Death at La Fenice cgb-1

by Donna Leon

  ‘She was eleven when we were married. They got on well. After she learned who he was—I think her classmates must have told her—she seemed a little frightened of him, but that passed. Helmut was very good with children.’ She stopped and grimaced at the grotesque irony of what she had just said.

  And then. And then. And then,’ she repeated, unable to free herself from the grooves of memory. ‘This summer, I had to go back to Budapest. To see my mother, who isn’t well. Helmut said that everything would be all right while I was gone. I took a cab, and I went to the airport. But the airport was closed. I don’t remember why. A strike. Or trouble with the customs officers.’ She looked up then. ‘It really doesn’t matter why it was closed, does it?’

  ‘No, Signora.’

  ‘There was a long delay, more than an hour, and then we were told that there would be no flights until the following morning. So I took another cab and went home. It wasn’t very late, not even midnight, so I didn’t bother to call and tell him I was coming back. I went home and let myself into the house. There were no lights on, so I went upstairs. Alex has always been a restless sleeper, so I went to her room to check on her. To check on her.’ She looked up at him, expressionless.

  ‘When I got to the top of the stairs, I could hear her. I thought she was having a nightmare. It wasn’t a scream, just a noise. Like an animal. Just a noise. Only that. And I went to her room. He was there. With her.

  ‘This is the strange part,’ she said quite calmly, as though she were sharing a puzzle with him, asking him what he thought of it. ‘I don’t remember what happened. No, I know that he left, but I don’t remember what I said to him or he said to me. I stayed with Alex that night.

  ‘Later, days later, he told me that Alex had had a nightmare.’ She laughed in disgust and disbelief. ‘That’s all he said. We never talked about it. I sent Alex to her grandparents. To school there. And we never talked about it. Oh, how modern we were, how civilized. Of course, we stopped sleeping together, and stopped being with each other. And Alex was gone.’

  ‘Do her grandparents know what happened?’

  A quick shake of her head. ‘No; I told them what I told everyone, that I didn’t want her schooling interrupted when we came to Venice.’

  ‘When did you decide? To do what you did?’ Brunetti asked.

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. One day, the idea was simply there. The only thing that was really important to him, the only thing he really loved, was his music, so I decided that was the thing I’d take away from him. At the time, it seemed fair.’

  ‘And does it now?’

  She considered this for a long time before she answered. ‘Yes, it still does seem fair. Everything that’s happened seems fair. But that’s not the point, is it?’

  To him, there was no point in any of it. No point, and no message, and no lesson. It was no more than human evil and the terrible waste that comes from it.

  Her voice was suddenly tired. ‘What happens now?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he answered honestly. ‘Do you have any idea where he got the cyanide?’

  She shrugged her shoulders, as though she thought the question irrelevant. ‘It could have been anywhere,’ she said. ‘He has a friend who is a chemist, or it could have been one of his friends from the old days.’ When she saw Brunetti’s puzzled glance, she explained. ‘The war. He made a lot of powerful friends then, and many of them are important men now.’

  ‘Then the rumors about him are true?’

  ‘I don’t know. Before we were married, he said they were all lies, and I believed him. I don’t believe it anymore.’ She said this bitterly, then forced herself back to her original explanation. ‘I don’t know where he got it, but I know it would have been no problem for him.’ Her sad smile returned. ‘I had access to it, of course. He knew that.’

  ‘Access? How?’

  ‘We didn’t come down here together. We didn’t want to travel together. I stopped in Heidelberg for two days on the way down, to see my former husband.’ Who, Brunetti recalled, taught pharmacology.

  ‘Did the Maestro know that you were there?’

  She nodded. ‘My first husband and I remained friends, and we hold property together.’

  ‘Did you tell him what happened?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said, raising her voice for the first time.

  ‘Where did you see him?’

  ‘At the university. I met him at his laboratory. He’s working on a new drug to minimize the effects of Parkinson’s. He showed me through the laboratory, and then we went to lunch together.’

  ‘Did the Maestro know this?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I suppose I might have told him. I probably did. It was very difficult for us to find anything to talk about. This was a neutral topic, so we were glad to have it to talk about.’

  ‘Did you and the Maestro ever talk about what happened?’

  She couldn’t bring herself to ask what he meant; she knew. ‘No.’

  ‘Did you ever talk about the future? What you were going to do?’

  ‘No, not directly.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘One day, when I was coming in and he was going to rehearsal, he said, “Just wait until after Traviata.” I thought he meant that we would be able to decide what to do then. But I had already decided to leave him. I’d written to two hospitals, one in Budapest and one in Augsburg, and I’d talked to my former husband about his help in finding me a position in a hospital.’

