by Donna Leon
“What is it?” Roseanna demanded.
“Steffani’s will.”
Twenty-eight
“Oddio,” Roseanna said. “After all this time.”
Caterina hadn’t looked at the document closely, but she had noticed no witness signatures, though their presence or absence was rendered moot by the passing of three centuries. She looked across at the other woman. “I think we have to call them.”
“Who?”
“Dottor Moretti and the cousins,” Caterina answered.
“Call Dottor Moretti first,” Roseanna said, then added, “Unless he’s here, there’s no way to control them when they see those bags.”
Roseanna was right, and Caterina knew it. She had his number in her phone, and she dialed it. “Ah, Caterina,” he said by way of salutation. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”
She worked at keeping her voice friendly. “I’ve found something I think you and the cousins should see.”
“What is that?”
“I’ve found a statement of testamentary dispositions,” she couldn’t stop herself from saying.
“Steffani’s?” he asked, voice alert and louder than it had been.
“Yes,” she said, then added, “and something else.”
“Tell me.”
“There was a false bottom in the second trunk, and there were six leather bags hidden there. Along with the paper, signed by him.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ve seen other documents he wrote, and the handwriting looks the same.”
“Have you called the cousins?”
“No, we thought that should be left to you.”
“We?”
“Signora Salvi was with me when I found them.”
“I thought you said you needed to be alone when you read the papers.” An edge had come into his voice, one she had not heard before.
“I asked her to help me move the trunks.”
“You should have asked me,” he said, and she heard how hard he had to work to keep his voice level.
“I didn’t know what I was going to find,” she said calmly. “If I had known, I surely would have called.”
She let the silence after that grow for a while before she said, “Could you call them? And come here?”
“Certainly. I’ll do it now.” He paused and then added, voice very calm, “I’d prefer you not to look in the bags you said you found.”
“I was hired to read papers, not look in bags,” she answered. She wondered if he heard the snap.
“I’ll call them and call you back,” he said.
When Caterina switched off her phone, Roseanna said, sounding surprised “You didn’t sound very friendly.”
“Dottor Moretti is only my employer.”
“I thought the cousins were.”
“Well, he’s working for them, and they’ve asked him to oversee my work, so in that sense he’s my employer.”
Roseanna started to speak, stopped, then began again. “I’m not so sure he is,” she finally said.
“Not sure who is what?” Caterina asked.
“That he’s your employer, or even what he’s up to,” Roseanna said.
“How else could he be involved?”
Roseanna shrugged. “I have no idea, but I heard them talking in the corridor outside my office the day the trunks were delivered.”
“All three of them?”
“Excuse me?”
“Was it all three of them you heard talking?”
“No, only the cousins.”
“Talking about what?”
“They insisted on coming, the cousins. From what I could understand of what they said when we were upstairs, he had already convinced them to hire a researcher.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because that was the justification they used to be present when the trunks came. They said they wanted to see if there was enough room for the researcher to work in.” Roseanna gave an angry huff. “As if they cared a fig about that, or would even know how much room a person would need. Or what a researcher is.” Freed of her anger at the cousins, Roseanna said more calmly, “At any rate, that’s the excuse they gave for coming. But I don’t believe it for an instant.”
“Then why do you think they came?”
“To look at the trunks, maybe even to touch them, the way people do with magic things, or the way they look in the newspaper every day to see what their stocks are worth.”
Failing to stifle her impatience, Caterina said, “What did you hear them say?”
Roseanna bowed her head and pulled her lips together, as if to acknowledge her own long-windedness. “They were leaving, all three of them, but Dottor Moretti had trouble with the lock to the door to the stairs, and the two of them came past my office while he was still back there.” She waited after she said this, but Caterina did not prod.
“Stievani said something about not liking Dottor Moretti, and the other one said something like it wasn’t every day people got a lawyer like Dottor Moretti, and they should be glad that he was sent to them.”
“What does that mean?”
Shrug-smile. “I don’t know. I’m not even sure that’s exactly what they said. They were walking past the door, and I wasn’t really paying attention.”
Caterina wondered who would send Dottor Moretti to work for the cousins? It would be child’s play to persuade the cousins to accept the services of a lawyer; if an undertaker offered them his services, they’d probably commit suicide to be able to make use of the free offer.
Her phone rang. It was Dottor Moretti, saying he had contacted both cousins and that they would be there in an hour. She thanked him, hung up, and relayed the message to Roseanna.
“Time for a coffee, I’d say,” Roseanna declared.
“I think we can leave it,” Caterina said, waving a hand around the room and recalling the time she had failed to close up the papers and lock the room.
“Va a remengo, questo,” Roseanna said, consigning the trunks and the papers to hell or unimportance, or both. They went and had a coffee, and when they returned, they waited in Roseanna’s office for the three men to arrive.
