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  ‘When did you realize that he knew what the injections were?’

  ‘I was in here one night, reading. I hadn’t gone to the rehearsal that day, the way I usually did. It was too painful, listening to the music, to the bad chords, the entrances that came too soon or too late, and knowing that I’d done that, done it as surely as if I’d taken the baton from his hands and waved it crazily around in the air.’ She stopped speaking, as though listening to the discordant music of those rehearsals.

  ‘I was in here, reading, or trying to read, and I heard—’ She looked up at the sound of the word and said, like an actor delivering an aside in a crowded theater, ‘My God, it’s hard to avoid that word, isn’t it?’ and slipped back into her role. ‘He was early, had come back early from the theater. I heard him come down the hall and then open the door. He was still wearing his coat, and he was carrying the score of Traviata. It was one of his favorite operas. He loved to conduct it. He came in and stood there, just over there,’ she said, pointing to a space where no one stood now. ‘He looked at me, and he asked me, “You did this, didn’t you?”‘ She continued looking at the door, waiting for the words to be said again.

  ‘Did you answer him?’

  ‘I owed him that much, didn’t I?’ she asked, voice calm and reasonable. ‘Yes, I told him I’d done it.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He left. Not the house, just the room. And then we managed not to see each other again, not until the prima.’

  ‘Did he threaten you in any way? Say that he was going to go to the police? Punish you?’

  She seemed to be honestly puzzled by his question. ‘What good would that have done? If you’ve spoken to the doctor, you know that the damage is permanent. There was nothing that the police could do, there was nothing that anyone could do, to get his hearing back. And there was no way he could punish me.’ She paused long enough to light another cigarette. ‘Except by doing what he did,’ she said.

  ‘And what is that?’ Brunetti asked.

  She chided him openly. ‘If you know as much as you. seem to know, then you must know that as well.’

  He met her glance, keeping his face expressionless, ‘I still have two questions, Signora. The first is an honest question that I ask out of ignorance. And the second is simpler, and I think I know the answer already.’

  ‘Then start with the second one,’ she said.

  ‘It concerns your husband. Why would he try to punish you in this way?’

  ‘By “in this way,” do you mean by making it look as if I had murdered him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He watched as she tried to speak, saw the words begin to form themselves and then drop, forgotten. At last she said, voice low, ‘He saw himself as above the law, above the law the rest of us had to follow. I think he believed that it was his genius that gave him this power, this right. And God knows we all encouraged him in that. We made him a god of music, and we fell down and worshiped him.’ She stopped and looked across at him. ‘I’m sorry; I’m not answering your question. You wanted to know if he was capable of trying to make it look as if I was responsible. But you see,’ she said, raising her hands to him, as if she wanted to pull understanding from him, ‘I was responsible. So he did have a right to do this to me. It would have been less horrible if I had killed the man; that would have left the god untouched.’ She broke off, but Brunetti said nothing.

  ‘I’m trying to tell you how he would have seen it. I knew him so well, knew how he felt, what he thought.’ Again she paused, then she continued with her attempt to make him understand. ‘Something strange occurred to me after he died and I began to realize how careful he had been, inviting me back, letting me into the dressing room. It seemed to me then, and it still does now, that he had a right to do what he did, to punish me. In a way, he was his music. And I killed that instead of killing him. He was dead. Before he died, he was already dead. I’d killed his spirit. I saw it during the rehearsals, when he peered over those glasses and tried to hear through his useless hearing aid what was happening to the music. And he couldn’t hear. He couldn’t hear.’ She shook her head at something she didn’t understand. ‘He didn’t have to punish me, Mr. Brunetti. That’s been done. I’ve spent my time in hell.’

  She folded her hands in her lap and continued. ‘Then, the night of the prima, he told me what he was going to do.’ When she saw Brunetti’s surprise, she explained: ‘No, he didn’t tell me, not like that, not clearly. I didn’t realize it at the time.’

  ‘Was this when you went backstage?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘At first, he didn’t say anything when he saw. me at the door. Just looked up at me. But then he must have seen someone in the corridor behind me. Perhaps he thought they were coming toward the dressing room.’ She bowed her head wearily. ‘I don’t know. All he said was something that sounded rehearsed: what Tosca says when she sees Cavaradossi’s body— “Finire cosi, finire cosi.” I didn’t understand then—”to finish like this, like this”—but I should have. She says it just before she kills herself, but I didn’t understand. Not then.’ Brunetti was surprised to see a grin of near amusement flash across her face. ‘That was very like him, to be dramatic at the last minute. Melodramatic, really. Later, I was surprised that he would take his last words from an opera by Puccini.’ She looked up, serious. ‘I hope that doesn’t sound strange. But I thought he would want to be remembered quoting something by Mozart. Or Wagner.’ He watched her struggle with mounting hysteria. He stood and went over to a cabinet that stood between the two windows and poured her a small glass of brandy. He stood for a moment, glass in hand, and looked out at the bell tower of San Marco. Then he went back to her and handed her the glass.