  Either way, Brunetti realized, she was trapped. There was evidence that she had been planning a separate future, even before he died. And now she was a widow, and enormously rich. And even if the information about her daughter was made public, there was evidence that she had stopped on the way to Venice to talk to the girl’s father, a man who surely had access to the poison that had killed the Maestro.

  No Italian judge would convict a woman for what she had done, not if she explained about her daughter. Given the evidence Brunetti had—Signora Santina’s testimony about her sister, the interviews with the doctors, even the suicide of his second wife at a time when their daughter was twelve years old—there was no court in Italy that would bring a charge of murder against her. But all of this would hang upon the testimony of the girl, upon the tall girl Alex, in love with horses and still a child.

  Brunetti knew that this woman would never let that testimony take place, regardless of the consequences if she did not. Further, he knew that he would never allow it to happen, either.

  And without the testimony of the daughter? There was the obvious coolness between them, her easy access to the poison, her presence in the dressing room that night, wildly out of keeping with what they had always done. All that had the appearance of truth. If she was charged only with having given him injections that she knew would destroy his hearing, she would be freed of the accusation of murder, but this scenario would work only if her daughter’s name was mentioned. He knew that was impossible.

  ‘Before he died, before any of this ever happened,’ he began, leaving it to her to interpret what he meant by ‘this,’ ‘did your husband ever speak about his age; was he afraid of a physical decline?’

  She paused for a while before she answered him, puzzled by the irrelevance of his question. ‘Yes, we talked about it. Not often, but once or twice. Once, when we’d all had more than enough to drink, we talked about it with Erich and Hedwig.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘It was Erich, if I remember correctly. He said that in the future, if anything should ever stop him from working—not just stop him from doing surgery but make him be, well, not himself anymore, not able to be a doctor in any way—he said he was a doctor and knew how to take care of that himself.

  ‘It was very late, and we were all very tired, so perhaps that made the conversation more serious than it might have been. He said that, and then Helmut said that he understood him perfectly and would do the same thing.’


  ‘Would Dr. Steinbrunner remember this conversation?’

  ‘I think so. It was only this summer. The night of our anniversary.’

  ‘Did your husband ever say anything more specific than that?’ Before she could answer, he completed the question: ‘When there were other people present?’

  ‘Do you mean, when there were witnesses?’

  He nodded.

  ‘No, not that I can remember But that night, the conversation was so serious that it was clear to us all just what they meant.’

  ‘Will your friends remember it as meaning what you say it did?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. I don’t think they approve of me, not as a wife for Helmut.’ After she said that, she looked up at him suddenly, eyes wide with horror. ‘Do you think they knew?’

  Brunetti shook his head, hoping to assure her that, no, they didn’t know, couldn’t have known something like that about him and remained silent. But he had no reason to believe that. He veered away and asked, ‘Can you remember any other time your husband might have made reference to that subject?’

  ‘There were the letters he sent me before we were married.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He was joking, trying to dismiss the difference in our ages. He said that I’d never be burdened with a feeble, helpless old husband, that he’d see that this never happened.’

  ‘Do you still have those letters?’

  She bowed her head and said softly, ‘Yes. I still have everything he ever gave me, all the letters he sent me.’

  ‘I still don’t understand how you could do it,’ he said, not shocked or outraged; simply puzzled.

  ‘I don’t know anymore, either. I’ve thought about it so much that I’ve probably invented new reasons for it, new justifications. To punish him? Or maybe I wanted to weaken him so much that he’d be absolutely, completely dependent on me. Or maybe I knew that it would force him to do what he did. I simply don’t know anymore, and I don’t think I’ll ever understand why.’ He thought she had finished, but she added, voice icy, ‘But I’m glad I did it, and I’d do it again.’

  He looked away from her then. Because Brunetti was not a lawyer, he had no idea of the nature of the crime. Assault? Theft? If you steal a man’s hearing, what do you steal from him? And is the crime worse if the victim’s hearing is more important to him than other people’s hearing is to them?

  ‘Signora, do you believe he invited you backstage to make it look as if you had killed him?’

  ‘I don’t know, but he might have. He believed in justice. But if he wanted that, he could have arranged things to look far worse for me. I’ve thought about this, since that night. Maybe he left it like this so that I wouldn’t ever be sure what he intended. And this way, he wouldn’t be responsible for whatever happened to me because of it.’ She gave a small smile. ‘He was a very complex man.’

  Brunetti leaned toward her and placed his hand on her arm. ‘Signora, listen very carefully to what happened during this interview,’ he said, deciding, thinking of Chiara and deciding. ‘We talked about the way your husband had confided in you his fears about his growing deafness.’

