Death at La Fenice

by Donna Leon

  Padovani interrupted himself long enough to sit back and smile broadly as Signora Antonia placed the oblong plates of antipasto in front of them.

  ‘What sort of reviews do you write?’

  ‘Oh, that depends,’ Padovani said, spearing a chunk of octopus with his fork. ‘For the doctor’s son, I say he shows “complete ignorance of colour and line”. But the lawyer is a friend of one of the directors of the newspaper, so his wife “displays a mastery of composition and draftsmanship”, when, in fact, she couldn’t draw a square without making it look like a triangle.’

  ‘Does it bother you?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Does what bother me – writing what I don’t believe?’ Padovani asked, breaking another bread stick in half.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In the beginning, I suppose it did. But then I realized it was the only way I could be free to write the reviews I really care about.’ He saw Brunetti’s look and smiled. ‘Come now, Guido, don’t tell me you’ve never ignored a piece of evidence or written a report in a way to suggest something other than what that evidence suggested.’

  Before he could answer this, Antonia was back. Padovani finished the last shrimp on his plate and smiled up at her. ‘Delicious, Signora.’ She took his plate, then Brunetti’s.

  Immediately she was back with the risotto, steaming and rich. When she saw Padovani reach out for the salt on the table, she said, ‘There’s enough salt already.’ He pulled his hand back as though it had been burned and picked up his fork.

  ‘But come, Guido, you didn’t invite me here – at the city’s expense, I hope – to chat about the progress of my career, nor to examine my conscience. You said that you wanted more information.’

  ‘I’d like to know what else you learned about Signora Santina.’

  Delicately, Padovani extracted a small piece of shrimp shell from his mouth, placed it on the side of his plate, and said, ‘I’m afraid, then, that I’ll have to pay for my own lunch.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I can’t give you any more information about her. Narciso was just on his way out when I called him, and all he had time to do was give me the address. So all I know is what I told you that night. I’m sorry.’

  Brunetti thought it artless of him to make the remark about paying for his lunch. ‘Well, then, perhaps you could tell me about some of the other people instead.’

  ‘I’ll confess, Guido, that I’ve been busy. I’ve called a number of my friends here, and in Milan and Rome, and you have but to speak their names and I shall become a very fountain of information.’

  ‘Flavia Petrelli?’

  ‘Ah, the divine Flavia.’ He placed a forkful of risotto in his mouth and pronounced it excellent. ‘You would no doubt also like to know about the equally divine Miss Lynch, I suppose?’

  ‘I’d like to know whatever you know about either one of them.’

  Padovani ate some more of his risotto and pushed it aside. ‘Do you want to ask me specific questions, or do you want me simply to chatter on?

  ‘The chatter would probably be best.’

  ‘Yes. No doubt. So I’ve often been told.’ He sipped at his wine and began. ‘I forget where Flavia studied. Possibly Rome. In any case, the unexpected happened, as it always does, and she was asked to step in at the last minute and replace the ever ailing Caballé. She did, the critics went wild, and she was famous overnight.’ He leaned forward to touch the back of Brunetti’s hand with one finger. ‘I thought I might, for dramatic purposes, divide the story into two parts: professional and personal.’ Brunetti nodded.

  ‘That, pretty much, was the professional. She was famous, and she remained that way. Remains that way.’ He sipped at his wine again, poured some more into his glass.

  ‘So now for the personal. Enter the husband. She was singing in the Liceo in Barcelona, about two or three years after her success in Rome. He was something important in Spain. Plastics, factories, I think; in any case, something very dull but very profitable. In any case, lots of money, lots of friends with big houses and important names. Fairy-tale romance, garlands of flowers, truck-loads of the things wherever she happened to be singing, jewels, all the usual temptations, and La Petrelli – who is, between parentheses, just a simple little country girl from some small town near Trento – went and fell in love and married him. And his factories, and his plastics, and his important friends.’

  Antonia arrived and carried away their plates, clearly disapproving of the fact that Padovani’s was still half full.

  ‘She continued to sing; she continued to grow more famous. And he seemed to like travelling with her, liked being the Latin husband of the famous diva, meeting more famous people, seeing his picture in the papers – all the sort of thing that people of his class need. Then came the children, but she continued to sing, and she continued to become more famous. But it soon became evident that things were no longer as honeymoonish as they had been. She cancelled a performance, then another. Soon after that, she stopped singing for a year, went back to Spain with him. And didn’t sing.’

  Antonia approached the table with a long metal tray upon which lay their branzino. She placed it on a small serving table next to them and very efficiently cut two portions of tender white fish from it. She placed the portions in front of them. ‘I hope you like this.’ The men exchanged a glance in silent acceptance of the threat.

  ‘Thank you, Signora,’ Padovani said. ‘Might I trouble you for the green salad?’

  ‘When you finish the fish,’ she said, and went back towards the kitchen. This, Brunetti reminded himself, is one of the best restaurants in the city.

  Padovani took a few bites of the fish. ‘And then she was back, as suddenly as she had disappeared, and the voice, during the year when she hadn’t sung in public, had grown bigger, become more that immense, clear voice she has now. But now the husband was no longer in sight, and then there was a quiet separation, and an even more quiet divorce, which she got here, and then, when it became possible, in Spain.’

