The City of Falling Angels

by John Berendt

  With love,

  Mary

  My most curious discovery at the Beinecke, however, was not something I read, but something I was not permitted to read. All but one of the 208 boxes of the Olga Rudge Papers were available for perusal. One box, number 156, was off-limits, “restricted” until the year 2016. Box 156 contained the papers of the Ezra Pound Foundation.

  I would like to have asked Jane Rylands what the sealed box contained and why it was sealed. There were a number of other questions I would have put to her as well, but since Philip had warned me that he would view even the submission of written questions as an “invasion,” I did not. Instead I called the Beinecke’s director, Ralph Franklin, and asked him why this box, and only this box, was sealed.

  “That was one of the conditions upon which the Ezra Pound Foundation agreed to the sale.”

  “Why the year 2016, which is twenty-six years after the deal was signed?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you pay Jane Rylands any money?” I asked.

  “We never dealt with Jane Rylands directly,” he said. “We dealt with the Ezra Pound Foundation. There were two competing parties, both claiming ownership of Olga Rudge’s papers: Olga Rudge on the one hand and the Ezra Pound Foundation on the other. We bought out both claims and thereby bought the papers.”

  “At that point, of course,” I said, “the foundation consisted only of Jane Rylands and a lawyer in Cleveland. Shortly after making the deal with Yale, they dissolved the foundation. What happened to the money?”

  “I don’t know what the foundation did with the money it was paid.”

  “Would that information be revealed in the box that’s sealed until 2016?”

  “Even I don’t know what’s in the box,” he said.

  UPON MY RETURN TO VENICE, I went directly to Calle Querini and knocked on the door of the Reverend and Mrs. James Harkins. Reverend Harkins greeted me warmly and handed me the key to the house next door. Mary had left it for me. I had made arrangements to rent the Hidden Nest for the next six weeks. The interior had been renovated recently, Mary said, and no longer had any of her parents’ effects in it, but the idea of seeing Venice from the perspective of the Hidden Nest, however briefly, appealed to me.

  “Don’t forget,” said Reverend Jim, “we generally sit down to cocktails at five-thirty!”

  I thanked him and walked next door, turned the key in the lock, and opened the door.

  The house was sixteen feet square, broom clean, and spare of furniture. Its white walls had been freshly painted. On the ground floor, where Olga’s papers had once been stored in trunks and where, before he lapsed into silence, Ezra Pound read his poetry aloud to friends, there was now a dining room table, four chairs, and a small kitchen behind sliding doors. Two windows on either side of an open fireplace looked out on the Cipriani garden in back and, on the far side of the garden, the high brick wall of the old Customs warehouse. A framed poster from a 1920s concert, featuring Olga Rudge and George Antheil, hung on the wall. But there were no books or bookshelves and no mural.

  Up a flight of wooden stairs, the second floor, once Olga’s bedroom, was furnished now with a table and two chairs.

  On the third floor, which had been Pound’s studio, there was a bed and a bathroom. A simple wooden writing table had been built into the stair rail in front of the window.

  An object on the table caught my eye. It was a book, the only book in the house: a paperback copy of The Aspern Papers. I turned to the title page and read the inscription: “May the ‘hidden nest’ inspire an equal masterpiece—M de R.”

  {10}

  FOR A COUPLE OF BUCKS

  YOU’RE SURPRISED?” Ludovico De Luigi raised an eyebrow and peered at me, greatly amused at my response to the day’s news. We were sitting at an outdoor café in Campo San Barnaba, and the newspaper on the table in front of us bore a headline that contained the word “arson.” The experts looking into the Fenice fire had changed their minds. Back in February, they had decided the fire had been caused by a combination of accident and negligence. Now it was June, and they had come to the conclusion it was arson.

  “Why shouldn’t I be surprised?” I said. “Months ago they ruled out arson with ‘near-mathematical certainty.’ Have you been sure all along it was arson?”

  “No, and I’m not even so sure now,” said De Luigi. “But it was inevitable that someone would be accused of arson. I knew it would happen as soon as Casson said he was going to prosecute a lot of very important people for criminal negligence—the mayor, the general manager of the Fenice, the secretary-general of the Fenice, the chief engineer of Venice. These are men of means. They’ve hired the best defense lawyers in Italy. These lawyers know they can’t prove their clients weren’t negligent, because they were negligent. But if they can persuade the court that it was a case of arson, and if an arsonist can be found and convicted, then all charges of negligence are automatically dropped, by law.”

  “Are you suggesting that the experts have been pressured into changing their minds?”

  De Luigi shrugged. “It’s never that blatant. It’s more subtle than that.”

  I was about to ask De Luigi what kind of subtlety he had in mind when a woman sitting at the table next to us gasped. A seagull had landed in the midst of a cluster of pigeons pecking at bread crumbs and had seized one of the pigeons in its beak. The pigeon was flapping and wriggling, trying to free itself from the much bigger seagull. In short order, the seagull had the pigeon pinned to the pavement and was jabbing its chest with its long, sharp beak. After a few moments, it pulled out a bloody morsel the size of a large grape—the pigeon’s heart, no doubt—juggled it in its beak, and swallowed it.

