Death at La Fenice

by Donna Leon

  ‘Thank you,’ he said as the boat hovered at the wooden landing. No one answered him, so he left the cabin, jumped from the boat onto the platform, and stood there as the boat pulled back into line, following the casket out into the deeper waters of the laguna.

  12

  Like most of the palazzi on the Grand Canal, Palazzo Falier was originally meant to be approached by boat, and guests were meant to enter by means of the four shallow steps leading down to the landing on the canal. But this entrance had long since been closed off by a heavy metal grating that was opened only when large objects were delivered by boat. In these fallen times, guests arrived by foot, walking from Ca’ Rezzonico, the nearest vaporetto stop, or from other parts of the city.

  Brunetti and Paola approached the palazzo by foot, passing in front of the university, then through Campo San Barnaba, after which they turned left and along a narrow canal that led them to the side entrance of the palazzo.

  They rang the bell and then were ushered into the courtyard by a young man Paola had never seen before. Probably hired for the night.

  ‘At least he’s not wearing knee breeches and a wig,’ Brunetti remarked as they climbed the exterior staircase. The young man had not bothered to ask who they were or whether they had been invited. Either he had a guest list committed to memory and could recognize everyone who arrived or, more likely, he simply did not care whom he let into the palazzo.

  At the top of the stairs, they heard music coming from the left, where the three enormous reception rooms were located. Following the sound, they went down a mirror-lined hallway, accompanied by their own dim reflections. The huge oaken doors to the first room stood open. Light, music, and the scent of expensive perfume and flowers spilled from beyond them.

  The light that filled the room came from two immense Murano glass chandeliers, covered with playful angels and Cupids, which hung from the frescoed ceiling, and from candle-filled stanchions that lined the walls. The music came from a discreet trio in the corner, who played Vivaldi in one of his more repetitive moods. And the scent emanated from the flock of brightly coloured and even more brightly chattering women who decorated the room.

  A few minutes after he saw them enter, the count approached, bowed to kiss Paola’s cheek, and extended his hand to his son-in-law. He was a tall man in his late sixties who, making no attempt to disguise the fact that his hair was thinning, wore it cut short around a tonsure and looked like a particularly studious monk. Paola had his brown eyes and broad mouth but had been spared the large prow of aristocratic nose that was the central feature of his face. His dinner jacket was so well tailored that even had it been pink, the only thing anyone seeing it would have noticed was the cut.

  ‘Your mother is delighted that you both could come.’ The subtle emphasis alluded to the fact that this was the first time Brunetti had attended one of their parties. ‘I hope you will enjoy yourselves.’

  ‘I’m sure we will,’ Brunetti replied for them both. For seventeen years, he had avoided calling his father-in-law anything. He couldn’t use the title, nor could he bring himself to call the man Papà. ‘Orazio’, his Christian name, was too intimate, a baying at the moon of social equality. So Brunetti struggled on, not calling him anything, not even ‘Signore’. They did, however, compromise and use the familiar tu form of address with each other, though even that did not fall easily from their lips.

  The count saw his wife come across the room and smiled, beckoning her to join them. She manoeuvred her way through the crowd with a combination of grace and social skill that Brunetti envied, stopping to kiss a cheek here, lightly touch an arm there. He quite enjoyed the countess, stiff and formal in her chains of pearls and layers of black chiffon. As usual, her feet were encased in dagger-pointed shoes with heels as high as kerbstones, stones, which still failed to bring her level with her husband’s shoulder.

  ‘Paola, Paola,’ she cried, making no attempt to hide her delight at seeing her only child. ‘I’m so glad you could finally bring Guido with you.’ She broke off for a moment to kiss them both. ‘I’m so glad to see you here, not just for Christmas or for those awful fireworks.’ Not one to keep a cat in the bag, the countess.

  ‘Come,’ said the count. ‘Let me get you a drink, Guido.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he answered, then, to Paola and her mother, ‘May we bring you something?’

  ‘No, no. Mamma and I will get something in a little while.’

