Death at La Fenice

by Donna Leon

  ‘I thought that . . .’

  ‘That I’d have to refuse him as a patient because he’s rich and can afford better doctors? Is that what you meant, Commissario?’ she asked, making no attempt to disguise her anger. ‘Not only is that personally offensive, but it also shows a rather simplistic vision of the world. I suppose neither surprises me very much.’ That last made him wonder what the count might have said about him during their talks.

  He felt that the entire conversation had gotten out of hand. He had intended no offence, had not meant to suggest that the count could find better doctors. His surprise was entirely about this doctor’s having accepted him. ‘Doctor, please,’ he said, and held out a hand between them. ‘I’m sorry, but the world I work in is a simplistic one. There are good people’ – she was listening, so he dared to add, with a smile, ‘. . . like us.’ She had the grace to return his smile. ‘And then there are the people who break the law.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ she said, her anger not diminished, after all. ‘And does that give us all the right to divide up the world into two groups, the one we’re ion and all the others? And I get to treat those people who share my politics and let the rest die?

  You make it sound like a cowboy film – the good guys and the lawbreakers, and never the least bit of difficulty in telling the difference between the two.’

  Struggling to defend himself, he said, ‘I didn’t say which law; I just said they broke the law.’

  ‘Isn’t there only one law in your vision of the world – the law of the state?’ Her contempt was open, and he hoped it was for the law of the state and not for him.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he answered.

  She threw up her hands. ‘If this is when poor old God gets dragged down from heaven and put into the conversation, I’m going to get more champagne.’

  ‘No, let me,’ he said, and took her glass from her. He soon returned with a fresh glass of champagne and some mineral water for himself. She accepted the champagne and thanked him with an entirely friendly and normal smile.

  She sipped, then asked him, ‘And this law of yours?’ She said it with such real interest and lack of rancour that the last exchange was entirely erased. On both sides, he realized.

  ‘Clearly, the one we have isn’t enough,’ he began, surprised to hear himself saying this, for it was this law he had spent his career defending. ‘We need a more human – or perhaps more humane – one.’ He stopped, aware of how foolish it made him feel to say this. And, worse, to mean it.

  ‘That would certainly be wonderful,’ she said with a blandness that made him immediately suspicious. ‘But wouldn’t that interfere with your profession? After all, it’s your job to enforce that other law, the law of the state.’

  ‘They’re really the same.’ Realizing how lame and stupid this sounded, he added, ‘Usually.’

  ‘But not always?’

  ‘No, not always.’

  ‘And when they’re not?’

  ‘I try to see the point where they intersect, where they’re the same.’

  ‘And if they’re not?’

  ‘Then I do what I have to do.’

  She burst into laughter so spontaneous that he joined her, aware of how much he had sounded like John Wayne just before he went out to that last gunfight.

  ‘I apologize for baiting you, Guido; I really do. If it’s any consolation to you, it’s the same sort of decision we doctors have to make, though not too often, when what we think is right isn’t the same as what the law says is right.’

  He was, they both were, saved by Paola, who came up to him and asked if he was ready to go.

  ‘Paola,’ he said, turning to present her to the other woman. ‘This is your father’s doctor,’ hoping to surprise her.

  ‘Oh, Barbara,’ Paola exclaimed. ‘I’m so glad to meet you. My father talks about you all the time. I’m sorry it’s taken us this long to meet.’

  Brunetti watched and listened while they talked, amazed at the ease with which women made it obvious that they liked each other, at their enormous mutual trust, even at first meeting. United in a common concern for a man he had always found cool and distant, these two were talking as though they had known each other for years. There was none of the abrasive moral stocktaking that had transpired between him and the doctor. She and Paola had performed some sort of instant evaluation and been immediately pleased with what they found. He had often observed this phenomenon but feared he would never understand it. He had the same ability to become quickly friendly with another man, but somehow the intimacy stopped a few layers down. This immediate intimacy he was watching went deep, to some central place, before it stopped. And evidently it hadn’t stopped; it had only paused until the next meeting.

  They had arrived at the point of discussing Raffaele, the count’s only grandson, before Paola and Barbara remembered that Brunetti was still there. Paola could tell from his restless foot-shifting that he was tired and wanted to leave, so she said, ‘I’m sorry, Barbara, to tell you all this about Raffaele. Now you’ll have two generations to worry about, instead of one.’

  ‘No, it’s good to get a different view about the children. He’s always so worried about them. But so proud of both of you.’ It took Brunetti a moment before he realized she meant him and Paola. This was becoming, indeed, a night of many marvels.

  He didn’t notice how it was done, but the two women decided it was time for them all to leave. The doctor set her glass down on a table beside her, and Paola turned to take his arm at the same moment. They exchanged farewells, and he was again struck by how much warmer the doctor was with Paola than with him.

  13

  As fortune would have it, it was the next morning that his first report was due on Patta’s desk ‘before eight’. Since the clock, when he opened his eyes and saw it, read eight-fifteen, that was clearly going to be impossible.

  A half hour later, feeling more recognizably human, he came into the kitchen and found Paola reading L’Unità, which reminded him it was Tuesday. For reasons he had never understood, she read a different newspaper each morning, spanning the political spectrum from right to left, and languages from French to English. Years ago, when he had first met her and understood her even less, he had asked about this. Her response, he came to realize only years later, made perfect sense: ‘I want to see how many different ways the same lies can be told.’ Nothing he had read in the ensuing years had come close to suggesting that her approach was wrong. Today it was the Communist lie; tomorrow the Christian Democrats would get their chance.

