In the previous installment, the Venetian vacation has run into a snag and James Newhouse suggests everybody should visit his villa in the Berici Hills. It's only about 50 miles away and a delightful country get-away. After LauraLynn suggests a break in Padua to see the Giotto frescoes from c.1300, they arrive at Newhouse's Villa Venticelli or "House of the Breezes." Once there, Kerr meets two of the Italian branch of Vector's "Watchers," undercover agents who look after Toni's safety.
Kerr decides to give in and explore nearby Legnago, the birthplace of Antonio Salieri, along with Cameron and Toni. While looking for some undiscovered letters that might shed some light on Salieri's relationship to Mozart and the original plans for Cosí fan tutte, they find some letters from a teenager named Benedetto Speranzani who's just been apprenticed to Salieri around the time Mozart wrote his opera. That's when Tom Purdue calls Kerr from Maine: something appears to be wrong, but he doesn't want to talk about it over the phone.
= = = = = = =
CHAPTER 2
It was a shame to leave the Veneto behind, with the sun shining brilliantly each morning, everything turning into beautiful springtime. The garden at the Villa Venticelli burst with new plants blossoming every day. It was, as Vexilla rhapsodized, “a riot of sunshine, color, and fresh air,” delightful even when compared to her little bungalow. I admit I didn't miss Venice that much, picturesque to visit, a great place to relax if the conditions were right. But much of our time there, conditions weren't right, and moods wore quickly. Never used to life as a tourist in the past, even as a child, whatever I'd planned ended up cramming two weeks' sight-seeing into one, which never allowed time for simple relaxation and enjoyment. It became a further “luxuriation” of my retirement to feel so perfectly unscripted, time unconfined. So, naturally, it had to end.
Once Tom had asked me and I realized his saying it was okay to put it off was merely being polite, there was nothing to do but make preparations to return to America – briefly. It shouldn't take long to find out what it was Tom needed, whatever it was only I could help him with. Why couldn't I take a week, then come back to rejoin everyone at the villa and resume our interrupted Italian idyll? A visit to Tom in Maine would become a vacation within a vacation.
Initially, Cameron and I had gone to England to honor my promise to Frieda, looking after her heir Toni, and stayed on as a kind of “musical governess,” part of the Phlaumix Court household. Already family friends, we'd both become part of the general entourage and accompanied LauraLynn and Burnson on one outing after another. As for those other responsibilities, we realized we could leave Toni in the capable hands of the Fontanas, Sandrina and Rafano, who'd continue to look after her safety and report to Vector as needed.
Alone with Rafano – Sebastiano Fontana in real life (at least, I assume that was his real name) – driving to the airport, we knew there was no up-date yet on that threat Vector reported earlier. There was always the possibility it had been a false alarm, vague potentiality, but these days one couldn't be too sure.
A year ago, I would never have imagined how my life would change. Last summer, Frieda's funeral led unexpectedly to a three-month stay in England (Toni's “first semester”), and now Burnson's heart attack intruded on our second semester's visit with its subsequent recuperation that stretched across Provençe, Venice, and these beautiful hills south of Verona. Who imagined I'd be living a life of such leisure, a private instructor to the daughter of a wealthy aristocratic family? And now, a holiday further interrupted, I was on my way to Maine.
But then six months ago, I couldn't imagine rescuing my friend Tom Purdue from the nefarious grasp of either SHMRG, that villainous music-licensing company, or the Aficionati, a secret society of intellectual musical extremists. If Tom, isolated in his Maine woods, needed help while he recovered from that awful stroke, I could only imagine why.
Plus now I'd found myself on a musicological adventure, whatever role these red-headed Ciapollos had played, not to mention the timing; plus the still-vague threat against Toni and now Tom's sudden call for help? It struck me as a lot of coincidences for someone who didn't like to believe in coincidences, but here I was...
Before we left, I'd called an acquaintance I'd met years ago in Boston, a musicologist at Vienna's major university, Arcangelo Collegnano. I needed to pick his brain about backstage politics in the late-18th Century.
“Ever since childhood, Mozart, trained by his over-protective father, Leopold,” I told Cameron and Toni, “imagined if he didn't get what he wanted, somebody's plotting against him behind his back out of professional jealousy.” An uncomfortable by-product of Shaffer's play (and, more, Milos Forman's film) Amadeus was the possibility Mozart could've been a spoiled brat.
