The Jewels of Paradise

by Donna Leon

  “What’s his full name?” Cristina asked.

  “Andrea Moretti.”

  “How old?”

  “About forty-five.”

  “Born there?”

  “I think so.”

  There was a long, silent pause, during which Caterina stood first on one foot and then the other, an exercise someone had once told her would help her keep her balance in old age. “Ach du Lieber Gott,” she heard her sister say, speaking in German and shocking Caterina by doing so.

  “What?”

  “Do you want to guess where he studied?”

  “I know I’m not going to like this, so you better just tell me,” Caterina said.

  “The University of Navarra,” Cristina told her.

  “Novara?” Caterina asked, wondering what he was doing in Piemonte.

  “Navarra,” Cristina said, pronouncing it as though it had four r’s.

  “Vade retro, satana,” Caterina whispered, then added, “Founded by that lunatic who started Opus Dei,” too late to consider that this was perhaps not the way to refer to a colleague of a woman who had taken final vows.

  “They run the place. Their graduates are everywhere,” Cristina chimed in, suggesting that she might not have been offended by the remark.

  “I never would have thought . . .” Caterina began but let the thought wander off, unfinished. “That means I can’t believe anything he’s told me.” She’d said it.

  “Probably.”

  Leaving her reflections on Avvocato Moretti’s motivation to some later time, Caterina asked, “Then what’s he after?”

  “With them, power’s always a safe guess,” Tina said, causing Caterina, who had the same suspicion, to wonder if they’d both fallen victim to paranoia of the worst sort.

  Caterina couldn’t stand it any more. “If you can think that, Tina, why do you stay with it?” There was such a long silence that she finally said, “Sorry. None of my business.”

  “That’s all right,” Cristina said in a very sober voice.

  “Really sorry, Tina-Lina.”

  Cristina was silent for so long that Caterina began to wonder if she had finally gone too far. She waited and something like a prayer formed in her mind that she had not finally asked the wrong question of her favorite sister.

  “Right,” Cristina said decisively. “So we go on corresponding naturally, and I’ll pass on any information I find or anyone sends me.”

  “Good,” Caterina agreed. “But . . .”

  “I know, I know, if I learn anything that he shouldn’t know about, I should send it to . . . to where?”

  Caterina floundered, trying to think of someone she could trust to pass on information. She didn’t want to involve her family in any way. Her email at the university in Manchester had been canceled when she left. That gave her the idea. “Look, you can send it to the address of a friend. He almost never reads his emails, and I have his password. I can go into an Internet café to check.” When Cristina agreed, Caterina carefully spelled out the Romanian’s email address.

  After that, they both started to laugh, though neither one of them knew why that happened. Feeling better because of it, Caterina said good night, hung up, and went to bed.

  The first thing she did the next morning was send two emails to Dottor Moretti, quite as if they had not had dinner together the previous evening. The first was formal and described in some detail Steffani’s correspondence with Sophie Charlotte and explained that the ease of his connection with her would have given him added social status and, directly or indirectly, aided him in pursuit of work as a composer. Declaring that she was sensitive to her employers’ understandable desire to see her research come to a conclusion, she announced her intention to suspend her library reading for a few days and continue with the papers in the trunk.

  In the second, addressing him as “Andrea” and using the familiar form of address, she thanked him for the pleasant time she had had with him the previous evening, both the conversation and the discovery of a good restaurant.

  She gave considerable thought to how to close the email and decided on “Cari saluti, Caterina,” which, while being informal, was nothing more than that but certainly suggested continuing goodwill.

  That done, she took a shower, stopped and had a coffee, and walked to the Foundation, arriving a bit after nine. She went up to the office, unlocked the cupboard, and took the pile she had last been reading. She sat at the desk and started to do the job she was being paid to do, at least until the end of the month.

  There were three documents in German, all of them reports from Catholic priests upon the success of their mission in various parts of Germany governed by Protestant rulers. To one degree or another, they spoke of the deep faith of their own parishioners and the need to remain strong in the face of political opposition. All asked Steffani in one way or another to intercede with Rome for more money to aid them in their labors, a phrase two of the writers used.

  There were a few letters from women with German surnames, none of whom Caterina managed to find in any of the articles or records she consulted online, praising Steffani for his music. One of them asked if he would favor her with a copy of one of his chamber duets. There were no copies of answers to any of these letters.

  Had Steffani, then, gone through his papers in the years immediately preceding his death and chosen to keep those he thought important, or had everything simply been bundled up after his death by the people sent to sort out his possessions? Try as she might, she could find no common thread, even common threads, among these papers. Save for the musical score, nothing seemed more important than anything else.

  She retied the stack and took it to the storeroom. When she placed it facedown on the pile of those she’d already read, there remained only one more parcel in the first trunk. She took it back to the desk and untied it and began to read.

