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
THE WORD ASTONISHED HER. “TREASURE?” SHE REPEATED. “WHAT 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.