Cameron wondered what constituted a motive for murder. “Wasn't fear he might be replaced enough for Salieri to eliminate the competition?” That was the age-old motive touted by every conspiracy theorist in Classical Music.
“No, Mozart was an outsider and the Emperor wasn't likely to replace Salieri with him, given how the court hierarchy worked. He'd have to be mighty pissed with Salieri to want to replace him.”
“Because he wasn't in the bureaucratic protocol to receive that many Imperial commissions? Did Salieri think Mozart was that much better?”
“It's possible Salieri thought the Emperor thought that. Salieri's job was to write and produce so many new operas per season. Ones he didn't have time to compose, he'd farm out to his assistants, a whole staff of composers working under him. Salieri was the boss and he made the decisions about who got what.
“Besides,” I continued while waiting for Collegnano's secretary to complete the call, “this was all about the opera house, nothing more. There would've been no rivalry if the Emperor wanted Mozart to write symphonies.”
Collegnano made his reputation bashing anyone who supported the theory Salieri murdered Mozart, partly because he himself grew up not far from Legnago and considered himself the loyal defender of his fellow home-town boy. When we met, we were guest lecturers at this musicology conference: he was already an expert in late-18th Century Viennese opera.
“I remember you said something about him once,” Cameron said as he packed his suitcase for our flight the next day. “I forget, but I'm pretty sure you'd mentioned there were 'back-stage politics' then.”
“Oh, that was years ago,” I said. “He was incensed originally I'd tried to get a paper published in 'Musicology Today,' since my degrees were 'only' in composition, not musicology. I'm sure he's forgotten.”
There was a click and I heard the clipped woodenness of Professor Collegnano asking in English “from whom is this call?”
Judging from his tone of voice after I introduced myself, I'd either interrupted him or he didn't remember me – or both – so I skipped over whatever familiarity we'd once shared before he'd become famous. There was no need for small talk, he was a busy man, and impatient at that, doubtless elbow-deep in dusty manuscripts. But if anybody would know whatever happened to a young composer full of dreams for a great future named Benedetto Speranzani, I figured it would be Professor Arcangelo Collegnano, and so I plunged ahead.
“I've recently run across some letters from a young man lately arrived in Vienna as a hand-picked apprentice to Antonio Salieri, telling his family about his life at the Imperial court and the opera. Apparently his family knew Salieri's family, a sister and some cousins, I believe. The letters were dated between 1787 and 1789.”
Still, the impatience and irritation remained in his voice. “Yes, Salieri had many apprentices and assistants over the years. Your question...?”
“The family's name is Speranzani, bakers near Legnago's cathedral. The boy's is Benedetto. I wondered if you know of any records...?”
He said Braunbehrens mentioned an apprentice from Legnago but didn't include his name.
“Have you checked John Rice's book on Salieri and opera? No? You should. Other than mine, it's one of the best. But I don't recall he'd ever mentioned a name remotely like Benedetto Speranzani.”
When he and his colleagues, he continued as if lecturing a beginner's survey class in Musicology, rattled off the names of popular composers from the Classical Era – “popular” in the context of contemporary accounts – he realized most of them, if not all of them beyond Mozart and Haydn, were unfamiliar to the general audience today.
“It's unlikely any typical American music-lover ever heard an opera by Josef Weigl or knew anything of Paisiello beyond the fact he wrote an opera some populist claptrap by Rossini obliterated from the repertoire.
“Still,” he continued, as if gazing off into the distance he envisioned some future paper on 'The Operas of Benedetto Speranzani,' “it is, you must admit, a wonderful name, so entirely memorable, so... redolent. I'd imagine to see a name like that on some list with otherwise lesser-known composers, it would immediately pique the curiosity.”
There was a long drawn-out silence as if perhaps he were thinking. “I would have to check some of the other libraries in Vienna who might have information about those countless, mostly forgotten composers. Even the Great Salieri's students were not guaranteed glorious careers in the best opera houses, no matter how much they wrote. If not Vienna or Prague or maybe Munich, perhaps he was a Kapellmeister in Dörfchensburg, for all we know,” he chuckled. “That would be like someone today teaching at some insignificant New England college.”
So, he did remember who I was... “Perhaps he didn't become a successful opera composer or even a composer at all. If he'd been one of Salieri's apprentices around the time of Cosí, I wondered if there's any record of any other relationships, working ones or friendly ones, with others at the Opera – like daPonte?”
“Tell me, Herr Kerr, where is it that you have found these letters?”
