by Donna Leon
She had been using the standard JSTOR site to access scholarly journals but now, sated with the serious tone of what she had been reading, she switched to a more mainstream search. She was not troubled to find a Thai girl who was looking for a considerate husband—“age and looks don’t matter”—lurking at the side of the page, and she was so accustomed to seeing ads for cars, restaurants, mortgages, and vitamins that she no longer saw them in any real sense. On the ninth page of articles available under Steffani’s name, she found a listing for Catholic Encyclopedia, and she thought she’d have a peek, much in the way one tried to see what cards another poker player might have in his hand.
It was only toward the middle of the article that Steffani’s clerical endeavors were mentioned, when it was noted that the Church had made him apostolic prothonotary—whatever that was—for north Germany, presumably in return for “his services for the cause of Catholicism in Hanover.” Services? The wording in the article was unclear; the closest date used in conjunction with his appointment to that post was 1680, when Steffani would have been twenty-six.
That ambiguity set her grazing through another source, where she found mention that he was an apostolic prothonotary by 1695, the year after Königsmarck’s murder. Services?
She heard a noise, a dull buzzing, and with no conscious thought, her mind turned to the man she had seen on the street and who had been sitting at her boat stop. A bolt of panic brought her to her feet and took her to the door, but as she moved away from the table, the sound grew dimmer. When she realized it was her telefonino ringing in her bag, Caterina felt her knees weaken and her face rush with heat. She walked back to the table, opened her bag, and pulled out the phone.
“Pronto?” she said, in a voice out of which she had forced every emotion save mild interest.
“Caterina?” a man asked.
Aware of how moist the hand that held the phone was, she transferred it to her other ear and wiped her hand on the back of her sweater. “Sì.” She was every busy woman who had ever been interrupted by a phone call, every person who had been disturbed at—she looked—9:40 in the evening and who certainly had better things to do with her time.
“Ciao. It’s Andrea. I’m not bothering you, am I?”
She pulled out a chair and sat, put the phone back into her dry hand. “No, of course not. I couldn’t find the phone.” She laughed, then found the whole situation funny and laughed again.
“I’m glad you did,” he said. “I wanted to tell you about the cousins.”
“Ah, yes. The cousins,” she said. “They aren’t happy?”
“They weren’t happy,” he said, stressing the second word. “In fact, Signor Scapinelli accused you of spending all of your time walking around the city and drinking coffee.”
“But?” she asked, refraining the impulse to observe that it was better than accusing her of walking around the city drinking grappa.
“But I used the same technique you did in the mail and explained that you were merely being conscientious and wanted to be sure you missed nothing that might make an attribution of the putative estate in favor of one claimant or the other.” Oh, my, she thought, how lawyerly he sounded.
“Thank you,” was the only thing she could say.
“There’s nothing to thank me for. It’s true. Unless you read whatever background information you can find, you won’t understand the context of what you read in the documents. And then either you’ll make the wrong decision or you won’t be able to make any decision at all.”
“It’s possible,” she said with the mildness of the hardened researcher, but then she considered the second thing he’d said, and asked, “What happens if it does end up that I can’t make a decision?”
“Ah,” he said, drawing out the sound. “In that case, any documents that have value would be sold and they’d divide whatever they bring.” He paused to let her speak. When she did not, he asked, “So far, though, you haven’t found anything that could be of great value, have you?”
“No, not to the best of my knowledge.”
“Then, as I said, they’ll sell everything for whatever they can get and split the profits.”
“But?” she asked, responding to the underlying uncertainty in his voice.
“They’ve told me there’s a legend, on both sides of the family, about the ancestor priest who left a hidden fortune.” The fact that Andrea could also tell this story, she thought, made it no more believable than when Roseanna had told it.
“There are lots of legends,” she said, then added dryly, “but there are few fortunes.”
“I know, I know, but the Stievani family insists he had it when he died. They have an ancestral aunt—this is in the nineteenth century—who supposedly had a paper from him where he said that he had left the Jewels of Paradise to his nephew Stievani—Giacomo Antonio—who was her great-grandfather.”
The use of the exact phrase Countess von Platen had used in her condemnation of Steffani shocked her. In a voice she tried to make sound dispassionate and lawyerly, she asked, “And this paper?”
This time he laughed. “If you ever get tired of music, you might consider the police force.”
She laughed outright. “I’m afraid I’m not cut out for that sort of thing.”
“You ask questions like a policewoman.”
“Like a researcher,” she corrected him.
“Could you explain the difference?”
Realizing how much she enjoyed sparring with him, Caterina said, “Researchers can’t arrest people and send them to jail.”
He laughed. “That’s true enough.”
Out of the blue, it came to her to ask him. “Do you believe this story about the aunt?” He was their lawyer, for heaven’s sake. What did she expect him to say?
He was silent for so long that she feared her question had offended him by its impertinence. Just as it occurred to her that he might have hung up, he said, “It doesn’t matter. It’s legally worthless.”
