late Maestro was incapable of believing that he was unattractive to any woman. If I were you, I would look into the sexual stuff. The answer might not be there, but it might be a good place to begin. But that,’ he said, pointing with his glass to the enormous television that loomed in front of them, ‘might merely be a response to an overexposure to that.’

He seemed to realize how unsatisfactory his information had been, so he added, ‘In Italy, there are at least three people who had good reason to hate him. But none of them is in a position to have done him any harm. One is singing in the chorus of the Bari Opera Company. He might have become an important Verdi baritone had he not, in the dreadful sixties, made the mistake of not bothering to hide his sexual preference from the Maestro. I’ve even heard that he made the mistake of approaching the Maestro himself, but I can’t believe that anyone could have been that stupid. Probably a myth. Whatever the cause, Wellauer is said to have dropped his name with a columnist who was a friend of his, and the articles started soon thereafter. That’s why he’s singing in Bari. In the chorus.

‘The second is teaching music theory at the Palermo conservatory. I’m not sure what happened between them, but he was a conductor who had received a good deal of excellent publicity. This was about ten years ago, but then his career stopped after a few months of devastating reviews. Here, I admit, I have no direct information, but Wellauer’s name was mentioned in relation to the reviews.

‘The third is only a faint bell in my gossip’s mind, but it involves someone who is said to be living here.’ When he saw their surprise, he amended, ‘No, not in the palazzo. In Venice. But she’s hardly in a state to have done anything, since she must be close to eighty and is said to be a recluse. And I’m not sure that I’ve got the story straight or even remember it correctly.’

When he saw Paola’s look, he held up his glass in excuse and explained, ‘It’s this stuff. Destroys brain cells. Or eats them.’ He swirled the liquid around in the glass, watching the small waves he created, waiting for them to produce the tide of memory.

‘I’ll tell you what I remember or what I think I remember. Her name is Clemenza Santina.’ When neither of them showed any sign of recognition, he explained: ‘She was one of the most famous sopranos right before the war. Same thing happened to her that happened to Rosa Ponselle in America— discovered singing in a music hall with her two sisters, and within a few months she was singing at La Scala. One of those natural, perfect voices that come along only a few times a century. But she never recorded anything, so the only memory we have of her is what people heard, what they recall.’ He saw their growing impatience, so he dragged himself back to the point. ‘There was something between her and Wellauer, or between him and one of the sisters. I can’t remember what it was or who told me, but she might have tried to kill him, or she threatened to kill him.’ He waved his glass in the air, and Brunetti saw how drunk the man was. ‘Anyway, I think someone got killed or died, or maybe it was just a threat. Maybe I’ll remember in the morning. Or maybe it’s not important.’

‘What made you think of her?’ asked Brunetti.

‘Because she sang Violetta with him. Before the war. Someone I was talking to, I can’t remember who it was, told me that they’d tried to interview her recently. Let me think for a minute.’ Again he consulted his drink, and again the memory came floating back. ‘Narciso, that’s who. He was doing an article on great singers of the past, and he went to see her, but she refused to speak to him, was very unpleasant about it. Didn’t even open the door, I think he said. And then he told me the story he’d heard about her and Wellauer, before the war. In Rome, I think.’

‘Did he say where she lives?’

‘No, he didn’t. But I can call him in the morning and ask.’

Either the alcohol or the waning conversation drained the sparkle from Padovani. As Brunetti watched, the foppishness subsided, and he became a middle-aged man with a thick beard and the beginnings of a substantial paunch, sitting with his feet tucked under him, exposing an inch of calf above black silk socks. Paola, he noticed, looked tired, or was she simply tired of having had to keep up the level of university banter with her former classmate? And Brunetti felt himself to be at that balance point that alcohol brought: if he continued drinking, he would soon be fuzzy and content; if he stopped, he would just as quickly be sober and somber. Choosing the second, he set his glass on the floor under his chair, sure a roving servant would find it before morning.

Paola set hers down as well and moved to the edge of her seat. She glanced over at Padovani, waiting for him to move, but he waved them off and picked up the bottle from the table. He poured himself a generous drink and said, ‘I’ll finish this before I return to the revels.’ Brunetti wondered if he was as bored with the fiction of scintillating chatter as Paola seemed to be. The three of them exchanged bright nothings, and Padovani promised to call in the morning if he managed to get the address of the soprano.

Paola led Brunetti back through the labyrinth of the palazzo, toward the lights and the music. When they entered the main salon, they noticed that more people had arrived and the music had increased in volume, keeping pace with the sound of conversation.

