by Donna Leon
“May I?” Caterina asked and picked up the notebook.
“Porpora” was written at the top of the page on the left, and below it were columns that listed the date of the arrival of the letter, the name and address of the person who sent it, and the date the letter was answered.
“Why do you keep it?” Caterina asked in a voice she made as neutral as she could.
Roseanna pursed her lips in embarrassment, careful to avoid Caterina’s gaze. “I’ve always kept permanent records of things, even my gas bills. It’s just a habit of mine, I suppose.” She pointed to the notebook. “This way, if anything goes missing or gets misfiled, I’ve got a record that it did arrive. I’ve kept it since I started here.” Then, head lowered, she added, “I began it with all the correspondence that was already here and kept adding to it over the years.”
Caterina stopped herself from asking if the Foundation had a website or email address or any evidence that it was functioning in the current millennium.
She thought of the letter complaining about Hasse’s grave. Such things did not lead to burglary. “Can you remember anyone asking a strange question or making a threat?” she asked.
“Some of the letters are strange,” Roseanna said. Then, as if hearing a playback, she slapped her hand over her mouth.
Caterina didn’t bother to fight the impulse and laughed out loud. “You should have seen some of the people I took classes with.” Then, swept away by memory, she added, “Or from,” and that set her off again.
Roseanna resisted for a moment but then gave in and said, laughing, “If you think they’re strange, you should see some of the people who come here. Not the ones who come to sleep but the ones who come to ask questions.”
Still laughing, Caterina nodded and waved a hand in the air. She knew, she knew. She’d spent a decade of her life with them.
“The ones who write letters are usually better. There’s an elderly gentleman in Pavia who still listens to phonograph records. He writes and asks for suggestions about which ones to buy. Would you believe it?” Roseanna asked and shook her head at this. This from a woman who still used a typewriter, Caterina thought.
Caterina took the notebook and, somehow knowing that Roseanna’s list would be in alphabetical order, paged back from “Porpora” to “Hasse” and saw that the letters in the file dated back twelve years; for “Caldara” it was a bit more than that, though there were only two letters.
She flipped back toward the end, passed “Sartorio” and found “Steffani.”
“Why is it that the entries for Steffani start such a short time ago, Roseanna?”
“Oh, he’s been forgotten for a long time,” Roseanna answered.
“I see,” Caterina said. She remembered seeing his portrait in something she had once read: round face and sagging chin, bishop’s cap with white hair sneaking out on both sides, long fingers caressing the cross he wore across his chest. The man had been dead for almost three centuries. Caterina closed the notebook and set it on the table. As she did, her eyes were drawn to the photo of the statue. Marcus Aurelius. Emperor. Hero. Blamed by generations of historians for having passed the throne to his son Commodus, as if they thought he should have remained childless. Childless. Without heirs.
Illumination flashed upon her, forcing out an involuntary grunt, as though someone had punched her in the stomach. “Marco Aurelio,” she pronounced. “Of course, of course.”
Startled, Roseanna turned to her. “What’s the matter?” She dropped a file on the table and put her hand on Caterina’s arm. When Caterina said nothing, she demanded, “What’s wrong?”
“Marco Aurelio,” Caterina repeated.
Roseanna looked at the cover of the notebook. “Yes, I know, but what’s wrong with you?”
Caterina rubbed her forehead, as if to push away a headache, and then tapped her fingers lightly against her head a few times. “Of course, of course,” she repeated. Then, to Roseanna, she said, “The trunks belonged to Steffani, didn’t they?”
The other woman’s mouth dropped open. “Who told you? They said no one was to say anything until the person they chose started to work on the papers. How did you find out?” When Caterina didn’t answer, Roseanna took her arm again, but this time with greater force. “Tell me.”
Caterina pointed to the notebook. “That did,” she said.
It was obvious that Roseanna had no idea what she was talking about. She picked up the notebook and paged through it, as if Caterina had seen the answer written inside. “I don’t understand,” she confessed and set the notebook back on the desk.
“I remembered,” Caterina said. “Things I read when I was at university. His first opera was Marco Aurelio.” Roseanna gave no look or nod of recognition, but how many people would know this? “And I remembered reading something. He had no direct heirs, and no one ever knew what happened to his possessions after his death.” The Church was mixed up in it somehow, too, she recalled, but she could not remember the details.
Roseanna went and sat behind the desk. It was the director’s desk and the director’s chair, but she looked like anything but a director. She leaned forward and propped her chin on her hand. “Yes. You’re right. It’s Steffani.” She pronounced it with the accent on the first syllable, as an Italian would. As Steffani had not.
“I don’t see what difference it makes,” Roseanna went on in a voice grown suddenly brisk. “Really. You would have known as soon as you started reading and found his name in the papers. It’s those two men,” she said, her voice growing warmer. “Everything has to be secret. No one can know anything. If one of them saw that the other one’s hair was on fire, he wouldn’t say anything.” Her tone was a mixture of anger and exasperation. “They’re terrible men. One’s worse than the other.”
