Death at La Fenice

by Donna Leon

  As Patta continued in this vein, Brunetti decided that if something was said about the glorious musical history of the city, he’d take Paola flowers that afternoon. ‘This is the city of Vivaldi. Mozart was here. We have a debt to pay to the world of music.’ Irises, he thought; she liked them best of all. And she’d put them in the tall blue Murano vase.

  ‘I want you to stop whatever you’re working on and devote yourself entirely to this. I’ve looked at the duty rosters,’ Patta continued, surprising Brunetti that he even knew they existed, ‘and I’ve assigned you two men to help you with this.’ Please let it not be Alvise and Riverre, and I’ll take her two dozen. ‘Alvise and Riverre. They’re good, solid men.’ Roughly translated, that meant they were loyal to Patta.

  ‘And I want to see progress in this. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Brunetti replied blandly.

  ‘Right, then. That’s all. I’ve got work to do, and I’m sure you’ve got a lot to get busy with.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Brunetti repeated, rising and going towards the door. He wondered what the parting shot would be. Hadn’t Patta taken his last vacation in London?

  ‘And good hunting, Brunetti.’

  Yes, London. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said quietly, and let himself out of the office.

  7

  For the next hour, Brunetti busied himself reading through the reports of the crime in the four major papers. Il Gazzettino, as was to be expected, put it all over the front page and saw it as a crime that somehow compromised the city and put it at risk. It editorialized that the police must quickly find the person responsible, not so much to bring that person to justice as to remove the blot from the honour of Venice. Reading it, Brunetti reflected on Patta’s having read this article instead of waiting for his usual L’Osservatore Romano, which wasn’t on the newsstands until ten.

  La Repubblica viewed the event in light of recent political developments, suggesting a relationship so subtle that only the journalist, or a psychiatrist, could grasp it. Corriere della Sera behaved as though the man had died in his bed and devoted a full page to an objective analysis of his contribution to the world of music, drawing special attention to his having championed the cause of certain modern composers.

  He saved L’Unità for last. Predictably, it screamed the first thing that came into its head – in this case, vengeance, which, predictably, it had got confused with justice. An editorial hinted broadly at the same old secrets in high places and dragged out, not surprisingly, poor old Sindona, dead in his jail cell, and asked the patently rhetorical question of whether there wasn’t some dark connection between these two ‘frighteningly similar’ deaths. Aside from the fact that they were both old men who died of cyanide poisoning, there was little similarity, frightening or not, that Brunetti could see.

  Not for the first time in his career, Brunetti reflected upon the possible advantage of censorship of the press. In the past, the German people had got along very well with a government that demanded it, and the American government seemed to fare similarly well with a population that wanted it.

  He turned back to the long story in the Corriere and tossed the three other papers into the wastebasket. He read through the article a second time, occasionally taking notes. If not the most famous conductor in the world, Wellauer was certainly ranked high among them. He had first conducted before the last war, the prodigy of the Berlin Conservatory. Not much was written about the war years, save that he had continued to conduct in his native Germany. It was in the fifties that his career had taken off and he had joined the international glitter set, flying from one continent to another to conduct a single concert, then going off to a third to conduct an opera.

  In the midst of the tinsel and the fame, he had remained the consummate musician, exacting both precision and delicacy from any orchestra he directed, insisting upon absolute fidelity to the score as written. Even the reputation he had acquired of being imperious or difficult paled before the universal praise that greeted his absolute devotion to his art.

  The article paid little attention to his personal life, save to mention that his current wife was his third and that the second had taken her life, twenty years before. His residences were given as Berlin, Gstaad, New York, and Venice.

  The picture that appeared on the front page was not a recent one. In it, Wellauer appeared in profile, talking with Maria Callas, who was in costume and was obviously the prime subject of the photograph. It seemed strange to him that the paper would print a photo that was at least thirty years old.

  He reached down into the wastebasket and grabbed back the Gazzettino. It, as usual, had a photo of the place where the death had occurred, the dull, balanced façade of Teatro La Fenice. Next to it was a smaller photo of the stage entrance, out of which something was being carried by two uniformed men. The picture below was a recent full-face publicity still of the Maestro: white tie, shock of silver hair swept back from his angular face. There was the faint Slavic tilt to the eyes, which appeared curiously light under the dark brows that overshadowed them. The nose was entirely too long for the face, but the effect of those eyes was so strong that the slight defect hardly seemed worth notice. The mouth was broad, the lips full and fleshy, a strangely sensual contrast with the austerity of the eyes. Brunetti tried to remember the face as he had seen it the night before, tightened and distorted by death, but the power of this photo was enough to supplant that image. He stared at those pale eyes and tried to imagine a hatred so strong that it would lead someone to destroy this man.

  His speculations were interrupted by the arrival of one of the secretaries, with the report that had come down from the police in Berlin, already translated into Italian.

  Before he began to read it, Brunetti reminded himself that Wellauer was a sort of living monument and the Germans were always on the lookout for heroes, so what he read was very likely to reflect both of those things. This meant that some truths would be there only by suggestion, others by omission. Hadn’t many musicians and artists belonged to the Nazi Party? But who remembered that now, after all these years?

