The Golden Egg

by Donna Leon

  Brunetti suspected he should be troubled, or at least embarrassed, by the amusement these phrases provoked in him, especially in the first case, but he was not. Politicians made no discernible sense when they spoke, few doctors used the word ‘cancer’ with patients who had it, and the word ‘immigrant’ could no longer be prefaced by ‘illegal’. Detach language from meaning, and the world was yours.

  Shaking his head when he found himself entertaining thoughts like this, he got to his feet and walked over to the window. The cat condominium still stood in front of

  the church of San Lorenzo. At this distance, Brunetti could not see any of the residents in front of it, but the sight of the tiny structure cheered him, as it always did. Unruly creatures, cats, and profoundly, incorrigibly disobedient. Were Paola not allergic, they would have one, perhaps two. Out loud, he found himself saying, in English, as did she, ‘“For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.”’ And so they are, Brunetti supposed.

  He returned to his desk and to the reports, forcing himself, like a swimmer in icy water, to stick at it and move ahead, though his destination seemed to move farther off, the more he struggled to reach it. It was a call from Paola that hauled him to the shore.

  ‘I called Donata Masi,’ she said, naming a colleague from the university who lived in Campo dei Frari and thus, Brunetti realized, close to the dry cleaner’s.

  ‘What did she tell you?’ he asked, knowing what the subject matter had to be.

  ‘That he wasn’t the son of either of the women there. She said she asked about him, years ago, and they told her they let him pretend to work there because they felt sorry for him.’

  ‘Pretend how?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Oh, you know. Folding clothes up and sometimes taking parcels home for people. Ironing flat things.’ He wanted to ask how this could have gone on for years, with never an official inspection of the place to see who was working there, but his wife was hardly the person to know, and so he let it pass.

  ‘Anything else?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Paola said, sounding disappointed. ‘I asked her if she knew his family, but she clammed up and said she didn’t want to get involved. So I changed the subject and asked her about a committee meeting we have tomorrow.’

  Brunetti wasted no time by asking what it was Donata didn’t want to get involved in. The possibility that officialdom in any of its manifestations might interest itself in a matter – any matter – was enough to cause a cordon sanitaire to form around the subject. People stopped talking, people knew nothing, people forgot. Let officialdom be represented in the form of the police, and forgetting quickly turned into total amnesia. The newspapers had recently been filled with accounts of women who had been raped by the Carabinieri who had arrested them or, in some cases, who had been raped by the officers to whom they had gone to report a crime. Trust the police?

  ‘And so?’ he asked.

  ‘So I don’t know what to do,’ Paola admitted.

  He allowed his sadness to seep into his voice and said, ‘There’s nothing you can do, Paola.’

  It took her a moment to answer. ‘The least I can do is let his family know he’s remembered by some of us. Not just by the women in the dry cleaner’s, but by some of us who saw him all these years.’

  ‘And what will that do?’ he asked. He knew he should not, but at times he lost all patience with her eternal desire to do the noble thing.

  ‘It won’t do anything, Guido,’ she said fiercely. ‘It’s not supposed to do anything. He’s dead, so there’s nothing anyone can do. But at least there can be some acknowledgement that people knew him and that he wasn’t just some poor dumb creature passing through life without anyone paying attention to him.’

  The little Brunetti had observed of the dead man suggested that this last description was in fact closer to the truth, but he lacked the will to say it. He evaded confrontation by saying, ‘I’ll ask downstairs and call the ambulance service and see what information they have about his family. If he has any. His name was Davide Cavanella.’ Before she could ask, he said, ‘Rizzardi gave it to me.’

  ‘Was he allowed to live alone?’ she burst out.

  ‘Paola,’ Brunetti said with great steadiness, ‘I’ll make a few phone calls and see what I can find out about him. All right?’ It wasn’t a test of wills, not really, but it was a test of whether she could still be reeled back from

  the edge of the verbal excess she invariably regretted.

  Her silence told Brunetti that she was as aware as he of how each of them was expecting the other to behave. ‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘Call me . . .’ she started to say, and then changed it to, ‘No, tell me about it when you get home.’

  He used an affectionate name and replaced the receiver.

  He phoned downstairs first to find out if the call about the man’s death had come to the Questura. Nothing of the kind, he was told. The Ospedale Civile gave a similar answer and referred him to the Carabinieri at Riva degli Schiavoni. After some time, they told him that they had received a call at 6.13 that morning and, informed that the person was dead, had sent the city hearse which was under the authority of the Ulss system, though it hadn’t been sent from the hospital.

  Brunetti took a few deep breaths to restore himself to the calm necessary to deal with bureaucracy and dialled

  the number the Carabinieri had given him. And it was from them that he finally learned the address of the dead man: San Polo 2364. As was often the case, the number meant nothing to Brunetti until he had looked in Calli, Campielli e Canali, where he saw that it was in one of the small calli beyond Campo San Stin.