“And if the paper had miraculously been preserved?” she asked, passing from impertinence to provocation.
“A piece of paper is a piece of paper,” he said.
“And a fragment of the True Cross is only a splinter of wood?” she asked.
There was another long pause before he asked, sounding falsely casual, “Why do you say that?”
She thought the comparison ought to have been clear enough, but she decided to explain. “If enough people choose to believe something is what other people say it is, then it becomes that to them.”
“Like what?” he asked amiably.
“The example I just gave you,” she said. “Or the Book of Mormon or the Shroud of Turin. Or a footprint in a stone where someone or other jumped up to heaven. It’s all the same.”
“It’s interesting,” he said, not sounding persuaded.
“What is?”
“That all of your examples are religious.”
“I thought I’d use that because it’s the area where they’re all sure to be nonsense.”
“Sure to be?”
She had the grace to laugh. “To the likes of me, at least.”
“And to the rest of us?”
“Then a piece of paper isn’t only a piece of paper, I suppose,” she said. “Depends on what you want to be true.”
He didn’t say anything for so long that she was sure she had gone too far and offended his beliefs or his sensibility and he was going to say good night and hang up.
“Would you be free for dinner tomorrow evening?” he surprised her by asking.
When she and her friends had first started going out with boys, there had been general agreement that one should never accept the first offer; it was a bad tactical move, they had all agreed, with the wisdom of teenagers.
Well, she was no
longer a teenager, was she? “Yes.”
Twenty-one
When she finished the call, Caterina had the choice of going to bed or going to work. She returned to the article in Catholic Encyclopedia. Toward the end there was a remark that, in light of everything she had learned about Steffani, deserved closer scrutiny. “A delicate mission was entrusted to him at the various German courts in 1696, and in 1698 at the court in Brussels, for which office he was singularly fitted by his gentle and prudent manners.”
Could this “delicate mission” at the German courts have been related to the Königsmarck murder? In everything she read about it, the murder was referred to, even in the indices, as the “Königsmarck Affair,” a triumph in rebranding if ever she had seen one. Had that rebranding been the office for which Steffani was singularly fitted because of his “gentle and prudent manners”? Gentle and prudent men are not often believed to be in the employ of murders or of men who commission murders, are they? She switched away from the encyclopedia, determined to consult more reliable sources.
Duke Ernst August had for years longed to add the title and power of elector to his string of titles, and it was finally granted to him by the emperor in 1692. Soon after, his daughter-in-law’s attention-getting lover disappeared, leaving not a trace save in the memoirs and gossip of members of his court and of the North German aristocracy. His disappearance was referred to as an “Affair,” and the man who stood most to profit from it remained unblemished by it.
She dived into the catalogue of the library of the University of Vienna, in whose waters she had been swimming for years, and quickly discovered the precise honors and powers that came along with the title of elector. Besides electing the Holy Roman Emperor, they got to call themselves a prince. “Big deal,” Caterina muttered to herself, having picked up the phrase from an American friend. More interestingly, the electors had the monopoly to all mineral wealth in their territories, this in an age when currency was based on gold and silver. They could also tax Jews and mint money. Thus “elector,” beyond being an honor that would satisfy the urgings of vanity, would satisfy those of greed as well. Who could resist such a combination?
But if your fool of a daughter-in-law put your reputation at risk by her public carryings-on with a noted rake, how seriously would your position be treated by the gilded and titled, or even by the common people? And how likely was it that the other electors would vote you into the club, a prerequisite her reading had revealed to her? Caterina had but to think of the death, three centuries later, of another beautiful young princess believed to have taken a lover, even though she was no longer married to the heir to the throne. When she died a very public death along with her lover, the world had exploded into an orgy of wild surmise and gossip about the true cause of their deaths. Would it have been any different if the death of Königsmarck had been a public event? Official information always moved with glacial majesty, while gossip travels at the speed of light. Softly, then, softly in the night; how much better a quiet disappearance that left behind only the “affair” than a corpse at the side of the road.
She opened the book about Steffani and had another look at the portrait, said to have been painted in 1714. Take away twenty years of fat, remove the double chin, give him back some of his hair, and he’d look as able as any man to stick a knife into another man’s back. Many accounts spoke of the sweetness and peacefulness of Steffani’s character. He was in Germany as a diplomat, a class of man not known for breaking up pubs in drunken brawls while in pursuit of their goals. But still his mission was the reconversion of Germany to Catholicism, and with whom better to start than with the Protestant duke of Hanover, and how better to win his favor than by doing him an enormous favor by eliminating an inconvenient relative who would make a mockery of his claim to the electorship? As Stalin was later to observe, “No man, no problem.”