Cautious to guard my secret, I only said how I'd stumbled on them quite by accident. “You know how it is...”
There was a ping-like beep on the line and I could hear the professor's voice cut out for maybe ten seconds.
When Collegnano returned, he said without any concern for rudeness over ending the call, “Excuse me, I have to take this.”
“Should I wait, or...” I started to ask, but the line went dead.
While, no, I'd never heard a complete opera by Josef Weigl – who did become Salieri's successor at the Imperial opera house – or knew little more beyond Paisiello's Barber of Seville losing out to Rossini's, it was difficult to ignore Collegnano's obvious sneer about insignificant little New England colleges like the one where I'd once taught. Since he was clearly going to be little help, I decided to pursue the daPonte side of the equation, hoping to find some connection between him and Speranzani, starting with his time in Sunbury. This was all based on a fairly wild conjecture that, if young Benedetto was Salieri's apprentice, he would have known daPonte, perhaps as a result of their collaborations on various projects of varying success. What were the chances, after 1792 when daPonte, estranged from Salieri, left Vienna, they might've remained friends and even, perhaps, correspondents?
If I remembered from reading his memoirs years ago, daPonte ended up in this sleepy little frontier town in Central Pennsylvania in 1811 only because his wife's family had, for whatever reason, settled there. That Sunburians were in need of cultural enlightenment with a desire to learn Italian seemed, on his part, a bit naïve. Instead he set up a grocery store with a still in the back shed, providing a more popular form of enlightenment, which for a period of time proved to be, on occasion, fairly successful.
The young woman answering the historical society's phone sounded confused when I wasn't interested in the genealogical records, apparently her specialty, and even more confused when I asked about papers belonging to Lorenzo daPonte. The person who could help me, she said, was on vacation for another week or so: she was only a substitute.
She'd no doubt found Reference Desk bullet points and rattled off how he'd been the librettist for three of Mozart's operas before I was able to stop her, already aware of his biographical summary.
“What I'm wondering,” once I'd interrupted her, “is if your society there has a collection that might include papers of daPonte's, particularly letters and specifically ones he'd received from Vienna mentioning Mozart or Salieri.”
“Who? You mean, wait – the guy who killed Mozart? I saw that movie – it was really cool! No, we don't, sorry...”
While e-mail might've taken forever to get a response if whoever'd check it was on vacation, a phone call proved disappointing; but without further help likely, I was glad we hadn't made the drive. In the meantime, I'd continue with a little more research here and maybe get back to them in a few weeks.
Legnago's little bookstore had French, German and of course Italian editions of Rodney Bolt's relatively recent daPonte biography entitled The Librettist of Venice (though he'd spent little of his career as a librettist there). The fairly ratty paperback copy of some anonymous 1929 edition of Lorenzo daPonte's Memoirs, published sometime in the early-1950s, was the only one they had in stock in English, but it might prove useful. I had a copy at home, but a cheap used edition wouldn't go amiss for our flight instead of Sartor resartus.
It had been years since I'd read Braunbehrens' 1990s biography of Salieri, provocatively retitled for the English edition The Maligned Master, but even finding a used copy in stock on-line was proving a challenge. The only copies in the store were Italian translations but some English ones might be arriving in a week or two.
I'd have to order John Rice's epic, Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera, on-line. It's always possible he'd mention someone like Speranzani. Too heavy to drag around in my luggage anyway, it'll have to wait.
Bumping into walls and roadblocks was a frequent experience for musicologists, setting them back and forcing them to redefine their searches, so I decided to broaden my possibilities and check with another old friend. I only had an e-mail address, no phone number, for Anton Vole, a resident research librarian at the Doylestown Historical Society.
“Interesting quest you are on,” came his precisely worded response only minutes later. “But, if I might ask, what makes you think Mozart's librettist could have any connection with our fair city of Doylestown?”
It wasn't exactly an unforeseen question, and I could imagine he thought I was enjoying Italy perhaps a little too much, seeing so much history around me my mind started imagining the wildest possibilities. He also knew, working where he did, how some of the most unexpected things showed up in the most unexpected places.
To ask Vole a simple question often produced a lengthy response full of complex sentences and intricate connections pursuing numerous possibilities, like something from a Henry James novel, well thought out but surprisingly spontaneous. He wrote everything out in full, like those short interstitial phrases “by the way” and even “in case you were wondering.” No trendy internet abbreviations for him, not even “D'town” for Doylestown – though he did use DHS for the Doylestown Historical Society. “You never know: someone might think you mean Downingtown just down the road.”
