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  ‘Because she was seen going into his dressing room after the first act.’ Brunetti didn’t bother to clarify that this was only a suggestion from a witness, not yet confirmed. His interview had suggested she wasn’t telling the truth, perhaps about that, perhaps about something else.

  ‘I also spoke to the director,’ Brunetti continued. ‘He had an argument with the conductor before the performance began. But he didn’t see him again during the performance. I think he’s telling the truth.’ Patta didn’t bother to ask him why he thought this.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘I sent a message to the police in Berlin last night.’ He made a business of leafing through his notebook. ‘The message went out at—’

  ‘Never mind.’ Patta cut him off. ‘What did they say?’

  ‘They’ll fax down a full report today, any information they have on Wellauer or his wife.’

  ‘What about the wife? Did you speak to her?’

  ‘Not more than a few words. She was very upset. I don’t think anyone could have talked to her.’

  ‘Where was she?’

  ‘When I spoke to her?’

  ‘No, during the performance.’

  ‘She was sitting in the audience, in the orchestra. She said she went back to see him after the second act but got there too late to speak to him, that they never spoke.’

  ‘You mean she was backstage when he died?’ Patta asked with an eagerness so strong Brunetti almost believed the man would need little more to arrest her for the crime.

  ‘Yes, but I don’t know whether she saw him, whether she went into the dressing room.’

  ‘Well, make it your business to find out.’ Even Patta realized that his tone had been too harsh. He added, ‘Sit down, Brunetti.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said, closing his notebook and slipping it into his pocket before taking a seat opposite his superior. Patta’s chair, he knew, was a few centimeters higher than this one, something the vice-questore undoubtedly regarded as a delicate psychological advantage.

  ‘How long was she back there?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. She was very upset when I spoke to her, so her story wasn’t very clear.’

  ‘Could she have gone into the dressing room?’ Patta asked.

  ‘She might have. I don’t know.’

  ‘It sounds like you’re making excuses for her,’ said Patta, then added, ‘Is she pretty?’ Brunetti realized Patta must have found out about the difference in age between the dead man and his widow.

  ‘If you like tall blonds,’ Brunetti said.

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘My wife doesn’t permit me to, sir.’

  Patta thrust around for a way to pull the conversation back together. ‘Did anyone else go into the dressing room during the performance? Where did the coffee come from?’

  ‘There’s a bar on the ground floor of the theater. Probably from there.’

  ‘Find out.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Now pay attention, Brunetti.’ Brunetti nodded. ‘I want the name of anyone who was in the dressing room, or near it, last night. And I want to find out more about the wife. How long they’ve been married, where she comes from, that sort of thing.’ Brunetti nodded.

  ‘Brunetti?’ Patta suddenly asked.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Why aren’t you taking notes?’

  Brunetti permitted himself the smallest of smiles. ‘Oh, I never forget anything you say, sir.’

  Patta chose, for reasons of his own, to give this a literal reading. ‘I don’t believe what she told you about not seeing him. People don’t start to do things and then change their minds. I’m sure there’s something here. It probably has something to do with the difference in their ages.’ It was rumored that Patta had spent two years studying psychology at the University of Palermo before changing to the law. But it was unblemished fact that, after an undistinguished career as a student, he had taken his degree and, soon thereafter, as a direct result of his father’s very distinguished career in the Christian Democratic party, had been appointed a vice-commissario of police. And now, after more than twenty years, he was vice-questore of the police of Venice.

  Patta having apparently finished with his orders, Brunetti prepared himself for what was coming, the speech about the honor of the city. As night the day, the thought gave birth to Patta’s words. ‘You might not understand this, Commissario, but this is one of the most famous artists of our era. And he was killed here in our city, Venice’—which name never failed to sound faintly ridiculous coming from Patta, with his Sicilian accent. ‘We have to do everything in our power to see that this crime is solved; we cannot allow this crime to blot the reputation, the very honor, of our city.’ There were times when Brunetti was tempted to take notes of what the man said.

  As Patta continued in this vein, Brunetti decided that if something was said about the glorious musical history of the city, he’d take Paola flowers that afternoon. ‘This is the city of Vivaldi. Mozart was here. We have a debt to pay to the world of music.’ Irises, he thought; she liked them best of all. And she’d put them in the tall blue Murano vase.

  ‘I want you to stop whatever you’re working on and devote yourself entirely to this. I’ve looked at the duty rosters,’ Patta continued, surprising Brunetti that he even knew they existed, ‘and I’ve assigned you two men to help you with this.’ Please let it not be Alvise and Riverre, and I’ll take her two dozen. ‘Alvise and Riverre. They’re good, solid men.’ Roughly translated, that meant they were loyal to Patta.

  ‘And I want to see progress in this. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Brunetti replied blandly.

  ‘Right, then. That’s all. I’ve got work to do, and I’m sure you’ve got a lot to get busy with.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Brunetti repeated, rising and going toward the door. He wondered what the parting shot would be. Hadn’t Patta taken his last vacation in London?

