Death at La Fenice

  The signs of fatigue he had seen in her when he entered had grown more pronounced during their conversation. The line of her shoulders was less straight; twin lines ran down from her nose to the corners of her mouth. ‘I have only a few more questions,’ he said.

  ‘Would you like something to drink?’ It was clear that she was being no more than formally polite.

  ‘Thank you, but no. I’ll ask these questions and then leave you.’ She nodded tiredly, almost as if she knew that these were the questions he had come to ask.

  ‘Signora, I would like to know something about your relationship with your husband.’ He watched her grow visibly more distant and self-protective. He nodded. ‘The difference in age between you was considerable.’

  ‘Yes, it was.’

  He remained silent, waiting. She finally said, stating, not admitting, and he liked her for that, ‘Helmut was thirty-seven years older than I.’ That would make her a few years older than he had judged her to be, just Paola’s age. Wellauer was just eight years younger than Brunetti’s grandfather. As strange as he found that thought, Brunetti tried to give no sign of it. What was it like for this woman, with a husband almost two generations older than she? He saw that she was shifting uncomfortably under the intensity of his gaze, and he glanced away for a moment, as if thinking about how to phrase his next question.

  ‘Did the difference in your ages create any difficulties in your marriage?’ How transparent was the cloud of euphemism that always surrounded such a union. Though polite, the question was still a voyeur’s leer, and he was embarrassed by it.

  Her silence stretched out for so long that he didn’t know if it spoke of her disgust with his curiosity or her annoyance at the artificiality with which he expressed it. Suddenly sounding very tired, she said, ‘Because of the differences in our ages, in our generations, we saw the world differently, but I married him because I was in love with him.’ Brunetti’s instinct told him that he had just heard the truth, but the same instinct also told him that he had heard only the singular. His humanity prevented him from asking about the omission.

  As a sign that he was finished, he closed the notebook and slipped it back into his pocket. ‘Thank you, Signora. It was very kind of you to see me at this time.’ He trailed off, unwilling to lapse again into euphemism or platitude. ‘Have you made arrangements for the funeral?’

  ‘Tomorrow. At ten. At San Moisè. Helmut loved the city and always hoped that he would have the privilege of being buried here.’

  The little that Brunetti had heard and read about the conductor made him doubt that the dead man would have viewed privilege as anything other than what he could bestow, but perhaps Venice had sufficient grandeur to be an exception. ‘I hope you have no objection if I attend.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘I have one more question, also a painful one. Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to harm your husband? Is there anyone with whom he recently argued, anyone he might have had reason to fear?’

  Her smile was small, but it was a smile. ‘Does that mean,’ she asked, ‘can I think of anyone who might have wanted to kill him?’

  Brunetti nodded.

  ‘His career was very long, and I’m sure he offended many people during it. Some people disliked him, surely. But I can’t think of anyone who would do this.’ Absently, she ran her finger along the arm of her chair. ‘And no one who loved music could do this.’

  He rose to his feet and extended his hand. ‘Thank you, Signora, for your time and your patience.’ She stood and took his hand. ‘Please don’t bother,’ he said, meaning that he would see himself out of the apartment. She dismissed his suggestion with a shake of her head and led him down the hall. At the door, they shook hands again, neither speaking. He left the apartment troubled by the interview, not quite sure if the reason was only the platitudes and excessive courtesies on his part or something he had been too dull to catch.

  10

  While he was inside, it had grown dark, the suddenly descending early-winter obscurity that added to the desolation that brooded over the city until the release of spring. He decided not to go back to his office, not willing to risk his anger if there was still no report from the lab and not interested in reading the German report again. As he walked, he reflected on how very little he had learned about the dead man. No, he had a great deal of information, but it was all strangely out of focus, too formal and impersonal. A genius, a homophobe, adored by the world of music, a man whom a woman half his age would love, but still a man whose substance was elusive. Brunetti knew some of the facts, but he had no idea of the reality.