Brunetti looked around, filled with anticipatory boredom at the sight and sound of these well-dressed, well-fed, well-versed people. He sensed that Paola had registered his feelings and was about to suggest they leave, when he saw someone he recognized. Standing at the bar, glass in one hand and cigarette in the other, was the doctor who had first examined Wellauer’s body and declared him dead. At the time, Brunetti had wondered how someone who was wearing jeans had managed to be sitting in the orchestra. Tonight she was dressed much the same, a pair of gray slacks and a black jacket, with an obvious lack of concern for her own appearance that Brunetti would have thought impossible in an Italian woman.

He told Paola he had seen someone he wanted to talk to, and she replied that she would try to find her parents to thank them for the party. They separated, and he went across the room toward the doctor, whose name he had forgotten. She made no attempt to disguise the fact that she recognized and remembered him.

‘Good evening, Commissario,’ she said when he came up beside her.

‘Good evening, Doctor,’ he replied, and then added, as if they had managed sufficient homage to the rule of formality, ‘My name is Guido.’

‘And mine is Barbara.’

‘How small the city is,’ he observed, the banality of the remark allowing him, a formal man, to avoid having to commit himself to addressing her as either lei or tu.

‘Sooner or later, everyone meets everyone,’ she concurred, avoiding with equal skill any direct address.

Deciding on the formal lei, he said, ‘I’m sorry I never thanked you for your help the other night.’

She shrugged this away and asked, ‘Was my diagnosis correct?’

‘Yes,’ he said, wondering how she could have avoided reading about it in every newspaper in the country. ‘It was in the coffee, as you said.’

‘I thought so. But I have to confess I recognized the smell only from reading Agatha Christie.’

‘Me too. It’s the only time I ever smelled it in real life.’ Both of them ignored the awkwardness of that last word.

She stubbed out her cigarette in a potted palm the size of an orange tree. ‘How would a person get it?’ she asked.

‘That’s what I wanted to ask you, Doctor.’

She paused and considered for a few moments before she suggested, ‘In a pharmacy, a laboratory, but I’m sure it would be a controlled substance.’

‘It is and it isn’t.’

She, being an Italian, understood immediately. ‘So it could disappear and never be reported, or even missed?’

‘Yes, I think so. One of my men is checking the pharmacies in the city, but we could never hope to check all the factories in Marghera or Mestre.’

‘It’s used for developing film, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, and with certain petrochemicals.’

‘There’s enough of that in Marghera to keep your man busy.’

‘For days, I’m afraid,’ he admitted.

Noticing that her drink was gone, he asked, ‘Would you like another?’

‘No, thank you. I think I’ve had enough of the count’s champagne for one evening.’

‘Have you been here other evenings?’ he asked, frankly curious.

‘Yes, a few. He always invites me, and if I’m free, I try to come.’

‘Why?’ The question slipped out before he had a chance to think.

‘He’s my patient.’

‘You’re his doctor?’ Brunetti was too astonished to disguise his response.

She laughed. What was more, her amusement was entirely natural and without resentment. ‘If he’s my patient, then I suppose I’ve got to be his doctor.’ She relented. ‘My office is just on the other side of the campo. I was the servants’ doctor first, but then, about a year ago, I met the count when I was here to visit one of them, and we began to talk.’

‘About what?’ Brunetti was astonished at the possibility that the count was capable of an action so mundane as talking, especially with someone as unpretentious as this young woman.

‘That first time, we talked about the servant, who had influenza, but when I came back, we somehow started to talk about Greek poetry. And that led to a discussion, if I remember correctly, of Greek and Roman historians. The count is particularly fond of Thucydides. Since I’d gone to the classical liceo, I could talk about them without making a fool of myself, so the count decided I must be a competent doctor. Now he comes to my office every so often, and we talk about Thucydides and Strabo.’ She leaned back against the wall and crossed her ankles in front of her. ‘He’s very much like my other patients. Most of them come to talk about ailments they don’t have and pain they don’t feel. The count is more interesting to talk to, but I suppose there’s really not much difference between them. He’s lonely and old, just like them, and he needs someone to talk to.’

Brunetti was shocked to silence by this assessment of the count. Lonely? A man who could pick up the phone and triumph over a Swiss bank’s code of secrecy? A man who could find out the contents of a man’s will before the man was buried? So lonely that he would go and talk to his doctor about Greek historians?