“Perhaps,” I suggested, “since daPonte was a merchant traveling between Sunbury and Philadelphia for his supplies and he couldn't make it all in one day, did he stay at inns or maybe with friends? Might he have left some papers or letters with someone that could have ended up, years later, in some museum's bequest?”
Vole wrote back “we are undergoing an intense reorganization at the moment, attempting to digitize as many files as we can. A tedious process at best – eventually it will make such searches considerably easier.”
Talk about needles and haystacks, and, for that matter, haystacks as numerous as historical societies scattered all across the Philadelphia suburbs.
“Meanwhile, I'll dig around,” he added, “see what I can find, if anything.”
“I'm still in Italy but we're leaving for America tomorrow, with any luck. I'll stop by in a couple days. Ciao!”
I looked out the window of the plane, Venice's lagoon behind us as the land ahead changed gradually into Alpine foothills – we connected with Frankfort on the Rhine rather than fly across southern France – and realized I had more than enough hours to be confined to a seat in second class with my usual anxieties. Cameron, who'd plugged his headphones into the latest Screaming Dead Lawn Zombies album, let me have the window seat so I could occupy my mind with thoughts other than worries generated by Tom's call.
The unexpected side-trip to Venice had been the fulfillment of a long-postponed childhood dream, a disappointment not to connect with J.P.. A side-trip to Maine, now, equally unexpected, evoked summertime memories of childhood visits with Rob Sullivan when I'd first met his cousin LauraLynn at the family vacation home on their island off the coast.
Instead, I re-focused on what likelihood any letters between Mozart and daPonte, written while they worked on Cosí, much less between daPonte and Salieri, ever existed. Did any exist outside the usual published collections? Wasn't Cameron right when he suggested they wouldn't need to write letters, meeting almost daily over details of the creative process? But what about letters to someone else – Mozart writing to Constanze, off at some spa, crowing about Salieri's failure with Cosí? Did daPonte confess to some absent friend about tensions between him and Salieri?
What were the chances, I wondered, drilling further down into the doldrums, I'd find anything with Mozart's name on it that hasn't already surfaced and been hauled off to some museum or private collection? Because it was not just musicologists looking to broaden our knowledge of the past trawling through dusty boxes in out-of-the-way attics. There was an increasingly active underground network of collectors seeking the rarest memorabilia who would do anything possible to purchase them, people who merely wanted to look at them and say “I own this!”
If my letters mentioned Salieri by name, couldn't that demand a higher monetary price on the Black Market than mentioning daPonte's? As for Benedetto Speranzani's name, on its own, who would give a damn? Was it enough to mention somebody famous in it regardless who signed it, regardless what its true historical value would be?
Little is known, as far as the evidence shows, about the time Mozart spent working on daPonte's libretto, Cosí fan tutte, between the autumn of 1789 and his mentioning the New Year's Eve rehearsal. There is also Constanze's curiously contradictory remark made years later to the Novellos with news of Salieri's initial, if failed, involvement. The famous story about this bit of court gossip the Emperor wanted Mozart to set to music has largely been discredited. But which part: his suggesting the plot – or wanting Mozart to set it?
“What if...?” isn't likely to stand up in a musicological court of law, despite how conjecture has already injured Salieri's reputation, but my less than literal mind often goes to that “what if” option. Is it possible to think how things might have gone would yield some evidence that might prove, in fact, it had?
Could it give me an angle on someone's frame of mind, like a detective trying to figure out a suspect's motive which fires up the Little Gray Cells and reveals – ta-dah! – the Smoking Gun? Could Benedetto Speranzani have grown up to become the Missing Link between Mozart and Salieri that proves Salieri's innocence – or guilt?
Then of course there's always the coincidental involvement over time of at least three different Ciapollos pointing me in this direction. How could I ever explain all that to anyone with a straight face?
Mozart's letter to Puchberg has been quoted in every attack on Salieri making him the likely suspect behind Mozart's early death, sufficient proof of a rivalry that would eventually lead to claims of murder. Anyone who took Peter Shaffer's play or the movie based on it seriously, Salieri the Villain, would immediately believe these implications. This passage suggests there were serious “plots” against Mozart and his new opera, and they were coming from the Imperial Kapellmeister. What did Mozart tell Puchberg? What were Salieri and his minions up to?