  He walked on and considered the means by which he had acquired his information. He had the resources of Interpol at his command, he had the full cooperation of the German police, and he had sufficient rank to call upon the entire police system of Italy. Obviously, then, the most reliable way to get accurate information about the man was to address himself to the unfailing source of all information – gossip.

  It would be an exaggeration to say that Brunetti disliked Paola’s parents, the Count and Countess Falier, but it would be an equal exaggeration to say that he liked them. They puzzled him in much the same way that a pair of whooping cranes would puzzle someone accustomed to tossing peanuts to the pigeons in the park. They belonged to a rare and elegant species, and Brunetti, after knowing them for almost two decades, had to admit that he had mixed feelings about the inevitability of their extinction.

  Count Falier, who numbered two doges on his mother’s side, could, and did, trace his family back to the tenth century. There were crusaders perched on the limbs of his family tree, a cardinal or two, a composer of secondary importance, and the former Italian ambassador to the court of King Zog of Albania. Paola’s mother was Florentine by birth, though her family had transferred itself to the northern city shortly after that event. They claimed descent from the Medici, and in a kind of genealogical chess that had a strange fascination for people of their circle, she matched her husband’s doges with a pope and a textile millionaire, the cardinal with a cousin of Petrarch, the composer with a famous castrato (from whom, sadly, no issue), and the ambassador with Garibaldi’s banker.

  They lived in a palazzo that had belonged to the Falieri for at least three centuries, a vast rambling vault on the Grand Canal that was virtually impossible to heat in the winter and that was kept from imminent collapse only by the constant ministrations of an ever-present horde of masons, builders, plumbers, and electricians, all of whom joined Count Falier willingly in the perpetual Venetian battle against the inexorable forces of time, tide, and industrial pollution.

  Brunetti had never counted the rooms in the palazzo and had always been embarrassed to ask how many there were. Its four floors were surrounded on three sides by canals, its back propped up by a deconsecrated church. He entered it only on formal occasions: the vigil of Christmas, when they went to eat fish and exchange gifts; the name day of Count Orazio, when, for some reason, they ate pheasant and again gave gifts; and the Feast of the Redeemer, when they went to eat pasta fagioli and watch the fireworks soaring above Piazza San Marco. His children loved to visit their grandparents on these occasions, and he knew they went, either by themselves or with Paola, to visit during the year. He chose to believe that it was because of the palazzo and the possibilities of exploration it offered, but he had the niggling suspicion that they loved their grandparents and enjoyed their company, twin phenomena that baffled Brunetti utterly.

  The count was ‘in finance’. Throughout the seventeen years Brunetti had been married to Paola, this was the only description he had ever heard of her father’s profession. He was not described as being ‘a financier’, no doubt because that might have suggested something manual, like counting money or going to the office. No, the count was ‘in finance’, in much the same way that the de Beers were ‘in mines’, or von Thyssen ‘in steel’.

  The countess, for her part, was ‘in society’, which meant that s
he attended the opening nights of Italy’s four major opera houses, arranged benefit concerts for the Italian Red Cross, and gave a masked ball for four hundred people each year during Carnevale.

  Brunetti, for his part, earned slightly more than three million lire a month as a commissario of police, a sum he calculated to be only a bit more than what his father-in-law paid each month for the right to dock his boat in front of the palazzo. A decade ago, the count had attempted to persuade Brunetti to leave the police and join him in a career in banking. He continually pointed out that Brunetti ought not to spend his life in the company of tax evaders, wife beaters, pimps, thieves, and perverts. The offers had come to a sudden halt one Christmas when, goaded beyond patience, Brunetti had pointed out that although he and the count seemed to work among the same people, he at least had the consolation of being able to arrest them, whereas the count was constrained to invite them to dinner.