  Count Falier led Brunetti across the room, pausing occasionally to exchange a greeting or a word. At the bar, he asked for champagne for himself and a Scotch for his son-in-law.

  As he handed the drink to Brunetti, he asked, ‘I assume you’re here in the line of duty. Is that correct?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Brunetti answered, glad of the other man’s directness.

  ‘Good. Then my time hasn’t been wasted.’

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ Brunetti said.

  Nodding to an enormous woman who had just enthroned herself in front of the piano, the count said, ‘I know from Paola that you’ve been assigned this Wellauer thing. It’s bad for the city, a crime like this.’ As he spoke, he could not restrain his look of disapproval at the conductor for having gotten himself killed, especially during the social season. ‘In any case, when I heard that Paola called to say you both wanted to come tonight, I made a few phone calls. I assumed that you would want to know about his finances.’

  ‘Yes, that’s correct.’ Was there any information this man couldn’t get, just by picking up the phone and dialling the right number? ‘May I ask what you learned?’

  ‘He wasn’t as wealthy as he was generally thought to be.’ Brunetti waited for this to be translated into numbers he could understand. He and the count, surely, would have different ideas of what ‘wealthy’ meant. ‘His total holdings, in stocks and bonds and real estate, probably didn’t amount to more than ten million deutsche marks. He’s got four million francs in Switzerland, at the Union Bank in Lugano, but I doubt that the German tax people will learn anything about that.’ As Brunetti was calculating that it would take him approximately three hundred and fifty years to earn such money, the count added, ‘His income from performances and recordings must bring in at least three or four million marks a year.’

  ‘I see,’ Brunetti acknowledged. ‘And the will?’

  ‘I didn’t succeed in getting a copy of it,’ the count said apologetically. Since the man had been dead only two days, Brunetti believed this was a lapse he could overlook. ‘But it’s divided equally among his children and his wife. There is talk, however, that he tried to get in touch with his lawyers a few weeks before he died; no one knows why, and it need not have been about his will.’

  ‘What does that mean, ‘tried to get in touch with’?’

  ‘He called his lawyers’ office in Berlin, but apparently there was something wrong with the connection, and he never called back.’

  ‘Did any of the people you spoke to say anything about his personal life?’

  The count’s glass stopped just short of his mouth with such a sudden motion that some of the pale liquid splashed onto the lapel of his jacket. He glared at Brunetti in astonishment, as though all the reservations he had harboured for almost two decades had suddenly been proved true. ‘What do you think I am, a spy?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Brunetti said, offering the count his handkerchief to dry his lapel. ‘It’s the job. I forget.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that,’ the count agreed, though his tone was void of any assent. ‘I’ll go and see if I can find Paola and her mother.’ He left, retaining the handkerchief, which Brunetti feared would be washed, starched, ironed, and sent back by special courier.

  Brunetti pushed himself away from the bar and set out into the sea of people to begin his own search for Paola. He knew many of those in the room but, as it were, at second hand. Though he had never been introduced to most of them, he knew their scandals, their histories, their affairs, both legal and romantic. Part of this came
from his being a policeman, but most of it came from living in what was really a provincial town where gossip was the real cult and where, had it not been at least a nominally Christian city, the reigning deity would surely have been Rumour.

  During the more than five minutes it took him to find Paola, he exchanged greetings with a number of people and turned down repeated offers of a fresh drink. The countess was nowhere in sight; her husband had no doubt warned her of the risk of moral infection that stalked the room.

  When Paola came up to him, she grabbed his arm and whispered in his ear. ‘I’ve found just what you want.’

  ‘A way to leave?’ he said, but only to himself. With her, he practised some restraint. ‘What?’

  ‘The voice of gossip, the real thing. We were at university together.’

  ‘Who? Where?’ he asked, interested in his surroundings for the first time that night.

  ‘He’s over there, at the door to the balcony.’ She nudged him with her elbow and pointed with her chin to a man who stood across the room, at the central windows that overlooked the canal. The man looked to be about the same age as Paola, though he had clearly had a harder time getting there. From this distance, all Brunetti could distinguish was a short beard, mottled with grey, and a black jacket that seemed to be made of velvet.

