by Donna Leon
They walked down Ruga Giuffa, making small talk, admiring this or that, pointing to a perfume they had once tried but got tired of. Because they were Venetian, they also commented on the shops that were gone and what had come after them: the wonderful place that sold bathroom fixtures replaced by the cheapest of fake-leather bags and belts.
After crossing the bridge, Roseanna continued straight across the campo, to Caterina’s relief avoiding the bar alongside the canal. In front of the other bar, Roseanna stopped and asked, “Inside or outside?” This time, it was Caterina who tested the temperature before saying, “Inside, I’m afraid.” But before they went in, she pointed to the near corner and asked, “What happened to that palazzo?” As Caterina remembered, the building, like Steffani’s chests were now, had been at the center of a contested inheritance, but in this case rumor said it concerned not first and second cousins but first and second wives, a far more deadly game.
“A hotel,” Roseanna said, making no attempt to disguise her disgust. “They hacked it up inside and brought in cheap imitation furniture, and now tourists can tell themselves they’re staying in a real Venetian palazzo.” She pushed open the door and went into the bar. Caterina saw that there was no place to sit and delighted in the fact. She had had enough of gemütlich coffeehouses with velvet benches and whipped cream everywhere: alongside the strudel, inside the cakes, on top of the coffee. Here a person stood, drank a coffee in one swift gulp, and went back to the business of the day.
Roseanna called the barman by name and asked for two coffees, which arrived almost instantly and were as quickly consumed. Roseanna said nothing, nor did Caterina; so much for the idea of an intimate conversation. When they were back outside, Caterina glanced at her watch and saw it was a bit after eleven, so she turned left and headed toward the bridge that would take them back to the Foundation. “You still haven’t told me about the treasure,” she said, deciding that push had come to shove.
Roseanna, walking beside her, nodded, then surprised her by saying, “I know. It’s so crazy I’m almost embarrassed to talk about it. And I don’t know how much you’re supposed to be told.”
Caterina stopped before the bridge and pulled Roseanna to the right to keep her out of the way of the people passing by. “Roseanna, I know who it’s all about, and I know what sort of men the cousins are, and now you’ve told me there’s some sort of treasure. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand that’s why they’re so interested in the trunks and the papers.” Suddenly tired of all the secrecy, she spoke before she thought. “What do they think the other applicants who didn’t get the job are doing? Not telling people about all of this?”
As often happened with her, the more she thought about the situation, the more her anger grew. What in God’s name do these fools think is in the trunks, the manuscript of Monteverdi’s lost Arianna? A missing papal tiara? Saint Veronica’s veil?
Roseanna started to speak but Caterina ignored her. “You’re the one who mentioned it, who used the word treasure. I didn’t. So tell me what this is all about.” Her heart was pounding, sweat stood on her forehead, but she stopped because she realized there was no threat she could make. She needed the job, and she realized the scholar she had once been was curious to follow the paper trail that led back to Steffani.
Roseanna moved away from her as from a source of heat that had become uncomfortable, but she made no attempt to go back across the bridge. She pursed her lips and looked down at her shoes, shifted her bag from one shoulder to the other, moving it to the side away from Caterina. “First, let me tell you there were no other applicants. Only you.”
“Then why did they tell me there were?” Caterina all but bleated.
“Capitalism,” Roseanna said and smiled.
“What?”
“To beat your price down.” She smiled after she said it, and Caterina saw the force of her logic. “If you thought there were a lot of people after the job, you’d be willing to let them pay you less than you’re worth.”
Caterina raised a hand to cover her face from the embarrassment of it.
Roseanna reached over and latched her arm into Caterina’s; she turned toward the bridge, pulling Caterina along beside her. “All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I think is happening.”
The story she told was at times unclear, her telling of it filled with backups and turnarounds, with omissions and additions, and corrections and afterthoughts, of what she had heard at the Foundation, read, and imagined. In essence, it filled in some of the gaps left in the story Caterina had been told by Dottor Moretti and what she had inferred from her meetings with the two cousins. Letters from Steffani existed in which he spoke of the poverty of his life. When she heard Roseanna say this, Caterina tried to recall ever having seen a letter from a Baroque-era composer—indeed, any composer—who complained of the excessive richness of his life. But there also existed a letter—Roseanna had indeed put in her time reading at the Marciana—written in the last year of his life in which he mentioned some of the objects in his possession, among them books and pictures and a casket and jewels. The catalogue of the more than five hundred books he owned listed first editions of Luther, which would be of enormous value today.
“Is that the treasure?”
Roseanna stopped and pulled her arm free to raise it, along with the other, in a gesture of complete exasperation. “My God, listen to me. We don’t even know if there are papers in the chests—or what’s in them—and here I am talking about treasure. The whole thing’s crazy.”
Caterina took great comfort from the other woman’s unconscious use of the plural. And yet Roseanna had a point in saying that they were all crazy. Caterina was swiftly approaching the same view. If the cousins had learned of the possibility of unearned wealth, Caterina had seen enough of them to know how they would be driven wild by the thought of so-called treasure.