  ‘And good hunting, Brunetti.’

  Yes, London. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said quietly, and let himself out of the office.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  For the next hour, Brunetti busied himself reading through the reports of the crime in the four major papers. Il Gazzettino, as was to be expected, put it all over the front page and saw it as a crime that somehow compromised the city and put it at risk. It editorialized that the police must quickly find the person responsible, not so much to bring that person to justice as to remove the blot from the honor of Venice. Reading it, Brunetti reflected on Patta’s having read this article instead of waiting for his usual L’Osservatore Romano, which wasn’t on the newsstands until ten.

  La Repubblica viewed the event in light of recent political developments, suggesting a relationship so subtle that only the journalist, or a psychiatrist, could grasp it. Corriere della Sera behaved as though the man had died in his bed and devoted a full page to an objective analysis of his contribution to the world of music, drawing special attention to his having championed the cause of certain modern composers.

  He saved L’Unità for last. Predictably, it screamed the first thing that came into its head—in this case, vengeance, which, predictably, it had got confused with justice. An editorial hinted broadly at the same old secrets in high places and dragged out, not surprisingly, poor old Sindona, dead in his jail cell, and asked the patently rhetorical question of whether there wasn’t some dark connection between these two ‘frighteningly similar’ deaths. Aside from the fact that they were both old men who died of cyanide poisoning, there was little similarity, frightening or not, that Brunetti could see.

  Not for the first time in his career, Brunetti reflected upon the possible advantage of censorship of the press. In the past, the German people had got along very well with a government that demanded it, and the American government seemed to fare similarly well with a population that wanted it.

  He turned back to the long story in the Corriere, and tossed t
he three other papers into the wastebasket. He read through the article a second time, occasionally taking notes. If not the most famous conductor in the world, Wellauer was certainly ranked high among them. He had first conducted before the last war, the prodigy of the Berlin Conservatory. Not much was written about the war years, save that he had continued to conduct in his native Germany. It was in the fifties that his career had taken off and he had joined the international glitter set, flying from one continent to another to conduct a single concert, then going off to a third to conduct an opera.

  In the midst of the tinsel and the fame, he had remained the consummate musician, exacting both precision and delicacy from any orchestra he directed, insisting upon absolute fidelity to the score as written. Even the reputation he had acquired of being imperious or difficult paled before the universal praise that greeted his absolute devotion to his art.

  The article paid little attention to his personal life, save to mention that his current wife was his third and that the second had taken her life, twenty years before. His residences were given as Berlin, Gstaad, New York, and Venice.

  The picture that appeared on the front page was not a recent one. In it, Wellauer appeared in profile, talking with Maria Callas, who was in costume and was obviously the prime subject of the photograph. It seemed strange to him that the paper would print a photo that was at least thirty years old.

  He reached down into the wastebasket and grabbed back the Gazzettino. It, as usual, had a photo of the place where the death had occurred, the dull, balanced facade of Teatro La Fenice. Next to it was a smaller photo of the stage entrance, out of which something was being carried by two uniformed men. The picture below was a recent full-face publicity still of the Maestro: white tie, shock of silver hair swept back from his angular face. There was the faint Slavic tilt to the eyes, which appeared curiously light under the dark brows that overshadowed them. The nose was entirely too long for the face, but the effect of those eyes was so strong that the slight defect hardly seemed worth notice. The mouth was broad, the lips full and fleshy, a strangely sensual contrast with the austerity of the eyes. Brunetti tried to remember the face as he had seen it the night before, tightened and distorted by death, but the power of this photo was enough to supplant that image. He stared at those pale eyes and tried to imagine a hatred so strong that it would lead someone to destroy this man.

  His speculations were interrupted by the arrival of one of the secretaries, with the report that had come down from the police in Berlin, already translated into Italian.

  Before he began to read it, Brunetti reminded himself that Wellauer was a sort of living monument and the Germans were always on the lookout for heroes, so what he read was very likely to reflect both of those things. This meant that some truths would be there only by suggestion, others by omission. Hadn’t many musicians and artists belonged to the Nazi Party? But who remembered that now, after all these years?

  He opened the report and began to read the Italian text, the German useless to him. Wellauer had no criminal record whatsoever, not even a driving violation. His apartment in Gstaad had been robbed twice; both times, nothing had been recovered, no one apprehended, and the insurance had made good, though the totals had been enormous.

  Brunetti waded through two more paragraphs of Germanic exactitude until he came to the suicide of the second wife. She had hanged herself in the basement of their Munich apartment on 30 April 1968, after what the report referred to as ‘a long period of depression.’ No suicide note had been found. She had left three children, twin boys and a girl, then aged seven and twelve. Wellauer had himself discovered the body and, after the funeral, had gone into a period of complete seclusion that lasted six months.

