The Jewels of Paradise

Twenty-seven

ALTHOUGH SERGIO INVITED HER BACK TO DINNER, CATERINA was reluctant to go as far as San Polo. How easily the habits of the city returned, making her hesitant to leave her own sestiere, viewing an invitation to San Polo or Santa Croce as little different from a forced expedition to the Himalayas. What would happen if she had to cross Il Ponte della Libertà toward terraferma? Take her passport? Refuse to go because of her fear of strange food and exotic diseases?

She managed to shake off these musings and persuaded Sergio that it would be easier to explain things to Clara if she were not present.

When they left the café, he said he’d walk home, which meant he’d head back toward the Accademia. He kissed her on both cheeks, told her to call him again if she needed him, and headed off to his home and his family.

Caterina walked out to the water, noticed that the daylight was swiftly disappearing, and started along the riva, heading home. What a pair of failures they were. At the first sign of weakness, both she and Sergio capitulated. In her case, her dislike of confrontation was the result of size, not principle.

By the time Caterina was in university, Mina had long been a myth, and her discs could still astonish. How Caterina loved the cover of one of the old discs—it must be from three decades ago—with her head seamlessly airbrushed onto the body of a bodybuilder. A woman’s head—and brain—on top of a hundred kilos of muscle and power; if Caterina had that body, she’d once believed, she’d be the head of the music department at the University of Vienna. Hell, she’d have been head of state.

But now, having learned that size and power could be a handicap, at least for a person as decent as Sergio, she had to dismiss even that illusion. The man had followed her because he was afraid of his father, and his fear now made him untouchable by her or Sergio. “Mamma mia,” she whispered.

When she got to the apartment she spent another two hours hunting for Abbé Montalbano, chasing him through scholarly books and journals in four languages, seeking some sign of his passing in the catalogues listing the hundreds of thousands of books now available online, even though she knew he was unlikely to appear. She searched for him in historical journals and musicological theses, in the diplomatic files of minor principalities and the memoirs of forgotten noblemen and women.

Occasionally she caught a fleeting glimpse of him. In 1680 he accompanied Friedrich August, the son of Ernst August, as tutor on a trip to Venice and Rome. A letter from a composer for whom he wrote libretti referred to him as an intensely religious man, though in a “superstitious way.” Montalbano was believed to be Venetian, though she found no record of his birth in the city archives. He hung around the court in Hanover for years, always ready, it seemed, to help Ernst August with the embarrassing affairs of his family. Little was written about his salary until he was paid, and royally—Caterina smiled as that word came to her—the 150,000 thalers that came to him in the year of Königsmarck’s death, though some sources cut it to just 10,000. The only subsequent references to him that Caterina found appeared in a biography of Leibniz, where he was said to have returned to his native country and become the archdeacon of Mantova, where he died in 1695, and a reference to the account books of the court of Hanover, in which was noted a pension paid to the “mistress of the Abbé Montalbano” for forty-seven years after his death. The money that was given to him, whatever its true quantity, might as well have evaporated for all that was ever known of it.

She switched files and found the words of Countess von Platen: it was the abbé “who gained from the fatal blow that sent him to his maker . . . Did he not, Judas-like, make possible and profit from the crime? The blood money given to him bought the Jewels of Paradise, but nothing can buy him manhood and honor and beauty.”

“Pronoun reference, you fool,” she said out loud. Change the meaning of “he” from Abbé Steffani to Abbé Montalbano, and the picture of Steffani changed focus. He ceased to be an assassin; he ceased to have been involved in a murder to curry political favor for himself or his religion. He went back to being a fine composer and a man busy to advance the interests of his church and family. “Nothing can buy him manhood . . .” If this was not a reference to Steffani, then the writer was using “manhood” as a synecdoche for all the manly virtues absent from a man like Montalbano and not for missing body parts.

