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  Going back to an earlier question, Brunetti asked, ‘What did you say to him during the argument?’

  ‘The usual things one says in an argument,’ Santore said wearily. ‘I called him a liar, and he called me a faggot. Then I said some unpleasant things about the production, about the music and his conducting, and he said the same things about the stage direction. The usual things.’ He stopped speaking and slumped in his chair.

  ‘Did you threaten him?’

  Santore’s eyes shot to Brunetti’s face. He couldn’t disguise his shock at the question. ‘He was an old man.’

  ‘Are you sorry he’s dead?’

  This was another question the director wasn’t prepared to hear. He thought for a time before he answered it. ‘No, not for the death of the man. For his wife, yes. This will be . . .’ he began, but then didn’t finish the sentence. ‘For the death of the musician, yes, I’m very sorry about that. He was old, and he was at the end of his career. I think he knew that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The conducting, it didn’t have its old glory somehow, didn’t have that old fire. I’m not a musician, so I can’t be clear about just what it was. But something was missing.’ He paused and shook his head. ‘No, maybe it’s just my anger.’

  ‘Did you talk to anyone about this?’

  ‘No; one doesn’t complain about God.’ He paused for a moment, then said, ‘Yes, I did. I mentioned it to Flavia.’

  ‘La Signora Petrelli?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what did she say?’

  ‘She’d worked with him before; often, I think. She was bothered by the difference in him, spoke to me about it once.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Nothing specific; just that it was like working with one of the younger conductors, someone with little experience.’

  ‘Did anyone else mention it?’

  ‘No, no one; at least not to me.’

  ‘Was your friend Saverio in the theater tonight?’

  ‘Saverio’s in Naples,’ Santore responded coldly.

  ‘I see.’ It had been the wrong question. The mood of easy intimacy was gone. ‘How much longer will you be in Venice, Signor Santore?’

  ‘I usually leave after the prima has been successfully performed. But Helmut’s death will change things. I’ll probably be here for another few days, until the new conductor is fully at home with the production.’ When Brunetti made no response to this, he asked, ‘Will I be allowed to go back to Florence?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Three days. Four. I have to stay for at least one performance with the new conductor. But then I’d like to go home.’

  ‘There’s no reason you can’t go,’ Brunetti said, and stood. ‘All we’ll need is an address where we can reach you, but you can certainly give that to one of my men at the theater tomorrow.’ He extended his hand. Santore got to his feet and took it. ‘Thank you for the brandy. And good luck with the Agamemnon.’ Santore smiled his thanks, and saying nothing else, Brunetti left.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Brunetti decided to walk home, to take advantage of the star-studded sky and the deserted streets. He paused in front of the hotel, measuring distances. The map of the city that lay imprinted in the minds of all Venetians showed him that the shortest way was across the Rialto Bridge. He cut across Campo San Fantin and into the labyrinth of narrow streets that wound back toward the bridge. No one passed him as he walked, and he had the strange sensation of having the sleeping city entirely to himself. At San Luca, he passed the pharmacy, one of the few places that were open all night, except for the train station, where slept the homeless and the mad.

  And then he was at the water’s edge, the bridge to his right. How typically Venetian it was, looking, from a distance, lofty and ethereal but revealing itself, upon closer reflection, to be firmly grounded in the mud of the city.

  Across the bridge, he walked through the now abandoned market. It was usually a cross lo bear, shoving and pushing through the crowded street, through herds of tourists jammed together between vegetable stalls on one side and shops filled with the worst sort of tourist junk on the other, but tonight he had it to himself and could stride freely. Ahead of him, in the middle of the street, a pair of lovers stood, glued hip to hip, blind to the beauty about them but perhaps, after all, somehow inspired by it.

  At the clock, he turned left, glad to be almost home. Five minutes brought him to his favorite shop, Biancat, the florist, whose windows offered the city a daily explosion of beauty. Tonight, through the clinging humidity of the glass, tubs of yellow roses preened themselves, while behind them lurked a cloud of pale jasmine. He walked quickly past the second window, crowded with lurid orchids, which always looked faintly cannibalistic to him.

  He let himself into the palazzo in which he lived, bracing himself, as he always had to do when he was tired, for the task of climbing the ninety-four steps to their fourth-floor apartment. The previous owner had built the apartment illegally more than thirty years before, simply added another floor to the existing building without bothering with official permission of any sort. This situation had somehow been obscured when Brunetti bought the apartment ten years ago, and ever since, he had lived in recurrent fear of being confronted with a summons to legalize the obvious. He trembled at the prospect of the Herculean task of getting the permits that would authenticate both that the apartment existed and that he had a right to live there. The mere fact that the walls were there and he lived within them would hardly be thought relevant. The bribes would be ruinous.