But only a week before, Salieri had arranged the premiere of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet for the Tonkünstlersozietät he was president of, another one of his prestigious positions ensuring him considerable political power in Vienna. Does the Puchberg Letter prove Salieri's rivalry was real and potentially dangerous, or does it prove Mozart was one paranoid dude?
It would depend, I think, on the reader's imagination, filling in the inferences: had Salieri tried inflaming the rivalry between singers (not too hard to do given the two divas in the leading roles)? Or, for the more over-imaginative mind, had he tried dropping a piano on Mozart as he left the theater one night?
What exactly was behind that single sentence certainly tantalizes the imagination: “I will tell you about Salieri's plots, which, however, have completely failed already.” What had the Kapellmeister tried? How did Mozart subvert them?
In true cliff-hanger fashion, the letter – at least that famous quotation – ends there. That's hardly enough evidence in court to convict a criminal even of intent, but it floats prominently through every conspiracy theory. Assuming there were plots (plural), then what kind: hindrances to disrupt rehearsals, delay the premiere, annoy the Emperor – but death threats?
But there's also the fact a lot of time passed between New Year's Eve and Cosí's premiere in January of 1790, and Mozart's tragic death after a brief illness in early December of 1791.
Shaffer overlooks the fact Joseph II died shortly after Cosí's premiere (he never saw it), Salieri eventually resigned from the Opera and Mozart, out-of-favor with the new emperor, didn't even bother with the vacancy. There's little drama if Leopold II's lack of interest in the arts, especially anything like “New Music,” scuttled Salieri's principle motive.
For the rest of what proved an extremely long flight, blessedly unmemorable given my general discomfort if not fear of flying, I alternated between daPonte's Memoirs and staring out the window deep in thought. These thoughts wandered in and out of consciousness like a fugue where Salieri's presence and Speranzani's potential served as alternating subjects. Different contrasting countersubjects provided certain levels of bewildering variety – Collegnano, the Three Carlos, at least five Ciapollos, even the Two Fontanas. Through all this cacophonous counterpoint, Cameron slept peacefully in the seat beside me.
It was the wildest goose I could imagine chasing at the moment, how well Lorenzo daPonte knew one of Salieri's students and if they had remained correspondents even if they ever had become friends. Around every corner in Legnano, wherever you looked, you'd see Salieri but you'd never get any closer – and so it continued.
Back in 2006 or so, when it first came out, I'd bought Bolt's biography of Lorenzo daPonte, born Emanuel Conegliano, but read only certain parts of it, admittedly buying it for my reference library. After all, I'd accumulated over the years numerous books about Mozart, hadn't I, so it seemed worth filling out the collection. But I'd never felt the urge to invest in any of the Salieri biographies which had become available in the 1990s. Besides, Collegnano's 1,000-page Antonio Salieri and His Times was not available in English.
I don't think I'd ever read daPonte's Memoirs from beginning to end, paging through, dipping into it occasionally when after some specific information, but having very little reason to do so over the years. There were many things, I gathered, given the nature of memoirs, he'd overlooked so as not to make himself look bad. A poor Jewish family, the Coneglianos converted to Catholicism, sent the newly baptized Lorenzo off to school to become a priest. His life was plagued by scandals with women, gambling debts, and bad investments.
But it struck me as odd he never described his meeting Mozart for the first time, given his biggest claim to fame and, at least in hindsight, the apex of his life and career. Billing himself as “Librettist to the Great Mozart,” he never mentioned Mozart's death or his reaction to it. Isn't that odd?
The evening we'd returned to the villa from our little trip to Legnago, walking the streets Salieri walked as a child, I ran a few on-line searches on Benedetto Speranzani's name and found nothing. There was not a byte of proof he'd ever existed either as a composer or a line in a baptistry record. Yet I'd held his letters in my hands, a few paper scraps in a library located near where he'd once lived. What were his hopes when, like his mentor, he left town for Vienna?
How would we, today, regard Salieri's music if Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart never existed or had, like several siblings, died in infancy? Would he be, by default, one of the Great Composers of Classical Music? Could Speranzani, if he'd been able to realize his dreams, have become famous like other Salieri pupils, even Schubert or Beethoven?
Multiply the likes of Salieri, someone who was prolific, popular and powerful in his time, whose music is largely forgotten today, by the thousands of other composers whose names, like Speranzani's, aren't even footnotes, and what hope do any of us have to become part of that infinitesimal percentage whose struggles are rewarded by posterity?
As we flew over the vast, boring expanse of the Atlantic, I found myself begin to doze off, finally giving in, and half-expected my dreams to be filled with plots concocted by fellow underachievers.