The “Jewels of Paradise,” however, remained a mystery to her. What did Montalbano buy with his blood money and what became of it at his death?

Hunger reminded her that it was time to stop asking these questions and think of finding something to eat. She cut some courgette and put them on to sauté, cut some tomatoes and added them, set it to simmer. The realization crashed upon her that, in all this time, she had not done the obvious thing and listened to Steffani’s music. She had read through it, sung through it in a soft voice, hummed a good deal of it. But she had not heard it in any real sense. She went over to the computer and found YouTube, typed in his name, and then selected Niobe, the work with which she was most familiar.

She turned down the flame under the vegetables and went back to the dining area and, glancing out this window, saw that the Bears were visible, having dinner. She switched off the light and moved back from the window, where she thought they would not see her, and studied the family. Niobe was the mother of fourteen children, and her boasting of their perfections had brought upon her the wrath of the gods, who slaughtered them all. The Bears had only two, both seated at the table with them.

Signor Bear opened the wine and poured his wife, and then himself, a glass. Caterina found that an excellent idea and went to the refrigerator and poured herself some Ribolla Gialla. The aria that came from the computer was, she thought, the lament by King Anfione, the father of the slaughtered children, sung by a countertenor whose voice she did not recognize.

Across the calle, Signor Bear turned to his son and slowly ruffled his hair, letting his hand linger at the base of the boy’s skull for a second before returning to his fork. The singer’s voice, accompanied minimally by lute and violins, sang to Caterina of the future, of his pianti, dolor, e tormenti. Did Signor Bear ever lie awake at night and worry about the safety of his children the way her parents, she knew, had worried about them? Did he have always at one step from him the fear of il mio dolor? Her father was a teacher, Anfione a king, and Signor Bear? What did he do to bring home the honey for his wife and babies? Did it matter? Grief was the great leveler.

The rhythm changed and Anfione was calling his troops all’armi. Almost by magic, as if the Bears had the music playing in their home, the son stabbed his fork at the food on his plate, glanced at his father for approval, waved a forkful of what looked like pieces of short pasta in the air a few times, and then, in perfect rhythm with the battle cry of the king, popped it into his mouth. Caterina laughed out loud and took another sip of her wine.

The young daughter, who sat opposite her brother, shot him a glance, the look every little sister gave to the older brother who got all of the attention. And love? Her face was a study in a child’s version of tragedy, while from the computer the same voice announced “Dell’alma stanca,” and, indeed, the little girl, in the manner of little girls, looked as though her soul were tired and dejected and abandoned. But then, just as the voice referred to placidi respiri, the father leaned toward her, then leaned closer still, and kissed her cheek. Her glance as she turned toward her father was so filled with joy that Caterina turned from it, telling herself it was time to check the zucchini.

By the time she took her dinner and another glass of wine back to the table, the Bears had finished their dinner and left the kitchen. Caterina, reluctant to read, turned her mind from the idea of children and considered, instead, the men, historical and actual, she had encountered since she came back to Venice. Her thoughts did not follow the chronological order in which she had encountered them. Her speculations jumped from one to another, then leaped ahead three centuries, drawn by similarities among them: their effect on women, their loyalty to friends or causes, the seriousness of their desires.

At the end of considerable reflection, and to her considerable surprise, she discovered that Steffani was the man she found most interesting, although she failed utterly to form any clear sense of him or feel any emotion save pity. A priest, a proselytizer, probably a spy for the Vatican, Steffani was all of these things, and all of them were things she was historically preconditioned to dislike. At the same time, she had found no evidence that Steffani had betrayed anyone, nor that he had suggested the burning of heretics. And he had written that music, the strains of which still haunted her.

