Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon
‘I’m not so sure of that,’ Brunetti said.
‘Oh, come on,’ she snapped. ‘This is Italy, the land of the happy family, the sacred family. She’d be allowed to have as many lovers as she wanted, so long as they were men. That would put the father, or a sort of father, back into the house. But the instant this became public, she’d never have a chance against him.’
‘Don’t you think you’re exaggerating?’
‘Exaggerating what?’ she demanded. ‘My life’s never been a secret. I’ve always been too rich for it to matter what people thought of me or said about me. But that didn’t stop them from saying it. So even if nothing could be proved about us, just think what a clever lawyer could do: “The soprano with the millionairess secretary.” No, it would look like exactly what it is.’
‘She could lie,’ Brunetti said, suggesting perjury.
‘With an Italian judge, I don’t think that would make any difference. Besides, I don’t think she’d lie. I really don’t think she would. No, not about this. Flavia really does think she’s above the law.’ Instantly, she seemed to regret saying that. ‘But she’s all words, only talk, just like on the stage. She’ll shout and rage at people, but it’s all gestures. I’ve never known her to be violent, not to anyone. Just words.’
Brunetti was enough of an Italian to believe that words might easily change to something else when a woman’s children were involved, but he kept that opinion to himself. ‘Do you mind if I ask you some personal questions?’
She sighed wearily, anticipating what was coming, and shook her head.
‘Has anyone ever tried to blackmail either one of you?’
This was clearly not the sort of question she had feared. ‘No, never. Not me, and not Flavia, or at least she’s never told me.’
‘And the children? How do you get on with them?’
‘Pretty well. Paolo is thirteen and Vittoria’s eight, so at least he might have some idea of what’s going on. But again, Flavia has never said anything, nothing has ever been said.’ She shrugged, openhanded, and in that gesture ceased to be in any way Italian and became entirely American.
‘And the future?’
‘You mean old age? Sipping tea together in the afternoon at Florian’s?’
It was rather a more sedate picture than he might have painted, but it would do. He nodded.
‘I have no idea. While I’m with her, I can’t work, so I have to decide about that, about what I want.’
‘What is it you do?’
‘I’m an archaeologist. Chinese. That’s how I met Flavia. I helped arrange the China exhibit in the Doge’s Palace three years ago. The bigwigs brought her along because she was singing Lucia at La Scala. And then they brought her to the party after the opening. Then I had to go back to Xian; that’s where the dig is, the one I’m working on. There are only three of us there, three Westerners. And I’ve been away for three months now, and I have to go back or I’ll be replaced.’
‘The soldiers?’ he asked, memory still bright with the image of the terra-cotta statues he had seen at that show, each one perfectly individualized and looking like the portrait of a man.
‘That’s just the beginning,’ she said. ‘There are thousands of them, more than we have any idea of. We haven’t even begun to excavate the treasure in the central tomb. There’s so much red tape with the government. But last fall we got permission to begin work on the treasure mound. From the little I’ve seen, it’s going to be the most important archaeological find since King Tut. In fact, that will look like nothing once we start to take out what’s buried there.’
He had always believed the passion of scholars to be an invention of people who wrote books, an attempt to render them more recognizably human. Seeing her, he realized how wrong he had been.
‘Even their tools are beautiful, even the small bowls the workers used to eat from.’
‘And if you don’t go back?’
‘If I don’t go back, I lose it all. Not the fame. The Chinese deserve that. But the chance to see those things, to touch them, to have a real sense of what the people who made them were like. If I don’t go back, I lose all that.’
‘And is that more important to you than this?’ he asked, gesturing around the dressing room.
‘That’s not a fair question.’ She made her own broad gesture, one that took in the make-up on the table, the costumes hanging behind the door, the wigs propped up on pedestals. ‘This sort of thing isn’t my future. Mine is pots and shards and pieces of a civilization thousands of years old. And Flavia’s is here, in the middle of this. In five years, she’ll be the most famous Verdi singer in the world. I don’t think there’s a place for me in that. It’s not anything she’s realized yet, but I told you what she’s like. She won’t think of it until it happens.’
‘But you have?’
‘Of course.’
‘What will you do?’
‘See what happens here, with all this.’ She gestured again, this time encompassing the death that had taken place in this theatre four nights before. ‘And then I’ll go back to China. Or I think I will.’
‘Just like that?’
‘No, not “just like that,” but I’ll still go.’
‘Is it worth it?’ he asked.
‘Is what worth it?’
‘China.’
She shrugged again. ‘It’s my work. It’s what I do. And, in the end, I suppose it’s what I love as well. I can’t spend my life sitting in dressing rooms, reading Chinese poetry, and waiting for the opera to end so that I can live my life.’
‘Have you told her?’
‘Has she told me what?’ demanded Flavia Petrelli, making a thoroughly theatrical entrance and slamming the door behind her. She swept across the room, trailing behind her the train of a pale-blue gown. She was entirely transformed, radiant, as beautiful as Brunetti had ever seen a woman be. And it wasn’t a costume or make-up that had made this change; she was dressed as what she was and what she did. That had transformed her. Her eyes swept around the room, taking in the two glasses, the amiability of their postures. ‘Has she told me what?’ she demanded a second time.