“The cousins?” Caterina asked.
Roseanna raised her head and gave an angry flip of her hand. “What cousins? They’re just two men who smell the possibility of money. That’s the way they’re related.” Then, after a moment’s reflection, “And in mutual suspicion.”
“Are they really his descendants?” Caterina asked. “Steffani’s?”
“Oh, they are, they are.”
“How do they know that? Or prove it?”
Here Roseanna gave a snort, of either disgust or anger. Then she stopped and gave Caterina a sudden, assessing look. Whatever she saw led her to say, “It’s the Mormons.”
“I beg your pardon?” Steffani, she remembered, had been a clergyman of some sort, so where’d the Mormons come from? “He was a priest, wasn’t he? And long before the Mormons.”
“Oh, I know that,” Roseanna said. “But that’s how you can find your ancestors. By asking them.”
Caterina, who took very little interest in her own ancestors, could hardly imagine asking the Mormons to look for them. “What have the Mormons got to do with this?”
Roseanna smiled and waved her fingers before her face to suggest a lack of mental stability. “It’s what they believe, or at least what Dottor Moretti told me they believe. They can go back and baptize people in the past.” Her expression showed how much faith she put in this possibility.
Caterina stared at her for a long moment. “You think you can marry them in the past, too, and inherit their money?”
It took Roseanna a moment to realize this was a joke, and when she did, she laughed, losing a decade as she did. When she stopped, she wiped her eyes and said, her voice a bit rough after laughing so hard, “It would be convenient, wouldn’t it?” She considered the possibilities for a while and said, “I suppose I could marry Gianni Agnelli.” Then, with a careful attention to fact that made Caterina admire her, she added, “No, he lived too long. I’d want someone who died young.”
Caterina stopped herself from naming a candidate or two and returned to the business at hand.
Wiping away a few vagrant tears that remained, and still smiling, Roseanna said, “Dottor Moretti told me they’re very good at tracing people’s ancestry, and they’re generous about giving the information.”
“How do they do it? This is a Catholic country. And parts of Germany are, too.” This rang another historical bell. Steffani had been somehow mixed up in the squabbles between the Protestants and the Catholics. How long ago it was, and how futile such things seemed now. Before his time, people died disputing how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Whether the host was flesh or merely a symbol. During his lifetime, the wars still went on. She shook her head at the thought of it. How many millions had died for those angels and for those flesh/nonflesh hosts? Centuries later, and the churches are empty except for old people and kids with badly tuned guitars.
“What’s wrong?” Roseanna asked.
“Nothing,” Caterina said with a small shake of her head. “I was just trying to remember what I read as a student about Steffani.”
“There are books about him in the Marciana, I’m sure,” Roseanna said. “I haven’t read about him, but some of the others are fascinating. Gesualdo killed his wife and her lover, and he was a hunchback, too. Porpora went bankrupt, and all I ever read about Cavalli said he sat around all day, writing operas.”
Caterina gave her a long look, as if seeing a different person, but said nothing.
“I like this music, so I started reading about it, and about the composers. The conservatory has books, but they wouldn’t let me use the library.” From her tone, it was difficult to tell whether she was offended. But then she smiled. “At the Marciana, when I said I was the acting director here, they let me use them.”
“Good for you,” Caterina said with a blossoming smile.
“Thank you,” Roseanna said in a voice best suited to confession. “And their lives were interesting. Besides, if I work here, I should know something about what we’re doing, shouldn’t I?”
First the woman wanted to marry the richest man in Italy, and now she struck a death blow to every political appointee in the country. What would she want next? A functioning political system? The philosopher king?
“Tell me more about the Mormons,” Caterina said.
It looked as if Roseanna might have preferred talking about her job, or about the music, but she nodded and said, “Dottor Moretti said he’s used them before. He said they have files going back hundreds of years, and you can trace your family back all those generations.”
“So these two cousins can trace their ancestry back to Steffani?”
“To his cousins, they could. That’s how they’re descended. The Mormons have copies of parish registers from all over Italy, and they sent Dottor Moretti copies of all of the documents: birth certificates, death certificates, marriage contracts.”
Caterina thought of the two cousins; she doubted that they would be more computer savvy than Roseanna. “Who did it for them?” Caterina asked. “The online search?”
“Not them. The Mormons did it all for them.”
“Interesting,” Caterina said. “There was no will, was there?”
“He didn’t have one, or no one could find one, so the Church claimed everything. Some things were sold to pay his debts, and the rest was lost until the trunks turned up.”
