Death at La Fenice

by Donna Leon

  ‘Was your name mentioned in the letter?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘What about Flavia? What did she say?’

  Biting her lips, she lifted one hand and pointed it at her heart.

  ‘She blames you?’

  Just like Chiara, she nodded and then dragged the back of her hand under her nose. It came away wet and gleaming. He pulled out his handkerchief and handed it to her. She took it, but seeming not to have any idea what she was supposed to do with it, she sat with it in her hand, tears running down her face, nose dripping. Feeling not a little foolish but remembering that, after all, he was someone’s father, he took the handkerchief and patted at her face with it. She started back in her seat and took the handkerchief from him. She wiped her face, blew her nose, and put it in her pocket, the second he had lost in a week.

  ‘She said it was my fault, that none of this would have happened if it weren’t for me.’ Her voice was tight and raspy. She grimaced. ‘The awful thing is it’s true. I know it’s not really true, but I can’t make it not be true, the way she says it is.’

  ‘Did the letter say where the information came from?’

  ‘No. But it had to be Wellauer.’

  ‘Good.’

  She looked at him in surprise. ‘How can that be good? The lawyer said they were going to bring charges. That would make everything public.’

  ‘Brett,’ he said, voice level and calm. ‘Think about it. If his witness was Wellauer, he’d have to testify. And even if he were still alive, he’d never get himself caught in something like this. It’s just a threat.’

  ‘But still, if they bring charges . . .’

  ‘All he’s trying to do is scare you. And look how he’s succeeded. No court, even an Italian court, would admit anything on hearsay, and that’s all the letter is, without the person who wrote it to give evidence.’ He watched her as she considered this. ‘There isn’t any evidence, is there?’

  ‘What do you mean by evidence?’

  ‘Letters. I don’t know. Conversations.’

  ‘No, nothing like that. I’ve never written anything, not even from China. And Flavia’s always too busy to write.’

  ‘What about her friends? Do they know?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s not something that people like to talk about.’

  ‘Then I don’t think you have anything to worry about.’

  She tried to smile, tried to convince herself that he had somehow managed to bring her back from grief to safety. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really,’ he said, and smiled. ‘I spend a lot of time with lawyers, and all this one is trying to do is scare you and threaten you.’

  ‘Well,’ she began, with a laugh that turned into a hiccup, ‘he certainly managed to do that.’ Then, under her breath, ‘The bastard.’

  With that, Brunetti thought it was safe to order two brandies, which the waiter was very quick to bring. When the drinks arrived, she said, ‘She was awful.’

  He took a sip and waited for her to say more.

  ‘She said terrible things.’

  ‘We all do sometimes.’

  ‘I don’t,’ she retorted immediately, and he suspected that she didn’t, that she would use language as a tool and not a weapon.

  ‘She’ll forget it, Brett. People who say such things always do.’

  She shrugged, dismissing that as irrelevant. She, clearly, wouldn’t forget.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked, really interested in her answer.

  ‘Go home. See if she’s there. See what happens.’

  He realized that he had never so much as bothered to learn if Petrelli had her own home in the city, had never initiated an investigation of her behaviour, either before or after Wellauer’s death. Was it that easy for him to be misled? Was he so different from the rest of men – show him a pretty face, cry a little, appear to be intelligent and honest, and he’d just cancel out the possibility that you could have killed a man or could love someone who did?

  He was frightened by how easily this woman had disarmed him. He pulled some loose bills from his pocket and dropped them on the table. ‘Yes, that’s a good idea,’ he finally said, pushing back his chair and getting to his feet.

  He caught her sudden insecurity at seeing him so suddenly change from friend to stranger. He couldn’t even do this well. ‘Come on, I’ll go as far as Santi Giovanni e Paolo with you.’ Outside, because it was night and because it was habit, he linked his arm with hers as they walked. Neither one of them spoke. He was aware of how much she felt like a woman, of the wider arc of her hips, of how pleasant it was to have her move close against him when they passed people on the narrow streets. All this he realized as he walked her home to her lover.

  They said goodbye under the statue of Colleoni, no more than that, just a simple goodbye.

  23

  Brunetti walked back through the quiet city, troubled by what he had just heard. He thought he knew something of love, having learned about it with Paola. Was he so conventional, then, that this woman’s love – for there was no question that it was love – had to remain alien to him because it didn’t conform to his ideas? He dismissed that all as sentimentality at its worst and concentrated, instead, on the question he had asked himself in the bar: whether his affection for this woman, his attraction towards something in her, had blinded him to what he was supposed to be doing. Flavia Petrelli just didn’t seem to be someone who would kill in cold blood. He had no doubt that, in a moment of heat or passion, she would be capable of killing someone; most people are. For her, it would have been a knife in the ribs or a shove down the steps, not poison, administered coolly, almost dispassionately.

  Who, then? The sister in Argentina? Had she come back and exacted vengeance for her older sister’s death? After waiting almost half a century? The idea was ludicrous.

  Who, then? Not the director, Santore. Not for a friend’s cancelled contract. Santore certainly had enough connections, after a lifetime in the theatre, to find his friend a place to sing, even if he had the most modest of talents. Even if he didn’t have any talent at all.