  ‘Come on; I’ll introduce you,’ urged Paola, tugging at his arm and leading him across the room towards the man, who smiled when he recognized Paola coming towards him. His nose was flat, as though it had once been broken, and his eyes were sad, as though his heart had been. He looked like a stevedore who wrote poetry.

  ‘Ah, the lovely Paola,’ he said as she reached him. He switched his drink into his left hand, took Paola’s with his right, and bent to place a kiss in the air just above it. ‘And this,’ he said, turning to Brunetti, ‘must be the famous Guido, about whom all of us grew so tired of hearing more years ago than it is discreet of me to remember.’ He took Brunetti’s hand and shook it firmly, making no attempt to disguise the interest with which he studied him.

  ‘Stop it, Dami, and stop staring at Guido as if he were a painting.’

  ‘Force of habit, my treasure, peering and prying at everything I observe. Next I’ll no doubt peel back his jacket and try to see where he’s signed.’

  None of this made any sense to Brunetti, whose confusion must have been obvious to both of the others, for the man hastened to explain. ‘As I can see, Paola will never introduce us, and she apparently has chosen to keep our past together a secret from you.’ Before Brunetti could respond to the suggestion here, he continued: ‘I am Demetriano Padovani, former classmate of your fair wife and currently a critic of things artistic.’ He made a small bow.

  Brunetti was, like most Italians, familiar with the name. This was the bright new art critic, the terror of both painters and museum directors. Paola and he had read his articles with shared delight, but he’d had no idea that they had gone to university together.

  The other man grabbed a fresh drink from a passing waiter. ‘I must apologize to you, Guido – if I may take the liberty of calling you Guido at our first meeting and of giving you the tu, an evidence of growing social and linguistic promiscuity – and confess to having spent years hating you.’ Brunetti’s confusion at this remark obviously delighted him. ‘Back in those dark ages when we were students and all desperately in love with your Paola, we were convulsed by jealousy and, I admit, loathing for this Guido who seemed to have arrived from the stars to carry her heart away from us. First she wanted to know all about him, then it was ‘Will he take me for a coffee?’ which as quickly developed into ‘Do you think he likes me?’ until all of us, much as we loved the daffy girl, were quite ready to throttle her one dark night and toss her into a canal, just to have some freedom from the dark incubus that was Guido and so be left in peace to study for our exams.’ Delighting in Paola’s obvious discomfiture, he continued: ‘And then she married him. You, that is. Much to our delight, as nothing is such an effective remedy for the mad excesses of love,’ and here he paused to sip from his drink, before adding, ‘as is marriage.’ Content with having made Paola blush and Brunetti look around for another drink, he said, ‘It’s really a very good thing you did marry her, Guido, else not a one of us would have managed to pass our exams, so smitten were we with the girl.’

  ‘It was my only purpose in marrying her,’ Brunetti replied.

  Padovani understood. ‘And for that charity, let me offer you a drink. ‘What would you like?’

  ‘Scotch for us both,’ Paola answered, then added, ‘but come back quickly. I want to talk to you.’

  Padovani bowed his head in false submission and headed off in pursuit of a waiter, moving like a very royal yacht of politeness as he made his way through the crowd. In a moment, he was back, holding three glasses in his hands.

  ‘Are you still writing for L’Unità?’ Paola asked as he handed her the drink.

  At the sound of the name of the newspaper, Padovani pulled down his head in mock terror and shot conspiratorial glances around the room. He gave a very theatrical hiss and waved them close to him. In a whisper, he told them, ‘Don’t dare pronounce the name of that newspaper in this room, or your father will have the servants turn me out of the house.’ Though Padovani’s tone made it clear he was joking, Brunetti suspected that he was far closer to the truth than he realized.

