by Donna Leon
‘And have you written that review?’
‘Yes. It appeared this morning.’
‘I’m sorry, Professor, but I haven’t had time to read it. Could you tell me if it was a favorable review?’
‘On the whole, yes. The singers are good, and Petrelli is superb. She’s probably the only Verdi soprano singing today, the only real one, that is. The tenor is less good, but he’s still very young, and I think the voice will mature.’
‘And the conductor?’
‘As I said in my review, anyone coming in new under these circumstances has an especially difficult task. It’s not an easy thing to lead an orchestra that has been rehearsed by someone else.’
‘Yes, I can understand that.’
‘But considering all the difficulties he encountered,’ continued the professor, ‘he did remarkably well. He’s a very talented young man, and he seems to have a special feeling for Verdi.’
‘And what about Maestro Wellauer?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘If you had written a review of the opening night, the performance Wellauer began, what would you have said?’
‘About the performance as a whole or about the Maestro?’
‘Either. Both.’
It was clear that the question confused the professor. ‘I’m not sure how to answer that. The Maestro’s death made it all unnecessary.’
‘But if you had written it, what would you have said about his conducting?’
The professor tilted his chair back and locked his hands behind his head, just the way Brunetti remembered his own professors doing. He sat like that for a while, pondering the question, then allowed his chair to slam hack down onto the floor. ‘I’m afraid the review would have been a different one.’
‘In what way Professor?’
‘For the singers, much the same. Signora Petrelli is always magnificent. The tenor sang well, as I said, and will certainly grow better with more experience on the stage. The night of the opening, they sang much the same way, but the result was different.’ Seeing Brunetti’s confusion, he attempted to explain. ‘You see, I have so many years of his conducting to erase. It was difficult to listen to the music that night without having all those years of genius interfere with what I was actually hearing.
‘Let me try to explain it this way. During a performance, it is the conductor who keeps things together, sees that the singers maintain the right tempi, that the orchestra supports them, that the entrances are on time, that neither is allowed to get away from the other. And he must also see that the orchestra’s playing doesn’t get too loud, that the crescendi build and are dramatic but, at the same time, don’t drown out the singers. When a conductor hears this happening, he can quiet them with a flick of his hand or a finger to the mouth.’ To illustrate, the musician demonstrated the gestures that Brunetti had seen performed during many concerts and operas.
‘And he must, at every moment, be in charge of everything: chorus, singers, orchestra, keeping them in balance perfectly. If he doesn’t do this, then the whole thing falls apart, and all anyone hears is the separate parts, not the whole opera as a unit.’
‘And that night, the night the Maestro died?’
‘The central control wasn’t there. There were times when the orchestra grew so loud that I couldn’t hear the singers, and I’m sure they must have had trouble hearing one another. There were other times when the orchestra played too fast and the singers had to struggle to keep up with them. Or the opposite.’
‘Was anyone else in the theater aware of this, Professor?’
Rezzonico raised his eyebrows and snorted in disgust. ‘Commissario, I don’t know how familiar you are with the Venetian audience, but the most complimentary thing that can be said of them is that they are dogs. They don’t go to the theater to listen to music or hear beautiful singing; they go to wear their new clothes and be seen in them by their friends, and those friends are there for the same reasons. You could bring the town band from the smallest town in Sicily and put them in the orchestra pit and have them play, and no one in the audience would notice the difference. If the costumes are lavish and the scenery is elaborate, then we have a success. If the opera is modern or the singers aren’t Italian, then we are sure to have a failure.’ The professor realized that this was turning into a speech, so he lowered his voice and added, ‘But to answer your question: no, I doubt that very many people in the theater realized what was happening.’
‘The other critics?’
The professor snorted again. ‘Aside from Narciso at La Repubblica, there isn’t a musician among them. Some simply go to the rehearsals and then write their reviews. Some can’t even follow a score. No, there’s no judgment there.’
‘What do you think the cause of Maestro Wellauer’s failure, if that’s the proper term, might have been?’
‘Anything. A bad night. He was an old man, after all. He could have been upset, perhaps by something that happened before the performance. Or, ridiculous as this sounds, it could have been nothing more than indigestion. But whatever it was, he was not in control of the music that night. It got away from him; the orchestra did what they wanted, and the singers tried to stay with them. But there was very little sense of command from him.’
‘Anything else, Professor?’
‘Do you mean about the music?’
‘That, or anything else.’
Rezzonico considered for a moment, this time lacing his fingers together on his lap, and finally said, ‘This will perhaps sound strange. And it sounds strange to me because I don’t know why I say it or believe it. But I think he knew.’
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘Wellauer. I think he knew.’
‘About the music? About what was going on?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why do you say that, Professor?’