  That left the widow, but Brunetti’s instincts told him that her grief was real and that her lack of interest in finding the person responsible had nothing to do with protecting herself. If anything, she seemed to want to protect the dead man, and that led Brunetti back where he had begun, needing and wanting to know more about the man’s past, about his character, about the crack in his careful pose of moral rectitude that would have led someone to put poison in his coffee.

  Brunetti was uncomfortable with the fact that he didn’t like Wellauer, had none of the compassion and outrage he usually felt for those whose lives had been stolen from them. He couldn’t shake himself of the belief that – he couldn’t express it any more clearly – Wellauer had somehow been involved in his own death. He snorted; everyone is involved in his own death. But no matter how he tried, the idea would neither disappear nor clarify, and so he kept searching for the detail that might have provoked the death, and he kept failing to find it.

  The next morning was as dismal as his mood. A thick fog had appeared during the night, seeping up from the waters on which the city was built, not drifting in from the sea. When he stepped out of his front door, cold, misty tendrils wrapped themselves around his face, slipped beneath his collar. He could see clearly for only a few metres, and then vision grew cloudy; buildings slipped into and out of sight, as though they, and not the fog, shifted and moved. Phantoms, clothed in a nimbus of shimmering grey, passed him on the street, floating by as though disembodied. If he turned to follow them with his eyes, he saw them disappear, swallowed up by the dense film that filled the narrow streets and lay upon the waters like a curse. Instinct and long experience told him there would be no boat service on the Grand Canal; the fog was far too thick for that. He walked blindly, telling his feet to lead, allowing decades of familiarity with bridges, streets, and turns to take him over to the Zattere and the landing where
both the number 8 and the number 5 stopped on their way to the Giudecca.

  Service was limited, and the boats, divorced from any idea of a schedule, appeared randomly out of clouds of fog, radar screens spinning. He waited fifteen minutes before a number 5 loomed up, then slammed heavily into the dock, rocking it and causing a few of the people waiting there to lose their balance and fall into one another. Only the radar saw the crossing; the humans huddled down in the cabin, blind as moles in sand.

  When he got off the boat, Brunetti had no choice but to walk forward until he could almost touch the front of the buildings along the waterfront. Keeping them an arm’s length away, he walked towards where he remembered the archway to be. When he got to an opening in the line of façades, he turned into it, not really certain that this was Corte Mosca. He could not read the name, though it was painted on the wall only a foot above his head.

  The humidity had worsened the smell of cat; the cold sharpened it. The dead plants in the courtyard now lay under a blanket of fog. He knocked at the door, knocked again more loudly, and heard her call out from the other side. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Commissario Brunetti.’

  Again he listened to the slow, angry rasp of metal on metal as she pulled back the heavy bolts that secured the door. She pulled it towards her. The sharp increase in humidity forced her to give it an upward tug in the middle of its arc to lift it from the uneven floor. Still wearing the overcoat, though it was now buttoned tight, she didn’t bother to ask him what he wanted. She stepped back enough to allow him to enter, then slammed the door behind him. Again she bolted it securely before turning to lead him down the narrow passageway. In the kitchen, he went and sat near the stove, and she stopped to kick the rags back into place beneath the door.

  She shuffled to her chair and collapsed into it, to be immediately enveloped in the waiting scarves and shawls.

  ‘You’re back.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘What I came for last time.’

  ‘And what’s that? I’m an old woman, and I don’t remember things.’ The intelligence in her eyes belied that.

  ‘I’d like some information about your sister.’

  Without bothering to ask which one he meant, she said, ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘I don’t want to make you remember your grief, Signora, but I need to know more about Wellauer so that I can understand why he died.’

  ‘And if he deserved to die?’

  ‘Signora, we all deserve to die, but no one should get to decide for us when that will be.’

  ‘Oh, my.’ She chuckled dryly. ‘You’re a real Jesuit, aren’t you? And who decided when my sister would die? And who decided how?’ As suddenly as her anger had flared up, it died, and she asked, ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘I know of your relation with him. I know that he was said to be the father of your sister’s child. And I know that she died in Rome in 1939.’

  ‘She didn’t just die. She bled to death,’ she said in a voice as bleak as blood and death. ‘She bled to death in a hotel room, the room he put her in after the abortion and where he didn’t go to visit her.’ The pain of age struggled in her voice with the pain of memory. ‘When they found her, she had been dead for a day. Perhaps two. And it was another day before I learned about it. I was under house arrest, but friends came to tell me about her. I left the house. I had to strike a policeman to do it, knock him to the ground and kick him in the face to do it, to get away. But I left. And none of them, none of the people who saw me kick him, none of them stopped to help him.

  ‘I went with my friends. To where she was. Everything that was necessary had already been done, and we buried her the same day. No priest came, because of the way she died, so we just buried her. The grave was very small.’ Her voice trailed away, borne off by the power of memory.

  He had seen this happen many times in the past, and he therefore had the sense to remain quiet. The words had started now, and she wouldn’t be able to stop until she had said them all and gotten free of them. He waited, patient, living now in the past with her.

