Acqua Alta - [Commissario Brunetti 05]

by Donna Leon

  ‘Did either of you recognize any of the photos?’ he asked, though he was sure the officer who had brought over the photos of men who matched the descriptions the two women had given would have told him if they had.

  Flavia shook her head, and Brett said, ‘No.’

  ‘You said they warned you not to go to a meeting with Dottor Semenzato. Then you said something about ceramics from the China exhibition. Do you mean the one that was here, at the Doge’s Palace?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I remember,’ Brunetti said. ‘You organized it, didn’t you?’ he asked.

  She forgot and nodded, then rested her head back on the pillows and waited a moment for the world to stop spinning. When it did, she said, ‘Some pieces came from our dig, in Xian. The Chinese chose me as liaison. I know people.’ Even though the wires were gone, she still moved her jaw gingerly; a deep buzz still underlay everything she said and filled her ears with its constant whine.

  Flavia interrupted and explained for her. ‘The show opened first in New York and then went to London. Brett went to the New York opening and then back to close it down for shipment to London. But she had to go back to China before the London opening. Something happened at the dig.’ Turning to Brett, she asked, ‘What was it, cara?’

  ‘Treasure.’

  That, apparently, was enough to remind Flavia. ‘They’d just opened up the passage into the burial chamber, so they called Brett in London and told her she had to go back to oversee the excavation of the tomb.’

  ‘Who was in charge of the opening here?’

  This time, Brett answered. ‘I was, I got back from China three days before it closed in London. And then I came here with it to set it up.’ She closed her eyes then, and Brunetti thought she was tired with the talking, but she opened them immediately and continued. ‘I left before the exhibition closed, so they sent the pieces back to China.’

  ‘They?’ Brunetti asked.

  Brett glanced across at Flavia before she answered, then said, ‘Dottor Semenzato was here, and my assistant came from China to close the show and send everything back.’

  ‘You weren’t in charge?’ he asked.

  Again, she looked at Flavia before answering. ‘No, I couldn’t be here. I didn’t see the pieces again until this winter.’

  ‘Four years later?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said and waved her hand as if that would help explain. ‘The shipment got held up on the way back to China and then in Beijing. Red tape. It ended up in a customs warehouse in Shanghai for two years. The pieces from Xian didn’t get back until two months ago.’ Brunetti watched her consider her words, searching for a way to explain. ‘They weren’t the same. Copies. Not the soldier or the jade shroud: they were the originals. But the ceramics, I knew it, but I couldn’t prove it until I tested them, and I couldn’t do that in China.’

  He had learned enough from Lele’s offended glance not to ask her how she knew they were false. She just knew, and that was that. Prevented from asking a qualitative question, he could still ask a quantitative one. ‘How many pieces were fake?’

  ‘Three. Maybe four or five. And that’s only from the dig in Xian where I am.’

  ‘What about other pieces from the show?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. That’s not the sort of question you can ask in China.’

  Through all of this, Flavia sat quietly, turning her head back and forth as they spoke. Her lack of surprise told him that she already knew about this.

  ‘What have you done?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘So far, nothing.’

  Given the fact that this conversation was taking place in a hospital room and she was speaking through swollen lips, this seemed, to Brunetti, something of an understatement. ‘Who did you tell about it?’

  ‘Only Semenzato. I wrote to him from China, three months ago, and told him some of the pieces sent back were copies. I asked to see him.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘Nothing. He didn’t answer my letter. I waited three weeks, then I tried to call him, but that’s not easy, from China. So I came here to talk to him.’

  Just like that? You can’t get through-on the phone, so you jump on a plane and fly halfway around the world to talk to someone?

  As if she had read his thoughts, she answered. ‘It’s my reputation. I’m responsible for those pieces.’

  Flavia broke in here. ‘The pieces could have been switched when they got back to China. It didn’t have to happen here. And you’re hardly responsible for what happened when they got there.’ There was real animosity in Flavia’s voice. Brunetti found it interesting that she sounded jealous, of all things, of a country.

  Her tone wasn’t lost on Brett, who answered sharply, ‘It doesn’t matter where it happened; it happened.’

  To divert them both and remembering what Lele had said about ‘knowing’ that something was genuine or false, Brunetti the policeman asked, ‘Do you have proof?’

  ‘Yes,’ Brett began, voice more slurred than it had been when he arrived.

  Hearing that, Flavia interrupted them both and turned to Brunetti. ‘I think that’s enough, Dottor Brunetti.’

  He looked across at Brett, and he was forced to agree. The bruises on her face seemed darker now than when he had come in, and she had sunk lower on the pillows. She smiled and closed her eyes.

  He didn’t insist. ‘I’m sorry, signora,’ he said to Flavia. ‘But it can’t wait.’

  ‘At least until she’s home,’ Flavia said.

  He glanced at Brett, to see what she thought of this, but she was asleep, head turned to one side, mouth slack and open. ‘Tomorrow?’