‘It was after the scene in the second act where Germont pleads with Violetta.’ He looked at Brunetti to see if he knew the plot of the opera. Brunetti nodded, and the professor continued. ‘It’s a scene that always gets a great deal of applause, especially if the singers are as good as Dardi and Petrelli. They were, and so there was long applause. During the applause, I watched the Maestro. He set his baton down on the podium, and I had the oddest sensation that he was getting ready to leave, simply step down from the podium and walk away. Either I saw it or I invented it, but he seemed just about to be making that step - when the applause stopped and the first violins raised their bows. He saw them, nodded to them, and picked up the baton. And the opera continued, but I still have the peculiar feeling that if he hadn’t seen their motion, he would simply have walked away from there.’
‘Did anyone else notice this?’
‘I don’t know. No one I’ve spoken to has wanted to say much about the performance, and what little they’ve said has been very guarded. I was sitting in one of the front tier of boxes, off on the left, so I had a clear view of him. I suppose everyone else was watching the singers. Later, when I heard the announcement that he couldn’t continue, I thought he’d had an attack of some sort. But not that he had been killed.’
‘What have these other people said?’
‘As I told you, they have been, well, almost cautious, not wanting to say anything against him, now that he’s dead. But a few of the people here have said much the same thing, that the performance was disappointing. Nothing more than that.’
‘I read your article about his career, Professor. You spoke very highly of him.’
‘He was one of the great musicians of the century. A genius.’
‘You make no mention of that last performance in your article, Professor.’
‘You don’t condemn a man for one bad night, Commissario, especially not when the total career has been so great.’
‘Yes, I know; not for one bad night and not for one bad thing.’
‘Precisely,’ agreed the professor, and he turned his attention to two young women who came into the room, each carrying a
thick musical score. ‘But if you will excuse me, Commissario, my students are beginning to arrive, and my class is about to begin.’
‘Of course, Professor,’ Brunetti said, getting to his feet and extending his hand. ‘Thank you very much for both your time and your help.’
The other man muttered something in return, but Brunetti could tell that his attention had clearly shifted to his students. He left the room and went down the broad steps, out into Campo San Stefano.
It was a campo he walked through often, and he had come to know not only the people who worked there, in the bars and shops, but even the dogs that walked or played there. Lazing in the pale sunlight was a pink-and-white bulldog whose lack of muzzle always made Brunetti uneasy. Then there was that odd Chinese thing that had grown from what looked like a pile of furred tripe into a creature of surpassing ugliness. Last, lolling in front of the ceramics store, he saw the black mongrel that remained so motionless all day that many people had come to believe he was part of the merchandise.
He decided to have a coffee at Café Paolin. Tables were still set up outside, but the only people at them today were foreigners, desperately trying to convince themselves that it was warm enough to have a cappuccino at a table in the open air. Sensible people went inside.
He exchanged hellos with the barman, who had tact enough not to ask him if there was any news in the case. In a city where there were no secrets of any sort, people had developed a capacity to avoid asking direct questions or remarking on anything other than the casual. He knew that no matter how long the case dragged on, none of the people with whom he interacted at this level—barman, newsdealer, bank teller—would ever say a word about it to him.
After downing an espresso, he felt restless, not at all hungry for the lunch that everyone around him seemed to be hurrying toward. He called his office, to be told that Signore Padovani had called and left a name and address for him. No message, just the name: Clemenza Santina; and the address: Corte Mosca, Giudecca.
* * * *
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The island of the Giudecca was a part of Venice Brunetti seldom visited. Visible from Piazza San Marco, visible, in fact, from the entire back flank of the island, in places no more than a hundred meters away, it nevertheless lived in strange isolation from the rest of the city. The grisly stories that appeared in the paper with embarrassing frequency, of children being bitten by rats or people found dead of overdoses, always seemed to take place on the Giudecca. Even the presence of a dethroned monarch and a fading movie star of the fifties couldn’t redeem it in the popular consciousness as a sinister, backward place where nasty things happened.
Brunetti, along with a large part of the city, usually went there in July, during the Feast of the Redeemer, which celebrated the cessation of the plague of 1576. For two days, a pontoon bridge joined the Giudecca with the main island, allowing the faithful to walk across the water to the Church of the Redeemer, there to give thanks for yet another instance of the divine intervention that seemed so frequently to have saved or spared the city.
As the number 8 boat slapped its way across the choppy waters, he stood on the deck and looked off in the distance at the industrial inferno of Marghera, where smokestacks tossed up fluffy clouds of smoke that would gradually sneak across the laguna to dine on Venice’s white Istrian marble. He wondered what divine intercession could save the city from the oil slick, this modern plague that covered the waters of the laguna and had already destroyed millions of the crabs that had crawled through the nightmares of his childhood. What Redeemer could come and save the city from the pall of greenish smoke that was slowly turning marble to meringue? A man of limited faith, he could imagine no salvation, either divine or human.