  He opened the report and began to read the Italian text, the German useless to him. Wellauer had no criminal record whatsoever, not even a driving violation. His apartment in Gstaad had been robbed twice; both times, nothing had been recovered, no one apprehended, and the insurance had made good, though the totals had been enormous.

  Brunetti waded through two more paragraphs of Germanic exactitude until he came to the suicide of the second wife. She had hanged herself in the basement of their Munich apartment on 30 April 1968, after what the report referred to as ‘a long period of depression’. No suicide note had been found. She had left three children, twin boys and a girl, then aged seven and twelve. Wellauer had himself discovered the body and, after the funeral, had gone into a period of complete seclusion that lasted six months.

  The police had paid no attention to him until his marriage, two years ago, to Elizabeth Balintffy, a Hungarian by birth, a doctor by training and profession, and a German by her first marriage, which had ended in divorce three years before her marriage to Wellauer. She had no criminal record, either in Germany or in Hungary. She had one child by the first marriage, a daughter, Alexandra, aged thirteen.

  Brunetti looked, and looked in vain, for some reference to what Wellauer had done during the war years. There was mention of his first marriage, in 1936, to the daughter of a German industrialist, and his divorce after the war. Between those dates, the man seemed not to have existed, which, to Brunetti, spoke very eloquently of what he had been doing or, at any rate, supporting. This, however, was a suspicion about which he was likely to get very little confirmation, especially not in an official report from the German police.

  Wellauer was, in short, as clean as a man could possibly wish to be. But still, someone had put cyanide in his coffee. Experience had taught Brunetti that people killed one another primarily for two reasons: money and sex. The order wasn’t important, and the
second was very often called love, but he had, in fifteen years spent among the murderous, encountered few exceptions to that rule.

  Well before eleven, he had finished with the German police report. He called down to the laboratory, only to learn that nothing had been done, no fingerprints taken from the cup or from the other surfaces in the dressing room, which remained sealed, a fact that, he was told, had already prompted three phone calls from the theatre. He yelled a bit at that, but he knew it was useless. He spoke briefly with Miotti, who said he’d learned nothing further from the portiere the night before, save that the conductor was a ‘cold one’, the wife very pleasant and friendly, and La Petrelli not at all to his liking. The portiere gave no reason for this, falling back, instead, on the explanation that she was antipatica. For him, that was enough.

  There was no sense in sending either Alvise or Riverre to take prints, not until the lab could determine if prints other than those of the conductor were on the cup. No need for haste here.

  Disgruntled that he would miss lunch, Brunetti left his office a little after noon and walked to the bar on the corner, where he had a sandwich and a glass of wine, not at all pleased with either. Though everyone in the bar knew who he was, no one asked him about the death, though one old man did rustle his newspaper suggestively. Brunetti walked down to the San Zaccaria stop and caught the number 5 boat, which would take him to the cemetery island of San Michele, cutting through the Arsenale and along the back side of the island. He seldom visited the cemetery, somehow not having acquired the cult of the dead so common among Italians. He had come here in the past; in fact, one of his first memories was of being taken here as a child to help tend the grave of his grandmother, killed in Treviso during the Allied bombing of that city during the war. He remembered how colourful the graves were, blanketed with flowers, and how neat, each precise rectangle separated from the others by razor-edged patches of green. And, in the midst of this, how grim the people, almost all women, who came carrying those armloads of flowers. How drab and shabby they were, as if all their love for colour and neatness was exhausted by the need to care for those spirits in the ground, leaving none left over for themselves.

  And now, some thirty-five years later, the graves were just as neat, the flowers still explosive with colour, but the people who passed among the graves looked as if they belonged to the world of the living, were no longer those wraiths of the postwar years. His father’s grave was easily found, not too far from Stravinsky. The Russian was safe; he would remain there, untouched, for as long as the cemetery remained or people remembered his music. His father’s tenancy was far more precarious, for the time was arriving when his grave would be opened and his bones taken to be put in an ossuary in one of the long, crowded walls of the cemetery.

  The plot, however, was neatly tended; his brother was more conscientious than he. The carnations that stood in the glass vase set in the earth of the grave were new; the frost of three nights earlier would have killed any that had been placed here before. He bent down and brushed aside a few leaves that the wind had blown up against the vase. He straightened up, then stooped to pick up a cigarette butt that lay beside the headstone. He stood again and looked at the picture displayed upon the front of the stone. He saw his own eyes, his own jaw, and the too-big ears that had skipped over him and his brother and gone, instead, to their sons.

  ‘Ciao, Papà,’ he said, but then he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He walked down to the end of the row of graves and dropped the cigarette butt into a large metal can set in the earth.

  At the office of the cemetery, he announced his name and rank and was shown into a small waiting room by a man who told him to wait, the doctor would be with him soon. There was nothing to read in the room, so he contented himself with looking out the only window, which gave on to the enclosed cloister about which the buildings of the cemetery had been built.