  Flavia hesitated, then gave him a reluctant ‘Yes’.

  He stood and took his coat from the chair. Flavia came as far as the door with him. ‘She’s not just worried about her reputation, you know,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand it, but she needs to see that these pieces get back to China,’ she added, shaking her head in apparent confusion.

  Because Flavia Petrelli was one of the best singing actresses of her day, Brunetti knew it was impossible to tell when the actress spoke and when the woman, but this sounded like the second. Assuming that it was, he answered, ‘I know that. I think it’s one of the reasons I want to find out about this.’

  ‘And the other reasons?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘I won’t work any better if I’m doing it out of personal motives, signora,’ he said, signalling the end of their brief personal truce. He pulled on his coat and let himself out of the room. Flavia stood for a moment staring across at Brett, then returned to her seat beside the bed and picked up the pile of costume drawings.

  * * * *

  Chapter Eight

  Leaving the hospital, Brunetti noticed that the sky had darkened, and a sharp wind had risen, sweeping across the city from the south. The air was heavy and damp, presaging rain, and that meant they might be awakened in the night by the shrill blast of the sirens. He hated acqua alta with the passion that all Venetians felt for it, felt an anticipatory rage at the gaping tourists who would cluster together on the raised wooden boards, giggling, pointing, snapping pictures and blocking decent people who just wanted to get to work or do their shopping so they could get inside where it was dry and be rid of the bother, the mess, the constant irritation that the unstoppable waters brought to the city. Already calculating, he realized that the water would affect him only on the way to and from work, when he had to pass through Campo San Bartolomeo at the foot of the Rialto Bridge. Luckily, the area around the Questura was high enough to be free of all but the worst flooding.

  He pulled up the collar of his coat, wishing he had thought to wear a scarf that morning, and hunched his head down, propelled from behind by the wind. As he crossed behind the statue of Colleoni, the first fat drops splattered on the pavement in front of him. The only advantage of the wind was that it drove the rain at a sharp diagonal, keeping one side of the narrow calle dry, protected by the
roofs. Those wiser than he had thought to bring umbrellas and walked protected by them, ignoring anyone who had to dodge around or under them.

  By the time he got to the Questura, the shoulders of his coat were wet through and his shoes soaked. In his office, he removed his coat and put it on a hanger, then hung it on the curtain rod that ran in front of the window above the radiator. Anyone looking into the room from across the canal would see, perhaps, a man who had hanged himself in his own office. If they worked in the Questura, their first impulse would no doubt be to count the floors, looking to see if it was Patta’s window.

  Brunetti found a single sheet of paper on his desk, a report from Interpol in Geneva saying that they had no information about and no record of Francesco Semenzato. Below that neatly typed message, however, there was a brief handwritten note: ‘Rumours here, nothing definite. I’ll ask around.’ And below that was a scrawled signature he recognized as belonging to Piet Heinegger.

  His phone rang late that afternoon. It was Lele, saying that he had managed to get in touch with a few friends of his, including the one in Burma. No one had been willing to say anything about Semenzato directly, but Lele had learned that the museum director was believed to be involved in the antiques business. No, not as a buyer but as a seller. One of the men he had spoken to said he had heard that Semenzato had invested in an antique shop, but he knew no more than that, not where it was or who the official owner might be.

  ‘Sounds like that would create a conflict of interest,’ Brunetti said, ‘buying from his partner with the museum’s money.’

  ‘He wouldn’t be the only one,’ Lele muttered, but Brunetti let the remark lie. ‘There’s another thing,’ the artist added.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When I mentioned stolen art works, one of them said he’d heard rumours about an important collector in Venice.’

  ‘Semenzato?’

  ‘No,’ Lele answered. ‘I didn’t ask, but the word is out that I’m curious about him, so I’m sure my friend would have told me if it was Semenzato.’

  ‘Did he say who it was?’

  ‘No. He didn’t know. But the rumour is that it’s a gentleman from the South.’ Lele said this as if he believed it impossible for any gentleman to come from the South.

  ‘But no name?’

  ‘No, Guido. But I’ll keep asking around.’

  ‘Thanks. I appreciate this, Lele. I couldn’t do this myself.’

  ‘No, you couldn’t,’ Lele said evenly. Then, not even bothering to brush off Brunetti’s thanks, Lele said, ‘I’ll call you if I hear anything else,’ and hung up.

  Believing that he had done enough for the afternoon and not wanting to be trapped on this side of the city by the arrival of acqua alta, Brunetti went home early and had two quiet hours to himself before Paola got back from the university. When she got home, soaked by the increasing intensity of the rain, she said that she had used the quotation, given the spurious attribution, but still the dreaded marchese had managed to spoil it, suggesting that a writer such as James, who was supposed to have such a good reputation, certainly could have avoided such simple-minded redundancies. Brunetti listened as she explained, surprised at how much he had come, over the last months, to dislike this young man he had never met. Food and wine tempered Paola’s mood, as they always did, and when Raffi volunteered to do the dishes, she radiated contentment and well-being.

