The Golden Egg

by Donna Leon

  At the door, he turned to Pucetti and said, voice rich with sarcasm, ‘If you’d like to see that the Signora isn’t persecuted by the officials at the hospital, as well, perhaps you’d go along to keep an eye on her?’

  Pucetti opened his mouth to defend himself but glanced at Signora Cavanella, as if to ask her what she wanted. Then he lowered his head and allowed the moment to pass.

  ‘It would be very kind if he could come with me,’ Signora Cavanella said, and Brunetti made no attempt to prevent a look of raw anger from flashing across his face. But he was trapped, and his face showed that he knew it. ‘All right, then. If that’s what you want.’ He turned towards the door, saying, ‘I’ll leave it to you two to decide what time is best for you,’ and left the apartment, not bothering to close the door quietly.

  11

  Brunetti turned into the first calle on the right, irritated that the scene had got beyond his control and he had not thought to ask her about the pills that had killed her son. As he approached the bar on the first corner, Vianello materialized from the doorway. ‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked.

  Brunetti walked up to him, saying, ‘Pucetti made a serious mistake joining the police: he could have had

  a career on the stage.’

  Vianello turned back into the bar and went over to a table near the window that provided a clear view down the calle, thus explaining his sudden appearance at the door. A glass of white wine stood to the left of that day’s Gazzettino; Brunetti waved to the barman and pointed to the glass.

  As Brunetti pulled out a chair, Vianello closed the paper and set it aside. ‘Tell me,’ Vianello said.

  ‘When we were still outside,’ Brunetti began, ‘and you were pulling your disappearing act, Pucetti – completely out of the blue – asked her if her son used to play soccer in Campo San Polo.’ Hearing this, Vianello grimaced and picked up his glass.

  The barman arrived and set a second glass of wine in front of Brunetti; he picked it up and took a drink. ‘He said he and his friends used to play soccer there and her son was goalie for them sometimes.’ Even before Vianello could comment, Brunetti went on, ‘I know: he lives down in Castello, so why he’d be playing soccer in San Polo is beyond me.’

  ‘He hates sports,’ Vianello said. In response to Brunetti’s surprise, Vianello explained. ‘One day, I was reading La Gazzetta dello Sport in the squad room, and when he saw it he said he hated soccer, was sick of reading about it, hearing people talk about it.’ He finished his wine and set the glass on the table. ‘So you can forget the idea that he was playing anything – especially soccer – in Campo San Polo.’

  Brunetti swirled his wine around for a moment and said, ‘Then he’s even more clever than I thought he was.’

  ‘And the woman?’ Vianello asked.

  ‘A liar. She invented a break-in to explain the lack of papers: apparently, she has nothing, or he had nothing. And the birth and baptismal certificates were lost when they moved back from France. Which is where she said he was born.’ He finished his wine and set his glass beside Vianello’s.

  ‘Why would she lie about something like that?’ Vianello asked. It was not that he thought Brunetti had the answer hidden in his back pocket, but an invitation to joint speculation.

  ‘Maybe she stole him from outside a supermarket because she wanted a baby,’ Brunetti said.

  ‘Or raised the baby of a relative,’ countered Vianello, adding, ‘It’s not as if anyone much cares whether women who have children are married or not.’

  ‘That’s now,’ Brunetti said. ‘Her son was born about forty years ago. Things were different then. Think about when we were kids, what our parents said about unmarried women who had children.’

  Vianello thought for a moment, then said, ‘But the fact that we heard them talk about it means that women were doing it, and enough of them for there to be talk. In front of children, that is.’

  Casting his memory back, Brunetti was forced to agree that Vianello was right. He remembered hearing his parents – really, his mother with her friends – talk about other women in the neighbourhood who lived with men without benefit of clergy, had children with them. As far as he could recall , all that seemed to matter to his mother was whether they treated the children well, which meant keeping them clean, raising them to be polite and respectful of their elders, feeding them abundantly, and seeing that they went to school and did well. But that was his mother; he had doubts as to whether her friends shared this elasticity of moral vision.

