by Donna Leon
“From what region, sir?” Vianello asked, pen poised over the page. The fact that he didn’t ask about the secretary was enough to tell Brunetti that word of her arrival had already spread.
“If she can do it, for the entire country. Also missing tourists.”
“You don’t like the idea of a prostitute, sir?”
Brunetti remembered that naked body, so terribly like his own. “No, it’s not a body anyone would pay to use.”
12
On Saturday morning, Brunetti accompanied his family to the train station, but it was a subdued group that got onto the number one vaporetto at the San Silvestro stop. Paola was angry that Brunetti would not leave what she had taken to calling “his transvestite” to come up to Bolzano at least for the first weekend of the vacation; Brunetti was angry that she wouldn’t understand. Raffaele regretted leaving the virginal charms of Sara Paganuzzi behind, although he took some comfort from the fact that they would be reunited in one week’s time—besides, until then, there would be fresh mush-rooms to hunt for in the woods. Chiara, as was so often the case, was entirely unselfish in her regret, for she wished that her father, who always worked too hard, could get away and have a real vacation.
Family etiquette dictated that everyone carry their own bag, but since Brunetti would be going only as far as Mestre, and hence had no bag, Paola took advantage of him to carry her large suitcase while she carried only her handbag and The Collected Letters of Henry James, a volume so formidable in size as to convince Brunetti that she wouldn’t have had time for him anyway. Because Brunetti carried Paola’s suitcase, the domino theory was immediately made manifest, and Chiara stuffed some of her books into her mother’s suitcase, thus leaving space in her own for Raffi’s second pair of mountain boots. Whereupon his mother insisted that he use that space to carry her copy of The Sacred Fount, having decided that this was the year she would finally have enough time to read it.
They all climbed into the same compartment of the 8:35, a train that would get Brunetti to Mestre in ten minutes and them to Bolzano in time for lunch. No one had much to say during the short trip across the laguna; Paola made sure he had the phone number of the hotel in his wallet, and Raffaele reminded him that this was the same train Sara was to take next Saturday, leaving Brunetti to wonder if he was supposed to carry her bag, too.
At Mestre, he kissed the children, and Paola walked down the corridor to the door with him. “I hope you can come up next weekend, Guido. Even better, that you get this settled and can come up even sooner.”
He smiled, but he didn’t want to tell her how unlikely that was; after all, they didn’t even know who the dead man was yet. He kissed her on both cheeks, got down from the train, and walked back toward the compartment where the children were. Chiara was already eating a peach. As he stood on the platform, gazing at them through the window, he saw Paola come back into the compartment and, almost without glancing at her, pull out a handkerchief and hand it to Chiara. The train began to move just as Chiara turned to wipe her mouth and, turning, saw him on the platform. Her face, half of it still gleaming with peach juice, lit up with pure delight and she leaped to the window. “Ciao, Papà, ciao, ciao,” she shouted over the sound of the engine. She stood on the seat of the train and leaned out, waving Paola’s handkerchief at him madly. He stood on the platform and waved until the tiny white flag of love disappeared in the distance.
When he got to Gallo’s office at the Mestre Questura, the sergeant met him at the door. “We’ve got someone coming out to take a look at the body,” he said with no prelude.
“Who? Why?”
“Your people had a call this morning. From a,” and here he looked down at a piece of paper in his hand, “from a Signora Mascari. Her husband is the director of the Venice office of the Bank of Verona. He’s been gone since Saturday.”
“That’s a week ago,” Brunetti said. “What’s taken her this long to notice he’s missing?”
“He was supposed to go on a business trip. To Messina. He left Sunday afternoon, and that’s the last she heard of him.”
“A week? She let a week go by before she called us?”
“I didn’t speak to her,” Gallo said, almost as if Brunetti had been accusing him of negligence.
“Who did?”
“I don’t know. All I have is a piece of paper that was put on my desk, telling me that she’s going to Umberto Primo this morning to take a look at him and hoped to get there by nine-thirty.”
