The Jewels of Paradise (6 page)

“I like this music, so I started reading about it, and about the composers. The conservatory has books, but they wouldn’t let me use the library.” From her tone, it was difficult to tell whether she was offended. But then she smiled. “At the Marciana, when I said I was the acting director here, they let me use them.”

“Good for you,” Caterina said with a blossoming smile.

“Thank you,” Roseanna said in a voice best suited to confession. “And their lives were interesting. Besides, if I work here, I should know something about what we’re doing, shouldn’t I?”

First the woman wanted to marry the richest man in Italy, and now she struck a death blow to every political appointee in the country. What would she want next? A functioning political system? The philosopher king?

“Tell me more about the Mormons,” Caterina said.

It looked as if Roseanna might have preferred talking about her job, or about the music, but she nodded and said, “Dottor Moretti said he’s used them before. He said they have files going back hundreds of years, and you can trace your family back all those generations.”

“So these two cousins can trace their ancestry back to Steffani?”

“To his cousins, they could. That’s how they’re descended. The Mormons have copies of parish registers from all over Italy, and they sent Dottor Moretti copies of all of the documents: birth certificates, death certificates, marriage contracts.”

Caterina thought of the two cousins; she doubted that they would be more computer savvy than Roseanna. “Who did it for them?” Caterina asked. “The online search?”

“Not them. The Mormons did it all for them.”

“Interesting,” Caterina said. “There was no will, was there?”

“He didn’t have one, or no one could find one, so the Church claimed everything. Some things were sold to pay his debts, and the rest was lost until the trunks turned up.”

Caterina sat back in her chair and studied her feet. The cousins had no interest in the contents of the trunks, save for what price they might bring. If they were the papers of what her profession would call a major minor composer, dead these three centuries, what was their value? The Stabat Mater was a masterpiece, and the few opera arias she knew were wonderful, though strangely short to the modern ear. She’d gone down to London to see
Niobe
a few years ago and found it a revelation. What was that heartbreaking lament, something about
Dal mio petto
? With a key change toward the end that had driven her wild when she heard it and then again when a musician friend had shown her the score. But her personal excitement would hardly influence the price put on a manuscript. A page of a score by Mozart was worth a fortune, or Bach, or Handel, but who had ever heard of Steffani? And yet the cousins were willing to hire a lawyer and arbitrator and pay her salary. For two trunks they thought were full of papers?

An English poet she had read at school had said that fortune went up and down like a “bucket in a well.” So did the fortune of composers as tastes changed and reputations were reevaluated. The roads to concert houses were littered with the bones of the reputations of composers such as Gassmann, Tosi, Keiser. Every so often, some long-dead composer would be resurrected and hailed as a newly discovered master. She had seen it happen with Hildegard von Bingen and Josquin des Prez. For a year or so no concert hall was without at least one performance of their music. And then they went back to being dead and written about in books, which is where Caterina thought they both belonged. But if what she had heard in London was any indication, Steffani did not belong there, not at all.

“Are you listening, Caterina?” she heard Roseanna ask.

“No, I’m sorry,” she said with an embarrassed grin. “I was thinking about something else.”

“What?”

“That no one much values Steffani’s music these days.” She said it with regret, thinking of the beauty of the arias and the mastery shown in the Stabat Mater. Maybe it was time for a return to the stage for the good bishop.

“It’s not the music those two are after,” Roseanna said.

“What is it, then?” Caterina asked, wondering what else might have lasted and come down through the centuries.

“The treasure.”

Five

T
HE WORD ASTONISHED HER. “
T
REASURE?” SHE REPEATED.
“W
HAT
treasure?”

“He didn’t tell you?” Roseanna asked.

“Who?” Caterina asked. Then, “Tell me what?”

“Dottor Moretti. He must know about it,” Roseanna said, sounding surprised. “I thought he’d have told you when you accepted the job.”

Caterina, who had been strolling along a beach, looking idly at the shells underfoot, felt herself suddenly swept away by an unexpected wave. The water, she realized, was deeper than she had expected. She thought of the two cousins, and there came a sudden vision of sharp fins slicing through the waters. To escape this fantasy, she put her hand on Roseanna’s arm and said, “Believe me. I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“
Ma, ti xe Venexiana
?” Roseanna asked, exaggerating the pronunciation of the dialect words.

Caterina nodded; she had been away from home so long that Italian now came more easily to her than did the language she had heard at home as a child, but still dialect was the language of her bones.

“You’re Venetian and you don’t know anything about those two?” she asked, leading Caterina away from the idea of treasure to, presumably, the two cousins.

“The usurer and the man with the fleet of water taxis who has almost no income?” Caterina said, and Roseanna gave her a look that was the equivalent of a stamp in her passport. To know that much about them was to be Venetian.

“What else do you know?” she asked Caterina.

“That Stievani’s sons and nephews drive the taxis. And make a fortune. All undeclared, of course.”

“And Scapinelli?”

“That he’s a convicted usurer but still works in the shops of his sons. Who are not angels, either.”

Roseanna considered all of this for some time and asked, moving even further away from any mention of treasure, “Is your mother Margherita Rossi?”

“Yes.”

“And her father played in the Fenice orchestra?”

“Yes. Violin.”

“Then I know your family,” Roseanna said and sighed. “Your grandfather used to give my father opera tickets.” She did not sound at all pleased at the memory, or perhaps her displeasure resulted from the obligations imposed upon her by that memory.

Caterina had the sense to remain quiet and wait and allow Roseanna to decide the order in which to tell things. “They’re very bad men,” Roseanna said and then added, by way of explication, “They come of bad families. One side was originally from Castelfranco and the other’s from Padova, I think. But they’ve been here in the city for generations. Greed’s in their bones.”