As she washed and dried the dishes, she continued to think about him. He had been an insider, reared in the Vatican and familiar with the workings of Propaganda Fide. He knew what they were and worked to bring other people under their power. She stopped, a cotton towel running around the rim of her wineglass, realizing that she still had no idea of whether Steffani believed it all or not. Was he a man of his era, as opportunistic as the next, using the Church as a means to accumulate power and hoping to convert people only to build up numbers? Or did he believe it all and want others to find the same salvation in faith he believed he might have found? Nothing she had read about him allowed her to decide. Was the Stabat Mater an example of glowing faith or an example of musical genius?

The next morning Caterina was at the Foundation at nine, bent on getting to work on the papers in the second trunk. She paused as she closed the door to the building, drawn as if by the music of Parnassus itself, to the sound coming from Roseanna’s office. Indeed, as she arrived at the open door, she found what she expected: Roseanna was typing. Click and clack and then whir and slam and click, click-click, thud, click-click.

She knocked on the side of the door, and Roseanna looked up, smiling when she saw her. “Want to try?” she said and laughed.

Caterina shook her head as at the sight of mystery. “No, thanks. But I would like you to give me a hand.”

Without asking what it might be, Roseanna abandoned her task and got to her feet. “Gladly.”

“Upstairs. The trunks,” Caterina said. “I want to start on the papers in the second, but I don’t want to have to lean over the first every time I have to get into it. Maybe you’d help me move them?”

“Good idea,” Roseanna said. “Backs are terrible. You’re sure to do something to yours if you keep leaning over to get at the papers, especially when you get to the bottom of the piles.”

Talking about bad backs and the people they knew who had them, the two women went upstairs to the director’s office. Caterina unlocked the door and let them in and was surprised to find the room warm, almost uncomfortably so. She looked around in search of the source, her mind flashing to the possibility of fire. Roseanna put her unease at rest by going over to open one of the windows and swing back the shutters, allowing the sun to flood into the room; cool spring air and birdsong entered with it. “At last,” Roseanna said with palpable relief. She opened the other window and left them both open.

Caterina delighted in the fresh air and rejoiced in the sound. She unlocked the cabinet and pulled the doors open wide. For a moment, the women stood in front of the trunks, discussing the best way to move the first so as most easily to create access to the second.

When it was agreed, they each took a handle and carried the first trunk forward a meter or so, lowering it slowly to the parquet floor. They did the same with the second, which weighed more, and set it to the left of the other. Without having to discuss it, they lifted the first one and replaced it in the back of the storeroom, where the other had been, then put the other in front of it.

“Thanks,” Caterina said. Then, “Curious?”

Roseanna, who had not had a clear view of the papers when the trunks were first opened, said that she was but remained at a polite distance, as if to acknowledge Caterina’s right to open the trunk.

Caterina did just that, leaned over to peer inside, and saw that the papers had shifted around so as no longer to be separable into piles. Indeed, a few sheets of paper had worked themselves loose and now lay vertically between the other piles. Thinking as a researcher, she realized that this would create a problem of chronology among any papers that were not dated and began to plan how to remove them systematically so as to maintain the order into which they had shifted themselves.

Perhaps the best thing to do was to remove the loose papers and then slip her hand in at the place where the two separate piles had once met and feel if the intermingling of papers extended all the way to the bottom of the trunk.

She crouched next to the trunk and leaned over the edge, propping her weight on her right hand as she leaned forward. She slipped her left hand inside at the point where the two stacks of papers must once have met. She slid it down, the papers rubbing against her palm. She moved her hand slowly, hoping to find a place where the stacks were still separated.

She heard Roseanna move behind her and shifted her own weight in surprise. Her left foot slipped on the waxed parquet, and she lost her balance, slipping forward and falling across the open top of the trunk. Her left palm landed flat on the bottom of the trunk, and her right hand on the floor just in front. She braced herself, elbows stiff.

An inglorious, awkward figure, she crouched half in and half out of the trunk, her right knee on the floor, her left leg shot out behind her. Roseanna was immediately at her side, one hand under her arm, trying to help her back to her knees. “Are you all right?”

