by Donna Leon
She nodded as if in answer to a different question and pushed herself up from the sofa and walked across the room to the bookshelves. Brunetti winced at the gingerly way she walked, at how slowly she raised her arm to pull a thick book down from a high shelf. Tucking it under one arm, she came back towards them and placed the book on the low table that stood in front of the sofa. She flipped it open, riffled through a few pages, then pushed it open and held it there with both palms pressed down on the outer edge of the pages.
Brunetti bent forward and looked at the coloured photo on the page. It appeared to be an immense gate, but all scale was missing because it wasn’t attached to walls of any sort; instead, it stood free in a room, perhaps a museum gallery. Immense winged bulls stood in protective posture on either side of the opening. The background was the same cobalt blue of the brick that had been used to kill Semenzato, the body of the animals the same vibrant gold. A closer look showed him that the wall was entirely constructed of rectangular bricks, the form of the bulls raised up upon its surface in low relief.
‘What is it?’ he asked, pointing down at the photo.
‘The Ishtar Gate of Babylon,’ she said. ‘Much of it’s been reconstructed, but that’s where the brick came from. That or a structure like it, from the same place.’ Before he could ask, she explained, ‘I remember that some of the bricks were in the storerooms of the museum when we were working there.’
‘But how did it get on to his desk?’ Brunetti asked.
Brett smiled again. ‘The perks of the job, I suppose. He was the director, so he could have pretty well anything he wanted from the permanent collection brought up to his office.’
‘Is that normal?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes, it is. Of course, they can’t have a Leonardo or a Bellini hanging there just for them to look at, but it’s not unusual for pieces from a museum’s holdings to be used to decorate an office, especially the director’s.’
‘Are records kept of this kind of borrowing?’ he asked.
From the other side of the table, Flavia crossed her legs with a slither of silk and said softly, ‘Ah, so that’s how it is.’ Then she added, as if Brunetti had asked, ‘I met him only once, but I didn’t like him.’
‘When did you meet him, Flavia?’ Brett asked, ignoring Brunetti’s question.
‘About a half hour before I met you, cara. At your exhibition at the Palazzo Ducale.’
Almost automatically, Brett corrected her, ‘It wasn’t my exhibition.’ Brunetti had the feeling that this same correction had been made many times before.
‘Well, whosever it was, then,’ Flavia said. ‘It had just opened, and I was being shown around the city, given the full treatment — visiting diva and all that.’ Her tone made the idea of her fame sound faintly ridiculous. Since Brett must know this story of their meeting, Brunetti assumed the explanation was directed at him.
‘Semenzato showed me through the galleries, but I had a rehearsal that afternoon, and I suppose I might have been a bit brusque with him.’ Brusque? Brunetti had seen Flavia’s ill humour, and brusque was hardly an adequate term to describe it.
‘He kept telling me how much he admired my talent.’ She paused and leaned towards Brunetti, placing a hand on his arm while she explained, ‘That always means they’ve never heard me sing and probably wouldn’t like it if they did, but they’ve heard enough to know that I’m famous, so they feel they have to flatter me.’ That explanation given, she removed her hand and sat back in her chair. ‘I had the feeling that, while he was showing me how wonderful the exhibition was—’ here she turned to Brett and added, ‘and it was,’ then turned her attention back to Brunetti and continued — ‘what I was supposed to be registering was how wonderful he was for having thought of it. Though he didn’t. Well, I didn’t know that at the time — that it was Brett’s show — but he was pushy about it, and I didn’t like it.’
Brunetti could well imagine that she wouldn’t like the competition of pushy people. No, that was unfair, for she didn’t push herself forward. He had to admit that he had been wrong the last time he met her. There was no vanity here, only the calm acceptance of her own worth and of her own talent, and he knew enough about her past to realize how hard that must have been to achieve.
‘But then you came by with a glass of champagne and rescued me from him,’ she said, smiling at Brett.
‘That’s not a bad idea, champagne,’ Brett said, cutting short Flavia’s flow of memory, and Brunetti was struck at how very similar her reaction was to Paolas whenever he began to tell people about the way they met, crashing into one another at the end of one of the aisles in the library of the university. How many times in their years together had she asked him to get her a drink or otherwise interrupted his story by asking someone else a question? And why did the telling of that story bring him such joy? Mysteries. Mysteries.
Taking the hint, Flavia got out of her chair and went across the room. It was only eleven thirty in the morning, but if they felt like drinking champagne, he hardly thought it his place to contradict or try to prevent them.
Brett flipped a page in the book, then sat back in the sofa, and the pages floated back into place, showing Brunetti the gold bull, part of which had killed Semenzato.
‘How did you meet him?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I worked with him on the China show, five years ago. Most of our contact was through letters because I was in China while most of the arrangements were being made. I wrote and suggested a number of pieces, sending photos and dimensions, and weights, since they all had to be air-freighted from Xian and Beijing to New York and London for the exhibition there, and then to Milan, and then trucked and boated here.’ She paused for a moment and then added, ‘I didn’t meet him until I got here to set the show up.’
