She put the papers back in order, tied up the bundle, and took it back to the open storeroom. She put the papers, all read and tallied, back inside the trunk in the order in which they had been when it was opened. She closed the trunk, flirted with the idea of beginning with the papers in the other, but decided her time might be better spent considering her immediate future.
Twenty-five
CATERINA WAS IN NO WAY A GREEDY PERSON. SHE HAD LITTLE interest in the accumulation of wealth and spent most of what she earned on leading what she considered a decent life. Part of this might have resulted from the security that comes with happiness. She had always been loved and cared for by her family, so she assumed that being loved and cared for were things that would continue throughout her life, regardless of her salary or accumulated wealth. Many people were strongly motivated by the desire to accumulate it, she knew, but she found it difficult to muster the energy for the attempt.
Caterina did, however, have a sense of fair play. She had been promised a job and had left the relative security of Manchester to return to Venice in order to begin that job, she told herself, ignoring the fact that she was eager to leave Manchester and would have jumped at any offer as well as the fact that she had overlooked the time limitation stated in the contract she had been so eager to sign. She had, she admitted, been told from the beginning that the position was temporary, but she had chosen to believe it might last several months. Now she learned that it would last only one month, even though she had no idea how long it would take her to read the remaining documents.
She turned on the computer and checked her emails. There was an offer for unlimited local calls and high-speed Internet for only eighteen euros a month, the offer of a smart phone for next to nothing, and an email from Tina. She deleted the first two and opened the third, curious to learn how their conversation of the night before and the revelations prompting it would have affected Tina’s style.
“Dear Cati. As you might have expected, the interest of my friends has waned in the absence of new information or questions about Steffani. Even my friend in Constance has gone mute, so I guess you are on your own. I’ve been reminded of a deadline and so have to get back to my more recent events, but please understand that I’ll always abandon them to help, if you give me some idea of what to look for. You don’t even have to tell me why.
“Maybe the Marciana has some of those compilations of documents and letters having to do with musicians from the period. It’s the librarian’s equivalent of what the rest of us do with oddly matched socks: just throw them all in a drawer and forget about them. I’m sure the librarians could tell you if they have such things.
“Other than that, I have no advice to pass on to you and can hope only that you will discover more dark revelations about lust, adultery, and murder, so very much more interesting than my own tedious analysis of Vatican foreign policy. Love, Tina-Lina.”
It was a very limp attempt to sound limp, so perhaps it would convince whoever else was reading her emails to believe that Caterina and her sister were both bored with the research and everything surrounding it.
Caterina opened a new mail and answered, “Dear Tina. Yes, once we got beyond the thrills of the Königsmarck Affair, things have indeed become a bit dull. Blame it on the even tenor of Steffani’s life, I fear.
“I did, however, come on some papers today that have him, as well as members of the Stievani and Scapinelli families, involved in the transfer of ownership of some farms near Castelfranco, and I’m going to try to see if I can find more about it tomorrow. Right now, I’m too tired after almost an entire day of reading handwritten documents in Latin and German and Italian to see straight or even think. I’d like nothing better than to lie on the sofa and watch reruns of something uplifting like, for example, Visitors. Remember how we adored it? Good lord, it must be twenty-five years ago, and I still remember those giant reptiles gobbling humans as if they were large mice. How I’d love to watch it tonight, pretend I was a Visitor, and gobble a number of people.” She read over what she had written and canceled the last sentence. Though Caterina had no idea why, she wanted Dottor Moretti to read and believe that she was tired and bored with her research.
She continued the emaiclass="underline" “You think they stole the idea from Dante? I’ve always wondered about that. On that note of unresolved attribution, I’ll go home—to an apartment where there is no television and thus no possibility of Visitors—have some dinner and get in bed with l’Espresso, which this week promises me revelations about garbage in Naples and the dangers of breast implants. Or maybe I’ll take the biography of Steffani—who had to worry about neither of those things—and finally finish reading it. Love, Cati.”
She switched to the site of Manchester University and opened the Romanian’s mail, whispering a silent apology to him for invading his privacy, his life, perhaps his secrets. When she noticed that there were one hundred and twelve unread emails, she smiled and retracted the prayer. She put the senders in alphabetical order and, seeing that there was nothing from Cristina, put them back in the order of arrival and left the site without having glanced at the names of any of the senders, very proud of her own force of will.
After that, she wrote to Dottor Moretti, saying that she was following the trail of land transfers near Castelfranco that involved both Steffani and his two cousins. These papers, she told him, might display some preference toward one side or the other of the family and thus be useful in her research.
She pushed the “send” key, thinking that a person could get to enjoy this James Bond stuff, locked up everything, and went home.
Her search for records of the land transfers took her two days. She worked in the Foundation office because she did not want to turn herself into a recluse in the apartment. She did not so much as open the door to the storage place where the trunks were kept. First she accessed the records of the Ufficio Catasto of Castelfranco, the city closest to the village where both parcels of land were located and where the titles were registered; then she searched in Treviso, the provincial capital. The online information from the first office stated that what records it had from the eighteenth century had been put online, though when she phoned to state the impossibility of finding these records, no one she spoke to seemed able to tell her just where online they had been put. When she was forced to call the office in Treviso to ask for the same explanation of its files, the woman she spoke to gave her the appropriate file numbers but could not tell her to which general file the numbers referred.