  After more than an hour of close reading, she had gotten through only one of two tightly written pages, front and back, and had decided that this was bottom feeding. These were accounts of the events and conversations, kept in a hand other than the one she had verified to be Steffani’s—did he have a ­secretary?—leading to the conversion or reconversion to Catholicism of various German aristocrats and dignitaries. Because no identification was provided beyond their names, Caterina could not measure the political importance of their religious change of stance. She was diligent with the first page and searched through the usual historical directories and sites for their names and managed to identify most of them. But what was the importance of the conversion of Henriette Christine and Countess Augusta Dorothea of Schwarzburg-Arnstadt, even if they were the daughters of Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel?

  It was two and she was hungry and she was bored to the point of pain, something that had rarely happened during past research. It was all so futile, trying to find some indication of where Steffani might have left treasure, only so his greedy descendants could fight over it. Better to go out and find more novels like the one owned by d’Annunzio and sit reading them until the end of the month, producing inventive reports and translations of the papers she did not read. Perhaps she could use the plots of the novels as sources for her summaries of the unread papers? Perhaps she could go and get something to eat?

  She carefully locked the papers away, then locked the door to the office and the door at the bottom of the steps. She went down to Roseanna’s office and found the door open; it had been closed when she came in and had remained so when she knocked on it. So Roseanna had been in and had not come up to check on her. Good or bad?

  She left the building and locked the door. During the time she had been inside, the day had turned to glory. The sun beat down, and she was quickly warm, and then so hot she had to remove her jacket. She decided to walk to the Piazza, if only to have the chance to look across
at San Giorgio and up the Grand Canal. As to lunch, God would surely provide.

  She cut out to the Riva, turned right and walked toward the Piazza, eyes always pulled to her left by the excess on display. There were more boats moored to the side of San Giorgio than she remembered, but everything else was the same. Remove the vaporetti and the other motor-driven boats, and it would look much the same as it had centuries ago. As it had in Steffani’s day, she told herself and liked the thought.

  Arrived at the Piazza she stopped and looked around: Basilica, tower, Marciana, columns, flags, clock. The ridiculous beauty of it all moved her close to tears. This was normal for her; this was one of her childhood playgrounds; this was home. She crossed in front of the Basilica, thinking she’d go back toward Rialto, but the crowds coming toward her down the Merceria frightened her, and she turned right past the leoncini and headed back, feeling abandoned by God, toward San Zaccaria.

  Halfway to the end of the Basilica, she glanced into one of the numerous glass shops to the left and saw, sitting in a chair behind the cash register, reading a newspaper on the counter in front of him, the man who had followed her the other night. She missed a step but kept moving forward and regained her balance. There had been no doubt about it, no hesitation before she recognized him: it was the same man. She continued walking. It was only when she was long past the window that she turned back and noted the name of the shop.

  It provided scant comfort to know he was not a paid killer; seeing him had still been a shock. She might not know who he was, but finding out would not be difficult. She could ask Clara or Cinzia to help. They could take one of their kids to render themselves even more innocent and start talking to him in Veneziano. Clara would be better, for her radiant happiness would pull secrets from anyone. Caterina’s thoughts turned to Clara’s husband, Sergio, who weighed just short of a hundred kilos and stood almost two meters tall. He was a far better choice of visitor.

  Immeasurably cheered, she continued down toward San Filippo e Giacomo and turned off to go and have three of the small pizzas, two for lunch, and one to celebrate her discovery of the man who had followed her.

  Twenty-four

  She returned to the Foundation and found Roseanna in her office, sitting at her desk, reading, and looking quite the acting director of the Fondazione Musicale Italo-Tedesca. So fond of her had Caterina become in these days and so accustomed to seeing her that her hairstyle now seemed carefully executed and eye-catching.

  “What are you reading?” Caterina asked as she came in.

  Roseanna looked up and smiled in greeting. “A book about psychoactive medicine.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Caterina said. “Why that?” Few subjects could seem farther from the business of the Foundation.

  “My best friend’s been diagnosed with depression, and her doctor wants her to start taking these things.” From the harsh tone Roseanna used, Caterina was left in no doubt about her thoughts on the subject.

  “And you disagree?”

  Roseanna set the book facedown on the desk. “It’s not my place to agree or disagree, Caterina. I don’t have any medical or pharmacological training, so some of what I read I don’t even understand.”

  “And the book?” Caterina asked.

  Shrug-smile. “We’ve been friends since school, best friends, and she asked me what I thought she should do. So I thought I’d read about it, both sides, and see if I could make any sense of it.”

  “Have you learned anything?”

  “Not to trust statistics or numbers or the published results of experiments,” Roseanna said instantly, then added, “Not that I ever did. Well, not much.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the people who make drugs don’t have to publish the bad results, only the good ones, and medicines are usually tested against a placebo, not against another medicine.” She patted the back of the book affectionately. “This writer makes the observation that it’s not hard to make a medicine that is more effective than a sugar pill.” Her eyes went into half focus for a moment, and then she said, “I’ve never smoked, but I’ve seen how my friends who are smokers seem to relax as soon as they light a cigarette. So you could run a test and show that smoking a cigarette is an excellent way to reduce stress.”