‘He talks about you sometimes as well,’ she said. ‘About all of you.’

‘He does?’

‘Yes. He carries your pictures in his wallet. He’s shown them to me a number of times. You, your wife, the children.’

‘Why are you telling me this, Doctor?’

‘As I told you, he’s a lonely old man. And he’s my patient, so I try to do whatever I can to help him.’ When she saw that he was going to object, she added, ‘Whatever I can, if I think it will help him.’

‘Doctor, is it normal for you to accept private patients?’

If she saw where this was leading, she made no sign of it. ‘Most of my patients are public health patients.’

‘How many private patients do you have?’

‘I don’t think that’s any of your business, Commissario.’

‘No, I suppose it’s not,’ he admitted. ‘Would you answer one about your politics?’ It was a question that, in Italy, still had some meaning, the parties not yet all being carbon copies of one another.

‘I’m Communist, of course, even with the new name.’

‘Yet you accept as your patient one of the richest men in Venice? Probably one of the richest in Italy?’

‘Of course. Why shouldn’t I?’

‘I just told you. Because he’s a very rich man.’

‘What’s that got to do with my accepting him as a patient?’

‘I thought that...’

‘That I’d have to refuse him as a patient because he’s rich and can afford better doctors? Is that what you meant, Commissario?’ she asked, making no attempt to disguise her anger. ‘Not only is that personally offensive, but it also shows a rather simplistic vision of the world. I suppose neither surprises me very much.’ That last made him wonder what the count might have said about him during their talks.

He felt that the entire conversation had gotten out of hand. He had intended no offense, had not meant to suggest that the count could find better doctors. His surprise was entirely about this doctor’s having accepted him. ‘Doctor, please,’ he said, and held out a hand between them. ‘I’m sorry, but the world I work in is a simplistic one. There are good people.’ She was listening, so he dared to add, with a smile, ‘. . . like us.’ She had the grace to return his smile. ‘And then there are people who break the law.’

‘Oh, I see,’ she said, her anger not diminished, after all. ‘And does that give us all the right to divide up the world into two groups, the one we’re in and all the others? And I get to treat those people who share my politics and let the rest die? You make it sound like a cowboy film—the good guys and the lawbreakers, and never the least bit of difficulty in telling the difference between the two.’

Struggling to defend himself, he said, ‘I didn’t say which law; I just said they broke the law.’

‘Isn’t there only one law in your vision of the world—the law of the state?’ Her contempt was open, and he hoped it was for the law of the state and not for him.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ he answered.

She threw up her hands. ‘If this is when poor old God gets dragged down from heaven and put into the conversation, I’m going to get more champagne.’

‘No, let me,’ he said, and took her glass from her. He soon returned with a fresh glass of champagne and some mineral water for himself. She accepted the champagne and thanked him with an entirely friendly and normal smile.

She sipped, then asked him, ‘And this law of yours?’ She said it with such real interest and lack of rancor that the last exchange was entirely erased. On both sides, he realized.

‘Clearly, the one we have isn’t enough,’ he began, surprised to hear himself saying this, for it was this law he had spent his career defending. ‘We need a more human—or perhaps more humane—one.’ He stopped, aware of how foolish it made him feel to say this. And, worse, to mean it.

‘That would certainly be wonderful,’ she said with a blandness that made him immediately suspicious. ‘But wouldn’t that interfere with your profession? After all, it’s your job to enforce that other law, the law of the state.’

‘They’re really the same.’ Realizing how lame and stupid this sounded, he added, ‘Usually.’

‘But not always?’

‘No, not always.’

‘And when they’re not?’

‘I try to see the point where they intersect, where they’re the same.’

‘And if they’re not?’

‘Then I do what I have to do.’

She burst into laughter so spontaneous that he joined her, aware of how much he had sounded like John Wayne just before he went out to that last gunfight.

‘I apologize for baiting you, Guido; I really do. If it’s any consolation to you, it’s the same sort of decision we doctors have to make, though not too often, when what we think is right isn’t the same as what the law says is right.’

He was, they both were, saved by Paola, who came up to him and asked if he was ready to go.

‘Paola,’ he said, turning to present her to the other woman. ‘This is your father’s doctor,’ hoping to surprise her.

‘Oh, Barbara,’ Paola exclaimed. ‘I’m so glad to meet you. My father talks about you all the time. I’m sorry it’s taken us this long to meet.’