  ‘What were the grounds for the divorce?’ Brunetti asked.

  Padovani held up an admonitory hand. ‘All in good time. I want this to have the sound and pace of a nineteenth-century novel. So she began to sing again, our Flavia, and as I said, she was more magnificent than ever. But we never saw her. Not at dinners, not at parties, not at the performances of other singers. She had become something of a recluse, lived quietly with her children in Milan, where she was singing regularly.’ He leaned across the table. ‘Is the suspense growing?’

  ‘Agonizingly so,’ said Brunetti, and took another mouthful of fish. ‘And the divorce?’

  Padovani laughed. ‘Paola warned me about this, said you were a ferret. All right, all right, you shall have the truth. But unfortunately, the truth, as it so often has a habit of being, is quite pedestrian. It turns out that he beat her, quite regularly and quite severely. I suppose it was his idea of how a real man treats his wife.’ He shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘But she left?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Not until he put her in the hospital. Even in Spain, some people are willing to draw the line at this. She went to the Italian embassy with her children. With no money and no passports. Our ambassador at the time, like all of them, was a lickspittle and tried to send her back to her husband. But his wife, a Sicilian – and let not a word be said against them – stormed down to the consular section and stood there while three passports were made out, and then she drove Flavia and her children to the airport, where she charged three first-class tickets to Milan to the embassy account and waited with them until the plane took off. It appears that she had seen Flavia sing Odabella three years before and felt she owed her at least that much.’

  Brunetti found himself wondering just how much of this could be important to Wellauer’s death and, made suspicious by Padovani’s ironical manner, wondering how much of it was true.

  As if reading his mind, Padovani leaned forward and said, ‘It’s true. Be
lieve me.’

  ‘How did you learn all this?’

  ‘Guido, you’ve been a policeman long enough to have learned that as soon as a person reaches a certain level of notoriety, there are no more secrets.’ Brunetti smiled in agreement, and Padovani continued. ‘Now we have the interesting part, the return of our heroine to life. And the cause, as always in stories like this, is love. Well, at any rate,’ he added after a reflective pause, ‘lust.’

  Brunetti, aware of the man’s obvious enjoyment of the story he was telling, was tempted to take his revenge by telling Antonia that Padovani hadn’t eaten all his fish but had hidden it in his napkin.

  ‘Her period of seclusion lasted almost three years. And then there was a series of, well, involvements. The first was a tenor she happened to be singing with. A very bad tenor but, luckily for her, a very nice man. Unluckily for her, he had an equally nice wife, to whom he very quickly returned. Then there were, in quick succession’ – he began to tick them off on his fingers as he named them – ‘a baritone, another tenor, a dancer, or perhaps that was the director, a doctor who seems to have slipped in unnoticed, and finally, wonder of wonders, a countertenor. And then, as quickly as all this had begun, it stopped.’ So did Padovani, while Antonia set his salad down in front of him. He prepared it, adding far too much vinegar for Brunetti’s taste. ‘She was seen with no one for about a year. And suddenly l’americana was on the scene and seemed to have conquered the divine Flavia.’ Sensing Brunetti’s interest, he asked, ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what do you think of her?’

  ‘I like her.’

  ‘So do I,’ agreed Padovani. ‘This thing between her and Flavia makes no sense at all.’

  Brunetti felt uncomfortable about showing any interest in this, so he didn’t ask Padovani to expand on the subject.

  Asking him to do so was hardly necessary. ‘They met about three years ago, during that China exhibition. They were seen a few times after that, having lunch together, going to the theatre, but then l’americana had to go back to China.’

  All the coy archness dropped out of Padovani’s voice. ‘I’ve read her books on Chinese art, the two that have been translated into Italian and the short one in English. If she’s not the most important archaeologist working in the field today, she soon will be. I don’t understand what she sees in Flavia, for Flavia, though she might be a genius, is really something of a bitch.’

  ‘But what about love?’ Brunetti asked, then amended the question as Padovani had. ‘Or lust?’

  ‘That’s all right for the likes of Flavia; it doesn’t take her away from her work. But the other one has in her hands one of the most important archaeological discoveries of our time, and I think she has the judgement and the skill to –’ Padovani stopped suddenly, picked up his wine, and emptied his glass. ‘Excuse me. I seldom get carried away like this. It must be the influence of the stately Antonia.’

  Even though he knew it had nothing to do with the investigation, Brunetti couldn’t stop himself from asking, ‘Is she the first, ah, woman lover Petrelli had?’

  ‘I don’t think so, but the others have been passing affairs.’

  ‘And this? Is it different?’

  ‘For which one?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Since it’s gone on for three years, I’d say yes, it’s serious. For both of them.’ Padovani picked the last green leaf from the bottom of his salad bowl and said, ‘Perhaps I’m being unfair to Flavia. It costs her a lot, this affair.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘There are a great number of lesbian singers,’ he explained. ‘Strangely enough, most of them seem to be mezzo-sopranos. But that’s neither here nor there. The difficulty is that they are far less tolerated than their male colleagues who also happen to be gay. So none of them dare to be open about their lives, and most of them are very discreet, choosing to disguise their lover as their secretary or their agent. But Flavia can hardly disguise Brett as anything. And so there is talk, and I’m sure there are looks and whispers when they come into a room together.’