The men exchanged a look; Gallo pushed up his sleeve and glanced at his watch.
“Yes,” Brunetti said. “Let’s go.”
There ensued a muddle that was almost cinematic in its idiocy. Their car found itself in heavy early-morning traffic; the driver decided to cut around it and come at the hospital from the rear, only to meet even heavier traffic, which got them to the hospital after Signora Mascari had not only identified the body as that of her husband, Leonardo, but had left in the same taxi that had brought her out from Venice, heading toward the Mestre Questura, where, she was told, the police would answer her questions.
All of this meant that Brunetti and Gallo got back to the Questura to find that Signora Mascari had been waiting for them for more than a quarter of an hour. She sat, upright and entirely alone, on a wooden bench in the corridor outside Gallo’s office. She was a woman whose dress and manner suggested, not that her youth had fled, but that it had never existed. Her suit, a midnight blue raw silk, was conservative in cut, the skirt a bit longer than was then fashionable. The color of the cloth contrasted sharply with her pallid skin.
She looked up as the two men approached, and Brunetti noticed that her hair was that standard red so popular with women of Paola’s age. She wore little makeup, and so he was able to see the small lines at the corners of the eyes and mouth, lines brought on either by age or worry, Brunetti couldn’t tell which. She stood and took a step toward them. Brunetti stopped in front of her and held out his hand. “Signora Mascari, I’m Commissario Brunetti from the Venice police.”
She took his hand and gave it no more than the quickest of light touches. He noticed that her eyes seemed very bright, but he couldn’t tell if this was caused by unshed tears or the reflection from the glasses she wore.
“I extend my condolences, Signora Mascari,” he said. “I understand how painful and shocking this must be for you.” She still made no acknowledgment that he had spoken. “Is there someone you would like us to call and have come here to be with you?”
She shook her head at this. “Tell me what happened,” she said.
“Perhaps we could step into Sergeant Gallo’s office,” Brunetti said, reaching down to open the door. He allowed the woman to pass in front of him. He glanced back at Gallo, who raised his eyebrows in interrogation; Brunetti nodded, and the sergeant came into the office with them. Brunetti held a chair for Signora Mascari, who sat and looked up at him.
“Is there something we could get you, Signora? A glass of water? Tea?”
“No. Nothing. Tell me what happened.”
Sergeant Gallo took his place quietly behind his desk; Brunetti sat in a chair not far from Signora Mascari.
“Your husband’s body was found in Mestre on Monday morning. If you’ve spoken to the people at the hospital, you know that the cause of death was a blow to the head.”
She interrupted him. “There were blows to the face, as well.” After she said this, she looked away and stared down at her hands.
“Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to harm your husband, Signora? Can you think of anyone who has ever menaced him or with whom he had a serious argument?”
She shook her head in immediate negation. “Leonardo had no enemies,” she said.
Brunetti’s experience suggested that a man did not get to be the director of a bank without making enemies, but he said nothing.
“Did your husband ever mention difficulties at his work? Perhaps an employee he had to fire? Someone who was turned down for a l
oan and who held him responsible?”
Again, she shook her head. “No, nothing like that. There’s never been any trouble.”
“And your family, Signora? Has your husband ever had difficulties with anyone in your family?”
“What is this?” she demanded. “Why are you asking me these questions?”
“Signora,” Brunetti began, making what he hoped was a calming gesture with his hands. “The manner of your husband’s death, the very violence of it, suggests that whoever did it had reason to hate your husband a great deal, and so, before we can begin to look for that person, we have to have some idea of why he might have done what he did. So it is necessary that these questions be asked, painful as I know them to be.”
“But I can’t tell you anything. Leonardo had no enemies.” After repeating this, she looked across at Gallo, as if to ask him to verify what she said or to help her persuade Brunetti to believe her.
“When your husband left the house last Sunday, he was on his way to Messina?” Brunetti asked. She nodded. “Do you know the purpose of his trip, Signora?”