  The seagull left the dead pigeon lying on the paving stones and strutted toward the edge of the San Barnaba Canal (toward the very spot, as it happened, where many years earlier Katharine Hepburn fell backward into the canal in Summertime). The other pigeons, having flown away in panic during the attack, fluttered back and resumed pecking at the bread crumbs only a few feet from the seagull, sensing perhaps that its appetite had been satisfied. The woman at the next table shuddered and turned away. De Luigi chuckled silently.

  “There you have it,” he said, “acted out before your eyes. An allegory: the strong versus the weak. It’s always the same. The powerful always win, and the weak always come back to be victims all over again.” He laughed.

  Now that the experts had ruled the Fenice fire a case of arson, it was up to Felice Casson to identify the guilty party or parties. “All that remains to be done is to put a face on the monster or monsters who did this,” Casson was quoted as saying. Speculation focused once again on the Mafia. Casson let it be known that he was in active pursuit of the Mafia theory. He had received a phone call from a prosecutor in Bari, where the Mafia had burned down the Petruzzelli Opera House in 1991. After comparing photographs of the two fires, the Bari prosecutor noticed a disturbing similarity: In both the Petruzzelli and Fenice fires, flames started on an upper floor and spread quickly in a lateral direction, indicating arson. Could the two fires be related? The close rapport between the Mafia boss who had ordered the Bari fire, Antonio Capriati, and the Mafia boss of the Veneto region, Felice “Angel Face” Maniero, lent weight to a possible Bari-Venice connection. Over the years, the two men had met frequently in Padua. Furthermore, in 1993, while he was on trial for robbery and drug trafficking, “Angel Face” Maniero had admitted under oath that he had considered setting fire to the Fenice as a way of intimidating the men prosecuting him.

  Despite Mayor Cacciari’s oft-repeated insistence that there was no Mafia presence in Venice, it was generally understood that “Angel Face” Maniero and the Mafia controlled the water-taxi business in Venice and that until recently Maniero ran the moneylending racket in front of the Casino, charging the usurious rate of 10 percent a day.

  The youthful, forty-one-year-old Maniero was one of Italy’s most daring and outrageous mafiosi. He once boas
ted of having ordered the theft of a jewel-encrusted reliquary containing St. Anthony’s jawbone from the Padua cathedral to use as a bargaining chip later on, in the event that he or any of his men were ever arrested. Maniero cultivated an image of urbane nonchalance. He wore ascots, owned a fleet of luxury cars, and was often seen consuming champagne and caviar in the company of tall, blond women. While being hunted by the police in 1993, he bought a thirty-six-foot yacht and brazenly set off on a cruise around the Mediterranean. Police caught up with him off Capri, boarded the yacht, and arrested him. Though convicted and sentenced to thirty-three years in jail, Maniero made a spectacular prison break after only a few months behind bars. Seven of his henchmen, disguised as carabinieri and armed with assault rifles, strode into the high-security prison in Padua and held the guards at gunpoint while he and five other members of his gang escaped. When he was recaptured five months later, Maniero turned informer. In exchange for his release under the witness-protection program, he provided information that led to the arrest of more than three hundred Mafia figures. At the time of the Fenice fire, Maniero was in Mestre testifying against seventy-two fellow mafiosi in trials involving a pair of million-dollar robberies, the sale of hundreds of kilos of heroin, and a double homicide.

  Maniero’s collaboration with the anti-Mafia prosecutors had made it entirely possible that if Maniero had not been responsible for the Fenice fire himself, other Mafia figures might have ordered it to make it look as though he had done it.

  Another Mafia theory presented itself when a Sicilian mob informer told Casson that the top Mafia boss in Palermo, Pietro Aglieri, had confided to an associate that he had set fire to the Fenice in order to save face. A government witness in a Mafia trial in the Veneto had declared himself to be both a homosexual and a great friend of Aglieri’s. Deeply embarrassed, Aglieri sought to redeem himself among his underworld peers by flexing his muscles and pulling off a cataclysmic stunt in Venice. He would torch the Fenice. According to the informant, Aglieri and another clan member drove up to Venice from Palermo and set the Fenice on fire with a cigarette lighter. Casson pursued this story until he began to have doubts about the source. But rather than reject the story out of hand, he passed it on to the anti-Mafia unit in Venice for further investigation.

  Meanwhile Casson’s experts did their best to explain why they had changed their minds about how the fire had started. They had originally believed that a spark or a carelessly tossed cigarette had ignited the resin-coated flooring in the ridotto, the lobby on the third level of the entrance wing. The burning resins would have started a slow fire in the floorboards, one that smoldered for two or three hours before bursting into flame. A smoldering fire was typical of an accidental fire.

  But subsequent lab tests had shown that even with the resin coating, the flooring would not catch fire except at a much higher temperature than a spark or a cigarette could have provided. The experts were forced to conclude that the floorboards would have caught fire only if someone had poured flammable liquid onto them first. Eight liters of the highly combustible solvent Solfip had been stored in the ridotto, and traces of it were found in charred remnants of the floorboards.

