The Jewels of Paradise by Donna Leon Read Free Book Online Page A

waters. To escape this fantasy, she put her hand on Roseanna’s arm and said, “Believe me. I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
    “ Ma, ti xe Venexiana ?” Roseanna asked, exaggerating the pronunciation of the dialect words.
    Caterina nodded; she had been away from home so long that Italian now came more easily to her than did the language she had heard at home as a child, but still dialect was the language of her bones.
    “You’re Venetian and you don’t know anything about those two?” she asked, leading Caterina away from the idea of treasure to, presumably, the two cousins.
    “The usurer and the man with the fleet of water taxis who has almost no income?” Caterina said, and Roseanna gave her a look that was the equivalent of a stamp in her passport. To know that much about them was to be Venetian.
    “What else do you know?” she asked Caterina.
    “That Stievani’s sons and nephews drive the taxis. And make a fortune. All undeclared, of course.”
    “And Scapinelli?”
    “That he’s a convicted usurer but still works in the shops of his sons. Who are not angels, either.”
    Roseanna considered all of this for some time and asked, moving even further away from any mention of treasure, “Is your mother Margherita Rossi?”
    “Yes.”
    “And her father played in the Fenice orchestra?”
    “Yes. Violin.”
    “Then I know your family,” Roseanna said and sighed. “Your grandfather used to give my father opera tickets.” She did not sound at all pleased at the memory, or perhaps her displeasure resulted from the obligations imposed upon her by that memory.
    Caterina had the sense to remain quiet and wait and allow Roseanna to decide the order in which to tell things. “They’re very bad men,” Roseanna said and then added, by way of explication, “They come of bad families. One side was originally from Castelfranco and the other’s from Padova, I think. But they’ve been here in the city for generations. Greed’s in their bones.”
    Suddenly tired of what sounded like melodrama and overcome with impatience, Caterina said, “And what about treasure? Where does that come from?”
    “No one knows,” Roseanna said.
    “Does anyone know where it is?” Caterina asked.
    Roseanna shook her head and surprised Caterina by suddenly getting to her feet. “Let’s go get a coffee,” she said, and headed for the door without bothering to wait and see if the other woman followed her.
    Outside, Caterina stopped in the calle , waiting for Roseanna to choose the direction. It had been years since she had been in this part of the city, so she had no idea which bars still served decent coffee.
    Roseanna stood for a moment, moving her head from side to side, much in the manner of a hunting dog testing the air for the temperature or passing prey. “Come on,” she finally said, turning to the right and, at the first corner, right again. “We can go to that place in Campo Santa Maria Formosa.”
    There were two of them, Caterina remembered, the one with the outside benches that remained in place until the really cold weather arrived and the one opposite it, along the canal, that she had been told—and thereafter always believed—had once been the room where the bodies of the dead in the parish were kept before being taken out to the cemetery on San Michele.
    They walked down Ruga Giuffa, making small talk, admiring this or that, pointing to a perfume they had once tried but got tired of. Because they were Venetian, they also commented on the shops that were gone and what had come after them: the wonderful place that sold bathroom fixtures replaced by the cheapest of fake-leather bags and belts.
    After crossing the bridge, Roseanna continued straight across the campo, to Caterina’s relief avoiding the bar alongside the canal. In front of the other bar, Roseanna stopped and asked, “Inside or outside?” This time, it was Caterina who tested the temperature before saying, “Inside, I’m