Death at La Fenice cgb-1

by Donna Leon

  ‘That she doesn’t like Traviata,’ Brunetti said. ‘I remarked that it was strange to find her here, reading, while you were singing, and she explained that it wasn’t one of her favorite operas.’

  ‘It’s also strange to find you here Commissario. And I know it’s not one of her favorite operas.’ If she didn’t believe him, she gave no sign of it. He had stood when she came in. She walked in front of him, took one of the glasses that stood on the counter, filled it with mineral water, and drank it down in four long swallows. She filled it again and drank off half. ‘It’s like being in a sauna, with all those lights.’ She finished the water and set the glass down. ‘What are you two talking about?’

  ‘He told you, Flavia. Traviata.’

  ‘That’s a lie,’ the singer snapped. ‘But I don’t have time to talk about it.’ Turning to Brunetti, she said, voice tight with anger and high in the manner of singers’ voices after they have sung, ‘If you’d be so kind as to get out of my dressing room, I’d like to change into my costume for the next act.’

  ‘Certainly, Signora,’ he said, all politeness and apology. Nodding to Brett, who gave him a brief smile in return but stayed in her chair, he left the room quickly. Outside, he paused and listened, ear close to the door, not at all ashamed of what he was doing. But whatever they had to say to each other they said in low voices.

  The woman in the blue smock appeared at the top of the steps. Brunetti pulled himself away from the door and walked toward her. Explaining that he had finished with the dressing room, he handed her the key, smiled, thanked her, and went back down the stairs to the stage area, where he found a chaos that amazed him. Gowned figures slumped against the walls, smoking and laughing. Men in tuxedos talked about soccer. And stagehands roamed back and forth, carrying paper ferns and trays with champagne glasses glued solidly to the bottom.

  Down the short corridor to the right was the door to the conductor’s dressing room, closed now behind the new conductor. Brunetti stood at the end of the corridor for at least ten minutes, and no one bothered to ask him who he was or what he was doing there. Finally, a bell sounded and a bearded man in a jacket and tie went from group to group backstage, pointing in various directions and sending them off to whatever it was they were supposed to do.

  The conductor left the dressing room, closed the door behind him, and walked past Brunetti without paying any attention to him. As soon as he was gone, Brunetti went casually down the corridor and into the room. No one saw him go in or, if they saw him, bothered to ask him what he was doing there.

  The room was much as it had been the other night, save that a small cup and saucer were sitting on the table, not lying on the floor. He stayed only a moment, then left. His departure was as little noticed as his entrance, and this only four days after a man had died in that room.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER SEVENTEN

  By the time he got home, it was too late to take Paola and the children to dinner, as he had promised he would do that evening; besides, he could smell the mingled odors of garlic and sage as he climbed the stairs.

  As he walked into the apartment, he had a moment of total disorientation, for the voice of Flavia Petrelli, which voice he had last heard singing Violetta twenty minutes before, was performing the end of the second-act in his living room. He took two sudden and completely involuntary steps forward, until he remembered that the performance was being broadcast live that evening. Paola wasn’t much of an opera fan and was probably watching to figure out which of the singers was a murderer. In which curiosity, he was sure, she was joined by millions of households all over Italy.

  From the living room, he heard the voice of his daughter, Chiara, call out, ‘Papà’s home,’ over which Violetta begged Alfredo to leave her forever.

  He went into the living room just as the tenor threw a fistful of paper money into Flavia Petrelli’s face. She sank to the floor, gracefully, in tears, Alfredo’s father hurried across the stage to reprove him, and Chiara asked, ‘Why did he do that, Papà? I thought he loved her.’ She glanced up at him from what looked like math homework and, receiving no answer, repeated the question. ‘Why’d he do that?’

  ‘He thought she was going out with another man,’ was the best Brunetti could come up with by way of explanation.

  ‘What difference would that make? It’s not like they’re married or anything.’

  ‘Ciao, Guido,’ Paola called from the kitchen.

  ‘Well,’ Chiara persisted. ‘Why is he so angry?’

  Brunetti walked in front of her and lowered the volume on the television, wondering what it was that rendered all teenagers deaf. He could tell from the way she held her pencil in front of her and wiggled it in the air that she had no intention of letting this one go. He decided to compromise. ‘They were living together, weren’t they?’

  ‘Yes; so what?’

  ‘Well, when people live together, they usually don’t go out with other people.’

  ‘But she wasn’t going out with anyone. She did all that just to make him think she was.’

  ‘I guess he believed her, and he got jealous.’

  ‘He doesn’t have any reason to be jealous. She really loves him. Anyone can see that. He’s a jerk. Besides, it’s her money, isn’t it?’

  ‘Hmm,’ he temporized, trying to remember the plot of Traviata.

  ‘Why didn’t he go out and get a job? As long as she’s supporting him, then she’s got the right to do whatever she wants.’ The audience thundered its applause.

