Falling in Love

by Donna Leon

  He moved on to Wikipedia and was reminded that she had been born in Alto Adige more than forty years ago and had begun her musical training there. He jumped over the summary of her career and started reading the short paragraph entitled ‘Personal Life’. There was the husband, listed correctly as Spanish, and two children whose names were not given. Her marriage, he read, had ended in divorce. There was the usual reference to ‘early talent’, ‘astonishing debut’, and ‘technical mastery’, as well as a list of the roles she had sung, but there was nothing beyond this.

  Returning to Google, he opened another article, which consisted chiefly of photos, but he soon tired of the wigs and ball gowns. He had the number of her telefonino in his and he called it.

  ‘Sì,’ she answered on the fourth ring.

  ‘Flavia,’ he began, ‘it’s Guido. I’d like to talk to you; this evening, if possible.’

  There was a very long pause, and finally she said, ‘How long will it take and what do you want to talk about?’

  ‘It’s about a girl you spoke to, and I have no idea how long it will take,’ he answered.

  ‘A girl?’she asked. ‘What girl?’

  ‘Francesca Santello,’ he said, but the name was met with silence. ‘You spoke to her at the theatre a few days ago.’

  ‘The contralto?’ Flavia asked.

  ‘I think so. Yes.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘Could I come and see you?’

  ‘Guido, I’m in the theatre. I have to sing tonight. If whatever you have to tell me is going to upset me, I don’t want to hear it, not this soon before a performance. Besides, there’s nothing I can tell you about her. We met at the theatre, I complimented her, and that was that.’ He heard a noise from her end of the phone: it sounded like a door closing. Then he heard a woman’s voice – not Flavia’s. Then silence.

  ‘Could I come to see you after the performance?’ he asked.

  ‘Has something happened to the girl?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. But she’s all right.’

  ‘Then why are you calling me?’

  ‘Because I want you to tell me as much as you remember of your meeting with her.’

  ‘I could do that right now,’ she said, her voice less friendly than it had been.

  ‘No, I’d rather do it in person.’

  ‘So I can betray my guilt with my facial expression?’ she asked, perhaps as a joke, perhaps not.

  ‘No, not at all. I just don’t want us to be rushed: I want you to have time to remember what happened and what you said.’

  There was another long pause, during which he could hear the other woman’s voice again and then some noises that might have been objects being moved around or set down.

  ‘All right,’ she said brusquely, the sort of voice one used with importuning salesmen. ‘You know what time we finish. I’ll wait for you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Brunetti answered, but she had broken the connection before he spoke the second word.

  He should have checked to see if there was a performance before he called, but the story troubled him: inexplicable violence always did. If his interpretation of events was correct, then there was every possibility that the violence directed at Francesca might expand to include Flavia.

  He explained at dinner that he had to go out to speak to Flavia Petrelli that evening, after the performance. Neither of the children seemed interested, though Paola listened to his speculations attentively. At the end of his account, she said, ‘People become fixated on other people.’ She tilted her head and looked into the far distance, the way she did when some new idea came to her. ‘I think that might be why Petrarch has always made me so uncomfortable.’

  ‘What?’ Brunetti asked in open astonishment.

  ‘His thing with Laura,’ she said, and Brunetti pondered these words – in the mouth of the most serious reader he had ever known, and said of the man who had taught his country how to write poetry. His thing with Laura?

  ‘I’ve always wondered if he simply wound himself up about her, although I suspect he got into a state because that kept the poetry coming.’

  ‘Beautiful poetry,’ Brunetti said, aiming for precision here.

  ‘Of course, beautiful poetry, but one does get so tired of all the unrequited love.’ That said, she stacked the dishes prior to putting them in the sink, the children long since having slunk off to their rooms to engage in idle pursuits while leaving the work to their mother. ‘And what about Laura? She might have thought he was a pest, a creep, or, if you will, a stalker, which is why I thought of him in this context.’ She turned on the hot water and set the plates in the sink, then looked at Brunetti and said, ‘You think, if he were living now, he’d have Laura chained in the cellar, and she’d be the mother of his two illegitimate children?’

  Unable to find an adequate response to her question, the best Brunetti could do was say, ‘You never told me you thought this way about Petrarch.’

  ‘I’m simply tired of the fuss. People quote him, but how many people actually read him any more?’ she demanded. ‘And how many times can a poet get away with something like:

  “Aura che quelle chiome bionde et crespe

  cercondi et movi, et se’ mossa da loro,

  soavamente, e spargi quel dolce oro,

  et poi ’l raccogli, e ’n bei nodi il rincrespe”. . .’

  That said, Paola brought her lips together and said apologetically, ‘I used to know the whole thing, but now that’s all I can remember.’ She pulled the silverware from the soapy water, rinsed it under hot, and set it in the drying rack above the sink, saying, ‘Next thing, they’ll be calling you to say I’m lost on the street and can’t find my way home.’

  Brunetti looked at his watch, kissed her without saying anything and left for the theatre.