  He opened his bottom drawer and started to pull out the phone book, irritated with himself that he had not thought of this simple solution first. His hand stopped when he remembered that the man was deaf: perhaps it was no solution at all. But perhaps he lived with a family member: someone must be able to answer a phone. Brunetti looked at the far wall and summoned up the memory of the man: expressionless face, forever concentrated on something no one else could see, or hear; mouth always a bit open, perhaps to aid breathing; a restless lack of coordination that affected his walk and the way he repeatedly patted the cloth when he tried to fold the garments in the back room of the dry cleaner’s.

  He opened the book and looked through the Cs until he found Cavanella, Ana, at that address. Before even deciding to do it or knowing why he should want to, Brunetti dialled the number. It rang six times before a deep voice that was probably a woman’s answered with ‘Sì.’ There was no interrogation in the word, no curiosity.

  ‘Signora Cavanella,’ Brunetti began.

  ‘Sì,’ she repeated.

  ‘This is Commissario Guido Brunetti. I’m calling

  to . . . .’ Before he could finish the sentence, Brunetti was speaking to silence: the woman had replaced the phone.

  He looked at his watch. It was just after five, so if he assigned himself the task of going to speak to her in person, he would be so close to home when he finished the interview that there would be no sense in his returning to the Questura.

  He took the Number Two to San Tomà, walked past the Frari, down the bridge and along the canal towards Campo San Stin. He crossed it and turned right at the second calle. The name he wanted was on the third door on the left. He rang it and waited.

  After what seemed a long time, he heard a shutter open above him. Brunetti stepped back and looked up. A woman with a cloud of too-red hair stood at the first floor window, looking down at him.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked with no preliminaries and less grace.

  ‘I’m Commissario Brunetti, Signora,’ he answered politely, suddenly not at all sure just how it was he had ended up here, staring up at her uninviting expression. ‘There are some questions we have to ask you,’ he improvised. As he spoke, he studied her face – she was barely five metres from him – looking for signs of resemblance to a man he had to confess he barely remembered and, a
side from his odd, robotic movements, probably would not have recognized.

  ‘About what?’ she asked. Brunetti wondered what she thought the police might have come to ask about, but then his mind caught up with the absolute lack of emotion in her question and it occurred to him that she might have been pushed – either by grief or the drugs used to combat it – into a place beyond all emotion or the ability to register it.

  He backed into the calle, so that he could speak to her without having to look almost directly above himself.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked.

  ‘To speak to you, Signora,’ he said, though he had still given no conscious thought to what he wanted to say to her.

  She considered his statement, said ‘Va bene’, then closed the window and turned away.

  Brunetti returned to the door and waited; and continued to wait. After a few minutes, the door was pulled open. The woman stepped forward and stood in the doorway, repeating, ‘What do you want?’ Her voice was neutral, devoid of interest. He could have been trying to sell her a set of cooking pots or to convert her to the love of Jesus.

  ‘First, to express my condolences, Signora, and then to ask if there is any help you might need from any agency of the city.’ Brunetti knew he had only the authority of humanity to offer the first and no authority whatsoever to offer the second. But he had told Paola he would try to help, and he would do that in whatever form he could.

  She looked at him directly and Brunetti had the strange sensation that she was waiting for his words to be played back so that she could understand what they meant. In a situation such as this, Brunetti’s first impulse was usually to speak again, but he remained silent, curious to see how long it would take her to answer him. A long time passed: she looked blankly at him, while Brunetti studied her.

  She might have been in her fifties, but he wasn’t sure at which end of them he found her. The red hair stopped two centimetres from her scalp and slipped into white for the rest of the way home. Her eyes were a clear blue, the skin around them virtually unlined. Her nose and well-defined cheekbones were further evidence that she might once have been a great beauty. And it was in the angled line of those bones that he caught a fleeting glimpse of the dead man.

  She was taller than average, though the thickening around her waist suggested that she might once have been taller still. Her hands, he noticed, had inordinately short fingers and the shiny skin that comes to hands that have spent a lot of time in hot water.

  Brunetti realized that she had no intention of speaking: he could stand there for the rest of the afternoon and still she would not say anything to him. ‘Would you like to come to see Davide, Signora?’ he finally asked.

  At the mention of the name, she took a half-step backwards, as though trying to escape the name or the grief it brought her. She held up one of those thick, work-branded hands to ward off his words, stepped back into the house, and closed the door.

  6

  Though the woman’s retreat meant Brunetti could go home early, his failure to get her to speak to him left him dissatisfied and, strangely enough, uncomfortable about going home when he should still be at work. He told himself not to behave like a schoolboy whose teacher might call and find him still at home when he was meant to be at school and, screwing up his courage, went to a bar in Campo San Polo and took a seat outside. He ordered a spritz, sure it would be the last of the season: a month from now, the thought of ice and chilled Aperol – chilled anything, for that matter – would set his teeth on edge. But the late afternoon sun was gentle on his face, and he was happy to sit in it and watch the world go by, busying itself with things he no longer had to concern himself with today.