Caterina did not answer, perhaps did not even hear the question. She pulled her left leg forward and put her knee on the ground, which brought her up higher in relation to the top of the trunk. But she didn’t move away from it. Instead, she knelt like that, one hand inside and one outside of the trunk, both palms flat.

“What’s the matter?” Roseanna asked, squeezing her shoulder to get her attention.

“The floor,” Caterina said.

“What?” Roseanna asked, looking around.

“The floor,” Caterina repeated. “It’s lower than the trunk.”

Roseanna’s look became troubled but she kept her hand on Caterina’s shoulder, this time trying a squeeze that would provide comfort. In a consciously soft voice, she asked, “What do you mean, Caterina?”

Instead of answering, Caterina rose up higher, still kneeling, still supporting herself on both hands. She turned and looked at Roseanna, though her hands remained where they were. “The bottom of the trunk is higher than the floor,” she said. Seeing Roseanna’s confusion, Caterina could do nothing but laugh.

“There’s a fake bottom,” she said. Some seconds passed. Roseanna looked at her, saw the way one shoulder was higher than the other, and started to laugh.

It took a few moments for Caterina to decide what to do. She slowly pulled her hand from the trunk, her palm sliding against the side so as not to damage any papers it brushed past and got to her feet. As if a message had passed between them, both women reached to the handles and pulled the trunk forward. “I need a stick,” Caterina said, and Roseanna understood immediately.

“The carpenter,” Roseanna said. “Across the street. He’d have a meter stick.” Before Caterina could answer, Roseanna was out of the room.

Caterina returned her attention to the problem of getting the papers out of the trunk while keeping them in the same order in which she had found them. She stuck her upturned palms about ten centimeters down and began to slip her fingers forward and into the expanse of mingled papers. Rocking her hands up and down minimally, she slid them to the center of the papers, then moved them toward the sides of the trunk. Slowly she lifted them upward, ready to set everything back into place at the first sign of resistance. But the papers came free and she stood, a slab of them in her hands. She walked to the desk and set the papers as far to the left as she could.

When she returned to the trunk, she could see the intermingling of small packets of papers continuing down toward the bottom. She bent and repeated her motions, straightening up with another slice of papers in her hands. She placed this one to the right of the first. By the time Roseanna came back, there were five stacks on the table; enough had been removed to show that the rest of the papers lay in two separate stacks of neatly tied bundles.

Roseanna waved the segmented wooden stick above her head. “I’ve got it,” she said, her voice as triumphant as her gesture.

Caterina smiled in acknowledgment. “Let’s get the rest of the papers out,” she said, kneeling to reach into the trunk. She picked up some bundles on the left and took them over to the table. Roseanna set the meter on the table and went to the trunk. Monkey see, monkey do. She took the same quantity of papers as Caterina had and put them beside the others, then together they went back to the trunk and repeated the process until it was empty.

Only then did Caterina pick up the meter and pull open its first three segments. The trunk was no deeper than that, she thought. She put the end of the stick on the floor and ran her finger down the numbers. “Fifty-nine centimeters,” she said aloud.

She lifted it and stuck it into the empty trunk until its end hit the bottom. “Fifty-two,” she said. Out of curiosity, she pulled out the meter and used it to measure the thickness of the wood used in its construction: one and a half centimeters. So if the true and false bottoms of the trunk were the same, there would still be four centimeters into which to place papers or objects.

“What do we do now?” Roseanna asked.

Instead of answering, Caterina leaned into the trunk and felt around the four sides of the bottom with her hand. Everything felt smooth. “Do you have a flashlight?” she asked Roseanna, who was suddenly kneeling beside her.

“No,” Roseanna said, then reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out her iPhone. “But I have this.” She tapped the surface a few times, and a mini-spotlight ignited. She reached in and beamed the light around the bottom of the trunk. As she ran the light around, Caterina leaned forward and they bumped into each other. Roseanna dropped the phone.