  The single piece of evidence that had originally led the experts to conclude that the fire had been accidental was the discovery that the beams supporting the floor of the ridotto had burned all the way through. This, they believed, had indicated a slow, smoldering start, and therefore an accidental fire. In keeping with the new arson scenario, the experts now said that because the beams had been coated with resin and saturated with solvent, they had kept on burning throughout the fire, despite being doused with water from the firemen’s hoses.

  So the fire had not smoldered for two or three hours. It had become a roaring blaze within ten or fifteen minutes of being set. This would mean that the fire had been set sometime between 8:20 P.M. and 8:50 P.M. and not at six o’clock, as the experts had thought at first. But then what about the eight witnesses who said they had smelled something burning outside the Fenice at six o’clock? The experts pointed out that nobody inside the Fenice had smelled anything at that hour and that, furthermore, none of the witnesses to the six-o’clock smell had reported it when they said they smelled it. The six-o’clock smell, the experts suggested, had most likely come from a restaurant kitchen or a wood-burning oven.

  The fire’s transformation from negligence to arson meant that Felice Casson had to go back and reexamine all the information that had been gathered in the past several months. Casson now took greater interest in three young men in their twenties who had been seen running toward Campo San Fantin shouting, “Scampemo, scampemo!” (Let’s get out of here!) in the Venetian dialect shortly before the fire broke out. They had been laughing. It seemed to witnesses that they might have pulled a prank of some sort that had perhaps been taken the wrong way. Two other young men had been seen running away ten minutes later. They had all come from the direction of the Fenice’s stage door on Calle della Fenice.

  Twenty-five people had been working on the restoration of the theater on January 29. Casson wanted to know who had been the last to leave.

  GILBERTO PAGGIARO, the Fenice’s sad-eyed, fifty-four-year-old custodian, came on duty at four o’clock on the afternoon of January 29, 1996. From his chair in the small porter’s office next to the stage-door exit, he saw most of the people leave between 5:00 P.M. and 5:30 P.M. Three more people left the building during the next half hour: a set designer, a press officer, and the snack-bar lady whose coffee machine would briefly be blamed for the fire. At 6:30 P.M., the Fenice’s house electrician went home. Ten minutes after that, an executive of one of the firms doing work in the Fenice left, and he was followed by a work-crew foreman. At 7:30 P.M., the Fenice’s staff carpenter walked out with four other employees who had joined him in the carpentry shop to celebrate the birthday of a former colleague.

  That left nine people still in the theater at eight o’clock: the custodian Paggiaro; the Fenice’s photographer, Giuseppe Bonannini, who was taking pictures to document the renovation work; and seven young electricians employed by Viet, a small electrical contractor. Viet was behind in its work. All seven of the company’s electricians, including the owner of the company, had lately been putting in twelve-hour days. Three of the men had been hired within the last week to help make up for lost time. On January 29, they were working on the ground floor. At eight o’clock, they finished work and went up to the dressing room on the fourth floor to shower and change.

  Enrico Carella, the twenty-seven-year-old owner of Viet, told investigators that he left at 8:30 P.M. with his cousin Massimiliano Marchetti, who was also one of his employees. Within the next five minutes, three more electricians left, one of whom later told investigators that he and the other two were probably the three young men seen running down Calle della Fenice. “We’d been joking around,” he said.

  A sixth electrician left a few minutes later, saying good-bye to the remaining electrician on his way out. The last Viet electrician to leave had been asked by the Fenice’s house electrician to turn off lights throughout the theater. After doing so, he stopped by the porter’s office on his way out; not finding Paggiaro, he left a note to the effect that he had turned off the lights as asked. The note was found after the fire, but this man, Roberto Visentin, was the only one of the seven Viet electricians whose departure had not been witnessed by anyone else.

  Now only two people remained in the theater: the custodian Gilberto Paggiaro and the photographer Giuseppe Bonannini.

  Paggiaro set off on a security check at 8:30, picking his way through the darkened theater with a flashlight. This tour generally took upwards of half an hour, given the size of the opera house, its many levels, and its labyrinthine layout. Paggiaro first walked upstairs, crossed the stage, and went into the south wing, where he looked through the rabbit warren of offices and meeting rooms. He found everything in order. He then walked back across the stage and checked the offices in the north wing. Still nothin
g amiss. From there he moved along the horseshoe corridor behind the second tier of boxes toward the rear of the auditorium and the Apollonian rooms. It was at this point, as he approached the middle of the horseshoe corridor, that he smelled smoke. Believing that the smell was coming from the outside, he opened a window and saw a woman across the calle shouting, “Help! The theater is on fire!”

  Now Paggiaro was alarmed. He knew that the photographer Bonannini was still in his office on the fourth floor, because Bonannini had asked him to come by his office while he was on his rounds and guide him downstairs through the dark with his flashlight. Paggiaro raced upstairs and found Bonannini in his office, still sorting photographs.