  He studied the campo, glad it was one of the big ones, where kids could play soccer or ride their bicycles, the second in violation of some city ordinance that no one liked or bothered to obey. His drink came, and he let it sit in front of him for a while so as better to savour the first taste of it. He fished up the slice of orange and bit into it, then followed with the first bitter-sweet-cold-bitter sip. Three swallows landed near his feet. He leaned across to the next table and took a potato crisp from the bowl left behind by the last clients, crumbled it between his fingers, and tossed the pieces to the busy birds, which fell upon them. He took another sip and studied the birds.

  A shadow fell across his table and his drink. Looking up, he was momentarily blinded by the sun, but when his vision cleared he saw Lieutenant Scarpa, Vice-Questore Patta’s assistant, standing above him. ‘Good afternoon, Commissario,’ the Lieutenant said. ‘Busy with the birds?’ The Lieutenant was in full uniform, with his dark woollen jacket, but seemed remarkably cool. As if suddenly recalling that he was speaking to a superior officer, he removed his hat and held it, elbow bent, stiffly at his side.

  ‘Yes, Lieutenant,’ Brunetti said with an easy smile,

  ‘the owner says they’ve been stealing potato crisps from the bowls on the tables, so I came over to investigate the case.’ He pointed to the bird on the far left and added, ‘I suspect that one’s the ringleader, so I’m going to stay here and finish my drink while I keep my eye on him, just to be sure.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to reading your report,’ the Lieutenant said, gave a lazy salute, replaced his hat, and walked away, heading in the direction from which Brunetti had arrived.

  Paola had picked up many English expressions from the nannies who had lived with her family while she was growing up, and one of them sprang to Brunetti’s mind: ‘A ghost walked over my grave.’ Or was it a goose? And how was it that a speaking person could have a grave? Regardless of the sense of it or who did the stepping, it perfectly described the effect of Scarpa’s presence. The fact that the Lieutenant was walking towards San Stin made Brunetti uncomfortable.

  He finished his drink, paid the waiter, and walked home. Paola was in the kitchen, washing salad; she looked up in surprise when he walked in. He kissed the right side of her forehead and said, ‘I found his address and went there, but the mother . . .’ his voice trailed off for a moment. ‘She refused to talk to me, closed the door in my face.’

  Paola poured the water out of the bottom part of the spinner and, replacing the salad, began to spin it dry. ‘What did she say?’ She asked above the whirling noise.

  ‘Nothing,’ Brunetti answered. ‘It was all very strange.’

  ‘Why didn’t she speak? If she came to the door, then she heard the bell, and that means she’s not deaf.’

  ‘No, no,’ Brunetti answered. ‘She can hear and she can speak. But all she did was ask me why I was there.’

  ‘Did you tell her you were a policeman?’

  ‘Yes. I told her on the phone, and again when I went there.’

  ‘Then why wouldn’t she talk to you?’

  ‘Fear of the police, shock, grief, you name it,’ he answered. ‘You know people don’t like to talk to us.’

  ‘But she came to the door?’ Paola asked, and when he seemed confused by the question, she added, ‘Or else how could she have shut it in your face?’

  ‘I told you: it was all very strange,’ Brunetti repeated.

  ‘How did he die?’ she asked.

  ‘He took sleeping pills,’ Brunetti said, seeing no reason to tell her more.

  The information stunned her. ‘You mean he killed himself?’

  Brunetti shrugged. ‘He could have taken them accidentally. But they killed him.’

  Paola said nothing for a very long time, then finally asked, ‘Are you going to have to talk to her?’

  ‘I just tried to, but she wouldn’t speak to me.’

  ‘No, I mean talk to her officially,’ Paola clarified. ‘As the police. Are you obliged to because he died like that?’ He had seen no report from the men from the ambulance, which meant it was probably bogged down on someone’s desk; he’d locate it in the morning.

  ‘Yes. In a case like this, we’d usually want to exclude the possibility of suicide.’ She gave him a strange look but said nothing.
She took the leaves out of the spinner and put them in a large salad bowl. In an ordinary voice, she said, ‘Would you get me a glass of wine?’

  ‘White?’

  She looked out the window before she answered, in the direction of the Dolomites, though they were hidden by the combination of pollution and fog that descended

  on the Veneto for a good portion of the year. ‘No, I think it’s time to start drinking red again,’ she said, and bent to pull a frying pan out of the cabinet.

  Brunetti did as he was told and chose a bottle of simple Cabernet. White might have been better as a follow-up to the spritz, but if Paola wanted red, then red it would be.

  She put the frying pan on the stove, glanced at her watch, and took the glass he offered her. She sipped, nodded her thanks, and asked, ‘You think there’s time to watch the sun set?’

  It had already happened when they got to the living room, so they contented themselves with sitting on the sofa and watching the light disappear in the west. Before Brunetti could do the husbandly thing and ask Paola how her day had been, she said, ‘Her behaviour’s strange, isn’t it?’