He got off at the Zittele stop, turned to the left, and walked along the water, searching for the entrance to Corte Mosca. Back across the water lay the city, glittering in the weak winter sunlight. He passed the church, closed now for God’s afternoon siesta, and saw, just beyond it, the entrance to the courtyard. Narrow and low, the heavily shadowed passageway stank of cat.
At the end of the stone tunnel, he found himself at the edge of a rank garden that grew rampant at the center of the inner courtyard. To one side, something that might have been a cat was gnawing at a feathered thing. At the sound of his footsteps, the cat backed under a rosebush, pulling with it the thing it had been eating. On the opposite side of the courtyard stood a warped wooden door. He went across, occasionally freeing himself from a clinging thorn, to knock, then pound, on it.
After minutes, the door was pulled back a handsbreadth, and two eyes looked out at him. He explained that he was looking for Signora Santina. The eyes studied him, squinting in confusion, then retreated a bit into the complete darkness of the house. In deference to the infirmities of age, he repeated his question, this time almost shouting. At that, a small hole opened up under the two eyes, and a man’s voice told him that the signora lived over there, at the opposite side of the courtyard.
Brunetti turned and looked back across the garden. Near the tunnel entrance, but almost hidden by a pile of decomposing grass and branches, was another low door. As he turned around to express his thanks, the door slammed shut in his face. Careful, he crossed the garden and knocked on the other door.
He had to wait even longer this time. When the door opened, he saw a pair of eyes at the same height as the others, and he wondered if this creature had somehow managed to run from one side of the building to the other. But closer examination showed him that these eyes were lighter and the surrounding face was clearly that of a woman, though it was as scored by wrinkles and pinched by cold as the first one had been.
‘Yes?’ she asked, looking up at him. She was a little pile of a woman, wrapped tight in layers of sweaters and scarves. From the bottom of the lowest skirt hung what appeared to be the hem of a flannel nightgown. She wore a pair of thick woolen slippers like those his grandmother had worn. Over everything, a man’s overcoat, unbuttoned, hung open.
‘Signora Santina?’
‘What do you want?’ The voice was high and sharp with age, making it difficult for him to believe that it belonged to one of the great singers of the prewar era. In that voice, too, he heard all the suspicion of authority that was instinctive to Italians, especially the old. That suspicion had taught him to delay as long as possible telling anyone who he was.
‘Signora,’ he said, leaning forward and speaking in a clear, loud voice, ‘I’d like to speak to you about Maestro Helmut Wellauer.’
Her face registered nothing that indicated she had heard about his death. ‘You don’t have lo shout. I’m not deaf. What are you, a journalist? Like that other one?’
‘No, Signora. I’m not. But I would like to speak to you about the Maestro.’ He spoke carefully now, intent upon his effect. ‘I know that you sang with him. In the days of your glory.’ At this word, her eyes shot up to his, and some trace of softness slipped into them.
She studied him, looking for the musician behind the conservative blue tie. ‘Yes, I sang with him. But that was long ago.’
‘Yes, Signora, I know that. But I would be honored if you would talk about your career.’
‘So long as it’s my career with him, you mean?’ He saw the very instant when she realized who, or what, he was.
‘You’re police, aren’t you?’ she asked, as though the news had come to her as a smell, not an idea. She pulled the overcoat closed in front of her, crossing her arms over her chest.
‘Yes, Signora, I am, but I’ve always been an admirer of yours.’
‘Then why haven’t I seen you here before? Liar.’ She said it in description, not in anger. ‘But I’ll talk to you. If I don’t, you’ll come back with papers.’ She turned abruptly and stepped back into darkness. ‘Come in, come in. I can’t afford to heat the whole courtyard.’
He went in behind her and was immediately assailed by cold and damp. He didn’t know if it was the effect of being so suddenly cut off from
the sun, but the apartment seemed far colder than the open courtyard had been. She brushed past him and pushed the door closed, cutting off entirely the light and the memory of warmth. With her foot, she pushed a thick roll of flannel into place against the narrow opening under the door. Then she locked the door, slipping its bolts home. With a policeman inside, she double-locked the door.
‘This way,’ she muttered, and set off down a long corridor. Brunetti was forced to wait until his eyes adjusted to the dimness before he followed her along the dank passageway and into a small, dark kitchen, in the middle of which was an antique kerosene heater. The lowest of flames flickered at its base; a heavy armchair, as layered with blankets as the old woman was with sweaters, was pulled up close to it.
‘I suppose you want coffee,’ she said as she closed the door to the kitchen, again kicking rolled rags against the crack beneath the door.