‘Who decided what pieces would come here from China?’
This question caused her to grimace in remembered exasperation. ‘Who knows?’ When he failed to understand, she tried to explain. ‘Involved in this were the Chinese government, their ministries of antiquities and foreign affairs, and, on our side’— he noticed that Venice was, unconsciously, ‘our side’ — ‘the museum, the department of antiquities, the finance police, the ministry of culture, and a few other bureaus I’ve forced myself to forget about.’ She allowed the memory of officialdom to flow across her. ‘Here, it was awful, far worse than for New York or London. And I had to do all this from Xian, with letters delayed in the mail, or held up by the censors. Finally, after three months of it - this was about a year before it opened - I came here for two weeks and got most of it done, though I had to fly down to Rome twice to do it.’
‘And Semenzato?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I think, first, you have to understand that his was pretty much a political appointment.’ She saw Brunetti’s surprise and smiled. ‘He had museum experience, I forget where. But his selection was a political payoff. Anyway, there were—’ she corrected herself immediately - ‘there are curators at the museum who actually take care of the collection. His job was primarily administrative, and he did that very well.’
‘What about the exhibition here? Did he help you set it up?’ From the other side of the apartment, he could hear Flavia moving around, hear drawers and cabinets being opened and closed, the clink of glasses.
‘To a small degree. I told you how I more or less commuted back and forth from Xian for the openings in New York and London, but I came here for the opening.’ He thought she was finished, but then she added, ‘And I stayed on for about a month after it.’
‘How much contact did you have with him?’
‘Very little. He was on vacation for much of the time it was being set up, and then when he got back, he had to go to Rome for conferences with the Minister, trying to arrange an exchange with the Brera in Milan for another exhibition they were planning.’
‘But certainly you dealt with him personally at some time during all of this?’
‘Yes, I did. He was utterly charmi
ng and, when he could be, very helpful. He gave me carte blanche with the exhibition, allowed me to set it up as I pleased. And then, when it closed, he did the same for my assistant.’
‘Your assistant?’ Brunetti asked.
Brett glanced across towards the kitchen and then answered, ‘Matsuko Shibata. She was my assistant in Xian, on loan from the Tokyo Museum, in an exchange policy between the Japanese and Chinese governments. She’d studied at Berkeley but gone back to Tokyo after she got her degree.’
‘Where is she now?’ Brunetti asked.
She bent down over the book and turned a block of pages, her hand coming to rest beside a delicate Japanese screen painting that showed herons in flight above a tall growth of bamboo. ‘She’s dead. She was killed in an accident on the site.’
‘What happened?’ Brunetti spoke very softly, aware that Semenzato’s death made this accident into something that Brett had already begun to examine in an entirely new fashion.
‘She fell. The dig in Xian is little more than an open pit covered by an aeroplane hangar. All of the statues were buried, part of the army that the emperor would take into eternity with him. In some places, we’ve had to dig down three or four metres to reach them. There’s an outer perimeter above the dig, and there’s a low wall that protects tourists from falling into it or from kicking dirt down on us when we’re working. In some areas, where tourists aren’t permitted, there’s no wall. Matsuko fell,’ she began, but Brunetti watched as she continued to process new possibilities and adjusted her language accordingly. She restated this. ‘Matsuko’s body was found at the bottom of one of these places. She’d fallen about three metres and broken her neck.’ She glanced across at Brunetti and made open admission of her new doubts by changing that last sentence. ‘She was found at the bottom, with a broken neck.’
‘When was she killed?’
A loud shot rang out from the kitchen. Entirely without thinking, Brunetti pivoted out of his chair and crouched in front of Brett, his body placed between her and the open door to the kitchen. His hand was underneath his jacket, pulling at his revolver, when they heard Flavia shout, ‘Porco vacca,’ and then both of them heard the unmistakable sound of champagne splashing from the neck of a bottle on to the floor.
He released his hold on the pistol and moved back into his seat without saying anything to Brett. In different circumstances, it might have been funny, but neither of them laughed. By silent consent, they decided to ignore it, and Brunetti repeated his question: ‘When was she killed?’
Deciding to save time and answer all of his questions at once, she said, ‘It happened about three weeks after I’d sent my first letter to Semenzato.’
‘When was that?’
‘In the middle of December. I took her body back to Tokyo. That is, I went with it. With her.’ She stopped, voice dried up by memory that she was not going to let Brunetti have any part of.
‘I was going to San Francisco for Christmas,’ she continued. ‘So I left early and spent three days in Tokyo. I saw her family.’ Again, a long pause. ‘Then I went to San Francisco.’
Flavia came back from the kitchen, balancing a silver tray with three tall champagne flutes on one hand, the other wrapped around the neck of a bottle of Dom Perignon as if she were carrying a tennis racquet. No stinting here, not on the after-breakfast champagne.
She had heard Brett’s last words and asked, ‘Are you telling Guido about our happy Christmas?’ The use of his first name did not go unnoticed by any of them, nor did her emphasis on ‘happy’.