  “Better than a sugar pill?” Caterina asked.

  “I’d say so.” Then, as if suddenly aware of how far afield this conversation was from their common interest, she asked, “I thought you had gone to the Marciana.”

  Caterina shook the suggestion away. “No, I’m going to read through the papers, at least those in the first trunk, before I go to the library again.” She paused and then added, “I can’t make up my mind about him.”

  “Because he was a priest?”

  “No, not that. It’s because I don’t have any idea what he wanted. Usually we can tell that—what a person most wants—if we’ve been around him for a while or read about him. But, with Steffani, I just don’t know. Did he so desperately need to be accepted as an equal by the people he worked for? Did he really want to save the Church? He writes about his music and the pleasure he takes in writing it, but there’s no compelling desire to be famous for it, to be thought a great composer. It’s obvious that he loved it and loved composing it, but . . . but he gave it up so easily. If it were his compelling passion, he couldn’t have done that. Just stop, I mean.”

  Caterina saw no reason why she couldn’t tell Roseanna what she had learned, or thought she had learned, so she added, “He might have been a castrato.” She tried to say it neutrally but she wasn’t sure she succeeded. It was not a remark that lent itself to neutrality.

  “Oh, the poor man,” Roseanna said, pressing one hand to her face. “The poor man.”

  “I’m not absolutely sure he was,” Caterina said immediately. “But he’s described somewhere as un musico, and that’s the word that was used for them.”

  “To fill the choirs to sing the glory of God,” Roseanna said calmly, as if there did not exist sarcasm sufficient for the words.

  “There’s only the one reference,” Caterina said, choosing not to mention the Haydn libretto.

  Neither of them found anything further to add. “I’ll go back upstairs,” Caterina said.

  Roseanna nodded, and Caterina turned and headed toward the door. She was almost there when Roseanna said, “I’m glad they hired you.”

  Not turning back, Caterina acknowledged the remark by raising her right hand in the air. “Me, too,” she said and pulled her keys out of her pocket.

  Upstairs, she sat at the desk and pulled her telefonino from her purse. On the way back, she’d considered what to do about the man who had followed her. Before she made the call, she wanted to be sure about what to say. She had no proof that her research was related to the fact that he followed her, and then waited for her, but no other explanation made sense of it. Any of the many odd men in the city might have followed her; in fact, it had happened to her once, years ago. But he knew which vaporetto stop she would take, which meant he knew where her parents lived and where she did. Or else blind chance had . . . She dismissed this possibility even before it was fully formulated.

  She tried to tell herself he hadn’t done anything more than cause her some emotion between surprise and unease, but then she remembered kneeling in front of the toilet and vomiting and admitted that he had terrified her. Accepting that, she punched in the number of Clara’s husband, Sergio, who owned and managed a factory on the mainland in Marcon that made metal sheeting.

  Sergio had been left an orphan at the age of eleven; part of his joy in marrying Clara was that she gave him back a family. She had four sisters, and two of those had children so, with glee, he had taken on the whole lot of them, becoming the big brother none of them had had and acquiring not only a wife but the endless set of obligations and responsibilities he had pined after for ye
ars.

  “Ciao, Caterina,” he answered.

  “Sergio,” she began, deciding to waste no time. “I have a problem, and I thought you would be the person to help me solve it.” By presenting it this way to Sergio, she knew, she was pandering to his desire to be loved by the family and his need to believe himself a useful part of it.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “A few nights ago, a man followed me from where I’m working to Campo Santa Maria Formosa. I was on the way to Mamma and Papà’s” she said, conscious of using those names to reel him in, “and then he was waiting at the vaporetto stop when I went home.”

  “The same man?” Sergio asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You know him?”

  “No. But I know where he works. I walked past a shop, near the Basilica, and he was sitting behind the counter.” She started to describe the man and was astonished to realize all she remembered was light hair, cut very short.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  That was the essential Sergio: no time wasted asking if she was sure or if she had considered the consequences of getting him mixed up in this. Blood was thicker than water. Had he asked this question while she was being sick into the toilet, she probably would have told him to rip the man’s head off, but time had passed and the menace had been let out of the situation, the same way air could be let out of a balloon.

  “Maybe you could stop by and ask him what he wanted?”

  “You want to come?”

  Caterina remembered a time, decades ago, when she had come home from school after hearing someone use the expression “Vengeance is a dish that is best eaten cold,” and told her mother how clever she thought it was, forgetting that her mother’s generation had been brought up in a different epoch. Caterina had been surprised by her mother’s failure to laugh, then more surprised when she said, “It doesn’t matter, darling, if it’s hot or it’s cold, vengeance still destroys your soul, either way,” and had asked her youngest daughter if she’d like a piece of chocolate cake.