‘That she doesn’t like Traviata,’ Brunetti said. ‘I remarked that it was strange to find her here, reading, while you were singing, and she explained that it wasn’t one of her favourite operas.’
‘It’s also strange to find you here, Commissario. And I know it’s not one of her favourite operas.’ If she didn’t believe him, she gave no sign of it. He had stood when she came in. She walked in front of him, took one of the glasses that stood on the counter, filled it with mineral water, and drank it down in four long swallows. She filled it again and drank off half. ‘It’s like being in a sauna, with all those lights.’ She finished the water and set the glass down. ‘What are you two talking about?’
‘He told you, Flavia. Traviata.’
‘That’s a lie,’ the singer snapped. ‘But I don’t have time to talk about it.’ Turning to Brunetti, she said, voice tight with anger and high in the manner of singers’ voices after they have sung, ‘If you’d be so kind as to get out of my dressing room, I’d like to change into my costume for the next act.’
‘Certainly, Signora,’ he said, all politeness and apology. Nodding to Brett, who gave him a brief smile in return but stayed in her chair, he left the room quickly. Outside, he paused and listened, ear close to the door, not at all ashamed of what he was doing. But whatever they had to say to each other they said in low voices.
The woman in the blue smock appeared at the top of the steps. Brunetti pulled himself away from the door and walked towards her. Explaining that he had finished with the dressing room, he handed her the key, smiled, thanked her, and went back down the stairs to the stage area, where he found a chaos that amazed him. Gowned figures slumped against the walls, smoking and laughing. Men in tuxedos talked about soccer. And stagehands roamed back and forth, carrying paper ferns and trays with champagne glasses glued solidly to the bottom.
Down the short corridor to the right was the door to the conductor’s dressing room, closed now behind the new conductor. Brunetti stood at the end of the corridor for at least ten minutes, and no one bothered to ask him who he was or what he was doing there. Finally, a bell sounded and a bearded man in a jacket and tie went from group to group backstage, pointing in various directions and sending them off to whatever it was they were supposed to do.
The conductor left the dressing room, closed the door behind him, and walked past Brunetti without paying any attention to him. As soon as he was gone, Brunetti went casually down the corridor and into the room. No one saw him go in or, if they saw him, bothered to ask him what he was doing there.
The room was much as it had been the other night, save that a small cup and saucer were sitting on the table, not lying on the floor. He stayed only a moment, then left. His departure was as little noticed as his entrance, and this only four days after a man had died in that room.
17
By the time he got home, it was too late to take Paola and the children to dinner, as he had promised he would do that evening; besides, he could smell the mingled odours of garlic and sage as he climbed the stairs.
As he walked into the apartment, he had a moment of total disorientation, for the voice of Flavia Petrelli, which voice he had last heard singing Violetta twenty minutes before, was performing the end of the second act in his living room. He took two sudden and completely involuntary steps forward, until he remembered that the performance was being broadcast live that evening. Paola wasn’t much of an opera fan and was probably watching to figure out which of the singers was a murderer. In which curiosity, he was sure, she was joined by millions of households all over Italy.
From the living room, he heard the voice of his daughter, Chiara, call out, ‘Papà’s home,’ over which Violetta begged Alfredo to leave her forever.
He went into the living room just as the tenor threw a fistful of paper money into Flavia Petrelli’s face. She sank to the floor, gracefully, in tears. Alfredo’s father hurried across the stage to reprove him, and Chiara asked, ‘Why did he do that, Papà? I thought he loved her.’ She glanced up at him from what looked like math homework and, receiving no answer, repeated the question. ‘Why’d he do that?’
‘He thought she was going out with another man,’ was the best Brunetti could come up with by way of explanation.
‘What difference would that make? It’s not like they’re married or anything.’
‘Ciao, Guido,’ Paola called from the kitchen.
‘Well,’ Chiara persisted. ‘Why is he so angry?’
Brunetti walked in front of her and lowered the volume on the television, wondering what it was that rendered all teenagers deaf. He could tell from the way she held her pencil in front of her and wiggled it in the air that she had no intention of letting this one go. He decided to compromise. ‘They were living together, weren’t they?’
‘Yes; so what?’
‘Well, when people live together, they usually don’t go out with other people.’
‘But she wasn’t going out with anyone. She did all that just to make him think she was.’
‘I guess he believed her, and he got jealous.’
‘He doesn’t have any reason to be jealous. She really loves him. Anyone can see that. He’s a jerk. Besides, it’s her money, isn’t it?’
‘Hmm,’ he temporized, trying to remember the plot of Traviata.
‘Why didn’t he go out and get a job? As long as she’s supporting him, then she’s got the right to do whatever she wants.’ The audience thundered its applause.
‘It’s not always like that, angel.’
‘Well, sometimes it is, isn’t it, Papà? Why not? Most of my friends, if their mothers don’t work, like Mamma does, then their fathers always decide everything – where they’ll go on vacation, everything. And some of them even have lovers.’ This last was delivered weakly, more as a question than as a statement. ‘And they get to do it because they earn the money, so they get to tell everyone what they have to do.’ Not even Paola, he believed, could so accurately have summed up the capitalist system. It was, in fact, his wife’s voice he heard in Chiara’s speech.
