The Jewels of Paradise

Twenty-three

“WHICH EMAILS?” CRISTINA DEMANDED, HER VOICE FULLY awake.

“The ones I’ve been writing on the computer he so generously gave me to use in the office. He said his company wasn’t using it, so he had one of his tech people work on it . . .” Here she had to stop and take a few deep breaths before going on. “And he brought it to me, and I’ve been using it ever since.” Two more deep breaths. Her knees were shaking. She sat down on the sofa.

“How do you know he’s reading them, Cati?”

“At dinner tonight, he told me I’d understand something because I’d studied law.”

“Well, you did. Two years, if I remember correctly.”

“I never told him.”

“Then maybe he read it on your CV.”

“It’s not there,” Caterina said with fierce energy. “I never talk about it, and I did not include it in the CV.”

“But how do you cover over a gap of two years?”

“I added a year to the things I did before and after. I figured they wouldn’t check, no one ever does. And if it wasn’t in the CV, and I never said anything to him about it, then the only way he knows is from your mail.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I just told you, Tina,” she said. Hearing the anger in her voice, she moderated her tone. “He knew I studied law, and the only way he could have known that was from reading your email, where you mentioned it.” How many times would the sleep-sodden Cristina have to hear this before she understood?

“But why would he say that to you?”

“He was telling me that things revert to the State after a certain period if no heir makes a claim, and I suppose he meant to be complimentary or inclusive, make me feel like one of the pack, and said something about how I should know that because I studied law.”

“Did you react?”

“I hope not. I acted as if it didn’t register with me. He probably thinks he read it in my CV. After all, who wouldn’t mention something like that?”

“You, apparently,” Tina broke in to suggest. Her laugh restored the usual warmth of their conversation.

“What’s he up to?” Caterina asked, aware of a vague sense that the documents in the storeroom had been moved or tampered with.

“That’s not the question to ask.”

“What is, then?”

“What to do? If he didn’t realize you know he’s reading them, then you and I can just continue to write back and forth. We have to. If we suddenly stopped, he’d suspect something.”

“What is this, James Bond?” Caterina asked.

“Only if you want it to be, Cati,” Cristina said calmly. “If not, then you continue to do your job, read the papers, and tell them what they say, let them find their treasure or not, and take the money and run.”

“That’s very worldly advice.”

Tina said nothing in return, which probably meant she didn’t want to begin a discussion like this, not at this hour.

Thinking out loud, Cristina said, “I wonder if the cousins put him up to this?”

“Who else would he be doing it for?” Tina asked.

It certainly sounded like something the cousins would do to be sure she didn’t try to cheat them in some way. Her only question was whether Dottor Moretti—Andrea—would be party to such a thing. The fact that she believed he might saddened her immeasurably.

Neither of the sisters said anything for a long time. Caterina ran through the jumbled memories of her conversations with Avvocato Moretti. For a moment, she thought of encephalitis and its effect on the brain, but she dismissed that. “He spent six months recovering from encephalitis by reading the Fathers of the Church in Latin,” she said aloud. Hearing herself say it, she asked, “Is your computer on?”

“Like the love of the Holy Spirit, my computer is always on.”

“Put in his name and see what comes up.”

“Should I call you back?”

“No, just do it,” Caterina said briskly.

She heard the footsteps, the sound of a chair scraping the floor, and then a long silence.

“What’s his full name?” Cristina asked.

“Andrea Moretti.”

“How old?”

“About forty-five.”

“Born there?”

“I think so.”

There was a long, silent pause, during which Caterina stood first on one foot and then the other, an exercise someone had once told her would help her keep her balance in old age. “Ach du Lieber Gott,” she heard her sister say, speaking in German and shocking Caterina by doing so.

“What?”

“Do you want to guess where he studied?”

“I know I’m not going to like this, so you better just tell me,” Caterina said.

“The University of Navarra,” Cristina told her.

“Novara?” Caterina asked, wondering what he was doing in Piemonte.

“Navarra,” Cristina said, pronouncing it as though it had four r’s.

“Vade retro, satana,” Caterina whispered, then added, “Founded by that lunatic who started Opus Dei,” too late to consider that this was perhaps not the way to refer to a colleague of a woman who had taken final vows.

“They run the place. Their graduates are everywhere,” Cristina chimed in, suggesting that she might not have been offended by the remark.

“I never would have thought . . .” Caterina began but let the thought wander off, unfinished. “That means I can’t believe anything he’s told me.” She’d said it.

“Probably.”

Leaving her reflections on Avvocato Moretti’s motivation to some later time, Caterina asked, “Then what’s he after?”

“With them, power’s always a safe guess,” Tina said, causing Caterina, who had the same suspicion, to wonder if they’d both fallen victim to paranoia of the worst sort.

Caterina couldn’t stand it any more. “If you can think that, Tina, why do you stay with it?” There was such a long silence that she finally said, “Sorry. None of my business.”

“That’s all right,” Cristina said in a very sober voice.

“Really sorry, Tina-Lina.”

Cristina was silent for so long that Caterina began to wonder if she had finally gone too far. She waited and something like a prayer formed in her mind that she had not finally asked the wrong question of her favorite sister.

“Right,” Cristina said decisively. “So we go on corresponding naturally, and I’ll pass on any information I find or anyone sends me.”

“Good,” Caterina agreed. “But . . .”

“I know, I know, if I learn anything that he shouldn’t know about, I should send it to . . . to where?”

Caterina floundered, trying to think of someone she could trust to pass on information. She didn’t want to involve her family in any way. Her email at the university in Manchester had been canceled when she left. That gave her the idea. “Look, you can send it to the address of a friend. He almost never reads his emails, and I have his password. I can go into an Internet café to check.” When Cristina agreed, Caterina carefully spelled out the Romanian’s email address.