  So it was with some trepidation that night that Brunetti asked Paola if it would be possible for them to attend the party her parents were giving the following evening to celebrate the opening of a new exhibition of French Impressionist paintings at the Doge’s Palace.

  ‘But how did you know about the party?’ Paola asked, astonished.

  ‘I read about it in the paper.’

  ‘My parents, and you read about it in the paper?’ This seemed to offend Paola’s atavistic concept of the family.

  ‘Yes; but will you ask them?’

  ‘Guido, I usually have to threaten you just to get you to go and have Christmas dinner with them, and now you suddenly want to go to one of their parties. Why?’

  ‘Because I want to talk to the sort of people who go to that sort of thing.’

  Paola, who had been reading and grading student papers when he came in, carefully set her pen down and graced him with the look she usually reserved for brutal infelicities of language. Though they were not infrequent in the papers that rested under her pen, she was not accustomed to hearing them from her husband. She looked at him a long time, formulating one of the replies he often relished as much as he dreaded. ‘I doubt that they could refuse, given the elegance of your request,’ she said, then picked up the pen and bent back over the papers.

  It was late, and he knew that she was tired, so he busied himself at the counter, making coffee. ‘You know you won’t sleep if you drink coffee this late,’ she said, recognizing what he was doing from the sounds he made.

  He passed her on the way to the stove, ruffled her hair, and said, ‘I’ll think of something to occupy myself.’

  She grunted, struck a line through a phrase, and asked, ‘Why do you want to meet them?’

  ‘To find out as much as I can about Wellauer. I’ve been reading about what a genius he was, about his career, about his wives, but I don’t have any real idea of what sort of man he was.’

  ‘And you think the sort of people,’ she said with heavy emphasis, ‘who go to my parents’ parties would know about him?’

  ‘I want to know about his private life, and those are the people who would know the sort of thing I want to know.’

  ‘That’s the sort of thing you can read about in STOP.’ It never failed to amaze him that a person who taught English literature at the university could be so intimate with the gutter press.

  ‘Paola,’ he said. ‘I want to find out things that are true about him. STOP’s the sort of place where you read about Mother Teresa’s abortion.’

  She grunted and turned a page, leaving a trail of angry blue marks behind her.

  He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a litre of milk, splashed some into a pan, and set it on the flame to heat. From long experience, he knew that she would refuse to drink a cup of coffee, no matter how much milk he added to it, insisting that it would keep her awake. But once he had his own, she would sip at it, end up drinking most of it, then sleep like a rock. From the cabinet he pulled down a bag of sweet biscuits they bought for the children and peered into it to see how many were left.

  When the coffee was finished boiling up into the top of the double pot, he poured it into a mug, added the steaming milk, spooned in less sugar than he liked, and went to sit across from Paola. Absently, still intent on the paper in front of her, she reached out and took a sip of coffee even before he had a chance to do so. When she put it back on the table, he wrapped his fingers around it but didn’t pick it up. She turned a page, reached out for the mug, and looked up at him when he refused to release it.

  ‘Eh?’ she asked.

  ‘Not until you agree to call your mother.’

  She tried to push his hand away. When he refused to move it, she wrote a rude word on it with her pen. ‘You’ll have to wear a suit.’

  ‘I always wear a suit when I go to see your parents.’

  ‘Well, you never look like you’re happy to be wearing a suit.’

  ‘All right,’ he said, smiling. ‘I promise to wear a suit and to look happy that I’m wearing it. So will you call your mother?’

  ‘All right,’ she conceded. ‘But I meant it about the suit.’

  ‘Yes, my treasure,’ he fawned. He let go of the cup and pushed it towards her. When she had taken another sip, he extracted a biscuit from the bag and dipped it into the coffee.

  ‘You are disgusting,’ she said, then smiled.

  ‘Simple peasant,’ he agreed, shoving the biscuit into his mouth.

