A Question of Belief

by Donna Leon

‘Yes. Yes. When he came back, he said it was on the ground just at the foot of Ponte Santa Caterina. Almost at the Gesuiti.’

  ‘So he retraced the route of your walk, Signora?’ Brunetti asked, after calculating the distance between their home and the bridge.

  ‘He must have. I was in bed by then, so all I asked was whether he had found the sweater, and when he told me he had, I’m afraid I went right to sleep.’

  ‘I see, I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘It’s surprising he said nothing about this in the statement he gave to Lieutenant Scarpa.’

  ‘As you said, Commissario, memory is a strange thing.’ Then, before he could say it, she continued, ‘It’s strange, as well, that I didn’t remember this until now.’ As if to emphasize just how odd all of this really was, she put a hand to her forehead and gave him a vague look.

  ‘How long do you think he was gone, Signora?’ Brunetti asked.

  She did that familiar Venetian thing of gazing off while memory walked the distance. ‘It would take about fifteen minutes to get to the bridge, I suppose, because he would have been walking slowly. So twice that,’ she said, then, as if uncertain that he could work out the maths unaided, she supplied the sum: ‘Half an hour at most.’

  ‘Thank you, Signora,’ Brunetti said and got to his feet.

  By the time Brunetti got to Signor Fulgoni’s bank, his jacket was plastered to his back, and his trousers bunched together uncomfortably between his legs at every step. He stepped into the air-conditioned foyer and paused to wipe his face and neck with his handkerchief. Luckily, the created temperature was mild, rather than arctic, and Brunetti soon adjusted to it. He crossed the marble-floored lobby and approached a desk behind which sat a crisp-suited young woman. She glanced up and must have seen a dishevelled man in a wrinkled blue jacket, for she asked with badly disguised disdain, ‘May I help you, Signore?’ She spoke in Italian but with an undisguised Veneto cadence.

  Brunetti took out his wallet and showed his warrant card. ‘I’d like to speak to Signor Fulgoni,’ he said, careful to speak Veneziano. Then, imitating the thick accent of the friends with whom his father had played cards in the osterie of Brunetti’s youth, he added, ‘I want to talk to him about a murder.’

  The young woman got to her feet with a speed that, had there been no air conditioning, would have brought sweat to her brow. She looked at Brunetti, off to the left, and then picked up the phone and dialled a number.

  ‘There’s someone here who would like to speak to Dottor Fulgoni,’ she said; then, after listening for a moment, added, ‘He’s a policeman.’ She looked at Brunetti with a placating smile, said ‘Sì,’ said it again, and set down the phone.

  ‘I’ll take you there,’ she said, careful not to get too close to Brunetti. She turned and started to walk towards the back of the bank.

  Brunetti had once read an article in a publication he could no longer recall that discussed the location of the various rooms in a house in terms of atavistic memories of danger. The rooms where people were at their weakest were invariably placed – or so the article maintained – farthest from the point of entry, the place where danger would burst into the house. Thus bedrooms were on the second floor or at the back of the house, forcing the invader, it was suggested, to fight his way through less well-defended positions with his sword or club, thus alerting the owner and giving ample time to prepare for escape or defence.

  Brunetti had no doubt that Signora Fulgoni would have phoned her husband by now, perhaps hoping to give him enough time to slip out a back window or to start sharpening his axe.

  Two desks stood on either side of a door at the back of the bank, as though they were bookends and the door some rare piece of incunabula. Another young woman stood in front of one desk; the other was empty.

  The first woman stopped and said, raising a hand in Brunetti’s direction, ‘This is the policeman.’

  Brunetti fought down the impulse to growl and wave his hands in their faces, but then he remembered that, in the land where money was god, policemen were not meant to enter the places of worship. Instead, he smiled amiably at the second young woman, who turned and opened the central door without bothering to knock. There was to be no surprising Dottor Fulgoni.

  The man was already moving towards Brunetti. He was dressed in a sober dark grey suit. His tie was maroon, with some sort of fine pattern on it, and he had a maroon handkerchief in his breast pocket. As the man approached, Brunetti hunted for the signs of femininity he had noticed at the funeral and, seeking, found none.

