The Golden Egg

by Donna Leon

  Brunetti’s experience as a policeman had given him a strong suspicion of urban myths, but that same experience had proven to him that some of them were true.

  ‘And so?’ he asked.

  Bianchini finished his water. ‘And so we’ve sort of decided to even up the odds. There are some violations we don’t see and aren’t going to see.’ He met Brunetti’s glance, then went on, ‘And if we’re given something in return for this, then there’s no Venetian who’ll think it’s wrong.’ He spoke with conviction, including himself among those Venetians.

  Bianchini drank the last of his coffee, set his cup down and said, ‘The mayor doesn’t have to worry about any consequences.’ He spoke with such finality that there was no doubting him.

  Bianchini slid to the end of the bench and got to his feet. He reached his hand behind him for his wallet.

  ‘No, no,’ Brunetti said, thinking of the way he had driven the gondolieri from the bar. ‘Bambola won’t take your money.’ He pushed the plate and saucer forward and got to his feet. Standing beside Bianchini, he felt the difference in their heights: he was a tall man, looking at Bianchini’s chin.

  Brunetti went to the door, made a rolling sign with his hand to tell Bambola he would pay him later, and walked outside with the other man.

  Both men looked down to the end of the embankment, where one of the gondolieri was talking to a pair of young Japanese tourists. As they watched, he led them to his gondola and helped them down into it, then jumped aboard. With one foot, he pushed the boat away from the riva and bent in a graceful gesture to pick up his oar. The boat disappeared to the right. Bianchini turned towards San Marco, and Brunetti, after thanking him for his time, opened his umbrella and headed back to the Questura.

  He stopped in the officers’ squad room on the way to his office, but there was no sign of Pucetti. Upstairs, he checked his email and found the report from the ambulance squad that had answered the call to the Cavanella home. ‘Time of call: 6.13; time of arrival: 7.37; name of person who let them into the house: Ana Cavanella; condition of subject: deceased; condition of deceased: in bed, in pyjamas, signs of vomiting: arrival at morgue: 8.46.’ And that was all.

  There was also one from Rizzardi, attached to which he found the rough draft of his autopsy report. Brunetti scrolled down, past the height and weight and probable age, past the chocolate drink and biscuits, to the parts of the body, and thus to the teeth. There were two amalgam fillings and signs that a wisdom tooth on the upper left had been removed. None of the work appeared to be recent and all, ‘conformed to the standards and style of Italian dentistry’.

  ‘Such as they are,’ Brunetti, who went to a Dutch dentist on Lido, said under his breath.

  He wrote back to Rizzardi and explained that they might need dental evidence to prove the boy’s identity and asked him to take X-rays of the work. He went downstairs to talk to Signorina Elettra.

  She considered the problem for a few minutes and said she would have to get a list of the email addresses of the dentists registered with the union of dentists in the province of Venezia and send them the X-rays, along with a photo of the dead man and a description of his disability. Thus, if Davide’s dentist worked in the province of Venice, they might discover more about him. ‘Assuming that the work wasn’t done in some other province,’ she said.

  ‘His mother doesn’t seem like the sort of person who would take him to a specialist out the province,’ Brunetti said, but then decided to exhaust other possibilities before attempting this.

  Signorina Elettra ran the fingers of her left hand through her hair and said, ‘How strange all of this is.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you refer to Signora Cavanella as his mother while you’re still trying to identify him.’

  Brunetti nodded in swift agreement. ‘I’m not in any doubt about who he is. But it’s not enough that she looks like him or that she calls him her son. Not legally.’

  She put her elbows on her desk and rested her face in her hands. He noticed the way her skin was pulled tighter by her hands, removing a number of years: he didn’t like having to admit that he noticed the difference.

  ‘You’d think, in this world where we’re all registered from the time we’re born – from even before, with prenatal tests – that something like this would be impossible,’ she said, her confusion evident in her voice. ‘If he were a foreigner, I’d understand: check the hotels, find out where his shoes and clothing come from, put a photo in the papers, contact the embassies. That’s all pretty standard.’

  She looked at Brunetti, but he had no suggestions to offer.

  ‘You’ve got his body. You’ve got his mother. He was taken out of the house where he was living. And you can’t identify him.’ He knew she had no personal stake in any of this, so the best he could assume was that the patent disorder of it offended her. ‘A person can’t live somewhere all his life and not leave any traces. It just can’t happen.’

  Brunetti agreed, and for some reason his mind moved away from the dead man to his mother; he wondered if the same would be true of her. There had to be a reason for the obstacles she was placing in the way of the identification of her son; in that case, she was certainly not going to tell them what it was. But traces there had to be. ‘Let me go and get something,’ he said.

  Back in his office he shifted through the files and loose papers that had accumulated on his desk, telling himself, as he always did when searching for something, that he had to be more orderly with documents and files, and just think of the time tossed away looking for things, when, if he’d only think to . . .

  He found her file and still disliked the sensation of his hand on the bleached, warped paper. He opened it and found the address, took the copy of Calli, Campielli e Canali from his drawer and looked for the building. And there it was, an enormous beige rectangle on the opposite side of the canal from Campiello degli Incurabili and looking quite enormous. He tried to run his memory over the area, but it was decades since he had been there, and he had no clear image of it.

