She had another walk to the window, opened her bag, and took out an energy bar, the sort of thing people think is meant to be eaten during an assault on Everest. She glanced at the motionless backs of the two other researchers, who appeared not to have moved since last she looked at them, muffled the noise she made opening this wrapper, and ate it in four bites. Although she had been careful to touch only the wrapper and not the sticky bar, still she wiped her hands with her handkerchief and used it to whisk at invisible crumbs on her blouse before returning to the book.
She had skimmed a hundred and fifty pages, and she flipped to the end to see the page number: there were just forty pages left. Life is never guilt-free, she reflected, and perhaps it was good enough for her, after all. “Jealous wrath,” “violent rages,” and “unbearable torture” came at her, only to be countered by “moments of bliss,” “joy such as she had never known,” which is not to overlook “two spirits united as one.” The villains appeared—all wearing the requisite “dark cloaks”—and the worst of them, Nicolò Montalbano, was the one to commit the “vile deed.” Not from any interest in the prose or curiosity about the fate of the protagonists, but simply because she was growing progressively hungrier, Caterina speeded the pace of her reading, and within another fifteen minutes she was done with it. She snapped it closed and tossed it—something Caterina was not in the habit of doing with books—onto the desk.
How had it happened that the historical accounts, which were more or less locked to the reported facts, had fascinated her and aroused her sympathies for these two careless fools, while the fictional telling of the tale, which was meant to bare their souls and was free to attribute to them the most tempestuous emotions while playing with the reader’s, left her feeling only relieved that these two selfish little geese had been removed from the scene?
The energy bar had not been enough. Hunger attacked her, and she gave in to it. She chose three of the books and put them in her bag, left the library unquestioned, crossed the Piazzetta and started back toward Castello, walking along the water and happy to do so. At the bottom of the first bridge she turned left and down a calle running back from the Bacino. Up on the right, her feet and stomach remembered, there was a ridiculously small bar that used to serve tiny pizzas topped with a single anchovy. And so it was, and the spritz was unchanged, and after three of the first and one of the second, Caterina was ready to go back to the Foundation and work her way through the remaining documents in the last packet in the trunk.
They dealt with the transfer to Steffani of a benefice and an estate in Seltz, which she learned was on the Rhine and belonged to the Palatinate. It was one of those cities that ping-ponged between Catholic and Protestant; the Reformation turned it Protestant and the French turned it back to Catholicism. And then the Jesuits came on the scene, and Caterina, una mangia prete of no indifferent conviction, had a presentiment that things would get worse for everyone involved, and there would be a lot of empty pockets. She remembered then that backward-slanting note added to the list of things that had been left to the Jesuits. “Fool.”
The account she read was complicated, for it attempted to explain in historical and legal terms what was, to put it crassly, a case of people’s fighting over money. The earnings from Steffani’s appointment as Provost of Seltz were denied him because of the prior involvement and subsequent claims of the Jesuits, who insisted that the monies were theirs by right. The case rumbled through the ecclesiastical courts for years as the pope dodged this way and that to avoid making a decision about who was to sweep up the loot.
In 1713, Steffani, who insisted on his full right to the money, received only 713 thalers out of the total payment of 6,000. Appeals and people willing to defend Steffani’s claim to the money went to and from Rome, but the matter continued to drag on without resolution. “Jesuits,” she muttered under her breath, much in the manner of a person of lesser civility uttering an obscenity.
Some documents suggested that the missing money was a serious blow to Steffani’s finances. Because the legal cases took place in the decade before his death, and his claims repeatedly referred to his parlous financial condition, Caterina again wondered where all the money had gone. He was to retire soon after his unsuccessful attempt to collect the benefice of Seltz; some accounts claimed that he also had severe difficulty in collecting the money from his benefice in Carrara. She remembered that the sale of indulgences was one of the grievances that Luther made public when he nailed up his theses on the door of the cathedral. Had the bargaining with benefices been another?
The dispute continued as Steffani’s financial situation worsened. He repeatedly petitioned the pope, the Jesuits, and various temporal rulers to be given possession of the monies due from the benefice. What surprised Caterina were the names of the people to whom he felt comfortable enough to write to ask for help: the king of England, the elector of Mainz, the English ambassador in The Hague, even the emperor himself: “I have asked the emperor if he, as an act of charity or fondness, could buy the paintings from me so that I can survive a little while longer.” “My lamentations can be matched only by those of Jeremiah. In the end I need to plead for alms. The King of England urges me to remain in Hanover more strongly than do the people in Rome. It is the world turned upside down.” At the same time that he was addressing these people, he was also writing to others to tell them he was reduced to begging for alms. “I now have nothing more to sell with which to maintain myself.” “I have sold all of my possessions, even my small chalice, made of silver. Because of this, I can no longer provide myself even those things people think are necessary.” All the letters implied that at this time in his life he was reduced to selling his possessions, and this rendered the cousins’ belief in a family treasure even more ridiculous.
She went back to the computer and to the archives holding material on Steffani: in Munich, Hanover, and Rome. She logged in to the Fondo Spiga in Rome, named after Steffani’s benefice, and started scrolling down the papers that were posted. And found the cousins. No, not the cousins, but the men who must have been their ancestors and thus the direct heirs to Steffani’s estate. In 1724, the abbé wrote to Giacomo Antonio Stievani and to the archpriest of Castelfranco, Antonio Scapinelli, inquiring about the deeds to some houses in the San Marcuola section of Venice, which the three of them had jointly inherited but which had been somehow usurped by the Labia family. Steffani suggested that the men meet to arrive at an agreement as to how the estate should be reclaimed and divided among them. The archive had no record of a response from them.
An heir writes to his cousins to ask how they might divide property they have inherited in common, and the others fail to respond to, or even acknowledge, the request, no doubt by so doing preventing any attempt to sell the property or divide and pay out the profits. Caterina remembered how much it used to annoy her, when she was younger, to hear her mother speak of her distrust of anyone who “came of greedy people.” She had attempted to reason with her foolish mother, victim of her antiquated beliefs in hereditary family characteristics. Ah, those who have eyes and see not.
Reading randomly in the archives devoured the rest of Caterina’s afternoon, and by the end of it, though she had learned more about the financial difficulties that afflicted Steffani toward the end of his life, she had no firmer grasp of the man.