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‘No, it’s good to get a different view about the children. He’s always so worried about them. But so proud of both of you.’ It took Brunetti a moment before he realized she meant him and Paola. This was becoming, indeed, a night of many marvels.
He didn’t notice how it was done, but the two women decided it was time for them all to leave. The doctor set her glass down on a table beside her, and Paola turned to take his arm at the same moment. They exchanged farewells, and he was again struck by how much warmer the doctor was with Paola than with him.
* * * *
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
As fortune would have it, it was the next morning that his first report was due on Patta’s desk ‘before eight.’ Since the clock, when he opened his eyes and saw it, read eight-fifteen, that was clearly going to be impossible.
A half hour later, feeling more recognizably human, he came into the kitchen and found Paola reading L’Unità, which reminded him : it was Tuesday. For reasons he had never understood, she read a different newspaper each morning, spanning the political spectrum from right to left, and languages from French to English. Years ago, when he had first met her and understood her even less, he had asked about this. Her response, he came to realize only years later, made perfect sense: ‘I want to see how many different ways the same lies can be told.’ Nothing he had read in the ensuing years had come close to suggesting that her approach was wrong. Today it was the Communist lie; tomorrow the Christian Democrats would get their chance.
He bent and kissed her on the back of the neck. She grunted but didn’t bother to look up. Silently, she pointed to the left, where a plate of fresh brioches sat on the counter. As she turned a page, he poured himself a cup of coffee, spooned in three sugars, and took the seat opposite her. ‘News?’ he asked, biting into a brioche.
‘Sort of. We don’t have a government as of yesterday afternoon. The President’s trying to form one, but it looks like he hasn’t got a chance. And at the bakery this morning, all anyone talked about was how cold it’s turned. No wonder we have the sort of government we do: we deserve it. Well,’ she said, pausing over the photo of the most recent President-designate, ‘perhaps we don’t. No one could deserve that.’
‘What else?’ he asked, falling into the decade-old ritual. It allowed him to learn what was happening without having to read the papers, and it also usually gave him a very precise idea of her mood.
‘Train strike next week, in protest to the firing of an engineer who got drunk and drove his train into another one. The men who worked with him had been complaining about him for months, but no one paid any attention. So three people are dead. And now, because he’s been fired, the same people who complained about him are threatening to go on strike because he was fired.’ She turned a page. He took another brioche. ‘New threat of terrorist attacks. Maybe that will keep the tourists away.’ She turned another page. ‘Review of opening night at the Rome opera. A disaster. Lousy conductor. Dami told me last night that the orchestra had been complaining about him for weeks, all during rehearsals, but no one listened. Makes sense. No one listens to the men who run the trains, so why should anyone listen to musicians who get to hear him all during rehearsals?’
He set his coffee down so suddenly that some of it splashed onto the table. Paola’s only response was to pull the paper closer to her.
‘What did you say?’
‘Hmm?’ she asked, not really listening.
‘What did you say about the conductor?’
She looked up because of the tone, not the words. ‘What?’
‘About the conductor, what did you just say?’
As happened with most of the dicta she delivered each morning, this one appeared to have been forgotten as soon as she was free of it. She flipped back to the page where the article appeared and looked at it again. ‘Oh, yes, the orchestra. If anyone had paid any attention to them, they would have known he was a lousy conductor. After all, they’re the best sort of judge about how good a musician is, aren’t they?’
‘Paola,’ he said, pushing the paper down from in front of her, ‘if I weren’t married to you, I’d leave my wife for you.’
He was glad to see he had surprised her; it was something he rarely achieved. He left her like that, peering over her reading glasses, not at all sure what she had done.
He ran down all the ninety-four steps, eager to get to work and start making phone calls.
When he arrived fifteen minutes later, there had still been no sign of Patta, so he dictated a short paragraph and sent it to be placed on his superior’s desk. That done, he called the main office of the Gazzettino and asked to speak to Salvatore Rezzonico, the chief music critic. He was told he was not at the office but could be found either at home or at the music conservatory. When he finally located the man, at home, and explained what he wanted, Rezzonico agreed to speak to him later that morning at the conservatory, where he was teaching a class at eleven. Next Brunetti called his dentist; he had once mentioned a cousin who played first violin in the La Fenice orchestra. Traverso was his name, and Brunetti called and arranged to speak to him before the performance that night.
He spent the next half hour talking with Miotti, who had come up with little more at the theater, save for another member of the chorus who was sure he had seen Flavia Petrelli go into the conductor’s dressing room after the first act. Miotti had further learned the reason for the portiere’s obvious antipathy for the soprano: his belief that she was somehow involved with ‘l’americana.’ Beyond this, Miotti had learned nothing. Brunetti sent him off to the archives of the Gazzettino to look for anything about a scandal involving the Maestro and an Italian singer, sometime ‘before the war.’ He avoided Miottits look at the vagueness of this and suggested that there might be a filing system that would facilitate things.
