The City of Falling Angels

by John Berendt

  “Why a perfect ending?” I asked. “Things are left hanging.”

  “Yes, but this is the sort of ending Venice can live with, happily and forever.” He daubed gold paint on the canvas. “Look what the story offers: a great fire, a cultural calamity, the spectacle of public officials blaming each other, an unseemly rush for the money to rebuild the theater, the satisfaction of a trial with guilty verdicts and jail sentences, the pride of the Fenice’s rebirth, and”—he lifted his brush and looked up—“an unsolved mystery. Money secretly changing hands. Unnamed culprits hiding in the shadows. It stimulates the imagination, gives people the freedom to make up any scenario they want. What more could anyone ask?”

  THE DIGITAL CLOCK outside the Fenice stood at 537 on the day Laura Migliori found traces of green paint exactly where she had hoped to find them, meaning that the truncated figure in the foreground had been Virgil after all. At one o’clock that same day, an appellate court in Mestre upheld the guilty verdicts of Enrico Carella and Massimiliano Marchetti. Lawyers for the two young men announced they would take their case to a higher court, the court of cassazione in Rome, for the second and final appeal.

  A year later, in midsummer 2003, the theater resembled a life-size plywood model of itself: bare ceiling, bare walls, and five tiers of bare wooden boxes. It seemed impossible that the Fenice would be finished in four months, but construction managers assured the press that the rebuilding was still on target. Shortly after noon on day 140, word came from Rome that the cassazione court had rejected the final appeal of Carella and Marchetti. They would go to jail.

  The police arrived at Marchetti’s house at 4:00 P.M. and led him away in handcuffs to begin serving a sentence of six years.

  “That cassazione court really busted my balls,” said Marchetti’s lawyer, Giovanni Seno, when I called him a week afterward. “They usually give a person a couple of days to get his affairs in order before they finalize the sentence and lock him up. Ball-breakers! Last year I had a guy sentenced to nine years for drug trafficking, and they let a month go by before they arrested him. But that’s nothing. My associate has a woman defendant who’s a drug addict/robber/prostitute, and she’s still free after a year and a half, because they can’t find the paperwork from the appeals court, so they haven’t finalized her sentence. Marchetti they grab in a couple of hours! Tell me, where was he going to run off to with a newborn baby girl and a wife? But Carella! ”

  Enrico Carella had not been home when the police came to get him, nor did he turn up later on in the day, or the next day. In an interview two months earlier, he had told Gianluca Amadori of the Gazzettino that if his appeal failed, he would serve his term. Carella’s defense attorney said shortly after the appeal was rejected that he had already spoken with Carella and that he would surrender himself soon. On the third day, the Venetian authorities pronounced Carella “missing” but not “in hiding.” At the end of the week, they declared him a fugitive.

  “So who forfeits the bail money?” I asked Seno. “And how much was it?”

  “What bail?” he said. “We don’t have a bail system in Italy. We had one for two or three years, but there weren’t any bail bondsmen, like you have in America, so only the rich defendants were able to get off. It became a social issue.”

  “Do you think the police are still looking for him?”

  “I know they are, because obviously it’s a humiliating defeat for them. They didn’t catch the one they should have caught. In my opinion, Carella behaved like someone who was going to take off. He prepared for it. Even the interview he gave the Gazzettino was part of the setup, saying he’d serve his term if the cassazione went against him.

  “It ’s not over yet. I’ve been in this business thirty years, and I’m not used to losing cases. I haven’t shelved the file. I have it all on computer. And I promise you that if something happens, I’ll let you know. I haven’t told you everything. I have to be honest with you. I haven’t told you everything.”

  Whatever it was that Giovanni Seno was holding back from me, it could not have been much comfort to Massimiliano Marchetti, who was serving time in a jail in Padua—the same jail Seno’s old Mafia client, Felice “Angel Face” Maniero, had broken out of a few years before.

  I went to Salzano to see the Marchettis. We sat in their kitchen drinking Cokes from a plastic liter bottle, as we had on my first visit.

  “Because of ‘Angel Face’ Maniero,” Marchetti’s father said, “they keep the prisoners locked in their cells all day now.”

  Although the Marchettis were careworn and depressed, I sensed they felt some relief knowing that the countdown to a conclusion of their nightmare had already begun. With good behavior, Massimiliano could be out in two years and eight months.

  “But they still find ways of torturing him,” said his mother. “Last week they sent him a formal letter telling him his sentence had been miscalculated and that he would have to serve an additional fourteen days.”

  “Then they sent him a bill for court costs,” said his father. “Two thousand five hundred eighty-two euros [$3,300].” Signora Marchetti shook her head.

  “Have you heard anything about your nephew, Enrico Carella?”

  “No,” said Signora Marchetti.

