The Jewels of Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page B

anything.”
    “What?”
    “Don’t touch anything,” she repeated.
    The other woman looked at her with open curiosity. Then, “I don’t want the police here again,” she said with sudden energy.
    Caterina leaned forward to put her body closer to the shelves. “But look at it. Someone’s been through those papers.” Then, remembering no doubt what she had seen in the cinema, she asked, “Who else has a key to this room?”
    “I do. That’s all.”
    “Dottor Moretti gave me one to the building,” Caterina said, wondering how difficult it would be to get into this office. “No one else has one?” she asked and no sooner saw Roseanna’s expression than she realized she had gone too far. She tried to modify the effect by going on, as if naturally, “This must be a terrible shock for you, Roseanna. To have someone come in and do this.” Her tactic of thus excluding Roseanna herself as a possible suspect was as crude as it was obvious.
    Caterina ran through what she knew about the police. Their first suspects would be anyone with keys to the building. Or, learning that the disturbance—she didn’t even know if it had been a theft—concerned correspondence about centuries-old music and the men who wrote it, they would simply leave. That is, if they came in the first place.
    Using her most placatory tone, Caterina said, “You’re right, of course. This is nothing for the police.” That made them partners and equally complicit.
    “What’s missing?” Caterina moved back from the cabinet, as if to give physical evidence of her trust in Roseanna’s competence. Her sister Cinzia had been involved with an anthropologist for some years and had passed on to her sisters what she had learned from him about dominance displays in simians. Caterina thought of this as she moved back from the desk, leaving access to the cabinet entirely to Roseanna.
    The acting director leaned into the cabinet and gathered the files on each shelf into a stack, tapping papers back inside the folders out of which they projected. She put the first pile on the desk and beside them those from the shelf below. Beginning with the first pile, she opened each file and straightened the papers until she had them in an order she seemed to like, then did the same with those on the second pile.
    Next she went back to the top file on the first stack and began to page through the letters. Caterina, to disguise her impatience, went and studied the second portrait to see if there was a name printed at the bottom. Beside her, Roseanna methodically opened one file after another, fingering the papers in each before putting it down and taking up another one.
    Caterina returned her attention to the men with the wigs.
    “Caterina,” Roseanna said.
    “ Sì ?”
    “I don’t understand this,” she said hesitantly. Perhaps this was merely an expression of her surprise that anyone would have bothered to snoop around in the files of the Fondazione Musicale Italo-Tedesca.
    “What?”
    “Nothing seems to be missing.”

Four
    “W HAT?” C ATERINA ASKED, AMAZED THAT SOMEONE WOULD have gone to the trouble of breaking in and then not have taken anything. What she had seen did not suggest vandalism. Nothing had spilled out of the cabinet, nothing had been destroyed. There were signs of a hasty, careless search, nothing more.
    Roseanna gave her a manila folder. Neatly typed (yes, typed) on the flap was “Sartorio, Antonio, 1630–1680.”
    “What’s in it?” Caterina asked as she handed it back without opening it.
    “The letters we’ve received over the years concerning him,” Roseanna said, hefting it in her right hand, as if she could judge by the weight.
    “Everything seems to be here,” Roseanna said. “And in this one,” she added, passing another file to Caterina. “But I can check.”
    Caterina began to read the top letter in the file she held, which was in German and addressed to the director of the Foundation by title and not by name. The