Brunetti now left his office and walked across the city to the music conservatory, fitted into a small campo near the Accademia Bridge. After much asking, he found the professor’s classroom on the third floor and the professor waiting there, either for him or for his students.
As so often happened in Venice, Brunetti recognized the man from having walked past him many times in that part of the city. Though they had never spoken to one another, the warmth of the man’s greeting made it obvious that he was familiar with Brunetti for the same reason. Rezzonico was a small man with a pallid complexion and beautifully manicured nails. Clean-shaven, with hair cut very short, he wore a dark-gray suit and a somber tie, as if he were intentionally dressing for the role of professor.
‘What is it I can do for you, Commissario?’ he asked after Brunetti had introduced himself and taken a seat at one of the desks that filled the classroom.
‘It’s about Maestro Wellauer.’
‘Ah, yes,’ responded Rezzonico, his voice growing predictably somber. ‘A sad loss to the world of music’ This was, after all, the man who had written his obituary.
Brunetti waited for the requisite time to pass, then continued. ‘Were you going to review that performance of Traviata for the paper, Professor?’
‘Yes, I was.’
‘But the review never appeared?’
‘No, we decided—that is, the editor decided—that out of respect for the Maestro and because the performance was not completed, we would wait for the new conductor and review one of his performances.’
‘And have you written that review?’
‘Yes. It appeared this morning.’
‘I’m sorry, Professor, but I haven’t had time to read it. Could you tell me if it was a favorable review?’
‘On the whole, yes. The singers are good, and Petrelli is superb. She’s probably the only Verdi soprano singing today, the only real one, that is. The tenor is less good, but he’s still very young, and I think the voice will mature.’
‘And the conductor?’
‘As I said in my review, anyone coming in new under these circumstances has an especially difficult task. It’s not an easy thing to
lead an orchestra that has been rehearsed by someone else.’
‘Yes, I can understand that.’
‘But considering all the difficulties he encountered,’ continued the professor, ‘he did remarkably well. He’s a very talented young man, and he seems to have a special feeling for Verdi.’
‘And what about Maestro Wellauer?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘If you had written a review of the opening night, the performance Wellauer began, what would you have said?’
‘About the performance as a whole or about the Maestro?’
‘Either. Both.’
It was clear that the question confused the professor. ‘I’m not sure how to answer that. The Maestro’s death made it all unnecessary.’
‘But if you had written it, what would you have said about his conducting?’
The professor tilted his chair back and locked his hands behind his head, just the way Brunetti remembered his own professors doing. He sat like that for a while, pondering the question, then allowed his chair to slam hack down onto the floor. ‘I’m afraid the review would have been a different one.’
‘In what way Professor?’
‘For the singers, much the same. Signora Petrelli is always magnificent. The tenor sang well, as I said, and will certainly grow better with more experience on the stage. The night of the opening, they sang much the same way, but the result was different.’ Seeing Brunetti’s confusion, he attempted to explain. ‘You see, I have so many years of his conducting to erase. It was difficult to listen to the music that night without having all those years of genius interfere with what I was actually hearing.
‘Let me try to explain it this way. During a performance, it is the conductor who keeps things together, sees that the singers maintain the right tempi, that the orchestra supports them, that the entrances are on time, that neither is allowed to get away from the other. And he must also see that the orchestra’s playing doesn’t get too loud, that the crescendi build and are dramatic but, at the same time, don’t drown out the singers. When a conductor hears this happening, he can quiet them with a flick of his hand or a finger to the mouth.’ To illustrate, the musician demonstrated the gestures that Brunetti had seen performed during many concerts and operas.
‘And he must, at every moment, be in charge of everything: chorus, singers, orchestra, keeping them in balance perfectly. If he doesn’t do this, then the whole thing falls apart, and all anyone hears is the separate parts, not the whole opera as a unit.’
‘And that night, the night the Maestro died?’
‘The central control wasn’t there. There were times when the orchestra grew so loud that I couldn’t hear the singers, and I’m sure they must have had trouble hearing one another. There were other times when the orchestra played too fast and the singers had to struggle to keep up with them. Or the opposite.’
‘Was anyone else in the theater aware of this, Professor?’