Suddenly tired of what sounded like melodrama and overcome with impatience, Caterina said, “And what about treasure? Where does that come from?”

“No one knows,” Roseanna said.

“Does anyone know where it is?” Caterina asked.

Roseanna shook her head and surprised Caterina by suddenly getting to her feet. “Let’s go get a coffee,” she said, and headed for the door without bothering to wait and see if the other woman followed her.

Outside, Caterina stopped in the
calle
, waiting for Roseanna to choose the direction. It had been years since she had been in this part of the city, so she had no idea which bars still served decent coffee.

Roseanna stood for a moment, moving her head from side to side, much in the manner of a hunting dog testing the air for the temperature or passing prey. “Come on,” she finally said, turning to the right and, at the first corner, right again. “We can go to that place in Campo Santa Maria Formosa.”

There were two of them, Caterina remembered, the one with the outside benches that remained in place until the really cold weather arrived and the one opposite it, along the canal, that she had been told—and thereafter always believed—had once been the room where the bodies of the dead in the parish were kept before being taken out to the cemetery on San Michele.

They walked down Ruga Giuffa, making small talk, admiring this or that, pointing to a perfume they had once tried but got tired of. Because they were Venetian, they also commented on the shops that were gone and what had come after them: the wonderful place that sold bathroom fixtures replaced by the cheapest of fake-leather bags and belts.

After crossing the bridge, Roseanna continued straight across the
campo,
to Caterina’s relief avoiding the bar alongside the canal. In front of the other bar, Roseanna stopped and asked, “Inside or outside?” This time, it was Caterina who tested the temperature before saying, “Inside, I’m afraid.” But before they went in, she pointed to the near corner and asked, “What happened to that
palazzo
?” As Caterina remembered, the building, like Steffani’s chests were now, had been at the center of a contested inheritance, but in this case rumor said it concerned not first and second cousins but first and second wives, a far more deadly game.

“A hotel,” Roseanna said, making no attempt to disguise her disgust. “They hacked it up inside and brought in cheap imitation furniture, and now tourists can tell themselves they’re staying in a real Venetian
palazzo
.” She pushed open the door and went into the bar. Caterina saw that there was no place to sit and delighted in the fact. She had had enough of
gemütlich
coffeehouses with velvet benches and whipped cream everywhere: alongside the strudel, inside the cakes, on top of the coffee. Here a person stood, drank a coffee in one swift gulp, and went back to the business of the day.

Roseanna called the barman by name and asked for two coffees, which arrived almost instantly and were as quickly consumed. Roseanna said nothing, nor did Caterina; so much for the idea of an intimate conversation. When they were back outside, Caterina glanced at her watch and saw it was a bit after eleven, so she turned left and headed toward the bridge that would take them back to the Foundation. “You still haven’t told me about the treasure,” she said, deciding that push had come to shove.

Roseanna, walking beside her, nodded, then surprised her by saying, “I know. It’s so crazy I’m almost embarrassed to talk about it. And I don’t know how much you’re supposed to be told.”

Caterina stopped before the bridge and pulled Roseanna to the right to keep her out of the way of the people passing by. “Roseanna, I know who it’s all about, and I know what sort of men the cousins are, and now you’ve told me there’s some sort of treasure. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand that’s why they’re so interested in the trunks and the papers.” Suddenly tired of all the secrecy, she spoke before she thought. “What do they think the other applicants who didn’t get the job are doing? Not telling people about all of this?”

As often happened with her, the more she thought about the situation, the more her anger grew. What in God’s name do these fools think is in the trunks, the manuscript of Monteverdi’s lost
Arianna
? A missing papal tiara? Saint Veronica’s veil?

Roseanna started to speak but Caterina ignored her. “You’re the one who mentioned it, who used the word
treasure
. I didn’t. So tell me what this is all about.” Her heart was pounding, sweat stood on her forehead, but she stopped because she realized there was no threat she could make. She needed the job, and she realized the scholar she had once been was curious to follow the paper trail that led back to Steffani.

Roseanna moved away from her as from a source of heat that had become uncomfortable, but she made no attempt to go back across the bridge. She pursed her lips and looked down at her shoes, shifted her bag from one shoulder to the other, moving it to the side away from Caterina. “First, let me tell you there were no other applicants. Only you.”

“Then why did they tell me there were?” Caterina all but bleated.

“Capitalism,” Roseanna said and smiled.

“What?”

“To beat your price down.” She smiled after she said it, and Caterina saw the force of her logic. “If you thought there were a lot of people after the job, you’d be willing to let them pay you less than you’re worth.”

Caterina raised a hand to cover her face from the embarrassment of it.

Roseanna reached over and latched her arm into Caterina’s; she turned toward the bridge, pulling Caterina along beside her. “All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I think is happening.”

The story she told was at times unclear, her telling of it filled with backups and turnarounds, with omissions and additions, and corrections and afterthoughts, of what she had heard at the Foundation, read, and imagined. In essence, it filled in some of the gaps left in the story Caterina had been told by Dottor Moretti and what she had inferred from her meetings with the two cousins. Letters from Steffani existed in which he spoke of the poverty of his life. When she heard Roseanna say this, Caterina tried to recall ever having seen a letter from a Baroque-era composer—indeed, any composer—who complained of the excessive richness of his life. But there also existed a letter—Roseanna had indeed put in her time reading at the Marciana—written in the last year of his life in which he mentioned some of the objects in his possession, among them books and pictures and a casket and jewels. The catalogue of the more than five hundred books he owned listed first editions of Luther, which would be of enormous value today.