It was a bit more than an hour before they got there. Caterina was surprised that the three of them came together. She had foreseen the separate arrival of one, or each, of the cousins, whom she was sure would say he could be trusted to wait upstairs in the office for the others. Dottor Moretti must have imagined the same possibility and arranged to meet them somewhere else, or perhaps he had not told them why he wanted to see them, had merely told them it was imperative to meet. She found that she didn’t care any longer which it was or what he had done.
Stievani looked eager; Scapinelli looked unwell, like a man who had had bad news and feared hearing worse—perhaps his son had called him; she hoped so. Dottor Moretti looked the same as ever, even to the gloss on his shoes and the all but invisible striping in his dark blue suit. He nodded at Roseanna and smiled amiably at Caterina. He was indeed a prudent man.
They all shook hands, but before Caterina could say a word, Scapinelli said, “Let’s go upstairs.”
So Moretti had told them, Caterina realized. Saying nothing, she led the way up the stairs and down the corridor to the director’s office. She went in first, Moretti followed, then the cousins, and then Roseanna.
They all remained by the door, though it was clear that the attention of the men was directed across the room, as if on laser beams, to the open trunk that stood to the left of the cupboard. None of them, however, moved toward it, as though they all needed the support of the others to break the spell that had fallen upon them.
Caterina decided the time of politesse was ended. “Would you like to see the document?” she asked, not bothering
to direct the question at any one of them in particular.
Like men released from an enchantment, they started toward the trunk at the same instant, only to draw up short of it, as if again zapped by some magic force. Caterina walked through them, the maga who had the power to unravel the secret signs. She picked up the document from where she had left it on top of the open trunk and held it out to Dottor Moretti.
He took it eagerly, and the cousins crowded to his side, looking down at the paper. Stievani tried to move Moretti’s arm higher, as if to bring the paper closer to his own eyes, and Scapinelli took out a plastic box and extracted a pair of reading glasses.
As she watched, Moretti’s lips began to move, as Italians’ often did when they read. After only a few seconds, he moved his right shoulder in a gesture that reminded Caterina of the way a chicken fluffed out a wing to win it more space. Stievani moved a half step away, and Scapinelli used the opportunity to move even closer.
Moretti, unable to disguise his exasperation, handed the paper to Caterina and said, “Perhaps it would be better if you read it, Dottoressa.” He had slipped back into the formal lei, which suited her just fine.
She took the paper from him, saw the way the four cousin eyes followed it hungrily. And these men believed that the other would abide by their agreement to let the winner take all?
“‘Knowing my death to be near, I, Bishop Agostino Steffani, set pen to paper to make disposition of my possessions in a manner just and fitting in the eyes of God.’” After reading that, Caterina looked at the three men to see how they’d take to the idea of God’s being mixed up in this. The cousins seemed uninterested; Moretti now resembled a hunting dog that had heard the first call of his master’s voice.
“‘My life has been devoted to service, to both my temporal and my Divine masters, and I have tried to give them my loyalty in all my endeavors. I have also served my other master, Music, though with less attention and less loyalty.
“‘I have sought, and squandered, worldly gain, and I have done things no man can be proud of. But no man can be proud of the act that set me on my path in life.
“‘I leave little behind me save my music, and these treasures, which are of much greater value than any notes of music that could be written or imagined. I leave the music to the air and the treasures . . .’” Here Caterina looked up from the paper and studied the faces of the men in thrall to her voice.
She did not like what she saw and returned to the page. “‘. . . and the treasures I leave to my cousins, Giacomo Antonio Stievani and Antonio Scapinelli, in equal portions.
“‘To eliminate all suspicions about my having accumulated such wealth as to allow me to purchase these Jewels,’” he wrote, and Caterina wondered if he had capitalized the word while writing in Italian because of the Germanic influence on his language for all those decades, and he automatically capitalized all nouns, “‘I declare that the money was given to me by a friend who became a Judas, not only to me but to an innocent man. Judas-like, he regretted his betrayal and came to me to be shriven of his sin, forgetting that to forgive sins is not in my power, as it was not in his.’”
She looked at Roseanna, then at the men, and saw the same confusion on her face and on Stievani’s and Scapinelli’s. Moretti, however, seemed to be following everything, the bastard.
“‘The money came to me at his death, and I could think of no finer, no nobler, use for it than to purchase the Jewels of Paradise, which I leave here to the edification and enrichment of my dear cousins in just return for the generosity with which they have treated me.’”
There followed the signature and the date, and that was all.
“So they’re ours?” Scapinelli asked when it was evident that Caterina had finished reading the document. He took a step toward the trunk and leaned over to look inside. His cousin moved quickly to stand beside him. Had the clear disposition of the will put an end to the idea that winner would take all?
To Caterina, it seemed like the moment of stupor in a Rossini opera, just before the ensemble that brought the act to a rousing finale. Would their voices join in one by one? What duets would be formed? Tercets? Would she sing a duet with Roseanna? She scorned the tenor.
“Dottoressa,” Moretti said, who also had moved to the side of the trunk, “I think it would be right for you to see to opening these bags.”
