Death at La Fenice

‘Eh?’ she asked.

‘Not until you agree to call your mother.’

She tried to push his hand away. When he refused to move it, she wrote a rude word on it with her pen. ‘You’ll have to wear a suit.’

‘I always wear a suit when I go to see your parents.’

‘Well, you never look like you’re happy to be wearing a suit.’

All right,’ he said, smiling. ‘I promise to wear a suit and to look happy that I’m wearing it. So will you call your mother?’

‘All right,’ she conceded. ‘But I meant it about the suit.’

‘Yes, my treasure,’ he fawned. He let go of the cup and pushed it toward her. When she had taken another sip, he extracted a biscuit from the bag and dipped it into the coffee.

‘You are disgusting,’ she said, then smiled.

‘Simple peasant,’ he agreed, shoving the biscuit into his mouth.

Paola never talked much about what it had been like to be raised in the palazzo, with an English nanny and a flock of servants, but if he knew anything about all those years, he knew that she had never been permitted to dunk. He saw it as a great lapse in her upbringing and insisted that their children be allowed to do it. She had agreed, but with great reluctance. Neither child, he never failed to point out to her, showed grave signs of moral or physical decline as a result.

From the way she scribbled a hasty comment across the bottom of a page, he knew she was about to come to the end of her patience for that night.

‘I’m so tired of their blunt minds, Guido,’ she said, capping the pen and tossing it down on the table. ‘I’d almost rather deal with murderers. At least they can be punished.’

The coffee was finished, or he would have pushed it toward her. Instead he got up and took a bottle of grappa from the cabinet. It was the only comfort he could think of at the moment.

‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘First coffee, and now grappa. We’ll never get to sleep.’

‘Shall we try keeping each other awake?’ he asked. She glowed.

* * * *

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The following morning, he arrived at the Questura at eight, carrying with him the day’s newspapers, which he read through quickly. There was little new information: most of it had been said the day before. The summaries of Wellauer’s career were longer, the cries that the killer be brought to justice more strident, but there was nothing that Brunetti didn’t already know.

The lab report was on his desk. The only fingerprints on the cup, in which traces of potassium cyanide were found, were Wellauer’s. In the dressing room, there were scores of other prints, far too many to be checked. He decided against having prints taken. Since the only ones on the cup were Wellauer’s, there seemed little sense in identifying all those found in the room.

Along with the fingerprint report was a list of articles found in the dressing room. He remembered having seen most of them: the score of Traviata, each page crowded with notations in the angular Gothic script of the conductor; a comb, a wallet, change; the clothes he had been wearing and those in the closet; a handkerchief and a package of mints. There had also been a Rolex Oyster, a pen, and a small address book.

The officers who had gone to take a look at the conductor’s home—one could hardly call it a search—had written a report, but since they had no idea of what they were supposed to be looking for, Brunetti had little hope that their report would reveal anything of interest or importance. Nevertheless, he picked it up and read through it carefully.

The Maestro had had a remarkably complete wardrobe for a man who spent only a few weeks in the city each year. He marveled at the precision of the notes made about the clothing: ‘Black double-vent cashmere jacket (Duca D’Aosta); cobalt and muted-umber sweater, size 52 (Missoni).’ For a moment, he wondered if he had lost his bearings and found himself in the Valentino boutique rather than in police headquarters. He flipped to the end and found, as he had feared, the signatures of AIvise and Riverre, the two officers who had written, a year ago, about a body that had been pulled out of the sea at the Lido: ‘Appears to have died of suffocation.’

He turned back to the report. The signora, it appeared, did not share her late husband’s interest in clothing. Nor, from what he read, did it seem that Alvise and Riverre thought highly of her taste. ‘Varese boots, only one pair. Black woolen coat, no label.’ They had, however, apparently been impressed by the library, which they described as ‘extensive, in three languages and what appears to be Hungarian.’

He turned another page. There were two guest rooms in the apartment, each with a separate bath. Fresh towels, empty closets, Christian Dior soap.

There was no evidence of Signora Wellauer’s daughter; nothing in the report suggested the presence in the house of the third member of the family. Neither of the two extra rooms held a teenager’s clothes or books or possessions of any kind. Knowing how he was forever finding proof of his own daughter’s existence under foot, Brunetti found this strange. Her mother had explained that she was going to school in Munich. But it was a remarkable child who managed to take all of her clutter along with her.

There was a description of the Belgian maid’s room, which the two officers appeared to have found too simply furnished, and of the maid, whom they had found subdued but helpful. The last room described was the Maestro’s office, where they had found ‘documents.’ Some, it seems, had been brought back and looked over by the German translator, who explained, in a page added to the report, that the bulk of them pertained to business and contracts. A datebook had been inspected and judged unimportant.

Brunetti decided to seek out the two authors of this document and thus spare himself the irritation of having to wait for them to respond to his request that they come up to his office. Since it was almost nine, he knew that he would find them down the street at the bar on the other side of the Ponte dei Greci. It was not the precise hour but the fact that it was before noon that made this conclusion inescapable.