The Jewels of Paradise Read Free Page A

shelves, lying flat as though placed there in haste. She looked more closely and saw that one of them was a historical novel about a castrato.
    Nothing either of the two men said or did suggested that they were anything but gentlemen. The evidence that such an attribution was mistaken had come that evening from her parents, with whom she was staying, and who, in the best Venetian way, told her what was common knowledge about each of them.
    Franco Scapinelli was the owner of four shops selling glass in the area around San Marco. He was also—though nothing that happened during the interview would have suggested this—a convicted usurer who was forbidden from owning any business in the city. But who to forbid a man from giving his sons a hand in their shops? What sort of law would that be?
    The other contender, Umberto Stievani, owned water taxis, seven of them, and declared, according to a friend of Caterina’s father—a friend who happened to work in the Guardia di Finanza—a yearly income of just over eleven thousand euros. The combined income of his two sons who worked for him as pilots did not reach that of their father.
    During the interviews, both men claimed great interest in the manuscripts and documents and whatever else might be contained in the chests, but as Caterina listened to each of them, she realized their interest was not in any historical or musicological importance the purported documents might have. Both had asked if any manuscripts would have value, meaning would anyone want to buy them. Stievani, no doubt because of his time spent among taxi drivers, had used the elegance of their language to ask, “ Valgono schei? ” Caterina wondered if money was real to him only if named in Veneziano.
    They must have approved of her, for here she was less than a month later, both her position and her apartment in Manchester abandoned, standing in an office at the Fondazione Italo-Tedesca, eager to begin work. And she was home again, her spirit salved by the sounds and smells of the city, by the enveloping familiarity.
    She took a closer look around the room. Three small prints hung to the left of the window behind the desk. She moved across the room, not a difficult thing to do, and took a closer look at these bewigged men in their plastic Ikea frames. She recognized Apostolo Zeno by the length of his wig and the long white scarf popping out from his robes. Familiarity with prints of the bewigged Handel made it easy to recognize him. And farthest to the left was Porpora, looking as though he’d stolen his wig from Bach and his jacket from a naval commander. Poor old Porpora, to have been such a high flier and then to have died in penury.
    Caterina examined the window behind her. About the size of one of the prints, 15 × 20 centimeters, it had to be the smallest window she had ever seen. It might even be the smallest window in the city.
    She put her face close to the glass and saw the shutters of the apartment on the other side of the calle : green, weather-stained, shut, as if the inhabitants were still asleep. It was ten in the morning, surely time that respectable people—hearing herself think it, gente per bene , she felt as though she were channeling her grandmother’s voice—would be up and about, off to the office, off to school, busy, doing, working.
    Caterina, a victim of the work ethic, had always thought she must be a throwback to some northern European invader, a blond-haired Goth whose genetically fueled lust for industry had lain dormant for generations, centuries, only to burst into bloom with the birth of the last child of Marco Pellegrini and Margherita Rossi. How else explain the atavistic desire for serious work that had driven her even when she was a child? How else explain her response when once offered a job as a city counselor for music education by the mayor, an old friend of her father? She saw no sense in diverting money from one school to another, nor in overseeing music