  Not really conscious of what it was, she took it and sipped at it. He returned to the window and continued his observation of the bell tower. When he was sure it was the way it had always been, he resumed his seat opposite her.

  ‘Will you tell me why you did it, Signora?’

  Her surprise was genuine. ‘If you were clever enough to find out how I did it, then surely you must know why.’

  He shook his head. ‘I won’t say what I think, because if I’m wrong, I’ll dishonor the man.’ Even as he spoke the words, he knew how much he was himself sounding like a Puccini libretto.

  ‘That means you do understand, doesn’t it?’ she asked, and leaned forward to place the still-full glass next to the package of cigarettes.

  ‘Your daughter, Signora?’

  She bit at her upper lip and gave a nod so small as to be imperceptible. When she released her lip, he saw the white marks where she had bitten into it. She extended her hand toward the cigarettes, pulled it back, caught it in the other, and said in a voice so low he had to lean forward to hear her, ‘I had no idea,’ and shook her head at the ugliness of it. ‘Alex is not a musical child. She didn’t even know who he was when I started seeing him. When I told her that I wanted to marry him, she seemed interested. Then, when I told her that he had a farm and that he had horses, she was very interested. That’s all she ever cared about, horses, like the heroine in an English book for children. Horses and books about horses.

  ‘She was eleven when we were married. They got on well. After she learned who he was—I think her classmates must have told her—she seemed a little frightened of him, but that passed. Helmut was very good with children.’ She stopped and grimaced at the grotesque irony of what she had just said.

  And then. And then. And then,’ she repeated, unable to free herself from the grooves of memory. ‘This summer, I had to go back to Budapest. To see my mother, who isn’t well. Helmut said that everything would be all right while I was gone. I took a cab, and I went to the airport. But the airport was closed. I don’t remember why. A strike. Or trouble with the customs officers.’ She looked up then. ‘It really doesn’t matter why it was closed, does it?’

  ‘No, Signora.’

  �
��There was a long delay, more than an hour, and then we were told that there would be no flights until the following morning. So I took another cab and went home. It wasn’t very late, not even midnight, so I didn’t bother to call and tell him I was coming back. I went home and let myself into the house. There were no lights on, so I went upstairs. Alex has always been a restless sleeper, so I went to her room to check on her. To check on her.’ She looked up at him, expressionless.

  ‘When I got to the top of the stairs, I could hear her. I thought she was having a nightmare. It wasn’t a scream, just a noise. Like an animal. Just a noise. Only that. And I went to her room. He was there. With her.

  ‘This is the strange part,’ she said quite calmly, as though she were sharing a puzzle with him, asking him what he thought of it. ‘I don’t remember what happened. No, I know that he left, but I don’t remember what I said to him or he said to me. I stayed with Alex that night.

  ‘Later, days later, he told me that Alex had had a nightmare.’ She laughed in disgust and disbelief. ‘That’s all he said. We never talked about it. I sent Alex to her grandparents. To school there. And we never talked about it. Oh, how modern we were, how civilized. Of course, we stopped sleeping together, and stopped being with each other. And Alex was gone.’

  ‘Do her grandparents know what happened?’

  A quick shake of her head. ‘No; I told them what I told everyone, that I didn’t want her schooling interrupted when we came to Venice.’

  ‘When did you decide? To do what you did?’ Brunetti asked.

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. One day, the idea was simply there. The only thing that was really important to him, the only thing he really loved, was his music, so I decided that was the thing I’d take away from him. At the time, it seemed fair.’

  ‘And does it now?’

  She considered this for a long time before she answered. ‘Yes, it still does seem fair. Everything that’s happened seems fair. But that’s not the point, is it?’

  To him, there was no point in any of it. No point, and no message, and no lesson. It was no more than human evil and the terrible waste that comes from it.

  Her voice was suddenly tired. ‘What happens now?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he answered honestly. ‘Do you have any idea where he got the cyanide?’

  She shrugged her shoulders, as though she thought the question irrelevant. ‘It could have been anywhere,’ she said. ‘He has a friend who is a chemist, or it could have been one of his friends from the old days.’ When she saw Brunetti’s puzzled glance, she explained. ‘The war. He made a lot of powerful friends then, and many of them are important men now.’

  ‘Then the rumors about him are true?’

