The Jewels of Paradise

Five

THE WORD ASTONISHED HER. “TREASURE?” SHE REPEATED. “WHAT treasure?”

“He didn’t tell you?” Roseanna asked.

“Who?” Caterina asked. Then, “Tell me what?”

“Dottor Moretti. He must know about it,” Roseanna said, sounding surprised. “I thought he’d have told you when you accepted the job.”

Caterina, who had been strolling along a beach, looking idly at the shells underfoot, felt herself suddenly swept away by an unexpected wave. The water, she realized, was deeper than she had expected. She thought of the two cousins, and there came a sudden vision of sharp fins slicing through the waters. To escape this fantasy, she put her hand on Roseanna’s arm and said, “Believe me. I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“Ma, ti xe Venexiana?” Roseanna asked, exaggerating the pronunciation of the dialect words.

Caterina nodded; she had been away from home so long that Italian now came more easily to her than did the language she had heard at home as a child, but still dialect was the language of her bones.

“You’re Venetian and you don’t know anything about those two?” she asked, leading Caterina away from the idea of treasure to, presumably, the two cousins.

“The usurer and the man with the fleet of water taxis who has almost no income?” Caterina said, and Roseanna gave her a look that was the equivalent of a stamp in her passport. To know that much about them was to be Venetian.

“What else do you know?” she asked Caterina.

“That Stievani’s sons and nephews drive the taxis. And make a fortune. All undeclared, of course.”

“And Scapinelli?”

“That he’s a convicted usurer but still works in the shops of his sons. Who are not angels, either.”

Roseanna considered all of this for some time and asked, moving even further away from any mention of treasure, “Is your mother Margherita Rossi?”

“Yes.”

“And her father played in the Fenice orchestra?”

“Yes. Violin.”

“Then I know your family,” Roseanna said and sighed. “Your grandfather used to give my father opera tickets.” She did not sound at all pleased at the memory, or perhaps her displeasure resulted from the obligations imposed upon her by that memory.

Caterina had the sense to remain quiet and wait and allow Roseanna to decide the order in which to tell things. “They’re very bad men,” Roseanna said and then added, by way of explication, “They come of bad families. One side was originally from Castelfranco and the other’s from Padova, I think. But they’ve been here in the city for generations. Greed’s in their bones.”

Suddenly tired of what sounded like melodrama and overcome with impatience, Caterina said, “And what about treasure? Where does that come from?”

“No one knows,” Roseanna said.

“Does anyone know where it is?” Caterina asked.

Roseanna shook her head and surprised Caterina by suddenly getting to her feet. “Let’s go get a coffee,” she said, and headed for the door without bothering to wait and see if the other woman followed her.

Outside, Caterina stopped in the calle, waiting for Roseanna to choose the direction. It had been years since she had been in this part of the city, so she had no idea which bars still served decent coffee.

Roseanna stood for a moment, moving her head from side to side, much in the manner of a hunting dog testing the air for the temperature or passing prey. “Come on,” she finally said, turning to the right and, at the first corner, right again. “We can go to that place in Campo Santa Maria Formosa.”

There were two of them, Caterina remembered, the one with the outside benches that remained in place until the really cold weather arrived and the one opposite it, along the canal, that she had been told—and thereafter always believed—had once been the room where the bodies of the dead in the parish were kept before being taken out to the cemetery on San Michele.

They walked down Ruga Giuffa, making small talk, admiring this or that, pointing to a perfume they had once tried but got tired of. Because they were Venetian, they also commented on the shops that were gone and what had come after them: the wonderful place that sold bathroom fixtures replaced by the cheapest of fake-leather bags and belts.

After crossing the bridge, Roseanna continued straight across the campo, to Caterina’s relief avoiding the bar alongside the canal. In front of the other bar, Roseanna stopped and asked, “Inside or outside?” This time, it was Caterina who tested the temperature before saying, “Inside, I’m afraid.” But before they went in, she pointed to the near corner and asked, “What happened to that palazzo?” As Caterina remembered, the building, like Steffani’s chests were now, had been at the center of a contested inheritance, but in this case rumor said it concerned not first and second cousins but first and second wives, a far more deadly game.

“A hotel,” Roseanna said, making no attempt to disguise her disgust. “They hacked it up inside and brought in cheap imitation furniture, and now tourists can tell themselves they’re staying in a real Venetian palazzo.” She pushed open the door and went into the bar. Caterina saw that there was no place to sit and delighted in the fact. She had had enough of gemütlich coffeehouses with velvet benches and whipped cream everywhere: alongside the strudel, inside the cakes, on top of the coffee. Here a person stood, drank a coffee in one swift gulp, and went back to the business of the day.

Roseanna called the barman by name and asked for two coffees, which arrived almost instantly and were as quickly consumed. Roseanna said nothing, nor did Caterina; so much for the idea of an intimate conversation. When they were back outside, Caterina glanced at her watch and saw it was a bit after eleven, so she turned left and headed toward the bridge that would take them back to the Foundation. “You still haven’t told me about the treasure,” she said, deciding that push had come to shove.

