She tried to tell herself he hadn’t done anything more than cause her some emotion between surprise and unease, but then she remembered kneeling in front of the toilet and vomiting and admitted that he had terrified her. Accepting that, she punched in the number of Clara’s husband, Sergio, who owned and managed a factory on the mainland in Marcon that made metal sheeting.
Sergio had been left an orphan at the age of eleven; part of his joy in marrying Clara was that she gave him back a family. She had four sisters, and two of those had children so, with glee, he had taken on the whole lot of them, becoming the big brother none of them had had and acquiring not only a wife but the endless set of obligations and responsibilities he had pined after for years.
“
Ciao
, Caterina,” he answered.
“Sergio,” she began, deciding to waste no time. “I have a problem, and I thought you would be the person to help me solve it.” By presenting it this way to Sergio, she knew, she was pandering to his desire to be loved by the family and his need to believe himself a useful part of it.
“Tell me,” he said.
“A few nights ago, a man followed me from where I’m working to Campo Santa Maria Formosa. I was on the way to
Mamma
and
Papà
’s” she said, conscious of using those names to reel him in, “and then he was waiting at the vaporetto stop when I went home.”
“The same man?” Sergio asked.
“Yes.”
“You know him?”
“No. But I know where he works. I walked past a shop, near the Basilica, and he was sitting behind the counter.” She started to describe the man and was astonished to realize all she remembered was light hair, cut very short.
“What do you want me to do?”
That was the essential Sergio: no time wasted asking if she was sure or if she had considered the consequences of getting him mixed up in this. Blood was thicker than water. Had he asked this question while she was being sick into the toilet, she probably would have told him to rip the man’s head off, but time had passed and the menace had been let out of the situation, the same way air could be let out of a balloon.
“Maybe you could stop by and ask him what he wanted?”
“You want to come?”
Caterina remembered a time, decades ago, when she had come home from school after hearing someone use the expression “Vengeance is a dish that is best eaten cold,” and told her mother how clever she thought it was, forgetting that her mother’s generation had been brought up in a different epoch. Caterina had been surprised by her mother’s failure to laugh, then more surprised when she said, “It doesn’t matter, darling, if it’s hot or it’s cold, vengeance still destroys your soul, either way,” and had asked her youngest daughter if she’d like a piece of chocolate cake.
For a moment, Caterina considered the possibility, toyed with the thought of the man’s expression when she walked into his shop with Sergio looming at her side. “No, he didn’t hurt me. He scared me, but it was just the one time, and I haven’t seen him since. Except in his shop.”
“All right. Tell me where he is and I’ll go talk to him.” Then he asked, “Is there any hurry?”
She was about to say that there was, but, since she had not seen the man again, good sense intervened and she said, “No, not really.”
“Then I’ll go past it on my way home. Not today and not tomorrow. I’m sorry, I can’t, really. But I will, I promise.”
Caterina had no doubt of that and reassured him that there was no hurry, none at all. She described the location of the shop and did not allow herself to remind Sergio that he had a factory to run and shouldn’t spend his time coming in to the city in the middle of the day. She wanted an explanation, and if Sergio could provide it for her, all the better. To suggest that she had no sense of urgency whatsoever, she spent a few minutes asking about the children, all possessed of genius and beauty beyond that usually bestowed upon even the most gifted children. Then a voice called Sergio’s name and he said he’d call her after he’d spoken to the man.
Caterina returned to the documents and read through the three remaining sides of paper listing the names of the people Steffani successfully brought to or back to the Church. She forced herself to do the basic historical research and was rewarded by identifying all but six of them. Even if the result of her research turned up nothing meaningful about Steffani, the professors who had taught her how to do research could still be proud that they had taught her so well.
She plodded on, all but aching for something to come and save her from the tedium of these letters.
As if to wish for it were to make it materialize, the next paper was the manuscript of a
recitativo
,
“Dell’ alma stanca.”
Caterina had perhaps spent too long a day reading through papers of a certain banality, and so to come upon this title pushed her, if only for an instant, beyond the limits of her scholarly patience and she said out loud, “This
alma
is certainly very
stanca
.”
Recovering from that moment of truth telling, she took a closer look at the score and recognized both the music and the handwriting. She sang her way through the soprano part, remembering that it was scored for—wonder of wonders—four viole da gamba. She joined her voice to the silver shimmer of the instruments and heard how well it worked and then heard how wonderful it sounded. As often happened, the quality of the music far outclassed the libretto, and she felt a moment’s sympathy for Steffani for having had to use these threadbare sentiments over and over. She remembered the performance of
Niobe
she had seen, where in the following aria strings and flutes had joined the viols. She realized that the score must then be printed and thus the sale of this page would not condemn it to some private archive, never to be heard. Smiling, she made a note of the document, listing the packet number and counting through the sheets to get the right page number. This way, either the victorious cousin or the two of them together could easily find one of the salable documents and do with it as they pleased.
The next paper was a letter from Ortensio Mauro, whose name she recognized as Steffani’s best friend and librettist. Dated 1707, it must have been sent to Steffani in Düsseldorf and seemed to describe events in Hanover, which he had left four years before. She read a few paragraphs of gossip and then found this: “Here there is singing and playing every evening . . . You are the innocent cause of this. This music has more charm than Sympathy itself, and all that are here feel the sweet ties that stir and exhilarate their souls. You might issue a blessing, confirm or consecrate, excommunicate, whatever you like; neither your blessing nor your curse will ever have such force or charm, such power or pathos, as your agreeable notes. There is no end here of admiring and listening to them.” She ran her hand across the surface of the page, as if to caress the spirit of the man who had been generous enough to write that.
