Styx & Stone (14 page)

Saettano took a seat on the more worn of the brown leather chairs. The late afternoon sun splashed over him, and he closed his eyes as if to absorb the warmth.

“The sun does my bones good,” he said.

I sat in the chair next to his and squinted through the brilliant rays of the January afternoon. The old man laid his cane over his lap as if he intended to stay.

“Tell me, Eleonora.”

“When I arrived at the hospital this morning,” I said, “I found my father’s ventilator disconnected. He couldn’t breathe, and his heart stopped just after I reattached it.”

Saettano mumbled something in Italian to himself. “Perhaps it was an accident?”

“The air tube had been pulled out of the ventilator. It was no accident.”

“Who would do such a thing? It’s monstrous.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But the burglary struck me as false from the start. I asked myself, why the random destruction of so many record albums? Why was the manuscript taken? How did the burglar get into the apartment? There was no sign of forced entry or struggle. And, if the thief had truly been after valuables, wouldn’t he have taken my father’s billfold or searched the bedroom? Any self-respecting burglar would have looked for jewelry, unless he knew there was no woman of the house.”

Saettano listened patiently. I watched him watching me, his face effulgently orange in the sun, his eyes nearly transparent except for the whitish fog of cataracts. I continued:

“My father must have known the burglar. Or, rather, the burglar knew my father.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I wasn’t until this morning. It was just a vague doubt in the back of my mind. But then I sifted through the broken records, and the music finally clued me in. I separated the destroyed records from the ones merely thrown about the room. Let me run the names past you and see if you come to the same conclusion as I did.”

Saettano nodded.

“Gustav Mahler,” I began. “Felix Mendelssohn, Ernest Bloch, Max Bruch, Meyerbeer, Gershwin, Rubinstein, Bruckner . . .”

“No other records were destroyed? Just these?”

I nodded.

The old man turned to face the window. He tapped his forehead a few times with the bony fingers of his right hand. Then he cleared his throat to speak.

“
Dunque
,” he said in Italian, his brow furrowed, “indeed, there appears to be a pattern. But one of those names spoils the pudding, as you say in English.”

I knew what he said had something to do with the proverb about proof and the eating of the pudding, but to straighten it out would have distracted me from his point.

“All of the composers you named are Jewish,” he announced. “Except one, or two, actually: Anton Bruckner and Max Bruch. And of course Mendelssohn practiced Christianity, but if what you’re driving at is anti-Semitism, I suppose your burglar would consider him as Jewish as David Ben-Gurion.”

Swayed by the preponderance of evidence, I had assumed that Bruckner, who’d lost a 78 and an LP in the pogrom, was a Jew. Now, my theory seemed flawed. Still, the others were all Jews, Mendelssohn’s baptism notwithstanding.

“Your theory is an interesting one, Eleonora,” said the old man. “After all, if you mistook Bruckner for a Jew, then perhaps a burglar as cultured as you could have made the same mistake. In the main, your instincts are on target. Bruch was not a Jew himself, but his
Kol Nidrei
and Bloch’s
Poèmes juifs
are distinctly Jewish themes. Mahler was reviled by Nazi propagandists—and even Hitler himself—as a decadent Jewish composer. Rubinstein and Gershwin are easily recognizable as Jews by their famous names. And Meyerbeer, whose real name was Jakob Liebmann Beer, was obviously Jewish.”

We both considered the idea in silence.

Saettano nodded finally and said: “Yes, I accept your conclusion, Eleonora, even if we must assume imperfection in the burglar’s research. But what does it mean? How does this illuminate the crime?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “My mother’s jewels and my father’s cash were never part of the burglar’s plan. And if greed wasn’t the motivation, then violence was. My father knew his attacker, I’m sure of that now. Whoever attacked him knows he is Jewish and, obviously, hates him for it. This wasn’t a real robbery. The burglar was after my father and his manuscript. The knickknacks he stole were a smokescreen to make it look like a robbery gone wrong. I think the burglary and the vandalism of my brother’s grave were the work of one person.”

“Then your father is still in danger. What can you do to protect him?”

“The police are watching him tonight, and I’ve already arranged for a guard for tomorrow.”

Saettano nodded. “Good. Then what is your next move?”

“Actually, I’d like to pick your brain, if I may.”

The old man smiled. “I don’t see how I can help you, Eleonora.”

“Tell me about Dante,” I said.

At six, Professor Saettano and I sat down at either end of the eight-foot oak table in his dining room. Libby, the professor’s companion, served the dinner and took a place next to him on the corner. I felt isolated on my far end. Saettano’s diet permitted only lighter fare, so we began with a consommé and an Orvieto Classico; he was born in Umbria and had retained a nostalgia for its grapes.

“The
Commedia
is the perfect poem,” announced my host, leaning to one side to see me around a centerpiece of dried flowers. “By perfect, I mean total, complete, circular. Dante Alighieri achieved a rare union: perfection of poetic form and theological doctrine. The very structure of the poem is part of its mystical mission.” He sipped some soup, wiped his lips with the linen napkin tied around his neck, and strained to see me again. I tried to meet him halfway. “I’m sure you are familiar with the basic tenets of Christian dogma: from a condition of universal sin, we gain salvation or fall into eternal perdition. A kind of morality play with high stakes. Dante understood this, as the word
commedia
, or ‘play,’ indicates.

