Death at La Fenice

he knew the plot of the opera. Brunetti nodded, and the professor continued. ‘It’s a scene that always gets a great deal of applause, especially if the singers are as good as Dardi and Petrelli. They were, and so there was long applause. During the applause, I watched the Maestro. He set his baton down on the podium, and I had the oddest sensation that he was getting ready to leave, simply step down from the podium and walk away. Either I saw it or I invented it, but he seemed just about to be making that step - when the applause stopped and the first violins raised their bows. He saw them, nodded to them, and picked up the baton. And the opera continued, but I still have the peculiar feeling that if he hadn’t seen their motion, he would simply have walked away from there.’

‘Did anyone else notice this?’

‘I don’t know. No one I’ve spoken to has wanted to say much about the performance, and what little they’ve said has been very guarded. I was sitting in one of the front tier of boxes, off on the left, so I had a clear view of him. I suppose everyone else was watching the singers. Later, when I heard the announcement that he couldn’t continue, I thought he’d had an attack of some sort. But not that he had been killed.’

‘What have these other people said?’

‘As I told you, they have been, well, almost cautious, not wanting to say anything against him, now that he’s dead. But a few of the people here have said much the same thing, that the performance was disappointing. Nothing more than that.’

‘I read your article about his career, Professor. You spoke very highly of him.’

‘He was one of the great musicians of the century. A genius.’

‘You make no mention of that last performance in your article, Professor.’

‘You don’t condemn a man for one bad night, Commissario, especially not when the total career has been so great.’

‘Yes, I know; not for one bad night and not for one bad thing.’

‘Precisely,’ agreed the professor, and he turned his attention to two young women who came into the room, each carrying a thick musical score. ‘But if you will excuse me, Commissario, my students are beginning to arrive, and my class is about to begin.’

‘Of course, Professor,’ Brunetti said, getting to his feet and extending his hand. ‘Thank you very much for both your time and your help.’

The other man muttered something in return, but Brunetti could tell that his attention had clearly shifted to his students. He left the room and went down the broad steps, out into Campo San Stefano.

It was a campo he walked through often, and he had come to know not only the people who worked there, in the bars and shops, but even the dogs that walked or played there. Lazing in the pale sunlight was a pink-and-white bulldog whose lack of muzzle always made Brunetti uneasy. Then there was that odd Chinese thing that had grown from what looked like a pile of furred tripe into a creature of surpassing ugliness. Last, lolling in front of the ceramics store, he saw the black mongrel that remained so motionless all day that many people had come to believe he was part of the merchandise.

He decided to have a coffee at Cafe Paolin. Tables were still set up outside, but the only people at them today were foreigners, desperately trying to convince themselves that it was warm enough to have a cappuccino at a table in the open air. Sensible people went inside.

He exchanged hellos with the barman, who had tact enough not to ask him if there was any news in the case. In a city where there were no secrets of any sort, people had developed a capacity to avoid asking direct questions or remarking on anything other than the casual. He knew that no matter how long the case dragged on, none of the people with whom he interacted at this level—barman, newsdealer, bank teller—would ever say a word about it to him.

After downing an espresso, he felt restless, not at all hungry for the lunch that everyone around him seemed to be hurrying toward. He called his office, to be told that Signore Padovani had called and left a name and address for him. No message, just the name: Clemenza Santina; and the address: Corte Mosca, Giudecca.

* * * *

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The island of the Giudecca was a part of Venice Brunetti seldom visited. Visible from Piazza San Marco, visible, in fact, from the entire back flank of the island, in places no more than a hundred meters away, it nevertheless lived in strange isolation from the rest of the city. The grisly stories that appeared in the paper with embarrassing frequency, of children being bitten by rats or people found dead of overdoses, always seemed to take place on the Giudecca. Even the presence of a dethroned monarch and a fading movie star of the fifties couldn’t redeem it in the popular consciousness as a sinister, backward place where nasty things happened.

Brunetti, along with a large part of the city, usually went there in July, during the Feast of the Redeemer, which celebrated the cessation of the plague of 1576. For two days, a pontoon bridge joined the Giudecca with the main island, allowing the faithful to walk across the water to the Church of the Redeemer, there to give thanks for yet another instance of the divine intervention that seemed so frequently to have saved or spared the city.

As the number 8 boat slapped its way across the choppy waters, he stood on the deck and looked off in the distance at the industrial inferno of Marghera, where smokestacks tossed up fluffy clouds of smoke that would gradually sneak across the laguna to dine on Venice’s white Istrian marble. He wondered what divine intercession could save the city from the oil slick, this modern plague that covered the waters of the laguna and had already destroyed millions of the crabs that had crawled through the nightmares of his childhood. What Redeemer could come and save the city from the pall of greenish smoke that was slowly turning marble to meringue? A man of limited faith, he could imagine no salvation, either divine or human.

He got off at the Zittele stop, turned to the left, and walked along the water, searching for the entrance to Corte Mosca. Back across the water lay the city, glittering in the weak winter sunlight. He passed the church, closed now for God’s afternoon siesta, and saw, just beyond it, the entrance to the courtyard. Narrow and low, the heavily shadowed passageway stank of cat.

At the end of the stone tunnel, he found himself at the edge of a rank garden that grew rampant at the center of the inner courtyard. To one side, something that might have been a cat was gnawing at a feathered thing. At the sound of his footsteps, the cat backed under a rosebush, pulling with it the thing it had been eating. On the opposite side of the courtyard stood a warped wooden door. He went across, occasionally freeing himself from a