Using her most placatory tone, Caterina said, “You’re right, of course. This is nothing for the police.” That made them partners and equally complicit.
“What’s missing?” Caterina moved back from the cabinet, as if to give physical evidence of her trust in Roseanna’s competence. Her sister Cinzia had been involved with an anthropologist for some years and had passed on to her sisters what she had learned from him about dominance displays in simians. Caterina thought of this as she moved back from the desk, leaving access to the cabinet entirely to Roseanna.
The acting director leaned into the cabinet and gathered the files on each shelf into a stack, tapping papers back inside the folders out of which they projected. She put the first pile on the desk and beside them those from the shelf below. Beginning with the first pile, she opened each file and straightened the papers until she had them in an order she seemed to like, then did the same with those on the second pile.
Next she went back to the top file on the first stack and began to page through the letters. Caterina, to disguise her impatience, went and studied the second portrait to see if there was a name printed at the bottom. Beside her, Roseanna methodically opened one file after another, fingering the papers in each before putting it down and taking up another one.
Caterina returned her attention to the men with the wigs.
“Caterina,” Roseanna said.
“
Sì
?”
“I don’t understand this,” she said hesitantly. Perhaps this was merely an expression of her surprise that anyone would have bothered to snoop around in the files of the Fondazione Musicale Italo-Tedesca.
“What?”
“Nothing seems to be missing.”
Four
“W
HAT?”
C
ATERINA ASKED, AMAZED THAT SOMEONE WOULD
have gone to the trouble of breaking in and then not have taken anything. What she had seen did not suggest vandalism. Nothing had spilled out of the cabinet, nothing had been destroyed. There were signs of a hasty, careless search, nothing more.
Roseanna gave her a manila folder. Neatly typed (yes, typed) on the flap was “Sartorio, Antonio, 1630–1680.”
“What’s in it?” Caterina asked as she handed it back without opening it.
“The letters we’ve received over the years concerning him,” Roseanna said, hefting it in her right hand, as if she could judge by the weight.
“Everything seems to be here,” Roseanna said. “And in this one,” she added, passing another file to Caterina. “But I can check.”
Caterina began to read the top letter in the file she held, which was in German and addressed to the director of the Foundation by title and not by name. The writer began by saying that, the last time he had been in Venice, he had been unable to find Hasse’s grave in the church of San Marcuola and asked, in a peremptory manner, why the Foundation had not seen to the placing of a memorial plaque in the church. The writer was a member of the Hasse Society in . . .
Caterina pulled her attention from the letter and asked, “What did you just say?”
“I wanted to check if anything’s missing from the Porpora file.”
“How?” Caterina asked, suddenly interested in what Roseanna had said.
Instead of answering, Roseanna turned back to the cabinet and reached inside to place her hand on one of the decorative knobs on the inlaid panels that ran perpendicular to the shelves. She gave it a sharp twist and the panel tilted forward and down, revealing a vertical drawer the width of the panel, about ten centimeters. She reached in and pulled out a student’s notebook, on its cover the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius.
She set the notebook on the desk, opened it toward the front, and pressed it flat by running her hand down the center. She set the file she was holding beside the notebook and removed the letters. Methodically, she paged through them, each time putting her forefinger on an entry in the notebook; it was too far from Caterina for her to read. When she had checked all the letters, Roseanna turned to her and said, “They’re all here.”
“May I?” Caterina asked and picked up the notebook.
“Porpora” was written at the top of the page on the left, and below it were columns that listed the date of the arrival of the letter, the name and address of the person who sent it, and the date the letter was answered.
“Why do you keep it?” Caterina asked in a voice she made as neutral as she could.
Roseanna pursed her lips in embarrassment, careful to avoid Caterina’s gaze. “I’ve always kept permanent records of things, even my gas bills. It’s just a habit of mine, I suppose.” She pointed to the notebook. “This way, if anything goes missing or gets misfiled, I’ve got a record that it did arrive. I’ve kept it since I started here.” Then, head lowered, she added, “I began it with all the correspondence that was already here and kept adding to it over the years.”
Caterina stopped herself from asking if the Foundation had a website or email address or any evidence that it was functioning in the current millennium.
She thought of the letter complaining about Hasse’s grave. Such things did not lead to burglary. “Can you remember anyone asking a strange question or making a threat?” she asked.
“Some of the letters are strange,” Roseanna said. Then, as if hearing a playback, she slapped her hand over her mouth.
Caterina didn’t bother to fight the impulse and laughed out loud. “You should have seen some of the people I took classes with.” Then, swept away by memory, she added, “Or from,” and that set her off again.
Roseanna resisted for a moment but then gave in and said, laughing, “If you think they’re strange, you should see some of the people who come here. Not the ones who come to sleep but the ones who come to ask questions.”
Still laughing, Caterina nodded and waved a hand in the air. She knew, she knew. She’d spent a decade of her life with them.
“The ones who write letters are usually better. There’s an elderly gentleman in Pavia who still listens to phonograph records. He writes and asks for suggestions about which ones to buy. Would you believe it?” Roseanna asked and shook her head at this. This from a woman who still used a typewriter, Caterina thought.
Caterina took the notebook and, somehow knowing that Roseanna’s list would be in alphabetical order, paged back from “Porpora” to “Hasse” and saw that the letters in the file dated back twelve years; for “Caldara” it was a bit more than that, though there were only two letters.
She flipped back toward the end, passed “Sartorio” and found “Steffani.”
“Why is it that the entries for Steffani start such a short time ago, Roseanna?”
“Oh, he’s been forgotten for a long time,” Roseanna answered.