  Brunetti had only to remember the portiere’s tone to know how true this was. ‘Have you been to their apartment here?’

  ‘Those skylights,’ Padovani said, and they both laughed.

  ‘How did she manage that?’ asked Brunetti, who had been refused a permit to install thermal windows.

  ‘Her family is one of those old American ones, which stole its money more than a hundred years ago and is, therefore, respectable. An uncle of hers left her the apartment, which I think he won at cards about fifty years ago. As for the windows, the story goes that she tried to get someone to do them for her, but no one would lift a finger without a permit. So, finally, she simply went up on the roof, took off the tiles, cut holes in the roof, and built the frames.’

  ‘Didn’t anyone see her?’ In Venice, all a person had to do was lift a hammer to the outside of a building and phones would be lifted in every house in the area. ‘Didn’t anyone call the police?’

  ‘You’ve seen how high she is. No one who saw her up there could really tell what she was doing and would assume she was just checking the roof. Or fixing a tile.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Once the windows were in, she called the office of the city planner and told them what she had done. She asked them to send someone around to figure out how much the fine would be.’

  ‘And?’ marvelled Brunetti, amazed that a foreigner would come up with so perfectly Italianate a solution.

  ‘A few months later, that’s what they actually did. But when they got there and saw how well the work had been done, they wouldn’t believe her when she told them she had done the job herself and insisted that she give them the names of her ‘accomplices’. She repeated that she had done it herself, and they continued to refuse to believe her. Finally, she picked up the phone and dialled the mayor’s office and asked to speak to ‘Lucio’. This with two architects from the city planning office standing there with their rulers in their hands. She had a few words with ‘Lucio’, handed the phone to one of them and said that the mayor wanted to have a word with him.’ Padovani mimicked the whole thing, ending by passing an invisible phone across the table.

  ‘So the mayor had a few words with them, and they climbed out on the roof and measured the skylights, calculated the fine, and she sent them back to their office with a cheque in their hands.’ Brunetti threw back his head and laughed so loud that people sitting at other tables looked their way.

  ‘Wait, it gets better,’ Padovani said. ‘The cheque was made out to cash, and she never received an acknowledgement that the fine had been paid. And I’m told that the blueprints in the office of deeds at city hall have been changed, and the skylights are on them.’ They laughed together at this victory of ingenuity over authority.

  ‘Where does all this money come from?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Oh, God, who knows? Where does American money come from? Steel. Railways. You know how it is over there. It doesn’t matter if you murder or rob to get it. The trick is in keeping it for a hundred years, and then you’re aristocrats.’

  ‘Is that so different from here?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Padovani explained, smiling. ‘Here we have to keep it five hundred years before we’re aristocrats. And there’s another difference. In Italy, you have to be well-dressed. In America, it’s difficult to tell which are the millionaires and which are the servants.’ Remembering Brett’s boots, Brunetti wanted to demur. But there was no stopping Padovani, who was off again. ‘They have a magazine there. I can’t remember which one it is, but each year they publish a list of the richest people in America. Only the names and where the money comes from. I think they must be afraid to publish all their pictures. The ones they do, it’s enough to make a person believe that money really is the root of all evil or, at the very least, bad taste. The women all look as though they’d been hung over open fires and dried. And th
e men, good God, the men. God, who dresses them? Do you think they eat plastic?’

  Whatever answer Brunetti might have given was cut short by Antonia’s return. She asked if they wanted fruit or cake for dessert. Nervously, they both said they would forgo dessert and have coffee instead. She didn’t like it, but she cleared the table.

  ‘But to answer your question,’ Padovani said when she was gone, ‘I don’t know where the money comes from, but there seems to be no end to it. Her uncle was very generous to various hospitals and charities in the city, and she seems to be doing the same, though most of what she gives is specifically for restoration.’

  ‘Then that would explain the help from “Lucio”.

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘What about her personal life?’

  Padovani gave him a strange glance, having long since realized how little any of this had to do with the investigation of Wellauer’s death. But that could hardly be enough to stop him from telling what he knew. After all, gossip’s greatest charm was its utter superfluity. ‘Very little. I mean, there’s not much that anyone knows for sure. She seems always to have been of this persuasion, but almost nothing is known about her personal life before she came here.’

  ‘Which was when?’

  ‘About seven years ago. That is, that it became her permanent address. She spent years here, with her uncle, when she was a child.’

  ‘That explains the Veneziano, then.’

  Padovani laughed. ‘It is strange to hear someone who isn’t one of us speak it, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  At this point, Antonia returned with the coffees, bringing with her two small glasses of grappa, which she told them were offered with the compliments of the restaurant. Though neither of them wanted the fiery liquid, they made a show of sipping at it and praising its quality. She moved off, suspicious, and Brunetti caught her looking back at them from the door of the kitchen, as if she expected them to pour the grappa into their shoes.