The Jewels of Paradise

by Donna Leon

  Her link to the outer world rang and she answered it gladly.

  Twenty-six

  “Cati,” said a voice she recognized as Sergio’s. “I have to talk to you.”

  “News?” she asked brightly before the sound of his voice registered. A second too late, she asked, “What’s wrong?”

  Instead of answering her, he said, “Tell me where you are.”

  “I’m in the Marciana.”

  “I’m down at the Museo Navale. I can be there in ten minutes. Where can we meet?”

  “Florian’s. In the back.”

  “Good,” he said and broke the connection.

  Sergio had sounded tense and worried, something she had never heard before, and she began to castigate herself; her rash request that giant Sergio go and menace the man in the shop had refused to factor in Sergio’s sweetness of character. What was to stop the man who had been so successful in terrifying her from turning his attentions, and his menaces, on Sergio? As she walked toward Florian’s, she thought about the possible consequences. It would be easy enough for this unknown man, whom she assumed was Venetian, to use the same spiderweb of connection and information to identify Sergio, and from there it would be simplicity itself to find his factory, his home, his wife, his children. His sister-in-law.

  She had set it all in motion, had hidden behind a man and his muscles and his size in hopes of intimidating another man who had used the same weapons against her. And all she’d managed to do was put at risk the people she most loved. So preoccupied was she with these thoughts that she failed to notice the elaborate gilded mirrors or the silk-covered chairs and sofas in the café, nor did she respond to the smiles and greetings of the waiters. She went to the bar at the back of the café, distracted by bitter regret and self-castigation. “Fight your own battles,” she whispered to herself as she sat on the tall stool at the bar.

  “Scusi, Signorina?” the waiter said with a smile. “Non ho capito.” She gave him a startled glance. No, no one would understand what she had done and what it might lead to.

  “Un caffè,” she said. She didn’t want coffee but the thought of adding alcohol of any sort to her fear repelled her. The coffee came quickly, one of the advantages of sitting back here. She tore open an envelope of sugar and spilled it slowly into the cup, stirred it around, set the spoon on the edge of the saucer, and turned to one side, more to avoid her reflection in the mirror than to be able to see Sergio arrive.

  Waiters came to the bar and spoke their orders, carried trays out to the people sitting at the tables in the cafè. She had noticed some courageous souls sitting at tables in the Piazza, shivering in their jackets and scarves in the thin spring sun as part of the full price of the Venetian experience.

  She looked back at the coffee, realizing it would be cold by now and even less appealing. When she looked up again, Sergio was there: tall, thick-bodied, safe. She slid from the stool and wrapped her arms around him, put her face into his neck, and said, “I’m sorry, Sergio. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  When she pulled away from him, she saw surprise spread across his face, and when she glanced at the waiter, she saw it mirrored on his, though mixed with open curiosity.

  “What’s wrong?” Sergio asked. “What’s happened?”

  “That man. What did he do?”

  Sergio held her by the arm and moved her back to the stool and didn’t release her until she was back on it. “What happened?” she asked, needing to know the worst.

  “That man?” Sergio asked.

  She felt a sudden flash of irritation. What other man could she mean? “What did he do?” she asked.

  Sergio turned to the waiter and asked for a glass of white wine, anything he had. He looked at her untouched coffee, placed the back of his fingers against the side of the cup, then picked up the cup and saucer and reached over the counter and set them on the other side. “Two glasses,” he said to the waiter and turned to Caterina.

  “Tell me what happened,” she said, then added, “Please.”

  Sergio tried to smile, finally managed it, though she suspected it was to soothe her anxiety more than at the story he had to tell. “I couldn’t go until yesterday evening. I had to talk to some people in a hotel about metal reinforcements.” Involuntarily, Caterina clenched her teeth at the mention of this useless detail.

  The waiter set the glasses down in front of them. Sergio handed her one but did not bother to tap his glass against hers, nor did he say “Cin cin.” He took a long drink and set the glass on the counter. He scooped up a handful of peanuts and began to put them into his mouth, one by one, with his other hand. How long would she have to wait before he told her what had happened?

  “I went in about seven. No one else was there. The store is full of crap, that stuff they get from China. Terrible, ugly things. Robaccia.” Was he wasting time to calm her down and prepare her for the worst?

  “I went in, and he looked up and smiled, sort of waved his hand around the shop to tell me to take my time. As if any of that stuff would interest me.” Then he surprised her by saying, “But some things did. He’s got some of those butterflies the guy in Calle del Fumo makes. Really nice. Only thing in the shop—except for him—that’s Venetian.”

  From wanting to hold him and protect him, Caterina had passed to wanting to put her hands around his throat to choke the information out of him. But she said nothing, picked up her glass and took a sip, tasting nothing.

  “So I picked up one of them and went back to where he was sitting, reading the paper.” Sergio finished the peanuts and took another sip of wine, set the glass next to hers.

