The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt Read Free Book Online Page A

haphazardly, and several were unaccounted for.
     
     
    There was also the curious tale of the Fenice’s café. Officials had ordered the café shut down during renovation, but the café manager, Signora Annamaria Rosato, had begged her bosses to let her keep it open as a canteen for the workers. They had relented, telling her, “Just be careful.” So Signora Rosato set up her electric coffeemaker and her electric hot plate for making pasta. She moved this makeshift kitchen from room to room, staying out of the way of the renovation work as best she could. But since the fire had started in the Apollonian rooms, very close to the site of her operations of the moment, Signora Rosato and her coffeemaker became a media sensation. The police called her in for questioning as a suspect. They cleared her, but not before her unexpected notoriety had made her so resentful that she began suggesting names of other people she thought might be worth looking into as suspects—the workers who had used her stove on the afternoon of the fire, for example, and the conservators who had left powerful heat lamps aimed at wet patches of stucco overnight in order to dry them. All the people she fingered were brought in for questioning and later released.
     
     
    The prosecutors, despite having interviewed dozens of witnesses, admitted to the Gazzettino that at this point they did not know how the fire had started. Prosecutor Felice Casson appointed a panel of four experts to investigate the fire and told them to begin work immediately.
     
     
    One thing was already painfully clear, however: Neither of the two major evils confronting Venice could be blamed for the fire—not the rising sea level, which threatened to inundate the city at some unspecified time in the future, nor the overabundance of tourists, which was choking the life out of the city. There had been no high water and hardly any tourists in Venice on the night the Fenice burned. This time Venice had only itself to blame.
     
     
    According to the Gazzettino, there was to be a town meeting to discuss the Fenice later in the day. It would be held at the Ateneo Veneto, a monumental sixteenth-century palace on the opposite side of Campo San Fantin from the Fenice. The Ateneo Veneto had originally been the home of a black-hooded fraternal order dedicated to escorting condemned prisoners to the gallows and providing them with a decent burial. For the last two hundred years, however, it had served as the Academy of Letters and Sciences, the cultural Parnassus of Venice. Lectures and convocations of the highest literary and artistic significance were held in the ornate Great Hall on the ground floor. For an event merely to be scheduled at the Ateneo Veneto meant that the cultural elite of Venice considered it important.
     
     
    I went to Campo San Fantin half an hour before the meeting and found a somber gathering of Venetians filing past the Fenice in silent mourning. Two carabinieri, or policemen, stood guard in front, smartly dressed in dark blue suits with rakish red stripes along the trouser seams. They were smoking cigarettes. At first glance, the Fenice looked just as it always had—the formal portico, the Corinthian columns, the ornamental iron gates, the windows and balustrades—all completely intact. But of course this was just the façade, and façade was all there was. The Fenice had become a mask of itself. Behind the mask, the interior had been reduced to a pile of rubble.
     
     
    The crowd in front of the Fenice drifted across the campo to the Ateneo Veneto for the town meeting. The Great Hall was already filled to overflowing. People stood at the rear and along the sides of the room, while the speakers milled around nervously in front. The audience buzzed with conversation and conjecture.
     
     
    A woman standing near the door turned to another woman. “There are no accidents,” she said. “Just wait. You’ll see.” The other woman nodded in agreement. Two men