  “What has your sister said about his disappearance?”

  “I haven’t spoken to her,” she said.

  “Really? Since when?”

  “It’s been about three months, ever since Massimiliano went to jail. She stopped talking to me. She hasn’t called.”

  “And you haven’t called her?”

  “No. She’s the one who should call.”

  “Is this because you feel that Enrico is responsible for all your troubles?”

  “We just wish he’d never offered Massimiliano the job,” said her husband.

  When I came back to Venice, I went to the Giudecca to see Lucia Carella, Enrico’s mother. She had not heard from her son since the day he vanished.

  “I prefer not hearing from him,” she said, “because hearing from him means something has happened. When I don’t hear anything, I think he’s okay. Maybe. As okay as a runaway can be.”

  “Do you assume your telephone is tapped?”

  “Telephones, cell phones, his ex-girlfriends’ phones, everybody’s phone. They’re hoping he’ll call me. I hear strange noises when I’m on the phone.”

  “In his interview with the Gazzettino, Enrico said he thought Massimiliano’s parents blame him for everything. Why did he think so?”

  “The way they acted.”

  “Did they say anything directly to Enrico?”

  “No, absolutely not.”

  “Your sister tells me the two of you haven’t spoken in about three months.”

  “She called the day Massimiliano was arrested, but I haven’t heard from her since. My mother lives with me, and that means she hasn’t spoken to her mother either. And since I am eight years older—and my mother, by the way, is eighty—I think it should be her to call us, or at least call her mother.”

  “So that’s the way it stands.”

  “She has always been the smallest one and the most spoiled. She thinks I’m the one who should call, and I think she’s the one who should call. It’s stupid, but the longer it goes on, the worse it gets.”

  “It’s sad.”

  “Yes, it’s sad. But maybe suddenly I’ll just pick up the phone and call her. That’s the kind of person I am.”

  “Your sister is probably a little distracted at this point.”

  “Yes, she is distracted, but I am more distracted than she is. At least she knows where her son is. I don’t.”

  {15}

  OPEN HOUSE

  THE NARROW CANAL between the Gritti Hotel and Palazzo Contarini was the only route along which boats could ferry building materials from the Grand Canal to the Fenice. The first cargoes had been disassembled cranes and scaffolding, then bricks, beams, pipes, and planks—the building blocks of the theater. Now, after some tw
enty thousand boatloads, came the refinements: the gilded ornaments, the painted canvases, the lighting fixtures, the chairs upholstered in rose-colored velvet. The day-counting clock in front of the Fenice was down to two digits, and work was still on schedule, give or take a few days.

  When at long last the Fenice shed its scaffolding and wooden barriers, the gloom lifted from Campo San Fantin. The Ristorante Antico Martini came out from the shadows and basked in the glow of the Fenice’s freshly cleaned façade. “We left a few streaks of discoloration here and there so it wouldn’t look too new,” said Franco Bajo, the chief construction engineer. “That’s the complaint we expect to hear most often, that the Fenice doesn’t look old enough.”

  Inside the theater, the auditorium was once again becoming an arcadian forest glade. Vines, flowers, woodland animals, and mythical creatures climbed the walls and parapets toward the ceiling, where bare-breasted nymphs bathed in the gilded swirls of a sylvan stream.

  As it turned out, none of the thousands of color photographs of the theater’s interior had been much use in determining its true colors. The silk lampshades on the sconces around the hall had cast a distorting yellow glow. Only one source could be trusted: the opening scene of Luchino Visconti’s 1954 Senso, the first Italian feature-length film shot in color. Visconti had been meticulous in re-creating the look of Italy in 1866. He removed the Fenice’s lampshades to make it appear as though the theater was lit by gaslight and, by doing so, achieved near-perfect color reproduction.

  It was decided that the Fenice would open with a week of orchestral concerts rather than full-scale opera; the backstage crew had not yet been trained in the use of the computerized scenery-moving machinery. Operas would begin a year later. For the grand opening night, Riccardo Muti would conduct the Fenice’s orchestra and chorus.

  To cope with the rush for tickets, the Fenice held an auction on the Internet, with prices ranging from $750 to $2,500 at first, then dropping each day, as tickets were sold. It was a game of box-office chicken: The longer one waited, the cheaper the seat but the more limited the selection. Wait too long and the concert might be sold out.

  That was not the entire story, however. It was no secret that hundreds of opening-night seats were being given away to celebrities and the well-connected. Only fools and the truly desperate would buy a ticket. Since this was a pageant I felt obliged to witness, however, I gritted my teeth and bought a seat in the third tier on the last day of the auction, for $600.