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
Our neighbor Mrs. Quigley was surprised to hear from us about “coming home” so soon – Cameron agreed we should check in with her every other week with an e-mail and a few attached photos so she'd feel we hadn't forgotten her or weren't grateful for her caring for the cats and checking on the house. She'd written back with a “full report” on how the cats were doing, not that I believed for one instant they missed either of us as long as someone fed them and petted them. While we make a point of never mentioning Toni, it wasn't until the Berici Hills I wondered if whatever chatter Vector heard wasn't the result of someone tracking us through these otherwise uninformative e-mails. Could hackers from the Guidonian Hand have traced our exact location and assumed wherever we were, Toni was likely to be?
Once we'd left Phlaumix Court, Cameron ran routine security sweeps of both our phones and laptops, though I usually let him take care of Mrs. Quigley's e-mails along with the bills and other business. It was more likely, keeping an eye on my house on Conan Drive, the Hand had hacked into Mrs. Quigley's computer. The possibility they'd confront her to get information regarding our whereabouts was disconcerting; putting her life in danger, cause for alarm. In that regard, I'd contacted Agent Bond of the IMP just in case.
There was no way to tell who might be tracking us and hatching some plan that got back to the Watchers, and it's possible it might not involve Toni and the Hand at all. Our initial contact with the Hand, an organization that went back two centuries, had been through SHMRG, a more recent entity. Since the International Music Police began monitoring SHMRG's activities years ago, I thought Agent Bond – Sarah Bond – should know about this. She informed me Captain Ritard of the New York Office was “already aware.”
But aware of what, she wouldn't say, beyond I should contact him directly with any “concerns” about the on-going SHMRG investigation. “There are new developments since their former CEO N. Ron Steele's latest disappearance.” And like any modern corporation, SHMRG was buying up the competition to turn them into newly re-organized subsidiaries – like the Hand.
So instead of an e-mail, this time I called Mrs. Quigley, much to her surprise and, alas, delight – for there was nothing she liked more than a nice, friendly and, equally alas, lengthy conversation – telling her without further explanation we would be home late the next evening but I'd contact her again the next morning.
“It'll only be for a day – we'll leave almost immediately for Maine and...”
“Oh, is this to visit your friend, Dr. Purdue?” she interrupted. “How's he...”
“I'll tell you tomorrow about...”
“That's fine, dear.”
Mrs. Quigley lived there long before I'd bought the house across the street, immediately taking an interest in her new neighbor. Her husband, a bank manager at Doylestown National named Hudson Quigley, had died two years later, not long after he'd retired. She was most curious when Cameron moved in. “You'd never mentioned a nephew!”
As we got out of the taxi, I saw her look through her drapes, intent on making sure it was us. She came out on her porch, waving; we waved back, then went inside. The mail was neatly stacked inside the vestibule, piles for bills, personal correspondence, and presumed junk mail, by far the largest.
There was a large advertising flier, the most annoying kind of trash, from something called “The Allegro Conservatory” addressed to Cameron. “Be the Next Mozart!”, he read with a chuckle, then tossed it aside.
I didn't bother with the mail beyond the one piece of “personal correspondence,” a single letter with no return address but postmarked from Paris two weeks ago. That one, I opened and read immediately. It was a two-page handwritten note from J.P., telling me of Henry's death, and included the obituary from Venice's English newspaper. But now I had a direct street address and phone number where I would reach him later, checking the time difference. Maybe once we returned to Italy in a couple weeks, he'd be back.
I quickly inspected the house and half-expected to find it ransacked by agents from the Hand looking for who knew what, but instead the place was far more tidy than when we'd left it. Since we'd emptied the refrigerator and freezer before our trip, Cameron suggested a quick run to grab some dinner, preferably Chinese.
But instead of take-out, I suggested a real dinner, despite my jet-lag – it never failed, whichever direction we'd been flying in – and since we were both feeling voracious, I thought Trouvère's the logical choice. We often ate there after a concert and the place was blessedly quiet, their menu a wide selection always excellently prepared.
Cameron figured I'd doze off mid-meal or keel over face-down in the dessert, so I promised he could have my dessert. We were no sooner seated than my phone rang: J.P., calling from Paris!
“J.P.! It must be the middle of the night in Paris – what are you doing awake so late? Is everything okay?”
He laughed. “Just insomnia. I hope I didn't wake you up this late?”