  “I figured I’d do it like the guys in the movies do. Be a tough guy, start right from the beginning and frighten the little creep.” The man who had followed her was ten centimeters taller than she; only Sergio would see him as little.

  “So what did you do?” she ventured.

  “I held up the butterfly right in front of him and asked him what he was doing following my sister-in-law around and frightening her. Then I broke one of the wings off the butterfly and let it drop on the page he was reading.” Having said this, Sergio looked at his feet, then reached for his glass and took a larger sip.

  He held the glass up between himself and Caterina, his thick fingers easily capable of snapping the stem with the least of efforts. He set it down and took some more peanuts.

  “What did he do?” she asked, needing to know the consequences of her own rashness.

  Sergio put his handful of peanuts down on the napkin beside his glass and said, “He pushed his chair back until it hit the wall and tried to stand up.” With his index finger, Sergio pushed at the peanuts, as if he were trying to straighten them into a single line. Caterina realized then that he wanted to have something to look at other than her as he spoke.

  “But he couldn’t stand up. He was shaking so hard he had to put his head between his knees.” Sergio lined up a few more peanuts.

  “When his head was still down there and all I could see was the back of it, he said, ‘Please don’t hurt me, please. My father made me do it. I didn’t hurt her. I didn’t even talk to her.’” Sergio looked at her for confirmation.

  Caterina could do nothing more than nod. He hadn’t hurt her. He hadn’t spoken to her. He’d followed her and terrified her, but he hadn’t hurt her.

  “What did he do to you? What did he say?” Sergio asked.

  She shook her head. “He frightened me,” she said. Then, realizing how inadequate that sounded, she said, “He terrified me.”

  Voice much lower, Sergio said, “He started to cry. Not like people in the movies, with tears down his face and you know it’s all fake. He was almost hysterical, sobbing and wrapping his arms around his chest and keeping his head hidden like he had to protect himself.” Sergio’s voice came in gusts, like the November wind on th
e Lido. “He kept saying, again and again, ‘I didn’t want to do it. My Daddy made me do it. I had to frighten her. He said she doesn’t work enough.’ It was like he was a kid again. He really couldn’t stop.”

  “What did you do?”

  Sergio threw his arms out to his sides; they were so long that one of the waiters had to dance away from his hand, which caused Sergio to apologize to him and the waiter to smile and say it was nothing.

  When Sergio looked back at her, he seemed calmer. “If it had been one of the kids I would have told him to quiet down and given him a handkerchief and told him it would be okay. But this was the guy who followed you.”

  “So?”

  “So I asked him his father’s name.”

  “And.”

  “Scapinelli,” Sergio said. “That mean something?”

  “Yes,” Caterina said, realizing she was not at all surprised. “Then what?”

  “Then, I was so embarrassed, all I could think of to do was ask him how much the butterfly cost.” Seeing her surprise, Sergio said, “I know, I know it was a stupid thing to say, but it was the only thing I could think of.”

  “What did he do?”

  Sergio smiled or came close to smiling. “I guess he was as surprised as you were, or I was, because he looked up at me and said it cost twenty euros but I didn’t have to pay for it. He’d tell his father it got broken by a client.”

  “And?”

  Looking surprised that she would be in any doubt about what he would do, Sergio said, “I did what I had to do. I reached into my pocket for my wallet.” He paused and gave her a pained look. “When he saw me move, he pushed away to the side like he thought I was going to hit him. Right along the wall, still in the chair, but against the wall. And this time he bent down and put his arms over his head.” He waited a moment, then, as though the story wouldn’t be complete without this last detail, he said, “And he made a noise. Like an animal. In a trap.”

  Sergio picked up his glass, looked at it, then put it back on the counter.

  In a voice he made sound calm, he said, “I took out twenty euros and I set them on the newspaper. Beside the wing. And I told him that nothing was going to happen to him and that he could believe me.”

  “And?”

  “And then I left the shop and went home.”

  “Did you tell Clara?”

  “No. I wanted to talk to you first.”

  “Good. Thank you,” Caterina said, then, “How does this make you feel?”

  “Like a shit. I’ve never bullied anyone in my life,” Sergio said, then knowing how impossible to believe that would be for anyone who saw him, he added, “Not since I was a kid, that is.” He raised his hands inward and drew them repeatedly up and down in front of his body. “I can’t very well do that, can I?”

  “So it’s a handicap?” Caterina asked, stunned by her own question.

  “What?”

  “Being so big. It’s a handicap?”

  Sergio smiled, as if the question had suddenly set him free from something. “I never thought of it that way,” he said, voice filled with new surmise. He took another handful of peanuts and put them all into his mouth. He chewed them for a while, washed them down with the rest of the wine. He turned and signaled to the waiter, gave her an inquisitive look, but Caterina shook away the possibility of a second glass.

  The waiter was quickly back with another glass of wine. Perhaps, having come close to Sergio’s outstretched hand, he didn’t want to keep this client waiting.

  Sergio took the glass and waved it in Caterina’s direction. “What should I do about Clara?”

