The Romanian set down his glass—he didn’t bother with food and thus had no fork to set down—and broke his silence to ask, in Italian, “You want to get out of this place?”
Caterina’s answering glance was filled with curiosity, as was her voice. “Do you mean this dinner or this university?”
He smiled, took his wine glass, and looked around for another bottle. “This university,” he said in a completely sober voice.
“Yes.” She picked up her own glass, surprised to hear her admission and struck by its force.
“A friend has told me that la Fondazione Musicale Italo-Tedesca is looking for a scholar.” He sipped, smiled. She liked his smile, though perhaps not his teeth.
“La Fondazione Musicale Italo-Tedesca,” she repeated. There was something with a similar name at home, she recalled, but she knew little about it. Dilettantes, amateurs. Surely he was speaking about something in the German-speaking world.
“You know it?”
“I’ve heard of it,” she said in the same tone she’d use if someone asked her if she’d heard about the infestation of bedbugs in New York hotels.
He finished the wine and held up the glass. Looking at it, he said, surprising her with the angry vehemence with which he spoke, “Italy.” The glass was from Italy? The wine?
“Money,” he added in what she thought he intended to be a seductive voice. “Some.” When he saw how little effect this had on her his smile returned, as if she’d just agreed with him about something he had believed for a long time. “Research. New documents.” He saw the jolt this gave her and glanced toward the head of the table, where the chairman sat. “You want to end up like him?”
In a voice that slipped toward possibility, she smiled and said, “Tell me more.”
He ignored her and looked in vain at the bottles on the sideboard. Perhaps he had already reached the point where the trip back and forth was impossible for him.
He placed his empty glass on the table next to the glass of the woman to his right, who was turned to her other neighbor. He switched glasses.
“Idiots,” he said in a suddenly loud voice. They were speaking Italian, so the slurring of his speech, though it did nothing to lower the volume of his voice, at least managed to disguise the hard dentals of that word. No one so much as bothered to glance in his direction.
He surprised her by taking his napkin and wiping methodically around the edge of his neighbor’s glass. Only then did he take a long drink from it.
Seeing that he had all but emptied what had now become his glass, Caterina leaned across the table and poured what was left of her white wine into the small quantity of red at the bottom. He nodded.
His smile faded and he muttered, “I don’t want it. Maybe you’d like it?”
“Why?” she asked, confused. Did he mean her wine?
“I told you,” he answered, giving her a sharp look. “Aren’t you listening? It’s in Venice. I hate Venice.”
So it was the one at home: a job in the city. She didn’t know everything, but she knew a lot: how serious could this place be if she’d never heard anything about it save the name? Italians cared little for the Baroque. No, only Verdi, Rossini, and—God help us all, she thought, as a small shudder walked a descending cadence down her spine—Puccini.
“You’re talking about Venice? The job’s in Venice?” His eyes had continued their retreat from certain focus all the time he had been talking, and she wanted to be clear that this possibility existed before she opened her heart to hope.
“Hateful place,” he said, making a sour face. “Disgusting climate. Horrible food. Tourists. T-shirts. All those tattoos.”
“You’ve said no?” she asked with wide-eyed wonder that begged for explanation.
“Venice,” he repeated and swilled his wine to wash away the very sound of it. “I’d go to Treviso, Castelfranco. Friuli. Good wine.” He looked into his glass, as if to ask the contents where they had come from, but finding no answer, he turned back to her. “Even Germany. I like beer.”
Having spent many years in the academic world, Caterina did not doubt that this would sufficiently explain his acceptance of a job.
“Why me?” she asked.
“You’ve been nice to me.” Did that mean half a glass of white wine or the fact that she had spoken to him with respect and had smiled at him occasionally during the last years? It didn’t matter. “And you’re blonde.” That at least made sense.
“Would you recommend me?” she asked.
“If you get me a bottle of red from the sideboard,” he answered.
Two
GREATER CHANGES HAD RESULTED FROM STRANGER THINGS, she reflected, calling herself back from memory. The research job was hers, and she was back in Venice, though hired only to complete a single project. She looked around at the office where she was to wait for the acting director. If an office could be a small, high-ceilinged cubicle with two tiny windows, one behind the desk and one so close to the ceiling as to provide some light but no view, then this was an office. The desk and chair added to that possibility, though the absence of computer, telephone, and even paper and pen suggested more a monk’s cell than anything else. The location—in what had once been a two-floor apartment at the end of Ruga Giuffa—could be used to argue either case. But it was a cold day at the beginning of April and the room was warm; thus it had to be an office that was meant to be in use.
What little she had been able to learn about the Foundation before applying for the job had prepared her for this dismal room: nothing in it—and nothing not in it—surprised her. The Internet had provided her with some information about the Foundation: it had been established twenty-three years before by Ludovico Dardago, a Venetian banker who had made a career in Germany and was a passionate lover of Baroque opera, both Italian and German. He had left money for the creation of a foundation to “disseminate and promote the performance of the music of composers who traveled and worked between Germany and Italy during the Baroque era.”
However modest the rooms, the location was propitious, only a ten-minute walk to the major collections of the Biblioteca Marciana, where manuscripts and scores were to be found.
When she thought about the events that had brought her to this room and viewed her situation in a certain way, Caterina concluded that she had been hired for a bit part in a bad nineteenth-century melodrama: The Rediscovered Trunks? The Rival Cousins? For more than a year, two cousins, descended from different sides of a mutual ancestor’s family, had been embroiled in a dispute over the ownership of two recently rediscovered trunks that had once belonged to their ancestor. Both possessed archival evidence proving their descent from the former owner, a cleric and musician who had died without issue. Unable to find legal redress, and with great reluctance, they had finally consulted an arbitrator, who suggested that, in light of their refusal to divide equally the still-unknown contents of the trunks, a neutral and competent researcher be hired, at their shared expense, to examine the historical record and any documents contained in the trunks for words that showed a preference for one side of the family over the other. In the event that such a document was found, both agreed—in a contract drawn up by the arbitrator and signed in front of a notary—that the entire contents of the trunks would become the exclusive possessions of the person whose ancestor was so favored.