  His steps were precise, his hair and features well cut, and his eyebrows pointed arches over his eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Commissario; they didn’t give me your name,’ Fulgoni said in a voice that was reassuringly deep. He shook Brunetti’s hand and led him to a sofa that sat on one side of the office.

  Brunetti introduced himself as they crossed the room and chose to seat himself in the leather chair that stood in front of the sofa; Fulgoni took the sofa. He had sharply-defined cheekbones and a long nose. ‘May I offer you something, Commissario?’ Fulgoni asked. He had an attractive voice, very musical, and he spoke Italian from which had been erased all sign of Veneto accent or cadence.

  ‘Thank you, Dottore,’ Brunetti said. ‘Perhaps later.’

  Fulgoni smiled and thanked the young woman, who left the office.

  ‘My wife called me and told me about your visit,’ Fulgoni said. ‘She said there was some confusion about the time we got back to our home the night Signor Fontana was killed.’

  ‘Yes,’ Brunetti said, ‘among other things.’

  Fulgoni did not pretend to be surprised by this. ‘I assume my wife has clarified the time we got home.’

  ‘Yes, and she told me about your sweater, and your going out to look for it,’ Brunetti said.

  Fulgoni did not respond but sat quietly, studying Brunetti’s face while allowing his own to be studied. Finally he said, ‘Ah, yes. The sweater.’ The way Fulgoni pronounced that last word told Brunetti that it had enormous significance for him, but Brunetti had no idea what the significance might be.

  ‘She said you realized, when you got back from your walk, that you had lost a green sweater. She said the sweater was important to you – I think “talisman” was the word she used – so you went back outside to look for it.’

  ‘Did she tell you that I found it?’

  ‘Yes, and that you told her you had when you came back.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then, she said, she went to sleep.’

  ‘Did she tell you, by any chance, how long I was out? Looking for the sweater?’

  ‘She wasn’t sure, but she said it was about half an hour.’

  ‘I see,’ Fulgoni said. He pushed himself back in the sofa, sitting up a bit higher. He met Brunetti’s gaze for a moment but then glanced away and fixed his eyes on the far wall. Brunetti did not interrupt his reflections.

  A minute passed before Fulgoni said, ‘My wife told me that you – the police – have found traces of me and Signor Fontana in the courtyard. In the same place in the courtyard, to be exact.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘What traces?’ he asked, cleared his throat, and then added, ‘And where?’

  Trapped in his own lie, Brunetti waited some time before answering the question. Fulgoni glanced at him but then looked away, and Brunetti decided to risk saying, ‘I think you know the answers to both those questions, Dottore.’

  Only a man with the habit of honesty or one sufficiently ingenuous to be deceived by Brunetti’s air of certainty would have found that a satisfactory answer to his questions.

  ‘Ah,’ escaped Fulgoni’s lips in a single long breath, the sort of noise a swimmer makes when hauling himself out of the pool at the far end, race over. ‘Would you tell me again what my wife said?’ he asked in a voice he struggled to keep calm.

  ‘That you went out for a walk with her to escape the heat in your apartment, and that when you came back, you realized you had dropped your swe
ater, and that you then went out for about half an hour and came back with it.’

  ‘I see,’ Fulgoni said. Looking directly at Brunetti, he asked, ‘And do you think this would have been enough time for me to go downstairs and kill Fontana? To have beaten his head in against that statue?’

  With no hesitation, Brunetti said, ‘Yes,’ and added, ‘There would have been time enough.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean I did it?’ Fulgoni asked.

  ‘Until there is a motive, your killing him would make no sense,’ Brunetti answered.

  ‘Of course,’ Fulgoni said, ‘and how – what’s the English word, “sporting?” of you to tell me.’

  Brunetti was more surprised by the sentiment than by Fulgoni’s use of the word.

  ‘Would those samples you say you’ve found supply a motive?’ Fulgoni asked.

  ‘Yes, they would,’ Brunetti answered, intensely conscious of Fulgoni’s phrasing: ‘you say you’ve found’.

  Fulgoni startled Brunetti by getting suddenly to his feet. ‘I think I don’t want to be in the bank any more, Commissario.’

  Brunetti rose but remained silent.

  ‘Why don’t we go to my home and have a look, then?’ Fulgoni suggested.

  ‘If you think that will help things,’ Brunetti said, though he had no idea, not really, of what he meant by that.