After that, they both started to laugh, though neither one of them knew why that happened. Feeling better because of it, Caterina said good night, hung up, and went to bed.

The first thing she did the next morning was send two emails to Dottor Moretti, quite as if they had not had dinner together the previous evening. The first was formal and described in some detail Steffani’s correspondence with Sophie Charlotte and explained that the ease of his connection with her would have given him added social status and, directly or indirectly, aided him in pursuit of work as a composer. Declaring that she was sensitive to her employers’ understandable desire to see her research come to a conclusion, she announced her intention to suspend her library reading for a few days and continue with the papers in the trunk.

In the second, addressing him as “Andrea” and using the familiar form of address, she thanked him for the pleasant time she had had with him the previous evening, both the conversation and the discovery of a good restaurant.

She gave considerable thought to how to close the email and decided on “Cari saluti, Caterina,” which, while being informal, was nothing more than that but certainly suggested continuing goodwill.

That done, she took a shower, stopped and had a coffee, and walked to the Foundation, arriving a bit after nine. She went up to the office, unlocked the cupboard, and took the pile she had last been reading. She sat at the desk and started to do the job she was being paid to do, at least until the end of the month.

There were three documents in German, all of them reports from Catholic priests upon the success of their mission in various parts of Germany governed by Protestant rulers. To one degree or another, they spoke of the deep faith of their own parishioners and the need to remain strong in the face of political opposition. All asked Steffani in one way or another to intercede with Rome for more money to aid them in their labors, a phrase two of the writers used.

There were a few letters from women with German surnames, none of whom Caterina managed to find in any of the articles or records she consulted online, praising Steffani for his music. One of them asked if he would favor her with a copy of one of his chamber duets. There were no copies of answers to any of these letters.

Had Steffani, then, gone through his papers in the years immediately preceding his death and chosen to keep those he thought important, or had everything simply been bundled up after his death by the people sent to sort out his possessions? Try as she might, she could find no common thread, even common threads, among these papers. Save for the musical score, nothing seemed more important than anything else.

She retied the stack and took it to the storeroom. When she placed it facedown on the pile of those she’d already read, there remained only one more parcel in the first trunk. She took it back to the desk and untied it and began to read.

After more than an hour of close reading, she had gotten through only one of two tightly written pages, front and back, and had decided that this was bottom feeding. These were accounts of the events and conversations, kept in a hand other than the one she had verified to be Steffani’s—did he have a secretary?—leading to the conversion or reconversion to Catholicism of various German aristocrats and dignitaries. Because no identification was provided beyond their names, Caterina could not measure the political importance of their religious change of stance. She was diligent with the first page and searched through the usual historical directories and sites for their names and managed to identify most of them. But what was the importance of the conversion of Henriette Christine and Countess Augusta Dorothea of Schwarzburg-Arnstadt, even if they were the daughters of Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel?

It was two and she was hungry and she was bored to the point of pain, something that had rarely happened during past research. It was all so futile, trying to find some indication of where Steffani might have left treasure, only so his greedy descendants could fight over it. Better to go out and find more novels like the one owned by d’Annunzio and sit reading them until the end of the month, producing inventive reports and translations of the papers she did not read. Perhaps she could use the plots of the novels as sources for her summaries of the unread papers? Perhaps she could go and get something to eat?

She carefully locked the papers away, then locked the door to the office and the door at the bottom of the steps. She went down to Roseanna’s office and found the door open; it had been closed when she came in and had remained so when she knocked on it. So Roseanna had been in and had not come up to check on her. Good or bad?

She left the building and locked the door. During the time she had been inside, the day had turned to glory. The sun beat down, and she was quickly warm, and then so hot she had to remove her jacket. She decided to walk to the Piazza, if only to have the chance to look across at San Giorgio and up the Grand Canal. As to lunch, God would surely provide.

She cut out to the Riva, turned right and walked toward the Piazza, eyes always pulled to her left by the excess on display. There were more boats moored to the side of San Giorgio than she remembered, but everything else was the same. Remove the vaporetti and the other motor-driven boats, and it would look much the same as it had centuries ago. As it had in Steffani’s day, she told herself and liked the thought.

Arrived at the Piazza she stopped and looked around: Basilica, tower, Marciana, columns, flags, clock. The ridiculous beauty of it all moved her close to tears. This was normal for her; this was one of her childhood playgrounds; this was home. She crossed in front of the Basilica, thinking she’d go back toward Rialto, but the crowds coming toward her down the Merceria frightened her, and she turned right past the leoncini and headed back, feeling abandoned by God, toward San Zaccaria.

Halfway to the end of the Basilica, she glanced into one of the numerous glass shops to the left and saw, sitting in a chair behind the cash register, reading a newspaper on the counter in front of him, the man who had followed her the other night. She missed a step but kept moving forward and regained her balance. There had been no doubt about it, no hesitation before she recognized him: it was the same man. She continued walking. It was only when she was long past the window that she turned back and noted the name of the shop.

It provided scant comfort to know he was not a paid killer; seeing him had still been a shock. She might not know who he was, but finding out would not be difficult. She could ask Clara or Cinzia to help. They could take one of their kids to render themselves even more innocent and start talking to him in Veneziano. Clara would be better, for her radiant happiness would pull secrets from anyone. Caterina’s thoughts turned to Clara’s husband, Sergio, who weighed just short of a hundred kilos and stood almost two meters tall. He was a far better choice of visitor.

Immeasurably cheered, she continued down toward San Filippo e Giacomo and turned off to go and have three of the small pizzas, two for lunch, and one to celebrate her discovery of the man who had followed her.