He glanced up at the stars, seen clearly above the darkness of the unlighted street, and noticed their beauty. Holding their image in mind, he continued toward the hotel.
The lobby was empty and had the abandoned look common to public places at night. Behind the reception desk, the night potter sat, chair tilted back against the wall, that day’s pink sporting newspaper open before him. An old man in a green-and-black-striped apron was busy spreading sawdust on the marble floor of the lobby and sweeping it clean. When Brunetti saw that he had trailed his way through the fine wooden chips and couldn’t traverse the lobby without tracking a path across the already swept floor, he looked at the old man and said, ‘Scusi.’
‘It’s nothing,’ the old man said, and trailed after him with his broom. The man behind the newspaper didn’t even bother to look up.
Brunetti continued on into the lobby of the hotel. Six or seven clusters of large stuffed chairs were pulled up around low tables. Brunetti threaded his way through them and went to join the only person in the room. If the press was to be believed, the man sitting there was the best stage director currently working in Italy. Two years before, Brunetti had seen his production of a Pirandello play at the Goldoni Theater and had been impressed with it, far more with the direction than with the acting, which had been mediocre. Santore was known to be homosexual, but in the theatrical world where a mixed marriage was one between a man and a woman, his personal life had never served as an impediment to his success. And now he was said to have been seen angrily leaving the dressing room of a man who had died violently not too long afterward.
Santore rose to his feet as Brunetti approached. They shook hands and exchanged names. Santore was a man of average height and build, but he had the face of a boxer at the end of an unlucky career. His nose was squat, its skin large-pored. His mouth was broad, his lips thick and moist. He asked Brunetti if he would like a drink, and from that mouth came words spoken in the purest of Florentine accents, pronounced with the clarity and grace of an actor. Brunetti thought Dante must have sounded like this.
When Brunetti accepted his suggestion that they have brandy, Santore went off for some. Left alone, Brunetti looked down at the book the other man had left open on the table in front of him, then pulled it toward him.
Santore came back, carrying two snifters, each generously filled with brandy.
‘Thanks,’ Brunetti said, accepting the glass and taking a large swallow. He pointed at the book and decided to begin with that, rather than with the usual obvious questions about where he had been, what he had done. ‘Aeschylus?’
Santore smiled at the question, hiding any surprise he might have felt that a policeman could read the title in Greek.
‘Are you reading it for pleasure, or for work?’
‘I suppose you could call it work,’ Santore answered, and sipped at his brandy. ‘I’m supposed to begin work on a new production of the Agamemnon in Rome in three weeks.’
‘In Greek?’ Brunetti asked, but it was clear that he didn’t mean it.
‘No, in translation.’ Santore was silent for a moment, but then he allowed his curiosity to get the better of him. ‘How is it that a policeman reads Greek?’
Brunetti swirled the liquid around in his glass. ‘Four years of it. But a long time ago. I’ve forgotten almost all I knew.’
‘But you can still recognize Aeschylus?’
‘I can read the letters. I’m afraid that’s all that’s left.’ He took another swallow of his drink and added, ‘I’ve always liked it about the Greeks that they kept the violence off the stage.’
‘Unlike us?’ Santore asked, then asked again, ‘Unlike this?’
‘Yes, unlike this,’ Brunetti admitted, not even bothering to wonder how Santore would have learned that the death had been violent. The theater was small, so he had probably learned that even before the police did, probably even before they had been called.
‘Did you speak to him this evening?’ There was no need to use a name.
‘Yes. We had an argument before the first curtain. We met in the bar and went back to his dressing room. That’s where it started.’ Santore spoke without hesitation. ‘I don’t remember if we were shouting at each other, but our voices were raised.’
‘What were you arguing about?’ Brunetti asked, as calmly as if he’d been talking to an old friend and equally certain that he would get the truth in response.
‘We had come to a verbal agreement about this production. I kept my part of it. Helmut refused to keep his.’
Instead of asking Santore to clarify the remark, Brunetti finished his brandy and set the glass on the table between them, waiting for him to continue.
Santore cupped his hands around the bottom of his glass and rolled it slowly from side to side. ‘I agreed to direct this production because he promised to help a friend of mine to get a job this summer, at the Halle Festival. It isn’t a big festival, and the part wasn’t an important one, but Helmut agreed to speak to the directors and ask that my friend be given the part. Helmut was going to be conducting just the one opera there.’ Santore brought the glass to his lips and took a sip. ‘That’s what the argument was about.’
‘What did you say during the argument?’
‘I’m not sure I remember everything I said, or what he said, but I do remember saying that I thought what he’d done, since I’d already done my part, was dishonest and immoral.’ He sighed. ‘You always ended up talking like him, when you talked to Helmut.’
‘What did he say to that?’
‘He laughed.’
‘Why?’
Before he answered, Santore asked, ‘Would you like another drink? I’m going to have one.’
Brunetti nodded, grateful. This time, while Santore was gone, he laid his head against the back of the chair and closed his eyes.
He opened them when he heard Santore’s steps approach. He took the glass that the other man handed him and asked, as if there had been no break in the conversation, ‘Why did he laugh?’
Santore lowered himself into his chair, this time holding the glass with one hand cupped under it. ‘Part of it, I suppose, is that Helmut thought himself above common morality. Or perhaps he thought he’d managed to create his own, different from ours, better.’ Brunetti said nothing, so he continued: ‘It’s almost as if he alone had the right to define what morality meant, almost as if he thought no one else had the right to use the term. He certainly thought I had no right to use it.’ He shrugged, sipped.
‘Why would he think that?’
‘Because of my homosexuality,’ the other answered simply, suggesting that he considered the issue equal in importance to, say, a choice of newspaper.
‘Is that the reason he refused to help your friend?’
‘In the end, yes,’ Santore said. ‘At first, he said it was because Saverio wasn’t good enough, didn’t have enough stage experience. But the real reason came later, when he accused me of wanting a favor for my lover.’ He leaned forward and put his glass down on the table. ‘Helmut has always seen himself as a sort of guardian of public morals,’ he said, then corrected his grammar. ‘Saw himself.’