  Paola never talked much about what it had been like to be raised in the palazzo, with an English nanny and a flock of servants, but if he knew anything about all those years, he knew that she had never been permitted to dunk. He saw it as a great lapse in her upbringing and insisted that their children be allowed to do it. She had agreed, but with great reluctance. Neither child, he never failed to point out to her, showed grave signs of moral or physical decline as a result.

  From the way she scribbled a hasty comment across the bottom of a page, he knew she was about to come to the end of her patience for that night.

  ‘I’m so tired of their blunt minds, Guido,’ she said, capping the pen and tossing it down on the table. ‘I’d almost rather deal with murderers. At least they can be punished.’

  The coffee was finished, or he would have pushed it towards her. Instead he got up and took a bottle of grappa from the cabinet. It was the only comfort he could think of at the moment.

  ‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘First coffee, and now grappa. We’ll never get to sleep.’

  ‘Shall we try keeping each other awake?’ he asked. She glowed.

  11

  The following morning, he arrived at the Questura at eight, carrying with him the day’s newspapers, which he read through quickly. There was little new information; most of it had been said the day before. The summaries of Wellauer’s career were longer, the cries that the killer be brought to justice more strident, but there was nothing that Brunetti didn’t already know.

  The lab report was on his desk. The only fingerprints on the cup, in which traces of potassium cyanide were found, were Wellauer’s. In the dressing room, there were scores of other prints, far too many to be checked. He decided against having prints taken. Since the only ones on the cup were Wellauer’s, there seemed little sense in identifying all those found in the room.

  Along with the fingerprint report was a list of articles found in the dressing room. He remembered having seen most of them: the score of Traviata, each page crowded with notations in the angular Gothic script of the conductor; a comb, a wallet, change; the clothes he had been wearing and those in the closet; a handkerchief and a package of mints. There had also been a Rolex Oyster, a pen, and a small address book.

  The officers who had gone to take a look at the conductor’s home – one could hardly call it a search – had written a report, but since they had no idea of what they were supposed to be looking for, Brunetti had little hope that their report would reveal anything of interest or importance. Nevertheless, he picked it up and read through it carefully.

  The M
aestro had had a remarkably complete wardrobe for a man who spent only a few weeks in the city each year. He marvelled at the precision of the notes made about the clothing: ‘Black double-vent cashmere jacket (Duca D’Aosta); cobalt and muted-umber sweater, size 52 (Missoni).’ For a moment, he wondered if he had lost his bearings and found himself in the Valentino boutique rather than in police headquarters. He flipped to the end and found, as he had feared, the signatures of Alvise and Riverre, the two officers who had written, a year ago, about a body that had been pulled out of the sea at the Lido: ‘Appears to have died of suffocation.’

  He turned back to the report. The signora, it appeared, did not share her late husband’s interest in clothing. Nor, from what he read, did it seem that Alvise and Riverre thought highly of her taste. ‘Varese boots, only one pair. Black woolen coat, no label.’ They had, however, apparently been impressed by the library, which they described as ‘extensive, in three languages and what appears to be Hungarian’.

  He turned another page. There were two guest rooms in the apartment, each with a separate bath. Fresh towels, empty closets, Christian Dior soap.

  There was no evidence of Signora Wellauer’s daughter; nothing in the report suggested the presence in the house of the third member of the family. Neither of the two extra rooms held a teenager’s clothes or books or possessions of any kind. Knowing how he was forever finding proof of his own daughter’s existence under foot, Brunetti found this strange. Her mother had explained that she was going to school in Munich. But it was a remarkable child who managed to take all of her clutter along with her.

  There was a description of the Belgian maid’s room, which the two officers appeared to have found too simply furnished, and of the maid, whom they had found subdued but helpful. The last room described was the Maestro’s office, where they had found ‘documents’. Some, it seems, had been brought back and looked over by the German translator, who explained, in a page added to the report, that the bulk of them pertained to business and contracts. A datebook had been inspected and judged unimportant.