“He told me it was for the bank and that he would be back on Friday. Yesterday.”
“But he didn’t mention what the trip was about?”
“No, he never did. He always said his work wasn’t very interesting, and he seldom discussed it with me.”
“Did you hear anything from him after he left, Signora?”
“No. He left for the airport on Sunday afternoon. He had a flight to Rome, where he had to change planes.”
“Did your husband call you after that, Signora? Did he call you from Rome or from Messina?”
“No, but he never did. Whenever he went on a business trip, he’d simply go wherever he was going and then come home, or he’d call me from his office in the bank if he went directly there when he got back to Venice.”
“Was this usual, Signora?”
“Was what usual?”
“That he would go away on business and not get in touch with you?”
“I just told you,” she said, her voice becoming a bit sharp. “He traveled a bit for the bank, six or seven times a year. Sometimes he would send me a postcard or bring me a gift, but he never called.”
“When did you begin to become alarmed, Signora?”
“Last night. I thought he would go to the bank in the afternoon, when he got back, and then come home. But when he wasn’t home by seven, I called the bank, but it was closed. I tried to call two of the men he worked with, but they weren’t home.” She paused here, took a deep breath, and then continued, “I told myself I’d got the day wrong or the time, but by this morning, I couldn’t fool myself anymore, so I called one of the men who works at the bank, and he called a colleague in Messina, and then he called me back.” She stopped talking here.
“What did he tell you, Signora?” Brunetti asked in a low voice.
She put one knuckle to her mouth, hoping, perhaps, to keep the words from coming out, but she had seen the body in the morgue, and so there was no use in that. “He told me that Leonardo had never been to Messina. And so I called the police. Called you. They told me . . . when I gave them a description of Leonardo . . . they told me that I should come out here. So I did.” Her voice had grown increasingly ragged as she explained all of this, and when she finished, her hands were clutched desperately together in her lap.
“Signora, are you sure there’s no one you’d like to call or have us call to come here to be with you? Perhaps you shouldn’t be alone at this time,” Brunetti said.
“No. No, there’s no one I want to see.” Abruptly, she stood. “I don’t have to stay here, do I? Am I free to leave?”
“Of course, Signora. You’ve been more than kind to answer these questions.”
She ignored this.
Brunetti made a small gesture to Gallo as he stood and followed Signora Mascari to the door. “We’ll have a car take you back to Venice, Signora.”
“I don’t want anyone to see me arrive in a police car,” she said.
“It will be an unmarked car, Signora, and the driver won’t be in uniform.”
She made no acknowledgment of this, and the fact that she didn’t object probably meant that she would accept the ride to Piazzale Roma.
Brunetti opened the door and accompanied her toward the stairs at the end of the corridor. He noticed that her right hand had a death grip on her purse, and the left was jammed into the pocket of her jacket.
Downstairs, Brunetti went out onto the steps of the Questura with her, out into the heat that he had forgotten. A dark blue sedan waited at the foot of the steps, motor running. Brunetti bent down and opened the door for her, held her arm as she stepped into the car. Once seated, she turned away from him and looked out the window on the other side, although all she saw was traffic and the bleak facade of office buildings. Brunetti closed the door softly and told the driver to take Signora Mascari back to Piazzale Roma.
When the car disappeared into the flow of traffic, Brunetti went back to Gallo’s office. As he went in, he asked the sergeant, “Well, what did you think?”
“I don’t believe in people who have no enemies.”
“Especially middle-aged bank managers,” Brunetti added.
“And so?” Gallo asked.
“I’ll go back to Venice and see if there’s anything I can find out there from my people. Now that we’ve got a name, we at least have a place to begin to look.”
“For what?” Gallo asked.
Brunetti’s answer was immediate. “First, we’ve got to do what we should have been doing from the beginning, find out where the clothing and the shoes he was wearing came from.”
Gallo took this as a reproach and answered just as quickly, “Nothing on the dress yet, but we’ve got the name of the manufacturer of the shoes and should have a list by this afternoon of the stores that sold them.”