  Fulgoni reached for his phone and asked that a taxi be called for him.

  The two men stood side by side on the deck, not speaking, as the taxi carried them up the Grand Canal and under the Rialto. The day was sun-bright, but the breeze on the water kept them from feeling the heat. In Brunetti’s experience, tension drove most people to talk, and the tension that filled Fulgoni was easily read in the white of his knuckles as he grasped the taxi’s railing. But anger just as often kept them silent as they used their energy to run over the past, perhaps seeking the place or time where things went wrong or flew out of control.

  The taxi pulled up at the same place Foa had used the day the body was discovered. Fulgoni paid the driver and added a generous tip, then stepped on to the embankment. He turned to see if Brunetti needed a hand, but he was already beside him.

  Still not speaking, they walked down the embankment and over the bridge. They stopped at the portone and Brunetti waited while Fulgoni pulled out his keys and opened the door.

  Fulgoni led the way to the storeroom that held the birdcages and drew up sharp in front of the padlocked chain. ‘I assume it’s there that you found your samples?’ he asked, pointing inside.

  Brunetti had thought to get the keys from the evidence room and pulled them from his pocket. He fitted the various keys in the lock until he found the right one, removed the lock and opened the door. It was almost noon, so the sun beat down squarely upon them and cast no light into the storeroom. Fulgoni reached inside and switched on the light.

  Ignoring the birdcages, he walked straight to the boxes piled beside them. Brunetti watched as he read the labels, though his body blocked Brunetti from reading them. At last he reached up and slid one out, creating a small avalanche as the boxes above it collapsed to fill the space. He placed it on a small round table with a scratched surface that Brunetti had overlooked. Fulgoni picked at the tape, dry and difficult to remove, that sealed the box and pulled it loose in a single long strip. Turning to Brunetti, he said, ‘Perhaps you’d like to open it, Commissario.’

  He moved past Fulgoni and pulled back the first flaps, then the next two. A grey turtleneck sweater lay on the top.

  ‘I think you have to look deeper, Commissario,’ Fulgoni said and then gave a dry laugh in which there was no humour whatsoever.

  Brunetti folded back the sweater; beneath it was a thick blue sweater with a zipper. And beneath that was a light green V-neck sweater. ‘Yes, look at the label,’ Fulgoni said at the same instant Brunetti’s eyes fell upon the Jaeger tag.

  Brunetti let the other sweaters fall back into place and closed the flaps of the box. He turned to Fulgoni and said, ‘Does this mean you did not go out in search of your sweater?’

  ‘This box was packed at the end of winter, Commissario,’ Fulgoni said. ‘So, no, I wasn’t wearing it, and I did not drop it. And so I did not go out in search of it.’ He placed the sweater carelessly on top of the pile of boxes, then bent to pick up the dry strip of tape from the floor.

  Keeping his eyes on the brown tape as he wrapped it around two fingers, he said, ‘My wife doesn’t like mess. Or disorder.’ He slipped the paper cylinder into his pocket, looked at Brunetti and said, ‘I’ve always tried to respect her wishes.’ He nodded towards the birdcages and said, ‘That’s proof that I did, I suppose. We didn’t have children, so one year she decided that she wanted birds. She filled the house with them.’ He waved a magician’s arm over the empty cages. ‘But they died or they grew sick, so we gave them away. Well, the ones that weren’t sick.’

  ‘And those that were?’ Brunetti asked, as he felt he was being asked to do.

  ‘My wife disposed of them when they died,’ Fulgoni said. He turned to Brunetti. ‘I’ve always been far more sentimental than my wife, so I wanted to bury them over on the other side of the courtyard, under the palms.’ He made a vague gesture beyond the door of the storeroom. ‘But she put them in plastic bags and had the garbage man take them away.’

  ‘But you kept the cages?’ Brunetti said.

  Fulgoni ran his eye over the stacks of wooden bird houses and said, puzzled by it, ‘Yes, we did, didn’t we? I wonder why that was?’

  Brunetti knew this was a question not in search of an answer.

  ‘Maybe my wife likes cages,’ Fulgoni said with a desolate smile. ‘I’d never thought of it that way.’ He walked over and pulled the grated door of the storeroom towards them until it closed and then stood for a moment with his hands holding two of the upright bars, looking out at the courtyard. Then he turned to face Brunetti and asked, ‘But which side is the cage, do you think, Commissario? In here or out there?’

