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‘Those were the careers he helped, but there are just as many he ruined, especially among men of my particular persuasion and,’ he added, sipping at his drink, ‘women of similar taste. The late Maestro was incapable of believing that he was unattractive to any woman. If I were you, I would look into the sexual stuff. The answer might not be there, but it might be a good place to begin. But that,’ he said, pointing with his glass to the enormous television that loomed in front of them, ‘might merely be a response to an overexposure to that.’
He seemed to realize how unsatisfactory his information had been, so he added, ‘In Italy, there are at least three people who had good reason to hate him. But none of them is in a position to have done him any harm. One is singing in the chorus of the Bari Opera Company. He might have become an important Verdi baritone had he not, in the dreadful sixties, made the mistake of not bothering to hide his sexual preference from the Maestro. I’ve even heard that he made the mistake of approaching the Maestro himself, but I can’t believe that anyone could have been that stupid. Probably a myth. Whatever the cause, Wellauer is said to have dropped his name with a columnist who was a friend of his, and the articles started soon thereafter. That’s why he’s singing in Bari. In the chorus.
‘The second is teaching music theory at the Palermo conservatory. I’m not sure what happened between them, but he was a conductor who had received a good deal of excellent publicity. This was about ten years ago, but then his career stopped after a few months of devastating reviews. Here, I admit, I have no direct information, but Wellauer’s name was mentioned in relation to the reviews.
‘The third is only a faint bell in my gossip’s mind, but it involves someone who is said to be living here.’ When he saw their surprise, he amended, ‘No, not in the palazzo. In Venice. But she’s hardly in a state to have done anything, since she must be close to eighty and is said to be a recluse. And I’m not sure that I’ve got the story straight or even remember it correctly.’
When he saw Paola’s look, he held up his glass in excuse and explained, ‘It’s this stuff. Destroys brain cells. Or eats them.’ He swirled the liquid around in the glass, watching the small waves he created, waiting for them to produce the tide of memory.
‘I’ll tell you what I remember or what I think I remember. Her name is Clemenza Santina.’ When neither of them showed any sign of recognition, he explained: ‘She was one of the most famous sopranos right before the war. Same thing happened to her that happened to Rosa Ponselle in America— discovered singing in a music hall with her two sisters, and within a few months she was singing at La Scala. One of those natural, perfect voices that come along only a few times a century. But she never recorded anything, so the only memory we have of her is what people heard, what they recall.’ He saw their growing impatience, so he dragged himself back to the point. ‘There was something between her and Wellauer, or between him and one of the sisters. I can’t remember what it was or who told me, but she might have tried to kill him, or she threatened to kill him.’ He waved his glass in the air, and Brunetti saw how drunk the man was. ‘Anyway, I think someone got killed or died, or maybe it was just a threat. Maybe I’ll remember in the morning. Or maybe it’s not important.’
‘What made you think of her?’ asked Brunetti.
‘Because she sang Violetta with him. Before the war. Someone I was talking to, I can’t remember who it was, told me that they’d tried to interview her recently. Let me think for a minute.’ Again he consulted his drink, and again the memory came floating back. ‘Narciso, that’s who. He was doing an article on great singers of the past, and he went to see her, but she refused to speak to him, was very unpleasant about it. Didn’t even open the door, I think he said. And then he told me the story he’d heard about her and Wellauer, before the war. In Rome, I think.’
‘Did he say where she lives?’
‘No, he didn’t. But I can call him in the morning and ask.’
Either the alcohol or the waning conversation drained the sparkle from Padovani. As Brunetti watched, the foppishness subsided, and he became a middle-aged man with a thick beard and the beginnings of a substantial paunch, sitting with his feet tucked under him, exposing an inch of calf above black silk socks. Paola, he noticed, looked tired, or was she simply tired of having had to keep up the level of university banter with her former classmate? And Brunetti felt himself to be at that balance point that alcohol brought: if he continued drinking, he would soon be fuzzy and content; if he stopped, he would just as quickly be sober and somber. Choosing the second, he set his glass on the floor under his chair, sure a roving servant would find it before morning.
Paola set hers down as well and moved to the edge of her seat. She glanced over at Padovani, waiting for him to move, but he waved them off and picked up the bottle from the table. He poured himself a generous drink and said, ‘I’ll finish this before I return to the revels.’ Brunetti wondered if he was as bored with the fiction of scintillating chatter as Paola seemed to be. The three of them exchanged bright nothings, and Padovani promised to call in the morning if he managed to get the address of the soprano.
Paola led Brunetti back through the labyrinth of the palazzo, toward the lights and the music. When they entered the main salon, they noticed that more people had arrived and the music had increased in volume, keeping pace with the sound of conversation.