  ‘We dressed her all in white. And then we buried her, in that tiny grave. That tiny hole. I went back to my home after the funeral, and they arrested me. But since I was already arrested, it didn’t make any difference. I asked them about the policeman, and they said he was all right. I apologized to him when I saw him later. After the war, when the Allies were in the city, he hid in my cellar for a month, until my mother came and took him away. I had no reason to dislike him or want to hurt him.’

  ‘How did it happen?’

  She glanced up at him in confusion, honestly not understanding.

  ‘Your sister and Wellauer?’

  She licked her lips and studied her gnarled hands, just visible among the shawls. ‘I introduced them. He had heard about the way my singing career started, so when they came to Germany to see me sing, he asked me to introduce him to them, to Clara and to little Camilla.’

  ‘Were you involved with him then?’

  ‘Do you mean, was he my lover?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes, he was. It started almost immediately, when I went up there to sing.’

  ‘And his affair with your sister?’ he asked.

  Her head snapped back as though he had hit her. She leaned forward, and Brunetti thought she was going to strike out at him. Instead she spat. A thin, watery gobbet landed on his thigh and slowly sank into the fabric of his trousers. He was too stunned to wipe it away.

  ‘Damn you. You’re all the same. Still all the same,’ she shouted in a wild, cracked voice. ‘You look at something, and you see the filth you want to see.’ Her voice grew louder, and she repeated what he had said, mockingly. ‘His affair with my sister. His affair.’ She leaned closer to him, eyes narrowed with hatred, and whispered, ‘My sister was twelve years old. Twelve years old. We buried her in her First Communion dress; she was still that small. She was a little girl.

  ‘He raped her, Mr Policeman. He didn’t have an affair with my little sister. He raped her. The first time, and then the other times, when he threatened her, threatened to tell me about her, about what a bad girl she was. And then, when she was pregnant, he sent us both back to Rome. And I didn’t know anything about it. For he was still my lover. Making love to me and then raping my little baby sister. Do you see, Mr Policeman, why I’m glad he’s dead and why I say he deserved to die?’ Her face was transformed by the rage she had carried for half a century.

  ‘Do you want to know it all, Mr Policeman?’

  Brunetti nodded, seeing it, understanding.

  ‘He came back to Rome, to conduct that Norma there with me. And she told him she was pregnant. She was too frightened to tell us, too afraid that we would tell her what a bad girl she was. So he arranged the abortion, and he took her there, and then he took her to that hotel. And he left her there, and she bled to death. And when she died, she was still only twelve years old.’

  He saw her hand move out of its wrapping of shawls and scarves, saw it swing up towards him. He did little more than move his head back, and the blow missed him. This maddened her, and she slammed her gnarled hand against the wooden arm of the chair and shrieked with the pain of it.

  She lunged out of her chair, sending shawls and blankets slithering to the floor. ‘Get out of my house, you pig. You pig.’

  Brunetti leapt away from her, tripping over the leg of his chair, and stumbled down the corridor before her. Her hand remained raised in front of her, and he fled from screaming rage. She stopped, panting, while he fumbled with the bolts, pulling them back. In the courtyard, he could still hear her voice as she screamed at him, at Wellauer, at the world. She slammed and bolted the door, but still she raged on. He stood shivering in the fog, shaken by the anger he had raised in her. He forced himself to take deep breaths, to forget that first instant when he had felt real fear of the woman, fear of the tremendous impulse of memory that had pulled her
up from her chair and towards him.

  24

  He had to wait almost half an hour at the boat stop, and by the time the number 5 came, he was thoroughly chilled. There had been no change in the atmosphere, so during the trip back across the laguna to San Zaccaria, he huddled in the barely heated inner cabin and looked out on damp whiteness that clawed at the misty windows. Arrived at the Questura, he walked up to his office, ignoring the few people who greeted him. Inside, he closed the door but kept his coat on, waiting for the chill to pass from his body. Images crowded into his mind. He saw the old woman, a fury, screaming her way down the damp corridor; he saw the three sisters in the artful V of their pose; and he saw the little girl lying dead in her First Communion dress. And he saw it all, saw the pattern, saw the plan.

  He finally took off his coat and tossed it on the back of a chair. He went to his desk and started to search through the papers littered across its top. He set files and folders aside, hunting until he found the green-covered autopsy report.

  On the second page, he found what he remembered would be there: Rizzardi had made note of the small bruises on arm and buttock, listing them only as ‘traces of subcutaneous bleeding, cause unknown.’

  Neither of the two doctors he had spoken to had mentioned giving Wellauer any sort of injection. But a man who was married to a doctor would hardly have had to make an appointment to receive an injection. Nor did Brunetti believe he had to have an appointment to speak to that doctor.

  He returned to the pile of papers and found the report from the German police and read through it until he found something that had tugged at his memory. Elizabeth Wellauer’s first husband, Alexandra’s father, not only taught at the University of Heidelberg but was chairman of the Department of Pharmacology. She had stopped to see him on her way to Venice.

  ‘Yes?’ Elizabeth Wellauer said as she opened the door for him.