  Mayor Costa had done his best to promote the evening as a world-class, star-studded event. His staff leaked the names of likely attendees, including the actors Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, and Joseph Fiennes, all of whom were in the throes of making The Merchant of Venice—but not in Venice. The movie was being filmed on the cheap in Luxembourg. Mayor Costa, all but down on his knees, promised that if they came to the opening, he would fly them back to Luxembourg by private jet immediately after the concert, in time for filming the next morning.

  As dignitaries began arriving two days before the concert, security tightened around the Fenice. Streets were blocked off. Police and firemen were more than ever in evidence, although for different reasons. The police were protecting the VIPs from terrorists; the firemen were staging noisy demonstrations over a contract dispute, hoping to embarrass Mayor Costa.

  When the president and first lady of Italy, Carlo and Franca Ciampi, arrived from Rome, the local and national media chronicled their every move. The Corriere della Sera reported that the Ciampis had passed up a high-society luncheon, to be given in their honor by Larry Lovett, in favor of a sentimental lunch at Taverna La Fenice, where they had dined on their honeymoon fifty-nine years before. According to the Gazzettino the Ciampis ate baby shrimp and polenta, creamed codfish, pasta with artichokes and scampi, scalloped sea bass, and Venetian pastries along with prosecco and Tocai.

  AS THE HOUR OF THE INAUGURAL APPROACHED, I recalled the mask maker Guerrino Lovato’s explanation of the operagoing experience as a gradually unfolding ritual that began at home with the operagoer getting dressed. That being the case, my night at the opera started at about the time I was inserting my shirt studs with one hand, holding the telephone receiver with the other, and listening to Ludovico De Luigi pronounce the evening an ignoble farce.

  “It will be an exercise in vanity, vulgarity, and self-congratulation,” he said. “Costa has been boasting that the reopening of the Fenice means ‘the city still has a pulse.’ It means no such thing. Sadly, Venice is already dead. Everything is based on the exploitation of the corpse—the shameless exploitation of the corpse.” De Luigi would not be attending the opening. The temptation to pull off another scherzo would be too great, he said, and the police were already on edge, what with the protesting firemen complicating security. There would be zero tolerance for any sort of spontaneous artistic expression tonight. Anyway, De Luigi had not been invited, and he had no intention of buying a ticket.

  My opening-night ritual unfolded further as I stepped onto the Number 1 vaporetto for the ride down the Grand Canal. It had been reported a few days earlier that Enrico Carella had been briefly sighted on a vaporetto. I spoke with Felice Casson afterward.

  “I doubt that the police are really looking for him,” Casson said. “If he were a terrorist or a Mafia boss of a certain importance, then special search teams would be set up, with either the carabinieri or the police, and then it would be only a matter of time. They have methods that work very well. But they probably don’t think Carella is worth the effort. Other, more dangerous cases have higher priority.”

  It crossed my mind to pass this information on to Lucia Carella, who would probably have taken it as welcome news. But that would be meddling; besides, Casson was far too clever. If I repeated what he had told me, Signora Carella might let down her guard and play right into his hands. It was none of my business. In any case, Enrico Carella was not on board the Number 1 vaporetto the night of the Fenice reopening.

  Bright white television lights illuminated Campo San Fantin and the red carpet cascading down the steps of the Fenice. Ahead of me, President Ciampi entered the theater, all but hidden inside a phalanx of praetorian guards wearing ceremonial helmets topped by horse tails that arched and fell, like fountains of white hair.

  I went directly upstairs to the Dante Room, which was now the bar, curious to see how the Inferno fresco had turned out. Laura Migliori and her crew had revived the colors in the surviving segment, sketching the missing figures in outline against a plain background. I was looking at the sketch of Virgil and his laurel wreath when I felt a tug at my elbow.

  I turned and confronted a vaguely familiar, florid-faced man, who was smiling as if he knew me. It was Massimo Donadon—the Rat Man of Treviso. I had not seen him since the Carnival ball in 1996.

  “Signor Donadon!” I said. “How’s the rat-poison business?”

  “I’m just back from the Netherlands,” he said. “I have new customers.”

  “What’s your secret ingredient for Dutch rats?” I asked.

  “Salmon and cheese,” he said.

  “No Dutch chocolate?”

  “A little, not much.”

  Donadon’s expression suddenly turned serious.

  “Something very strange is happening in Italy,” he said. He motioned for me to move toward the corner of the room, where we could hear each other better.

  “I’ve noticed,” he said, “that in the past few years Italian rats have begun to prefer eating plastic to Parmesan cheese.”

  “Really!”

  “My entire business, if you remember, is based on the idea that rats eat what people eat.”

  “Yes, of course I remember.”

  “But people don’t eat plastic!” he said. “I thought, ‘My God, I’m ruined! What am I going to do? Rats are beginning to eat food that human beings don’t eat! This cannot be true!’”