  ‘I don’t know. Before we were married, he said they were all lies, and I believed him. I don’t believe it anymore.’ She said this bitterly, then forced herself back to her original explanation. ‘I don’t know where he got it, but I know it would have been no problem for him.’ Her sad smile returned. ‘I had access to it, of course. He knew that.’

  ‘Access? How?’

  ‘We didn’t come down here together. We didn’t want to travel together. I stopped in Heidelberg for two days on the way down, to see my former husband.’ Who, Brunetti recalled, taught pharmacology.

  ‘Did the Maestro know that you were there?’

  She nodded. ‘My first husband and I remained friends, and we hold property together.’

  ‘Did you tell him what happened?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said, raising her voice for the first time.

  ‘Where did you see him?’

  ‘At the university. I met him at his laboratory. He’s working on a new drug to minimize the effects of Parkinson’s. He showed me through the laboratory, and then we went to lunch together.’

  ‘Did the Maestro know this?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I suppose I might have told him. I probably did. It was very difficult for us to find anything to talk about. This was a neutral topic, so we were glad to have it to talk about.’

  ‘Did you and the Maestro ever talk about what happened?’

  She couldn’t bring herself to ask what he meant; she knew. ‘No.’

  ‘Did you ever talk about the future? What you were going to do?’

  ‘No, not directly.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘One day, when I was coming in and he was going to rehearsal, he said, “Just wait until after Traviata.” I thought he meant that we would be able to decide what to do then. But I had already decided to leave him. I’d written to two hospitals, one in Budapest and one in Augsburg, and I’d talked to my former husband about his help in finding me a position in a hospital.’

  Either way, Brunetti realized, she was trapped. There was evidence that she had been planning a separate future, even before he died. And now she was a widow, and enormously rich. And even if the information about her daughter was made public, there was evidence that she had stopped on the way to Venice to talk to the girl’s father, a man who surely had access to the poison that had killed the Maestro.

  No Italian judge would convict a woman for what she had done, not if she explained about her daughter. Given the evidence Brunetti had—Signora Santina’s testimony about her sister, the interviews with the doctors, even the suicide of his second wife at a time when their daughter was twelve years old—there was no court in Italy that would bring a charge of murder against her. But all of this would hang upon the testimony of the girl, upon the tall girl Alex, in love with horses and still a child.

  Brunetti knew that this woman would never let that testimony take place, regardless of the consequences if she did not. Further, he knew that he would never allow it to happen, either.

  And without the testimony of the daughter? There was the obvious coolness between them, her easy access to the poison, her presence in the dressing room that night, wildly out of keeping with what they had always done. All that had the appearance of truth. If she was charged only with having given him injections that she knew would destroy his hearing, she would be freed of the accusation of murder, but this scenario would work only if her daughter’s name was mentioned. He knew that was impossible.

  ‘Before he died, before any of this ever happened,’ he began, leaving it to her to interpret what he meant by ‘this,’ ‘did your husband ever speak about his age; was he afraid of a physical decline?’

  She paused for a while before she answered him, puzzled by the irrelevance of his question. ‘Yes, we talked about it. Not often, but once or twice. Once, when we’d all had more than enough to drink, we talked about it with Erich and Hedwig.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘It was Erich, if I remember correctly. He said that in the future, if anything should ever stop him from working—not just stop him from doing surgery but make him be, well, not himself anymore, not able to be a doctor in any way—he said he was a doctor and knew how to take care of that himself.

  ‘It was very late, and we were all very tired, so perhaps that made the conversation more serious than it might have been. He said that, and then Helmut said that he understood him perfectly and would do the same thing.’

  ‘Would Dr. Steinbrunner remember this conversation?’

  ‘I think so. It was only this summer. The night of our anniversary.’

  ‘Did your husband ever say anything more specific than that?’ Before she could answer, he completed the question: ‘When there were other people present?’

  ‘Do you mean, when there were witnesses?’

  He nodded.

  ‘No, not that I can remember But that night, the conversation was so serious that it was clear to us all just what they meant.’

  ‘Will your friends remember it as meaning what you say it did?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. I don’t think they approve of me, not as a wife for Helmut.’ After she said that, she looked up at him suddenly, eyes wide with horror. ‘Do you think they
knew?’

  Brunetti shook his head, hoping to assure her that, no, they didn’t know, couldn’t have known something like that about him and remained silent. But he had no reason to believe that. He veered away and asked, ‘Can you remember any other time your husband might have made reference to that subject?’

  ‘There were the letters he sent me before we were married.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He was joking, trying to dismiss the difference in our ages. He said that I’d never be burdened with a feeble, helpless old husband, that he’d see that this never happened.’