by Donna Leon
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. There was no answer from them in the archives.”
“What did he sound like?” Roseanna asked thoughtfully, as if she were speaking of a person Caterina had just met.
“Excuse me?”
“Steffani. What did he sound like in his letter?”
“Polite,” she said after a moment’s reflection, not having given this conscious thought while she was reading the letter. “And weak,” she added, surprising herself even more. “He all but begged them to get in touch with him, and he kept insisting that his only motivation was the good of the family, almost as if he thought they’d have reason to doubt that.” She thought about the letter a bit longer and added, “It made me—I don’t know—uncomfortable.”
“Why?”
“Because the tone was so humble. People then were more formal with one another than we are, and the language was more elaborate and full of all sorts of formulaic courtesies,” she conceded. “But this was too humble, and I suppose it troubled me because it was so out of place in a man of his stature.”
“As a musician?”
“Yes. And he was a bishop, for heaven’s sake. So to hear him use this tone with two cousins from a provincial place like Castelfranco, to try to convince them to help him get money . . . well, it was difficult to read.” It occurred to her that, if anyone knew for certain whether Agostino was a castrato, it would be members of his family; perhaps this explained his painful deference toward them.
“Does that mean you’ve come to like him? Steffani?” What strange questions Roseanna asked. Caterina had never thought in terms of liking him or not. His life puzzled her, but she had persuaded herself that her main interest was in trying to find out enough about him to be able to do her job.
She raised a hand and made a seesawing gesture. “I don’t know if I like him.”
Her answer took her by surprise. She liked his industry, the fierce pace at which he drove himself, but those were qualities, not a complete person. “I have to keep on looking,” she heard herself say.
“Upstairs?” Roseanna asked, following the question with an upward gesture with her chin.
“No. In the Marciana. I’ve still got a few things to look at.”
“Good luck.”
Caterina smiled her thanks and, spirits suddenly uplifted, started toward the Marciana.
She found her carrel as she had left it the day before. She had stopped on the way to replenish her supply of chocolate and energy bars, though her researcher’s conscience did not rest easy about having done this. Before turning her attention to the books, she stood at the window and considered her reading of the past few days. What she had read, both in the documents at the Foundation and in the books in her carrel, had raised as many questions as they had answered.
She sat and opened her notebook and pressed it flat, then opened a new book. This one separated its analysis into biography and music. She’d started it two days before but had been waylaid by the allure of the so-called affair. Well, enough of that and back to work.
She read carefully, skimming over the by now familiar details of his early life, until he went to Hanover in 1688 as court composer. As happened each time she read or thought of it, she was struck by how odd that combination seemed in these times.
Vivaldi was a priest as well as a musician, but he had used his position in the Church as a means to further his music, the center of his life. He had lived and worked as a musician, and he had composed up until his death, probably in the arms of his life’s companion, Anna Girò. Caterina knew precious little about his life, but she knew that things ecclesiastical, other than sacred music, played no part in it, nor did he ever aspire to any higher clerical position.
This was not the case, surely, with Steffani, upon whom benefices and titles rained. The shining purpose of his life, for which he apparently abandoned composing, was the return of northern Germany to the Catholic Church, at which he proved a dismal failure. She found accounts of his endeavors in two histories of the Church in northern Germany, written in Latin and German. Each praised his enterprise and dedication, describing his achievements in Hanover and Düsseldorf. The German text devoted a mere five pages to his work as a musician.
When she emerged from the second of these, hunger drove her from the library and to the nearest bar, where she had two sandwiches and a glass of water before returning—unquestioned and unexamined—to her place in the library.
The next book was a 1905 edition of the correspondence between Sophie Charlotte and Steffani, in French, which both of them wrote with ease and grace. One of his letters found him at a low ebb. “The bitter grief I suffer because of the affairs of the world; the pain I suffer in seeing so many people whom I respect wishing to destroy themselves entirely.” He wrote of leading a life “that is truly a burden” and of his “unlimited hypochondria.” He described a life in which his only friend and source of safety was his harpsichord. It seemed to Caterina that, after saying all of this, he suddenly realized he had to try to joke his way out of the truth he had revealed, but the tone did not ring true to Caterina. What did ring true was the ease with which he addressed the recipient. She hoped the queen had accepted it because of his musical gifts rather than for his clerical position. Or was it the unspoken awareness that he was a castrato that rendered his liberties harmless?
She continued reading the letters, trying to think of them as the performance of a person whom fate had moved up the social ladder but who remained aware, no matter how high he rose, of just how precarious his position was. Seen in this light, a new tone became audible in his prose. She noted the excessive gratitude he poured upon Sophie Charlotte for the simplest favor, the flattery that sometimes became overwhelming: “since you have power over all”; “the graces that your Majesty deigned to bestow upon me”; “the letter with which your Majesty honored me”; “Your Majesty cannot do anything that is not at the peak of perfection”; “I have the pleasure of serving your Majesty.”
