Death at La Fenice

She made no move to unwrap herself, so Brunetti picked up the single spoon and chipped away a piece of sugar. ‘Allow me, Signora,’ he said, and dropped it into her cup, using the spoon to move it around. He chopped off another piece of sugar and put it into his own cup, where it lay, solid and undissolvable. The liquid he sipped was thick, lukewarm, and lethal. A lump of sugar banged against his teeth, having done nothing to fight the acrid taste of the coffee. He took another sip, then set it down on the table. Signora Santina left her own untouched.

He sat back in his chair and, making no attempt to disguise his curiosity, looked around the room. If he had expected to find any evidence of a career as meteoric as it was brief, he was mistaken. No poster of past opening nights hung upon these walls, no photos of the singer in costume. The only object that might have been a sign from her past was a large portrait photo in a silver frame that stood on top of a chipped wooden bureau. Arranged in a formal, artificial V, three young women, girls really, sat and smiled at the camera.

Still ignoring the cup at her side, she asked abruptly, ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Is it true that you sang with him, Signora?’

‘Yes. The season of 1937. But not here.’

‘Where?’

‘Munich.’

‘And what opera, Signora?’

‘Don Giovanni The Germans were always mad for their own. And the Austrians. So we gave them Mozart.’ She added, with a small snort of contempt, ‘And Wagner. Of course he gave them Wagner. He loved Wagner.’

‘Who? Wellauer?’

‘No. L’imbianchino,’ she said, using the word for house-painter and, with it, conveying the sentiments that had cost countless people their lives.

‘And the Maestro, did he like Wagner as well?’

‘He liked anything the other one liked,’ she said with contempt she made no effort to disguise. ‘But he liked him on his own, liked Wagner. They all do. It’s the brooding and pain. It appeals to them. I think they like suffering. Their own or others’.’

Ignoring this, he asked, ‘Did you know the Maestro well, Signora?’

She looked away from Brunetti, over toward the photo, then down at her hands, which she held carefully separated, as if even the most casual contact could cause them pain. ‘Yes, I knew him well,’ she finally said.

After what seemed a long time, he asked, ‘What can you tell me about him, Signora?’

‘He was vain,’ she finally said. ‘But with reason. He was the greatest conductor I ever worked with. I didn’t sing with them all; my career was too short. But of those I sang with, he was the best. I don’t know how he did it, but he could take any music, no matter how familiar it was, and he could make it seem new, as if it had never been played, or heard, before. Musicians didn’t like him, usually, but they respected him. He could make them play like angels.’

‘You said your career was too snort. What caused it to end?’

She looked at him then, but she didn’t ask how anyone who said he was a fan of hers could fail to know the story. After all, he was a policeman, and they always lied. About everything. ‘I refused to sing for II Duce. It was in Rome, at the opening night of the 1938 season. Norma. The general manager came backstage just before the curtain and told me that we had the honor of having Mussolini in the audience that night. And . . .’ Her voice trailed off, seeking a way to explain this. ‘And I was young and brave, and I said I wouldn’t sing. I was young and I was famous, and I thought that I could do something like that, that my fame would protect me. I thought that Italians loved art and music enough to allow me to do that and be safe.’ She shook her head at the thought.

‘What happened, Signora?’

‘I didn’t sing. I didn’t sing that night, and I didn’t sing in public again. He couldn’t kill me for that, for not singing, but he could arrest me. I stayed in my home in Rome until the end of the war, and when it was over, when it was over, I didn’t sing anymore.’ She shifted around in her chair. ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’

‘About the Maestro, then. Is there anything else you can remember about him?’ Though neither of them had mentioned his death, both of them spoke of him as among the dead.

‘No, nothing.’

‘Is it true, Signora, that you had personal difficulties with him?’

‘I knew him fifty years ago.’ She sighed. ‘How can that be important?’

‘Signora, I want only to get an idea of the man. All I know about him is his music, which is beautiful, and his body, which I saw and which was not. The more I know about him, the more I might be able to understand how he died.’

‘It was poison, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’ There was no malice, no venom in her voice. She could have been remarking on a passage of music or a meal, for all the enthusiasm she showed. He noticed that her hands were joined together now, fingers nervously weaving in and out. ‘But I’m sorry someone killed him.’ Which was it? he asked himself. ‘Because I would have liked it to be suicide, so he would damn his soul as well as die.’ Her tone remained level, dispassionate.

Brunetti shivered; his teeth started to chatter. Almost involuntarily, he got up from his seat and began to walk around in an effort to bring some warmth back into his limbs. At the bureau, he stopped in front of the photo and studied it. The three girls wore the exaggerated fashions of the thirties: long lace dresses trailing to the floor, open-toed shoes with immense heels. All three had the same dark, bow-shaped lips and razor-thin eyebrows. Under the makeup and marcelled hair, he could see that they were very young. They were arranged in descending order of age, the oldest to the left. She might have been in her early twenties, the middle one a few years younger. The last seemed little more than a child, perhaps in her early teens.