Donna Leon - The Jewels of Paradise

She flipped back toward the end, passed “Sartorio” and found “Steffani.”

“Why is it that the entries for Steffani start such a short time ago, Roseanna?”

“Oh, he’s been forgotten for a long time,” Roseanna answered.

“I see,” Caterina said. She remembered seeing his portrait in something she had once read: round face and sagging chin, bishop’s cap with white hair sneaking out on both sides, long fingers caressing the cross he wore across his chest. The man had been dead for almost three centuries. Caterina closed the notebook and set it on the table. As she did, her eyes were drawn to the photo of the statue. Marcus Aurelius. Emperor. Hero. Blamed by generations of historians for having passed the throne to his son Commodus, as if they thought he should have remained childless. Childless. Without heirs.

Illumination flashed upon her, forcing out an involuntary grunt, as though someone had punched her in the stomach. “Marco Aurelio,” she pronounced. “Of course, of course.”

Startled, Roseanna turned to her. “What’s the matter?” She dropped a file on the table and put her hand on Caterina’s arm. When Caterina said nothing, she demanded, “What’s wrong?”

“Marco Aurelio,” Caterina repeated.

Roseanna looked at the cover of the notebook. “Yes, I know, but what’s wrong with you?”

Caterina rubbed her forehead, as if to push away a headache, and then tapped her fingers lightly against her head a few times. “Of course, of course,” she repeated. Then, to Roseanna, she said, “The trunks belonged to Steffani, didn’t they?”

The other woman’s mouth dropped open. “Who told you? They said no one was to say anything until the person they chose started to work on the papers. How did you find out?” When Caterina didn’t answer, Roseanna took her arm again, but this time with greater force. “Tell me.”

Caterina pointed to the notebook. “That did,” she said.

It was obvious that Roseanna had no idea what she was talking about. She picked up the notebook and paged through it, as if Caterina had seen the answer written inside. “I don’t understand,” she confessed and set the notebook back on the desk.

“I remembered,” Caterina said. “Things I read when I was at university. His first opera was Marco Aurelio .” Roseanna gave no look or nod of recognition, but how many people would know this? “And I remembered reading something. He had no direct heirs, and no one ever knew what happened to his possessions after his death.” The Church was mixed up in it somehow, too, she recalled, but she could not remember the details.

Roseanna went and sat behind the desk. It was the director’s desk and the director’s chair, but she looked like anything but a director. She leaned forward and propped her chin on her hand. “Yes. You’re right. It’s Steffani.” She pronounced it with the accent on the first syllable, as an Italian would. As Steffani had not.

“I don’t see what difference it makes,” Roseanna went on in a voice grown suddenly brisk. “Really. You would have known as soon as you started reading and found his name in the papers. It’s those two men,” she said, her voice growing warmer. “Everything has to be secret. No one can know anything. If one of them saw that the other one’s hair was on fire, he wouldn’t say anything.” Her tone was a mixture of anger and exasperation. “They’re terrible men. One’s worse than the other.”

“The cousins?” Caterina asked.

Roseanna raised her head and gave an angry flip of her hand. “What cousins? They’re just two men who smell the possibility of money. That’s the way they’re related.” Then, after a moment’s reflection, “And in mutual suspicion.”

“Are they really his descendants?” Caterina asked. “Steffani’s?”

“Oh, they are, they are.”

“How do they know that? Or prove it?”

Here Roseanna gave a snort, of either disgust or anger. Then she stopped and gave Caterina a sudden, assessing look. Whatever she saw led her to say, “It’s the Mormons.”

“I beg your pardon?” Steffani, she remembered, had been a clergyman of some sort, so where’d the Mormons come from? “He was a priest, wasn’t he? And long before the Mormons.”

“Oh, I know that,” Roseanna said. “But that’s how you can find your ancestors. By asking them.”

Caterina, who took very little interest in her own ancestors, could hardly imagine asking the Mormons to look for them. “What have the Mormons got to do with this?”

Roseanna smiled and waved her fingers before her face to suggest a lack of mental stability. “It’s what they believe, or at least what Dottor Moretti told me they believe. They can go back and baptize people in the past.” Her expression showed how much faith she put in this possibility.

Caterina stared at her for a long moment. “You think you can marry them in the past, too, and inherit their money?”

It took Roseanna a moment to realize this was a joke, and when she did, she laughed, losing a decade as she did. When she stopped, she wiped her eyes and said, her voice a bit rough after laughing so hard, “It would be convenient, wouldn’t it?” She considered the possibilities for a while and said, “I suppose I could marry Gianni Agnelli.” Then, with a careful attention to fact that made Caterina admire her, she added, “No, he lived too long. I’d want someone who died young.”

Caterina stopped herself from naming a candidate or two and returned to the business at hand.

Wiping away a few vagrant tears that remained, and still smiling, Roseanna said, “Dottor Moretti told me they’re very good at tracing people’s ancestry, and they’re generous about giving the information.”

“How do they do it? This is a Catholic country. And parts of Germany are, too.” This rang another historical bell. Steffani had been somehow mixed up in the squabbles between the Protestants and the Catholics. How long ago it was, and how futile such things seemed now. Before his time, people died disputing how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Whether the host was flesh or merely a symbol. During his lifetime, the wars still went on. She shook her head at the thought of it. How many millions had died for those angels and for those flesh/nonflesh hosts? Centuries later, and the churches are empty except for old people and kids with badly tuned guitars.

“What’s wrong?” Roseanna asked.

“Nothing,” Caterina said with a small shake of her head. “I was just trying to remember what I read as a student about Steffani.”

“There are books about him in the Marciana, I’m sure,” Roseanna said. “I haven’t read about him, but some of the others are fascinating. Gesualdo killed his wife and her lover, and he was a hunchback, too. Porpora went bankrupt, and all I ever read about Cavalli said he sat around all day, writing operas.”

Caterina gave her a long look, as if seeing a different person, but said nothing.

“I like this music, so I started reading about it, and about the composers. The conservatory has books, but they wouldn’t let me use the library.” From her tone, it was difficult to tell whether she was offended. But then she smiled. “At the Marciana, when I said I was the acting director here, they let me use them.”

“Good for you,” Caterina said with a blossoming smile.

“Thank you,” Roseanna said in a voice best suited to confession. “And their lives were interesting. Besides, if I work here, I should know something about what we’re doing, shouldn’t I?”

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?