Death at La Fenice

‘I want you to stop whatever you’re working on and devote yourself entirely to this. I’ve looked at the duty rosters,’ Patta continued, surprising Brunetti that he even knew they existed, ‘and I’ve assigned you two men to help you with this.’ Please let it not be Alvise and Riverre, and I’ll take her two dozen. ‘Alvise and Riverre. They’re good, solid men.’ Roughly translated, that meant they were loyal to Patta.

‘And I want to see progress in this. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Brunetti replied blandly.

‘Right, then. That’s all. I’ve got work to do, and I’m sure you’ve got a lot to get busy with.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Brunetti repeated, rising and going toward the door. He wondered what the parting shot would be. Hadn’t Patta taken his last vacation in London?

‘And good hunting, Brunetti.’

Yes, London. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said quietly, and let himself out of the office.

* * * *

CHAPTER SEVEN

For the next hour, Brunetti busied himself reading through the reports of the crime in the four major papers. Il Gazzettino, as was to be expected, put it all over the front page and saw it as a crime that somehow compromised the city and put it at risk. It editorialized that the police must quickly find the person responsible, not so much to bring that person to justice as to remove the blot from the honor of Venice. Reading it, Brunetti reflected on Patta’s having read this article instead of waiting for his usual L’Osservatore Romano, which wasn’t on the newsstands until ten.

La Repubblica viewed the event in light of recent political developments, suggesting a relationship so subtle that only the journalist, or a psychiatrist, could grasp it. Corriere della Sera behaved as though the man had died in his bed and devoted a full page to an objective analysis of his contribution to the world of music, drawing special attention to his having championed the cause of certain modern composers.

He saved L’Unita for last. Predictably, it screamed the first thing that came into its head—in this case, vengeance, which, predictably, it had got confused with justice. An editorial hinted broadly at the same old secrets in high places and dragged out, not surprisingly, poor old Sindona, dead in his jail cell, and asked the patently rhetorical question of whether there wasn’t some dark connection between these two ‘frighteningly similar’ deaths. Aside from the fact that they were both old men who died of cyanide poisoning, there was little similarity, frightening or not, that Brunetti could see.

Not for the first time in his career, Brunetti reflected upon the possible advantage of censorship of the press. In the past, the German people had got along very well with a government that demanded it, and the American government seemed to fare similarly well with a population that wanted it.

He turned back to the long story in the Corriere, and tossed the three other papers into the wastebasket. He read through the article a second time, occasionally taking notes. If not the most famous conductor in the world, Wellauer was certainly ranked high among them. He had first conducted before the last war, the prodigy of the Berlin Conservatory. Not much was written about the war years, save that he had continued to conduct in his native Germany. It was in the fifties that his career had taken off and he had joined the international glitter set, flying from one continent to another to conduct a single concert, then going off to a third to conduct an opera.

In the midst of the tinsel and the fame, he had remained the consummate musician, exacting both precision and delicacy from any orchestra he directed, insisting upon absolute fidelity to the score as written. Even the reputation he had acquired of being imperious or difficult paled before the universal praise that greeted his absolute devotion to his art.

The article paid little attention to his personal life, save to mention that his current wife was his third and that the second had taken her life, twenty years before. His residences were given as Berlin, Gstaad, New York, and Venice.

The picture that appeared on the front page was not a recent one. In it, Wellauer appeared in profile, talking with Maria Callas, who was in costume and was obviously the prime subject of the photograph. It seemed strange to him that the paper would print a photo that was at least thirty years old.

He reached down into the wastebasket and grabbed back the Gazzettino. It, as usual, had a photo of the place where the death had occurred, the dull, balanced facade of Teatro La Fenice. Next to it was a smaller photo of the stage entrance, out of which something was being carried by two uniformed men. The picture below was a recent full-face publicity still of the Maestro: white tie, shock of silver hair swept back from his angular face. There was the faint Slavic tilt to the eyes, which appeared curiously light under the dark brows that overshadowed them. The nose was entirely too long for the face, but the effect of those eyes was so strong that the slight defect hardly seemed worth notice. The mouth was broad, the lips full and fleshy, a strangely sensual contrast with the austerity of the eyes. Brunetti tried to remember the face as he had seen it the night before, tightened and distorted by death, but the power of this photo was enough to supplant that image. He stared at those pale eyes and tried to imagine a hatred so strong that it would lead someone to destroy this man.

His speculations were interrupted by the arrival of one of the secretaries, with the report that had come down from the police in Berlin, already translated into Italian.

Before he began to read it, Brunetti reminded himself that Wellauer was a sort of living monument and the Germans were always on the lookout for heroes, so what he read was very likely to reflect both of those things. This meant that some truths would be there only by suggestion, others by omission. Hadn’t many musicians and artists belonged to the Nazi Party? But who remembered that now, after all these years?

He opened the report and began to read the Italian text, the German useless to him. Wellauer had no criminal record whatsoever, not even a driving violation. His apartment in Gstaad had been robbed twice; both times, nothing had been recovered, no one apprehended, and the insurance had made good, though the totals had been enormous.

Brunetti waded through two more paragraphs of Germanic exactitude until he came to the suicide of the second wife. She had hanged herself in the basement of their Munich apartment on 30 April 1968, after what the report referred to as ‘a long period of depression.’ No suicide note had been found. She had left three children, twin boys and a girl, then aged seven and twelve. Wellauer had himself discovered the body and, after the funeral, had gone into a period of complete seclusion that lasted six months.

The police had paid no attention to him until his marriage, two years ago, to Elizabeth Balintffy, a Hungarian by birth, a doctor by training and profession, and a German by her first marriage, which had ended in divorce three years before her marriage to Wellauer. She had no criminal record, either in Germany or in Hungary. She had one child by the first marriage, a daughter, Alexandra, aged thirteen.

Brunetti looked, and looked in vain, for some reference to what Wellauer had done during the war years. There was mention of his first marriage, in 1936, to the daughter of a German industrialist, and his divorce after the war. Between those dates, the man seemed not to have existed, which, to Brunetti, spoke very eloquently of what he had been doing or, at any rate, supporting. This, however, was a suspicion about which he was likely to get very little confirmation, especially not in an official report from the German police.

Wellauer was, in short, as clean as a man could possibly wish to be. But still, someone had put cyanide in his coffee. Experience had taught Brunetti that people killed one another primarily for two reasons: money and sex. The order wasn’t important, and the second was very often called love, but he had, in fifteen years spent among the murderous, encountered few exceptions to that rule.

Well before eleven, he had finished with the German police report. He called down to the laboratory, only to learn that nothing had been done, no fingerprints taken from the cup or from the other surfaces in the dressing room, which remained sealed, a fact that, he was told, had already prompted three phone calls from the theater. He yelled a bit at that, but he knew it was useless. He spoke briefly with Miotti, who said he’d learned nothing further from the portiere the night before, save that the conductor was a ‘cold one,’ the wife very pleasant and friendly, and La Petrelli not at all to his liking. The portiere gave no reason for this, falling back, instead, on the explanation that she was antipatica. For him, that was enough.

There was no sense in sending either Alvise or Riverre to take prints, not until the lab could determine if prints other than those of the conductor were on the cup. No need for haste here.

Disgruntled that he would miss lunch, Brunetti left his office a little after noon and walked to the bar on the