  His flight from further discussion of Italian poetry brought him to the theatre fifteen minutes before the end of the performance. He showed his warrant card at the stage door and said he’d find his way backstage. The guard displayed little interest and told him the elevator was on his left.

  When he got out on stage level, he saw a man about his own age, dressed as he was, in suit and tie, and asked him the way to the stage. The man, a sheaf of papers in his hand, pointed straight ahead and told him he’d hear it, then walked off and left him there without having bothered to ask him who he was.

  Brunetti followed his directions and walked down a dimly lit corridor to a soundproof door that failed to stifle the throb of the orchestra. He opened the door just as poor old Mario got it in the chest from some of Rome’s finest: the sound swept over him, and the voices. Music, confusion, general noise. After pausing to allow his eyes to adjust to the brighter light, Brunetti took a few steps forward and stopped behind three stagehands who stood with their arms folded, watching the opera, and two others who were busy with their telefonini. And there on the stage was Flavia, hair crowned with a jewelled diadem, red gown trailing behind her, standing again on the ramparts of Castel Sant’Angelo, announcing her death. And then over she went, the music crashed out again, the curtain closed slowly, and one of the stagehands turned his attention to the screen of his colleague’s phone.

  The audience, as they had the night he was there, went wild, erupting into the frenzy that Tosca’s suicide and those final chords were meant to provoke and, in the hands of someone who could sing and act, usually did. Brunetti shifted a few metres so that he could see the entire area behind the curtain, where the singers loitered in a group, talking among themselves and laughing. Minutes passed.

  A man holding a clipboard waved it to herd together the three principal singers and shooed them to centre stage, then turned and waved everyone else to the sides. The curtains pulled back, and the three singers, all miraculously returned to life, appeared, to receive their tumultuous applause. After some time, Flavia slipped to the side and brought out the conductor – whom she had referred to, at the Faliers’, as ‘a mediocrity that thumps’ – then stood b
ack and joined in the applause. Everyone linked hands again, and the curtains closed on them.

  Brunetti stood on the side and watched for minutes as various performers walked from behind the curtains to receive their due. He saw the way Flavia put on a smile, flashing with delight each time she appeared to the public, then saw it dissolve the instant she returned behind the curtain.

  As the applause thundered on, the man in charge clapped his hands briskly and pulled back the edge of one of the curtains to create an opening for the principals. He clapped again, more loudly, and the four people looked towards him. Tosca was drinking a glass of water and passed it to her dresser; the conductor was nowhere to be seen; Scarpia shined his shoes by rubbing them against the back of his trousers, Cavaradossi stuffed his telefonino into the pocket of his bloodstained doublet. Brunetti had once been told that it was done by squirting red ink from the inside of whatever they were wearing, so that the blood erupted just at the moment they were shot or stabbed. He wondered idly, as the audience continued its mad noise, if it washed out and, if so, whether the theatre had washing machines. Singers sweated a lot when they sang: the lights, the tension, the sheer physical strain of singing. They probably had dry cleaning machines, as well. Showbiz.

  The man with the clipboard nodded, and Scarpia walked out to centre stage. Loud applause. He returned at the moment the applause peaked, and out went Mario. Louder applause, longer applause. He came back behind the curtain, pulled out his telefonino and continued his conversation. Tosca walked slowly from behind the curtain and stood entirely still. Pandemonium.

  From the angle where he stood, Brunetti saw her right arm rise, as if to salute all that enthusiasm, all that love. Then it sank as she lowered herself in a slow curtsey that ratcheted up the applause. He watched her wave as she stepped unerringly backwards to the opening in the curtain and slipped through it, giving place to the conductor, who had returned to the stage and was enveloped in applause. Quickly back, he walked past the singers without bothering to speak to them.

  After some time, when there was no lessening of enthusiasm from the audience, all four of them joined hands, filed on to the stage and took their united bow. They repeated this twice, and then left the diminishing applause and retreated behind the curtain. The man directing the bows made a quick horizontal gesture with his hands, as Brunetti had seen ground staff do when a plane was safely docked at the terminal. Gradually, the applause trickled down and stopped.

  Behind Brunetti, the stage crew were busy disassembling Castel Sant’Angelo. They lowered the massive blocks of the stone ramparts that ringed the tower on to dollies and wheeled them offstage. Windows came apart as easily as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, were placed on different dollies, and sent to join the pieces of the ramparts.

  When this ceased to interest Brunetti, he looked around and saw that he was the only person, other than the head of the stage crew and the workers, to remain onstage. He approached and asked the man giving the orders if he could tell him where Signora Petrelli’s dressing room was.

  The man gave him a sharp look and asked, ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m a friend,’ Brunetti answered.

  ‘How’d you get back here?’ he asked.

  Brunetti removed his wallet and pulled out his warrant card. The other man took it and studied it carefully, looked at him to check the photo, then handed it back.