  They were in bed by ten, she deeply asleep over a particularly infelicitous example of student writing and he deeply engrossed in a new translation of Suetonius. He had just reached the passage describing those little boys swimming in Tiberius’ pool at Capri when the phone rang.

  ‘Pronto’ he answered, hoping it wouldn’t be police business but knowing that, at ten to eleven, it probably was.

  ‘Commissario, this is Monico.’ Sergeant Monico, Brunetti recalled, was in charge of the night shift that week.

  ‘What is it, Monico?’

  ‘I think we’ve got a murder, sir.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Palazzo Ducale.’

  ‘Who is it?’ he asked, though he knew.

  ‘The director, sir.’

  ‘Semenzato?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It looks like a break-in. The cleaning woman found him about ten minutes ago and went screaming down to the guards. They went back up to the office and saw him, and they called us.’

  ‘What have you done?’ He dropped the book on to the floor at the side of the bed and began looking around the room to see where he had left his clothes.

  ‘We called Vice-Questore Patta, but his wife said he wasn’t there, and she has no idea of how to get in touch with him.’ Either of which, Brunetti reflected, could be a lie. ‘So I decided to call you, sir.’

  ‘Did they tell you what happened, the guards?’

  ‘Yes, sir. The man I spoke to said there was a lot of blood, and it looked like he’d been hit on the head.’

  ‘Was he dead when the cleaning lady found him?’

  ‘I think so, sir. The guards said he was dead when they got there.’

  ‘All right,’ Brunetti said, flipping back the covers. ‘I’ll go over there now. Send whoever’s there — who is it tonight?’

  ‘Vianello, sir. He was here on night shift with me, so he went over as soon as the call came in.’

  ‘Good. Call Dottor Rizzardi and ask him to meet me there.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I was going to call him as soon as I spoke to you.’

  ‘Good,’ Brunetti said, swinging his feet out and putting them on the floor. ‘I should be there in about twenty minutes. We’ll need a team to photograph and take prints.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ll call Pavese and Foscolo as soon as I’ve spoken to Dottor Rizzardi.’

  ‘All right. Twenty minutes,’ Brunetti said and hung up. Was it possible to be shocked and still not be surprised? A violent death, and only four days after Brett was attacked with similar brutality. While he pulled on his clothing and tied his shoes, he warned himself against jumping to conclusions. He walked around to Paola’s side of the bed, leaned down, and shook her gently by the shoulder.

  She opened her eyes and looked up at him over the top of the glasses she had begun, that year, to use for reading. She wore a ragged old flannel dressing gown she had bought in Scotland more than ten years ago and, pulled over it, an Irish knit cardigan her parents had given her for Christmas almost as long ago. Seeing her like that, momentarily confused by his having pulled her from her first deep sleep and peering myopically at him, he thought how much she looked like the homeless and apparently mad women who passed their winter nights in the railway station. Feeling traitorous for the thought, he leaned into the circle of light created by her reading lamp and bent down to kiss her forehead.

  ‘Was that the sovereign call of duty?’ she asked, immediately awake.

  ‘Yes. Semenzato. The cleaning woman found him in his office at the Palazzo Ducale.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Murdered?’

  ‘It looks that way.’

  She removed her glasses and placed them on the papers that spilled across the covers in front of her. ‘Have you sent a guard to the American’s room?’ she asked, leaving it to him to follow the swift logic of what she said.

  ‘No,’ he admitted, ‘but I will as soon as I get to the Palazzo. I don’t think they’d risk two in the same night, but I’ll send a man over.’ How easily ‘they’ had come into existence, created by his refusal to believe in coincidence and Paola’s to believe in human goodness.

  ‘Who called?’ she asked.

  ‘Monico.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, recognizing the name and familiar with the man. ‘I’ll call him and tell him about the guard.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Don’t wait up. I’m afraid this will take a long time.’

  ‘So will this,’ she said, leaning forward and gathering up the papers.

>   He bent again and this time kissed her on the lips. She returned his kiss and turned it into a real one. He straightened up and she surprised him by wrapping her arms around his waist and pressing her face into his stomach. She said something that was too mumbled to understand. Gently, he stroked her hair, but his mind was on Semenzato and Chinese ceramics.

  She pulled herself away and reached for her glasses. Putting them on, she said, ‘Remember to take your boots.’

  * * * *

  Chapter Nine

  When commissario Brunetti of the Venice police arrived at the scene of the murder of the director of the most important museum in the city, he carried in his right hand a white plastic shopping bag which bore in red letters the name of a supermarket. Inside the bag were a pair of size ten rubber boots, black, which he had bought at Standa three years before. The first thing he did when he arrived at the guards’ station at the bottom of the staircase that led up to the museum was hand the bag to the guard he found there, saying he’d pick it up when he left.