  ‘It’s not always like that, angel’

  ‘Well, sometimes it is, isn’t it, Papà? Why not? Most of my friends, if their mothers don’t work, like Mamma does, then their fathers always decide everything—where they’ll go on vacation, everything. And some of them even have lovers.’ This last was delivered weakly, more as a question than as a statement. ‘And they get to do it because they earn the money, so they get to tell everyone what they have to do.’ Not even Paola, he believed, could so accurately have summed up the capitalist system. It was, in fact, his wife’s voice he heard in Chiara’s speech.

  ‘It’s not as easy as that, sweetheart.’ He pulled at his tie. ‘Chiara, would you be an angel of grace and mercy and go into the kitchen and get your poor old father a glass of wine?’

  ‘Sure.’ She tossed down her pencil, more than willing to abandon the issue. ‘White or red?’

  ‘See if there’s some Prosecco. If not, bring me whatever you think I’d like.’ In family jargon, this translated to whatever wine she wanted to have a taste of.

  He lowered himself into the sofa and kicked off his shoes, propping his feet on the low table. He listened as an announcer filled the audience in, rather unnecessarily, on the events of the last few days. The man’s eager, ghoulish tone made it sound like something from an opera, of the more bloody verismo repertory.

  Chiara came back into the room. She was tall, utterly lacking in physical grace. From two rooms away, he could tell when it was Chiara’s turn to do the dishes by the crashes and bangs that filled the house. But she was pretty, would perhaps become beautiful, with wide-spaced eyes and a soft down just beneath her ears that melted his heart with tenderness each time he saw it caught in a revealing light.

  ‘Fragolino,’ she said from behind him, and passed the glass to him, managing to spill only a drop, and that on the floor. ‘Can I have a sip? Mamma didn’t want to open it. She said there was just one more bottle after this, but I said you were very tired, so she said it was all right.’ Even before he could consent, she took the glass back and sipped from it. ‘How can a wine smell like strawberries, Papà?’ Why was it that, when children loved you, you knew everything, and when they were angry with you, you knew nothing?

  ‘It’s the grape. It smells like strawberries, so the wine does too.’ He smelled, then tasted, the truth of this. ‘You doing your homework?’

  ‘Yes, mathematics,’ she said, managing to put into the word an enthusiasm that confused him utter
ly. This, he remembered, was the child who explained his bank statements to him every three months and who was going to try to complete his tax form for him this May.

  ‘What sort of mathematics?’ he asked with feigned interest.

  ‘Oh, you wouldn’t understand, Papà.’ Then, with lightning speed, ‘When are you going to get me a computer?’

  ‘When I win the lottery.’ He had reason to believe that his father-in-law was going to give her a laptop computer for Christmas, and he disliked the fact that he disliked that fact.

  ‘Oh, Papà, you always say that.’ She sat down opposite him, plunked her feet onto the table between them, and placed them, sole to sole, against his. She gave a soft push with one foot. ‘Maria Rinaldi has one, and so does Fabrizio, and I’ll never be any good in school, not really good, until I have one.’

  ‘It looks like you’re doing fine with a pencil.’

  ‘Sure I can do it, but it takes me forever.’

  ‘Isn’t it better for your brain if you exercise it, rather than letting the machine do it?’

  ‘That’s dumb, Papà. The brain’s not a muscle. We learned that in biology. Besides, you don’t walk across the city to get information if you can use the phone to get it for you.’ He pushed back with his foot, but he didn’t answer. ‘Well, you don’t, do you, Papà?’

  ‘What would you do with all the time you saved if you got one?’

  ‘I’d do more complicated problems. It doesn’t do it for me, Papà, honest. It just does it faster. That’s all it is, a machine that adds and subtracts a million times faster than we can.’

  ‘Do you have any idea of how much those things cost?’

  ‘Sure; the little Toshiba I want costs two million.’

  Luckily, Paola came into the room then, or he would have had to tell Chiara just how much chance she had of getting a computer from him. Because that might lead her to mention her grandfather, he was doubly glad to see Paola. She carried the bottle of Fragolino and another glass. At the same time, the chattering voices on the television faded away and were replaced by the prelude to the third act.

  Paola set down the bottle and sat on the arm of the sofa, next to him. On the screen, the curtain rose to display a barren room. It was difficult to recognize Flavia Petrelli, whom he had seen in the full power of her beauty little more than an hour before, in the frail woman slumped under the shawl who lay on the divan, one hand fallen weakly to the floor below her. She looked more like Signora Santina than she did a famous courtesan. The dark circles under her eyes, the misery of her drawn mouth, spoke convincingly of sickness and despair. Even her voice, when she asked Annina to give what little money she had to the poor, was weak, charged with pain and loss.

  ‘She’s very good,’ Paola said. Brunetti shushed her. They watched.