Roseanna, walking beside her, nodded, then surprised her by saying, “I know. It’s so crazy I’m almost embarrassed to talk about it. And I don’t know how much you’re supposed to be told.”

Caterina stopped before the bridge and pulled Roseanna to the right to keep her out of the way of the people passing by. “Roseanna, I know who it’s all about, and I know what sort of men the cousins are, and now you’ve told me there’s some sort of treasure. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand that’s why they’re so interested in the trunks and the papers.” Suddenly tired of all the secrecy, she spoke before she thought. “What do they think the other applicants who didn’t get the job are doing? Not telling people about all of this?”

As often happened with her, the more she thought about the situation, the more her anger grew. What in God’s name do these fools think is in the trunks, the manuscript of Monteverdi’s lost Arianna? A missing papal tiara? Saint Veronica’s veil?

Roseanna started to speak but Caterina ignored her. “You’re the one who mentioned it, who used the word treasure. I didn’t. So tell me what this is all about.” Her heart was pounding, sweat stood on her forehead, but she stopped because she realized there was no threat she could make. She needed the job, and she realized the scholar she had once been was curious to follow the paper trail that led back to Steffani.

Roseanna moved away from her as from a source of heat that had become uncomfortable, but she made no attempt to go back across the bridge. She pursed her lips and looked down at her shoes, shifted her bag from one shoulder to the other, moving it to the side away from Caterina. “First, let me tell you there were no other applicants. Only you.”

“Then why did they tell me there were?” Caterina all but bleated.

“Capitalism,” Roseanna said and smiled.

“What?”

“To beat your price down.” She smiled after she said it, and Caterina saw the force of her logic. “If you thought there were a lot of people after the job, you’d be willing to let them pay you less than you’re worth.”

Caterina raised a hand to cover her face from the embarrassment of it.

Roseanna reached over and latched her arm into Caterina’s; she turned toward the bridge, pulling Caterina along beside her. “All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I think is happening.”

The story she told was at times unclear, her telling of it filled with backups and turnarounds, with omissions and additions, and corrections and afterthoughts, of what she had heard at the Foundation, read, and imagined. In essence, it filled in some of the gaps left in the story Caterina had been told by Dottor Moretti and what she had inferred from her meetings with the two cousins. Letters from Steffani existed in which he spoke of the poverty of his life. When she heard Roseanna say this, Caterina tried to recall ever having seen a letter from a Baroque-era composer—indeed, any composer—who complained of the excessive richness of his life. But there also existed a letter—Roseanna had indeed put in her time reading at the Marciana—written in the last year of his life in which he mentioned some of the objects in his possession, among them books and pictures and a casket and jewels. The catalogue of the more than five hundred books he owned listed first editions of Luther, which would be of enormous value today.

“Is that the treasure?”

Roseanna stopped and pulled her arm free to raise it, along with the other, in a gesture of complete exasperation. “My God, listen to me. We don’t even know if there are papers in the chests—or what’s in them—and here I am talking about treasure. The whole thing’s crazy.”

Caterina took great comfort from the other woman’s unconscious use of the plural. And yet Roseanna had a point in saying that they were all crazy. Caterina was swiftly approaching the same view. If the cousins had learned of the possibility of unearned wealth, Caterina had seen enough of them to know how they would be driven wild by the thought of so-called treasure.

As to the likelihood that any papers in the trunk would lead to the discovery of a treasure, Caterina was less certain. It was unlikely that any treasure—whatever it was—would still be resting, safely undiscovered, in the place where it had been put. Realizing that her speculations led nowhere, Caterina asked, “What else did you learn?” Producing her easiest and most relaxed smile, she coaxed, “I had to do a lot of that sort of reading while I was in school. It’s comforting to know that someone else finds it interesting.”

Roseanna, who had been spared the experience of reading back issues of Studies in Early Baroque Counterpoint, gave Caterina an uncertain glance and said, “I understood only the historical parts, not the musicological.”

“Good,” Caterina said with a smile, “the historical part’s usually more interesting.”

This earned her another puzzled glance, enough to warn her to treat her profession with greater seriousness. “What else did you read?”

“One of the articles said that his possessions went to a Vatican organization called Propaganda Fide and disappeared, then these two trunks turned up a few years ago when an inventory was made. Then somehow the cousins managed to have them sent here. I was never told how that happened.”

Caterina realized there was little to be gained from trying to penetrate any of the mysteries created by the cousins. Thinking out loud and returning to the question of the trunks, Caterina said, “If they were autograph scores, then the music would have a certain value.”

“What does certain value mean?” Roseanna asked.

“I have no idea. That usually depends on how famous the composer is and how many of his manuscripts are on the market. But Steffani’s star isn’t in the ascendant, so no one’s going to be paying a fortune for whatever might be there.”

Nudged by curiosity about when she would be able to begin her research, Caterina asked, “Did Dottor Moretti tell you when they’d come to open the chests?”

“Noon,” Roseanna said and looked at her watch. Then, sounding like a guilty schoolgirl and not at all like the acting director of the Fondazione Musicale Italo-Tedesca, she said, “We better get back.”