Brunetti watched and listened while they talked, amazed at the ease with which women made it obvious that they liked each other, at their enormous mutual trust, even at first meeting. United in a common concern for a man he had always found cool and distant, these two were talking as though they had known each other for years. There was none of the abrasive moral stocktaking that had transpired between him and the doctor. She and Paola had performed some sort of instant evaluation and been immediately pleased with what they found. He had often observed this phenomenon but feared he would never understand it. He had the same ability to become quickly friendly with another man, but somehow the intimacy stopped a few layers down. This immediate intimacy he was watching went deep, to some central place, before it stopped. And evidently it hadn’t stopped; it had only paused until the next meeting.

They had arrived at the point of discussing Raffaele, the count’s only grandson, before Paola and Barbara remembered that Brunetti was still there. Paola could tell from his restless foot-shifting that he was tired and wanted to leave, so she said, ‘I’m sorry, Barbara, to tell you all this about Raffaele. Now you’ll have two generations to worry about, instead of one.’

‘No, it’s good to get a different view about the children. He’s always so worried about them. But so proud of both of you.’ It took Brunetti a moment before he realized she meant him and Paola. This was becoming, indeed, a night of many marvels.

He didn’t notice how it was done, but the two women decided it was time for them all to leave. The doctor set her glass down on a table beside her, and Paola turned to take his arm at the same moment. They exchanged farewells, and he was again struck by how much warmer the doctor was with Paola than with him.

* * * *

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

As fortune would have it, it was the next morning that his first report was due on Patta’s desk ‘before eight.’ Since the clock, when he opened his eyes and saw it, read eight-fifteen, that was clearly going to be impossible.

A half hour later, feeling more recognizably human, he came into the kitchen and found Paola reading L’Unità, which reminded him ^: it was Tuesday. For reasons he had never understood, she read a different newspaper each morning, spanning the political spectrum from right to left, and languages from French to English. Years ago, when he had first met her and understood her even less, he had asked about this. Her response, he came to realize only years later, made perfect sense: ‘I want to see how many different ways the same lies can be told.’ Nothing he had read in the ensuing years had come close to suggesting that her approach was wrong. Today it was the Communist lie; tomorrow the Christian Democrats would get their chance.

He bent and kissed her on the back of the neck. She grunted but didn’t bother to look up. Silently, she pointed to the left, where a plate of fresh brioches sat on the counter. As she turned a page, he poured himself a cup of coffee, spooned in three sugars, and took the seat opposite her. ‘News?’ he asked, biting into a brioche.

‘Sort of. We don’t have a government as of yesterday afternoon. The President’s trying to form one, but it looks like he hasn’t got a chance. And at the bakery this morning, all anyone talked about was how cold it’s turned. No wonder we have the sort of government we do: we deserve it. Well,’ she said, pausing over the photo of the most recent President-designate, ‘perhaps we don’t. No one could deserve that.’

‘What else?’ he asked, falling into the decade-old ritual. It allowed him to learn what was happening without having to read the papers, and it also usually gave him a very precise idea of her mood.

‘Train strike next week, in protest to the firing of an engineer who got drunk and drove his train into another one. The men who worked with him had been complaining about him for months, but no one paid any attention. So three people are dead. And now, because he’s been fired, the same people who complained about him are threatening to go on strike because he was fired.’ She turned a page. He took another brioche. ‘New threat of terrorist attacks. Maybe that will keep the tourists away.’ She turned another page. ‘Review of opening night at the Rome opera. A disaster. Lousy conductor. Dami told me last night that the orchestra had been complaining about him for weeks, all during rehearsals, but no one listened. Makes sense. No one listens to the men who run the trains, so why should anyone listen to musicians who get to hear him all during rehearsals?’

He set his coffee down so suddenly that some of it splashed onto the table. Paola’s only response was to pull the paper closer to her.

‘What did you say?’

‘Hmm?’ she asked, not really listening.

‘What did you say about the conductor?’

She looked up because of the tone, not the words. ‘What?’

‘About the conductor, what did you just say?’

As happened with most of the dicta she delivered each morning, this one appeared to have been forgotten as soon as she was free of it. She flipped back to the page where the article appeared and looked at it again. ‘Oh, yes, the orchestra. If anyone had paid any attention to them, they would have known he was a lousy conductor. After all, they’re the best sort of judge about how good a musician is, aren’t they?’

‘Paola,’ he said, pushing the paper down from in front of her, ‘if I weren’t married to you, I’d leave my wife for you.’

He was glad to see he had surprised her; it was something he rarely achieved. He left her like that, peering over her reading glasses, not at all sure what she had done.