  Startled, she began to protest. ‘But—’

  He cut her off before she could say anything else. ‘How he told you of his deafness, how he feared it. That he had gone to his friend Erich in Germany and then to another doctor, in Padova, and that both of them had told him that he was growing deaf. That this explains his behavior here, his obvious depression. And that you told me you were afraid that he had killed himself when he realized that his career was over, that he had no future as a musician.’ His voice sounded as tired as he felt.

  When she started to protest, he said only, ‘Signora, the only person who would suffer because of the truth is the only innocent one.’

  She was silenced by the truth of this. ‘How do I do all this?’

  He had no idea how to advise her, never before having helped a criminal invent an alibi or deny the evidence of a crime. ‘The important thing is that you told me about his deafness. From that, everything will follow.’ She looked at him, still puzzled, and he spoke to her as he would to a dull child who refused to understand a lesson. ‘You told me this the second time I spoke to you, the morning I came to visit you here. You told me that he had been having serious trouble with his hearing and had spoken to his friend Erich.’ She began to protest, and he could have shaken her for her dullness. ‘He also told you he had been to another doctor. All of this will be in the report of our meeting.’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she finally asked.

  He dismissed the question with a gesture.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she repeated.

  ‘Because you didn’t kill him.’

  ‘And the rest? What I did do to him?’

  ‘There’s no way you can be made to suffer for that without making your daughter suffer even more.’

  She winced away from this truth. ‘What else do I have to do?’ she asked, obedient now.

  ‘I’m not sure yet. Just remember that we-talked about this the first morning I came here to see you.’

  She started to speak and then stopped.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing, nothing.’

  He got suddenly to his feet. It made him uncomfortable, sitting here and plotting. ‘That’s all, then. I imagine you’ll have to testify at the inquest, when it happens.’

  ‘Will you be there?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll have filed my report by then and given my opinion.’

  ‘And what will that be?’

  ‘It will be the truth, Signora.’

  Her voice was level. ‘I don’t know what the truth is anymore.’

  ‘I will tell the procuratore that my investigation revealed that your husband committed suicide when he realized that he was going deaf. Just as it was.’

  ‘Yes,’ she echoed. ‘Just as it was.’

  He left her sitting in the room where she had given her husband the last injection.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  At eight the next morning, just as ordered, Brunetti placed his report on Vice-Questore Patta’s desk, where it sat until his superior officer arrived at his office, just past eleven. When, after returning three personal phone calls and reading through the financial newspaper, the vice-questore brought himself to read the report, he found it both interesting and illuminating:

  The results of my investigation lead me to conclude that Maestro Helmut Wellauer took his own life as a result of his growing deafness.

  1. During the last months, his hearing had deteriorated to the point where he had less than 40 percent of normal hearing. (See attached interviews with Drs. Steinmbrunner and Treport; and attached medical records.)

  2. This loss of hearing resulted in increasing inability to function as a conductor. (See attached interviews with Prof. Rezzonico and Signore Traverse)

  3. The Maestro was in a depressed state of mind. (See attached interviews with Signora Wellauer and Signorina Breddes.)

  4. He had access to the poison used. (See attached interviews with Signora Wellauer and Dr. Steinbrunner.)

  5. He was known to favor the idea of suicide, should he arrive at a point in which he could no longer function as a musician (See attached telephone interview with Dr. Steinbrunner. Personal correspondence to follow from Germany.)

  Given the overwhelming weight of this information, plus the logical exclusion of suspects who might have had either motive or opportunity to commit a crime, I can conclude only that the Maestro accepted suicide as an alternative to deafness.

  Respectfully submitted,

  Guido Brunetti

  Commissario of Police

  ‘I suspected this from the beginning, of course,’ Patta said to Brunetti, who had answered his superior’s request that he come to his office to discuss the case. ‘But I didn’t want to say anything at the beginning and thus prejudice your investigation.’

  ‘Th
at was very generous of you, sir,’ Brunetti said. ‘And very intelligent.’ He studied the facade of the church of San Lorenzo, partof which was visible beyond his superior’s shoulder.

  ‘It was unthinkable that anyone who loved music could have done such a thing.’ It was evident that Patta included himself among that number. ‘His wife says here . . .,’ he began, looking down at the report. Brunetti studied, this time, the small diamond tie tack in the form of a rose that Patta wore in his red tie. ‘. . . that he was “visibly disturbed.”‘ This reference convinced Brunetti that Patta had indeed read the report, an event of surpassing rarity. ‘Revolting as the behavior of those two women is,’ Patta continued, making a small moue of disgust at something that did not appear in the report, ‘it is unlikely that either of them would have the psychological profile of a murderer.’ Whatever that meant.