Acqua Alta

cara. They all look like potatoes and stink of paprika. And they all shout so, especially the sopranos.’ She finished her champagne and paused long enough to refill her glass. ‘Where was I?’

‘On the sofa, I think, pleading with God,’ Brett suggested.

‘Ah, yes. And then the Scarpia, a great, lumbering clod of a man, he tripped over the telephone wire and pulled it out of the wall. So there I lay on the sofa, line to God cut off, and, beyond the baritone, I could see the director in the wings, waving at me like a madman. I think he wanted me to plug it back in and use it, put the call through any way I could.’ She sipped, smiled at Brunetti with a warmth that drove him to sip at his own champagne, and continued. ‘But an artist has to have some standards,’ glancing now at Brett, ‘or as you Americans say, has to draw a line in the sand.’

She stopped and Brunetti picked up his cue. He said it. ‘What did you do?’

‘I picked up the receiver and sang into it, just as if I had someone on the other end, just as if no one had seen it pulled from the wall.’ She set her glass down on the table, stood and stretched her arms out in agonized cruciform, then, utterly without warning, she began to sing the last phrases of the aria. ‘ “Nell’ora del dolor perch e , Signor, ah perch e me ne rimuneri cosi?” ‘ How did she do it? From a normal speaking voice, with no preparation, right up to those solidly floated notes?

Brunetti laughed outright, spilling some champagne down the front of his shirt. Brett set her glass on the table and clapped both hands to the sides of her mouth.

Flavia, as calmly as if she’d just gone into the kitchen to check on the roast and found it done, sat back down in her chair and continued her story. ‘Scarpia had to turn his back on the audience, he was laughing so hard. It was the first thing he’d done in a month that made me like him. I almost regretted having to kill him a few minutes later. The director was hysterical during the intermission, screaming at me that I’d ruined his production, swearing he’d never work with me again. Well, that’s certain, isn’t it? The reviews were terrible.’

‘Flavia,’ Brett chided, ‘it was the reviews of the production that were terrible; your reviews were wonderful.’

As if explaining something to a child, Flavia said, ‘My reviews are always wonderful, cara,’ Just like that. She turned her attention to Brunetti. ‘It was into this fiasco that she came,’ she said, pointing to Brett, ‘for Christmas with me and my children.’ She shook her head a few times. ‘She came in from taking that young woman’s body to Tokyo. No, it wasn’t a happy Christmas.’

Brunetti decided that, champagne or not, he still wanted to know more about the death of Brett’s assistant. ‘Was there any question at the time that it might not have been an accident?’

Brett shook her head, glass forgotten in front of her. ‘No. At one time or another, almost all of us had slipped when walking on the edge of the dig. One of the Chinese archaeologists had fallen and broken his ankle about a month before. So at the time we all believed that it was an accident. It might have been,’ she added with an absolute lack of conviction.

‘She worked on the exhibition here?’ he asked.

‘Not the opening. I came here alone for that. But Matsuko oversaw the packing, when the pieces left for China.’

‘Were you here?’ Brunetti asked.

Brett hesitated a long time, glanced across at Flavia, bowed her head, and answered, ‘No, I wasn’t.’

Flavia reached again for the bottle and poured more champagne into their glasses, though hers was the only glass that needed filling.

No one spoke for a while, and then Flavia asked Brett, making it a statement, not a question, ‘She didn’t speak Italian, did she?’

‘No, she didn’t,’ Brett answered.

‘But both she and Semenzato spoke English, as I remember.’

‘What difference does that make?’ Brett asked, her voice edged with an anger Brunetti sensed but couldn’t fathom.

Flavia made a tsking sound with her tongue and turned in feigned exasperation to Brunetti. ‘Maybe it’s true what people say about us Italians, and we do have a greater sympathy with dishonesty than other people. You see, don’t you?’

He nodded. ‘It means,’ he explained to Brett when he saw that Flavia would not, ‘that she couldn’t deal with people here except through Semenzato. They had a common language.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Brett said. She understood now what they meant, but that didn’t mean she liked it. ‘So now Semenzato is guilty, just like that, and Matsuko is, too? Just because they both spoke English?’

Neither Brunetti nor Flavia said a word.

‘I worked with Matsuko for three years,’ Brett insisted. ‘She was an archaeologist, a curator. You two can’t just decide she was a thief, you can’t sit there and play judge and jury and decide she’s guilty without any information, any proof.’ Brunetti noted that she seemed to have no problem with their equal assumption of Semenzato’s guilt.

Still, neither of them answered her. Almost a full minute passed. Finally, Brett sat back in the sofa, then reached forward and picked up her glass. But she didn’t drink, merely swirled the champagne around in the glass and then put it back down on the table. ‘Occam’s Razor,’ she finally said in English, voice resigned.

Brunetti waited for Flavia to speak, thinking this might make some sense to her, but Flavia said nothing. So he asked, ‘Whose razor?’

‘William of Occam,’ Brett repeated, though she kept her eyes on her glass. ‘He was a medieval philosopher. English, I think. He had a theory that said the correct explanation to any problem was usually the one that made the simplest use of the available information.’

Signor William, Brunetti caught himself thinking, was clearly not an Italian. He glanced across at Flavia and would have sworn that her raised eyebrow carried the same message.