“In brief, the story is that of the poet who has lost the right way and finds himself in a dark wood. A slave to his fear, he is set upon by wild beasts: an allegorical crisis of faith. The spirit of the poet Virgil, summoned by a divine lady—Beatrice—comes to him and leads him on a journey of redemption through the horrors of hell and the sufferings of Mount Purgatory. Then Beatrice guides him through the empyrean of paradise to the very sight of God.”

At Libby’s urging, the professor interrupted his lecture to eat his cooling consommé. I watched her surreptitiously as we spooned our soup in silence. She was a short, vigorous woman of about sixty. I found her face to be stiff, at times stubborn, but never severe. Her gray hair, cut short for maximum ease of care, was pushed behind her ears. She wore a plain housedress and no jewelry.

“You’re such a sloppy eater, Franco,” she scolded softly, daubing his chin with her own napkin.

The old man said nothing, submitting meekly to his companion’s authority. Then Libby cleared the bowls and disappeared into the kitchen.

“The
Commedia
,” said Saettano, resuming his lesson, “is divided into three canticles: the
Inferno
,
Purgatorio
, and
Paradiso
, each counting thirty-three
canti
. The first
canto
of the
Inferno
is considered an introduction and makes the total perfect: one hundred
canti
in all. The rhyme scheme is
terza rima
, an intricate verse pattern in threes. Three is, of course, the number of canticles in the poem and of the Holy Trinity. Within this perfect structure, Dante built the perfect universe, from hell to the heavens.”

Libby pushed through the door from the kitchen, bearing three steaming plates of spaghetti prepared with oil and garlic. Just another ascetic meal for the aging professor’s delicate constitution: tasty, but not very substantial.

“What about punishment in the
Comedy
?” I asked.

“I was getting to that,” he said, chewing a forkful of pasta Libby had chopped down to size for him. “As I told you yesterday at the reception for Ruggero, the
contrapasso
is a metaphysical
quid pro quo
of sin, judgment, and punishment. Souls condemned to hell are judged when they arrive. They are hurled into one of the nine circles of the abyss, and there they must suffer for all eternity, until judgment day. Each circle punishes a different category of sin, which is divided into three major types: sins of the leopard, sins of the lion, and sins of the wolf. These represent incontinence or lust, violence, and treachery.”

“And violence is the most severe?” I asked.

“No!” he said, almost shouting. Then, remembering he was not in class, he took a friendlier tone. “Treachery is the most severe class of evil. Lust is an appetite, the lowest order in the rank of mortal sins. Violence falls in the middle. It is a physical offense. Treachery is a sin of the intellect. It includes all transgressions of reason and the mind, from treason to blasphemy.”

“So, Judas Iscariot, say, would be in hot water in the
Inferno
?”

Saettano chuckled and looked to his consort, who shared his amusement. “You are confused by the ignorant stereotypes of hell, Eleonora,” he said, not exactly flattering me. (First the remark about my drinking and now this.) “Dante’s
Inferno
is not a furnace throughout. Contrary to popular imagery of hell, in Dante, its lowest circle is a frozen lake.”

I blushed as I twirled the spaghetti around my fork.

“But you are right: Judas can be found in the very pit of hell, stuffed into one of Satan’s three mouths. He is there with Brutus and Cassius, who betrayed Julius Caesar.”

“What about the violent?” I asked.

“They are punished in a variety of ways. Some are cooked in a river of boiling blood. Others are burned by a fiery rain on an arid plain of the
Inferno
. The topography of hell is remarkably diverse.”

“And the . . . incontinent?” (I was trying to be mature about it, but that word wasn’t cooperating.)

“Again, it varies. There are many sins that fall into the category of incontinence. Lust, gluttony, avarice, and so on. Each punishment has its own penal logic. A famous episode from the
Inferno
tells of a pair of adulterous lovers, Paolo and Francesca, who are whipped about mercilessly by a thrashing wind.”

I paused a moment to reflect on where I might land in hell: surely among the lustful. If so, I could count on running into a few people I have known. With all respect to the Florentine poet, I didn’t buy a word of it.

Saettano was permitted two forkfuls of the final course of the meal: a grilled scallop of veal with a squeeze of lemon.

“You will not find me among the gluttons of hell,” he said, chewing on his pittance. “I am assured eventual salvation, as I am already in purgatory here on Earth,” and he smiled. I wasn’t quite sure I got his joke, but I chuckled nevertheless.

We had coffee in the den. The sun had long since set, and the view from Saettano’s window was the rippled reflection of a half moon in the Hudson and the illuminated skyline on the Jersey side. The room was dark except for the fire Libby had built in the fireplace. The red and yellow flames splashed light over us, and the old man seemed to draw the same strength from their heat as he had from the sun that afternoon. The three of us sat silently for several minutes before Saettano spoke.

“Why have you asked me these questions about the
Commedia
?” he said, turning his face from the fire’s glow to look at me.

I shrugged. “Maybe it’s my way of getting closer to my father. Dante is his life’s work, and I know so little about it. I think I avoided it just because of him.”

“Let us hope it is not too late,” he said.

It was about nine when I put shoulder to glass and pushed through the revolving door of 26 Fifth Avenue. Rodney was sitting stiffly in his usual chair, but he was not alone. Across the lobby, sinking into one of the upholstered armchairs, Detective-Sergeant Jimmo McKeever looked like a half-folded convertible top. He rose from the chair, and the creased overcoat on his lap dropped to the floor. The little man bent over and furled it in like a sail.