Donna Leon - The Jewels of Paradise

“If only she’d played by the rules,” Caterina caught herself thinking. If only silly, besotted Sophie Dorothea had been a bit more discreet about her affair, things could have gone along without fuss. Georg would have his mistresses, she could have her lover, and she would have ended up the queen of England instead of a prisoner in a castle, cut off from her children and the world and all visits save that of her mother, whom she did not particularly like.

Caterina had been reading all day and she was tired, but she told herself she didn’t have to clock in to the office at nine the next morning so could continue reading as late as she chose. Besides, she was intrigued by how much these people and their behavior seemed familiar to her: change their clothing and hairstyles, teach them other languages, and they would feel completely at home in Rome or Milan or, for that fact, London, where a number of the minor players had remained and prospered.

Adulterous behavior among the Hanoverians was no news to Caterina nor to any person in Europe who knew where the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas and the Windsors came from. Not that, she reflected, their Continental relatives had distinguished themselves by the sobriety of their comportment.

She had been using the standard JSTOR site to access scholarly journals but now, sated with the serious tone of what she had been reading, she switched to a more mainstream search. She was not troubled to find a Thai girl who was looking for a considerate husband—“age and looks don’t matter”—lurking at the side of the page, and she was so accustomed to seeing ads for cars, restaurants, mortgages, and vitamins that she no longer saw them in any real sense. On the ninth page of articles available under Steffani’s name, she found a listing for Catholic Encyclopedia , and she thought she’d have a peek, much in the way one tried to see what cards another poker player might have in his hand.

It was only toward the middle of the article that Steffani’s clerical endeavors were mentioned, when it was noted that the Church had made him apostolic prothonotary—whatever that was—for north Germany, presumably in return for “his services for the cause of Catholicism in Hanover.” Services? The wording in the article was unclear; the closest date used in conjunction with his appointment to that post was 1680, when Steffani would have been twenty-six.

That ambiguity set her grazing through another source, where she found mention that he was an apostolic prothonotary by 1695, the year after Königsmarck’s murder. Services?

She heard a noise, a dull buzzing, and with no conscious thought, her mind turned to the man she had seen on the street and who had been sitting at her boat stop. A bolt of panic brought her to her feet and took her to the door, but as she moved away from the table, the sound grew dimmer. When she realized it was her telefonino ringing in her bag, Caterina felt her knees weaken and her face rush with heat. She walked back to the table, opened her bag, and pulled out the phone.

“ Pronto ?” she said, in a voice out of which she had forced every emotion save mild interest.

“Caterina?” a man asked.

Aware of how moist the hand that held the phone was, she transferred it to her other ear and wiped her hand on the back of her sweater. “Sì.” She was every busy woman who had ever been interrupted by a phone call, every person who had been disturbed at—she looked—9:40 in the evening and who certainly had better things to do with her time.

“ Ciao . It’s Andrea. I’m not bothering you, am I?”

She pulled out a chair and sat, put the phone back into her dry hand. “No, of course not. I couldn’t find the phone.” She laughed, then found the whole situation funny and laughed again.

“I’m glad you did,” he said. “I wanted to tell you about the cousins.”

“Ah, yes. The cousins,” she said. “They aren’t happy?”

“They weren’t happy,” he said, stressing the second word. “In fact, Signor Scapinelli accused you of spending all of your time walking around the city and drinking coffee.”

“But?” she asked, refraining the impulse to observe that it was better than accusing her of walking around the city drinking grappa.

“But I used the same technique you did in the mail and explained that you were merely being conscientious and wanted to be sure you missed nothing that might make an attribution of the putative estate in favor of one claimant or the other.” Oh, my, she thought, how lawyerly he sounded.

“Thank you,” was the only thing she could say.

“There’s nothing to thank me for. It’s true. Unless you read whatever background information you can find, you won’t understand the context of what you read in the documents. And then either you’ll make the wrong decision or you won’t be able to make any decision at all.”

“It’s possible,” she said with the mildness of the hardened researcher, but then she considered the second thing he’d said, and asked, “What happens if it does end up that I can’t make a decision?”

“Ah,” he said, drawing out the sound. “In that case, any documents that have value would be sold and they’d divide whatever they bring.” He paused to let her speak. When she did not, he asked, “So far, though, you haven’t found anything that could be of great value, have you?”

“No, not to the best of my knowledge.”

“Then, as I said, they’ll sell everything for whatever they can get and split the profits.”

“But?” she asked, responding to the underlying uncertainty in his voice.

“They’ve told me there’s a legend, on both sides of the family, about the ancestor priest who left a hidden fortune.” The fact that Andrea could also tell this story, she thought, made it no more believable than when Roseanna had told it.

“There are lots of legends,” she said, then added dryly, “but there are few fortunes.”

“I know, I know, but the Stievani family insists he had it when he died. They have an ancestral aunt—this is in the nineteenth century—who supposedly had a paper from him where he said that he had left the Jewels of Paradise to his nephew Stievani—Giacomo Antonio—who was her great-grandfather.”

The use of the exact phrase Countess von Platen had used in her condemnation of Steffani shocked her. In a voice she tried to make sound dispassionate and lawyerly, she asked, “And this paper?”

This time he laughed. “If you ever get tired of music, you might consider the police force.”

She laughed outright. “I’m afraid I’m not cut out for that sort of thing.”

“You ask questions like a policewoman.”

“Like a researcher,” she corrected him.

“Could you explain the difference?”

Realizing how much she enjoyed sparring with him, Caterina said, “Researchers can’t arrest people and send them to jail.”

He laughed. “That’s true enough.”

Out of the blue, it came to her to ask him. “Do you believe this story about the aunt?” He was their lawyer, for heaven’s sake. What did she expect him to say?

He was silent for so long that she feared her question had offended him by its impertinence. Just as it occurred to her that he might have hung up, he said, “It doesn’t matter. It’s legally worthless.”

“And if the paper had miraculously been preserved?” she asked, passing from impertinence to provocation.

“A piece of paper is a piece of paper,” he said.

“And a fragment of the True Cross is only a splinter of wood?” she asked.

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.”