  His speculations were interrupted by the entrance of Pucetti, who had seen them from the street. He approached their table, saying, “I hope you don’t mind if I have a drink while I’m in uniform.”

  ‘Only if you let me pay for it,’ Brunetti said and went over to the bar to get him a glass of white wine. When he came back with it, Pucetti was sitting opposite Vianello and busy telling him about his encounter.

  ‘I’m to go and pick her up at ten tomorrow morning and take her to the hospital,’ he said, accepting the glass Brunetti offered him. He took an eager swallow and set it down. Turning to Brunetti, he said, ‘I hope you understand I didn’t mean any disrespect, sir.’

  Brunetti laughed, followed by Vianello, and then by Pucetti himself. Looking at Vianello, Brunetti said, ‘You should have heard him: “I think the Signora should be asked to give this information only once,” and then just the least little bit of a hesitation before he added, “sir”.’ He turned to the young officer, whose face had turned red with embarrassment, and said, ‘Well done, Pucetti.’ Then he gave in to his curiosity and asked, ‘How did you know about the soccer?’

  Pucetti picked up his glass and swirled his wine around; to give him something to look at while he spoke, Brunetti thought. ‘The guys in the squad room were talking about Cavanella, and one of them – Corolla – said he used to play soccer over here, and they would let him – Cavanella, that is – play goalie because they felt sorry for him. He fell down a lot, but he played well enough: besides, no one ever does want to be goalie.’

  ‘He said they all tried to make him feel good,’ Pucetti went on. ‘Smacking him on the shoulder when he caught the ball or blocked a goal.’

  That explained, Brunetti called them back to business by looking at Pucetti and asking, ‘What did you make of her story?’ Then, to aid him, he added, ‘Two possibilities we’ve come up with, which are that she stole the baby’ – he smiled to suggest that this was not to be taken seriously – ‘or that she raised the child for a relative. Or it could even have been a friend, I suppose.’ Then, in fairness before Pucetti committed himself to either proposition, Brunetti added, ‘I don’t think either one has any merit.’ He had seen, or thought he had seen, the resemblance between their faces and did not doubt for an instant that Signora Cavanella was the mother of the dead man.

  ‘Neither do I,’ added Vianello. ‘I think the obvious reason is that she wasn’t married to the father.’

  ‘What difference does that make?’ Pucetti asked. The question, but even more the clear perplexity on his face, showed his age and the generation from which he came.

  ‘It was like that, Roberto,’ Vianello assured him. ‘Believe me. And when your grandparents were your age, women with illegitimate children were shunned by all decent people; sometimes their children were taken from them and put into orphanages.’

  The older men watched Pucetti process this tale, his incomprehension as evident as if he had been told that children in former times went to work at the age of eight. Perhaps because Brunetti’s grandparents had lived with the family for the first ten years of his life, he was aware in a visceral, real sense of the way things used to be. Pucetti had grown up in a world of computers and an elastic ethical system, so the thought that a woman would be shunned for being unmarried at the time of the birth of her child would be as bizarre to him as the idea that people would be willing to die in defence of an idea rather than the possession of an object.

  The older men seeme
d to decide at the same moment that persisting in a history lesson was futile. Brunetti asked, ‘Did she say anything else?’

  Pucetti, also glad to return to the present, said, ‘She elaborated a bit on her story about France. It turns out that her husband was French and left her soon after he brought them back to Italy.’

  ‘Where she said his parents were living?’ asked a sceptical Brunetti.

  Pucetti smiled. ‘She told me she felt so threatened by you that she got things all mixed up. It seems they went to his parents in France, and then they came back to Italy, though she didn’t say where.’ His voice was neutral, leaving the other men to believe what they would of the story. ‘He stayed with them for only a short time, and then he went back to France and she never heard from him again.’

  ‘She called him her husband?’ Vianello asked.

  Pucetti shrugged. ‘I had the feeling it might have been a courtesy title. And she seemed uncertain about where they were living in France.’