He ran down all the ninety-four steps, eager to get to work and start making phone calls.

When he arrived fifteen minutes later, there had still been no sign of Patta, so he dictated a short paragraph and sent it to be placed on his superior’s desk. That done, he called the main office of the Gazzettino and asked to speak to Salvatore Rezzonico, the chief music critic. He was told he was not at the office but could be found either at home or at the music conservatory. When he finally located the man, at home, and explained what he wanted, Rezzonico agreed to speak to him later that morning at the conservatory, where he was teaching a class at eleven. Next Brunetti called his dentist; he had once mentioned a cousin who played first violin in the La Fenice orchestra. Traverso was his name, and Brunetti called and arranged to speak to him before the performance that night.

He spent the next half hour talking with Miotti, who had come up with little more at the theater, save for another member of the chorus who was sure he had seen Flavia Petrelli go into the conductor’s dressing room after the first act. Miotti had further learned the reason for the portiere’s obvious antipathy for the soprano: his belief that she was somehow involved with ‘l’americana.’ Beyond this, Miotti had learned nothing. Brunetti sent him off to the archives of the Gazzettino to look for anything about a scandal involving the Maestro and an Italian singer, sometime ‘before the war.’ He avoided Miottits look at the vagueness of this and suggested that there might be a filing system that would facilitate things.

Brunetti now left his office and walked across the city to the music conservatory, fitted into a small campo near the Accademia Bridge. After much asking, he found the professor’s classroom on the third floor and the professor waiting there, either for him or for his students.

As so often happened in Venice, Brunetti recognized the man from having walked past him many times in that part of the city. Though they had never spoken to one another, the warmth of the man’s greeting made it obvious that he was familiar with Brunetti for the same reason. Rezzonico was a small man with a pallid complexion and beautifully manicured nails. Clean-shaven, with hair cut very short, he wore a dark-gray suit and a somber tie, as if he were intentionally dressing for the role of professor.

‘What is it I can do for you, Commissario?’ he asked after Brunetti had introduced himself and taken a seat at one of the desks that filled the classroom.

‘It’s about Maestro Wellauer.’

‘Ah, yes,’ responded Rezzonico, his voice growing predictably somber. ‘A sad loss to the world of music’ This was, after all, the man who had written his obituary.

Brunetti waited for the requisite time to pass, then continued. ‘Were you going to review that performance of Traviata for the paper, Professor?’

‘Yes, I was.’

‘But the review never appeared?’

‘No, we decided—that is, the editor decided—that out of respect for the Maestro and because the performance was not completed, we would wait for the new conductor and review one of his performances.’

‘And have you written that review?’

‘Yes. It appeared this morning.’

‘I’m sorry, Professor, but I haven’t had time to read it. Could you tell me if it was a favorable review?’

‘On the whole, yes. The singers are good, and Petrelli is superb. She’s probably the only Verdi soprano singing today, the only real one, that is. The tenor is less good, but he’s still very young, and I think the voice will mature.’

‘And the conductor?’

‘As I said in my review, anyone coming in new under these circumstances has an especially difficult task. It’s not an easy thing to lead an orchestra that has been rehearsed by someone else.’

‘Yes, I can understand that.’

‘But considering all the difficulties he encountered,’ continued the professor, ‘he did remarkably well. He’s a very talented young man, and he seems to have a special feeling for Verdi.’

‘And what about Maestro Wellauer?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘If you had written a review of the opening night, the performance Wellauer began, what would you have said?’

‘About the performance as a whole or about the Maestro?’

‘Either. Both.’

It was clear that the question confused the professor. ‘I’m not sure how to answer that. The Maestro’s death made it all unnecessary.’

‘But if you had written it, what would you have said about his conducting?’

The professor tilted his chair back and locked his hands behind his head, just the way Brunetti remembered his own professors doing. He sat like that for a while, pondering the question, then allowed his chair to slam hack down onto the floor. ‘I’m afraid the review would have been a different one.’

‘In what way Professor?’

‘For the singers, much the same. Signora Petrelli is always magnificent. The tenor sang well, as I said, and will certainly grow better with more experience on the stage. The night of the opening, they sang much the same way, but the result was different.’ Seeing Brunetti’s confusion, he attempted to explain. ‘You see, I have so many years of his conducting to erase. It was difficult to listen to the music that night without having all those years of genius interfere with what I was actually hearing.