  At the beginning of his career, Brunetti had asked to attend the autopsy of the victim of the first murder he had investigated, a prostitute killed by her pimp. He had watched intently as the body was rolled into the operating theatre, stared fascinated as the white sheet was pulled back from her nearly perfect body. And as the doctor raised the scalpel above the flesh, ready to begin the long butterfly incision, Brunetti had pitched forward and fainted amid the medical students with whom he sat. They had calmly carried him out into the hall and left him, groggy, on a chair before hurrying back to watch. Since then, he had seen the victims of many murders, seen the human body rent by knives, guns, even bombs, but he had never learned to look on them calmly, and he could never again bring himself to watch the calculated violation of an autopsy.

  The door to the small waiting room opened, and Rizzardi, dressed as impeccably as he had been the night before, entered. He smelled of expensive soap, not of the carbolic that Brunetti couldn’t help associating with his work.

  ‘Good afternoon, Guido,’ he said, and extended a hand. ‘I’m sorry you bothered to come all the way out here. I could easily have phoned you with what little I learned.’

  ‘That’s all right, Ettore; I wanted to come out anyway. And there won’t be anything until those fools in the lab give me a report. And it’s certainly too soon to speak to the widow.’

  ‘Then let me give you what I have,’ the doctor said, closing his eyes and beginning to recite from memory. Brunetti removed the notebook from his pocket and took down what he heard. ‘The man was in excellent health. If I didn’t know his age, seventy-four, I would have guessed him to be at least ten years younger, early sixties, perhaps even later fifties. Muscles in excellent tone, probably through exercise added to a generally healthy body. No sign of disease in the internal organs. He can’t have been a drinker; liver was perfect. Strange to see in a man his age. Didn’t smoke, though I think he might have, years ago, and stopped. I’d say he was good for another ten or twenty years.’ Finished, he opened his eyes and looked at Brunetti.

  ‘And cause of death?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Potassium cyanide. In the coffee. I’d estimate he ingested about thirty milligrams, more than enough to kill him.’ He paused for a moment, then added, ‘I’d never actually seen it before. Remarkable effect.’ His voice trailed off, and he lapsed into a reverie that Brunetti found unsettling.

  After a moment, Brunetti asked, ‘Is it as quick as I’ve read it is?’

  ‘Yes, I think it is,’ the doctor answered. ‘As I said, I’ve never seen a case before, not a real one. I’d just read about it.’

  ‘Instantaneous?’

  Rizzardi thought for a moment before he answered. ‘Yes, I suppose it is, or so close as to make it the same thing. He might have had a moment to realize what was happening, but he would have thought it was a stroke or a heart attack. In any case, well before he could have realized what it was, he would have been dead.’

  ‘What’s the actual cause of death?’

  ‘Everything stops. Everything simply stops working: heart, lungs, brain.’

  ‘In seconds?’

  ‘Yes. Five. Ten at the most.’

  ‘No wonder they use it,’ Brunetti said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Spies, in spy novels. With capsules hidden in hollow teeth.’

  ‘Um,’ Rizzardi muttered. If he found Brunetti’s comparison at all strange, he gave no indication of it. ‘Yes, there’s no question that it’s fast, but there are others that are much more deadly.’ In response to Brunetti’s raised eyebrows, he explained, ‘Botulism. The same amount that killed him could probably kill half of Italy.’

  There seemed little to be gained from this subject, regardless of the doctor’s evident enthusiasm for it, so Brunetti asked, ‘Is there anything else?’

  ‘It looks like he’s been under treatment for the last few weeks. Do you know if he had a cold or flu or something like that?’

  ‘No,’ Brunetti said, shaking his head. ‘We don’t know anything yet. Why?’

  ‘There were signs of injections. Th
ere was no indication of drug abuse, so I imagine it was antibiotics, perhaps a vitamin, some normal procedure. In fact, the traces were so faint that it might not even have been injections; they could have been simple bruises.’

  ‘But not drugs?’

  ‘No, not likely,’ the doctor said. ‘He could easily have given himself an injection in the right hip – he was right-handed – but a right-handed person can’t give himself an injection in the right arm or left buttock, at least not where I found the mark. And as I said, he was in excellent health. I would have seen signs of drug use, if there had been any.’ He paused a moment and then added, ‘Besides, I’m not even sure that’s what they are. In my report, I’ll simply enter them as subcutaneous bleeding.’ Brunetti could tell from his voice that he considered the marks a triviality and already regretted mentioning them.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No, nothing. Whoever did this robbed him of at least another ten years of life.’

  As was usual with him, Rizzardi displayed, and probably felt, no curiosity whatsoever about who might have committed the crime. In the years he’d known him, Brunetti had never heard the doctor ask about the criminal. At times, he had become interested in, even fascinated by, a particularly inventive means of death, but he seemed never to care about who had done it or if the person had been found.

  ‘Thanks, Ettore,’ Brunetti said, and shook the doctor’s hand. ‘I wish they would work this fast in the lab.’

  ‘I doubt that their curiosity is as compelling as mine,’ Rizzardi said, again confirming Brunetti in the belief that he would never understand the man.