As to the likelihood that any papers in the trunk would lead to the discovery of a treasure, Caterina was less certain. It was unlikely that any treasure—whatever it was—would still be resting, safely undiscovered, in the place where it had been put. Realizing that her speculations led nowhere, Caterina asked, “What else did you learn?” Producing her easiest and most relaxed smile, she coaxed, “I had to do a lot of that sort of reading while I was in school. It’s comforting to know that someone else finds it interesting.”
Roseanna, who had been spared the experience of reading back issues of Studies in Early Baroque Counterpoint, gave Caterina an uncertain glance and said, “I understood only the historical parts, not the musicological.”
“Good,” Caterina said with a smile, “the historical part’s usually more interesting.”
This earned her another puzzled glance, enough to warn her to treat her profession with greater seriousness. “What else did you read?”
“One of the articles said that his possessions went to a Vatican organization called Propaganda Fide and disappeared, then these two trunks turned up a few years ago when an inventory was made. Then somehow the cousins managed to have them sent here. I was never told how that happened.”
Caterina realized there was little to be gained from trying to penetrate any of the mysteries created by the cousins. Thinking out loud and returning to the question of the trunks, Caterina said, “If they were autograph scores, then the music would have a certain value.”
“What does certain value mean?” Roseanna asked.
“I have no idea. That usually depends on how famous the composer is and how many of his manuscripts are on the market. But Steffani’s star isn’t in the ascendant, so no one’s going to be paying a fortune for whatever might be there.”
Nudged by curiosity about when she would be able to begin her research, Caterina asked, “Did Dottor Moretti tell you when they’d come to open the chests?”
“Noon,” Roseanna said and looked at
her watch. Then, sounding like a guilty schoolgirl and not at all like the acting director of the Fondazione Musicale Italo-Tedesca, she said, “We better get back.”
Six
They had been in Roseanna’s office only a few minutes when they heard the front door open and close. Footsteps approached, and then Dottor Moretti was in the doorway, just as she remembered him: dark gray suit with a faint stripe of lighter gray, dark blue tie with a stripe so discreet as to reveal itself only under torture. Caterina was certain he would be able to comb his hair in the reflection from his shoes, were it not that a man such as Dottor Moretti would never comb his hair in public. He’d give it a discreet tap, perhaps a faint stroke in the wake of a heavy wind. But a comb? Never.
He was a tidy man, not tall and not short, a few centimeters taller than she. His hair, neither dark nor light, was thick and cut short, already turning white at the temples. The oval lenses of his gold-framed glasses were so clean that she wondered if he wore a new pair every day. His nose was narrow and straight, his eyes a very pale blue, hardly the eyes of the cliché Italian, though perhaps those of the cliché Veneziano. She doubted, however, that dialect ever passed those lips; in the few conversations they had had, he had used an easy elegance of language, as if he had chosen to speak as an adult from his very first words. She had no idea of what part of the country he came from, and his speech provided no clue.
A gray woolen topcoat was folded over his arm, and the other hand held the briefcase she had noticed before, smooth brown leather with twin brass locks that looked as though someone gave them a very careful buffing at least once a week. Caterina, a great admirer of men’s clothing and often of the men who wore it, coveted the bag.
Dottor Moretti looked to be in his early forties, though the faint wrinkles around his eyes allowed of the possibility that the number might be greater. He seemed to smile only when a remark amused him; Caterina had found herself, when last they spoke, trying to make him smile, perhaps even to laugh. It had taken her no time to realize that he was responsive to language used well. As to his feelings about music, she had no idea.
“Signore,” he said with a small bow toward both of them that, had another man made it, would have been faintly ridiculous. As made by Dottor Moretti, it was a show of respect and attention, meant perhaps to be read as a man’s declaration that he lived to serve these ladies’ wishes. Caterina, remembering that he was a lawyer, dismissed that possibility and chose to read it as an old-fashioned gesture from that marvel of marvels, an old-fashioned man.
“Dottore,” she said, getting to her feet and extending her hand. “A great pleasure to see you again.”
“The pleasure is once more entirely mine, Dottoressa,” he said, releasing her hand. He turned immediately and offered it to Roseanna, who rose halfway from her desk to take it, saying only, “Buon giorno, Dottore.”
Dottor Moretti set his briefcase on the floor and leaned it against Roseanna’s desk. She in turn gave a half wave, half shrug that presented the surface of her desk as the one place where he might possibly sit in this two-chaired room. Caterina was interested to see how he would react. He did not surprise her. He folded his coat and set it neatly on the desk, then leaned back against it and folded his arms.
“I’m glad you’re both here,” he began. “Signor Stievani and Signor Scapinelli should arrive at noon. This gives me the chance to speak to you both before they get here.”
“To tell us what?” Roseanna asked. So far, Caterina noted, nothing she said to Moretti had required her to choose between the polite or the familiar form of address. Linguistically, then, they could be friends, they could be enemies, they could be lovers. Roseanna’s manner with him, however, suggested equal parts of interest and deference, effectively eliminating the second possibility.