Caterina sat back in her chair and studied her feet. The cousins had no interest in the contents of the trunks, save for what price they might bring. If they were the papers of what her profession would call a major minor composer, dead these three centuries, what was their value? The Stabat Mater was a masterpiece, and the few opera arias she knew were wonderful, though strangely short to the modern ear. She’d gone down to London to see Niobe a few years ago and found it a revelation. What was that heartbreaking lament, something about Dal mio petto? With a key change toward the end that had driven her wild when she heard it and then again when a musician friend had shown her the score. But her personal excitement would hardly influence the price put on a manuscript. A page of a score by Mozart was worth a fortune, or Bach, or Handel, but who had ever heard of Steffani? And yet the cousins were willing to hire a lawyer and arbitrator and pay her salary. For two trunks they thought were full of papers?
An English poet she had read at school had said that fortune went up and down like a “bucket in a well.” So did the fortune of composers as tastes changed and reputations were reevaluated. The roads to concert houses were littered with the bones of the reputations of composers such as Gassmann, Tosi, Keiser. Every so often, some long-dead composer would be resurrected and hailed as a newly discovered master. She had seen it happen with Hildegard von Bingen and Josquin des Prez. For a year or so no concert hall was without at least one performance of their music. And then they went back to being dead and written about in books, which is where Caterina thought they both belonged. But if what she had heard in London was any indication, Steffani did not belong there, not at all.
“Are you listening, Caterina?” she heard Roseanna ask.
“No, I’m sorry,” she said with an embarrassed grin. “I was thinking about something else.”
“What?”
“That no one much values Steffani’s music these days.” She said it with regret, thinking of the beauty of the arias and the mastery shown in the Stabat Mater. Maybe it was time for a return to the stage for the good bishop.
“It’s not the music those two are after,” Roseanna said.
“What is it, then?” Caterina asked, wondering what else might have lasted and come down through the centuries.
“The treasure.”
Five
The word astonished her. “Treasure?” she repeated. “What treasure?”
“He didn’t tell you?” Roseanna asked.
“Who?” Caterina asked. Then, “Tell me what?”
“Dottor Moretti. He must know about it,” Roseanna said, sounding surprised. “I thought he’d have told you when you accepted the job.”
Caterina, who had been strolling along a beach, looking idly at the shells underfoot, felt herself suddenly swept away by an unexpected wave. The water, she realized, was deeper than she had expected. She thought of the two cousins, and there came a sudden vision of sharp fins slicing through the waters. To escape this fantasy, she put her hand on Roseanna’s arm and said, “Believe me. I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“Ma, ti xe Venexiana?” Roseanna asked, exaggerating the pronunciation of the dialect words.
Caterina nodded; she had been away from home so long that Italian now came more easily to her than did the language she had heard at home as a child, but still dialect was the language of her bones.
“You’re Venetian and you don’t know anything about those two?” she asked, leading Caterina away from the idea of treasure to, presumably, the two cousins.
“The usurer and the man with the fleet of water taxis who has almost no income?” Caterina said, and Roseanna gave her a look that was the equivalent of a stamp in her passport. To know that much about them was to be Venetian.
“What else do you know?” she asked Caterina.
“That Stievani’s sons and nephews drive the taxis. And make a fortune. All undeclared, of course.”
“And Scapinelli?”
“That he’s a convicted usurer but still works in the shops of his sons. Who are not angels, either.”
Roseanna considered all of this for some time and asked, moving even further away from any mention of treasure, “Is your mother Margherita Rossi?”
“Yes.”
“And her father played in the Fenice orchestra?”
“Yes. Violin.”
“Then I know your family,” Roseanna said and sighed. “Your grandfather used to give my father opera tickets.” She did not sound at all pleased at the memory, or perhaps her disple
asure resulted from the obligations imposed upon her by that memory.
Caterina had the sense to remain quiet and wait and allow Roseanna to decide the order in which to tell things. “They’re very bad men,” Roseanna said and then added, by way of explication, “They come of bad families. One side was originally from Castelfranco and the other’s from Padova, I think. But they’ve been here in the city for generations. Greed’s in their bones.”
Suddenly tired of what sounded like melodrama and overcome with impatience, Caterina said, “And what about treasure? Where does that come from?”
“No one knows,” Roseanna said.
“Does anyone know where it is?” Caterina asked.
Roseanna shook her head and surprised Caterina by suddenly getting to her feet. “Let’s go get a coffee,” she said, and headed for the door without bothering to wait and see if the other woman followed her.
Outside, Caterina stopped in the calle, waiting for Roseanna to choose the direction. It had been years since she had been in this part of the city, so she had no idea which bars still served decent coffee.
Roseanna stood for a moment, moving her head from side to side, much in the manner of a hunting dog testing the air for the temperature or passing prey. “Come on,” she finally said, turning to the right and, at the first corner, right again. “We can go to that place in Campo Santa Maria Formosa.”
There were two of them, Caterina remembered, the one with the outside benches that remained in place until the really cold weather arrived and the one opposite it, along the canal, that she had been told—and thereafter always believed—had once been the room where the bodies of the dead in the parish were kept before being taken out to the cemetery on San Michele.