  Brunetti was a man of infinite patience, so simply stood and waited for Fulgoni to speak again. He had seen this moment many times before and had come to think of it as a kind of unravelling or unhinging, when a person decides that things have to be made clear, if only to himself.

  Fulgoni put the tips of the fingers of his right hand on his lips, as if to give evidence of how deep in thought he was. When he removed his fingers, his lips and the area around them were stained a dark brown; Brunetti’s eyes fled to Fulgoni’s hands, but he saw there only the rust from the bars, not Fontana’s blood.

  Brunetti closed his eyes, suddenly aware of the heat of this cage in which the two of them were trapped.

  ‘I’d like to show you something, Commissario,’ Fulgoni said in an entirely normal voice. When Brunetti looked at him, he saw that the banker was wiping his hands with the handkerchief from his jacket pocket. Brunetti was struck by the way his hands grew cleaner without making the handkerchief darker.

  Fulgoni moved past Brunetti and returned to where the cages were stacked. He studied them for a moment, then leaned down to examine one on the bottom row. He bent and put his hands on either side of it and started to wiggle it back and forth, working it free from the other cages trapping it.

  He yanked it out, and the cages imitated the boxes by collapsing into the space where it had been, landing askew.

  Fulgoni carried the cage to the table and set it beside the box. ‘Have a look, Commissario,’ he said, stepping back to remove his shadow, which the light cast across the cage.

  Brunetti bent to study it: he saw a wooden birdcage, thin ribs of bamboo, the classic ‘Made in China’ construction. On the bottom, instead of newspaper, lay a piece of red cloth. It seemed to be woven of light cotton, and near the back Brunetti could see a separate piece: could it be a sleeve? Yes, that was it, a sleeve, and there was the collar, right at the back. A sweater then, a red cotton sweater, summer weight. Fulgoni stood beside him, motionless and silent, so Brunetti returned his attention
to the cloth, puzzled that the other man should want him to look at it. Just below the neck there appeared a figure, or at least a change in colour. Darker than the rest of the sweater, it was amorphous: a flower, perhaps? One of those big things like a peony? An anemone?

  There, on the top of the sleeve, was another flower, this one smaller and darker. Drier.

  Brunetti reached to open the door of the cage but before he could, Fulgoni put a hand on his arm, saying, ‘Don’t touch it, Commissario. I don’t think you want to contaminate the evidence.’ There was no trace of sarcasm in his voice, only concern.

  Brunetti looked at the sweater for a long time before he asked, ‘How careful were you when you put it in there?’

  ‘I picked it up with my handkerchief after she went back upstairs. I didn’t know what would happen, but I wanted there to be some . . .’

  ‘Some what?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Something that would show what had happened.’

  ‘Would you tell me what that was?’

  Fulgoni moved closer to the door, perhaps in search of cooler air. Both of them were sweating heavily, and the birdcages, since being disturbed by Fulgoni, emanated a foul, dusty odour.

  ‘Araldo and I had use of one another. I suppose you could say it that way. He seemed to like things to be quick and anonymous, and I had no choice but to settle for that.’ Fulgoni sighed, and in the process must have drawn in some of the air disturbed by the cages, for he started to cough. The force of it bent him forward, and he covered his mouth with his hand, smearing the rust stains further.

  When the coughing stopped, he stood upright and continued. ‘We would meet here. Araldo called it,’ he said with conscious melodrama and a wave of his arm at the low ceiling, the dust-tinged beams, ‘our own little love nest.’ He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped at his face, spreading the rust, but lighter now, across his forehead.’My wife knew, I suppose. My mistake was to think she didn’t care.’

  He said nothing more for so long a time that Brunetti asked, ‘And that night?’

  ‘It was almost as my wife told you, except that it was her sweater that was dropped. A red cotton sweater. I said I’d go out and look for it. It wasn’t as far as Santa Caterina, but just on the other side of the first bridge. When I went out, I saw that the door to Fontana’s mailbox was open: that was the signal we used. If I saw it when my wife and I came home together, I’d make some excuse about going out for a walk, and I’d come downstairs and ring his doorbell from out in the calle, so he’d have an excuse to go out. And when he came down, we would retreat to our bower of love.’