Donna Leon - The Jewels of Paradise

She heard Roseanna move behind her and shifted her own weight in surprise. Her left foot slipped on the waxed parquet, and she lost her balance, slipping forward and falling across the open top of the trunk. Her left palm landed flat on the bottom of the trunk, and her right hand on the floor just in front. She braced herself, elbows stiff.

An inglorious, awkward figure, she crouched half in and half out of the trunk, her right knee on the floor, her left leg shot out behind her. Roseanna was immediately at her side, one hand under her arm, trying to help her back to her knees. “Are you all right?”

Caterina did not answer, perhaps did not even hear the question. She pulled her left leg forward and put her knee on the ground, which brought her up higher in relation to the top of the trunk. But she didn’t move away from it. Instead, she knelt like that, one hand inside and one outside of the trunk, both palms flat.

“What’s the matter?” Roseanna asked, squeezing her shoulder to get her attention.

“The floor,” Caterina said.

“What?” Roseanna asked, looking around.

“The floor,” Caterina repeated. “It’s lower than the trunk.”

Roseanna’s look became troubled but she kept her hand on Caterina’s shoulder, this time trying a squeeze that would provide comfort. In a consciously soft voice, she asked, “What do you mean, Caterina?”

Instead of answering, Caterina rose up higher, still kneeling, still supporting herself on both hands. She turned and looked at Roseanna, though her hands remained where they were. “The bottom of the trunk is higher than the floor,” she said. Seeing Roseanna’s confusion, Caterina could do nothing but laugh.

“There’s a fake bottom,” she said. Some seconds passed. Roseanna looked at her, saw the way one shoulder was higher than the other, and started to laugh.

It took a few moments for Caterina to decide what to do. She slowly pulled her hand from the trunk, her palm sliding against the side so as not to damage any papers it brushed past and got to her feet. As if a message had passed between them, both women reached to the handles and pulled the trunk forward. “I need a stick,” Caterina said, and Roseanna understood immediately.

“The carpenter,” Roseanna said. “Across the street. He’d have a meter stick.” Before Caterina could answer, Roseanna was out of the room.

Caterina returned her attention to the problem of getting the papers out of the trunk while keeping them in the same order in which she had found them. She stuck her upturned palms about ten centimeters down and began to slip her fingers forward and into the expanse of mingled papers. Rocking her hands up and down minimally, she slid them to the center of the papers, then moved them toward the sides of the trunk. Slowly she lifted them upward, ready to set everything back into place at the first sign of resistance. But the papers came free and she stood, a slab of them in her hands. She walked to the desk and set the papers as far to the left as she could.

When she returned to the trunk, she could see the intermingling of small packets of papers continuing down toward the bottom. She bent and repeated her motions, straightening up with another slice of papers in her hands. She placed this one to the right of the first. By the time Roseanna came back, there were five stacks on the table; enough had been removed to show that the rest of the papers lay in two separate stacks of neatly tied bundles.

Roseanna waved the segmented wooden stick above her head. “I’ve got it,” she said, her voice as triumphant as her gesture.

Caterina smiled in acknowledgment. “Let’s get the rest of the papers out,” she said, kneeling to reach into the trunk. She picked up some bundles on the left and took them over to the table. Roseanna set the meter on the table and went to the trunk. Monkey see, monkey do. She took the same quantity of papers as Caterina had and put them beside the others, then together they went back to the trunk and repeated the process until it was empty.

Only then did Caterina pick up the meter and pull open its first three segments. The trunk was no deeper than that, she thought. She put the end of the stick on the floor and ran her finger down the numbers. “Fifty-nine centimeters,” she said aloud.

She lifted it and stuck it into the empty trunk until its end hit the bottom. “Fifty-two,” she said. Out of curiosity, she pulled out the meter and used it to measure the thickness of the wood used in its construction: one and a half centimeters. So if the true and false bottoms of the trunk were the same, there would still be four centimeters into which to place papers or objects.

“What do we do now?” Roseanna asked.

Instead of answering, Caterina leaned into the trunk and felt around the four sides of the bottom with her hand. Everything felt smooth. “Do you have a flashlight?” she asked Roseanna, who was suddenly kneeling beside her.

“No,” Roseanna said, then reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out her iPhone. “But I have this.” She tapped the surface a few times, and a mini-spotlight ignited. She reached in and beamed the light around the bottom of the trunk. As she ran the light around, Caterina leaned forward and they bumped into each other. Roseanna dropped the phone.

She picked it up and moved to the end of the trunk, leaving Caterina alone on the side. “I’ll go around it slowly this time,” Roseanna said.

Caterina nodded, wondering if it was going to be necessary to shatter the bottom to expose whatever space was underneath. She ran her hand, more slowly this time, along the bottom, closing her eyes to let her fingers have more of her attention. When she had covered all four sides, she shifted the angle of her hand and began to move her fingers along the sides of the trunk, just above the seam where they met the bottom.

Only a few centimeters from a corner, she felt it, though she didn’t have any idea what she was feeling. Just at the seam, she felt the smallest of imperfections, like a small chip on the edge of a wineglass, though so smooth that, unless one were feeling for it, it would pass undetected. “Give me a pencil,” she said, keeping her finger on the tiny opening.

Roseanna set the phone down on the bottom of the trunk, went over to Caterina’s desk, and came back with a pencil. Caterina took it with her left hand and reached into the trunk to make a small mark on the bottom, just below the place where she felt the hole. Then she continued to move her finger along the remaining three sides, but the wood was like velvet.

When she was finished, she took the pencil with her right hand and prodded at the place above the pencil mark. The point of the pencil penetrated a few millimeters and stopped, either because it grew too big or because the point had run into something.

Caterina got to her feet and went to her bag and removed from it, of all unlikely things, a Swiss Army knife.

“What are you doing?” asked a shocked Roseanna.

Caterina didn’t answer but came back and knelt again beside the trunk. She turned the knife around and examined the other side, then pulled out the corkscrew “Maybe this will work,” she said, reaching back into the trunk.

Roseanna picked up the phone and shined the light on the pencil mark. Caterina manipulated the knife until the point found the hole, then pushed the point until she felt it slip inside. Gently, gently, she tried to turn it, first one way and then the other, but it refused to move. There was only one thing left to do, which was to angle her fist so that the curved point would catch in the bottom panel and, if possible, lever it upward.

She gripped the body of the knife, which had now become the handle, and pressed her fist forward as she turned it up. At first she felt the same resistance that had met her attempts to move it to the side, and then it seemed that the point managed to penetrate something, for her hand met less resistance. The handle moved closer to the side of the trunk, and then she had to take her hand off the handle and push it with the flat of her hand.