  “You mean about telling her?”

  Sergio nodded.

  “You tell her everything, don’t you?”

  He nodded again.

  “Then you better tell her.”

  “I thought so, too.”

  “But tell her you were doing it for me.”

  “You think that will change anything?” he asked. Sergio, she knew from long experience, could be as hard on himself as she was capable of being when judging her own excesses.

  “You were helping someone in the family. If she wants to get angry, she can get angry with me.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time, would it?” he asked, then smiled. Caterina reached for some peanuts and thought about having a second glass of wine.

  Twenty-seven

  Although Sergio invited her back to dinner, Caterina was reluctant to go as far as San Polo. How easily the habits of the city returned, making her hesitant to leave her own sestiere, viewing an invitation to San Polo or Santa Croce as little different from a forced expedition to the Himalayas. What would happen if she had to cross Il Ponte della Libertà toward terraferma? Take her passport? Refuse to go because of her fear of strange food and exotic diseases?

  She managed to shake off these musings and persuaded Sergio that it would be easier to explain things to Clara if she were not present.

  When they left the café, he said he’d walk home, which meant he’d head back toward the Accademia. He kissed her on both cheeks, told her to call him again if she needed him, and headed off to his home and his family.

  Caterina walked out to the water, noticed that the daylight was swiftly disappearing, and started along the riva, heading home. What a pair of failures they were. At the first sign of weakness, both she and Sergio capitulated. In her case, her dislike of confrontation was the result of size, not principle.

  By the time Caterina was in university, Mina had long been a myth, and her discs could still astonish. How Caterina loved the cover of one of the old discs—it must be from three decades ago—with her head seamlessly airbrushed onto the body of a bodybuilder. A woman’s head—and brain—on top of a hundred kilos of muscle and power; if Caterina had that body, she’d once believed, she’d be the head of the music department at the University of Vienna. Hell, she’d have been head of state.

  But now, having learned that size and power could be a handi­cap, at least for a person as decent as Sergio, she had to dismiss even that illusion. The man had followed her because he was afraid of his father, and his fear now made him untouchable by her or Sergio. “Mamma mia,” she whispered.

  When she got to the apartment she spent another two hours hunting for Abbé Montalbano, chasing him through scholarly books and journals in four languages, seeking some sign of his passing in the catalogues listing the hundreds of thousands of books now available online, even though she knew he was unlikely to appear. She searched for him in historical journals and musicological theses, in the diplomatic files of minor principalities and the memoirs of forgotten noblemen and women.

  Occasionally she caught a fleeting glimpse of him. In 1680 he accompanied Friedrich August, the son of Ernst August, as tutor on a trip to Venice and Rome. A letter from a composer for whom he wrote libretti referred to him as an intensely religious man, though in a “superstitious way.” Montalbano was believed to be Venetian, though she found no record of his birth in the city archives. He hung around the court in Hanover for years, always ready, it seemed, to help Ernst August with the embarrassing affairs of his family. Little was written about his salary until he was paid, and royally—Caterina smiled as that word came to her—the 150,000 thalers that came to him in the year of Königsmarck’s death, though some sources cut it to just 10,000. The only subsequent references to him that Caterina found appeared in a biography of Leibniz, where he was said to have returned to his native country and become the archdeacon of Mantova, where he died in 1695, and a reference to the account books of the court of Hanover, in which was noted a pension paid to the “mistress of the Abbé Montalbano” for forty-seven years after his death. The money that was given to him, whatever its true quantity, might as well have evaporated for all that was ever known of it.

  She swit
ched files and found the words of Countess von Platen: it was the abbé “who gained from the fatal blow that sent him to his maker . . . Did he not, Judas-like, make possible and profit from the crime? The blood money given to him bought the Jewels of Paradise, but nothing can buy him manhood and honor and beauty.”

  “Pronoun reference, you fool,” she said out loud. Change the meaning of “he” from Abbé Steffani to Abbé Montalbano, and the picture of Steffani changed focus. He ceased to be an assassin; he ceased to have been involved in a murder to curry political favor for himself or his religion. He went back to being a fine composer and a man busy to advance the interests of his church and family. “Nothing can buy him manhood . . .” If this was not a reference to Steffani, then the writer was using “manhood” as a synecdoche for all the manly virtues absent from a man like Montalbano and not for missing body parts.

  The “Jewels of Paradise,” however, remained a mystery to her. What did Montalbano buy with his blood money and what became of it at his death?

  Hunger reminded her that it was time to stop asking these questions and think of finding something to eat. She cut some courgette and put them on to sauté, cut some tomatoes and added them, set it to simmer. The realization crashed upon her that, in all this time, she had not done the obvious thing and listened to Steffani’s music. She had read through it, sung through it in a soft voice, hummed a good deal of it. But she had not heard it in any real sense. She went over to the computer and found YouTube, typed in his name, and then selected Niobe, the work with which she was most familiar.