  He took the book downstairs, keeping the page open with his finger, and in Signorina Elettra’s office opened it on the desk beside her computer. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s in Dorsoduro.’

  ‘What is?’ she asked in honest confusion.

  ‘The place where Ana Cavanella lived in 1968, when she was arrested for shoplifting.’

  ‘How old was she?

  ‘Sixteen,’ Brunetti answered.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing. She was underage. Her employer sent someone to get her, and that was the end of it.’ Seeing that she was not satisfied with this, he added, ‘Pucetti couldn’t find anything about the son, but there was

  an old file on her down in the archives, so he brought

  it up.’

  He angled the book towards her and she ran her finger across the bridges and down the calli leading to 616. She picked it up and flipped to the end and then forward again until she found the pages with the names of the various buildings. He watched her finger run down the list of buildings until it stopped and she read aloud, ‘Palazzo Lembo.’ She looked at Brunetti. ‘That mean anything to you?’

  ‘The King of Copper,’ he said.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ Signorina Elettra answered.

  Brunetti smiled. ‘It was before your time. Lembo – I don’t remember his first name – the King of Copper. His family had mines somewhere; Africa, I think, or maybe South America. But way back, at the beginning of the last century. There was some other mineral, but I can’t remember which one it was. Tin, maybe. But copper was the main business.’

  ‘I was at school with a girl named Lembo. Margherita. But they were from Torino, I think.’

  ‘No, no, these Lembos have been here since the crusades,’ Brunetti said. The Brunettis had been, too, he knew, but that sort of thing seemed to matter only in the case of nobility or wealth. Poor people had grandparents; the rich had ancestors.

  ‘
The palazzo was probably broken up into separate apartments,’ Signorina Elettra suggested.

  ‘Only one way to find out,’ Brunetti said.

  She gave him a very quizzical look. ‘You’re really taken with this, aren’t you, Commissario?’

  From her tone, he could not tell whether she approved or not. The silence around Davide Cavanella could be an example of bureaucratic oversight, but it might be something else. ‘I think I’ll ask Foa to take me over to have a look at the palazzo.’

  14

  Foa, glad of the chance to go for what Brunetti did not tell him was little more than a joyride, gave him a hand getting on to the boat. Over to Dorsoduro to look at a building: this made as much sense to Foa as taking the Vice-Questore to lunch and was certainly much more fun because Brunetti at least stood on deck and enjoyed the ride rather than sitting in the cabin talking on his telefonino. Brunetti learned all of this indirectly, just as he learned much of what he knew. Foa never criticized their superior openly, but perhaps because they were speaking in Veneziano, he could make use of a wide range of references and expressions that were virtually untranslatable.

  Foa took the Canale della Giudecca, rather than the Grand Canal because the more direct route was around the back, he said. He knew the building, of course: was there a water door in the city he had not taken a boat past in the last twenty years? They turned into Rio delle Toresele, Foa slowing to make the turn. He slowed down even more as they approached Calle Capuzzi on the left. ‘That’s it,’ Foa said, pointing to a high-arched dark green door that stood at the top of three moss-covered steps leading down to the water.

  Brunetti had never noticed the door, but who would notice a door that looked exactly like thousands in the city? ‘You know anything about the place?’ Brunetti asked.

  Foa pulled the boat up at the entrance to the next calle and switched the motor to idle. ‘Some rich people used to live there. I remember because there was a very nice boat they used to tie up here.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Must have been twenty years ago. Maybe more.’ Then, after a moment’s reflection, Foa added, ‘Boat hasn’t been there for years.’

  ‘Can you get in a little closer to the riva?’ Brunetti asked. ‘I’d like to go around and take a look at the place.’

  Foa pulled the boat up beside the riva. Luckily, it was high tide, so Brunetti could avoid the slippery stairs and step directly on to the pavement of the riva. He walked down the narrow calle to the door of 616, a ponderous oak slab varnished dark brown and divided into four high rectangles by thick, bevelled strips of the same colour. There was a modern brass lock, dulled nearly green by the humidity.

  To the left was a tarnished brass plaque with the name ‘Lembo’ incised below the single bell. The Copper King, or was it tin? Brunetti stepped back and studied the façade of the palazzo. Narrow, it rose four floors: the grey plaster had flaked away in many places, exposing the brick beneath. Two simple arched windows stood to the left of the door and one to the right, all three of them heavily grilled with iron bars that were not free of the rust of neglect. The quadrifora of the first floor was blackened at the top, as though smoke had leaked out of the four narrow windows for centuries and stained the carved marble above them, which might well have been the case.

  The windows of the floor above appeared almost twice as tall as those on the floor below, making them seem curiously etiolated in relation to the building. The frames and glass were obviously modern and the marble pilasters dividing them were a shocking white, smooth and almost entirely devoid of ornamentation, unlike the worn fluted columns of the windows below.