  ‘Could you take me there?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said and turned back the way Brunetti thought he had come, then down a long corridor: turn right, turn left, into the elevator and up, he thought, two floors. They turned left into a corridor, and on the third door on the left he saw Flavia’s name. The man left him there. Brunetti knocked, and a woman’s muffled voice shouted out something that did not sound inviting. A few minutes later, the door opened and a woman came out of the room, carrying the red gown on a hanger. She stopped when she saw him and asked, ‘Are you Guido?’

  Brunetti nodded, and she held the door open, then pulled it closed after him.

  Flavia, barefoot and wearing a white cotton dressing gown, sat in front of the mirror, running both hands through her short hair; her wig stood on a stand to her left. She removed her hands from her hair and shook her head wildly: drops flew from it on all sides. Grabbing a towel, she rubbed her head for what seemed a long time. Tiring of this, she threw the towel on the counter and turned to Brunetti. ‘He got in here again,’ she said with an unsteady voice.

  ‘Tell me,’ Brunetti said, taking a seat to her left so as not to tower over her while they were speaking.

  ‘When I came back after the performance, this was here,’ she said in an uneasy voice, pointing to a wrinkled bundle of dark blue wrapping paper. A piece of thin gold ribbon lay on the floor.

  ‘What is it?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Look,’ she said and reached for the paper.

  ‘Don’t touch it,’ he said more loudly than he should have. Her hand froze, and she shot him an angry look in which he saw the automatic response of a wilful person who is stopped from doing what they want to do.

  ‘Fingerprints,’ he said calmly, then added, hoping she watched crime shows on television, ‘DNA.’

  Chagrin replaced the anger on her face and she said, ‘Sorry, I should have thought.’

  ‘What is it?’ he asked again.

  ‘You have to see it.’ She picked up a long-handled comb from her dressing table. Reversing it, she used the pointed end to push at the paper, moving it to one side. There was a flash under the makeup lights; she caught something with the sharp end of the comb and pulled it free of the paper.

  ‘Oddio,’ Brunetti said. ‘Is that real?’ Lying next to the wrinkled paper was a necklace. Every so often, the gold links thinned and wove around stones the size of Fisherman’s Friend throat lozenges, though these were deep green, not dusty dark brown. ‘Are they real?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘All I know is that someone left this package here, and I opened it when I got back from the curtain calls.’

  ‘Why did you open it?’ Brunetti asked, resisting the impulse to add, ‘with everything that’s going on’.

  ‘Marina, my dresser, told me a few days ago that she’d found something she thought I might like at the street fair in San Maurizio and would bring it tonight.’

  Glancing at the necklace, Brunetti said, ‘That’s hardly the sort of thing one sees on sale at the street fair in Campo San Maurizio, is it?’ Then he asked, ‘Did you ask her about it?’

  ‘No, I didn’t have to. When she came in to collect my costume, she said she had to take care of the grandchildren yesterday and she forgot all about it.’

  ‘Did she see it?’ he asked, eyes on the hypnotizing green.

  ‘No. I put a towel over it. I thought you were the person I should show it to.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Brunetti said. His eyes roamed back to the green, and he counted the lozenges: there were at least a dozen. ‘How does it make you feel?’ he asked, pointing with his chin towards the necklace.

  She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth, then opened them just enough to whisper, ‘It terrifies me.’

  16

  ‘Can’t you lock the door?’ he asked gently, to show he understood her reaction.

  She shrugged the idea away. ‘I suppose I could, but people always need to come in: if I forget a fan or a shawl, Marina has to get it, and the makeup artist leaves her things here.’

  These sounded flimsy arguments to Brunetti, but he said nothing. Looking into the mirror, she caught his eye and said, ‘The real reason is I wouldn’t know where to put the key when I’m onstage. My costumes for this production don’t have pockets, and I’m certainly not going to stuff it down my bodice.’

  ‘I’ve always wondered about that,’ Brunetti said, then immediately wished he had not.

  ‘About what?’ she asked, running her hands through her hair, this time evidently satisfied that it was dry.

  ‘I’ve read or b
een told those stories about old-time sopranos,’ Brunetti said, ‘who wouldn’t sing until they were paid in cash, and then put the silk bag of ducats or dollars or God knows what down their bodice.’

  ‘The days of being paid in cash are long gone, I’m afraid,’ she said with real regret. ‘Today it’s all agents and bank transfers and financial records.’ She studied her face in the mirror. ‘How lovely it would be to be paid in cash,’ she said, sounding wistful at the passing of a finer era.

  She turned away from the mirror to face him squarely. ‘Tell me about the girl.’

  ‘Someone pushed her down a bridge last night, saying, “È mia.”’

  ‘Oh, the poor thing. What happened to her?’

  ‘She broke her arm and hit her head badly enough to need stitches.’

  Her face tightened. ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘Because of her age and because of the language.’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Her attacker didn’t say “Sei mia”, which you’d ordinarily use with a young person and, I think, with someone you’re pushing down a bridge.’ He had hoped she’d smile when he said that, but she did not, so he went on. ‘He said, “È mia.”’ Again he waited, and again Flavia said nothing. ‘Either he was speaking formally, or he was speaking about some other person: “She’s mine.”’