  The police had paid no attention to him until his marriage, two years ago, to Elizabeth Balintffy, a Hungarian by birth, a doctor by training and profession, and a German by her first marriage, which had ended in divorce three years before her marriage to Wellauer. She had no criminal record, either in Germany or in Hungary. She had one child by the first marriage, a daughter, Alexandra, aged thirteen.

  Brunetti looked, and looked in vain, for some reference to what Wellauer had done during the war years. There was mention of his first marriage, in 1936, to the daughter of a German industrialist, and his divorce after the war. Between those dates, the man seemed not to have existed, which, to Brunetti, spoke very eloquently of what he had been doing or, at any rate, supporting. This, however, was a suspicion about which he was likely to get very little confirmation, especially not in an official report from the German police.

  Wellauer was, in short, as clean as a man could possibly wish to be. But still, someone had put cyanide in his coffee. Experience had taught Brunetti that people killed one another primarily for two reasons: money and sex. The order wasn’t important, and the second was very often called love, but he had, in fifteen years spent among the murderous, encountered few exceptions to that rule.

  Well before eleven, he had finished with the German police report. He called down to the laboratory, only to learn that nothing had been done, no fingerprints taken from the cup or from the other surfaces in the dressing room, which remained sealed, a fact that, he was told, had already prompted three phone calls from the theater. He yelled a bit at that, but he knew it was useless. He spoke briefly with Miotti, who said he’d learned nothing further from the portiere the night before, save that the conductor was a ‘cold one,’ the wife very pleasant and friendly, and La Petrelli not at all to his liking. The portiere gave no reason for this, falling back, instead, on the explanation that she was antipatica. For him, that was enough.

  There was no sense in sending either Alvise or Riverre to take prints, not until the lab could determine if prints other than those of the conductor were on the cup. No need for haste here.

  Disgruntled that he would miss lunch, Brunetti left his office a little after noon and walked to the bar on the corner, where he had a sandwich and a glass of wine, not at all pleased with either. Though everyone in the bar knew who he was, no one asked him about the death, though one old man did rustle his newspaper suggestively. Brunetti walked down to the San Zaccaria stop and caught the number 5 boat, which would take him to the cemetery island of San Michele, cutting through the Arsenate and along the back side of the island. He seldom visited the cemetery, somehow not having acquired the cult of the dead so common among Italians.

  He had come here in the past; in fact, one of his first memories was of being taken here as a child to help tend the grave of his grandmother, killed in Treviso during the Allied bombing of that city during the war. He remembered how colorful the graves were, blanketed with flowers, and how neat, each precise rectangle separated from the others by razor-edged patches of green. And, in the midst of this, how grim the people, almost all women, who came carrying those armloads of flowers. How drab and shabby they were, as if all their love for color and neatness was exhausted by the need to care for those spirits in the ground, leaving none left over for themselves.

  And now, some thirty-five years later, the graves were just as neat, the flowers still explosive with color, but the people who passed among the graves looked as if they belonged to the world of the living, were no longer those wraiths of the postwar years. His father’s grave was easily found, not too far from Stravinsky. The Russian was safe; he would remain there, untouched, for as long as the cemetery remained or people remembered his music. His father’s tenancy was far more precarious, for the time was arriving when his grave would be opened and his bones taken to be put in an ossuary in one of the long, crowded walls of the cemetery.

  The plot, however, was neatly tended; his brother was more conscientious than he. The carnations that stood in the glass vase set in the earth of the grave were new; the frost of three nights earlier would have killed any that had been placed here before. He bent down and brushed aside a few leaves that the wind had blown up against the vase. He straightened up, then stooped to pick up a cigarette bu
tt that lay beside the headstone. He stood again and looked at the picture displayed upon the front of the stone. He saw his own eyes, his own jaw, and the too-big ears that had skipped over him and his brother and gone, instead, to their sons.

  ‘Ciao, Papà,’ he said, but then he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He walked down to the end of the row of graves and dropped the cigarette butt into a large metal can set in the earth.

  At the office of the cemetery, he announced his name and his rank and was shown into a small waiting room by a man who told him to wait, the doctor would be with him soon. There was nothing to read in the room, so he contented himself with looking out the only window, which gave onto the enclosed cloister about which the buildings of the cemetery had been built.

  At the beginning of his career, Brunetti had asked to attend the autopsy of the victim of the first murder he had investigated, a prostitute killed by her pimp. He had watched intently as the body was rolled into the operating theater, stared fascinated as the white sheet was pulled back from her nearly perfect body. And as the doctor raised the scalpel above the flesh, ready to begin the long butterfly incision, Brunetti had pitched forward and fainted amid the medical students with whom he sat. They had calmly carried him out into the hall and left him, groggy, on a chair before hurrying back to watch. Since then, he had seen the victims of many murders, seen the human body rent by knives, guns, even bombs, but he had never learned to look on them calmly, and he could never again bring himself to watch the calculated violation of an autopsy.