The Jewels of Paradise by Donna Leon

Author:Donna Leon
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780802120649
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

SHE MADE NO MENTION OF THE MAN AT DINNER, NOT WANTING to alarm her parents but also not wanting to alarm herself. He had done nothing to menace her, had not even spoken to her, yet he had unsettled her and, she admitted to herself while trying to pay attention to a story her mother was telling, had frightened her. The city was a safe island in a world that seemed to be going increasingly off its axis; to read the papers was to fear that some infection was abroad. She returned her attention to her mother’s story, and to her food. Homemade polenta made from grain sent to her father by an old friend who still grew corn in Friuli. The rabbit came from Bisiol, where her mother had been buying rabbit for twenty years. The artichokes were from Sant’Erasmo; her mother had recently joined a cooperative that delivered a basket of vegetables and fruit to the house twice a week. The purchaser had no choice about what was delivered: it was what was in season, and it was organic.

Her mother had complained about never having eaten so many apples in her life, but when Caterina ate one of them, cooked in red wine and covered with whipped cream, she would gladly have signed her mother up for another two months of apples. They talked of many things: her father’s work, her mother’s friends, her sisters’ marriages, her nieces and nephews. Caterina wondered, should it happen that she someday had an estate to leave, whether she would be happy to leave it—in the event of her not having husband or children—to her nieces and nephews? They were only children now but who knew what they would become as adults?

As her parents continued to talk and she continued to half listen to them, she thought about Steffani. He had passed most of his life in Germany, going back to Italy only occasionally and usually for fairly short periods. How much had he seen of his relatives or their children? Had he even seen them, known them, tossed them in the air and played with them and sung his songs to them? And the cousins, these men who descended from the children’s children of his cousins, with what right did they stake a claim on his papers and estate, and where had the idea of a “treasure” come from? No one had explained that to her. The only reference she’d found to his estate mentioned that, after his creditors had been paid, there remained “2,029 florins, some papers, some relics, medals, and music.” It was that “and music” that hit her with force. Exclude that and the man had lived seventy-four years: some papers, some money, some relics, and some medals. Treasure?

“Where did we all get the idea that your great-grandfather lost everything at the casinò?” she surprised her father by asking. Both her parents stared at her, but neither of them asked her if she had been paying attention to what they were saying, so obvious was it that she had not.

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