Brunetti looked around, filled with anticipatory boredom at the sight and sound of these well-dressed, well-fed, well-versed people. He sensed that Paola had registered his feelings and was about to suggest they leave, when he saw someone he recognized. Standing at the bar, glass in one hand and cigarette in the other, was the doctor who had first examined Wellauer’s body and declared him dead. At the time, Brunetti had wondered how someone who was wearing jeans had managed to be sitting in the orchestra. Tonight she was dressed much the same, a pair of gray slacks and a black jacket, with an obvious lack of concern for her own appearance that Brunetti would have thought impossible in an Italian woman.
He told Paola he had seen someone he wanted to talk to, and she replied that she would try to find her parents to thank them for the party. They separated, and he went across the room toward the doctor, whose name he had forgotten. She made no attempt to disguise the fact that she recognized and remembered him.
‘Good evening, Commissario,’ she said when he came up beside her.
‘Good evening, Doctor,’ he replied, and then added, as if they had managed sufficient homage to the rule of formality, ‘My name is Guido.’
‘And mine is Barbara.’
‘How small the city is,’ he observed, the banality of the remark allowing him, a formal man, to avoid having to commit himself to addressing her as either lei or tu.
‘Sooner or later, everyone meets everyone,’ she concurred, avoiding with equal skill any direct address.
Deciding on the formal lei, he said, ‘I’m sorry I never thanked you for your help the other night.’
She shrugged this away and asked, ‘Was my diagnosis correct?’
‘Yes,’ he said, wondering how she could have avoided reading about it in every newspaper in the country. ‘It was in the coffee, as you said.’
‘I thought so. But I have to confess I recognized the smell only from reading Agatha Christie.’
‘Me too. It’s the only time I ever smelled it in real life.’ Both of them ignored the awkwardness of that last word.
She stubbed out her cigarette in a potted palm the size of an orange tree. ‘How would a person get it?’ she asked.
‘That’s what I wanted to ask you, Doctor.’
She paused and considered for a few moments before she suggested, ‘In a pharmacy, a laboratory, but I’m sure it would be a controlled substance.’
‘It is and it isn’t.’
She, being an Italian, understood immediately. ‘So it could disappear and never be reported, or even missed?’
‘Yes, I think so. One of my men is checking the p
harmacies in the city, but we could never hope to check all the factories in Marghera or Mestre.’
‘It’s used for developing film, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, and with certain petrochemicals.’
‘There’s enough of that in Marghera to keep your man busy.’
‘For days, I’m afraid,’ he admitted.
Noticing that her drink was gone, he asked, ‘Would you like another?’
‘No, thank you. I think I’ve had enough of the count’s champagne for one evening.’
‘Have you been here other evenings?’ he asked, frankly curious.
‘Yes, a few. He always invites me, and if I’m free, I try to come.’
‘Why?’ The question slipped out before he had a chance to think.
‘He’s my patient.’
‘You’re his doctor?’ Brunetti was too astonished to disguise his response.
She laughed. What was more, her amusement was entirely natural and without resentment. ‘If he’s my patient, then I suppose I’ve got to be his doctor.’ She relented. ‘My office is just on the other side of the campo. I was the servants’ doctor first, but then, about a year ago, I met the count when I was here to visit one of them, and we began to talk.’
‘About what?’ Brunetti was astonished at the possibility that the count was capable of an action so mundane as talking, especially with someone as unpretentious as this young woman.
‘That first time, we talked about the servant, who had influenza, but when I came back, we somehow started to talk about Greek poetry. And that led to a discussion, if I remember correctly, of Greek and Roman historians. The count is particularly fond of Thucydides. Since I’d gone to the classical liceo, I could talk about them without making a fool of myself, so the count decided I must be a competent doctor. Now he comes to my office every so often, and we talk about Thucydides and Strabo.’ She leaned back against the wall and crossed her ankles in front of her. ‘He’s very much like my other patients. Most of them come to talk about ailments they don’t have and pain they don’t feel. The count is more interesting to talk to, but I suppose there’s really not much difference between them. He’s lonely and old, just like them, and he needs someone to talk to.’
Brunetti was shocked to silence by this assessment of the count. Lonely? A man who could pick up the phone and triumph over a Swiss bank’s code of secrecy? A man who could find out the contents of a man’s will before the man was buried? So lonely that he would go and talk to his doctor about Greek historians?
‘He talks about you sometimes as well,’ she said. ‘About all of you.’
‘He does?’
‘Yes. He carries your pictures in his wallet. He’s shown them to me a number of times. You, your wife, the children.’
‘Why are you telling me this, Doctor?’
‘As I told you, he’s a lonely old man. And he’s my patient, so I try to do whatever I can to help him.’ When she saw that he was going to object, she added, ‘Whatever I can, if I think it will help him.’
‘Doctor, is it normal for you to accept private patients?’
If she saw where this was leading, she made no sign of it. ‘Most of my patients are public health patients.’
