Death at La Fenice

matched her husband’s doges with a pope and a textile millionaire, the cardinal with a cousin of Petrarch, the composer with a famous castrato (from whom, sadly, no issue), and the ambassador with Garibaldi’s banker.

They lived in a palazzo that had belonged to the Falieri for at least three centuries, a vast rambling vault on the Grand Canal that was virtually impossible to heat in the winter and that was kept from imminent collapse only by the constant ministrations of an ever-present horde of masons, builders, plumbers, and electricians, all of whom joined Count Falier willingly in the perpetual Venetian battle against the inexorable forces of time, tide, and industrial pollution.

Brunetti had never counted the rooms in the palazzo and had always been embarrassed to ask how many there were. Its four floors were surrounded on three sides by canals, its back propped up by a deconsecrated church. He entered it only on formal occasions: the vigil of Christmas, when they went to eat fish and exchange gifts; the name day of Count Orazio, when, for some reason, they ate pheasant and again gave gifts; and the Feast of the Redeemer, when they went to eat pasta fagioli and watch the fireworks soaring above Piazza San Marco. His children loved to visit their grandparents on these occasions, and he knew they went, either by themselves or with Paola, to visit during the year. He chose to believe that it was because of the palazzo and the possibilities of exploration it offered, but he had the niggling suspicion that they loved their grandparents and enjoyed their company, twin phenomena that baffled Brunetti utterly.

The count was ‘in finance.’ Throughout the seventeen years Brunetti had been married to Paola, this was the only description he had ever heard of her father’s profession. He was not described as being ‘a financier,’ no doubt because that might have suggested something manual, like counting money or going to the office. No, the count was ‘in finance,’ in much the same way that the de Beers were ‘in mines,’ or von Thyssen ‘in steel.’

The countess, for her part, was ‘in society,’ which meant that she attended the opening nights of Italy’s four major opera houses, arranged benefit concerts for the Italian Red Cross, and gave a masked ball for four hundred people each year during Carnevale.

Brunetti, for his part, earned slightly more than three million lire a month as a commissario of police, a sum he calculated to be only a bit more than what his father-in-law paid each month for the right to dock his boat in front of the palazzo. A decade ago, the count had attempted to persuade Brunetti to leave the police and join him in a career in banking. He continually pointed out that Brunetti ought not to spend his life .in the company of tax evaders, wife beaters, pimps, thieves, and perverts. The offers had come to a sudden halt one Christmas when, goaded beyond patience, Brunetti had pointed out that although he and the count seemed to work among the same people, he at least had the consolation of being able to arrest them, whereas the count was constrained to invite them to dinner.

So it was with some trepidation that night that Brunetti asked Paola if it would be possible for them to attend the party her parents were giving the following evening to celebrate the opening of a new exhibition of French impressionist paintings at the Doge’s Palace.

‘But how did you know about the party?’ Paola asked, astonished.

‘I read about it in the paper.’

‘My parents, and you read about it in the paper?’ This seemed to offend Paola’s atavistic concept of the family.

‘Yes; but will you ask them?’

‘Guido, I usually have to threaten you just to get you to go and have Christmas dinner with them, and now you suddenly want to go to one of their parties. Why?’

‘Because I want to talk to the sort of people who go to that sort of thing.’

Paola, who had been reading and grading student papers when he came in, carefully set her pen down and graced him with the look she usually reserved for brutal infelicities of language. Though they were not infrequent in the papers that rested under her pen, she was not accustomed to hearing them from her husband. She looked at him a long time, formulating one of the replies he often relished as much as he dreaded. ‘I doubt that they could refuse, given the elegance of your request,’ she said, then picked up the pen and bent back over the papers.

It was late, and he knew that she was tired, so he busied himself at the counter, making coffee. ‘You know you won’t sleep if you drink coffee this late,’ she said, recognizing what he was doing from the sounds he made.

He passed her on the way to the stove, ruffled her hair, and said, ‘I’ll think of something to occupy myself.’

She grunted, struck a line through a phrase, and asked, ‘Why do you want to meet them?’

‘To find out as much as I can about Wellauer. I’ve been reading about what a genius he was, about his career, about his wives, but I don’t have any real idea of what sort of man he was.’

‘And you think the sort of people,’ she said with heavy emphasis, ‘who go to my parents’ parties would know about him?’

‘I want to know about his private life, and those are the people who would know the sort of thing I want to know.’

‘That’s the sort of thing you can read about in STOP.’ It never failed to amaze him that a person who taught English literature at the university could be so intimate with the gutter press.

‘Paola,’ he said. ‘I want to find out things that are true about him. STOP’s the sort of place where you read about Mother Teresa’s abortion.’

She grunted and turned a page, leaving a trail of angry blue marks behind her.

He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a liter of milk, splashed some into a pan, and set it on the flame to heat. From long experience, he knew that she would refuse to drink a cup of coffee, no matter how much milk he added to it, insisting that it would keep her awake. But once he had his own, she would sip at it, end up drinking most of it, then sleep like a rock. From the cabinet he pulled down a bag of sweet biscuits they bought for the children and peered into it to see how many were left.

When the coffee was finished boiling up into the top of the double pot, he poured it into a mug, added the steaming milk, spooned in less sugar than he liked, and went to sit across from Paola. Absently, still intent on the paper in front of her, she reached out and took a sip of coffee even before he had a chance to do so. When she put it back on the table, he wrapped his fingers around it but didn’t pick it up. She turned a page, reached out for the mug, and looked up at him when he refused to release it.