Another two hours passed as she read her way through more of the documents left behind by a busy and active life. Some of them could be there only because of a random gathering up of documents. There was a series of land transfer documents from a farm in the town of Vedelago; the names Stievani and Scapinelli appeared on all of them as sellers. A quick look at a map showed her Vedelago was about ten kilometers to the east of Castelfranco, the town where Steffani was born. Then there were more about the sale of another farm in the same town, these too bearing the names of the ancestors of the cousins. There was a single letter dated 19 August 1725, from Scapinelli, saying that, of course, their cousin Agostino would be sent his share of the money received from the sale of the houses, but he must understand that these things took time. There was only the one letter. And then there were no more documents. She had read through all of the papers in the first chest and found nothing that in any way expressed a “testamentary disposition” on the part of Abbé Agostino Steffani, though she had found tantalizing mention of the two families.
She put the papers back in order, tied up the bundle, and took it back to the open storeroom. She put the papers, all read and tallied, back inside the trunk in the order in which they had been when it was opened. She closed the trunk, flirted with the idea of beginning with the papers in the other, but decided her time might be better spent considering her immediate future.
Twenty-five
C
ATERINA WAS IN NO WAY A GREEDY PERSON.
S
HE HAD LITTLE
interest in the accumulation of wealth and spent most of what she earned on leading what she considered a decent life. Part of this might have resulted from the security that comes with happiness. She had always been loved and cared for by her family, so she assumed that being loved and cared for were things that would continue throughout her life, regardless of her salary or accumulated wealth. Many people were strongly motivated by the desire to accumulate it, she knew, but she found it difficult to muster the energy for the attempt.
Caterina did, however, have a sense of fair play. She had been promised a job and had left the relative security of Manchester to return to Venice in order to begin that job, she told herself, ignoring the fact that she was eager to leave Manchester and would have jumped at any offer as well as the fact that she had overlooked the time limitation stated in the contract she had been so eager to sign. She had, she admitted, been told from the beginning that the position was temporary, but she had chosen to believe it might last several months. Now she learned that it would last only one month, even though she had no idea how long it would take her to read the remaining documents.
She turned on the computer and checked her emails. There was an offer for unlimited local calls and high-speed Internet for only eighteen euros a month, the offer of a smart phone for next to nothing, and an email from Tina. She deleted the first two and opened the third, curious to learn how their conversation of the night before and the revelations prompting it would have affected Tina’s style.
“Dear Cati. As you might have expected, the interest of my friends has waned in the absence of new information or questions about Steffani. Even my friend in Constance has gone mute, so I guess you are on your own. I’ve been reminded of a deadline and so have to get back to my more recent events, but please understand that I’ll always abandon them to help, if you give me some idea of what to look for. You don’t even have to tell me why.
“Maybe the Marciana has some of those compilations of documents and letters having to do with musicians from the period. It’s the librarian’s equivalent of what the rest of us do with oddly matched socks: just throw them all in a drawer and forget about them. I’m sure the librarians could tell you if they have such things.
“Other than that, I have no advice to pass on to you and can hope only that you will discover more dark revelations about lust, adultery, and murder, so very much more interesting than my own tedious analysis of Vatican foreign policy. Love, Tina-Lina.”
It was a very limp attempt to sound limp, so perhaps it would convince whoever else was reading her emails to believe that Caterina and her sister were both bored with the research and everything surrounding it.
Caterina opened a new mail and answered, “Dear Tina. Yes, once we got beyond the thrills of the Königsmarck Affair, things have indeed become a bit dull. Blame it on the even tenor of Steffani’s life, I fear.
“I did, however, come on some papers today that have him, as well as members of the Stievani and Scapinelli families, involved in the transfer of ownership of some farms near Castelfranco, and I’m going to try to see if I can find more about it tomorrow. Right now, I’m too tired after almost an entire day of reading handwritten documents in Latin and German and Italian to see straight or even think. I’d like nothing better than to lie on the sofa and watch reruns of something uplifting like, for example,
Visitors
. Remember how we adored it? Good lord, it must be twenty-five years ago, and I still remember those giant reptiles gobbling humans as if they were large mice. How I’d love to watch it tonight, pretend I was a Visitor, and gobble a number of people.” She read over what she had written and canceled the last sentence. Though Caterina had no idea why, she wanted Dottor Moretti to read and believe that she was tired and bored with her research.
She continued the email: “You think they stole the idea from Dante? I’ve always wondered about that. On that note of unresolved attribution, I’ll go home—to an apartment where there is no television and thus no possibility of
Visitors
—have some dinner and get in bed with
l’Espresso
, which this week promises me revelations about garbage in Naples and the dangers of breast implants. Or maybe I’ll take the biography of Steffani—who had to worry about neither of those things—and finally finish reading it. Love, Cati.”
She switched to the site of Manchester University and opened the Romanian’s mail, whispering a silent apology to him for invading his privacy, his life, perhaps his secrets. When she noticed that there were one hundred and twelve unread emails, she smiled and retracted the prayer. She put the senders in alphabetical order and, seeing that there was nothing from Cristina, put them back in the order of arrival and left the site without having glanced at the names of any of the senders, very proud of her own force of will.