‘Let me try to explain it this way. During a performance, it is the conductor who keeps things together, sees that the singers maintain the right tempi, that the orchestra supports them, that the entrances are on time, that neither is allowed to get away from the other. And he must also see that the orchestra’s playing doesn’t get too loud, that the crescendi build and are dramatic but, at the same time, don’t drown out the singers. When a conductor hears this happening, he can quiet them with a flick of his hand or a finger to the mouth.’ To illustrate, the musician demonstrated the gestures that Brunetti had seen performed during many concerts and operas.

‘And he must, at every moment, be in charge of everything: chorus, singers, orchestra, keeping them in balance perfectly. If he doesn’t do this, then the whole thing falls apart, and all anyone hears is the separate parts, not the whole opera as a unit.’

‘And that night, the night the Maestro died?’

‘The central control wasn’t there. There were times when the orchestra grew so loud that I couldn’t hear the singers, and I’m sure they must have had trouble hearing one another. There were other times when the orchestra played too fast and the singers had to struggle to keep up with them. Or the opposite.’

‘Was anyone else in the theater aware of this, Professor?’

Rezzonico raised his eyebrows and snorted in disgust. ‘Commissario, I don’t know how familiar you are with the Venetian audience, but the most complimentary thing that can be said of them is that they are dogs. They don’t go to the theater to listen to music or hear beautiful singing; they go to wear their new clothes and be seen in them by their friends, and those friends are there for the same reasons. You could bring the town band from the smallest town in Sicily and put them in the orchestra pit and have them play, and no one in the audience would notice the difference. If the costumes are lavish and the scenery is elaborate, then we have a success. If the opera is modern or the singers aren’t Italian, then we are sure to have a failure.’ The professor realized that this was turning into a speech, so he lowered his voice and added, ‘But to answer your question: no, I doubt that very many people in the theater realized what was happening.’

‘The other critics?’

The professor snorted again. ‘Aside from Narciso at La Repubblica, there isn’t a musician among them. Some simply go to the rehearsals and then write their reviews. Some can’t even follow a score. No, there’s no judgment there.’

‘What do you think the cause of Maestro Wellauer’s failure, if that’s the proper term, might have been?’

‘Anything. A bad night. He was an old man, after all. He could have been upset, perhaps by something that happened before the performance. Or, ridiculous as this sounds, it could have been nothing more than indigestion. But whatever it was, he was not in control of the music that night. It got away from him; the orchestra did what they wanted, and the singers tried to stay with them. But there was very little sense of command from him.’

‘Anything else, Professor?’

‘Do you mean about the music?’

‘That, or anything else.’

Rezzonico considered for a moment, this time lacing his fingers together on his lap, and finally said, ‘This will perhaps sound strange. And it sounds strange to me because I don’t know why I say it or believe it. But I think he knew.’

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘Wellauer. I think he knew.’

‘About the music? About what was going on?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why do you say that, Professor?’

‘It was after the scene in the second act where Germont pleads with Violetta.’ He looked at Brunetti to see if he knew the plot of the opera. Brunetti nodded, and the professor continued. ‘It’s a scene that always gets a great deal of applause, especially if the singers are as good as Dardi and Petrelli. They were, and so there was long applause. During the applause, I watched the Maestro. He set his baton down on the podium, and I had the oddest sensation that he was getting ready to leave, simply step down from the podium and walk away. Either I saw it or I invented it, but he seemed just about to be making that step - when the applause stopped and the first violins raised their bows. He saw them, nodded to them, and picked up the baton. And the opera continued, but I still have the peculiar feeling that if he hadn’t seen their motion, he would simply have walked away from there.’

‘Did anyone else notice this?’

‘I don’t know. No one I’ve spoken to has wanted to say much about the performance, and what little they’ve said has been very guarded. I was sitting in one of the front tier of boxes, off on the left, so I had a clear view of him. I suppose everyone else was watching the singers. Later, when I heard the announcement that he couldn’t continue, I thought he’d had an attack of some sort. But not that he had been killed.’

‘What have these other people said?’

‘As I told you, they have been, well, almost cautious, not wanting to say anything against him, now that he’s dead. But a few of the people here have said much the same thing, that the performance was disappointing. Nothing more than that.’

‘I read your article about his career, Professor. You spoke very highly of him.’

‘He was one of the great musicians of the century. A genius.’

‘You make no mention of that last performance in your article, Professor.’

‘You don’t condemn a man for one bad night, Commissario, especially not when the total career has been so great.’

‘Yes, I know; not for one bad night and not for one bad thing.’