J.P. explained he'd just received my message forwarded from his neighbor in Venice. “Signora Prestoli, a good watch-dog – not so presto.”
“I'd just found your letter – we arrived home earlier tonight – there it was. My neighbor – we call her 'Mistress Quickly' – saw no name on the return address and decided not to forward it – figures...”
“So does this mean you're home for good now, I've missed you on your one visit to Venice? What bad timing!”
I explained the anticipated plan was to return shortly and resume our holiday. “For now, we're here to visit Tom Purdue.”
“That sounds unexpected – everything okay?”
“Hard to say...”
“Tell him I said hello!”
J.P. admitted his cousins in Paris had long begun to wear him out if they weren't already tired of him themselves, but he'd eventually have to face his return to Venice and living alone. Paris had always been a magical place for him when he was young; now, the social activity had lost its charm. The family worked diligently to keep his spirits up – “it was quite fatiguing” – plus, he had few friends left there, anymore. Soon it became clear they wanted to get back to their lives, too.
It wasn't like he'd be lonely – he and Henry had many friends nearby – but the empty house was full of memories. “Venice is beautiful, too,” he admitted, “and I enjoy simply walking around, observing. Maybe you can bring Tom over and visit for a week or two? It would be good to see you both.”
While I explained Tom wasn't quite ready to travel any time soon, Cameron had been trying hard to get my attention, the waiter gesturing he could come back later when I'd finished my call. I pointed at the menu – my usual, the chicken paillard á la pecanois – then invited J.P. to join us for dinner.
“It's the closest thing to a real French restaurant we have in Doylestown,” I laughed, “not that I'd know the difference.”
He apologized for intruding but I promised to call him back, maybe tomorrow.
While we waited for our entrees – I'd been disappointed to learn his favorite “chicken paillard” wasn't named for the once-ubiquitous conductor of Baroque music, Jean-François Paillard: the term meant “pounded into a thin cutlet” – I told Cameron some of the more intriguing, potentially relevant but less salient biographic details daPonte had mentioned in his Memoirs.
There'd been an accident near “Ourvigsbourg” on the way back to Sunbury, and another one, the same year, in “La Trappe.” “This time, he said he was riding in a coach and seriously injured.”
Cameron, meanwhile, began tapping into his phone as I continued, no doubt “googling.”
“They took him back to a friend's, to Benjamin Barton's where he convalesced for some time – but who was Benjamin Barton?”
“Trappe,” Cameron announced, “is about 25 miles southwest of here and Barton was a doctor, a leader of Philadelphia's intellectual community!”
“Aha!” I said, a little too loud for the rest of the restaurant patrons to ignore, several looking over toward us. It was then I noticed someone near the bar get up to leave. It was the checked suit I noticed first, before I saw the reddish hair, the hooked nose, the pale complexion: Ciapollo!
The man stuffed something into an inside pocket and strutted for the door, but Cameron saw him, too, in full profile.
“My God, you're right,” he said, “they're everywhere!”
We continued eating in silence.
As we drove home from Trouvère's before lethargy finally got the better of me, I resumed my interrupted trend of thought. “Suppose daPonte had a letter with him and lost it in the accident?”
“Suppose,” Cameron picked it up, “someone found it later and, no parlo l'Italiano, he'd thrown it away – or maybe kept it?”
“Where does one look for a letter lost two hundred years ago? The coach company's Lost & Found? A nearby farmer's attic? Maybe he'd left it at Barton's place in Philadelphia – you never know...”
“Or,” Cameron added, shrugging his shoulders as he parked the car, “maybe it was just ground into the mud, lost forever?”
“Ugh...” It was not a pleasant thought, considering. I refused to be defeated.
“Sounds more like an exercise in historical fiction.”
Speaking of which, what's another Ciapollo doing here?
“Maybe Mr. Vole's found something...?”
If yet another Ciapollo has surfaced in America, they must be following me. Cameron and I agreed not to discuss anything related to Salieri, the daPonte letter, or especially Toni while in the house. Did someone, our latest Ciapollonian, slip into the house during our absence and plant a bug? Maybe Mrs. Quigley found it...
After a tediously diverting chat over morning coffee at Casa Quickly, visiting the cats – jet-lag or not, I felt hung over – we headed out on our anonymous errand, not mentioning the Doylestown Historical Society.