  ‘She mentioned Poitiers,’ Brunetti reminded him.

  ‘I know,’ Pucetti said with a very sly smile.

  Vianello reached across the table and poked Pucetti in the arm. ‘Come on, Roberto, what else have you done that makes you look so proud of yourself?’

  ‘I told her I’d been there once, with my parents, when I was a kid, and I loved playing on the beach.’

  Vianello propped his elbows on the table and hid his face in his hands. He shook his head, and from behind his hands came his muffled voice, ‘Oh, you sly bastard.’ Then he asked, looking at him directly, ‘What did she say?’

  ‘That with the baby she never had time to go to the beach. But that her husband told her it was very beautiful.’ After a brief hesitation, Pucetti said, his regret audible, ‘It was too easy, really. I almost felt sorry for her.’

  His use of that ‘almost’ did not go unheard by Brunetti, but he said only, ‘So she’s never been to Poitiers, but if we ask her about that, she’ll just say she had it mixed up with some city that was on the beach. Even if her story’s true, there’s no way we can check it. The French won’t cooperate. I don’t believe her story, but if it were true, the baby would be registered under the father’s name, and we don’t know what that is.’

  Pucetti made a small gesture that reminded Brunetti of a student’s raising his hand in class. ‘If I might ask, Commmissario, why is this so important to you?’

  ‘Because she’s telling too many lies,’ Brunetti answered without hesitation. ‘I want to know what she’s lying about.’

  He decided to tell them something he had realized after his conversation with Rizzardi. ‘He can’t be buried

  until he’s identified.’

  ‘Isn’t that why I’m going to the hospital with his mother tomorrow morning?’ Pucetti asked. ‘She’ll identify him, surely.’

  ‘That’s not enough,’ Brunetti said, aware of how cold the statement was.

  ‘Why?’ Pucetti asked. Brunetti knew that Vianello understood the reason and wanted Pucetti to learn it in a way that would make him never forget it.

  ‘Because there has to be official proof that the dead person is who he is claimed to be or thought to be. She can say anyone is her son, and that dead man could be anyone. Until she can provide a document that proves he is who she says he is, the state will not accept her word.’ To prevent Pucetti from saying something he might later regret, Brunetti added, ‘Think about it for a minute. People can’t be buried before there’s certainty about who they are.’ He could think of examples to argue his point – the woman who throws herself off a bridge and whose body is found two hundred kilometres away; the unidentified body found in a field – but he thought it more important to state the principle: the unknown cannot be put underground, not before every effort has been made to find out who they are. It was atavistic, he realized, perhaps linked to magic and taboo. The dead deserve at least to be recognized, and the living deserve at least to know the people they have loved are dead, and not missing.

  To Pucetti he said, ‘Take her to see Rizzardi.’

  Vianello glanced at Pucetti, as if assessing whether to question Brunetti’s authority, or his decisions, in front of a uniformed officer. He must have decided that the young man was sufficiently discreet, for he said, ‘You’re treating it as though you don’t believe it was a natural death, Guido.’

  That Vianello should say this in front of the younger man was an indication of his confidence in him, or so Brunetti chose to believe. ‘I think it is,’ he insisted. ‘He probably thought the pills were something to eat, something good because his mother kept them hidden from him.’

  What troubled him was not the circumstances of the man’s death but the fact that he had managed to live for forty years without leaving any bureaucratic traces that he had lived at all. That mystery, and its sadness, nagged at Brunetti, but he did not want to give voice to this.

  12

  After dinner, Brunetti told Paola about his conversation with Signora Cavanella and her refusal to divulge any information about her son, and about the lies she had told both him and Pucetti to explain away the missing documents.

  ‘Why would she want to lie about her son?’ Paola asked. ‘It’s not as if she kept him locked up in the attic for forty years, is it?’ She sank deeper into the cushions of the ratty old sofa she kept in her study: she spent so much time in that spoon-like posture that he sometimes marvelled she could still stand upright and walk.

  ‘It suggests he isn’t her son at all,’ she said, but it was speculation, not inquiry.