There was a long silence while the cousins considered the statement. Stievani nodded, and Scapinelli said, very reluctantly, “Va bene.”
Caterina walked over to the desk and set the document, facedown, on the surface, then went back to the trunk. She leaned inside and, two by two, carried the bags over and placed them at the other end of the table.
“You’re sure you want me to open them, Dottore?” she asked Moretti, also using the formal lei. The three men had another silent conference, and when no objection was proposed she picked up the first bag. The leather was dry and hard, unpleasant to her hand. With some difficulty Caterina untied the stiff knot that held the leather strings together and used the backs of her fingers to pry open the mouth of the bag.
She was suddenly overwhelmed by a reluctance to know what was in the bag and an even stronger repugnance to touch whatever it was. She handed the bag to Moretti. He reached inside, and his fingers delicately removed a slip of paper with a few words written on it in faded ink. He looked at the paper and, gasping, stood rooted to the spot.
Scapinelli, immune to presentiments or surprise, grabbed the bag from him and stuffed his fingers inside. A second later his fingers emerged holding a long, thin sliver that Caterina at first thought might be a decorative silver pin of some sort, tarnished with age.
Scapinelli put it into the palm of his other hand and studied it. “What the hell is this?” he demanded, quite as if everyone else in the room were agreed to keep the information from him.
After long moments, Moretti broke the silence. “It’s the finger of Saint Cyril of Alexandria,” he said, holding the tiny scrap of paper toward Scapinelli. In a voice made low by reverence, he whispered, “Pillar of Faith and Seal of all the Fathers.”
Scapinelli turned to him and shouted, “What? Seal of what? It’s a bone, for the love of God. Can’t you see it? It’s a piece of bone.”
Moretti reached out and took it from Scapinelli’s hand. He removed his handkerchief and wrapped the tiny bone reverently, then, holding the handkerchief in his hand, he made the sign of the cross, touching his body in four places with the cloth.
Caterina thought of a time, it must have been twenty years ago, when she had been returning to Venice on an overnight train. Luckily, her compartment held only three people, she and a young couple. At about ten, Caterina had gone to use the toilet and, finding a long line of people waiting to use it, she had been away from the compartment for at least twenty minutes. When she got back, the door was closed and the light turned off. She slid back the door, thinking how lucky she was to have three empty seats on which she could stretch out and sleep, when the light from the corridor flashed across the naked bodies of the young people, linked in lovemaking on the seat opposite hers.
She felt the same shame when she caught a glimpse of the expression on Dottor Moretti’s face, for there she read an emotion so intense that no one had the right to observe it. She looked away, allowed a moment to pass, and handed him the second bag. The paper described it as the fingernail of Saint Peter Chrysologus. And so it went until the six bags had been opened and the papers extracted. And each time Moretti handled the piece of dried flesh or nail or the bloodstained tissues with a reverence from which even the cousins were forced to avert their eyes.
When the bags were on the table, the document placed beside it, Caterina turned away from Moretti, who was leaning over them, his hands propped on either side of them, his head bowed. Addressing Scapinelli, she said, “I don’t see any sense in disputing any of this. His
wishes are clear. You each get half of what’s in those bags.”
A cunning look flashed across Scapinelli’s eyes and he said, “Aren’t those things always surrounded by gold and jewels? What happened to them?” Suspicion seeped into his voice as he spoke, and the final words were all but an accusation of theft.
“Signora Salvi was with me when I found them.”
Roseanna nodded.
“I called Dottor Moretti, with her here, as soon as I read the first sentence.” Then, more forcefully, “No one’s stolen anything.”
“Then where did the gold and jewels go?”
“I doubt there were any,” Caterina said.
“There always was,” Scapinelli said with the insistence the ignorant always use when defending a position.
“Maybe he didn’t want there to be any gold. Or diamonds. Or emeralds,” Caterina suggested.
Stievani broke in here to ask, “What do you mean?”
“Maybe he wanted to leave only a spiritual gift to his cousins.”
“Then what did he do with the money?” Scapinelli demanded, quite as if he thought she knew and was refusing to tell him.
“The money went for the relics,” Caterina said. “That’s what had value.”
Waving his hand at the bags, Stievani said, “It’s only a mess of bones and rags.”
Moretti pushed himself away from the table and took a step toward Stievani. “You fool,” he said in a tight voice. He raised his hands but lowered them slowly to his sides.
Caterina surprised herself by laughing. “Fool,” she said, and laughed again.
Moretti turned his glance on her, and she wondered what had happened to Andrea. “He believed,” Moretti said. “He knew what they were worth. More than gold. More than diamonds.”
“And if he didn’t believe?” she asked Dottor Moretti. “If he thought they were just pieces of pig’s bone and dirty handkerchiefs? What better way to free himself of the blood money he was given?” The cousins seemed to begin to understand, but she didn’t want them to get off free, so she asked, “And how better to pay back the cousins who refused to help him than by giving them things that had no value except that put on them by faith?”