Death at La Fenice cgb-1

by Donna Leon

  * * * *

  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 clos
e.’ 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 do
n’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.’