Ignoring her remark, Dottor Moretti continued. “They’re very eager for Dottoressa Pellegrini to begin work.”
“Today, I hope,” Caterina said. Did he think she had stopped in to borrow a cup of sugar from Roseanna?
“Yes.”
“The sooner she reads through it all, the sooner they can stop paying her salary,” Roseanna observed in a dead level voice entirely free of irony or sarcasm. Time is money, she was Venetian: that’s the way things are.
Ignoring Roseanna’s comment, he asked Caterina, “Do you have any objection to beginning so soon, Dottoressa?”
She smiled. “Quite the opposite, Dottore. I’m very eager to begin and discover what treasures . . .” she began, giving the briefest pause, “. . . await us in those chests.”
His glance was sudden, and he turned it immediately into a smile. “I compliment you for your energy and eagerness, Dottoressa. I’m sure we all look forward to the results of your research.”
“That can’t be all those two want,” Roseanna said. Dottor Moretti gave her a long assessing look, as if surprised at this unwonted frankness in front of the researcher who, like him, was meant to be entirely neutral. Saying nothing, he bent down and snapped open his briefcase. He pulled out some papers and handed one to Caterina, keeping one for himself. “I’ve spoken to the two . . .”—here he gave a pause even more infinitesimal than Caterina’s had been—“. . . gentlemen, about the procedure for the research.”
“Procedure?” Roseanna asked before Caterina could speak.
“If you’ll take a look,” he said, raising the paper and peering over the top of his glasses to speak to Caterina, “you’ll see written what I’ve already told you, that they want written reports.” He glanced back at the paper and read aloud, “‘. . . With a summary of the documents read and translations of any that might refer to our deceased relative’s desires regarding the disposition of his worldly assets.’”
Caterina decided to enjoy the words, which the cousins must have learned from Dottor Moretti: “deceased relative”; “disposition of his worldly assets.” Ah, what a marvel language was, and blessed they who respected it.
“The Dottoressa is not to have private or personal contact with either of the two . . .”—again that pause—“. . . gentlemen. In the event that she has information to convey or in response to any request from either of the two parties that she provide further information about the documents, it must be provided to me and the two parties at the same time. Further, all emails must go through me.” He glanced at Caterina, who nodded in understanding and acceptance, deciding to wait before asking about the computer on which she was meant to send these emails. Before leaving Manchester, she had returned to the university the laptop it had provided to each researcher and had now only her own desktop, which she had no intention of bringing from her apartment.
“And,” he went on, looking up and through the lenses of his glasses as he said this, “in the event that either of them should request a meeting to explain any of the documents, they must both agree to the time and place, and I’m afraid I must be present at any such meeting.”
With a small smile, Caterina said, “I hope your fear does not result from the thought of my presence, Dottore.”
This earned her one of his smiles. “Only from the thought that my presence might not be as enjoyable as theirs is sure to be,” he replied.
Caterina returned her attention to the paper he had given her. Was a lawyer supposed to speak of his clients this way, she wondered? The cousins might have enough money to pay a man wearing a suit like his, but they seemed to lack the price of his respect. They must be very sure of Dottor Moretti’s ability to find the best person to lead them to whatever treasure there might be, but then she remembered what Roseanna had told her about her being the only person interviewed, and she wondered how concerned the cousins were about anything except price. Further, was she meant to be complimented or flattered by the slighting way he spoke of them, as if to suggest he was being open and honest with her?
“I see there are other conditions,” she said, holding up her
copy of the paper. “What’s this about having to read any papers in the order in which I find them?” she asked tersely. “Of course I will.” She felt her voice growing sharp and paused a moment to try to relax. “How else would a scholar go through papers?” Her visceral resentment told her a good deal about the way she felt about the cousins.
“Unfortunately,” Dottor Moretti began, putting on a serious face, “I did not make the list of requirements, Dottoressa, nor is it in my competence to question them. They were given to me, and it’s my task to persuade you to follow them.”
“Of course, I’ll follow them,” she said, “but these gentlemen might consider the fact that they are paying me for my expertise, and part of that is knowing how to deal with documents.” In the face of his silence—neither obstinate nor patient, just silence—she went on. “I have only a general historical context for any documents I might find,” she said. “I’m at home in the music of the period, but I foresee needing to do research beyond reading the actual documents so as to put them into an historical context.” He said nothing, and so she concluded, “I would like to establish that as one of my conditions.”
“One?” he asked.
She held up the paper and said, “I haven’t finished reading this yet. There might be more.”
Roseanna broke in here and said, “Perhaps they’re hoping that there will be a folder on the top with neat lettering on the outside, saying, ‘Last will and testament.’ And below it in a different hand, just to save time, ‘List of everything of value and where to find it.’” If she was trying to make a joke, one glance at Dottor Moretti’s face showed she had not succeeded.
“You’ve told me he died intestate,” Caterina said. “I can only hope I do find a will among the papers, or something in which he makes his desires known. But I’d still have to read the rest of the papers, of course, to see that he did not subsequently contradict this.”