Roseanna’s gasp was entirely involuntary. “Maria Vergine,” she exclaimed. No liar, Caterina thought, would say that. Then Roseanna gave her astonishment an upgrade and whispered, “Oddio.”
When Roseanna reached toward the files, Caterina said, “No, Roseanna. Don’t touch anything.”
“What?”
“Don’t touch anything,” she repeated.
The other woman looked at her with open curiosity. Then, “I don’t want the police here again,” she said with sudden energy.
Caterina leaned forward to put her body closer to the shelves. “But look at it. Someone’s been through those papers.” Then, remembering no doubt what she had seen in the cinema, she asked, “Who else has a key to this room?”
“I do. That’s all.”
“Dottor Moretti gave me one to the building,” Caterina said, wondering how difficult it would be to get into this office. “No one else has one?” she asked and no sooner saw Roseanna’s expression than she realized she had gone too far. She tried to modify the effect by going on, as if naturally, “This must be a terrible shock for you, Roseanna. To have someone come in and do this.” Her tactic of thus excluding Roseanna herself as a possible suspect was as crude as it was obvious.
Caterina ran through what she knew about the police. Their first suspects would be anyone with keys to the building. Or, learning that the disturbance—she didn’t even know if it had been a theft—concerned correspondence about centuries-old music and the men who wrote it, they would simply leave. That is, if they came in the first place.
Using her most placatory tone, Caterina said, “You’re right, of course. This is nothing for the police.” That made them partners and equally complicit.
“What’s missing?” Caterina moved back from the cabinet, as if to give physical evidence of her trust in Roseanna’s competence. Her sister Cinzia had been involved with an anthropologist for some years and had passed on to her sisters what she had learned from him about dominance displays in simians. Caterina thought of this as she moved back from the desk, leaving access to the cabinet entirely to Roseanna.
The acting director leaned into the cabinet and gathered the files on each shelf into a stack, tapping papers back inside the folders out of which they projected. She put the first pile on the desk and beside them those from the shelf below. Beginning with the first pile, she opened each file and straightened the papers until she had them in an order she seemed to like, then did the same with those on the second pile.
Next she went back to the top file on the first stack and began to page through the letters. Caterina, to disguise her impatience, went and studied the second portrait to see if there was a name printed at the bottom. Beside her, Roseanna methodically opened one file after another, fingering the papers in each before putting it down and taking up another one.
Caterina returned her attention to the men with the wigs.
“Caterina,” Roseanna said.
“Sì?”
“I don’t understand this,” she said hesitantly. Perhaps this was merely an expression of her surprise that anyone would have bothered to snoop around in the files of the Fondazione Musicale Italo-Tedesca.
“What?”
“Nothing seems to be missing.”
Four
“WHAT?” CATERINA ASKED, AMAZED THAT SOMEONE WOULD have gone to the trouble of breaking in and then not have taken anything. What she had seen did not suggest vandalism. Nothing had spilled out of the cabinet, nothing had been destroyed. There were signs of a hasty, careless search, nothing more.
Roseanna gave her a manila folder. Neatly typed (yes, typed) on the flap was “Sartorio, Antonio, 1630–1680.”
“What’s in it?” Caterina asked as she handed it back without opening it.
“The letters we’ve received over the years concerning him,” Roseanna said, hefting it in her right hand, as if she could judge by the weight.
“Everything seems to be here,” Roseanna said. “And in this one,” she added, passing another file to Caterina. “But I can check.”
Caterina began to read the top letter in the file she held, which was in German and addressed to the director of the Foundation by title and not by name. The writer began by saying that, the last time he had been in Venice, he had been unable to find Hasse’s grave in the church of San Marcuola and asked, in a peremptory manner, why the Foundation had not seen to the placing of a memorial plaque in the church. The writer was a member of the Hasse Society in . . .
Caterina pulled her attention from the letter and asked, “What did you just say?”
“I wanted to check if anything’s missing from the Porpora file.”
“How?” Caterina asked, suddenly interested in what Roseanna had said.
Instead of answering, Roseanna turned back to the cabinet and reached inside to place her hand on one of the decorative knobs on the inlaid panels that ran perpendicular to the shelves. She gave it a sharp twist and the panel tilted forward and down, revealing a vertical drawer the width of the panel, about ten centimeters. She reached in and pulled out a student’s notebook, on its cover the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius.
She set the notebook on the desk, opened it toward the front, and pressed it flat by running her hand down the center. She set the file she was holding beside the notebook and removed the letters. Methodically, she paged through them, each time putting her forefinger on an entry in the notebook; it was too far from Caterina for her to read. When she had checked all the letters, Roseanna turned to her and said, “They’re all here.”
“May I?” Caterina asked and picked up the notebook.
“Porpora” was written at the top of the page on the left, and below it were columns that listed the date of the arrival of the letter, the name and address of the person who sent it, and the date the letter was answered.
“Why do you keep it?” Caterina asked in a voice she made as neutral as she could.
Roseanna pursed her lips in embarrassment, careful to avoid Caterina’s gaze. “I’ve always kept permanent records of things, even my gas bills. It’s just a habit of mine, I suppose.” She pointed to the notebook. “This way, if anything goes missing or gets misfiled, I’ve got a record that it did arrive. I’ve kept it since I started here.” Then, head lowered, she added, “I began it with all the correspondence that was already here and kept adding to it over the years.”
Caterina stopped herself from asking if the Foundation had a website or email address or any evidence that it was functioning in the current millennium.
She thought of the letter complaining about Hasse’s grave. Such things did not lead to burglary. “Can you remember anyone asking a strange question or making a threat?” she asked.
“Some of the letters are strange,” Roseanna said. Then, as if hearing a playback, she slapped her hand over her mouth.
Caterina didn’t bother to fight the impulse and laughed out loud. “You should have seen some of the people I took classes with.” Then, swept away by memory, she added, “Or from,” and that set her off again.
Roseanna resisted for a moment but then gave in and said, laughing, “If you think they’re strange, you should see some of the people who come here. Not the ones who come to sleep but the ones who come to ask questions.”
Still laughing, Caterina nodded and waved a hand in the air. She knew, she knew. She’d spent a decade of her life with them.
“The ones who write letters are usually better. There’s an elderly gentleman in Pavia who still listens to phonograph records. He writes and asks for suggestions about which ones to buy. Would you believe it?” Roseanna asked and shook her head at this. This from a woman who still used a typewriter, Caterina thought.