There was another long pause before he asked, sounding falsely casual, “Why do you say that?”
She thought the comparison ought to have been clear enough, but she decided to explain. “If enough people choose to believe something is what other people say it is, then it becomes that to them.”
“Like what?” he asked amiably.
“The example I just gave you,” she said. “Or the Book of Mormon or the Shroud of Turin. Or a footprint in a stone where someone or other jumped up to heaven. It’s all the same.”
“It’s interesting,” he said, not sounding persuaded.
“What is?”
“That all of your examples are religious.”
“I thought I’d use that because it’s the area where they’re all sure to be nonsense.”
“Sure to be?”
She had the grace to laugh. “To the likes of me, at least.”
“And to the rest of us?”
“Then a piece of paper isn’t only a piece of paper, I suppose,” she said. “Depends on what you want to be true.”
He didn’t say anything for so long that she was sure she had gone too far and offended his beliefs or his sensibility and he was going to say good night and hang up.
“Would you be free for dinner tomorrow evening?” he surprised her by asking.
When she and her friends had first started going out with boys, there had been general agreement that one should never accept the first offer; it was a bad tactical move, they had all agreed, with the wisdom of teenagers.
Well, she was no longer a teenager, was she? “Yes.”
Twenty-one
WHEN SHE FINISHED THE CALL, CATERINA HAD THE CHOICE OF going to bed or going to work. She returned to the article in Catholic Encyclopedia. Toward the end there was a remark that, in light of everything she had learned about Steffani, deserved closer scrutiny. “A delicate mission was entrusted to him at the various German courts in 1696, and in 1698 at the court in Brussels, for which office he was singularly fitted by his gentle and prudent manners.”
Could this “delicate mission” at the German courts have been related to the Königsmarck murder? In everything she read about it, the murder was referred to, even in the indices, as the “Königsmarck Affair,” a triumph in rebranding if ever she had seen one. Had that rebranding been the office for which Steffani was singularly fitted because of his “gentle and prudent manners”? Gentle and prudent men are not often believed to be in the employ of murders or of men who commission murders, are they? She switched away from the encyclopedia, determined to consult more reliable sources.
Duke Ernst August had for years longed to add the title and power of elector to his string of titles, and it was finally granted to him by the emperor in 1692. Soon after, his daughter-in-law’s attention-getting lover disappeared, leaving not a trace save in the memoirs and gossip of members of his court and of the North German aristocracy. His disappearance was referred to as an “Affair,” and the man who stood most to profit from it remained unblemished by it.
She dived into the catalogue of the library of the University of Vienna, in whose waters she had been swimming for years, and quickly discovered the precise honors and powers that came along with the title of elector. Besides electing the Holy Roman Emperor, they got to call themselves a prince. “Big deal,” Caterina muttered to herself, having picked up the phrase from an American friend. More interestingly, the electors had the monopoly to all mineral wealth in their territories, this in an age when currency was based on gold and silver. They could also tax Jews and mint money. Thus “elector,” beyond being an honor that would satisfy the urgings of vanity, would satisfy those of greed as well. Who could resist such a combination?
But if your fool of a daughter-in-law put your reputation at risk by her public carryings-on with a noted rake, how seriously would your position be treated by the gilded and titled, or even by the common people? And how likely was it that the other electors would vote you into the club, a prerequisite her reading had revealed to her? Caterina had but to think of the death, three centuries later, of another beautiful young princess believed to have taken a lover, even though she was no longer married to the heir to the throne. When she died a very public death along with her lover, the world had exploded into an orgy of wild surmise and gossip about the true cause of their deaths. Would it have been any different if the death of Königsmarck had been a public event? Official information always moved with glacial majesty, while gossip travels at the speed of light. Softly, then, softly in the night; how much better a quiet disappearance that left behind only the “affair” than a corpse at the side of the road.
She opened the book about Steffani and had another look at the portrait, said to have been painted in 1714. Take away twenty years of fat, remove the double chin, give him back some of his hair, and he’d look as able as any man to stick a knife into another man’s back. Many accounts spoke of the sweetness and peacefulness of Steffani’s character. He was in Germany as a diplomat, a class of man not known for breaking up pubs in drunken brawls while in pursuit of their goals. But still his mission was the reconversion of Germany to Catholicism, and with whom better to start than with the Protestant duke of Hanover, and how better to win his favor than by doing him an enormous favor by eliminating an inconvenient relative who would make a mockery of his claim to the electorship? As Stalin was later to observe, “No man, no problem.”
Steffani might have failed to reconvert north Germany to the true religion, but he did win religious toleration and a new church for the Catholics of Hanover, and his Vatican masters might well have calculated this as a fair exchange for the death of a man who was, after all, only a Protestant. Caterina came upon another reference to Nicolò Montalbano and the 150,000 thalers. She might have been a bit hazy about the exact value of a thaler in 1694, but she was in no confusion about the size of 150,000.
The next year, Steffani’s opera I Trionfi del Fato presented the idea that humans are not entirely responsible for their emotions and thus neither for their actions. What more anodyne sentiment with which to calm the gossip-bestirred waters of the electoral court? Was this part of Steffani’s “delicate mission”?
It was past midnight, and she decided she had had enough of speculation and wonder and moving around to see events from a perspective that might make them look different from what they seemed from some other point of view.
She went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water, then went into the bathroom and washed her face and brushed her teeth. As she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw a woman in her mid-thirties with a straight nose and eyes that were green in this light. She took the toothbrush from her mouth and put it in the glass on the side of the sink, cupped some water in her hands, and rinsed out her mouth. When she was upright, she looked at the woman again and told her, “Your sister is a historian. She’d know how to find this Montalbano guy. Besides, she’s living in Germany, and that’s where all this happened.” Nodding at her own sagacity, she went back to the desk and turned on the computer again.
“Tina-Lina, I’m sorry to leave you in existential high water, but I want to ask you a favor. Hunt around and find me more about Nicolò Montalbano, a Venetian living at the court of Ernst August when Königsmarck was murdered and who came into a lot of money soon after his death. His name is already familiar to me, but I think it’s familiar because of his involvement with music and not for murder and blackmail. I’d be very grateful if you would try to find him in other places. I also came across mention of him in a lurid novel about the euphemistically called “Affair,” an exact reference to which I can send you, should you want to read it and learn. If Uncle Rinaldo can’t take you on as an apprentice, perhaps you could give a thought to a literary life. Think of the use you could make of your years of historical study; think of the passionate scenes you could toss into novels about the Council of Worms or the War of the Spanish Succession, and I’m sure there’s some neck-and-neck competition to be bishop of Maienfeld that you could transform into the Gone with the Wind of our times.