Steffani might have failed to reconvert north Germany to the true religion, but he did win religious toleration and a new church for the Catholics of Hanover, and his Vatican masters might well have calculated this as a fair exchange for the death of a man who was, after all, only a Protestant. Caterina came upon another reference to Nicolò Montalbano and the 150,000 thalers. She might have been a bit hazy about the exact value of a thaler in 1694, but she was in no confusion about the size of 150,000.
The next year, Steffani’s opera I Trionfi del Fato presented the idea that humans are not entirely responsible for their emotions and thus neither for their actions. What more anodyne sentiment with which to calm the gossip-bestirred waters of the electoral court? Was this part of Steffani’s “delicate mission”?
It was past midnight, and she decided she had had enough of speculation and wonder and moving around to see events from a perspective that might make them look different from what they seemed from some other point of view.
She went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water, then went into the bathroom and washed her face and brushed her teeth. As she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw a woman in her mid-thirties with a straight nose and eyes that were green in this light. She took the toothbrush from her mouth and put it in the glass on the side of the sink, cupped some water in her hands, and rinsed out her mouth. When she was upright, she looked at the woman again and told her, “Your sister is a historian. She’d know how to find this Montalbano guy. Besides, she’s living in Germany, and that’s where all this happened.” Nodding at her own sagacity, she went back to the desk and turned on the computer again.
“Tina-Lina, I’m sorry to leave you in existential high water, but I want to ask you a favor. Hunt around and find me more about Nicolò Montalbano, a Venetian living at the court of Ernst August when Königsmarck was murdered and who came into a lot of money soon after his death. His name is already familiar to me, but I think it’s familiar because of his involvement with music and not for murder and blackmail. I’d be very grateful if you would try to find him in other places. I also came across mention of him in a lurid novel about the euphemistically called “Affair,” an exact reference to which I can send you, should you want to read it and learn. If Uncle Rinaldo can’t take you on as an apprentice, perhaps you could give a thought to a literary life. Think of the use you could make of your years of historical study; think of the passionate scenes you could toss into novels about the Council of Worms or the War of the Spanish Succession, and I’m sure there’s some neck-and-neck competition to be bishop of Maienfeld that you could transform into the Gone with the Wind of our times.
“It’s late, I’m tired, and I’m having dinner tomorrow night with a very attractive man I’ve met here. I almost hope nothing comes of it because he’s a lawyer, and I’d hate to have to revise my opinion of them as bloodsucking opportunists.
“There’s a spare room in this apartment they’ve given me, just in case you think about coming home and maybe don’t want to stay with Mamma and Papà. Love, Cati.”
As soon as she sent the mail, she realized she should not have said that last, about coming home. That’s the trouble with emails: you write them in haste and send them off, and that means there’s never time to steam the letter and read it through again to see if you should say it or not.
She turned off the computer and, leaving the open books where they were, went to bed.
The next day she awoke filled with an inordinate sense of expectation, and for the first few moments she could not locate the source of the feeling. But then she remembered her dinner date with the bloodsucking opportunist, laughed out loud, and got out of bed.
Andrea was to come by and pick her up at the Foundation at 7:30. This would give her the chance to stop at the Foundation before going to the Marciana, to spend the day in the library, and then return to the Foundation to send a report of the day’s reading. She could not rid herself of a conspiratorial glee at the thought that she would go to the Foundation to send her email to Dottor Moretti to send on to the cousins a
nd then go out to dinner with him.
As soon as she stepped outside, she felt that the weather had changed and the spring had decided to become serious about itself. She had spent time in Manchester, she reminded herself, and had learned to mistrust the weather, but still she saw no need to go back up four flights of stairs to get a heavier jacket or a scarf. When she came out onto the Riva, however, she was hit by the wind coming off the water and hurried toward the Arsenale stop, deciding to take the vaporetto, even if for only one stop. A number 1 came from behind only a minute after that but her automatic calculation told her there was no way to get it, even if she were to break into a run, which she refused to do. She watched it pass her by, and she kept on walking, cutting in at Bragora to get away from the wind.
She let herself into the building and went down to Roseanna’s office. The door was open and she looked in to see Roseanna at her desk, her telefonino at her ear. The other woman smiled and waved her inside, said a few polite words into the phone, then ended the conversation. She dropped the phone on her desk, got up to come around to give Caterina two kisses. “Any progress?” she asked, but with curiosity and not reproach.
“I’ve been doing background reading at the Marciana,” Caterina explained. Roseanna leaned back against her desk, her hands propped flat behind her, ready to listen.
“I found a letter he wrote to two men called Stievani and Scapinelli.”
“Really?” Roseanna’s curiosity was splashed across her face.
“Yes. The original two cousins,” she said and was pleased to see Roseanna’s answering smile.
“What did he tell them?”
“They—he and the two of them—were heirs to some houses near San Marcuola that had been taken over by the Labia family. He wanted to meet them to discuss what to do about getting possession of the houses and selling them. It sounds like he was short of money.”
When Roseanna didn’t respond, she continued. “They didn’t answer him.”