Brunetti took the tray and set it down on the table; Flavia poured champagne liberally into the glasses. Bubbles rushed over the rim of one of them, spilled down the side and over the edge of the tray, racing towards the book that still lay open on the table. Brett nipped it closed and placed it on the sofa beside her. Flavia handed Brunetti a glass, put one on the table in front of the place where she had been sitting, and passed the third to Brett.
‘Cin Cin,’ Flavia toasted with bright artificiality, and they raised their glasses to one another. ‘If we’re going to talk about San Francisco, then I think I need at least champagne.’ She sat down facing them and took something too big to be called a sip from her glass.
Brunetti gave her an inquiring glance, and she rushed to explain. ‘I was singing there. Tosca. God, what a disaster.’ In a gesture so consciously theatrical it mocked itself, she placed the back of her hand to her forehead, closed her eyes for a moment, then continued, ‘We had a German director who had a “concept”. Unfortunately, his concept was to update the opera to make it relevant,’ which word she pronounced with special contempt, ‘and stage it during the Romanian Revolution, and Searpia was supposed to be Ceaucescu, or however that terrible man pronounced his name. I was still supposed to be the reigning diva, but of Bucharest, not Rome.’ She draped the hand over her eyes at the memory but forged ahead. ‘I remember that there were tanks and machine guns, and at one point I had to hide a hand grenade in my cleavage.’
‘Don’t forget the telephone,’ Brett said, covering her mouth and pressing her lips closed so as not to laugh.
‘Oh, sweet heavens, the telephone. It tells you how much I’ve tried to put it out of my memory that I didn’t remember it.’ She turned to Brunetti, took a mouthful far more suited to mineral water than champagne, and continued, eyes alive at the memory. ‘In the middle of “Visse d’arte”, the director wanted me to try to telephone for help. So there I was, stretched across a sofa, trying to convince God that I didn’t deserve any of this, and I didn’t, when the Searpia — I think he was a real Romanian - I certainly never understood a word he said.’ She paused a moment and then added, ‘Or sang.’
Brett interrupted to correct her. ‘He was Bulgarian, Flavia.’
Flavia’s wave, even encumbered with the glass, was airily dismissive. ‘Same thing, cara. They all look like potatoes and stink of paprika. And they all shout so, especially the sopranos.’ She finished her champagne and paused long enough to refill her glass. ‘Where was I?’
‘On the sofa, I think, pleading with God,’ Brett suggested.
‘Ah, yes. And then the Scarpia, a great, lumbering clod of a man, he tripped over the telephone wire and pulled it out of the wall. So there I lay on the sofa, line to God cut off, and, beyond the baritone, I could see the director in the wings, waving at me like a madman. I think he wanted me to plug it back in and use it, put the call through any way I could.’ She sipped, smiled at Brunetti with a warmth that drove him to sip at his own champagne, and continued. ‘But an artist has to have some standards,’ glancing now at Brett, ‘or as you Americans say, has to draw a line in the sand.’
She stopped and Brunetti picked up his cue. He said it. ‘What did you do?’
‘I picked up the receiver and sang into it, just as if I had someone on the other end, just as if no one had seen it pulled from the wall.’ She set her glass down on the table, stood and stretched her arms out in agonized cruciform, then, utterly without warning, she began to sing the last phrases of the aria. ‘ “Nell’ora del dolor perch è , Signor, ah perch è me ne rimuneri cosi?” ‘ How did she do it? From a normal speaking voice, with no preparation, right up to those solidly floated notes?
Brunetti laughed outright, spilling some champagne down the front of his shirt. Brett set her glass on the table and clapped both hands to the sides of her mouth.
Flavia, as calmly as if she’d just gone into the kitchen to check on the roast and found it done, sat back down in her chair and continued her story. ‘Scarpia had to turn his back on the audience, he was laughing so hard. It was the first thing he’d done in a month that made me like him. I almost regretted having to kill him a few minutes later. The director was hysterical during the intermission, screaming at me that I’d ruined his production, swearing he’d never work with me again. Well, that’s certain, isn’t it? The reviews were terrible.’
‘Flavia,’ Brett chided, ‘it was the reviews of the production that were t
errible; your reviews were wonderful.’
As if explaining something to a child, Flavia said, ‘My reviews are always wonderful, cara,’ Just like that. She turned her attention to Brunetti. ‘It was into this fiasco that she came,’ she said, pointing to Brett, ‘for Christmas with me and my children.’ She shook her head a few times. ‘She came in from taking that young woman’s body to Tokyo. No, it wasn’t a happy Christmas.’
Brunetti decided that, champagne or not, he still wanted to know more about the death of Brett’s assistant. ‘Was there any question at the time that it might not have been an accident?’
Brett shook her head, glass forgotten in front of her. ‘No. At one time or another, almost all of us had slipped when walking on the edge of the dig. One of the Chinese archaeologists had fallen and broken his ankle about a month before. So at the time we all believed that it was an accident. It might have been,’ she added with an absolute lack of conviction.
‘She worked on the exhibition here?’ he asked.
‘Not the opening. I came here alone for that. But Matsuko oversaw the packing, when the pieces left for China.’