Rezzonico raised his eyebrows and snorted in disgust. ‘Commissario, I don’t know how familiar you are with the Venetian audience, but the most complimentary thing that can be said of them is that they are dogs. They don’t go to the theater to listen to music or hear beautiful singing; they go to wear their new clothes and be seen in them by their friends, and those friends are there for the same reasons. You could bring the town band from the smallest town in Sicily and put them in the orchestra pit and have them play, and no one in the audience would notice the difference. If the costumes are lavish and the scenery is elaborate, then we have a success. If the opera is modern or the singers aren’t Italian, then we are sure to have a failure.’ The professor realized that this was turning into a speech, so he lowered his voice and added, ‘But to answer your question: no, I doubt that very many people in the theater realized what was happening.’
‘The other critics?’
The professor snorted again. ‘Aside from Narciso at La Repubblica, there isn’t a musician among them. Some simply go to the rehearsals and then write their reviews. Some can’t even follow a score. No, there’s no judgment there.’
‘What do you think the cause of Maestro Wellauer’s failure, if that’s the proper term, might have been?’
‘Anything. A bad night. He was an old man, after all. He could have been upset, perhaps by something that happened before the performance. Or, ridiculous as this sounds, it could have been nothing more than indigestion. But whatever it was, he was not in control of the music that night. It got away from him; the orchestra did what they wanted, and the singers tried to stay with them. But there was very little sense of command from him.’
‘Anything else, Professor?’
‘Do you mean about the music?’
‘That, or anything else.’
Rezzonico considered for a moment, this time lacing his fingers together on his lap, and finally said, ‘This will perhaps sound strange. And it sounds strange to me because I don’t know why I say it or believe it. But I think he knew.’
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘Wellauer. I think he knew.’
‘About the music? About what was going on?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why do you say that, Professor?’
‘It was after the scene in the second act where Germont pleads with Violetta.’ He looked at Brunetti to see if he knew the plot of the opera. Brunetti nodded, and the professor continued. ‘It’s a scene that always gets a great deal of applause, especially if the singers are as good as Dardi and Petrelli. They were, and so there was long applause. During the applause, I watched the Maestro. He set his baton down on the podium, and I had the oddest sensation that he was getting ready to leave, simply step down from the podium and walk away. Either I saw it or I invented it, but he seemed just about to be making that step - when the applause stopped and the first violins raised their bows. He saw them, nodded to them, and picked up the baton. And the opera continued, but I still have the peculiar feeling that if he hadn’t seen their motion, he would simply have walked away from there.’
‘Did anyone else notice this?’
‘I don’t know. No one I’ve spoken to has wanted to say much about the performance, and what little they’ve said has been very guarded. I was sitting in one of the front tier of boxes, off on the left, so I had a clear view of him. I suppose everyone else was watching the singers. Later, when I heard the announcement that he couldn’t continue, I thought he’d had an attack of some sort. But not that he had been killed.’
‘What have these other people said?’
‘As I told you, they have been, well, almost cautious, not wanting to say anything against him, now that he’s dead. But a few of the people here have said much the same thing, that the performance was disappointing. Nothing more than that.’
‘I read your article about his career, Professor. You spoke very highly of him.’
‘He was one of the great musicians of the century. A genius.’
‘You make no mention of that last performance in your article, Professor.’
‘You don’t condemn a man for one bad night, Commissario, especially not when the total career has been so great.’
‘Yes, I know; not for one bad night and not for one bad thing.’
‘Precisely,’ agreed the professor, and he turned his attention to two young women who came into the room, each carrying a thick musical score. ‘But if you will excuse me, Commissario, my students are beginning to arrive, and my class is about to begin.’
‘Of course, Professor,’ Brunetti said, getting to his feet and extending his hand. ‘Thank you very much for both your time and your help.’
The other man muttered something in return, but Brunetti could tell that his attention had clearly shifted to his students. He left the room and went down the broad steps, out into Campo San Stefano.
It was a campo he walked through often, and he had come to know not only the people who worked there, in the bars and shops, but even the dogs that walked or played ther
e. Lazing in the pale sunlight was a pink-and-white bulldog whose lack of muzzle always made Brunetti uneasy. Then there was that odd Chinese thing that had grown from what looked like a pile of furred tripe into a creature of surpassing ugliness. Last, lolling in front of the ceramics store, he saw the black mongrel that remained so motionless all day that many people had come to believe he was part of the merchandise.
He decided to have a coffee at Café Paolin. Tables were still set up outside, but the only people at them today were foreigners, desperately trying to convince themselves that it was warm enough to have a cappuccino at a table in the open air. Sensible people went inside.
He exchanged hellos with the barman, who had tact enough not to ask him if there was any news in the case. In a city where there were no secrets of any sort, people had developed a capacity to avoid asking direct questions or remarking on anything other than the casual. He knew that no matter how long the case dragged on, none of the people with whom he interacted at this level—barman, newsdealer, bank teller—would ever say a word about it to him.