“I see,” Caterina said. She remembered seeing his portrait in something she had once read: round face and sagging chin, bishop’s cap with white hair sneaking out on both sides, long fingers caressing the cross he wore across his chest. The man had been dead for almost three centuries. Caterina closed the notebook and set it on the table. As she did, her eyes were drawn to the photo of the statue. Marcus Aurelius. Emperor. Hero. Blamed by generations of historians for having passed the throne to his son Commodus, as if they thought he should have remained childless. Childless. Without heirs.
Illumination flashed upon her, forcing out an involuntary grunt, as though someone had punched her in the stomach. “Marco Aurelio,” she pronounced. “Of course, of course.”
Startled, Roseanna turned to her. “What’s the matter?” She dropped a file on the table and put her hand on Caterina’s arm. When Caterina said nothing, she demanded, “What’s wrong?”
“Marco Aurelio,” Caterina repeated.
Roseanna looked at the cover of the notebook. “Yes, I know, but what’s wrong with you?”
Caterina rubbed her forehead, as if to push away a headache, and then tapped her fingers lightly against her head a few times. “Of course, of course,” she repeated. Then, to Roseanna, she said, “The trunks belonged to Steffani, didn’t they?”
The other woman’s mouth dropped open. “Who told you? They said no one was to say anything until the person they chose started to work on the papers. How did you find out?” When Caterina didn’t answer, Roseanna took her arm again, but this time with greater force. “Tell me.”
Caterina pointed to the notebook. “That did,” she said.
It was obvious that Roseanna had no idea what she was talking about. She picked up the notebook and paged through it, as if Caterina had seen the answer written inside. “I don’t understand,” she confessed and set the notebook back on the desk.
“I remembered,” Caterina said. “Things I read when I was at university. His first opera was
Marco Aurelio
.” Roseanna gave no look or nod of recognition, but how many people would know this? “And I remembered reading something. He had no direct heirs, and no one ever knew what happened to his possessions after his death.” The Church was mixed up in it somehow, too, she recalled, but she could not remember the details.
Roseanna went and sat behind the desk. It was the director’s desk and the director’s chair, but she looked like anything but a director. She leaned forward and propped her chin on her hand. “Yes. You’re right. It’s Steffani.” She pronounced it with the accent on the first syllable, as an Italian would. As Steffani had not.
“I don’t see what difference it makes,” Roseanna went on in a voice grown suddenly brisk. “Really. You would have known as soon as you started reading and found his name in the papers. It’s those two men,” she said, her voice growing warmer. “Everything has to be secret. No one can know anything. If one of them saw that the other one’s hair was on fire, he wouldn’t say anything.” Her tone was a mixture of anger and exasperation. “They’re terrible men. One’s worse than the other.”
“The cousins?” Caterina asked.
Roseanna raised her head and gave an angry flip of her hand. “What cousins? They’re just two men who smell the possibility of money. That’s the way they’re related.” Then, after a moment’s reflection, “And in mutual suspicion.”
“Are they really his descendants?” Caterina asked. “Steffani’s?”
“Oh, they are, they are.”
“How do they know that? Or prove it?”
Here Roseanna gave a snort, of either disgust or anger. Then she stopped and gave Caterina a sudden, assessing look. Whatever she saw led her to say, “It’s the Mormons.”
“I beg your pardon?” Steffani, she remembered, had been a clergyman of some sort, so where’d the Mormons come from? “He was a priest, wasn’t he? And long before the Mormons.”
“Oh, I know that,” Roseanna said. “But that’s how you can find your ancestors. By asking them.”
Caterina, who took very little interest in her own ancestors, could hardly imagine asking the Mormons to look for them. “What have the Mormons got to do with this?”
Roseanna smiled and waved her fingers before her face to suggest a lack of mental stability. “It’s what they believe, or at least what Dottor Moretti told me they believe. They can go back and baptize people in the past.” Her expression showed how much faith she put in this possibility.
Caterina stared at her for a long moment. “You think you can marry them in the past, too, and inherit their money?”
It took Roseanna a moment to realize this was a joke, and when she did, she laughed, losing a decade as she did. When she stopped, she wiped her eyes and said, her voice a bit rough after laughing so hard, “It would be convenient, wouldn’t it?” She considered the possibilities for a while and said, “I suppose I could marry Gianni Agnelli.” Then, with a careful attention to fact that made Caterina admire her, she added, “No, he lived too long. I’d want someone who died young.”
Caterina stopped herself from naming a candidate or two and returned to the business at hand.
Wiping away a few vagrant tears that remained, and still smiling, Roseanna said, “Dottor Moretti told me they’re very good at tracing people’s ancestry, and they’re generous about giving the information.”
“How do they do it? This is a Catholic country. And parts of Germany are, too.” This rang another historical bell. Steffani had been somehow mixed up in the squabbles between the Protestants and the Catholics. How long ago it was, and how futile such things seemed now. Before his time, people died disputing how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Whether the host was flesh or merely a symbol. During his lifetime, the wars still went on. She shook her head at the thought of it. How many millions had died for those angels and for those flesh/nonflesh hosts? Centuries later, and the churches are empty except for old people and kids with badly tuned guitars.
“What’s wrong?” Roseanna asked.
“Nothing,” Caterina said with a small shake of her head. “I was just trying to remember what I read as a student about Steffani.”
“There are books about him in the Marciana, I’m sure,” Roseanna said. “I haven’t read about him, but some of the others are fascinating. Gesualdo killed his wife and her lover, and he was a hunchback, too. Porpora went bankrupt, and all I ever read about Cavalli said he sat around all day, writing operas.”
Caterina gave her a long look, as if seeing a different person, but said nothing.