  He opened the door, glad of the warmth and smell he associated with the apartment: lavender, wax, the scent of something cooking in the kitchen at the back; it was a mixture that represented to him, in a way he couldn’t explain, the existence of sanity in the daily madness that was his work.

  ‘Is that you, Guido?’ Paola called from the living room. He wondered who else she might be expecting at two in the morning, but he didn’t ask.

  ‘Yes,’ he called back, kicking off his shoes and removing his coat, just now beginning to accept how tired he was.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’ She came into the hall and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

  He nodded, making no attempt to hide his exhaustion from her. Trailing her down the hall toward the kitchen, he took a chair while she filled the kettle and put it on the stove to boil. She pulled down a bag of dried leaves from a cupboard above her head, opened it, sniffed, and asked, ‘Verbena?’

  ‘Fine, fine,’ he answered, too tired to care.

  She tossed a handful of dried leaves into the terra-cotta teapot that had been his grandmother’s and came over to stand behind him. She kissed the back of his head, right on the spot where his hair was beginning to thin. ‘What is it?’

  ‘At La Fenice. Someone poisoned the conductor.’

  ‘Wellauer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She placed her hands on his shoulders and gave them a gentle squeeze that he found encouraging. No comment was necessary; it was obvious to both of them that the press would make a sensation of the death and become screamingly insistent that the culprit be found as quickly as possible. Either he or Paola could have written the editorials that would appear in the morning, were probably being written even now.

  The kettle shot out a burst of steam, and Paola went to pour the water into the chipped pot. As always, he found her mere physical presence comforting, found solace in observing the easy efficiency with which she moved and did things. Like many Venetian women, Paola was fair-skinned and had the red-gold hair so often seen in portraits of the women of the seventeenth century. Not beautiful by any ordinary canon, she had a nose that was a bit too long and a chin that was more than a bit too determined. He liked both.

  ‘Any ideas?’ she asked, bringing the pot and two mugs to the table. She sat opposite him, poured out the aromatic tea, then went back to the cupboard and returned with an immense jar of h
oney.

  ‘Its too early,’ he said, spooning honey into his mug. He swirled it around, clicking his spoon against the side of the mug, then spoke in rhythm with the clicking of the spoon. ‘There’s a young wife, a soprano who lied about not seeing him before he died, and a gay director who had an argument with him before he was killed.’

  ‘Maybe you ought to try to sell the story. It sounds like something we’d see on TV

  ‘And a dead genius,’ he added.

  ‘Yes, that would help.’ Paola sipped at her tea, then blew on it to cool it. ‘How much younger is the wife?’

  ‘Easily young enough to be his daughter. Thirty years, I’d say.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, using one of the Americanisms toward which her vocabulary was prone. ‘I say it was the wife.’

  Though he had repeatedly asked her not to do this, she insisted on choosing a suspect at the beginning of any investigation he worked on, and she was generally wrong, for she always opted for the most obvious choice. Once, exasperated beyond bearing, he’d asked her why she insisted on doing it, and she’d explained that since she had written her dissertation on Henry James, she considered herself entitled to the release of finding the obvious in real life, since she’d never found it in his novels. Nothing Brunetti had ever done could stop her from making her choice, and nothing could ever induce her to inject any subtlety into her selection.

  ‘Which means,’ he said, still swirling his spoon, ‘that it will turn out to be someone in the chorus.’

  ‘Or the butler.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he agreed, and drank his tea. They sat in companionable silence until the tea was gone. He took both mugs and placed them in the sink, and set the teapot on the counter beside it, safe from harm.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER SIX

  The morning after the conductor’s body was found, Brunetti arrived at his office a bit before nine, to discover that an event almost as marvelous as that of the night before had transpired: his immediate superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, was already in his office and had been calling for Brunetti for almost half an hour. This fact was revealed to him first by the porter who stood just inside the entrance to the building, then by an officer he met on the stairs, then by the secretary who worked for him and the two other commissarios of the city. Making no attempt to hurry, Brunetti checked his mail, phoned the switchboard to see if there had been any calls, and at last went down the flight of stairs that led to his superior’s office.

  Cavaliere Giuseppe Patta had been sent to Venice three years before in an attempt to introduce new blood into the criminal justice system. In this case, the blood had been Sicilian and had proved to be incompatible with that of Venice. Patta used an onyx cigarette holder and had been known, upon occasion, to carry a silver-headed walking stick. Though the first had made Brunetti stare and the second laugh, he tried to reserve judgment until he had worked long enough with the man to decide if he had a right to these affectations. It had taken Brunetti less than a month to decide that though the affectations did suit the man, he had little right to them. The vice-questore’s work schedule included a long coffee each summer morning on the terrace of the Gritti, and, in the winter, at Florian’s. Lunch was usually taken at the Cipriani pool or Harry’s Bar, and he usually decided at about four to ‘call it a day.’ Few others would so name it. Brunetti had quickly learned, as well, that Patta was to be addressed, at all times, as ‘Vice-Questore’ or the even grander ‘Cavaliere,’ the provenance of which title remained obscure. Not only did he insist that his title be used, but he had to be addressed formally as lei, leaving it to the rabble to call one another by the familiar, tu.