‘How many private patients do you have?’
‘I don’t think that’s any of your business, Commissario.’
‘No, I suppose it’s not,’ he admitted. ‘Would you answer one about your politics?’ It was a question that, in Italy, still had some meaning, the parties not yet all being carbon copies of one another.
‘I’m Communist, of course, even with the new name.’
‘Yet you accept as your patient one of the richest men in Venice? Probably one of the richest in Italy?’
‘Of course. Why shouldn’t I?’
‘I just told you. Because he’s a very rich man.’
‘What’s that got to do with my accepting him as a patient?’
‘I thought that...’
‘That I’d have to refuse him as a patient because he’s rich and can afford better doctors? Is that what you meant, Commissario?’ she asked, making no attempt to disguise her anger. ‘Not only is that personally offensive, but it also shows a rather simplistic vision of the world. I suppose neither surprises me very much.’ That last made him wonder what the count might have said about him during their talks.
He felt that the entire conversation had gotten out of hand. He had intended no offense, had not meant to suggest that the count could find better doctors. His surprise was entirely about this doctor’s having accepted him. ‘Doctor, please,’ he said, and held out a hand between them. ‘I’m sorry, but the world I work in is a simplistic one. There are good people.’ She was listening, so he dared to add, with a smile, ‘. . . like us.’ She had the grace to return his smile. ‘And then there are people who break the law.’
‘Oh, I see,’ she said, her anger not diminished, after all. ‘And does that give us all the right to divide up the world into two groups, the one we’re in and all the others? And I get to treat those people who share my politics and let the rest die? You make it sound like a cowboy film—the good guys and the lawbreakers, and never the least bit of difficulty in telling the difference between the two.’
Struggling to defend himself, he said, ‘I didn’t say which law; I just said they broke the law.’
‘Isn’t there only one law in your vision of the world—the law of the state?’ Her contempt was open, and he hoped it was for the law of the state and not for him.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ he answered.
She threw up her hands. ‘If this is when poor old God gets dragged down from heaven and put into the conversation, I’m going to get more champagne.’
‘No, let me,’ he said, and took her glass from her. He soon returned with a fresh glass of champagne and some mineral water for himself. She accepted the champagne and thanked him with an entirely friendly and normal smile.
She sipped, then asked him, ‘And this law of yours?’ She said it with such real interest and lack of rancor that the last exchange was entirely erased. On both sides, he realized.
‘Clearly, the one we have isn’t enough,’ he began, surprised to hear himself saying this, for it was this law he had spent his career defending. ‘We need a more human—or perhaps more humane—one.’ He stopped, aware of how foolish it made him feel to say this. And, worse, to mean it.
‘That would certainly be wonderful,’ she said with a blandness that made him immediately suspicious. ‘But wouldn’t that interfere with your profession? After all, it’s your job to enforce that other law, the law of the state.’
‘They’re really the same.’ Realizing how lame and stupid this sounded, he added, ‘Usually.’
‘But not always?’
‘No, not always.’
‘And when they’re not?’
‘I try to see the point where they intersect, where they’re the same.’
‘And if they’re not?’
‘Then I do what I have to do.’
She burst into laughter so spontaneous that he joined her, aware of how much he had sounded like John Wayne just before he went out to that last gunfight.
‘I apologize for baiting you, Guido; I really do. If it’s any consolation to you, it’s the same sort of decision we doctors have to make, though not too often, when what we think is right isn’t the same as what the law says is right.’
He was, they both were, saved by Paola, who came up to him and asked if he was ready to go.
‘Paola,’ he said, turning to present her to the other woman. ‘This is your father’s doctor,’ hoping to surprise her.
‘Oh, Barbara,’ Paola exclaimed. ‘I’m so glad to meet you. My father talks about you all the time. I’m sorry it’s taken us this long to meet.’
Brunetti watched and listened while they talked, amazed at the ease with which women made it obvious that they liked each other, at their enormous mutual trust, even at first meeting. United in a co
mmon concern for a man he had always found cool and distant, these two were talking as though they had known each other for years. There was none of the abrasive moral stocktaking that had transpired between him and the doctor. She and Paola had performed some sort of instant evaluation and been immediately pleased with what they found. He had often observed this phenomenon but feared he would never understand it. He had the same ability to become quickly friendly with another man, but somehow the intimacy stopped a few layers down. This immediate intimacy he was watching went deep, to some central place, before it stopped. And evidently it hadn’t stopped; it had only paused until the next meeting.
They had arrived at the point of discussing Raffaele, the count’s only grandson, before Paola and Barbara remembered that Brunetti was still there. Paola could tell from his restless foot-shifting that he was tired and wanted to leave, so she said, ‘I’m sorry, Barbara, to tell you all this about Raffaele. Now you’ll have two generations to worry about, instead of one.’