  ‘I saw him only a few times, like you, but he resembled her,’ Brunetti told her.

  ‘I can’t place her,’ Paola said, closing her eyes and resting her head against the back of the sofa. ‘But I might not have noticed her. Sixtyish, badly dyed red hair, good legs, good skin, and still attractive. There are scores of women in this city who fit that description.’ Then, after a pause, ‘I wonder where she works.’

  ‘Why do you think she works?’

  ‘Because manna from heaven falls only in the Bible, Guido.’ He smiled, which encouraged her to continue. ‘It’s our new duty to work until we drop, remember? By the time you and I get there, they’ll have extended the age to eighty.’ She paused, then added, ‘No, I speak ill of our leaders. They’ll have pity on women and let us stop at seventy-eight.’

  ‘I still don’t understand why she’d behave so strangely,’ Brunetti said, accustomed to her sideswipes at the government, any government, and equally accustomed to ignoring them.

  ‘People are strange, as you never cease to tell me.’

  He thought of his conversation that day with Vianello and his insistence that people were too much under the eye and observation, not only of the authorities, but of any business that could find a way to pry into their lives. At the thought of Vianello, Brunetti felt another twinge at the presumptuousness of his having suggested to his friend that Nadia be asked to investigate. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said, patting Paola’s leg and getting to his feet. ‘I am taking to my bed with Lucretius.’

  She gave him a long look, grinned, and said, ‘As your wife, I blanch at the thought that you are going to bed with a man who wants to explain to you The Nature of Things.’

  He smiled back, reached out to her with one hand, and said, ‘Would you like to try, instead?’

  She got to her feet.

  The next morning, the rain that Foa had smelled in the air arrived, and Brunetti put on a raincoat and carried an umbrella when he left the house. He decided to take the Number One from San Silvestro to the Zattere, and stopped to pick up that day’s Gazzettino for the ride. On board, he noticed how few people were reading a newspaper; how few, in fact, were reading anything. Of course, that they were slowly passing the most beautiful sight in the world might have distracted them from the Gazzettino’s cursory presentation and mistaken analysis of world events, but he still remained surprised at how few people read. He read, Paola read, the kids r
ead, but he realized how seldom he talked about books or found a person who appeared to take a serious interest in them.

  His mind opened to the castigation that was never far from it. Here he was again, assuming that what he thought was what other people must surely think; that his judgements must have universal validity. Lucretius knew that what is food to one man is bitter poison to another, a lesson life had been trying to teach Brunetti for

  a generation.

  As he tugged at this idea, studying the people who sat on the other side of the boat, his newspaper lay forgotten

  on his lap, making Brunetti yet another of those who sat on the vaporetto, gazing about without apparent purpose.

  He got off at San Zaccaria and made his wet way to the Questura. He went up to his office, shook the umbrella until it would have whimpered if it could, hung his coat on the outside of the cupboard, and stamped around until his feet no longer left wet prints on the floor.

  He turned on his computer and checked his email, quite unconscious of how automatic this process had become in the last few years. It was no longer necessary for him to stop in Signorina Elettra’s office or in the squad room

  to find out what was happening: most information waited for him in the computer. It was, however, information without nuance, without the unveiled scepticism with which Vianello greeted certain reports and without Signorina Elettra’s insights to set things straight.

  He found an invitation to a conference in Palermo that would ‘enhance coordination between the community and the organizations dedicated to maintaining order in civil society’. He pushed his chair back and stared out the window, allowing the Cloud of Ironic Despair to descend upon his head. Did this mean he was invited to a meeting between the citizens of Palermo and the police, or did the people in charge down there have a sense of humour and it was really meant to be a meeting between local citizens and the Mafia, the only organization well enough led, sufficiently clear in its purposes, and free of infiltrators to go about the business of maintaining order in society so as best to suck from it what little life remained? His first impulse was that of the show-off, to forward the invitation to Vianello and ask if the second possibility were correct, but the habit of leaving no traces was second nature to him and he resisted the temptation.