  Brunetti took another step back and leaned against the building opposite. Above the windows he saw a row of small barbacani supporting a marble drain, though the much later addition of a low top floor had turned the drain into a mere ornamental motif. The real drain, metal and jarringly noticeable, corroded in more than one place, ran under the tiled roof and leaked two dark feathers of mould and rust down the façade.

  Brunetti turned to his right, out to the fondamenta and down to the bridge at San Vio. He crossed it and went into the bar on the left, where he had often stopped for a coffee and was familiar with the people working there without knowing their names. He asked for a glass of white wine, glanced around at the people at the tables, looking for someone he knew, but he recognized no one.

  When the barman brought the wine, Brunetti thanked him. Nodding at the calle with his chin, he asked, careful to speak Veneziano, ‘Does the Lembo family still live in that palazzo?’ The man, who was short, stocky, balding, with a thick nose and the rugged skin of a drinker, set the glass on the counter and took a small step back, as if to put a greater distance between himself and the question.

  There followed a process Brunetti had been observing for decades. The barman might not know his rank or branch of service, but he was certain to know, however vaguely, that Brunetti, a client for decades, was involved with the police. Thus his question was not innocent, nor was it idle. This meant that the man had to weigh up his sense of duty to the state (which one could probably estimate as zero) with his accumulated memories of Brunetti’s behaviour over time, and then against that he had to weigh any obligation he might have to the Lembo family. This calculation was immediate, and Brunetti was probably more conscious of it than was the man engaged in it.

  ‘The daughters still live there,’ he said after a hesitation so short most people would not have noticed it. He turned and switched on the coffee grinder next to the coffee machine, though the plastic container was well more than half full.

  Brunetti took a sip of his wine, waited out the noise, and when it stopped, asked for a tuna and artichoke tramezzino. It came wrapped in a paper napkin and on a plate.

  ‘Ana Cavanella used to live there, didn’t she?’ Brunetti asked and took a bite of the sandwich. Too much mayonnaise, as was increasingly the case all over the city, he didn’t know why.

  ‘Is this about her son?’ the barman asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered, seeing no reason to lie.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He took sleeping pills, vomited, and choked to death,’ Brunetti said.

  The man’s hand rose protectively to his throat; he left it there while he said, ‘Oh, the poor woman.’

  ‘You knew her?’ Brunetti asked quite naturally, as though they were old friends and the subject had come up in conversation.

  ‘Years ago,’ the man said. ‘Must be forty. Even more.’ Then, ‘How old was he?’

  ‘In his forties,’ Brunetti answered and took another sip of his wine. Then, very casually, ‘She’s still an attractive woman. Must have had him when she was young.’

  The man shot him a suspicious look; Brunetti countered it by taking another bite of his sandwich and nodding his appreciation. ‘I spoke to her three days ago, just after he died. Terrible, terrible.’

  The man’s curiosity got the better of him. ‘How’d that happen? I always thought the boy was retarded. You think she’d be careful with pills and things like that.’

  Brunetti sighed and said, ‘I don’t think we can be careful all the time.’

  Two men came into the bar and asked for coffees. The barman served them and was quickly back in front of Brunetti. He picked up a glass and wiped at it with a towel.

  ‘What was it people called Lembo?’ Brunetti asked, as if the name were dangling just at the edge of his memory, in need only of some help from a person with a better one. ‘The Duke of Something?’

  ‘King,’ the barman said, pleased to have found it first. ‘The King of Copper.’

  Brunetti smiled in approval. ‘Of course. Thanks.’ Then, the way people did, he repeated the name, ‘The King of Copper’, shaking his head at the outlandishness of it. He finished his tramezzino and did not order another one because he did not want the barman to move away.

  ‘My father,’ Brunetti lied, ‘used to talk about him.’ Then, as if allowing memory to
seep back, he continued, ‘He had a boat – my father – and he would take him . . .’

  He broke off and allowed a look of great confusion to cross his face. ‘I don’t remember whether it was fishing or to Piazzale Roma.’ He shook his head: age takes away so many memories. ‘He used to talk about his daughters. One of them was about my age, and he’d tell me I should be more like her; quieter, more obedient.’

  ‘That must have been Lucrezia,’ the barman said.

  Delight flashed from Brunetti’s eyes. ‘Yes, of course. That was her name.’ He caught the barman’s eyes in his glance and said, ‘I never met her, but I have to confess there were times when I wanted to go on the boat with my father and throw her off.’ He chuckled, looked down at his feet, and shook his head.

  ‘Why?’

  With a smile that displayed his pleasure that this man should be curious about his family memories, Brunetti said, ‘Because my father talked about her so much. Said she was like this and like that: all the things I wasn’t.’

  ‘Is your father still alive?’ the barman surprised him by asking.

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Because, if he were, you could tell him that he was wrong.’

  Confused smile. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

  ‘You’re a respectable man. A policeman, aren’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes to the policeman,’ Brunetti said. ‘I don’t know about the respectable.’

  ‘Well, Lucrezia isn’t.’

  Once more Brunetti looked confused and, he attempted, faintly concerned. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Men. Alcohol. Trouble with her children. Divorce.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Brunetti said, speaking as though he’d just had bad news about an old friend. Then, deciding to risk it, ‘I’m glad my father never had to hear this.’