  He bent and kissed her on the back of the neck. She grunted but didn’t bother to look up. Silently, she pointed to the left, where a plate of fresh brioches sat on the counter. As she turned a page, he poured himself a cup of coffee, spooned in three sugars, and took the seat opposite her. ‘News?’ he asked, biting into a brioche.

  ‘Sort of. We don’t have a government as of yesterday afternoon. The President’s trying to form one, but it looks like he hasn’t got a chance. And at the bakery this morning, all anyone talked about was how cold it’s turned. No wonder we have the sort of government we do: we deserve it. Well,’ she said, pausing over the photo of the most recent President-designate, ‘perhaps we don’t. No one could deserve that.’

  ‘What else?’ he asked, falling into the decade-old ritual. It allowed him to learn what was happening without having to read the papers, and it also usually gave him a very precise idea of her mood.

  ‘Train strike next week, in protest to the firing of an engineer who got drunk and drove his train into another one. The men who worked with him had been complaining about him for months, but no one paid any attention. So three people are dead. And now, because he’s been fired, the same people who complained about him are threatening to go on strike because he was fired.’ She turned a page. He took another brioche. ‘New threat of terrorist attacks. Maybe that will keep the tourists away.’ She turned another page. ‘Review of opening night at the Rome opera.
A disaster. Lousy conductor. Dami told me last night that the orchestra had been complaining about him for weeks, all during rehearsals, but no one listened. Makes sense. No one listens to the men who run the trains, so why should anyone listen to musicians who get to hear him all during rehearsals?’

  He set his coffee down so suddenly that some of it splashed onto the table. Paola’s only response was to pull the paper closer to her.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Hmm?’ she asked, not really listening.

  ‘What did you say about the conductor?’

  She looked up because of the tone, not the words. ‘What?’

  ‘About the conductor, what did you just say?’

  As happened with most of the dicta she delivered each morning, this one appeared to have been forgotten as soon as she was free of it. She flipped to the page where the article appeared and looked at it again. ‘Oh, yes, the orchestra. If anyone had paid any attention to them, they would have known he was a lousy conductor. After all, they’re the best sort of judge about how good a musician is, aren’t they?’

  ‘Paola,’ he said, pushing the paper down from in front of her, ‘if I weren’t married to you, I’d leave my wife for you.’

  He was glad to see he had surprised her; it was something he rarely achieved. He left her like that, peering over her reading glasses, not at all sure what she had done.

  He ran down all the ninety-four steps, eager to get to work and start making phone calls.

  When he arrived fifteen minutes later, there had still been no sign of Patta, so he dictated a short paragraph and sent it to be placed on his superior’s desk. That done, he called the main office of the Gazzettino and asked to speak to Salvatore Rezzonico, the chief music critic. He was told he was not at the office but could be found either at home or at the music conservatory. When he finally located the man, at home, and explained what he wanted, Rezzonico agreed to speak to him later that morning at the conservatory, where he was teaching a class at eleven. Next Brunetti called his dentist; he had once mentioned a cousin who played first violin in the La Fenice orchestra. Traverso was his name, and Brunetti called and arranged to speak to him before the performance that night.

  He spent the next half hour talking with Miotti, who had come up with little more at the theatre, save for another member of the chorus who was sure he had seen Flavia Petrelli go into the conductor’s dressing room after the first act. Miotti had further learned the reason for the portiere’s obvious antipathy for the soprano: his belief that she was somehow involved with ‘l’americana’. Beyond this, Miotti had learned nothing. Brunetti sent him off to the archives of the Gazzettino to look for anything about a scandal involving the Maestro and an Italian singer, sometime ‘before the war’. He avoided Miotti’s look at the vagueness of this and suggested that there might be a filing system that would facilitate things.

  Brunetti now left his office and walked across the city to the music conservatory, fitted into a small campo near the Accademia Bridge. After much asking, he found the professor’s classroom on the third floor and the professor waiting there, either for him or for his students.

  As so often happened in Venice, Brunetti recognized the man from having walked past him many times in that part of the city. Though they had never spoken to one another, the warmth of the man’s greeting made it obvious that he was familiar with Brunetti for the same reason. Rezzonico was a small man with a pallid complexion and beautifully manicured nails. Clean-shaven, with hair cut very short, he wore a dark-grey suit and a sombre tie, as if he were intentionally dressing for the role of professor.

  ‘What is it I can do for you, Commissario?’ he asked after Brunetti had introduced himself and taken a seat at one of the desks that filled the classroom.

  ‘It’s about Maestro Wellauer.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ responded Rezzonico, his voice growing predictably sombre. ‘A sad loss to the world of music.’ This was, after all, the man who had written his obituary.

  Brunetti waited for the requisite time to pass, then continued. ‘Were you going to review that performance of Traviata for the paper, Professor?’

  ‘Yes, I was.’

  ‘But the review never appeared?’

  ‘No, we decided – that is, the editor decided – that out of respect for the Maestro and because the performance was not completed, we would wait for the new conductor and review one of his performances.’

  ‘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 favourable 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 back 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 theatre 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 theatre 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 theatre 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 judgement 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 him. 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.’