She picked it up and moved to the end of the trunk, leaving Caterina alone on the side. “I’ll go around it slowly this time,” Roseanna said.

Caterina nodded, wondering if it was going to be necessary to shatter the bottom to expose whatever space was underneath. She ran her hand, more slowly this time, along the bottom, closing her eyes to let her fingers have more of her attention. When she had covered all four sides, she shifted the angle of her hand and began to move her fingers along the sides of the trunk, just above the seam where they met the bottom.

Only a few centimeters from a corner, she felt it, though she didn’t have any idea what she was feeling. Just at the seam, she felt the smallest of imperfections, like a small chip on the edge of a wineglass, though so smooth that, unless one were feeling for it, it would pass undetected. “Give me a pencil,” she said, keeping her finger on the tiny opening.

Roseanna set the phone down on the bottom of the trunk, went over to Caterina’s desk, and came back with a pencil. Caterina took it with her left hand and reached into the trunk to make a small mark on the bottom, just below the place where she felt the hole. Then she continued to move her finger along the remaining three sides, but the wood was like velvet.

When she was finished, she took the pencil with her right hand and prodded at the place above the pencil mark. The point of the pencil penetrated a few millimeters and stopped, either because it grew too big or because the point had run into something.

Caterina got to her feet and went to her bag and removed from it, of all unlikely things, a Swiss Army knife.

“What are you doing?” asked a shocked Roseanna.

Caterina didn’t answer but came back and knelt again beside the trunk. She turned the knife around and examined the other side, then pulled out the corkscrew “Maybe this will work,” she said, reaching back into the trunk.

Roseanna picked up the phone and shined the light on the pencil mark. Caterina manipulated the knife until the point found the hole, then pushed the point until she felt it slip inside. Gently, gently, she tried to turn it, first one way and then the other, but it refused to move. There was only one thing left to do, which was to angle her fist so that the curved point would catch in the bottom panel and, if possible, lever it upward.

She gripped the body of the knife, which had now become the handle, and pressed her fist forward as she turned it up. At first she felt the same resistance that had met her attempts to move it to the side, and then it seemed that the point managed to penetrate something, for her hand met less resistance. The handle moved closer to the side of the trunk, and then she had to take her hand off the handle and push it with the flat of her hand.

As she did that, she saw the floor of the trunk begin to move upward. It rose steadily until the knife handle met the wall. The bottom had come loose in the corner, and she managed to slip her fingernails, and then her fingers, under it. Slowly, she pulled at it until, as easily as if she were opening a box of cigars, the entire bottom panel slid up. As it reached the top of the trunk, they could both see that the board was slightly beveled on all four sides. This would allow it to slip down easily and fit tightly into place. It could be pried up only by inserting a narrow, curved point into the hole in the side.

Caterina took the bottom, which was surprisingly thin—barely half a centimeter—from the trunk and leaned it against the wall. Both of the women leaned into the trunk, and Roseanna shined her light on the bottom.

They saw a piece of thick-woven cloth, perhaps a towel or something used to cover a small table. Linen, unstained with age, it rested on the bottom. Caterina reached inside with both hands, took it at two corners, and peeled it back. Below it, resting in what seemed to be a thick nest of the same cloth, were six flat leather bags, the old-fashioned type with drawstring tops. Each was about the size of a human hand. A piece of paper lay atop them.

Caterina, her scholar’s habits asserting themselves, picked it up with both hands and lifted it carefully from the trunk. Still kneeling, she rested it on the angle of the top of the trunk to examine it.

She recognized the back-leaning handwriting. “Knowing my death to be near, I, Bishop Agostino Steffani, set pen to paper to make disposition of my possessions in a manner just and fitting in the eyes of God.”

She tore her eyes from the text and looked to the bottom. The document was dated 1 February 1728, less than two weeks before his death.

“What is it?” Roseanna demanded.

“Steffani’s will.”