At this point, Caterina told herself to bear in mind that Steffani was corresponding with the Queen of Prussia, a woman renowned throughout Europe for the depth and breadth of her learning. Caterina remembered the palace in Berlin named for her and the enormous, passionate support she gave to countless musicians. This thought was enough to dispel her last opposition to Steffani’s deference to her. “Narrow-minded liberal,” she whispered in self-accusation.
But still, but still, she was filled with the desire to take Steffani and shake him by the dangling ends of his alb and tell him that, three hundred years later, Sophie Charlotte had been remaindered to footnotes in histories of Prussia read by a few hundred people, while his music was still performed and admired. “Narrow-minded snob,” she whispered to herself this time.
Twenty-two
“The troubles of this century no longer cause me much pain because they are making you again turn your hand to music. Throw yourself in headlong, I implore you. Music is a friend who will not abandon or betray you, nor will she be cruel to you. You have drawn from her all the delight and beauties of the heavens, whereas friends are tepid and cunning and mistresses are without gratitude.” This was the answer Steffani received from the queen in response to his own troubled letter. Her words rose above the usual courtly language and revealed her heart. Caterina felt her own heart warm to learn that he should have had this gracious, generous support from a woman he admired so fully.
Nevertheless, within months, the correspondence was dead. Steffani, in response to a request from a Medici cardinal, implored the queen to change her decision not to allow her favorite court musician to return to his monastery in Italy. And she, in queenly fashion, was not amused. The correspondence ended, but not before Leibniz, that most savvy of philosophers, remarked to a friend that he understood Her Majesty’s anger. “After all, if a Duke had only o
ne hunting horse, and someone requested him to give it up, how else would he expect the Duke to respond than with anger?”
Well, Caterina thought, old Leibniz certainly had no illusions about describing the pecking order in a royal court, did he? And he’d certainly hung around enough of them to have learned a thing or two about the positions of musicians, and let’s forget all the flowery praise. Steffani’s bishopric hadn’t protected him one whit, not when he stepped over that invisible line. You’re a genius and I am enthralled by the beauty of your music, but just remember to stay in your proper place, and don’t think for an instant that you can question the decisions of the Queen of Prussia.
She looked at her watch and saw that it was after six, which gave her just barely enough time to get back to the Foundation and write a report to Dottor Moretti. Because she knew that she was going to be out to dinner that evening, she did not bother to take any of the books with her and left them where they were, planning to return the next day to continue reading the background material.
She got to the office before seven but found no sign of Roseanna. She went up to what had become her office, but she did not open the storeroom. Instead, she turned on the computer and gave her name and password to the server. There were three emails, but before so much as glancing at the names of the senders, she opened a blank mail, headed it to Andrea, but, addressing the cousins by their surnames, gave a hurried account of the results of her research that day. Without bothering to read it over, she sent it off and returned to her inbox.
The first mail arrived from a bank she had never heard of and inquired if she wanted to take out a loan. Delete.
The second came from a young Russian woman, twenty-four, with a doctorate in electrical engineering, hoping to begin a meaningful correspondence with a well-educated and well-bred Italian man. Resisting the temptation to forward it to Avvocato Moretti, she deleted it.
The last was from Cristina, sent early that afternoon. “You studied law, Cati, and it wasn’t so very long ago, so surely you remember what those legal people call a statute of limitations on wills. Any unclaimed bequest Steffani might have made lapsed centuries ago. If there turns out to be something of value among those papers, it in no way belongs to the egregious cousins but, alas, to our even more egregious State.
“I don’t have any idea of what sort of people you’re mixed up with. The non-heirs sound unpleasant, at least to someone who has been out of the city for as long as I have and thus isn’t exposed to the daily discourse of men like them. Surely their lawyer must know this common legal fact, which makes me wonder what he’s up to. I don’t want to say anything unpleasant about him in case he’s the lawyer you’re going out to dinner with, but, if it is he, he should have known a fact as basic as this.
“If you have no luck with him, and if you can tell me exactly where the trunks were in Rome—that is, what bureau or office had them—I might be able to do a bit of trekking through the muck for you and find out how they were released. I still have a number of friends there who believe that the discovery of truth begins with an accurate account of verifiable events and is not an elaborate progress toward some predetermined truth. Besides, I’m curious.
“Thanks for your offer of hospitality. If I decide to bolt, it’s the first place I’d go, believe me. Love, Tina-Lina.”
The clock on the computer desktop told her it was 7:15 and so, without planning what to say, Caterina hit “respond.”
“Dear Tina. The trunks were in the care/possession of the Propaganda Fide, as sinister a name as your lot could come up with short of KGB or CIA. I was told that someone who was doing an inventory found the trunks. His research probably found the names of the original cousins and he looked for people with the same surnames in the area about Castelfranco and got in touch with them. That’s certainly what I or any other researcher would do, but this is only a guess, not a certainty.
“When I opened them, it looked as though no one had done so since the time they were first sealed, but I’m sure breaking and entering and leaving no traces is the least of the Black Arts practiced by the PF.