While the traffic was bad enough, finding someplace to park wasn't much better, but eventually we made it only to find “Mr. Vole was recently relocated to the archives at the Basker Hill Annex.” She gave us directions to “the Old Shoscombe Place” actually not far from Conan Drive, “walking distance” when I was younger.
The traffic hadn't improved with our trip back to the town's north side. “How annoying he'd said nothing about his location. Ironic I have to track him down while tracking down the daPonte letter!”
Cameron cautioned me about putting too much hope on “the alleged daPonte letter” since there's no clear indication one even exists.
The Old Shoscombe Place was a once impressive mansion, mostly overgrown shrubs with too much ivy climbing walls of blood-red brick. Its reclusive owner, the last of the Basker family, died recently without heirs.
There was a makeshift desk in the vestibule piled with boxes which young men in coveralls hauled off into the distance. When I asked where I'd find Mr. Vole, someone said he's with Norbert.
“Norbert?” Perhaps one of the society's board members. A young man pointed outside.
We followed a path around to the side.
It wasn't long before we found Anton and a huge black Labrador retriever nearly the size of a small pony. “Norbert?”
“Yes, in fact,” Vole said, smiling. “It's my turn for walkies this morning.”
Norbert was the last of the labs generations of Baskers had bred, his grizzled muzzle and weary eyes indicating advanced age. “He sort of came with the house. A good security system, you'd think.”
He would prove a challenge for any burglar to step over, that's true, but otherwise the dog didn't look terribly fierce.
As we walked around to the basement entrance, I asked Mr. Vole, “is this the closest historical society to the town of Trappe in Montgomery County?”
“I don't really know – funny you should ask.”
“Funny... – why is that?” I looked at Cameron who smiled and shrugged his shoulders as we followed Anton and Norbert inside.
“Well,” putting more kibble in Norbert's bowl, big enough to bathe an infant in, “last night, I'd run across something odd. Given the move, I wasn't sure I'd be able to find it, though.”
Norbert looked up and let out a most undog-like wheezy woof before dropping his head contentedly onto his blanket.
“Good boy!”
I looked around at all these piles, one box short of pure chaos.
“Then, there it was, on that very pile!” He had pointed to a wall of old boxes just behind Norbert's blanket.
“Browsing through catalogs,” he continued, “for something that might be associated with someone Italian – unusual for this area at the time, – led to a reference to some items which set off several light bulbs.”
He placed a crumbling cardboard box on his desk, carefully opening the flaps. I peered inside at the seemingly insignificant contents.
“This is just part of the Marie and Vaughan Trappe Bequest of 1843 which nobody ever really got around to examine.”
He lifted a delicate jewelry box, badly faded. “Take a look – at this!”
There's that thrill of discovery, especially when it seemed so illogical and unrealistic, given all the doubts and fears around you, when everything falls into place with the opening of a single, simple box. The fact your hunch was right, that something you didn't know before in fact exists, that answers some age-old question...? – “Priceless!” Maybe it's not earth-shattering to the world-at-large, but it's important to me, to know I may have helped find that answer. Now to follow it through, take it to the next step – such exhilaration!
Cameron long considered me a “homebody,” stranded within my comfort zone until these recent trips opened a wider tolerance for “adventure.” And more importantly, given my usual insecure complacency, spontaneous to boot – “adventure” indeed! This one may have ignited in Italy but it culminated right here in my own backyard, literally blocks down the street!
I could hardly wait till Anton would have the scans ready – he'd e-mail them to me while I was in Maine – and hopefully by then the copy of Speranzani's letters would arrive from Legnago. Rather than a dusty trail dragging on for several years, all this happened in a matter of a few short days!
This could well be the very thing that would make my name as a serious musicologist, for what it was worth. Or at least, a very lucky one – “eat your heart out, Arcangelo Collegnano!”
Mr. Vole, without benefit of Norbert, gave us a quick tour of the main floor of the old Basker Hill mansion with quick comments how the society would turn it into a research center. It seemed a huge investment, given the times, but the house came free, apparently with more than just a resident watchdog.
When Vole waved and headed back into the hallway toward his basement lair, I noticed another man had entered the vestibule. I froze in my tracks, grabbing Cameron's arm: the man from the restaurant!
The same red hair, sparse beard, weak eyes – weak chin, for that matter – pale complexion, and hooked nose from last night. The suit was nearly identical, too, with broad checks but a bluish color.
As I turned and tried walking nonchalantly out the door, I noticed he'd pulled out a phone and made a call.
= = = = = = =
©2022 by Dick Strawser for Thoughts on a Train.
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