  Patta preferred not to be disturbed by any of the more distressing details of crime or other such messiness. One of the few things that could drive him to run his fingers through the graceful curls at his temples was a suggestion in the press that the police were in any way lax in their duties. It did not matter what the press chose to comment on: that a child had managed to slip through a police cordon to give a flower to a visiting dignitary or that notice had been taken of the open sale of drugs by African street vendors. Any suggestion that so little as hinted at anything less than a police stranglehold on the inhabitants of the city sent Patta into paroxysms of accusation, most of which fell upon his three commissarios. His ire was usually expressed in long memos to them, in which the crimes of omission by the police were made to sound infinitely more heinous than those of commission by the criminal population.

  Patta had been known, as the result of a suggestion in the press, to declare various ‘crime alerts,’ in which he singled out a particular crime, much in the way he would select an especially rich dessert from the cloth-draped sweet table in a restaurant, and announced in the press that, this week, the crime in question would be wiped out or, at least, minimized. Brunetti could not, when he read of the most recent ‘crime alert’—for this was information that was generally revealed to him only by the press—help but think of the scene in Casablanca in which the order was given to ‘round up the usual suspects.’ That was done, a few teenagers were sentenced to jail for a month or so, and things went back to normal until the press’s attentions once again provoked an ‘alert.’

  Brunetti often mused that the crime rate in Venice was low—one of the lowest in Europe and certainly the lowest in Italy—because the criminals, and they were almost always thieves, simply didn’t know how to get away. Only a resident could navigate the spiderweb of narrow calles, could know in advance that this one was a dead end or that one ended in a canal. And the Venetians, the native population, tended to be law-abiding, if only because their tradition and history had given them an excessive respect for the rights of private property and the imperative need to see to its safekeeping. So there was very little crime, and when there was an act of violence or, much more rarely, a murder, the criminal was quickly and easily found: the husband, the neighbor, the business partner. Usually all they had to do was round up the usual suspects.

  But Wellauer’s death, Brunetti knew, was different. He was a famous man, no doubt the most famous conductor of the age, and he had been killed in Venice’s little jewel of an opera house. Because it was Brunetti’s case, the vice-questore would find him directly responsible for any bad publicity that might attach to the police.

  He knocked on the door and waited to be told to enter. When the shout came, Brunetti pushed open the door and saw Patta where he knew he would be seated, poised as he knew he would find him, sitting behind his enormous desk, bent over a paper that was made important by the scrutiny he gave it. Even in a country of handsome men, Patta was shockingly handsome, with a chiseled Roman profile, wide-spaced and piercing eyes, and the body of an athlete, though he was well into his fifties. He preferred, when photographed for the papers, to be taken in left profile.

  ‘So you’ve finally come,’ Patta said, suggesting that Brunetti was hours late rather than on time. ‘I thought I’d have to wait all morning for you,’ he added, which Brunetti thought was overplaying the role. When Brunetti made no response to either remark, Patta demanded, ‘What have you got?’

  Brunetti pulled that morning’s Gazzettino from his pocket and answered, ‘The paper, sir, Its right here on page one.’ Then, before Patta could stop him, he read out, ‘“Famous Maestro Found Dead. Murder Suspected.”‘ He offered the paper to his superior.

  Patta kept his voice level but dismissed the paper with a wave. ‘I’ve already read that. I meant what have you found out?’

  Brunetti reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out his notebook. There was nothing written in it except for the name, address, and phone number of the American woman, but so long as he was kept standing in front of the seated Patta, there was no way the other man could see that the pages were virtually empty. Pointedly, he wet the finger of one hand and leafed slowly through the pages. ‘The room was unlocked, and there was no key in the door. That means that anyone could have gone in or out at any time dur
ing the performance.’

  ‘Where was the poison?’

  ‘In the coffee, I think. But I won’t know until after the autopsy and the lab report.’

  ‘When’s the autopsy?’

  ‘This morning, I think. At eleven.’

  ‘Good. What else?’

  Brunetti turned a page, exposing fresh emptiness. ‘I spoke to the singers at the theater. The baritone saw him, but only to say hello. The tenor says he didn’t see him, and the soprano says she saw him only when she came into the theater.’ He glanced down at Patta, who waited. ‘The tenor’s telling the truth. The soprano’s lying.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ Patta snapped.

  ‘Because I think it’s true, sir.’

  With exaggerated patience, as if he were speaking to an especially slow child, Patta asked, ‘And why, Commissario, do you think it’s true?’