“Yes, tonight’s lawyer is the cousins’ lawyer. I’ll ply him with wine and grappa and try to get him to explain how they got their hands on the trunks. That failing, I might be forced to tempt him with the possibility of my charms, and where the grown man who could prove resistant to those?
“Thanks for the information about the statute of limitations, and I’m ashamed I never thought of it. Of course I knew it, but I’m afraid Avvocato Moretti quite drove all memory of the study of the law, to make no mention of good sense, out of my head. Or maybe I simply wanted to keep this job because it’s interesting and lets me be at home. Love, Cati.”
Ten minutes after she sent the mail, her telefonino rang. Her first thought was her parents, calling to see if she was free for dinner, they as ever ready to feed their last born and save her from a night of solitude.
She answered with her name.
“Ciao, Caterina,” Andrea said. “I’m out in the street. Come down when you’re finished.”
“Don’t you have a key?” she blurted.
“Yes, but I’m off duty tonight,” he said with a laugh. “Listen, there’s a bar out on Via Garibaldi, first on the left. I’ll be in there, all right?”
For a moment, she could find nothing to say, caught between surprise and embarrassment. “I’ll be two minutes. Order me a spritz, all right? With Aperol.”
“Sarà fatto,” he said and was gone.
The tactic of playing hard to get had never appealed to Caterina, not because it was not effective—her friends had used it with great success—but because it was so obvious. Above all things, she hated being kept waiting, and few things could embarrass her as much as keeping another person waiting unnecessarily. She turned off the computer, put her telefonino in her bag, went to check that the door to the storeroom was locked, locked the office, and went downstairs.
He was there, standing at the bar, that day’s Gazzettino spread open beside him as he sipped a glass of white wine. A spritz of the proper orange stood on the counter to the left of the newspaper.
He heard her come in, looked up, and smiled. He closed the paper and set it to the side of the counter. “I didn’t take you away from anything, did I?” he asked. For a moment, Caterina was puzzled by the change in him. Face and height the same, wire-rimmed glasses and carefully shined shoes. But he was wearing a light tweed jacket. A tie, of course, and a white shirt, but he was not wearing a suit. Was this an honor or an insult?
“No, not at all. I was sending an email.” She nodded toward the paper. “Anything there? I haven’t read the papers for days.”
“Same old things. Jealous husband kills wife, North Korea threatens the South, politician caught taking a bribe from a builder, woman gives birth at sixty-two.”
Andrea, obviously judging this the wrong way to begin their evening, handed her the spritz, tapped his glass against hers, and said, “Cin cin.”
“Sounds like I’m wiser to stay in the eighteenth century, then,” she said and took a sip. It was perfect, sharp and sweet at the same time, and today one of the first days of the year when a person might want to drink something cold.
“Still digging?” he asked, but idly, as if he were only being polite.
“I’ve stopped digging,” she said. His expression of more than mild surprise led her to add, “That is, digging into things that don’t concern me.”
He gave her a long, appraising glance, as if he were weighing her answer, and then said, “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard a woman say that.” His smile and the glance that preceded it took any sting out of the remark.
“Ha, ha,” she said in the manner of a cartoon character and then allowed herself to laugh, managing thus both to disapprove of the remark while still being amused by it.
“What is it you’re not digging into?” he asked and took another sip of his drink. Before she could answer, he signaled the barman and asked for some peanuts. “I didn’t have lunch today,” he said by way of explanation.
Caterina started to ask why, but he took another sip and said only, “Meeting,” then, “Tell me about your not digging.”
He sounded curious, so she told him the background to the Königsmarck Affair. His lawyer’s mind, accustomed to hearing many names dragged into a story, seemed to keep them all straight. When she moved on to the account contained in Countess von Platen’s memoirs, he stopped her to ask if this were Königsmarck’s ex-mistress, impressing Caterina with both his memory and his concentration.
Then, before she could continue, he said, “She’s an unreliable witness.” He watched her expression, then added, “I mean in legal terms, theoretical terms.”
“Why?” she asked, though it was evident. She wanted to know if he had some other, lawyerly reason so to judge her.
“The obvious one is that she had reason to dislike him, especially if he ended the affair. That means she’d be unlikely to speak in his favor.”
“To say the minimum,” she agreed. “Why else?”
“It means, as well, that she might attempt to hide the real killer.”
“For ending a love affair?” Caterina asked, unable to stifle her astonishment.
“Your surprise does you credit, Dottoressa,” he said, raising his glass to her and finishing his wine. He set it on the counter and went on, “And, yes, for ending the affair.” Before she could protest, he said, “I don’t practice criminal law, but I have colleagues who do, and they tell me things that would make your hair stand on end.”
He saw that he had her complete attention. “You’ve probably read the phrase in the paper motivi futili. My friends have told me about a lot of the trivial things that cost people their lives: a car parked in someone else’s space, the refusal to give a cigarette, a radio too loud or a television, a minor car accident.” He raised his hand toward the barman, signaling for the bill.