‘It’s not as easy as that, sweetheart.’ He pulled at his tie. ‘Chiara, would you be an angel of grace and mercy and go into the kitchen and get your poor old father a glass of wine?’
‘Sure.’ She tossed down her pencil, more than willing to abandon the issue. ‘White or red?’
‘See if there’s some Prosecco. If not, bring me whatever you think I’d like.’ In family jargon, this translated to whatever wine she wanted to have a taste of.
He lowered himself into the sofa and kicked off his shoes, propping his feet on the low table. He listened as an announcer filled the audience in, rather unnecessarily, on the events of the last few days. The man’s eager, ghoulish tone made it sound like something from an opera, of the more bloody verismo repertory.
Chiara came back into the room. She was tall, utterly lacking in physical grace. From two rooms away, he could tell when it was Chiara’s turn to do the dishes by the crashes and bangs that filled the house. But she was pretty, would perhaps become beautiful, with wide-spaced eyes and a soft down just beneath her ears that melted his heart with tenderness each time he saw it caught in a revealing light.
‘Fragolino,’ she said from behind him, and passed the glass to him, managing to spill only a drop, and that on the floor. ‘Can I have a sip? Mamma didn’t want to open it. She said there was just one more bottle after this, but I said you were very tired, so she said it was all right.’ Even before he could consent, she took the glass back and sipped from it. ‘How can a wine smell like strawberries, Papà?’ Why was it that, when children loved you, you knew everything, and when they were angry with you, you knew nothing?
‘It’s the grape. It smells like strawberries, so the wine does too.’ He smelled, then tasted, the truth of this. ‘You doing your homework?’
‘Yes, mathematics,’ she said, managing to put into the word an enthusiasm that confused him utterly. This, he remembered, was the child who explained his bank statements to him every three months and who was going to try to complete his tax form for him this May.
‘What sort of mathematics?’ he asked with feigned interest.
‘Oh, you wouldn’t understand, Papà.’ Then, with lightning speed, ‘When are you going to get me a computer?’
‘When I win the lottery.’ He had reason to believe that his father-in-law was going to give her a laptop computer for Christmas, and he disliked the fact that he disliked the fact.
‘Oh, Papà, you always say that.’ She sat down opposite him, plunked her feet onto the table between them, and placed them, sole to sole, against his. She gave a soft push with one foot. ‘Maria Rinaldi has one, and so does Fabrizio, and I’ll never be any good in school, not really good, until I have one.’
‘It looks like you’re doing fine with a pencil.’
‘Sure I can do it, but it takes me forever.’
‘Isn’t it better for your brain if you exercise it, rather than letting the machine do it?’
‘That’s dumb, Papà. The brain’s not muscle. We learned that in biology. Besides, you don’t walk across the city to get information if you can use the phone to get it for you.’ He pushed back with his foot, but he didn’t answer. ‘Well, you don’t, do you, Papa?’
‘What would you do with all the time you saved if you got one?’
‘I’d do more complicated problems. It doesn’t do it for me, Papà, honest. It just does it faster. That’s all it is, a machine that adds and subtracts a million times faster than we can.’
‘Do you have any idea of how much those things cost?’
‘Sure; the little Toshiba I want costs two million.’
Luckily, Paola came into the room then, or he would have had to tell Chiara just how much chance she had of getting a computer from him. Because that might
Paola set down the bottle and sat on the arm of the sofa, next to him. On the screen, the curtain rose to display a barren room. It was difficult to recognize Flavia Petrelli, whom he had seen in the full power of her beauty little more than an hour before, in the frail woman slumped under the shawl who lay on the divan, one hand fallen weakly to the floor below her. She looked more like Signora Santina than she did a famous courtesan. The dark circles under her eyes, the misery of her drawn mouth, spoke convincingly of sickness and despair. Even her voice, when she asked Annina to give what little money she had to the poor, was weak, charged with pain and loss.
‘She’s very good,’ Paola said. Brunetti shushed her. They watched.
‘And he’s dumb,’ Chiara added as Alfredo swept into the room and grabbed her up in his arms.
‘Shhh,’ they both hissed at her. She returned to her figures, muttering, ‘Jerk’ under her breath, just loud enough for her parents to hear.
He watched Petrelli’s face transform itself with the ecstasy of reunion, watched it flush with real joy. Together, they planned a future they would never have, and her voice changed; he heard it returning to strength and clarity.
Her joy pulled her to her feet, raised her hands towards heaven. ‘I feel myself reborn,’ she cried, whereupon, this being opera, she promptly collapsed and died.
‘I still think he’s a jerk,’ Chiara insisted over Alfredo’s lamentation and the wild applause of the audience. ‘Even if she lived, how would they support themselves? Is she supposed to go back to what she was doing before she met him?’ Brunetti wanted to know nothing of how much his daughter might understand about that sort of thing. Having voiced her opinion, Chiara scribbled a long row of numbers at the bottom of her paper, slipped the paper into her math book, and flipped the book shut.