  The critic stood up to his full height, sipped at his drink, and changed to a voice that was almost declamatory. ‘Paola, my dear, could it be that you have abandoned the ideals of our youth and no longer read the proletarian voice of the Communist Party? Excuse me,’ he corrected himself, ‘the Democratic Party of the Left?’ Heads turned at the sound of the name, but he went on. ‘God above, don’t tell me you’ve accepted your age and begun to read Corriere or, even worse, La Repubblica, the voice of the grubbing middle class, disguised as the voice of the grubbing lower class?’

  ‘No, we read L’Osservatore Romano,’ Brunetti said, naming the official organ of the Vatican, which still fulminated against divorce, abortion, and the pernicious myth of female equality.

  ‘How wise of you,’ Padovani said, voice unctuous with praise. ‘But since you read those glowing pages, you wouldn’t know that I am, however humbly, the voice of artistic judgment for the struggling masses.’ He dropped his voice and continued, aping perfectly the orotund voices of the RAI newscasters announcing the most recent fall of the government. ‘I am the representative of the clear-eyed labourer. In me you see the rude-voiced and grubby-fingered critic who seeks the values of true proletarian art in the midst of modern chaos.’ He nodded in silent greeting to a passing figure and continued. ‘It seems a great pity that you are not familiar with my work. Perhaps I can send you copies of my most recent articles. Pity I don’t carry them about with me, but I suppose even genius must display some humility, however spurious.’ They had all begun to enjoy this, so he continued. ‘My most recent favourite was a wonderful piece I wrote last month about an exhibition of contemporary Cuban art – you know, tractors and grinning pineapples.’ He made a moue of feigned distress until the exact words of his review came back to him. ‘I praised its – how did I put it? – “its wonderful symmetry of refined form and purposeful integrity”. He leaned forward and whispered in Paola’s ear, but so loud that Brunetti had no trouble hearing. ‘I lifted that from one I wrote two years ago about Polish wood-blocks, where I praised, if memory serves, “refined symmetry of purposeful form”.’

  ‘And do you,’ Paola asked, glancing at his velvet jacket, ‘go to the office like that?’

  ‘How deliciously bitchy you have remained, Paola.’ He laughed, leaning forward to kiss her lightly on the cheek. ‘But to answer your question, my angel, no, I do not think it seemly to take this opulence to the halls of the working class. I don more suitable attire, namely a dreadful pair of trousers my maid’s husband would no longer wear and a jacket my nephew was going to give to the poor. Nor’ – he held up a hand to preve
nt any interruption or question – ‘do I any longer drive there in the Maserati. I thought that would establish the wrong tone; besides, parking is such a problem in Rome. I solved the problem, for a while, by borrowing my maid’s Fiat to drive to the office. But it would be covered with parking tickets, and then I lost hours taking the commissario of police to lunch to see that they were taken care of. So now I simply take a cab from my house and have myself left off just around the corner from the office, where I deliver my weekly article, speak angrily about social injustice, and then go down the street to a lovely little pasticceria, where I treat myself to a shockingly rich pastry. Then I go home and have a long soak in a hot tub and read Proust.

  ‘“And so, on each side, is simple truth suppressed,”’ he said, quoting from a Shakespeare sonnet, one of the texts to which he had devoted the seven years he spent getting a degree in English literature at Oxford. ‘But you must want something, some information, dearest Paola,’ he said with a directness that was out of character or, at least, out of the character he was playing. ‘First your father calls me personally with an invitation to this party, and then you attach yourself to me like a button, and I doubt that you’d do that unless you wanted something from me. And as the divine Guido is here with you, all you can legitimately want is information. And since I know just what it is Guido does for a living, I can but surmise it has to do with the scandal that has rocked our fair city, struck dumb the music world, and, in the doing, removed from the face of the planet a nasty piece of work.’ The introduction of the British expression had the intended effect of surprising them both to gasps. He covered his mouth and gave a giggle of purest delight.

  ‘Oh, Dami, you knew all along. Why didn’t you just say so?’

  Though Padovani’s voice was steady when he answered, Brunetti could see that his eyes were bright, perhaps with alcohol, perhaps with something else. It mattered little to him what it was, so long as the man would explain his last remark.