Brunetti had not intended his remark as a criticism of the Mestre branch, but he let it stand. It could do no harm to spur Gallo and his men into finding out where Mascari’s clothing had come from, for surely those shoes and that dress were not the sort of thing a middle-aged banker wore to the office.
13
If Brunetti thought he was going to find people working on a Saturday morning in August, the staff of the Questura thought otherwise; there were guards at the door, even a cleaning woman on the stairs, but the offices were empty, and he knew there was no hope of getting anything done until Monday morning. For a moment, he thought of getting on a train to Bolzano, but he knew it would be after dinner before he got there, just as he knew he would spend all day tomorrow eager to be back in the city.
He let himself into his office and opened the windows, although he was aware there was no good to be done by that. The room became more humid, perhaps even minimally hotter. No new papers lay on his desk, no report from Signorina Elettra.
He reached down into his bottom drawer and pulled out the telephone book. He flipped it open and turned to the L’s, but there was no listing for Lega della Moralità, although that didn’t surprise him. Under the S’s, he found Santomauro, Giancarlo, aw. and an address in San Marco. The late Leonardo Mascari, he learned by using the same system, lived in Castello. This surprised him; Castello was the least prestigious sestiere of the city, a zone primarily inhabited by solid working-class families, an area where children could still grow up speaking nothing but dialect and remain entirely ignorant of Italian until they began elementary school. Perhaps it was the Mascari family home. Or perhaps he had made a lucky deal on an apartment or house. Apartments in Venice were so hard to find, and those found so outrageously priced, either to buy or to rent, that even Castello was becoming fashionable. Spending enough money on restoration could perhaps provide respectability, if not for the entire quartiere, then at least for the individual address.
He checked the listings in the yellow pages for banks, and found that the Bank of Verona was listed in Campo San Bartolomeo, the narrow campo at the foot o
f the Rialto where many banks had their offices; this surprised him, for he could not remember ever having seen it. More out of curiosity than anything else, he dialed the number. The phone was picked up on the third ring, and a man’s voice said, “Si?” as though he were expecting a call.
“Is this the Bank of Verona?” Brunetti asked.
There was a moment’s pause, and then the man said, “I’m sorry, you’ve reached a wrong number.”
“Sorry to trouble you,” Brunetti said.
The other man replaced the phone without saying anything else.
The vagaries of SIP, the national telephone service, were such that having reached a wrong number would strike no one as in any way strange, but Brunetti was certain he had dialed the number correctly. He dialed the number again, but this time it rang unanswered twelve times before Brunetti replaced the receiver. He looked at the listing again and made a note of the address. Then he checked the phone book for Morelli’s pharmacy. The addresses were only a few numbers apart. He tossed the phone book back into the drawer and kicked it shut. He closed the windows, went downstairs, and left the Questura.
Ten minutes later, he walked out from the sottoportico of Calle della Bissa and into Campo San Bartolomeo. His eyes went up to the bronze statue of Goldoni, perhaps not his favorite playwright but certainly the one who could make him laugh the hardest, especially when the plays were presented in their original Veneziano dialect, as they always were here in the city that filled his plays and that loved him enough to put up this statue. Goldoni was in full stride, which made this campo the perfect place for him to be, for here, everyone rushed, always on their way somewhere: across the Rialto Bridge to go to the vegetable market; from the Rialto to either the San Marco or the Cannaregio district. If people lived anywhere near the heart of the city, its geography would pull them through San Bartolomeo at least once a day.
When Brunetti got there, foot traffic was at its height as people rushed to the market before it closed or hurried home from work, the week finally over. Casually, he walked along the east side of the campo, looking at the numbers painted above the doors. As he had expected, the number was painted above an entranceway two doors to the right of the pharmacy. He stood for a moment in front of the panel of bells beside the door and studied the names. The Bank of Verona was listed, as were three other names with bells beside them, probably private apartments.