  ‘And he’s dumb,’ Chiara added as Alfredo swept into the room and grabbed her up in his arms.

  ‘Shhh,’ they both hissed at her. She returned to her figures, muttering, for her parents to hear.

  He watched Petrelli’s face transform itself with the ecstasy of reunion, watched it flush with real joy. Together, they planned a future they would never have, and her voice changed; he heard it returning to strength and clarity.

  Her joy pulled her to her feet, raised her hands toward heaven. ‘I feel myself reborn,’ she cried, whereupon, this being opera, she promptly collapsed and died.

  ‘I still think he’s a jerk,’ Chiara insisted over Alfredo’s lamentation and the wild applause of the audience. ‘Even if she lived, how would they support themselves? Is she supposed to go back to what she was doing before she met him?’ Brunetti wanted to know nothing of how much his daughter might understand about that sort of thing. Having voiced her opinion, Chiara scribbled a long row of numbers at the bottom of her paper, slipped the paper into her math book, and flipped the book shut.

  ‘I had no idea she was that good,’ Paola said respectfully, completely ignoring her daughter’s comments. ‘What’s she like?’ The question was typical of her. The woman’s involvement in a murder case had not been enough to interest Paola in her, not until she had seen the quality of her performance.

  ‘She’s just a singer,’ he said dismissively.

  ‘Yes, and Reagan was just an actor,’ Paola said. ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘She’s arrogant, afraid of losing her children, and wears brown a lot.’

  ‘Let’s eat,’ Chiara said. ‘I’m starved.’

  ‘Then go and set the table, and we’ll be there in a minute.’

  Chiara pushed herself up from her chair with every show of reluctance and went toward the kitchen, but not before saying, ‘And now I suppose you’ll make Papà tell you what she’s really like, and I’ll miss all the good parts, just like always.’ One of the great crosses of Chiara’s life was the fact that she could never get information from her father to transform into the coin of schoolyard popularity.

  ‘I wonder,’ Paola said, pouring wine into both their glasses, ‘how she learned to act like that. I had an aunt who died of TB years ago, when I was a little girl, and I can still remember the way she looked, the way she was always moving her hands nervously, just the way she did onstage, always shifting them around in her lap and grabbing one with the other.’ Then, with characteristic abruptness, ‘Do you think she did it?’

  He shrugged. ‘She might have. Everyone’s busy trying to give me the idea that she’s the Latin fireball, all passion, knife in the ribs the instant the offending word is spoken. But you’ve just seen how well she can act, so there’s nothing to say she isn’t cold and calculating and entirely capable of having done it the way it was done. And she’s intelligent, I think.’

  ‘What about her friend?’

  ‘The American?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know about her. She told me Petrelli went to see him after the first act, but only to argue with him.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘He’d been threatening to tell her ex-husband about the affair with Brett.’

  If Paola was surprised at his use of the first name, she gave no sign of it.

  ‘Are there children?’

  ‘Yes. Two.’

  ‘Then it’s a serious threat. But what about her, about Brett, as you call her. Could she have done it?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. The affair isn’t that fundamental to her life. Or she won’t let it be. No, it’s not likely.’

  ‘You still didn’t answer me about Petrelli.’

  ‘Come on, Paola, you know I’m always wrong when I try to work by intuition, when I suspect too much or I suspect too soon. I don’t know about her. The only thing I know is that this has got to have something to do with his past.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, agreeing to leave it. ‘Let’s eat. I have chicken, and artichokes, and a bottle of Soave.’

  ‘God be praised,’ he said, getting to his feet and pulling her up from the arm of the chair. Together, they went into the kitchen.

  As usual, the minute before dinner was on the table and they were ready to eat, Raffaele, Brunetti’s firstborn, son, and heir appeared from his room. He was fifteen, tall for his age, and took after Brunetti in appearance and gesture. In everything else, he took after no one in the family and would certainly have denied the possibility that his behavior resembled that of anyone, living or dead. He had discovered, by himself, that the world is corrupt and the system unjust, and that men in power were interested in that and that alone. Because he was the first person ever to have made this discovery with such force and purity, he insisted upon showing his ample contempt for all those not yet graced with the clarity of his vision. This included, of course, his family, with the possible exception of Chiara, whom he excused from social guilt because of her youth and because she could be counted on to give him half of her allowance. His grandfather, it seemed, had also somehow managed to slip through the eye of the needle, no one understood how.

  He attended the classical liceo, w
hich was supposed to prepare him for the university, but he had done badly for the last year and had recently begun to talk of not going anymore, since ‘education is just another part of the system by which the workers are oppressed.’ Nor, should he quit school, had he any intention of finding a job, as that would make him subject to ‘the system that oppresses the workers.’ Hence, to avoid oppressing, he would refuse to get an education, and to avoid being oppressed, he would refuse to get a job. Brunetti found the simplicity of Raffaele’s reasoning absolutely Jesuitical.